I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Fourteen

I was just seven years old when I had my first encounter with death, and Ruairidh Macfarlane saved my life.

I was born three years before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, and most of my growing up was done during the Eighties when she ruled our country with an iron fist in a velvet glove. I didn’t know much about politics then. I was too young. But I learned to associate the name of Thatcher with economic depression and unemployment, growing up as I did in a community where barely a single soul had voted for her and unemployment was rife.

The population of Balanish was, and is, only a few hundred. When I was still a child most of our neighbours were crofters. They kept sheep on land divided into narrow strips, and grew mostly potatoes and root vegetables. There were a few fishermen, but even then there was no serious fishing being done from the west coast. A few folk worked in the mill at Carloway, and others had jobs with the council, like my dad, and travelled to and from Stornoway on a daily basis. Others were unemployed, and only the money from the buroo and subsistence crofting kept them going until better times.

I had, when I look back on it now, the best childhood I could have hoped for. Idyllic in many ways. I had two older brothers, Anndra and Uilleam. Anndra was the middle child. And maybe because the first child gets all the attention, and the girl gets all the adoration, he developed a mischievous streak. He knew I hated spiders, and I would find them everywhere. In my school bag, in my pockets, even in my bed. It gave him endless amusement.

But he and Uilleam were also ultra-protective. The merest hint of a threat to me, no matter who from, and they would rally round to stand resolute in my defence. Family came first. Tormenting Niamh second.

Sometimes, to escape their mischief, I would hide in the peat stack. My father was meticulous in the building of our stack. Long and beautifully rounded, a perfect herringbone construction to maximise drainage. But once it was built, it was the boys who were sent out to bring in the peats for the fire. And when I became old enough the peat-fetching was delegated to me. At an early age, I learned how to hollow out one end of it, hiding the peats I removed in the old blackhouse, and making myself a wee den inside that I could conceal by stuffing peats in the hole to block it. It was my secret place, though it had always disappeared by the end of the winter.

We had perfect freedom in those days to wander wherever the mood took us. As long as we were home in time for meals. Looking back, it seems the world was a safer place then. I used to cycle three miles or more to the next village along the coast to play with Seonag. I went part of the way on the main road, and then over a rough dirt track that wound its way around the hills beyond the Doune Braes Hotel. And I went in all weathers.

It’s a funny thing. Most folk on the mainland are obsessed by the weather. Because they get a fair amount of the good stuff, they don’t take it well when it turns bad. On the island, the weather’s almost always bad, and changes so fast that you don’t really notice it. It just is.

I met Seonag on our first day at primary school and we sort of clicked. Her folks had a croft that ran right down to the shore, with a stunning view across East Loch Roag to Great Bernera. Her father owned a mobile shop, and he used to travel up and down all the villages on the west coast selling processed meats and root vegetables, fruit in season, and tinned goods and bread and sweeties for the kids. He also did some weaving, and we used to hear his old Hattersley clacking away in the shed at the top of the croft.

When Seonag came to our place we played in a small stone outbuilding, or bothag as we called it in Gaelic. Houses was the name of the game we indulged in there, furnishing it like a big doll’s house that we could crawl in and out of, dragging our dollies with us, teaching them how to sit up straight and eat nicely.

It was where my father kept his tools, and we had to drag them all out to make space for our domestic fantasy. He would get mad at us and tell us to go amuse ourselves elsewhere. Which is when we’d head off to play down by the shore. I couldn’t count the hours we spent down there trying to catch crabs in the pools left by the outgoing tide, or just sitting on the rocks with the stink of the kelp in our nostrils, watching the boats coming in and out of the harbour across the bay.

There was an old walled cemetery on the shore, by the foot of our croft, that hadn’t been used for a hundred years or more. But it always reduced us to silence when we would pass by it, knowing that the spirits of the dead were kept somewhere inside it, behind its moss-smothered walls. I remember Seonag saying to me once in a hushed voice, ‘Will they bury us in there when it’s our turn to die?’ I particularly remember that phrase — our turn to die. Somehow I’d never thought of it like that before, and maybe it was the first time I had ever fully understood that one day I, too, would die.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I told her, a little shocked and trying to recover myself. ‘They don’t bury folk in there any more.’ I remembered my grampa telling me that it was an accidental cemetery. In the old days they took the bodies by boat across the water to a burial ground on Little Bernera. But when the weather was too bad, they buried them right there, a stone’s throw from the slipway.

