Stone of Destiny (18 page)

For a moment Mr Stuart was too overcome with pride and delight to speak. Then he seized us each by an arm and ushered us into a bright room with a leaping fire. I was introduced to Mrs Stuart, and to Alan’s sister; a drink of whisky was put in our hands, and in the babble of conversation we sat down and looked at the fire and tried to believe that this was as real as the dark and the cold and the fog and the ice-bound roads and the crucifixion of sleeplessness.

Our story ran through all the dream. We had never told it in all its fantastic detail. Now we tripped over each other to prompt our memories, and always we would be interrupted, and a newspaper would be thrust into our hands so that we might read what the world was saying. The fire leaped and crackled and blazed; the room was light; the people were our people; they spoke our language and knew us, and we knew them. They were our people. We could hardly believe it.

Before we went to bed we heard Kay’s story, which was no less fascinating than ours. Alan’s sister told it, for she had been the only one at home in the early evening when Kay had called.

When she left me, Kay realised that I had misdirected her and that she was not at Victoria as I had said she was. She drove around asking her way, and finally struck Knightsbridge. It was at the traffic lights in Knightsbridge that she heard the great crash, and found her piece of the Stone lying in the road behind her. To this day I can imagine her grimace of exasperation at my carelessness in not shutting the boot properly. Kay is a small girl, yet she picked up that lump of sandstone, which weighed more than she did, and put it back into the car. This time she made sure that all was properly secured.

She drove on, certain that every noise she heard was the boot opening. Several times she stopped the car to make sure she had
not lost her piece of the Stone on the road. Meanwhile she was asking her way all the time, trying to reach her Scots friend near Oxford, not Birmingham, as I had thought. She was certain that she would find asylum there.

At length she became worried. She had left a complete chain of people behind her who had directed a girl in a Ford Anglia to Oxford, and she was certain that they would rush to the police when her description was circulated. She saw a signpost for Birmingham, a place where she also had a friend. All this time she had been giving lifts to anyone who thumbed her. First she stopped for two old ladies, with whom she exchanged recipes, and then for a solider who showed her a shortcut which saved her many miles. As well as being a Christian act, giving lifts was good camouflage, and may have saved her from the police.

When she neared Birmingham, she saw a great deal of police activity. At one place she saw police patrols checking every car that passed through their checkpoint. She casually turned down a side road, drove back the way she had come, and probed out another route where there was less inspection.

At length she reached her friend’s house. She stopped the car outside and rang the doorbell. Her friend opened the door, but before she could find a word to express her pleasure Kay told her, ‘I’m a fugitive. I’ve got part of the Stone of Destiny with me.’

Her friend was startled, as who would not be?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You’re a friend of mine and that’s all that matters.’

Together they concocted a story to tell the girl’s mother. They decided to say that Kay had been to Oxford to collect her brother’s car, who was in the forces and about to be posted to Korea. Since the roads were so bad she had decided to leave the car and go on by train. Kay’s friend was English through and through. Now do you see why I prefer an honourable English person to an Anglicised Scot?

Kay was introduced to the mother, who thought her a very
brave girl to have motored all the way from Oxford over such bad roads. For the rest of Christmas Day she sat playing party games and trying to look as though she had had at least one night’s sleep in the last three or four. When the announcement of our success came over the radio, it was the first that she had heard of it, since she had left me as I raced back to the Abbey. It was all that she could do to refrain from shouting with joy. Yet no one except her friend knew her secret, as she sat and played games and wore a paper hat.

Kay left the next day without the mother suspecting her guilt. I do not know if she ever found out. Certainly when I went to Birmingham a fortnight later to collect the piece of Stone and drive it home in the Anglia, she had no suspicions. Indeed I drove the lady into the centre of the town that day, and as we drove we wondered together where ‘those Nationalists’ might have hidden the Stone. She did not know that part of it was only a yard behind her, and I did not tell her. I hope she has forgiven us for our deception.

Kay’s story should be remembered wherever Scotswomen wish to honour their kind. Alan and I had each other to lean on, and we leaned heavily. I should not have liked to have made all the decisions myself, and to have come through them all on my own. Kay did it. Alone she made all the right decisions, calmly making her way through police cordons in a car that was sought by the police. There were photographs of Ford Anglias in all the newspapers, and people everywhere were on the lookout for them. In particular they were on the lookout for a dark-haired girl in a Ford Anglia and she calmly drove through them all quite on her own. To do something in company as Alan and I did is one thing. But to do it alone, making your own decisions, and making the right ones, is a totally different matter. No wonder I have always thought her quite beyond praise. I saw little of her after that Christmas. She went off a few weeks later to teach at Duncraig Castle School in Wester Ross and I never saw her again.

Wester Ross is a long way from Glasgow, and in the early 1950s the roads west of the Great Glen were still unmetalled tracks, passable by car but only just. I was not to know that night in Barrhead that in all the years after these few days together we would never meet again. It would become one of the great regrets of my life that I never got to know her. No doubt as the years slipped past I would wonder whether to go to see her again. I would wonder if it would be a trespass and intrusion, or a welcome reunion, but I never tried. We met as strangers and we parted in a London street as strangers. Other people would think what they like to think. They would try to make some long-lost love story out of it but it was never like that. In truth we were both in love with something greater, something too sacred to dwell on. Patriotism is never out of fashion but it is not the fashion to speak of it. She loved the Gaeltacht more than any man and, lovely as she was, she never married. She taught in Gaelic among her fellow Gaels to the end of her working days, but I did not know that then. Her account of our adventure together would make interesting reading. Perhaps her brave kindness is the cause of her silence. She could tell a tale of my bungling, and of my selfish arrogance, but she hasn’t. She, more than anyone else, was the powerhouse of our success, yet I have had fame from it which I do not want. We could have done nothing without her.

