Murdo's War Read online

  ‘Oh, did he?’

  Henry Smith leaned forward. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ Hector shook his head. ‘Not just now, thank you.’ He looked across at his old friend the barman and smiled slightly. ‘I don’t think you’d get it, anyway. One pint a night these days.’ He shifted in his chair and clasped the fingers of his big gnarled hands together, shrewdly regarding the man who sat opposite him.

  Murdo looked from one to the other, and an odd pair they made; the weather-beaten fisherman in his old sweater and seaboots, the smooth-cheeked businessman in a country tweed suit.

  This time the silence remained unbroken. Murdo felt the tension mounting.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ Henry Smith said at length. ‘I’ve told you all I can for the present. You’ll be well paid, I can promise you that.’

  For a long moment Hector did not reply, then, ‘How much stuff is there?’ he asked.

  ‘About eight or ten loads, I should say – if your boat is the size I think.’

  ‘How is it packed?’

  ‘Boxes and crates, I suppose. Nothing very big, anyway.’

  ‘And where do you want them taking?’

  ‘Well, I thought if you brought them here we could stack them away somewhere until I get a lorry to pick them up.’

  ‘What, here?’ Hector indicated the inn.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘What do you mean by ‘here’, then?’

  ‘Somewhere near the beach, I thought.

  Murdo sat up and looked towards the bar to hide his growing excitement.

  Hector shook his head patiently. ‘It might be a quiet place, this, but you can hardly leave a great stack of cases on the beach in the middle of a war and expect nobody to see them.’

  ‘Naturally not.’ A trace of impatience showed on Henry Smith’s face. ‘I’m not entirely stupid. We’d find a place to put them.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. But there must be some fairly deep caves around here, some place they would be safe for a few days.’

  Murdo’s eyes widened. Quickly he glanced at Hector.

  ‘I don’t suppose you were anywhere near the beach tonight?’ Hector said.

  ‘No, I was away at Thurso until I came in here. Why?’

  ‘I was just wondering.’ Hector put yet another match to his pipe. He spoke through the smoke. ‘You’ve got a car, then?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The Englishman leaned forward again, not to be deterred. ‘Is there a cave,’ he said, ‘or an old croft house, or somewhere like that?’

  Hector shrugged. ‘I suppose you could find some place, right enough.’

  Casually Murdo looked down at the man’s shoes, but they were neat and well-polished and bore no trace of sand.

  ‘One thing I should say,’ Mr Smith continued. ‘Some men will be coming over with the crates. They used to work in the Stavanger factory and I want them to join me in Oxford. One of them could come across and keep an eye on things if you thought it was necessary.’

  ‘Mm.’ Hector drew himself up and took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘No; say Wednesday.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Oh, around six-thirty.’ Hector turned to Murdo. ‘Come on, boy. It’s time we were home.’

  Murdo stood up and pulled his jacket comfortably around him.

  ‘Goodnight,’ Henry Smith said.

  ‘Goodnight,’ and the two, old man and boy, made their way across the smoky bar-room.

  As they stepped out of the door, Murdo felt the night air grip his face like a giant, icy hand.

  In a moment his eyes accustomed themselves to the moonlight. He looked down the hillside to the bay from which the soft, ceaseless roar of the waves rose on the breeze. Suddenly he touched Hector’s arm and pointed. Almost invisible among the shadows of the inn yard was a big black car. It had not been there an hour earlier, of that he was certain.

  The old Ford was hard to start and needed a few cranks to get it going, but in a few minutes they were home. The tilly lamp was lit, a fire roared up the chimney, and Hector busied himself over the stove. Soon they were seated at a small table tucking into black- pudding, bacon and eggs while a big teapot steamed gently on the hob of the fire.

  Hector was first to finish. He pushed his plate back with a sigh and rubbed the back of a hand across his lips. Taking a couple of biscuits from the tin, he carried his mug of tea to the fire and topped it up from the big teapot. A minute later Murdo joined him, and at either side of the fire they stretched back in the old armchairs and gave themselves up to the heat flung out by the blazing peats.

