The Chessmen

CHAPTER EIGHT

I first met Whistler Macaskill when I left Crobost school in Ness to go into third year at the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. We had a certain swagger, us Ness boys. Thought we were a bit special. Until we arrived at the Nicolson and found that everyone else had a swagger, too. The Uig crowd, the boys from Lochs, the wild westers from Carloway. But the big city soon knocked it out of us.

I can laugh now, but that’s what Stornoway felt like then. It was the only town on the island, with all its shops and cafes and restaurants, and its inner and outer harbour. It was home to the Hebridean fishing fleet and a population of eleven thousand. Sadly, there was no cinema in those days, since the Church had forced the Playhouse to close down following a showing of Jesus Christ, Superstar. At least, that was what they said, but it was before my time, so I don’t know if it’s true. The old cinema became the Royal British Legion Club, and still is.

The Church dominated life then, and in many ways still does. In all its various incarnations. But it was the presbyterian Church of Scotland and the breakaway Free Church that prevailed. They wouldn’t allow flights or ferries on the Sabbath when I was a boy, and there was not a single shop, cafe, newsagent or chippie open. You read your Sunday newspapers on Monday, and if you forgot to buy your cigarettes on a Saturday you would have an even more miserable Sunday than usual.

But that particular year, there was something special about the kids from Uig. They arrived with their own band. Six kids who’d been playing music together since primary school. Solas, they called themselves, the Gaelic equivalent of solace or comfort, and they had already developed their own unique mix of traditional Celtic music and rock. An eclectic fusion that in a few years would make them the most commercially successful Celtic rock band of their generation.

I wasn’t really aware of them at first. I was too busy adapting to life away from home in the student lodgings at the Gibson Hostel in Ripley Place. We came down from Ness in a bus on the Monday morning, and back again on the Friday night. Not that I missed my life at Crobost. My folks had been dead for years by then, and existence with my aunt was spartan. My friend Artair had gone to the Lews Castle College because his grades hadn’t been good enough to get him into the Nicolson. They wouldn’t do that to kids these days in case it gave them low self-esteem. But it wasn’t a consideration back then. Relations with my primary school sweetheart, Marsaili Macdonald, were in temporary abeyance. So in those first few months I was busy trying to forget her and make myself new friends.

The first time I came across Solas was when it was announced there was to be a ceilidh at the school. I’d heard that a group of kids from Uig was going to be playing at it and someone said they were rehearsing in one of the annexes, so I went along to see if it would be worth going to the ceilidh or not. It was a decision that changed the course of my life.

There were six in the band.

Roddy Mackenzie was the keyboard player and leader. What he said went. He had a synthesizer. A Yamaha DX-9. And I’d never heard anything like it. Strings, brass, grand piano, human voices. It could make any sound at all, apparently, and convince you it was the real thing. He was a good-looking boy, Roddy. A little under six foot, with a shock of blonde curls that tumbled around his head and a smile that, annoyingly, could charm you even when you didn’t want to be charmed.

The drummer, Murdo ‘Skins’ Mackinnon, had a high-hat and a snare drum when he arrived at the Nicolson. He used a packing case for a bass drum and biscuit tins for tomtoms. By the time he left he had a full Ludwig kit.

The guitarist, Uilleam Campbell, was a short, intense boy that everyone called Strings. Most people on the island had a nickname, because so many of the Christian names and surnames were the same. If you had sent a postcard from Australia to Strings, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, it would have reached him, no problem.

Iain MacCuish was the bass player. They called him Rambo, because anyone less like Sylvester Stallone would be hard to imagine.

And then there was Whistler. So-called because he played the Celtic flute as if he’d been born with it at his lips. Pure, haunting liquid music it was that poured from that flute of his. Sounds that swooped and soared with a flick of his finger, or a curl of his mouth. Strange somehow, coming from such a big brute of a boy whose temper and black moods would become so familiar to me. A boy so clever that while I spent untold hours studying for end-of-term exams, Whistler was off trapping rabbits, or pulling trout from the Red River, and still got the best grades in the school. I didn’t know what autistic was in those days. But if you were to ask me now, I’d say that’s what Whistler Macaskill was. Or something close to it.

