It was what my uncle called a vintage car. A Humber Hawk. A big black sleek American-looking thing with a green-leather bench seat in the front and a column gear change. My uncle was so proud of it. ‘They stopped making these in sixty-seven,’ he told us, more than once. He frequently related the story of how Rita’s father had bought one of the last models off the production line, about the same time The Beatles were releasing Sgt. Pepper’s, but never registered it. He had kept it in his garage, wrapped almost literally in cotton wool. It was another thirteen years before he finally declared it to the authorities, registering it in 1980, and making it unique and very nearly priceless. He had gifted it to Hector and Rita as a wedding present.
The couple had treasured it ever since, keeping it mostly in the garage and taking it out on only rare occasions. It was the first time they had brought it up to the Hebrides.
Me and Anndra and Uilleam crowded into the back seat and rode like royalty around the island when my aunt and uncle took us shopping in Stornoway, or out for the day to Uig, or Luskentyre in Harris. It made you want to wave from the window, like the Queen, when people would turn their heads to watch us going by. Other motorists would slow almost to a stop in passing places so they could get a better look.
From time to time Anndra got to sit up front. He must have been nearly seventeen by then, and desperate to learn to drive. But lessons cost money, and it was likely he couldn’t afford it until he was out working himself. Which would be some way off. Because he was anxious to go to university in Glasgow to study Gaelic.
One day, on the road down to Uig, Uncle Hector turned off on to a disused stretch of single-track and got out of the car. He waved Anndra into the driver’s seat. ‘On you go, son,’ he said. ‘Just a few hundred yards, mind. But it’ll be enough to give you a feel for it.’ And my uncle slipped into the passenger seat beside him and gave him instructions. It was quite a sacrifice for Uncle Hector to take a risk like that, and I can remember him wincing as Anndra crunched into first gear. But once my brother got her running, it was a smooth drive in a straight line, and he actually managed to get into top gear before finally running out of road and slowing to a stop. We all clapped, and Anndra glowed with pleasure. Uncle Hector said, ‘One day maybe, Anndra, I’ll leave her to you in my will.’ Me and Uilleam were dead jealous.
That summer we had been enjoying one of the finest spells of weather that I could remember. The wind was soft from the south-west, bringing warm air with it, but for once no rain, and we had day after day of clear blue skies and baking hot sunshine. Even the midges got burned off in the heat, and we spent days on end on this beach or that, getting tans like none of us had ever had before.
The day it happened, Dad and Uncle Hector were going fishing together. I don’t know where, and it probably wasn’t legal. They weren’t saying, and no one was asking. But they went off at first light with their sacks on their backs and their rods over the shoulders.
Aunt Rita had decided that we should go to Dalmore Beach for the day, and she and Mum spent half the morning preparing a sumptuous pack lunch that we could take with us. In the end, Mum decided that she would stay home and cook, and that we would have a big family dinner that night, since my aunt and uncle were scheduled to leave the next day.
We set off late in the morning, after Seonag’s mum had dropped her off, and we all squeezed into the car. Me and Seonag in the back with Uilleam, and Anndra up front with Aunt Rita.
I’ll never forget driving down that road to the beach. The colour of the sea simmering between headlands, the painfully clear blue of the sky. And the hills rising on either side of us burned brown by all the weeks of sunshine. I have never driven down that same road since with anything other than lead in my heart.
When we arrived at the metalled parking there were no other cars there, but I noticed half a dozen bikes leaning against the cemetery fence, and when we got out of the car the whoops and cries of their owners carried to us on the wind from the beach. Which was disappointing. Nine times out of ten we would have had the beach to ourselves.
Seonag and I ran on ahead, carrying fold-up canvas chairs and travelling rugs, and Aunt Rita followed with the boys, carrying two big hampers. A veritable feast!
When we got down to the beach, and picked our way over the stones to the sand, we saw that the bikers were in fact half a dozen lads from Balanish. And my heart skipped a beat when I saw that one of them was Ruairidh. They were playing football, stripped to the waist and wearing only shorts, kicking their ball about on the firm sand left by the receding tide. I heard Seonag beside me issuing a grunt of disapproval. ‘Bloody typical,’ she said. ‘Why do boys have to go and ruin everything?’
The boys saw us arriving, and probably had very similar thoughts. But I noticed that Ruairidh had clocked who we were, and his eyes lingered just a little longer in our direction than the others’. This was after the incident at the village disco, and before Ruairidh and I finally connected during my first summer break at Linshader, so I was playing it cool and chose to ignore them entirely.
I heard Uilleam cursing in Gaelic as he and Anndra and Aunt Rita appeared on the beach behind us. Rita would have lived with Hector long enough to recognize a few Gaelic oaths, and she shushed Uilleam and suggested we set up camp on the far side of the beach, just about as far away as we could get from the noisy, football-playing youths.
She was wearing a beautiful blue print dress with flaring skirts that billowed in the wind as she strode off through the soft warm sand to pick a spot. Her wide-brimmed straw hat fibrillated in the breeze and stayed on her head thanks only to the ribbons tied in a bow beneath her chin.
Uilleam growled at the footballers as we passed them. He had never liked Ruairidh, and I had always thought that maybe he was jealous that it was Ruairidh who’d had the initiative and courage to rescue me from the bog, when Uilleam was the older boy, and my brother to boot. As if Ruairidh had somehow done it just to show him up. By now Uilleam was already away from the island at university, and was only home for a couple of weeks following a summer job working at a hotel in Pitlochry.
He and Anndra hammered stakes into the sand to stretch out a windbreak while Aunt Rita spread the travelling rugs and arranged the hampers and chairs. Seonag and I stripped off to the bathing costumes beneath our clothes and went splashing and shrieking into the water. Despite the heat of the summer, the sea was still ice-cold and a shock to the system.
‘Don’t go in too far,’ Aunt Rita called after us. ‘You know how deep it gets.’
I knew only too well from past experience. When the tide goes out it leaves a stretch of gently sloping wet sand, before suddenly shelving steeply away into deeper, darker water. You could tell from the way the waves broke as they came in and were quickly sucked out again by a powerful undertow. Sometimes you saw surfers out in the bay, but they would be strong swimmers, often with life vests. The waves weren’t big enough today to attract the surfers, but forceful enough to knock you over and drag you back out if you weren’t careful and strayed too far in.
It’s true there was a time when most islanders couldn’t swim. In fact, fear of the water was almost instilled into us. If you had a healthy fear of it and couldn’t swim, then you wouldn’t be tempted to go into the sea. But a drowning tragedy at Uig had persuaded my parents that we should learn. Anndra and I were sent off to Stornoway for lessons, but Uilleam refused to go. I think his fear of the water was already too deeply ingrained.