Caroline Deacon
Journalist and author based in Scotland, UK

Carved from Wood

The Homecoming

Inverness - October 1945
“Before the war, it was summer all the year round.”
George Orwell – Coming up for Air (1903-1950)

The two young women linked arms for comfort as they crossed the slippery cobbles and readied themselves to walk beneath the blackened archway that led into the busy station.
“He’ll be there, won’t he?” the taller one whispered, to which the other replied, with a reassuring squeeze of the arm, “Aye, that he will, surely to God. Not much longer now!”
 Already they could hear impatient whistles, belching steam and the clanking of iron rods lumbering up for journeys to scattered destinations. It seemed a whole world away from the quiet swish, swish of the sea with its salty fresh smell, which they had left behind in the dark, early hours of that day, stepping onto the bus for their long and sickeningly bumpy ride to Inverness. Their ears were now being assaulted by a cacophony of voices; English speaking mostly, but also Gaelic, and some Polish and Italian. Soot particles were stinging their eyes, making it difficult to peer through the smoke and the urgent, bustling crowds to discover where and when the train was due to arrive.
They spotted the platform they wanted and settled themselves to wait in a place where they would be able to see all the disembarking passengers. When the train became visible in the distance, the taller of the two girls began to shuffle her feet, lifting one, and then the other, rubbing each up and down the back of the supporting leg, a fidgeting that was causing her to wrinkle her stockings. The other girl was craning her neck forward as if the extra inches would give her better vision and tapping her fingers on her friend’s forearm. Neither reprimanded the other for these signs of impatience.
The giant LMS engine’s brakes let out a long screech of protest and the train juddered, slowing towards them, heavy doors flinging open already; the end of the line, the hundreds of people crammed into every corner desperate to get out and breathe in fresh Highland air.
Porters were readying wooden trolleys near the first class carriages, taking hold of the gloved hands of fur clad ladies to steady them down the steps, rushing to help the gentlemen in their tweeds and plus fours to unload their leather trunks and gun cases, obviously up to catch the last of the stalking. The toffs seemed oblivious to the mass of people in shabby coats who streamed noisily, like a burn in spate, from the third class carriages.
The girls now stood motionless, clutching each other, straining their eyes for that first glimpse of a tall young man with pale blue eyes and thick curly red hair; hair which they had last seen nearly six years ago shorn and tamed under a jaunty new army cap. Six feet two with broad shoulders, he’d been the nemesis of many an opposition shinty team.
“What do I have to fear from war?” he’d asked them, as he kissed each of them in turn goodbye, spinning them off their feet till they were dizzy.
Elsie, the taller girl, was waiting for her beloved big brother, her protector in their small village school, the boy who had hauled her up the grassy cliffs to look for puffin burrows and gulls eggs in endless summer days. Last time they’d been together she was only fourteen and small for her age; the years had given her another four or five inches.  Morag, although shorter, was two years older, and for her, this returning soldier was the lad who had courted her as she struggled shyly into womanhood, who had awoken in her a deep longing with his hot kisses behind the dry stone walls before war dragged him away to the other side of the world.
After the regiment had left Aberdeen to head south and there was no more chance of home leave, letters began to arrive, and the girls spent every spare hour together pouring over these. The early ones were writ large with a confident hand; later on, the writing became tiny to make the most of scraps of paper. All had smelt to them of exotic places and were franked with stamps of lurid colours, foreign to the pale pastels and turquoises of their home.
Their families read in the paper about the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941 and tried to imagine his role in this. Elsie’s grandfather’s comment: “’Tis as well we don’t have all that carry on for Christmas Day that the English folk do; parties and presents and the like,” received fervent nods; had he been fighting for his life to protect this island while those in London and such places were exchanging presents and making merry?
After that, the Hogmanay celebrations were muted, discussions of the progress of the war in the Far East not far from anyone’s lips who had a son or father in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Then on February 16th 1942, they heard that Singapore had fallen. Not long after came the dreaded telegram, “missing, believed captured”. Elsie had immediately conjured up a somewhat confused vision of him being lassoed with a rope while standing in very tall grass, Morag had pictured a small man with a yellow face pointing a gun at her tall handsome hero who was standing with his hands up, an awful parody of their own childhood games.
 They’d endured another long wait, and then confirmation; a Red Cross postcard, which was signed by his own hand, to say that he was indeed captured by the enemy, but that he was alive. By this time Morag was 18 and working in Glasgow, doing her bit for the war effort, assembling weapons. From the moment she heard what had become of him, every day’s work had felt like a personal mission; she wanted to produce the bomb that would end this war and bring him home again.
 Stories began to circulate in Glasgow about how the Japanese were treating their prisoners, about torture and starvation, and Morag listened with a horrified anxiety, wanting to hear, but not wanting to. It was like picking at a scab, she thought, or maybe more like watching the aftermath of one of the bombing raids near the Clydebank, in that she wanted not to think about it, but at the same time she would linger, afraid of not knowing, afraid that what lurked in her imagination might be worse.
VE Day came and the country celebrated. Morag went about her daily business in limbo, feeling out of touch as troops arrived home, filling the streets of Glasgow, and every smiling face was like a slap, reminding her that Ruaridh was still out there, still in danger. Unable to bear it she went home to be with Elsie and the rest of the community, hanging on through that long summer, waiting and wanting. Eventually VJ day, 15th August, came and went, and another wait and finally, finally, the letter came. The letter that they had prayed for every Sunday in the tiny white harled church, their prayers carried aloft by screaming gulls, to say that he was free and was travelling home, would be on the train which now, at last, stood before them on this chilly autumn day.
The last of the porters strode by them, pushing their trolleys. They ignored the girls in their faded skirts and patched jackets. Morag and Elsie exchanged worried glances. Where was their returning hero? The platform began to empty. They watched the stragglers; older people in dusty black coats and head scarves or hats, struggling out of the carriage doors clutching brown paper packages and wicker baskets, ready for a day of messages in the town. Now they could not look at each other, the thought they dare not express out loud passing between them silently; had he missed the train? Perhaps it was all a dream, and he was still imprisoned on the other side of the world by “those cruel heathen Japs with their slitty eyes” who their minister had railed against from his towering pulpit.
Then, from the last carriage, an old soldier wobbled down the steps. Thin, bald or perhaps with sparse grey, certainly not worth mentioning, hair tucked under the faded army cap. Hunched over a stick which seemed to be all that kept his frail body from sinking into the platform. Surely this person, someone’s beloved grandfather, was too old to have fought in this war? They watched as he turned back to the train, struggling to pull a new and garish yellow bag down the steps onto the platform. At once the girls raced forward to help this old man whom no-one had come to meet.
As he heard them approach, the old soldier turned slowly round to face them, and smiled at them a toothless smile, pale shrunken gums showing through thinned splintered lips. Elsie smiled politely back at this stranger, then turned, puzzled, to look at her friend as she gasped. Morag had known the stranger through his eyes, which were, as they had always been, that pale colour of the bluebells.
“Ruaridh! ’Tis you!” Inside, a long forgotten lament, part of a song once sung by her mother, sprang into her mind unbidden, “fiùran ùr a’ chùil chleachdaich:” the young sapling of the curly hair. Where had that young man gone? No matter. He was home.