The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  Above the din, I shouted, ‘When will we reach Perth station?’

  The driver leaned out of the cab and peered into the rushing darkness. ‘We’ll cross the Earn soon and then the Tay. Ten minutes.’ He held up all of his fingers.

  Perth station was potentially a choke point. If the signal station at Leuchars had suspected something and wanted to stop us, or the station master at Guardbridge had somehow freed himself, I guessed that would be where the points had not been changed for a through train and we would be forced to pull up.

  ‘Coal,’ the driver shouted to me, pointing at the tender behind and above the boiler. ‘We’ll need to take on coal somewhere.’

  That had simply not occurred to me, but before I could ask how much was left, the rhythm of the train changed for a few seconds as we crossed the girders of the bridge over the River Earn. A mile or two to the east, it ran into the Firth of Tay and thirty miles to the west, it wound its way through the village of Comrie.

  *

  ‘Feasgar math dhuit,’ said Donald MacCaig as he unlocked the door of his emporium.

  His habitual ‘Good evening to you’ in Gaelic always sounded more like an accusation than a greeting to Robert. How was it that a MacDonald of Morar, a descendant of the Lords of the Isles, had lost his Gaelic, the ancestral language of power, the language that was dying of disuse, the language of the grey defeats of the past?

  As the old man switched on the lights, Robert looked up at the ornate Celtic lettering of a sign above the counter. It read Siol na h’Alba, the Seed of Scotland. Long ago, when Robert made the mistake of asking what it meant, it turned out that MacCaig was a member of a small nationalist group whose goal was not the independence of Scotland. ‘Leave the Lowlanders to the English. They have nothing but disdain for us,’ MacCaig had said. The Siol na h’Alba group had a higher ambition than the creation of border posts at Berwick and Carlisle: they wanted to usher in a new golden age for the Highlands, with nothing less than the revival of the Lordship of the Isles. Harmless, but passionate, thought Robert.

  ‘How many guns will you be wanting to hire?’ asked MacCaig. ‘I have four.’ From under his counter, he lifted out the gun slips and, one by one, untied them. He carefully unwrapped the freshly cleaned and oiled shotguns from their soft cloths. Elegant, their stocks intricately tooled and with gleaming wooden butts of richly coloured woods, they were objects of great and lethal beauty. ‘The Midland and the Joseph Lang should suit those of our guests not used to doing much shooting. Or they could be shot by a lady. They’re light and the kick is not terrible.’

  Small and rotund, speaking slowly with the characteristic sibilant ‘s’ of the Highlander, MacCaig was a good salesman and as he showed the shotguns to MacDonald, he was also doing mental arithmetic, working out how much money he could get away with charging. A lot, he thought. MacCaig picked up a gun that seemed more sleek and streamlined, older than the others. ‘This is Spanish, an AYA. I’ve shot it myself on the moor. Lovely swing and it is an ejector.’ The old man smiled. ‘You have to remember that when you break the gun, you should stay out of the way when the spent cartridges come flying out.’ And finally, saving and savouring the best for last, he untied the last slip. ‘This is my own. A Purdey. I’ll lend it to you, Mr MacDonald, but only if you shoot it yourself.’

  With a dozen boxes of twelve-bore cartridges, Robert laid the gun slips carefully in the boot of the Humber.

  Ever curious, and with no reticence whatever, MacCaig emerged from the shop £150 richer than he had been minutes before. He peered into the car windows, waving and trying to place the people that had come west with the MacDonalds. He had seen them before, he was certain.

  *

  I jumped when the driver pulled the cord for the train’s whistle as he slowed under the glare of the bright lights of Perth station. The signallers seemed to have directed the train into a central through track, the middle one of three that passed between platforms.

  ‘We do not stop here. You understand?’ I said to the driver. We were going much more slowly than I would have liked but I could see no movement in the station, no soldiers waiting to board us. I had asked Katie and Griffith-Smith to make sure everyone was lying on the floor to give the impression of an empty train. But no one seemed to be about. Staying in character, I shouted, ‘Schnell! Schnell! Faster! Faster! We need to make progress.’

