The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

We sat in silence, Archie swirling his cold tea. I rubbed the side of my jaw, realizing that I’d been clenching my teeth.

  ‘So, how did you come to be in Marseille?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably like you,’ Archie replied. ‘Fought with my unit, always in retreat, across northern France as the Boches pressed in. We were on the outskirts of St Valery when we saw it go up in flames, heard we’d surrendered. So a group of us set out to walk south. Never want to eat a raw potato again or sleep in a field. Made it this far and ended up as part of Caskie’s little band of hope. Along with a few others in the town. And you?’

  ‘Captured a couple of times, made it down to Marseille. Hoping to get home.’

  ‘And you will. You must.’ He stared into the dregs in his mug. ‘I am glad to see you again. I can’t tell you how much.’ He looked up from under a wrinkled brow.

  I gave a smile, or something like it.

  ‘I’ve missed you no end, Fred. Do you think about when we were younger, the island?’

  ‘I think about it.’

  He sniffed, shifted on his stool, pulling at his jacket so he wasn’t sitting on the hem. ‘You know, I tried to look you up.’

  ‘I was away a lot. Overseas.’

  Another silence. Perhaps he had tried to contact Lachlan before he passed away. I’d never know.

  ‘Why don’t I come by and pick you up first thing tomorrow? There may be some queuing to do at the embassy.’ He stood up to go. Paused. ‘Look, Fred,’ he began, ‘about Chrissie—’

  I held up my hands. ‘Stop right there, if you don’t mind. That’s all in the past and we’re going to have to work together now, so let’s just leave it at that.’

  ‘Right. All right. We’ll leave it there.’

  He was gone. I held tightly to the bar, rigid with the shock of seeing him again.

  It wasn’t all right, it would never be right – and this was the man I was going to have to trust with my life. An unthinkable idea had begun to form as I stared into the stains stuck to the sides of my cold mug of tea. No one knew the identity of the traitor in the chain of safe houses and passeurs from Lille to Spain.

  Anyone, Caskie had said. It could be anyone.

  All day, I thought of talking to Caskie, telling him my misgivings about Archie, but what did I have to go on, really? A past quarrel and a gut feeling. Not enough to hang a man. But I would be watching Archie Macleod like a hawk.

  Later, lying in the stuffy back room in the dark, I thought, but it wasn’t just Archie to blame, was it? I let my mind go to a thought I didn’t like to dwell on. Dark and painful. Because in the end, hadn’t Chrissie chosen Archie that day?

  I’d never been able to understood how it could be so. I’d felt married to her heart and soul for all the differences there were between us. And thought she had felt the same.

  And my part, my fault in the matter? Leaving in anger, refusing to hear what you might have had to tell me, Chrissie.

  And regrets? And forgiveness? I left, blaming you. But what terrible times did you go through as the island was cleared? When I was never there to help you, never by your side?

  And now the years had gone by. Probably, you’d married, someone on the mainland, children perhaps.

  But what if you hadn’t? What if there was a chance, just a chance, that if I saw you again then we could start anew, find in the ashes something of what we shared so long ago?

  CHAPTER 35

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, JUNE 1928

  I met every boat at the jetty that summer, could feel a boat coming from miles away. I was there in front of Neil’s tin hut each time the mails were handed out, waiting to hear my name called, and each time disappointed.

  In June, we welcomed home two distant relatives on a visit from Australia, a Reverend MacQueen and his wife. Their grandparents had left the island some seventy years ago, after the Great Disruption, when the Spirit fell on the islands in the days when a gospel ship was seen blazing on dry land and holy fire and languages came down on the people in a great revival. The laird here would not let people choose their own minister of inspiration as they wished. He locked the church to make the people see sense and accept the minister he chose. So thirty people from the village had left for Australia where they could worship as they saw fit.

  The Reverend MacQueen and his wife had heard about our island paradise from their grandparents, a place that had lived not by money but by kindness and community, by faith and hard work, where all that the people wore and ate was taken from the land God had given them, grinding the corn by hand with a stone quern, sewing their own jackets while seated outside on the grass. A jewel of an island.

