Ardnish Was Home

by Angus MacDonald

  There were four of us pupils, from all over Ardnish. We took a piece of lunch with us and a bottle of milk if we were lucky, and in the winter we had to bring an armful of wood or peat for the stove. All classes were in English, and we were forbidden to speak the Gaelic. Learning Latin from English, when we didn’t speak either, wasn’t that easy.

  Mr Erskine, our teacher who hailed from Glasgow, seemed to be no more than a boy himself, but he worked us hard, and we were in a good position by the time we were fourteen and ready to go to work. Or sixteen, as I was; my mother made me stay on so that I could go to university if the opportunity arose.

  The school building was by the sea, and I remember our indignation when a few days after Mr Erskine started at the school he turned the room around so that we couldn’t look out of the window at the sea. Sandy, always the daring one, turned it back again the following weekend. Mr Erskine gave him six of the best with his trousers down, which our mothers agreed was thoroughly deserved.

  Mairi, or Aunt Mairi as we called her when we were young, was a great maker of tweed. Being from the Hebridean island of Eriskay, she had learned the craft from her parents and had got everyone in Peanmeanach into making it. The spring was the collecting of the crotal, the lichens which give the tweed its peculiar orange colour. The crotal was scraped off the rocks with spoons and piled into a basket. Mairi would buy about a hundred fleeces after the clipping of the sheep. She was very particular about which fleeces she chose: no black wool, and none with brambles or muck in it. Then the wool would be washed, combed, dyed and spun into a yarn. She would get everyone from the village to help tease and wash the wool, and even got them singing the waulking songs from the islands. There was an old pedal-driven loom that she worked into the small hours, just as her father and grandfather had done before her.

  The Astley-Nicholsons were very taken by her distinctive orange tweed and would take as much as she could produce for the Arisaig estate tweed. It may seem an odd choice, but for eight months a year, when the first frost arrives, the grasses on the mountains turn a surprising shade of orange, so the tweed is perfect for the stalkers and their guests to approach the deer unseen.

  I was delighted when Sandy joined our Company, and we had a tremendous three days’ leave after our two months’ training in the Scottish Borders. Armed with our sleeping kit and some fishing lines, we spent the day on a river, caught lots of fish and then went to the local pub and drank beer. Apart from a rare trip to Mallaig or Fort William we had rarely experienced a pub before. It was an establishment of which we approved greatly.

  The weather was unusually lovely and we lay soaking it all in. We built a good fire every night and sat up talking about home and how we were going to go back as soon as we could. We talked about girls and what it would be like to make love. We talked about my injured father, who Sandy had seen only a short while before. I laughed when Sandy told me how cranky he was becoming and how he kept my mother running around doing errands for him. That wouldn’t last, we agreed.

  Sandy was from a family called Ferguson that had left St Kilda at the time of his grandfather. St Kilda is a series of islands sixty miles west of the Scottish mainland. The fifty or so inhabitants live a harsh life, enduring wild weather in the long hard winters. Tragically, almost all the babies died shortly after birth, but a Nurse Barclay spent time on the island and soon discovered what the problem was. She watched in horror as the islanders practised a Christian ceremony of anointing the umbilical cord with oil from the body of a fulmar bird. Nurse Barclay realised that the babies were being given tetanus and soon put a stop to it.

  Sandy told me a story of a crew of four oarsmen taking five men and two boys, including an ancestor of his, in their big boat from the main island, called Hirta, to a 500-foot-tall rock, Stac an Armin, which lay four miles away. The seven of them were deposited with food and supplies for a couple of weeks. The plan was that when they had done their work they would light a grass fire and the boat would come back and fetch them.

  There, Sandy’s ancestor and the others used nooses on the end of long poles to snare fulmar seabirds, swiping at the birds as they flew past and catching them in nets until they had accumulated a big enough pile. The oil would be used for lighting in those days, and the feathers were sold for bedding. They also harvested guillemots, gannets and puffins by the hundreds of thousands. After two weeks they were ready to finish and get home.

