The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  ‘I’m sorry, Chrissie. I lost my faith in you, in your love, but I could never stop loving you. I had the world, yes, travelled it from east to west, but all I wanted in the end was to come home to you.’

  ‘So much lost. But what else could you know but what Archie told you.’

  ‘I could have believed in you, in what was true.’

  She sighed, looked out of the window with her lips pressed together.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Chrissie.’

  She gave a tiny nod.

  ‘And I know Archie was sorry for what he’d done. He told me that much.’

  She looked at me, startled. ‘Archie told you that?’

  ‘In France. Archie saved my life, Chrissie. If it wasn’t for him I would have died going over into Spain. I’d never have made it home and be sitting here now. And, Chrissie, he told me about the child. Our daughter.’

  A quiet fell in the room. She sighed.

  ‘Yes, Archie knew about Rachel Anne, and I think he tried to help, the piano, the grant for her to go to college one day. There’s a charity for people who have come from St Kilda, but this was something different, specific for me and for Rachel. I suspected it was Archie who was the anonymous donor.’

  I nodded. ‘He wanted to make amends.’

  ‘And now he is dead. Did he suffer?’ Tears were in her eyes.

  ‘I held him as he went. He died in peace, I think.’

  The tears were flowing freely now, for both of us, and I could bear it no longer but reached out and took both her hands in mine. She did not pull away.

  I heard the door open and a girl stood in the kitchen, the girl from the lane, so like Chrissie but the hair lighter, the face longer, large brown eyes. My daughter. And I could see from her eyes that she understood who I was. She waited for her mother to speak.

  Chrissie had stood too, wiping at her eyes. ‘Rachel Anne, do you know who this is?’

  She nodded. ‘I think so. The man from the photograph.’

  The world seemed to have narrowed into that one moment. I heard the shake in my voice. ‘I’m Fred, Fred Lawson, your father.’

  She nodded, calmly. ‘I see. Mr Lawson, I am pleased to meet you after so much time.’

  No trace of any welcome or gladness. But then, who was I but a stranger?

  ‘I should have come sooner. . .’ I tried.

  ‘Well, you are here,’ Rachel Anne said, breezily. ‘But where is it you will go now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You need not worry on our account. You see, we have been well without you, Mr Lawson. After so long, it seems we have no great need of you.’

  ‘Rachel Anne, that’s not called for.’

  ‘I will be at Aileen’s. I will come back when he has left.’

  And she was gone, still in her coat. ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ said Chrissie, sinking down in her chair, deep shadows under her eyes in the lamplight. ‘She will come round to the idea of you.’

  ‘She has her mother’s fiery nature, and the doggedness of her father,’ I said and she smiled a little at that.

  ‘And where were you planning to go after seeing us?’ she asked.

  ‘I hadn’t any plans,’ I confessed, ‘beyond finding you.’

  ‘Well, it’s all but dark and there’s no more buses for today, so unless you want a very long walk by torchlight I suggest you sleep on the couch here tonight, have a bite to eat together.’

  ‘I don’t want to bother you. And Rachel’s waiting for me to be gone.’

  ‘I promise, she doesn’t mean that.’ Chrissie went over to the shelves, busied herself with something there. ‘Do you have to go?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then. It would be a great happiness to me if you would stay a while longer. That is all I would ask.’

  She made a meal of bacon and potatoes, enough for Rachel Anne too, though it went cold on the stove as we talked and the darkness deepened, leading each other through the years that we had known. Oh, I could have wept, and I did weep, for all she had suffered without me, for all I had missed. And yet, how was it, that in being together now time seemed to have healed itself, for an ease seeped into the space between us like a silver solder, and we were as comfortable together as only old friends can be, who even after many years may take up an old conversation as if it were halted a day ago. I had not expected that, to feel so at home by her side so readily. Time had done nothing to reduce her beauty, or how much I loved her for all she was.

  Did she feel the same towards me, though, or was her warmth just for an old friendship that had bloomed into too much and then faded? I couldn’t tell.

