by Peter May
I suppose that’s what started the ambition in most of us. And one by one, those of us who could afford it got ourselves little 50cc mopeds, which in reality were not much more than motorized bicycles. The only money I had was whatever I earned humphing gear for Sòlas. By fifth year they were playing at dances and ceilidhs and pubs all over Lewis, and even down in Harris, and I was sharing a little in their success. But by the time I was able to afford a clapped-out old moped for myself, Roddy had already turned seventeen and graduated to a 125cc Vespa T5 Mk1. Classic blue. Secondhand, of course. It was only a scooter, and would have been scorned by real motorbike enthusiasts, but we thought it was solid gold.
There had always been a rivalry in the band between Roddy and Strings. They were the two major creative forces behind the original music that Sòlas was starting to produce. But that rivalry spilled over into the bike group, too, and it wasn’t long before Strings appeared with his own 125cc machine. I can’t remember the make of it now, but I’ll never forget the colour. It was bright yellow. The same colour as the tormentil that grew among the coastal bracken in summer. You always saw Strings coming.
I spent most of my spare time working on my moped just to keep it on the road. It was a Puch. A Dakota VZ50. It had a 50cc fan-cooled motor with a three-speed gearbox, and was on its last legs. I never took it back to Ness, not just because my aunt would have disapproved, but because I seriously doubted if it would ever have got me there.
On fine spring afternoons, after school, we used to motor out on our bikes, past Engie’s and Kenneth Mackenzie’s mill, over Oliver’s Brae towards the airport and the turnoff to Holm Point. This was a finger of land that extended out into the bay just before the narrow neck of beach and causeway that led to the Eye Peninsula. The fields around us were fallow and shimmered yellow, full of dandelions. There was a cluster of buildings at Holm Farm, but we stayed away from there, and congregated just beyond the road end looking out over the rocks that were known as the Beasts of Holm.
The oil-rig construction yard at Arnish was visible on the far side of the bay, as was the little squat lighthouse there on the rocks, and we had a splendid view back across the whole of Stornoway, sitting low and catching the sunlight in the shelter of the trees that climbed the castle hill behind it. You could hear the sounds of the town carried on the breeze, busy and distant, and dwarfed by the rush of the sea and the oystercatchers and wagtails that dipped and dived around us.
We didn’t do much there. Just loafed around in the sunshine, smoking, drinking beer if we had any, flirting with the girls who had ridden out on the back of the bikes.
I suppose if any of us had been aware of the weathered granite obelisk that stood behind its rectangular wrought-iron fence right out on the point, we might have thought it was a war monument of some sort. But I don’t think any of us ever paid it any attention. Until the day the old man shouted at us for disrespecting the dead.
It was a Friday afternoon. Some of us had free periods at the end of the day and had ridden out to Holm to profit from the spring sunshine before getting the bus home. We didn’t notice him at first, out there at the point, standing by the rusted railing, among the grass and weeds growing all around it. A solitary, stooped figure in black, thin white hair whipped up around his head by the wind.
I had clocked him when we were parking up, but quickly forgot about him when trouble broke out between Whistler and Big Kenny. I’m not sure how it began. I was busy trying to chat up a pretty little girl called Seonag, who had ridden out to Holm Point on the back of my bike. There was a lot of laughter, and some of the boys had cans of beer in their saddlebags. But it was the tone of the voices raised above the rabble that caught my attention. There was real anger in them. And menace. I turned to see Whistler shove Kenny in the chest with both hands. There was enough force in that push to send Kenny staggering several steps backwards, and Whistler was gathering his brows like an imminent storm.
‘I’ve fucking had it with you, Coinneach!’
I knew it was serious when Whistler used Kenny’s Gaelic name. Kenny gathered the remnants of his dignity about him and puffed out his chest. ‘You’re seriously off your head, Macaskill, you know that?’
