The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Archie and the brown-haired boy waved while the ship left the bay, the two girls leaning out over the water, waving and blowing kisses. Then they went back up to the village jaunty, boys let out for a holiday, and no signs, I saw with sharp relief, of any broken hearts in the parting.

  But it wasn’t any help to me, for I had understood now what a girl for Archie Macleod and his ilk looked like, and she did not look or dress anything like me. They dressed like the drawings in Mrs Munro’s magazines, while I wore clothes plucked from wool off the back of our wild little sheep, spun by my mother and sewn by my father to a pattern his grandmother might have worn.

  The villagers were gathered together in front of the tin hut joined on to Neil Ferguson’s bothy, the St Kilda Post Office. He passed out the mail – two whole sacks for the Munros. The village fell quiet that evening with the reading of letters from loved ones. I crept back into the schoolroom where Lachie and I had carried in the two tea chests filled with old books donated by the ladies of the SPCK. In books you may visit places that you will never see with your own eyes. Although this is the great lesson I have learned from such books, there may be grander, or more modern places than our island, but there’s no guarantee that any of them is happier. I found Treasure Island, and I picked it up for I knew that Mrs Munro would not mind if I took it away to read.

  There stood the piano, a stranger beneath the familiar shelves of nib pens, chalks, and the buckling map of the world with its new islands of black mildew spots from the damp sea air – no sign of St Kilda on our school map. I raised the piano’s lid and pressed one of the white keys, a voice that came out loud and deep like the knock of a memory deep in your chest. I ran my fingers across more of the white keys, the sound growing more silvery, wishing I could call up the tune that Mrs Munro had played. I would one day, that was my resolution, but now the room was growing dim and cold. I put the lid back down, the wood smooth as the curve of a wave before it falls, and left the piano to its silence.

  I walked home thoughtful through the evening, the bothies darkening into the hillside’s shadow, the square windows at the side of each door casting oblongs of slanted light across the flagstones and grass. It was always sad to walk past number two, the MacDonalds’, the windows dark now, the door locked. Their eldest girl, Mary Anne, was one of the ones who had fallen in love with a navy man in the Great War. He’d visit almost every night there by the fireside, spinning stories from his home in Lewis. When the war was over, and Mary left to marry him and all the family followed, they took with them four grown sons, which made it all the harder for those of us left behind to do all the work we must, in order that we might live. Old Mrs MacDonald and the MacDonald cousins still lived in number eight, but the old lady had never recovered from the loss of her son and his bairns.

  I could see the light of my father’s pipe glowing outside our home at the far end of the village street. He was watching the lingering of a pink stain between the darkening sea and sky, listening to the creaking and cawing of the sea parrots settling in their burrows on the outcrops of Dùn across the bay. He’d had a good day, selling off a full length of tweed to one of the tourists come out with the boat.

  ‘The air is lightening. We’ll have all the fulmars back soon,’ he said. ‘Who knows the map they follow, but they always know the way home.’

  ‘It is lonely here without the birds,’ I said.

  I glanced beyond to the last cottage, number sixteen, also in darkness since the death of Angus Mor. Beyond the unlit bothy lay the darkening land and the deep gulley where the stream lay hidden. And after that, the stony land rose and broke off into vast rocky cliffs, then nothing but air above water.

  With us all standing around the table, Father made worship with a reading from his worn little Bible and a prayer. We shared a meal of boiled mutton and potatoes. We had tea with sugar and a tin of sweet biscuits from the boat – all the little gentle habits that could begin again now that we had the summer boats in each week and tourists to buy what things we’d woven and knitted over the winter.

  Fortified by such a meal, I felt less troubled by the thought of Archie’s golden beauty here on our island, and golden he was. After all, he was away over on the other side of the bay where I would like as hardly see him. And surely there was no reason for him to ever come into the schoolroom when I was with Mrs Munro.

  ‘And, Chrissie, you’ll come and help tomorrow,’ my mother said. ‘We’ve to clean out Angus Mor’s place. It will be good to have a lamp in the window at nights again.’

