And upstairs – or was it downstairs? – was where the first-class lounge was and the white-clothed tables where the well-to-do dined from bow-tied waiters, while we languished next to the cattle in the steerage. O my God, I’d almost forgotten that – the sight of lifting cows and cars on to harnesses into the boat at Lochboisdale pier and then the pitiful sounds they made during the long crossing as the swell rose and fell and the waves thumped against the prow.
I remember once sneaking into the first-class dining room on some kind of lying pretext and managing to get a plate of food away with me. It was a salad – the first time I’d ever seen one. Two thick slices of the best cold ham were covered in a white sauce and next to it things I’d never seen before which I now believe to have been tomatoes and asparagus and rocket and lettuce. I smuggled them down to my father in the steerage who took one look at the plate and said,
‘Do you think I’m a cow or something?’
He came to my graduation, which was a rather grand affair in the Sheldonian Theatre. I didn’t want to go of course – considered it a bourgeois pretence, but since my parents had worked and struggled so hard to make sure
I was educated, I felt at the time that at least we ought to have a day out.
I remember once when I was very young – it must have been during the time of what they called the Eleven Plus exam – my father walked ten miles through the rain to the house of the local council clerk so that he could borrow his fountain pen for me for the day of the examination.
I sat at the small northerly window in our hut for hours waiting for him to return and I can still see him in his big green raincoat coming over the hill a mile or so to the north. I still remember the fountain pen, which was red with a blue top and which squirted ink everywhere once you dipped it into the inkwell which he’d also acquired.
‘No no no no – don’t waste it,’ he shouted, and my fun was spoilt. Only two of us passed the Eleven Plus: myself and the local harbour master’s son, George, who later became a professor, and the last I heard of him he was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The graduation, which took place on a hot day in June, was rather like a cattle market. These would happen twice a year, the spring sales and the autumn sales, when men and women would drag a bellowing cow by a rope down the main road, to be sold to the drovers.
We would sit by the roadside shouting insults at them, ‘There you go Seumas – you’ll get a ha’penny for that one!’ ‘You’d be as well going back home with that one – the drovers will think you’re trying to sell a mouse!’
The further you travelled with your cow the less chance you had: the drovers knew fine it was too long to travel back in the dark with a reluctant cow and would offer ha’pennies towards the end of the day for the poor beasts. ‘There goes poor Peggy with her sixpence,’ my mother would say.
Old Seònaid made a fine name for herself. There she was at the end of the day dragging her only cow round the auction ring. We listened open-mouthed as the auctioneer began his magic incantations: the cattle rattle acaramaarabid abaracadaabin which we later understood to mean hundred-for-a-bid, hundred-for-a-bid, ninety-for-a-bid, ninety-for-a-bid… and on reaching the halfway low point of fifty-for-a-bid with not one single hand raised old Seònaid was heard to protest,
‘S e a’ bhò a tha mi reic ‘s chan e an ròpa’ –’ ‘It’s the cow I’m selling, not the rope!’
For the graduation, we all hired ridiculous gowns from somewhere and then sat in preapportioned rows and moved forward one row at a time as our disciplines and classes were called. I’d almost persuaded my father to hire a kilt for the day but he refused point blank saying that he’d rather go naked than dress up in that stuff. I almost called his bluff, but knowing that he would do it, backed down, only because I knew they would restrain him at the door if he arrived nude. So he too hired a suit and sat ill at ease at the back, but proud enough to see one of the family, for the first time ever, getting a university degree, which are now so two-a-penny.
Afterwards, we went for what used to be called High Tea then, to The White Horse Inn on Broad Street, which was at the time run by a rather jolly couple from Edinburgh. A three-course graduation special was on, which seemed reasonable value – lentil soup, followed by stew and potatoes, and then apple pie with custard. I smile now, about the innocence of these pre-health-choice, pre-salad days. You’ll have had your tea? Afterwards I think we went to a pub, though we wouldn’t have stayed long for my father didn’t drink and then I took him back to his lodgings which were on the other side of All Soul’s. It was the last time he was ever on the mainland.
Those Oxford years were an adventure, and looking back on them I don’t think I’ve ever properly removed myself from them. I’ve always been eighteen, and expecting the Rowing Club boys to come round any moment to head out on one of our wild escapades. Richard even had a Bentley in the third year, which of course was a great attraction when it came to women. The Mark VI Sports Saloon, which was the one with the all-steel body and the 4.6 litre engine.
Most Sundays were spent driving round the Cotswolds: up to Stratford-upon-Avon to the North, and the beautiful city of Bath to the south. The names still ring like childhood rhymes in my head, and I can still see Richard, with his long scarf, and myself and Jodie and Lucy singing our hearts out as we drank champagne through these ancient places overwhelmed by tourists like ourselves – Bourton-on-the-Water, Burford, Chipping Norton, Salisbury, Stow-on-the-Wold. How big and pretty the thatched cottages out there were, like little story-book castles, compared to the ones I knew.
