We Fought for Ardnish

by Angus MacDonald

  Then, to my delight, the brigadier started talking to me about Angus. He told me he had been best friends with his son, Michael, which I already knew. I was then thrilled to hear that Angus had been pestering staff and the Red Cross for news of me since he had returned from his operation. Nervously, I asked where he was.

  ‘He’s in Canada now with the Lovat Scouts, training in the Rockies,’ the brigadier replied. ‘He’s a fine fellow.’

  I was elated to hear he was alive and well, and that he had been searching for me, though it was disappointing to learn he wasn’t in London where I could see him. Nonetheless, that night I went to bed happier than I had been in many, many months.

  Next day, I met with a Harley Street specialist. ‘Well, my dear,’ he said, ‘if I were to try and make you walk properly again this is what I would do: I would break your toes again and reset them. But you could be unable to walk for two months. The alternative is to operate on each foot separately, which means you could use crutches to get around.’

  Neither option was particularly attractive, since I had spent so much time in pain already. I told him that my father was a doctor in Canada and asked if he could write instructions for him, reasoning that if I had to be off my feet for months, I would prefer to be at home.

  The specialist agreed, and after a few more days finalising my affairs with Baker Street and the Canadian Embassy I was off to Liverpool with a one-way ticket home. I wrote a tentative letter to Angus, care of the Lovat Scouts in Jasper, to say I was alive and heading home to recover from my injuries in Chéticamp, though for all I knew he may well have been back in Britain before it caught up with him.

  After an uneventful, week-long trip across the Atlantic aboard a virtually empty ship that was due to return with armaments, I spent two days in Halifax with an old school-friend, Michelle. I told her about Angus.

  She saw straight through me and burst out laughing. ‘You’ve fallen in love, Sophie, it’s as simple as that. Keep writing to him, then go and find him in Scotland.’

  ‘But I treated him poorly,’ I admitted. ‘It’s been nearly a year since I saw him last and we only knew each other for a few days. He thinks I was killed by the Germans. I know he tried to find me, but I’ll bet he got over it and hasn’t given me a thought for months.’ I fought back tears. ‘He probably has a girl in his life now . . . maybe he’s married . . .’

  Michelle gave me a hug. ‘He’ll be pining for you, my darling, I promise you that. Call your parents. Go home and get fit and well for your man.’

  My hands shook as I dialled. Hearing my voice, my mother gasped. ‘Sophie, is it really you? You’re alive?’ She shouted excitedly to my father, ‘She’s alive, she’s alive! It’s Sophie!’

  ‘I’m coming home,’ I told them. ‘I’m arriving on the train at Inverness tomorrow at five o’clock.’

  They were ecstatic. ‘We’ll be there, darling,’ cried my mother. ‘We can drive you home in our new car. I can’t believe you are safe and sound! Everything is perfect!’

  Safe and sound, I thought to myself. How would I explain my injuries? They had no idea of what I’d gone through. But I would worry about that tomorrow.

  Chapter 14

  Angus, Lovat Scouts, Canada

  The last few days in the Rockies were spent packing. There was to be an advance party and I wanted to be with it. My friend Andrew and I had hatched a plan to visit Aunt Sheena and then for me to go on to Sophie’s parents; Andrew would meet Sheena and then be introduced to the Miramichi MacDonalds, his cousins in Mull River. We marched with all the confidence we could muster into the colonel’s office and asked if we could go up with the advance party to Halifax and then, during the layover waiting for the boat, take the train to Inverness.

  When we were granted our chit for four days’ leave, we were like excited schoolboys on holiday. After a seemingly never-ending train journey from Jasper, we arrived in Halifax and made a dash to Mulgrave for the ferry across the Canso Strait, to catch the Inverness train.

  We made it with moments to spare. On the journey, Andrew and I had talked about where the battalion might be sent next. It now seemed likely to be southern Italy, not exactly the terrain for which we’d been training. Everyone had been hoping for Norway. ‘Well, at least we’ll be fighting the Italians rather than the SS,’ Andrew remarked.

