The Wind from the Sea

  THE

  WIND

  FROM THE

  SEA

  By the same author

  The Valley of the Vines

  A Strange Inheritance

  Another Chance, Another Life

  THE

  WIND

  FROM THE

  SEA

  Mark Neilson

  ROBERT HALE

  First published in 2017 by

  Robert Hale, an imprint of

  The Crowood Press Ltd,

  Ramsbury, Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  www.halebooks.com

  © Mark Neilson 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 71982 161 5

  The right of Mark Neilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  To Pat

  For all the hours you have spent alone

  while I was writing

  Chapter 1

  Clouds pressed on the sea’s horizon, turning it into a solid bar of black. Out on the pier head, the wind had an edge that cut through everything, and brought heavy seas thudding into the sheltering walls. It was May, almost summertime – but nobody had told the Buckie weather that.

  Mary Cowie drew the old woollen jacket more firmly about her shoulders, and breathed deeply. She was back where she belonged. The wind from the sea biting deep into her lungs, driving away the smells of disinfectant and sickness, while the calls of the seabirds wheeling overhead drowned the memory of men crying out in fear and pain. She had come home, from the war. To start out in life again.

  A gust of wind whipped dark hair around her face. Absentmindedly, she tried to tuck it beneath the jacket’s hood – then gave up and threw her head back as the wind streamed round her. The thought of this moment had kept her going, been her talisman through five years in front line hospital units, then in the convalescent hospital back in England after the war had finished.

  She leaned into the wind, like a carved figurehead on an old schooner, drinking in the keen fresh air. Then shuddered, wrapped the jacket around herself again, and began to retrace her steps to the inner harbour.

  ‘That’s never Mary Cowie?’ A young fisherman paused in the act of mending his nets, looking up from the deck of his boat. Dark curls spilled over his weather-burned face and bright blue eyes.

  Mary smiled. ‘Trust you to be the first to see me, Andy. Yes, I’m back home, at last – the prodigal daughter returned.’

  He grinned. ‘Don’t expect a fatted calf. The way the fishing’s been, a couple of stale salt herrings are as much as we can run to. What’s kept you so long?’

  ‘I’ve been working down south. Nursing the boys who came back from the war on a hospital train.’

  He pulled a face, and began to stitch the nets again.

  Amazing how quickly people wanted to forget the war, she thought bleakly. Above all else, forget the casualties who now made them feel uncomfortable.

  ‘Home for good? Or just visiting?’ he called up.

  ‘I’ve done my shift at nursing,’ she said. ‘So I am here to stay. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away again.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’ve missed you. All the young lads have been missing you.’

  ‘Away with your blethers!’ she laughed. ‘I’m old enough to be their mother.’

  He tilted his head, smiling. ‘You don’t look it,’ he judged. ‘Not yet.’

  She picked up a piece of dried seaweed from the quay, and threw it down at him. He ducked, laughing, as it drifted down into the harbour water between them.

  ‘Where’s your brother, Neil?’ she asked.

  Andy’s face sobered. Closed up, almost. ‘Like you, he’s late back.’

  ‘Working somewhere else?’

  ‘No. In hospital.’

  ‘Oh.’ She waited, but nothing else was volunteered. ‘In hospital’ could mean anything – or nothing. Lots of lads had hung back, to keep their wounded mates company. Even to help hard-pressed staff, as porters. ‘Good to see you anyway, Andy. Tell Neil I was asking for him, next time you write.’

  The head dropped back down over his nets. ‘I’m not one for writing.’

  She nodded. Like most local men, Andy Findlay had left school at twelve with nothing in his head but a desire to get out on his father’s fishing boat, following his brother Neil. Most fishing boats were family-run, sons taking over when the father retired as skipper. As Neil had done, then gone on to prove his worth – a new skipper, inheriting his father’s instinct for fish, sensing their every twist and turn in the sea. Catches meant wages, and men queued to work for him.

  Old faces: the town would be full of them. She must drop in and see Aggie, a visit that would be something of a two-edged sword. It would be wonderful to meet her one-time best friend again: but that friend was now a war widow, with a young son who had never seen his father. Like plenty of others, in a Britain woefully damaged by the War.

  That sick old war had a lot to answer for, she thought grimly. A lot of local lads had volunteered for service in the Gordons, then marched raggedly off to the railway station and a Pals’ Battalion. Only a few came back to tell the tale. The rest were still in Flanders and the other battlefields: pushing up daisies, as the wounded survivors jested with their gallows humour.

  Mary stopped, her face troubled. It was the future she should be thinking about, not the past and its scars. Lest she find herself reliving the old nightmares again, of a young VAD thrown into front line nursing. Learning fast as she had to cope with the ongoing flood of torn and broken men and diseased wounds.