  ‘Who is taking it?’ I asked, wondering if there might soon be news of a wedding – though who it could be from our small pool of young people I could not imagine.

  ‘The laird’s son and his friend will bide there. The minister’s feared it will be too much for his wife to have the boys staying in the manse for months on end so he has asked me to sweep out the bothy and get it ready and I’ll be glad if you can help me.’

  And all night, I could not decide if this was terrible news or very good news.

  The next day, I volunteered to go up over to the glen to find fresh grass for the cows. Soon the cows would be out on the summer shielings and I’d be going over each day to milk them. That would be my saving, I thought – though the other half of me wanted nothing but to come upon Archie as I walked along the path and see his face finally light up – Chrissie, is that you at last?

  It was years since the lonely bothy at the end of the village had seen so much company, every woman along the village street popping by to help clean a window or sweep out the floor or shake out the curtains on loan from the manse. The house was watertight but it had been used to store the climbing ropes. They hung from the rafters like vines. There was a mess of ash and a rusted kettle in the fireplace used by passing sailors or by the young men from the village who came to escape their little homes and smoke their tobacco when they had some.

  From halfway up the slope of Mullach Mòr I paused to look back at the goods being carried from the manse along the village street. I could hear the barking of the dogs small and clear from down below, someone singing. Above, snow-white gannets were circling around the bay, narrow wings outstretched like bent knives. I waited to watch that moment they fold into a dart and fall so swift that you lose sight of them until a white star of foam blooms silent on the sea. There were hosts of fulmars too, hanging steady on the up-currents from the cliffs. I could hear them calling to each other down on the rock faces like wooden hinges, with the puffins and the guillemots, the great cacophony and riot of seabirds that is our full summer chorus here on St Kilda, an ever-present storm of creaking, chattering, ackacking, laughing bird song.

  When I came back with the bundle of new-grown docken and hay, so many things were still out on the grass like an excess of playthings. What, for example, was the need for the great wooden tripod with the box next to it? And a telescope, and more parcels of books than I had ever seen in the schoolroom. Untold tins, sacks and bottles.

  Someone should have reminded his lordship that we were safe from famine here over the summer. I pulled my young cousin Tormod away from the unguarded telescope and hauled him home with me, along with a stern and whispered warning about touching any of those things which if broken we would never be able to replace.

  ‘Ah, Chrissie, but they said I could,’ he protested as I shut him inside.

  ‘They did no such thing.’

  ‘They did, Chrissie,’ said Mother. ‘They are good boys.’ She was arranging tins of salted beef and butter inside the cupboard. ‘All this, and they have done the same kindness for every home in the village.’ She was smiling at all her stores like a harvest gathered in from the croft. ‘And it behoves us as Christians to return the care and keep an eye on those boys, see they fare well for the sake of their mothers.’

  ‘Just as their mother Lady Macleod would for me if I were to go and live next to her,’ I said.

  ‘As she would, Chrissie dear. As she does for all those who
work the laird’s lands.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. If the laird cared for us so much where was the regular mail boat that should come to us all through the winter? What if, during the last bad winter, no one had found our scraps of paper in their tiny wooden floats calling for help when we were hungry and sick? What if the winds and the tides had not taken one of the tiny boats to a beach in Norway where a man had opened the tin with our message inside and contacted the admiralty for us? The boy who had already found the letter washed up in Taransay had not been believed and our message ignored as a childish trick. That was how precarious it was for us in winter. But I kept silent, for there is always only kindness in my mother. It was ever the way of the St Kilda folk to think kindness and duty both first and last, and to see any bad in people, whenever they find it, as a rare and anomalous condition.

  As was his custom, Father went out with his pipe to watch the last of the setting sun. I wanted to go out with him as I often did, but I could hear the English-sounding voices of our new neighbours outside, talking between themselves, calling a goodnight to Father. So I kept by the lamp with the book brought over from the schoolroom.

