The Complete McAuslan (67 page)

But, good for Wade, he succeeded where the Romans had failed. He pushed his roads through the heart of the Highlands and along the chain of government outposts on the loch sides, Fort William, Fort Augustus, and Fort George, letting in the law and the red soldiers who between them finally put the hems (and the breeks) on the wild men of the north. It all came to an end at Culloden – and a right mess that was, thanks to the MacDonalds and Lord George Murray and (to give the swine his due) the Duke of Cumberland, who had learned the vital lesson that if you can stop Scotland scoring in the first ten minutes, you stand an excellent chance, because they tend to lose interest. After that there was nothing for Ronald and Donald to do, once they had emerged cursing from the heather, but join the Highland regiments cunningly established by the government as a safety valve through which the clansmen could vent their exuberance on the enemies of the Crown for a change – which is how I came to return to Wade’s House two centuries later.

I had known it from childhood, because after the general finished his roads and went home it had reverted to my uncle’s family (a small, aggressive colony of Gordons who had come down from the north in the remote past to establish themselves among the local Stewarts, Camerons, Campbells, Black Mount MacDonalds, and those perpetual pests, the MacGregors), and when he married my aunt they farmed from Wade’s House and kept the nearby hotel, an impressive tourist lodge catering for fishers, guns, and a strange new breed, the skiers, who in those pre-war days were just beginning to hurl themselves down the slopes of Ben Lawers. My uncle was a tall, courtly gentleman, a former county cricketer who dreamed that his nephew (with the advantage of English summers to practise in) would some day confound the Australians who were carrying all before them in that era of Bradman and O’Reilly. In my holidays he would have me out on the hotel tennis court, heaving up my juvenile leg-spinners until my wrist creaked, and once I twisted so hard that I achieved a googly and he lost it against the dark conifers and was trapped dead as mutton leg before.

He took me off in triumph to the still-room and filled me with orange juice, and showed me off to a vaguely-remembered group of large, tweedy, moustached men who spoke with the accents of Morningside and Kelvinside and the Home Counties; I think of them whenever I see a whisky advertisement in the New Yorker. They belonged to a world of which I was barely conscious then, of plus-fours and brass-capped shotgun shells, fishing flies and glossy magazines on low oak tables, stuttering motor cars with running-boards, and pipes smoking fragrantly; they had a sound and a smell and a presence that died in September, 1939.

There was another world outside the hotel, and its centre was Wade’s House, from which my aunt used to send me out with the dinner-pails for the farm-men on the hill; I would trudge up through the heather and wait to take back the empty containers, watching the shy, silent men with their lean brown faces and wishing I could understand them. They were distant and wary of the small boy in his school jersey, and on the rare occasions when they spoke their voices were odd and high-pitched. I wondered if I seemed as strange to them; when one of them once asked me my name and I told him, he looked at me with a queer smile as though wondering: how did that happen? I was reminded of them years later, in Saskatchewan, when I saw Blackfeet straight off the reservation; they had the same quiet durability and strange shifting quality; you had an uncomfortable feeling that you had better watch them. When they came to the hotel in the evening, it was to the big public bar at the back, a thousand miles from the tweed and leather lounge of the motorists at the front, and I noticed with admiration the ease with which my uncle and aunt moved between the two worlds, at home in either.

To my childish mind, one world was safe and the other wild. In Wade’s House I had discovered a book by a man called Neil Munro about these very hills; it was full of dangers and onfalls and swords in the night, and as I snuggled down in bed it was comforting to know that the walls were feet thick, for I could picture the edge of the rocky burn beneath my deepembrasured window, and Col of the Tricks was standing there under the silent trees, with his bonnet drawn down, smiling to himself and turning his dirk in his hand, and his face was the face of the men on the hill.

It wasn’t all imagination. Once I woke to the sound of stealthy footsteps and whispers under my window, and when I reported this sensation to my aunt in the morning she smiled in mock wonder and teased me by humming ‘Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by’, which I neither understood nor connected with the big salmon wrapped in ferns in the stone larder or the fact that Jeannie the maid was scrubbing scales from the back door step. On other occasions there would be a couple of hares or a brace of birds hanging under the rowans; in my infant innocence I assumed that a friend had left them – which was true, in a way. Once, in the season of the year, a great haunch of venison turned up mysteriously in the garage, and my uncle became as fretful as his genial, easygoing nature would allow.

