Ardnish Read online

  Her voice had attracted attention and a couple of soldiers came back to see what was going on. I assured them that all was well, and we resumed our walk, but in weary silence. My mind was racing. I had of course heard the rumours about the camps but, naively, had hoped they were exaggerated. No wonder these women hated us. But what could I do to save these two? Since Linde had saved me, I felt that I now had a personal responsibility to do something in return.

  At that moment I heard ferocious barking and yelping. Hondjie had run on ahead, scavenging for some food, and had disappeared from view. I dropped the shaft of the cart and sprinted off towards the noise. A pack of four wild dogs had set upon her, defending the remains of an ox she had sniffed out. She was writhing around trying to escape as they mauled her. I waded in with my boots and fists flying, and soon there were jaws snapping, the wild dogs twisting and turning everywhere. I managed to grab Hondjie by the scruff of her neck and drag her out of the melee. Thankfully Captain MacDonald was there within seconds and, leaning down from his horse, began whipping the animals away, firing a couple of shots from his pistol at them for good measure as they slunk off into the veld.

  By this time Anja was beside me, crying out her dog’s name and stroking Hondjie, who was whimpering. I quickly examined the animal and turned to Anja. ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her. ‘It’s not too bad. We’ll tidy her up and she’ll be as right as rain.’

  The men surrounded us, all talking of their experiences of dog fights and offering advice on what best to do. Cammy pushed through with the company medic and told the men to get back to their posts.

  Ten minutes later, Hondjie’s wounds had been treated with iodine from the medic’s pack and her leg was bandaged. A soldier found a scrap of dried meat for Hondjie, who seemed to be recovering from her ordeal, and we laid her in the cart. The crisis was over.

  As we set off again, there was a change of attitude from Linde. Rescuing the dog seemed to have broken the ice. Looking me in the eye, she placed her hand on my arm and said, ‘Thank you. Without you, Hondjie would be dead.’

  Her warm words delighted me though I refrained from saying aloud what I was thinking: that without me and my fellow soldiers, Hondjie would not have been in this situation at all. ‘Think nothing of it,’ I replied, smiling at her. I wanted to continue talking to her, to find out more about her but held back. There would be time enough for that.

  Captain MacDonald called a halt shortly after that and we settled down for the night, the Vanloos family apart from the men. The next morning, we were up and on our way at dawn. I hurried over to the Scotch cart to help. Anja was still exhausted and her mother encouraged her to climb onto the cart to sleep for a bit longer.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Did they give you a tough time?’

  ‘It was fine,’ she said, but from her tone I knew it wasn’t.

  I chattered away about myself to help pass the time. I told her I farmed sheep and cattle, was a joiner by trade, and lived in the most beautiful village in the world, in the Highlands of Scotland, with a sandy beach which looked south over the sea to mountains beyond. Although I suspect she understood little of it, I couldn’t help telling her the Ardnish parable, as told to me by my grandfather:

  After Adam and Eve’s time, God told all his people that they needed to come and meet Him on the Sabbath at noon and He would give them land where they could live with their spouses and rear children. But Donald Gillies was late and didn’t arrive until well past the appointed hour. The Lord looked down on him and said, ‘My child, you are late, why is that?’

  Donald Gillies replied that he had been busy feeding the sheep and cows otherwise his people would go hungry.

  The Lord saw that he was a good man and took pity on him, saying, ‘Well, my son, I was keeping the best place on earth for myself. It’s called Ardnish, and it is there you should live and not leave until I come down to earth once more.’

  Chapter 19

  Donald John, Ardnish, 1944

  I can see the dawn breaking through the windows. Another night has passed. The wind is increasing, a westerly; I can tell by the sound it makes coming down the chimney. We are well sheltered here, from all but the warmer southerly. It wasn’t so long since we moved from the old blackhouse next door into the post office building. The thatch of our old house was finished and cold draughts came whistling through the gappy stone walls, but this place has a decent slate roof and paving-stone floor.

