A Rope - in Case

TALL TALES FROM THE OUTER HEBRIDES. The March morning was full of mist; grey and inscrutable the swirling formations loped in from the sea to hover uncertainly over the village of Bruach so that the houses and crofts vanished and re-emerged in a constantly changing pattern; the land apeared to be adrift in a thick silence through which the distant throbbing of the burn and the nearer rasp of tide on shingle barely penetrated. For every day of mist in March there ll be an inch of snow in May, the old crofters predicted. The fourth of Lillian Beckwith's books on her life on Bruach, A Rope - In Case is packed with hilarious stories and delightful characters. Yet it is never sentimental - always observant.

Lilian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.

Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir About My Father's Business, a child's eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter's Kitchen (Arrow, 1976).

Since her death, Beckwith's novel A Shine of Rainbows has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which in 2009 won 'Best Feature' awards at the Heartland and Chicago Children's Film Festivals.