Just before New Year, it started to snow again. My heart sank. It would not endear the captains of the boats in harbour for just the weekend if George were to be snow-bound. Quite often Saturday was the only day that any maintenance could be done on these vessels, as most of their captains were Calvinists and so forbade work on the Sabbath. The one and only bus, all shops, ferries, fishing and any kind of fun were at a standstill on the Sabbath.
There were exemptions from the ‘no work’ rule, which came under the rough headings of ‘mercy’, ‘emergency’ and ‘necessity’. A district nurse was exempt so far as ‘emergencies’ were concerned, which was just as well, and ‘mercy’ could be made to fit almost any medical eventuality. ‘Necessity’ applied mainly to the feeding of livestock and the milking of cows, but human food had to be prepared on the Saturday. Things have relaxed a little over the years and the insidious apostasy blamed on incomers like ourselves.
George and I often found ourselves dealing with the same people as we went about our vastly different jobs. One day, just after the Christmas ‘break’, I paid one of my regular visits to an old bachelor by the name of Euan who lived in Cill Donnan. George had mentioned the old chap as being one of the first to demand a TV set and aerial. Euan was a determined customer and luckily his house was so high that there was no trouble in obtaining a signal. He was mightily impressed when George switched on the flickering picture. Later, he was to boast that he had the clearest picture on Papavray. He was not so impressed with me!
We had many old bachelors living on Papavray, as on all the Hebridean islands. This phenomenon is attributed to the lack of work, which caused so many young men to join the Merchant or Royal Navy, many giving their lives in wars and peace alike on the unforgiving sea. Living the nomadic life of seamen, they opted to remain single until they retired or were obliged to return to work the crofts on the death of their parents. To their dismay, they often found that the women had been less patient, aware that their biological clocks were ticking inexorably towards a time when they would be past childbearing. And how they all loved children! These women usually married mainlanders or the few men who remained behind.
Old Euan was one of those old sea dogs who had never found a partner. He was nicknamed ‘Get Oot’ by Nick and Andy, or, if I was not supposed to hear, ‘Bloody Hell’.
And not without reason! Tall and shambling, he spent most of his time in the pub. There were only two on the island and his house was almost next door to one of them. When roaring drunk, Euan deeply resented the summer tourists who often sat in the sun on the wooden benches against the pub wall. On wobbling out of the door, screwing his eyes up in the bright light, he would scowl horribly at these unfortunate folk and bellow, ‘Bloody hell, get oot o’ here!’ They usually did!
This morning, the smell that wafted from his open croft house door as I approached was redolent of unwashed clothes, old dogs, mice and something else that I didn’t even try to identify. He was sitting by the fire in his wellies, staring at the blank screen of his bright new ‘teleeffission’ as though awaiting the first glimmer of the evening programmes.
Hanging from a hook over the smouldering peats was an old-fashioned iron saucepan from which bubbled some malodorous pink froth that was running down into the fire.
‘What on earth is that, Euan?’
‘This? Tis me dinner, Nurse.’
I gazed at the disgusting mess that fizzed and spluttered as it reached the hot peats.
‘But what is it?’ I asked in horror.
‘Ach. Tis sheep’s lungs. Old Ben and Gyp are going to have some too.’
I gulped and hastily turned my attention to the reason for my visit.
‘How’s the sore leg today?’
‘I dinna know how it is. I canna see it, can I?’ he replied grumpily.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I canna see through ma boots and I canna get them off!’
I stared at him.
‘Euan, you can’t mean that you have not had your wellies off since I was last here?’
‘Aye.’
‘But what about at night?’
‘I slept in them o’ course. What would I do else? Four days and nights I’ve had these boots on.’ There was a note of pride in the old fellow’s voice.
I have often wished that, just as one can close one’s mouth and eyes, noses had some similar mechanism so that smells, such as the one I knew I was about to encounter, could be avoided.
‘I’m going to have to remove these boots, Euan. I might have to cut them off.’
‘You canna do that, Nurse! These are ma only boots! I have no more to me.’
