by Jess Smith
The big man said nothing as he reached for something concealed in the heather.
Fear gave way to terror as I squealed, ‘Please don’t cut the head off me Donald, I am a good wean really!’
‘What in blazes are you whelping about lassie?’
‘Yon wild dog, is it hiding ready to rip my throat?’
With a bewildered stare he shook his head and continued about his business. ‘I have no animal to speak of, I’m here to play my pipes as I do every year.’
‘Are you not a ghost? Did you not fight alongside Bonnie Prince Charlie? My Dad’s cried after him you know!’
‘Ha, ha, a ghost indeed! I fought side by side with many a Charlie but none so Royal. Now you away home, your mother must wonder where you are. I take it there’s a mother?’
‘God,’ I thought, ‘a mother indeed, and she’ll kill me, for sure it must be late, and no doubt the wee ones will have told her everything.’ Still, this man fascinated me and I had to know more.
‘So you’re a real man? That’s a relief, I can tell you, sir. Was I not saying to my sisters earlier a wild demon haunted this moor, and he was the spit of yourself.’
Once again the bewildered look spread across his face followed by a wide grin: ‘Red Donald, ha!’
With the fear gone I was able to relax, and to wonder at why he came so far out of the way to play bagpipes.
He lifted his concealed pipes from the heather and placed them to his mouth. After two or three drones, he began to play the most beautiful music. I’d heard many a piper, but Lordy, this was the McCoy, I can tell you. He certainly knew his stuff, this look-a-like Jacobite ghost! On and on he played in the June heat, which must have been melting him for it was me, and me wearing only a vest and thin cotton shorts.
I listened to the man for ages before my empty belly told me it was way past time for making tracks back. I hoped Mammy’s mood would be improved, and that she’d forgotten I’d frightened the wee ones. Maybe not! But if I took the piper back with me and said the poor cratur was dying with the thirst, perhaps I’d escape the wallops. I thought it worth a try.
‘You must have an awfy drouth on yourself, piper. How does a grand cup o’ tea and buttery scone sound to you?’
‘It tells me a lassie shouldn’t be so friendly with strange men, that’s what I think. Don’t your folks tell you it’s wrong to speak with strangers? Get away home with you!’
‘But surely you’re thirsty?’
‘That will keep till I get into Inverness. Now I’m losing my rag. I’ll not tell you again, be off with you!’
I could see it was pointless trying to persuade him, so waving cheerio I shouted out, ‘Well, here’s hoping my Dad’s got the bus engine fixed, I hate this creepy, dead place.’
‘What did you say lassie?’ he seemed to perk up at my mentioning the bus. ‘Bus, did you say?’
So, after I’d told him all about our bus-home and engine being broke, the man said, ‘I know a thing or two about buses, what kind is it?’
I knew everything about the bus and proudly answered, ‘1948 Bedford, with a long chassis, oh, and a Vauxhall engine!’
‘Right then, wee lassie with the curly black hair, let’s see this bus of yours.’
Arriving back I took one look at Mammy’s face, and fine knew a wallop was coming with my supper. So, as quick as you like, I got my bit in first: ‘This is a piper who is dying of the drouth, Mam. I found him out on the moor, poor cratur asked me for a drap tea.’
Mammy looked at the heavily tartan-clad man and said, ‘You’re not to listen to my lassie. She’d do anything rather than take the licking that’s due her.’
I thought the back o’ the hand was heading my way, when, to my surprise, my ‘ghost’ said, ‘Och, not at all, missus. This wee lass told me she had the best mother in all the world, but was a bit upset ’cause her Mam was missing the strawberries. She wondered if I might cheer you up with a blaw on the pipes.’
‘Aye well, the difference between me and you, lad, is I know this wee madam and you don’t. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do to escape a well-deserved leathering, but that will come later. Get you down and fill the kettle at the burn.’ She ordered me in such a manner I knew I was for it.
Now, folks, if you could just see the size of this family heirloom and the colour of it—jet black with soot, from hundreds of years hanging over a blazing fire. A great muckle brute that took two hands to carry it, and blackened both legs into the bargain. But given the circumstances, who was I to protest? ‘Will I fetch the milk you have cooling in the burn as well, Mammy?’
