‘My mother Louise and my grandparents live there with a friend, Mairi. My mother is Welsh; she was a nurse at Gallipoli in the Great War and she met my father when he was a patient. He had been wounded on a mission and she nursed him back to health. They fell in love, married, and she was pregnant with me when my father was killed in an accident as they made their way home to Ardnish at the end of the war.’
‘How tragic,’ Françoise whispered.
‘My mother’s dream was to marry a farmer and live in the country. I suppose she did both, but her life hasn’t exactly turned out as she might have hoped. She has a widow’s pension and she makes a little money collecting whelks and making tweed, but it’s hard. Now that I’m earning, I send her money whenever I can. She has pined for my father ever since he died. Do you know, when she is out and about by herself and thinks no one is near, she talks out loud to him? “DP, do you think there are any wooden pegs I could fix this roof with?”, or “Will the lamb prices be better this year?” I feel so sorry for her.’
I felt Françoise give my arm a comforting squeeze, but I couldn’t trust myself to look at her.
‘Peanmeanach is the last of the four communities on Ardnish peninsula where people still live,’ I said softly, ‘and when my grandparents die then I’m sure my mother will leave. The only place where a man can make a living is Laggan, my farm. I ran it for a few years until the war broke out and now my grandmother is farming it on her own.’
‘Is it close to your mother?’ Françoise asked.
‘It is, and it’s a grand piece of land. I have eighteen Highland cattle, and five hundred Blackface sheep.’
I glanced at her to see if she thought I was boasting, but she smiled warmly. ‘My mother is a fantastic shepherdess,’ I went on. ‘She’s always had great dogs, and although she’s slowing up a bit now, I think she’ll be good for another few years. She has a girl come to stay in the summer and they manage things between them.’
‘I think it’s lovely you have your own farm,’ Françoise said. ‘I can tell how fond you are of the place.’ She smiled, then pulled away and reached for her boots. ‘We should go.’
Chapter 2
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and Françoise looked apprehensive. We would be visible. But we had no choice. The Italians would be looking for us and we had to step out. There was nothing in the hut we could use to carry water, so I made sure we gulped down as much as we could before setting off and tried to ignore the increasing hunger pangs. If we didn’t get food before long, we’d really start to weaken.
It was a gorgeous morning. The sun was just beginning to touch the peaks, crowning them in a deep orange glow, as we began a half-hour walk across the plateau before the ascent up the gulley. The snow would have been up to our waists if we hadn’t had our snow shoes.
As we walked side by side we conversed quietly.
‘I expect you’re Catholic, being French?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she replied.
‘Where I come from, Lochaber and the southern Hebrides are almost entirely Catholic. John Knox, the Presbyterian, just didn’t make it to our part of Scotland; the terrain was too much of a challenge for him, I think! And my uncle is a priest.’
‘Is that Father Angus?’ Françoise asked.
‘Yes. He’s my father’s older brother; he’ll be about fifty-seven now. He comes to stay every year and sometimes brings my grandfather’s great friend the Archbishop with him. He’s very keen on fishing. My mother became a convert, too. She used to go to Mass regularly with my grandparents at our beautiful wee church, Our Lady of the Braes, and one day she just decided that she wanted to be baptised a Catholic. Uncle Angus was coming up to stay, my grandparents were delighted, and so they decided to make a big party of it. I suspect a part of it was that Mother knew how pleased my father would have been. Mind you, she always insisted that her mother was religious, too. Anyhow, they had a gathering in the hotel in Arisaig, where many of their friends live now, after Mass at St Mary’s. Religion was always a big part of my upbringing. My grandparents have great faith.’
‘I can sense that,’ Françoise said.
We laboured on through the deep snow, tipping over frequently and having to help each other up. As the ground steepened, we walked in silence; but my brain was hyperactive and eventually I summoned the courage to ask the question which had been troubling me from the outset.
