Ardnish Was Home

by Angus MacDonald

  ‘What a shambles they are,’ scoffs Prissie. ‘They look just like armed peasants.’

  ‘Well, they beat a hundred thousand of our finest men,’ I reply.

  I can swim, but neither Prissie nor Louise can, and getting Marc across the river is likely to be impossible. Louise decides to go down to the river and see if there are any crossing points. In the evening light, Prissie watches her, hunched over like an old woman, making her way slowly down to the river and along its bank, two hundred yards away and in full view of a thousand Turkish troops. There are some goats grazing down there; hopefully they’ll assume they belong to her.

  I can only sit, tense with fear, and pray for her safe return.

  She comes back just as it is growing dark, mud up to her knees, with the news that the road bridge is the only way across.

  ‘The river is wide and deep, and very muddy along the banks,’ she says. ‘There’s no way we can get across. All the locals must use the road bridge.’

  What can we do? We decide to rest up and gather our thoughts. Lying head to head, we talk about Prissie’s shot.

  ‘My first murder,’ she says, her voice heavy with horror. ‘What if he was just coming to offer us food?’

  ‘He had a gun, and it was pointed at us. You did the right thing, Prissie. We would be dead now, or worse – handed across to the Turkish army,’ I say, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. ‘People bringing you supper don’t threaten you with guns.’

  ‘Still, though, I’ll never forget the look on his face when he was hit,’ Prissie whispers.

  We chew on our goat meat, and lie shivering in the cold in silence. We would have to cross the bridge at night, and head into the hills beyond where the peninsula ended and the land stretched to the town of Kesan, and then west. We might only be thirty miles from the border now.

  Under a full moon, we set off towards the road. It’s a big risk, but what would be the point in delaying? The chaos of the war might mean that there is a gap between the groups of soldiers along the route and we can slip through, unobserved. Will our donkey alert everyone, or will the horses along the road stamp and whinny as we approach?

  We wait about three hundred yards from the road while Louise crawls forward to see if there is an opportunity. Prissie and I sit in a hollow, wrapped up in our blankets, shivering. If there are any alert sentries they might challenge us, but with the battle lost and everyone homeward bound we can’t believe local peasants would be of much interest to them.

  Louise comes back. She’s had trouble finding us again. ‘Everyone is lying asleep by the road,’ she whispers. ‘They might wake up, but we’ve got a chance of passing through quickly. We must go now, though. I don’t think it’s going to be safer any other time.’

  I am helped up onto Marc. My stomach is churning with fear as we approach. We seem to be making a hell of a noise. Marc is snapping every twig underfoot, although luckily he’s not braying. The worst thing is, I can see next to nothing; my wretched eyes are useless in the gloom. How close are we? Is anyone stirring? Is that a soldier lifting his gun? I have to trust to fate.

  The donkey lurches up a bank, and I hang on tightly. I can hear Turkish horses snickering at our arrival and there are fires glowing dimly all along the road far into the distance. We go along a hard road for a few minutes, before dropping down the other side. Once again I feel the long grasses against my legs.

  We’ve made it.

  I have never been so nervous in my life. Sweat is pouring off me. An agonising twenty minutes later, we stop and I am helped off the donkey. For a few moments, we all hold each other for support. Louise starts laughing – sheer relief after all the anxiety. We are all trembling. We must have been only a few feet away from men who were sleeping and we seemed to have made a din like an army charging, but we have got away with it.

  ‘I could definitely hear men talking, really close by,’ says Prissie. ‘If one near us had woken we would have had a hundred of them all around us in seconds.’

  We head closer to the sea and keep moving along the plain, parallel to the road, for a couple of miles. We push through an overgrown path, grasses up to our chest. We are now a good mile away from the Turkish troops.

