by Leah Fleming
‘No… No… Never turn your back on a man, do not let him near your body…Yield not to temptation.’ Her mother’s warning was shouting in her ear. Now she knew what temptation was all about. It was about lying in the sand under the stars. It was kissing the salt and sand from Ewan’s lips and his neck and his chest. It was about strange stirrings between her legs and a longing to be joined together like a fierce magnetic force. It was begging time to stand still, feeling the warmth of his beating heart, drowning in his black eyes, drawing him ever closer into her body. No! NO! Minn was afraid.
‘We’d better go.’ Minn sat up brusquely, shaking the sand from her lap. Ewan grabbed her arm.
‘Do we have to? I’m so comfortable here with you. The sun is still settling and the moon creeps slowly. Plenty of time yet to seal our vow.
‘I won’t harm you, Minn, don’t be scared. There will be other nights than this when I come on leave. I’ll take you to Oban to see the stores and the town and the trains. That’s another promise,’ he whispered, putting his arm around her, drawing her down again to his side.
‘All these bright promises.’ Minn shivered, feeling a sudden chill. ‘Hold me, Ewan, hold me so tight. I’m afraid.’
‘I’ll hold you for ever, Minn Macfee, don’t you be worrying over me.’
She cooried into his broad chest, watching the purple twilight between day and night, listening to the whish of the water on the gravel, begging the evening sun not to set over the horizon.
‘I don’t know why I’m after feeling this fear, but just hold me, Ewan, please,’ she said, feeling the tears stinging her eyes.
Why was the world going mad around them? They were little more than children thrown into a whirlwind, powerless against the magnetic force of a world at war. Now she had found him how could she let him go?
Four
Normandy 1942
‘Keep that bloody stern up, Mackinnon,’ yelled a sergeant major’s voice in his ears. Ten tired men in a dory with a conked-out engine rowed desperately away from the French shoreline: backs bent double in a frantic rhythm, hoping against hope they would make their rendezvous somewhere in the open sea. Ewan was fighting his exhaustion and fear as the dawn light was streaking to the east, exposing the raiders to the guns along the concrete coast.
From the start the mission had been a total cock-up. Two injured men, one having to be left behind to the mercy of the Boche. Nothing had gone right and now they were rowing for their lives with only fitness and anger fuelling the power of their strokes.
Ewan watched the sweat pouring from the back in front knowing he must distract his mind away from bursting lungs and the cramp in his legs. He must not let the others down. He looked at the grimaces on the faces around him streaked with black greasepaint, black hoods bobbing, eyes blinking with blank, fixed stares. Each man was fighting his own private battle to survive with only the discipline and months of training for just such an escape on their side.
Was this what it was all about: Those months at the White House on the Isle of Arran, based at the shooting lodge of the Duke of Montrose? One of a bunch of raw recruits, all scruffy Herberts and oddballs who wanted to be part of the new special boat squadron section of the Royal Marines: a secret force selected from volunteers mad enough to want more action behind enemy lines after the fall of Dunkirk. Now they were putting all those back-breaking exercises into practice.
Think about Arran, all those bloody exercises, the pain and cunning, Ewan was panting to himself. Think about that daft professor who cycled five hundred miles on his old tin bike to show them all the delights of seaweed. The grimaces of revulsion on some of their faces as they tasted hedge salads, seagull eggs and raw kelp for the first time made Ewan grin to himself. He recalled how in desperation they had paid a local fisherman to smuggle them sole and lobster and scallops for a secret feast over an open fire.
Then there was the old cailleach who cursed them for profaning the Sabbath as they skimmed up the cliffs and scared the sheep, creeping about under cover of darkness on the leeward side of paths to avoid sniffing farm dogs and insomniacs. They were a team of raiders, invisible, silent, a lethal bunch lurking in caves, under rocks, canoeing for miles, with a ton of demolition equipment in their backpacks; each individual with his own expertise, his own method of surprise and attack, his own way of disposing of the enemy.