‘You don’t have to answer this, but why exactly are you here? There’s something I don’t know, isn’t there? I mean, I’ve done this job for a month by myself and all of a sudden I’m supposed to need a female, fluent French-speaker, and an SOE agent at that?’
She hesitated, colouring slightly. ‘You’re right, Angus, I have a separate mission. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it is. If you were captured, my mission would be compromised and, frankly, it’s too important.’
I forced a smile. ‘Fair enough, lass.’ But of course, I wasn’t satisfied with her response.
We plodded on. I turned things over and over in my mind. I suspected the worst and knew Françoise wasn’t there to learn from, or to support, me. There was an ulterior motive – some big job on. Would it involve me and my network, or was she going to go it alone? I felt myself growing increasingly preoccupied with possibilities and it was all I could do to stop myself from pressing her further.
Instead, I turned my mind to home and how things might be going there. Were they having a wet winter? Was my grandmother coping with the farm? I prayed we had enough hay cut for the cows over the winter; the big field was getting full of reeds as the drains clogged up and it desperately needed some lime on it to cut the acidity of the peat. But getting workers in, with the men away at war, was almost impossible.
I thought of St Kilda. Ten years before, the islands’ people had asked the government to arrange an evacuation – for the same reason as we may one day have to leave Peanmeanach. The young could not make a living and were forced to head to the cities or join the armed forces, leaving the old to fend for themselves. On St Kilda you needed at least four strong men to pull the boat onshore after a fishing trip or an expedition to harvest fulmars. When that could not happen, their income went. People were prepared to handle terrible weather, personal tragedies or hunger, but there finally came a time when the familiarity of their homeland and the beauty of their surroundings was not enough.
I feared Ardnish was at that stage now. Everyone was old. My grandfather, now in his eighties, was badly incapacitated with his one leg. Mairi Ferguson and grandmother must be approaching Grandfather’s age, too. I’d heard that my father used to bemoan the likely end of our community thirty years ago. Well, it had survived one more generation at least, but if I were to die in this war, the rest of them would be away within the year.
We had a hard, two-hour climb up the near-vertical couloir in the sunshine, taking it in turns to lead, kicking deep into the soft snow, our snowshoes secured on our backs. We looked constantly over our shoulders, conscious that we might have an Alpini patrol in pursuit. If that were the case, we would stand out – black dots against the white snow – visible for miles around. So we made haste and soon, dripping in sweat despite the cold, we reached the top, ten thousand feet up, gasping in the thin air.
My fair skin put me at a disadvantage in these conditions. With the back of my neck exposed to the sun and the glare bouncing off the snow onto my face, I was getting dreadfully burned despite my efforts to keep my collar up. We were desperate for water now. But up on the ridge we had the consolation of a breathtaking view of Mont Blanc, Aiguille du Midi and a hundred other peaks. We sat in the sunshine, recovering and admiring the view of France in front of us.
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ marvelled Françoise. ‘It’s magnificent. I hear the Canadian Rockies are similar, but I’ve never been there either.’
I was growing uneasy. ‘We need to keep going, otherwise we’ll freeze to death. It’ll be dark before we get down off the glac
ier. There’s supposed to be a descent rope somewhere around here. You look over there and I’ll search this way.’
A minute later she cried out, ‘It’s here, Angus, but it’s not good.’
I rushed to her. There was a rope, sure enough, but only a short length, tied around a rock. The descent rope was nowhere to be found. The Alpini must have cut it to stop the Free French using the route.
‘We can try to make it down anyway, can’t we?’ said Françoise. ‘I mean, we can hardly go back with a lot of angry Italians on our tail.’
She was right, of course. We had no option. Nervously, we began to head down, placing each foot with extreme care. It was my most difficult ever descent. Rocky at first, with stone crumbling under our feet, it felt like my boots were on marbles, rolling under the leather. Our gloves, soaking as we began, soon froze solid as, with our faces against the hillside, we kicked our boots into much harder snow, ice in places. How I longed for the crampons and ice axes we had in training in Scotland.
