The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Ambushed, irritated, I fell in. Listening as he pointed out the sights.

  ‘Hotel du Louvre, the American Bar, that’s where the Germans like to hang out. Not many in uniform, but they’re here.’ Flicking his head at a pink stone tower and castle wall on a rocky promontory. ‘Fort Saint-Jean. British servicemen caught were interned there until last month. Quite a cushy number since they were allowed out on parole on a daily basis. Sadly, there’s been a crackdown after one too many escapes and they’ve been moved away into the middle of nowhere at Saint-Hippolyte. Makes our job a lot trickier.’

  We reached the old port, an inland basin that spread into the city’s old centre, ringed around with crumbling tenements, some so derelict they were propped up with wooden buttresses like decaying cathedrals. An overpowering stench from piles of rotting fish guts on the cobbles, dried urine. A persistent wind stirring up eddies of straw and detritus. Children and dogs ran in swarms around the fishermen and the old women in black who sat mending nets or gutting tiny fish. I glimpsed side streets so narrow you could touch the tenement fronts each side, cobbled steps running with water, women gossiping. A woman helping a child pull his shorts back up after relieving himself.

  ‘Interesting neighbourhood,’ said Archie. ‘Bristling with crooks, pimps and with intellectuals on the run from the Nazis. Anything’s on sale here, if you don’t mind the chance of being swindled.’ He detoured into a cafe on the waterfront. ‘Barman here’s a good man, if you ever need to lie low. Just a thought.’

  Two small black coffees, a draught from under the door, the air smoky with cheap tobacco. I felt uneasy and wrong-footed. Wasn’t this just the district to take someone if they were about to disappear without a trace, in the narrow alleys and greasy water of the harbour?

  Archie seemed tense as we sat opposite each other. Just like the old Archie, he was going to have his say.

  ‘I know you said to drop it, but hear me out. I’ll be leaving Marseille soon and you’ll be crossing the mountains into Spain. I may not have another chance. There’s no other way to say this. Look, I wanted you to know that I lied back then, more or less.’

  I studied him, listening hard.

  ‘You see, there was never anything between Chrissie and me that day. I was hurt and jealous, I suppose. I never was good at feeling abandoned. I’m not proud of it, but, yes, I did make it clear to Chrissie that I wanted her. I’d had a fair few drinks. I wanted to hurt you. But Chrissie was having none of it. She loved you, Fred, only you.’

  I widened my eyes, trying to get the table back in focus as my heart began to race. ‘And now you have to tell me this, when the damage is done, when it’s too late. Don’t think—’

  ‘Wait. Wait. There’s more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Fred, you have a daughter.’

  I tried to take in what he had just told me. ‘Chrissie had a child?’

  ‘Your child.’

  ‘What have you done? All this time. . . But how do you know?’ And then I realized what he was saying. ‘So you’ve kept in touch with Chrissie?’

  ‘In a way, the odd letter, just to make sure they were all right. I told you, Fred, I tried to find you, but you were nowhere. You never came back. But the point I’m trying to make is that she loved you, Fred. You have to know that. She didn’t marry anyone else.’

  I held my head in my hands, spoke slowly. ‘A child. She’ll be thirteen, and I’ve never seen her.’ I raised my head, tried to bear the sight of the man before me, who’d done far worse damage than I’d ever imagined. ‘You’ve seen her?’

  ‘From a distance. She doesn’t know me. She’s called Rachel Anne.’

  ‘And you know that how?’

  ‘A letter Chrissie wrote.’

  ‘Are you quite sure there’s nothing between you and Chrissie?’

  ‘Only as a friend trying to right a wrong. I’m not that man any more, Fred.’

  ‘But wait. So you must have her address. You know where Chrissie lives.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I scrambled in my pockets for a pencil, told him to write it down on a piece of paper.

  ‘I’ll make my own way back.’

  I all but ran back to the mission, floating above the crowds and the scream of the sea birds. I had Chrissie’s address. And Caskie had said he could get letters home through his contacts in the Church of Scotland.

  Chrissie was alive. She had a daughter. We had a daughter.