  Murdo propped his thick-stockinged feet on the hearth and gazed into the heart of the fire. He was a dark boy with shaggy black hair that tumbled down his forehead, not particularly tall, but thickset for his years. He was growing up quickly, already his upper lip was shadowy with down. Although no relation, he had been living with Hector more or less since the previous summer when he had left school. The two of them got along very well. The old fisherman was glad of the boy’s company in a house which had seemed empty since his daughter went down to England to be married; and Murdo liked living with Hector, whose rough and ready ways were so warm and homely, especially after his aunt’s spick and span house.

  How he had hated that shining place they had to call home. They had lived there almost since Murdo could remember, for his mother had died when Lachlan was born, leaving his father, still in his early twenties, with three children to look after. At length circumstances had compelled him to accept the generous offer of his sister Winifred, ten years older than himself, to move into the old manse. She had done her best, but a joyless sort of place it had been. As he stared into the fire Murdo remembered – the complaints, the smacks, the punishments.

  ‘Murdo, don’t play on the stairs, I’ve just brushed them; and put that china dog down, you’ll break it. Goodness sake, child, watch the wallpaper. Let me see your hands – go and wash them! I don’t know how you get in such a mess. Why can’t you be content, like Geoffrey, and read a book?’

  Geoffrey was the son of the local minister, a blond boy with white knees and soft hands. Murdo’s hands, in contrast, were broad and usually stained or cut. The top joint of the third finger on his right hand was missing as the result of an accident with a wire rope when he was ten.

  Sandy, their father had been the one bright spark in all those years: his father, strong and sandy-haired as his name, who would take him out in the boat to the lobsters, or fishing up the river; who bought him the second-hand bicycle and fishing rod; who would swing him up before him on one of the horses and gallop wildly about the fields. And then he had gone, volunteered for the army in the early days of the war – and Maggie, Lachlan and himself were left to the dreary round of existence with their Aunt Winifred and Uncle George. A few months later Maggie had left school and went to work at a hotel in Thurso, twenty miles away.

  By then Murdo was eleven and old enough to keep out of his aunt’s hair. Increasingly as he grew older, however, they seemed to come into conflict. He and Lachlan, towards whom he felt a growing responsibility, were in the house as little as they could manage. Certainly they were unjust to her, for she gave them good meals and warm beds, and their clothes were always well cared for. After all these years, however, she still thought that boys should not have mud on their trousers, should not get dirty hands, or tear through the house, or shout or get into trouble. She wanted them as still and cool and well-ordered as her own shining rooms, and life was one long battle.

  A few days after his fourteenth birthday, Murdo had left school. It was his ambition to join the merchant navy and work his way towards bosun – or possibly to become a trawlerman – and when he was older to work a croft and run a boat of his own, like his father and Hector. For a year or two in his spare time he had helped Hector with the creels, and begun to set a few that he made himself. Now, since the merchant fleet was cut back by e
nemy action and there was no work locally, he began to go fishing and help about the croft more regularly. Despite the old fisherman’s reputation as a rogue, Murdo’s father was pleased at the unlikely friendship.

  So Murdo worked alongside Hector on the Lobster Boy, and with little success tried to prompt him into doing something about his neglected croft, where the shed roofs leaked, the tools grew rusty, and rank grass and weeds were only kept at bay by marauding sheep. Soon they were together so much that Murdo started taking his meals there, and gradually settled in until at length he had his own room and kept most of his belongings at the house.

  Not surprisingly, his aunt disapproved of the situation, but her remonstrations went unheeded, and after she had written to tell his father about it she said no more. Now Murdo saw her only occasionally.

  But Hector’s activities were not confined to lobster fishing and tending his sheep on the hills. Periodically the two would sally out in the dark hours with a twenty yard length of salmon net in the boot of the car; or perhaps, if the time of year and the weather were right, with a couple of sharp knives and a pony, and a rifle slung in the crook of an arm. The following Sunday a dozen cottages in Strathy would be filled with the savour of roast venison. This, however, was the first time Hector had let the boy cross the dangerous Pentland Firth with him to Orkney, to bring back a load of the moonshine whisky.