  Only a few seconds later we had left the lights of the station behind and were gathering speed as we moved through the western suburbs of Perth and into the darkness of a Highland night.

  *

  With its white façade rising up like a huge tombstone, Darroch House looked ghostly in the moonlight. Three storeys high, very imposing, it looked down on a long, wide paddock that ran down to the loch shore. And beyond, twinkled the distant lights of Arisaig. Behind and around the sides of the house, stands of Scots pines and ancient oaks sheltered it from the Atlantic storms and the winds that swept off the moorland to the south. To keep out the hungry hill sheep, a drystane dyke with a ditch below it curved around behind the trees and then stretched like open arms on either side of the paddock that led the eye down to Loch nan Ceall and its white, sandy beach. Robert MacDonald sometimes thought of his house turning its back on the wind, with the collar of its coat pulled up.

  The Humber rattled over the cattle grid, waking up Eileen and Jenny, and came to a halt in the close between the back door and the outbuildings. Robert had asked MacCaig to light the Rayburn stove and take the chill off the house, but when Jenny opened the sitting room door, the room was icy cold.

  ‘Alan and I will get logs from the store, if you can get a start with that kindling,’ said Robert.

  Fires, their lighting, how to arrange logs and create the most warming blaze . . . all of these things delighted Jenny MacDonald. With some old newspaper she made minister’s sticks by rolling up a few pages into a long tube, flattening it and then twisting and folding the result into a plait. Laying three of these cross-wise in the grate, she then snapped twigs into short lengths and stooked them like miniature sheaves of corn into a wigwam shape. Only then did she light the fire. Everything was so dry, having been in the kindling basket since the summer before, that it caught and crackled immediately.

  In the hallway, Alan Grant was waiting by the telephone. He had asked the operator to connect him with a Borders number, his father’s hospitable friend, Ian Landles. When the phone rang he picked up and spoke clearly and quickly. ‘Ian, will you please tell your guest all is well and that he should continue to lie low. Thank you. Goodbye.’

  Goodness knows who might have been listening, but his father had to know that he and especially his beloved granddaughter, Katie, were OK. John Grant was sensible and would sit tight.

  The butter was rock-hard but Mrs MacCaig’s bannocks were soft and fluffy. Still wearing their overcoats, the Grants and the MacDonalds sat close to the blaze, sipping watery whiskies and eating tinned ham sandwiches. It was late but the long day was not yet over. Robert set an alarm clock for 6 a.m. and settled back into his favourite armchair, one with a high back, long seat and high arm rests, while the others trooped upstairs to bed.

  *

  ‘I am Major Klaus Saxl from the Department of Public Safety. And where is your salute, Private?’

  When the train drew into Comrie station, I jumped down from the cab onto the platform, only to be challenged by a sentry. In harsh, parade-ground German, I told him that my colleague and I needed to see the camp commandant immediately. We did not care if he was asleep. We had urgent business, a matter of the greatest importance to the Reich.

  In the office, I watched the commandant read the orders I had typed at the MacDonalds’ house earlier that day. He looked up, handed the sheet of paper back to me and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It makes no difference to me. Two fewer old Jews to dispose of. Saves me two bullets after roll call tomorrow.’

  When Griffith-Smith and one of the guards reached Hut 21, he unlocked the door, swi
tched on the light and rattled his stick on the corrugated iron. Jamie winced at what he saw. ‘Levinson!’ he shouted. ‘Levinson up!’ Their son-in-law pulled his hat as far down his forehead as he could, but when the terrified prisoners saw who it was, Rafael opened his mouth and was about to cry out when Griffith-Smith hit him hard on the side of the head, saying in accented English, ‘Silence! Do as you are told! Come quickly, now!’

  While Griffith-Smith and I were at the camp, Katie and the stoker found Comrie station’s coal store. After shunting backwards a little way, the tender was moved closer but, maddeningly, the coal bins lay on the other side of the second track. Rousing all of the American scientists, Katie organised a chain. ‘Only the big lumps,’ said the stoker, ‘I can break them up.’ And so from hand to blackening hand, lit by a torch, coal was loaded onto the locomotive. The engine driver and the stoker watched, wondering who their passengers were.

