Ardnish Was Home Episode 11

WAR I’ve decided to ask Louise to describe herself. It’s difficult for me to ask while pretending to be a detached observer. I hope she’ll let me feel her hair and put a hand on her leg – maybe more.

She bursts out laughing and says she’s too short, too skinny and has boring dirty hair which needs cutting.

I yearn to know how slim she is, how her mouth moves when she smiles and what colour her eyes are.

The ardour of a passionate youth is not satisfied by her self-deprecating response, so I back off, but determined to try again at a later date.

Instead, we complain good-naturedly about the food, the weather and anything else which constitutes safe ground.

I doze off and wake up with a start. My body is racked with coughing and I am soaked with sweat. I shiver in the warmth. A nurse brings me brackish water and I feel miserable.

I listen to the distant voices of medical staff, hoping to hear Louise.

The groans and occasional cries of pain from the injured provide a constant background tinnitus that we’re becoming immune to.

My eyes are sore, my shoulder is sore, and I feel so weak that I cannot even lift my head. Not a man an attractive nurse would be interested in.

I think of my mother . . . the

HOME

Morag is my mother. She is a very small woman, and very powerful in that nonphysical way wee people often are.

She is hardy and brave and stubborn, and was said to have been a beauty in her youth, although the working in the fields, the hard days and often damp bed have given her stiff joints and a bent back.

She keeps her own counsel and gets to know people well before she judges them. She will always lend people an ear and is ever a voice of reason and sense.

As the years passed she became more than just a mother to me; she became the mother to those in the village. And she stood no nonsense.

It wasn’t just the bairns who feared her when they stepped out of line.

Her own father was a book-keeper in Glasgow, and as she grew up she never wanted for anything.

She had come on holiday with a friend from Glasgow and met my father for the first time at Arisaig House.

There was a wedding for one of the staff at the big house, and my father had gone across to play the pipes for it.

My mother was a relative of the girl who was getting married and had come up for the celebration.

Many people met their future spouses at weddings in those days, when travel was a rare thing.

Love must be a powerful thing, as from the day she arrived at Peanmeanach she must have known that a comfortable life was not for her.

It’s not that we were lacking anything because we weren’t; it was just that we had a simple life.

Porridge and herring were our staple diet. Tea was, like sugar, rare. She only travelled to Fort William once or twice a year.

My father didn’t speak English to her from the day they got married. He said that she had to learn the Gaelic or she would be miserable and lonely.

Her choice

It might just as easily have been her choice, though, as she would surely have felt the need to learn it quickly.

Many of the people in the village didn’t have the English language at all, and so by the time her first born arrived she could even swear in our language as well as the next person.

I try to imagine her first few weeks of married life: no talk with her husband – or anyone else for that matter – and the winter rain sweeping across the sea from the Americas.

She would have been expected to go out with the other women, ankle deep in the sea, to collect the shellfish.

She never went back to Glasgow from the day of her wedding until the day Angus was made a priest, even though Father was abroad a lot soldiering.

I wish that she would have had more children who survived, although God knows how she would have fed them.

I was born late with Angus eight years older than me and Sheena three years older than him.

My parents had another three children, but the oldest one of them died aged two of pneumonia, and the other two died straight after their birth. I was the last born.

My sister Sheena was very active, she never sat down for a minute.

When our father was working at the building of Roshven, Sheena would go across and help out.

The Blackburns had a cousin called Margaret who often came to stay at Roshven and became a good friend to my sister.

It was from Margaret that Sheena learned to swim, a rare thing around there.

Sheena called Margaret ‘Lady’, because when they first met Sheena was very young and Margaret was a very sophisticated teenager.

They used to head off together to gather shellfish: razor shells and mussels.

When it was warmer they would dive for scallops and sometimes even oysters off Roshven farm, where the River Ailort Jowed into the sea.

Great success

We were always being given findings to eat that she had collected from the sea, whether it was seaweed or whelks.

Most were horrid, but sometimes she had great success.

The best of these was a huge lobster that she and Margaret caught in a pot that they set out, off Sloch.

It was as long as a small child was high, and Sheena could hardly lift it. I was only 10 years old at the time.

Apparently, my father had to make a big fire outside, wrap it in wet leaves and bake it on a sheet of tin.

Dripping in butter, it fed the dozen people of Peanmeanach, and, apparently, was so rich not one of them could manage another morsel afterwards.

My father didn’t speak English to her from the day they got married. He said that she had to learn the Gaelic

More tomorrow.

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