  It was this omnipresent corruption which had driven her to transfer into one of the Elsie Inglis Scottish Women’s Hospital’s front line units, with their firm belief that the sooner nursing and surgical help could be provided, the greater the number of casualties who would survive their wounds. Whereas the War Office practice of shipping the wounded back to distant military hospitals with only primitive dressings on their wounds had meant that the filth of the battlefield had poisoned the damaged tissue, and gangrene was often a bigger threat than the wound itself.

  She had suffered her fill of shock and horror. Now she was turning back the clock to her girlhood and her years as a young fisherlass. At the grand old age of twenty-five, trying to rediscover the joy and hope which that girl had once taken as boring and normal.

  Mary looked across the harbour, up into the new town, which ran parallel to the sea front. There were figures everywhere; men wheeling barrows at the fish merchants’ sheds, men lounging in doorways at the chandlers’ and the sail-makers’, filling bags on the colliers’ quay, walking along past the seafront shops. Men and women going about their normal business. Living life quietly. As it should be lived.

  She was home. Ready to remake her life and become a ‘gutter quine’ again, a fisherlass following the local fleet from port to port once the herring season started in earnest, gutting and grading the fish which were brought to her table, her hands moving so fast the individual actions of cutting, gutting and grading were simply a twist of the fingers and her wrist.

  And the place to make her start was the visit she feared the most.

  Mary braced herself. She would go and visit her once-best friend, the war widow with a new bairn hanging onto her
skirts. Because Aggie, like herself, had to find a way to live her life again. Perhaps they could discover it together.

  Nobody could mistake him for anything other than a soldier. From the close-cropped hair, greying at the temples, down through the granite-set face, the broad shoulders swaying to the regular marching stride, everything about him shrieked military.

  His dusty boots pounded out the miles along the road to the Banffshire coast, looking as if they could march forever. From the dust of travel on the man’s clothes too, they might have done that already. The wind moaned, the sun scattered shadows, the pulses of rain slanted down. The steady stride never faltered: this soldier had marched through a whole lot worse than this.

  He turned, almost marking time as the inside man on an invisible file of soldiers, where a narrow road branched off down the shallow hill and dropped to the dark blue steel of the sea. Grey houses sat in neat rows down below him: the harbour lay behind these, he knew. Just as he knew there would be faces in that harbour, and in the tiny fisher villages that made up the town, there would be eyes upon him that he would struggle to meet. Because of the men who had marched with him up this road in another lifetime, as a ragged, jesting volunteer corps. The least he could do was to march their shadows back down the road, in silent, soldierly style.

  The sun blinked out from behind a cloud as he strode through the first scattered group of houses in the new town that a laird had once planned above the sea towns and the harbour. Down to the start of the town proper, the tall, grey houses and the scattered shops. In the distance, seagulls wheeled and called.

  He marched on, oblivious to the curious stares from the women entering and leaving the shops. There was something about him which was familiar, but it edged away from their minds. Just another soldier laddie, dropping in for a mouthful of food and a drink if he’d enough money in his pocket. On his long way home. A journey which a lot of their own Buckie loons would never make.

  At the crossroads, among the horses and carts, a charabanc backfired.

  It happened so often these days that few people noticed. But the soldier, at the very instant of the noise, threw himself into a rolling dive that took him into the shelter of a shop doorway, scattering the women there. Just as quickly, he was on his hands and knees, peering out round the corner of the doorway.

  Tense as a coiled spring for a few seconds. Then his head drooped.

  The man sighed, and pushed himself back to his feet, dusting down the well-worn uniform. Only then, it seemed, did he become conscious of the women watching, one with a small child clutching at her skirts, grubby hands to his mouth.

  He stood up awkwardly. Raised his own hand, in mute apology.

  Then with an effort that was worth a medal in itself, he straightened his shoulders, set his head back in the same granite-hard angle it had held before, and began marching again, down to the harbour. With a driven intensity.

  Behind him, two women watched. ‘Have you ever seen the like …’ the older woman said breathlessly. ‘What got into the lad?’

  ‘He thought it was the guns,’ the younger woman said, her arm already round the child, offering automatic security and comfort.

  ‘From the war?’

  ‘Where else?’ The young woman gathered the boy in front of her. ‘And do you know who he was?’ she asked. ‘That was Neil Findlay, Eric Findlay’s son.’

  The older woman shielded her eyes. ‘I’d never have known him,’ she said. ‘He’s changed so much.’

  ‘Haven’t they all?’ the young woman said bitterly. ‘The ones who came back are all different men. But better different, than dead.’ She stared after the marching figure. ‘That frightened laddie was once the best skipper sailing out of Buckie.’

  ‘Maybe he was,’ the older woman said. ‘But he’s a sick man now …’

  ‘I thought you said that the bread was stale,’ said Mary, nibbling a sandwich.

  ‘Even the seagulls turned it down,’ smiled Chrissie Buchan.

  ‘Then they’re better fed than they were before I left,’ Mary replied.

  Chrissie sighed. ‘Old bread’s cheaper than new. With no man in the house, every farthing has to do the work of two. The local boys are good. Fishermen look after their own – especially the ones who worked with Tom. They drop in to leave us some fish, or old clothes for the bairn. They don’t insult us with money – although there’s not much of that around.’

