by Valpy, Fiona
Flora and Mairi stumbled towards the faint light of one of the torches and helped get a casualty on to a stretcher. The sailor retched and choked, covered in thick black oil and coughing up seawater, exhausted from the swim to shore.
Somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the torchlight and the headlight beams of the waiting vehicles on the cliff top that illuminated the feverish dance of the snow, the vessel was being swallowed, inexorably, by the ocean. Had she sailed just a few hundred yards further on, the crew would have been able to make the turn into the safety of the loch, but in the snow-shrouded darkness they’d swung close to the shore too early and the storm had driven the ship into the rocky maw of the point. Summoned by the flares fired from the mortally wounded ship, a tug from the harbour had tried to reach the stricken vessel, firing a line across to it to pull it to safety, but the waves and the wind were too wild and had thwarted the rescue attempt.
‘Do we know the name of the vessel?’ Flora shouted to one of the stretcher-bearers as they were about to make the perilous journey back up the cliff path with their patient.
‘It’s a Yankee ship,’ he yelled back. ‘The William H. Welch.’
Anxiously, Flora turned to Mairi, about to ask her whether she knew the name of the Gustavsens’ ship. But she froze as a beam of torchlight illuminated the mask of anguish on her friend’s face. Following her gaze, Flora turned to see Alec and Ruaridh carrying a lifeless body between them. As the faint glimmer of light scanned over them, something pale gleamed for a fleeting moment, a glint of gold in the darkness. And then Flora realised, horrified, that what she had glimpsed was a strand of white-blond hair.
‘It’s Hal,’ shouted Ruaridh. As they drew alongside, Flora laid her fingertips in the soft crook of his neck, feeling for a pulse. But she could see already that it was too late.
Mairi had stumbled away, calling Roy’s name, her anguished screams like the cries of a seabird on the wind. They searched frantically, knowing he wouldn’t have been far from his brother’s side, that he must, now, be here somewhere. After an eternity they found him, washed ashore, the fronds of his hair drifting like golden weed at the water’s edge. As Flora shouted for a stretcher, Mairi fell to her knees beside him, oblivious to the icy water. She laid her ear against his chest and gave a single, wrenching sob of relief as she felt the rise of a faint breath. And then Flora had pulled her away as the medics went to work, willing him to live, to breathe again, to swim hard against the current that had already swept his brother away, fighting his way back to the shores of the living.
As the storm began to abate and a grey dawn broke – at last – over the hills, Flora and Mairi climbed wearily back up the cliff path, following the stretcher-bearers carrying the last of the survivors. There weren’t many – only a scant dozen of the crew of over seventy had managed to live through the brutal onslaught of the storm-whipped sea. The girls were soaked to the skin, shivering with shock and cold that they scarcely registered. Through the dark hours of that February morning, they had made the journey back and forth to the hospital at Gairloch three times, carrying survivors, each one a miracle pulled from the black water. The first of them had been Roy Gustavsen.
At the near end of the beach a long row of bodies had been laid on the damp sand, their limbs gently straightened as they were set down carefully one alongside the other. Some were heart-achingly young, boys who’d joined the Merchant Marine as they were not yet old enough for military service. In that row, Hal Gustavsen lay beside his fellow crew members, and Flora had wept hot salt tears over him, her heart leaden at the thought of having to break the news to Bridie, and of Mairi having to tell Roy. And as the feeble winter daylight won the struggle to push the night westwards, it revealed the broken carcass of the William H. Welch, impaled on the rocks where the hungry, scavenging waves continued to pick clean its bones.
The entire community gathered in the kirk that Sunday to say prayers and sing hymns for the souls lost in the wreck the previous day. They mourned those sons of other mothers and fathers as though they were their own, as they would wish their men to be mourned should they fall in far-off lands: because humanity has no borders.
