Ardnish Page 13

  Sinclair took exception to this and tried to drive them off, threatening to call the police. The MacDonald boys were furious, arguing that they’d taken deer off the hill for generations and weren’t about to stop now. They gave Sinclair a bit of a hiding and tied him up in his cottage. The next day, feeling guilty, they went back over with a dram and some food for him, and before long they all became fast friends, even coming to an arrangement about an occasional deer for the pot.

  I told her that Lottie MacDonald himself had shot a stag at Alisary, and as he came to gralloch it, realised that he’d forgotten his sgian-dubh. He had two options. He could either try to get the carcass to the boat intact, which would be far too heavy, or he could go home and get a knife which, with the boat trip across the loch, would take half a day. He came up with a third option which was to rip open the animal’s chest with his teeth and thereafter pull out the stomach.

  I enjoyed the astonishment on Linde’s face at the end of that story!

  Anja had been quiet and serious at the outset of our journey, but it seemed that she and I had become firm friends over the past few days. She was ten years old, such a sweet girl with curly, flaxen hair and a pretty embroidered dress. I think she could see how much I enjoyed her mother’s company and how helpful I was with the cart. I gave her a chunk of chocolate which I had in my bag and she loved it – she’d never tasted it before.

  ‘You are kind to my daughter,’ said Linde. ‘She likes you.’

  ‘And I like her, too. She’s a lovely lass.’ Then, tentatively, I added, ‘Where is her father?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she replied firmly.

  I knew she meant it, and we walked on in silence for some time until, suddenly, Linde began speaking, her voice cracking. ‘Sometimes I forget you are taking us to a concentration camp and . . .’ She began to sob quietly.

  I reached out to console her, but she pushed me away and clutched Anja close to her.

  I always tried to be discreet when I was around Linde, but the other men had begun to tease me about being so attached to her, and soon Captain MacDonald took me aside. ‘Everyone is aware of how much time you spend with that young woman,’ he said firmly, his voice laden with disapproval. ‘I’m going to get one of the others to lend you his horse, and you can go ahead with the advance party.’

  It wasn’t phrased as an order, but it was one. Of course, he was thinking of my Morag back at home, and trying to protect me from temptation. But I was stung, and remonstrated strongly. ‘Yes, sir. But if I may, tomorrow I’d like to help her again. Her own family are all dead and she’s hated by her in-laws. I believe she sees me as her protector.’ I felt the weakness of my entreaty as I uttered the words. I could tell he wasn’t persuaded. I tried again, telling him how she had knocked the old Boer’s rifle out of the way and saved my life. But her actions didn’t justify what he saw as my amorous intentions towards the woman. We left it like that, but I knew I wouldn’t stop gravitating towards her.

  ‘Sir, I can’t stop thinking about the camp at Aliwal North. The women believe they are being taken there to die.’

  MacDonald said nothing in response, so I continued: ‘Even though we are soldiers with our orders, should we, as Christians, take civilians to their death?’ I looked at him anxiously. Would he bellow at me again, or respond as an old friend?

  ‘Donald John, I know how much this worries you, and if I thought we were taking these people to a death camp then I wouldn’t do it. You’ve heard of Emily Hobhouse, haven’t you? She’s becoming involved and is already improving the conditions within the camps. Linde doesn’t know the truth about what is happening.’

  ‘But she fears the worst, sir,’ I said. ‘She’s terrified for her daughter.’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t believe it’s quite so bad as she imagines. You know what happens to rumours once they start to spread. They get worse and worse. I truly think that Mrs Hobhouse has the situation under control.’

  I knew that in December, the humanitarian Emily Hobhouse had come across from England to inspect the camps. She was horrified by the deprivation she witnessed and coined the term ‘concentration camps’. Once back in Britain, she submitted a report to the British Government and launched a campaign that was causing a stir.

  I was reassured by his statement and left with a lighter step.

