Ardnish Was Home Read online

  Wrapped in blankets and with a roaring fire, we are soon comfortable. Food is the only real issue; the oranges and coffee won’t last long. Prissie and Louise search high and low and come up with some flour, forgotten in a pantry. They manage to bake something – a cross between bread and a biscuit – and serve it with jam. It is a real saviour.

  ‘I hope the others are all right,’ says Prissie. ‘It’s so cold outside.’ Those are the last words I hear before I doze off.

  *

  ‘It’s stopped snowing!’ Louise exclaims next morning. ‘I hope the Turks don’t come down here. Maybe we should hang a white sheet on a stick.’

  My eye is getting better. It is wet and gooey, but after it has been bathed and I open and shut my eyelids for a minute, there is definite improvement. I can make out the shape of people and see them moving around, and also the location of the door and window.

  We talk about how long it might take for a rescue party to come and find us; we reckon at least two days. Will they come by boat, or along the shore? We hope it will be by boat as then they would take us straight to the Gloucester Castle.

  ‘What will we do if they don’t come?’ I venture.

  No one has an answer.

  ‘Come on, DP,’ says Louise. ‘We need to get you more comfortable walking around. We need to build your strength up, too.’

  ‘I’ll need a cromach,’ I say.

  ‘A what?’

  I grin. ‘A cromach is a stick that we take to the hill when we’re working the sheep, or for balance. I’ll need a dog, too. A Highland man always has to have a dog with him. But a cromach for now and we’ll get the dog later.’

  Louise finds a stick and we go outside. Carefully, she puts her arm across my shoulder and shows me how to sweep the stick back and forth to detect obstacles, to lift my feet higher rather than shuffle, and to bend and straighten my injured arm. ‘We’ll do this all day, DP,’ she says. ‘You need to be a lot fitter than this.’

  As we stand together in the warm evening sun it seems difficult to imagine the dreadful weather of just two days before. I gently flex my arm, and Louise rubs the muscle when I get spasms and cramps. I can see shapes and movement quite well, but no colour yet, and everything is blurred. Louise has made a patch for my left eye.

  ‘You look quite rakish, DP! It suits you,’ Prissie exclaims. ‘I can almost see some naughtiness in you now. Not the perfect DP we thought you were.’

  ‘Are you tired of my stories?’ I ask Louise, somewhat belatedly. ‘They must mean nothing to you. A distant people in a faraway land.’

  I feel her move close to me. ‘They’re lovely, DP,’ she replies. ‘What a wonderful life you and your family have had. I long to see it for myself.’

  I think I believe her. I feel happy. I inhale her scent and control the urge to touch her cheek. I want to so much. I could kiss her right now. No one would see. But I don’t; she might run inside. If only I could see her eyes; then I could tell what she is thinking.

  There’s a shout from Prissie. ‘Come on, Louise! We have lots to do before the light fades.’

  The other three patients are in as incapable a state as myself. The priest, Father Joseph, lies in the bed beside me. I speak to him. His speech is slurred, as if he has been drinking. He’d been hit by shrapnel in the back and brought in by a party from HQ who were returning from a recce at the front.

  Then there is the sapper corporal who lost a leg on a mine. Although it has been amputated above the knee, the stump has gone gangrenous, and the stench is awful. Prissie says it is like sharing a room with a man long dead. Back in the Casualty Station, Dr Sheridan had put the stump in boiling water to try and kill the infection. He also strapped on a bag of maggots to eat the rotting flesh. The poor man has an awful fever and screams terribly in his delirium, for hour upon hour. I ask Louise if he could be moved to another part of the house as no one can rest with the noise of his suffering. He will be dead by the morning, I think. God bless him.

  Louise tells me that Prissie has something of a soft spot for officers. Mr Skinner and I talk a lot. He came straight from officer training at Mons and had been on the way up to join his battalion in the west. He was staying overnight with a rearguard party on the beach when they were shelled and he was knocked out. He is keen to get back to join them, and is worried that we think he is malingering. His father is a lawyer and he is desperate to go to university and become a lawyer, too.

