‘If you know how to hunt with a rifle, ski well and climb an overhanging rock face you’ll be all right whatever happens to you in life,’ Father told me. He said it with conviction and, aged seven, I did not question the proposition’s truth. Skiing was out for the moment as there was no snow, but he started me at once on the other two skills he considered essential to prepare a boy for the modern world. For we lived then in the ideal situation for him to teach me both – Arisaig – a tiny village in the west highlands of Scotland. At the start of the Second World War he’d been sent by the army to this remote spot as a commando instructor.
The whole stretch of some 900 square miles of coast and wilderness had been taken over by the Special Operations Executive. To seal it off from the outside world was not difficult, only a single-track railway line and one very bad road led into the region; an official permit was necessary to enter it and the men who examined these permits, although in military uniform, were not soldiers but security agents and police detectives.
Arisaig House, Inverailort Castle and the few other large isolated houses in the area were requisitioned as schools of mountain and guerrilla warfare, and used for training male and female agents. The SOE had come into being after the fall of France, in order to foster and support resistance groups in occupied territories. Its function was to supply agents skilled in the tactics of unorthodox warfare, including destruction by explosives, silent killing and unarmed combat. When their training was completed they were smuggled into occupied territories by parachute or submarine, equipped with the explosives and weaponry required to inflict maximum damage and disruption.
The resident instructors in these arts were an oddly assorted group of men which included a Norwegian champion ski jumper, a Russian professional wrestler and the ‘Heavenly Twins’, a cheerfully sinister pair who had come from the Shanghai police. One of them, Captain Bill Sykes, specialised in throttling people with his enormous hands, while the other, Captain Fairbairn (‘Murder made easy, that’s me!’), had developed an individual style of killing from a combination of black-belt karate and the night-time techniques of the Shanghai waterfront. And then there was Father.
He was chief instructor at Inverailort. A damp, gloomy, Victorian monstrosity, the castle stood at the head of a sea loch, facing due north and situated beneath a mountain which cut off all sun except for a few hours in high summer. But Father was in his element – for he enjoyed discomfort and physical challenge. To be wet and cold and hungry made him feel real. He was resourceful, courageous, tough and a crack shot. He led his men on gruelling treks through the mountains, sleeping out without tents both winter and summer. They carried no food but lived off limpets and mussels gathered from the shore, which he taught them to eat raw – as he did me.
Arisaig was very cut off from normal life. It stood in a landscape of astonishing beauty and grandeur, a savage wilderness broken up by lochs reaching far between the mountains, by treacherous bogs, ravines and streams swollen with rainwater cascading from the cliffs. It was a place inhabited only by sheep and deer and birds and the dour descendants of those Highland families who had not been evicted from their crofts and shipped to North America to make room for livestock.
The village and its outlying crofts had a total population of 450. Its inhabitants, the native Highlanders who were our neighbours, were a wiry, short-legged people with toffee-coloured hair, closed faces and a guarded manner. Only after we’d been there two or three years did they return a greeting or acknowledge us in the street. Few owned a bicycle, none possessed a car. There was no electricity, people lived by the light of paraffin lamps and candles, warmed their damp cottages by peat fires or (rarely, because it cost money to run) a smelly paraffin heater. Except for a handful of jobs on the Arisaig estate, which owned all the cottages and land, there was no work and never had been. The villagers dressed in ragged clothes and lived out their austere existence in a state of poverty, at times near to destitution. Conditions in the area had changed little over the last hundred years.
Arisaig was set on a bay of the sea enclosed by steep heather-covered hills and backed by range upon range of mountains. Its single street ran along the rocky shoreline past a small inn built the previous century, past cottages, a tiny one-man post office and a blacksmith’s forge where the estate carthorses and crofters’ ponies were fitted with metal shoes, to turn up a steep hill and skirt a walled garden containing a run-down church and its manse, then continue out of the village on to the wooded slopes beneath the mountains.