‘Where will we be buried, then?’

‘Dalmore,’ I said.

‘On the beach?’ Seonag was amazed.

‘Don’t be daft! There’s a cemetery on the machair above the beach. That’s where everyone goes now.’ Years later I always thought of Dalmore as being the valley of death. It was a place that took on a significance in my life that I could never have guessed at then.

Sundays were my least favourite day of the week. None of us was allowed out to play. I had friends whose parents made them sit in and read the bible all day, and although my folks were never that religious, we still got dragged off to midday service at the Free Church of Scotland. It sat right next door to the Church of Scotland. I never knew the difference then, and still don’t today. Except that they present a shining example of how folk can never agree on anything. Even God.

You might think that with two churches Balanish was a big place. It wasn’t. You could walk from one end of it to the other in a few minutes. Although folk who lived a mile or two out along the road in either direction would tell you that they were balaniseachs too. There was a primary school with two teachers, and when you completed your seventh year you went to Shawbost for the first two years of secondary. Then on to Stornoway. Either the Nicolson or Lews Castle. Right next door stood a community hall that was opened by Donnie ‘Dotaman’ Macleod, who was a kind of Gaelic TV celebrity and singer. Runrig, the Celtic rock band, played there once. I can remember sitting in class hearing them practise on the Friday afternoon before the concert that night.

There wasn’t much to do in the evenings. The older kids ran a youth club in the hall, and there were usually discos on the Friday night, but me and Seonag were too young for that then. Too young, too, for the pleasures of cigarettes and alcohol enjoyed by village teenagers on wet, windy, winter nights huddled under the bridge, or in the bus shelter, smoking and drinking vodka straight from the bottle. We were dead jealous, and wishing away our lives till we were old enough to join them. Such were the heights of our childhood ambitions.

My favourite person when I was seven was my grampa. He was my dad’s dad, but I never knew my dad’s mother. She died before I was born. Grampa lived with us in the croft house. Or should I say, we lived with him. It was his house. His croft. Anndra and Uilleam shared a bed, and I slept on the settee in the front room. Grampa had his own room at the back. He had something about him, that old man. He knew stuff. About the world. And about people. He’d spent years at sea and was hard as nails. Even in his seventies. No man in his right mind would pick a fight with him, and yet I never heard him utter a word in anger, or say a bad thing about anyone.

I spent many a long hour sitting with him when he was weaving in the old blackhouse. I’d watch his hands, clasped together in front of him as if in prayer, as he worked the treadles with his feet. Big-knuckled hands spattered brown with age, and veins that stood out on them like ropes. And he would tell me tales of places I had never heard of, with exotic and sometimes daft-sounding names. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Abidjan. Dakar. ‘Never judge a man,’ he used to say to me, ‘by the thickness of his wallet, but by the stoutness of his heart.’ I had no idea what he meant then. But I do now.

My mother doted on that man. More than her own father, and maybe even her own husband. I look back sometimes now and wonder, had she known Grampa as a young man would she rather have married him than my dad?

When family came to stay, which they did quite often in the summer, they would sleep in an old caravan that we kept at the side of the house, lashed down to stop it from blowing away in the south-westerlies.

It was by the side of the caravan that Anndra found Grampa lying on the path one day. The old man had just returned from his daily walk through the village, and his cloth bunnet and his walking stick were lying on the slabs beside him.

Anndra came running into the house. ‘Something’s wrong with Grampa!’ We were just gathering to sit down to dinner and so we all ran out on to the path. Immediately he saw his father, my dad turned and pushed me away. ‘Get back in the house, lassie.’ But it was too late. I’d already caught sight of him. Lying in a strangely unnatural position on the path. It was the first time I had seen a dead person, and although I’m sure he was still warm, his blue eyes were wide and staring at the sky, and it was clear that life had left him. It was his body alright, but it wasn’t my grampa lying there. He was already somewhere else.