The jibe was like a red rag to a bull, and Whistler went for him, fists flying. Kenny took one to the head, another to his midriff, before the two of them landed with a thud in the grass, one on top of the other. Kenny’s knee came up, trying to hit the sweet spot between Whistler’s legs, but just missed, and we saw blood burst from his mouth as Whistler’s big fist connected with his lips.
There were three or four of us on top of them in a moment. Hands grasping at the shoulders and arms of the big flute player, dragging him off the gasping Kenny. But Whistler was in a rage, one of those tantrums in which he lost all control. And he turned his fury on us. Unfortunately I was the nearest, and the first to make contact with knuckles like ball bearings. They struck me on the side of the head and knocked me to the ground, lights flashing in my eyes, in just the same way as they did all those years later.
By the time I had recovered my senses, Whistler had already turned back to Kenny and was advancing towards him with something like a growl rising in his throat. No one there was any match for him, least of all me. But that thrawn part of me which had always got me into trouble burned down my back like molten wax, propelling me into battle without thought or fear. Whistler and I, it seemed, were destined always to resolve our conflicts by the fist.
I dived, shoulder first, as I had been taught on the rugby pitch, and took him just above the knees. He went down like a sack of rocks, face-first into the ground, his own weight expelling all the air from his lungs, like the sound of the sea sucking at the cliffs. If it hadn’t been for the voice that rose above the shrieks and cries of alarm and encouragement, I think he might have killed me when he recovered his breath.
None of us had been aware of the old man’s approach. But his voice cut through the clamour, sharp and high, like a rapier.
‘What do you think you’re doing! Behaving like idiots in the presence of the dead. Have you no respect?’ Had he spoken in English perhaps his words would have had less impact. But the Gaelic somehow carried more weight.
Silence fell upon us like a shroud, Whistler and I still lying gasping on the ground. Everyone looked towards the old man. He wore a shabby black suit, and I could see food stains on his grey pullover beneath it. The cap he had clutched in his hand out at the monument was pulled firmly down now over his head. His eyes were part shadowed, but they were dark eyes full of anger. His face hung loose on a bony skull, his flesh goose-white and stained brown in places by age. He raised the hand in which he held his stick and pointed a finger deformed by bulbous joints in my direction.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself, young Finlay Macleod.’ I was startled to hear my name. I had no idea who he was. As I struggled to my feet, he turned towards Whistler. ‘And you, John Angus Macaskill.’ I could see Whistler’s surprise, too. ‘Both of you should know better. Neither of you would be here today if John Macleod hadn’t made it ashore with his line.’
He swivelled his gaze, then, in the direction of Big Kenny, and his eyes lingered for a moment on the blood around his mouth. ‘And you should be grateful, Coinneach Iain Maclean, that your grandfather was born during a home leave in 1916, or you’d not have been around either.’
No one knew what to say. And in the silence that followed we could hear the distant rumble of traffic along South Beach, and I don’t know why, but my eye fell upon the lines of headstones in Sanndabhaig Cemetery, sentinels standing in silent reproach for a misdemeanour we didn’t know we’d committed.
The old man bowed his head and walked through us towards the road end, supporting himself on his stick. And we watched him recede into the distance, making his slow, determined way in the direction of the main road.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ someone said. But I had lost interest in the group, focused now on the monument
out on the point. The old man had aroused my curiosity, unsettling me, as if he had just walked over my grave. I forgot all about my fight with Whistler and left the group, their animated discussion carried away on the wind, and walked out to the point for the first time. The monument itself was a sad affair, weather-stained and neglected, the black engraved letters on it barely legible. Whoever had raised it there was long gone, and the reason they had done so long forgotten.
The world around me faded into some distant dimension as I crouched down to wipe my hand across the text, and only the words and the images they conjured had any presence in my consciousness.
Erected by the people of Lewis and friends in grateful memory of the men of the Royal Navy who lost their lives in the Iolaire disaster at the Beasts of Holm on the 1st January 1919. Of the 205 persons lost, 175 were natives of the island and for them and their comrades Lewis still mourns. With gratitude for their service and in sorrow for their loss.
