their drone of engines.
The comfort of celestial song
being sung in heaven
as they veer down,
spotting some survivors
upon a boat within the waves.
In that act of mercy,
grey pinions are transformed
into gold wings that mark them
as messengers of God.
2
Before that night, he had heard others talk about the dangers of flying over that island.
There was the distraction of its cliffs and skerries (‘They come out of nowhere at you and – whoosh! – you have to pull the plane right back to get out of their way…’). There were the seabirds circling its cliffs (‘They’re all around you… All around you.’) One or two even mentioned the voices they had heard when they flew across its length. Talk and song filled the cockpit; waves of gibberish crackled and hissed like static on their radio. Some of it wasn’t unlike the wail of the Gaelic psalms they had heard reverberating from inside the walls of the kirks around Tiree (‘A weird sound… Like cats in heat’). Sitting in the mess, Neil had laughed and dismissed all that talk, thinking it was mainly the legacy of late-night drinking, the fantasies of war-fevered men who had been too long away from home. Like them, there was much to which he wanted to go back to, a girl waiting in Creiginish to whom he could whisper Gaelic words and phrases too secret and private to ever express to those he met in Crosapol, Scarinish, the villages of Tiree…
That was the case until the evening he and the fellow members of his crew flew across that far island. It had veered up in front of him; the fog clearing from its length and breadth the way he had sometimes seen it fading from the French communities of Cheticamp and St Joseph du Moine while fishing on his father’s boat in his youth. On the look-out for German submarines and ships skirting the coastline of Scotland, far out to sea, its cliffs and birds had come as a surprise to him. Even more so was the line of houses in the island bay.
‘Go closer, Neil,’ His navigator, David yelled at him. ‘Let’s have a closer look at that strange place.’
‘OK…’
He had taken the Hudson down lower, scanning the cleits that dotted the hillside like small, grey ruins, saw what looked like a church and manse. A store stood there too, squat beside the island harbour. It was all very different from The Reef, the flat stretch of land where the airfield was in Tiree.
‘Does anyone live there?’ a voice asked.
‘No… It’s uninhabited. People left there some ten years ago or so.’
‘Damn… No wonder. It’s pretty remote.’
It was then that Neil heard the voices. Soft and tender, they whispered above the racket of the engine, sounding like the talk of people he had left behind in Cape Breton before this conflict had taken him from its shores.
‘Trobhad…’
‘Thig an seo…’
There was an undercurrent of Gaelic psalm, rising like a wave from the land below. The verse washed over him, its sound cleansing and wholesome after all the death and destruction he had seen over the last few years, the pain and suffering that the bombs his plane had jettisoned had created in town and cities across the continent of Europe.
‘Seadh, fòs ged ghluaisinn eadhon trìd
ghlinn dorcha sgàil a’ bhàis,
Aon olc no urchuid a theachd orm
chan eagal leam ‘s cha chàs…’
‘Though I walk through death’s dark vale
Yet will I fear no ill,
For thou art with me and thy rod
And staff me comfort still…’
He wanted to give into it, to surrender to the calm that these voices promised. He could have a comfortable life on islands like these, much like the one his ancestors had experienced, heading out from small coves and bays in low-throttled fishing boats, casting nets and lines, returning homewards with a hold rich and filled with fish.
‘Trobhad…’
‘Tha aite dhuit an seo…’
‘Thig nuas…’
Suddenly, a shout startled him. David was leaning towards him, yelling in alarm.
‘Neil!’
He thought about that moment later; the incident recurring in his dreams, especially when he heard about the other flights that ended there, planes swollen by flame in places like Gleann Mhor, Soay and the heights of Conachair. He wondered if these pilots had been summoned by voices, the cries that beckoned men to an older, gentler life…
3
I believe in the Resurrection, each week celebrating its miracles on the altar where the Sacrifice of the Mass is offered, but it was a grim sort that took place near the top of Conachair that day.
Shortly after landing, we climbed past the cleits, the little stone buildings found all around the island, discovering small fragments of the lost Beaufighter as we went on our way; a shattering of Perspex; tiny fragments of the cylinders of the plane’s two radial engines; an armoured windscreen jutting out of the turf; a trail of wreckage that ended in a deep crater where both heather and peat had been scorched and burnt, the remains of the aircraft swallowed by flame. It was there that we saw the tail wheel, some of the Beaufighter’s guns, two propellers that were wedged into the island’s surface like the outstretched wings of a giant bird. As we stood there surrounded by fulmars angry at the disturbance caused to a place that had long been empty of human beings, their buckled, broken wingspans made me shiver. Men had once flown in the aircraft that crashed here; both lost pilots and their crew, all not much older than me. I crossed myself at the thought of this, doing it furtively in case the others might notice.
‘Take a look at this,’ Davidson muttered.
