Читать книгу No More Silence - David Whelan - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

Paradise Found

Paradise was 17 miles long by 13 miles wide. I took the measure of it on 6 August 1964. North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, a place as remote as it is beautiful. My new home. I was seven years old, and an extended island family of 2,205 hardy souls who lived on the western fringe of Europe were waiting to welcome me to the next stage of my young and not uneventful life. Four of them would be the brothers and sisters who, until that momentous day, I did not know existed.

‘I have something to tell you, Davie,’ said the social worker, as we rode in a taxi from the tiny airport at Benbecula across an alien landscape beneath an endless sky.

I felt very small. The incredible excitement of the journey from Glasgow to the airport, and then the wonderful adventure of the flight, had subsumed any questions that had been forming in my mind. It had only been a few hours since I had left the doctors’ house. My innocent enquiry about the food had sent them fleeing indoors, with tears streaming down their faces. I was confused. As I was ushered into the car, I heard from behind me a terrible howl of anguish, which I could not understand. They wanted me to go away, didn’t they? There was no time to think about it now. I would think about it later. Now there was only space and wind and blue sky.

The social worker sensed that I had come back down to earth physically and metaphorically. It was time for answers. She placed her arm around my shoulder, drawing me closer to her in the back of the car, enveloping me in comforting warmth. I was too young and damaged to recognise such an action as intimacy, which had played little part in my life so far. However, I sensed she wanted to share something special with me.

‘Do you know you have brothers and sisters, Davie? Did you know that?’ she asked.

I was not sure what having brothers and sisters meant. The concept was unclear. My life had been a pretty solitary affair until that time, usually me and whichever adults had charge over my care. I looked for inspiration at the back of the silent driver’s head and beyond, to his view of the astonishing landscape spreading before us. Neither he nor the cloudless sky offered any explanation.

‘They went away when you were still a tiny baby,’ the social worker continued. ‘While you’ve been in one place, they’ve been in another – here,’ she added, her hand indicating what seemed like a vast plain beyond the safety and seclusion of the old car, which was now rattling along a rutted track. ‘But now,’ she said, ‘you’ll all be together.’ She looked towards the front, beyond the driver, to the ribbon of road lying ahead. ‘We’re nearly at Knockintorran – look!’ she said.

The blue ‘reek’ of peat smoke was a thin, almost transparent column leaking into the sky from the chimney of an isolated single-storey cottage that was dwarfed by the landscape. I could sense the rough texture of the grey walls, which, from this distance, looked as cold as the feeling in my stomach. I was still grappling with this brothers-and-sisters problem.

It would soon be resolved. They were lined up against the wall of the croft house, an honour guard for the new arrival. They would soon have names: Johnny, Jeanette, Jimmy and Irene. Ranging in age from 9 to 13, they, too, had spent a significant portion of their lives separated from me, but they had the advantage of memory. A man and woman were standing behind the children, a tentative smile playing on their kind and ruddy country faces. These were folk outwith my experience, dressed in rough-and-ready clothes, with a quiet stateliness that I would come to realise was the hallmark of those who live in wild places. It is hard to describe. They had a dignity that belied their appearance. Morag and Willie MacDonald were my new mother and father.

I learned later that I was here because my natural mother had refused to agree to me being adopted by two childless doctors in Glasgow, despite not being able to care for me herself. Unbeknown to me, while I had been in and out of children’s homes and foster care, my brothers and sisters had been staying with Willie and Morag. Ma’s demand, which reunited me with my siblings, was arguably the only true act of compassion she had ever shown her children. The social worker gently pushed me out of the car and into my new life. The woman behind the children waved my brothers and sisters forward. It was an awkward moment.

Someone, I can’t remember who, said, ‘Hello, Davie!’

I had come home.

I still do not know what possessed social workers to despatch a gaggle of poverty-bred street kids from Glasgow to an island where English was the second language, but I bless them still for it. I would discover that my brothers and sisters were much changed from the urchins who had left the city so many years before. They formed a circle round me, and standing in the centre I suddenly had the feeling that I was where I was meant to be. Maybe that was what this brothers-and-sisters thing meant.

They were clearly fascinated by me, this small stranger who had without ceremony been added to their number. They looked from me to my new parents, asking questions in an unfamiliar tongue; they had acquired Gaelic. Children learn by osmosis and it would not be long before that incomprehensible and musical language would morph into words and phrases that I could understand.

I brushed aside the clouds of insects that had formed around my head – midges. Those familiar with the west of Scotland will know the scourge of these minuscule and annoying creatures.

Morag and Willie MacDonald took me into the warmth of their home, warmth that was as emotional as it was physical. Heat emanated from a large open fire beside an Aga, upon which a great black kettle was coming to the boil. I would discover that this kettle boiled from dawn till bedtime. Morag walked into a wall of steam. To this day I remember her in a halo of cloud. She never strayed far from that cooker and its huge pots of potatoes and stew, which took two hands to carry to the wooden deal table in the middle of her kitchen. It was the heart of the home.

