Ardnish Was Home Episode 2

HOME My parents, Donald John and Morag Gillies, are the glue of the village. They are involved in everything. If they were to leave, so would everyone else. But they won’t.

Then there is the old woman – or cailleach in the Gaelic – Eilidh Cameron. She must be about 80 years old, though she wouldn’t know for sure herself. Her husband never returned from the army when she was young and she never met anyone else.

The whaler, because he was one once, is John Macdonald, and he and his wife Aggie are in their sixties. Quiet, gentle people. Their daughters emigrated to Australia some years ago and they haven’t seen them since.

There is Mairi Ferguson, Sandy’s mother and great friend of my mother, and Johnny ‘the Bochan’, a bachelor who lives for his collie dogs. He must be in his seventies now.

He has a house at Peanmeanach but prefers to stay in a bothy at Sloch at the west of the peninsula. The postie, in the smart new post office house, is John MacEachan, a local man, and handy at fixing anything at all.

Mairi is a character like my mother, of energy and go. Always a smile on face, even when washing clothes in burn in driving rain.

Short and stocky, she’s permanently dressed from head to foot in tweed woven by herself, with a grey shawl over her shoulders, even on the hottest August day.

She is a kindly woman who collects wood or peat for the old, and when someone is feeling poorly she’d have a poultice or herbal remedy made up to help them.

I recall the wee wood about 200 yards behind the village, not far off the path that takes you to the mainland.

Whenever other children were around, Sandy and I would drag them off to our den by the burn in the wood.

There was an oak with branches hanging over the burn with an excellent tree house that my father had helped build when we were wee, just as his father had done for him on the same branches 30 years before.

The moss underneath was so deep that it came up to your ankles and was excellent for using as ammunition, and we had an full her the old plough that we had dragged in, to use as a barricade. Often, whenever our mothers wanted to find a pan, or my father a tool, this is where they would come and look first.

We didn’t learn for many years that my father was able to keep an eye on us by taking his old stalker’s telescope from behind the door, steadying it against the corner of the house and observing exactly what we were up to.

So when we had promised to do our schoolwork in the tree house he knew with certainty that we were building a dam instead.

WAR

As I lie here my hand can reach down to touch the drones of the bagpipes that I know so well. If I die, will they be taken back to my family? Or buried beside me? I would like somebody to take them home.

Maybe my commanding officer would; he knows how famous these pipes are. When Louise comes to my bed, I tell her these pipes are important to the Highlands, would she get a message to Colonel Macdonald to ask him if he could get them back to my father?

“No, DP. You’ll be carrying them back yourself and playing a tune as you do so,” she replied, giving my shoulder a squeeze. This was typical of Louise.

Although I couldn’t see her smile, I could sense it.

Our family are the hereditary pipers to the Chieftains of the Macdonalds of Clanranald, with the bagpipes not so much an instrument of pleasure as a way of life. As I grew up, it often seemed as though the sound of the chanter or the pipes themselves would fill the air, rebounding from the hills around the village.

It was said that the Blackburns decided to build the great house of Roshven when they heard the pipers of Peanmeanach playing across the water after anchoring their yacht in the bay.

These very pipes were played when Prince Charlie landed at Glenfinnan in 1745. They served with the 79th in Balaclava during the Crimean war and were in my father’s hands when my regiment, the Lovat Scouts, was raised to fight the Boers in South Africa in 1901.

At least two of my ancestors were killed playing them, including my greatgrandfather who was hacked to death with knives during the Indian mutiny. It seems I may well be the third.

“Donald Peter?” Louise’s doctor’s here to look at you.”

To look at me. That’s all he does, “Am I beyond saving?” I ask him.

He takes the bandage off my shoulder and mutters as he probes with his fingers, prising my glued eyes open. It hurts me, and I twist away from him and cry out.

I hear a gasp from Louise. “Doctor Sheridan, the patient is in real pain!”

There is a silence. I can feel the tension between the two of them.

“And how do you feel today?” he asks me distractedly.

I feel a stethoscope

“The same, I think.”

“It won’t be long before we have you the hospital ship and back to Malta.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I say, though I can hear that he has already hurried on. Louise goes, too, but not before giving my hand a reassuring pat.

We injured are in a field station, tucked under a cliff where the Turks cannot shell us. There are maybe a hundred of us here, I am told, waiting until we get word that there is space on a hospital ship for us.

The Gloucester Castle has taken a run to Malta with the last cargo of wounded and is due back in a week, we are told. So we wait.

Every now and again someone slips away and the Turkish prisoners come and carry him out for burial.

Like all my people, I am a Roman Catholic and I worry about not having a priest to hear my last confession, and being buried amongst non-believers.

I hear that there is a priest amongst the injured but that he has a head wound and cannot talk or move. I would like to have him near me as I go. voice. against my

Ardnish Was Home is published by Birlinn. The third novel in the series, Ardnish, was published in 2020. birlinn.co.uk

“The really. chest. on

As I lie, my hand can reach down to touch the drones of the bagpipes. If I die, will they be taken back to my family?