by Memory
And maybe kindness matters. For despite things, this other bonny lad kept coming to the house. Andrew MacDonell, bringing meat and fish and laughter. He was invited inside and talked for hours on end in the evening with Anna and he listened to Elizabeth, and he loved Anna and she loved him. She loved him simply because he was fun to be with. He cared. It was that rare thing: tenderness.
He was a fisherman and said that of course he’d be pleased to bring up a fairy-bairn, for to do so was to bless the child and the new parents, and to do that was to bless the whole world. He was no simpleton. Just simply knew that to say something was to bring it into being. And despite all the prevailing taboos he asked her one morning to go out on the small boat with him to fish, for ‘all that stuff about lassies on board was nonsense’, and so they sailed round the point out towards the skerries where the fishing was best, and that day they took the best catch Andrew ever had. Saithe, herring, mackerel, cod and ling.
‘Och, love grows,’ he said as he threw back the smaller, living fish into the sea. And though it was nothing new, it moved her. For she too knew that the value of words is in the person who utters them, not in the words themselves.
And he told her a grand story about the first ever wedding, and said they too should also have a wedding like that.
‘For the first wedding ever held,’ he said, ‘was on Little Christmas Eve. On the 5th of January. There was a big company gathered at the wedding, and they had plenty to eat and drink. And Our Saviour was there and his mother. The drink, you see, gave out as the night wore on, and the young couple were embarrassed that the drink hadn’t held out till morning for the company. And the Glorious Virgin noticed, you see, that the young couple were unhappy about it, and she told her son to make more drink. So he gave an order then to fill the vessels with water, and every vessel in the house was filled with water, and he made wine of every drop of it, and as he did that from then till morning for the newly married pair, it is said that ever since the water becomes wine on Little Christmas Eve. The wedding was in Cana,’ Andrew said. ‘That is in Heaven, I suppose.’
He asked her to marry him. She said yes and asked if they’d have wine at their wedding and he said no, just water, which would then turn into wine. And she asked if it would be in a church, and he said no, it would be outside, for that was God’s church, and she asked if there would be a minister, and he said, yes to sign papers for everyone needed papers now, but if she preferred they could just get married where they were, but they finally agreed to get married by the cairn up on the cliff where everyone could see them and celebrate with them, which is what happened.
And then they went by horse and cart over the hill to the kirk in the next valley where they were blessed and signed papers and returned afterwards to hold a ceilidh in the barn where everyone danced and sang and drank all the miraculous water they could find which tasted so sweet and heady while baby John slept in the straw.
Elizabeth permitted herself to die. She’d been fighting the illness for a while, and would have withered away had it not been for Anna. Consumption it was called then, when tuberculosis attacked the lungs, bringing coughs, fever, night sweats and weight loss. Mere willpower kept Elizabeth alive while she caressed Anna through the valleys, and that life was further extended when Andrew MacDonell starting coming about the house, for in Gaelic the disease she had was called ‘Glacach nan Dòmhnallach’ or ‘the MacDonald’s Disease’, because it was believed that there were particular tribes of MacDonalds who could cure it with the charms of their touch and the use of a certain set of words. But there must be no fee given of any kind for the touch or for the words.
So Andrew, being of that tribe, came to her aid. Elizabeth lay down on the bed and Andrew took her flesh and bones and sinews and joints asunder and rubbed butter onto her body. He worked her arms in all directions, her knuckles meeting behind her back. Her shoulder-blades were pressed and worked to and fro and every fibre of the upper part of her body thoroughly massaged. Anna made the linaments out of heron oil and the powder of deer’s antlers. She made Elizabeth drink milk warm from the cow from a clay crock.