And then there was Mairead Morrison, who played the fiddle and sang. She had the voice of an angel, a body that would arouse any teenage boy’s passion, and a smile that would break your heart. Long dark hair falling around square shoulders, and startling Celtic blue eyes. I fell in love with her the first moment I saw her. Me and every other boy in the school.

I was standing in the annexe as the band started to pack up at the end of their rehearsal, drooling like an idiot as Mairead put away her violin, and didn’t realize at first that the voice shouting ‘Hey!’ was being directed at me. It was a big, ginger-haired boy with a livid two-inch scar on his left cheek. He stood at the far side of the classroom. I looked at him. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘Fin. Fin Macleod.’

‘Where are you from, Fin?’

‘Crobost.’

‘Aw hell, another Niseach!’ It was the Gaelic name for someone from the district of Ness, which was in the far north-west corner of the island where I lived. It drew a laugh from the members of the band. I saw Mairead looking at me and blushed. ‘Well, I suppose you’ll have to do,’ carrot-top said. ‘I’m Kenny John, but everyone calls me Kenny Mor.’ Which was Big Kenny. ‘I’ll need a hand to shift all this stuff over to the hall.’

‘What do you need a hand for? You’ve always managed before.’ Whistler was addressing himself to Kenny, but glaring at me.

‘There’s the new PA, Whistler, and Roddy’s stack. I can’t handle that on my own.’

‘Crap! We’ve got enough hangers-on as it is!’ Whistler stomped out of the classroom.

Kenny grinned. ‘Ignore him. He’s just pissed off because he saw you ogling Mairead.’

I blushed again, this time to the roots of my hair, and saw Mairead grinning in my direction. I had no idea then how Whistler’s obsession with Mairead would shape his future. Kenny chucked me a cardboard box. ‘Cables go in there. All neatly wound and tied off.’

I crossed the classroom and lowered my voice. ‘Are Whistler and Mairead. . you know. .?’

Kenny laughed. ‘He wishes.’ And under his breath, ‘Like the rest of us.’ He glanced towards the keyboard player. ‘She’s Roddy’s property.’ Then he looked at me again. ‘Are you going to give me a hand or not?’

I nodded.

Which is how I came to be a gear humpher for Solas for the rest of my time at the Nicolson.

It is also how I came to be a member of the motorcycle group. I would say ‘gang’, but that has connotations which wouldn’t be right. We were just a group of kids who wanted motor-driven wheels beneath us as soon as we turned sixteen. Roddy was the first, which was not surprising, since his parents were better off than anyone else’s. He got a bright red shiny moped, and used to ride around town with Mairead sitting on the luggage rack at the back, her arms around him, and we all imagined what it must feel like to have her pressing herself up against you like that. I’m not sure how legal it was — having a passenger on the back, I mean — but the cops never stopped them.

I suppose that’s what started the ambition in most of us. And one by one, those of us who could afford it got ourselves little 50cc mopeds, which in reality were not much more than motorized bicycles. The only money I had was whatever I earned humphing gear for Solas. By fifth year they were playing at dances and ceilidhs and pubs all over Lewis, and even down in Harris, and I was sharing a little in their success. But by the time I was able to afford a clapped-out old moped for myself, Roddy had already turned seventeen and graduated to a 125cc Vespa T5 Mk1. Classic blue. Secondhand, of course. It was only a scooter, and would have been scorned by real motorbike enthusiasts, but we thought it was solid gold.

There had always been a rivalry in the band between Roddy and Strings. They were the two major creative forces behind the original music that Solas was starting to produce. But that rivalry spilled over into the bike group, too, and it wasn’t long before Strings appeared with his own 125cc machine. I can’t remember the make of it now, but I’ll never forget the colour. It was bright yellow. The same colour as the tormentil that grew among the coastal bracken in summer. You always saw Strings coming.