That manse was my home. A square, solidly built four-bedroomed house, Mother had bought it for £1,000, though the price did not include the Wee Free Church standing in its garden. By 1940 the sect was so long out of favour most of its followers were dead. Only one service a year was celebrated in our little church; the minister came from Fort William on a motorbike to take it. That first year five elderly celebrants hobbled through our garden to attend it; the second year three; the next, only one. After that the abandoned church was used only to store our kayaks, Father’s Arctic sledge and harness, his harpoons, boomerang, eighteen-foot leather dog whip and our bicycles. On VE Day I tugged the bell clear off its tower, pealing it too exuberantly in celebration of Allied victory, and after that the building decayed in silence through the years beneath an ever-deepening layer of dust marked only by a trail of footprints to our stash of toys.
A track ran past the manse’s garden, leading up to the tiny railway station on the lower slopes of the mountain range behind the village. Set back from this track, two small houses and the Protestant church stood overhung by large trees. Built of dark granite which turned black in the rain, one house was the church’s manse, the other the Protestant school.
The school had eight pupils; I was one. Its only teacher was Miss Gillies. Small and old and shapeless under layers of clothes to protect against the chill, she kept order with a leather strap. The classroom was low roofed and dark, the heavy trees outside the window cut off the light. It contained a dozen hinge-topped wooden desks, battered, heavily scarred and carved with names, which faced the blackboard and a cast-iron stove. During winter and spring terms each pupil would bring a clod of peat or lump of coal to feed the stove, as well as the wrapped ‘piece’ which was their midday meal.
Two of the pupils were sons of the estate ghillie who lived in an isolated croft three miles away on the far arm of the bay. Thin bony boys with wary eyes and the ferocious manner of maltreated dogs, they walked the distance barefoot on an unsurfaced track, carrying their hobnailed boots which they put on when they reached the school. At the end of class they removed them for the walk home – which for half the year was made in darkness. Another boy, who had a mad mother, owned no clothes but wore a woollen blanket which hung in folds around his scrawny little body, his head poking out through a hole cut in its centre.
The pupils were between six and fourteen years old. All spoke with Highland accents, hardly moving their lips. My first weeks there I could understand nothing that was said to me; to them my English accent was incomprehensible. It did not make for a cosy relationship. They had every reason to hate the English. Arisaig was the very centre of the 1745 rebellion. Bonny Prince Charlie had landed here, in the rocky bay below Arisaig House, to raise the clans and march south on his doomed adventure with the bagpipes skirling. And it was here he returned as a fugitive with a price of £30,000 on his head, pursued over these hills, hidden in these same caves and woods, fed on scraps from these same crofts … and from here finally he fled by a boat to France, a drunk and broken hero.
And it was here the worst reprisals of the vengeful English army had been perpetrated on the local population. Crofts had been torched, the inhabitants’ tools and poor possessions tossed on to the fire. Their cattle had been stolen or killed, their land confiscated. Living in caves and holes in the ground, they had starved or frozen to death.
I wasn’t popular with my fellow pupils in the school, but I wasn’t bullied. I was an alien lifeform, a representative of the occupying power which had oppressed them for two centuries. I was looked at with suspicion, resentment and a wary hostility – but I was left entirely alone.
I was more than ready when class ended at 4.30, and ran the hundred yards to home. Throughout the winter I read, for the manse was filled with books. The rest of the year I lived outdoors. Most days I spent by myself scavenging for food, which was severely rationed. There was no fresh meat or fish, no fruit, and no fresh vegetables except cabbage and potatoes. What was available in the only shop, which sold coal, rope, tools, paraffin and boots, was extremely limited.
