Being spawned of the Isle of Lewis in the Western Isles of Scotland, I simply had to read a Lillian Beckwith book when I first found one. The first one was The Hills is Lonely which I read a couple of decades ago I think: I loved it.

Having gone back there last summer with son, sister and brother in law, all memories revived and then sister Susan bought a job lot of Lillian Beckwith books in Halifax of all places. She loaned me this one, The Sea for Breakfast. This is better than Bruach Blend, which I found to be a bit of a drag.

I remember Ruari from The Hills ... and he's back; but not in the lead role that he took then. Still deaf, still tactless, still a great character.

There are so many snippettes and vignettes in this book that it's difficult to know where to start. There's the sexist thing, of course: an able bodied crofter watching indifferently while his wife laboured under the burden of a boll of meal (140 lbs, approx 65 kg). Then there was Alistair Beag who had been taken to hospital after rupturing himself when trying to life a load on to his wife's back.

I didn't know that red heads are seen as a bit of a curse there ... now I do!

The God squad, forgive me, arrived and were archetypical of their sort I suppose. Lilly livered and limp the lot of them. Two women in particular who were particularly soft, one of whom would weep at the slightest provocation. They were known locally as Flutter and Stutter ... you can imagine why! They were treated shamelessly in some respects but must have brought it on themselves. There's the story of the blackcurrants to watch out for. A healthy bush in the garden bursting with blackcurrants one day, stripped bare the next ... the birds getting the blame from the sisters when the overflowing jam pots told the entire story but the ladies couldn't see it!

Yawn, Beckwith's nickname for him, arrived at her cottage one day with a nice frame for that picture you were painting ... just washed up on the beach. She humoured him as he nailed it to the wall and didn't have the heart to tell him that the tourquoise blue enamelled thing was, in reality, a toilet seat that may have floated all of the way from the good old USA!

One of the ladies in the story is a villager named Dollac (she was not only beautiful but as happy a natured girl as I have ever met). Poignant for me as I know that Dollac is the familiar of Dolina, in turn the feminine of Donald. How do I know this? Dolina was my mother's name: she was a Western Islander by birth and by upbringing and that's why we went to the Isle of Lewis every summer. So Dollac wrote this May your honeymoon be like our dining room table: four legs and no drawers! My mother would never have written that!!

Beckwith wrote her books in the 1960s by and large I think and her use of language reflects that: the fact that she was a school teacher leads her to write in a certain way too. After about a third of the book I found myself underlining the words she used that are rare now and may even have been rarely used then:

melodeon
asseverate
expostulated
imprecations
consonance
compunction

Although the copy of this book was made for the British market it has been edited with the American market in mind I am sure as I am convinced that Lillian Beckwith writing in the 1960s would not have said that there have been times in the wakeful hours and she talked about a frypan. She just wouldn't say those things!

I enjoyed this book and do recommend it; but I did feel having finished it and then started reading a detective story, Beckwith's style feels a little bit heavy going. Purely a matter of style: even if the style is heavy, the story's light. Read the book then go to the Westeren Isles and live it! It's still there!

Duncan Williamson
26 March 2006