I spent most of my spare time working on my moped just to keep it on the road. It was a Puch. A Dakota VZ50. It had a 50cc fan-cooled motor with a three-speed gearbox, and was on its last legs. I never took it back to Ness, not just because my aunt would have disapproved, but because I seriously doubted if it would ever have got me there.

On fine spring afternoons, after school, we used to motor out on our bikes, past Engie’s and Kenneth Mackenzie’s mill, over Oliver’s Brae towards the airport and the turnoff to Holm Point. This was a finger of land that extended out into the bay just before the narrow neck of beach and causeway that led to the Eye Peninsula. The fields around us were fallow and shimmered yellow, full of dandelions. There was a cluster of buildings at Holm Farm, but we stayed away from there, and congregated just beyond the road end looking out over the rocks that were known as the Beasts of Holm.

The oil-rig construction yard at Arnish was visible on the far side of the bay, as was the little squat lighthouse there on the rocks, and we had a splendid view back across the whole of Stornoway, sitting low and catching the sunlight in the shelter of the trees that climbed the castle hill behind it. You could hear the sounds of the town carried on the breeze, busy and distant, and dwarfed by the rush of the sea and the oystercatchers and wagtails that dipped and dived around us.

We didn’t do much there. Just loafed around in the sunshine, smoking, drinking beer if we had any, flirting with the girls who had ridden out on the back of the bikes.

I suppose if any of us had been aware of the weathered granite obelisk that stood behind its rectangular wrought-iron fence right out on the point, we might have thought it was a war monument of some sort. But I don’t think any of us ever paid it any attention. Until the day the old man shouted at us for disrespecting the dead.

It was a Friday afternoon. Some of us had free periods at the end of the day and had ridden out to Holm to profit from the spring sunshine before getting the bus home. We didn’t notice him at first, out there at the point, standing by the rusted railing, among the grass and weeds growing all around it. A solitary, stooped figure in black, thin white hair whipped up around his head by the wind.

I had clocked him when we were parking up, but quickly forgot about him when trouble broke out between Whistler and Big Kenny. I’m not sure how it began. I was busy trying to chat up a pretty little girl called Seonag, who had ridden out to Holm Point on the back of my bike. There was a lot of laughter, and some of the boys had cans of beer in their saddlebags. But it was the tone of the voices raised above the rabble that caught my attention. There was real anger in them. And menace. I turned to see Whistler shove Kenny in the chest with both hands. There was enough force in that push to send Kenny staggering several steps backwards, and Whistler was gathering his brows like an imminent storm.

‘I’ve fucking had it with you, Coinneach!’

I knew it was serious when Whistler used Kenny’s Gaelic name. Kenny gathered the remnants of his dignity about him and puffed out his chest. ‘You’re seriously off your head, Macaskill, you know that?’

The jibe was like a red rag to a bull, and Whistler went for him, fists flying. Kenny took one to the head, another to his midriff, before the two of them landed with a thud in the grass, one on top of the other. Kenny’s knee came up, trying to hit the sweet spot between Whistler’s legs, but just missed, and we saw blood burst from his mouth as Whistler’s big fist connected with his lips.

There were three or four of us on top of them in a moment. Hands grasping at the shoulders and arms of the big flute player, dragging him off the gasping Kenny. But Whistler was in a rage, one of those tantrums in which he lost all control. And he turned his fury on us. Unfortunately I was the nearest, and the first to make contact with knuckles like ball bearings. They struck me on the side of the head and knocked me to the ground, lights flashing in my eyes, in just the same way as they did all those years later.

By the time I had recovered my senses, Whistler had already turned back to Kenny and was advancing towards him with something like a growl rising in his throat. No one there was any match for him, least of all me. But that thrawn part of me which had always got me into trouble burned down my back like molten wax, propelling me into battle without thought or fear. Whistler and I, it seemed, were destined always to resolve our conflicts by the fist.

I dived, shoulder first, as I had been taught on the rugby pitch, and took him just above the knees. He went down like a sack of rocks, face-first into the ground, his own weight expelling all the air from his lungs, like the sound of the sea sucking at the cliffs. If it hadn’t been for the voice that rose above the shrieks and cries of alarm and encouragement, I think he might have killed me when he recovered his breath.