I knew I was climbing beyond my ability here. Weak with hunger and without a rope, one mistake would mean a vertical fall of over three hundred feet and certain death. My whole body was trembling and the muscles across my shoulders were rigid. I had to force myself to relax. The sweat caused by the sun during the early morning climb had switched to the cold sweat of fear. It had been fifty-six hours since we had eaten the morsels of bread the day before. But Françoise seemed to be doing well. Her slight frame was deceptively strong and agile, well suited to this type of challenge. It was I who was struggling to keep up with her, I realised.
‘Your steps are too far apart for me,’ she had said. ‘Let me lead.’
I knew that she could sense I was the weaker climber and was simply being mindful of my feelings. I felt a surge of gratitude as I followed her gingerly downwards.
It was afternoon by the time we reached the bottom of the cliff. We still had a good four hours of difficult walking ahead of us until we reached Claude’s house and, hopefully, a good meal. My whole body was cramped and shaking uncontrollably. I wanted to hug Françoise in my exhilaration at our managing the descent, but I thought better of it.
She was busying herself strapping on her snowshoes. ‘Quick,’ she urged, ‘we need to head off and into that warm sunshine.’
We set off across the glacier, building up a good pace, keeping a good distance apart in case of crevasses, and soon settled into a rhythm. I couldn’t help glancing covertly in her direction from time to time.
I’d had very little to do with girls. I was twenty-six years old and my life had been sheltered, to say the least. I had been the only child at school for most of my time there and then the opportunity of farming Laggan had come up and I’d gone straight into that. I’d never even kissed a girl. Grandmother often sent me off to ceilidhs in Mallaig with my uncle Owen and to weddings of people I’d never heard of in Fort William. ‘You need to get away and meet people,’ she would plead. I’d go to please her, and I would try my best to have a good time, but secretly I dreaded these events. Françoise was attractive, but she oozed sophistication and professionalism, and I confess I felt a little overwhelmed.
She could tell that I was tiring now; she had to wait for me from time to time but she did so with tact, chatting to me to take my mind off the effort.
‘My father is a doctor,’ she told me, ‘and my mother is headmistress of the local school. They were both born in France and moved to Canada to work. France was in a bad way after the Depression and Canada was keen to get professional French-speaking immigrants. The money was good and my parents were just married and wanted to try something new together for a few years. The years after the Crash weren’t great for them, of course, but they were a lot worse for others. At least with my father being a doctor, he could get work. We had a nice house and two decent incomes, so my sister and I had a comfortable upbringing. There aren’t many in Chéticamp who could claim that.’
I nodded. ‘There are few in the Highlands of Scotland who have good work like your parents. That’s why there has been such a move to Glasgow or abroad. At school, Gaelic was forbidden – everything was taught in English. I think because there was an expectation we’d need it when we moved away.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Françoise said.
‘Yes, but it didn’t seem so at the time. You know, as a boy, I had a pony of my own. She was called Barra, after the island. She was a Highland garron; they’re bred to carry deer carcasses down from the hill. She was built like a tank, and so slow.’
I chuckled as I recalled an incident.
‘Why are you laughing, Angus?’
‘Something that happened just after I stopped school. One day I had to go to Lochailort for coal. Barra could carry two hundredweight with no problem, but I had to drag her along the track, she was so stubborn. At the end of our path, when you get to the Fort William to Mallaig road, there’s a big clearing. A group of Irish travellers had set up a camp of six wagons, with a large tarpaulin stretched over poles and a fire underneath.
‘There was a pretty girl there, about my age. Her name was Maureen and she had beautiful long black hair. I was always looking for an opportunity to stop and talk to her. Whenever I arrived, their dogs would bark like mad and nip my ankles. I’d have to carry my own collie, she was so frightened.