His protests were in vain. I tried to get those wretched boots off as gently as possible, but with every tug he bellowed in pain, so I was forced to cut them off. Both of them. Although the ulcer was on the right leg, I knew that four days of incarceration in a rubber boot (held cosily near the fire) would undoubtedly have caused the ulceration of the varicose veins in the left as well. And it had.
‘Thems was good, good boots,’ he kept moaning. ‘How am I to get more, Nurse?’
‘With legs like these, you won’t be going out for a while anyway, Euan.’
I was wrong. I continued to dress the legs for several weeks while, with dogged persistence, Euan plodded to the pub every day in a pair of ancient slippers!
There was another old seaman whom George and I saw in our different capacities almost daily. He lived near the steamer pier and, in the manner of many old sea dogs, spent all his time watching the inter-island steamer coming and going and chatting to the tourists. To old Angus, smart modern cars were a source of wonder.
One day, a disembarking passenger in a very streamlined vehicle asked him how far it was to Cill Donnan.
Glancing admiringly at the sleek monster, Angus replied, ‘Ach, tis five miles but in that you’ll do it in three.’
On another occasion, when it was announced that the outgoing steamer would be 30 minutes late departing, an impatient visitor was complaining loud and long until Angus got tired of his grumbles.
‘Ach, haud your wheesht, man. It’ll no take you long to wait half an hour!’
Celtic logic, perhaps?
SEVEN
A castle and a corpus
So Hogmanay approached. I was not looking forward to the usual crop of casualties, many of them self-inflicted by overindulgence, and the snow would be an added complication.
The crofters did not start their celebrations in earnest until midnight, when the men would grasp their bottles and visit every house in their village and those with transport might venture farther – even if the ‘transport’ was an ancient tractor. The very old and the very young and the women folk would stay at home to receive the revellers, the women having baked cakes and pies, boiled clootie dumpling and made Scotch pancakes ‘to keep out the cold’ (and to soak up the whisky, no doubt). The occupant of each home visited was required to take a dram from the caller’s bottle. The caller would then graciously accept the same amount, or more, from the bottle on the sideboard. As the night wore on, the steps became wobblier, the drams bigger and the visits longer until some of the merrymakers were overcome by sleep. Usually in someone else’s house.
Being unable to keep up with this rate of consumption, Beth and I, as the women of the house, and therefore left behind to receive these characters, had a ‘system’. We courteously accepted the drams (one each) and pretended to sip them, saying that we were used to drinking slowly (unlike the locals who ‘downed in one’), gave the expected dram in return and, after the visitor had departed, took the contents of our glasses, which had not actually touched our lips, and poured them into the bottle on the sideboard ready for the next caller. As all the crofters seemed to favour the same well-known brand, the mixture was quite acceptable. At the end of the night, we had more whisky than when it started!
Meanwhile, the men of our household roamed from house to house with their bottles, handed out the requ
ired amounts, actually drank very little but ate a great deal. George always said that Mary’s clootie dumpling was excellent and why wasn’t mine nearly so good? My reply is unprintable!
On this particular Hogmanay, all the family had been asked to the laird’s home for early evening drinks. Duncan and his family lived in Dun Ruadh, a small castle of ancient origin. It had been in ruins when Duncan’s father had become clan chieftain, and he had renovated about half of the building and stabilised the rest as an attractive ruin.
We entered by a huge oak door made from timbers recovered from an old shipwreck. This led into a high-vaulted baronial hall. A blazing fire burned in an enormous granite fireplace (the coal boat had obviously called at the pier recently, as peat would never burn like that). A few prints and paintings of animals and hunting scenes adorned the walls.
Present were Dr Mac and his wife, Fiona, with her halo of very white fluffy hair. She walked with two sticks as she was arthritic: a complaint that afflicted many of our older people, probably due to the damp atmosphere of the Western Isles. Alistair, with unlit pipe firmly in place, was sitting with Alice on a high-backed wooden settle, and Richard, the factor, strode about helping Duncan. Richard was a tall ex-army Englishman. His equally tall wife, Elaine, was also English, and local gossip had it that she had been a minor film star. Her father, Sir Kenneth Somebody, sitting close to the fire, was also an ex-officer and still had a military bearing.
