Something stirs in the depths of my memory. Maybe there was something familiar about those slate-blue eyes of his, but I can’t quite place him. I reach to grasp at dim thoughts, but they dart away, just beyond my reach, slippery as fish.
I fill the kettle from the tap and set it on the stove to boil. As I take the old brown teapot down from its place on the shelf, a breaker of grief crashes over me, knocking the breath from my chest. Mum’s voice seems to fill the kitchen around me, singing that same song, and I hug the pot to my heart.
‘Oh dig my grave both lang and deep
Put a bunch o’ roses at my head and feet
And in the middle a turtle dove,
Let the people ken that I died o’ love . . .’
She always had a pot of tea on the go, forever bringing me a mug whether I wanted it or not. But the sight of that old teapot makes me realise that they were never just cups of tea she was giving me. They were some of the punctuation marks that helped make sense of our story together – those little pauses and connections that I took for granted. Those cups of tea were just one of the ways she let me know she loved me, several times a day.
With the words of her song still echoing in my head, I go through to the sitting room and take the photo of my dad off the mantelpiece. His dark eyes are unfathomable, hidden in shadow in the picture, which is the only one I have of him. His name was Alec Mackenzie-Grant, he was in the navy, and he died before I was born. But I know little else about him. When I’d pester Mum to tell me stories of him she always spoke of his kindness, of how he’d loved her and how he would have loved me had he known me. But when I pushed her to tell me more, when I asked her about his parents – my grandparents – and his life as the laird’s son up at the big house, she’d been evasive. She’d always change the subject, saying, ‘Did I tell you about the time Alec and your Uncle Ruaridh went out in the boat to catch mackerel and saw a basking shark?’ And although I’d heard the story a hundred times, I’d let her tell it again.
It was only as I grew older that I realised how hard it must have been for her, contemplating the life she might have had as mistress of Ardtuath House and perhaps regretting the life she’d not been able to give me. And so I learned to stop asking those questions, which only made her look so sad. But I always wondered about my dad – who he really was and why Mum was reluctant to talk about his side of the family. Her stories were of the innocence of childhood, an innocence that the tides of war must have swept away. It’s understandable that there were things she wanted to protect me from, things she wanted to forget. But now I regret not asking her again. I regret not knowing their story. I regret that it’s a part of my own story that is now lost to me.
I set his picture back in its place, next to the one of my mum. I don’t even have a photo of the pair of them together and that thought saddens me even more.
The kettle whistles as the water comes to the boil, calling me back to the here and now, and I wipe a tear away on the sleeve of my dressing gown. Back in the kitchen I warm the pot, spoon in the leaves from the tin caddy on the counter and let them steep. A proper pot of tea, just the way my mum, Flora, always made it.
And then I hear Daisy stirring and I hurry back to scoop her up from the bed and make her day begin with a smile.
Flora, 1939
Flora Gordon added peat to the range and set the kettle on the stovetop to boil. The waters of the loch were just beginning to turn pearly-grey in the light of the dawn. Her father would be home any minute, back from giving the animals their early feed, and he’d be needing his breakfast and a warming cup of tea.
She heard his boots on the path, accompanied by the lighter patter of Braan’s paws. The black Labrador was always at his side, whether he was checking on the ponies in the field and the working dogs in their kennel behind the steading, or out on the hill keeping an eye on the game birds and deer for which, as keeper on the Ardtuath Estate, he was responsible.
She hummed a tune softly under her breath and the kettle joined in, muttering and whistling to itself. She set the pan of oatmeal that had been steeping all night on to the heat, adding a pinch of salt and giving it a good stir. Then she warmed the brown teapot and spooned in the leaves from the caddy, her movements quick and deft with the efficiency born of habit.
Braan bounced through the kitchen door, tail wagging, looking for a pat from her before burying his snout in the tin bowl containing his own breakfast.
‘All right, Dad?’ she asked, expecting that the answer would be his usual silent nod as he took his seat at the head of the table and stretched out his feet in their thick woollen socks towards the warmth of the range.
But this morning he went instead to stand at the window looking out across the loch. ‘Looks like we have visitors,’ he said, nodding towards the water.
Drying her hands on the cloth that hung beside the stove, Flora joined him.
In the silence of the early light, a line of ships slid into view. Their grey hulls moved slowly, but with a power that parted the waves with ease. The air around them appeared to vibrate, agitating the seabirds that wheeled above them. She counted five vessels. They seemed to have materialised like leviathans risen from the waters of the loch, awoken from their slumber by the declaration, just ten days ago, that Britain was now at war with Germany.
Her father picked up the pair of binoculars from the windowsill and looked through the sights. Wordlessly, he passed them to Flora. The ships bristled with guns and antennae and as they drew closer she could hear the thrum of their engines.
‘That’ll be the Home Fleet then, I reckon,’ her father said.
Flora shivered with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. ‘But what would they be doing here? The war is hundreds of miles away.’
Her father looked at her shrewdly from beneath his shock of white hair. ‘It was hundreds of miles away, lass. But not any more.’
‘Might Ruaridh be on one of them, do you think?’ Flora’s heart leapt at the thought. Her brother had joined the Royal Navy two years before, and she sorely missed him. Like so many lads who’d grown up on that coast, he was as at home on the water as he was on the hills.
‘I doubt it. His last letter said he was in Portsmouth, assigned to destroyers. They’re smaller than those battleships out there. He could be deployed anywhere by now.’
As they watched, the leading ship manoeuvred slowly to a halt and dropped anchor with a rattle of chains audible even at this distance. Flora handed the binoculars back to her father. ‘What do you think they’re doing here in Loch Ewe?’
He shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.’
He turned away from the window, but not before she’d glimpsed the look in his eyes. Although his bearing was as upright as ever and his manner as calm as usual, she could tell the war filled him with dread. He was fearful for what it meant for his son, far away in England, and now the arrival of these warships in the peaceful waters of the loch below Keeper’s Cottage had brought that sense of dread right up to their front door. The presence of her tall, capable father who was so at ease in these hills – a man trusted by the laird to oversee the Ardtuath Estate and a figure so respected in the lochside community – had always made her feel safe. But that glimpse of fear in his eyes made her feel that a fault line had cracked open in the ground beneath her feet, disturbing the equilibrium of their lives.