by Alan Warner
The Macrae I knew – the son of this one – was a large jovial fat man who dressed in a brown canvas blouse. Day after day he would set off with his wheelbarrow and bring back a huge boulder which he would lever on to the ground in order to add another part of the wall to the house, which by now had three walls and a stone floor and three windows. The trouble with Iain Macrae was that he liked children and when they danced round making fun of his house which would never in their opinion be finished, he would look at them with a merry smile and tell them stories. When he was doing this, his expression would become wonderfully tender and he would gaze into the distance over their heads as if he were seeing a most beautiful serene sight. He would completely abandon any work on his house and begin, ‘Last night I was walking across the moor looking for a boulder when I saw an owl sitting on a stone reading a book.’ The children would gather round him open-mouthed and cease to play pranks. He was really a very lazy fat man who seemed to move heavily like a large solid cloud. When he was asked why he didn’t abandon the house altogether he would say, ‘One must have something to do. Even if it’s no good.’ And he would smile a sad clownish smile. He was liked in the village as he would do anything for anyone at any time and would wholly neglect his own affairs in order to help. When he was on his death-bed he was making jokes about his coffin and saying that they must get him a large one. At one time he would say that it should be made of stone, but at other times he preferred wood since it changed so much, whereas stone never changed, and this was its weakness. In fact he didn’t care about the quality of the stone he trundled along in his wheelbarrow and sometimes he would forget which stone he ought to have been using at a particular time. ‘We all have something to do,’ he would say, ‘and this was what was left to me. I couldn’t live in this house,’ he would add, ‘if it was finished. I would admire it from a distance.’ And so another wall and another window would be slowly added in the interval of telling stories to the children. But the people grew used to seeing this unfinished structure and praised God that their own houses were wind and rain proof and tightly made. He also died as a result of wheeling a stone along. He fell on his face while torrents of blood poured out of his mouth, and stained the ground. He wasn’t long on his death-bed where he grew very thin and meagre so that no one would ever have thought that he had weighed fifteen stone and could tell interesting stories to children, who as a mark of respect gathered a bunch of flowers and laid them on his grave.
His son was a brisker thinner man who decided that the house must be finished once and for all. He had grown up in the knowledge that his father had been, to a certain extent, a figure of fun and was determined that he himself would not be humorous or play the clown for anybody. For this reason he would rise early in the morning and start on the house. The village would resound to his hammering day after day. He never ceased working. He was also resolute that he would do all the work himself. It is true that he couldn’t handle a hammer as well as his forebears but what he lost in skill he made up for in determination. ‘One should never leave a job incomplete,’ he would say, staring you straight in the eye. ‘Never. It is immoral. Laziness is immoral.’ And as most of the villagers were themselves lazy, standing at the corners of their houses with their hands in their pockets most of the day, he wasn’t liked much. ‘I have other things I must do after this is completed,’ he would say. And so he would work like a slave. People said that he would kill himself but in fact he didn’t. He seemed to be very tough physically and never once had an illness while he was building the house, though he worked in the rain and sometimes in the snow.
Eventually one morning he finished it. People thought that he would have a celebration party but he didn’t. He wasn’t the kind of man who cared for sentiment. But when the house was completed it was noticed that he would stand looking at it and then move onward and look at it from another angle. A depression hung over the village. The villagers had thought that they would be glad when the house was finished but they weren’t. It was partly because it wasn’t as good as they had expected (after all builders had been working at it for a hundred years at least and perhaps even longer than that) and in comparison with their dreams it looked more ordinary than they had expected. They didn’t quite know what they had expected, but they had certainly expected a structure more elaborate and elegant than they got. It seemed to be saying that after all man’s imagination is much the same everywhere.
But the real trouble was that they didn’t have so much to talk about. In the past if there was a pause in the conversation they would start to tell some story about That House or if they didn’t have actual stories about it they would invent some. In any case the village seemed to grow gloomier and gloomier. Some of them wanted to smash the house down so that it could be started all over again. But of course they wouldn’t do that for they were all basically law-abiding people. But they grew to hate the last of the Macraes, who was called William. And as he sensed this he began to avoid them. He too grew tired of looking at the house in which he had begun to live. He had bought very ordinary furniture for it, and all the usual conveniences of a house, and in fact made it look very common and not to be distinguished from the other houses of the village except that it was a stone house. People would say how different he was from his forefathers and what fine ideas they had had, and what plans and ideals they had nursed. William tried to mix with them but not very successfully since, though he enquired about their families, they knew that fundamentally he wasn’t interested. Obscurely they felt that they had been betrayed. Was all their legend-making to end up like this after all, with this very ordinary house which seemed to answer very trivial problems? Why, because it was lived in, the house didn’t even have any ghosts! The villagers had even been cheated of that! They looked forward to William’s death and for this reason hoped that he would not marry, since they would then have the freedom to do with the house what their imaginations wished. They actively discouraged any girl in the village from marrying him, though at the same time they were worried lest he should import a wife from somewhere else. But in fact he showed no sign of doing that. On the contrary, he would sit in the house brooding for hours and it was even rumoured that he wished to pull the house down and start again. But all the zest had left him – perhaps he had overworked too long – and he remained where he was in his ordinary house with the ordinary curtains and the ordinary carpets and furniture.