‘Oh, dear, I wish Jock wouldn’t do it,’ he sighed. ‘Or Archie, or whoever it is this time. It’s embarrassing.’

‘A switch for the laird from the laird’s man,’ said my aunt cryptically. ‘It’s probably the Dipper. Jock and Archie are busy on Lochnabee these days, according to Jeannie.’

‘Not again!’ groaned my uncle. ‘Do they know how long they can get, if the gadgers catch them?’

‘Probably, dear, but the gadgers never do. Don’t worry about them.’

‘I don’t worry about
them.
I worry about meeting the Admiral or old Buchanan and having them tell me that another stag’s vanished without trace, or that there isn’t a fish left in Loch Tulla, and who on earth can have done it? It puts me in a very difficult position.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said my aunt. ‘The position’s perfectly easy – you don’t know.’

‘I can guess. If it isn’t Jock, it’s Archie, or the Dipper, or Roy Ban, or Wee Joe, or any one of a dozen. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t employ half of them.’

‘What’s a gadger, Aunt Alison?’ I asked, and was told gently to run along and play with my ball, none the wiser.

Over the years I began to understand. Agriculture and legitimate field sports were the principal local industries, but poaching and illicit distilling ran them a close second, it being well known that a switch from the braeside, a fish from the burn, and a stag from the hill were the right of every Highlander, and that if he chose to manufacture his own drink it was nobody else’s business. The surrounding estates, which catered for visiting sportsmen, employed armies of keepers and watchers who waged a constant war against the local poachers - this was before the big gangs from far afield came to despoil the glens systematically – and the Excisemen or ‘gadgers’ (so called from the word gauger) combed the woods and corries in search of unlawful stills. Sometimes they even had to take to the water: my aunt had referred to Lochnabee, where the enterprising peasantry operated their little distillery in a small boat anchored in the middle of that gloomy tarn, the principle being that if the Law appeared on the shore, and capture was certain, you heaved the whole caboodle over the side, got out the rods to pose as innocent fishers, and defied the gadgers to prosecute when all the evidence was at the bottom of the loch. A shocking waste of equipment, but better than being nailed in some mountain hut or woodland fastness where hurried concealment of your Heath Robinson equipment was impossible.

My uncle was right: his position
was
difficult. He was by way of being what in England would be called the squire, because although his farm and hotel were small concerns compared to the great estates around, he and his had been there as long as Ben Lui, while the estates were new and commercial. He knew half his people were out with guns and nets and snares by night, lifting what wasn’t theirs, and distilling the good news in secret, but what was he to do – clype on his own folk? He couldn’t have proved anything, anyway. Tell them to stop it? Tell the fish to keep out of water. At the same time, he was on good terms with his neighbours, like the Admiral and other landlords, and being a gentleman and sensible of his conflicting loyalties, it troubled him. My Aunt Alison, not having been born with his social scruples, and having a wicked sense of humour, found it all rather funny, and suffered no pangs when goodwill offerings appeared mysteriously on the step. She knew they were not bribes, but tribute.

My uncle died early in the war, but where another childless widow might have sold up, Aunt Alison continued to run farm and hotel as though it were a matter of course for a woman past middle age, thereby confirming the suspicion that she had been the real manager all along; and she was accepted in that strong masculine world without question. She had been a great beauty, one of your tall northern blondes with eyes like sapphires, and even when she was white-haired she continued to flutter the hearts of such susceptible local bachelors as the Admiral and Robin Elphinstone, much to her amusement; she treated them as she treated everyone, with that frank easiness and direct good humour that you often find in northern women; it stops short of being hard, but there is a tough streak of realism in it, and a touch of mischief – Stevenson caught it exactly with Miss Grant, the Lord Advocate’s daughter, in
Catriona
. Aunt Alison had the same gift of tongues: educated Edinburgh in the drawing-room for her guests, pure Perthshire on the hillside when Dougal neglected the sheep-dipping, but with the same calm, pleasant delivery.

