Murdo's War (4 page)

Murdo stood up. ‘I’m just going to Dad’s room, I need some socks. These ones have had it.’

He took up a torch from the side of the bed and blew out the lamp. Softly in the dim beam he passed the foot of the bed that had been his own and pulled open the door. The radio grew louder, but all was still. Swiftly he crossed the long landing and let himself into his father’s bedroom.

He knew in which drawer to look. As he pulled it open the familiar scent rose to his nostrils; a clean manly smell, a comfortable smell – his father. He poked about and selected two thick pairs of working socks.

Though Murdo wanted nothing else, he pulled open the adjacent drawer. It was half full of oddments; cigarette case, armbands, old brushes, an out of date calendar, a small bowl that Murdo had carved for his father at school. Face down, lay a framed photograph of Lachlan and himself with their sister Maggie. She was four years older and now worked away from home. Briefly Murdo examined it, recognising the sunlit riverbank where the photograph had been taken but forgetting the occasion, for they were all much younger. Before their father went away it had stood on his dressing table. Murdo laid it on top of the chest. He was just about to close the drawer when the torch beam fell on his father’s pocket knife, half hidden beneath a tangle of old salmon line. He took it in his hand, a practical knife with a handle of black and white horn. He flipped up the single blade, honed down and concave,
very sharp. His father used it all the time. For a moment Murdo was undecided, then he snapped the knife shut and dropped it into his trouser pocket.

A minute later, socks and photograph in hand, he was back in Lachlan’s bedroom.

‘I’ve taken Dad’s knife as well,’ he said. ‘So you don’t need to get blamed if they go looking and it’s not there. Now I’m off. How long will you be away?’

‘Till the end of the week after next – a bit over a fortnight,’ said Lachlan sleepily.

Murdo switched off the torch and drew back the curtains. The road and hills were bright with moonlight. As he pushed down the window the bitter breeze flowed into the room. He had forgotten how exceedingly cold it was.

‘Hey, I’m not going out there.’ He shivered. ‘You can let me out the back door.’

Softly in the darkness the two boys tiptoed downstairs and flitted into the kitchen. The top bolt of the door was stiff and resisted Murdo’s tugging. Suddenly it gave and shot back with a loud bang.

‘Oh blast!’ In a moment he had turned the key in the lock and was outside. ‘Have a good time in Edinburgh.’

There was no time to say more. A door opened in the hallway and there was the sound of voices. Murdo took to his heels, stubbing his protruding toes against a hidden boulder.

Light flooded the back of the house. He heard his aunt’s voice. ‘What on earth are you doing out here at this time of night, child? And in your pyjamas. You’ll catch your death of cold.’

‘I just wanted to see what kind of night it was,’ Lachlan replied. ‘The moon and that.’

‘The moon and that! I should have thought you would have seen enough of the moon and that, being out till all hours with Donald Sutherland.’ There was a pause. When she spoke again her voice was a little softer. ‘But it’s a nice night, sure enough.’

‘Yes, it was foggy before. I wanted to see if it would be all right for going down to Edinburgh tomorrow.’

‘Lachlan, I don’t believe a word of it. You only had to look out of your bedroom window. I wouldn’t be surprised but you were down for more food. Where you put it all I’ll never know, the amount you ate at supper, all that bread and cheese. And you’re still as thin as a rake. I’m sure the neighbours must think I starve you. Perhaps you’ve got worms.’

Again there was silence. Then Murdo, crouched behind the shed nursing his damaged toes, heard a sharp intake of breath.

‘I know what you were doing, that brother of yours has been round, hasn’t he? That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it, giving him food?’

‘No, Aunt Winifred.’ Lachlan’s voice rang with innocence and injured righteousness.

But again she did not believe him and Murdo saw the lamplight wavering down the grass towards him. Soft as a wraith he flitted away down the side of the house, sprang over the wall into the front garden, collected his boots and jacket, and vanished into the shadows at the far side of the old manse.