I heard the sound of bikes starting up, and shouted goodbyes, as the group revved their engines and accelerated across the grass for the road home. I stood up, only to become immediately aware of a shadow at my shoulder. It was Whistler, a strange, bewildered look on his face. And beyond him, standing by his bike and staring out towards us, Big Kenny. Almost as if he were frightened to come and see for himself. All three of us had forgotten our fight by now, and the reasons for it. I searched Whistler’s eyes for some sign of understanding, and when I saw none, asked, ‘What’s the Iolaire?’
He shrugged. ‘No idea.’
There was a strange quality in the light that night. And when the bus passed the shieling with the green roof out on the Barvas moor, I felt a shiver run through me. And sensed, perhaps more than ever before, the presence of my mother and father at this spot where they had lost their lives.
By the time I got home the sky was an odd purple colour, streaked with grey, and all yellow along the horizon where the sun laid down its liquid gold from behind cloud you couldn’t even see. Across the Minch, the mountains of Sutherland were as clear as I had ever seen them. Which meant there was bad weather on the way.
I couldn’t get the old man out of my mind, and I suppose I must have been unusually quiet, for it was unlike my aunt to ask me what was wrong. She was a peculiarly disinterested woman, my aunt, self-contained and rarely given to shows of emotion. She never treated me badly, but I always sensed her resentment at having been burdened with the care of her little sister’s boy. As if somehow I had stolen her life from her. A life, it appeared to me, that was already over, and passing in sad isolation in the big white house overlooking the jetty beyond the village.
She sat at the dinner table in one of her colourful chiffon wraps, candles burning already along the mantle, the smell of incense and cigarette smoke heavy in the air, like some melancholy memory of another life in a sixties world of youth and hope.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Spit it out, Finlay.’ She never spoke to me in Gaelic. And she never called me Fin. Just about the only person in the world not to.
‘What was the Iolaire?’ I asked her.
She cast me a curious look. ‘Why do you ask about that?’
‘I saw the monument out at Holm Point today.’ I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell her about the old man.
Her eyes glazed over, gazing off into some distant past. She shook her head. ‘It’s something folk never really talked about. And today, I suppose, it’s all but forgotten.’
‘What happened?’
‘They say it was very nearly the worst maritime disaster in British peacetime history. Second only to the Titanic.’
‘And it happened here on Lewis?’ I was incredulous. Why had I never heard of it before?
‘On a black New Year’s morning on the rocks at the Beasts of Holm. Within sight of the lights of Stornoway harbour, and with hundreds of folk waiting at the pier.’ She was lost in silent thought for some minutes, and I didn’t dare speak in case she wouldn’t tell me any more. Finally she said, ‘It was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and God knows, enough of our menfolk had died already in that senseless conflict. But the rest were on their way home. Survivors all. Desperate to put their feet back on the island of their birth, and feel the arms of mothers and wives, sons and daughters around them.’
She liked a single glass of wine with her meal, my aunt. But that night she pulled the bottle towards her and poured a second.
‘They were Royal Navy Reservists,’ she said. ‘From Lewis and Harris. Dumped by the Ministry on to the pier at Kyle of Lochalsh off trains from Inverness. The rear admiral requisitioned an old tub of a steam-yacht called the Iolaire to bring back those of them that the MacBrayne’s mailboat couldn’t carry. More than two hundred and eighty as I recall.’ She shook her head. ‘Hopelessly inadequate it was. The men were in full uniform, and wearing heavy boots. Many of them didn’t have life jackets, and most couldn’t even find a seat.’ She took a sip from her glass. ‘A rough crossing it was, too. But they were within sight of home. They could see the lights of the harbour. It was claimed by some that the crew had been drinking whisky to celebrate the New Year. Whether or not that’s true we’ll never know, but the captain set the wrong course for the harbour and the Iolaire struck the reef at the Beasts.’