  Day after day, they lit the fire, and still there was no movement on the main island. They were there from September throughout the winter, putting up with 100mph winds, snow sweeping across the Atlantic, and just a small bothy for shelter, largely underground, with a stone roof sealed with turf they could just crawl into.

  Imagine – no fuel for a fire and just raw seabirds to eat. Eventually, in the spring, Macleod of Macleod’s factor came to collect the rent, and the men frantically waved the boat down as it passed. They got back to Village Bay on Hirta to discover that there had been a terrible dose of smallpox, and so many had died that that they hadn’t been able to launch the boat.

  Chapter 3

  WAR

  I’ve decided to ask Louise to describe herself. It’s difficult for me to ask while pretending to be a detached observer. I hope she’ll let me feel her hair and put a hand on her leg – maybe more. She bursts out laughing and says she’s too short, too skinny and has boring dirty hair which needs cutting.

  I yearn to know how slim she is, how her mouth moves when she smiles and what colour her eyes are. The ardour of a passionate youth is not satisfied by her self-deprecating response, so I back off to try again at a later date. Instead, we complain good-naturedly about the food, the weather and anything else which constitutes safe ground.

  I doze off and wake up with a start. My body is racked with coughing and I am soaked with sweat. I shiver in the warmth. A nurse brings me brackish water and I feel miserable. I listen to the distant voices of the medical staff, hoping to hear Louise. The groans and occasional cries of pain from the injured provide a constant background tinnitus that we’re becoming immune to. My eyes are sore, my shoulder is sore, and I feel so weak that I cannot even lift my head. Not a man an attractive nurse would be interested in.

  I think of my mother . . .

  HOME

  Morag is my mother. She is a very small woman, and very powerful in that non-physical way wee people often are. She is hardy and brave and stubborn, and was said to have been a beauty in her youth, although the working in the fields, the hard days and often damp bed have given her stiff joints and a bent back. She keeps her own counsel and gets to know people well before she judges them. She will always lend people an ear and is ever a voice of reason and sense.

  As the years passed she became more than just a mother to me; she became the mother to those in the village. And she stood no nonsense. It wasn’t just the bairns who feared her when they stepped out of line.

  Her own father was a book-keeper in Glasgow, and as she grew up she never wanted for anything. She had come on holiday with a friend from Glasgow and met my father for the first time at Arisaig House.

  There was a wedding for one of the staff at the big house, and my father had gone across to play the pipes for it. My mother was a relative of the girl who was getting married and had come up for the celebration. Many people met their future spouses at weddings in those days, when travel was a rare thing.

  Love must be a powerful thing, as from the day she arrived at Peanmeanach she must have known that a comfortable life was not for her. It’s not that we were lacking anything because we weren’t; it was just that we had a simple life. Porridge and herring were our staple diet. Tea was, like sugar, rare. She only went to Fort William once or twice a year.

  My father didn’t speak English to her from the day they got married. He said that she had to learn the Gaelic or she would be miserable and lonely. It might just as easily have been her choice, though, as she would surely have felt the need to learn it quickly. Many of
the people in the village didn’t have the English at all, and so by the time her first born arrived she could even swear in our language as well as the next person.

  I try to imagine her first few weeks of married life: no talk with her husband – or anyone else for that matter – and the winter rain sweeping across the sea from the Americas, and being expected to go out with the other women, ankle deep in the sea, to collect the shellfish.

  She never went back to Glasgow from the day of her wedding until the day Angus was made a priest, even though Father was abroad a lot soldiering.

  I wish that she would have had more children who survived, although God knows how she would have fed them. I was born late with Angus eight years older than me and Sheena three years older than him. My parents had another three children, but the oldest one of them died aged two of pneumonia, and the other two died straight after their birth. I was the last born.

  My sister Sheena was very active, never sat down for a minute. When our father was working at the building of Roshven, Sheena would go across and help out. The Blackburns had a cousin called Margaret who often came to stay at Roshven and became a good friend to my sister. It was from Margaret that Sheena learned to swim, a rare thing around there.

