'Nuair bha mi og' (When I was young)

摘要

When I was born in the early 1950s, London was beset by terrible smogs. I was diagnosed with asthma and so, when I was six months old, my parents uprooted themselves and went to live with my Scottish grandparents at the clachan (a small group of houses, hamlet, smaller than a village) in the Western Isles. My grandfather was a weaver crofter. It was a dying way of life even then. I can't remember how many sheep and cows we were allowed on the souming (number and type of stock an individual croft can graze on common grazings), but we always had milk. In the summer we had butter too. The winter butter was not fit to eat as the cows were fed turnips and swedes which imparted an unpleasant taste to the butter. It had another use. We used it to grease the washed fleece ready for carding. Other people in the clachan used to use the oil from the bottom of the salt herring barrel, or so my nanna said. Very few of the old people carried on with the old textile skills. Most of our fleeces went to the tweed mills to be mechanically spun and woven by the outworkers on their Hattersley looms. We always kept back two or three for my grandmother to process into yarn and knit into socks, jumpers, mittens and gloves. She would also spin for the occasional special tweed for my grandfather to weave, mostly weft only, but sometimes warp and weft.