HECTOR’S CAR WAS
parked in its usual corner outside the Captain Ivy Inn. Due to black-out restrictions the building looked deserted. Murdo found the car doors unlocked and searched among the jumbled oddments on the floor behind the front seats for his tackety boots. Sitting on the edge of the horse trough, he pulled off his seaboots and stripped off the damp, not over-fresh remains of his socks. The breeze from the bay blew bitterly cold about his feet, though a little on the large side, his father’s socks were thick and comfortable. He reached for his nailed boots. The leather laces, short through having repeatedly been broken, were hard and difficult to knot.

When he had finished, his feet felt luxuriously warm. Briefly he stamped on the frozen yard, then looked for a place to dump the discarded socks. There were no dustbins. He tried to roll back a stone on the moor, but it was frozen into the peat and immovable. Finally he opened the car again and dropped them, already stiffening, among the rubbish in the back.

Murdo was about to close the car door when it occurred to him that although the crates of whisky had been delivered, Hector would certainly have held on to at least one bottle to share with friends. He felt in the pocket beneath the dashboard and at once his fingers lighted on the smooth, cold glass of a lemonade bottle: the distillers used whatever bottles came to hand. He drew it out and pressed back the spring clip with his thumbs. Carefully he sniffed and grimaced. Then throwing caution to the winds he took a good swig. The whisky tasted even worse than before and the boy shuddered to his very toes. A chill flush passed across his face. On the instant he knew it had been a mistake and wished he had left the spirit alone.

Hector could hardly fail to notice that the neck of the bottle was a couple of inches down. Spitting and guilty, Murdo hurried to the tap at the corner of the inn yard. It was frozen solid; an icicle reached halfway to the ground. Quietly he let himself into the inn and topped up the bottle at the wash basin in the toilet. Drops clung to the glass and smeared as he rubbed it against the sleeve of his jacket. He looked for a towel or cloth, but there was none. At length he wiped it dry on the tail of his shirt, and returned the bottle to the car.

As Murdo pushed open the door of the bar-room the light and warmth and beery smell washed over him. Though it was nearly an hour after official closing time a dozen men were still present, for no-one bothered very much in that remote part of the country.

Murdo closed the door behind him and crossed to Hector at the bar. A few of the men smiled and nodded abstractedly, but their minds were elsewhere. From the crackling and fading bar radio the gravelly voice of Winston Churchill rolled out, a recording of his broadcast earlier in the evening. Again, it seemed, as well as hardships to be endured, he could tell of some success – Montgomery in Tunisia, the Russian resistance at Stalingrad. But still, perhaps more than ever, there was need for resolution and courage, the greatest danger might yet be to come. The might of the German army in Europe was moving west; already there was news of a considerable build-up near the Channel ports of France. The con- clusion was not to be avoided that Herr Hitler was planning a bold and desperate strike against Britain itself, the very heart of the powers that rose against him. As the Nazi lion’s teeth were drawn it grew more savage. In the bar-room the men were still, no-one spoke.

Murdo listened with them. A man he had not seen before came through the door that led to the guests’ accommodation. He leaned easily on the end of the bar and jingled the coins in his pocket. The landlord motioned him to be patient and listened on.

To Murdo it all meant very little. The war, in this January of 1943, was vague and remote. They had explained it all at school, of course, and he heard the daily news. But though he knew the names of the various battles and theatres of war – El Alamein, Leningrad, Guadalcanal, the Battle of Britain – he was not very sure where they were or what had happened; and the Allied generals and politicians, he knew their names but not exactly who they were or what they did. Hitler was the main enemy, of course, with Mussolini, and Goering, Goebbles and Himmler, like the rude soldiers’ rhyme that one of his pals had brought back from the army camp.

