The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 4

Listening was painful; she was out of tune and had no sense of rhythm

Itold him that something happened after his ship was torpedoed, when many of the crew and passengers were in the water, either clinging to flotsam or perched on rafts, while a lucky few managed to board the only launched lifeboat.

I didn’t know what it was but it was dreadful, and nobody in my family would talk about it.

Someone (I wasn’t able to say whom) wrote about the event in an article or a pamphlet or even a book. I had wanted to know about it for more than 30 years but nobody in my family would breathe a word.

“You have to understand there was such confusion at that time,” the man’s voice was consoling. “It was all so chaotic and reports back were often inaccurate.”

“But something awful happened,” I insisted. “A bad, maybe even shameful thing. Do you know?” I asked.

“I can’t think... you know, this is my subject... the Fall of Singapore. It’s been written about over and over again but it still fascinates people. These men were incredibly brave... Brigadier Paris, Captain Mike Blackwood were remarkable men. So was your uncle. He was a real hero in his wee car.” “But something awful was written about him...” “I can’t think what, except maybe it’s Walter Gibson’s book The Boat that you’re referring to.

“It’s impossible to verify what he wrote as nobody survived except two Javanese sailors, a Chinese woman called Doris Lim, who was murdered by her husband in Sumatra and Gibson. So, we’ll never know what happened.

“I’m sorry but this is far too complex a subject to discuss over the phone. Come in sometime. We’ll try to help.”

I explored many other avenues and points of view first, however, at the beginning of his life, to better understand his death.

Homing pigeon

In summer Mummy was a homing pigeon. You just had to point her in the right direction and she drove all the way from our farmhouse in South-West Scotland on the Solway Firth to Kintyre, her birthplace, where she grew up with her brother.

This long finger of Scotland, once described by the Vikings as “almost an island”, juts out from the heart of Argyll towards Northern Ireland. The channel separating each country is only a distance of 14 miles.

In those days, the fifties and early sixties, the car journey was a marathon, with at least one ferry crossing, sometimes two and a trek involving tail-totail crawling up the west bank of Loch Lomond and along further loch-sides, before we reached our final lap.

If that was not difficult enough, our Morris Oxford lacked power steering and had no seat belts or childproof door-locks.

Colin, our young brother sat in the front beside Mummy, while we three, Elisabeth, Janet and myself, perched on the back seat. We got used to the car’s violent motion; hurled first to the right, then the left, our small stomachs lurched at every bend.

Mummy liked to stop on Loch Lomond-side for a picnic lunch. So, keeping the water on our right as we drove past bays and pine trees growing by the roadside, she pulled in at Luss, away from the stuttering ribbon of cars and caravans.

“What’s that?” one of us pointed to a figure on a plinth standing in the water a few feet from the bank. “It’s a statue of a boy!” Mummy said. “Why is it there?”

Drowned

“Not sure,” Mummy poured diluted Kia-ora orange juice into a small beaker. “I think it’s to remember a child who drowned!” she said, reluctant to explain further.

We stopped reaching for potato crisps and ham sandwiches and tried to understand. Drawing in our breaths, we turned our young minds towards the subject of death. “Why did he drown?” one of us asked. “I don’t know. Perhaps he fell into the water, found himself out of his depth and didn’t know how to swim, so he drowned.”

I could hear Mummy’s voice tremble but she recovered her equilibrium before casting an eye over the food lying on the rug. “Anyone want a chocolate biscuit?” she asked picking up a packet of Viennese whirls.

“What’s it like to drown?” Being her oldest and the most inquisitive, I often troubled her with awkward questions.

“You are so demanding, Mary!” Mummy turned from me to watch a duck preening its feathers by the water’s edge; fumbling in her bag for a packet of cigarettes, she extracted one and lit it.

The sharp intake of breath as she inhaled made me think of a person touching something hot. Only when plumes of smoke began to waft from each of her nostrils did Mummy relax. “It’s better not to think about these things.” “Why?” “Believe me it’s best not to,” she insisted. “You’re far too young to understand.” “Am I?” Mummy parted her lips, not to take another draw from her cigarette but to speak. However no words came, only a sigh. She raised the cigarette again to her mouth and sucked in another quota of nicotine and found her voice, soft with smoke. “It’s no use talking about the past.”

I stared at her, at the white stick growing a head of ash and sensed her irritation.

She threw me an apologetic smile, then hummed a tune. I knew it. We all did. It was Andy Stewart’s A Scottish Soldier. Colin had a 45 rpm record of the hit. “There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier.” My mother’s frown turned into a smile as she began to sing.

Out of tune

Listening was painful; she was out of tune and had no sense of rhythm.

“Who wandered far away and soldiered far away.” She looked again at the duck now grooming its bill. “There was none bolder with good broad shoulder.”

Why had we children liked that song? Stewart’s voice, vital and virile, often reverberated through our passageway at home from sitting room to kitchen, even upstairs in our bedrooms.

Over and over again Colin would reach for the sleeve, draw out the disc, sling it on the turntable, drop the needle on the vinyl and off it went. I had never seen Mummy’s reaction and wondered if she had one at all.

On this occasion, she straightened her back and looked out towards the statue.

Her delivery was sharp and stark with each word belched from the depths of her diaphragm: “And now the soldier, the Scottish soldier, who wandered far away and soldiered far away, sees leaves are falling and death is calling and he will fade away in that far land.”

(More tomorrow)