and some mince and tatties. You must be hungry after your long journey. Then the lady who’s going to be looking after you will come and find you and take you to your new home.’
She hurried off to help with the next children in need of some freshening up. But as she worked, she was aware of the boys watching her, two pairs of round, grey-blue eyes peering over the rims of the cups of milk they’d been given.
Once their hot meal had been consumed and the bowls scraped clean, the children began to leave in twos and threes, gathering up bags of belongings and boxes of rations, having been claimed by their host families. Mrs Carmichael continued to direct operations from the doorway until, at last, the hall was empty apart from the two little boys left sitting at the table. The younger of the two – David – had fallen asleep, propped against his brother’s shoulder, worn out by the long day’s journey from home to this strange new place. But as she finished drying up the cups and plates, Flora noticed that Stuart still maintained a wary eye on the proceedings in the hall as he watched over his little brother.
At last, Moira Carmichael left her station at the door and bustled across to make sure everything had been put away properly. ‘All finished? Well done, girls.’
‘What about those two?’ Flora nodded discreetly towards the forlorn-looking pair at the table.
‘Don’t you worry about them,’ Mrs Carmichael said. For all her outward bluster, Flora knew she had a heart of gold and that a bedrock of kindness lurked beneath her bossiness. ‘Stuart and David are coming with me. You wouldn’t expect me not to do my duty, would you, with my own sons’ rooms to spare in the house? Right then, boys, pick up your things. Let’s get you home.’
Flora smiled encouragingly at the pair as they turned to look over their shoulders at her, following like a pair of bedraggled ducklings in Mrs Carmichael’s wake. With a cheery wave of her damp dish towel, she said, ‘Bye then, boys. I’ll see you around.’
Stuart draped an arm protectively around his brother’s shoulder, ushering him on towards their first night in a strange bedroom in an unfamiliar house. And her heart swelled again with emotion as she remembered how Alec and Ruaridh used to do the exact same thing when they were young, on the football field or plotting their next adventure in the den among the trees: another pair of brothers-in-arms.
Lexie, 1978
On the days when the weather allows it, Daisy and I have got into the habit of walking down to the jetty. Or rather I walk and Daisy commands which direction to take from her perch in the baby carrier on my shoulders. There’s always plenty to see. She likes to check up on the sheep in the field behind the hall, leaning out of the carrier to peer behind the corrugated half-cylinder of the hall’s wartime extension and watch the flock diligently cropping the grass.
‘In the springtime, there’ll be lambs,’ I tell her.
‘Lat,’ she says, approvingly. Her speech really is coming on in leaps and bounds.
When we first got here, I would walk with her on the more solitary path that leads from Keeper’s Cottage up through the pine trees to Ardtuath House. The ‘Big Hoose’, as it’s known locally, is shut up most of the time, only used very occasionally for shooting or fishing weekends. But there was something so bleak about the façade of the deserted house, with its forbidding, darkened windows and air of abandonment, that it made me want to seek out happier places to walk. My mood is low enough already without any additional dampeners. And so we’ve taken to heading towards the village, the risk of having to be sociable being a lesser evil than the risk of complete and utter despondency.
We walk past the row of cottages, where we are usually accosted by someone weeding flowerbeds or trimming hedges in their front garden. Daisy enjoys the attention, even if I do not.
I nod and smile, responding to the social niceties. ‘Yes, she’s getting bigger every day. Yes, thanks, we’ve settled in fine. I know, isn’t it a grand day for a walk?’ And all the time I’m hoping that my smile is doing a good job of hiding how desperately lonely I feel. While I know I should value these simple daily connections, to my mind they only serve