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  Several of the island men in the Scouts only spoke Gaelic and poor communication with the officers could lead to all sorts of misunderstanding. I would often call upon Donald John to be my translator. Donald John always had a flair for languages; it ran in his family. He became determined to learn Dutch; there were always prisoners to be interrogated or transported, and he decided he could be more useful if he could converse with them. We had been at Heilbron for a couple of days when he encountered a captured Boer who had been a schoolteacher and was keen to improve his English. Donald John would go over to his compound twice a day. The Boer, named Coen, had a bayonet wound in his thigh and Donald John was able to get him iodine and fresh bandages. He told Donald John he had fought alongside the British at Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus twenty years ago as a lad and had a great affection for the Tommies, as he called the British. Coen sorely wished the war would end. He believed nothing good would come of it and the British, with their vast numbers, would win sooner rather than later. He said that many of the Boer would fight to the bitter end as a matter of honour. Donald John relayed this information to me and I must confess I was not surprised.

  Chapter 11

  Donald John, Ardnish, 1944

  The family goes about their day. Louise comes to talk for a while; I sense they must have agreed to take it in turns to look after me. I feel content; it’s pleasant listening to her, feeling her young hand on mine.

  Louise loves to talk. She tells me about how the farmhouse at Laggan is in a better state than it has been for years, how lucky her son is to have the farm tenancy for Ardnish when the war ends, and how kind it was of Colonel Willie’s son to give a guarantee to the Arisaig Estate on his behalf. And how lucky Donald Angus is that the women are looking after it for him in the meantime, although he will doubtless make more of it eventually. The farm could definitely hold more cattle and sheep on the place than it does currently.

  But then she pauses. I suspect she is thinking of Donald Peter, her late husband and my beloved son. She seldom talks about him to me, perhaps knowing it still hurts after all those years.

  ‘Do you still miss my son, Louise? You never mention him.’ Old people can say what they like, speak what other people fear to, so I venture the question.

  Tears well in her eyes and her hand clasps mine tighter. ‘I do miss him, Father, desperately. But it’s been so long now, sometimes I wonder if the boy I see in my mind was just a dream. Was he really like I remember him, I wonder?’

  She rocks gently back and forth on the edge of the bed. ‘He would have so loved Donald Angus and been so incredibly proud of him – his piping successes and doing so well in the army. The father and son have all the same characteristics. The way they sweep their hair back, the tilt of the head when they’re listening intently, even the words they use. How can that be?’

  She talks about how wonderful it is that Donald Angus loves Ardnish as much as his father did and how he yearns for it to flourish, to be full of children’s voices once again. He wants to find a wife who is happy with her own company, who would enjoy the remoteness and wildness – a girl who will love him and this place and share his dreams for it.

  ‘He told me once’ – she smiles – ‘when he was young that he wants to have eight children, all with red hair, and then the school board would have to open the school again. Can you imagine!

  ‘It’s such a shame that he found this Canadian girl and fell for her. His first love, yet he never tells her and then she gets captured.’

  She looks at me, willing me to say that the girl, Françoise, will be all right.

  But I don’t want her to have false hope. ‘We don’t know anything for sure, Louise. All we can do is keep praying for her.’ Privately, I know her experience will have been horrific. She was very likely tortured and then taken to a death camp. I’ve seen the newspaper articles about the German concentration camps; few came out alive from those hellholes. I wonder if she managed to keep her secrets about the resistance fighters and their families; if not, dozens would be arrested, and there would probably be reprisals against the village. Donald Angus hadn’t mentioned anything about reprisals when he was home. I had told him as gently as I could to stop pining for her and get on with his life when he was home on leave, but he didn’t want to hear it: he was determined to keep searching.

  We sit in companionable silence for a while, each with our own thoughts.

  ‘I’d love to have met her,’ says Louise after a while. ‘I wonder what her feelings for my son were. She can’t have helped falling for him, don’t you think?’

  I nod. ‘She’ll be a grand lass. He has good taste in women.’