None of us had been aware of the old man’s approach. But his voice cut through the clamour, sharp and high, like a rapier.

‘What do you think you’re doing! Behaving like idiots in the presence of the dead. Have you no respect?’ Had he spoken in English perhaps his words would have had less impact. But the Gaelic somehow carried more weight.

Silence fell upon us like a shroud, Whistler and I still lying gasping on the ground. Everyone looked towards the old man. He wore a shabby black suit, and I could see food stains on his grey pullover beneath it. The cap he had clutched in his hand out at the monument was pulled firmly down now over his head. His eyes were part shadowed, but they were dark eyes full of anger. His face hung loose on a bony skull, his flesh goose-white and stained brown in places by age. He raised the hand in which he held his stick and pointed a finger deformed by bulbous joints in my direction.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, young Finlay Macleod.’ I was startled to hear my name. I had no idea who he was. As I struggled to my feet, he turned towards Whistler. ‘And you, John Angus Macaskill.’ I could see Whistler’s surprise, too. ‘Both of you should know better. Neither of you would be here today if John Macleod hadn’t made it ashore with his line.’

He swivelled his gaze, then, in the direction of Big Kenny, and his eyes lingered for a moment on the blood around his mouth. ‘And you should be grateful, Coinneach Iain Maclean, that your grandfather was born during a home leave in 1916, or you’d not have been around either.’

No one knew what to say. And in the silence that followed we could hear the distant rumble of traffic along South Beach, and I don’t know why, but my eye fell upon the lines of headstones in Sanndabhaig Cemetery, sentinels standing in silent reproach for a misdemeanour we didn’t know we’d committed.

The old man bowed his head and walked through us towards the road end, supporting himself on his stick. And we watched him recede into the distance, making his slow, determined way in the direction of the main road.

‘What the hell was that all about?’ someone said. But I had lost interest in the group, focused now on the monument out on the point. The old man had aroused my curiosity, unsettling me, as if he had just walked over my grave. I forgot all about my fight with Whistler and left the group, their animated discussion carried away on the wind, and walked out to the point for the first time. The monument itself was a sad affair, weather-stained and neglected, the black engraved letters on it barely legible. Whoever had raised it there was long gone, and the reason they had done so long forgotten.

The world around me faded into some distant dimension as I crouched down to wipe my hand across the text, and only the words and the images they conjured had any presence in my consciousness.

Erected by the people of Lewis and friends in grateful memory of the men of the Royal Navy who lost their lives in the Iolaire disaster at the Beasts of Holm on the 1st January 1919. Of the 205 persons lost, 175 were natives of the island and for them and their comrades Lewis still mourns. With gratitude for their service and in sorrow for their loss.

I heard the sound of bikes starting up, and shouted goodbyes, as the group revved their engines and accelerated across the grass for the road home. I stood up, only to become immediately aware of a shadow at my shoulder. It was Whistler, a strange, bewildered look on his face. And beyond him, standing by his bike and staring out towards us, Big Kenny. Almost as if he were frightened to come and see for himself. All three of us had forgotten our fight by now, and the reasons for it. I searched Whistler’s eyes for some sign of understanding, and when I saw none, asked, ‘What’s the Iolaire?’

He shrugged. ‘No idea.’

There was a strange quality in the light that night. And when the bus passed the shieling with the green roof out on the Barvas moor, I felt a shiver run through me. And sensed, perhaps more than ever before, the presence of my mother and father at this spot where they had lost their lives.

By the time I got home the sky was an odd purple colour, streaked with grey, and all yellow along the horizon where the sun laid down its liquid gold from behind cloud you couldn’t even see. Across the Minch, the mountains of Sutherland were as clear as I had ever seen them. Which meant there was bad weather on the way.

I couldn’t get the old man out of my mind, and I suppose I must have been unusually quiet, for it was unlike my aunt to ask me what was wrong. She was a peculiarly disinterested woman, my aunt, self-contained and rarely given to shows of emotion. She never treated me badly, but I always sensed her resentment at having been burdened with the care of her little sister’s boy. As if somehow I had stolen her life from her. A life, it appeared to me, that was already over, and passing in sad isolation in the big white house overlooking the jetty beyond the village.