The loch contained fish, but no one fished it because no one in the village was rich enough to own a boat. Its rocky coves were thick with mussels clumped beneath the seaweed; there were oysters, and at low tide you could find clams and dig for razor fish in the sand, though with the stubborn perversity that characterises the Highlander, the locals refused to eat shellfish. But we did, and I was the family provider. And to a nine-year-old boy whose head was filled with others’ fictional adventures the sea also carried far greater treasures. Outside the bay where the village was situated, the coastline fronted the open ocean; any wreckage from a ship torpedoed in the North Atlantic was washed up eventually on this rocky shore. Over the course of the war I found a crate of lard and two of margarine, each containing a fifty-pound slab of edible fat beneath a skim of marine growth. I came on large battered tins of tea, a case of American K-rations half buried in the sand, a German mine … and more. One day, scavenging the shore beyond the mouth of the bay, I came across what looked from a distance like a heap of sodden rags half-hidden among the sea-wrack. Scrambling down the rocks to where it lay, I saw it was a dead body. His hair was twined with weed, the flesh of his face slimy white beneath a wet swatch of kelp, and his eyes had been eaten out by crabs. I stared at him with horror and fascination, unable to approach closer or to run away. On getting home I told no one, I don’t know why. The drowned sailor haunted my mind, I saw him in my dreams. Almost every day I walked the four miles to look at the decomposing body and check if it was really there. Then one morning it was gone. I have no idea if it was found and taken away or what happened, for no one ever spoke of it in the village.
During the school holidays I stayed out all day, walking miles over the hills to scavenge remote beaches the locals never harvested. Alone, I was happy. Less so at weekends when Father’s dog-weary troops at Lochailort slept off the gruelling exercises he’d put them through and he was home and free to train me.
In his early thirties, fit, strong and of great energy, he was leading the vigorous outdoors life he so enjoyed. The climate in western Scotland, which has the highest rainfall in Europe, was particularly stimulating to him. His greatest pleasure in life, he once told me, was walking long distances in the rain. Wet weekend on wet weekend, blinded by the driving storm, I found myself clinging to one vertical rockface after another with frozen fingers, inching myself in terror towards his impatient figure outlined on the summit high above me. ‘Anchor yourself before you reach, never look down,’ he yelled. Roped to him, I finally reached the top. ‘Now without the rope, you have to learn to depend on yourself alone,’ he said.
The other skills he taught me I took to with greater pleasure. The arsenal of weaponry in the manse was extensive. The Mannlicher had been one of Gino’s hunting rifles, and the two .22 rifles, twelve-bore and Greener gun dated from those Greenland expeditions. A beautiful long-barrelled .22 revolver had belonged to his father. The rest had been liberated from Inverailort: a Colt .45 automatic pistol, a .303 army rifle adapted to fire grenades, a flare pistol, a Sten gun, boxes of Mills bombs and, later, plastic grenades. He’d assembled this collection with a deliberate intent and kept it in his study together with other more specialised equipment in daily use at the castle. A plywood cupboard contained a crossbow, weighted throwing spikes, a flick-knife, a telescopic spring cosh and a garrotte.
These were the ideal toys for a boy in his view – he taught me to use all of them. ‘You have to do it from behind. Not very sporting but it’s him or you remember. Right arm over his head … cross the wires … yank back hard!’ he instructed.
Father enjoyed weapons, but the collection had been put together in case of the unthinkable – Britain’s occupation by Germany. Though no one spoke of Allied defeat, this looked quite possible at the time. Had it occurred it’s unlikely the Hun would have stayed long, finding it as profitless and inconvenient to subjugate Highland Scotland as had the English and the Romans before them, but while they remained Father planned to continue the struggle from caves and mountain hideouts from which he’d lead a guerrilla band on raids to harass the enemy’s garrisons and ambush their transport. He’d chosen these spots already and took me on long hikes to show me the advantages of their position and nearness to fresh water, which in many cases was dripping down the walls. I viewed our future habitations with childish dismay. Wouldn’t it be better just to surrender with everyone else and stay in the manse with our books, I wondered. But I knew better than to ask.