We were greeted effusively by Felicity, who was a superb hostess. She was a beautiful, well-groomed woman who had met Duncan when they were both at Oxford. Her father was an earl and felt that marrying a mere clan chieftain and living on a remote island was letting the family down. She didn’t care. She and Duncan were very happy and had raised a noisy brood of daughters before the long-awaited heir arrived. I knew all the children well, as they were always in some sort of trouble – bruises, cuts, toothache, broken bones, a near drowning and now chickenpox.
‘Ha, Mrs MacLeod! Welcome, welcome,’ Duncan tended to boom.
I introduced everyone and then left Duncan and George to chat. It proved to be one of the most lucrative ‘chats’ of George’s life. The laird wanted the entire castle wired. Electricity had not reached the Western Isles at the time of the renovation, so a noisy generator produced the lighting that we enjoyed this evening. He wanted lights everywhere, night storage heaters in every room, power for all the usual domestic appliances and three showers. He handed the whole contract to George there and then. It was a mammoth task that would keep our family for about a year.
Later, I was sitting with Elaine when I noticed her father in deep conversation with John and Nick. They were listening with rapt attention.
Elaine saw my glance and said, ‘I think he’s telling them one of his war stories.’
Many of us were drinking coffee by this time, and I was surprised to notice that he was drinking his from a steaming mug that he held with both hands, disregarding the handle. It did not seem to fit with his stately bearing. Later, the boys were agog with a tale that explained it and which accounted for their fascinated faces.
It seemed that Sir Kenneth had been in the RAF during the war and had been shot down over Germany. He had been captured and sent to a prison camp but had proved a great nuisance to the Germans by insisting on better conditions for the servicemen incarcerated with him. They moved him to another camp with a more brutal regime in the hope of breaking his spirit, but the strategy misfired when he and several others tunnelled their way out. Two of his colleagues were shot while he and ‘the Dauphin’, a French officer, were once again recaptured. The German authorities were taking no risks this time and sent them both to Colditz. Its impregnable position successfully foiled all their attempts at escape, but they spent much time in the cold, damp dungeons in solitary confinement. However, one guard was susceptible to bribery and agreed to bring Sir Kenneth one hot drink per day. Hence the hands cradling the mug. Hands that had been blue with cold and only felt blessed warmth once daily. It was a habit that had never died. Sadly, we didn’t see him again for he had not escaped the bad health that these brave men so often suffered later in their lives. He died the following winter.
We went home before midnight: the men to join the ranks of the first-footers, Beth and I to await the arrival of the early and therefore more sober revellers.
The night went without undue incident until Paul burst in at about 2 a.m. saying that, on his way home (he had had enough), he had seen a pair of wellington boots sticking out of a ditch. They had been upside down, but he could not see much as his torch had gone out.
‘We’d better go and see what’s happened,’ I said.
Leaving Beth to cope, we set off. Flurries of snow stung our faces as we struggled across the croft. I had already guessed that it would be old Hughie. Well into his 80s, he should have stayed at home but insisted on accompanying the ‘young fellows’. I was wondering how long he had been in the snow, and I was fairly sure that we were about to find a corpse – or ‘corpus’, as the locals termed it.
Paul led me straight to the spot and there were the boots, sole-side up, sticking out of the snow like two skyscrapers. We jumped into the ditch, sinking to our thighs in the soft whiteness. Where was the owner of these boots?
There was a shout and George and the rest of the boys arrived. As the first of them landed in the ditch, there was a moan and some very indistinct swearing from somewhere below us. Looking at each other in amazement, we all began to scrape away the snow and soon found a tweed-covered arm and a flat-capped head. Two bleary eyes gazed up at us and gradually we extricated a very cold and very angry old man.
‘Where are ma boots? I had on ma boots, I’ll have ye know! And I’m away to wee Morag’s and I canna be going all that way wi’out ma boots.’