She sat at the dinner table in one of her colourful chiffon wraps, candles burning already along the mantle, the smell of incense and cigarette smoke heavy in the air, like some melancholy memory of another life in a sixties world of youth and hope.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Spit it out, Finlay.’ She never spoke to me in Gaelic. And she never called me Fin. Just about the only person in the world not to.

‘What was the Iolaire?’ I asked her.

She cast me a curious look. ‘Why do you ask about that?’

‘I saw the monument out at Holm Point today.’ I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell her about the old man.

Her eyes glazed over, gazing off into some distant past. She shook her head. ‘It’s something folk never really talked about. And today, I suppose, it’s all but forgotten.’

‘What happened?’

‘They say it was very nearly the worst maritime disaster in British peacetime history. Second only to the Titanic.’

‘And it happened here on Lewis?’ I was incredulous. Why had I never heard of it before?

‘On a black New Year’s morning on the rocks at the Beasts of Holm. Within sight of the lights of Stornoway harbour, and with hundreds of folk waiting at the pier.’ She was lost in silent thought for some minutes, and I didn’t dare speak in case she wouldn’t tell me any more. Finally she said, ‘It was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and God knows, enough of our menfolk had died already in that senseless conflict. But the rest were on their way home. Survivors all. Desperate to put their feet back on the island of their birth, and feel the arms of mothers and wives, sons and daughters around them.’

She liked a single glass of wine with her meal, my aunt. But that night she pulled the bottle towards her and poured a second.

‘They were Royal Navy Reservists,’ she said. ‘From Lewis and Harris. Dumped by the Ministry on to the pier at Kyle of Lochalsh off trains from Inverness. The rear admiral requisitioned an old tub of a steam-yacht called the Iolaire to bring back those of them that the MacBrayne’s mailboat couldn’t carry. More than two hundred and eighty as I recall.’ She shook her head. ‘Hopelessly inadequate it was. The men were in full uniform, and wearing heavy boots. Many of them didn’t have life jackets, and most couldn’t even find a seat.’ She took a sip from her glass. ‘A rough crossing it was, too. But they were within sight of home. They could see the lights of the harbour. It was claimed by some that the crew had been drinking whisky to celebrate the New Year. Whether or not that’s true we’ll never know, but the captain set the wrong course for the harbour and the Iolaire struck the reef at the Beasts.’

She stood up, taking her glass with her, and went to gaze from the window out over the bay below. She could see her own reflection in the glass, and adopted a pose that perhaps she thought conveyed the tragedy she described.

‘In fact, they were only a few yards from shore. That was the irony, after surviving all those years at war. The sea was wild, and many of them were simply dashed against the rocks. Others couldn’t swim. Didn’t know how.’ She glanced at Fin. ‘You know how it is with islanders.’ She returned her gaze to the window, raising her glass to her lips. ‘Some were middle-aged, others just teenagers. More than two hundred men died, nearly a hundred and eighty of them from the island. Some villages lost all their menfolk that night, Finlay. All of them.’

She turned back into the room. I couldn’t see her face properly against the last of the light from the window, just flickering features highlighted by her candles. It seemed hollow, like a skull, her hair a thin, wispy halo around her head.

‘I once heard the old men of the village talk about it. When I was a girl. The only time I can ever recall anyone speak of it. The bodies arriving back in Ness en masse. On horse-drawn carts that pulled four or six coffins apiece all the way up that long west coast road.’ She laid down her glass and lit a cigarette, and the smoke billowed around her head like breath on a frosty morning.

‘Did we lose someone? Our family, I mean?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. The Macleods of Crobost were one of the lucky ones. Your grandfather was a boy of nineteen, returning after just a year away. God knows how, but he survived.’ She looked at me, tipping her head at an oddly curious angle. ‘Your father’s father. You wouldn’t have been here today if he’d drowned like the rest.’ And I shivered, just as I had when the bus passed the shieling earlier in the evening.

