The olman could never do much damage to anyone because he always had his doubts. I think he cherished them, really, as proof he was still human after a certain six years. So it couldn’t really have all been Yorkshire puddings baking over petrol fires, his personal history of World War Two. He was a restless body, for as long as I can remember. You might expect that of a man who was trapped in a confined space, not once but twice in his lifetime.
One day, in my room in the SY flat owned by the Mill, all the revolutionaries were doing sweet FA as usual. This was us settling back in the hometown after us all getting disorientated in the Central Belt. Kenny F, me and the boys did nothing much except learn to smoke and wear out vinyl discs, in a dark room, shutting the curtains on the decent weather outside. The cove himself came in to us with a tray of coffee. He was more or less his own boss since we moved back to the Island. He was under contract to design for new markets but trusted to do it his way, like Frank Sinatra. In fact he was quite bloody capable of bursting into that song just to embarrass me in front of the mates. This time he dropped a line in our direction.
‘Surprised to see any of yous in here when there’s big money to be made down the hoil.’
The Klondykers. We hadn’t heard the Norskis were back? Pound an hour, here we come. That was two full-price LPs for the dawn till dusk shift.
‘No, better than that. Two-fifty, or maybe it was up to three quid now. But nobody could stand more than a couple of hours of that. No, not the herring. A Geest boat. Banana-carrier. The refrigeration’s gone bust and the hold’s stinking. It’s got to get cleared. They’re issuing masks and everything.’
We were off. Searched both Number One and Number Two piers. Nothing to see. The coal boat was in, that was about the lot. We took another looksee before we could admit to ourselves he’d hooked us. A bloody banana boat, how the hell had we bought that dummy? The gang came back, livid, to find him trying to continue being deadpan. Giving it up and just falling apart. But he’d a hell of a laugh when he got going. Big laugh for a slightly built guy. A tall man but still, nothing much of him.
Back further than that. Fast rewind. Before we left the Island in the first place. We played war most of the time, back in the cul-de-sac. Think we were playing it when I fell from the rafters at the second storey of brick houses, going up fast in the field behind us. OK, there was blood then and it could have been bad. Must have looked bad. Someone saw me and screamed. No, don’t start, I wasn’t that bad looking a kid. Kirsty was standing out with the older coves in the street. She led me by the hand to our own house. Just needed a clean up. Herself and the olaid just gently wiped the blood away. Nothing needed stitching. Just as well, I was thinking of the sewing machine when they said that. It looked like a normal one but they’d got an electric motor fixed to it now.
Could have been it, I suppose, if I’d made the wrong landing. But most of the time you never came close to the thing. Death, I mean.
War games got exciting again when the Bay of Pigs was on. The themes changed from Second to Third World War. But Sputniks made stronger pictures than missiles. You couldn’t get them yet in Airfix kits, but the American lot, Revell, they had missile models. Andra had given me a set, one holiday. Jeeps and U.S. personnel guarding a missile installation.
About that time I used to go to the slaughterhouse, round the corner, to get the innards of a sheep so my grannie could make marag – black and white puddings. These streets still had village ways then. My mother – she was in hospital. The Broch stomach had bothered her for years and she was having a big chunk of it removed. She was home in a week or two, taking it easy for a short time. The operation seemed to work.
We had plenty of visitors. Never heard so many war stories from the olman and my uncle Andra, who’d got a flight over. They hit it off. Yarns.
There were stolen geese and a scrawny turkey that needed fattening. A sack of almonds that was worth a fortune if they could find a buyer. Petrol traded for anything. Plenty of petrol. Trouble was, the British Army used more petrol when it was static. The brass were getting suspicious.
What the hell do I know? It was all Commando comics to me. I was born ten years to the day after that rat took to his bunker. That’s an insult to rats and I retract it. The great orator gone shabby.
That wasn’t the end of it. Not by a long way. A lot of people got killed after that. What about Japan? And Andra had a brother killed when his Jeep fell off a bridge when the whole show was over.
One day, my Lewis uncle, Ruaraidh, called by with a dram in him and the yarns with his brother really did get going. But they stopped, mid-flight. The olman asked why they had to keep doing this, just telling the funny stories. Nothing about the rest of it. Shivering under trucks. The sound of shells, falling close.
Now fast-back to later summer holidays, 1968. When the olman was putting in every hour of the day to keep us in a bungalow on a hungry hill in the Central Belt. And my mother was working and worrying about money. They were only too happy when I wanted to be packed back to the Island for the whole of the holidays.
