It is said in the family that I hadn’t even reached my first birthday when he had me on his knee blowing into a wee metal pipe that he had made into a chanter of sorts.
‘Have you played yet?’ he would ask me every morning, almost before my feet had touched the floor beside the bed. Or, as he wrote a new tune, ‘Do you think the birrell would do better before the D or after it?’
He soldiered for about half his life, and it was during these years that there was some money around, but these didn’t coincide with my life as the regiment was disbanded after the Boer War and resurrected for this war. The beautiful hills and sandy beach around the village didn’t make for a living, and when the market for kelp died with the invention of a cheaper chemical that did the same job, half the income of the place was gone. That is when people had to leave.
But not Father. ‘I would rather stay here and die than follow Aunt Lexie to Canada, or head off to the shipyards in Glasgow,’ he would declare loudly. ‘And in any case – ‘‘plays the finest Strathspey and Reel in the country’’ – would having that on my papers secure me a job?’ Not to mention the fact that he had a wooden leg, so his mobility was impaired. He did carpentry work at Roshven House quite a lot, creating the panelling and shelving in the library. He took three years to do it, often spending a couple of weeks over there at a time.
He also did some seasonal ghillie work for Arisaig Estate. He had to watch the deer on the hills, establish where they had wandered off to when the stalking was on, and work with the ponies taking the stags back to the larder at the end of the day. The ponies came to him to be saddled up, and he would ride one with his leg sticking out.
The stalker for Ardnish was big Ewen Cameron who lived at Polnish, and it was him my father worked for. Father was paid by the day and didn’t work for much more than a third of the year. But we did have the house rent free, and the factor allowed us three cows. Ewen was known as Ewen Fiadhaich, which means wild Ewen, as in his youth he was as wild as a swarm of bees, getting banned from school, often wildly drunk and having tremendous fights over girls.
My mother in her determined way once pleaded with the factor for ways of getting more work to the village. ‘Soon everyone will have gone,’ she said, ‘and Donald John will have us fade away.’
When my father was out with the laird stalking, my mother followed them up and, with big Ewen off gralloching a beast, she told the laird how it was: ‘There is a sixty-acre field behind the village, which is too boggy for anything much more than rough grazing. You could make an improvement which would make it possible for us to continue to live there.’
And so it happened. We had eight men come and stay for a month, and with the four in the village helping as well, a massive trench was dug along the middle of the bog, running down to the sea. A high fence was put around the field to keep the deer out, and grass seed was provided for us.
The next year, we had a small farm, with hay and potatoes. My father wrote a letter to the laird saying if he ever had need of a piper he would be delighted to play and would take nothing for it.
The people of the west made money from collecting shellfish. Scallops and whelks were the standard, but razorfish, clams and mussels were also common. They were stored in hessian bags in a flat water pool and sold by the pound whenever a boat came by, maybe once a fortnight. You seldom looked out to sea without spotting a couple of people bent over with a bucket and stick on the foreshore. We could barter the shellfish, too; the driver on the steam train was always happy to swap a couple of bags of good coal for some scallops or mussels, and cousin Tearlach, when visiting from Canna, would arrive with a gallon of fine whisky and leave with some fine fresh lobsters.
Sandy and I would ride the garrons up to the Singing Sands to swim in the summer, or up to Loch Doir a’ Ghearrain to try and catch a trout when we knew big Ewen was away. The garron is a Highland pony that is used to carry deer off the mountain. Not a big beast, it is stocky and sure-footed. We usually had two and a foal around the place.
During the rut, with the stags roaring in the hills, the ponies would be alert, knowing that they were to be off up the hill with Father. In the summer months, they might be two hours away on the north of the peninsula. There would be an agreement to meet Ewen Fiadhaich, and father would set off before daylight. In due course, along would come the stalking party – as likely as not a couple of men who had business connections with Sir Arthur. If the day went well, then father would return with news of a stag on the pony and a guinea tip in his pocket. Quite often, they would be stalking on Arisaig peninsula, and the ponies and my father would stay at Borrodale for a few nights.