After every massage Andrew would rinse his hands in cold water in the running stream, otherwise the disease would be transferred to the next thing he touched. Andrew also had the spoken charm which he chanted as he massaged his mother-in-law: I trample on thee, evil wasting, as tramples swan on brine, thou wasting of back, thou wasting of body, thou foul wasting of chest. May Christ’s own Gospel be to make thee whole, the Gospel of the Healer of healers, the Gospel of the God of grace, to remove from thee thy sickness in the pool of health from the crown of thy head to the base of thy two heels, from thy two loins thither to thy two loins thither, in reliance on the might of the God of love and of the whole Powers together – the love of grace.
And whether it was the physical touch, or the spoken charm, or the need to stay alive until Anna and Andrew and John were settled didn’t matter, for Elizabeth survived long enough to see the future and was buried on a clear winter’s day in the ancient graveyard, surrounded by a trinity of love.
8
When the new century dawned, Anna and Andrew built a new house for themselves further down the glen, nearer the river and where the pasture was better. The passing of the Act of 1886 had given them all security of tenure, so bit by bit families began to improve their crofts, freed from the fear of eviction. It was, at long last, worthwhile building that new byre, extending the pasture land, draining and improving the soil. Progress was practical rather than visionary.
They spent a couple of years gathering enough stones to build a house and by the time the Boer War ceased they were in their new home. It had a bit of space – a fire-room, a closet-room for themselves, a sleeping-room for the children and a byre for the animals. The fishing was good and the market improved with the opening of the railway line to the south, allowing Andrew to send fish down as far as the London stalls. Billingsgate became a magic word. Anna had a loom and made tweeds which she also began posting south. At the school there was now a lady teacher, a Miss Tulloch, who was as gentle as a lamb and taught all manners of things, from sewing to science, with grace and wisdom and wit.
Anna and Andrew had four children of their own besides John. Three girls – Isobel, Mairead and Sandra, and a boy, Magnus. The best years are when the children are young and no-one dies or is ill. They learned and played, and afterwards Anna thought that the sun had shone for twenty years. They ran about barefoot and guddled the streams and imagined they were deep-sea sailors and brought shells home from the shore which were gold bullion from shipwrecks, and coloured pebbles from the streams, which they transformed into castles. The king or queen of the castle was always the person who could build the highest wall and all of them quickly learned that the best way to do that was to build thick from the bottom. It was no use just piling one stone on top of another. The first one always had to be long and flat and the others diminishing in size until the wall reached the sky. The child whose wall stood last and longest would shout out across the valley ‘I’m the king of the castle, you’re all dirty wee rascals’, and order the beaten vassals to do chores for them. Lick their feet, or hand over all their pebbles as a forfeit, or promise to serve and obey them for the rest of their lives.
And perhaps the rest of their lives were shadows played out in that sharp sunshine. John was eighteen, Isobel sixteen, Mairead fourteen, Sandra twelve and Magnus seven when their father Andrew died in a fishing accident in 1910. No-one could explain why it happened – the old women who would have found a reason had all gone. Anna, herself just thirty-six, took the decision to leave the croft and go south to Inverness, for the sole reason that she believed her children would have better prospects there. They were good at school and Miss Tulloch helped to persuade her that they would all be better off in the town, where there was a very good Academy for the younger children and where there would be plenty of jobs available for John and Isobel, who were both very bright. Miss
Tulloch had relatives in Inverness who were merchants and she said she would write letters of recommendation to them.
Which is how Anna came to be a children’s nurse and chaperone in the home of the ironmonger Albert Fetlar and his wife Eunice, who had twin girls aged five. Fetlar also had a flat in the town which he gave to Anna in return for her domestic services, along with promises that John could start work any time as an indentured clerk in his business, for he was a bright, honest lad who could count well. Though John had no desire to be a clerk and made noises about joining the Army, which was based out in the splendid barracks nearby at Fort George. He’d seen them marching through the town on Saturdays and could hear their gunfire at night across the firth. So John signed up with the Seaforth Highlanders and was given training and their bonny uniform and then despatched to India with the 1st Battalion.