  His privileged life is as different from ours as you can imagine, but nothing is too much effort for him. He dashes about, collecting wood for the fire and carrying things eagerly for the nurses. Louise tells me that Prissie takes his pulse constantly and feels his brow, and we laugh. Prissie always has a good story to tell. She keeps everyone in good humour, especially Mr Skinner.

  The sapper does, indeed, die in the night. Mr Skinner helps Prissie and Louise carry him outside where they pile stones over him and mark his grave with a little wooden cross. Back in the house, Father Joseph says a prayer for him and asks him to have a word with our maker when he arrives up above to see if He can get us out of here. It is a selfish thing to think, but it is so good to have silence again. His constant moaning was distressing, and put all of us on edge.

  Several days pass. Prissie and Louise find a couple of chickens which Mr Skinner kills and plucks. They boil them over the fire. We are growing increasingly worried: why haven’t we been rescued? Prissie and Louise are looking at all the alternatives to get to safety. Maybe the evacuation is over, and everyone has gone? But we all agree that it couldn’t have happened that quickly. I am privately concerned about how I am going to get around: the disorientation and vulnerability that I’d felt when stumbling out of the beetle and onto the rocks the other day is fresh in my mind. I had fallen repeatedly, the waves soaking me up to the waist, and cracked my shin several times. Without a sailor on each side I would never have made it. Just walking for a few minutes exhausts me, still.

  Mr Skinner gives us a map which he had with him. It turns out to be crucial. At the time, we hadn’t even considered retreating overland, but this map gives us another alternative if our troops have indeed been evacuated.

  As part of his officers’ course at Mons, Skinner was taught about escape and evasion. He tells us that the choice is whether to look like locals and act normally, which carries the risk of being shot as spies, or to stay in uniform, move at night and be soldiers attempting to get back home, in which case we would be taken as prisoners of war. We know that, with two women, there is a decent chance we can pass as locals from a distance, so that is the option we have chosen.

  Mr Skinner traces a finger over the map, showing the nurses a possible route. ‘Basically, you need to head north for a week of steady walking to the neck of the Gallipoli peninsula, then another couple of days towards the town of Kesan. From there, you turn west towards Ipsala and the border for about a week, and after you cross the river Evros you’re in Bulgaria. Another few days’ walking to Alexandroupolis, and you should be able to get a boat to safety – Greece, maybe.’

  My heart sinks. They all know that even half an hour’s walking is difficult enough for me.

  ‘A month of walking through rough country?’ Louise says. ‘How on earth will you manage, DP?’

  ‘Well, it’ll be a challenge,’ I reply. ‘But we have no choice.’

  We know that the river that forms the boundary between Turkey and Bulgaria will be extremely difficult to cross. But Skinner says that there are many people in that part of Turkey and Bulgaria who are of Greek origin and Christian; we might find someone who would help us get a boat across.

  And so we have the beginnings of a plan. Louise and Prissie spend many hours with Skinner discussing alternative routes. I sleep a lot, but I overhear Skinner explaining how we must avoid roads yet always read the road signs, and how local women will be much more amenable to help than men. Despite this advice, avoiding people at all costs seems to be the message.

  Today, we
hear distant shelling. The wind is coming from the south, so clearly the engagement is still on. I think about the poor buggers at the front. They’ll be curled up in trenches scraped out of impossibly hard ground, the scream of shells headed in their direction above them, followed by the thud as they hit the ground. There was nothing they could do to defend themselves – the shell either has your name on it, or it hasn’t. And they would be cold. While it is much warmer and the snow is nearly gone, the men would be soaked through and freezing, especially at night. It is strange to feel so fortunate.

  We need a horse and cart, if possible. With the sapper dead and Mr Skinner heading off shortly, only the priest and myself remain among the patients.

  The following day, Mr Skinner announces that he’ll be leaving tomorrow, first thing. He’s going to head along the bottom of the cliff face and hope that no one will see him. He does one great favour before he leaves. Taking the pistol, he goes out and shoots a goat. He skins and guts it, before chopping it into manageable pieces. I stand beside him as he does it and tell him where to cut. I’ve done it often enough with hinds and sheep alongside my father, though I am in no fit state to be of any use to Skinner at the moment.