He never minded; he would have his chanter in his pocket and would play happily for hours by himself.
The peninsula where we live is clothed in heather, with sharp outcrops of lichen-covered rock sticking out of it. When you walked across the hillside you would stick to the paths or the high ground, as the peaty bogs meant the ground could be very wet, and many a time the men would have to pull a cow out of a hole.
To the east is the Rois-Bheinn ridge, the huge boulder-covered, tooth-shaped An Stac and the hills above Inverailort. To our south and west lies the shore. As I lie here it is the sea that I think of most, changing colour daily; with the coral sand making it appear as green as that of the Indies one day and then the next, a heaving black, with the white foam rearing up on the land.
It is on days like these that the stomach churns in fear for the men still out in the boats trying to bring their catch to the shore. There is a village called Smirisary, about four miles beyond Glenuig to the west, where about thirty people live. You couldn’t get a cart to it along the rough ground; the houses are scattered around the glen rather than in a row like our village.
All the men there are involved in the fishing. They have two big boats, and they use ropes and wooden tree trunks as rollers to pull them up the steep shingle at the end of the day. The tides dictate the day’s activity, as they need to launch and pull the boat in at high tide. It takes four men to work each boat.
One day in late March, the boats went out as usual. But there had been much prior discussion between the men, because although it was calm now, a couple had felt that the weather would turn. My sister Sheena’s man, Colin Angus, was among them. Anyway, with money being short they decided to go out. They set off towards Eigg and got the net out to start fishing.
Only half a mile from shore, a squall came in as fast as you can imagine, and everyone on board saw it coming. There was a rush to pull the heavy net in and to turn the bow of the boat towards the wind.
They didn’t make it. The heavy net held the boat sideways on, and the waves went straight over the side and tipped the boat. With heavy woollen clothes and the coldness of the water, they didn’t have a chance; even if any of them had been able to swim they couldn’t have got back to shore. An awful thing, too, was that the people of Smirisary witnessed the whole thing, and couldn’t do anything about it.
This was the great disaster of our youth, for Sheena lost the person who was everything to her, and even now, ten years later, she hasn’t found herself a husband. Two of the other men were married: one with a wee girl and a wife due shortly, and the second a man near sixty. Also lost was a sixteen-year-old lad, whose mother watched the boat capsize and her son drown. She said that his screams would haunt her until her last breath.
The priest at Glenuig launched a fund to help the dependants, and the Oban Times launched an appeal. A lot of the people left Smirisary that year and went to the south. They could not forget that horrible day and needed to start a fresh life.
The people of the west are born with a story always at their lips. My father often told us anecdotes as we gathered driftwood: about the day the seaweed as high as a man was washed onto the beach; or having seen a ghostly deer by the village, evening after evening after a hind was shot by stalkers from the laird’s house. Its calf was found by my father and bottle fed. We never tired of the le
ngthy tale, which could take an hour as he talked in detail of milking the cow for the deer calf and keeping it company in the byre for the first couple of cold October nights. As the calf grew stronger, it followed Sheena and Angus to school and waited outside until they were ready to go home.
Father spoke of our ancestors, and of the great westerly storm of 1760 which blew down all the big trees from Ardnamurchan to Mallaig, and the destruction and misery it caused.
It had come at night when people were in their houses. The roofs were made of heather, of course, and blew straight off. Trees fell on buildings, and even walls that had stood for centuries blew over. Hundreds were killed, and in those days there wasn’t a doctor in the area.
Storytelling like this meant that we all knew our history: the bond of our family and its roots. I can see myself in my mind, with a wee lad at my knee beside the fire at Ardnish, telling the same story with the same inflection and exaggerations that my father had.
WAR
I hear Louise talking as she moves around the tent.
‘Maybe it’ll be quieter tonight,’ she whispers to me, and my heart leaps. ‘We can talk then.’