They sailed from Southampton on the Kinellan on the 1st of May via the South African route and arrived in Bombay two months later. His letters speak of the heat and the smell, and the initial marvel of such names as Agra and Dagshai and Ferozopre and Peshawar, which soon became as familiar to him as his native Gaelic names, Achadh Garbh, Dail an t-Seilich, Fearann Oisein and Peighinn Iubhair. One of his letters describes the sun as a furnace of flames and the smell of India like that of cooking herring on a peat fire. So many people just died, or went mad.
John’s illegitimacy was never mentioned by his parents or siblings, but the shame of it drifted in the air outside like the smell of rotting tangle from the shore. As an infant he sensed difference, but he was seven before he first heard the word ‘bastard’, though he thought nothing of it because he didn’t know what it meant. But he knew that the word was directed at him, and retained it like a small wound. Some years later he fell out with some of the bigger boys at school, who instantly used the word again when he knew what it meant.
‘You bastard,’ they shouted. ‘Son of the horse.’
They would make clip-clopping noises as he passed, and neighed towards him, and some of the girls took to chanting the miller songs. God only knows how they all knew.
I don’t suppose that joining the Seaforths had anything to do with all that, though the manly nature of war covered all kinds of scars. India was a melting pot of misfits, from the impoverished sons of Welsh miners to the gay sons of the squires of the shire, most of them dying to resist their fate. It was the survival of the fittest and it surprised John to learn that the race didn’t always go to the strong. Often they were the ones who broke early, their outward brawn a mere mask for hurt and fragility. And yet the scrawniest and least likely survived and thrived and became heroes out in the east, commanding regiments, slaughtering natives, and establishing the great Empire upon which the sun never set. They all learnt the basic things out there, in the tented whorehouses and the wooden beer shacks, where they became men or sank. For John, as for all the other soldiers, the local people were invisible, apart from those who served the camps or died in battle.
There were so many ways to survive. To keep your head down and get on with it. To brazen it out. To hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing. To dodge and dive, to believe in it all and ascend. John kept his head down, though his subsequent history tells that if you keep your head under water for too long you run out of oxygen. At least he didn’t get the clap or die of sunstroke. And then the Great War itself came and his battalion were brought back, this time via the Suez Canal on The Lancaster to Marseille.
They marched north in the sunshine towards the unknown mud, where he distinguished himself time and again in his service for king and country, at La Bassée, the First Battle of Messines, Armentieres and the Battle of Loos. From there, in December 1915, they were sent to Mesopotamia in the war against the Ottoman Empire, where he survived the battles at Sheikh Sa’ad, Wadi, Hanna, Dujailia and Sannaiyat, and earned his Gallipoli Star for his bravery in the fall of Kut and the subsequent capture of Baghdad.
The end of the war saw him serving in Egypt and Palestine, where he was finally wounded at the Battle of Megiddo and invalided home. He learned that the only thing that mattered, whether in the trenches or going over the top, was doing your best for your comrades. Just get on with it. And the worst of all things was to hide from whatever fate had in store for you. Others then called the first heroism and the second cowardice. You either got killed or you didn’t, for a shell would get you whether you were crouching and hiding or standing and fighting.
He stayed with his sister Mairead, who was the schoolmistress in one of the town’s schools. John loved Inverness in these glorious days after the war, when all was peace and silence. Until quite recently, there were those who remembered John, with his distinctive limp, walking in the gardens down by the river where he would go twice daily to feed the ducks and the wild swans. He’d been wounded by shrapnel above the left hip, and though the army doctors had done their best, the hip-bone was damaged and he would forever walk with a limp. He would occasionally shadow box by himself down by the river. He especially loved shinty, and even though incapacitated was still able to play in goals for the local team down at the Haugh, where he became renowned for being able to stop any ball in the air from a standing position simply by raising his stick in the air with a single hand.