  Louise sighs and gazes out of the window. ‘It’s turning to snow now,’ she murmurs. ‘It’s coming down thick and fast out there. Can you see it, Donald John? I hope Angus isn’t too far off. Didn’t he say he was going over to Laggan?’

  We make sporadic conversation over the next hour. The wind is driving the snow against the glass, and I can hardly see out.

  ‘It’ll be dark soon. I wish he was back,’ Louise says.

  It is dusk when Angus eventually returns, the door shooting back in the wind and a flurry of snow coming in with him. He stamps the snow off his boots.

  Louise fusses over him. They head over to Mairi’s house, promising to be back with supper shortly. Louise is anxious about the animals in the deep snow and how furious Morag would be if she came back to lots of dead sheep.

  In the silence, my fingers twitch a tune and I think about Donald Angus and his piping. Ever since he won at Inverness, he has become well known in the piping world, and is constantly asked to give lessons and to write tunes.

  I remember going to Mass at Our Lady of the Braes, well before the war, and near the back sat a good-looking young man I’d never seen before. He introduced himself after the service. He was a Canadian, by the name of Ranald Macdonald, from Inverness County in Cape Breton. He’d come to the Braes hoping to meet my grandson and myself. His people had left Roybridge in the 1820s and were related to the famous Cranachan brothers. The five unwed brothers were known as the strongest men in Scotland and legendary in the Highlands. He’d visited their house and Cille Choirill church, which the Cape Breton people had raised money to rebuild. He was eager to discuss piping with us, so I invited him to come and stay at Peanmeanach, telling him that Donald Angus, who was in Mallaig staying with his uncle, would be back home the next day.

  Ranald planned to stay the night, but he ended up staying for two weeks. He worked in a sawmill at home, and while he was with us he expertly cut and dragged firewood from all around.

  Ranald knew many old Highland tunes, long forgotten in these parts, some of which we’d heard of but had never heard played.

  My fingers were too stiff and my mind too old to learn new tunes, but I enjoyed listening to Ranald and Donald Angus chantering away all day. They learned a lot from each other. Ranald had heard of a woman called Sheena and many of the others who had emigrated from this area, through his fiddling friends. They were now settled on the east coast of Canada. When my wife enquired about Sheena and said she was without a family, he looked confused; we agreed it must be a different one. I recall asking if he knew of the Miramichi Macdonalds down at Mull River, friends of our Sheena and Cranachans like himself. ‘They’d be related to Colonel Willie and the Archbishop as likely as not,’ I told him. It turned out he had indeed heard of them, and agreed what fine people they were.

  Sheena mentioned Ranald in subsequent letters over the years and I heard from her that he had died just before the war broke out. He had been cutting lumber deep in the woods, there was a sudden heavy snowfall, and he became disorientated. Sadly, he never made it back to safety. We were all terribly upset at the news as he’d been a wonderful guest and acquaintance – someone whom Donald Angus would have enjoyed meeting in Canada.

  They are all huddled around the fire now. With the coal added to the peat, it’s blazing. The wind is rattling the
windows but it’s cosy in here, although my eyes sting with the acrid smoke.

  Angus brings me some photographs from the kist and I peer at them in the dim light. There is an image of several youngsters, smiling and excited, arms interlocked, twirling around outside, in a field somewhere. In the background I can see an elderly piper with short black hair. Angus turns the photograph over and I see the inscription: ‘Danny and Joe MacDonald, the Mull River MacDonalds. Aonghus Dhu piping.’

  ‘Isn’t it amazing,’ says Angus, ‘that thousands of miles across the Atlantic hundreds of thousands of people call themselves Scots, speak Gaelic, and pipe, fiddle and dance the same way as it’s done right here? There are MacDonalds, Gillies and MacLellans going to Mass and living in villages called Arisaig, Glencoe and Inverness. It really is a new Scotland. What a shame we never went over. Sheena would have shown us a great time.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I reply.