‘Stop grovelling,’ she said, ‘Mary will get it.’
The piper, obviously more interested in my father’s injured engine than my fate, walked over to Daddy who was elbow to thumb in sticky black oil, and within minutes the two were among the engine parts good style.
As I made my way back with the kettle, a sound I never thought I’d hear that day filled all our ears as the bus roared back to life. Mammy’s face lit up like the North Star.
‘Well done, piper,’ Daddy thanked him, ‘I never would have put it down to a wee bit bolt like that.’
Mammy hugged the life from the poor lad, as she forced him onto her cushioned stool and shoved a plate of hot buttered scones on his lap. ‘You eat and drink your fill. If anybody deserves a bit menses, then it’s you, my hardy piper.’
He didn’t half enjoy those scones, downed with near on half the kettle of tea. I kept close to him, hoping Mammy would forget my leathering. After all, was it not due to me things had turned out so well that day? A little whisper in my ear from Dad, that she’d forgiven me, answered things.
Later, when everyone had eaten, I told my folks about how beautifully our guest played the pipes.
‘Piper, would you start a ceilidh for us?’ I asked him, touching his pipe box.
Mammy drew her Jew’s harp from her skirt pocket and joined him. Daddy diddled Babsy on his knee as the rest of us sang and danced, while night drew in all round on sad Culloden Moor. I hoped the ghosts were enjoying our wee shindig. It would make a difference from the greeting and wailing that usually took place among the heather from followers of the battle.
Two hours later, the tired man folded his pipes away, saying it was time he was on his way. Mammy offered him a bed. He thanked her but refused, saying he’d things to be getting on with. Before saying his goodbyes, I just had to ask him why, in heaven’s name, did he go onto the moor and play the pipes in the June heat? I felt humbled and a bit saddened by his answer.
‘It’s for all Scots lads who lost their lives in every battle since 1746. And where better than the wild Culloden Moor where so many fell defending and conserving the culture of this little country of ours!’
I felt guilty that, in my efforts to frighten my sisters, I had in my childish way used such sacred ground to gain a cheap laugh, but being a child, what did I know? From that day I never did such a thing again. My Jacobite ghost had taught me a solemn lesson.
‘When you’ve done the dishes, lassies,’ said Daddy, ‘instead of going to bed we’ll head on down to Blair.’
‘Oh, I never asked the piper his name,’ said Mammy.
‘I think I heard him say Red Donald.’ I said, smiling.
‘Aye, would that be the same wild Heilander who runs along a sheep track swiping the heads off travellers?’
‘Not at all, Mammy, where did you get such a ridiculous idea?’
‘Where indeed, ye wee devil.’
That night while we slept Daddy trundled the long road to Blair, so that Mammy could pick her strawberries.
We were to run into my ‘Red Donald’ several times after that. Heading through the Pass of Glen Coe, we saw him blawing away to the tourists. Another time we glanced him high up on the Rest And Be Thankful. And I’m certain the stirring pipes of the said lad were heard as we passed through Lochaber (Fort William) on our way to Spean Bridge.
I remember a wee old man about five feet ta
ll who, like my piper, used to play in memory of the fallen of wars gone by. I met him at the point of the Devil’s Elbow. I called him ‘Arras’.
Arras was a town in France where many, many Scots lads made the final sacrifice defending the town in the Great War. He told me that two Scottish divisions, the 15th and the 51st, lost hundreds. His three brothers among them. He told me this little poem before we parted.
In the burgh toon o’ Arras,
When gloaming had come on,
Fifty pipers played retreat
As if they had been one,
And the Grande Palace o’ Arras
Hummed with the Highland drone!1
After playing he would bow his head and say, ‘God bless ye lads, rest in peace at Arras.’ And that’s the reason I called him that.
Pipers are common amongst the travelling community. Most families made sure a set of pipes were at hand, just in case a lad or lassie took up the playing. My mother’s great-grandfather was a gifted piper and he hailed from Kintyre. His name was Donald John Macarthur.