  You could see in their faces how shocked they were by the island, by the little we had and how simply we lived – living in squalor, as I heard him tell his wife.

  They were all for asking the entire village to come away with them to Australia where life would be so much easier and better.

  ‘And didn’t half the St Kildans who left us in fifty-two die on the ship from the measles?’ said old Finlay. No one was of a mind to go.

  ‘If you want me to leave here then you will have to send the policeman to drag me out of my house,’ Neil told them.

  In the end, the only change our cousins caused was to leave an Australian flag, which we flew from the school chimney in their honour till the wind whipped it away.

  Which was the morning that saw me stop going down to meet every boat? What happened to make me no longer want to go? The realization that summer was almost over and yet he had not written. I could no longer bear the pain of being disappointed. All the same, whenever a boat was in the bay, so long as there was a faint chance that someone might come running to the bothy with a message – ‘A letter for you, Chrissie, found in the bottom of the sack’ – then my skin prickled with a hopeless anticipation until the boat was gone.

  Perhaps I was the only one to feel our isolation as a blessing through that next winter. There was a peacefulness in not expecting any news as the months went by.

  And you were such a bonny child, sitting up and looking around. The dog, your dearest friend who let you grab his hair, and I spent long hours watching the fleeting expressions dawning new on your face as you tried to fathom the life around you, tiny frowns and startles and smiles. I carded the wool and rocked your crib with my foot each evening, Mother’s spinning wheel creaking its own rhythm as we sang the old songs and new ones that came to me while you slept and rocked like a little boat in the bay. The loom’s clacking and the soft shush of the shuttle going until two or three in the morning, waking after a few hours’ sleep to begin the work of the day, caring for the beasts in the byre and putting on the meal to cook. Soaking out the salt in the fulmar flesh so that you did not turn your head from the spoon.

  At last, a lull in the winter storms. We could hardly believe our ears, but there truly was a steam whistle sounding in the bay. It was Captain Tonner’s ship, the only one of the Fleetwood trawler captains who would still take the mails for us while the dispute with the boat owners and the post office carried on, the boat owners saying they will not allow the captains to bring the winter mail unless the post office pays the cost. I waited in the bothy doorway with you bundled up in your blanket, watching everyone run down to the jetty to see the rowing boat launched, how it bounced up and down on the unsettled sea, how you held out your arms, laughing at the sparkle of it in the winter sun.

  After so long, there were eight sacks of letters, greetings from the young ones far away, gifts and money for their parents, two red bags of post just for the manse. I took you down to join the people clustered around the steps of Neil’s post office hut as he called out the names. My heart going faster and faster until there it was, Christina Gillies. A parcel passed over heads. By the time it was in my hand I’d a whole story in my mind of how Fred must have somehow heard, how he’d wrapped up a gift for the baby, how he was planning to come and get us.

  It was Callum’s careful s
chool script on the brown paper. He’d posted a doll for you, a pink plastic creature hard as a nail with wispy yellow hair. You have it still, and we were grateful for it, though my heart broke a little more each time I saw it, recalling the disappointment that came with it.

  *

  Soon the land in front of the bothies was a small patchwork of brown rigs and new barley once again, not the wide sweeps of barley and potatoes that the old ones remembered but as much as we could plant. The sheep and the great shaggy cattle had been fenced out above the dyke wall so that they could not eat the new shoots. You sat outside on the grass as the irises pushed up and flowered yellow, and the children played with you and brought you the new puppies to hold like dolls. You were a year old now, and Fred had never once seen our beautiful child, never heard your name.

  I thought of writing a letter to Archie, but I did not trust him not to make trouble from it, so I listened when the factor came in case he might speak of the boys who had once lived in the cottage at the end. But he never mentioned Fred’s name. I heard from Mrs Munro that Archie had taken work far away in France, in Paris, but of Fred there was not one bit of news.