The coffin sat in the front porch for two days, and a procession of villagers came to see him lying in it and pay their last respects. Then the minister came and held a brief service in the back room, before the men closed up the coffin and carried it out to the waiting hearse. The days were long gone when they would have carried the coffin down to the slipway at the foot of our croft to sail him across to the island. And Dalmore was much too far to walk. So a hearse it was. But it was only the men who got into their cars to follow it.

‘Are we not going, too?’ I asked my mother.

‘Women don’t go to the grave,’ she said simply.

‘Why?’

‘They just don’t.’ And to my knowledge, she never once went to visit him.

She left me, then, sitting in the front room, gazing out across the bay. It had been a miserable morning, the shadow of death reflected in the clouds that obscured the sun. Suddenly there was a break in the sky out over the bay, and sunlight fell in rings of silver on to the dull pewter of the sea, and with the rain that fell a rainbow arced itself perfectly across the harbour. To this day I like to think that was Grampa saying goodbye.

Even then it struck me as strange that I had not spilled a tear over the passing of the old man. Perhaps I didn’t really understand the finality of death, or maybe it was just some kind of self-protection mechanism kicking in. But that was when I heard a soft sobbing coming from the back of the house, and I tiptoed out of the front room and down the hall. My mother was standing in the open door of my grampa’s room, and beyond her I could see his bunnet and his stick laid out on the bed. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. It wouldn’t be the last.

That night I slept in his bed for the first time. His room was now mine. When I look back I think about how it might have spooked me to sleep where a dead man had lain. But I derived an odd comfort from it, and somehow felt that he was still and always there, looking out for me.

In my fancy, I might have imagined that it was Grampa doing just that when I nearly drowned a few months later. But, actually, it was Ruairidh who saved me.

It was the end of August, and nearly the whole village was up on the Pentland Road to bring home the peats that had been left to dry out there over the summer.

It is usual for the peats to be cut in the month of May, which is traditionally one of the driest of the year. Although in the Hebrides dry is a relative term. The peat is cut into slabs from a long bank of it, using a special spade or tairsgear, and tossed over on to the bog to dry. Every family has its own peat bank, established sometimes over generations. The deeper it is, and the blacker the peat you cut from the bottom of it, the hotter it burns. It costs nothing, except the blood, sweat and tears you spill to dig it out. This was how islanders had heated their homes for centuries, though these days it is more likely to be oil-fired central heating.

Some weeks after the first cutting you would go back to lift the peats, which had dried on the top side, and build them into tiny stacks. Two or three on the sides and one on the top, to let the air around them. Then before the end of the summer you would harvest the hard dry peats to take them home and build your big stack for the winter.

It had been a wet summer that year, though up on the moor the wind always does a good job of drying the peat. Finally, the clouds had blown off to the east, and there was a break in the weather. It was still and warm. A fine window for fetching the peats. We had one lorry in the village, a sort of communal vehicle that everyone shared, and this was its busiest time of year. Back and forth between Balanish and the peat banks up on the Pentland Road.

The Pentland is a single-track road that follows the contours of the moor all the way across from Stornoway to Carloway. At one point it divides, and a spur of it winds down the hill to Breasclete. It was originally intended as the route of a railway line that was never built, and it got its name from Lord Pentland, the Secretary of State for Scotland, who secured the funding for it. But it’s not a road you would want to take if you were ever in a hurry to get anywhere.

I had rarely witnessed a sky so clear. You could see all the way down to the mountains of Harris in the south, cutting sharp purple contours against the blue. And to the west the Atlantic shimmered off into some impossibly distant horizon, beyond which lay Canada and America many thousands of miles away. But with the wind dropping, the midges were out in force, and so everyone was working hard and fast to get away from the wee biting beasts as fast as they could.

Seonag and I were still too young to be involved in the heavy work, and so we were running around like mad things making a nuisance of ourselves.

The Macfarlane peat bank was on the other side of the road, and Ruairidh’s whole family was out carrying the peats to stack them at the roadside until they could load them on to the lorry when it was their turn. Ruairidh was a couple of years older than me, and although he was in my class — primary one to five — I had barely been aware of his existence. His big brother, Donald, had already gone to Shawbost. And the family lived at the north end of the village, so there wasn’t much contact with us southerners.