  Sheena called Margaret ‘Lady’, because when they first met Sheena was very young and Margaret was a very sophisticated teenager. They used to head off together to gather shellfish: razor shells and mussels. When it was warmer they would dive for scallops and sometimes even oysters off Roshven farm, where the River Ailort flowed into the sea. We were always being given findings to eat that she had collected from the sea, whether it was seaweed or whelks. Most were horrid, but sometimes she had great success. The best of these was a huge lobster that she and Margaret caught in a pot that they set out, off Sloch. It was as long as a small child was high, and Sheena could hardly lift it. I was only ten years old at the time. Apparently, my father had to make a big fire outside, wrap it in wet leaves and bake it on a sheet of tin. Dripping in butter, it fed the dozen people of Peanmeanach, and was so rich not one of them could manage another morsel afterwards.

  The sea around Ardnish has always been full of fish of all sorts. It was our staple diet, but everyone preferred meat. Meat was rare, though. Allan the whaler would have one cow, and it would have one calf a year. That cow would give them milk all year round, and then the calf would be sold in the autumn to raise money to buy provisions to last the winter. Few people ate beef; it was just too precious.

  The sheep belong to the laird, as do the red deer. However, there might occasionally be a hind with a broken leg which had to be ‘put out of its misery’. This always tended to occur around about Christmas, it seemed to me.

  We didn’t have friends of our age to play with. Sandy and I, of course, had each other, but as families had moved away Angus had no one and Sheena likewise – that’s why she looked forward to Margaret’s visits so much. However, very often it didn’t matter how old or young people were. Fathers would play cards and tell stories to wee girls; grandmothers would reel and jig with teenage boys. In the cities it isn’t the same, I’m told; old people get awfully lonely.

  It was said that Mother would get a medal from the King for something she did, but she never did. It concerned the islands of St Kilda. Mother, Aggie and Mairi were down by the burn at the spot where it runs into the sea. They were doing the washing, and Mother was scrubbing Father’s clothes clean of the animal blood that had soaked them. My mother had to go off to get the tea ready, and as she walked back along the beach she saw a black ball bobbing in the water a short distance offshore. As it was out of reach, she left it alone, but she returned that evening to see if it had come closer. Fishing it into her hand with a stick, she saw that it was a sheep’s bladder. It had a knot tied in it, and attached to it was a tiny wooden shoe-like container. She slid it open and found a piece of paper with a message written in Gaelic on it: ‘The Fulmars are diseased, we have little food left, please help. Feb 1897 St Kilda.’

  There followed a frustrating time for her as she strove to get the policeman in Arisaig to do something about it. Upon failing, she turned to Sir Arthur Astley-Nicholson at the big house, but he was away, and so she walked the thirteen-mile return journey for two days in a row to try and meet with him and convince him to help. The factor was not keen to see his master bothered, but she refused to give up until the laird saw her. She sat on the front doorstep for hours on end waiting for him to get home.

  Sir Arthur immediately agreed to help and sent a telegram to a contact of his in the Home Office. The slow wheels of bureaucracy turned until mother eventually learned that a Navy boat had been sent from Oban.

  The Oban Times wrote an article on its front page headed ‘MORAG GILLIES OF ARDNISH SAVES 50 LIVES’. It said that an islander claimed that if the boat had not been sent, the people would have starved to death. The article is still in the house on the left as you go in; it is tattered and torn now, as Father or one of the three of us would proudly show it to anyone who turned up.

  My mother was an amazing person for growing things. When I was wee, there were always flowers in the house. Down by the beach, yellow irises grew waist-high in huge numbers, the rocks were smothered in sea pinks, and the field behind the house was a multitude of bog cotton, purple from the heather, and primroses on the bank.

  She had Father build a small walled garden, where she grew very tall cabbages given to her from a lady who lived in the Fair Isle, and carrots that thrived in the sandy soil. She knew every bird and creature, and we always had an injured beastie in the house.