And punting, with its inevitable rhyme! How I scoffed at first until I tried it and then realised that, like everything else, it was not as simple as it looked. What I couldn’t really stand were the boat races themselves, with these ever-so-keen athletes, in their eights and sculls and coxless fours and all the rest. Too many public schoolboys for my liking, though I have to confess I liked a whole bunch of them including Richard who had been through Eton, but was as full of earthy fun and joy as anyone I’ve ever met.
He was a wonderful climber, with a whole number of first ascents to his credit which still stand in the record books. He was the first to ice-climb the north peak of the Cryther Pass in Snowdonia and has several similar credits to his name in the Alps. I agreed to go climbing with him once to Glencoe, when he ascended both the North Buttress and the Crowberry Ridge alongside the great Scottish climber Dougal Haston.
I tried the first bit with them, but pulled out when I froze with fear about one-third of the way up, even though I was well harnessed to both. Richard was also a great musician – a flautist – latterly playing with the London Philharmonic before retiring to Australia where his partner’s son and daughter live.
The ferry is sailing smoothly through the waters. I will stay in a hotel on my home island for the first time in my life. Mostly because I don’t really have any close relatives left whom I feel I know well enough to stay with, but also through choice – it will give me more independence and freedom of movement without having to explain anything to anyone, except maybe to myself. Does that make me selfish? Are my cousins and my second cousins once or twice removed not entitled to share my life before I share it with the world? Am I entitled even to do share it with myself? The world. The little big big little big little world. Someone scores a goal on the television. Ronaldo. Whatever happened to Alan Gilzean?
The sailing into Lochboisdale harbour is as charming as it always was. The lighthouse at Calvay greets us again and the pier lights are as welcome as they always were. How few people now meet the ferry. Where once the quay was thronged – the arrival of the ferry was such a great event – is now a great emptiness. Because mobile phones are not permitted on the car deck folk sit silently in their cars waiting to drive off, while those coming on board for the outgoing sailing play with their iPhones or their radios.
I walk up to the pier hotel and find myself, for the first time ever, in t
he upstairs quarters of a mysterious world. Downstairs in the bar they used to have great bare-knuckle fights as in the westerns. When I was young I came to the hotel twice – once for a wedding reception when I was about seven and once again some years after for a meal after a funeral. In those days, this hotel belonged to the gentry and only those of a certain age and means – mainly men on a fishing holiday – stayed here. And here I was now, of that age, and of those means.
The young woman at reception has no idea I belong to the place and welcomes me with warmth and with grace, and even gives me advice about the attractions of the area and some of the places I should visit.
‘The beaches are great,’ she says, ‘and of course if you want to go fishing, we can arrange for a local gillie to take you to some of the best lochs and rivers.’
I pause on the stairs on the way up to my room to admire the wonderful catches that famous fishermen have made over the years, with the stuffed fish now encased in glass cages. How I’d admired these that time I came for the wedding reception: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more wonderful sight than the 30lb salmon caught on Loch Druidibeag on the 29th of April, 1952.
The wedding was that of a cousin of my mother, who was marrying a soldier. It was a memorable wedding, and not just because it was the first I ever attended. The bride stayed at our house the night before the wedding, and
I remember the sheer sense of fun that went on all night.
My father was a piper and what I remember most, of course, are the great reels and tunes he played while everyone danced. My mother seemed clothed in flour, with clouds of it rising from her arms in the kitchen as she baked and cooked on the griddle over the stove.
God only knows where they got the coloured balls and papier mâché from, but the house was transformed by them, with sprinkles of yellow and blue and red and green festooned everywhere. And we were allowed to eat as much as we could! Someone brought in a trayful of marshmallows and I can still taste the sweetness of the pink and white in my mouth.
The wedding itself was at the church of course, with the groom – who was serving in the Seaforths if I remember correctly – dressed up in his finest. Kilt and hose and sgian dubh and a black Glengarry with a tartan trim, I think, and we all stayed ever so quiet at the vows and cheered afterwards as we threw confetti at them as they left the church, making for the hotel and the wedding meal.
This, I now realise, was a bit of a break with convention for most young couples would have their wedding meal in the church hall with the local women providing the food, but I think the soldier must have had a bit of money and would have wanted to make a bit of a splash and have a ‘proper’ wedding meal at the hotel. I have no idea now what we ate, for all I remember of the hotel are the stairs and the glassed fish, which now seem a bit smaller and more pitiable.
There was a wedding dance too, held in the local village hall, and my memory of that is far less pleasant. I would just have been exhausted, for when I try to recall it now it’s one long confused fuzzy recollection with folk dancing and music swirling around and I just so much wanted to get carried home and get into my bed, but the thing seemed endless and I remember putting my head down somewhere and trying to close my eyes, but folk kept interrupting me and asking if
I wanted a lemonade or another slice of wedding cake. It may have been the most miserable I’ve ever been.
And I was on these stairs once before too, at the funeral.
I must have been sixteen then, for that’s when Iain died, killed by a charging bull in the field between the old school and the river. It was forbidden to go there, of course, which is why we all went there as often as we could or as often as we could get away with it, until the day he charged at Iain and trapped him between the old stone wall and the bog. We never went there again.
