The Silent Weaver Read Free

to be at Bayhead Drill Hall the next day, Saturday morning at eleven o’ clock. We were told then that on Monday we were going away. We got our uniforms from the drill hall, went back and got the horse.’
    On Saturday 2 September, as Donald John MacPherson and Angus MacPhee were collecting their uniforms and instructions from Bayhead and Carnan drill halls in North Uist and South Uist respectively, compulsory military service for all British men between the ages of 18 and 41 was announced.
    On Sunday 3 September 1939, as the two Uist men were attending their last church services at home for a very long time, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany.
    Donald John MacPherson’s courageous Second World War lasted until 1945 and would take him across two continents.Angus MacPhee was beginning an uncharted journey which would occupy the remainder of his long life. Donald John went to North America and southern Europe, and returned alive to tell the tales. Angus went to unmapped places, in which he had to create his own means of expression and realise a lonely, simple and precious form of solace. He would never properly return.
    Over 100 Lovat Scouts left North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist on Monday 4 September. Donald John MacPherson put on his uniform and mounted his ‘lovely’ mare Jessie. A few hundred yards up the track from their family house his sister Morag took his photograph. Then he rode east to the North Uist pier at Lochmaddy, took a steamer with the other 30 North Uist members of ‘B’ Company to the mainland railhead at Kyle of Lochalsh, and both Jessie and Donald John were transported by train from Kyle to the Lovat Scouts’ muster at Beauly, a small market town north-west of Inverness.
    Further south in Benbecula somebody had the bright idea of mustering the local unit in the back yard of a celebrated howff called the Creagorry Inn. Lieutenant Simon MacDonald had been sent from the mainland by way of Skye on a fishing boat to shepherd the Uist section of ‘B’ Company safely to Beauly. The young officer arrived at Creagorry and ‘spent what seemed like hours exhorting, pleading and eventually driving troopers out of the ever-open bar . . . Then the minister [probably, in that island at that time, a Roman Catholic priest] had a word with each man and finally we got separated from the weeping female attachments, and rode forth bravely into the waters of the ford [to South Uist] . . . The scene was not unmoving, the pipes playing, relatives waving from the shore and the horses splashing through the water.’
    In Iochdar that morning, Angus MacPhee sat in uniform, his kit slung over his saddle and a cigarette hanging rakishly from the corner of his mouth, astride what he would later describe as ‘a fine gelding’. One of his sisters took his photograph. Then he rode south with his friends, up the South Uist machair to Lochboisdale. Those who could do so took their own mounts. Those who could not borrowed horses from other crofters and then sold them to the army, posting the money back to the original owners.
    The late summer weather had been deteriorating ever since the declaration of war. Low cloud obscured the hills, and the watercourses which ran from the east into the western ocean were swollen by heavy rain. Seven miles south of Iochdar the horses and riders had trouble crossing the burn which ran at full spate through the township of Howmore. They were regaled on their journey by a veteran of the First World War, Farrier Sergeant MacRury of Benbecula, telling his fellow Scouts of a telegram he had supposedly received that very morning. ‘How much to remain neutral?’ Sergeant MacRury’s message had read. ‘Signed, Hitler.’ MacRury’s reply was uncompromising. ‘Nothing doing,’ he signalled Berlin. ‘We’ll fight it out same as last time! Signed, MacRury.’
    South of Howmore, the high walls of