29 10 07

The landscape of my childhood was littered with snapped & chewed pencils, the wooden pencil being a necessary tool for turning wayward boys into scholars, as was the birch, according to the then prevalent educational theories, or at any rate practices. In all the little inlets of the loch, where the land descends in the grip of rock to the edge of the water grow those great colonisers, birches. Many, having seeded themselves in the most exposed places & grown to a certain age have snapped at the leading edge, leaving only a broken & chewed looking stub. They grow in fours, fives & sixes. Maybe one is weaker than the others, or closer to prevailing gales & storm weather & snaps. This leaves a wind passage, for they all draw a little shelter from each other, & one by one, the others crack, being brittle rather than sinewy enough to bend with the wind. The weight of leaves & twigs will fold the tree top down, where it becomes a titbit for any passing deer. Those that survive , if it were not for the deer & sheep grazing seedlings & in lean winters eating the bark, shelter other species of tree. They act as nurses to alders, oak, rowan, holly. If there were no sheep & no human interference, there would be good woodland regeneration in a short space of time.
I like to think of pencils made of birch wood, but I know that most are made from cedar, a few, still, from pine. In Tibet ten years ago, I would sit down wherever I could to rest from the thin air & write with my pencil – the only thing it’s possible to write with in the rain. Everywhere a shy child would appear at my elbow, even where I could see no houses. The girl, or sometimes boy, would look at my pencil, look at my paper & look at me. I let her write, or sometimes the very young would draw. The pencil would be reluctantly handed back. When I stood, I would make a small gift of the pencil. We can get pencils cheap. China sells them by the million. When I need a pencil now, I wander along the streets that Scottish schoolchildren use & find them littering the ground, unchewed, seldom broken.
The pencils may not be made of birch, but from Sailean nan Cuileag just over the hill, the last loads of birch brooms were taken away at the end of the last century. The brooms were used in the Clydeside steel foundries. They were made in dark winter, as piece work at 4½ d a dozen, less than 2p. Hugh Cameron claimed to Alastair Cameron to be able to make 24 dozen in nine hours, which included felling the trees. Timber was shipped from the little bays and inlets around here for centuries, Sailean nan Cuileag, Port na h-Uamha, Camusaine, (where the number of trees was recorded precisely, as 41,070) for building, for charcoal, bark-oak for tanning. Cameron, again, records “all the tree except the crash it made when falling was used”. In the 1870s fellers & snedders were paid 16 shillings a week, a high wage in comparison to the birch-broom makers. Lost trades go with lost language & their gear & tackle. For tanning, the bark was taken from the bottom of the tree before it was felled. In Gaelic this was called moganachadha, & was a skilled job in itself. The moss was scraped off with a sgrioban coinnich which was curved to fit the tree; smaller branches were peeled - spitheagadh - by girls. I’ve yet to discover any Gaelic speaker here who knows these terms who did not come across them as I did, in Cameron’s Annals, written within living memory.
Peeled branches, as well as pencils also littered my childhood, but then I didn’t have to peel them to earn a crust.