The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  It always was the way of the village to welcome strangers. Some of the young sailors would come to ceilidh by the fire of an evening, telling tales of how life was on the mainland, film shows and cars and great cities, and our ears lapped it all up like fairy tales.

  So when the war ended and the navy men went and took it all away with them overnight, the young people never really settled back into their old life again. They knew how it was now, knew they was poor. Two of our island’s girls had gone away with the navy men as wives, and then came the cruellest blow. The entire MacDonald family decided to follow their daughter to Stornoway. The first time we ever had one of the cottages left empty.

  The sound of how good life was on the mainland was a bell sounding the end of our life, calling the young people away, one by one. And go they did, a handful, and then a flood.

  My older brother Norman got up one morning, saw there was a boat in the bay and told Mother he was leaving. Went that same day. He lives in Canada now and we live for his letters though they come but rarely. Morning and evening we prayed for him at family worship, and we prayed for him to come home and visit us one day.

  A few years after the Great War ended, there were barely fifty people left on the island, but those that were, they were determined to stay. There was no other life for them. And hadn’t there been St Kildans on the island for two thousand years, and probably before that, so why would we not stay?

  The tourists had started to come back on their summer visits, and we sore needed them to buy our tweed and souvenirs, but I’d begun to see how they must see us, backwards and poor, and to understand my place in the eyes of someone like Archie.

  When Archie finally did come back to the island, he’d grown so tall, a gawky sixteen-year-old. I’d heard he was away at school in London for most of the year, and I don’t think it was a kind place. My Archie had always been proud in himself, just as the stones and the sea know well who they are, but he’d changed. This tall, lanky, out-of-sorts Archie had a sly, watchful shame in his eyes.

  Archie’s older brother, the apple of his father’s eye, had been lost at Passchendaele in the Great War. So now Archie had to measure up as heir and it didn’t look like the laird thought he was doing too well, Archie loping after his father, the laird’s attention elsewhere, then turning to bark at Archie to not look so lifeless. Disappointment on the human heart is like the tap, tap of water that can wear away even granite. You could see the hope in Archie, that his father’s hand would rest easy on his shoulder, but his father’s hand was on Neil Ferguson’s shoulder as they discussed the barrels of ling to go back to Skye and Glasgow. Archie set to tallying up the rolls of tweed, his father angry because Archie had made a mistake and now they must start over.

  I found Archie down in the feather store, which we did not use any more to store the goods to be shipped out, not since the war, when the German submarine came up out of the bay like a great seal and smashed holes in the walls and roof. Archie was in the corner, sitting on a barrel and throwing stones at the broken wall. He did not hear me come in until I was there next to him and able to see the tears. As soon as he did notice me, he sprang up, shook his head back ready to be proud Archie, but I put my hand in his, quietly, and he turned to me surprised, hungry eyes. Then he said, fierce and determined, ‘I’m going to stay here with you, Chrissie. No one will miss me back there.’

  ‘I wish you could, Archie.’

  ‘I’m not going back to that damned school. They can’t make me.’

  We both knew they could do just that.

  ‘I will come back. I’ll come one day and marry you, Chrissie, and we’ll live in the factor’s house.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You won’t forget?’

  ‘I won’t ever forget.’

  Out in the bay, the Hebrides sounded her whistle. There was a noise in the doorway and the steward came in. ‘He’s looking for you, boy. We need to get on the boat before the tide turns.’

  Archie squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t forget, Chrissie.’

  But it would be a good many years more before Archie came back to the island, a grown man then. And who remembers the promises of children?

  *

  We’re sitting at the kitchen table. She’s gone quiet again, her hands folded, her face regretful, pained.

  I’ve so many more questions. It’s best not to interrupt her or she may give up altogether, but I can’t restrain myself.

  ‘So did he come back to the island? Where is Archie now, Mother?’

  Has she heard me?

  Frustrated, I blurt out, ‘And that other boy in the photo. Who is he?’