  Father found an abandoned otter pup one day on Goat Island. He brought it back, and mother fed it on sheep’s milk until it was strong enough to manage for itself. It was never part of the family and slept outside, but for all of my youth it would turn up and allow us to scratch it behind the ear and feed it an apple. It was accidentally shut in the house one day, and I’d never seen such a mess. Mother’s precious plates were smashed on the floor, and the tartan shawl on the back of the sofa had a big hole in it, where the otter had gripped it in her teeth and thrashed it about.

  Mother was also a goddess with the lambing. Late March every year, she would be away for a month across at Borrodale Farm. She would pack her bag, kiss Father and set off with the cromach he had made for her twenty-fifth birthday, an ash stick with a Blackface sheep’s horn that had been cut, chiselled and sanded into a perfect arc, for her to hold and also to loop around the neck of the sheep to pull it towards her. It had her name – Morag – burned into it.

  She had an unusual yellow collie called Flash that she had trained herself and was a great dog altogether, always at her side. Flash really came into her own at lambing time. Mother’s small hands were ideal for helping with a difficult lambing; she could slide a hand in and pull the head around inside the ewe, so that it came out first. She had a calming way with her that would settle the sheep down, so they delivered well. The factor knew that if she was there the number of surviving lambs would be high. She was the sort of woman who would be out when the rain had been hammering down for days on end, when just one more walk through the lambing fields to see if everything was all right would be one too many for everyone else. Many is the time that a distressed ewe would be found as a result of her vigilance.

  The money that Mother got for the month’s work made a real difference to my parents. The job was well paid, and although she was exhausted by the twenty-hour days, she loved it and would come back to the village with a real spring in her step. She always said that she knew winter was finished the day she had her first lamb in her arms. And sure enough, as she walked back to Ardnish from Borrodale she always had primroses in her hands that she had picked on the way.

  She got to know all the shepherds in the area, and once a year would head off for the sheepdog trials with Flash and relish the craic with the others. I would go with her, but Father never did. ‘It’s your mother’s thing,’ he would say.

 
All the shepherds but one were Catholic, and one, a mild and gentle soul, was called Donnie Macleod and he hailed from Harris. Many of the people from the Outer Isles are known as ‘Wee Frees’, that is to say that they are members of a Protestant group who don’t drink and on the Sabbath nothing apart from praying happens.

  The trials were always held on a Saturday, and the shepherds, apart from Donnie Macleod, would go along the previous night, have a few too many drams and talk about sheep. The problem was that the incomer had great dogs, and every year for ten years he would win. The laird of wherever the trials were that year would pass across the ten pound prize money and the cup, and the other shepherds would curse under their breath.

  The Friday night get-together was particularly inspired one year. The shepherds decided that Saturday wouldn’t do at all, they were all far too busy what with one thing and another, and it would be far better if the trials were moved to the Sunday from then on. Mother and Flash won the next year.

  My father Donald John is always called Donald John – never Donald or Donnie. It may seem slightly odd, as Gillies is a MacDonald name, so it is really Donald, son of Donald. There’s a man in Kinlocheil called Alexander Alexander, known as Double Sandy. You could never be too serious with my father around; he has a way with him that brings people to a quick smile. He is a kind and generous man, and my mother always said he would take the food from his famished children’s table and give it to a stranger rather than let him go on with an empty stomach. She would say, ‘It’s lucky we don’t live on the Mallaig road, with all its passing traffic. We’d have starved by now.’

  Father is tall and thin, has a mop of red hair streaked with grey, and a craggy smiling face. He’s sixty. He’s a piper, and although his fingers are a wee bit stiff now, he used to be the best in the land. He was Pipe Major of the Lovat Scouts before I was born, and hoped that I, too, would be the same. There is no doubt with this background that he was much respected in the area. Everyone knew him, the lairds acknowledged him as one at their level, and when a tune was needed to be dedicated to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her visit to Fort William, it was my father who did the honours.