Perhaps Father saw me as heir to his guerrilla band, the son of the chief, but I think it was more that he believed everyone in the tribe must be trained to maximum usefulness. And it was certainly useful that I should shoot rabbits and game for the pot. We were always short of food; I was permitted to shoot anything so long as I and the family could eat it. With his tuition I became a fair shot, and we moved on from these basic skills to further abilities he believed a growing boy required. I learned camouflage and fieldcraft, to read footprints and to track, to use rough terrain in stalking game or a human enemy, how to set up an ambush or mount a raid. He coached me in techniques of silent killing: the throat jab, Japanese strangle, bronco kick and knife work. A keen pupil, I took to my lessons eagerly, learning how to use a culvert to mine a road, where to place charges to blow a bridge, and the way to derail a train.
Under his supervision I became handy with a sten gun and moved on to grenades. ‘Bowl it, don’t throw it like a Mills bomb. This is an impact grenade, you have to bowl it straight arm,’ he ordered. The first time I flung one the explosion and effect on the target, and emotionally on myself, was awesome. Far and away my most satisfying experience to date.
He was a demanding tutor, but I was a keen pupil always ready to practise what I’d learned while he was at work rehearsing his troops at Lochailort. Then, in 1943, following the Allied landings in southern Europe, Father was posted to Italy to teach British and US troops to cross the Alps and fight on skis … and the ordnance at the manse was mine.
With Father gone away to war and his entire arsenal at my disposal I was blissfully and wholly content. By that time I had a baby brother, David, who occupied much of Mother’s and Nanny’s time. My role in this well-armed but now leaderless family was a traditional one. I had become the hunter, I brought home the meat.
Mother did not worry what I was up to, so long as I was out of the house all day. Nanny fussed as she gathered up the sodden clothes I’d discarded on the floor on my return, scolding me for slovenliness as she tidied away the Mills bombs in the toy cupboard. Then she’d poach one of the salmon I’d brought home from the day’s fishing; next morning she and Mother would smoke the rest of the catch in a primitive contraption Father had built in an outhouse.
I didn’t always fish with grenades, normally I used a hand line towed behind my kayak in the sea loch. In summer darkness did not fall until 11.00 pm. Some days the wide bay, enclosed by mountains, would be flat and smooth as a mirror reflecting the intense blue of the sky, the sea floor distinct and clear twenty feet below the canoe, alive with streaming weed and the bright red glint of sea anemones. A rifle across my knees, I paddled through a world of dazzling light; seals basking on the rocks drowsily raised their heads to look at me as I went by, yawned, then flopped back into somnolent after-lunch siesta. The only sound was the splash of my paddles, the cry of gulls and piping of the oyster catchers.
An archipelago of small islands was slung across the mouth of the bay, at low tide they were linked by beaches of shell-white sand. Scrawny grass, bracken and heather clung between their rocks, and here I collected gulls’ eggs, searched for flotsam among the sea-wrack on the beach and swam among the seals in the clear cold water in the channels between the cays.
Other days I spent tramping the broken coastline, looking for eiderduck. Deep-cut burns plunged down the mountain-side to the sea, their banks in spring scattered with a carpet of bluebells. In late summer wild roses bloomed, flag irises spread along the foreshore, the bracken on the hills turned rust red and crimson berries blazed in the rowan trees growing between the rocks.
Usually I carried my .22 rifle or a shotgun with me on these hunting treks, but once I took the Sten gun instead. It required subterfuge, for I was not supposed to use an automatic weapon unsupervised. I carried it from the manse wrapped in an oilskin together with a couple of loaded magazines and hid them beneath a tree in wait for a suitable moment. The next day a storm blew up and hunting was impossible. For a week I hung about indoors while the wind howled, shaking the house, and long Atlantic rollers smashed on the rocks across the mouth of the bay.
The first day of good weather I started out early. Nanny made me a ‘piece’ to take with me. She knew I was up to something, she had an uncanny nose for it though she didn’t always know what. ‘Now you be careful or you’ll be getting yourself in a real pickle,’ she told me.
