Читать книгу The Boy from Nowhere - Gregor Fisher, Melanie Reid - Страница 7

‘Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides’

King Lear: Act I, Scene I

A story has to start somewhere, so let it begin with two men, strangers to each other, but with lives that will run in parallel. Matthew Donaldson McKenzie and William Blake Kerr were born in Scotland in 1888 and 1895 respectively. Both survived the slaughter of the Somme, married the same year, had children the same age, found jobs and sought to make their way in the world. Eventually their paths would cross, with far-reaching consequences.

Matthew, the elder of the two, returned from the trenches to witness his sick wife give birth, and two days later he was to see her die. He was left with three motherless children, serious trench fever and a damaged leg.

In 1921 he re-married, to a young dressmaker, and took a job at a whisky distillery in a small village in central Scotland. He moved his family into a tied house – one of the houses under the hills. Remember this place, for we shall return here many times.

William, the younger soldier, returned from war scarred by the sight of filth and disease. Educated and ambitious, he got a job as a customs and excise officer, married and started a family. In 1928 came the move upon which this story hangs. William took a job overseeing three whisky distilleries within a mile of each other. One of them was where Matthew worked.

So the lives of the two men converged at the foot of the stern Ochil Hills. The factory engineer and the feared exciseman were neighbours, briefly, in the houses under the hills, and then work colleagues for the next decade. We have no proof, for time hides such tracks, that they were friends, but it is inconceivable they were not acquainted. William saw Matthew’s small daughters playing outside, on the stone steps or on the drying green. They were much the same age as his own little ones.

Victorians by birth, William and Matthew were God-fearing men of status, pillars of the community. One was a government law officer, the other a church organist and teacher at Sunday school. Freemasons, they abided by the social rules of a different age. One would die soon, but tragedy was to stalk them both. And one day scandalous events would unite them in a long-buried tale of betrayal, love and survival.

Let’s ask, just this once. Is everything random, or do we believe in fate?