  Chapter 21

  Donald John, Ardnish, 1944

  I’m wide awake now, alert and enjoying the reminiscing. I cast my mind back, flit through the highlights of my life: from winning the hand of my wife and the birth of our children to being singled out for my carpentry skills by Professor Blackburn on the completion of Roshven House . . . My pride in Angus becoming a priest and my grandson winning the Highland Society medal at the Northern Meeting Piping competition . . . All of them good times, to be sure.

  Of course I think of the difficult times, too: the shock of losing my leg, Linde and Anja, my son dying in the prime of his life, and my family coming close to starvation before I set off to fight in the Boer War. But I shake off these dark thoughts.

  By God, we’ve had some fun here. I smile to myself as the images crowd in. In my youth our festivities took place at New Year – Hogmanay being a much bigger celebration in the Highlands than Christmas. The villagers took turns to host the Hogmanay ceilidh. When I was a boy there were over two hundred people on Ardnish, so there were often as many as seventy or eighty in Peanmeanach on the night. There was a fiddler and a box player, plus my father and myself with the pipes. Father had me practising the chosen tunes for days beforehand. The young kicked things off with a couple of dances – usually the Eightsome Reel or the Schottische – and then the adults joined in. Everyone did a ‘turn’ – a poem, song or story – and not a word of English was spoken; few spoke anything but Gaelic back then. The tables were laden with fruitcake, scones and oatcakes. And of course there was plenty of whisky, not a drop of it legal, and gallons of beer. No matter how poor we were at the time, there was always a good meal to be had at Hogmanay.

  On the stroke of midnight there was a call for hush, and then came a rap on the door. ‘Failte!’ the host cried as he threw it open – welcome! – and in strode a tall, dark, handsome stranger bearing a tray with coal, salt and a dram of whisky. Everyone then made their way around the gathering, kissing and shaking hands, exchanging best wishes for the year ahead, and the songs and chatter went on all night. Invariably someone disgraced himself – a young lad getting sick, a couple caught having a cuddle out the back, or, more usually, a man falling over dead drunk while his wife scolded him.

  That was just the start of it. With heads already pounding, we headed off first-footing to all the clachans of Sloch, Laggan, Mullochbuie and Polnish. My parents carried two bottles of whisky with them. We started from the house around mid-morning on the first of January and didn’t get back for a couple of days, until we’d been by everyone, toasted in the New Year and wished each other good health and happiness for the year ahead. It was quite a ritual, and it meant everyone got to know each other well; a lot of good came out of it as the elderly and the sick all received a visit.

  The only person who didn’t welcome first-footers, I remember, was Margaret Macleod, the fierce school teacher at Polnish. She was an ardent member of the Free Church from Harris, who didn’t drink and loudly damned us all to hell for celebrating a pagan ritual like Hogmanay.

  I wake with a start to the sound of Angus’s voice asking if I’m all right. I must have dozed off, muttering to myself.

  The snow has stopped and the wind has blown itself out. It appears Angus has been in and out, carrying peat and doing other heavy jobs to help the women.

  ‘The snow is about eight inches deep, Father,’ he reports, ‘but I’ll warrant it’ll be a foot deeper in places where it’s drifted. Louise was relieved that the sheep were sheltered last night.’

  ‘What about the cow?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s fine, too. Mairi’s milking her right now. She
’ll be calving in a couple of months.’

  I cross myself, as has been my habit all my life, and both Angus and I laugh. The annual birth of a calf is so vital to a crofting family. I suspect I must have seen an old woman do it in my youth.

  ‘When do you need to get back to the 51st Division, Angus?’ I see him hesitate.

  ‘Och, there’s no hurry. They’ve got another priest there at the moment. I was due to be at the cathedral for a while, but we’ve plenty of priests and the Archbishop said I should stay here as long as I want. We normally have a few away doing missionary work, but the war has stopped all that, so they’re not short-staffed.’

  ‘Do you keep in touch with those you met at the seminary?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, they came from all over. Us Gaelic speakers from Lochaber and the islands are mostly in the Oban diocese and don’t pass through Edinburgh much. But Archbishop Andrew, being a Lochaber man himself, always keeps a special eye out for those of us from the west.’