  The sleet is splattering against the glass now, and there’s a drip-drip-drip into the bucket from the leak none of us somehow can find. The snow will return later, I feel sure. I was a fisherman for a while, and we avoided going out on days like this. The weather could change suddenly from good to bad and we would find ourselves rowing for dear life towards land.

  As the wind picks up and howls down the chimney I think of my dear old friend and neighbour, Ewan. Mairi’s late husband was on the herring boats. He would tell us stories of storms that would scare you to death just hearing about them. He was off the Flannan Isles one day, and the sky was as dark as night to the southwest, and they were on the wrong side of the island when the gale came. They could see the lighthouse flashing its warning light, much too close to them for comfort. The Flannan Isles have a terrible reputation amongst Hebridean folk for being ‘the devil’s islands’. One crew member was a lad, just fourteen, on his first voyage. Ewan knew the family, a widow with this only child.

  He had warned the captain to keep well clear of the islands. There were plenty of fish there but for a good reason: the locals kept out of the area. But this man was from Peterhead and no one knew better than himself.

  There were five men on board desperately pulling the nets in, tying down the anchor, spars and everything else that could move. The skipper had both sails up, cutting it fine, desperately trying to get north of the land. The hold had three tons of herring in it, so the boat was sitting low and heavy in the water.

  It was late morning when the first gust caught the sails. The boat tilted forty-five degrees and Ewan could feel the fish slide to one side. The mast seemed certain to break.

  ‘Haul them down!’ the skipper shouted. As the gale caught the loose canvas it writhed and flapped, and the men fought to stop the sails blowing into the water. By now the boat was plunging up and down, the sea coming over the sides, tens of tons at a time. The lad was caught at the stern, picked up by the water, bounced against the hold covers and swept along the deck past Ewan as he clung to the railing. Ewan said later that the lad actually knocked against him, his eyes looking, terrified, into Ewan’s from inches away, his hands fruitlessly trying to clutch at anything to prevent the inevitable. Ewan said that if he’d let go to help, he, too, would have been sent overboard. By this time, the boat was close to the cliffs, and the roar of the surf against the rocks was deafening, the spray shooting fifty feet into the air. It seemed they had only a slim chance of getting past. Even the non-believers on the boat were praying for salvation.

  They could see the three lighthouse men, dressed in their yellow oilskins and sou’westers, standing on the rocks only yards away ready to help – so close that Ewan could make out their frantic expressions. Somehow the boat made it past the rocks, but there was no let-up for the rest of the day and all through the night. Two men were working the pumps an hour at a time, and every now and again someone would go down to check the water level in the bilges. One of the hatch covers blew off and Ewan rushed forward, in the dark, with a piece of canvas and rope to cover the hole. He told us that balancing with his feet against the handrail, a loose rope lashing his face and every couple of minutes a wall of water trying to rip him from his position, was the most terrifying moment of his life. The old boat was creaking and groaning as it was pummelled by the elements, and they all knew that if a plank went, it would be the end of them.

  At last the storm abated. The crew slumped where they were, shocked and exhausted, unable to move or speak, each one contemplating with dread
telling the boy’s mother of his death when they returned to Mallaig.

  Ewan himself was swept off a deck a year or two later, leaving Mairi as yet another fisherman’s widow and their baby boy Sandy alone at Peanmeanach with us. He’d told me that he would die at sea, but all the same he was far too young to go. Fishing was the most perilous of work, even if the money was good. I’d always been happier with my feet on the ground and in my own bed every night.

  While we were in South Africa, a great mystery happened on the Flannan Isles. One of the Hebridean lads, a minister’s son, received a letter from his father and read it aloud to us. Everyone was transfixed, and it was discussed for days. It told of a night in December 1900 when a relief lighthouse keeper was being taken out to the island. When they anchored up, he went ashore. There was no sign of the three men there on duty, only uneaten food and an upside-down chair. Two oilskin coats were gone, but not the third, and entries in the log revealed the terror they endured during a great storm that had raged for three days. But the authorities on the neighbouring island of Lewis disputed the account, saying there had been no storm at all then; the sea had been calm. The bodies were never washed up, which was very rare and in itself needed explaining. ‘The Devil has claimed three souls,’ the minister wrote.

