by Peter May
Fin nodded thoughtfully. “I think it would be worth a look.”
Twenty-four
The drive south took Fin past Luskentyre and Scarista where he had gone the day before with George Gunn. He had been on the road nearly two hours when the bare green hills of South Harris rose up from the valley to dwarf the tiny settlements that clung tenaciously to the banks of the small lochs that flooded the gorges.
Beyond the single-storey white building with its pitched roofs that housed the Seallam visitor centre, cream-coloured cloud flowed down the sides of a conical hill like an erupting volcano. Unusually, the wind had dropped, and an unnatural still hung in the valley with the mist.
Dwarf pines crowded around the few houses that made up the village of Northton—An Taobh Tuath in the Gaelic. Yellow irises and the pink bloom of flowering azaleas lined the road, rare colour in a monotone landscape. A sign read: SEALLAM! Exhibitions, Genealogy, Teas/Coffees.
Fin parked in a gravel area on the far side of a stream that wound its way down between the hills, and he followed a rough path to the small wooden bridge that took him over it and across to the centre. A big man with a fuzz of white hair fringing an otherwise bald head introduced himself as Seallam’s consultant genealogist, Bill Lawson. He pushed enormous seventies teardrop glasses back up on to the bridge of a long nose and confessed to being the man whose hobby had become the obsession described by the Stornoway Gazette.
He was only too happy to show Fin the huge wall maps of North America and Australia that comprised a part of the centre’s public exhibition. Clusters of black-headed pins identified settlements of Hebridean families who had gone in search of new lives in California, the eastern seaboard of the United States, Nova Scotia, south-eastern Australia.
“What exactly is it you’re looking for?” he asked Fin.
“It’s one particular family. The Macdonalds of Seilebost. Murdo and Peggy. They had a son called Tormod who drowned in a boating accident in 1958. They left their croft some time in the early sixties, and may have gone abroad. It’s now lying derelict.”
“That should be simple enough,” the genealogist said, and Fin followed him through to a small sales and reception area where shelves groaned with coffee-table tomes, and hard-cover tourist guides to the islands. Bill Lawson stooped to recover a volume from a pile of buff-coloured publications on the bottom shelf. “These are our croft histories of Harris,” he said. “We do it by village and croft. Who lived there, when and where they went. Everything else changes, but the land itself stays in the same place.” He flipped through the pages of the spiral-bound book. “Prior to civil registration in 1855 information was thin on the ground. What information was kept was all in a foreign language. English.” He smiled. “So you got what the registrar thought the name should be. Wrong in many cases. And often they just weren’t interested. Same as the church records. Some ministers kept a faithful register. Others couldn’t be bothered. We’ve combined word-of-mouth with the official records kept since 1855, and when the two match up you can be pretty sure it’s accurate.”
“So you think you can tell me what happened to the Macdonalds?”
He grinned. “Yes, I do. We have research on virtually every household in the Western Isles over the last two hundred years. More than 27,500 family trees.”
It took him about fifteen minutes searching through record books and his computer database to track down the croft and its history, and the ancestral lineage of all those who had lived on it and worked the land over generations.
“Yes, here we are.” He stabbed a finger at the pages of one of his books. “Murdo and Peggy Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1962. New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.”
“Were there any branches of the family who stayed on in the islands?”
“Let me see . . .” He ran his finger down a list of names. “There’s Peggy’s cousin, Marion. Married a Catholic lad just before the war. Donald Angus O’Henley.” He chuckled. “I bet that caused a bit of a stir.”
“And any surviving members of that family?”
But the old genealogist shook his head as he examined the records. “Looks like he was killed some time during the war. There were no children. She died in 1991.”
Fin breathed his frustration through his teeth. It seemed as if he had made his journey in vain. “I don’t suppose there would be any neighbours around who might still remember them?”
“Well, you’d have to go down to Eriskay for that.”
“Eriskay?”
“Oh, aye. That’s where Donald Angus came from. And there’s no way a Catholic lad was ever going to settle down among the fun-hating Presbyterians of Harris.” He laughed at his own joke. “When they got married she went to live with him on his family croft at Haunn on the Isle of Eriskay.”
The little ferry and fishing port of An t-Òb was renamed Leverburgh by William Hesketh Lever, later Lord Leverhulme, who bought the town, along with most of South Harris, just after the First World War.
Very little evidence remained now of the half a million pounds he had spent to develop it into a major fishing port, designed to supply the more than four hundred fish shops he had purchased throughout Britain. Piers were built, curing sheds, smoke houses. Plans had been made to blast a channel through to the inner loch, creating a harbour for up to two hundred boats.
But the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley, and when Leverhulme died of pneumonia in 1924, the plans were abandoned and the estate sold off.
Now, a dwindling population of little over two thousand lived in a scattering of houses around the pier and concrete ramp built to accommodate the roll-on roll-off ferries that plied back and forth among the islands peppering the waters between South Harris and North Uist. Dreams of a major fishing port were lost irretrievably in the mist.