  And I knew where they were living, on the west coast of Scotland in Morvern.

  CHAPTER 41

  Rachel Anne

  MORVERN, 1941

  The months went by. A few postcards began to come through from the men of the 51st held in German prison camps. But what of the thousands still missing? I couldn’t bear to listen to the news any more on the wireless, losing hope that we’d ever hear from my father.

  It made Mother and me all the more grateful that my uncle was in a reserve occupation in the docks. Though we did not speak of him outside the house, not with the great silence about our men’s fate hanging over the land.

  ‘I think there’s a letter from Uncle Callum,’ I called, seeing the postie come up our path with his canvas sack. I opened the door and ran out to him.

  I hurried into the kitchen. Mother was minding the porridge on the stove. I held out the envelope to her. She studied it as she stirred. It looked official, a typed address.

  ‘I don’t think that is from Callum. Put it there on the table, my hands are wet.’

  She took her time, pouring tea, eyes on the letter.

  ‘But who could be sending us a letter if it’s not from Uncle Callum? Can I open it, Mother?’

  ‘No, wait.’ She brought the bowls to the table. Picked up the envelope and turned it over, thick paper. Miss C. Gillies. She frowned at that, took a knife to ease along the top fold.

  ‘Why ever is the Church of Scotland sending me this? From the overseas department, it says.’

  I looked over her shoulder. The letter was a printed sheet, the blanks filled in with typewritten words that were thicker and paler than the others. I started to read but she suddenly let it drop to the table.

  ‘What is it, Mother?’ I asked

  She gave no reply.

  I took the letter up, reading it aloud. Her eyes tight shut as I read, head shaking in denial. ‘Private Frederick Lawson, posted missing believed dead, has been reported alive.’

  She sobbed, a gulp and then clamped her hands over her face, as if with one word all the tears she had stored up from the years gone by would come gushing out.

  ‘It’s him isn’t it? The boy with dark hair. My father. But where is he now? Is he here, Mother? Is he still in France? Why doesn’t it say? And why does it have to be kept secret?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But why are they sending us this news? And why has it come from the church?’

  ‘I really don’t understand.’ She took the letter back, reading it again. And then her face cleared, hope written across it. ‘But if they’ve sent this here, then somehow, Fred’s found our address. He’s alive, Rachel Anne, and he wants me to know it.’

  The tears had started to push their way out now, no stopping them. ‘Oh, I had feared so much I’d hear he’d been lost in France. But he’s alive, Rachel Anne. Fred is alive.’

  She convulsed with sobs.

  I took her shoulder, shook it. ‘But we have to find out more. What if he’s here, in hospital somewhere? It might be the only chance to see him. To meet him. We have to telephone the church offices this letter came from, now, and make them tell us more.’

  ‘Rachel Anne, I don’t think they can know any more than this or surely they would have said. But then, why would we have to not tell anyone. . . unless he’s still in France, or in Germany, in prison perhaps like all the other soldiers we’ve heard about, all the thousands of men from the Scots regiments taken to Germany after Dunkirk.’

  But I wasn’t ready to give up.
/>   ‘We could try phoning the church office. Please. Will you?’

  ‘I will try, Rachel. I’ll try and find out more.’

  ‘And if he never comes home? What if he never knows about me, how I’ve waited for him?’

  She put her arms around me, held on tight when I tried to pull away. She rocked my stiff and angry body until our tears were finished. Until there was no more to be done than continue with the day – and to wait and to hope.

  I longed to meet my father, but sometimes, I saw myself standing in front of him, shouting, ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you come and find us?’ I thought I’d always kept a part of my heart for my father, but had it, I wondered, become hard and scarred over with anger and too much waiting?

  CHAPTER 42

  Fred

  MARSEILLE, 1941

  Caskie came in to our room on the third morning with two overcoats, long and narrow with wide shoulders.

  ‘Not quite the right apparel for mountain climbing but you will need protection above the snow line.’

  Angus’s had needed shortening, but Caskie knew an Arabic tailor in the old port who altered clothes to fit without questions. Angus smoothed down the fine tweed fabric. ‘Must have been quite an aristocrat the man who wore this.’

