From our first arrival in the cave we were inconvenienced by lack of a place in which to stow our belongings. We struggled along while the west end was open and the cave was light. Thereafter we could no longer carry bulky obstacles out of doors when they were in the way. We were always tripping over bedding, clothes, pots and tools, and besides our annoyance we had a permanent fear in case we broke something irreplaceable. We could only get ahead with our work because Terry did little except stay beside me moving things from one place to another as I digged or pounded, and that of course meant that our work went at the rate of one pair of hands instead of two.

We realized that we could never make progress until we had a place in which to stow our furniture. Even in tins our food became damp, and our bedding required to be aired every day. Our health as well as our comfort demanded cupboards.

‘We ought to have left two openings in the wall beside the fireplace for pots and dishes,’ I said. But the wall would have been too weak had we done that.

‘Could we not make holes in the rock and drive pegs into them,’ Terry suggested.

We tried and failed to drive a hole in the rock.

‘In fact we’re beat,’ Terry said in a melancholy voice. ‘Och then I suppose we can’t do anything but struggle away as best we can. Oh I do hate to see this litter on the floor, everything spoiling—’

While we were tormenting our heads for a solution to this problem another presented itself. We were most uncomfortable sleeping on the floor, even after the floor was levelled. We had only enough bedclothes to keep us warm and of course we could not spare to lay any underneath us in place of a mattress to relieve the hardness of the floor. To make matters worse it was necessary to roll up our bed whenever we wakened since we needed all the cave’s space to cook and work in. This second objection to our bed on the floor hindered us from making a heather couch. We knew that a properly made heather-bed was softer than the softest bed of down. You gather young heather and pack it upright in a square frame until the whole frame is tightly filled. We could have made a simpler bed of heather or bracken heaped on the floor. The bracken or heather would scatter through the cave. It would become damp. It could not be replaced by dry heather in winter.

Furthermore every bed we envisaged on the floor would expose us to the draught which blew towards the fireplace.

‘If we had a hammock—’ Terry lamented after a long futile discussion.

‘Terry! Terry!’ I cried in rapture. ‘Oh, what a fool I am not to have thought of it—’