A Croft in the Hills by Katharine Stewart Read Free Book Online

churn into butter, after setting aside the jugfuls for porridge and tea. Any surplus would be fed to the growing chickens.
Later on we hoped to rear a baconer for our own use and some table poultry.
    When the garden really came into production we meant to have a good supply of all the hardy vegetables and fruit. An evening stroll with the gun would often yield a couple of young rabbits for
the pot. Very good they were in those days, and now, although the crops are certainly better off without them, we do miss the meals they gave us.
    In fact, our aim was to be as far as possible self-sufficient in the way of food and to cut down other living costs to a minimum. The fuel problem, for instance, we hoped would take care of
itself, with the limitless supplies of peat and dead wood that were to hand. As for clothes, they had only to be serviceable, not decorative, so that hard-wearing stuff such as corduroy and denim
and leather, which would survive for years, was our chief rig. In Helen’s case, of course, we had to allow for growth, which was rapid. But, by buying things several sizes too big and taking
in ample reefs and tucks, even these were made to last. Corduroy slacks, which began voluminous and ankle-length, she could still wear several years later, almost skin-tight and reaching not much
below her knees, and still be in the fashion! Only on footwear were we all extremely hard, and gum-boots and leather shoes have had to be renewed at alarmingly frequent intervals.
    The surplus eggs were already beginning to bring us in a useful supply of ready cash, and in an extremely handy way. Every Thursday we left a boxful at the gate for collection by the van from
the packing-station and the following Thursday we found an envelope containing the pounds, shillings and pence and a note explaining exactly how many eggs were first-grade, second-grade, cracked or
‘rejects’—so that we knew where we were and what we could count on in this department. The grocer’s van was calling regularly every week and the money from the previous
week’s eggs usually met his bill for bread, tea, sugar, butcher-meat and oddments.
    In other ways, too, we meant to be self-sufficient. We had to rely on our own resources for mental stimulus. We had hundreds of books, accumulated over the years, and we had come to treat them
with a new respect during the evenings of our first winter in the hills. We had always read a lot and loved music. But to read a book in a half-circle of firelight, with the feet-deep snow outside
cutting off all possible interruption, to hear on the wireless a symphony of Sibelius above the shrieking of a north-east gale, is to experience these things in the raw. I shall always remember
rereading
Wuthering Heights
in these conditions and entering, as it were, barefoot, into Emily Brontë’s world.
    The last thing we wanted to do was to run away from life. We were all too well aware of what went on in the wider world and we listened as avidly as the next household to B.B.C. news bulletins
and talks on current affairs. We could get a paper delivered to the door on the afternoon of its day of publication. But we did firmly and passionately believe that close contact with natural
things was the only means of getting the savour of balanced living. It was the deeper world we wanted to explore, not the wider.
    On the croft we could work hard all day, feel the sun on our hands or the rain on our faces, come in to eat food fresh from the ground and still have time to stand on the doorstep in the evening
light, to watch the birds gliding in the shadowed air, engaged in their own lives, and to see the stars come out, and to wonder.
    We were fully aware of the fact that man had prefabricated a ghastly doom for himself. Nuclear weapons could destroy cities, could wipe out the records of a whole civilisation, and that was bad
enough. But that they could also destroy the earth upon which, ultimately, all depended, that was the