Recovering the Sten from its hiding place I went towards the mouth of the bay, keeping to the heather and bracken covered slopes behind the shore. The short, all-metal gun felt heavy and lethal in my hand. I carried it openly; if I came across anyone I possessed enough fieldcraft to disappear into the heather without being sighted. There was a small bay opposite the islands where I’d found duck before and I approached it carefully. Peering over the crest I saw a covey by the far end of the cove. Pulling back, I slithered on my belly to peer down to where they floated. There were seven, out of range but swimming in my direction. I inched the snub barrel of the Sten through the bracken to take aim. Midges buzzed around my face, my bare legs prickled in the bracken but I dared not move. When the covey was at thirty yards I let loose, emptying the magazine in a shuddering sustained burst which scattered a rain of bullets all over the sea.
To my astonishment I got three. I swam out to recover the family dinner before it sank. Flushed with pride I carried the ducks home and handed them to Nanny in the kitchen. ‘Gracious me, they’re cut to ribbons. I’ll have to make a stew of these,’ she said.
I shot nothing we didn’t eat, and we had need of food. That beautiful savage landscape of mountains, woods and sea was my own habitat, as it was of the game I hunted. What I did seemed natural; I was part of an elemental world, the hunter on the hill, and before my childhood ended I went after the biggest game of all.
Between spring and late autumn basking shark appear off north-west Scotland. The second largest fish in the sea, they grow thirty feet in length and weigh up to seven tons. One-seventh of that weight is their liver which, refined, yields 30 per cent in edible oil. After the war there was a shortage of such oil, used in making margarine, cooking fat and soap; it trebled in price.
Recognising the potential, two men equipped boats to hunt basking shark commercially. One of these was Gavin Maxwell, an SOE instructor at Arisaig whom I remember only as a vaguely sinister solitary figure loping around the village – but perhaps this was coloured by Father’s dislike of him: ‘Frightful little pansy, wears dark glasses.’ The other was Mother’s brother, Tony Watkins.
Tony’s first successful attempt to catch a basking shark had been with a hand-held harpoon from a rowing boat, the two on the oars backing off fast the instant he’d planted it in the fish. Diving, the shark towed the boat for thirty-six hours. They brought it to shore at last on the Irish coast. Slitting it open, they measured the liver and took a sample for processing. The results had encouraged Tony to continue with the venture.
Mother’s modest inheritance had been safely invested, and never touched. Never spend capital was an article of faith to her, emphatic as thou shalt not kill. Tony used his to buy three West Coast fishing smacks, each capable of sleeping three in considerable discomfort, and a trawler which he equipped as a factory vessel. The hunting boats were fitted with a specially strengthened bow platform, solid enough to absorb the recoil of the Norwegian whaling guns mounted on them. Aged twelve, I passed a summer working on one of those boats.
Each day was spent at sea searching for shark, and in the evening the small fleet made its way to one or other of the little harbours on the islands or mainland coast. No more than villages with a jetty, they consisted of only a pub, a shop, and a few cottages. Situated at the edge of the world, and in many cases connected to it only by sea, these were extraordinarily primitive places. All the inhabitants came to stand on the quay in silence watching us as we put into harbour. Once there, we used the ‘bathroom’, a bucket on a rope, then ate supper fried up on a Primus stove.
After the meal some of the crew went ashore to try their luck with the local girls – often with success, for to them they were rare and exotic visitors – while Tony, three crewmen and I sat on deck in the endless northern twilight and played poker. He taught me the game, ‘Never draw to an inside straight … If you’re going to bluff you must come in strong.’ He was skilled in poker, he’d published a book about the game and played professionally.
During the days at sea I passed the time belayed securely to the top of the boat’s wheelhouse, scanning the waves with binoculars watching for prey. In the rain with a sea running it was almost impossible to make out the black dorsal fin rising clear of the water that betrays the fish. Like the rest of the crew I was on a bounty system, paid a pound for any shark I spotted and that we succeeded in catching. It was an enormous sum of money to me, my pocket money at the time was a shilling (5p) a week.
After days aching for the opportunity, Tony asked if I wanted to take my turn as harpoon gunner. Thrilled out of my mind, I was worried by the responsibility. To fire at a shark and miss meant hours, even half a day lost before we were in position for another strike. The whole crew would be let down; it would be unbearable to flunk it.
