Ghillie

The olman went alone to the funeral of his mother. She was my grannie with the Spangles. The one who knew all about fishing and dipping as well as scones. He wanted me to come with him, on the train, bus and ferry. The car was in the garage again.

The olaid said we could just get the plane, Glasgow to Stornoway, and worry about it at the end of the month but the olman said he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the money. It was when they shut that tin door and you were up there. At least on the ferry you could get out on deck. You could open the window of the train – it was all diesel or electric now, on the passenger lines. But a very few shunts of sooty smoke still went up behind our house as the coal-train went out along the valley of the Devon river. Further upstream, they called it Glendevon, but not down here.

The olaid tried to persuade me. My heels, in their new brogues, were digging at the vinyl-covered floor. They weren’t the leather-soled ones that were back in fashion again, expensive ones worn under expensive blue jeans. But the uppers were leather, over cheaper moulded soles. And we couldn’t afford to carpet our semi so my shoes made a noise on the new vinyl, as they kicked out resistance to all this duty of death.

The olman let me off the hook. The olaid had already come back from the Co-op with the decent clothes I needed, bought on tick. That was a thing she was never going to do. The dark cord trousers had decent pockets, she said. Her own father always said, if times were tight you couldn’t afford not to buy trousers with decent pockets. If they bothered about the pockets, all the rest of the breeks would last longer.

But she didn’t take the clothes back when my father said he’d go alone. Maybe the wee man had a point, he said. It would be fine at the bread-van and the fish-van, the right things would be said. But at the wake, in the house, all the borrowed seats filled with people in dark clothes, and in the church, no-one would be saying anything good about a woman that never harmed anyone. There was no mention of maybe my sister going up. She was in the middle of exams and it was a long way to go to make the tea and the soup. That’s what women did at Lewis funerals after the short service which never mentioned the person you were going to bury.

I was hearing them talking, late on. Kirsty’s voice was there, too. The olman was saying his mother managed without a husband most of her life and she kept you laughing with it. Didn’t spend on herself but saved from what she had. A woman who could produce what was needed from behind the wally-dugs on the mantel-shelf, at the exact moment. She’d lost her own man when the First War was over for the rest of Great Britain. And she’d given a son to the convoys that kept the supply lines going and the alliance together.

Hell, he knew the world was falling to bits and we were all sinners without having to be told it again. And all the nods in his direction as one who had left the fold and needed this lesson of the transient nature of our lives.

Maybe there might even be a mention of this Gomorrah in the Central Belt. It was Alloa’s turn to be in the news. An interpretation of the law in Scotland allowed local councils the yea or nea on censorship, when it came to cinema. So cars were coming from other regions where other councils had taken a moral standpoint on Ulysses, the film. They came from far and wide, maybe to see what was behind the two-page inserts in the papers or maybe to express solidarity with Clackmannan, who refused the power of censorship. You couldn’t guess at the motives of the occupants of all these Anglias, all these Cambridges, Cortinas, Beetles. Triumphs.

We tried to get a look at the boards, walking through the park to the town, to catch a later bus home. But the usual gallery of stills had been replaced with a discreet rough board, giving the times of the showings.

The olman was subdued, on his return from Lewis. It could have been the travel or it could just have been sheer guilt from us not having returned to visit, as a family, since the removal van. But I heard them talking late. You could hear a lot from up the sliding ladder into the converted loft. Shares of the croft. Long before leaving the Island, he had forfeited all right to anything in Griomsiadair. He couldn’t argue with that. But something would have been handy enough to keep the Building Society at bay.

Then my mother’s voice came stronger. That bloody car would have to come off the road. We could hardly afford to put petrol in it anyway. We wouldn’t get anything for it but at least we wouldn’t have to go taxing and insuring it. And the no-claims was gone since that knock on the way home from that damned football match.

So we were green before our time, courtesy of the Abbey National. The Morris went into the garage and stayed. He had to catch the workers’ bus at the corner and she would just walk up and down Hungry Hill. I lost the contact with my father that came from him driving me out to Crook of Devon or Rumbling Bridge and collecting me at the end of the day. He’d make a token moan about it but once or twice he’d even shown some interest in this angling after small trout, under hazels, over brambles.

He’d knock them on the head for me. Gut them with the small sharp smooth-handled knife that every crofter’s son carried in a pocket. He quite liked being my ghillie. At least it was out in the open. Nothing would get him into a small boat of any sort again. He could just about cope with the Loch Seaforth as long as he could get out on deck.

But my corduroy trousers and pink nylon shirt and mock brogue shoes got put to use. The olaid got the word from The Broch. Grampa was failing fast – his lungs of course and Granma was jist broken-hertit. We ended up staying on after one funeral for the next. They were no more than three weeks apart, all in the summer holidays so I didn’t have to get time off school.

People were quite cheery but I was sad about the pre-fab and the garden. There were still jars and jars of greenish onions in the cupboard and enough Tunnocks biscuits to stick to the teeth of half the population of Scotland. My granma could never believe there would ever be enough to feed the whole family. There were tins of ham and a fridge full of bacon. She was a hefty lady and maybe that had something to do with the massive strokes, one after the other. But everyone was saying it was a mercy really, she couldn’t have gone on long without Sandy.

There was a brass band in full uniform at her funeral and the minister said what a good woman she was. They only carried the coffin the very last bit, here, just family. So a lot of men didn’t get a shot of carrying it on the black frame.

The olman was not very long back from going to the Lewis funeral. Now he hired a car to drive up the east coast to join the family for The Broch ones. We all went back down together. It was a Fiat 500. We all fitted in and we came across the Tay Bridge.