'Why ... she'd had a foal. A foal at thirrrty-four!'
We all said how wonderful it was, and then managed to make
our excuses and get away-but only on condition that we came
back and saw him again.
As we were leaving, he took Don by the arm and beckoned
him aside.
'You must mind one thing, though,' he said.
'What's that?' said Don.
'You must mind the tale of the folk who come to Skye on
holiday.'
Don didn't know what to make of this. Alasdair looked round
rather in a conspiratorial way as if he was afraid that something
beyond the mountains might overhear him.
'Aye, well ... it's a fruitful place, is Skye.' He looked round
again and his voice dropped to a whisper. 'There may be a wee
thing about Christmas time.' He patted Don on the arm, and
in the same instant was gone.
And of the magical things about that holiday in Skye, the
holiday I had been so unsure about, the prophecy of Alasdair
Macdonald proved to be the most magical thing of all.
69
AI : I
CHAPTER SIX
WE WERE SAD when the time came to drive back on to tne
ferry and Skye began to diminish towards the horizon. All my
misgivings about going on holiday and whether it would be
a success had long since evaporated. I watched the Cuillins
sinking into the sea in the far distance. I had been fascinated by
the Cuillins, the great, high mountains of Skye. To me they
seemed like people. Perhaps it was because I had not been able
to see for very long, but I tended-and for t.hat matter, still doto
attach personalities to things. Trees are different personalities
to me because they are all shaped so differently, and I found
that the Cuillins were like this. They gave me a feeling of knowing
them in a strange way. I used to look at them, black and
awesome, seeming to exert a power over the entire island, and
somehow they also seemed to have power over the people of
Skye, making them what they were, preventing them from
moving with the times as people had on the mainland for better
or worse, and ensuring that Skye went on as it had done for
thousands of years. Perhaps it was just a fancy, but that is how
the mountains made me feel.
No doubt I had caught, as the song says, 'the tangle of the
isles'. One day we had been on a trip from Skye, north across
the Minches, over the water to Harris in the Outer Hebrides.
On the ferry across, Harold and I, Zelda and Emma, stood on
the upper deck at the guard-rails. Harold is such a warmhearted
person that I felt he was as thrilled to be sharing what I
was seeing as Don always was. Don had gone below with Betty
because it was so windy. Emma and Zelda stood there sniffing
the sea wind, and the expressions on their faces translated all
the fascinating scents that came off the shore. It was so marvellous
to watch Emma and see her reactions. I had so often
felt vibrations on the harness and had to guess at what she
was seeing. Now I could watch her. Harold looked down at
70
p,nima, seeming to know what I was thinking. He gave her a
pat.
'Good girl, Emma. You're a good girl.' And he turned to me,
adding, 'She knows you can see, all right.'
'Yes,' I said, 'she does.'
'She's not daft, that dog,' he said.
That, I thought, she certainly is not, and my mind went back
to the day that Emma had first realized I could see: when
stealthily she was about to steal some of the cats' food, and I
said, 'Yes, I can see you, Emma!' Poor Emma, she spun round,
amazed and shocked at the same time and life was never quite
the same again.
I watched the waves beating against the bows of the ferry,
turning white as they were parted, and tossing up in a lovely
spray. And the clouds were fascinating. It was really windy and
they were sweeping past us in the sky. It was so exhilarating.
When we reached Harris the first thing I noticed was its
barrenness. The grass was not really grass at all, just edges of
brown that grew out of the sides of the roads. It was not at all
like Skye.
'I don't think I'd like to live here,' I said to Don. 'There's a
strange feeling that we're right on the very edge of the world.'
But this was only a first impression.
'And there don't seem to be any sheep,' Don said with
a smile.
'Did you hear that, Harold?' I said. 'No sheep!'
'Well, thank goodness for that anyway,' he said. 'You can
have a good run, Zelda old girl.' So we set off for a walk with
the two dogs happily romping ahead of us. As we rounded a
bend in the road I saw the most beautiful beach beneath us,
with a sea that was turquoise blue, a genuine turquoise, more
vivid than any on a holiday postcard. The sand was a silvery
colour, a dazzling silver. Don and Emma and I were first down
to that beach. I ran along and looked back every so often to see
my footmarks in the sand. Everyone else laughed at me. But I
felt like a child again, and really wanted to stop and build
sandcastles!
I watched Emma. Her tail was in the air, wagging, her nose
was in the sand and she left a furrow as she shuffled it all up in
7I
I A
front of her. It was the most beautiful beach I had ever seen.