I had not seen her for three years when military duty took me north from Edinburgh not long after the battalion came home from North Africa. A truck-load of ammunition had to be taken from Redford Barracks to Fort William, and since an officer had to be in charge of that dangerous cargo I was told to take a 15-cwt, a driver, and two men as escort, and set off forthwith. The trip would take me past my aunt’s door, so I got the Colonel’s leave to stay over a couple of nights. As escort I chose Lance-Corporal Macrae and Private McAuslan-and if it strains belief that I should want to take McAuslan anywhere, I can plead good reason. He had just emerged, acquitted and crowing, from a court-martial for disobedience to a newly-promoted and officious young corporal, and, knowing my men, I didn’t want them falling foul of each other again in my absence. Macrae I took because he’d been a ghillie and stalker in that part of the country, and I thought he would enjoy it. Kind-hearted subaltern, you see; if I’d known what was brewing in Darkest Perthshire I’d have chosen more carefully.

Part of our load had to be dropped off at Dunkeld – why they needed land-mines there I can’t imagine – so from Ballinluig we took the northern road which carries you along the Tummel and the Garry into the wilds of Badenoch by way of Killiecrankie Pass. We stopped at the marker stone where Bonnie Dundee was killed, and surveyed the grim heights from which his claymores had descended like a thunderbolt to drive Mackay’s Government regiments into the river in five furious minutes.

Like a tempest down the ridges
Swept the hurricane of steel

in Aytoun’s splendid onomatopoeic lines – or as McAuslan put it, scowling sternly round the battlefield: ‘That sortit the buggers! Here, izzat ra Bonnie Dundee in ra song, sur? He musta been a helluva boy! Five minutes, no kiddin’? He wisnae messin’ aboot, wis he?’ He shook his unkempt head in admiration, and I hadn’t the heart to tell him that, as a staunch Protestant, he’d probably have found himself being routed along with Mackay.

It was fine scenery as we went west to Fort William, and when we had shed the last of our cargo it was a pleasantly eerie journey down through the Weeping Glen of my tough grandmother’s folk, where it’s always raining and even the sheep wear their shawls over their heads. We halted short of King’s House for a cigarette, and McAuslan waxed indignant at my description of the Glencoe Massacre; it had been, in his opinion, weel ower the score, even fur ra bluidy Campbells – mind you, knowin’ that big swine Sarn’t Campbell in A Company he wisnae a bit surprised. We drove on south, and it was a beautiful summer evening when we pulled up on the gravel drive before my aunt’s hotel. They were doing heavy business, by the number of cars out in front, and the big entrance hall was full of tweeds and twin-sets having afternoon tea; I exchanged glad cries of greeting with several members of the hotel staff and was informed that herself was in the office with the Admiral.

‘He’s still about, is he?’

‘As ever, the wee pest!’ said Jimmy the Porter. ‘Still the lord o’ creation, five foot o’ wind wi’ a hanky in his cuff! She’s far too soft with him, and I don’t give a dam if he has got a party of twelve for dinner! Away you in, Dand, and maybe he’ll have the grace to make himself scarce.’

I escaped the mountainous hug of Bridie the linen-mistress, dried myself off, and entered the long passage to my aunt’s office-sitting-room, whence came the sound of an Admiral in full voice, minatory and plaintive:

‘. . . I just don’t understand you, Alison, I really don’t! You’re a landowner yourself, but you take it far too lightly, in my opinion. Far too lightly. I’m sorry, but . . .’

‘Well, we don’t all strut about the place as though we had dominion over palm and pine.’ She sounded more amused than impatient. ‘Since when has the Excise been your business, anyway?’

‘It’s the business of all right-thinking people,’ snapped the Admiral. ‘Of whom I had always thought you were one, Alison – ’

‘Ach, don’t be so damned pompous, Jacky!’ She was laughing at him. ‘You’re just being officious. And vindictive, let me tell you. I don’t know which is worse.’

‘I happen,’ said the Admiral, ‘to be a magistrate . . .’ and at that point I coughed loudly, knocked, and went in. The Admiral, who resembled an ocean-going tug in a R.Y.S. blazer, was planted indignantly before the fireplace; my aunt, seated in silver-haired elegance behind her desk and looking as usual like an elderly but mischievous Norse goddess, whooped at the sight of me. ‘My, will you look at the bonny sojer!’ After exclamations and embraces she demanded if the Admiral remembered me, and he shook hands, beaming, crying of course, of course, the young spin-bowler, eh? I had known him from my infancy, and liked him, for he was a decent, hearty wee man, if given to self-importance. We exchanged pleasantries while my aunt watched, smiling, and then he said, well, he must be pushing along, frowned pleadingly at her and said
do
give serious thought to what I’ve been saying, won’t you, my dear, and stumped off.