But he began to hear noises. Dull thuds which made him jump and howling sounds which prevented him from sleeping. After a while he began to hear voices. He was to go down to the river every day and wash his handkerchief in the Ness and after the fifth washing he would be given a message written on the corner of the cloth. So every morning he began to limp down to the river and crouch there washing the handkerchief and reading the secret signs. It was from Oliver Cromwell, telling him that he had been chosen to set up the New Commonwealth and that the flag-raising for the movement should take place on Mayday on the top of Tomnahurich Hill. Meantime he was to go down to the river every morning to receive further instructions about this Second Commonwealth.
Voices tell you what to do. They cajole and persuade and tempt and instruct in the sweetest and harshest varieties known to man. Soft and low and high and shrill, male and female, young and old. They accuse. You bastard. They praise. There you go, my bonny lad. They question. Are you sure? They tempt. Go on. They encourage. You can do it. They lie. You can’t. They flatter. All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
The same low voice as his sergeant-major had at Fort George, and the same thin voice as his commanding officer at Agra. Instructions to stand, march, dig, run, sleep, dress, shoot, kill, die. Voices telling him about jiga-jig for a rupee, the voices of the loose-wallahs and the prayer-wallahs and the vegetable-wallahs and the beer-wallahs, shouting that they could cure cholera and enable him to have a permanent erection, and the voice of the Goat-Major pleading for them not to sacrifice the animal. Voices telling him that it would soon be all over, that justice and peace and righteousness would reign, that the desert would bloom like the rose, that poppies would grow in the mud, that there would be homes fit for heroes. And in the trenches he would sometimes remember the school lessons he had, about Oliver Cromwell and how he had beheaded the king and established a commonwealth, and an old woman he knew up north who advised her son not to go anywhere near Inverness ‘because it’s full of the dregs of Cromwell’s Army’. And here he was now, the great man himself, giving him direct instructions to carry on his good work. And who better to carry out his instructions than he who had faithfully followed every instruction given to him by his superiors in India and France and Mesopotamia and survived?
His sister took him to see Doctor Russell, who wrote out the official certificate which saw him admitted for the first time into the Northern Counties District Lunatic Asylum at Craig Dunain, two miles west of the town. It was a beautiful building with gorgeous gardens and like all asylums was filled with the mad, the grieving and the broken-hearted. Everyone from girls who’d had illegitimate children to homosexuals, from Napoleon Bonaparte MacKenzie to those who spen
t years rocking backwards and forwards in foetal positions in the lobbies or in the gardens.
John MacDonell’s official medical diagnosis reads:
The patient has been behaving in an obsessive manner for a while. He is convinced he hears voices and consequently goes down to the River Ness every morning to wash his handkerchief and receive instructions from Oliver Cromwell. These voices and delusions may have been triggered by his war-time experiences. The patient was in India where he was of good conduct. His Army medical records show that he had malaria. He also took part in the campaign on the Western Front and then later in Mesopotamia, where he distinguished himself before being badly wounded by shrapnel. He shows no violent tendencies and is not a danger to anyone. His physical symptoms are also consistent with other patients who have suffered from shell-shock. He is of good intelligence and the prognosis is good.
Dr William T Russell, Academy Street, Inverness.
It was a beautiful summer’s day. The rhododendrons and azaleas in the hospital gardens were in full bloom and the bees were dining on the clover. Every bird in God’s universe was singing its little heart out, as if there was not enough time to celebrate the summer. They passed the pond where dozens of men and women were out feeding the ducks. Three men were rolling down the slope of grass in perfect unison. A lady with a parasol was dancing over by the fountain.
His mother Anna and his sister Mairead accompanied him to the hospital. They were all filled with fear. Not of the unknown, for that is nothing. But of the imagined unknown, or at least of the unknown about which they’d heard so many rumours and tales and stories. This place of horror and darkness. Of folk being chained up and locked in darkened rooms and being gagged and beaten and jumping out of windows. Everyone in Inverness had heard the howls when the moon was full and bright. But worse, the stigma of being labelled a lunatic, and all it meant: failure.