Peter May - The Lewis Man

‘This was my secret place when I was a kid,’ Fin said. ‘I used to come down here when I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I never came back after my parents were killed and I went to live with my aunt.’

Donald looked around this tiny oasis of calm, the sound of the sea echoing around it, so close and yet so far away. Even the wind barely made it down here.

‘I’ve been a couple of times since I got back.’ Fin smiled sadly. ‘Maybe I thought I’d find the old me still here. A ghost from an age of innocence. Nothing but pebbles and crabs, though, and a very distant echo of the past. But I think that’s probably only in my head.’ He grinned and planted one foot on a ledge of rock. ‘What did you come to see me about?’

‘I woke up thinking about Tormod, and his stolen identity.’ Donald laughed. ‘Well, after I’d drunk about a pint of water and swallowed two paracetamol, that is. I haven’t had that much whisky in a long time.’

‘Catriona will be banning me from the manse.’

Donald grinned. ‘She already has.’

Fin laughed, and it felt good to laugh with Donald again after all these years. ‘So what was it you thought about Tormod?’

‘There was an article in the Gazette a couple of months ago, Fin. About a genealogy centre down at the south end of Harris. Seallam, it’s called. One man’s hobby that became an obsession. And now it’s just about the most comprehensive record of family relationships in the Outer Hebrides. Better than any church or government records. This guy’s traced tens of thousands of family connections from the islands as far as North America and Australia. If anyone has a record of the Macdonald family and all its branches, it would be him.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you think?’

Fin nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think it would be worth a look.’

The drive south took Fin past Luskentyre and Scarista where he had gone the day before with George Gunn. He had been on the road nearly two hours when the bare green hills of South Harris rose up from the valley to dwarf the tiny settlements that clung tenaciously to the banks of the small lochs that flooded the gorges.

Beyond the single-storey white building with its pitched roofs that housed the Seallam visitor centre, cream-coloured cloud flowed down the sides of a conical hill like an erupting volcano. Unusually, the wind had dropped, and an unnatural still hung in the valley with the mist.

Dwarf pines crowded around the few houses that made up the village of Northton — An Taobh Tuath in the Gaelic. Yellow irises and the pink bloom of flowering azaleas lined the road, rare colour in a monotone landscape. A sign read: SEALLAM! Exhibitions, Genealogy, Teas/Coffees .

Fin parked in a gravel area on the far side of a stream that wound its way down between the hills, and he followed a rough path to the small wooden bridge that took him over it and across to the centre. A big man with a fuzz of white hair fringing an otherwise bald head introduced himself as Seallam’s consultant genealogist, Bill Lawson. He pushed enormous seventies teardrop glasses back up on to the bridge of a long nose and confessed to being the man whose hobby had become the obsession described by the Stornoway Gazette .

He was only too happy to show Fin the huge wall maps of North America and Australia that comprised a part of the centre’s public exhibition. Clusters of black-headed pins identified settlements of Hebridean families who had gone in search of new lives in California, the eastern seaboard of the United States, Nova Scotia, south-eastern Australia.

‘What exactly is it you’re looking for?’ he asked Fin.

‘It’s one particular family. The Macdonalds of Seilebost. Murdo and Peggy. They had a son called Tormod who drowned in a boating accident in 1958. They left their croft some time in the early sixties, and may have gone abroad. It’s now lying derelict.’

‘That should be simple enough,’ the genealogist said, and Fin followed him through to a small sales and reception area where shelves groaned with coffee-table tomes, and hard-cover tourist guides to the islands. Bill Lawson stooped to recover a volume from a pile of buff-coloured publications on the bottom shelf. ‘These are our croft histories of Harris,’ he said. ‘We do it by village and croft. Who lived there, when and where they went. Everything else changes, but the land itself stays in the same place.’ He flipped through the pages of the spiral-bound book. ‘Prior to civil registration in 1855 information was thin on the ground. What information was kept was all in a foreign language. English.’ He smiled. ‘So you got what the registrar thought the name should be. Wrong in many cases. And often they just weren’t interested. Same as the church records. Some ministers kept a faithful register. Others couldn’t be bothered. We’ve combined word-of-mouth with the official records kept since 1855, and when the two match up you can be pretty sure it’s accurate.’

‘So you think you can tell me what happened to the Macdonalds?’

He grinned. ‘Yes, I do. We have research on virtually every household in the Western Isles over the last two hundred years. More than 27,500 family trees.’

It took him about fifteen minutes searching through record books and his computer database to track down the croft and its history, and the ancestral lineage of all those who had lived on it and worked the land over generations.

‘Yes, here we are.’ He stabbed a finger at the pages of one of his books. ‘Murdo and Peggy Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1962. New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.’

‘Were there any branches of the family who stayed on in the islands?’

‘Let me see …’ He ran his finger down a list of names. ‘There’s Peggy’s cousin, Marion. Married a Catholic lad just before the war. Donald Angus O’Henley.’ He chuckled. ‘I bet that caused a bit of a stir.’

‘And any surviving members of that family?’

But the old genealogist shook his head as he examined the records. ‘Looks like he was killed some time during the war. There were no children. She died in 1991.’

Fin breathed his frustration through his teeth. It seemed as if he had made his journey in vain. ‘I don’t suppose there would be any neighbours around who might still remember them?’

‘Well, you’d have to go down to Eriskay for that.’

‘Eriskay?’

‘Oh, aye. That’s where Donald Angus came from. And there’s no way a Catholic lad was ever going to settle down among the fun-hating Presbyterians of Harris.’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘When they got married she went to live with him on his family croft at Haunn on the Isle of Eriskay.’

The little ferry and fishing port of An t-Ob was renamed Leverburgh by William Hesketh Lever, later Lord Leverhulme, who bought the town, along with most of South Harris, just after the First World War.

Very little evidence remained now of the half a million pounds he had spent to develop it into a major fishing port, designed to supply the more than four hundred fish shops he had purchased throughout Britain. Piers were built, curing sheds, smoke houses. Plans had been made to blast a channel through to the inner loch, creating a harbour for up to two hundred boats.

But the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley, and when Leverhulme died of pneumonia in 1924, the plans were abandoned and the estate sold off.

Now, a dwindling population of little over two thousand lived in a scattering of houses around the pier and concrete ramp built to accommodate the roll-on roll-off ferries that plied back and forth among the islands peppering the waters between South Harris and North Uist. Dreams of a major fishing port were lost irretrievably in the mist.