The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Finlay also had been carrying a gannet that he had skinned and stuffed, a tall startled-looking creature, its long neck stretched up and its beak to the sky, which would have been handsome were it not for the crick in the bird’s neck. We watched two city ladies giggle and shake their heads when Finlay offered it for sale.

  Coming into the cottage the next day to start the porridge, I saw the very same bird leaning lopsided at the back of Fred’s desk. For the rest of the week Finlay went about like a sea captain on the bridge of his boat, smoking away at his clay pipe, or happy as he sat on the log outside his cottage, watching the evening sun take its leave in the west.

  ‘That’s a fine-looking bird,’ I said to Fred as I left that morning.

  ‘I was always very fond of taxidermy,’ he told me. And there was a smile in his eyes, an understanding between us of what he had done.

  ‘And there’s a message,’ I said. ‘Lachie says they are rowing out to Boreray to catch the gannets if you want to go with them.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Fred

  ST KILDA, 1927

  I had begun to give up any hope of getting over to the island of Boreray, that tantalizing deep-blue shadow four miles out from the main island of Hirta, so was more than delighted when Lachie told me they were taking the boat there. With the number of able men so depleted, it was no longer a trip they made often.

  ‘But you can swim, can’t you, Mr Lawson?’ Chrissie had added after she’d told me about the trip. Worry in her eyes. I remembered then that Chrissie had lost two uncles in a boat accident off Boreray as a child. Plus a cousin who had died of appendicitis, stranded there in a storm before they could get him off. ‘And you know how sharp gannet beaks are?’ I listened to her as she described the birds, as erudite in her island knowledge as any book-learned naturalist.

  Seen from far away, the gannet is a sleek creature of feathers and air, gliding on the winds or streaking like an arrow into the water. They float above the volcanic towers of Boreray in battalions, narrow wings held wide to ride the air, black silhouettes or dazzling white depending on the angle of the sun. But for all their elegance, the gannet is a dangerous bird, always at war with its neighbour for its few inches of rock. Gannets can only be taken from the rock at night, and even then you must first kill the sentry bird so he does not wake the colony, their sword-like beaks sharp as any gutting knife.

  There were eight of us in the boat, old Finlay, Chrissie’s brother Callum and the boy Lachie who also helps Archie from time to time. Archie, myself, Neil Ferguson, Tormod Òg and the eldest of the MacKinnon boys. We rowed out just after dusk, the night above us a great tent of luminous blue where the stars were beginning to make themselves known. The sea shelves away thousands of feet as soon as you are away from the island cliffs and you could feel the power of the rise and fall of the Atlantic swell, lifting the small boat up and down with its deep, steady breathing. How tiny a speck we were amid such grandeur and strength. Never once was the sea at rest lest we should begin again to consider ourselves the captains of the world as we might have done on land. The navy skies darkened, slowly revealing their depths in a knowledge hidden to the eye by day, a host of lights in the darkness, singing in silence above us. The stacs and Boreray, dark and ancient fantastical shapes against the stars, looming and dipping with the horizon, approaching us and swinging away with the progress of the boat. Some four miles away from Hirta, the men began to set the lines, leaving buoys to mark their place.

  The plan was to land on the rocky outcrops at the foot of Boreray for a few hours to catch some of the little sheep out there, gather eggs or young birds, and I was hoping to collect various samples of rock, but the men began conferring in Gaelic, their tone serious. My ears picked up a frisson of alarm that entered my soul, a fear that was atavistic and numinous, for here we were all but alone, at the mercy of the deep and the mounting swell. The force of the boat’s pitching had become uncomfortable and alarming. Tormod Òg explained in his slow, lilting English that since they had decided there was no hope of landing that night with the swell so high, we were best to try and shelter in a cave among the abrupt precipices at the back of the rock.

