The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  At the end of the day, Mrs Munro asked me to wait after the children were gone. Her long face was kind and sadly serious. A wisp from her grey hair pleat was bothering her and she pushed it back twice.

  ‘Chrissie, does your mother know?’

  I said nothing, but my hands went to cover my stomach. I shook my head.

  ‘This is a sad day. I did not expect this of you, Chrissie. You know you cannot come and teach the children any more. It would not be the right example.’

  I hung my head. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And can you tell me who the father is?’

  To this I made no reply.

  ‘Well, I can make a guess. But only you can know the truth of it, and if you will not say. . . Oh, here’s a sorry story, Chrissie. Will you tell your mother to come and see us at the manse this evening?’

  I nodded, tears running down my face. ‘Have you anything else to tell me, Chrissie?’ She waited a long while, my tears falling onto the wooden floor, making dark drops on the dusty planks, but I had no voice.

  ‘Well, you had better get home then.’ Then she came and put her arms around me. I realized she too was crying. ‘You’ve chosen a hard path for yourself. It will not be easy, not any of it.’

  *

  Early in December, snow fell, the whole island transformed by a pristine white scrim. I stared out at the bleached land, blue shadows marking the contours, and it seemed that we were on an island newly formed. I held my hands across the pressure of my rounded middle and thought of the little white bones forming smooth inside, bone of my bone, a child of this place. Against the dazzling white, the sea and the sky were delicate blues, pale and lovely. I kept going out just to look at it, almost intoxicated on the wonder of it all as though I’d been at the brandy in the cupboard. I thought, well, it is the time of Mary, who had no earthly father to show for her child, a time when every mother is glad of her miracle even though it is so difficult. And then I was sad, because didn’t Mary have her hard-working, steadfast Joseph?

  By noonday, the sky had begun to take on a pink stain in the clouds, a lilac line dusky at the horizon reminding us that the day was already leaving. And it was around that time of snow that Ewen Ian came to call most nights, cluttering up our kitchen with his big long legs, taking a hank of sheep’s wool from the basket to card it to and fro in that slow deliberate way he had until I felt my very nerves worn down and ragged, waiting for what I knew he would say sooner or later.

  Ewen Ian helped my father put up the loom, the sound of hammering along the village street as every home did the same. My father and my mother worked late each night, taking it in turns to lengthen the tweed bolts. I tried to help, but soon fell asleep over the threads, and they walked me through to my room where I slept with the thud of the shuttle weaving back and fro, the clack of the foot boards being pulled and pushed in a rhythm that went with the beating of my heart and the pumping of blood as the child inside me knit together and grew.

  I thought of a letter from him, what he might say if he wrote, how I might write back and let him know what had happened to me, the happiness he would surely feel then.

  At last, Tormod brought word that he’d seen a trawler sheltering from the storm over in Glen Bay. It took two more days before the winds would let the trawler into Village Bay, the sea rising and sinking like our hopes. Perhaps it was a boat that had picked up our mail. The old ones especially were sorely longing for letters from their children, and for the supplies and money that they sent home. Finlay was out there with the old lifeboat that is our only boat now, anxious to see if he could persuade the captain to let him have some tobacco, but he came back with the news that the boat had not brought our letters. The captain would, however, take our letters and post them in Fleetwood. A great flurry in the village to get letters off with the boat.

  I wrote my letter in my thoughts.

  Christmas came, though we did not make much of Christmas in the way that the nurse and the minister’s wife did, since we keep the old dates. But the children went to the manse for a party with paper hats and cake and sweets. On New Year’s Day, with the snow deep across the village, every wall and stone buried or added to, and the sky above the white hills a heavy blue grey, Ewen Ian came to our house again. He asked my father if he and I might be married.

  I could see the hope in my parents’ faces as my father passed on the message with Ewen Ian still standing there. ‘But it is up to Chrissie,’ Father said.

