Peter May - The Lewis Man

‘Aye, I did that. Old widow O’Henley it was who stayed there when I was a kid. Her and a young lassie called Ceit who was in my class at school. A homer.’

Fin frowned. ‘A homer? What’s that?’

‘A boy or a girl from a home, a ghraidh . There were hundreds of them taken out of orphanages and local authority homes by the councils and the Catholic Church, and shipped out here to the islands. Just handed over to complete strangers, they were. No vetting in those days. Kids were dumped off the ferry at Lochboisdale to stand on the pier with family names tied around their necks, waiting to be claimed. The primary school up on the hill there was full of them. Nearly a hundred at one time.’

Fin was shocked. ‘I had no idea.’

Morag lit a cigarette and puffed away on it as she spoke. ‘Aye, they were at it right into the sixties. I once heard the priest saying it was good to have fresh blood in the islands after generations of inbreeding. I think that was the idea. Though they weren’t all orphans, you know. Some came from broken homes. But there was no going back. Once you got sent out here all ties with the past were cut. You were forbidden contact with parents or family. Poor little bastards. Some of them got terribly abused. Beaten, or worse. Most were just treated like slave labour. A few were luckier, like me.’

Fin raised an eyebrow. ‘You were a homer?’

‘I was, Mr Macleod. Boarded with a family at Parks, over on the other side of the island. All gone now, of course. No children of their own, you see. But unlike many, I have happy memories of my time here. Which is why I had no problems about coming back.’ She emptied her glass. ‘I need a wee top-up. How about you?’

‘No thanks.’ Fin had barely touched his.

Morag moved Dino off her knee and eased herself out of the settee to pour another drink. ‘Of course, it wasn’t just the locals who gave the kids a hard time. There were incomers, too. Mostly English. Like the headmaster at Daliburgh school.’ She smiled. ‘Thought he was coming here to civilize us, aghraidh , and banned the Gillean Cullaig.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s the name they gave to the Hogmanay tradition when gangs of boys went around the houses on New Year’s Eve blessing each house with a poem, and being rewarded with bread and scones, and cake and fruit. All dropped into the white flour sacks they carried. They’d been doing it for centuries. But Mr Bidgood thought it smacked of begging, and issued an edict forbidding any of his pupils to take part.’

‘And everyone obeyed?’

‘Well, most did. But there was one boy in my class. Donald John. A homer. He boarded with the Gillies family, a brother and sister, over there on the other side the hill. He defied the ban and went out with the older boys. When Bidgood found out he gave that lad such a leathering with the tawse.’

Fin shook his head. ‘He shouldn’t have had the right to do that.’

‘Oh, they had the right to do what they pleased in those days. But Donald Seamus — that was the man that Donald John boarded with — he took exception. Went up to the school and beat the living shit out of that headmaster. Excuse my French. He took Donald John out of school that very day, too, and the boy never went back.’ She smiled. ‘Bidgood returned to England with his tail between his legs within the month.’ She smiled. ‘It was a colourful life we lived back then.’

Fin looked around and thought that it was a colourful life that she was living still. ‘So do you have any idea what happened to Ceit?’

Morag shrugged and sipped again at her gin. ‘None at all, I’m afraid, a ghraidh . She left the island not long before myself, and for all I know never came back.’

Another dead end.

By the time Fin came to leave, the cloud was gathering ominously all along the western bay, the wind had stiffened and carried the odd spot of rain. Somewhere much further to the west, beyond the cloud, the sun was drizzling liquid gold on the ocean as it dipped towards the horizon.

Morag said, ‘I’d better run you back over the hill, a ghraidh . It looks like you could get caught in a downpour. I’ll just open the garage doors now, so that I can drive straight in when I get back.’

She tapped a code into a controller at the side of the door, and it swung slowly upwards to fold flat into the roof. As they got into the car, Fin spotted an old spinning wheel at the back of the garage. ‘You don’t spin wool, do you?’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Good God, no. Never have, never will.’ Dino jumped up into her lap and she closed the door, but kept the roof down this time. He snuffled and yelped and rubbed his wet nose all over the window until she lowered it, and he draped himself in his habitual place over her arm to poke his face out into the wind. As she drove down the driveway she said, ‘It’s an old one I’m having restored. It’ll sit nicely in the dining room. A reminder of days gone by. All the women spun wool here when I was a girl. They would oil it and knit it into blankets and socks and jerseys for the menfolk. Most of the men were fishermen in those days, at sea five days a week, and the Eriskay jerseys knitted with that oiled wool were as good as waterproofs. They all wore them.’

She swerved at the foot of the drive as she took a draw on her cigarette, and missed the fencepost by inches.

‘Each of the women had her own pattern, you know. Usually handed down from mother to daughter. So distinctive that when a man’s body was pulled from the sea, decayed beyond recognition, he could almost always be identified from the knitted pattern of his pullover. As good as a fingerprint, it was.’

She waved at the old man and his dog to whom Fin had spoken earlier, and the Mercedes nearly went into a ditch. But Morag seemed oblivious.

‘There’s an old retired priest on the island who’s a bit of a historian.’ She laughed. ‘Nothing much else for a celibate man to do on a long winter’s night.’ She swung a mischievous smile Fin’s way. ‘Anyway, he’s a bit of an expert on the knitted patterns of old Eriskay. Has a collection of photographs and drawings, I’ve heard. Goes back a hundred years and more, they say.’

As they reached the top of the hill she glanced curiously across at her passenger. ‘You don’t say much, Mr Macleod.’

And Fin thought it would have been difficult to get a word in edgeways. But all he said was, ‘I’ve enjoyed hearing your stories, Morag.’

After a moment she said, ‘What’s your interest in the folk who lived at the O’Henley croft?’

‘It’s not really the O’Henley woman herself that I’m interested in, Morag. I’m trying to trace the roots of an old man now living on Lewis. I think he might have come from Eriskay.’

‘Well, maybe I know him. What’s his name?’

‘Oh, it’s not a name you would know. He calls himself Tormod Macdonald now. But that’s not his real name.’

‘Then what is?’

‘That’s what I don’t know.’

The rain started as Fin drove north from Ludagh, sweeping across the machair from the open sea to the west. Big fat drops that came first in ones and twos, before reinforcements arrived and compelled him to put his wipers on at double speed. He turned off at Daliburgh on to the Lochboisdale road, his mind filled still with the thought that Morag’s story of Eriskay knitting patterns was perhaps his last chance to track down the true identity of Marsaili’s father. A very, very long shot indeed.

The Lochboisdale Hotel sat on the hill above the harbour, in the lee of Ben Kenneth. It was an old, traditional, whitewashed building with modern extensions, and a dining lounge with a view out over the bay. At a dark reception desk in the lobby, a girl in a tartan skirt gave him keys to a single room, and confirmed that they did, indeed, have a fax machine. Fin noted the number and climbed the staircase to his room.