He was standing on the cliff edge with the pack of a parachute torn from its harness. The silk was partly burned away; the shroud lines scorched.
‘Poor bloody sod,’ Martin said. ‘Do you think he went over?’
‘Probably… A lot more with him too. The wind would have blown some of the wreckage over the top.’ Stepping tentatively, he looked down at the rocks. ‘There’ll be loads there we’ll never find.’
‘Sea too deep…’
‘Aye.’
‘Cliffs too high…’
It was then that I found the flying boot a few yards from the crater. Its laces were snapped, as if someone had wrestled it off his foot. As it dangled in my fingers, I felt as if I had encountered violent death for the first time since I joined the Services. My stomach retched and my head felt giddy.
‘This might belong to him…’ I said.
They gathered round me, turning it over and over in their hands. They examined the sole for traces of mud, the leather for any blood or scorch marks that might have stained and coloured its surface.
‘We’d better go and search for him,’ Davidson said.
We looked at our Commanding Officer. The Beaufighter had gone missing at the beginning of June. It was now the end of August. The chances of any man surviving on the island for that long were small. If either the explosion or the chill of the winds didn’t kill him, hunger wouldn’t take too long to do its work. It was mainly birds that were there to feast on and they would escape easily from his fingers, leaving him limping in their wake.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he muttered. ‘But we’ve all got to look. Rutherford, you and Martin check all the bothies you come across as you go down the hill. Wylie, you and Robertson go in the other direction. Check the houses down below when you get there.’
‘Fine.’
Dividing ourselves into two groups, Martin and I set off down the gullies that bordered the cliffs, searching for anything that could be found. Davidson’s voice boomed after us as we slid and scurried in the direction of Village Bay.
‘Let’s not take too long about it. An hour or two. The chances are he wouldn’t live too long if he crashed here.’
I nodded in response. That much was clear. For all that autumn had not yet come, the wind was cold enough to make any man’s bone
s flutter, especially if he had gone through the horror of a plane crash. I imagined him stumbling down the peat slope, escaping the flames. The cries of his friends would be echoing in his ears as he relived the moment when the pilot realised there was a cliff ahead of him in the darkness, its crest veering up over his head at some 1,397 feet.
‘Lift up… Lift up…’
‘Come on, boy… Come on…’
But that had not been possible: the fuselage scraping over rock and heather, ploughing into the island’s thin soil.
I shook the thought from my head, checking through the entrance of the first of the cleits to see if any survivors could be found. I imagined that if anyone were there, they would lie crumpled like broken angels, the soft silk of their parachutes wrapped around them, limbs twisted and out of shape. If they could speak at all, they would not be using any tongue found within the mouth of men. The comfort of human language would have been long taken from them, stolen by their own despair.
Martin was babbling too, talking about every cleit he visited. ‘There’s nothing in this one. Nothing… Nothing…’
I stayed silent, nervous that I might find someone who had crawled from the wreckage to shelter in one of these stores. There was no doubt that he would be dead now – a dark seraph with his face obscured by peat or the smoke of an explosion. A charred cherub. He would be blinded, eyes pecked out by the beaks of seabirds. His body was likely to be stripped of flesh. I tried to guard myself from the thought of all this by whispering a prayer.
‘Angel of God, my Guardian dear, to whom His love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide…’
The search went on until we reached the houses. Their windows were boarded up. Some of the roofs were holed and rotten, collapsing in upon themselves with the weight of years and decay. For a long time, Martin and I looked at them, pondering whether or not to step in. They seemed like places ghosts or dens might occupy.
Eventually, however, I steeled myself. I pushed open the door of one, squeezing my way into the darkness within, uttering the beginnings of another prayer to protect me from what might lie ahead.
‘Heavenly Father, Your infinite love for us has chosen an angel in heaven…’
It was then that something came at me, thrashing blindly, striking my head. Something wet and sticky covered my face, darkening my gaze. I could barely see, aware only of the foulness of the smell that pervaded the air, filling the atmosphere of the house. For the moment, I thought it was the airman who had attacked me, trapped in his white, silk parachute, pounding me in all his confusion. It took me a moment to realise that it was a fulmar, left stranded by its broken, wounded wing.
‘God,’ Martin muttered, standing beside. ‘It’s the poor bugger’s spirit. Trapped within that bird.’
I’ve thought of that moment a thousand times since then. It comes to mind when a bride comes towards me, dressed in her bridal gown; when little girls stand before the altar wearing their confirmation dresses; when children run around with sheets over their heads, pretending they are ghosts.