  Murdo stirred, then stood, warming his legs at the glowing peats. His hand found a crumpled, much-read forces letter in his back pocket. He smoothed it, looking at his father’s handwriting, and set it behind a tin on the mantlepiece, then changed his mind and decided to take it upstairs. He yawned, without putting a hand up.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘Aye, it’s high time,’ said Hector, glancing at the old chiming wag-at-the-wa’. ‘No hurry in the morning, though.’ He mused for a moment. ‘What did you make of yon chap – Smith?’

  Murdo shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It all seemed a bit fishy to me – the caves and that. And that big black car outside the Captain Ivy – it must have been his.’ He poked a corner of peat into the flames with the toe of his stocking. ‘He seemed all right, though. The money should be good.’

  Hector nodded, looking across at the youth who already meant so much to him. For a moment he felt a disturbing twinge of uncertainty, but with careless optimism he quickly cast it aside. Murdo was looking down into the flames, his dark face glowing in the firelight.

  ‘What do you say if we give him a go?’ Hector said. ‘A bit of excitement, eh? Give him a run for his money.’

  Murdo looked over, smiling. The old seaman’s blue eyes twinkled like a mischievous boy’s in the lamplight.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  The Men in Hiding

  IT WAS A FUNNY business. The previous evening Hector and Murdo had kept their appointment with Henry Smith at the Captain Ivy, and the deal was confirmed. To their surprise, they learned that the machinery, along with nine men, had already been sitting out on Island Roan for the best part of a week. Now Mr Smith was waiting for them up at the graveyard, and in two and a half hours they would be out on the island themselves. What would they find?

  Still, twenty pounds a trip with a bonus at the end was not to be turned down. Not if you were in Hector’s position. In his mind Murdo had half of it spent already; a better tractor, new roof for the barn, a couple of loads of hay. Perhaps they would be able to get the croft going again, properly this time. Though Hector was promising nothing, his hopes were high. Eight or ten trips, Mr Smith thought. Well, better hope the weather held.

  Hector came downstairs, struggling with a safety-pin to hold his braces. As they drove through the deserted scattering of houses and forked left on the track to the graveyard, Murdo pulled off his nailed boots, tucked the thick blue trousers into his socks, and reached for his seaboots.

  Henry Smith was waiting for them, his big car parked on the green opposite the graveyard gates. The earth was hard as stone as they walked around the end of the old graveyard wall. Then they were descending the dunes. The world was black and silver: the dry-stane dykes on the headland were sharp-etched above impenetrable cliffs; the beach below shone white as a cornfield. Though all three carried torches, they had no need of them as they dropped to the shore, and passed beneath the high stacks on the smooth carpet of sand.

  Murdo led the way, happy in the face of such an adventure. The bitter breeze, slight as it was, froze his face and clouded his breath, but within the layers of clothes he glowed with warmth.

  ‘Go straight in and when we get there,’ called Hector. ‘Light the lamp.’

  Murdo turned from the moonlight into the shadow of the cliffs and switched on his torch. The cave mouth loomed up before him. Six tides had washed the sand since he had sat there on the crate of whisky and heard the cough in the fog; and four since the following evening when four men and two boys had removed the whisky to a safer spot in the shed behind Hector’s cottage.

  He paused for a moment and looked back towards the beach. His footprints scarred the sand, sharp-etched with shadow. An idea struck him. He stepped aside to a rock and pretended to pull up one of his socks.

  The men passed into the cave ahead of him. As soon as they were gone he stepped back and turned his torch on the two sets of footprints. They were very distinct in the damp sand. Hector’s, like his own, showed the barred imprint of a sea-boot. But Henry Smith’s! Murdo’s heart thudded. He crouched to examine one more closely. It looked exactly the same as those they had followed below the dunes, where the intruder had been walking; the shape of the toe, the curve of the heel, the little drag where it had been put down and lifted. If only he could be sure.