It was our turn for the lorry, and Uilleam and Anndra were helping Mum and Dad pile on the peats while Seonag and I went running across the moor, jumping in puddles and getting ourselves soaked in spite of our wellies.

We had gone some way from the road when I spotted a makeshift path of old wooden pallets that someone had laid in the long distant past to access a particularly rich bank of peat. The bog was eternally sodden here, and if you weren’t careful your wellies would get stuck and sucked into it and you’d lose them.

If I hadn’t been so intoxicated by the childish pursuit of puddle jumping, it might have occurred to me that there was danger in leaping from pallet to pallet, feeling the rotten wood crack and break beneath my feet. But I was so intent on reaching the puddle at the end of it that I never stopped to think.

Seonag was infinitely more cautious. She had stopped and was shouting at me to come back. Which only spurred me on. My cotton summer dress was already soaked and spattered with slurry, and I was aware of my blonde curls streaming out behind me as I ran. Two, three more pallets and I could take off and leap feet-first into that puddle, which was sure to make the biggest splash. Bigger than any splash Seonag had made. I could see the blue of the sky reflected in its mirrored surface. And the anticipation of shattering its stillness, like breaking glass, was almost breathtaking.

I can still remember the thrill I felt as I launched myself off that final, disintegrating pallet, and then the shock of the cold as I dropped into the water like a stone, submerged right up to my neck. This was no puddle. It was a deep, water-filled trench, and immediately I could feel the mud beneath it claiming me.

You never think you will die, especially when you are young, but with a sudden clarity I realized that’s exactly what was going to happen. It was all I could do to tip back my head and keep the water from going into my mouth.

I heard Seonag screaming, and then the voices of men shouting. I strained to turn my head and look back along the path of rotting pallets as my father and brothers tried to follow in my footsteps. But they were so much heavier than I was. The pallets would not support their weight. All around me the bog was impassable. Waterlogged after months of rain. It would have dragged a man down and drawn him under before he even realized there was no way back.

My father was up to his waist already and stuck fast. There was panic everywhere, more folk running from the adjoining peat banks. Someone threw a rope to my father and they managed to pull him out. But it was not long enough to reach me.

That was when I saw Ruairidh for the first time, standing silhouetted against the sky on an old abandoned peat bank. He was closer to me there than my father had managed, but still not close enough to reach me with the rope. He turned and ran off, and I looked up at the sky then, feeling the irresistible force of the bog, and knew that I was going under, and that no one would reach me before I drowned. I saw my grampa’s eyes, wide and lifeless, and wondered what it felt like to be dead.

And then Ruairidh was back. He had Donald with him, and between them they were hefting three stout planks that they must have fetched from the back of the lorry. The rest of the men and several of the women appeared behind them. I could see my mother’s eyes filled with fear, and the grim expression on my father’s face as Ruairidh laid the first of the planks across the bog. I knew it would spread his weight, and that there was no one lighter who could do it except, perhaps, for Seonag. But she would have been hopeless.

After he had crawled about halfway along that first plank, Ruairidh turned to get the next one from Donald and manoeuvre it ahead of himself to extend the bridge. And then another to slide even further ahead as he inched forward on his hands and knees.

By the time he reached the end of the third plank he was within touching distance, lying flat on his belly. If he had slipped off, or if the plank had overturned, he’d have been sucked down into the bog himself. I felt his outstretched hands reach me below the water, slipping beneath my arms to stop me from going under. And I turned to look into his eyes. Deep blue Celtic eyes beneath a mop of black, curling hair. Eyes filled with concern. But if he was afraid, it was not evident. And for the first time I thought that maybe I wouldn’t die after all.

Someone had found another rope, tying the two together to make it long enough to reach me. I saw my father throw the end of it out towards Ruairidh. It landed on the water beside me. Ruairidh let go with one hand and stretched out to get it, very nearly tipping himself off the plank in the process. I watched the concentration on his face, and the relief as his fingers closed around it and he was able to feed it below the water, beneath my arms and across my chest to tie in a knot at my back.