He died of some form of melancholia. After his death, all the furniture and carpets etc. were sold by a dull-looking niece of his from outside the island who had no intention of coming back. The house remained empty since there was no one who wanted to buy it and a satisfactory series of legends began to blossom around it, most of them having to do with mysterious lights at windows, men reading Bibles in a greenish light or telling stories to phantom children. Stories were freely invented and the best of them survived and the worst perished. The most mysterious statement they found was in one of the books which the second Macrae had kept. It read, ‘When all the lies have been answered, other lies will have to be invented.’ The villagers thought that in inventing legends they were being true to the early founders of the house and looked at it as women will stand at a church door watching the bride coming out and dreaming that she at least will begin a race of uncorrupted children, not realising that for this to happen she must be a virgin of the purest blood.
A September Day
It was a day in autumn when I came home from school in Stornoway, a town which was seven miles from the village. The sky was a perfect blue, and the corn was yellow and as yet uncut. I left the bus at the bottom of the road and walked the rest of the way home. I was eleven years old, and I wore short trousers and a woollen jersey both of which my mother had made for me. Even as I write, the movement of the fresh air on my legs returns to me, and the red radiance of the heather all about me. Every day I went to Stornoway on the bus and every day I came back. I began to think of myself as more sophisticated than the vil
lagers. Didn’t I know all about Pythagoras’s Theorem and was I not immersed in the history of other nations as well as my own?
As I walked along the road I looked down at the thatched house where old Meg stayed. Sometimes one would see her coming from the shop with her red bloomers down about her big red fat legs. She went home to a house full of cats, hungry, ragged, vicious. Today there was no smoke from her chimney: perhaps she was lying in her bed. Her breath was much shorter than it used to be.
Outside his house old Malcolm was sharpening his scythe. I shouted, ‘Hullo’ to him and the scythe momentarily glittered in the sun as he turned towards me. His wife like a small figure on a Dutch clock came out and threw a basinful of water on the grass. ‘Hullo,’ I shouted as I felt myself coming home. Old Malcolm shouted in Gaelic that it was a fine day, and then spat on his hands.
The village returned to me again, every house, every wall, every ditch. It was so very different from Stornoway whose houses were crowded together, whose sea was thickly populated with fishing boats. I knew practically every stone in the village. At the same time I knew so much that didn’t belong to the village at all.
Head bent over his scythe, Malcolm sharpened the blade, and I made my way home to the little house in which we lived. Very distantly I heard a cock crow in the middle of the afternoon, a traditional sign of bad luck. After it had crowed a dog barked and then another dog and then another one. Ahead of me stretched the sea, a big blue plate that swelled to the horizon on which a lone ship was moving.
‘Huh, so you’re home,’ said my mother, ‘you took your time.’
As my mother hardly ever went to town I came home to her as if from another land. She made me work at my books but the work I was doing was beyond her. Nevertheless she knew with a deep instinctive knowledge that learning was the road to the sort of reasonable life that she had never had.
‘You’re just in time to go out to the shop for me,’ she said. ‘You can have your tea when you come back. Get me some sugar and tea.’
I put my bag down on the oil-skinned table and took the money she gave me. I didn’t particularly like to go to the shop, but at the same time I didn’t strenuously object. As I was walking along the road I met Daial who had come home from the village school. Now that I had gone to the town school I was warier with him than I had been in the past. He asked me if I wanted a game of football and I said that I had to go on a message for my mother. He snorted and went back into his house.
When I had passed him, I met old deaf Mrs Macleod. She shouted at me as if against a gale, in Gaelic, ‘And how is Iain today? You’re the clever one, aren’t you? Ask your mother if she wants to buy any milk. Anything going on in the town?’
I said I didn’t know of anything. She came up and said, ‘Your mother made that jersey, didn’t she? I wonder what kind of wool it is. Your mother is a very good knitter.’
I squirmed under her hands. ‘I’ll have to get the pattern from her sometime,’ she shouted into my ear. I almost felt my knees reddening with embarrassment.
When I left her I ran and ran, as if I wished to escape somewhere. Why were people always poking and probing? And yet I had been flattered when she said that I was the clever one.
I arrived at the shop and waited my turn. The shop sold everything from sugar to paraffin to methylated spirits for our Tilleys. Seonaid was talking to the woman who owned the shop and saying, ‘Did you hear if war is declared yet? I’ll take two loaves.’
‘No,’ said the other one.
I was gazing at the conversation sweets in the jars, and wished that I had money to buy some, but we were too poor.