She stood up, taking her glass with her, and went to gaze from the window out over the bay below. She could see her own reflection in the glass, and adopted a pose that perhaps she thought conveyed the tragedy she described.
‘In fact, they were only a few yards from shore. That was the irony, after surviving all those years at war. The sea was wild, and many of them were simply dashed against the rocks. Others couldn’t swim. Didn’t know how.’ She glanced at Fin. ‘You know how it is with islanders.’ She returned her gaze to the window, raising her glass to her lips. ‘Some were middle-aged, others just teenagers. More than two hundred men died, nearly a hundred and eighty of them from the island. Some villages lost all their menfolk that night, Finlay. All of them.’
She turned back into the room. I couldn’t see her face properly against the last of the light from the window, just flickering features highlighted by her candles. It seemed hollow, like a skull, her hair a thin, wispy halo around her head.
‘I once heard the old men of the village talk about it. When I was a girl. The only time I can ever recall anyone speak of it. The bodies arriving back in Ness en masse. On horse-drawn carts that pulled four or six coffins apiece all the way up that long west coast road.’ She laid down her glass and lit a cigarette, and the smoke billowed around her head like breath on a frosty morning.
‘Did we lose someone? Our family, I mean?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘No. The Macleods of Crobost were one of the lucky ones. Your grandfather was a boy of nineteen, returning after just a year away. God knows how, but he survived.’ She looked at me, tipping her head at an oddly curious angle. ‘Your father’s father. You wouldn’t have been here today if he’d drowned like the rest.’ And I shivered, just as I had when the bus passed the shieling earlier in the evening.
‘Who was John Macleod?’ My own voice sounded very small. ‘Was he related?’
‘John Finlay Macleod, you mean?’ She drained her glass. ‘Not that I know of. That man was a hero by all accounts. Somehow he made it ashore with a line, right below where that monument is today, and as a result forty men’s lives were saved. Including your grandfather’s.’
I passed the weekend in a cloud of uncertainty and depression, unable to escape the thought of all those poor men surviving the war only to die on their own doorstep. And the fact that my grandfather had survived it lingered oddly in my mind like a faintly unpleasant taste in the mouth. It took me a while to identify it.
Guilt.
They say the survivors of major disasters are often afflicted by a sense of guilt. Why had they survived when so many others had not? I suppose I was experiencing it by association. If my grandfather had died like all the others, then
I wouldn’t have been there. And it made me wonder why I was.
The bad weather finally arrived on the Saturday night. Storm-force winds driving in from the south-west, big dark clouds, contused and bleeding rain. I watched it run down my window on a miserable Sunday, and couldn’t wait to be on the bus back to Stornoway in the morning.
The storm had passed by the Monday, but it was still overcast, dull light suffused with a grey-green, as if we were all somehow trapped inside a Tupperware box. But the wind had dried the roads and grasses already, and I tried to empty my mind on the bus ride to town by focusing on the bog cotton that danced among the peat.
There was no chance of me being able to concentrate on schoolwork, and straight off I made my way up through the town to where the library was housed in a jumble of half a dozen or so Portakabins on the corner of Keith Street. I thought they would probably keep archives of the Stornoway Gazette there. Yes, the woman at the issue desk told me. They kept the archives in a locked room to my right. What year would I be wanting to look at? 1919, I told her.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘A very popular year this morning, it seems. Are you doing a project at the Nicolson?’ And in response to my frown she said, ‘There’s another lad looking at microfilm of that same year in the Gaelic and Local History section down the hall.’
I found Whistler in the reference room, sitting at a table slowly spooling through the newspaper’s coverage of the Iolaire disaster. He turned as I came in, but said nothing. I pulled up a chair and sat down beside him to watch scratched and ageing images of words written long ago about a tragedy that folk never spoke of. They passed before my eyes like history itself.