The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  We went down the ladder, springy under our weight. She turned away, arms crossed as if we were not really there, and we followed her like shadows past the goat pens out into the glare of the morning, the sun promising a day of good weather.

  She led us back into the gloom of the farm buildings where the farmer and two other men were waiting to talk to us. The younger of them had good English.

  They told us that we were welcome to stay at their farm until they could arrange to take us further south towards the Spanish border. I felt intensely grateful to realize that a network resistance was already beginning to take shape, helping the trickle of stranded soldiers who were trying to get back home. But it was still piecemeal and fragile. The plans for us to move on uncertain.

  For the next few weeks we were two farm labourers, demobbed after occupation, helping the farmer with the chores. The Tissiers were more than glad of the hands, Monsieur doubly impressed when he realized I could milk a goat – not so hard after watching Chrissie milk the little cow and the black-faced sheep.

  But every nerve in my body was telling me we should keep moving. We needed to keep crossing off the miles. And yet, for now, to stay seemed our safest chance of making it back.

  We began to get visitors from the neighbouring farms, two girls bringing food and clothes, smiling at Angus. Then a boy and his mother arrived with gifts of food for les Anglais. It can’t have been easy feeding two extra when rationing was beginning to bite, but the lack of security due to our local fame worried me, and not only for ourselves.

  Our standing further rose when Angus noticed deer in the woods nearby and set a wire trap. Monsieur Tissier was amazed I knew how to gralloch the carcass into sections – skills I’d learned from the gamekeeper’s son on the estate where my uncle Lachlan worked until he retired to the little flat in Edinburgh.

  A long table of friends toasting the venison and les Écossais. An old man began humming a ditty, making his fingers dance as if playing the bagpipes. Bemused, I recognized a marching tune, ‘Miss Drummond of Perth’. A girl leaned forward. ‘My grandfather wants to tell you that in the last war, we hid soldiers from Scotland. Many men. And now we do it again.’

  The goodwill and the risks these people were running left me without words. I raised my glass. ‘To friends,’ I said. ‘Les amis. And the old alliance.’

  But looking around the room at the crowded table made me deeply anxious. Weeks had gone by and still there was no news of a contact to help us move on towards the border. ‘Soon,’ the farmer told us, each time I asked. ‘Soon. A few problems to sort out, and then you will move south.’

  I slept uneasily after supper that night. Should we make a move on our own, risk it? I woke with a headache from the cold. The frost had settled on the small window of the grenier. The water in the washing bowl had a thin glaze of ice.

  Angus and I were helping tie the last stooks of wheat in the fenceless fields when we saw the small figure of Madame running across the uneven ground, carrying a bag. Out of breath, she delivered her message. The Germans were searching for abandoned war equipment and guns. They’d caught wind of something and were in the next village asking about escapees. No time to go back to the house. She’d brought what spare clothes we had, the compass folded inside a map torn from a calendar, boiled eggs and bread, a little money.

  Down a bank on a side track, a man was waiting with bicycles.

  There was barely time for a goodbye. They took our thanks gruffly. It was simply what decent people did, to help someone. To resist les Boches. We followed the man ahead, pedalling through the countryside, the first signs of changing colours in the trees.

  I had no idea where we were headed. No idea what lay before us. All I knew was, I was ready to travel the length and breadth of France if the world would give me the chance to spend one more hour with you. To say I’m sorry.

  CHAPTER 10

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1927

  What should I see as I came out of my door in the morning but Archie’s companion stood facing out to sea, a mug of water and a mirror on the low wall that runs between the path and the potato rigs below. He was still in his long-sleeved undergarment, his braces hanging down by his trousers. Quite at home, feet planted apart, he was neatening round his beard with a razor. Hearing the rattle of the pump as I filled the bucket, he turned and waved at me, calling out a greeting in English. I bent my head and made as if I had not noticed him, embarrassed to meet him as he carried out so private a task.

  Seeing the bucket was filled, he came over, the shaving soap still on half his chin, and took the handle. ‘Here, let me,’ he said in his awkward Gaelic. But I did not let go.

