For every story there’s a lighter and a darker version. My uncle Andra, fae The Broch, talked about plucking the geese. They were in Italy in the war and the lads had done a deal. Jock Rose, the tinker, showed how it was done. He plunged the carcasses into near-boiling water and then the feathers just flew off. But first you had to kill your goose. They’re big birds and none of the squaddies ever managed to do that twisting the neck thing. Except Jock.
So it was all done, in the right order, and they made a proper dinner. Invited their new friends and colleagues in the trade fuelled by British Army petrol to eat with them. The squaddies told their new mates to bring wives and daughters. The table was set. But Jock Rose arrived pissed. He’d got hold of a horse and cart and there were two hoors from the brothel, sitting one on either side of him. The guests evaporated. Some of them grabbed food, as they legged it out, stuffing it in the pockets of their good clothes. These were hungry times in the villages and the towns of Italy.
But Andra also told me about the dysentry. How no-one was reporting sick. If you did that, they wouldn’t let you on the train. No-one wanted to stay on that continent any longer than he had to. You were so desperate to get home that you’d shit in overflowing buckets for three days and nights. That was the only hint that something had happened inside the minds of all these men in tin hats. Not just those with a story like my own father’s – his escape from a tank. An armoured vehicle that had been mobile, just seconds before, became a steel coffin. A smouldering target. A hatch clanged shut for the last time and he was outside of it. By a whisker.
We kept hens for a while. Out the back. The daughter, Anna, and me had fun, building the housie with the nesting box on the side and the run out front. Long before that, I remembered my grannie just lifting a corner of the coop and grabbing a black one. She disappeared into the shed with it and we got it to take home in a bag. It might not be worth roasting but there would be good soup there.
I killed hens after making sure Anna really was somewhere out of the way. First I listened to advice then I did the twist thing just as I’d been told, so I thought. But you might as well have been doing the other kind of twist, chasing it round the garden when it came back to life. So I put an edge on the hatchet after that. They still quivered and moved more than you could think possible but you knew they were dead in most senses.
We kept two geese for a while. This was pushing it, even in a back garden stretching out for half an acre. The neighbours all had projects too. There was no hassle. We thought our geese would breed but one day we found two eggs. We phoned a man versed in these matters. When are you in town, next?
So my uncle’s mate, Angus from Garyvard, officially sexed our stock and neither was a gander. But they were very protective about their fine eggs – it took a single one to make the richest omelette or scrambled egg you could want. I’m tasting them now, creamy without the addition of cream. I felt bad, keeping one goose off with a stick while I stole the egg they were jointly guarding. I knew I couldn’t carry on doing this. So the deal was done – two live geese for two live lobsters. At least I knew how to do them, courtesy of Mrs Beeton. As per crab. That diagonal thing with the skewer through the eyes.
The latter days of the barter system in the Coastguard Service. I broke the news as gently as I could to Anna who liked to stroll down the urban allotment to throw grain in their direction. They were going to a good home.
‘But I wanted to eat the gooses,’ she said.
I don’t think I could have swung the hatchet at one of those arching necks. And I didn’t know any relative of any Jock Rose who would do that favour.
It was my Lewis uncle, Ruaraidh, arranged mattters, out on the croft. I must have been very young because they didn’t want me in there at the time. I could catch some of my grannie’s yarns for a change. It might even have been Angus, in there with him. In the villages there was usually an expert, in at the killing.
But I remember being proud when my uncle gave me my share to take back to town. ‘You earned it,’ he said, ‘you’ve hardly missed a fank.’ And the olaid was proud of me too, not just because there was a whole pile of chops and a gigot, shoulder and everything. Maybe my sister was scowling. It wasn’t fair. I got to go driving about in the van and take part in all these things while she had to help my mother in the kitchen.
Ruaraidh was at the hospital when I saw him for the last time. I wasn’t so good at reading the signs – he didn’t give a lot away anyway, asking after everybody. He had cancer of the stomach. They say that’s one of the most painful. But I was there in uniform, on the way home after the day-shift. Her Majesty’s Coastguard, he said. That was maybe enough. He knew I was in a job that needed doing. That’s all he would say about his own years in the war. Except for one new year’s visit, a rare exchange with my olman.
‘Aye, we were there when they were needing them. Not when they were feeding them.’
We came close to getting the real stories then. But they never came out that night. They never did, in my hearing.
It was a bit sudden when I said I’d better be heading now because Gabriele’s brother, Michel, was over from Germany and they wouldn’t eat till I got there. Something went, fast as a North Minch rainsquall, across his face. He knew that was it, even if I hadn’t faced it yet. He did say something to me though. Very low-key.
‘Don’t wait till you’re an old man,’ he said. ‘It might never happen. You tell your own stories when you need to.’
I never took the chance to tell him what it all meant to me, the runs out to fanks at Griomsiadair. An initiation into a world of blood, sweat and yarns.