  Cave does not describe the vast cathedral of black rock we entered, an unseen hand pushing us up and down the height of the walls. We shipped the boat into the middle, far enough from the rock sides to lie at anchor in relative safety, and sat listening to the echo of the water slopping against the cave wall. The entrance held a view unparalleled, the great night of stars and the universe’s deepness framed by the dark sides of the cavern.

  We had some of the oatcakes left from an earlier meal, a little of the home-made cheese, the men expecting by now to be on the field that tops the rock, lighting a fire to make a meal of roast mutton for the party. After eating, they removed their woollen caps and one of them produced a small, black book and began to read from it in sonorous Gaelic. Tormod murmured to me the number of the psalm, and although I cannot in retrospect recall which one it was, I would recall its purport as clearly as though I had heard it in English.

  The lector began to sing, one pleading voice, a powerful nasal tenor rendered small and lonely by the sea cave, crying out in a strange, gnarled language; the men answering him as one, line by line, the call and answer of ancient text, till the cave filled and amplified and echoed back the voice of their combined wailing, deep and strange, not beautiful, but a thing of dignity and wisdom and tears, until the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up. Something beyond mankind came near to us. It was not an hour that I will ever forget as the sea bore us up and down and we seemed to launch out among the deep of the stars.

  Archie was more familiar with the island’s ways of doing things and had made a pillow from his coat, quickly unconscious in sleep. I too slept with my head on my coat, my boots in the wet of sea slop at the bottom of the boat, my soul still reverberating with this half glimpse of something near and far off.

  At first light we left. I was able to examine with my eyes the cave walls and the layers of black gabbro of the back of Boreray, the fantastical chimneys, precipices and petrified castles rising up out of the sea, the gannets pouring off the cliffs in white, feathery waves. As the boat pulled away, the outlying stacs swung round before us like Neolithic tools spearing the deep, black and cribbed with the runes of lines of nesting birds.

  All the men’s efforts were now to bring in the ling caught overnight. I helped haul in the garlands of viscous brown and silver creatures, the muscular fruit of salt water. The boat lay low as we rowed for Hirta once more, the men quiet as the waves lapped at the boat’s rim.

  We reached the bay at noon, the women on the jetty greeting us as though they had feared for their men’s lives – which they had indeed.

  I returned with not a single solid specimen, and without ever setting foot on that place, but I had brought something else back. The lifting of the boat on the water, the impression of that vast cave of night resonating with the men’s song, I held in my mind, brooding over that experience many times as I lay near to sleep.

  And it was that singing in the stars that stayed with me, years later, in the long afternoons of hiding and fleeing in northern France, trying to keep at bay the cold fear and depression, or as I lay burning with typhoid in the Spanish prison camp in Ebro through the frozen nights of winter, calling me back from feverish dreams to rise and try and find you once again.

  CHAPTER 19

  Fred

  LILLE, 1940

  The garage down a side street of Lille didn’t look like the most likely place for us to stop. A man was stripping down the engine of the type of black Mercedes favoured by the German officers.

  He straightened up as we approached, looking up and down the street for anyone watching. Tall and elderly, shoulders stooped, grey hair and an anxious, furrowed brow, he wiped his hands on a rag. The pungent smell of engine oil and petrol took me back to that boy in Uncle Lachlan’s garage.

  ‘Le soldat Angla
is?’ he muttered to the guide.

  ‘Écossais,’ I said.

  We wheeled our bikes through to the back of the garage into a courtyard stacked with tyres and rusting car parts, and parked them against the wall. Up a set of rickety wooden stairs on the side of a workshop and we came to an apartment, a long row of low windows overlooking a canal. A second elderly man, equally tall and lugubrious in blue overalls, was making coffee on a small wood-burning stove, the same deliberate way of doing things, the same watchful, unhappy expression, alert for bad news. They were the brothers Anton and Gilbert Lesage. We shook hands, cold and leathery. Gilbert poured hot coffee and cut slices from a dark loaf.

  Our guide, a printer from the city, explained that we would wait there until a passeur took us on to Paris.