  By mid morning we arrive in the foothills and settle down to rest, camping down by the sea in a little inlet. Offshore are two very striking islands; even with my vision I can see their outline, like two whales, a mother and calf. Listening to the murmuring of the sea and the cries of the seabirds reminds me of home. We feel safe here. We can’t be seen from the hills above or from the road. It is almost warm as Louise and I lie together, almost touching.

  I drift off to sleep and wake to see her looking very intently at me. She looks guilty, like a child caught stealing a biscuit. I smile; she smiles.

  We risk a fire that evening, collecting dry driftwood along the shore so that there is minimal smoke. As the birds wheel about and call, I talk about the birds at Ardnish . . .

  HOME

  My mother always talked about wildlife, but it is birds she likes the most. She and Mrs Blackburn sometimes went on bird-spotting trips together; they came to Canna to see puffins when I was working out there. There are eagles at Meoble, and along the shore of Loch Shiel, we once went up and saw an eyrie when Mother was there doing the lambing. They fly over Peanmeanach and get mobbed by the hoodie crows. On the beach, there are flocks of dunlins which run back and forth in time with the waves; they are incredibly endearing. Then we have terns, lots of gulls, some eider duck and even some corncrake that live in the big field behind the village. And there is a cormorant that sits like an old black widow on a rock on the beach. My mother has Mrs Blackburn’s book of bird paintings and she shows us which is which.

  WAR

  We reckon we are more than halfway to the border. We wake early, untether the donkey and set off, in heavily scented pine woods now. But the weather is deteriorating. Cold, unrelenting rain soaks us through. Our woollen clothes grow heavier, and we are feeling utterly miserable. We all know we will become sick if we spend the night out in this.

  We battle on for a few hours, before admitting defeat and taking shelter under a big rock for most of the day. We don’t speak, just watch the water pouring down the flanks of our donkey as it stands with its ears flattened and head down. In the evening, we head off again, Prissie ahead of us. We are not as cautious as before.

  Prissie dashes back to tell us she has seen candlelight in a window. We whisper a plan of action. We have to do the same as the last time and hope that the result will be as successful. I am left on the donkey so that if all goes wrong they can come running back and we can escape into the darkness. As it happens, it is just a sweet old man who sits nodding as we set up camp around him. His house is in a dreadful state; I can see through the roof in some places and there is a bare earthen floor with puddles. There is only one room with a raised bed in the corner, a table and stool. Within half an hour, we have our wet clothes steaming by a roaring fire and the girls are cooking some of our chicken. We share it with the old man who is most grateful. He doesn’t seem to have any food in the house at all. He must be ninety years old at least, and he is as deaf as a post.

  Chapter 9

  WAR

  We talk into the early hours, huddled round the fire in scratchy and no doubt flea-infested blankets, as the old man snores quietly.

  Although Prissie doesn’t have the lovely singsong voice of the Welsh Valleys that Louise has, it took me a while to gather that she was from Liverpool. Having had so little to do with people from outwith the West Highlands I struggle to guess where people are from. I persuade her to tell me a bit about herself.

  Louise and I lean against each other and listen as her story unfolds . . .

  PRISSIE

  My father was a docker at the Albert Docks in Liverpool. He was a big strong man and made a good wage loading and unloading the huge freight ships that came and went from the empire. Liverpool was a great place to work. It was said
that forty per cent of the world’s trade went through the dockyards there. The pay was good, and there were always treats that came our way from loads that were spilled – the dockers would squirrel some away to take home. For instance, I’d had a pineapple years before any of my friends, and even bananas arrived on our table a couple of times a year.

  Liverpool Docks had thousands of working men, and when the horn blasted for shift changes, the crowds pouring up the road and into the town were amazing to see. They were all men, all wearing hats, all smoking, and all wearing black or brown, dirty and tired from carrying big loads to and from the ships. Lugging sacks of coal for twelve hours a day was hard work.