  ‘What photo?’ She turns furious blue eyes on me. ‘Rachel Anne, you’ve been going through my things! You’d no right.’ She rises up, fists on the table. ‘You can get up those stairs now, and don’t let me see your face again. That you could be so sly.’

  ‘Well, it’s you that makes me so because you never tell me anything.’ I clatter up, slam the door to my room under the sloping eaves – though it doesn’t make a very satisfying bang since the damp makes the door stiff. I drop onto my mattress with a creaking of iron springs. Surely she can hear the thundering of my heart below after my daring to throw out such naked words.

  After a while I hear a noise downstairs, small cries like a muffled bird, and I creep out to the top of the stairs. My mother is crying. I go down, trying not to let the stairs crack and startle her. She’s sitting at the piano, weeping quietly into her hands. I kneel by her, put my arms around her waist.

  ‘Oh, I loved that boy, Rachel Anne.’

  Archie? Did she mean Archie? But I dare not ask.

  It’s early, but I leave her and go up to bed, relieved to be alone and with my thoughts. When I wake a little while later, I hear her downstairs still, the faint sound of the English broadcaster on the wireless. My mother listening, leaning forward, as though expecting a particular message from the newsreader. Turning over in my bed, it strikes me, of course, those boys in the photo, not boys any more, would surely be well of an age to fight in France.

  Then I realize what my mother is listening for and go cold.

  For even though there has been all the triumphant news of the boys brought back from Dunkirk, everyone here in the Highlands knows of a brother or a father or a neighbour who has not come back from France. The BBC doesn’t seem to want to talk about the thousands of Highland men still missing. All through the villages and glens, people wait for news of the 51st Highland Division. Are they prisoners – dead? Where are they?

  CHAPTER 6

  Fred

  NORTHERN FRANCE, 1940

  After Tournai, I was sent to a prison barracks in Bethune. And as soon as my health was good enough, I began to make plans to escape again.

  Bethune prison was overcrowded and filthy. We slept on musty straw that came alive with lice at night. It was a holding station for escapees and men left behind in northern France before they were moved on to camps inside Germany. From the rumours coming back, it seemed that thousands of the 51st Highland Division had already been shipped off that way. At least the guards were nothing like the police Gestapo at Tournai. These were regular German soldiers and not without some fellow feeling. Overwhelmed by the numbers, they struggled to feed us, but at least they turned a blind eye to local people passing food through the prison gates. It must have looked harmless enough, girls, or old women with baskets, broken-hearted for all those boys. That’s how I got talking with a Belgian teacher who agreed to help with some essentials.

  On the third day she passed me a small loaf, told me to eat it with care. Inside, a map of France. I studied it carefully. With the coasts so heavily patrolled by German troops, our only hope now was to go south and try for the border into Spain. The following day she managed to pass through some civilian clothes.

  This is what the start of resistance looks like, I thought, girls in pretty dresses passing discreet parcels of their brothers’ and fathers’ shirts through the bars
while our boys make sure the guards are distracted.

  I’d noticed a washhouse around the side. Once you were on the roof there’d only be a few feet more to climb to the top of the massive flint wall. It was a long drop of twenty feet on the other side, but not impossible with some luck.

  It was just the two of us, me and a boy from Uist called Angus Maclean, tall and thin with sandy hair and a pale, freckled face. We counted a five-minute gap between patrols, enough time to get up on the roof. Others would follow if we got away.

  In the small hours of the morning, the moonlight much brighter than I would have liked, we climbed up onto the washhouse roof and lay on the tiles, waiting to be discovered at any moment, every breath far too loud. We heard the patrol passing below. As soon as the sound of their boots died away, I was up on the wall, hung from my fingers and then dropped. A jarring jolt through my bones, but I staggered up with nothing more than bruises. Angus dropped next, tears to his trousers but no more.

