‘We didn’t find out anything,’ I continued.

We knew, without any evidence of our eyes and ears, but by the instruction of instinct merely, that it was not the state of our house by itself which appalled us and drove us back to the hills. Our house was a portent of the world. That blind squalid fate which happened to it, and involved us, was general, though we had no proof to give our minds, assuring them they thought truly, or to tell our hearts that the woe which lay on them was justly felt. When we saw our house we knew, suddenly and without doubt, that it had fellows more horridly destroyed, and we had fellows too. We were afraid; we were overwhelmed by the knowledge of events that we had never heard of, but for which our house stood as a token. I remembered the lightless valley of the Spey.

On this day of passing June, throughout this night, we escaped into the country where the sun and the moor existed by themselves; and in this place, divorced from the land of men, we escaped from fear and unhappiness. We were as the wild creatures of our wild country.

10 JULY

WE HAVE BEEN gathering blaeberries for jam this evening in the birch wood above Loch Coulter. Things ripen late here. We must be thirteen hundred feet above sea-level and the flush of ripe berries will not come for several days yet. Nevertheless we find bushes hung with swollen blue-dusted fruit in sheltered hollows exposed to the south and we have grown prudent enough to gather what fruit we can at the earliest moment of ripening. If rain comes unexpectedly the berries that are ripe will be spoiled for jam. Fruit is not so plentiful that we can afford to let any go to waste.

We were very imprudent lately. When we arrived home from our house, running to escape in broad daylight, we were past caring whether we were seen. And even after we arrived at the cave we continued to act as if nothing mattered except our unhappiness. We went out to cut peats in a rage of energy that proved no anodyne as if there were no other people in the world but ourselves. That first stage passed, yet we grew no more cautious, for we were filled with exaltation as blind as our despair.

I shudder now to think of the risks we ran. We cut our peats at midday. I scoured the country for game at noon. We spent every daylight hour in the open, as if we craved to be discovered.