  She made up a bed for me on the hard little couch, the knobbles of the wool fabric rough beneath the sheet.

  In the dark I heard Rachel Anne return home, eat her dinner cold from the stove and then go up.

  At first light I’d shaved at the kitchen sink and folded my blankets. I sat on the back step smoking, the sky in the east bright with a red tinge. The line of dark forest at the end of a field grew from shadow to trees, gathering the light above. It was cold even with my army coat wrapped around me but I had lost the habit of houses and felt more at ease outside with my smoke in the raw air. It must have been an hour later that I conceded to the chill and went inside. The girl was sitting in the morning gloom of the kitchen, a mug of tea in her hands. She was dressed in a woollen jersey and skirt. She nodded at the pot of tea on the table, a lopsided knitted cosy that had seen better days. There were two empty mugs on the table, a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar. I poured a welcome cup of strong tea. Something I would have given a lot for in the camp and I savoured it now, standing by the window.

  ‘You can sit down,’ she said.

  I pulled out a chair, an apologetic smile and sat down opposite her.

  Chrissie was up too. I heard her footsteps down the stairs and she came in in a hurry.

  ‘Why did you let me sleep?’ she said. ‘And now I must go directly to the farm and shan’t be back a while. But you’ll stay?’ I could hear the wanting in her voice, an anguish almost, and I was relieved – if sorry – to hear her pain.

  ‘Of course, if you don’t mind. If you’ve any jobs I could help with, chopping some wood?’

  This pleased her, and not because she had any such chores. I could see that too in her face.

  She tucked her hair away under a knitted beret, belted her coat. ‘And you’ll be here, Rachel Anne. In case Mr Lawson has something he wants? Make a bit of breakfast now?’

  Very quiet, a shrug, ‘I’ll be here.’

  It was a long morning in limbo. Rachel Anne stayed in her room and I sat and read a book I had with me, taking in nothing. After a while I wandered around the room, sat down at the piano and began to pick out one of her songs from the island. A long time since I’d played. Each note a memory. I’d got the whole tune, taking it with both hands when I became aware of someone standing behind me. Rachel Anne had come downstairs and stood in the doorway. I stopped and turned. There were tears on her face.

  ‘You took such a long time to come home,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry. So sorry.’

  ‘Why did you take so long?’

  ‘I think I stopped believing in love.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I love your mother, Rachel Anne. And I’m so sorry to have missed so much of you growing up. Now, all I can ask for is a chance to get to know you.’

  She seemed undecided, a bird on the edge of flight. I played a few more notes to fill the silence. I felt a movement behind me. She crossed the room and pulled up a chair to sit beside me.

  ‘You can ask me anything, Rachel Anne,’ I said, my hands still now. And she did. All through till the late afternoon we talked, trying to fill in the years we had missed. I was in awe of this wonderful girl, my daughter, spirited and gentle, beautiful and proud. And as smart as new paint. You could see Rachel Anne could do anything she had a mind to do.

  That’s how Chrissie found us, out
on the back step, still talking. Rachel Anne had brought down photographs of the island, an old snap of me and Archie smiling out at the sea, at the days to come, all filled with promise.

  I gave the photo into Chrissie’s hands as she gathered the others from Rachel. She glanced down, studying those boys from another time. So much lost and gone. But when she looked up, tears in the corners of her eyes, there it was, I caught a glimpse of the old Chrissie, those direct eyes on mine. Did she see me? And I hoped.

  After supper, I walked along the lane with Chrissie in the cool evening, the scent of the dew carrying the land and the green leaves in the air, fresh and cold.

  I began, ‘Chrissie, I’m sorry—’

  ‘Don’t say sorry any more. I know how many boys didn’t come back around here and all over the glens. So many missing, thousands of our men still in prison camps far away. I know how lucky I am to see you now. And even if you go tomorrow, I will still count myself as that.’

  ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. But I don’t expect anything. I know they’ll call you back to fight.’