Moira Carmichael held her head high, although strands of grey hair escaped from under her Sunday hat. Her deep contralto underpinned Lady Helen’s more fragile, wavering soprano and Flora’s voice that soared like the lark’s, rising to the rafters above the crammed pews. And as the congregation joined in the final chorus, a shaft of February sunlight slanted in through the window, blinding her eyes with tears of molten gold as she glanced over at Bridie who sat with her head bowed by the weight of her grief, unable to stand, unable to sing, unable to speak.
Lexie, 1978
So many of the old songs from these parts tell stories of the sea taking loved ones. I suppose that’s inevitable in a community of fishermen, whose womenfolk watch and wait for those who might never return. As Mairi and I park the car and walk along the track to the headland, the words of one such song play in a loop in my head.
‘Hushed be thy moaning, lone bird of the sea
Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee
Thy home is the angry wave,
Mine but the lonely grave
Horo, Mhairi dhu, turn ye to me.’
We’ve come for a walk to Black Bay, where a few pitiful remnants from the wreck of the William H. Welch still lie scattered and rusting. The carcass of the ship itself has gone, lying submerged beneath the waters surrounding the rocks of Furadh Mor. But when we pick our way down the cliffs to the beach, I spot the twisted and broken remains of a lifeboat among the rocks. As we start to walk across the stones, I hum the plaintive tune under my breath and the wind catches the notes and flings them across the stretch of water to the treacherous, craggy island that marks the ship’s grave. Here and there, scraps of rusted metal torn from the ship by the fury of the storm that night in 1944 are still visible where they have washed up among the stones. I stoop to pick one up – a bolt of some kind – and it is heavy in the palm of my hand. I rub my thumb over its salt-roughened surface and it leaves a stain of blood-brown rust on my skin. Carefully, I replace the bolt in its bed of stones. This whole beach feels like a grave, and I have the sense that nothing should be disturbed.
I dropped Daisy off at Bridie’s this morning when I picked Mairi up for our drive out to the point. As we were leaving, Bridie thrust a bunch of sky-blue forget-me-nots into Mairi’s hands, tied with a length of ivory ribbon. She said nothing, just turned back, holding Daisy’s hand in hers, and walked slowly up the path to her door.
I glance across at Mairi. She’s walked down to the water’s edge and she stands with the posy in her hands, watching the waves. I stay back, letting her have her space as she remembers the night that Hal was lost and Roy was saved. At last she fumbles in a pocket for a hankie and raises it to wipe the tears from her eyes, and I walk across the shingle to stand at her side.
‘Thank you for coming here with me,’ she says, turning towards me with a smile. ‘I’ve never been able to face coming back before now. But it’s good to be standing here with you, remembering the ones we’ve lost. Your mum was amazing that night. She worked tirelessly, doing what could be done for the survivors. She took care of me, too. After we found Roy and took him to the hospital, she was the one who insisted on coming back twice more so we could keep helping with the rescue. I was shattered – seeing Hal’s body and thinking we’d lost Roy as well was one of the worst moments of my life. But Flora made me keep going that night, and I knew it was the right thing. Even though we couldn’t save Hal, there were others who needed our help. Some of them were boys like him, as young as eighteen. In places we had to feel our way with our hands, because in the storm and the darkness it was impossible to distinguish the oil-covered bodies from the rocks.’
It’s hard to imagine that night on a summer’s day like this one, with the pink heads of the sea thrift nodding in the breeze and the sun warming the stones. But if I close m
y eyes, I can see the rescuers stumbling blindly through the storm: crofters, soldiers and sailors alike joining in the desperate search, the scene lit from the point above us by the headlights of the vehicles parked there.
We make our way to the far end of the cove and Mairi carefully places Bridie’s posy on the rocks at the water’s edge. Then, with a nod, she takes my arm and we turn away. As we go, I glance back to where the waves are already reaching for the brave little bunch of flowers whose pale ribbon flutters in the wind.
We walk back in silence from the headland where Mum parked the ambulance that night, along the rough track to where I’ve left the car at the end of the road. Mairi gazes out one last time towards the rocks of Furadh Mor and then opens the car door.
‘Right,’ she says with a little more of her usual brightness and briskness, ‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a cup of tea and a cuddle with wee Daisy.’