I think of that lost airman then, imagining he is still there, imprisoned in a cleit, trapped within his parachute, desperate to take flight once again…
Storm Petrel
After the islanders had gone,
storm petrels were no longer
guided ashore by psalms,
no voice or verse directing flight
from kirk-walls
on nights of storm or calm.
instead, they fluttered blindly,
sight dark as small heads,
the furtive tips of wings,
hoping to catch an echo
of sermons, lost soundwaves
from dead elders precenting
lines for a faithful congregation
that might stop these seabirds
flailing,
sending a net to save them
as they sought their route
back home.
Fulmars
‘They’re homesick for us,’ Neil’s dad said when he was told there were more and more fulmars being discovered nesting on the mainland. ‘They’re pining since we left.’
Neil saw them first when he arrived in St Andrews to study for the ministry – birds reeling near its cliffs or nesting in the crumbling walls of the Abbey. Tears glimmered in his eyes when he recalled how these birds had been the source of so much that his people had valued on the island. Light, meat and plumage. The glow of their lamps. The chink of coins in their pockets.
It wasn’t long after that he was arrested. A headline in the local paper told of how a Divinity student had been caught scaling one of the Abbey towers.
He told them he had been trying to gain a sense of what living there must have been like for the old monks and holy men who had once prayed and worshipped in the building.
He knew that explanation would have been – to their ears at least – a lot less weird than the truth.
Fowl Talk
1
The birds only started to behave that way after they had watched Fionn sitting at his household fire for a year or so. He would move his head up and down continually while he was perched on a stool there, his eyes narrowing, neck swelling, mouth puffing. Finally he would let loose a thick black spleuchan of tobacco and gannet fat from his lips, soaking all his neighbours and intruders long before landing. It sizzled in a pale blue flame on the fireside, providing more fuel for the blaze.
Fascinated by all this, the fulmars would study him for hours, imitating his every gesture, not only his behaviour in front of the fire but also the way he circled round the island, never moving in a straight line anywhere (he would do this even as he clambered up a slope from the shore, his footsteps spiralling constantly as he climbed). They, too, would work up their throats when they saw any man approaching, prepared to drench them in a dark shower of salt and oil, regurgitating fish they had swallowed and consumed.
Soon they even learned to speak Gaelic like him, impersonating his soft, liquidy vowels, his slight lisp, giving – in their own unique way – honour and praise to the one they saw as the greatest islander of them all.
2
Niall Iain was the one who noticed that the fulmars were speaking Gaelic when he returned to the island a short time after the evacuation. The birds were squatting on nests that overlooked the spot where the men of the community used to sit in their Parliament, discussing the nature and timing of the work to be done that day. Occupying the edges of roofs and chimney tops, they squirted a black, oily substance from their beaks at those who came near them, behaving the way their role-model, Fionn, had done all those years before.
‘Oich – oich…’ Niall Iain overheard one fulmar say.
‘Obh, obh…’ another muttered.
‘‘S truagh an latha a dh’fhàg iad a chroit,’ a third one added. ‘It’s a sad day they left the croft.’
Niall Iain smiled sadly to himself. For all that there were no people remaining on its shores, the nature of the conversations he heard there hadn’t changed much.
Myths and Landmarks I
/ Uirsgeulan agus luilean I
The Guga Stone
1
When she sculpts and hones
the guga stone,
she feels guided by her ancestors,
their lost skills stirring once more
in her bones,
returning slowly to her,
each shift of wrist and finger
shown to her by them,
loaned from that distant source
from which her careful art had grown.
And so she completes her craftwork,
chiselling the folded wings,
plumage, head,
the cruel stillness of that eye
which despite the strong winds blowing
stays fixed in that position,
determining what shoals have swam
into its slaughter zone,
w
eighing up what segment of the catch
glinting on the cold horizon
it might claim for its own.
2
Guga stone, they called it,
that pebble whirled
through a window of the manse,
shattering and splintering glass
and achieving what was thought before
doctrinally impossible,
making Reverend Mackay
dance…
3
One ‘recipe’ for guga reads as follows:
Ingredients – one guga and one stone. Place both in pan of water and boil. Once you can pierce the stone with a fork, the guga is ready for eating.
There were times so hard
they served the guga stone,
grinding off small pebbles,
cutting rock down to the bone
and laying it down upon the plate
where diners savoured juices,
consuming dust for sustenance,
pronouncing that fine offering fit for any palate,
a five-star gourmet great.
4
Sometimes goodness is not within the solan goose.
There are times it lets loose evil,
when its arctic wings cast shadows on smooth
waters, bringing dark news and upheaval
to men on days of peace,
when it seems to pluck and seize the high wind,
capture thunder to release
wrath upon its rivals,
these fishermen with vessels
moving through quiet seas.
And that is why men clutch the guga stone
in gnarled and calloused fingers,
a talisman that soothes them like a prayer,
the means by which they figure
the tricks and ruses of that ruthless bird
as it sweeps indignities on those
who misuse and abuse its world.
The MacQueen and Gillies Stones
The Guga Stone Page 6