Fin pulled in behind two lines of vehicles that sat on the tarmac waiting for the ferry. Beyond piles of discarded creels, and grazing sheep, a line of green-clad houses ran between hills that folded one upon the other down towards the shore. The wind had died completely, and water like glass reflected rocks strewn with amber seaweed. Out in the Sound of Harris, the ferry emerged distantly from the grey, like a ghost drifting among the shadows of the islands: Ensay, Killegray, Langaigh, Grodhaigh.
He sat and watched as the ferry approached the harbour, hearing at last the thud, thud of its engines. It would take an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, to drive south through the Uists, across the barren moonscape that was Benbecula, to the Sound of Eriskay, and the island itself at the southern end of the archipelago, the last stop before Barra.
The leads that drew him there were tenuous. A cousin of the dead Tormod Macdonald’s mother who had moved to the island. The lazy beds of Eriskay, the feannagan of which Marsaili’s father had spoken. And then, there had been the church on the hill that he had described, with its view over the cemetery to the silver sands beyond. It could have been the church at Scarista, except that there was no boat in that church, and the sands it overlooked were golden, not silver. Somehow he trusted the old man’s scattered recollections, fragments of memory painting a picture not to be found on Harris, where the real Tormod Macdonald had lived and died. These were memories from another place, another time. Eriskay. Perhaps.
The warning sirens started up as the Loch Portain slipped into harbour, and began lowering her ramp to the concrete. A few cars and a handful of lorries spilled out from her belly, and the waiting lines of vehicles started down the slope one by one.
The one-hour crossing from Harris to Berneray drifted by like a dream. The ferry seemed almost to glide across the mirrored surface of the Sound, drifting past the spectral islets and rocks that emerged phantom-like from a silvered mist. Fin stood on the foredeck, grasping the rail, and watching clouds like brushstrokes leaving darker streaks against the palest of grey skies. He had rarely seen the islands in such splendid stillness, mysterious and ethereal, without the least sign that man had ever passed this way before.
; Finally the dark outline of the island of Berneray loomed out of the gloom, and Fin returned to the car deck to disembark at the start of his long drive south. This disparate collection of islands, which had once been miscalled the Long Island, was now largely connected by a network of causeways bridging fords where once vehicles could only pass at low tide. Only between Harris and Berneray, and Eriskay and Barra, was it still necessary to cross by boat.
North Uist presented a dark, primal landscape. Soaring mountains shrouded in cloud that poured down their slopes to spread tendrils of mist across the moor. The skeletons of long-abandoned homes, gable ends standing stark and black against a brooding sky. Hostile and inhospitable bogland, shredded by scraps of loch and ragged inlets. The ruins of all the failed attempts by men and women to tame it were everywhere in evidence, and those who remained were huddled together in a handful of small, sheltered townships.
Further south, over yet more causeways, the island of Benbecula, flat and featureless, passed in a blur. Then somehow the sky seemed to open up, the oppression lifted, and South Uist spread itself out before him, mountains to the east, the fertile plains of the machair to the west, stretching all the way to the sea.
The cloud was higher now, broken by a rising wind, and sunlight broke through to spill itself in rivers and pools across the land. Yellow and purple flowers bent and bowed in the breeze, and Fin felt his spirits lifting. He drove past the turn-off to the east coast ferry port of Lochboisdale, and away off to the west he could see the abandoned sheds of the old seaweed factory at Orasaigh, beyond a walled Protestant cemetery. Even in death, it seemed, there was segregation between Catholics and Protestants.
Finally he turned east on the road to Ludagh, and across the shimmering Sound of Eriskay he caught his first glimpse of the island itself. It was smaller than he had imagined, dwarfed somehow by the island of Barra and its ring of islets lingering darkly beyond the watercolour wash of sea behind it.
A stone jetty extended out across the mouth of the bay at Ludagh, and a few isolated houses stood up on the hill facing south across the Sound. The tide was out, and a handful of boats at anchor in the bay lay tipped over on their keels in the sand. The concrete stanchions of a disused pier extended out beyond the slipway where once a ferry must have carried people and goods back and forth.
Fin parked his car on the jetty and stepped out into a stiffening breeze that blew warm into his face from the south. He breathed in the smell of the sea and raised his hand to shade his eyes from the glare of sunlight on water as he gazed across to Eriskay. He could not have said why, but he was almost overtaken by the strangest sense of destiny, something like déjà vu, as he looked upon the island.
An elderly man in jeans and a knitted jumper was working on the hull of an upturned dinghy. He had a face like leather beneath a thatch of spun silver. He nodded, and Fin said, “I thought there was a causeway over to Eriskay now.”
The man stood up and pointed east. “Aye, there is. Just carry on round the road to the point there.”
And Fin strained against the glare to see the causeway spanning the Sound along the horizon. “Thanks.” He got back into his car and followed the road to where it curved around to the point, and he found himself crossing a cattle grid on to the long, straight stretch of road built atop the thousands of tons of boulders that had been dumped to create the causeway between the islands.
As he approached it, Eriskay filled his field of vision, treeless and barren, a single mountain pushing up into the sky. The road turned up between the folds of rising hills to lift him on to the island proper. It reached a T-junction, and he turned left on a narrow ribbon of tarmac that took him down to the old harbour at Haunn, where Bill Lawson had told him the O’Henley family croft was to be found.