  Leaving Gilbert some muttered instructions, Anton returned to the garage, a sad glance back at us before he left.

  After we had eaten, Gilbert showed me a ladder up to a room at the back of the apartment. It had the dusty, faded smell of a place long unused. Two single beds. So they were expecting Angus to arrive. On the wall was a photo from the last war of two young men in uniform. Gilbert tapped the glass.

  ‘Les fils d’Anton,’ he said, shaking his head. I realized that his brother’s boys must have been killed by the Germans in the last war. The bullet marks you saw on the buildings, the damage and the memories, it was all still there from the last war.

  It was another week before Angus finally turned up. I’d never been happier to see his freckled face, gaunt and tinged with violet under the eyes after the hospital stay.

  I could see what it cost the brothers to have us there, Anton especially, whose wife had not wanted to outlive their children. They couldn’t do enough for us, quietly, no fuss or thanks wanted, because that’s what people did, the right thing. They fed us, they found clothes for us, shared their meals of fried potatoes and eggs, sometimes a chicken, the sofa worn and their habits frugal. Some of the clothes they gave us, the mothball-embalmed long underpants and button vests, I suspected had once belonged to the boys who’d slept in our room, and were handed to us at great cost.

  After a week, Madame Curtil arrived, a middle-aged woman with grey-blond hair, a rusty voice, and an avid pipe smoker. She was the contact who would make arrangements for us to be moved on. We talked around the table over glasses of astringent red wine. Her late husband had been an English teacher and she spoke it fluently. I had the feeling we were being interviewed for our reliability as we chatted – these people were risking their lives for us.

  We had to wait for our next contact before we could go south, she said. It was arranged but there were some problems and we would have to be patient. But first we had to do something about our terrible clothes, and provide a photo. A couple of days later, two suits arrived. Angus turned in front of the shaving mirror to catch sight of his transformation. ‘If my girl could see me now, looking like a Frenchman.’

  ‘A Frenchman with freckles and red hair.’

  Our first outing for two weeks. We were taken to the tall church with a copper-roofed spire a few streets away to meet l’Abbé, a priest in wire-rimmed spectacles and a woollen cardigan. He took our photos to produce beautifully forged ausweis passes. The walls around his study were lined with meticulous watercolours, the usual outlet for his artistic skills.

  More long days with nothing to do but wait. The brothers, increasingly quiet, seemed to age before our eyes. We began to wonder how long we could impose upon them. I was longing to be on the move again, longing for impossible things like the chance to walk into Lachlan’s sitting room one more time.

  Angus spent his time whittling away at a piece of wood with his penknife, a bird that fitted inside the palm of your hand. For his girl. In the evening, we listened to Radio Londres, and watched rare smiles dawn over Gilbert and Anton’s faces as news began to come through about the first successes of the British pilots, the first hope that the war might turn one day.

  The two of us were sitting at the table one afternoon, a fly buzzing, Angus cleaning some spark plugs set out on newspaper. We had been chatting now and then in Gaelic when we realized a child had appeared in the room, a boy of eight, blond hair. His light steps had made no sound on the wooden stairs. He had a thin little face, quizzical. He looked at us for a moment, then turned and went back down to his mother. Spying sideways through the window in the door, I saw the woman. She had blond hair and a red dress, a tiny trilby hat. She was talking loudly in French with a heavy German accent. A cold sickly sweat sprung over my back. We waited for the boy to call out to his mother, for the ensuing ruckus, but as he tried to talk to her she brushed the child off impatiently. He gave up, kicking at an oil drum with boredom.

  She was the wife of a Nazi officer. She’d dented his car and wanted it repaired without an official fuss.

  We were going to have to move.

  There were tears in Anton’s eyes as he embraced me. Pain on his face as he grasped Angus – the same age as his youngest son – to his chest one last time. Now all our hopes of making it home were in the hands of our passeur, a tall, thin seventeen-year-old called Richard Leneuve.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fred

  ST KILDA, 1927

  I woke to the sight of a two dead whales floating in the bay, tethered together at the nose. A steam whaler must have come in overnight. No sign of Archie in the bothy. I wondered if he had fallen asleep over at Lachie’s, or perhaps he’d risen early to begin work somewhere over in the glen.

