For once, she’s silent. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it seems to me that something in her usually open expression closes in on itself. It’s fleeting – a wary look in her eyes as she inadvertently glances towards the hills above the loch. Something about it reminds me of the look in my mum’s eyes when I’d ask her questions about my dad.
Then she pulls herself together. ‘Of course, darlin’。 You bring Daisy over to mine sometime and we’ll have a cup of tea and a chat. I’ll be happy to tell you about Alec and Flora. They really were the golden couple. Well, here’s the jetty – you’ll be taking Daisy to look at the boats, I expect. I must be getting on.’
I stand and watch as she hurries on towards the shop. She turns to look back, giving us a wave, before she ducks through the door.
Is it my imagination, or do I get the impression that when I asked her to tell me about my parents, she was choosing her words very carefully? That caution – and the momentary silence that preceded it – are enough to pique my interest. Is there something there, something that concerns my own past?
Because, for once and most unusually, it seems to me that there’s something that Bridie Macdonald is NOT saying.
Flora, 1939
The ebb and flow of the navy’s ships in and out of Loch Ewe continued as winter drew in. Along the shore, wisps of peat smoke rose from the chimneys of the little white croft houses, the soft, familiar scent mingling with the sharper smell of fuel oil as tankers replenished the grey hulks on the water.
It was a clear, still morning, and although the December sun lay low in the sky it had managed to flood the loch with light for a few precious hours. Flora was making the most of the good weather, at work in the patch of garden alongside Keeper’s Cottage. Her fork plunged easily into the dark soil. It had been worked for generations, enriched with seaweed from the shore and rotted manure from the stables up at the big house, and it provided them with a good supply of vegetables under Flora’s careful stewardship. Digging up potatoes, she transferred them, still covered in a powdering of black loam, into a bucket. The tatties rattled against the tin sides of the pail, quickly filling it. Then she heaved it to the store behind the house and emptied it into the larger wooden crates where the harvest would keep through the winter. Ruaridh had suggested that they turn the storehouse into an Anderson shelter, as some of the other crofters had done in case of air raids, but her father had just shrugged and said it didn’t seem worth the fuss. Looking out across the water on that calm winter’s day, Flora tended to agree with him. The war still seemed very far away. And, after all, the secrecy afforded by Loch Ewe’s secluded position was the very reason for its use as a safe harbour.
Coming to the end of the heaped row, she straightened up, hands in the small of her back, and pushed a tendril of hair from her eyes with her wrist. Two small boys were walking along the road and she waved to them as they drew nearer.
‘Hello there! Stuart and David, isn’t it? How are you getting on?’
They wore clothes that were a size or two too large, jumper sleeves rolled up and short trousers hanging below their knees over thick woollen socks. Moira Carmichael must have kitted them out in her sons’ outgrown clothing. Despite the poor fit, the things were of good quality and looked a good deal warmer than the few clothes the boys had brought with them from Glasgow.
Two pairs of round blue-grey eyes regarded her solemnly. ‘Hello, miss,’ said Stuart, the elder of the two. ‘We’ve to go for a walk and get out of Mrs Carmichael’s hair.’
Flora smiled at the words, clearly repeated verbatim. ‘Well, it’s a good day for it. How would you like to give me a hand getting the last of these tatties out of the ground? And then we can find you a glass of milk and maybe a bit of bannock indoors?’
Two heads nodded and they came up the path to where she stood.
‘Can you manage the fork, Stuart? Dig like this, see? If you just turn the ground over, David and I can gather the tatties into the pail.’
She smiled at their amazement as the first forkful unearthed a heap of potatoes. ‘Get them all up, that’s it. Don’t bother to rub the soil off, it helps them keep.’
With the two extra pairs of hands, the rows were quickly harvested. By the time they’d finished, the boys’ cheeks glowed with their exertions and the sea air.
Flora set aside a handful of potatoes and dug up a couple of neeps to take into the kitchen. Once boiled and mashed, they would accompany the venison stew that she’d prepared earlier, which simmered slowly on the stove so it’d be ready for her father’s supper when he came off the hill.