Then he let me go. I didn’t want him to leave me as he worked his way back along the bridge of planks. But I felt the tension in the rope and knew that I would not go under now.

Slowly — it seemed interminable at the time — they pulled me from the water. The mud and peat beneath releasing me with great reluctance, but retaining my wellies for eternity. I clung to the rope with desperate muddy fingers as they hauled me finally to safety.

I suppose I had been expecting angry words of admonition. Adults grabbing me by the arm to shake me and tell me how bloody stupid I had been. But all I felt were arms of love and gratitude around me. Kisses planted on my wet, mud-streaked face as I wept inconsolably, soaked through now and shivering, even though there was still warmth in the sunshine. My overwhelming emotion was one of humiliation. That I had been so foolish, and had to be rescued by some boy! I knew how I must look, too. Slathered in glaur, my hair a tangle of peat and mud and bog water. And I glanced around to search out what I was sure would be the smug face of my rescuer. But among all the adults crowding around me Ruairidh was nowhere to be seen, and I found myself deeply disappointed.

‘Come on, young lady,’ my mother said, hoisting me up into her arms. ‘It’s home for you and into the bath.’

I sat up in the front of the lorry, shivering and sobbing with embarrassment, my mother on one side of me, the driver on the other. Back at the house I was stripped of my clothes and plunged into a hot bath, which stopped my shivering but failed to dissipate my shame.

Later, freshly dressed, my hair still wet and hanging in ropes, I stood at the front gate watching for the return of the lorry from the Pentland Moor. When finally it came, I saw Ruairidh and Donald sitting up in the back with the peats. As it passed our house I caught Ruairidh’s eye. He seemed oddly embarrassed. I waved and mouthed thank you, before it disappeared around the curve of the road, heading north towards the Macfarlane croft.

School began again the following week for the autumn term, and that was the first time I had seen Ruairidh since he saved my life up at the peats. He was in primary five, and I was in three, so we were still in the same class. He sat at the foot of the row next to mine and I could barely concentrate on the lessons for watching him.

In the playground, too, I was distracted from the girls’ games. Skipping and peever. Hardly able to tear my eyes away from the boys kicking their daft football around the playground.

Seonag was annoyed with me. Unaccountably angry. And it was a while before I realized she was jealous. ‘Boys are so silly,’ she said dismissively. ‘Big and clumsy and stupid.’

As for Ruairidh, it was as if the incident on the Pentland Road had never happened. I never once caught him even glancing in my direction. And I began to think that perhaps he hated me.

It was another three years before I had the chance to pay him back for saving my life, even if it was in just a very small way.

He had paid me not the least attention in all that time, moving the following year into the class above mine, and the year after that to Shawbost. I caught the occasional glimpse of him getting on to the minibus that took the Balanish kids to secondary school, and from time to time at village functions, though I was still too young to go to the dances. When he had crawled out across those planks to rescue me from the bog up on the moor, he’d been quite a slight boy. Now he’d sprouted, and was taller than Anndra, who was a big lad himself.

He’d have been twelve years old by that time, and conscious then of how he looked. Clothes, it seemed, were important to him, and he always had a certain style about him. Narrow jeans, and designer T-shirts and short jackets that sat well on his square shoulders. His hair was cut short at the sides, but left long at the back in a mullet — as well as on top, where it piled up in waves and curls. I’m sure he was using some kind of gel to keep it all in place. I didn’t know a single girl at school who didn’t think he was gorgeous. Except, of course, for Seonag, who had retained her jealous contempt for him all this time.

As for me, I hated how I looked. I had freckles, and hair that I spent hours trying to straighten. It’s funny how people with straight hair always want curls, and those with curly hair want it straight. I was never satisfied. I hadn’t started my periods yet, and still had a boyish figure, and not even the beginnings of breasts. Unlike Seonag, who had already begun to develop hips and boobs, and looked years older than me. She had the most stunning red hair with a porcelain complexion, and was morphing into the kind of beauty that was starting to turn heads in the playground.