‘Thank you for showing me that,’ I say. ‘It really helps, you know, you and Bridie telling me more about Mum’s life before I was born.’
She nods. ‘I know. Even though it’s so painful, grief is something we have to go through sooner or later. There’s no way round it, no way to avoid it. That’s something we all learned in the war. You go through it. But if you have a friend or two to walk along that path beside you, it helps you to bear it.’
I absorb her words as I drive back along the shore of the loch. She’s right, I realise. In their different ways, the friends I’ve found here are helping me shoulder the burden of my grief as we walk the path together. It helps to know they’re by my side.
As we push open the door of Bridie’s cottage, the sound of singing greets us.
‘Step we gladly, on we go,
Heel for heel and toe for toe,
Arm in arm and row on row,
All for Mairi’s wedding.’
Bridie’s teaching Daisy the ‘Lewis Bridal Song’, clapping along to keep the time.
‘Oh an oh,’ sings Daisy, laughing as Bridie bounces her on her knee.
‘Here they are, look, your mammy and your Auntie Mairi.’
‘Mam a Ma,’ agrees Daisy, reaching her hands towards me. I scoop her into my arms and give her a cuddle, but then she wriggles to be let down and toddles over to the coffee table where a large photo album lies open. I settle myself on the sofa and pick it up. There’s a black and white picture of Mairi and Roy on their wedding day as they come out of the kirk. Lined up on either side of the path is a guard of honour of Wrens, standing to attention in their neat uniforms. Mairi’s veil blows in the breeze and she is laughing up at Roy, whose white-blond hair gleams in the sunshine as he smiles back at his pretty bride.
Mairi comes to sit beside me and Daisy clambers on to her lap, where she’s as much at home as she’d be on mine. ‘Look.’ Mairi points to another photo on the next page. ‘That’s your granny.’
Daisy contemplates the picture seriously and then points a stubby finger of her own. ‘Gan,’ she says.
‘And Bridie, too – they were your bridesmaids,’ I exclaim.
I’ve never seen these photos before. Mum and Bridie stand on either side of Mairi and each of the three holds a posy of flowers. I swallow hard as I realise they are forget-me-nots, tied with lengths of pale ribbon, just like the bouquet Bridie handed Mairi to leave on the beach at Black Bay. She should have been marrying Hal in this photo. She should have embarked on the biggest adventure of her life alongside her friend, heading off to make a new life on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, the life that she should have had died on a storm-blackened beach on a February night in 1944. My heart aches for her and I think of what Mairi said in the car about grief.
I’m glad Bridie and Mum had each other as they walked along that hard and stony path together, side by side.
Flora, 1944
With the arrival of spring, Alec was reassigned to the patrols on the Western Approaches and, with a promotion to commander, he joined a new crew aboard the Kite. While it was hard being parted again, ever since she’d witnessed the shipwreck and the oil-blackened bodies washed up on the beach, an image of his bloodied hands on the axe had begun to haunt Flora’s dreams and she couldn’t help but feel a guilty sense of relief.
Mairi, who knew her so well, was astute enough to notice the change in Flora’s mood and commented on it one day when they were waiting outside the hospital in the ambulance. ‘How are things between you and Alec?’
‘Fine,’ replied Flora, but she could hear the defensive lift in her own voice. She tried for a little more nonchalance. ‘Why do you ask?’ She was loath to confide her doubts to her friend. After all, Bridie had lost Hal and Mairi had almost lost Roy. She ought to have felt she was the lucky one.
‘Because it’s strange. You almost seem happier these days with him off at sea. It never used to be that way. Are things tough with his parents again?’
Flora nodded miserably, then turned to face Mairi. ‘It’s that, yes. But there’s more,’ she admitted. ‘I feel I’m losing him. It’s as if everything is stacked against us, not just his father and his position in life, but the war, this latest promotion . . . Sometimes it feels as though everything is conspiring to push us apart. I don’t know if I can keep fighting against it all for much longer. More to the point, I don’t know that he can, either.’
‘I know it’s hard, being parted. The war’s taking a huge toll on us all. But anyone can see how much he loves you.’