  I turned my mind to work, of which there was plenty. It was a relentless life and the fatigue never left your bones with so many too old to do the heavy labour but who still needed turf to keep the fire burning and food to put on the table. And always so many tasks still to be done.

  I stood outside with you, holding you by your hands as you tried out your first steps along our village row, the walls of the houses not whitewashed any more but streaked with grey and damp, the street sprouting grass where once it was kept so neat, the roof falling in at the end of an empty house. I saw with a pinched heart that our village had the look of a place already abandoned.

  The laird did not press us too hard for our rents since we had not the means to pay him, but he took what he could from the island in recompense. Tweed and salted ling. Old Mr MacDonald was too embarrassed to tell the steward that when he took away the only bolt of tweed he’d made that year, he took all that the old man had left to sell. So how was Mr MacDonald to fill his cupboard for the winter? And more than ever, after so many cold autumns and bad harvests, we had need of money to buy in stores for the time of the long dark.

  Nurse Barclay had gone along the village taking it upon herself to remind the reverend’s wife and everyone else to put in their order for winter supplies in good time. She chided us because our lists were all too short. I marvelled that she did not understand how truly poor we were in the village. But she was a good soul, kept busy all summer with so many ailments from the old ones.

  That summer brought more tourists than we had ever seen. I was sitting outside the bothy with Mother’s spinning wheel while you played on the path – the tourists love to watch the thread grow and disappear as if it were some secret incantation unknown to the modern race – when a man came and sat on the bench nearby. I could feel from his attention that this was not an average tourist. He took out a small notebook and pencil. He introduced himself as one of the newspaper men, a Mr Alpin MacGregor from The Times of London. He wore the clothes of the gentry, but everything so flamboyant as if he were play-acting a Scottish gent of the highlands, the plus fours wide and baggy and a great bonnet cap. The smallest and shiniest brogues, long padded cheeks and a sharp nose.

  ‘Call me Alasdair,’ he said, and he spent some time admiring the child for her cleverness. I kept my face half hid by the hood of my shawl, a demure St Kildan. I had no wish to talk to one of the paper men.

  Then he asked me if I thought St Kilda would last another winter.

  I snapped my thread I was so annoyed, my foot too hard on the pedal.

  ‘I don’t mean to offend you, and if I lived here I can see that I would never want to leave, not on a day like this, but you must admit that the St Kildans are in a daily struggle against nature and I ask myself if you are not beginning to lose the battle. Next winter, perhaps?’

  ‘We have managed before and why should we not again,’ I told him. Just a babe, but you looked up, alarmed by the sharpness in my voice.

  ‘But with such a decline in able-bodied men to man the boats and fish and cut turf and do the tasks necessary to your survival here? I hear that you can’t get out to Boreray any more and the sheep there are being left to go wild. Can your fragile economy really survive the depredations of another winter, cut off for months? And what of the fishing boats with their mail strike? What if someone should become acutely ill?’

  I gathered up my Rachel Anne.

  ‘I do not think it is any business of yours, Mr Alpin. And I would ask that you leave us be.’

  ‘Come now. You must know how closely the public have followed St Kilda’s fortunes for years. The relief ships sent out in time of need, weren’t they arranged by newspapermen?’

  My father appeared then. He had heard the man’s insistent questioning. You were beginning to cry.

  ‘We will bid you good day, sir,’ he said.

  We went in and closed the door. The newspaper man stayed out on the path with his notebook, but the worries he had spelled out, they came right inside with us, sat down by the fireplace.

  The last tourist boat left. A quiet fell on the village. The feathery stacks of puffins and fulmars in flight around the cliffs gone. All was stone and wind again. I took you to the empty schoolroom where there was still the piano. It had been tuned by a visitor from the summer boats and I showed you some of the tunes I knew, your little hand on mine to feel the notes. One of the high keys would not play any more, but we could still make do. And, oh, you were clever, humming the melody and standing with your chin up so you could better see the notes as you reached to test the songs with your little hands, looking for the note you wanted. You were puzzled when we went back a month later and the damp had warped the strings out of tune again.