  ‘He was that,’ Caskie said. ‘But his mother will be happy to know that it is being used to help someone get home. Now for the journey. There will be just the two of you, a small inconspicuous party for now given the problems with the last trip. A far cry from the two or three trips a week we’ve been sending over recently, but we’ll need to be cautious.’

  He gave me a postcard with a picture of a basket of flowers. On the back was written, Uncle sends his love. Weather fine.

  ‘If you can, as soon as you get to the Spanish side, post this and I’ll know the route works.’

  ‘I’ll post it in Spain.’

  He clapped my shoulder. ‘So, you’ll take the train to Toulouse with the guide, change there for Foix. Once in Foix you’ll make contact with the mountain guide who will take you over the Pyrenees as far as the border where you’ll carry on down to link up with a man who will move you on to Madrid. And then it’s Gibraltar and home. If something goes wrong once you’re across the Spanish border, main thing is to get to Madrid and make contact with the embassy, quietly, back-door sort of thing. Sadly, there’ll be Spanish police, Guardia Civiles, patrolling the foothills on the Spanish side but at least if you’re picked up by them there’s a good chance of repatriation – eventually, Spain being neutral in theory.’

  ‘Eventually meaning?’

  ‘Some months at least. They have an internment camp at Miranda d’Ebro. Best avoided.’

  That evening, I went and sat in the little chapel that Caskie had set up in a room off the dining room. Just a table covered in a white cloth, two candles and a cross. A smell of hot wax from the candle, a hint of engine oil from the concrete floor revealing the origins of the mission as a set of garages before Caskie had them converted into the seaman’s boarding house. I hadn’t sat in a church or chapel for years. The simplicity of the room, almost poverty, really, took me back to the chapel on St Kilda and the strange wailing of psalms in that unearthly way, so raw and beautiful. I never thought I’d feel homesick for that.

  When I’d first arrived on the island, I’d seen the men in that chapel room as limited, their minds lacking in sophistication, but I’d come to realize that for all their material simplicity they were men of deeply considered theology, reading the Bible like a well-worn map, men who loved to debate the scriptures in their meetings like a gathering of old rabbis, and probably as learned as any college student and twice as wise. They knew who they were, their spiritual muscles, it seemed, as firm as the bodily muscles that kept them steady and safe as they navigated the soaring cliffs with the fathoms of sea a thousand feet below.

  I hadn’t done so for a long time, but I closed my eyes, let the quiet sink into me, and prayed, for you, and for a girl I’d never seen called Rachel Anne. I prayed for endurance, for the cold courage to keep going, no matter what, for a journey that would bring me home to you again.

  Archie came and went in the days before we left, quietly, always in a hurry, brief meetings with Caskie, slipping out through a side door, suddenly there in the hallway, evidently part of the underground network of people returning airmen and soldiers back home to take up the fight once again. Wealthy Marseille residents like Nancy, teenagers, priests, soldiers stranded after St Valery with enough French to pass as natives. Together they were running a covert war.

  A small thing that bothered me. Out in the old port late one afternoon on an errand to pick up some suits for some new arrivals that Caskie had ordered from his Arabic tailor, I saw Archie on a street corner, talking with a clean-shaven man in a neat trilby and a long cream mac. To me, the man had the look of an Abwehr agent. Something surreptitious in the way they were conferring. I held back in a doorway, watched them part. I attempted to trail Archie through the streets, lost him in the crowds on La Joliette.

  I told Caskie what I’d seen. He frowned, shook his head. ‘Archie is the most loyal man I know. I’d depend on him with my life. Whatever you saw, I can firmly say there will have been nothing underhand in it.’

  I wondered, how well does Caskie really know Archie though?

  Shortly after that, another safe house was raided, in a village outside Marseille, more arrests in the north, including Richard, the boy who had travelled with us on the train from Paris. Shaken by the news, I racked my brains to think if I’d said anything about him to Archie, or if Angus might have said something, but I couldn’t remember talking about him to Archie.