  ‘There is no need,’ I told him in English. ‘I am as capable of hauling a bucket of water as you, I think.’

  He put up both hands. Nodded his head. ‘I cede to the fairer sex.’

  And then I felt badly for him because he was not a tall man. ‘It’s not that you couldn’t. I wasn’t implying.’

  His eyes widened as if here was truly the beginning of an insult. I gave up and hurried away.

  ‘I’m Frederick by the way, Fred,’ he called after me. ‘And you must be?’

  ‘I must be who I am,’ I told him. ‘I’m Chrissie Gillies,’ I added over my shoulder.

  If I had to leave the house that day, I made sure to look out and check that they were not there, quickly cutting up between the bothies and going along their backs so that I might not see him or Archie again, annoyed that my freedom on my own land should be curtailed so.

  ‘Chrissie,’ Mrs MacQueen called as I passed behind her bothy where she was out seeing to her hens. ‘I’ve an awful bad back today and I need to take Ewen Ian up his bite to eat where he’s with the sheep. You don’t have time to run up the hill with it, do you? There’s a good girl.’

  Climbing up, I heard a thin and imperious voice calling my name, all but carried away on the wind, and there was Ewen Ian waving to me – something of national importance judging by his face.

  ‘Is that my strupac there, Chrissie?’

  I took him his cheese and oatcakes, a flask of tea, and he nibbled and chewed slowly, his eyes on the shimmering water of the sea. It always looked calm at such a distance. At the end of the Great War, when the U-boat came up in the bay and bombed the radio mast, the navy sent us a gun. No one expected such a thing now any more, but the navy still paid Ewen to keep their gun in order. Far more useful to us would have been for them to come and repair the radio mast. Full of the importance of his task, Ewen tended to the gun every month.

  Ewen Ian’s long face jutted out against the sky like one of the cliff rocks, a fine, great nose that had surely came off the Viking boats, handed down as an heirloom. A full beard, a narrow, querulous mouth. Try as I might, I could not think him a husband for me one day, no matter how much his mother or my mother recommended him. It was no help that he’d taken to wearing a wide cap on his long head like a mushroom on a stalk, which he never took off, much as he never took off the great importance he assigned to being Ewen Ian MacQueen.

  And just as I was being so uncharitable in my thoughts, he turned the kindest smile on me and said, ‘I thank you, Chrissie, for the trouble you have taken in climbing the hill to bring such a fine strupac of cheese and oatcakes yourself while I am here with the sheep. Quite peculiar in its fineness.’ Ewen Ian’s eyes were bright blue and filled with his blinkered good will. And wasn’t there a lot to admire in the efforts he put into learning new words from the books he borrowed from Mrs Munro’s little library in the schoolroom? And you know why he does that, don’t you, Chrissie? my mother says. Words he must find occasion to use irrespective of whether they are in the right place or not.

  I stood for a while looking out towards the curve of the horizon and America beyond, leaning a little into the wind as if I might be a sail on a ship going who knows where on these highways across the seas of the world.

  Ewen Ian’s voice cut in. He tipped his head toward
s the mainland. ‘Your cousin Marion went away on a boat, all the way to Glasgow.’

  ‘Aye, and lived in the house of our great-uncle Alexander Ferguson.’

  We lapsed into silence again, thinking of my great-uncle who left the island years back. Now he sold some of our tweed on the mainland for us, much to the annoyance of Lord Macleod.

  Ewen Ian sucked in the air through his teeth, shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s an awful busy place, Glasgow. People running around everywhere in crowds. I was there. Makes your head spin. All I wanted was to get home again. Marion too, when she went there. She had the new shoes and dressed like Sunday best every day to work in the big shop, but isn’t she back in her mother’s cottage again now? Came home as soon as she could.’

  His eyes met mine, a lesson in there for me.

  ‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t go to live in Glasgow.’

  He nodded.