Next morning it was light at 4.30 am. Our little fleet sailed an hour later, the hunting boats spreading out a mile apart in search pattern with the factory trawler following well astern. A breeze was blowing and the sea quite rough, but as we rounded the southern tip of Skye the sun pierced through the clouds to light up the mountains on the Isle of Rum ahead of us on the horizon.
Just before noon one of the boats radioed that they’d sighted shark and we closed up into a pack behind the fish. I felt a thud of excitement as I spotted their fins in the troughs between the waves.
Moving at a speed only slightly faster than our quarry we crept up behind the school. One shark separated from the rest, and it was this we went after. Tense with thrill I took my position at the bow, freeing the lock of the harpoon gun so I could move it.
The shark was directly ahead of us now. It was hard to judge distance on the broken water, at times the tall black fin looked like a sail, then it would disappear beneath the waves. I was terrified it would dive before we were in position. Minutely increasing speed, we moved up on it. The steady pulse of the low-compression engine seemed to lull the fish, but I knew any sudden movement could alarm it. As we nosed up slowly behind the fin the monstrous bulk of the shark became visible beneath the surface, its black hide streaked with algae. It was vast, awesome in its size. I trained the gun on it but the boat was pitching in the waves and I couldn’t keep aim. My heart was locked up in my throat as I guided the man at the wheel behind me with careful handsignals until we were right behind the slowing waving tail. Ten feet short of it I fired, aiming for a spot just behind the dorsal fin. With a loud bang the twenty-pound harpoon arced out, the tie line snaking after it. In a rush of exhilaration and terror I saw the harpoon bury itself in the shark, the shaft fall free. For a second I was overwhelmed by panic, then tumult broke loose in front of me. The water churned in spray, the tail rose eight feet clear of the surface, swiping the boat a blow that shook the deck and buckled the metal band reinforcing the bow. The shark went down fast, the coiled harpoon rope whipping across the foredeck as I jumped clear.
Towing the boat, the shark swam strongly for the open sea. Astern of us the other hunting boats were still stalking the pack, and far beyond them I could make out the distant mountains of Scotland. We let the shark tow the boat for an hour to tire it. Then, slipping the rope when the pressure built, the skipper winched the fish up cautiously, taking twenty minutes to do so. At last I could see its huge shape below the bow, the tail moving strongly in slow broad stokes … to become a flail as it broke clear of the surface, smashing repeatedly at the boat in a storm of spray, confusion, thuds and shouts of warning. Tony and I struggled to sling a chain around the tail so the shark could be secured.
We made fast the catch. The great fish was the length of our boat, it lay tied alongside while we sailed back to the factory vessel to deliver it. As I stood on deck looking down at the shark different emotions streamed through me. Triumph, pride – but also something close to dread. A horror that I had done this, that this gigantic sea-creature had been swimming along quite happily in the ocean … and I’d killed him.
A year later, while hunting in the mountains with a rifle, I wounded a rabbit which I could not reach to finish off but had to watch and listen to it die. Unable to put it out of its pain, I was torn apart by pity and guilt while I heard it suffer. The experience had such an effect on me I never killed any animal, fish, or bird again.
For me Arisaig was the kingdom of heaven, a savage unpopulated wilderness of beauty and adventure where wild roses bloomed behind the reed beds on the loch’s shore, where calm blue sea lapped white island beaches and the empty hills rose steep and silent but for the harsh cry of the raven and hooded crows. At the time we moved there, few of those remaining in the depopulated village had ever left it. Most had not travelled even as far as Fort William. Now, because of the war, no able-bodied men between eighteen and fifty were left. Those few I saw loitering in the village, who when it wasn’t raining sat on stones by the shore outside the shop, were physically handicapped or soft in the head.
The lives of all were governed by the Church. All pleasure and enjoyment was frowned on – the only recreations available were watching the single street from behind lace curtains, gossip, and drink. And, every two or three months, a ceilidh.
