Ardnish Was Home Episode 12

Fathers would play cards and tell stories to wee girls; grandmothers would reel and jig with teenage boys

The sea around Ardnish has always been full of fish of all sorts. It was our staple diet, but everyone preferred meat. Meat was rare, though. Allan the whaler would have one cow, and it would have one calf a year.

That cow would give them milk all year round, and then the calf would be sold in the autumn to raise money to buy provisions to last the winter. Few people ate beef; it was just too precious.

The sheep belong to the laird, as do the red deer. However, there might occasionally be a hind with a broken leg which had to be ‘put out of its misery’. This always tended to occur around about Christmas, it seemed to me.

We didn’t have friends of our age to play with. Sandy and I, of course, had each other, but as families had moved away Angus had no one and Sheena likewise – that’s why she looked forward to Margaret’s visits so much.

However, very often it didn’t matter how old or young people were. Fathers would play cards and tell stories to wee girls; grandmothers would reel and jig with teenage boys. In the cities it isn’t the same, I’m told; old people get awfully lonely.

It was said that Mother would get a medal from the King for something she did, but she never did. It concerned the islands of St Kilda.

Mother, Aggie and Mairi were down by the burn at the spot where it runs into the sea. They were doing the washing, and Mother was scrubbing Father’s clothes clean of the animal blood that had soaked them. My mother had to go off to get the tea ready, and as she walked back along the beach she saw a black ball bobbing in the water a short distance offshore.

As it was out of reach, she left it alone, but she returned that evening to see if it had come closer. Fishing it into her hand with a stick, she saw that it was a sheep’s bladder. It had a knot tied in it, and attached to it was a tiny wooden shoe-like container.

She slid it open and found a piece of paper with a message written in Gaelic on it: ‘The fulmars are diseased, we have little food left, please help. Feb 1897 St Kilda.’

There followed a frustrating time for her as she strove to get the policeman in Arisaig to do something about it. Upon failing, she turned to Sir Arthur Astleynicholson at the big house, but he was away, and so she walked the 13-mile return journey for two days in a row to try and meet with him and convince him to help.

The factor was not keen to see his master bothered, but she refused to give up until the laird saw her. She sat on the front doorstep for hours on end waiting for him to get home.

Sir Arthur immediately agreed to help and sent a telegram to a contact of his in the Home Office. The slow wheels of bureaucracy turned until mother eventually learned that a Navy boat had been sent from Oban.

The Oban Times wrote an article on its front page headed ‘Morag Gillies of Ardnish saves 50 lives’. It said that an islander claimed that if the boat had not been sent, the people would have starved to death.

The article is still in the house on the left as you go in; it is tattered and torn now, as Father or one of the three of us would proudly show it to anyone who turned up.

My mother was an amazing person for growing things. When I was wee, there were always flowers in the house. Down by the beach, yellow irises grew waist-high in huge numbers, the rocks were smothered in sea pinks, and the field behind the house was a multitude of bog cotton, purple from the heather, and primroses on the bank.

She had Father build a small walled garden, where she grew very tall cabbages given to her from a lady who lived in the Fair Isle, and carrots that thrived in the sandy soil.

She knew every bird and creature, and we always had an injured beastie in the house.

Father found an abandoned otter pup one day on Goat Island. He brought it back, and mother fed it on sheep’s milk until it was strong enough to manage for itself. It was never part of the family and slept outside, but for all of my youth it would turn up and allow us to scratch it behind the ear and feed it an apple.

It was accidentally shut in the house one day, and I’d never seen such a mess. Mother’s precious plates were smashed on the floor, and the tartan shawl on the back of the sofa had a big hole in it, where the otter had gripped it in her teeth and thrashed it about.

Mother was also a goddess with the lambing. Late March every year, she would be away for a month across at Borrodale Farm.

She would pack her bag, kiss Father and set off with the cromach he had made for her 25th birthday – an ash stick with a Blackface sheep’s horn that had been cut, chiselled and sanded into a perfect arc, for her to hold and also to loop around the neck of the sheep to pull it towards her. It had her name – Morag – burned into it.

She had an unusual yellow collie called Flash that she had trained herself and was a great dog altogether, always at her side. Flash really came into her own at lambing time.

Mother’s small hands were ideal for helping with a difficult lambing; she could slide a hand in and pull the head around inside the ewe, so that it came out first. She had a calming way with her that would settle the sheep down, so they delivered well.

The factor knew that, if she was there, the number of surviving lambs would be high. She was the sort of woman who would be out when the rain had been hammering down for days on end, when just one more walk through the lambing fields to see if everything was all right would be one too many for everyone else.

Many is the time that a distressed ewe would be found as a result of her vigilance.

The money that Mother got for the month’s work made a real difference to my parents. The job was well paid and, although she was exhausted by the 20-hour days, she loved it and would come back to the village with a real spring in her step.

She always said that she knew winter was finished the day she had her first lamb in her arms.

And sure enough, as she walked back to Ardnish from Borrodale she always had primroses in her hands that she had picked on the way.