  The barracks were on the edge of town. We dashed into the cover of some bushes, ran a few hundred yards through a back street then across the fields. As soon as we were inside the forest, I signalled to Angus to stop. Stood with hands on my knees, head hanging down for a while. We weren’t in the best condition after months on meagre prison rations.

  Angus took out the map, copied out by hand onto a thin sheet of paper.

  ‘If we strike out that way we should hit the road into the next town, perhaps get there by the morning.’

  It was a clear night with enough moonlight to carry on through the trees, then across fields of corn ready for harvest as the dawn began to break. We walked until the singing of the birds became deafening – a while since we had been outside in the open like this. But the light brought another problem. Our friend at the gate had given us civilian jackets and berets but we still wore enough army kit to be instantly recognizable. Passing along the edge of fields of potato plants we came upon a farmhouse set back in a copse, workmen’s clothes on the line. Swiftly, we pulled a couple of pairs of trousers down. We buried the khakis at the edge of the wood nearby and carried on. The boots were still a giveaway but we’d have to hope they’d go unnoticed if dusty enough.

  By noon we were on the road, better to walk in daylight like two labourers with nothing to hide than get caught in the dark and shot out of hand for breaking curfew. We acquired a hoe and a shovel to look more the part and covered sixty kilometres over the next few days, walking south through the vast, open fields of northern France. There were still signs of the massive displacement of refugees towards the coasts during the invasion. Streams of refugees had blocked our army vehicles with their high-sided farm carts loaded with bundles and a flotilla of prams and wheelbarrows and bicycles. People had started to return home but you could still see the faint chalk messages on barn doors or walls: famille Mercier passed this way; lost, boy aged six called Louis. They had gone back to round up the animals that had been turned out into the fields to fend for themselves but in places the endless fields of corn were now scarred and ruled across by the brutal lines of parallel tank tracks.

  And there were still scars from the Great War only twenty years before. In the middle of a cornfield we found a stone cross surrounded by flint walls. We slept with the rows of fallen soldiers that night.

  Back on the road the next morning, a convoy of German troops passed us, but we carried on at a slouching pace, better than to run and raise suspicions, holding our nerve, missing the rifles we had handed in at St Valery. We left the road again as soon as we could.

  For the next few nights we slept in barns or hen houses, eating carrots or cabbages from the fields, or asking for food at farms, looking more and more like tramps, unshaven, filthy, blisters on our feet. If I mumbled, my schoolboy French could pass for a Belgian labourer looking for farm work. Most guessed who we were, sometimes they gave us a few francs with the food they brought to the door. We walked through a village where more Germans were milling around, walked straight on as swiftly as we dared. You couldn’t avoid them. Northern France had been battened down and overrun with Reich troops. We needed to get over the border into France libre where there was nominally less chance of being recaptured.

  I felt for Angus, only eighteen but on the run through a country where there were people prepared to kill you. Out of prison, but not free. An intensely lonely feeling.

  Sometimes, the longing to be home again was overwhelming. But where was home now? With my uncle Lachlan passed away, there was nowhere for me to go back to.

  I thought of you, Chrissie. It was you I was walking towards, hoping to get home to, one foot in front of the other.

  But I’d always seen you back on the island, in the bothy next to where we once lived. If it was true that the island really had been cleared, then where you were now, I could only guess.

  Parched from a day’s march through dry countryside, we walked into a small village one afternoon, a few houses on the bend of a road, dust gritting the breeze. Ahead, a small estaminet with faded red lettering. The idea of a cold beer had never seemed more enticing. In our berets and blue workmen’s trousers, I thought my French, gruff and mumbled, would do well enough. We still had some francs left from the money given us.

  We sat down at a table by the door. I ordered two beers. Immediately the girl gave us a hard look. Whispered, ‘English?’

  So much for my French, then.

  Before I could reply, two German soldiers came in, went across to the zinc-topped bar. They stood with one foot up on the rail, helmets off, at ease and talking loudly.