This took place in the village hall, a ramshackle wooden building with a leaking roof, separated from our manse’s garden by a hedge. It had an old petrol-driven generator which often broke down but usually produced enough power for a dim electric light. Seated on hard wooden chairs, or on benches fixed to the walls, the whole village attended, even the infirm and mad. All had dressed in their Sunday best. The men had wet-combed their hair flat; in threadbare suits and shirts without a collar they perched stiffly along the benches, silent and attentive. Almost all were smoking, either pipes or thin handrolled cigarettes they held cupped in the hand. Seated apart from the men in the body of the hall were the women. They wore woollens, long skirts and heavy shoes, their capes and oilskin hats stowed neatly beneath their seats. None of the women smoked. None wore make-up and their stern craggy faces showed an impregnable fortitude. Even the young looked middle-aged.
The hall filled up with cigarette smoke as the ceilidh continued, it coiled in the beams of the rudimentary spotlights trained on the small stage. The talent was native to the village, the acts familiar: Donald the Post dressed up in kilt and sporran played the bagpipes; Marjorie Post, his daughter, performed the Highland fling and sword dance in full costume, kilt, ruffled lace blouse, tartan stockings and buttoned shoes; Bella Shop did recitations she composed herself; Wee Ian, a retired seaman whose eyes floated in sagging pouches filled with blood, reeled off epics in a hoarse wrecked voice, coughing abominably between verses. But mostly the evening was song.
Illuminated by the flickering yellow light, in itself a novel luxury, these evenings in the hall were magical. The performers sang of doomed causes, slaughtered clans, defeat and loss, and their laments were of a piercing sadness:
Ye’ll take the high road
And I’ll take the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore yee…
In the past they’d left their crofts only to accompany their clan chief as a warband in which many would perish, hacked to pieces on alien soil. They had to find their way back to their ancestral home; ‘the low road’ was death.
The villagers were not a happy lot – poor souls, they had little to be happy about. Their voices were held low, they rarely met your eye, showed no reaction. Their harsh lives had taught them to endure, but not to smile or ever to show emotion. Yet listening to those laments of parting, failure, loss and death, whose words they knew by heart and murmured as they heard, they were transported. Their faces became rapt; many wept. Despair unsealed their true being and they came alive.
Although it was our home, as a family we were never accepted by the villagers; only Nanny was asked into their houses. I was always the foreigner, the English boy. I left the place aged sixteen, not to return until I was sixty. Then, on my second day back I walked down to what was still the only shop to buy bread and milk. Having got what I needed I started home; while climbing the hill from the village to the manse I drew level with an old fellow resting on his stick while regaining his breath for the ascent. I glanced at him as I went by and within the broken-veined wreckage of his face I glimpsed the ghillie’s son I’d been at school with fifty years before. ‘Good day,’ I said, and he peered at me.
‘Och it’s you,’ he said after a few moments in an absolutely flat voice. ‘You blew up the wasps’ nest with a bomb; you’ve been away.’ He paused and asked accusingly, ‘When are you leaving?’
It was the sort of welcome I was used to, but I persisted; we lingered and we spoke, and over the dram or two in the manse which followed our chance encounter on that rainswept slope I told him something of what had happened to me in those four and a half decades since I’d left the kingdom and headed south into the world that lay outside its bounds. In time he departed, but in the ensuing days the gist of the personal history I’d related to him spread around the village for, despite TV which now almost everybody possessed, gossip and prurient curiosity in others’ lives still remained the principal activity of the place.
Over the next week as I went about the village (now more populous, prosperous and better dressed, with street lighting but essentially unchanged) I became conscious of something extraordinary taking place around me. Running into people I hadn’t seen since childhood, I met not hostility as before but instead cordiality and welcome. Their stony natures softened, they warmed to me in a way they never had before. In my defeat and destitution, which all now knew about, I’d proved myself to them. They could accept me; I was received as a native son come home; the prodigal had returned, suitably ruined.