The training was tough. It had to be. At every stage men fell by the wayside, disappearing back to former regiments. Only the fittest survived: the loners and the wiry nonconformists, and now his life depended on this motley crew of misfits from all ranks and none. They were being put to the ultimate test.
Ewan had earned his place as a canoe-cum-beach recce specialist, swimming offshore to test the depths and quality of the shoreline, plumbing the sea bed to test the graduations and shelving at twenty-yard intervals while his mate was on the beach taking sand samples. Each looking out for the other until they swam back to the rendezvous boat to put their information on the waiting chart.
On his last recce off the coast of Dieppe he had found no safe shelving beach but a jagged spit of rocks and was battered by waves ripping his canoe. It had been a struggle to complete the task, to avoid guards on the lookout. Only when the beach had been examined could they swim back to the waiting boat.
Now their skipper was flashing his torch, hoping to goodness the rendezvous boat would loom out of the darkness and haul them all aboard for mugs of hot coffee laced with navy rum.
Why do we keep putting ourselves in these crazy places? he thought, while spurring on his effort, not wanting to slacken the strike rate. He pretended he was a kid again, paddling like fury around the Phetray coast.
Had he not been risking his neck on the sea for as long as he could remember? The sea was his obsession. Oceangoing ships did nothing for him. He liked to be close to the restless water, to his kindred spirit, feeling the spray and the waves underneath him, testing his strength against the elements like some human seal swimming and sunbathing on the rocks. He could see the little tent he had made out of a sail, feel the rough surface and his nights under a stretch of sky and stars.
He discovered that the two-seater canoe was his second skin, light and transportable, silent and easy to conceal. Damn his long legs! They had nearly cost him his selection to the squadron, but his overall wiriness and sea legs were giving him a chance now to prove his worth. They were all rowing for their life.
No one on Phetray knew his true unit. He still wore his old naval uniform, fabricated manoeuvres and excuses why he was still on dry land. Administrative duties, mapping convoys were what his family thought he was doing. If his mother wondered at his weather-beaten muscular wiriness, his reticence about this office job and the bruises appearing after each bad parachute jump, she said nothing.
If only they would accept Minn as his unofficial fiancée, but they were still tight lipped about her and guarded in their opinion of her worth. How could it ever be after Agnes’s death? He could see it strained their Christian duty to be pleasant when he brought her home for tea.
Minn tried her best to please, sitting so pale and shy, her manners impeccable as Mother tried to be polite. She was not blind, reading the ‘not good enough for our son’ plastered across Mother’s furrowed brow.
She was working as a postal assistant helping Miss Macfadyen and driving a voluntary mobile canteen for the construction crews building the new aerodrome, serving teas and snacks around the island in the rickety van in all weathers. Her letters hinted at all the new concrete buildings and barracks that soon would bring thousands of airmen and crews to Phetray.
The very thought of Minn was spurring him on, firing his aching arms with new resolve. She was his girl and he was proud of her. On his last leave he was the first person allowed to take her abroad, to Oban to stay with his aunt, chaperoned by a nervous Eilidh Macfee. He would never forget that look of pure astonishment on her face when she saw the tiers of houses rising up from Oban Harbour, the c
rowds bustling around the harbour watching their arrival, the fishing fleet and the car traffic. The streets were full of fine shops and the rows of terraced houses rising up the hill with such gracious splendour amazed her. ‘When do all these people go away?’ she had asked.
‘They don’t…’ Ewan smiled recalling the look of incredulity on her face as she browsed in shop windows. That was what he loved about her: that look of delight in those blue eyes over the simplest of outings.
They dined in cafés and in the hotel. She watched the soldiers and servicemen with girls laughing on their arms going into the public bars. She practised her English slowly in the shops, and he was thrown by such a pukka accent. Each word slowly pronounced in an English accent with no trace of a highland lilt.