  Buttoning my shirt and pulling up my braces, I went down to the shore to get a closer look at the beasts. I’d seen whales breach the water and slap back down in a magnificent plume of spray off Sunderland as a boy, but these whales were sad reminders of any such glory, two empty carcasses, pushed and bobbed by the waves with no reply.

  Over on the rocks Callum was already casting lines for ling. I walked over and climbed up beside him. He wasn’t a bit surprised by the dead beasts.

  ‘Come the whaling season we get them here a lot. The captain leaves a couple here and then goes off to get another so he has a decent haul to take back to Bunavoneader.’

  ‘But the warm weather,’ I said, indicating the sun already bright and unchallenged. ‘They’ll start to smell soon, surely.’

  ‘The whalers pay Lord Macleod for the rent of the bay. It’s not always we can pay our rent, so we can’t begrudge him the chance to make something from the Norwegians. Aye, the beasts’ll not get moved until the whaler has at least three to tow back.’

  ‘I hope to goodness the captain’s back before the whale’s guts split.’

  ‘And did you know Archie Macleod was sleeping on the beach here? Came off the whaler this morning, a bit the worse for wear. Seems he was rowed out and had a good time celebrating the catch with the crew. The minister found him sleeping at the jetty and took him home to the manse to sleep it off.’

  Archie was sitting at Mrs Munro’s breakfast table. He wore my white roll-neck jersey, and was unshaven, his fair hair tousled. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes, as indeed he had, blue eyes smiling and as handsome as ever. She was ladling out oatmeal and judgement, not happy at all to have a drunk sleep off his sins in her sitting room. I was glad to see a bowl of porridge and a mug of strong tea set down before me too. And Archie was off on a new passion.

  ‘Did you see the creatures in the bay? I’m going out with the whalers one day soon. You haven’t lived, Fred, until you been on a ship riding the waves and chasing those beasts. I tell you, we got through the whisky I took out with me. But there’s plenty left in this one in my jacket. Mrs Munro, this one should be for you, for your kindness.’

  She took it from Archie, held it at arm’s length. ‘Thank you, Mr Macleod. I will put it in my medicine cabinet.’

  ‘The question I have for you,’ I said, moving my chair away, ‘is when did you last wash?’

  ‘That is the sort of question you would ask, my boy. Not the first concern for the men on
a whaler.’

  ‘Well, it’s the first concern for those who have to share the air with you. I’ll take him up to the cottage, Mrs Munro, and get some hot water on.’

  ‘And I think I shall have quite a beard,’ said Archie, his hand on the growth he’d been cultivating around his chin. It was fair and curly, almost pretty, giving weight to a chin that was slight compared to his wide forehead. ‘I’m planning on becoming quite the pirate,’ he said with a grin, and picking up a fork, created mayhem by challenging the two Munro boys to a duel.

  Lachie and Callum met us on the way back to the bothy, grinning to hear Archie’s story. Archie was never short of those who are mesmerized by him, over whom he casts the net of his friendship like a royal blessing.

  The boys came back with us and stayed much of the day, helping Archie toast the whalers and much else. All the work I’d done and was looking forward to showing Archie would have to wait. The boys only left when Chrissie came to fetch her brother, the expression on her face as she pulled him out of his chair accusing and angry.

  ‘You’d better not let Father see you like this,’ she scolded as they left. Callum, who was full of smiles, put his finger to his lips, shushing her good-naturedly.

  When Lachie had left, I let Archie know what I thought of him, suddenly angry.

  ‘And the water’s still hot,’ I said. ‘If you’re still thinking of washing today.’

  ‘Dear Fred,’ he said with a smile. ‘Always that middle-class anxiety for order and cleanliness.’