Sunday afternoon with Norwegians is a playtime and holiday, so our master and mates and engineers had a Saturnalia of shag or cormorant shooting and rather shocked the natives of Lerwick who heard the shooting. Our men rejoice more heartily at banging down these marauders than you and I, gentle reader, would rejoice at clawing down the highest birds in Britain, and we all eat them. To cook them, we skin them first, then lay breast and limbs, without the back, in vinegar and water for a night, and wash them in milk and water next morning, then they are stewed; there is a good deal of trouble taken with the cooking, and when done they are extremely bad to eat!
My Sunday, however, was passed in unbroken peace and quiet at Lochend on the west of Shetland. There is a silence at Lochend and on the silvery shingle beach, and over the crystalline rippling green bay that is astounding; a bee humming over the patch of yellow oats sounds quite loud, and a collie barking in the distance beside one of the grey thatched cottages sounds quite close. Haldane’s white, thick-walled stone house looks out on to a silvery shingle that makes a perfect crescent between a fresh-water lake of brown peaty water and the sea-loch where the water is green above the white sand, and purple above tangle.
Ah! the purity of the air there, with its scent of peat! How I have longed for it in town, and even in warm South Norway counted on breathing it again, and at every breath thanked heaven for its restorative energy. The morning dive was past expectation—how the Shetland sea makes the blood tingle and the skin glow! And the contrast from the outside keen air, after days buffeting on the North Atlantic or North Sea, to come into the warm stone house, to sit by the glowing peats and coal, surrounded by books of travel, illuminated missals and natural history, to read or to listen to my host telling tales of the times of our fathers, told as they told them, without haste and with exquisite inflection and skill in picturing peoples and places at home or abroad.
One family story he told me should be of national, or even international interest, so I must make it a classic. It was in the first days of trains in this country that my host and his brother were coming back to school in Edinburgh from Cloan in Perthshire with their father. The father was considered a splendid traveller, for he could actually sleep in these Early-Victorian carriages! As he lay asleep with a red rug drawn over him—which Haldane says figures largely in his boyish recollections—he and his brother plugged cattle and engine-drivers and various things as they passed, or at the stations, with their catapults, till at Larbert old Haldane awakened and saw the instruments and asked the boys what they were. “Never had such things when I was a boy,” he said. They explained to him how to fit a stone into the leather, and he did so and held the catapult out of the window and let fly, and with inexpressible joy the boys watched the stone go hurtling into the centre of the stationmaster’s window. Old Haldane promptly pulled the red plaid over his head, and out came the wrathful stationmaster, and the guard, and a boy clerk, who took them to the Haldane carriage. Wrathfully the stationmaster pulled open the door, and met the gaze of the cherubic innocents. Then angrily he pulled the red rug aside and disclosed the stem, judicial features of Haldane senior.
“How dare you, sir, disturb me in this rude manner?” he demanded of the guard he knew so well, and “Och, sir! Save us!—It’s you, Mr Haldane! A’ maist humbly apologise. A’ maun hae made a mistake,” and he bustled away, angrily elbowing the boy clerk and muttering: “Yon’s Mr Haldane, ye fuil, ye gowk, Haldane o’ Cloan, yin o’ the biggest shareholders o’ the Company.” “Ye may ca’ him what ye like,” said the clerk, “but A’ saw him let flee yon stane.”
As the train proceeded, Haldane père emerged from the red rug again and the three laughed long and loud, and the juniors told their father more about catties and what they did with them at school. And this led to talk of fights, and they asked their father if he ever fought at school, and he confessed to having done so and pointed to two metal teeth, mark of an ancient fray or “bicker” between the Edinburgh Academy boys and the boys of the Old Town on the mound. It is at this point that this domestic tale becomes of national interest, for the present Viscount and our Lord Chancellor appears on the scene; he was much the junior of these two elder brothers, and soon after this, when they had all got back to their respective schools, “Campy” and his brother asked Bob, the Benjamin, if he ever had a fight, and jeered at him for being at such a school where they didn’t fight—I forget which it was, possibly Henderson’s, and he replied that they were taught at school that it was very wrong to fight, and they referred to the two metal teeth of their father, and gentle Bobby went away thinking. A few days later he came home from school with two black eyes, and his poor little nose pointing north by south, and Lispeth, the old family nurse, was nearly broken-hearted. “Oh, wae’s me, puir wee lambie, wha’s gaun an’ made sic a sicht o’ ma bonnie wee bairn?” And he explained. He was top of his class, and “I thought I ought to fight, so I looked at the other boys, and there was one long one, at the bottom of the class, and I just gave him one on the eye—and he licked me.” And there were poultices applied to the black eyes—and his nose you have seen—and much pity from Lispeth for her bonnie wee laddie.
So the elder brother, R. C. Haldane, after travelling the wide world o’er, has found the most quiet, most restful spot in Ultima Thule, and the youngest is, we trust, still fighting for universal service, we trust, in London, England.
On this Haldane senior’s property we have the land station of our little whaling company, the Alexandra Company, which by our Government is allowed to run two small whaling steamers only, and incidentally to employ many Shetlanders at 23s. a week. More steamers we may not have. Ask herring-fishers why we may not!