The olaid always says she wants it in black and white. That goes for an estimate from the plumber or a politician’s promise. I got the chance she never had, nor her husband either. I went to the college of knowledge and found that truth seems to come between the lines of different accounts. Something in Gabriele’s letter set me thinking. I always seem to be returning to the years when we settled back on the Island. That’s when I really got into history, in reaction to a guy who said it was just another subject to tick off on the score sheet. Maybe that reaction was part of the cynical bastard’s intention.

None of you have any interest in history. I know this. Please don’t bother to argue. It’s unlikely to be a problem. You are all here because you wish to pass Higher History at the best grade possible. Some of you will need the grade so you will be accepted for a university or college course. Your reasons for being in this class are not really my main concern. I can help you to achieve the passes you are capable of but only if we understand one another.

Some of you are diligent workers, some of you are lazy. You are all capable of achieving a good pass in Higher Grade History if you pay attention and are willing to put in a moderate amount of work into learning and arranging some information. I will be showing you some techniques for passing this exam. I will attempt to minimise the amount of time necessary to achieve a good result. With your agreement, ladies and gentlemen of the fifth year, we will start now.

When I write on the board, it will be necessary for you to take notes. Let’s take the example of the French Revolution.

Please copy this.

He was always dressed like a bank manager. Decent dark suit but not at all flashy. Shone shoes and slicked hair. That’s back in fashion again (some histories do seem to go in cycles) but they call it gel now. He moved quietly about the room. Never seemed either slow or in a hurry. It was like the cove had Brylcreem under his shoes as well and he was gliding. I don’t remember him losing the rag or shouting or anything. He’d have been good in wartime. Great organisational skills and he was an effective communicator.

In 1972 we wrote how the incident at Sarajevo was only the spark which caused the inevitable conflagration of the First World War. The war would probably have happened without it, unless you chose another cause to front the list, if you forgot that one, under pressure. So all these boys from Griomsiadair or Rügen would have gone away to war anyway. Archduke or not. Maybe.

The timing mattered a bit though. If the spark had come from the late race to carve up what was left of Africa, maybe the war would have started later. Finished later. So it might not have been in the early hours of the 1st of January 1919 when the Lewis boys were coming home. The Naval contingent channelled on to His Majesty’s Yacht Iolaire. And it wouldn’t have been the exact combination of contributory causes which had her strike the Beasts of Holm. And my grandfather wouldn’t have been lost, a cable or two from the home island shore.

He wasn’t the only one who could have taken the helm that night. Most of the uniformed passengers would have recognised the lee shore. And he wasn’t the only one who failed to arrive for the big New Year homecoming. A change of clothes would have been waiting on a chair, in Griomsiadair or Garyvard, Aird Point, Aird Uig, Bays of Harris. Over two hundred changes of clothes put away again when the news came through. So even the next generation didn’t speak of it.

Not for a long time. And my olman never did, not in detail, at least not to me. He wrote it down though. Can’t say for sure when. Have a feeling it couldn’t have been that long before he died. He was a good talker but he never wrote verse. Only that one poem titled Iolaire. It didn’t rhyme but it had to be metrical. That degree of feeling needs a form.

So that’s history. Causes of this, causes of that. People’s pasts. Some memories you can substantiate, others you can’t. The olman’s stories. Andra’s. Told often enough to become set pieces. Vernacular but formal. Convincing yourself the Second World War was all about what you managed to cook and eat in tricky circumstances. But if he’d been given a bit more time, my olman might have told us how he’d at last squared up to the death of his own father. He’d written it down for himself. Another brave one. This piece of writing was not in the drawer in the weaving shed. It was in Ruaraidh’s house. I never thought the brothers had very much in common but maybe that was my olman trying to share something. Ruaraidh gave it back to me, when it looked like I might be settling into the Coastguard Service.

The sodden lifeline

stretching out from

broached iron.

Bitter hands held

these three strands.

Late carts spilling

useless apparatus

on stony fields.

Three shapes hanging

on stretching tendons

to an arrow-shaft from

a broken-backed yacht

with the name of an eagle.

Two slipped to seas.

One held through dark

swept by spray and

the timed light

of irrelevant Arnish.

We only went as far as the Causes of the First World War at Higher level. Causes of the Second World War – that was a sixth-year job. In our fifth year, when we were schooled in arranging causes of events, Kurt Waldheim replaced U Thant as Secretary-General of the UN. Which body of course has prevented all subsequent wars with a few minor exceptions, for example, Korea, Aden, Vietnam, Uganda and Ireland. (Random sample from a definitive list we never got, of wars since 1945, not run off from a master stencil to paper sweet with the smell of solvent, from a Gestetner machine.)

The Waldheim cove is another guy who had one hell of a yarn to tell. But he was never mentioned in our history class. He’s another one who had to tell his own story so often it became quite tidy. Kurt had been a corporal in the Austrian army. Thus he was drafted by the Nazis. There were no choices. He’d become a lieutenant, wounded on the Eastern Front. So he was back home early, he said. Often. As long as he was Secretary-General of the United Nations, he could get away with that. But once he stood for power, at home, he was in trouble.

It so happened that some of the facts were trapped in written records by an obsessive Nazi bureaucracy. He said he was just another soldier following orders. He kept buoyant, afloat on his own story for long enough. But his time was coming. His signature was on too many orders, carrying out too many deportations, or worse.