Early that morning in Alan’s house we drank a toast to her, and emptied our glasses. A meal was waiting for us, but we were too tired to eat. Common decency howled for a bath, but common decency went unheard. We looked on our beds with eyes that crawled. Stiff thighed and weary we fell into them. There were hot-water bottles in them, but we had time only to feel their warmth before we fell into a deep sleep.

Before we had gone to bed I had asked, as firmly and politely as I dared, to be called at eight o’clock. Sleep is a good thing, but it can be taken in too large dozes. We were safely home, but much remained to be done. We had only started. Even as we fell unconscious into bed we were thinking of what the next step should be. We had the car to clean of all evidence, and our compatriots to see; we had to meet Councillor Gray and John MacCormick to make our report; we had to meet Bill Craig, and give him a fuller account of the Stone’s hiding place to make certain that he could find it in the event of our arrest. Above all, we had to get into our usual haunts and act in a normal fashion, as our absence might have been noticed. I was on particularly dangerous ground here, because I was seldom far distant from the university. My prolonged absence would already have done no good.

When we were called I wakened immediately and lay happily for a moment thinking of success. I was going out to face my Glasgow accomplices, to report to them how we had succeeded beyond any reasonable expectations. That would be a pleasant thing to do. I was going to rejoin the society of my other friends, to appear normal to them while we discussed the Stone, with my special knowledge seething and bubbling under my equanimity.

I had a hot bath and a hot breakfast. My stiffness had
disappeared and my tiredness had been wiped away. I was on my toes physically as well as mentally. The curtain had rung down on Act I. I was changing myself from the tired chauffeur into the social buffoon, who would be an object of contempt rather than suspicion. We would try to out-scarlet the Scarlet Pimpernel. We would talk about the Stone until we became Stone bores. In our cups we would boast that we had taken it, or else that we had had a plan ready to take it if someone had not forestalled us. We would swear that we had guns and bombs and gelignite ready prepared, and hint darkly what we would be doing with it, if only something was not preventing us. We would talk like any other young extremists of the Nationalist movement. It was the safest thing we could do. We knew that the Glasgow police were far too intelligent ever to bother about any of the avowed extremists. And although Scotland Yard would probably be taken in, they were too far away to hear any such talk.

I left my torn coat with Mrs Stuart and was given an old one of Alan’s. I was also given an old wristwatch to replace the one I had lost in the Abbey. The watch did not go, and every quarter of an hour I had to seek some privacy to advance the hands. My watch, which had broken from my wrist when I wrestled with the Stone in the Abbey, was the principal clue the police then had. Its photograph featured again and again in the newspapers. In those days not to wear a watch on your wrist meant that you were a very suspicious character indeed. Or so we all thought.

Fully prepared to meet the world, Alan and I went out to start the car. It took us over an hour to get it going, and we had to run it a hundred yards downhill before it fired. Yet this was the car which in the hour of need outside the Abbey had fired instantly and allowed me to get the Stone away. Once back in Glasgow it knew it was near its stable. It developed some form of pulmonary disease in the carburettor, and seemed constantly on the verge of death. In its 12 or 13 years of life I am certain that it had never been driven so far for so long as it had been driven by us. Yet not
until our greatest need was past did it start to complain. Some cars have souls.

I went straight up to the University Union. It was of course the Christmas vacation, and the place should have been deserted. To my surprise all the familiar figures were about, and as I went forward to the fireplace, the very hub and centre of the university, one of my friends detached himself from a group of students and came forward to congratulate me.

‘Don’t congratulate me,’ I said, highly flattered nevertheless. ‘You’re being far too complimentary.’ Solemnly we discussed who might have done the deed. This man was accounted for; that man might have done it, but he drank too much to keep a secret; another had been talking about doing it for years, but he was a vainglorious lout with no ability; still another claimed that he had been there, but could make no statement at present.

‘Well, I’m beaten,’ I said. ‘I reckoned I knew every Nationalist in Scotland, and I still can’t put my finger on who did it.’ Then I mused for a moment. ‘Oh! I would have given my right hand to be there,’ I burst out. I glanced at my watch, still pointing to the last hour I had set it at. ‘Well, time flies,’ I said, and passed on.

The experience was one we all had, time and time again. All things considered, there was remarkably little suspicion. There was bound to be some leakage, for some of the people I had approached, who had refused to go to London with us, were thus in on the secret. Likewise Gavin and Alan had been forced to confide in a few of their friends to safeguard their alibis. Some of these people tried to guard us from ourselves, and told us that we were too interested in the Stone. Yet every Nationalist was interested, and the proof of our double bluff was the extent to which it worked. We were discovered in the end by patient police inquiry, and it is one of the most remarkable things about the whole enterprise that not one word came from those who knew us, to give the police any hint. They had to work from the outside without the help of any
informer or tip-off agent. Indeed, three months later, when I was roped in for questioning, I was delighted to be told what one of my fellows had said of me:

‘What! Ian Hamilton have anything to do with the Stone! The only person who would suspect Ian Hamilton is Ian Hamilton.’