My first – and erroneous – impression of the croft house was that it seemed sparse and bleak, but it was soon lit up by the bright, if stern, Morag. In retrospect, I realise Morag had none of the vanities of the city women I had known. Her looks were unprepossessing. Make-up and hair-styling were dismissed as the work of the Devil. Morag was a devout Christian. Her uniform of shapeless dress, cross-over white pinny and men’s socks, rising out of sturdy shoes that would not have looked out of place on a man’s feet, was good enough, thank you very much.

Willie was her soul mate, a silent, strong, hard-working man with cool blue eyes that took in everything but gave little away. He, too, wore a uniform – dungarees under a suit jacket and wellington boots. The sleeves of his collarless shirt were invariably rolled up to reveal bulging biceps. The ensemble was completed by a ‘caidie’ – a bunnet, or flat cap – which was removed from his head only at the dinner table or to wipe the sweat from his brow.

Their home reflected the couple. The term ‘modern amenities’ would have meant little to them. The toilet was in a shed at the back of the small garden. It was a treacherous journey in the dark. There was no electricity. The soft glow of light in the three-bedroom croft was generated by paraffin lamp, and while the world had long since been seduced by the age of television, it was an apparatus that Morag regarded as an abomination and an affront to the Good Lord. An ancient battery-powered radio, which broadcast the mournful Gaelic songs that became one of the soundtracks of my life, was sufficient for Morag and Willie. It would take me some time to come to terms with this strange new world of the Western Isles, a place with its own unique personality.

When I arrived on the island, the community survived on crofting. In English terms, crofters would be tenant farmers. My new parents had the lifelong tenancy of the croft, which had been passed down through generations of the family. Morag and Willie paid their rent to the ‘laird’, in this case the Fifth Earl of Granville, a cousin of the Queen, who owned a 60,000-acre estate, part of which was divided into the small farms.

The Outer Hebrides are a bleakly beautiful collection of islands, stretching from the largest, Lewis, in the north, through Harris and the Uists to the butt of Barra, in the south. Separated from the mainland by the Sea of the Hebrides, it is a world apart in every sense. North Uist is flat, almost devoid of trees, and blasted by Atlantic winds that would soon cleanse me. Moorland extends as far as the eye can see in a landscape punctuated by croft-house chimneys and their plumes of peat-fuelled fire smoke. The adjoining crofting communities of North and South Uist, where Gaelic is the first language, are steeped in Highland history. When I eventually went to the local school there were children who had not spoken a word of English before they began their education.

This is the birthplace of heroines such as Flora MacDonald, the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, which sought to restore the displaced Stuart dynasty to the thrones of Scotland and England. The romantic venture ended tragically with the defeat of the prince’s ragtag Highland Army by a superior British force at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. To this day, however, the memory of how Flora spirited away the fugitive prince ‘over the sea to Skye’ is still strong in the minds of the inhabitants of the islands.

Memory and heritage are precious things in a spectacular and timeless landscape ruled by majestic red deer, which roam a land of lochans teeming with trout, beneath a sky that is the domain of eagles. I had never seen or experienced anything like it. Until I became part of it, my horizon was defined by the distance from the front door of my house to the end of the street. This was another world, where quiet folk spun cloth that was fashioned into the clothes they wore. The food on their table came from the land, the fruits of their own labour.

It was my first evening at Knockintorran and I was about to partake of those fruits. To a child raised on watery soup and insipid stews, the richness and quantity of Morag’s fare would provoke the mother of all belly aches. All of us had somehow muddled through in the hours preceding dinner, operating in that self-conscious atmosphere in which much is thought but little is said. The social worker had long since departed. We were a guarded group as we gathered round the table, with the hatless Willie at its head. My brothers and sisters were subdued. There were obviously rules, which I knew nothing of, but I was street-smart enough to learn.

The table groaned under baskets of homemade bread and scones waiting to be smothered in butter, which had been churned by hand that day, and jam made from fruit grown in the garden. Morag emerged from her cloud of steam, bearing a large pot of potatoes, which she placed on the table. I reached out to take one and learned, somewhat painfully, the first rule of dining at Knockintorran. A wooden spoon tapped my knuckles.

‘Now, young David,’ said Morag, ‘you don’t snatch your food until we’ve thanked the Good Lord for what He’s given us. I’ll let you off this time because you don’t know any better, coming from that heathen city you’ve grown up in, but you will go to your bed hungry if I see bad manners like that from you again. Got it?’

I got it.

Willie bowed his head. Morag and the children followed suit as he intoned words in Gaelic. Later, when my ear attuned to the language, I would learn that he said, ‘Lord, for what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful.’

When he finished the prayer, my new life began in earnest. Those who eat together become a family.