  You could discern the shape of the child beneath my clothes now, no disguising it any more. It was a generous offer he made. It seemed I had no other options. It was clear to the village by then that I had been more than friends to one of the boys who had stayed that summer past, though I would not say a word on the matter. So what hope was there for me now? And I knew that Ewen Ian did truly love me. All three faces, so hopeful and wanting one answer. They had to shake their ears when I told Ewen that I could not marry him.

  My mother swallowed her disappointment, and my father was grave. Poor Ewen Ian stood his ground and said, ‘If you change your mind, Chrissie, I will be here. I will wait and you will see, we will make a good home. And the child I will raise as my own.’

  ‘I am sorry, Ewen Ian. For all I admire you as a brave and honest man, I can’t do it.’

  My parents said no more about Ewen Ian after he had gone. They never did press me though it was all they wanted. There never was a home more silent than ours that night. But I had heard my mother speak to Ewen Ian as he left. ‘Give her time. It’s aye hard to raise a bairn on your own.’

  CHAPTER 33

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, JANUARY 1928

  The rest of the winter was harsh. No more boats came. I wrote a letter and folded it inside a tobacco box, tied it to a piece of wood that might float. I struggled down to the rocks where they had launched mail buoys before in the worst of the winter famines in years gone by in the hope that they might reach the mainland. I threw my letter into the waves, hoping it might make land – though I did not write his name upon it.

  I went to sit with Allie MacCrimmon in her sooty cottage and took her a twist of black tea. I knew she had run out since she drinks it so strong.

  ‘Oh, if only the trawler was in from Aberdeen, I could ask the captain for tea and sugar for they always help us,’ she sighed.

  ‘Oh, Allie, are you out of the sugar too?’

  She reached across and gripped my wrist. ‘It’s not me I worry for. You must take care of yourself, Chrissie, for no one else can care for the precious child inside you.’

  I nodded. Old Allie had birthed children in the years before they had the knowledge that antiseptic and boiled water could fight the tetanus fever. It had carried off all eight of her babies.

  ‘I will, Allie. I’ll take good care.’

  ‘And I’ll give you a bottle of my fulmar oil, to put on the cord when they cut it. The best medicine.’

  ‘I don’t think the nurse will let us do that any more. But I like the wool you have spun very much.’

  She had got some of the rarest wool from the white Soays, and spun the thread very fine. I held the skein in my hands, the wool soft enough for the most delicate skin – and with a little washing, the smokiness from Allie’s home would come out in time. I took the needles from the pocket in my apron and began to cast on enough stitches for a little jacket.

  ‘And I won’t have Callum to help me dig the crofts this year,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure Tormod will help now he’s too big for school.’

  ‘Poor Tormod. Aren’t they saying he will do everything now there’s so few men on the island?’

  ‘It’s a heavy burden for you young ones that are left with too many among us old.’

  I distracted Allie from her gloomy mood by asking her to sing. But halfway through the song of the seal maid, she fell asleep. I put my knitting away, banked up the peats to keep the fire going and crept out.

  Not until February did we see another trawler call by in th
e bay. The village men rowed out to ask if the crew could let us have flour and tea and paraffin, and take an order for food supplies to the mainland. Starved of news and tobacco they went on deck to talk a while with men from the outside world. And we were left with a boat cold once again, with all the village sick and old Allie dying of it, though you and I did not get it, Rachel Anne. I was determined to keep you safe, you see.

  March brought everyone out to dig the crofts, carrying seaweed up to add to the new potato beds in front of the homes, freshly dug into new rigs.

  The days were lightening and our hearts lifted as some secret message told thousands upon thousands of birds that it was time to return once more; fulmars gliding and floating level with the land along the cliff tops; the black-tipped, chiselled wings of the gannets flying into the rocky bastions of Boreray.

  ‘Listen,’ I said to you while the birds filled the air with messages and songs and crackles and chatter. The first time you had heard our music here. The song of your home.