  Angus works directly for the Archbishop, who is the brother of my good friend Colonel Willie. He has visited Peanmeanach several times, and on those occasions we often headed to the loch for some trout fishing and a blether. I think of the colonel too. We made a good team in the Boer War, and when I came back after having my leg amputated, he not only made sure I got my army pension, but he also had a special saddle made for me that allowed me to balance better on the pony.

  He died in 1939, only a couple of months after war had been declared. When you are old, little beats a good funeral, and his, held on St Andrew’s Day at St Margaret’s, Roybridge, was one of the best. Donald Angus, Morag and I attended. My son Angus himself was the celebrant, assisting the Archbishop in commemorating his brother, with a good three hundred and fifty in attendance. I remember thinking I was the oldest person there.

  A party of eight Lovat Scouts, including my grandson, came down from Beauly for the funeral. My heart swells with pride at the memory. Two handsome, glossy black horses pulled the hearse from the village, and Morag and myself followed in a charabanc, kindly arranged by the colonel’s son, Andrew. Once all the mourners had found lifts in a variety of trucks and cars, or on horseback, or had marched the three miles from the church, everyone got ready to climb up the hill to the beautiful graveyard. Mary MacInnes, a famed beauty who lived at the bottom of the hill at Cille Choirill, passed tea around as everyone gathered.

  Uniformed Lovat Scouts formed the main bearer party and alongside them were the farm and distillery workers. At the foot of the Cille Choirill brae, Lord Lovat, looking immaculate, gave the order: ‘Pick up the coffin.’ Halfway up, the second order was given: ‘Put down the coffin.’ There, Andrew ‘drammed’ the coffin bearers, no doubt with Long John’s best whisky, served in a vast silver quaich, before the coffin was again hoisted shoulder high.

  Donald Angus played the lament, the mournful ‘Flowers Of The Forest’, as my oldest friend was lowered into the dark Lochaber soil. I struggled to hold back my tears.

  Chapter 22

  Donald John, South Africa, 1901

  Linde, Anja and I found that we had once again drifted apart from the rest of the convoy. Occasionally a soldier would ride back to see how we were getting on, as even the slowest wagon was way ahead, but most of the time it was just we three and Hondjie. She had made a remarkable recovery from her injuries and was no longer even limping.

  I was impressed by their stamina. We covered miles every day with few complaints, and I often found myself watching Linde: her determined stride, the way her blonde hair shone under the sun’s rays, and the moist sheen of perspiration on her forehead. At one point, she stopped to laugh freely at the antics of Anja and the dog, and threw back her head. I felt my heart lurch at the beauty of her.

  Later that morning, a soldier rode up to me and produced a letter from his saddlebag. It was from Morag. I turned it over in my hands.

  ‘Your wife?’ Linde asked, raising an eyebrow.

  I nodded.

  ‘Then you must stop and read it.’

  I hesitated. A cold feeling of discomfort filled my body. Shaking my head, I stuffed the letter in my pocket and resumed our trek.

  That evening, after we had made camp by a stream, I finally opened the letter.

  My dear husband,

  You are on the other side of the world, leading a different life from us here. You have sunshine and long days. Our winter is dragging slowly by. We have wind and rain, and are in bed by six in the dark with no kerosene.

  Life is hard here without you. With Angus away at Roshven working on the estate for two weeks and Sheena courting in Glenuig, it is just Donald Peter and me.

  We badly need money. Can you arrange for some to get to us? Food is becoming scarce. We haven’t had sugar or tea for over a month and mutton and kale keeps us alive but barely nourished . . .

  I read on: neighbours were leaving Ardnish for Melbourne and Antigonish in Nova Scotia; there were not enough strong people in the village to launch a boat to fish; and the Fergusons’ cow had given birth to a dead calf. I was overcome with guilt at being absent while Morag and the family suffered so much.

