“Taking the time from me! Right, pipers? It’s p’fickly simple. S’easy. One, two, an’ off we go!”
It was a nightmare, it really was. I had avoided being in the sixty-four; from where I was standing it looked like a crowd scene from “The Ten Commandments”, with the General playing Cecil de Mille. Officers, mess-waiters, batmen, swung into the dance as the pipes shrilled, setting to partners, circling forwards and back, forming an enormous ring, and heughing like things demented. The General bounded about the veranda, shouting; the pipe-sergeant hurtled through the sets, pulling, directing, exhorting; those of us watching clapped and stamped as the mammoth dance surged on, filling the night with its sound and fury.
It took, I am told, one hour and thirteen minutes by the Adjutant’s watch, and by the time it was over the Fusiliers from the adjoining barracks were roused and lined along the wall, assorted Arabs had come to gaze on the wonders of civilisation, and the military police mobile patrol was also on hand. But the General was tireless; I have a vague memory of him standing on the tailboard of a truck, addressing the assembled mob; I actually got close enough to hear him exhorting the pipe-sergeant in tones of enthusiasm and entreaty:
“Pipe-sarn’t! Pipey! May I call you Pipey? … never been done … three figures … think of it … hunner’n-twenty-eightsome … never another chance … try it … rope in the Fusiliers … massed pipers … regimental history … please, Pipey, for me …”
Some say that it actually happened, that a one hundred and twenty-eightsome reel was danced on the parade ground that night, General Sir Roderick MacCrimmon, K.C.B., D.S.O., and bar, presiding; that it was danced by Highlanders, Fusiliers, Arabs, military police, and three German prisoners of war; that it was danced to a conclusion, all figures. It may well have been; all I remember is a heaving, rushing crowd, like a mixture of Latin Carnival and Scarlett’s uphill charge at Balaclava, surging ponderously to the sound of the pipes; but I distinctly recall one set in which the General, the pipe-sergeant, and what looked like a genuine Senussi in a burnous, swept by roaring, “One, two, three,” and I know, too, that at one point I personally was part of a swinging human chain in which my immediate partners were the Fusiliers’ cook-sergeant and an Italian café proprietor from down the road. My memory tells me that it rose to a tremendous crescendo just as the first light of dawn stole over Africa, and then all faded away, silently, in the tartan-strewn morning.
No one remembers the General leaving later in the day, although the Colonel said he believed he was there, and that the General cried with emotion. It may have been so, for the inspection report later congratulated the battalion, and highly commended the pipe-sergeant on the standard of the officers’ dancing. Which was a mixed pleasure to the pipe-sergeant, since the night’s proceedings had been an offence to his orthodox soul.
“Mind you,” he would say, “General MacCrimmon had a fine agility at the pas-de-bas, and a decent sense of the time. Och, aye, he wass not bad, not bad … for a Campbell.”
I had two grandmothers, one Presbyterian, the other pagan. Each told me stories, in her own way. The pagan, an incredibly old, bright-eyed creature from the Far West, peopled the world with kelpies and pixies and giants, or fair cold princesses and their sea-rover lovers; these were the tales her people had brought in the long ships centuries ago. And sometimes she would tell of our more immediate mainland ancestors, of the Red Fox and Robin Roy Macgregor and the caterans of the Highlands and the dirty tricks they played each other. But always her stories were full of passion and fighting and magic and cunning stratagems, and above all, laughter. Watching her old, wrinkled face, so eager, and the play of her ancient thin hands, it was easy to believe that her own grandmother had known a woman who had seen the men coming back from the ’45, thrusting their broadswords into the thatch for another time, and stamping while the tears ran down their faces. Afterwards she would give me a penny or a potato scone, which she baked with great skill.
My other grandmother had only one story, the point of which eludes me still. She was a Glencoe MacDonald, strong and of few words, worshipping a stern God on whom she kept a close eye to see that he didn’t get up to anything the Presbytery wouldn’t have approved of, like granting salvation to Catholics and Wee Frees. She frightened me, for she was hard and forbidding and insisted that we walk miles to church on Sundays. On these walks I was naturally forbidden to take my ball; on weekdays I could dribble it along beside her, and on one occasion she even condescended to kick it, watching it with a cold eye to see that it rolled straight. It did. And it was on that occasion that she told me the story; the sight of a distant train puffing along the hillside had brought it to mind.
It appears that on the West Highland railway near Tyndrum there was a steep hill. A train of cattle in open trucks was steaming up it, when a coupling broke and the trucks began to run back downhill. In the rear truck was the elderly guard and a young assistant, and the guard, as the train gathered speed, cried to the young man:
“When you see me shump, you shump too. Better to be killed on the bank than smochtered among the cattle.”
They had both jumped, and the young man broke his ankle and the old guard smashed his watch, and the train thundered on to the bottom of the hill and glided gradually to a stop in perfect safety.
At this point my grandmother paused, and I waited for the punchline. She stood gazing out across the glen with that stony look that she would fasten on the minister if he looked like letting up in his sermon after a mere forty minutes; her mind was away somewhere else.
“And that,” she said impressively at last, “is what happened on the West Highland railway.”
I thought it was a pretty feeble story then, and it doesn’t look much better in retrospect, although I have a feeling she saw a point to it which she didn’t explain. But both the story and that grim old lady who told it come back to me every time I smell engine smoke or hear a whistle wail. I have remembered it on the long haul across the prairies, where the horizon stretches out for ever; on the sweaty Punjab Mail, jam-packed inside with white-robed Orientals, with more on the roof and in the windows and doorways and fat babus clinging for dear life a yard above the tracks; in the damp, blacked-out, blue-lit corridors of war-time trains clanking on and halting interminably; in football specials carrying the raucous, boozed-up supporters to Wembley; in a huge German train rattling across France with its solemn script notices, like ancient texts, telling you that pots were to be found under the seats, by order; in little trains at country halts, where beyond the misted windows you could see the glare of the porters’ lamps and hear the sudden bang of a carriage door and the lonely call of “Symington!” or “Tebay!”
Most of all I remembered it on the Cairo—Jerusalem run in 1946 or ’47, when the Stern Gang and the Irgun were at large, and the windows were sometimes boarded because the glass had been shot out, and lines were being blown up, and the illegal immigrant ships were coming in through the blockade, and a new nation was being uncomfortably born in a welter of hatred and confusion and total misunderstanding on all sides. Ben Hecht was having a holiday in his heart every time a British soldier died, and British soldiers were having a holiday in theirs at the prospect of getting away from a country they detested, in which some kind of illusion was shattered for them because the names of Bible stories had turned out to be places where machine-pistols rattled and grenades came in through windows. In the U.N. there was much talk and seeking of viable solutions and exploration of channels, and in the Palestine clubs young subalterns danced with their guns pushed round out of the way but still handy.
It was my gun that had got me into trouble. I had been on a course up at Acre—one of those courses where you walk miles across stony hills and look at maps, and