  ‘I gather the Italians have pretty much given up, so Germans are more likely.’ I replied. We felt that the war was coming to a close, and survival was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

  I sent a telegram to Sheena from Mulgrave, telling her we would be arriving by train in Mabou that afternoon. The ice in the strait had broken up, so the ferry was running again. If Sheena could get away, the plan was to go with her to Mull River, then I would ride to Chéticamp if she could get me a horse, and I would be back the next day to rejoin her, before catching up with the battalion and sailing from Halifax.

  Later that day, Andrew and I were standing outside a pretty white wooden house, only a few steps from the shore. It had ‘S. Gillies’ on the letterbox and ‘Glen Shian’ painted on the fence. There was a young woman tying up plants in the garden. She turned to look at us. I gasped; she was the spitting image of my grandmother and Sheena. It took seconds for it all to sink in. She must be Sheena’s daughter. I didn’t know; none of us knew. So much was suddenly becoming clear.

  ‘You must be Donald Angus,’ she said with a radiant smile as she walked towards me and held her hands out to take mine. ‘I know all about you. I’m Morag.’

  ‘Morag,’ I repeated. I introduced her to Andrew.

  She shook his hand. ‘Oh yes, Andrew, my mother often talks about your father, Colonel Willie,’ she said, before turning back to me. ‘I’m afraid Mother’s away, Donald Angus. It was me who opened your telegram, but she had already left. She’s judging a fiddle competition in Sydney and won’t be back till tomorrow. She doesn’t know you’re coming.’

  I hesitated, unsure whether it would be impolite to ask to stay, but Morag rescued me.

  ‘You’ll stay tonight, won’t you? So that you can see her tomorrow? I can’t wait to see her face! Please say you’ll stay.’

  I looked at Andrew’s smiling face. And it was settled.

  Andrew and I were quickly charmed by my cousin Morag. She seemed to know everything about my life, telling me she had been desperate to come and visit and still hoped to do so one day. She was married to a soldier and had a daughter of her own, Mairi, aged five, who was staying with friends. I was still taking in the fact that I had a cousin – what would my grandmother think? This was the biggest surprise to have happened in the family, ever.

  That evening, after supper, we gathered around the fire and talked about Sheena.

  ‘She’s had some sad times,’ Morag said. ‘I can’t imagine leaving home, emigrating, possibly never to return.’

  ‘It sounds as though she has told you everything about her life before she came here, though,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Morag agreed, ‘and of course I have her memoir.’

  ‘Her what?’ I asked.

  Morag smiled. ‘Mother was keen that I should know as much as possible about her old life. I think she feels guilty that she hasn’t told her parents about me, so she wrote it all down one day. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ I said. ‘It sounds like something private between the two of you.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Morag insisted. ‘Mother told me that she wanted me to know everything and that I was free to do as I wished with the information. Go on, Angus. I’ll fetch it for you and you can read it in bed.’

  Later, in bed, with some trepidation, I opened my aunt’s soft leather-bound journal and began to read her memoir . . .

  Sheena’s memoir

  The month after Colin Angus’s death, fishing off Smirisary, was hell for me. I was twenty-four years old, and he and I had been close since school age, with him always around Peanmeanach. As we grew up everyone treated us l
ike a couple about to get married anyway, and he was just preparing himself to ask my father. Father just wanted him to come over and get on with it but Colin Angus was scared he would say no.

  Then the accident happened and my Colin Angus drowned. It was as if the life had been sucked out of me. I lay curled up in bed every day; my parents tried their best, always thinking of diversions for me, but I felt sick constantly – with worry, I imagined. I even went to see Father Allan about becoming a nun. He told me to give it a year, and if I was still serious we could talk again. As it turned out that was good advice.