‘Nugget, did you say?’ said the woman who owned the shop.
‘Black,’ said Seonaid. ‘They won’t wear brown shoes. Everything black or navy blue.’
‘That’s right,’ said the shop owner. ‘No, I never heard anything about the war.’
‘That man Chamberlain always carries an umbrella,’ said Seonaid. ‘You’d think it was raining all the time.’
She turned to me and said, ‘And how is Iain today? You’re getting taller every time I see you. And are you doing well at the school?’
I murmured something under my breath but she soon forgot about me. I went to the door of the shop and I saw Peggy, a girl of my own age who was wearing a yellow dress. She also went to the village school.
‘Hullo,’ I said to her.
‘Hullo,’ she said, looking at me with a slant laughing eye.
She was wearing sandals and her legs were brown. It was a long time since I had seen her and now I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. She had used to sit beside me in Miss Taylor’s class. She was the prettiest girl in the school. Once I had even written notes to her which Miss Taylor had never seen.
‘Did you hear if war is declared?’ I asked her, trying to look very wise.
‘No,’ she said, staring at me as if I were mad. Then she began to rub one sandal against the other.
‘Are you liking the town school?’ she asked, looking at me aslant and half giggling.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. And then again. ‘It’s OK. We gamble with pennies,’ I added. ‘The school is ten times as big as the village school.’
Her eyes rounded with astonishment, but then she said, ‘I bet I wouldn’t like it.’
At that moment I looked up into the sky and saw a plane passing.
‘That’s an aeroplane,’ I said.
‘I bet you don’t know what kind it is,’ said Peggy.
I was angry that I didn’t know.
Suddenly Peggy dashed away at full speed shouting at the top of her voice, ‘Townie, townie, townie.’
I went back into the shop lest anyone should see me. I was mad and ashamed, especially as I had loved Peggy so much in the past.
When I got home my mother said that I had taken my time, hadn’t I? She began to talk about her brother who had been in a war in Egypt. ‘He was a sergeant,’ she said. ‘But this time,’ she continued, ‘all the young ones will be in the war.’
I thought of myself as a pilot swooping from the sky on a German plane, my machine gun stuttering. I was the leader of a squadron of aeroplanes, and after I had shot the enemy pilot down I waggled the wings of my plane in final salute. He and I were chivalrous foes, though we would never recognise each other of because of the goggles.
‘There’s Tormod who’ll have to go and Murchadh and Iain Beag.’ She reeled off a list of names. ‘There won’t be anyone left in the village except old men and old women. I was in the First World War myself, at the munitions. Peggy was with me, and one time she pulled the communication cord of the train,’ and she began to laugh, remembering it all, so that she suddenly looked very young and girlish instead of stern and unsmiling.
‘The ones here will all go to the navy,’ she said.
I hoped that the war wouldn’t stop before I was old enough to join the RAF, or perhaps the army.
When I had finished my tea I went out. Daial was waiting and we went and played a game of football. Daial was winning and I said that one of the goals he claimed he had scored shouldn’t be counted because the ball wasn’t over the line. We glared at each other and were about to fight when he said he wouldn’t count it after all. After we had stopped playing we began to wrestle and he had me pinned to the ground shouting, ‘Surrender.’ But I managed to roll away and then I had his arms locked and I was staring into his face while my legs rested on his stomach. Our two faces glared at each other, very close, so that I could see his reddening, and I could hear his breathing, Eventually I let him up and we ran a race, which he won.
I felt restless as if something was about to happen. It was as if the whole village was waiting for some frightening news. Now and again I would see two women talking earnestly together, their mouths going click, click, click.
I tried to do some homework but ships and planes came between me and my geometry. I was standing on the deck of a ship which was slowly capsizing, looking at the bo
ats which were pulling away. Not far from me there was a German U-boat. I remained on the deck for I knew that a captain always went down with his ship. The U-boat commander saluted me and I saluted him back. The water began to climb over my sandals, and my teeth chattered with the cold. I knew that the rest of the British Navy would avenge my death and that my heroic resistance would appear in the story books.
I looked up and my mother was standing looking at me with an odd expression on her face. However, all she said was, ‘Get on with your lessons.’
‘You wait,’ I thought, ‘you will read about me someday. Your sergeant brother won’t be in it.’
I went out to the door, and saw Tinkan hammering a post into the ground. The hammer rose and fell and it looked as if he had been hammering for ever, his head bald as a stone bent down so that he didn’t see me. In the distance I heard someone whistling. Why had Peggy called me a townie: there was no reason for that. But I would show her. Some day she would hear that I had died bravely winning the Victoria Cross or perhaps the Distinguished Conduct Medal. She would regret calling me a townie and in fact she might even show some of our notes to the man who came to write about me. Displacing the adverts on the front page of the local paper would be massive headlines: ‘Local Hero Goes Down Fighting.’