  As we headed back across the grass, I heard a great whooshing of wind coming down Conachair. A storm rushing in like a banshee. We got back to the bothy before the gale hit. It pummelled the houses like a vengeance, the walls shuddering with the blows. The rains ruined the crops and the hay. We had to go down on the cliffs to pull grass so that the cattle might have something to eat through the long dark. I felt a clenching in my stomach, knowing that we would be asking for charity again before the winter was out.

  But worse was to come. I saw Captain Tonner in front of Neil’s post office, the gloomy looks on the men’s faces as the men listened to him.

  ‘I am very sorry about it,’ Captain Tonner was saying. ‘Fifty pounds in coal it took me to get in last winter with the letters, and I’m only paid ten by the post office, you see. I can’t do it any more.’

  Old Finlay spent the winter writing letters of complaint to the government. But his letters stayed on his dresser, waiting for a boat to take them. ‘It is the mainland that makes itself far away from us,’ Finlay said as he sat in our kitchen. ‘If they would send us mail on the lighthouse ship as they did in the war, then we might live well here.’

  ‘When I was a child,’ said my grandmother Rachel, ‘the boats never came in winter, but we lived on our own stores with no help from outside.’

  ‘And didn’t we have fifty men then to grow those crops so we could store enough to last the winter? And even back then, the winter was often hungry,’ Finlay reminded her.

  She sighed, pulled her knitting closer to her eyes in the lamplight. ‘We must trust in God,’ she said.

  My father and the men took the boat over to Dùn to fetch off a sheep. But in the narrow gap between the island and Hirta, the wind came in so hard that it swept the boat over and the men had to swim for shore. My father when we found him on the beach was barely alive. He lingered a few more days but the pneumonia was in his lungs. And no one will ever know if he might have lived if we had a doctor or a hospital near, or a passing ship to take him off the island. Nurse Barclay saw it as her failure. Mother told her it was the will of God that he should go.
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br />   We laid him in our small cemetery, covered him with earth so that the irises and daisies would mark where he lay and set a boulder there taken from the sea. For three days we mourned him, and then the island claimed us again to wrest our living from what it gave us.

  And my father’s death meant we no longer had enough men to row a boat as far as Soay. The sheep there, the gannet harvest on Boreray, all lost to us now.

  Our supplies and our sprits low, cut off from the world, we dreaded the winter to come.

  CHAPTER 36

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1929

  If you could eat the majesty of the wild splendour of the seas in winter, then we would never have gone hungry, black waves with towers of spray coming up over the top of Dùn, or rampaging a hundred feet high against Oiseval’s cliffs. There were days when the howling of the gales left us deaf, ears ringing. To go out at night and feel yourself in the mighty hand of the Atlantic wind was to be humbled indeed. No human strength could ever match it.

  The MacKinnons with their eight children were soon low on their stores and surviving on thin porridge. Their bairns had no boots that winter, went barefoot across the frozen grass, rubbing their cold feet together to try and make some warmth as they sat in the schoolroom.

  Even the minister and his family had run out of lard and tea and flour. The nurse chided them for not listening to her warnings to put in a large enough order. But no one told her that our situation in the village was far worse, for to let her know would be the same as asking for gifts from her cupboard. But how we looked forward to her invitation to go to tea.

  Every week she would ask the women and the children to come to tea with her and give them advice on any little troubles they had. She gave the children a few sweets each time from the jar on her dresser. ‘They are such good children,’ she said. ‘I have never met bairns who did not eat sweets at once. Yours save them for later with such restraint.’

  What she did not understand was that the children took the sweets home to share with their parents and grandparents since those sweets were the only sugar seen in the St Kildan homes. We soon had nothing left to eat but potatoes and oatmeal and the birds we had from the island. We rarely took a lamb for the table since they were our rent for when the factor came. Often, we went hungry that year, though not you, Rachel Anne, for you were well over a year old and growing fast.