  The weaving was finished and the looms were coming down when at last the puffins came back, more and more each day until the sky above us each evening was that dizzying, dipping wheel of black feathers again, birds spilling from the cliffs like a giant plucking of feathers into the wind.

  By now we had the first fulmars taken from the cliffs, the winter-lean adults. And it was cruel to take them before they could lay their chicks, but we had not eaten fresh meat for so many weeks and my body was craving good sustenance more than it ever had. There were moments when you moved and I could feel the shape of a foot, an elbow, the rounded hardness of a head pressing under my skin, before you turned again and became a smooth world all to yourself.

  The first week in May, and after long discussions in front of the post office that morning, the men had gone down to paint the boat. My mother and the women were setting up the barrels of water to begin waulking the tweeds, felting them down into cloth that would be tight enough to keep out the weather. They were sitting around a board placed across two chairs and passing the cloth back from one bowl to the other, thumping the wool onto the plank in time to a song so old that most of the words had become a nonsense, when I knew you were coming.

  I stayed in the house as long as I could, pacing up and down, singing to myself, for I did not want to disturb anyone on such a busy morning for work – though I wished there was someone who knew my news and would rush in and say how glad they were that you would soon be here, someone who would hold my hand and smile at me with shining eyes for the joy of you. I kept my pains and my quiet joy to myself. Around noon, when the village ate their cheese and oatcakes, my mother came to fetch my father’s food to take over to him, and she saw me kneeling by the bed with my arms out, groaning.

  The nurse was not pleased that I had left it so long before calling her down. Nurse Williamina Barclay was a thin little lady with a clipped Edinburgh voice and a hooked nose like a bird, as sharp as antiseptic. She had a man’s indefatigability but was the kindest of souls. She fetched her tins of Keating’s powder and clean sheets and had my mother and the neighbours putting water to boil. I’d seen my cow birth her calf, so there were few surprises for me as to how things went from there on, except that I was lost in a world of dizziness and pains with the sound of the women along the village street beating the board with the wet cloth and singing a song, ‘Feathers and eggs, feathers and eggs, oh the birds the birds and feathers.’ The pain came in waves until I expected I would die, but sooner than anyone thought, the nurse cried, Chrissie, you have a girl. They gave you to my mother while the nurse tied the cord and doused me in antiseptic, then washed and wrapped you in a square of fresh sheet.

  And all this time, you had not cried. I raised myself up on my elbow for I knew the quiet of a lamb that needs to have breath blown in its nostrils. By the time they gave you to me, the minister had already arrived in the room to pray, and I feared they had given you to me to say goodbye. It was a long time before we saw you breathing well and even then you were such a quiet child. I named you Rachel Anne, for my mother’s mother. I sat and held you in the darkening as the sound of evening prayer came from along the village and my father stood in silent prayer by the hearth. You fed a little through the night, and each time I held you close in a goodbye, for you seemed so frail and quiet. I had remembered you before I opened my eyes in the morning in the half-light, and oh, it was a joy to me when I saw your blue eyes, open and watching me so calmly and so new.

  Everyone in the village came to see you with such solemn, fierce happiness over the next days, for we had kept you safe and kept you with us. There is no child on St Kilda that is not held precious. All you needed came with them, old garments stored in trunks or newly made by the women’s hands. You did not have a named father, my Rachel Anne, but you had a whole village to care for you. For there are no people more glad on earth than the people of St Kilda to see a baby, and you had so many grandfathers and grannies to rock your crib or bring you fresh milk as you grew or eggs or lamb when they were brought over from Soay or Dùn.

  I had no father to give to you, not yet, but I had this people to give you. And I believed in my heart that there was no better place or family that a child might have than this island, this jewel that had fallen from the pocket of God and where all men feel Him near and find the blessed solace of being welcome at every hearth along the strand of lighted bothies, be it even in the greatest and the darkest of storms. And soon, I whispered over your downy head, soon he will come home to us. For what is faith but the sure hope of things that will come but are not yet seen.

