men’s lives were saved. Including your grandfather’s.’
I passed the weekend in a cloud of uncertainty and depression, unable to escape the thought of all those poor men surviving the war only to die on their own doorstep. And the fact that my grandfather had survived it lingered oddly in my mind like a faintly unpleasant taste in the mouth. It took me a while to identify it.
Guilt.
They say the survivors of major disasters are often afflicted by a sense of guilt. Why had they survived when so many others had not? I suppose I was experiencing it by association. If my grandfather had died like all the others, then I wouldn’t have been there. And it made me wonder why I was.
The bad weather finally arrived on the Saturday night. Storm-force winds driving in from the south-west, big dark clouds, contused and bleeding rain. I watched it run down my window on a miserable Sunday, and couldn’t wait to be on the bus back to Stornoway in the morning.
The storm had passed by the Monday, but it was still overcast, dull light suffused with a grey-green, as if we were all somehow trapped inside a Tupperware box. But the wind had dried the roads and grasses already, and I tried to empty my mind on the bus ride to town by focusing on the bog cotton that danced among the peat.
There was no chance of me being able to concentrate on schoolwork, and straight off I made my way up through the town to where the library was housed in a jumble of half a dozen or so Portakabins on the corner of Keith Street. I thought they would probably keep archives of the
She raised an eyebrow. ‘A very popular year this morning, it seems. Are you doing a project at the Nicolson?’ And in response to my frown she said, ‘There’s another lad looking at microfilm of that same year in the Gaelic and Local History section down the hall.’
I found Whistler in the reference room, sitting at a table slowly spooling through the newspaper’s coverage of the
We sat a full half-hour in front of that machine, never a word between us, and finally left the library with a nod and a muttered thanks to the librarian, only to find Big Kenny standing beside the wheelie bins on the pavement outside. The wind swept through his ginger hair in waves, and he appeared to be undecided on whether to go in or not. He was startled to see us and raised his eyebrows in tentative query. ‘What did you find out?’
‘Nothing that you probably don’t already know by now,’ Whistler said.
‘My dad couldn’t tell me much. He said his dad would never talk about it.’
Whistler shrugged. ‘Mine wasn’t sober long enough to ask.’
Kenny nodded. ‘I’ve been at the town hall,’ he said. ‘The registrar’s office.’ I don’t know why we should have been so surprised, but we were.
‘And?’ Whistler asked.
‘Apparently there are three survivors still living. One of them’s at Bhaltos, down in Uig. I know his family.’
Norman Smith lived in an old white house at the foot of the village looking out towards the islands of Pabaigh Mor, Bhacasaigh, and the inappropriately named Siaram Mor. If Siaram Mor was the big island, we couldn’t imagine how small Siaram Beag might be, not that any of us had ever seen or heard of a Siaram Beag.
We rode down on two bikes, me sitting pillion behind Whistler. By the time we arrived my backside was aching. The wind had dropped, and the sea was a dull, dimpled pewter.
The old navy reservist sat in an armchair by the window, where he had an unbroken view out across the water to Pabaigh Mor. His daughter showed us in. An elderly woman herself, she said he liked to have visitors, but that we weren’t to tire him out. She went off to make tea as we settled ourselves down around the old man in a room so small and cluttered there was hardly space for the four of us. The air felt damp, suffused by the smell of peat smoke from turfs still smouldering in the fire. And I remember wondering how he had survived so long. But he had already cheated death once, why shouldn’t he do it again?
He was ninety-two years old, he told us proudly, his voice high-pitched and reedy, as if pared thin by the years. He had small dark eyes like black beads. They reflected the light from the window, sharp and still intelligent. I know that age can diminish men, but Norman Smith remained a giant of a man, sitting there in his chair, big- knuckled hands folded one over the top of the other on his stick. There was hardly a hair left on a broad, flat head splashed by age spots.
‘Took me years,’ he said in response to our question about the
‘How did it happen?’ Kenny asked.
‘God only knows, boy! The captain made a mistake when he set course for the harbour. Just half a point off he was. We should have been a little more to the west.’ We heard his breath rattle in his chest as he drew in air in silent reflection. I couldn’t imagine what pictures he was pulling back to mind. ‘A lot of us were sleeping, had our boots off and our heads down wherever we could find space on deck. There was a strong wind behind us, but it was strangely quiet when I heard someone shout that they could see the lights of Stornoway ahead. That’s when we struck the rocks. The noise as they ripped open her hull was almost human, like a cry of pain. And then there was panic. Panic as I’ve never seen before or since. If only we had grounded closer to the shore then maybe most of us would have been saved. But the rocks we struck were the furthest out.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘There were only two of us survived from the part of the ship I was on.’
I sat listening in concentrated silence, images appearing in my mind, evoked by simple words conveying abject horror.
‘The ship turned broadside and one man got ashore with a rope.’
‘John Finlay Macleod,’ Whistler said.
The old man nodded. ‘I remember moving his rope from the stern to the side. To this day I don’t know how I managed it. But that line saved me and a lot of others. We’d never have got ashore without it.’ His breathing became more rapid. ‘It was black as hell that night, boys, and we could all feel the presence of the devil come to take us.’
He breathed out long and deep, as if sighing, and appeared to relax again in his chair.
‘I still had no boots when I got ashore and climbed up on to the machair. I was soaked to the skin and chittering with the cold, and I knew I had injured my chest and my legs, though I couldn’t really feel anything. I saw a group of men huddled at the nearest house, but I decided that I would walk into town.’
We looked at each other. We knew just how long that walk was. We had ridden it often enough on our bikes.
‘When I got there I headed for the Admiralty building. There were some others who had made it off the boat, too. All sitting along the wall, wrapped in blankets and smoking, and not a word spoken among them.
‘Admiral Boyle came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. I’ve got a car for you, Norman, he said. It’ll take you and Uilleam and Malcolm back to Uig. In fact, it only took us as far as Calanais. And from there Duncan Macrae’s motor launch brought us down here to the pier at Bhaltos. Morning it was by then. New Year’s day. My family didn’t know I was coming home. I had been hoping to surprise them.’
A single bead of clear mucus hung from his nose, and he reached up absently to wipe it away with the back of his hand.
‘They were surprised all right. I met my sister Morag on the road and she took me home to where my mother was already preparing the New Year’s dinner. The news about what had happened to the
I saw his jaw tighten, then, and the clarity went out of his eyes, blurred by tears.
‘And I couldn’t tell them. My chest and legs were hurting like hell by then, but I kept it from them and made like nothing had happened.’ His breathing was becoming stertorous. ‘Until Mr and Mrs Macritchie and the MacLennan family came to the door, and I couldn’t face them. Because I knew their boys were all dead, and they had no idea of it. I ran to my room and shut the door and no one could understand what was wrong with me.’ Big silent tears fell now from red-rimmed eyes.
The old man’s daughter came in with a tray of tea, and her face creased with concern when she saw her
