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them only owned one set of clothes so that they had to borrow garments from their kin on the unusual occasion when they wished to wash their attire. He had even noticed that some did away with this altogether. He returned to the notebook with a disgusted look on his face:
    The St Kildans live in oval-shaped houses which are more like hovels than human dwellings. The houses are covered in grass and rubbish and can from afar be mistaken for burrows. They live close together in a clachan without any apparent structure to it. The walls of the buildings are as thick as they are high, about seven feet, and hence there are no windows to let the light in. The only source of light is a hole where the straw roof meets the wall, which also serves as a smoke outlet. Due to the thickness of the walls the wooden door opens on to a passage which leads into the byre end of the house. In order to reach the living area you have to make your way, in complete darkness, past the animals which dwell there in the winter, to the living area shared by men and dogs. There is no furniture as such, just a few utensils such as a couple of iron pots, a wooden chest or two, a few wooden plates and an iron lamp fuelled by fulmar oil. The beds are dug out of the thickness of the walls and the entrance to these grave-like beds is two by three feet. Ashes, dirty water and far worse are spread daily on the earth floor and covered every few days with more ashes. This way, they tell me, the thickness of the floor accumulates over the year so that by the springtime, before this human manure is dug out and spread across the fields, the inhabitants have to crawl around their houses on their hands and knees. What is more, they literally dive down into their beds at night, as the level of the floor is higher than the entrance to the ‘grave’.
    They tell me also that it can at times be very difficult to enter the building in wintertime. This is due to the fact that in front of the doorway, and extending well into the tunnel, is a hollow into which are thrown all the portions of the birds not used for food, the entire carcasses of those not edible, and all and every abomination you can imagine. I do not wish to think about the horrors I will have to crawl through in order to visit my parishioners when winter comes. God almighty! How can people survive under such circumstances? They do not seem to be too bothered by the standard of their living and maintain, in the most laconic way, that their ancestors built these houses and lived in them for a thousand years which in itself proves that they are good houses. But they do wonder why it is that they are not as strong as their forefathers appear to have been! I thank the Lord that my olfactory senses are so poorly developed.
    It was no wonder, the minister thought as he put down his pen, that the stench around the natives was so unbearable that it made his pregnant wife nauseous. He was suddenly ashamed of himself for thinking such negative thoughts of his own flock and added a paragraph to his notes:
    All praise be to the God of mercies, who has brought me hitherto, and permitted me to see the little group of mortal beings who inhabit this sequestered spot.
    Pleased by this magnanimous comment he decided that it was time for a break and went in search of Lizzie. He found her on the porch, her eyes closed against the sun and an untroubled smile on her face. He noticed that her cheeks were stroked in a pretty shade of pink. Her hands lay idle and cupped in her lap – they seemed to be gathering sunlight under her swelling stomach. He watched her quietly for a while and realised that he was at that moment raised to a level of happiness that could not possibly last. In her he celebrated the unearthly beauty of the morning. She reminded him of everything in life that he had denied himself since Will’s death all those years ago, and for the first time he allowed himself to recognise his dead friend’s