We Fought for Ardnish
Angus Macdonald
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It was January when I arrived at Inverailort. On the second day we had to swim almost a mile across Loch Eilt, then climb up to the top of An Stac, a craggy mountain almost three thousand feet high, then run back down into a Nissen hut and assemble our pistols from pieces, in the dark. I remember shaking with cold and exhaustion. If we didn’t do it within the allotted time we had to do it the next day and then the next. If we failed on the third attempt, we were sent back to our regiments in disgrace.’
‘Our tales are similar,’ Françoise remarked. ‘Fairbairn really did have a method, didn’t he? Tell me, where is Inverailort?’
I smiled at the way she pronounced ‘Inverailort’. ‘If I start telling you about the West Highlands I may not stop,’ I confessed. ‘The place is so close to my heart.’
Françoise stood up and looked out of the window. ‘Still no sunrise.’ ‘Go on, tell me about your home. We have a long, hard day ahead of us so give me something nice to think about.’
‘Well, my father used to say Ardnish is “the place where God was born”. Although it’s remote, with cold, hard winters, it’s a beautiful area – one where few visitors come, yet people don’t ever want to leave.
‘Our district is known as the Rough Bounds, because it’s so hard to get to over such wild countryside. The mountains rise, rough and grey, straight up from the shore. Loch Ailort is five miles long and a mile across, narrower in places. And part of the military training centre is at Roshven House, owned by friends of my family and which my grandfather helped to build. I could swim across the loch to it. At the top of the loch is Inverailort Castle; I can walk or row there in three hours. And just behind the peninsula, to the north, is Arisaig House. So you see, Ardnish is right in the centre of the SOE patch.’
‘How funny that you ended up training right across from your childhood home,’ said Françoise.
‘You’d love it, Françoise. The sea sparkles in the sun like you’ve never seen before, and the bed of flowers on the machair is so remarkable – yellow, pink, white, blue – it seems sacrilegious to walk on it. We would bathe in the burn, tingling and refreshing in August, harsh and painful in the winter. That river was the life blood of the village for cooking, drinking, washing clothes.
‘Peanmeanach is the last of the four communities on Ardnish peninsula where people still live,’ I said softly, ‘and when my grandparents die then I’m sure my mother will leave. The only place where a man can make a living is Laggan, my farm. I ran it for a few years until the war broke out and now my grandmother is farming it on her own.’