The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 97

In amongst utilitarian entries of plumbers, beehive makers, osteopaths and stockists of jam jar covers, my grandmother allocated a page to Angus

In comparison with Douna’s letter from the Chaplain General, Daisy’s missive from the War Office offered few words of consolation. She read the words over again, trying to find something hopeful in them and a host of questions arose in her mind. Where had Angus set off from? When did it happen? Was it a submarine that blew up the ship or a plane? Most of all, she wanted to know what had happened. Was he alive or dead? Did he manage to climb into a lifeboat or on to a raft? Had he reached dry land and if so, was he free or had he been captured?

Like many Britons, Daisy was familiar with seafaring tales. For centuries, ships were the principle means of travel and faraway lands were known as countries “overseas”, not one sea but several. In many stories hope featured and even scenes of redemption when the storm, once abated, deposited its human flotsam on terra firma – foreign, admittedly, but largely hospitable – with water to quench thirst and food in the form of fruit growing on trees. Respite In Shakespeare’s The Tempest the castaways find respite. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, based on a Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, lived for four years on an island in the Pacific. However, these stories are vastly outnumbered by tales of those who perish.

Testifying to the cruelty of the sea on the west coast of Scotland are many graveyards containing the final resting places of unidentified seamen.

Within a fortnight of receiving the War Office letter, Daisy placed a notice in The Times. In the West Highlands, living far from her siblings and friends in the south, she used the newspaper as a notice-board, its personal columns announcing family births, marriages and deaths.

This time, on April 20, it was to announce the loss of Angus alongside the Deaths and In Memoriam columns, in a new category starkly named Missing.

“Officially reported missing at sea,’ the notice states, “after the Fall of Singapore, Major Charles Angus Macdonald of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. Information gratefully received by Mrs. Moreton Macdonald, Largie, Tayinloan, Argyll.”

My grandmother was not alone; nine other entries accompanied hers, all from relatives, some parents, others brothers or sisters, seeking the whereabouts of loved ones who had served in Malaya. Most were young officers in the Royal Artillery or Indian regiments. One was from a female subaltern in the ATS asking for information on Brigadier Ivan Simson, General Percival’s chief engineer.

Byron’s death (April 19, 1824) is commemorated with a verse (very apt when considering Angus’s fate)

from his poem, The Bride of Abydos: The winds are high on Helles wave, As on that night of stormy water, When love, who sent, forgot to save, The young, the beautiful, the brave.

The notice elicited response. Although little of Daisy’s wartime documents and correspondence still exist, John Maxwell Macdonald, Jock’s eldest son, possesses the Largie visitors’ book. Her address book of that particular period demonstrates who was important to her.

In amongst utilitarian entries of plumbers, beehive makers, osteopaths and stockists of jam jar covers, my grandmother allocated a page to Angus with the addresses of the Argylls’ HQ and the Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) Association. Another was inserted soon after Angus was reported missing. Vigil Joanne Hawtrey Woore’s husband, David, an air force friend of Angus, was also lost after the Fall of Singapore. I like to think that Mrs Hawtrey Woore saw Daisy’s notice in The Times and got in touch.

For a while, the two women maintained their vigil. Then the other lady heard that her husband was alive but in captivity.

Daisy duly updated her entry for Angus’s air force friend by substituting the words “husband missing in Java” for POW. The name Hawtrey Woore is unusual, which was an advantage when I tried to find the couple’s descendants.

I wrote to Georgina Hawtrey Woore whose name was on a list of editors from a London publishing firm, but it wasn’t until I found her brother, Simon, on Facebook that I was able to make contact.

He replied that David and Joanne were his grandparents but he knew little about that period. David had set off from Singapore and was captured in Java. Nobody talked about it in his family.

Daisy included other names and addresses on her “Angus” page, possibly people who responded to her notice in The Times like Brigadier Paris’s widow, who lived in Sussex, and his cousin from Northumberland. I searched for more clues: names and addresses of Angus’s regimental friends and found a New Delhi address for Angus Rose and an Edinburgh one for Alison, his wife.

This couple occupied a space, not in the “Angus” column but on a page of similar importance to Daisy’s friends and family.

Although the burden of Angus’s disappearance weighed heaviest on his mother, sisters and brothers, others were anxious to discover what had happened to him. Poignancy Two days after Daisy placed her notice in The Times, Hector Greenfield, now commanding a brigade in the Middle East, enquired again from his mother in Argyll (the first time was on January 2 1942 when he asked ‘has anyone heard news of Angus Macdonald?”), ‘If you have any regimental news, particularly of the 2nd battalion, please let me have it, as I know nothing beyond Ian Stewart’s BBC broadcast from Bombay at the end of March and I wonder what happened to Angus and all of them.”

It is hard for our generation accustomed to instantaneous global communications to grasp that during the war news travelled slowly. Hector, serving in the Middle East, was poorly informed about what was going on in other parts of the world.

There is a poignancy here in Hector’s plea; it resembles strongly another relationship between two army officers, that of Angus’s grandfather and his adjutant, Lieutenant Lygon, who was killed in South Africa. After Colonel Stewart’s broadcast, the Macdonalds could be under no illusion as to what had gone on in Malaya with the Argylls. But where was Angus? The Colonel was in little doubt as to what had happened to The Rooseboom, but Daisy was yet to hear officially of its fate.

More tomorrow

© 2017 Mary C Gladstone, all rights reserved, courtesy of the author and Firefallmedia; available in hardcover and paperback online and from all booksellers.