‘Who was John Macleod?’ My own voice sounded very small. ‘Was he related?’

‘John Finlay Macleod, you mean?’ She drained her glass. ‘Not that I know of. That man was a hero by all accounts. Somehow he made it ashore with a line, right below where that monument is today, and as a result forty men’s lives were saved. Including your grandfather’s.’

I passed the weekend in a cloud of uncertainty and depression, unable to escape the thought of all those poor men surviving the war only to die on their own doorstep. And the fact that my grandfather had survived it lingered oddly in my mind like a faintly unpleasant taste in the mouth. It took me a while to identify it.

Guilt.

They say the survivors of major disasters are often afflicted by a sense of guilt. Why had they survived when so many others had not? I suppose I was experiencing it by association. If my grandfather had died like all the others, then I wouldn’t have been there. And it made me wonder why I was.

The bad weather finally arrived on the Saturday night. Storm-force winds driving in from the south-west, big dark clouds, contused and bleeding rain. I watched it run down my window on a miserable Sunday, and couldn’t wait to be on the bus back to Stornoway in the morning.

The storm had passed by the Monday, but it was still overcast, dull light suffused with a grey-green, as if we were all somehow trapped inside a Tupperware box. But the wind had dried the roads and grasses already, and I tried to empty my mind on the bus ride to town by focusing on the bog cotton that danced among the peat.

There was no chance of me being able to concentrate on schoolwork, and straight off I made my way up through the town to where the library was housed in a jumble of half a dozen or so Portakabins on the corner of Keith Street. I thought they would probably keep archives of the Stornoway Gazette there. Yes, the woman at the issue desk told me. They kept the archives in a locked room to my right. What year would I be wanting to look at? 1919, I told her.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘A very popular year this morning, it seems. Are you doing a project at the Nicolson?’ And in response to my frown she said, ‘There’s another lad looking at microfilm of that same year in the Gaelic and Local History section down the hall.’

I found Whistler in the reference room, sitting at a table slowly spooling through the newspaper’s coverage of the Iolaire disaster. He turned as I came in, but said nothing. I pulled up a chair and sat down beside him to watch scratched and ageing images of words written long ago about a tragedy that folk never spoke of. They passed before my eyes like history itself.

We sat a full half-hour in front of that machine, never a word between us, and finally left the library with a nod and a muttered thanks to the librarian, only to find Big Kenny standing beside the wheelie bins on the pavement outside. The wind swept through his ginger hair in waves, and he appeared to be undecided on whether to go in or not. He was startled to see us and raised his eyebrows in tentative query. ‘What did you find out?’

‘Nothing that you probably don’t already know by now,’ Whistler said.

‘My dad couldn’t tell me much. He said his dad would never talk about it.’

Whistler shrugged. ‘Mine wasn’t sober long enough to ask.’

Kenny nodded. ‘I’ve been at the town hall,’ he said. ‘The registrar’s office.’ I don’t know why we should have been so surprised, but we were.

‘And?’ Whistler asked.

‘Apparently there are three survivors still living. One of them’s at Bhaltos, down in Uig. I know his family.’

Norman Smith lived in an old white house at the foot of the village looking out towards the islands of Pabaigh Mor, Bhacasaigh, and the inappropriately named Siaram Mor. If Siaram Mor was the big island, we couldn’t imagine how small Siaram Beag might be, not that any of us had ever seen or heard of a Siaram Beag.

We rode down on two bikes, me sitting pillion behind Whistler. By the time we arrived my backside was aching. The wind had dropped, and the sea was a dull, dimpled pewter.

The old navy reservist sat in an armchair by the window, where he had an unbroken view out across the water to Pabaigh Mor. His daughter showed us in. An elderly woman herself, she said he liked to have visitors, but that we weren’t to tire him out. She went off to make tea as we settled ourselves down around the old man in a room so small and cluttered there was hardly space for the four of us. The air felt damp, suffused by the smell of peat smoke from turfs still smouldering in the fire. And I remember wondering how he had survived so long. But he had already cheated death once, why shouldn’t he do it again?