  ‘America, or Australia perhaps.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you, Christina?’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘Because you have your old ones to take care of, like me with my mother and her legs so bad.’ He folded the empty cloth and gave it to me. ‘There you are now.’

  ‘It is an honour to carry it down the hill for you,’ I said, taking it in both hands with a bow.

  He did not see any sarcasm or humour. He gave one slow nod. All was as it should be.

  Walking back down to the line of bothies that sat around the bay like a tide line, it pained me to admit it, but Ewen Ian was right: I could never go from here. For Hirta was a part of me and I was made from her. Nowhere more beautiful, nowhere else home, though the winter was long, and what could we do but sit round the peat fire carding, spinning, weaving – and hoping that our stores would last long enough to bring us safe to a new spring. Often, we went hungry in the long dark. How keenly we looked for the first lessening of the blackness in the morning, for the first hints of the day staying with us a little longer. And we listened out above the wind for the birds’ return, the first shearwaters, the fulmars on the cliffs of Hirta, the great gatherings of gannets on the fastness of Boreray and the myriads of little puffins wheeling around the island until they settled on the grassy slopes of Dùn and Cambir once again. For each of the little sea parrots came home to the same burrow, faithful to the same mate.

  I could never follow the young people who left, tempted away by memories of the lives we lived in the Great War. I was a little girl then but even I could hear how amazed the young people were: so this is how it must be on the mainland, to have the shop nearby and paid work and the money to buy what you fancied.

  There were so many things in that navy shop that we had never known we needed. I recall my grandfather sitting by the fire translating the English words on a blue and yellow tin into Gaelic. ‘Custard powder,’ he read out slowly. ‘So what is that now?’ He put a finger into the pale yellow flour and tasted it. Shook his head. Not to be trusted. He preferred the same reliable dish every day, boiled oats with a salted puffin for flavour. My mother, however, adored the thick yellow pudding, and so did we. Long after the army men and their shop were gone, we kept the last tin for storing buttons, the label worn and the lid rusted in the island’s damp air.

  My grandfather had got up and fetched the bag of barley sugars from the dresser that day. Everyone was in agreement that it was good the children could have sweets. But once you have a taste for sweets or cocoa or tea, it is hard to forget such things. And since we cannot grow tins of treacle or bags of peppermints here, then we must wait for the boats to come and bring us such necessities – or not.

  Walking home along the back of the village I saw two figures moving about on the croft land near the fairies’ house. Archie and his brown-haired friend.

  A second thing caught my eye. Two small boys lying flat on the turf roof of an old cleit, the soles of their feet and the behinds of their baggy old shorts proud to the sun, their chins on their fists. They were watching the laird’s son and his friend measuring out the ground around the fairies’ house with string and posts. I trod softly, coming up the bank until I was standing head and shoulders by the cleit roof.

  ‘And what is it you think you are doing now, Angus and Tormod MacDonald?’

  Angus turned his little flat face to me, brow wrinkled, shorn hair standing up shock in the wind, his waistcoat front pulled up to his eyes as though it might hide him.

  ‘Ah, will you get down, Chrissie. They’ll see ye.’

  ‘And why should they not see me, standing here where I live? And why is it that you are spying on them?’

  ‘It’s them that’s the spies,’ whispered Angus. ‘Get down, Chrissie.’

  I sighed and waited a while, no time for their games of make-believe, but curious as to what Archie and his friend were trying to do.

  ‘All you are looking at is the laird’s son and his very ordinary friend,’ I said.

  The shorter figure, in baggy blue trousers turned up to the knee and a white roll-neck jersey, unfurled a reel of string and pulled it taut between two posts.

  The tall one with the pale hair, a grace in his confident movements – he that made my silly heart go a little faster each time I saw him – held a long stick steady while Fred Lawson hammered it in with a mallet. A pole at each corner, they tied on cross poles and then pulled over canvas tarpaulins like a makeshift dwelling.

  The sun was warm at last under an open blue sky, the wind gentle across the grass. Fred pulled off his jersey, rolled it in a ball and placed it by his canvas bag, looking towards us for a second, his hand shielding his eyes.

