shaking his head.
“By George,” said he. “A brass band, hey? Stop you, and I’ll use that on Pipe-Major Macdonald, the next time he starts bumming his chat. No’ bad, no’ bad. And does the ither subalterns enjoy oor serenade?”
“I doubt if they’ve got my ear for music, pipey. Most of them probably think that if you played ‘Too Long in this Condition’ it would be more appropriate.”
He opened his eyes at that. “Too Long in this Condition” is a pibroch, long and weird and full of allusions to the MacCrimmons, and not the kind of thing that ignorant subalterns are expected to know about.
“Aye-aye, weel,” he said, smiling. “And you’re Mr MacNeill, aren’t you? D Company, if I remember. Ah-huh. Chust so.” He regarded me brightly, nodded, and turned away. “Look in at the office sometime, Mr MacNeill, if you have the inclination. Chust when you’re passing, you understand.”
And that small conversation was a step forward—a bigger one, really, than playing for the company football team, or getting my second pip as a full lieutenant, or even crossing the undefined line of acceptance by my own platoon—which I did quite unintentionally one night by losing my temper and slinging a mutinous Jock physically out of the canteen, in defiance of all common sense, military discipline, and officer-like conduct. For the pipey and I were friends from that morning on, and it is no small thing to be friends with a pipe-sergeant when you are trying to find your nervous feet in a Highland regiment.
He was in fact subordinate to the pipe-major and the drum-major, who were the executive heads of the band, but in his way he carried more weight than either of them. He was the musician, the authority on air and march and pibroch, the arbiter when it came to any question of quality in music or dancing. Years at his trade had left him with a curious deformity in which the facial muscles had given way on one side, so that when he blew, his cheek expanded like a balloon—an unnerving sight until you got used to it. He had enormous energy, both in movement and conversation, and was never still, buzzing about like a small tartan wasp, as when he was instructing young pipers in the finer points of their art.
“God be kind to me!” he would exclaim, leaping nervously round some perspiring youth who was going red in the face over the intricacies of “Wha’ll be King but Cherlie”. “You’re not plowing up a pluidy palloon, Wilson! You’re summoning the clans for the destruction of the damned Hanovers, aren’t you? Your music is charming the claymore out of the thatch and the dirk from the peat, so it is! Now, tuck it into your oxter and wake the hills with your challenge! Away you go!”
And the piper would squint, red-faced, and send his ear-splitting notes echoing off the band-room walls, very creditably, it seemed to me, and the pipey would call on the shades of the great MacCrimmon and Robin Oig to witness the defilement of their heritage.
“It’s enuff to make the Celtic aura of my blood turn to effluent!” was one of his more memorable observations. “It’s a gathering of fighting men you’re meant to be inspiring, boy! The noise you’re makin’ wouldnae collect a parcel of Caithness tinkers. You’ll be swinging it, next! Uplift yourself, Wilson! Mind, it’s not bobby-soxers you’re tryin’ to attract, it’s the men of might from the ends of the mountains, with their bonnets down and their shoes kicked off for the charge. And again—give your bags a heeze and imagine you’re sclimming up the Heights of Abraham with Young Simon’s caterans at your back and the French in front of you, not puffing and wheezing oot some American abomination at half-time at a futball match!”
And eventually, when it had been played to his satisfaction he would beam, and cry:
“There! There’s Wilson the Piper, waking the echoes in majesty before the face of kings, and the Chermans aall running away. Now, put up your pipes, and faall oot before you spoil it.”
This was his enclosed, jealously-guarded world; he had known nothing else since his boy service—except, as he said himself, “a wee bitty war”. Pipers, unlike most military bandsmen, tend to be fighting soldiers; in one Highland unit which I visited in Borneo only a few years ago, the band claimed to have accounted for more Communist terrorists than any of the rifle companies. And in peacetime they were privileged people, with their own little family inside the regiment itself, and the pipey presided over his domain of chanters and reeds and dirks and rehearsals and dancing, and kept a bright eye cocked at the battalion generally, to make sure that tradition was observed and custom honoured, and that there was no falling off in what he would describe vaguely as “Caledonia”. If he hadn’t been such a decent wee man, he would undoubtedly have been a “professional Highlander” of the most offensive kind.
The only time anyone ever saw the pipe-sergeant anything but thoroughly self-assured and bursting with musical confidence was once every two months or so, when he would produce a new pipe-tune of his own composition, and submit it, in a state bordering on nervous hysteria, to the Colonel, with a request that it might be included in the next beating of Retreat.
“Which one is it this time, pipey?” the Colonel would ask. “ ‘The Mist-Covered Streets of Aberdeen’ or ‘The 92nd’s Farewell to Hogg Market, Calcutta’?”
The pipey would scowl horribly, and then hurriedly arrange his face in what he supposed was a sycophantic grin, and say:
“Ach, you’re aye joshing, Colonel, sir. It’s jist a wee thing that I thought of entitling ‘Captain Lachlan Chisholm’s Fancy’, in honour of our medical officer. It has a certain … och, a captivatin’ sense of the bens and the glens and the heroes, sir—a kind of … eh … miasma, as it were—at least, I think so.”
“Does it sound like a pipe-tune?” the Colonel would ask. “If so, by all means play it. I’m sure it will be perfectly splendid.”
And at Retreat, with the pipey in a frenzy of excitement, the band would perform, and afterwards the pipey would approach the Colonel and inquire:
“How did you like ‘Captain Lachlan Chisholm’s Fancy’, Colonel, sir?”
And the Colonel, leaning on his cromach, would say:
“Which one was that?”
“The second last, sir—before ‘Cock o’ the North’.”
“Oh, that one. But that was ‘Bonnie Dundee’, surely? At least, it sounded like ‘Bonnie Dundee’. Come to think of it, pipey, your last composition—what was it?—‘The Unloading of the 75th at Colaba Causeway’, or something—it sounded terribly like ‘Highland Laddie’. Of course, I haven’t got your musical ear …”
“And he can say that again, and a third time in Gaelic,” the pipey would rage in the band-room afterwards. “God preserve us from a commanding officer that has no more music than a Border Leicester ewe! ‘The Unloading of the 75th’, says he—dam’ cheek, when fine he knows it was caalled ’The Wild Green Hills of—of—of—ach, where the hell was it, now …”
“Gorbals Cross,” the pipe-major would suggest.
“No such thing! And, curse him, he says my composeetions sound like ‘Bonnie Dundee’ and ‘Highland Laddie’, as if I wass some penny-whistle street-musician hawkin’ my tinny for coppers along Union Street. Stop you, and I’ll fix his duff wan o’ these days. I’ll write a jazz tune, and get it called ‘Colonel J. G. F. Gordon’s Delight’, and have it played in aall the dance-halls! He’ll be sorry then!”
And yet, there was no one in the battalion who knew the Colonel better than the pipey did, or was more
