Not every trip to the big house was so fraught. Lord and Lady Granville would invite me and Jimmy there for a birthday party for one of their children, who were educated in England and did not speak Gaelic. There were few children on the island who spoke English as well as we did, so we were brought in to translate, and to keep the laird’s children amused.
It would not be the only occasion when we would rub shoulders with the aristocracy and royalty. The Queen was a regular visitor in the summer, when the royal yacht Britannia sailed around the islands. Her Majesty would come ashore for the annual Agricultural Show and picnic with her cousin the earl and his family. In the year that I was there, Jeanette was chosen to present Her Majesty with a bunch of flowers when she came to open the show. Morag’s ample bosom heaved with the pride of it all, the signal for Jeanette to be prodded, poked and decorated with a brand-new pink party dress that made her look like a fairy on a cake. She hated it with a vengeance.
‘You will not embarrass me, lady,’ said Morag, ‘by wearing a tatty school uniform to meet the Queen. It’s the new dress for you, whether you like it or not.’
Jeanette could never have been described as ‘frilly’ but frilly she was, in spades. Morag had looked out her catalogue – a Bible of delights that had to be ordered from the mainland: North Uist, like my sister, did not do frilly. When the dress arrived, Jeanette was hoisted onto the kitchen table for a fitting.
My poor sister, who was 14, declared, ‘I feel like a pink blancmange! Why can’t I wear my school uniform?’
‘Do you want everyone to think you’re a scruff?’ Morag mumbled through a mouthful of pins. ‘You’ll not give us red faces, do you hear? This is a beautiful dress. If I’d had a dress like this when I was your age, I’d have thought I was the cat’s pyjamas. Now, stop jumping around while I pin this hem. You don’t want the Queen to see you with a squint hem, do you?’
Jeanette suffered for hours until Morag decided the dress was ‘just right’. It was only the beginning of Jeanette’s discomfiture. For weeks she had to practise how to greet Her Majesty with a proper curtsey. This was a joy to the rest of us. We howled with laughter. Poor Jeanette was never the lightest on her feet. She was ordered to curtsey very low and deferentially. Jeanette then had to take three steps, hand the Queen a bunch of flowers and say, ‘Good morning, Your Majesty.’ We practised with her, behind her back of course, stifling our giggles for fear of offending Morag’s sense of decorum. Jimmy and Johnny could not curtsey if their lives depended on it and they would inevitably end up tumbling over each other, whereupon a fight would ensue.
On the big day, we all trooped along to the show, wearing our kilts. Jeanette waited for the arrival of Her Majesty, picking at her dress, an act that had Morag drawing daggers with her eyes. When the Queen arrived in a big Land Rover, she waved to the locals and offered a wonderfully benign smile. Morag was resplendent in her Sunday best, a navy-blue two-piece ‘costume’ suit that smelled disconcertingly of mothballs. Dear Morag looked glamorous … almost. Even Willie had escaped from his dungarees, replaced for the occasion by a suit and a heavily starched white shirt, which, as the day progressed, was intent on choking him to death. In the end, Jeanette was perfect in words and actions. We stuffed our faces and returned home lit by the glow of it all.
We thought the good times would never end. How wrong we were. The only security in the lives of the Whelan children was the certainty of insecurity. The bombshell dropped when the MacDonalds were informed by the Social Work Department that our mother wanted us back and we were to be returned to Glasgow. For some godforsaken reason known only to the authorities, we would be prevented from maintaining contact with the only real parents we had known. There was no rhyme or reason to it, a casual and probably unintentional cruelty. It would be 20 years before we would see Morag again.
I had been on the island for little more than a year when we prepared to return to Glasgow and God knows what. The only thing we were certain of was that it would not be good. Paradise was about to be lost. The halcyon days would be left behind for a return to the slums and – worst of all – Quarriers beckoned.
CHAPTER 4
Paradise Lost
I had cried myself to exhaustion. As the aircraft carrying us away from North Uist arced out of Benbecula into an endless blue sky, my heart and stomach lurched. The feeling was more than physical. The Whelan siblings were surrounded by people embarking on journeys. We were in a sea of smiling faces, but we could not share the excitement that was so evident in our fellow passengers. They had something to look forward to on their journey. We did not, and we were terribly alone with our thoughts and the uncertainty of the future.
I was too young to fully appreciate what had been going on, but I had nonetheless begun putting together the pieces of a jigsaw that had been puzzling me for days: Willie’s grim-faced stoicism and Morag’s demeanour, so withdrawn, shedding tears at the slightest provocation. He had evidently been struggling under a dreadful burden, bearing a secret he could not share. Whatever was going on, Jeanette had been fretting about it, too, and it had transmitted to Irene, who had been abjectly miserable. It would be some time before I learned of the secret meetings in the barn between Willie and Jeanette when our future – or lack of it – was laid out before my eldest sister. Somewhere above my young head, the most recent chapter in our lives was closing and the next sad episode was in the process of being written. Our world was coming to an end. We would soon be leaving the island and we would not be returning. I was not party to the knowledge that we were going back to Glasgow to live permanently, but I knew, somehow I knew. I had been experiencing a dreadful sense of loss without quite knowing why. I wasn’t certain any more of what lay ahead.
Later, as we sat on the aircraft, our geographical destination was Glasgow. From the vantage point of adulthood, I am aware now that the distance between what had been and what would be was measured in more than mere miles. The clues had been there, but I was too naïve to identify them. The atmosphere at the croft had changed dramatically in the early part of May 1966, like the temperature in a room dropping suddenly. I could not, however, see the complete picture, only glimpses of a mysterious canvas. As I said, Morag had begun to cry at the smallest thing and she clung to us as if she would never see us again. She wouldn’t for a very long time. It would be many years before my sister Jeanette turned up on her doorstep, as a grown woman and the mother of three children. It would be even longer before we would be reunited with the only mother we had ever truly known. In the days before our departure, Morag had clung to us, a particular mystery to me because she was hardly the most demonstrative of women. Willie would take himself off to the barn, seemingly unable to hear me when I shouted a greeting at him. I knew instinctively I wasn’t being ignored; he was preoccupied.
What I did not know was that Willie had taken Jeanette to the barn because he had news for her. Jeanette revealed to me much later that this big, strong man was weeping unashamedly when he told her that Morag was broken-hearted because our real mother had demanded that we return to Glasgow, to start over ‘as a family’. He swore Jeanette to secrecy, which must have been a dreadful burden on her. I was playing in the early-summer sunshine, throwing a ball for Willie’s sheepdog – even working dogs were allowed a little fun in their life. Boy and dog were having a wonderful time, but our innocent game wasn’t quite managing to dispel the gloom of misery hanging over Willie as he headed into the barn. He beckoned to Jeanette. Something was amiss. I played on, oblivious to the life-changing events that were unfolding. Willie’s bright, open face, creased by sun and biting wind, had somehow crumpled. It was sorrow. I had seen enough of it in my life to recognise that mask. Jeanette also knew Willie was distressed, and within a few moments she knew why.
‘Lass, I have something to tell you,’ he said in a faltering voice. ‘This is the hardest thing for me, but I have to tell you.’
‘What?’ said Jeanette,