So if I was going to attract Ruairidh’s attention at all, I was going to have to find other ways of doing it.

It was approaching Halloween. Kids on the mainland, on October 31st, would dress up as pirates and fairies and Obi-Wan Kenobi and go out guising. But Lewis boys were up to something quite different. While the girls would gather in community and village halls, dancing and playing music and dooking for apples, the boys were out stealing gates.

I have no idea how it all started, but it was and is an island tradition. The boys would go out in gangs on Halloween to steal and hide as many croft gates as they could. The object of the exercise, it appeared, was to amuse the boys and annoy the owners. And if sheep got out, so much the better.

Of course, the boys got hell each year from their fathers. Fathers who had done the selfsame thing when they were young. And it would always be the same victims, too. Those crofters who reacted the most, shouting and chasing the boys. That, apparently, made it all much more fun.

There was one eccentric old bodach in Balanish who never failed to rise to the bait, and he had became the focus of attention every Halloween. His was the prize gate. His name was spelled E-a-c-h-a-n. But you have to know how that is pronounced in Gaelic to understand his nickname. The ea is pronounced ya, so the name is pronounced yachan. And everyone knew him as Yankee Eachan.

In the late Forties, after the war, Yankee Eachan had gone off to America in search of work. He left the island speaking only Gaelic, and when he returned a few years later, having picked up only a few words of English, he pronounced them with a broad American accent. Hence the nickname.

Now in his late sixties, he had a short temper and a foul mouth, despite being a respected elder of the church. Each year, as soon as he realized what was happening, he would be at his front door, spittle gathering about his lips as he shouted, ‘Gorram sumbitch!’ Followed by the Gaelic, ‘Fhalbh a thigh an Diabhaill!’ Which translated literally as ‘Go to the Devil’s house!’ Or in the vernacular as ‘Go to hell!’ And it never failed to amuse the boys, invariably producing the biggest laugh of the night. All the more because Yankee Eachan never seemed to have any recollection of the exact same thing happening the year before. He always gave chase, and on those rare occasions when he actually caught one of the boys he would give him a good smack round the side of the head for his trouble.

Both Anndra and Uilleam were now old enough to join the other village boys on the annual gate-stealing escapade, and that year I begged them to take me along because I knew that Ruairidh would be among them.

But they were scornful. Girls didn’t go stealing gates. That was boys’ work. Why didn’t I go to the Halloween party in the community hall with the rest of the lassies? But I was determined not to. And if I couldn’t actually tag along with the boys, then I was going to find myself a good vantage point and watch it all from a discreet distance.

The land rose quite steeply behind the church, before levelling out across the moor, and so I climbed up on to the hill that Halloween in order to see what was going on, and maybe catch a glimpse of Ruairidh.

It was a fine dry night, with a stiff breeze blowing in off the loch, and I sat cross-legged up there on my own with the wind tugging at my hair and my anorak, and watched as the drama of the evening unfolded below.

The boys divided themselves into two groups. One was to provide a distraction, while the other moved in to steal the gates. The distraction usually comprised a banger stuffed into the lock of a croft-house door. Once lit, the distraction team retreated to watch from a position of safety as the banger exploded and the startled crofter appeared in his doorway. The boys would then run off, encouraging the crofter to give chase. Which is when the second team would move in to lift the croft gate from its hinges and smuggle it away to hide someplace where it wouldn’t immediately be found.

Stupid! But that’s how it was.

The boys would usually manage to steal anything up to a dozen gates before darkness brought an end to the game. That night, watching from the hill behind the church, I saw them take five gates before they reached Yankee Eachan’s place.

Ruairidh was with the gate stealers, about six or seven of them, and I saw them crouching behind the remains of an old blackhouse as the distraction team moved towards Yankee Eachan’s front door. Most of them huddled by the fence as one brave soul crept up on the house to plant and light a banger at the front door. It went off with a crack that resonated around the hills, even before the boy who had lit the fuse was able to rejoin the others.

The door flew open almost at once, and Yankee Eachan stood there, a thick leather belt with a heavy buckle dangling from his hand. This year he was ready for them.

