Of Stone And Sky Episode 7

SThough there could be several days’ walk between post offices, she kept writing every day, even when his letters dwindled...

he wrote to Gid away at the war and sometimes he wrote back, but his letters gave little of the bright, mischievous boy who’d stolen a kiss and forgotten to buy any of her pots. (Well, I shall be charitable and say it was a lapse of memory. In the heady excitement of winning the race and the girl he apparently forgot the terms of his wager and spent the money on rounds of drinks at the Ferryman. We are a funny people that way, so closely tying our successes to our ruin.)

His handwriting was a struggle and stunted his sentences, forcing him to keep things short: “Leaving S’ampton for France tomorrow. Don’t like sea.”

She longed for more: Descriptions of how he lived, the Army way of things, his thoughts and passions – but he didn’t give it.

He did say, however, that her letters gave him courage, so she wrote every day.

She told how her family walked with their cart and horse across the moors to the crofters in the west, who called them the Summer Walkers and welcomed their wares, their news of other villages and their labour on the farms.

How they pitched their bow tent in all weathers and washed in streams, pausing beside the big rivers as her father and brothers caught fish and hunted for pearls.

How they sat round the fire at night naming the stars and sharing their stories and songs that went back hundreds of years.

How her people were the knowers of land, the tellers of myth, the keepers of faith.

Though there could be several days’ walk between post offices, she kept writing every day, even when his letters dwindled and stopped altogether.

That was in June 1940, and as her fears rose, the news finally trickled back of the battle at St Valery-en-Caux where many of the 51st Highland Division had been killed and even more taken as POWs.

No one knew Gid’s fate, except that he was not listed among the dead, and Agnes swung between pleading prayers and grief. She had nowhere to send her letters, but she still wrote and kept them safe, waiting.

At 17 she joined the Women’s Timber Corps and found herself back in Strathspey, felling the giant pines in the Caledonian Forest at Glenmore.

The lumberjills were crowded together in wooden huts with no electricity or running water and just an outside shack with a hole for a toilet.

In the winter mornings they woke to frost on their blankets and ice stiffening their clothes, and Agnes got up first to revive the fire and get water on for tea.

She was tougher than the others, who came from cities and factory jobs, but she did not scorn them.

They were noisy in their protests at stiffness and cold, but also in their laughter and ribald tales and their embracing of her.

Whit a braw wee trooper! Look at they muckle great airms, ye’ve got! Ach and you’re a bonnie yin, so ye are. Gies a sang, Aggie, gies a sang! There was no “dirty tink”.

At night she wrote her letter to a disappeared beloved and held the image of him, fragile as the candle flame, as full of hope.

Finally, it was all over: Victory declared, soldiers returning, home fronts and Land Armies disbanding.

Agnes got work at a dairy farm on the north-east coast of Caithness where the flat, low country seemed as endless as her waiting.

Demob stretched across agonising months till in October 1946 she overheard a conversation in a grocer’s.

It was a girl from Briachan, now a scullery maid at Dunrobin Castle, who was talking about some of the lads from home coming back and a village dance in the offing.

Who? Who? Agnes couldn’t help pulling her sleeve. There were a few names and then the only one that mattered: Gideon Munro.

Begging the Saturday off, Agnes caught the train to Briachan on the Friday afternoon under a sky cloud-heavy and damp.

As she travelled south from sweeping farmland to coast and firths, through towns and forests and over rivers, up mountain passes and down again into the strath, darkness fell.

Outside the carriage everything was vanished and unknowable; inside, she studied her face reflected in the window, and it seemed as much a mystery.

By the time she got off at Briachan, a lone figure on the small platform, it was well after nine and the village was dark and silent as the bottom of a loch.

She walked down to a deserted Ferryman and wondered about slipping into an outhouse for the night if there was no welcome at the Munros’.

Music struck up in the distance and turning towards it, she saw lights through the trees.

Pulling her coat tighter, she walked along the road towards the village hall where a ceilidh was in full swing, music and light spilling from the arched windows.

She peered through at the people swinging together in a steamy glow of warmth and laughter, the musicians on squeeze box, fiddle and piano, the men scrubbed and shining, the women in floral dresses with lipstick and set hair.

She cringed at her own worn clothes and cursed herself for coming.

Why was she here?

There had been no invitation and the raw truth was she had not heard from Gideon in these six years. He had forgotten her. She was a fool.

But turning away to investigate the sheds at the Ferryman, she saw him.

He was wheeling down a Virginia Reel, a steely energy in his spin and turn, sweat glistening on his skin and sticking the shirt to his back.

His hair was blunt short and showed every contour of his skull, so much thinner now and harder, as if chiselled from stone.

And there, on the right side of his face like a chunk broken from sculpture, was a patch of white flesh where his eye had been.

More tomorrow.

Merryn Glover is the author of three novels. She was brought up in south Asia and has lived in Scotland for nearly 30 years. She was the first writer in residence for Cairngorms National Park in 2019 and is published by Birlinn.