  Louise rummages in the kist. ‘There’s a letter along with that photograph,’ she says, picking it up and reading aloud. ‘“Went with friends to a parish picnic at Mabou where we danced. Tried the step-dance for the first time.”’ Louise glances over at me and smiles. ‘She goes on to write that “Black Angus was the best-known piper around but he was also a great fiddler”.’

  Angus is interested for another reason. ‘Look!’ he exclaims. ‘He has the bag on his right shoulder, and his right hand’s on top. His fingers are all crooked, too. I’ll bet he never learned to read music.’

  We study other photographs, all of them small and dogeared: a picnic by Lake Ainslie, adults, children and a large red-coated Labrador. ‘That’s Ruadh, Sheena told us once. What a handsome animal he is.’

  And here’s Sheena framed in the doorway of a pretty little cottage, holding a young girl’s hand. An old woman stands beside them. Written on the back, we read ‘Mrs MacEachern’.

  ‘That’s where Sheena lives. Isn’t she lucky having such a bonny house?’ Mairi says.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’ I ask.

  ‘No idea, maybe a friend’s daughter,’ Angus replies dismissively. ‘Doesn’t Sheena look well?’

  ‘Your mother was never happier than when Sheena came home to visit,’ I say. ‘She cried all the way back in the train after waving her off in Glasgow. She was convinced it would be the last time she’d ever see her.’

  ‘Sheena said that Danny, Joe and the piper are all Cranachan MacDonalds, from Roybridge way,’ Angus says. ‘She wrote to me about them. She said something along the lines of “whatever their material condition, a sense of dignity was bred in the bone”. I’ve always remembered it.’

  My eyelids are heavy.

  ‘I’ll check on himself,’ I hear Mairi whisper.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ she says, but I am not. I can hear her topping up the fire, and then she turns on the wireless. The clipped BBC voice announces the ten o’clock news.

  It is sobering. The Russians have relieved the siege of Leningrad, and it is believed that two million civilians there have died of starvation and disease. And the British destroyer HMS Janus has been sunk off the Anzio beachhead in Italy.

  ‘It’s hard to credit we’re winning, isn’t it?’ says my son.

  ‘My Lord,’ says Mairi, ‘What a shocking number of deaths. It’s beyond belief. Will this terrible war never end?’

  The storm is still battering against the window. I don’t remember snow like this for a good three years. There was a hell of a winter in ’41, when we were snowbound for two weeks and the sea froze. It had been novel for the first few days, but then we started to worry about the animals starving and realised we had precious little food for ourselves. It was bitterly cold, the snow two feet deep in places, but with clear blue skies and not a breath of wind. We had to take shovels and dig out the sheep that were huddled inside one of the ruined crofts.

  Captain Andrew MacDonald was back from the Faroe Islands on a visit at that time, training with the SOE at Inverailort Castle, and one afternoon we suddenly heard the deep throb of an engine and hurried out to see what was going on. Into the bay came a landing craft, with Captain MacDonald waving from the front as the bow was lowered. He and several soldiers unloaded provisions for us, as well as a few sacks of turnips for the livestock. He even had a bottle of Long John for myself. Never was there a more welcome visitor at Peanmeanach.

  He was carrying skis, I remember, and was planning to ski back to Arisaig. He showed us the sealskin strips attached to the base. They stopped the skis slipping backwards and meant he could travel as quick as a man could run. The Lovat Scouts had been issued with the ski equipment, along with white fur-lined jackets and trousers, in the Faroe Islands, where they had been sent to train before their mission to relieve Norway.

  The captain stayed overnight, providing an excellent excuse to have a wee dram. As we sat by the fire, we used the kindling axes to cut the turnips into smaller pieces for the sheep. He told us how the regiment was getting on in the Faroe Islands, how they were constantly getting strafed by German planes, and spending their time trying to blow up drifting mines. It was a garrison job and the men were frustrated; they wanted to get some action soon. It didn’t matter whether it was in Norway or even France.

  I remember the taste of that whisky well – was it the last I’d had? Maybe not, come to think of it. Donald Angus had a smidgen in a hip flask which he passed round last summer when he came over.

