‘Just clutch them as you board and the crew will never notice,’ he advised us.
He was correct. As we climbed into the cavernous empty hold of the helicopter, the crew stared at us with inane drunken grins and watery eyes and I realized we probably could have been holding anything at all, or nothing, and they would have been oblivious to it. The beast swallowed us like Jonah’s whale and took off. We bounced about in the huge metal barrel, as the pilots employed ‘tactical flying’ which meant flying horribly low, hugging the hillsides and swinging from one side of the valley to the other. This presumably was necessary to reduce the risk of being shot down, but I did wonder how much of it was just caused by drunk driving. Either way I secretly wished we had decided to return by those forest tracks. But we did eventually land safely in Split and found our large truck, Mary, waiting faithfully to take us home. We would have hugged her if our arms had been long enough.
2
To believe in something and not live it is dishonest.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Right through our childhood and beyond, the River Orchy was normally our friend, especially on days like this when the incessant rain and gushing feeder streams had it lapping the edge of our only road out. The prospect of a flooding river cutting us off from the rest of Dalmally was usually an exciting one, particularly when it meant a day off school. The Orchy had been a water playground running through every season of our childhood. On warm summer days we would carry our rubber dinghy up to Corryghoil, a slow-moving pool with a sandy beach, and swim in the cool deep water. Sometimes Dad would put the little boat on his old Rover trailer and take it further up the glen so we could ride it over waterfalls and beneath overhanging branches, all the way down to the old stone bridge. Occasionally in the winter the ice froze thick and we would meet our friends who lived on the other side, to ‘skate’ in our trainers or play ‘ice hockey’ with our shinty sticks and a stone for a puck. In the autumn we spent long hours trying to catch salmon as they battled upstream to spawn, our rare successes worth the wait, as we returned home victorious with a delicious silver fish and excited tales of how it had been caught.
But on this late autumn day in 1983, we worried as we watched the water’s creeping invasion of the fields below our house and noticed that neighbours Alasdair and Donald were moving their sheep to higher ground, for the following morning we were meant to be on our eagerly awaited flight to Yugoslavia. Long before the time arrived to begin our overnight drive to Heathrow Airport, the river was in full flood, the road submerged under an impassable torrent. It was then Dad explained he had thought ahead. He had parked our car earlier in the day, beyond the part of the road now flooded, and then walked back home. He handed us a torch and told us to get moving along the muddy hillside path above the flooded road. And so it was that our life-changing adventure began with a walk through darkness and driving rain, ankle-deep in mud with our luggage on our backs, while laughing at how Dad was always one step ahead.
It had all begun a few weeks earlier as we were sitting round the kitchen table after breakfast. Ruth, my sister, back home on holiday from university, looked up from her newspaper and said, ‘Look at this! It says here there are reports that the Virgin Mary is appearing to some teenagers in a place called Medjugorje in Yugoslavia!’ An excited conversation ensued. We were a devout Catholic family and knew about famous places like Lourdes where Our Lady had appeared in times gone by. We had even been, the previous year, on a family pilgrimage to the Marian shrine of Fatima in Portugal. But the idea that Our Lady could appear today, in our own time, was something that had never occurred to us before.
‘Mum, if this is even possibly true we should go,’ we implored. Our parents explained that they could not travel during the forthcoming Christmas holidays because of work to be done on the guest house (our home was a rambling old shooting and fishing lodge). We persevered and were amazed when they suggested that we should go on our own. Ruth and her boyfriend Ken were nineteen years old, while my brother Fergus and I were sixteen and fifteen respectively. Between that breakfast discussion and the day of the flood we discovered that the village of Medjugorje was near the town of Mostar but, beyond that, we hadn’t managed to locate it on a map, let alone figure out how we would travel there from the airport in Dubrovnik or where we would stay when we got there. ‘All part of the adventure,’ we thought, as did several of our cousins and a couple of university friends of Ruth and Ken’s who had asked to join us. So it was then, that ten of us, some rather muddy from the waist down, eventually boarded a flight from Heathrow to Dubrovnik.
In the stunningly beautiful walled city of Dubrovnik, perched on the edge of the sparkling blue Adriatic Sea, we managed to find a night’s lodging with a man who had only one English phrase, presumably learnt from watching American films. ‘Take it easy, sonofabitch!’ he would exclaim with a smile in answer to every question we asked of him. As far as we could understand, his boarding house was illegal, a little private enterprise that had no right to exist in this communist country. The next morning we discovered that during this holiday period there was no public transport available and eventually we resorted to hiring a couple of cars to reach our destination. Before long we were winding our way along the pretty coast and then up into steep mountains towards Mostar, all the while still laughing about the ‘sonofabitch’ man from the night before. We had been well warned that the police and communist authorities were not at all enthusiastic about the reported apparitions taking place in Medjugorje or the idea of foreigners travelling there. In fact, before our departure from Scotland, our parents had received calls from the Yugoslavian Embassy suggesting it would be irresponsible of them to allow us to go there. And so we were not terribly surprised when, a few miles from Medjugorje, we were stopped by policemen who questioned us about our reasons for being here. They let us go after a few minutes but did not look impressed when Ken had the audacity to ask them directions to the village from their roadblock.
Finally, we arrived in the little scattering of stone houses amid vineyards and fields of tobacco, and parked outside a white church with two spires that looked far too big for the tiny village around it. The other thing of immediate note was an enormous cross on top of the hill overlooking the village. On that weekday evening, we entered the church and to our amazement found it packed full. The people were saying the rosary and we could see that Mass was about to begin. It seemed nearly everyone else there was local. Tall, weather-beaten men, with huge farmers’ hands, old ladies dressed in black and families with young children sang and prayed with all their hearts. It was a Mass unlike anything we had ever experienced before and we were profoundly moved by this incredible spectacle of faith. After Mass the priest approached us, introduced himself as Father Slavko and asked us where we were from. He was amazed to hear we had travelled from Scotland and asked us where we planned to stay. We told him we didn’t know yet and he explained that there were no hotels or guest houses in the village. He introduced us to his sister and her family, who immediately insisted that we come and stay at their house. There were three sons in the family of similar ages to us, as well as their cousin Gordana, who was visiting from Australia on holiday. She patiently began translating for us, and for the next few days she never stopped! Aside from some conversations about Italian football – a shared passion of ours and the sons of the family – we talked about the extraordinary events that had been happening in this village.
They explained to us that on 24 June 1981, two teenagers from the village, while walking along the road one evening, saw a lady on the hillside who they recognized as the ‘Gospa’, the Croatian term for the Virgin Mary. The following days they were joined by four other children, who also saw her and heard her speak to them. She told them she was the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Peace. One of the first things she said to them was, ‘I have come to tell the world that God exists. He is fullness of life, and to enjoy the fullness and obtain peace you must return to God.’ From then on these six children began seeing and talking to the Virgin Mary daily and, within a few days, thousands of local