Young Fergus was shaking the boots free of snow, impatient to get back to the celebrations.
‘We have your boots here, Hughie, but you canna wear them the now. They are full of snow. What for were you takin them off, ye daft old bodach.’
‘I didna take them off, ye silly wee mannie. I was jumpin o’er the wire and I got caught up.’
The old fellow was shivering so much that his teeth (the few that he had) were chattering, and he was wet through as the snow on his clothes began to melt.
‘Home with you, Hughie,’ I said.
George and the boys volunteered to take him home and hand him over to his long-suffering wife. About an hour had passed when Beth and I heard laughter and the family came in, cold but well fed and full of some great joke.
‘You’d never guess. We took Hughie home and Dolleen bundled him inside. We went to two more houses and then started to walk home. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw Hughie out and about again. He was on his way to wee Morag’s in his socks!’
EIGHT
Deep ditches and high hills
The winter snows and Hogmanay celebrations had not finished with me yet. On the morning of New Year’s Day, the village was slumbering in the silver/blue dawn as everyone slept off the effects of the previous night’s jollifications, and I knew that folk on ‘the other side’ would be in a similar comatose condition. I was unlikely to hear any news about the state of the hill at Loch Annan, so I would just have to hope that I could make it to my regular visits.
So off I went: a lone little car on the narrow rutted road on the first day of 1971. With a few sideways waltzes and some tyre spinning, I was soon over the top and on my way to Cill Donnan. I attended to my first patient, a diabetic, and set off for the second.
As I approached the croft house, the usual three large dogs of indeterminate ancestry came rushing towards me, chorusing their disapproval of my intrusion. Bringing my trusty rolled and pointed umbrella into play, I waved it in a threatening arc before me and the dogs retreated, still creating a fearful din. Only once did a dog oppose this lethal-looking weapon and then he bit the point right off!
The deafening noise was further amplified this morni
ng by Katherine, who came hurrying towards me, shouting at the top of her considerable voice. I could not understand a word that she was saying, so she turned her attention to quieting the dogs by means of more yelling. Finally, they slunk away and blessed peace reigned.
‘What on earth is the matter, Kate?’
‘Nurse,’ she puffed, out of breath from her efforts. ‘You’ve to go to Dr Mac’s. Y’see, I sent wee Geordie to the doctor to see would he get something for his dad’s sore head. The poor mannie does suffer so . . .’ She paused for want of breath.
Privately, I thought that the ‘sore head’ probably had a lot to do with the aftermath of Hogmanay rather than any medical condition.
‘Dr Mac said when you come to do Granny, would you go to see him,’ she continued with importance.
‘GEORDIE!’ she bellowed, attempting to attract her son’s attention. He emerged from the byre.
‘Do you know what’s wrong, Geordie?’ I asked, in a more moderate tone. Contrary to his mother’s apparent belief that her son was deaf, Geordie’s hearing was quite normal. I think he was so used to being yelled at that he just didn’t bother to reply until his mother did yell!
‘Old Charlie’s in bother. It’s the drink, I think,’ he said in unconscious rhyme.
Nothing sounded too urgent. If I knew anything about Charlie, he’d be in the throes of a bout of DTs again. Reassured, I went into the house to my patient.
Florence McClellan was about 80 years old and was one of my patients who spoke very little English. Unlike her gargantuan daughter, my patient was a frail and gentle lady, much given to sitting too close to the fire because someone was always leaving the door open and she could never get warm. Unfortunately, this habit gave rise to numerous leg ulcers that needed constant attention.
Having applied new dressings, I faced the wrath of the dogs once more and made my way to see Dr Mac. As there was no surgery on New Year’s Day, I went straight to his home. The house was set in a tiny wood near the steamer ferry at Dalhavaig and on sunny summer days it appeared idyllic in its sylvan surroundings. In winter, however, it was dark and damp with tortured trees reaching starkly skywards to throw black shadows on the house. Dr Mac and Fiona had lived in the draughty old place for 40 years in perfect contentment and appeared not to notice its shortcomings.
The Island Nurse Page 4