  It was an almost full moon. Perhaps that is why I slept so badly, my mind whirring like the constant cries of the birds as they flew around the stacs, never still and never completing their circle but starting off on new angles and arcs. Perhaps it was reading so late. My grandmother, Rachel Òg, held that too many books damage the brain and ruin sleep. She trod only the steady path of her Bible, end to end, twice a year, in her old black house at the back of the village, and she was indeed a most sharp-minded woman for all her eighty years, a living encyclopaedia of all our stories and the old songs the people used to sing. But I knew what the problem was. It was the picture of Archie’s bright face and hair before me in the darkness.

  Giving up on sleep, I left my bed and, wrapping the blanket round my shoulders, went outside. The moon has a soothing effect on a soul that cannot sleep. There she was in her almost perfect roundness over the bay, and the insubstantial silver line that she throws to us across the sea wherever you may stand, that disappears before it reaches the shore. I felt so restless. I wanted to go down and pace the beach. None of my thoughts made any sense, and all around the same topic.

  I thought of Archie in the bothy next door, sleeping on the oat-chaff mattress we had brushed down and covered with the sheets from Dunvegan Castle. Someone would fall for him one day. Probably half the ladies in London already had. And seeing him standing there with his fair hair, even I hadn’t been able to stop myself being powerfully struck by the beauty of his tall frame and his open blue eyes.

  I told myself off then, for I was not like the silly girls in London. I surely had a stronger mind than to be swayed by worldly glamour and charms. A smile that promised secrets, a face proportioned just right. That laugh of his. A new creature. He even smelled new, like leather and wind and clean sweat. It was a mystery to me why I should be so fascinated in my thoughts by this new Archie when he was surely the same fretful boy I had always known.

  I went back in, sat down on the deep windowsill and drew up my knees. It was the chill part of the night now, the sky a luminous grey, black clouds bleeding across the moon, turning the sea to black then silver then black again. I watched the drama of the sky until I had all but forgotten my own small one, my eyelids finally drooping. I returned to my bed, but even in my sleep the thought of him stayed strong in my mind like the pull of the moon on the sea.

  CHAPTER 8

  Rachel Anne

  MORVERN, 1940

  Mother’s stories made me very curious about Dunvegan Castle on Skye, the seat of the Macleods. I’d managed to find photographs of it in books, looked up the family history. I could not find a picture of Archie Macleod, boy nor man, but I recalled well the photograph in my mother’s drawer and the tall blond boy, so I already knew what he looked like, at least as a young man.

  In my less sensible moments, I came up with a plan of how I would go to Dunvegan with its turrets and servants and knock on the great oak door and tell them, I’m Rachel Anne, your granddaughter. Perhaps. Though I knew I never would, even if I was cast-iron certain that such was the case.

  I’ve heard the very bad word that people use when they despise someone or think they have bad character. It’s the word for someone with no father to claim them. The worst of swears and insults. I know enough to understand that if your mother never marries the father, then you are nothing. You are legally a bastard.

  My mother lets people think my father passed away, Mrs Gillies, widow – but I know she’s a Miss. And it makes me feel very small to think that people could rightly come up to me and shout that bad word in my face. So I don’t think I will ever go to Dunvegan. Instead, I feel glad that we live far away from the world, lost among the hills and pine forests of Morvern, with neighbours too polite and discreet to ever suggest that my mother is anything other than who she lets it be known she is.

  So I put all thoughts of finding Archie Macleod out of my head.

  But then I see a copy of the Free Highland Press in the library, large letters across the front, Archie Macleod, heir to Dunvegan, presumed missing at St Valery. I know I shouldn’t but I put the newspaper in my bag, run home with it to show Mother.

  She goes white when she sees it, sinks down onto the chair.

  ‘Oh my poor boy,’ she whispers.

