Ardnish Was Home

by Angus MacDonald

  Angus MacDonald has lived all his life in the Highlands. He served in the local regiment, the Queen’s Own Highlanders, before building a financial publishing company that was sold in 2007. He now has businesses in recycling, renewables and education, and runs the Moidart Trust, a charitable organisation that helps people to develop companies in the West Highlands. He is married to Michie and has four sons – Archie, Jack, Jamie and Donald.

  First published in 2016 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Angus MacDonald 2016

  The moral right of Angus MacDonald to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978 1 78027 426 3

  eISBN: 978 0 85790 335 8

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

  Acknowledgements and Dedication

  Ardnish Was Home started as a short story and grew and grew. Holidays, starting at the millennium and for the next sixteen years, saw me rise ridiculously early and write for a few hours until we headed out to play. In between I would be collecting and collating the stories.

  As my siblings and I were being reared in the West Highlands, our father was the non-stop fount of these anecdotes, and we participated in the old ways of clipping the sheep, the gathering, stalking deer and building hay stacks. My grandfather would regale us with stories of his father, Colonel Willie, who plays a key role. It was my father too, who on reading the first few thousand words, encouraged me to persevere and complete the book.

  So, thanks to my father, Rory MacDonald, to whom I dedicate Ardnish Was Home, for providing both the tales and the inspiration to write it.

  AM

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note

  Ardnish is where God was born. Anyone who has been there on a day in early May, as the sun sets over Goat Isle, would see why it is a certainty.

  The peninsula is the most beautiful place on earth: the gentle hills behind the village; the towering mountains of An Stac and Roshven facing us, reflected in the sea on a calm day; the curve of the beach in front; and the islands of Eigg and Rum beyond. The clear air makes it feel as if the two islands are within reach although in fact it is a full day’s rowing to get to Eigg. Ardnish was home – it is where I belong – and every day I am away I yearn to return.

  Chapter 1

  WAR

  GALLIPOLI, OCTOBER 1915

  My eyes won’t open. My head is throbbing, and my wail of pain and fear brings running footsteps. There’s a girl, speaking in a language similar to Gaelic. I struggle desperately to get up – one arm is useless – and I hear the words, ‘You just lie there, boyo. We’ll get the doctor and get some morphine inside you.’

  My first spell of consciousness is agony. Flashing memories of the Turks’ brutality; my helplessness and inability to move. I hear a man’s voice as he takes my arm, then there’s a sharp jab and a soft cool cloth caresses my sweat-drenched face. A girl’s murmurings, like a lullaby, calm my anxiety, and I drift off to sleep . . .

  HOME

  I need to remember home; like me it is dying. My death knell is its death knell; a village that has been inhabited by my family for thousands of years is down to seven people, all of whom are over fifty. People don’t visit, the fields are deteriorating and a slow unhappy decline seems inevitable.

  *

  I see my parents outside; my mother’s knitting a pale blue woollen shawl and my father’s scraping down a reed for his bagpipes. They’re both laughing, and I remember why: we had two pet orphaned lambs and my brother and I were playing with them. I can picture my mother now, reaching out, drawing me to her, holding me tight.

  The journey to the place where I was born – and where my heart will go when I die – begins with the puffer from Oban to Mallaig. The boat visits a host of places that were visited by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, before calling at the pier in front of Inverailort Castle.

  As the boat steams up Loch Ailort, a finger of land some five miles long emerges, poking into the Atlantic. On the largest of its beaches, catching all the sun, wisps of smoke from a couple of the houses draw the gaze closer still. In front of the house on the left sits an old lady on a chair – my mother.

  The tide is high. The captain will run the boat up against the shore until stones scrape against the metal hull. In the next wee while, the boat will lie uncomfortably on her side as the water recedes and the crew help the passengers down a ladder and onto the seaweed-covered shore.

  The boat will be met by the laird, Mr Cameron-Head, and a couple of others, no doubt. Aboard will be a friend or two coming to stay for the summer and maybe a returning local who has been away at the university or working. Calum the Post will be there to collect the mail and put some parcels on the boat to be taken away. People will materialise from all over and coal, timber, wooden boxes of food and cloth, maybe a chest of drawers or some other furniture will be lifted over the side and carried, with difficulty, to the shore.

  The craic is good, with Mrs Cameron-Head appearing with tea for everyone, and when all is done, the crew and others head up to the inn for some food and to wait for the tide to come back in and refloat the boat. Then it will turn west and continue its voyage.

  It is a two-hour walk along the ridge, with the heather-covered land sloping down to the sea on each side. There will be a stag or two, I would warrant, and certainly some cattle. A plethora of birds will fly up from their nests, luring danger away from their nesting chicks. The path peters out on the hill above the village of Peanmeanach, where there is nothing to be done but soak in the magnificence of the setting.

  As the evening sun sets over the islands there is a warm glow over the crescent of houses; some just ruins now. One of the women, probably my mother, will have gone into the house to put the kettle on as she knows she has visitors.

  WAR

  ‘Now then, how are you feeling?’ A cool hand touches my forehead.