  ‘I never want to leave. I never want to leave you again, Chrissie.’

  Her hand took mine as we walked, fitted so well again inside my fingers. Then I stopped and I took her to me, or she moved to put her arms around me, and it was such a kiss, a kiss I had waited for, waited for many long years.

  And two months later, on my first leave after being called up again, Chrissie and I were married in the small chapel in Larachbeg.

  CHAPTER 46

  Fred

  FRANCE, 1950

  In the summer of 1950, at the behest of the Macleod family, I made arrangements to travel out to France and bring back the remains of Archie for reburial in his family plot at Kilmuir in Skye. It was strange to be in a peacetime France, free to sit out in a pavement cafe and enjoy the sun, though the years of strain could be seen in people’s faces, the bomb damage still evident through the train windows as I’d travelled down.

  Of course, I had been back to France before, in 1945 as part of the British Expeditionary Force in Normandy. After months of being stationed at special operations training camps in Scotland with scant leave to go home and see Chrissie, I’d been assigned to the newly re-formed 51st Highland Division, all of us determined to bring about the liberation of Europe, and the liberation of our boys from the prisons in Germany and Poland. It was strange to be fighting our way back across the same countryside we’d seen in retreat a few years earlier, the villages and farms increasingly ravaged by war as we neared the Rhine and the Germans dug in.

  At the Bremerhaven victory parade after VE day, the massed pipes and drums of the 51st led the Allies through town to take the salute, a mighty sound that vibrated deeply through my bones, reverberated in my chest along with a gratitude for the ending of those terrible times, and with pain for all the boys who had lost their lives or were still held prisoner.

  It had taken a while longer before the thousands of Scots boys who’d been taken at St Valery finally started to come home. No victory parade for them. Chrissie and I had been married for almost three years when I came across the eldest of the MacKinnon boys walking along Sauchiehall Street. He’d spent four years in a German prison camp deep inside occupied Poland.

  We see him often, now that we live in Glasgow for my work with an oil company. Chrissie gathers a group of St Kildans and Gaelic speakers in our kitchen most weeks. Rachel Anne comes by to listen in as the stories fly round the room, often bringing friends from university with her, though I realize lately it’s one particular fellow medic she’s bringing home. She tells me they want to join one of these summer work parties that go out to St Kilda, restoring the abandoned village as a historical site.

  It took another five years after the war’s end before the arrangements were completed to finally fetch Archie home. The burial service took place on a cool summer’s morning on Skye. It might seem strange to some that a titled family choose to be buried in Kilmuir, where the small stone church on a rise of open grassland no longer has a roof, but if a cathedral with its soaring pillars is built to echo a forest, then this chapel was even more exquisite. To one side, a sycamore in full leaf had spread to provide half the roof, the open sky the rest. An ancient rowan grew within the walls like a rood screen, intricate with lichen and leaves. The walls of silver-grey granite were embellished with rosettes of fern like finely chiselled medieval carvings. Grass and chamomile filled the spaces between the flagstones of the floor.

  Rachel Anne, Chrissie and I, together with the Macleod family, stood as the vicar committed Archie’s remains to the earth, his name engraved on a marble plaque hewn from the rare white and greenish marble of Skye.

  But the true memorial to Archie was surely the eagle soaring almost beyond sight; it was in the movement of the long blades of grass across the hillside, and the irises among them, bending with the wind. Nothing in that place was static, the sea loch and the sky moving from grey to silver to blue, the grass swaying and trembling, the speck of an eagle that hung momentarily then rose. Even the rocks, I knew, were changing under wind and frost. Imperceptibly, they rise and tilt with the pressure of the earth, and all the while, the mass of our planet hurtles on through the day, the realm of dark space and its stars beyond hidden from us by nothing more than a film of blue air.

  For this much I have learned, the only things that stand are love and forgiveness, they are an island of hope glimpsed and not glimpsed among the pounding waves and the storms, but there still, always there, the lights guiding us home.