  We have a word before he goes.

  ‘I’m leaving you some money, and I’ll send someone back to get you,’ he says. ‘I promise. But if they don’t come within three days you’ll need to head off yourselves. Every day you’re here is a worry. We aren’t that far from the front line. If neither the main party, Dr Sheridan nor I have sent a rescue party it will be because we’ve been captured . . . or something.’

  Prissie accompanies him for the first mile and climbs up the hill to see the fleet. On her return, she rushes into the house, crying, ‘I’ve seen a donkey! We must go and get it. We can move DP around on it.’

  Louise finds some rope, and between us we make a basic halter. I know how to make one, of course, but my arm and eyesight are still next to useless and explaining it isn’t easy. They don’t have much call for halters in the Welsh Valleys or Liverpool.

  The women go out to look for the animal, but despite searching for hours they can’t find it.

  *

  I have a good conversation with Father Joseph. He can talk only very little, and nod his head in response. I can tell he is in real pain.

  Brought up in Liverpool, he had converted to Catholicism a few years ago and went to work in Ireland, teaching for a religious order. He became a priest only recently. He didn’t know of my brother, though they must have been about the same age. We have a good rapport, given the circumstances.

  Father Joseph was assigned to join the Royal Green Jackets, which was a regiment largely made up of soldiers of Irish descent. But not long after getting off the ship, he was hit by shrapnel and paralysed.

  He is acutely aware of the problem. Prissie, Louise and I are able to walk; he is not. There is a reasonable chance of our reaching safety, with only the nurses and myself moving at night, but although he is a small man, we can’t carry him. If we leave him here he won’t be capable of looking after himself, and being a Christian priest he is not likely to be treated well by the Muslim Turks, who after all, are fighting a religious war. It is an agonising dilemma for us all.

  *

  Over the last two years there have been terrible stories circulating about the Turks massacring three quarters of a million Armenians: men, women and children. The Armenians are Christian, and moved down from Russia over the centuries and settled here. Whenever someone said that the Turks played a clean war by not shooting at our stretcher bearers or hospital ships, Colonel Willie would say, ‘Remember the Armenians’.

  ‘I’ll bet this house was owned by Armenians,’ I say. ‘That would explain why the cupboards have food in them, and their clothes are still here.’

  ‘You have to leave me here,’ insists Father Joseph. ‘I’ll be fine. The Lord is at my side.’ If he hadn’t been a priest we would have left him the pistol to shoot himself with if he’d had to.

  *

  It is now close to Christmas. The weather is pretty rotten. At least we have the shelter of the house and wood to burn, unlike the poor sods in their trenches. Two weeks have gone by, and there is no sign of anyone. Prissie and Louise take it in turn to go to the top of the hill and look at the ships offshore. They tell me that the Gloucester Castle is there, looking white and beautiful.

  ‘Must be at least six miles away,’ reckons Prissie. ‘With all those ravines I don’t think we’d get you there, even if there weren’t Turkish troops in the way.’

  We have a lengthy discussion about what to do. Six miles is nothing compared to a month’s walk to the port, but the terrain is very rough, and no one has succeeded in sending help for us. We can only conclude that they didn’t make it through. If they couldn’t make it, what chance do we have?

  ‘I just feel we have no chance of getting to Suvla,’ Louise says at last. ‘At least heading away from the battle we can lie up during the day and sneak our way through in our own time.’

  We all agree. This is our plan.

  We decide to wait two more days, to see if anyone comes. Maybe the weather will improve, too. We hear distant gunfire, but see no one.

  I am definitely getting stronger. My shoulder is stiff and painful, but I know it is on the mend. I am not looking forward to stumbling across rough ground, but Louise keeps me at my exercises, half an hour four times a day. We practise climbing fences and fallen trees, even running, though that is a disaster. On the odd sunny day, Louise and I walk around the steading. She pushes me to walk up hills and down steep slopes to get me used to exertion. I ask her to tell me about the flowers and the trees, as I still find it impossible to make out any detail, but she doesn’t know any of them.