So I was billeted with Ruaraidh and Sheena. Getting spoiled rotten. They didn’t have a family of their own. I’d come back early from Goat Island because I’d caught a sea trout instead of a mackerel. I didn’t want that sea silver to get cracked and dry.
He was day-off, down town. She was working in the morning, a history teacher at the Nic, because school was to start for the kids in a couple of days. She came home to make a late lunch. She didn’t believe me when I told her about all the tanks on the news. Rolling, one after another. The downfall of Dubček. A young guy setting himself on fire. With petrol.
Ruaraidh came back from the garage, scrubbed down and sat, dazed, in the armchair, still in his overalls. This was the man who told me stories with shadows and big laughs and the big laughs always won, in the end.
Jan Palach died a public death. A martyr who knows he’s going to heaven, that could have a shade of self-interest, he said. But Jan’s act was the ultimate thing one young guy could do against all that armour. The message went out, with some time-delays, out over continental Europe. Out across the North Sea.
Over Aberdeen and West Road in The Broch and across the Grampians and bouncing across the Minch. It got picked up at the remote aerials up from the new landfill site that was still called the òtrach. Only for us, grown in the town, it was now the okeroch. Part of our English. Then these signals were routed by cables. Into houses all over town.
God, I loved Ruaraidh and Sheena. But I never told them or showed them. Like the famous Lewisman who loved his wife so much that he very nearly told her. Can’t make amends for that to either of them now, anymore than I can ask my olman more about who he was. Or about when he was trapped in that tank. How it felt when he saw sky over him again.
Fast forward now. We’re all back on the Island. It was Ruaraidh who told me my father was gone. He didn’t tell me exactly. Just shook my hand, clasped me really and said what could he say?
Colin had waved us ashore. We’d been out at the pots. Bantering about sharing out the sheep and goats, one for our lobster curry in the bothy, one for the Lodge. The days were getting shorter and the water was getting cooler. But big Colin was just standing there and looking grim. I was thinking, shit I must have left the gate open when I fed the ponies in the morning.
Then, Colin said something like, ‘There’s some not very good news for you. Your father’s not well. The car’s ready. I’ll drive you in.’
Ruaraidh coming to meet me, once we arrived in town. That embrace was waiting to happen. Should have happened when we’d cut peats or dipped sheep or succeeded in something or other. Then me saying, I’ll be OK, just got to get some air. Him not wanting to let me and then realising I had to get out the back garden for a minute.
Talk about clarity. Everything embossing, printing. Every stalk of grass stood out on its own.
My sister coming home. Some comfort for our mother. The olaid just looked stunned. She couldn’t believe it yet.
We all went through a year at that heightened pitch. Stories came fast and furious. I got the feeling that maybe so many of them were like Ruaraidh’s own stories. And most of the olman’s. So many of them skirting around their real subject, maybe because they had to. Maybe their very purpose was to help cope with what had come to your senses, unasked for.
After so many stories you can come one day to the body you never saw because it had all been so sudden. The undertaker, I mean the father of the present one, taking care of everything, all in safe hands. There had to be a P.M. So the lid was put on the box, after the body was released. The only thing to see was a brass plate with his name and age.
And the job which now looks like therapy but was pure chance. Me taking the year out from Uni. It was Kenny’s uncle Angus who steered me to it. Ruaraidh was trying to get us in touch, see if they could get the two nephews to piss off to sea now and again. Get me out of the books and the hushed houses.
Angus had seen the card in the window. There on the board of the Buroo, was the hospital porter’s job. Shift work. So I got to meet the folk who dealt with local life and death. I got involved. Got my hands dirty, as they say.
One day, I took a look-in to see one of the guys, in the beds I kept having to move. This was one of the ambulance drivers. We’d give them a hand with the trolley, in the doors. You got to know each other over a cup of tea, after the patient was delivered. He’d had a wee stroke. Taken a turn, as they say. The job didn’t give you immunity. I went in for a yarn and he told me then, he was the one. My olman, he meant. He was first on scene. They were just too late. Cardiac arrest is like that.
We shook hands. He made a good recovery. Every time I saw him in the street there was something there between us and it wasn’t a bad thing.
Then there was the mortuary and I never thought much of it at first. Fact of life, as they say. One of the additional duties, you had to do, along with the medical staff. Then this night, this male nurse started clowning around a bit, not out of hand. Just his way of showing a trainee nurse something she’d need to get used to. He was only bantering, to make things easier. Part of hospital life.
But then he says to her, putting on an eerie sort of voice, ‘And this is where they do post-mortems.’
And I realised I was about to strangle the bastard and I knew I had to get outside before I laid hands on him. The night was very clear.