  It was not a hard thing to endure the months and months and all through the winter. The summer would be here again, and then he would return. I would give you to your father, the joy of you in his eyes, your small hand in his own.

  CHAPTER 34

  Fred

  MARSEILLE, 1941

  A loud banging on the door downstairs. If the French police were going to carry out a raid, it was always in the morning. We swung into action, quietly moving floorboards and bookcases with hidden alcoves to slide inside the stuffy spaces. I heard Caskie straightening the room then going downstairs with a calm, steady step.

  The police were there for at least an hour, turning over beds and emptying drawers in their frustration. I could hear them barking for men to show their papers, all clean. They spent a long time in Caskie’s room but failed to find the logbook where he recorded every man that came or went. Not that it would have helped them since all Caskie’s notes were in shorthand Gaelic.

  Later that afternoon, our forged papers arrived courtesy of a boy with a basket of fish.

  ‘No more hiding under the floorboards you’ll be pleased to hear,’ said Caskie. ‘You can take yourself off to the rest of the building, boys, there’s billiards, a reading room, but no going out into Marseille alone for now.’ He took me to one side. ‘And I want you to meet the man who will be organizing the next stage over the Pyrenees. A great friend of mine, one of the founders of the escape route, and no better man.’

  We walked down into the same room where we’d first presented ourselves as dusty escapees, now officially merchant seamen. So long as we were civilians with documents it was perfectly legal for Brits to be in Marseille under Vichy law.

  Our contact was already at the bar, his back to us, short cropped fair hair, a grey suit. He stood and turned towards us, the flash of a gold tiepin, neatly polished shoes. I all but stumbled on a rough floorboard. There was Archie Macleod, his arm outstretched in greeting. I stopped dead, unable to move for a moment.

  ‘Fred Lawson. After all these years.’ A look of shock on his face.

  ‘You know each other?’ said Caskie.

  ‘Went to university together,’ Archie said.

  ‘We were both on St Kilda,’ I added.

  ‘Then you’ll know what safe hands you are in.’ Caskie called to the boy laying tables. ‘Tony, could you get us some tea if you’ve a moment?’ The boy came back w
ith three thick seaman’s mugs.

  ‘I think this calls for a little something,’ said Archie, taking a silver flask from his coat pocket. He tipped a measure into his tea and offered the flask round. I shook my head, as did Caskie. Archie raised his mug to us and drank.

  I tried to take in Archie’s words as he spoke, essential information about crossing over into Spain, but I’d been swept back to that last day, raw and bereft. Even more distracting was the lump of rage I felt in my chest. I wanted to thrash Archie Macleod. The last man I would trust. I searched his face for a trace of the boy I had known. So this was Colonel Macleod now, working out of the British Embassy in Madrid, so he claimed. His face was heavier, cheeks pulled down by the extra flesh, the puffy eyes of a drinker, though the same boyish blue. His hand seemed to have become blurred and larger, straying towards the flask in his coat, tipping out a little more. The years had treated Archie badly. He looked middle-aged. Every so often, his eyes went to mine, unsure, as if checking my reaction, but I swiftly disengaged. I wasn’t going to let him believe his charm could work on me. I had forgotten nothing.

  ‘Main point is,’ he was saying, ‘we’ll need to scout out a new route. I don’t think we need to change the passeur, I’m pretty sure he’s solid. But we’ll see. And in the meantime, if your papers are in order then it’s a case of lying low here in Marseille until we’re ready.’

  ‘Papers yes, but still no ration cards,’ said Caskie. ‘If these boys are staying a while they’ll need them.’

  Archie nodded at me. ‘I can do something about that, if one of you can go to the American Embassy with me to sign.’

  ‘Thank you, Archie,’ said Caskie. ‘And now I have errands to run if we are to have supper tonight. You’ve no doubt much to talk about after so long.’