  Angus had half risen, ready to scarper. I put my hand on his firmly, stared at the girl to see what she would do.

  She leaned in, rubbing the table with her cloth, and muttered, ‘Finish your beer then go around to the back door.’

  We were shown into a small storeroom off the kitchen. The girl brought us two plates of fried eggs, potatoes, hunks of bread and small cheeses. The best meal we’d had in weeks. We were tucking into it, sitting on wine crates and saying how much kindness we’d been shown by people who were risking their lives to help us, when the door opened and two French gendarmes came in to the room, rifles slung over their backs. I saw the girl behind them in the doorway, arms folded. Was it she who’d betrayed us?

  The French police force was now officially under German command. No other way out of the room. I couldn’t believe we were back to square one. And my own fault, for hadn’t I’d gone against my own rules? Always stay on your guard. Never be too quick to trust a smiling face.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rachel Anne

  MORVERN, 1940

  It’s that time of year when the cold ambushes you each time you go out no matter what you wear, burning and burnishing the skin, leaving you weary in the warmth on coming home. Mother gets back from Brockett’s farm and falls asleep by the fire after supper each evening. She’s not young any more, into her thirties, but with her face soft in sleep, cheeks blooming from the cold, I can see that girl back on the island. I tuck a crochet shawl around her.

  Her eyes open, startled, as if she expected to see someone else, in a different room.

  ‘Was I singing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was singing in my dreams.’ She pulls the shawl higher over her shoulders.

  ‘What were you singing?’

  ‘Oh, some nonsense from we used to waulk the wet cloth. Feathers and eggs, feathers and eggs. That’s how it went.’

  We listen to the fire shift and rustle, the cry of some bird out in the dusk. ‘Do you remember it, Rachel Anne, when the birds came back at the end of winter? That was spring for us, the birds coming back to the island.’

  I shake my head but I see, or feel, a sensation of being held up in the air, wings flying over and my hands stretching up to catch something far, far away.

  ‘We’d had such a long winter of it once again, waves five hundred feet high hammering on the cliffs, winds that made the bothies shudder and rock li
ke boats at sea for nights on end. The storm so loud it drowned out the thunder, left us all deaf for a week. It wasn’t until May that the storms died down, and then, at last, the first puffins started to arrive. Just a few little sea parrots to begin with, their funny way of landing with a rush and a bump on the grass – for they’re made for water, never truly at home waddling on the grass. Then more and more, hour upon hour, until the whole sky above us was a whirling of little dark wings, the great wheel of feathers dipping this way and that around the island heights. I would lie on the grass on the hilltop and feel the birds flying over me, the shushing of their wings like a whisper.

  At past twenty, I was too old for the schoolroom, of course, but I used to go there from time to time to help the minister’s wife, Mrs Munro. She was a short, self-contained woman, who wore a narrow, straight up and down dress and a long cardigan she’d hold close. She preferred her own way in everything but she was always kind.

  I was hearing the little ones read from their English books, helping with the sums on their slates, when we heard the whistle of a boat at last. Even Mrs Munro couldn’t hide her excitement, the hope of letters from home lighting up her face. The children’s thoughts, of course, were gone out of the window straight away, to the bags of peppermints and lemon drops that the captain might bring them. Rodderick MacKinnon, the oldest boy, tall as a man now, was half standing at the back, trying to see out through the glass. The little ones in pinafores and mufflers ran to the window, calling out, ‘It’s the Hebrides. No, it’s one of the Aberdeen trawlers.’

  My cousin Tormod had stopped dead with his reader, waiting for Mrs Munro to declare the end of school, as often happened when a tourist boat came in.

  ‘We’ll carry on, I think, Chrissie. Running down to the shore in a rabble won’t make the boat come over any faster now, will it? If it does stop here today.’

  There it was. The pain that mixes with hope in hearing a boat’s call, for not all boats stopped by. Even the ones that whistled to us might sail straight on to the fishing grounds at Rockall.