They found an antiques shop up a side street full of old furniture and ancient pictures. He wanted to buy her something special as a memento, clothing, a hat, but she turned her nose up at his suggestions, preferring to ferret amongst the old junk until she found an ornament, a china figurine.
‘Look, Ewan, this is what I want.’ It was a sentimental piece: a shepherdess and boy entwined round a tree. ‘You can start off my collection for my hope chest,’ she laughed.
He wanted to buy her the sun and the moon, but most of all an antique ring: an aquamarine to match her eyes clustered with seed pearls, but she had eyes only for the ornament and it cost hardly anything.
Then the visit came to an end in Oban station as he headed south and she went back home on the SS Hebrides with her mother, carrying her precious purchases as if they were the Crown jewels.
They clung together as Minn sobbed into his coat, great gulps of tears. Ewan could taste the salt tears in her kisses. This was why he was fighting, for Minn and Phetray and the goodness and beauty of all they stood for.
They rowed on in the darkness, faces grimacing with pain. It might be sentimental bosh but he believed in justice and that right would prevail.
His secret warfare was dirty and violent. Smash and grab raids were rush jobs with knives and grenades. However covert the mission it let Jerry know that Britain had not given up the fight. Cross Channel surprise attacks were a reminder that some day soon armed forces would be coming back to France for good. His chosen work was fraught with danger, chances of survival often slim, but what the hell! Someone had to do it!
Ewan wondered how many of his nine lives he had used up. He thought about his first raid on a radar station close to Cherbourg. The plan was to snatch enemy troops to see what calibre of man was guarding the coast. They stormed aboard the motor boat so confidently, squeezed in the hull, and were buffeted by the waves until they were reduced to retching into buckets, staggering ashore to scramble up cliffs with a Bren gun, all set to cut the telegraph wires.
That was the plan but reality was so different. There were too many guards and the coastal defences were too thick. They abseiled back down under cover of darkness empty handed and sped back over the Channel with frustration. Other recces along the Bay of the Seine had been more successful, but tonight’s had been a bloody disaster.
The patrol had been parachuted low while two Whitley bombers took the flak above them. They were supposed to land in a stubble field near St Valery en Caux but somehow most of them had overshot the target. Precious time was wasted in gathering in stray parachutes and finding each other in the dark. They were camouflaged in combat jackets, netting hoods and grease-painted faces. A hidden dinghy with supplies had to be found and hidden under the rocks so that the men could begin the beach recce and take samples and measurements.
The routine descent down the cliff injured two men badly and then they realized they were some seven kilometres away from the rendezvous boat. There was little time left to do a decent job as they crept along the coast dragging their wounded. Eventually they made for the waiting dory but the damn engine cut out and there was nothing for it but to strip off and paddle her out.
Far in the distance blinked a flashlight from the motor transport. ‘Hurry up,’ came the signal for it was almost dawn.
Ewan lifted his gaze. Surely the boat was almost out of danger now? Then a searing flash of light was bearing down on them with a sickening splatter of gunfire from a patrol boat. The dory rose up into the air with the swell tipping the crew sideways into the water as bullets ripped the surface.
Ewan dived down for cover, his eardrums bursting with the roar and commotion. The rest was a blur of flashing lights and screeching voices. It was every man for himself now. He did not fancy spending the rest of the war ‘in the bag’ so he took another lungful of air and dived down into the darkness. He would head out to sea and take his chance. There must be some hiding place from that cursed searchlight.
He was swimming offshore, drifting with the tide; the sea was still warm, buoying him gently back and forth into the inky blackness, but streaks of dawn light were rising higher in the east. His mind was spinning from panic to calm. He knew he was tiring but tiredness meant death and he wanted to stay alive. How he wanted to stay alive, but the sea was warm and oily drowsiness would soon overcome his strength of will.
In the darkness he could hear voices calling, Gaelic voices, as he floated helplessly now: the sea cailleachs, sirens of the deep calling him down to play with them.