  The vicar is finished, Chrissie in her dark coat and hat, a red scarf at her throat, takes my hand in hers. I know what she is thinking, of the years Archie took from us, how young we all were, how foolish, and of all that Archie did for us, giving even his life so I might find her again. Dear Archie, true friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank to the many writers whose books have formed part of the research for this book, including The Life and Death of St Kilda by Tom Steel, Island at the Edge of the World by Charles MacLean and Margaret Buchanan, The Truth about St Kilda by Donald Gillies and St Kilda Portraits by David A. Quine.

  I have tried to render the islands of St Kilda as faithfully as possible and hope that the reader will be able to feel they have experienced something of the unique way of life that once existed there. The characters in the story, while many are loosely based on the people who lived on St Kilda, all remain necessarily fictional since there is not enough information available to write their actual stories. I believe they would prefer it that way.

  Likewise, the cast of characters for the Dunvegan Macleods is fictional. St Kilda was owned by Reginald Macleod of Macleod at the time of the evacuation but was sold to Lord Dumfries in 1931 as a bird sanctuary and is now held by the National Trust. St Kilda was the first site in Scotland to be named a World Heritage site and is home to a tenth of the British Isles’ seabird population.

  My thanks to Adam Nicolson whose wonderful book The Seabird’s Cry gave such a vivid portrayal of Atlantic seabirds and their behaviour. I would also like to thank Bill Lawson of the Seallam Centre in Harris for his carefully curated exhibition of St Kilda and his books and articles on St Kilda’s history. I’d like to thank artists Willie and Moira Fulton of Drinishader art gallery for their hospitality and help over the years while I have been researching books in Harris. Thanks also to Jane Knight and Christian Latham for the chance to stay in Still Waters, Grosebay, and for a peaceful time to work and explore the islands. Sea Harris took us on a wonderful boat trip to St Kilda and I’d recommend them highly, not least for the on-board cake and tea. Thank you too to Clare and Roger Gifford for the chance to stay in the Dunvegan Castle Dowager’s House on Skye.

  I read several journals and biographies of soldiers who escaped after St Valery and those who helped them return home, including Return to St Valery by Derek Lang, A Cameron Never Can Yield by Gregor MacDonald a
nd The Tartan Pimpernel by Donald Caskie and Mike Hughes. Also Monty Halls’ Escaping Hitler: Stories of Courage and Endurance on the Freedom Trails. Each year walkers retrace the route over the Pyrenees with the WW2 Escape Lines Memorial Society. Their website, Le Chemin de la Liberté was a great help. The Abbé, Nancy Fiocca and Reverend Donald Caskie are based on real characters, also Harry Cole. I hope this book pays tribute to the many people who risked their lives to return Allied servicemen home as part of the French Resistance.

  As a young man of nineteen, my father-in-law, Douglas Gifford, was at the Bremerhaven Victory Parade on VE day with the British Expeditionary Force and brought back photographs of the massed drums and pipes of the reformed 51st. I now understand more of how significant and poignant that parade must have been for the 51st. His photos and his stories about Second World War escape routes helped inspire this story.

  Thank you to early readers Kirsty, Hugh, George and Josh Gifford, and for the many trips to the Hebrides. I couldn’t have done this book without the patient support of family both in Scotland and in England. Thank you also to readers Penny and Martin Barrowman.

  Thank you to my editors at Corvus, Sara O’Keeffe, Susannah Hamilton and Poppy Mostyn-Owen. This book would not have gone forward without their enthusiasm for the project. Thank you especially to wonderful agent Jenny Hewson. Thank you to Justine Taylor for copy-editing the story with great patience. Any mistakes are mine. And thank you to Kirsty Doole and the publicity team at Corvus who tirelessly help to get books out into the world, and to the Corvus art department for the book’s evocative cover.

  Note on the Author

  Elisabeth Gifford is the author of four novels, including Secrets of the Sea House, which was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association’s Debut Crown and was a Waterstones Scotland Book of the Month. She lives in Kingston upon Thames.