  With only a few days’ notice I heard about an emigration ship leaving for Halifax from the distillery pier in Fort William. My family came with me to the dock, in tears like a hundred others, that dreich autumn day. Little did I know that it would be almost thirty years before I saw them and my dear Ardnish again. And how unbearably tragic that I never ever saw my brother, dear Donald Peter, again. He was like my doll as I grew up, eleven years younger and the perfect plaything for a teenage girl. I was told that one in six of the young men in the Highlands were killed in the Great War and it caused havoc to the continuity of the remote communities. Of the ten people of Ardnish in 1915, two of the young men were killed, and a third, Father Angus, joined the church.

  On the ship across I kept myself to myself, retching and weeping alternately. An older woman from Ballachulish, in the bunk below, was my saviour, bringing me towels, basins and food. As the voyage went on, little by little she teased my story from me. It was she who told me I was pregnant; to her it was clear as day. I was filled with hope and fear simultaneously, and I remember hugging myself to sleep that night. I had a wee baby from my man.

  My first job was in Mabou on the western shore of Cape Breton with the MacNeils, Iain and Dhileas. I told them about my condition and they swore not to let news of the child get back to my family. It was six months later that I gave birth to dear Morag, who shared my bed in an outbuilding. I stayed as a nanny to the MacNeils’ nine children for ten years. Morag was much loved and considered one of the family. Times were hard in Nova Scotia at that time, with mining bad and fish prices low, and, although they didn’t say anything, I could see the cost of having Morag and me was becoming too much for the MacNeils.

  I was lucky, though. The school needed a teacher. Although English was my second language, they didn’t have a lot of choice so I got the job. There was a shift happening at that time, with the older folk speaking Gaelic to each other, and the mothers to the children. But the bairns had to speak English by the time they arrived at school, and often they couldn’t.

  My family were all pipers, so, figuring I might have some musical ability I took up the fiddle around this time. I learnt with a boy, Buddy MacMaster, and after three years I was giving lessons myself and eventually became a judge at competitions.

  My Morag was the easiest wee scrap, sweet-natured and always smiling. I don’t know what I would have done without her. I never wrote to my parents to tell them of her, and as time went on it became more difficult. I am no longer sure if it was the shame of illegitimacy and fear of my parents’ judgement, or if it was because I wanted to show them my daughter in the flesh so they would have to fall in love with her, as I know they would.

  Morag and I had lodgings with an old widow who I became very close to, Nellie MacEachern. Her husband Ronald had died long before and had given her no children. In exchange for board I looked after the house and garden, and her, too, for five years before she passed away. I was left the house with its four bedrooms and grand view of the sea. After a while I renamed it Glen Shian, after the glen where Donald Peter is buried on his island. There is an area here in Inverness County also called Shian; it means fairy in Gaelic.

  We went from surviving on other people’s generosity to becoming part of the community in Mabou. We were surrounded by MacDonalds: Tearlach, Donald J. and Aoenas.

  Aoenas came to my door when I first started lodging there with a present of shortbread and asked me who my people were – the inevitable question of west coast Cape Breton.

  I told him I was the daughter of Donald John, son of Donald Angus, son of Donald John of Ardnish, and that was good enough for him. He knew the pipers well enough. Lineage here was pored over in detail.

  And as for men, I was courted for a few years, but no one compared to my Colin Angus, even though I was aware that his attractions probably grew and his imperfections disappeared as the years went by. I looked fine for my age; my hair was glossy and the staple diet of fish kept me slim. But rarely a glance came my way. I think I became a bit too quick to judge, with too sharp a tongue for some. A spinster, a teacher, a mother, I became known as ‘Sheena the fiddler’.

  My parents were always asking about men in their letters. For them, marriage was the solution to the world’s problems. I heard about their match-making effort long after the event, luckily. Colonel Willie came to stay with my parents before the war. They had received warning in advance and so everything was spick and span when he came; my mother would have been frantic. My father got on his pony and they would head up to Loch Doire a’ Ghearrain, where Miss Astley Nicholson had a boat, and they would go fishing together. The colonel and he would spend two or three days at Peanmeanach, enjoying the blether. Most of the talk would be about the Lovat Scouts, of their children and the year my brother DP spent making whisky on Canna.