The Brigadier doctor is coming to visit from the hospital ship tomorrow, and everyone is working to get the place looking its best. Louise gives me back my shirt, now dry, and helps me to put it on. As she does this I feel her fingers slide up my arm. Or am I imagining it? I might be. I wish I could look in her eyes; then I would be able to tell.
I had a sensation of light in my right eye today. The lids were being held open while being washed, and it was as if there was a flash. It may be a dream, but my head throbs and I have decided that this is a good sign. I may be clutching at straws, but I look forward to when my bandage is next removed. I can’t stop myself thinking of things that could happen if my sight was to return. After two weeks convinced that I was dying and that I would be blind to the end, my thoughts now are of proposing to Louise, taking her to Ardnish and becoming a fisherman. I am rushing ahead of reality so I try to caution myself. Just seeing her would be a dream come true. For the first time in days, I fall asleep with a smile on my face.
I wake sometime later, and I am given a cup of tea by one of the male orderlies.
‘You look like a happy man,’ he said. ‘Just what part of this hell hole are you enjoying? The flies, the food, the all-round misery?’
I don’t answer but I keep smiling. Unlike his, I thought, perhaps my life is looking better.
Chapter 4
WAR
I keep urging Louise to tell me a bit about herself. Apart from the bare facts I know – that she is Welsh, and a nurse – I hardly know a thing.
Tonight, as the rain thuds against the canvas and there is little other noise apart from the thud and crump of the shells falling in the distance, she tries to make me a bit more comfortable for the night ahead.
‘Louise,’ I plead, ‘tell me about your mother. What’s your life like back at home?’
I wait for the inevitable ‘Just you go to sleep, boyo, there’ll be time for that another day.’ Instead, there is silence as she settles herself down beside me. I can smell her, and feel her warmth. She starts to talk in her quiet, considered way . . .
LOUISE
Dad and I had always been close. When I fell and hurt myself, or was unhappy, it was to him I always went. When I was a baby I was very sick, and he used to hold me throughout the night, willing me to live. I loved him dearly.
We lived in real poverty, although we didn’t know it. Sharing an outside toilet with the neighbours, and the five of us children in two large beds. Mam and Dad shared a room with us – how they had the opportunity to have the children God knows.
My parents had always been close. They had married straight out of school and had drawn comfort from each other through the roughest of times. Dad has become quite fat now, his hair is white and greased back, his skin is pale, and the pores are ingrained with the dirt from the mines. He looks like a man twice his age.
We would listen as he coughed. A short sharp hack as he tried to clear the mucus from the back of his throat, then another, and another. His whole body would get caught in the wracking spasm, tightening as he fought for breath. And then, with a great effort, his lungs would release a fistful of phlegm, the colour of the coal that had caused it.
None of us spoke then. Though we were all awake, we lay in fear; a muffled sob from the little one the only sign of the pain we shared with Dad. He’d had the cough, as had most of the men in the town, as long as I could remember. It was only this particular winter that it had got to this stage, and we feared for his life. Mam had been at him to go to the doctor about it, but he wouldn’t.
‘It’s just a winter’s cough,’ he would say. ‘It’ll clear up.’
And so we all suffered with him, every morning as he woke for work. Maybe he knew they would stop him going to the pit, and how would he feed us then? There weren’t any jobs for a forty-year-old ex-miner.
It was the war that saved us, because at last there was work around. Mam went out to get a job.
‘The wee one is eight now,’ Mam said, meaning my brother Owen, ‘the others can look after him.’
Mam had heard of a cleaning job at the hospital in Abergavenny where her auntie worked. She left the house at five in the morning, walked down to the end of the valley, and took the bus to the town.
After one bad night with Dad not breathing for what seemed like ages, Mam sent me out to get the doctor. Dad didn’t know he was coming until he walked in the door, and it was only because of this that Dad agreed to see him.
Thomas, my other younger brother, was sixteen and he got Dad’s job in the pit. Mam had fixed it; she went to see the management and told them that Dad wasn’t fit for work but the lad would do it. She hated sending Thomas into the mine.