‘Do you think so? Because I’m really not certain of that any more. He’s struggling, Mairi. And I’m not sure being with me isn’t making it harder for him.’
‘Och, that’s just Sir Charles’s interference getting to you. Don’t you dare let him win, Flora Gordon! Don’t give him the satisfaction of destroying something so good.’
Their passenger appeared then, cutting short the chance to say anything more. As they drove back to the base, Flora tried to feel reassured by Mairi’s words. But in her heart of hearts, the doubts remained.
Alec was to have been away until the autumn. But, as the white heads of ox-eye daisies nodded at the roadside and the dog roses bloomed pink against the grey stones of the dykes, word came, via Ruaridh, that there was a plan to risk another summer convoy, which would muster in the loch and set sail for Archangel in mid-August. And so, with a mixture of feelings, she began to watch the sea again, scanning the northern horizon for the glimpse of a smudge of grey in the deep blue of the water, which might turn out to be the Kite returning to the harbour.
Bridie was the first of them to hear, in the end, and she hurried across the parade ground to tell Flora as she and Mairi parked up the ambulance for the day. It was the first time in months that Flora had seen a smile on Bridie’s face and while she still looked gaunt, with cheeks as pale as winter and purple shadows beneath her eyes, it was good to glimpse that brief flicker of her old cheerfulness, even if it was as short-lived as a match struck in a strong wind.
‘Alec’s ship is due in within the hour,’ Bridie announced, a little out of breath and pressing a hand into her side where a stitch griped. She gave Flora a quick hug and then hastened back to her duties in the canteen.
‘Here,’ said Mairi, holding out a hand for the key of the truck. ‘I’ll fill the tank and get everything sorted for the morning. You go and get out of your uniform and then you can be at the pier when he arrives.’
Flora smiled her thanks. ‘Say hello to Roy from me.’
Mairi nodded. He was staying on the farm, helping her father while he regained his strength. His lungs had been badly affected by the seawater on the night of the wreck and they’d very nearly lost him to a bout of pneumonia that had refused to shift, keeping him in the hospital for several weeks. He’d floated in and out of consciousness, adrift between life and death, but at last Mairi’s determined grasp on his hand had pulled him back to the shores of the living. Back to her. Afterwards, she’d helped him write letters to his parents, telling them of Hal’s final hours and describi
ng to them how the brothers had joined in the desperate struggle to try to save the ship. Three times the tug from Loch Ewe had tried to fire a line across to the foundering vessel and three times the strength of the storm had seized the line, wresting it away from the William H. Welch. When the merchant sailors knew that all was lost, the brothers had finally plunged, together, into the waves to swim for the shore, where they could see the headlights of the ambulances on the clifftop lighting a path through the maelstrom. The force of the tempest had separated them, but the thought that Hal might have made it safely to land kept Roy struggling on, even as the bitter cold sapped the last of his strength.
They wrote about Bridie, about how happy Hal had been with her and how much he’d been looking forward to seeing her again; they told his parents how much their younger son was loved by everyone he’d met in that wild mountainous land so far from his prairie home.
And Roy promised them that one day, just as soon as they could get safe passage, he would come back to them, bringing with him the pretty Scots lass to whom he was now engaged. He told Mairi that together they would all go and lay flowers on Hal’s grave: a simple white stone engraved with his name, the date of his birth and the date of the wreck – 26 February 1944 – in a churchyard at the edge of a waving sea of wheat.
Flora could tell from Alec’s silence that something was preoccupying him. He walked ahead of her up the path to the lochan, carrying the pack with the things they’d need to camp in the bothy for a couple of days. The springy peat cushioned each step they took, the ground soft and damp from a recent fall of summer rain. She shifted her basket to the opposite arm, swapping the pair of fishing rods to her other hand, and adjusted her pace to walk alongside him where the track broadened enough to allow it. She was a little wary, though, alert to another sudden swing in his mood, knowing that the gathering darkness might lead to another flash of that uncontrollable rage she’d glimpsed before.