  ‘Murdo!’ Hector’s voice echoed in the depths of the cave.

  ‘Coming.’ He rose and scuffed his own tell-tale prints, then shone his torch back along the winding tracks, resolving to tell Hector as soon as he had a chance.

  As he pushed through the narrow neck into the inner chamber, Hector was putting a match to the lantern. He settled the mantle and adjusted the flame to a fish-tail of brilliant white.

  Murdo knew the cave, the whole beach, like the back of his hand. He clambered to the broad ledge, sat in his usual place and shone the torch about. The shelf was about nine feet above the sand, high enough to ensure that only a northerly storm or a big spring tide with the wind on-shore could reach it. The waves broke their force on the narrow entrance, spurting and heaving impotently through the main body of the cave.

  Since the war started, children had been kept away from the beaches, for what looked like a box or a mooring buoy might not be so innocent. More than once a mine had exploded on the rocks with a force that blew in the windows quarter of a mile away; and several times the navy had towed a stranded mine out to sea for detonation. After all, the naval base of Scapa Flow was only thirty miles away across the Pentland Firth.

  Murdo was recalled from his day-dream by a light flashing in his face. Hector and Mr Smith were peering over the edge of the shelf.

  The Englishman nodded. ‘Yes, it will do very well.’ With surprising agility for a man whose appearance was so sedentary and urban, he climbed up and shone his torch around the shelf. Then from this vantage point he surveyed the whole cave, turning slowly, his torch winkling into corners that the lantern light did not reach.

  ‘Yes, very good.’ He nodded again and climbed down. ‘And you say no-one will come nosing around.’

  Hector was sitting on a boulder. He looked up at Murdo and back to Henry Smith.

  ‘None of the men in the village,’ he said. ‘Not at this time of year. It’s just the old fogies left, all the young ones are away. And the children don’t come down here much nowadays.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘It will do very well. Now for the island.’ A few minutes’ walk along shelving rocks brought them to the Lobster Boy, bobbing at her mooring in the black water of the inlet. Their creels, which they had lifted in the morning, formed a dark mound
against the crag, well above the reach of any winter storms. The moon cut a glittering track across the wet sand at the edge of the sea, and silvered the boards of the old boat. Hector pulled her over with a rope and they clambered down.

  Murdo sat on the side bench and the thick hoar frost crunched beneath his oilskins.

  ‘She’s going to be cold tonight,’ he said.

  ‘You’re right there, boy.’ Hector turned to his passenger. ‘You’ve got plenty of clothes on?’ he said.

  The Englishman pulled up the fur collar of his splendid coat in reply and showed the thickness of the material. ‘This should keep the cold out well enough,’ he said.

  ‘Mm.’ Hector was unconvinced and reached into the locker for his ancient oilskins. With long familiarity he stepped into a ragged pair of trousers and tied an equally shabby coat around himself with a length of cord.

  ‘Well, all ready?’ he said.

  A moment’s careful adjustment and the motor shuddered into life, freezing though the night was. For a moment it faltered, another tiny adjustment, and it settled to a fast throb. Clouds of white vapour puttered from the exhaust. ‘Good old girl.’ Hector replaced the engine cowling and patted it. ‘Just give her a minute or two to warm up.’

  Hand over hand Murdo pulled the heavy boat through the water until he reached the little buoy to which she was moored. At a word from Hector he cast off and hauled the dripping line aboard, his fingers aching with the cold. As the end flicked in, scattering a shower of drops across his face, Hector slipped the engine into gear and moved the throttle forward. The motor throbbed into low power. Moving from the anchorage they slid slowly through the rocky channel and out into the swelling waters of the bay.

  Thirty minutes later they were heading west on the twelve mile haul from Strathy Point to the island. The waves blew on to the starboard beam and they rolled a little in the troughs. The swell was slight, but now the Lobster Boy rose and fell as well, a pitching, yawing movement, perfect for making the landsman clutch his stomach and hang his head over the water.