  Mairi will be up along the row. She’s always been the first to rise in the village. On a still day I can hear her loom through the wall as the shuttle clanks back and forth. Today she might wait a bit, seeing she has Father Angus staying. Demand for her tweed is good; she can sell as much as she can make. All of the clothing factories are busy making military uniforms so a brightly coloured tweed is a popular gift for rich women to give to their menfolk when they’re on leave.

  It was a wild day like this that Ewan came to grief. He was from St Kilda and they knew all about bad weather out there. He used to tell me of the islands – Hirta, Boreray and Stac an Armin, with its six hundred-foot-high stack – and the gannets, petrels and puffins so thick in the air above the sea cliffs you couldn’t see the sky. Eighty-five people lived there when he left as a boy. He would have been terribly sad to know that the last few people, facing starvation and sickness, had asked to be evacuated fourteen years ago.

  Ewan was delivering a very old fishing boat to a man on Soay but never arrived. He set off from Oban and was coming around Ardnamurchan Point when he must have been washed off the deck. The lighthouse man at Ardnamurchan had noted that the boat was heading north under sail with gale force winds coming from the west. His body was found at Ardtoe and the boat itself smashed to pieces on the west end of Eilean Shona. The forecast had been for fine weather, but the storm had come out of nowhere. The man who was due to help him had dropped out so Ewan had foolishly decided to set sail alone.

  I’d love to have visited St Kilda. I remember Ewan’s son Sandy talking about going out to see a cousin who still lived there at the time. He and Donald Peter were just lads, and they had a plan to get the MacBrayne ferry across to Harris and then get a ride out on a fishing boat. They planned to stay a few weeks, living on fish and mutton – he told me there were sheep on the island – but somehow it never came to pass. I’ve seen photographs of Village Bay, with its curved inlet, the remains of a volcano and the twenty houses in a semi-circle following the curve of the pebbled beach. The manse and Protestant church sat on the right, and the hillside was crisscrossed in a lattice of small fields with cleits, wee stone huts that were used to store the feathers and oil from the fulmars they harvested.

  The door opens and Angus asks how my night was, if I managed to sleep a bit.

  ‘Och, not really, but it was fine,’ I reassure him. ‘I have my memories. I enjoy leafing through them in the small hours.’

  ‘He was coughing and spluttering all night and his chest is full of phlegm he can’t clear,’ Louise pipes up. ‘I think we should get the doctor again. I could go now.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, don’t you worry. He couldn’t do anything when he came last time, and anyway, it’s a priest I’m needing, not a doctor.’

  Chapter 20

  Donald John, South Africa, 1901

  The next day we found ourselves right at the front of the convoy. There was a problem with a wagon and an order was given for us to stop and wait. Stretched behind us were men off their horses, giving them a rest. Tired, too, the three of us lay on a bank in silence. I looked across at Linde. Her eyes were shut, her arm draped over Anja who was curled up asleep.

  Linde was beautiful; there was no doubt of that. Golden skin, freckles, a mouth that turned up at the edges. Her fair hair was tied back, apart from a wisp that lay across her face. I felt an urge to reach across and tuck it behind her ear. Boer women invariably wore large, wide-rimmed bonnets to keep the sun off their heads, but Linde was an exception.

  I looked away, suddenly blushing. I’d been staring at her. Thank goodness she hadn’t seen me. And thank goodness she was no longer hostile to me. I had the dog to thank for that.

  Hondjie was lying on her back, tail wagging as I scratched her tummy. The dog was greatly loved by Anja and her mother, and they enjoyed watching me playing with her or regaling them with one of my dog stories.

  ‘That dog likes you,’ said Linde, her eyes open now.

  ‘She’d like anyone who tickled her tummy,’ I replied with a smile. ‘We have a collie for working the sheep at home. In fact we’re never without a dog or two on the farm. Our neighbour, Johnny Bochan, has seventeen.’ I found myself using the word ‘farm’ to impress her, when what I really meant was ‘croft’, just a few barren acres.