‘No!’ Ewan spat the salt water from his lips. ‘You canna have me. You’ve had Agnes, you’re not having my bones!’ Every stroke was an effort of will but the voices called out louder and he tried to struggle as the arm came up to drag him under.
‘No! Ach away with you.’ The arm was too strong and held him fast.
Five
RAF Phetray, 1942
When the postie volunteered for the army, Minn Macfee wasted no time in volunteering to drive his old van. Archie the blacksmith gave her extra lessons and soon she collected deliveries from the ferry and bumped her way around the island trying to eke out their meagre petrol ration. Driving came easily for she had the confidence of youth and the wings of love at her heels. All the wolf whistles and calls from the construction crews just rolled off her as she delivered mail to the civilian gangs and took orders for filled rolls and pastries.
It was hard to persuade her fearful mother to be a passenger for a tour of the island in the van. Eilidh surveyed all the concrete hangars and huts with horror. ‘Yon’s a very Sodom and Gomorrah breathing fire over our heads night and day… to be sure there’ll be trouble for us. We’ll no be safe in our beds!’ she said.
At the same time she was proud of her daughter’s connection to the minister’s son. It gave her new purpose in rising from her bed to sweep the floor, milk the cow, collect the eggs for her basket and hold her head a little higher in the stores. Minn was going to marry above herself so she was.
The coming of an airbase to Phetray was bringing new life and prosperity to the islanders. There were billeting fees, extra provisions ordered, extra whisky for the bar. A city of grey concrete was erected in the middle of the island with its own piped water and electricity, tarmacadam roads replaced the dirt tracks, with look-out posts and Nissen hut barracks lined up alongside.
It was rumoured that there would be more airmen than civilians living on the island, and many more men than girls, news of which worried many a crofter husband and father alike.
‘You must keep busy and your eyes forward and don’t give temptation any encouragement,’ warned Eilidh every time Minn left for work. ‘Where men and maids meet, oft comes mischief and there’s plenty wee Jezebels on this island with time on their hands to make plenty mischief. Mark my words.’
‘Oh, Mother, why must you take the joy out of everything? Why is it so wrong to enjoy a crack or two with the airmen? They are such gentlemen,’ Minn argued. The airbase was bringing life to this dull place with servicemen in jaunty caps whistling and waving.
‘Get them on their own and you’ll soon find they’re no Christian men, these gentlemen of yours, after only one thing, I’m after thinking, even from a girl who is spoke
n for! There is only joy in heaven after the work is done and sins are paid for, mo ghaoil. Don’t go looking for pleasure in this life. I have never found any.’
‘That’s because you don’t open your eyes and see the beauty all around you, the flowers and music and the dancing. Why don’t you mix more with your neighbours?’ Minn pleaded, sensing her mother was lonely with only her spinning wheel and knitting for company.
‘I live as my Church says I must live, separated from the world’s wicked ways. It is the only true preparation for the life ahead when we, the chosen ones, shall be as new creatures in the eyes of the Lord, not frail sinners at his mercy every hour of the day! Get you to your work and mind what I say.’
There was no talking sense to Mother when she was in this mood and Minn was glad to leave the gloom of their four walls for the brightness of the day.
She lived for Ewan’s letters, savouring each page, reading them over and over again until she knew them by heart. She always called into the Manse when they arrived to share his news, sensing that his letters to them were shorter and more dutiful. She dusted the little figurine with care each morning until it sparkled in the sunshine from the tiny window of her boxroom. With each rub she made a wish for his safe return.
Driving the mobile canteen van grew from the island’s first haphazard catering effort to supplying teams of builders each day. Then it was formalized into a special post by representatives of the Women’s Rural Institute. They thought a single girl far too young and flighty to be let loose on her own among airmen, but everyone knew of Minn’s unofficial engagement and felt she could be trusted not to seduce the workers and jeopardize the war effort.