  My mother wrote to say that the Long John Distillery was not going well, with prohibition in the States, high excise duties, the depression and competition – and far too many distilleries.

  Apparently the colonel asked after me, and whether I’d found a man. He even suggested a rèitach – an arranged marriage – saying he’d heard they had a tremendous success rate. He suggested there must be many a middle-aged man in Cape Breton I hadn’t met who would be delighted to meet me.

  The colonel had said that some things were too important to be left to the young – I was fifty at that time – and so unbeknownst to me he wrote to some cousins in Mull River, the Miramichi MacDonalds, to try to set me up. I could just imagine Colonel Willie and my father, whisky glass in hand, cigarettes on the go, enjoying this ‘solution’.

  Much to my surprise, I received a letter in the post from one Big Calum of Mull River, whom I’d never heard of, asking me if I’d like to meet him at the school house dance. I was determined to say no, but after discussing it with a friend, reluctantly accepted. I had asked around and heard he worked in the family sawmill belonging to Colonel MacDonald’s cousins, about seven miles upstream from the mouth of Mull River. We had a grand time together. We danced the square dances well together, knew many of the same folk, and I impressed him when the band recognised me and asked if I would play a tune or two with the fiddle.

  Yet even before I met him I knew I wouldn’t marry him. His wife had died, leaving him with three teenage children, and he lived with his sister. From then on I saw him from time to time at a ceilidh as a good friend. That was the way it was.

  However, I became very friendly with his employers, Joe and his wife Mary Belle and Danny and Maggie MacDonald. Morag and I would often stay with them and their families at weekends to get away from school and give my dog, Ruadh, some proper exercise. I called him Ruadh, which is Gaelic for red, because he was a lovely chestnut Irish Setter, whom I adored. I became well known in Mabou for getting towed around by him.

  The MacDonalds’ sawmill was a fine operation. There was a big bandsaw that could slice trees four feet across. A tree went on rollers at one end and came out in planks at the other. It was driven by water from Mull River, powered by the snowmelt. Joe and Danny, the two owners, with half a dozen men, stacked roof shingles onto a wood sleigh, set the machinery, and felled and floated logs down the river to the dam. The spring and summer saw everyone at work in the fields.

  Between Joe and Danny’s two families, there were eleven children and Mary Belle fell pregnant with her fourth. When Morag was in her late teenage years she loved
to help with the babies. Mary Belle was a lot younger than me, nearer Morag’s age, but we got on very well. She soon became one of my closest friends.

  One weekend Maggie and Mary Belle were having a frolic and there were eight women around the table making a blanket for the baby. As they worked they sang a song in Gaelic called ‘Ho Rò Mo Nighean Donn Bhoidheach’:

  I asked her if she loved me,

  And she said she was above me.

  She opened the door and shoved me,

  And called me a fool.

  The post took a month between Ardnish and Mabou, so I read of Donald Angus’s piping success, the gold medal win in the Halifax Herald, two weeks before I got a rare letter about it from my proud father.

  I finally went home in 1938 for the summer, using some money from my inheritance. Ruadh had died, Morag was grown up and I didn’t have ties, so it was time. The liner left Halifax in late June and a week later pulled into Port Glasgow. Mother was waiting for me on the quay. She was showing her age now; with white hair, and a bit more stooped than I remembered her, but she was very sprightly considering she was well into her seventies. We didn’t stop talking for the whole five-hour train trip home. After all, we had over thirty years to catch up on.

  I had one overriding ambition during the trip and that was to tell my parents of young Morag, and what was more, that she was married and expecting a baby – a great-grandchild. But as much as I longed to, it never seemed to be the right time. As my stay went on I grew more and more burdened with the secret, and willed myself to blurt it out.

  I often thought that news of Morag’s existence might have reached Lochaber, there were so many families with relations on each side of the Atlantic. But clearly the people of Mabou had decided it was my secret and they weren’t going to reveal it.