‘Gorram sumbitch!’ he roared into the night. He was a big man. Built, as they say, like a brick shit house after years of manual labour. There was no doubting that if he caught you he would do you some damage. He dragged his old tweed bunnet over his bald head, and charged down the steps towards the boys by the fence. Their initial laughter dissolved quickly into alarm, and they hared off around the side of his house. The old man chased after them, swinging the belt around his head.

When they had disappeared from view, I saw the stealers slip out from the cover of the ruined blackhouse and run across the field to lift Yankee Eachan’s gate from its hinges. It was a galvanized tube gate, filled in with wire, so there wasn’t much weight in it. But no sooner had they removed it from its gate post, than Yankee Eachan reappeared from behind the house. He had only pretended to give chase to the distractors, waiting instead until the gate thieves showed themselves. Now he came charging towards them, cursing and swearing in Gaelic, still swinging his belt through the air.

I stood up, startled, thinking he was going to catch them.

There was blind panic among the boys. A bunch of them detached from the others and took off across the croft, heading down towards the shore. There were only two boys left with the gate. Ruairidh, and a lad with acne that everyone called Spotty. Carrying it between them, they starting running along the road towards the Free Church.

But even as they reached it I saw Ruairidh stumble and fall. He had gone over on his ankle. And although he was up again in a flash, I could see that he was limping heavily.

They ran around the side of the church, out of sight of their pursuer, stopping only briefly to heft the gate up on to the roof of a workers’ Portakabin where construction was under way on a new toilet block for the church. And then they split up. Spotty sprinted away past the lights of the community hall, where the girls were still inside playing music and fantasizing about boys, while Ruairidh limped around the back of the Church of Scotland next door and headed off down a path that would take him past my house.

I could see he was in distress, almost dragging his twisted ankle behind him. His stertorous breathing seemed to fill the night air. I saw Yankee Eachan come around the church, and knew he could see Spotty disappearing beyond the curve of the road. There was no chance that he would ever catch him.

Then he came round the back and saw Ruairidh hirpling away down the path. It was no stretch of the imagination to think that the old man might catch him quite easily. But he hesitated, looking around for a moment, and I knew that he was wondering where the gate had gone. But it was quite safely out of sight on top of the Portakabin. So he started after Ruairidh with another mouthful of profanity.

That’s when I had an idea, and went hurtling down the hillside, arms windmilling to stop me from falling. Coming from the hill I could cut across the curve of the path and get to my house before either of them.

I reached the gate just as Ruairidh was approaching, and I waved to him from behind the caravan, calling his name as loudly as I dared without alerting my folks inside the house. He seemed startled to see me, and stopped dead, glancing back to see Yankee Eachan approaching as fast as a man in his late sixties could. ‘Come on!’ I urged him, and signalled him to follow me around the back of the house. I was at the peat stack before he turned the corner, pulling out peats as fast as I could to open up the entrance to my secret place. ‘Get in!’

He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘In where?’

‘The peat stack. There’s a wee den inside.’

The sound of old Yankee Eachan approaching on the path made his mind up for him, and he clambered quickly inside, squeezing himself into a space that I had made only for myself. It was a tight fit, and he couldn’t move once he was in. I quickly piled the peats I had pulled out back into the hole and sealed it up. And just for good measure swung an old gate lying at an angle against the gable of the house, to lean up against the end of the stack. I even had time to dwell, if only for a moment, on the irony of it.

Yankee Eachan came puffing around the corner and stopped in his tracks when he saw me there. ‘Where’d that boy go!’ he shouted.

‘What boy?’ I said.

‘Don’t you play the innocent with me, young lady. I saw him come around the back of your house.’

‘The light’s not so good, Mr Macrae,’ I told him. ‘Your eyes must have deceived you.’ I’d read that in a book at school — about eyes deceiving you — and it seemed like the perfect use of it.

But it only seemed to infuriate him. He looked at me as if I were the devil incarnate. ‘Don’t mess with me, you wee bugger. You think I came up the Mississippi in a bubble? Where’d he go?’

The back door of our house flew open, and a slab of yellow light fell out across the back garden, the shadow of my father standing right in the middle of it.

‘What’s going on here?’ he bellowed.