  Captain Andrew was impressed with Donald Angus, telling us he was well regarded by everyone. He reckoned our lad would thrive in the SOE and vowed to try to get him signed up as soon as he got back. Morag was delighted with this plan. The SOE were based all around us at the big houses of Roshven, Inverailort and Arisaig, and we would get to see him.

  The next morning, we watched as the captain glided off effortlessly, through the snow and away uphill through the trees.

  Mairi has made some tasty broth but I struggle to get it down. After the fire is damped down, they head off to sleep, leaving me and Broch the collie to watch the embers flickering in the draught.

  I sleep fitfully, coughing and spluttering through the long night, until I am woken by the sound of the door opening.

  ‘Good morning, Donald John. How are you today?’ Mairi says in her soft lilting accent as she comes in, brushing the snow off her coat. Instinctively she adds a bit more water to Louise’s porridge and gives it a stir. ‘It’s as flat as a prairie out there, what with all the snow,’ she says. ‘All the hillocks and holes have been levelled.’

  I’d love nothing more than to get up and have a look myself.

  Angus comes in with a creel of peat in his hands. ‘I don’t think your priest will be coming to see us today, Father. He’d never find the path and I doubt the train will be running.’ He replenishes the stack by the fire. ‘This is the only creel in good shape now,’ he says. ‘The bottom has fallen out of the old one. We need you better, Father, so you can make some more.’

  I nod weakly. I pride myself on my creel-making. It’s a good couple of years since I made one; the last was for Mairi. It’s one of the things I can do well despite my injury. Louise and I used to take the pony over to Sloch where there is lots of straight hazel – perfect for creels. We would cut a couple of bundles of rods, strap them behind me and ride back. I would then get to work, peeling the bark off them and stacking them in the shed to dry. Creels were good for barter. There was a cobbler in Lochailort who made good sturdy boots and I made an exchange with him: a pair of boots for two creels and a fine cromach I’d made. It was the first time he’d made a pair of left-footed boots, he told me.

  The time passes quickly. It’s a perfect winter’s day, with not a breath of wind and the sunshine reflecting on the snow making the inside of the house surprisingly bright. I am worried that my wife won’t get here for days, with the snow so deep. The lost sheep are discovered, tucked safely in one of the tumbledown black houses, and the two women and Angus are in and out all day long, cheerful due to the invigorat
ing weather.

  In the hours when I am alone, I contemplate how Morag will manage when I die and my pension stops. There hasn’t been a lot I could contribute to the family coffers over the years since I lost my leg. I used to make about fifty peat creels every year, but with so few people on the peninsula now and with coal being available as part of our rations, there just isn’t the demand any more. I pride myself, immodestly, that the cromachs I make are the best in the Highlands. When old Astley-Nicholson was alive and bringing stalking guests over to Ardnish they never left without a stick and me without a guinea or two in my pocket and a smile on my face.

  Chapter 12

  Captain Willie MacDonald, South Africa, 1900

  I took a patrol of ten men to a farm near Winburg. Two white families occupied two separate dwellings: four women, four children and their servants. The women were hospitable, making us tea and offering husks, popular over here in the same way oatcakes are at home. Donald John conversed with them in his passable Dutch and we learned that their husbands were away helping on a nearby farm and would be back soon, maybe that evening. I reassured them that no harm would come to them and their property was safe.

  The two houses were most attractive – white-painted wood with green corrugated roofs and verandas, or stoeps – and surrounded by stunning acacia trees with bright yellow flowers. Massive gum trees overhung a dam which lay just below the site. Although it was March and getting colder at night, it was still infernally hot during the day, so we all took a dip in the water that night, before supper.

  On patrol, we had taken to what the natives called mealies. The dish consisted of corn cut from the cob, which was cooked in water and then mashed up and eaten with milk – a sort of delicious African porridge. I bought ten eggs, milk, bread and dried beef from the farmers’ wives for six shillings and we ate well that night, finishing up with melons and figs which we found around the grounds. There were orange and lemon trees in the fields, too, but their fruit wasn’t yet ripe.