Flora’s duties at the naval base mainly involved driving officers to and from the jetty, or delivering and collecting the personnel who manned the lookout posts that had been built around the loch. On occasion, too, she drove larger vehicles – trucks and ambulances – when the need arose. She was sitting in the NAAFI with Mairi when the order came to take an ambulance round to Cove, on the far side of Loch Ewe. A Tilly – the nickname they gave to small utility vehicles in the services – had gone off the road and ended up stuck in the ditch, and its occupants had sustained minor injuries.
Flora drove, with Mairi at her side, and they sped along the shore to where the road narrowed to a single track beyond Poolewe. A mile further on they came upon the car in the ditch, listing alarmingly to one side. A sub-lieutenant was trying to wedge a large stone under one of the back wheels. His colleague – an ordnance officer deputed to service the anti-aircraft gun at the lookout point – sat dazed at the side of the road, with none other than Bridie busily attempting to fashion a sling out of what, on closer inspection, appeared to be a strip torn from her petticoat.
The two girls jumped down from their vehicle. ‘Bridie! Are you all right? What happened?’ Flora asked.
‘A sheep in the road,’ Bridie replied cheerily. ‘Had to swerve to miss it. I got away with just a few bumps and bruises, but I think this poor laddie’s arm is broken. The sheep’s fine, though,’ she added.
‘Here,’ Mairi said. ‘Let me take a look.’ She gathered dressings and a proper sling from the back of the ambulance and knelt beside the officer. Deftly, she examined his injury and strapped his arm gently but firmly to his chest to immobilise the wrist, which was already beginning to swell.
Leaving Mairi to attend to the casualty, Flora helped the other young officer to attach a rope to the bumper of the Tilly. Reversing the ambulance, she managed to pull the car free of the ditch, righting it so that they could have a good look at the damage.
‘Oops,’ remarked Bridie, ‘that rear axle doesn’t look too healthy.’
‘It doesn’t look at all safe to drive. We’ll need to tow you back and get it seen to,’ said Flora.
The young man glanced at his watch. ‘I’m overdue to relieve the lookout at the point. D’you think you could drop me there and then come back for this lot?’
‘Of course. Jump in.’
She drove past the row of whitewashed crofts at Cove – those same cottages that she and Alec had seen from the water on their visit to the rocky arch beyond Firemore beach in the spring – to where the track petered out just past the concrete shelter that had been constructed as a lookout post at the mouth of the loch. While the sentries carried out their handover, Flora walked to the edge of the clifftop. Far beneath her, the waves crashed against the jagged black buttress of Furadh Mor, a crag that reared from the water a little way from the shore, where the sea surged and foamed over the rocks as if tugging in frustration at the shelter the headland afforded the calmer waters beyond. She knew the power of the waves wasn’t the only danger out there in the North Atlantic, where German battleships lurked beyond the horizon and U-boats prowled in packs, hunting down their prey like hungry wolves.
The drive back to the base at Mellon Charles was slow, hampered by the weight of the damaged Tilly, which floundered behind the ambulance on its tow rope like a drunken whale with Bridie at the wheel. The stir of their arrival brought the camp’s commander out from his hut. He raised his eyebrows at the sight of the damaged car and they rose further, almost disappearing beneath the peak of his cap, at the sight of the injured ordnance officer.
‘Take that man to the surgeon. And you – Miss Macdonald, is it? Report to my hut once you’ve washed that oil off your hands.’
Flora shot a sympathetic look at Bridie, although her friend seemed unabashed at the prospect of a dressing-down from the commander himself. After all, it wasn’t the first time she’d had a run-in with a sheep, and there was also the occasion when she’d met another Tilly head-on and had a narrow miss, although that time it had been the other driver who’d ended up in the ditch.
By lunchtime, Bridie had been reassigned from her driving duties to a role behind the counter in the NAAFI where the scope for wreaking devastation on the camp’s fleet of vehicles was considerably reduced. But, as she remarked cheerfully to Flora and Alec later over a port and lemon in the Jellyjar Tavern, she felt it was a role to which she was better suited, having gained valuable experience under Mrs Carmichael and the ladies of the Rural. Everyone came in and wanted to chat as well, so it was a good place to hear all the news.