‘Your wee girl’s hiding a boy who stole my gate,’ Yankee Eachan said indignantly.

‘What boy?’

‘I’ve no idea what his name is.’

My father gasped his irritation. ‘No I mean, where is he, this boy? Where’s the gate he took? And where would my wee lassie be hiding them?’

Yankee Eachan was at a loss. He looked around. It was evident that there was no boy and no gate, except for the one leaning against the peat stack. My father looked at the belt dangling from the old man’s hand.

‘And what were you going to do with that, might I ask?’

‘Give the bugger a good leathering.’

‘Watch your language in front of the lassie. And you a church elder, too.’ He snatched the belt from Eachan’s hand and examined it. ‘You’d do some damage with this. For heaven’s sake, man, it’s just a bit of fun. It happens every year. You know that!’

‘Aye, and I’ll be out half the night gathering my bloody sheep.’ He snatched his belt back. ‘Gorram sumbitch!’ And he stomped off.

When he had gone my father turned and gave me a dangerous look. ‘Where is he?’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t play the innocent with me, young lady!’ The same expression that Yankee Eachan had used. I put on my most earnest face.

‘Honest, Dad, I’ve no idea. I’m just back from a walk up on the hill.’

‘I thought you were going to the Halloween party.’

‘Nah...’ I scuffed my toe on the path. ‘Couldn’t be bothered this year.’

He held the door wide. ‘Time you were in anyway. It’s getting dark.’

I had no choice but to go inside. My father hesitated for a few moments on the step, casting an eagle eye all around the garden in the twilight, before banging the door shut.

I spent a restless and frustrating evening then, trying to think of excuses why I should go out into the back garden. But I couldn’t think of any that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. We had plenty of peats in for the night, so that wasn’t an option.

Ruairidh was jammed tight into the peat stack, and wouldn’t be able to get out without my help, and I couldn’t stop thinking of him stuck in there, and hating me for abandoning him. What if he needed the toilet? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Eventually my folks packed me off to bed, and I lay wide awake in the dark, fully dressed beneath the covers. I heard Anndra and Uilleam coming back, and could hear my father cross-examining them about who it was who had stolen Yankee Eachan’s gate. But they were no clypes, my brothers, and so no one ever knew that it was Ruairidh.

Eventually, my brothers went to bed. And I lay for what seemed like a further eternity before I heard my parents’ bedroom door shutting. I forced myself to wait a good fifteen or twenty minutes beyond that before I eased open my bedroom window and dropped down into the back garden.

There was a good moon out, so I had plenty of light to see by as I carefully swung the gate off the stack and peeled away the peats one by one. I felt the heat of Ruairidh’s body in the air that greeted me as I opened up the hole to the hiding place inside.

‘What the fuck?’ I heard him whisper. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I had to wait till everyone was in bed,’ I whispered back at him. Surely he would understand?

He scrambled out into the dark, stretching painfully stiff muscles that had all but gone into cramp. I saw the dark patch around the crotch of his jeans and realized he had wet himself. He turned and glared at me, humiliation writ large all over his face. ‘Find someone else to rescue next time,’ he hissed. And I thought what an ungrateful pig he was.

I had ruined any chance I might have had with him. But right then I didn’t care if I never saw him again for the rest of my life.

It didn’t take long for word to spread around the village that Yankee Eachan had lost his gate and couldn’t find it anywhere. Over the next few days he was to be seen tramping around the village, and from croft to croft, searching for it. Stories of how he had pursued the boys with a belt and buckle, intent on doing them harm, meant that no one had much sympathy for him. As my dad had said, it was just a bit of fun after all.

The story reached its conclusion on the sabbath.

Yankee Eachan always sat up in the balcony during services at the Free Church, despite his position as an elder. It was a tradition. Or, at least, his tradition. Perhaps he felt closer to God up there. Nobody knew. But on his way down the stairs at the end of the service, he passed a window that looked out on to the building work for the new toilet block, and the roof of the workmen’s Portakabin. And there, plain as day, lay his gate. He stopped on the stairs and glared at it through the window. His voice reverberated all around the church. ‘Gorram sumbitch!’