For the few men left . . . life was hard

"For the few men left on Hirta life was hard. Lachlan Macdonald stayed to look after his mother. His father had died in a drowning accident whenLachlan was young and his mother had been let to bring up the family. By the 1920s only Lachlan was prepared to carry on living on St. Kilda. ‘My brother went away to Glasgow and my mother was bad with rheumatics,’ he recalls. ‘She was all crippled up and she was on sticks at the end. So I was doing most of the work myself and I was only young, I used to do the spinning, do everything just to help my mother.’ Not yet twenty years old, Lachlan was also having to manage the croft, go with the men to hunt sea birds, and in the winter, of course, weave the cloth that would pay the rent. ‘When the winter came,’ he says, ‘you think you are going to have a rest, but it was as hard in the day in winter as it was in the summer. You were out through the day looking after your sheep and cattle, then when it come night you were sitting there in the house and you had a pair of cards to comb up the wool and then spinning it and weaving it and so forth. It was maybe two or three o’clock in the morning before you would get to your bed. Then you were up again in the morning, away back to work again. There was nothing, just work, work, all the time.”

The Life and Death of St. Kilda, by Tom Steel