An old stone jetty in a state of considerable disrepair reached out into a narrow, sheltered bay. A couple of derelict houses stood up among the rocks on the far side where a concrete quay looked all but abandoned. A handful of other houses stood around the bay, some inhabited, others in ruins. He parked at the end of the old jetty and walked over the rise, past piles of creels and nets laid out to dry, and found himself looking down the length of a concrete ramp, and back across the Sound to South Uist.
“That’s where the car ferry used to come in.” An old man with a quilted jacket and cloth cap stopped at his side, his wire-haired fox terrier pulling and twisting at the end of a long lead. “The old passenger boat used to come in at the other quay.” He chuckled. “There was no call for a car ferry till they built the roads. And they didn’t do that till the fifties. Even then, there wasn’t many folk had cars.”
“I take it you’re a local, then,” Fin said.
“Born and bred. But I can tell from your Gaelic you’re not from around here yourself.”
“I’m a Leodhasach,” Fin said. “From Crobost in Ness.”
“Never been that far north myself,” the old man said. “What brings you all the way down here?”
“I’m looking for the old O’Henley croft.”
“Oh, well, you’re not far off the mark. Come with me.”
And he turned and headed back over the rise towards the old jetty, his dog running on ahead, leaping and barking at the wind. Fin followed him until he stopped by the quayside, the little bay stretched out ahead of them.
“That yellow building over there on the left, the one without a roof—that used to be the village store and post office. Run by a chap called Nicholson, I think it was. The only Protestant on the island.” He grinned. “Can you imagine?”
Fin couldn’t.
“Just up beyond that, to the right, you’ll see the remains of an old stone cottage. Not much left of it now. That’s the O’Henley place. But she’s long dead. Widowed quite young, too. She had a wee lassie that stayed with her. Ceit, if my memory serves me well. But I’m not sure that she was her daughter.”
“What happened to her?”
“Oh, heaven knows. Gone long before the old lady died. Like all the young ones. They just couldn’t wait to get off the island in those days.” His smile was touched by sadness. “Then and now.”
Fin’s eyes strayed beyond the ruin towards a large white house built on the rocks above it. What looked like a brand-new driveway snaked up the hill to a levelled garden area at the front, and a wooden deck accessed by French windows from the house. Above it, a balcony was glassed in against the elements, and on the wall above that a neon star. “Who lives in the big white house?” he said.
The old man grinned. “Oh, that’s Morag MacEwan’s house. Retired to the island of her birth nigh on sixty years after she left it. I don’t remember her at all, but she’s a character, that one. You’ll maybe know her yourself.”
“Me?” Fin was taken aback.
“If you watched much telly, that is. She was a big star on one of those soap operas. Not short of a bob or two, I’ll tell you. Keeps her Christmas lights up all year round, and drives a pink, open-topped Mercedes.” He laughed. “They say her house is like Aladdin’s cave inside, though I’ve never been in it myself.”
Fin said, “How many people are there still living on Eriskay these days?”
“Och, not many. About a hundred and thirty now. Even when I was a lad there was only about five hundred or so. The island’s only two and a half miles long, you see. One and a half at its widest point. There’s not much of a living to be made here. Not from the land, and not from the sea now either.”
Fin let his gaze wander over the desolate, rocky hillsides and wondered how folk had ever managed to survive here. His eyes came to rest on a dark building sitting high up on the hill to his right, dominating the island. “What’s that place?”
The old man followed his gaze. “That’s the church,” he said. “St. Michael’s.”
Fin drove up the hill towards the little settlement of houses known as Rubha Ban which was built around the primary school and the health centre. A sign for Eaglais Naomh Mhicheil led him up a narrow track to a
stone-built church with steeply pitched roofs and tall windows delineated in white. An arched doorway topped by a white cross and the logo Quis ut Deus—Who is like God?—opened into the church at its south end. Outside its walls a black ship’s bell was mounted on a stand, and Fin wondered if that is what they rang to call the faithful to worship. The name, painted on it in white, was SMS Derfflinger.
He parked his car and looked back down the hill towards the jetty at Haunn, and across the Sound to South Uist. The sea shimmered and sparkled and moved as if it were alive, and sunlight streamed across the hills beyond it, the shadows of clouds tracking across their contours at speed. The wind was powerful up here, filling Fin’s jacket, and blowing through the tight curls of his hair as if trying to straighten them.
A very elderly lady in a red cardigan and dark-grey skirt was washing the floor in the entrance hall. She wore elbow-length green rubber gloves and sloshed soapy water from a bright red bucket. She wore a silk headscarf around cotton-wool hair, and nodded acknowledgement to him as she moved aside to let him past.
For just a moment time stopped for Fin. Light poured in through arched windows. Colourful statues of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, and winged angels bowed in prayer, cast long shadows across narrow wooden pews. Stars shone in a blue firmament painted in the dome above the altar, and the white-draped table itself was supported on the bows of a small boat.
Every hair on his arms, and the back of his neck, stood on end. For here was the church with the boat in it that Tormod had spoken of. He turned back towards the entrance.
“Excuse me.”