14
GLEN COE
Wouldn’t you know it, Daddy had forgotten he’d a bit of business to attend to, before heading for Blair.
‘What, surely not!’ Mammy was far from amused.
‘I’m right sorry, Jeannie, I clean forgot about Runty’s brock wool.’
Mammy stormed off and sat herself behind the steering wheel of Fordy, peeved to the eyeballs that she’d miss the first strawberries. I wasn’t too happy myself, although my mother’s necessity was to boil up the early strawberries for jam, and mine was only for the gorging of them!
Runty was a farmer from Tyndrum and every year Daddy collected up his brock wool. You know all those spare bits the sheep sheds from itself and leaves on fences, tree-trunks and the likes? Fine and warm in the winter is the woolly coat, but oh dearie, the creatures can see it far enough when the June sun all but bakes them. Have you seen a sheep rubbing itself on an old coarse tree, or a favourite fence-post? Have you also noticed how much loose wool lies around the fields? Well, that was another job the farmer needed traveller men to do for him, gathering the stuff in. There wasn’t payment for this laborious job that came from selling the bagged wool on to the rag merchant, and given we’re talking about pure wool, well, a few bob was made! Both parties benefited: farmers’ fields were left clean, and the travellers fed the family for a month or two, depending on their prudence.
So then, to reach Runty’s farm, we had the great pleasure of trundling through the mighty Glen Coe! I swear on my Granny’s rest, no other place in the whole of Scotland can take precedence over this magnificent glen. We stopped at the roadside for dinner, and for a well-needed ‘pee’ behind a rock cluster.
‘Well, bairns’ said Mammy, ‘if Daddy has the brock to do I want every one of you, sleeves up and all hands together, the quicker it’s done the faster I’ll get the strawberries.’
‘Yuk! All that sheep’s shit!’ said my older sister, making a screwed-up face.
‘Shirley, is it necessary for you to swear every time you open your mouth?’ asked Daddy, washing his hands in one of the many small burns which tumbled down the mountains and flow into the river Coe.
‘Och, no wonder, half the stuff is hanging from the sheep’s bum,’ she answered, joining him at the burn, rolling up her sleeves, then adding, ‘Give us the soap please, auld yin.’
Daddy glowered at his whimsical lassie, draped the hand-towel over her head, then reminded my sister, ‘God wasn’t pleased the last time you came out with a mouthful like that, mind?’
Shirley cringed! Well she remembered the time a ploughman and she were arguing about her lifting heavier bags of tatties than he was. His chauvinistic attitude got her riled up! She was raring for an argument.
After giving him a volley of curses, she turned, stood on a pitchfork handle and took a thumping great wallop to the face.
Shirley dried her hands, saying, ‘Aye, all right, Dad, point taken!’
‘Sure was, right on your two lips!’ laughed our Janey.
Every one of us went into fits laughing, minding how for days poor Shirley had to suck sustenance through a straw.
‘Now, now, that’s enough, don’t make fun of your sister like that,’ said my mother. Mammy always calmed the waves before a storm.
Truth was, we were all looking forward to Blair, and none of us liked the brock-gathering. Shirley was right, some of the wool did smell and fingers inherited a green tinge, which took weeks of scrubbing with strong carbolic soap to remove. The only consolation was that the stuff did weigh double, a blessing indeed when time came for putting it on the scales.
Glen Coe wasn’t half bonny, right enough: the mountains, each one different from the next, stretched their heads up into the clouds and beyond. I could picture God Himself, sitting up there, pleased at His creation. I bet He spent more time in Scotland than any other part of the world. I’m pretty sure He still does. How can anybody imagine this place as the setting for a massacre? For this is what historians teach about, ‘the slaughter of the MacDonalds’. A horror story by any standards, that dreadful deed of murder carried out by the Campbells on the inhabitants of this beautiful, peaceful glen!
‘While you’re allowing the food settling-time in your bellies,’ said my mother, ‘I’ll tell you a tale about your Granny, my own mother, and your Auntie Maggie when she was a bitty bairn. I hope it will leave you thinking about life’s dangers to travellers in those days. At least it’ll keep the lot of you quiet until we come to Runty’s.’