  The two boys ducked down fiercely, heads pressed to the turf. I too shrank back, wondering if he’d seen us but he merely turned his back, looking out at the wide view of the bay and the sea. When Angus and Tormod dared to raise their heads again, the two men were sitting below with their backs to us, committing the suspicious act of looking at a piece of paper.

  ‘Is it a map, Angus?’ asked Tormod. ‘For treasure?’

  ‘No, there are messages for the spies on the paper,’ said Angus in a whisper. ‘Secret instructions from the Kaiser to blow us all up again.’

  A missile flew low over our heads. Landed on the turf behind Tormod. That made us jump right enough.

  It was an apple. That’s all it was. But my heart was thudding and the one with the dark hair had turned his head up to see if his target had reached us. I could see him laughing, pleased with himself, which made me more than angry. Were we so poor and backward they may toss us food like animals? Throughout all my childhood we had had to endure the tourists. Their boats had brought us income but the price had been too high for the island. They came to study us, the last savages of Scotland, took home our tweed and the socks we women knitted in winter as if they were artefacts. And they wrote stories in the papers of how we were picturesque but ignorant and always in need.

  I had read the newspapers that the minister keeps in a pile.

  I rose up now to my full height, such as it is, and walked back to the village, never once looking behind where those men were still laughing at their trick, no doubt. I marched down the slope towards the stone necklace of bothies laid out lonely along the grass at the foot of the hills.

  CHAPTER 11

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1927

  ‘It’s not the first time men have come to dig up the fairies’ house,’ said my grandmother. ‘No good came of it then, and no good will come of it now.’

  My grandmother had the second sight, but it took no magic to see that her prophecy would come true. Out over the jagged fortress of Dùn’s rocks, grey giants fifty feet high were rising up, bent on vengeance, the wind blowing spray off their tall crests like the white hair of ancient gods.

  I do not have the second sight that has blessed – or cursed – my mother and her mother. Perhaps it is fading from us as the years go by. Pure superstition, said Mrs Munro. It’s a sin to believe in things like that, Chrissie. The ministe
r, however, had other things to say. An Uist man, he reckoned many Gaels carry a remnant of second sight, that there are far more things in the world than we can comprehend. ‘I’ve had more than one person tell me that they foresaw a death, Chrissie. A man I knew saw his uncle in Australia come to him even as he cut the hay on the croft. Came to say his last goodbye. And didn’t that man get a letter some months later from Melbourne saying that his uncle had passed away on that very day he had seen him? It is because we on St Kilda spend so much time in the Lord’s silence that there are those who can hear and see such things.’

  Cooped up in the house because of the storm, my father fretted about the sheep we had just let out, wily little half-black-face, half-Soays, but even they could not survive a full blast of the gale if they wandered close to the edge of the cliffs. ‘We’ll maybe lose one today,’ he grumbled, ‘if they’ve gone over to the slopes of Cambir. And what do those two boys think they are doing?’ He peered out of the side window towards the back of the village where Archie and his friend, dressed in baggy oilskins, were yelling and trying to hold on to the canvas panels. ‘Who is it that thinks to try and build a wood and canvas hut here in the Atlantic winds?’

  ‘Poor lads,’ murmured Mother.

  I squeezed myself next to Father to see. The gale was demolishing the shelter that the boys had rigged up over the entrance to the old underground house in the middle of the potato rigs at the back of Donald Òg’s croft. There was Archie, struggling to gather the stiff canvas fabric in with his friend. His friend ran up the slope and launched himself on top of an escaping sheet of plywood, holding tight, but the wind flipped him over and spun the sheet away like a giant mis-made bird, the boy left sprawling on the grass, clutching at his arm. Village men had come running now from all sides to help secure the flailing structure. My father grabbed his hat and jacket to join them.

  ‘Christina, no. . .’ cried Mother, but I’d already gone out of the door, wrapping a shawl around my head as I ran, bare feet on the icy wet grass. It surely was a wind to blow the sheep straight off the cliffs.