  ‘I’m thirsty. My eyes won’t open. Can you help me?’

  She returns with some water and props me up while I drink. Collapsing back onto the camp bed, I feel her take my hand. She bathes my sore eyes and tells me in as gentle a way as you can imagine that I have been blinded and my eyes had to be bandaged up to stop the sand getting in and to keep the flies away. She tells me my shoulder has taken a bullet, and they need to take a good look at it later, maybe on the hospital ship.

  As I lie in pain, in darkness, I can hear the rustle of her clothes and smell her scent. Her murmuring voice is so reassuring and comforting. The smell of cordite, the taste of tea being held to my lips, the noise of the battle all fade into the background when she is near. I feel as if I am in my mother’s arms again, and my muscles relax. The shivering subsides and the tension slips from my body as this extraordinary girl nurses me back from hell. I know she wants me to live and I am determined to do so �
�� for her, for Louise.

  As the minutes and hours tick past, the boom of the naval shelling from the shore where the engagement continues is carried up by the wind. There are a great many of us here, lying in rows in tents along the beach.

  I sense I am close to death, I am in so much pain, and I need to rely on senses other than eyesight. I pray to God that I will get better and that Louise and I will go to Ardnish and home.

  As dawn breaks, I listen to the groans of the injured and the agitated sounds of the nurses and medics moving wounded soldiers in and dead bodies out. We are given bread and strong coffee that makes us wince. The coffee has an unusual taste, but I am growing to like it. After the freezing cold of the night, the heat of the day penetrates the tents and I lie helpless, raking my hand back and forth on the sand.

  HOME

  My parents, Donald John and Morag Gillies, are the glue of the village. They are involved in everything. If they were to leave, so would everyone else. But they won’t.

  Then there is the old woman – or cailleach in the Gaelic – Eilidh Cameron. She must be about eighty, though she wouldn’t know for sure herself. Her husband never returned from the army when she was young and she never met anyone else. The whaler, because he was one once, is John Macdonald, and he and his wife Aggie are in their sixties. Quiet, gentle people. Their daughters emigrated to Australia some years ago and they haven’t seen them since. There is Mairi Ferguson, Sandy’s mother and great friend of my mother, and Johnny ‘the Bochan’, a bachelor who lives for his collie dogs. He must be in his seventies now. He has a house at Peanmeanach but prefers to stay in a bothy at Sloch at the west of the peninsula. The postie, in the smart new post office house, is John MacEachan, a local man, and handy at fixing anything at all.

  Mairi is a character like my mother, full of energy and go. Always a smile on her face, even when washing clothes in the burn in driving rain. Short and stocky, she’s permanently dressed from head to foot in tweed woven by herself, with a grey shawl over her shoulders, even on the hottest August day. She is a kindly woman who collects wood or peat for the old, and when someone is feeling poorly she’d have a poultice or herbal remedy made up to help them.

  I recall the wee wood about two hundred yards behind the village, not far off the path that takes you to the mainland. Whenever other children were around, Sandy and I would drag them off to our den by the burn in the wood. There was an oak with branches hanging over the burn with an excellent tree house that my father had helped build when we were wee, just as his father had done for him on the same branches thirty years before. The moss underneath was so deep that it came up to your ankles and was excellent for using as ammunition, and we had an old plough that we had dragged in, to use as a barricade. Often, whenever our mothers wanted to find a pan, or my father a tool, this is where they would come and look first.

  We didn’t learn for many years that my father was able to keep an eye on us by taking his old stalker’s telescope from behind the door, steadying it against the corner of the house and observing exactly what we were up to. So when we had promised to do our schoolwork in the tree house he knew with certainty that we were building a dam instead.

  WAR

  As I lie here my hand can reach down to touch the drones of the bagpipes that I know so well. If I die, will they be taken back to my family? Or buried beside me? I would like somebody to take them home. Maybe my commanding officer would; he knows how famous these pipes are. When Louise comes to my bed I tell her these pipes are important to the Highlands, would she get a message to Colonel Macdonald to ask him if he could get them back to my father?

  ‘No, DP. You’ll be carrying them back yourself and playing a tune as you do so,’ she replied, giving my shoulder a squeeze. This was typical of Louise. Although I couldn’t see her smile, I could sense it.

  Our family are the hereditary pipers to the Chieftains of the Macdonalds of Clanranald, with the bagpipes not so much an instrument of pleasure as a way of life. As I grew up it often seemed as though the sound of the chanter or the pipes themselves would fill the air, rebounding from the hills around the village. It was said that the Blackburns decided to build the great house of Roshven when they heard the pipers of Peanmeanach playing across the water after anchoring their yacht in the bay.

  These very pipes were played when Prince Charlie landed at Glenfinnan in 1745. They served with the 79th in Balaclava during the Crimean war and were in my father’s hands when my regiment, the Lovat Scouts, was raised to fight the Boers in South Africa in 1901. At least two of my ancestors were killed playing them, including my great-grandfather who was hacked to death with knives during the Indian mutiny. It seems I may well be the third.