He was ninety-two years old, he told us proudly, his voice high-pitched and reedy, as if pared thin by the years. He had small dark eyes like black beads. They reflected the light from the window, sharp and still intelligent. I know that age can diminish men, but Norman Smith remained a giant of a man, sitting there in his chair, big-knuckled hands folded one over the top of the other on his stick. There was hardly a hair left on a broad, flat head splashed by age spots.

‘Took me years,’ he said in response to our question about the Iolaire, ‘to even let the name of that damned boat pass my lips.’

‘How did it happen?’ Kenny asked.

‘God only knows, boy! The captain made a mistake when he set course for the harbour. Just half a point off he was. We should have been a little more to the west.’ We heard his breath rattle in his chest as he drew in air in silent reflection. I couldn’t imagine what pictures he was pulling back to mind. ‘A lot of us were sleeping, had our boots off and our heads down wherever we could find space on deck. There was a strong wind behind us, but it was strangely quiet when I heard someone shout that they could see the lights of Stornoway ahead. That’s when we struck the rocks. The noise as they ripped open her hull was almost human, like a cry of pain. And then there was panic. Panic as I’ve never seen before or since. If only we had grounded closer to the shore then maybe most of us would have been saved. But the rocks we struck were the furthest out.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘There were only two of us survived from the part of the ship I was on.’

I sat listening in concentrated silence, images appearing in my mind, evoked by simple words conveying abject horror.

‘The ship turned broadside and one man got ashore with a rope.’

‘John Finlay Macleod,’ Whistler said.

The old man nodded. ‘I remember moving his rope from the stern to the side. To this day I don’t know how I managed it. But that line saved me and a lot of others. We’d never have got ashore without it.’ His breathing became more rapid. ‘It was black as hell that night, boys, and we could all feel the presence of the devil come to take us.’

He breathed out long and deep, as if sighing, and appeared to relax again in his chair.

‘I still had no boots when I got ashore and climbed up on to the machair. I was soaked to the skin and chittering with the cold, and I knew I had injured my chest and my legs, though I couldn’t really feel anything. I saw a group of men huddled at the nearest house, but I decided that I would walk into town.’

We looked at each other. We knew just how long that walk was. We had ridden it often enough on our bikes.

‘When I got there I headed for the Admiralty building. There were some others who had made it off the boat, too. All sitting along the wall, wrapped in blankets and smoking, and not a word spoken among them.

‘Admiral Boyle came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. I’ve got a car for you, Norman, he said. It’ll take you and Uilleam and Malcolm back to Uig. In fact, it only took us as far as Calanais. And from there Duncan Macrae’s motor launch brought us down here to the pier at Bhaltos. Morning it was by then. New Year’s day. My family didn’t know I was coming home. I had been hoping to surprise them.’

A single bead of clear mucus hung from his nose, and he reached up absently to wipe it away with the back of his hand.

‘They were surprised all right. I met my sister Morag on the road and she took me home to where my mother was already preparing the New Year’s dinner. The news about what had happened to the Iolaire wasn’t put up in the post office at Uig until the following day, so no one knew yet.’

I saw his jaw tighten, then, and the clarity went out of his eyes, blurred by tears.

‘And I couldn’t tell them. My chest and legs were hurting like hell by then, but I kept it from them and made like nothing had happened.’ His breathing was becoming stertorous. ‘Until Mr and Mrs Macritchie and the MacLennan family came to the door, and I couldn’t face them. Because I knew their boys were all dead, and they had no idea of it. I ran to my room and shut the door and no one could understand what was wrong with me.’ Big silent tears fell now from red-rimmed eyes.

The old man’s daughter came in with a tray of tea, and her face creased with concern when she saw her father’s tears. ‘Oh, boys, what have you done to upset him?’ She laid the tray on the table and hurried to wipe away his tears with a hanky. ‘It’s okay, Dad. You calm yourself now.’

He almost pushed her away. ‘Nothing to be calm about. It’s how it was.’ He looked at Kenny, then. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘Or your father.’

Kenny looked startled. ‘My father, I think. Kenny Dubh Maclean.’