  When Katie saw the headlights of the vehicle returning from the camp, she herded everyone quickly back into the carriages as the stoker fired up the boiler.

  ‘I am sorry I hit you, Dr Levinson,’ said Griffith-Smith, ‘but I thought you were about to give the game away.’

  As the train shuddered, moved off and began to pick up speed, the doctor and his wife sat down in the carriage wide-eyed, dazed, certain they were dreaming as Miriam wrapped them in her arms and Griffith-Smith held up their grandchildren to kiss them. Katie brought blankets and the only food she could find – shortbread and a tin of corned beef.

  Jane Levinson turned to her husband and said quietly, ‘Perhaps we won’t die today.’

  Intended only for suburban use or short-haul journeys, the train made slow but steady progress. From the shore of Loch Earn, we turned north through Glen Ogle and then sharply west along the wide strath of Glen Dochart. Even in the small hours, the half-moon sky was bright enough to define the horizon of the high mountains of Breadalbane, Beinn Challuim and Beinn Cheathaich.

  When we slowed at the junction at Crianlarich to join the West Highland Line, I saw that the engine driver and the stoker were tiring, and no wonder. ‘How much further to Arisaig?’

  The driver shrugged. ‘Maybe two and half hours. It’s a long time since I was on this line. But after Rannoch Moor, we’ll have a slow climb.’

  I was still running on adrenalin after the theatre of Comrie Camp, and I watched the driver constantly. Once through the Nevis ranges, down into Glen Spean, we rolled through the Great Glen to Fort William, the Firth of Lorne and the last leg westwards to the ocean and Arisaig.

  4 January 1945

  Startled awake by an alarm clock bell that sounded more like a fire engine, Robert MacDonald groaned as he levered himself up out of his armchair. He removed all of the luggage, the tinned food, the four shotguns and the boxes of cartridges from the boot of the Humber and rattled across the cattle grid, driving up to Arisaig to meet the train. With only a rough estimate to go on, he did not know when, or indeed if, it would arrive. Robert parked outside the little station and closed his eyes.

  There was just enough light in the eastern sky for Donald MacCaig to see who it was that had driven into the village at such an early hour. The morning train down from Mallaig and its boxes of fish and shellfish would not stop at Arisaig and the first train from Fort William was not due for two hours. So what, or who, was Mr MacDonald waiting for?

  *

  Katie and Jamie roused all of their passengers as the train puffed along the north shore of Loch Eil. When they arrived at their destination in half an hour’s time, everyone had to be ready to get off the train and get out of sight as fast as possible. Hopefully, there would be no one about at that early hour. Katie also wanted everyone to be awake as they glided around the elegant curve of the Glenfinnan Viaduct.

  A pale pink winter dawn crept over the Nevis ranges. It lit the far shore of Loch Shiel as it wound away south from the little strath and the monument. Standing in the corridor with the American scientists and their families, Katie explained that the tall monument below them commemorated the place and the moment when Prince Charles raised the royal Stuart standard on April 19th 1745. ‘It was almost exactly two hundred years ago. The Highlanders were rebelling against what they saw as German tyranny, the Hanoverian monarchy. George I was a German. That’s what we’re doing too!’

  *

  ‘Your journey is over and you may return to St Andrews. But you must never speak to anyone of this. Never. It is a secret matter of the utmost importance to the Reich. I have your names and the addresses you gave me, and I’ll know where to find you if I discover you have been talking.’

  Deliberately abrupt, and with as much menace as I could summon up, I did what I could to intimidate the driver and the stoker. But I had my doubts about our expedition remaining a secret for much longer.

  Making several short round trips, Robert MacDonald took all of the luggage and the four children to Darroch House while Katie walked the mile and a half with all of the adults, except for the Levinsons. By the time everybody and everything reached the house, it was mid-morning on a clear, crystal, sunny West Highland day.

  In the cavernous kitchen, Jenny and Eileen were frying eggs and bacon, slicing bannocks and scones, heating pies in the Aga, filling dishes with jam and watching it all disappear as fast as it was put on the long kitchen table. Katie was counting. There were twenty-nine mouths to feed, twenty-five adults and four children. It was many more than I had first bargained for and the logistics of keeping them safe, fed and watered at Darroch House would not be easy.

