A school inspector from the mainland can hardly conceal his amazement at the primitive living conditions he encountered in the Hebrides.
Lewis
The bulk of the natives could not be described as of cleanly habits. The children often wore their scanty clothing till it was literally in rags. Almost all were barefooted in both summer and winter. It was customary to see women crossing the moors barefooted, but a man was rarely seen without boots on his feet. To save her husband the trouble of taking them off, when a stream had to be forded his wife transported him in her creel. Seeing this, I often wished that the ithish or straw rope across her breast would snap and let the unmanly burden drop into the water.
Let me now describe a Lewis crofter’s home, or ‘black house’ as it was appropriately called at least half a century ago. It consisted of two tiers of dry stone walls, with a padding of earth between them. On the top of the four feet thick walls grass generally grew, sometimes so profusely that I have seen a woman hoisting a lamb to feed on it. The roof consisted of rough cabers covered with a thick layer of straw held down by ropes or rapes of twisted heather, with big terminal stones to keep it from being blown off. Rarely was any sort of chimney seen by which the thick peat smoke could make its exit. As a rule there was a hole near the bottom of the thatch for the convenience of the poultry. The smoke from the peat fire in the middle of the floor percolated through the thatch, which in time became laden with a good deposit of soot. Annually the thatch was carefully stripped off by the men and carried in creels by the women to the potato patches, where it was laid alongside the drills for the nourishment of the sprouting tubers. The Lewis crofter would rather endure cold than part with his soot. The Gaelic proverb bears this out: Is fhearr an toit na’ ghaoth tuath (The smoke is better than the north wind).
At different ends of these black houses the family and the cattle, generally separated by a low wall, shared the accommodation. In such circumstances sanitation and cleanliness could not be expected. To remove the manure at a certain time of the year the end wall of the house had to be taken down. It was then that scarlet fever became prevalent, and sometimes carried off whole families. But what disgusted the Inspector most was the occasional verminous condition of the children. I have seen a pretty little girl so tormented that in the midst of her reading she tossed the book on the floor and vigorously scratched herself, the while eyeing first me and then her teacher with a troubled expression of uncertainty as to how this departure from good behaviour would be received.
Sometimes the animals also made themselves comfortable in the fire end of the house. One day after the examination of a school on the west side I visited a crofter’s house across the road. When I opened the door the volume of smoke almost blinded me. This explained the prevalence of ophthalmia amongst the children. Entering, I could just distinguish in the distance the subdued glow of a peat fire in the middle of the floor. I made in that direction, and as I neared it I saw beyond the fire a girl that had just arrived home from the school. When I drew near her she stepped back over some object at her feet. This I was amused to discover was a full-grown pig, which was lying comfortably by the side of the fire at her heels.