  ‘Has the fishing been bad? Andy Findlay said as much.’

  ‘There were barely a dozen boats working from the harbour in the war – and there’s only half the usual fleet getting provisioned for the herring season.’

  The one sure thing about fishing was that the good years were more than balanced by bad ones, Mary thought. The whole community enjoyed the first, and tightened its belt to survive the second. Not just the fisher folk. But all the trades which supplied them, from the sail-makers to the coal merchants.

  ‘Sounds grim,’ she said. She hesitated, then asked: ‘How is Aggie taking Tom’s death? It’s two years now, isn’t it?’

  Chrissie grimaced. She feared, as well as felt, for her daughter. ‘She’s taking it sore. She’s left with a child who has no father, and no money coming in. Is that why you’re here? To take her back to work on the fish?’

  The old woman’s eyes were shrewd, compassionate. The young woman in front of her had deep lines round her mouth and eyes, where there had been laughter before. The war had left its mark on her. And if she was back to stay, then she was back to work. In a fisher town, there was no other option.

  Mary nodded. ‘The Lord helps them that help themselves,’ she said. ‘I’ve dropped in to see if Aggie will make up a gutting team for the season. And ask if she knows anybody who can work as our packer.’

  It was the traditional way of working: two women gutting and grading the herring, while the third laid out the filleted carcases neatly in barrels, and scattered salt to preserve them. Back-breaking work for all three – especially the packer.

  The outside door clicked open and a gust of Buckie wind surged in.

  ‘That’s her. Ask her now. Aggie! We’ve a visitor,’ Chrissie called through.

  The door opened slowly: almost defensively. The child was pushed through first, with the mother following. She peered through the gloom of the cottage, then her whole face lit up.

  ‘Mary! Mary Cowie! You’ve come home at last.’

  The two women embraced. Aggie finally pushed Mary out to arm’s length.

  ‘You look older, quine. Nearly as old as me.’

  ‘Fresh air and good food will sort that out. For both of us.’

  ‘We can manage the air,’ Aggie said drily. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘To see you. To try and say what I couldn’t write, about Tom.’

  Aggie turned away, walking over to the sideboard where a soldier’s photograph stood in pride of place. She touched it gently. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t even try. There’s nothing will bring him back. He was such a quiet and gentle loon – the world’s worst soldier. Such a waste of a decent man.’

  Mary walked quietly over. Placed a silent hand on her friend’s shoulder.

  Aggie blinked, tears filling her eyes. She had flooded oceans with her tears, yet still they came. She reached back, to cover Mary’s hand with her own.

  Mary set out from Aggie’s house, and found herself down into the harbour again, instinct guiding her feet. She realized with a start that she had walked round the far quay of the inner harbour, out to the tumble of old nets which rotted there.

  She shook her head in annoyance, and turned back. Then saw the figure of a man, sitting hunched up, with his head resting on folded arms. The nets were gathered round him – as much for a screen, she sensed, as shelter from the wind.

  The nurse in her reacted before she had time to think. She walked quickly over, kneeled down. Gently touched the bowed shoulder, which flinched.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Do you need
any help?’

  The face came up, the eyes glazed. He had bitten his lip, she saw: and chewed the knuckles of his right hand, until they bled. He stared blindly at her, and through her – a look she knew only too well from the convalescent hospital.

  Mary’s heart lurched. ‘Is that you, Neil? Dear God, is that really you?’

  He blinked. ‘Couldn’t do it,’ he said thickly. ‘Couldn’t face them.’

  ‘Do what? Face who?’

  ‘Everybody. All the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the friends of the boys I didn’t bring back home …’

  As he spoke, his voice wavered, and his whole body began to shake. She saw the big hands grip his knees until the knuckles showed white. Without effect.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Can’t stop it. Shell-shock.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I have seen it often enough.’

  She reached out and firmly prised the big hands free, holding them in her own two hands and waiting until the shaking eased. Giving him the human contact that meant so much to men, when they’d got lost like this inside their minds.

  He glanced up from hunched shoulders. ‘You were there. At the war.’

  ‘I was. And many’s the time I wished I’d never seen France or Belgium.’

  The shaking stopped. Head still down, he released her hands. There were white marks where his fingers had gripped. ‘Came out of nowhere, the shaking,’ he mumbled. ‘For years, I was fine. Scared, but coping. Like we all were. Then one morning, I couldn’t give an order, or even lift my own rifle without dropping it.’

  The grey eyes came up, defiant and with something ironic in them.

  ‘I’m one of the lucky ones,’ he said. ‘The generals shot boys that were far worse than me.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘From what I saw, it was the generals they should have shot, and saved the men.’

  He laughed. An unsteady bark.

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘That’s what we thought too.’

  She studied him. His eyes were calm now, steady and direct. ‘Have you been back home, Neil?’