  I’m beside myself. ‘But he’ll never know now, never know about me. I was going to go to Dunvegan Castle—’

  My mother takes me by the arms, shakes me till I come back to my senses. ‘Oh, Rachel Anne, dearest, dearest girl. What are you thinking? No good could ever come of you going to Dunvegan.’

  Then all the fight and the anger goes out of her and she holds me close.

  ‘Mother, do you think they will come home safe?’ I ask.

  I can feel her shaking her head. ‘I don’t know, Rachel Anne. All we can do is wait, and pray. Pray for all those boys so far from home.’

  No more words from her now. She sighs. Is it Archie she’s thinking of now? Why is she so reluctant to spell out the name of the man who is my own father? I can’t bear to be with her then, pull away from her and go out into the lane, walking alone until my anger has faded and it’s only my hunger and lack of supper that send me back home again.

  I won’t answer her when she speaks that evening, go to my bed angry still. And worried too. Just what is it that stops her telling me plainly? What is the secret that she keeps so close?

  Late into the evening I can hear the muffled sound of the wireless. She never turns it off until she finally goes up to bed now. I picture her hunched nearby with the sewing left forgotten on her lap, listening and listening for a bulletin from the BBC with news of our men so far away. So many women across Scotland like my mother. There was no victorious return home for our boys from the beaches of St Valery. It wasn’t trumpeted in the papers, but we know now that many of them have been taken prisoner, thousands of them. So across the glens and the cities of Scotland, across the mountains and the islands, women wait for news, hoping the worst they’ll hear is that their men have been taken prisoner, and not lost at St Valery.

  CHAPTER 9

  Fred

  FRANCE, 1940

  Locked inside the prison van, I realized with a sinking heart that we were moving north again, erasing any small progress we’d made towards the Spanish border and the hope of getting home. No chance of getting away from the Channel coasts with them so heavily guarded and patrolled. I expected to hear the noises of a city after a while, for us to be taken inside a regional prison, but the van began to pitch and rock as if we were travelling along an unmade track. Finally, it came to a halt. The doors opened and we found ourselves marooned between endless beet and cabbage fields, blinking at a view of nothing but sky in every direction. One of the policemen uncuffed us. He pointed to a farmhouse set back in a spinney. ‘Là-bas. Frappez à la porte. Et vive la France’ He gave a s
alute. Speechless, we watched as they drove away. Then we turned towards to the farmhouse in the distance.

  ‘What d’you think?’ asked Angus.

  ‘Looks like the French are already fighting back on the quiet.’

  The day wouldn’t last much longer, the sky fading to an ominous blue black, the last of a low sun slicing through the clouds like glass.

  The door was answered by a middle-aged man in a bulging waistcoat and blue workmen’s trousers, bulked shoulders, grey stubble, a resigned chin set on a heavy neck, eyes that had seen it all and expected no better. He appraised us then gestured with his head to come in.

  In a dark kitchen, a woman in a summer dress and cardigan, a stained apron, was at the stove. She gave us a harried nod and sat us down to vast plates of duck eggs, bread and pâté. Tumblers of red wine. Half dead with fatigue, we were taken to a hayloft over a barn and left to fall asleep amid the champing of goats, the sharp scent of their coats rising from beneath like the cuddy smell of a byre back on the island – in the clean days of early summer, before what Archie did in his anger and everything was broken for ever.

  I woke, still half in a dream. Longing for you. Watching as you sat spinning before the bothy, your foot pressing the lever, your hands pulling the thread towards you and releasing, pulling to and fro as the spindle filled in a blur. I was a way off, across the grass, your song a hope that I could reach you again.

  I became dimly aware that I could hear the shuffling of goats below in the barn, the dust of the hay acidly sweet. You were far away although I felt the hope of your song still with me in my breast. The rank smell of the goats brought me fully to my senses. A voice was calling us from below.

  ‘Monsieurs, venez.’

  I shook Angus awake. He stared at me with a scowl, rising up in a rush, straw stuck all over his clothes.

  ‘It’s just the farm woman.’

  Relief on his face.