Old Mr Smith nodded. ‘Oh, aye. Knew his grandfather, too: Big Kenny, we called him.’

‘Really?’ Kenny was taken aback to learn that his great-grandfather had been known by the same moniker.

‘He was at the back of the boat with me when it struck.’ He shook his head. ‘Never made it. I don’t know why, but your family never brought him home. He’s buried with a lot of others at the cemetery at Sanndabhaig.’

We both looked at Kenny and saw his shock, as if he were hearing of the death of a close relative for the first time.

The old man swivelled his watery gaze towards Whistler. ‘Your father’s that drunk over at Ardroil.’

Whistler’s mouth tightened into a grim line, but he neither acknowledged nor denied it.

‘Not half the man his grandfather was. Calum John. Risked his life, he did, taking another man with him when it would have been easier to grab the line and pull himself ashore on his own.’

And then I felt his gaze fall on me.

‘I don’t know you, I think.’

My mouth was dry, as if I were sitting in the presence of God Himself and He was pointing a finger at me. ‘I’m Finlay Macleod from Crobost in Ness,’ I said. ‘My father was Angus.’

‘Ahhh.’ It was as if cataracts had been peeled away from the old man’s eyes and he could see clearly for the first time. ‘And his father was Donnie. That’s why you boys are here.’

I glanced at Whistler, but he just shrugged. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘It was Donnie Macleod that Calum John Macaskill risked his life to pull from the wreck of the Iolaire that night. For sure, you wouldn’t have been here today, son, if this lad’s great-granddad hadn’t brought your grandfather ashore.’

Outside we stood by our bikes for a long time without speaking. In the distance you could see the waves breaking all along the shore and the wind was the only voice among us. It was Kenny who broke the silence. He swung a leg over his bike. ‘I’m going back to Stornoway,’ he said. ‘To take a look at the grave.’ We nodded, and watched as he kicked his bike into life and puttered away up the hill. I looked at Whistler and said, ‘I think there’s something we need to do.’

Charles Morrison Ltd, the ship’s chandlers, was in Bank Street in Stornoway, a wonderfully old-fashioned hardware shop with all manner of tackle behind its big dark counter. We came out, blinking in the sunlight, Whistler and me, clutching a bottle of white spirit, and walked down to the inner harbour where we had parked our bikes.

The ride out to Holm Point took less than fifteen minutes, but we stopped on the way, at Sanndabhaig Cemetery, to pick up Big Kenny. We had seen him from a long way off standing at what must have been his great-grandfather’s grave. And the three of us abandoned our bikes at the road end and walked out to the monument.

I had an old rugby shirt in my saddlebag, and we spent the next hour working patiently and carefully at the stone, to clean away the decades of dirt and neglect which had almost obliterated the words of this memorial to the men who had died that dreadful night.

When we had finished we sat with our backs to the railing, and gazed out over the Beasts of Holm below. Slow-heaving slabs of green water, moving in cautious swells around the shiny black gneiss, broke white around its jagged edges, slurping and sighing almost as if it were alive.

So many had perished there on the dawn of that New Year’s day so long ago. Kenny’s great-grandfather among them. And all I could see as I looked out over the rocks was the image of the photograph I had seen that morning in the Stornoway Gazette. The mast of the Iolaire, poking up out of the water. The only part of the boat still visible. At first light rescuers had seen one man clinging to it for dear life. There had been others, but they had been taken by the cold during the night, and one by one dropped off to be claimed by the sea.

Kenny stood up. His scar was oddly inflamed. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, and left without another word.

It wasn’t until the rasp of his moped motor was finally lost in the distance that Whistler lit another cigarette and said to me, ‘I suppose this means I’m going to have to look out for you now.’

I frowned, not understanding. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Saving a life makes you responsible for it. I see no reason why that responsibility shouldn’t pass on across the generations.’

Later, when I reflected on Whistler’s words, I thought that if that were the case then John Finlay Macleod must have felt responsible for an awful lot of lives. And when my mind drifts back to the first day we learned about the Iolaire, I often wonder who that old man was, and how he’d known exactly who we were.