  *

  Donald MacCaig had not been able to make out every passenger who alighted from the train but he knew that this was no New Year holiday party. He had remembered the Grants from summer holidays before the war, but the others who rushed out of the station that morning were a mystery. They did not look Scottish, or English. Was it their clothes, their haircuts, even their way of walking? They seemed to be foreigners, but he had not heard anything of what they were saying to each other. One way or another, he would find out.

  Also, there were only eight bedrooms in the big house. Something strange was going on. Why had Mr MacDonald lied to him, and what did he want with those shotguns? At least one thing was clear, and it cheered the shopkeeper: they would need feeding, and he went into the kitchen to encourage Mrs MacCaig to do some more baking. Perhaps he himself would take a turn out to Taigh Darroch to see how they were fixed.

  *

  ‘Mommy! Mom!’ The only American child clattered into the kitchen, panting for breath, pointing behind her. ‘There are monsters out there!’

  The child seemed genuinely distressed and for a moment I wondered if we had been followed in some way. But when I went out of the porch, I saw the monsters about fifty yards away. Grazing quietly in the paddock were two red deer, one of them a magnificent twelve-pointer stag. Not many of them in New York.

  ‘What do we do now, Katie?’ After a lunch of game pie and tinned soup and a delicious nap, we had wrapped up warm for a walk around the policies of the house. ‘It’s nothing short of a miracle that we’re all here. But I think that somehow they’ll eventually find us. Maybe sooner rather than later. Too many loose ends along the way. So we must move quickly.’

  The constant warmth of the Gulf Stream meant that snow rarely lay around the shores of Loch nan Ceall. When we reached the brilliant white sands of the beach, a flat calm sea looked green while, beyond it, the mountains of Morar glowed a cold blue.

  ‘The people of this place, Gaelic speakers, see colours differently,’ said Katie after a long moment gazing north over the loch. ‘They talk of the sea being uaine, or green, and the land as gorm, blue.’

  That was the point, I thought. It was our land we were fighting for, our history, our people, their decency and their freedom to love the place where the mountains were blue and the sea was green.

  As we walked back up the paddock, and the two monsters lifted their heads from the grass to look at us, Katie put h
er arm through mine. ‘This is not just your fight, David, not just your responsibility. There are some very clever and resourceful people here. Let’s talk to them.’

  *

  ‘They’ll be frantic,’ Feldman said. ‘By now it will be clear to Colonel Kritzinger that we have all gone and unless he can find us quickly, his superiors will be furious.’ It was a prospect that clearly amused the little professor.

  In the kitchen, more than twenty of us had squeezed around the large table or were perched on window seats or sitting on the floor.

  I agreed. ‘They’ll comb the countryside looking for us and sooner or later will realise that we hijacked a train. So even though we seem to have put a lot of distance between us and them, the odds are that they’ll eventually find us.’

  With Feldman introducing them, his colleagues began to contribute. Dr Bradley Kaye made an obvious point, so obvious that it had not occurred to me. ‘If they attack us here, that will be confirmation that they have no more bombs. We are “it”. The only game in town. Nobody else can possibly be working on this to such an advanced level.’ He paused, looking around the room with a raised eyebrow, letting the thought settle. ‘And the other thing, something that might be a comfort, is that if there really are no other bombs, then they can’t risk killing us.’

  Having to raise my voice a little as discussion ranged back and forth around the room, I said, ‘I think we have to concentrate on two things.’

  Like an orchestra conductor, Professor Feldman raised his hands to quell the hubbub.

  ‘First of all, we have to be able to defend ourselves if we are attacked. Bradley is right. All of you scientists are not likely to be shot at, although accidents often happen. It’s everyone else, including and especially your families, who are in mortal danger. So please allow two soldiers to assess our situation methodically.’

  Griffith-Smith itemised our meagre arsenal. In addition to his pistol, we had seven shotguns and twenty boxes of cartridges with twenty-five shells in each. And that was it. ‘Shotguns are only lethal at short range,’ added Griffith-Smith, ‘and I have only one box of ammunition for my pistol.’