  When my sisters, Colleen and Caitlin, and I were young, there was always a gap somewhere in the fence that went around the docks that we could slip through at night. We’d wander around, and now again the Port police would give us a hell of a fright. We’d end up sprinting around the boxes and bales being chased by huge men wielding sticks. My parents were furious when Caitlin let slip one day where we had been, and we were made to promise not to go through the wire again. ‘Your dad will lose his job if they find out!’ my mother said.

  The place was intoxicating. We were in awe of the Cunard and White Star liners, on which the rich would head off to New York or Argentina. Then there were the grain ships leaving and the meat loads arriving. Horses pulling carts, the steam and whistles of the trains as they pushed and pulled loads across the docks. The men were all colours – coolies from China and blacks from Africa – and it was all part of the excitement and wonder of the place.

  Because Dad’s job was important for the war effort he didn’t get called up to fight, and because of the war our family prospered. There were fewer men available to work, and the supply ships that set off for Gallipoli and other places of war tended to go from Liverpool.

  Dad was fanatical about football and used to go and watch Everton every Saturday afternoon, even taking the train to Manchester or Blackburn. He was a good man. He didn’t drink too much, never laid a hand on Mother, and made good money.

  My parents were lucky to get good jobs. Being Catholic, Mother would avoid any conversation about religion. ‘If anyone at school calls you a Fenian teag or anything like that, ignore them, and don’t get into a fight.’

  There had been a bad time last year, though. Dad was guiding a big bale of cotton that had come from America onto the dock. Three men were feeding the rope through the block-and-tackle when one of them slipped. The rope ripped through his hands and the bale landed heavily on Dad. He broke his arm, the bone sticking through the skin. He was in agony.

  There were so many injuries at the docks that they had their own doctors, and within the hour they had given him some morphine, reset the bone, bandaged it up, and sent him home. There were few places in England where you would be sorted as well as that. He did have ten weeks on no pay, though, which was difficult, though luckily my parents had some savings put away in the building society.

  My mother was a matron in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, which was said to be the best in the world. She loved her job and went off to work each day in her starched and spotless uniform. We were terribly proud of her. I was always going to be a nurse, from my earliest days. Sometimes she would work nights and sometimes a day shift, so with both parents away we girls had the run of the city. By God, she was strict, though, and if we hadn’t done our school work or our daily chores, we got a thrashing from Dad when he came home.

  Because Mum and Dad both had good jobs, we had a comfortable life and lived in a good house in a nice area. My sister Colleen was very clever. She read all day and loved going to school. Her teacher came to Mum one day when Colleen was thirteen and said that there was a chance she could get to university. She could apply to the Blue Coat School, which had just moved to new buildings out of town. It was set up for orphans, but they had some vacancies and she could sleep there during the week.

  At first, Colleen didn’t want to go, but Mum came up with the idea that she could try and study to be a doctor – one of the first female doctors! Florence Nightingale had come from near our home, so anything to do with medicine was a big thing for all the girls in our house. Anyway, she sat the exams and got in; there was great excitement. Both Caitlin and I were quite jealous, but we were proud, too. The Blue Coat children were very obvious in the city centre as they wore such old-fashioned clothing.

  Despite the prosperity of Liverpool, there had been terrible unrest in the years coming up to the war. The city was sucking in people, many from Ireland like our family who had come for work. The old people from the city resented the Catholic flood and created areas that we weren’t allowed to live in. Men would be beaten and women would fight like vixens. On Thursday nights, the men would be given their pay, and the women would be at the gates of the docks where they would meet the men, take the pay packet and give some of it back so they could go down to the pub. Late that night, the wife would go down and find her man and lead him unsteadily back to the house; some had it easier than others.

  There were some ports that wouldn’t employ Catholics, and there was even the stoning of the Catholic bishop’s carriage by a handful of ruffians a few years ago. This coincided with a number of strikes that brought the ports to a halt, and the army was called in. It became known as Bloody Sunday, when strikers were killed by police. A gun-boat was even sent to the Mersey.

  I wanted to get away. A Scouser I will always be, but I don’t want to live there. When recruitment for the war was in full flow, I took my chance.