Don and I looked and looked along its length. It was not only
beautiful, but lonely in the friendliest way. We felt as if nobody
had ever been there before and we were the discoverers. It was
the sort of place I had dreamt of, the ideal of beauty and peace,
with the sea just sighing in the background. Even when I was
blind I knew that somewhere such a place existed, and now we
had found it.
I was thinking of this beach as the ferry took us back to the
mainland, and again on the drive back to Nottingham. When
we reached Nottingham, and life gradually returned to normal,
the memories of Skye and particularly of this beach became a
sort of mirage in the mind and I sometimes wondered, as I went
about the house, whether we had experienced it at all.
But I was reminded of Skye quite forcibly a few weeks later. I
had decided I ought to go and see my doctor. He examined me
and said, 'Well, Mrs Hocken, with any luck it should be about
Christmas time.' Apart from confirming what I already suspected,
I couldn't help smiling. The doctor thought it only too
natural that I * should appear delighted. He didn't know that
apart from that I was, in reality, recalling Alasdair Macdonald's
prophecy: 'There may be a wee thing about Christmas time.'
This was in the spring Of 1976, and we were still living in the
little council pre-fab which Emma and I had moved to before I
had met Don and we had married. His own house, with his
surgery built at the back and separate from the house, was still
occupied by his first wife and would be until she could find
some other suitable accommodation. Of course, it takes time to
fin
d the right property and to sort things out, but we had
arranged that when she did so we would move into the house.
In the meantime we were in our little prefabricated bungalow:
nice enough for Don, Emma and me, but when I found I was
pregnant, it made me impatient to move. I became rather
moody about the whole business because there simply was not
enough room for an addition to the family. I think poor Don
had quite a lot to put up with in those days. Every night when
he came home I greeted him and said, 'Anything arranged yet
on the house?'
'No, not yet. Don't worry.'
~72
'Oh, Don, I don't want to have the baby here. It really is too
small,' I would say, thinking also that I had really begun to
dislike the place.
'Don't worry, petal. We'll have moved long before the baby
comes along.'
But the move was not my only worry. I also thought constantly
about Emma and how she was going to react. By the
time the baby was born, Emma would be twelve. She had
never had a baby in the house, and I didn't want to upset her.
I didn't want her to feel that she was being pushed out in her
old age. I remember making it quite clear to Don: 'Now Emma
will always sleep by our bed, won't she, in her basket?'
'What do you mean?' he said.
'Well, I want that to be Emma's special thing. She'll always
be there, and the baby will have her own room.'
'Of course,' Don said, 'I think in any case, that babies should
be started off in their own room from the word go.'
At least I had that bit of comfort. I just hoped that Emma
would forgive me. I hoped desperately she wouldn't turn away
from me because she thought I had a new pet, which is how I
supposed a baby might appear to her.
After months of worrying, and only a few weeks before the
baby was due, we were at last going to move. Don rang up one
day to tell me the date had been fixed. That evening he said,
'Have you packed most of the stuff?'
'Well, just about,' I said, because I had been packing for ages.
We had been living for months in between tea chests and
cardboard boxes.
'Right. I'll get hold of the removal men tomorrow-and we
still haven't done anything about carpets and curtains for the
new house.'
It was not really a new house, of course, to him. But it was for
us. Carpets and curtains would help to make it a new place,
and we had to decorate a room for the baby. I knew Emma
would like it there because there was a much bigger garden for
her and just over the road a path led into open fields where I
knew she would have endless pleasure.
When moving day came and we started to shift the furniture
and take up the carpets we had rather a shock. The bungalow
73
had always been very damp, and condensation and leakages
everywhere had not helped matters either. In the living-room
Don had tried to damp-proof by putting extra wallpaper on
one of the walls.
'What do you think of that!' he'd said when he finished. He
had put a brick-style paper on. 'Looks solid as well. That should
keep the damp out.' I remember him standing back to admire
it. He had been really proud of his work. He had taken his
decorating overalls off-which are not often used, I might add
and sat, just looking at his wallpaper. 'Really does look good,
doesn't it? Don't you think it looks good?'
'Yes, it looks very nice.' But then, even as we were admiring
it, part of the corner began to curl up and peel off, as if an
invisible hand was taking it off the wall. We stared in disbelief,
and then it happened at another corner. Don went up to the
wall and tried to press it back into place. But it persisted in
coming off again and as soon as one piece was, pressed back
another peeled off. It was like a Laurel and Hardy film.