  ‘A mining town in Wales wasn’t the place to learn about these things,’ she says, with a grin.

  I can move around the steading now, and walk for about an hour before I need a rest. My eyes are sore but not infected. I wear a hat taken from the farmhouse to stop the glare of the winter sun.

  Prissie is drying out pieces of goat meat in front of the fire, and Louise is filling wine gourds with water for the trip, when we hear a horse approach. We hide in the farmhouse until we are sure it is an ally, and then we greet the man warmly.

  He introduces himself. ‘I’m a New Zealander, from the Otago Mounted Rifles. John Stewart.’

  He tells us that he had been sent to do reconnaissance and had been unable to get back to his regiment on Hill One Hundred with news, as there were Turks between him and his unit. He hasn’t eaten for days, so Prissie gives him some of the precious goat.

  He was trying to get to Suvla and had tried from various angles. It seemed that there were Turks everywhere and our troops were trying to get off the beaches and onto the boats as quickly as possible, loading at night so the Turks didn’t know of the evacuation. Like all Aussies and New Zealanders I have encountered, he is friendly and open; we all warm to him.

  I ask him if he had come across a Dr Sheridan on the way. He had not, but he had seen a man with a donkey in the distance, which might have been him.

  ‘Our donkey, probably. I hope the Turks get him,’ says Prissie.

  Nor had he news of the sailors and injured who left two weeks ago. He promises to get a message to the Scouts to let them know how we are, if he possibly can.

  We have decided to leave tomorrow. We are sitting in the main room, shivering in the cold and covered with blankets. John is adamant that we won’t get back to the beach along the shore. The others from our beetle may have managed, but the path has Turks positioned all along its length. He has decided to head around to the east and have another crack at it. We discuss our route – exactly the opposite way from where our troops were getting loaded onto boats on Suvla Bay. But we can’t stay here. The Turkish troops are sure to come, and what with Sandy and I having suffered so gruesomely at their hands already, I am not keen to rely on their decency.

  Father Joe doesn
’t join our conversation. We are all acutely aware that he is not coming. There is no point in discussing it.

  Louise and Prissie go through every drawer and cupboard, digging out clothes for us.

  ‘How do I look?’ jokes Louise, posing for Prissie in a large straw hat.

  Prissie tosses a woollen coat in her direction. ‘Goes well with this jacket – quite the rage!’

  They try on various items, and I can hear that John is enjoying the show. ‘The less you have on, the better I like it, ladies,’ he says.

  I feel a twinge of jealousy.

  Me in an army uniform and them in their scarlet nurses’ uniform is not going to be a sensible way to play it. We need to be the colour of the ground and the bushes, as we intend to travel at night and take shelter during the day. The women who sell the cigarettes on the beach wear black and brown clothing, with a shawl over their heads. Of course, the problem is that the menfolk who had lived in this house were a great deal shorter and more stocky than me. I am not far off six foot and very slim. There are heavy leather sandals with a strap that we can adjust for our bigger feet, however. We won’t pass muster under scrutiny, but from a hundred yards away we might get away with it.

  As we sit by the fire, sipping some ouzo, which we had found hidden with the owners’ clothing, we try not to think about the journey ahead.

  ‘Tell us a story, DP,’ pleads Prissie. ‘Cheer us up. Louise tells me you spent some time making whisky. Tell us about that.’

  ‘Ach, that story will take hours, and I really need to sleep. Have I told you about the clipping of the sheep, though?’

  HOME

  As my father explained to me, sheep were quite new in the Highlands and had been the reason for some of the Clearances, which saw tens of thousands of people thrown out of their crofts. After the 1745 rebellion, a lot of the clan chiefs fled to France to escape persecution. Over the next fifty years they broke their link with their people and they spent serious money. They moved from being fathers of the clan to being masters of the clan in their own mind – a subtle but significant shift. The chiefs now needed their vast acres of unproductive land to support them. In many instances, their people were moved, forcibly driven in some instances, from productive to barren land in order that professional shepherds and thousands of sheep could be installed in their place.