  Mum told me about the Queen Alexandra nurses. Quite a few were trained in Liverpool, and she knew one of their matrons a bit, so we had her round for tea. She arrived in her beautiful uniform, with a scarlet cape that only the officers wore. She spoke about the travel to distant countries, how the soldiers were so grateful for the help, and what fun all the nurses had together. Before the war, there were less than 300 of us, and we had to be over twenty-five, but she explained that there was now a huge recruitment drive – they were keen to have another 2,000 nurses as soon as possible.

  Mum was so flustered before she came. Everything was scrubbed and polished, and fancy cakes were baked. ‘She’s very posh,’ she warned us, ‘but very nice, too.’

  I finished school in June, and within a month I had been for my interview. A week later, I was offered a place on their training course. There were great celebrations in our house – the neighbours all came round and so did my schoolfriends. I showed them pictures in the recruitment flyers of the scarlet-and-grey uniforms and the white hats like nuns they wore. Everyone was very impressed, and my mum was especially proud of me.

  So I headed off down to the outskirts of London, to a big red-brick military hospital, with a wing that was set aside for our training and accommodation, and found myself in the bed beside my now best friend – Louise.

  WAR

  I bombard Prissie with questions. Does she have a boyfriend? Did she do well at school? Had she had fights with Protestants herself? But it seems she has told us all she is prepared to, for the time being.

  Louise piles more of the wood onto the fire and we eventually doze off. We are lying in smelly old blankets on hard ground, but it is bliss being sheltered from the rain and wind outside.

  After a terrible sleep we pull on our damp clothes. Louise gets the fire going and Prissie puts water on for coffee. After a week of travelling, I badly need a wash and a shave.

  I sit in my underwear with a bowl of hot water and a cloth and try to give myself a wash, but when I twist my shoulder it stings. Louise sits beside me and, without saying a word, takes the cloth. In complete silence, she moves the cloth all over my body; it feels like a declaration of devotion. Not a word is said. Her breathing and my heart pounding. I now know for certain she feels the same about me. As she wipes my face, she doesn’t catch my eye. I can see that she is blushing . . . Despite my pain and the cold, I smile like a contented cat.

  We aim to re
ach the outskirts of Kesan – maybe ten or fifteen miles away, we guess. The little donkey is quickly becoming a good friend. I must be a heavy load, despite being so underweight, and he has eaten little since we left, although we always try to find him grazing when we stop.

  Animals can sense things. Sea birds come inland before a big storm, for example. I heard of a man whose dog barked and barked and kept pulling a man away from under a big tree in a storm. He was just out of the way when there was a crack and a huge branch came down just where he had been standing. Maybe Marc is aware of my incapacity and senses I need help.

  We are startled when two children come around a bend. They say something, and we smile and wave our hands in a friendly greeting. They run past us. We’re fairly sure they’ll just think of us as strangers passing through the area. They look like children in the Highlands: smiling faces, well-darned clothes, barefoot. Maybe they’re off to school. Fortunately, the weather is getting better. We decide to rest behind a wall for a while, eating the last of the bread and honey and soaking up the sun.

  Louise and Prissie can see smoke from the town of Kesan a couple of miles away. There is a stretch of flat land in between, with little cover for us. The town has a mosque in the middle. There are people in the surrounding fields herding sheep and goats and heading into town with laden pack animals. We know there is a large army camp on the outskirts, but we haven’t seen any patrols. They clearly believe that the battle has been won and they are not in danger. We have no intention of getting any closer to the Turkish army than we have to, though.

  As we skirt around the town we notice a signpost on the road to Ipsala, which is the main border crossing. It is about thirty miles away, so maybe four days’ travelling at our gentle pace. We decide to risk moving a bit faster by going along the road early in the morning and resting up during the day. Because the area is so flat, we have at least a mile of good visibility and warning of other people. We are feeling a bit more confident now. We no longer expect to encounter armed men behind every bush.