  As I returned the letter to its envelope with a heavy heart, Linde joined me. ‘Do you want to talk, Donald John?’

  I nodded though I was uncertain whether I really did want to talk or not. I gazed into the distance, trying to formulate my thoughts.

  Linde persevered. ‘Is everything all right back home? Why don’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘Maybe it would be best if I drew it,’ I replied. I took out a notepad and pencil from my bag in the wagon, and settled down to draw. Anja leant on my shoulder, watching carefully. As I drew, I talked.

  I told them that the walls of Ardnish homes are built from stone dug up from the field or taken from the riverbed. The corners are rounded, not at ninety degrees. Two glazed windows at the front and a door in the middle. The roof is turf, covered in reeds that we gather every two or three years from the banks of the loch in the middle of the peninsula, and finally we throw an old fishing net over it all and tie rocks along the edges to keep the thatch from blowing off during a winter’s gale.

  ‘It looks lovely, so small and neat.’ Linde smiled, examining my sketch. ‘And where is the sea? Where are the mountains? Draw the village.’

  I did a rough sketch of Peanmeanach and the surrounding area, pointing out the singing sands beach where we swim on hot summer days, the moss where the peat is cut, and the big house at Roshven where I’d worked on and off for the last twenty years.

  I realised I had made it all sound idyllic and ridiculously romantic, and felt a pang of guilt. ‘Actually, Linde, the Vanloos farm was much nicer than ours,’ I confessed after a pause, and I decided to tell her the truth. That the dwellings were called blackhouses due to the smoke from the fire inside; that the floor was bare earth; that there was no running water and we had to walk to the burn to fill the kettle. That the children didn’t wear shoes except on the worst of winter days when they would wear their parents’ old boots to school and they each had to take a piece of peat or a lump of coal for the school fire.

  But at the same time, I was desperate for her not to think of us as impoverished peasants and so I went to great lengths to explain how sophisticated and well educated our people were and how they thrived all over the world. I didn’t want Linde to pity me, so I moved onto safer ground and started talking about the livestock at home. I knew Anja loved animals and I spoke as slowly as I could to make sure she understood.

  I told Anja about our sheep, that in the Highlands we had indisputably the most handsome sheep in the whole world, that they were quite small and had black faces, and had the most beautiful lambs. I described how Morag reared newborn lambs in a box beside the fire in the kitchen. The same old whisky bottle would be filled with cow’s milk and the children would squabble over who would feed them. After a couple of weeks, the lambs became noisy and naughty and would prance around the kitchen with their tails twitching
madly. Morag would shoo them out to be with the other sheep when they were old enough, but from then on, they would always come up and butt your leg with their heads, demanding food or a scratch behind the ear. I told Anja, in my most serious voice, that tame sheep were a menace.

  I admitted that we were much poorer at home than the farmers here, that finding any food in late winter was a real worry and that many children died young. Linde was sceptical, pointing out how smart the Scouts looked in their uniforms and their fine horses. I said we only had one cow and some sheep, and that we would make some money from helping the laird when he needed a wall built, or had gentlemen staying who wanted to be taken deer stalking. We survived on potatoes, oats and herring from the sea, and were lucky to live by the shore as we had fish to eat and seaweed to fertilise the land. It was much tougher to eke out an existence in the remote glens.

  Linde asked why my fingers often twitched so rhythmically, and I explained that it was the habit of many pipers as we had hundreds of tunes in our heads. I talked about the bagpipes and how my home of Ardnish was famous for its piping; after all, we had the legendary Donald MacDonald, himself a Scout, the MacDougalls from Sloch and our own family, the hereditary pipers for the Lords of the Isles.

  ‘The pipes are played for pleasure,’ I said, ‘at weddings, at parties, at funerals. When I play, everyone stops what they’re doing and listens, tapping their feet in time with the tune.’

  Linde had never heard them played, and when I mimed a rendition of a march, then a jig, we were soon convulsing with laughter. My pipes were at the military camp at Aliwal North and I promised to play them for her as soon as I could.