  ‘Donald Peter?’ Louise’s voice. ‘The doctor’s here to look at you.’

  To look at me. That’s all he does, really.

  ‘Am I beyond saving?’ I ask him.

  He takes the bandage off my shoulder and mutters as he probes with his fingers, prising my glued eyes open. It hurts me, and I twist away from him and cry out.

  I hear a gasp from Louise. ‘Doctor Sheridan, the patient is in real pain!’

  There is a silence. I can feel the tension between the two of them.

  ‘And how do you feel today?’ he asks me distractedly.

  I feel a stethoscope against my chest. ‘The same, I think.’

  ‘It won’t be long before we have you on the hospital ship and back to Malta.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ I say, though I can hear that he has already hurried on. Louise goes, too, but not before giving my hand a reassuring pat.

  We injured are in a field station, tucked under a cliff where the Turks cannot shell us. There are maybe a hundred of us here, I am told, waiting until we get word that there is space on a hospital ship for us. The Gloucester Castle has taken a run to Malta with the last cargo of wounded and is due back in a week, we are told. So we wait.

  Every now and again someone slips away and the Turkish prisoners come and carry him out for burial. Like all my people, I am a Roman Catholic and I worry about not having a priest to hear my last confession, and being buried amongst non-believers. I hear that there is a priest amongst the injured but that he has a head wound and cannot talk or move. I would like to have him near me as I go.

  I look forward to the long sleepless nights, when Louise comes to talk. I do feel spoilt. I monopolise her time, I’m demanding, and when she is nearby I can usually find an excuse to call her over. It usually works. I know I get much more attention than the other men. I am selfish, though, and a couple of times she has put me in my place.

  One day had been particularly busy, with lots of casualties arriving.

  ‘Nurse, nurse,’ I had called out as I heard her pass, ‘would you help me sit up a bit?’

  She did, but said firmly, ‘DP, we’ve been working flat out for fifteen hours. There are thirty men I need to look after urgently, and you’re not one of them today.’

  An hour later, she came by with a bottle of water. ‘Have a sip, DP, and get some sleep. I’m off to get some rest myself.’

  My heart lifted again. I’d been forgiven.

  Tonight, though, things are quiet. Louise is on duty and comes to sit on my cot beside me. She is all mine. We talk about the scarce water supplies and how the hospital ships would be back from Malta with space for us injured.

  ‘But tell me how you came to be here,’ Louise says, her hand on my arm.

  ‘Louise, you won’t want to hear. It’s not exciting. My family lead a quiet life. It’s just us and a few others tucked away in the Highlands with our animals. I’ll bet you’ve had a much more interesting life with parties and everything.’

  ‘Not at all. Tell me about your life, DP. I want to know about your parents, your house and your animals.’

  We have the time; there is no gunfire, and dawn is a long way off. I lie in silence with only the murmur of the waves a few feet from the tent. I can hear Louise breathing as she sits patiently,
knowing I’m going to talk. I know that if I stretch out my hand it will touch her.

  HOME

  I am only twenty-one, although I have seen as much of the Great War as anyone. My brother had just been ordained as a priest, and he and I signed up in 1914; opting for the Scouts, of course.

  Although only a year, it seems a lifetime ago that Colonel Willie MacDonald walked into Ardnish and declared that I was to join him to fight the Bosche. I was just back from two years on Canna and had no plans. To take the King’s shilling was the obvious thing to do; it was a tradition in the family.

  The Colonel and my father had served together thirteen years before against the Boers in South Africa, and we knew, when war broke out, that we would join him; it was unthinkable that we would do otherwise. The Colonel’s brother, Father Andrew, was a monk at Fort Augustus Abbey and knew my family well; he came to stay with my father from time to time and loved to go and fish in the hill lochs above the village.

  The Lovat Scouts had a great Boer War and were praised by everyone. The Highland men’s ability to spy the ground and report on troop movements saved countless lives. My father was proud of what they had achieved and valued highly the friendships he forged at that time.

  I tell Louise that my father has a wooden leg, and she asks me how it happened . . .

  *

  Camped up overnight in South Africa, the Boers attacked in the darkness, filling the officers’ tent with a fusillade of fire before turning on the troops and horse lines. The commanding officer, Colonel Murray, ordered an immediate bayonet charge before himself being killed. There was chaos. Many men were killed as they fled to the safety of the other Lovat Scout camp nearby. My father, however, lay in the darkness with a bullet in his thigh thinking his time was up, as the Boers celebrated wildly all around.

  But then, at first light, Lord Lovat led a horse-mounted charge, and the Boers were routed.

  By the time they got my father onto a ship, gangrene had set in, and so they took off the leg above the knee. He is now back at home – grateful for the War Office pension and the fact that he can still pipe. He can still ride a garron and hobble around the place on his false leg; in fact there is precious little he cannot do around the village. In some ways, he thinks it’s a blessing; they have plenty of money to buy what they need, and even if he had two sound legs he wouldn’t earn as much by a long shot on Ardnish.