‘It’s killing your dad,’ she said, ‘but we need the money. And it’s only for a year or two.’ That line had been trotted out through the Valleys since the first pit had been sunk. Of course there was no other work, and the money wasn’t bad. People preferred not to make the connection between a painful early death and the work.
Life at home became unbearable for the rest of us that summer. Dad got bored and drank too much. He went to the Miners’ Welfare Club after he got up and didn’t come home till Mam had tea ready at six. Mam tried to control how much money he got, but there always seemed enough for him to get drunk.
Mam excused him. ‘It’s the pain he’s in,’ she said. ‘He needs to get away from it.’
He wasn’t a bad man, he was just in terrible pain.
I remember the night he gave me the puppy. I think he wanted me to know he loved me. Dad knew he had been out of order, and one evening he said, ‘Louise, go next door. I’ve got a present for you. The Bevans are expecting you.’
Owen and I returned with an adorable writhing ball of fluff. It squirmed and licked and ate everything it could get its teeth onto. A wee collie dog, I named him Daffie. Daffie and I went everywhere, even sleeping in the bed between Owen and me.
I was the oldest, and Owen was my charge. I got him up and ready for school after Mam had gone off to work, while Dad lay in bed smelling of the drink and waking only to cough fit to die.
He didn’t stir in the morning until we were all out. At night when he was drunk he would shout and smash things in the house. The slightest thing would set him off – tea not ready, the fire not lit – so we would make ourselves scarce. He never hit us but he got more and more irritable, and you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. I could never do anything right and was often crying when Mam came home. My special relationship with my father had gone, and it was me he constantly shouted at to do his fetching and carrying. I wanted to leave, but Mam said she needed me to look after Owen.
*
I pause, swallowing back tears.
‘Hard times,’ says DP quietly.
He reaches out to me. I think he might put his arms around me, and although th
ere is nothing I want more, I move away a little. The risks are too great.
‘Och, DP. I’m talking as if this sort of thing was special to my family, but it’s the norm where we live.’ I try to keep my voice light, and I can feel my face flushing, but I’m determined to continue with my story . . .
*
It wasn’t anything specific that put me over the edge, but Dad had been giving me a torrent of abuse since he’d got back from the welfare club, and one day I decided I’d had enough. By the time Mam had come in, the children were all in tears. Dad had stormed out after I’d told him I was leaving. I lay huddled on my bed with Mam beside me as we talked about what I was to do.
In the hospital, there was a notice offering jobs for nurses with the forces. Mam said the Queen Alexandra would get me out of here. ‘There must be a better life out there,’ she said. She wanted us all to leave the Valleys. Daffie and I went to stay with my aunt in the other terrace, and Dad was told that I’d gone. Thankfully, nobody in the family let him know I was nearby. He sobered up for a few days, and Owen and the others tried to persuade me to come back. I wouldn’t. Mam took a day off work, and the two of us went to Newport for the interview. I never went back.
I’d had Daffie for six months by then, and it was him that nearly stopped me signing up. But at least Owen would have him; he adored him.
Three other girls from the Valleys and I went to train at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in 9 Grosvenor Gardens, London. The matron was a small tough woman who scared us half to death. She was always immaculately dressed, with not a hair out of place; even her shoes remained impossibly shiny at the end of a day on the wards. Everyone else in the hospital was terrified of her, too, even the surgeon, Colonel Birbeck. Known behind his back as Tommy, Birbeck was the Commanding Officer. If a speck of dirt was found, or we didn’t show enough respect to a patient, then all hell would break loose. Matron was posh, too. Her full name was Matron, Lady Viola Dryburgh. She was much older than us, about forty, we guessed. It was rumoured that her brother was an earl. Until just recently, the few Queen Alexandra nurses were all upper-class, but the war had resulted in a massive recruitment, and the likes of me were now allowed to join.
Ardnish Was Home Page 5