We tried everything, but nothing would stop the paper from
coming off, and at last Don ended up by using drawing pins.
We used to tell our friends that it was the latest fashion to put
up your wallpaper with drawing pins. When we came to move,
the wallpaper took rather a beating. We moved the sideboard,
which had been at the opposite end of the living-room wall
from the one that Don had tried to insulate with paper. As soon
as the sideboard had been moved out of position, we noticed
the wall behind it had turned a nasty colour, and suddenlyyes,
the wallpaper fell off.
'My word,' said Don, 'it's a good job we're leaving here.'
And in every room, as soon as the furniture was pulled away
from the wall and the beds were packed up and gone, the wallpaper
gradually started to peel and fall on to the floor. It was a
peculiar experience to see the home that I had lived in for years
become a shattered, damp shell, with a terrible, fusty smell
about it. When your furniture's gone your house really is empty,
as if you had never really lived there. You don't love it any
more; you only loved it when all your belongings were around
you and it looked so cosy and welcoming. When you get to the
reality of just walls, windows and doors, it is a totally different
74
place. I had thought I would be sad to move from there in the
end, despite my growing dislike of it since I had become pregnant.
But I was not at all sad when I took a last look round and
saw those bare rooms with wallpaper peeled off and lying
forlornly on the floor.
I went into hospital for only a couple of days to have the baby
because it had been made clear that I would not be allowed to
keep Emma in the hospital and I hated the idea of leaving her
behind. I had really wanted to have my baby at home, because
I think having a baby at home is the most natural thing in the
world. Having watched my cats have babies, I felt I knew all
about it. I also felt that to take anyone out of their natural
surroundings and put them in a strange place, with strangers
around them, was a hard thing to accept. But no one would
listen. The rules of the National Health Service decreed that I
had to go into hospital.
The expected date for the new arrival was just as Alasdair
Macdonald had predicted all those months before. Christmas
Eve. Three nights before, I started having contractions. I was
totally unprepared. I hadn't packed my case, as it advised in
all the leaflets handed out at ante-natal clinics. But then, I
didn't set much store by some of the advice. The list of
'do's' and 'don'ts' was incredible. 'Don't move house.' Well, I
suppose, there was some sense in that. But underneath it said,
'Don't catch a cold.' That was when I decided I could not
guarantee that I would comply.
We hadn't been in the new house long, and we were still not
straight. For one thing we were being re-wired and only two
lights worked in the entire place, one upstairs and one downstairs.
It had a depressing effect on me because I was experiencing
u
navoidable dark again. It was about half-past ten at night.
Don had been very late in the surgery-he normally doesn't
finish anyway until after nine-and we were having a meal.
Suddenly I put my fork down and said,
'Don, something strange is happening.'
He sort of dropped everything.
'What? What ... ? What's happening?'
'Well, I don't know. But I do know it's odd.'
'Goodness. Where's your case?'
75
I
i
II
k
m
'Er ... I haven't packed it.'
'Well, come on, you'd better do it now.' He got up and
rushed round in circles. It was strange, but I didn't panic at all
and I had expected I would.
So I went upstairs in the dark. And I think, considering the
fact that I couldn't see what I was packing, I did a fair job,
because I got everything in the suitcase and we all rushed out
to the car, Emma as well. Emma sat in her usual place in the
back, and when we arrived at the hospital she had to stay in the
car because she wasn't allowed inside the building. I suppose
the nurses must have thought it odd because while I lay in the
labour ward and Don sat by my side, the main part of our
conversation was about Emma-if you can call a series of
fragmented remarks 'conversation'.
'Is Emma all right?' I said between contractions.
'I'll go and have another look at her,' said Don, and I heard
his footsteps receding down the long corridor. And I waited for
him to come back.
'It's a bit cold out there,' he said on his return. 'I've given her
an extra blanket, and had the engine going to warm her up.'
'Oh, thank goodness for that,' I said. I think Don split his
time evenly between Emma and me while I was having the
baby. I very much wanted a little girl. Don didn't mind either
way. But I wanted a little girl, and that wasjust what she turned
out to be. We decided to call her Kerensa, an old Cornish name
in Don's family.
Two days later I was coming home in the ambulance, and,
although I knew I should have felt wildly happy, I was anything
but. My concern about Emma had started to weigh on me
emma vip Sheila Hocken Page 9