And so I stand in the room now, looking down at the splendid sight before me: the Minch red with the reflected light of the sun, setting far to the west in the other direction. I’m facing east here, and can see the distant hills of Skye – the mighty Cuillin hills themselves – shining red and black in the far distance. Perhaps muir fires are burning over Strath way, for I can see some smoke towards the south.
There is no window to the west here, though that has all to do with the hotel’s layout rather than tradition. The west window was always to be guarded against: that’s where the Sluagh – The Host of the Dead – entered. I knew myself of a man who was lifted away by the host on a number of occasions.
He was my immediate neighbour, Fearchar Mac Fhearchair, a big sturdy man almost seven feet tall who was once taken north to Benbecula, once south to Tiree, and once on a long distance journey, to London itself.
‘I heard the noise first,’ he told me, ‘and before I could do anything about it the Host had come in through the small window at the back and lifted me up with them through the skies. Niall Sgròb himself was at the head of The Host, flying with all his might. The first time they brought me down on the rocky skerry on the east coast of Benbecula, where they were kind enough to give me a feed of herring and potatoes. The time they took me to Tiree they tried to tempt me to fling the fairy arrow at a poor woman who was spinning inside her house, but I refused and so was swiftly returned back to my bed. And the last time they lifted me, they took me far south to the big city itself where they showed me all the shining rooftops of the great houses.’
And don’t just take my word for it or Fearchar’s, because I investigated the matter that year I returned home from university and found nobody who could diminish his evidence. I asked his wife if I could record her about the matter and she finally reluctantly agreed, on three different occasions giving exactly the same testimony as to what had happened.
‘The first time,’ she said, ‘I was out on the hills myself, herding the cattle, when I heard the noise down about the house. So I went down and of course Fearchar was not there, though his pipe lay lit on the table and his meal was still there half-finished. He was three days away that time, and when he came back on the morning of the fourth day he said the Sluagh had taken him north across the fords to Benbecula where they’d abandoned him on this remote skerry, though they had been good enough to leave him sufficient food to survive. The best of food it was too – herring and potatoes.’
‘And the second time?’ I asked.
‘Well, the second time, I was in the house myself with him when it happened. Again I heard a noise and when
I went down to the bed he’d gone. That time they took him much further away, down to Tiree, but he refused to do their bidding and got safely back home by the following evening. And the third time I was sitting right there with him by the fire when they came and took him away to show him the sights of the great city of London from the air. He saw very wonderful things, as I’m sure he’ll tell you himself.’
And indeed he did: he talked of things moving through the air, of things moving fast on iron roads, and of things flying towards the speed of light. Don’t we all explain what we have marvellously known? And here I am, finally getting round to it.
Fearchar verified every tale, putting pictures to words and words to pictures. He spoke about the sound the Host made: like a gaggle of geese. He spoke about travelling through the skies: fields and rivers and little villages and big cities moving at a great speed far below. This phrase always appeared in every telling of his travels: ‘One minute I was at home; the next, I was somewhere else.’
To be in two locations at once. And I remember as a child staying with an aunt who had a two-storey house, from where you could see as far north as Gerinish. And when night came I slept upstairs near the moon and stars and could hear voices downstairs talking and laughing and singing, and the clink of glasses, and I regretted that there were two different places.
Fearchar himself always travelled by bicycle, and it seemed obvious to me at this point that I too should travel by bike while I was here this time. I scanned the tourist leaflets by my bed and sure enough there was a bicycl
e hire place by the hotel just up from the pier shop, so the next morning I hired a beautiful red Raleigh which had ten gears. If I had seen such a vision as a child I believe I would have fainted. I leapt on to the bike, and like Fearchar began my journey inland, past the bank and the concrete steps and the old telephone exchange and the shack where the dentist pulled all my back teeth out.
There was the old school, now a ruin, and there too the wooden hut in which Albert, who’d fought in the Boer War and kept pigeons, had lived, and the small knitting factory, now turned into a traveller’s bunkhouse. The knitting patterns had become famous all over the world – intricate whorls based on seashells which adorned the jerseys, and then fine wave-like patterns which decorated the mittens and gloves and socks. My own mother had worked there for a while, carding the wool on a brand new machine which Singers had invented, but which then broke and became unworkable. How beautiful her hands were and how delicately she made the scarf she gifted me on my thirteenth birthday. I loved it. It was long and speckled with green and orange dye from the crotal, and when you shook it in the wind you could see the colours rising into the skies.
I stopped at the top of the hill, where there was a signal, and tried to phone Helen, but couldn’t get through. It was a clear morning. The local hospital, where my father had died, was about a mile ahead. That too was a bright spring morning: St Patrick’s Day.
We’d been out shearing the sheep when he cried out in pain and clutched his hands to his chest, dropping the clippers and allowing the greatest sin: letting a half-shorn sheep run out of the pen. I watched it jumping across the rocks with it’s fleece half-hanging from its back. For a crazy moment I wondered whether to rescue the animal or to turn towards my father. By the time I did, he was lying down in the clipped wool, gasping for that empty air. I panicked and tried to pump his chest and raise his arms and rub his face, but it was all over. There were no mobiles then. We were out on the hill on our own. He died in my arms.
The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 13