‘That day, Maureen shouted at them to go away and lie down, and off they went. She was wonderful with animals. She was trying to get a young piebald mare to stand still while she got a cart on her. She needed it to fetch the whelks the others had collected down at Loch na Uamh. She told me that this mare was a nightmare, wouldn’t work for her at all, and bucked and fidgeted the whole time. So I lent her Barra, who reversed between the shafts and off they plodded, while I took the mare to see if she would carry my coal bags. We planned to meet back at Maureen’s camp in a couple of hours. The mare was just fine with me as I rode her to the station, and stood steady as I stitched the coal sacks together over her back in pairs so that they hung well. And when we set off we moved at twice the speed. I wondered if Maureen would do a swap.
‘She said, “Well, handsome Donald Angus, I’ll give you my perfect Jester for your slowcoach Barra, but only if you give me a guinea as well.”
‘She always called me handsome, but we both knew that if I made the slightest move, her menfolk would give me a thrashing. They stick with their own, the travellers.’
‘Did you want to make a pass at her?’ Françoise asked.
I ducked the question and carried on with the story. ‘I reminded her that Barra could pull twice the weight of the little mare, so I offered to give her a lamb in the spring instead of a guinea. Maureen was intrigued, saying, “Well, handsome, don’t the creatures on God’s earth not belong to us all anyway?” And then she gave me this knowing wink . . .
‘And so, yes, the deal was done. I headed off back to the village with Jester, the coal and a big smile on my face. I couldn’t wait to see my grandfather’s face.
‘Right enough, everyone came out to look. Grandmother ran her hand down the pony’s legs and doubted whether I’d get a bargain from people like that. Grandfather felt the same. He thought Jester would bog herself, maybe get pneumonia in the winter rains. But I could tell my mother was quite proud of me.
‘I told Grandfather that Jester’s ancestors had been on the west coast since the railway was built forty years before and that she would be fine in bad weather. I’d need to teach her to plough, but she was definitely promising. And as it turned out, she was.’
Françoise and I kept up a brisk pace, crunching over the icy glacier, but she would always end up a few yards ahead. Then she would wait for me to catch up, and for a while we would step out side by side.
As the shadows lengthened we needed to find the path through the woods down into the valley. We were at the face of the glacier, where the enormous seracs tumbled down and you could hear the ominous groans and creaks of shifting ice. We had to make haste, but choosing a
safe route down the face of a glacier was tricky; rushing it would have been suicide.
I had been in similar situations before. ‘Be careful,’ I cautioned. ‘It might be three hundred feet deep in there and there’d be no way out.’
‘Ever the optimist,’ Françoise observed wryly.
‘I’m serious,’ I retorted sharply. ‘Claude told me one of his men fell into a crevasse not long ago, and there was already someone in there – dead. And they had a rope to pull their man out; we don’t.’
Both of us were silent as we inched our way to safety – a stumble either way would be lethal. It was only a hundred feet down the face of the glacier, but it took us a good hour, and night was falling.
We made it, and found to our relief that we had only a few hundred easy yards to the wood. We talked as we walked, Françoise in French. ‘You need to speak like a native, Angus. Practise, practise,’ she urged.
She talked about going to university, St Francis Xavier, how her sister Simone was at McGill in Montreal, and how their parents would spend hours doing homework with them.
I was silenced. Françoise was educated and wealthy. Me and my farming would be of little interest to her. I could have gone to university – everyone said so – but the tie of Ardnish had been too strong.
Françoise chattered on, but I had stopped listening. Had I taken the right path in life? If everyone else left Peanmeanach, would I stay at Laggan by myself, with no wife? I’d be talked about at the auction mart or in the Fort William shops as that mad Gillies fellow, the recluse. What girl would be happy to be so cut off these days? How would our children go to school? I was worrying myself into despondence, but tiredness and hunger always made me miserable.
We Fought for Ardnish Page 4