  The farm workers were nearby, tending to a few goats.

  ‘There is a wee island just off the beach, where my grandfather would keep his billy goat, although he called the males “bucks”. On Goat Island, about a mile away, there were half a dozen females, so in the autumn there would be a day when the men would capture the buck, load him into the boat and take him off for his annual visit. Getting him there was easy – he knew what was going on! – but trying to catch him a month later and bring him back was another thing altogether.’

  We both laughed at this, me blushing once more.

  I tried to think of another story which would steer us back into less awkward territory. I told her about an old English colonel who was a great friend of Christian Cameron-Head at Inverailort. The two men had met in their youth in London and remained great friends. Every October for many years he would come up to stay for a week and shoot a stag or two during the rut. As a result, he got to know the stalkers well. The colonel was a lifelong confirmed bachelor, and after he died he was one of the first people to be cremated in Glasgow. His ashes were sent back up to the castle and a case of whisky was left in his will to the two stalkers, with the instruction that his ashes should be scattered on Loch Ailort. So they rowed to the middle of the loch, with one stalker on the oars and the other carefully holding the urn. They agreed on a spot, whereupon the tin box was tossed overboard. But the wind caught it and it floated determinedly towards the north shore. The stalkers were alarmed. ‘He’ll land at Polnish!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Oh, no, he won’t,’ said the other and, picking up his rifle, he fired a couple of shots into the urn and it sank.

  ‘Why did you join the army?’ Linde asked.

  ‘Money and adventure, really. It’s what men in the Highlands of Scotland have done for generations. Our general says we’re the backbone of the British Army.’

  I told Linde how the Highlanders were known to be great soldiers, bragging that, with the skirl of the pipes, kilts blowing in the wind and bayonets fixed, even the bravest enemy would turn and run. Because of the hard conditions in the Highlands, for decades men had taken the King’s shilling and signed up. I told her about the Massacre of Glencoe when the Campbells were guests of the Macdonalds and were ordered to rise up in the middle of the night and put their hosts to the sword. Then I told her about 1715 and Bonnie Prince Charlie and the rising at Glenfinnan in 1745, and the subsequent disaster at C
ulloden. By the end of the day she was fairly steeped in my history, asking endless questions and regaling Anja with simplified versions of the dramatic parts.

  After all my tales of battle she wanted to know if all the men were rough in Scotland, fighting all the time, or were others kind, like me. I fancied she had a twinkle in her eye when she said this. I also felt that this was the first time she fully relaxed and warmed to me.

  I explained to her that Highlanders were gentle people really; it was the incomers who were rough. The building of the railway to Mallaig had brought some bad sorts to the area who would drink and fight amongst themselves. There were police in nearby Arisaig and Glenfinnan now, whereas before, the nearest had been in Fort William, thirty miles away.

  ‘Glencoe, Culloden – it seems you always lose,’ she said, teasing me. ‘Will you lose the war against the Boer, too?’

  I hesitated, squirming uncomfortably. ‘There are ten British soldiers for every one Boer fighter. I’m sure we won’t lose this time,’ I said quietly. ‘But enough of all my stories. I must be boring you with them. It’s your turn now.’

  ‘No, tell us more,’ she insisted. ‘But speak a little slower, please, and use simpler words. Sometimes I find it difficult to keep up.’

  As we progressed, a herd of gazelles came close to the convoy. A couple of the Scouts, determined to improve our rations, shot at them, and managed to hit one. It dropped to the ground and was brought back to great acclaim.

  ‘There aren’t gazelles in Scotland, are there?’ asked Linde hesitantly.

  ‘No, we have red deer. They’re about three times the size of a gazelle; the meat of one would feed our village for a whole week.’

  I told her that when I was growing up, when someone local had a fight, it always involved deer. When the Camerons at Inverailort Castle appointed a new gamekeeper – young and single, called Calum Sinclair, he hailed from the north – he was overly keen to establish his authority. The three sons of Lottie MacDonald of Laggan were accustomed to rowing across to Alisary and helping themselves to a hind or stag from the corrie between An Stac and Roshven hill.