  Caskie was sure the problem lay closer to Lille. The plans for us to cross the Pyrenees remained the same.

  Our guide on the journey to Foix, a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees, was a French girl of no more than twenty. She stood in the corridor of the train, keeping a discreet eye on her charges. The new coats may not have been ideal gear for mountaineering, but at least we did not look out of place on the train to Toulouse.

  At Toulouse we needed to change and take the local line to Foix. There were few German guards in evidence, but we knew that the station would have its share of German agents in plain clothes hanging around, along with the German-controlled French police guards. Angus and the girl walked ahead along the platform, holding hands like two sweethearts. I walked several steps behind. Then my skin began to prickle. From the corner of my eye I caught sight of a man standing a few paces ahead. He was lighting a cigarette, hands cupped around the flame – but from the tilt of his hat brim, I knew that he was watching us.

  No choice but to keep walking. I was almost alongside him when the brim lifted. I stumbled. Archie Macleod. He came towards me, grasped my hand, shook it murmuring, ‘Just smile, as if you expected to meet me, keep walking.’ He stooped closer as we walked. ‘Don’t get the train to Foix,’ speaking urgently now. ‘Germans are waiting to pick you up. Seems someone’s blown your cover. Came as soon as I heard from our contact. Go on to St Girons. I’ll meet you at the station, get another passeur fixed up in town. You’ll have to take a higher route across the mountains now, more risks of bad weather, but it can’t be helped.’

  ‘And does Caskie know about this change of plan?’

  Archie shook his head. ‘No time.’

  I had a cold feeling in my chest when I heard that. But it was Archie I was talking to. I studied his face, looking straight into his eyes. The expression was hard, unfathomable. He slipped an envelope into my pocket. ‘The tickets. Two. Tell the guide I’ll be on the train. She can leave now.’ Then in a louder voice, in French, ‘Wonderful to see you too. We’ll have dinner soon. In St Girons.’

  He wheeled away, disappearing into the huddle of people around the station cafe.

  I caught up with our guide, whispered the news. Her steps slowed, brow wrinkled. Given that the last trip that had been sent into the arms of the Gestapo, thi
s was a frightening change of plan. A voice inside me whispered still, ‘Can you really trust Archie?’

  She sighed, pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Then you should get the train for St Girons,’ her eyes asking me to tell her she was right.

  Angus leaned in, whispered to me before we boarded. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t trust this Macleod. Do you?’

  ‘We can’t risk going on to Foix, if he’s right.’ But I had to admit, part of me agreed with Angus very much.

  Late afternoon and our train pulled in to a fog-bound station. St Girons. Just one German guard with a dog meeting the head of the train. We got out of our carriage at the back, trying not to look hurried, passed through the station building without incident. Archie had reappeared up ahead, and we followed him towards the river. The foothills of the Pyrenees rose around us but were hidden behind the thick clouds that pressed down over the town. We followed Archie across a bridge to the sound of a roaring weir, a row of pollarded trees disappearing into the mist, their stunted tops like knuckles bristling with thin black shoots. The backs of houses loomed up along the bank to our left, huddled together, plain and solid against the mountain winds. Archie disappeared behind them. We trailed him through the streets to a quiet cafe in an alleyway where he seemed to know the patron. Promising to return with news of our guide, Archie left. We drank small coffees slowly, watching the door, listening out for boots and dogs.

  Dark was falling by the time Archie got back. We were in luck, he assured us, a whiff of brandy on his breath. His contact, an Andorran who knew the mountains like the back of his hand, was about to take a party over in the morning and we could join them. ‘Only thing is, they’re meeting up at a shepherd’s hut in the foothills ready to move on at first light. It will mean walking through the night to get there.’

  He led us through empty streets, windows shuttered, doors closed. This near to curfew, St Girons had become a ghost town. France might be free in the south but it was still haunted by the sound of boots. The Gestapo free to act.

  At a farmhouse just outside the town, Archie knocked on a door. An old man sold us stout sticks as tall as my shoulder, a parcel of salami and hard black bread. We weren’t the first escapees bound for the mountains to call there.