Whoever they were, however, or whatever they had done, none of their actions really concerned him. In the wild and remote Highlands it was hard for a boy like Murdo to understand. He had seen the occasional gangs of prisoners working on the farms and roads of Caithness. But his life was affected more by a northerly wind that kept him from the lobster creels than it was by the fall of Paris, or the capture of Tobruk and Singapore. Sometimes he stood on the headland with Hector’s binoculars and watched the British fleet moving along the horizon, cruisers and destroyers, frigates and little corvettes, a magic lantern show. The noise of their gunfire on manoeuvres off Cape Wrath echoed across the moors. He knew some of the men who sailed in these ships, and this touched him more, especially with his deep love of the sea: also Hector had told him something of his own years as a coxwain in the Royal Navy during the First World War.

But for Murdo the single great tragedy of the war was that it took his father away from the village and left him homeless – homeless and rootless – that at least was how it had felt, despite their aunt’s care. Apart from that, and the absence of nearly all the youger men from the district, the war meant simply the stopping of comics and ice cream and sweets, and the curtains that had to be kept tightly closed at night.

But the men in the bar listened raptly. Murdo looked at their faces, the serious faces of men too old to do the fighting, who had done their bit twenty-five years earlier, and whose sons and grandsons now fought in their place. Among them was a young soldier, Billy, home on convalescent leave. His tank had been blown up in the desert, and he was newly out of hospital, burned and suffering from shell-shock. Heedless of the regulations he lounged at the bar in an old sheep-stained jacket. At the end of the bar the stranger, less intent on the radio than the local men, stood waiting for his drink. He looked like a business man, plump, with a middle-aged baby face and gold-rimmed glasses. Idly Murdo regarded him.

The broadcast ended and life began again in the bar-room. The landlord pulled some half-pints of beer, a whisky bottle appeared and the men talked. It was all about the war – bombings in Glasgow, letters from their sons in the forces, the possibility of invasion.

‘For God’s sake give it a break, will you! Talk about something else.’

Billy’s voice cut through the bar-room talk like a knife. For a moment there was an embarrassed silence.

‘I’m sorry.’ He was trembling, the scar tissue was livid against his brown skin.

‘That’s all right, boy,’ said old Danny.

Slowly the talk began again and turned to cars and work and local aquaintances, all the daily things men talk about when they are together.

Murdo sipped a glass of shandy, which was all Hector would allow him. He tipped the damp bag of salt into a packet of crisps, an unaccustomed treat.

Hector was on the point of leaving. He waited for Murdo to finish his drink and tossed back the last inch of beer in his own glass, then began buttoning his jacket against the night air. Murdo buckled the battledress across his stomach. Bidding goodnight to the company, they made their way to the door.

They had hardly reached it, however, when the stranger crossed the room and addressed himself to Hector.

‘Mr Gunn?’ Hector nodded.

‘I wonder if I could have a few words with you.’

Hector looked at him for a long moment, his old weather-beaten face expressing nothing.

‘What about?’ he said.

The stranger looked towards a table in the far corner of the room. ‘Perhaps we could sit down,’ he suggested.

‘All right.’

Somewhat diffidently the stranger led the way to a plain varnished table. Hector seated himself with his back to the wall and Murdo sat beside him, the unfinished bag of crisps in his hand. The stranger pulled in a rickety chair opposite.

‘I suppose I should introduce myself,’ he said hesitantly. ‘My name’s Smith, Henry Smith.’ The English accent and rather high- pitched voice sounded strange and forced after the low, soft speech of the Highlanders.

Hector said nothing, but sat waiting for him to continue.

‘I’ve been up in Sutherland for a day or two now, staying at the inn here.’ He paused for a moment. ‘It’s a lovely spot.’

‘Aye.’

‘Well, it’s partly a holiday, but I’m mixing business with pleasure, and I’ve been trying to find a man who can help me with a bit of
– well, business.’

Murdo belched and made a face. The whisky and shandy were playing havoc with his insides. Hector regarded him keenly for a moment and repressed a smile.

Mr Smith took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one up. The backs of his hands were covered in a mat of golden hairs. He looked quizzically across the table at Hector and drew a deep breath.