Your loving
Alistair
I read it through twice, trying to visualize his circumstances at the time of writing, crouching in a trench on the crumbling perimeter of Madrid. And the writing, so overcharged with emotion — the Highland half of him crying out for pity. For prayer, too.
I looked across at the woman so still beside the fire. 'My mother said he used to write poetry.'
She took the letter from me, staring down at the two faded pages. 'During that summer… Yes, I suppose it was poetry. It didn't rhyme and I didn't understand it, you see. So he never showed me any more.' Her eyes were beginning to weep and she turned away, stuffing the letter back into her work bag. 'One of his brigade brought it more than a year later… That was just after our troops had been evacuated from Norway. He was an RAF sergeant then, stationed up at Graven. Brought us some sugar, too, didn't he, Albert?'
Her husband blinked and nodded. 'His name was Pettit. A kind man.'
'We were very short of sugar, you see, and with a growing boy…' Her voice trailed away. 'Those were difficult times here in Shetland, you know.' And she began knitting again. 'It's for my son,' she said. 'He was here today.' And her husband said, 'The first time in more than a year.'
That undercurrent again, and as soon as I had finished my whisky I left them, hurrying back to my lodgings while the words of that letter were still fresh in my mind. In the bare little room I wrote it down, I think exactly, and then I went to bed and for a long time lay awake in the dark thinking of his disillusionment and how it matched my own. To die on a battlefield for something you no longer believed in… And his last letter, not to my mother, but to this woman in Shetland. The Mother Earth of my native islands. The call of his homeland perhaps. Is that what we cling to at the point of death?
The only picture I had ever seen of him was in my mother's sitting-room in the big house on Rhode Island. It had been tucked away in a drawer full of odds and ends, a photograph taken outside the Registry Office in Edinburgh where they had been married. I remember my mother coming in and finding me standing there with it in my hand, the cold, contained fury with which she had whipped it away from me and torn it up. So long ago now that I could barely remember what he looked like, only the eyes, which had seemed to stare at me out of the print, and the fact that he was shorter than she was and his suit crumpled.
The wind blew all night. It was still blowing in the morning, but the clouds broken now and fitful gleams of sunshine. I started out for Brough shortly after nine, walking south along the back of West Burra, the grass all green and the sea sparkling. I found Miss Manson feeding chickens in the backyard of her cottage, a tall gaunt woman with steel-rimmed spectacles and a waspish tongue. The schoolteacher had warned me she was 'as full of gossip as a cat with kittens', so I didn't tell her who I was, only that I was a relative. It didn't satisfy her, of course, but she couldn't stop talking — chiefly about Anna Sandford and the dance she had led her husband, running all over the island after Alistair Randall so soon after they were married. 'And that son of hers — serves her right. He was always a hard boy and now he's up in Unst and hardly bothers with them at all… Well, there's little of Albert there, you know, the poor devil.'
I don't think she had known my father at all, only the gossip. She was a good deal younger. But she could remember the farm being sold and she showed me the dower chest her mother had bought at the auction, a plain oak piece carefully polished. Some people called Eunson lived there now and she told me how to find it. She also told me that the plaque I had heard about was not in Hamnavoe church, but in Grund Sound.
Grund Sound was another mile down the road. There was a little war memorial where the road to Houss branched off to the left across a stone bridge and the view down the South Voe was a bright vista of water, flat as a mirror in the sun. The church was just beyond the bridge, a small stone building close by the school. Fresh-dug earth, black as peat, was piled in one corner of the graveyard and the church door stood open. It was dark inside and stark in its plainness. The plaque was at the west end and the inscription, etched black on the plain brass, read:
ALISTAIR MOUAT RANDALL Journalist and soldier who died in the Spanish Civil War, 1939
'No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something.' — Browning
I stared at it a long time, wondering who had put it there — the date of death not given, nor the side he had fought on, and those lines from Browning. Was it my mother? Had she made that strange choice of an epitaph? I turned to the nearest pew and sat down, wishing I knew the rest of that poem.
Footsteps on the gravel outside and a single bell in the roof struck an uncertain note. It struck again, and then again, a slow toll, rhythmic as the strokes of an oar. The door swung open, the sunshine flooding in, and then four men bearing a coffin on their shoulders. There was no music, only the tread of their feet to act as a dirge. They laid the coffin down before the altar, the daffodils on it a blaze of spring in a shaft of sunlight. The men took a pew to the left and then a Presbyterian minister came in, followed by a young woman in a tweed skirt and a monkey jacket, a brown scarf tied over her head. Her face was set and very brown. Behind her was a shambling giant of a man, blond and bearded, and several others, all ill-at-ease in their Sunday best.
They were fishermen by the look of it. The girl didn't notice me, her gaze on the coffin, but the big man did, his eyes steel blue and his huge hands clenched. I waited until they had settled and then slipped away out into the sunshine, back to the little war memorial where I sat on the grass looking down the long vista of the voe to Houss Ness.
I was still there when they came out of the church. I saw the coffin laid to rest in its grave, and then they all left in a Land Rover, heading south down East Burra towards Houss, the girl driving. The minister locked up and followed them in his car, leaving only the gravedigger shovelling at the peat-black earth.
The sad little scene and the two lines of that poem… Death the solution to everything. Who had known him so well that he had revealed to them an inner conflict that matched my own? Who had cared enough to blazon it to the world, and understood enough to claim that, and not his death for a cause, as the real worth? Not Anna Sandford surely. Not my mother. But somebody. I stared blindly at the stone cross, bare against the blue sky, and wished I had known him. And then a car came from the direction of Hamnavoe and stopped in front of me, its bright red body blocking the view.
'You're Randall, aren't you?' The driver was a man of about my own age, perhaps a little more, his dark hair greying at the temples and blown by the wind. He wore a fisherman's jersey and his face was round and plump, the eyes slightly bloodshot. 'I was told I'd find you along the road to Grund Sound. Can I give you a lift?' And he pushed the door open for me. 'I'm Ian Sandford.'
I hesitated, wondering what he wanted. 'I'd as soon walk,' I said.
'Aye, it's a fine day, and we've not had many of those this last fortnight.' He was leaning towards me across the passenger seat, his face framed in long sideburns. 'Mother said you were a trawlerman. That right?'
I didn't say anything, trying to recall what else I had told her, the islands were an enclosed world and gossip travelled fast.
'Would you know the worth of a trawler lying beached with a hole in her bottom?' There was a speculative glint in his eyes.
'Depends how badly she's holed and what it's going to cost to get her off.'