This story happened at a time when Granny Power was camped a mile or two beyond the pass of Glen Coe, at the edge of Rannoch Moor. Now, there’s a place that can bring the hairs to attention on the back of your neck. Ask any traveller if they know a tale or two about the place and sure enough it’ll be a creepy one. Many a sleepless night I spent after a whiles round a campfire listening to ghost stories and Burker tales (stories of body-snatchers).
Was it the truth being told or not? Who can say, but it didn’t half make me peer into the darkness, thinking, ‘Was that a fox I heard in the undergrowth, or something creepily unnatural?’
Most stories were told by the older generation who lived in a time when there wasn’t a forced law to register a birth or death. Travellers were easy prey for body-hungry scientists needing to know the ins and outs of the human form.
‘Listen now, lassies, as I tell you this tale of terror, for never a truer tale was told!’ said Mammy, slipping the last plate into a basin of soapy water.
‘You tell the story, Jeannie, I’ll wash these dishes.’ Dad had heard the tale before. ‘Then we’ll be on our way.’
Finished eating, we gathered round our mother’s feet, pushing and jostling for the best view at her face, so as not to miss a look, a gasp, or the usual closing of her eyes in apprehension that a fearful sight was coming to her mind!
‘It happened before I was born,’ she said. ‘As my mother passed it to me, word for word I pass it to you. Take heed now, and one day you can give it to your own children.’ I now share this tale, reader, with you, as my mother did all those years ago.
In the late summer of 1913, a year before the Great War, my granny and her third child, wee Maggie, were hawking in Glencoe village. Maggie was only three years old, too young to be left with sister Winnie and brother Mattie, the two oldest, at the campsite. Grandad was, as usual, sleeping off the night before’s drink, and if the Devil himself brought him into hell’s fire, he’d have slept through it. The night before’s booze, as usual, resulted in Granny taking the brunt of his violent temper; the pain in her arm proved it. But the day’s hawking had been fruitful. A bag of clothes from a kindly wife whose children had long since outgrown them, and an old lady who shared some meal and bread with her, meant that, for this day at least, they would eat.
Mattie, only six, was a braw wee fisherman. Though his hands were too small to hold large fish, he’d guddled the burn and caught several tiddler
s. Left in the expert hands of eight-year-old Winnie, they were cleaned and ready for cooking whenever Granny returned.
As she sauntered home she looked upon the natural colours of the mountainside, saying to Maggie, ‘Look how bonny the brown bracken mingles with the purple heather.’
She smiled at Maggie, asking if her wee feet were sore. Three miles was a long way for one so young. The bairn held her mother’s hand, and nodded. ‘If my arm wasn’t so sore, I’d carry you awhiles, pet.’
As they came by the pass of Glen Coe the road narrowed through a gorge. At this point one leaves the mountains behind, and the vast expanse of Rannoch Moor stretches ahead.
Granny picked up an echo of a trotting horse and carriage far behind them. She’d no reason, but a sense of foreboding took hold as the sound made by the horse’s hooves on the old road became louder and louder.
Turning a bend in the road Granny pushed her bairn and the pack between big rocks. ‘Hide in there, my wee lamb, and not a sound, do you hear now!’
The bairn’s eyes widened as she sensed her mother’s apprehension.
‘No matter what happens, don’t show yourself—courie well down!’
Granny muttered a silent prayer that the coach and its passengers held no danger.
The coachman said nothing as he slowed his steed and passed her on the narrow road. Only a slight wave of the hand did he give. She kept her eyes fixed on his face for any sign of bad doings. No stranger could be trusted by a lone traveller woman in those days.
Before it trotted off, she saw one person, whom she took to be a man, inside the coach.
She knew a thing or two about horses: never, though, had she seen a bonnier stallion than that. All of sixteen hands at least, the mount of a gentleman; jet it was, as black as hell. The coach was adorned in brass livery, shining like a funeral carriage.
No, this fine gent would not interfere with a traveller woman and her wee one.