The Silent Weaver Read Free Page A

Stoneybridge School rose out of the mist like a fortress. They gathered their ponies inside the school’s stone walls, lit a fire in the schoolroom, were given ‘a splendid evening meal’ by Stoneybridge women, and settled down for the night.
    At about 9.30 p.m. a terrific thunderstorm erupted and many of the 70 ponies broke loose. The Scouts dashed outside and spent ‘a couple of soggy hours catching them and re-wiring them by the light of the lightning’. The storm passed andgave way to black night. At a dawn parade all the ponies were miraculously discovered still to be present at Stoneybridge School, but one was dead. A Court of Inquiry later determined that it had been struck by lightning. Lieutenant Simon MacDonald notified the police and asked them to dispose of the body. He took the horse’s blanket, headcollar and surcingle on south, with his surviving ‘damp but cheerful band’ augmented by Lovat Scouts Territorials from the villages of the middle and south of Uist, to Lochboisdale.
    At Lochboisdale pier, while Simon MacDonald was signing receipts for some 80 ponies, his soldiers repaired to the adjacent Lochboisdale Hotel for a final dram. To the lieutenant’s great relief the hotel’s proprietor, a future captain of the local Home Guard named Finlay Mackenzie, voluntarily closed his own bar until the soldiers’ boat sailed. It left the deep sheltered harbour of Loch Boisdale with bagpipes wailing from the decks and darkness falling, and immediately ran into another tremendous storm.
    They were embarked on a MacBrayne’s passenger and goods steamer which had been requisitioned for their sea crossing to Kyle of Lochalsh. On that second full night of the Second World War the ship sailed with no lights showing, across the Minch through a strong, gusting wind and driving rain. She steered westerly past the Small Isles of Canna, Rum and Eigg, up the Sound of Sleat and through the Kylerhea narrows. From Kyle, they too were taken by train to join the MacRaes and MacKenzies and Frasers of the Highland glens at the great muster in Beauly.
    In the first week of the war almost 500 Lovat Scouts congregated in Beauly from all corners of the north of Scotland. The islanders of ‘B’ Squadron were quartered atthe Beaufort Home Farm, in what Donald John MacPherson described as ‘a big shed’. Another member of ‘B’ Squadron, Donald John MacKenzie from Kintail, said that on the farm ‘chaos ruled mainly’.
    We slept in the byre on the concrete floor with three blankets, straw palliasse and pillow and boy was it cold and hard. We had some soup and stew to eat out of tin bowls and plates which when washed were stacked on the trestle tables in the open. When you went for breakfast in the morning they were stuck together by rust having not been dried. A couple of warmer days later we either picked the maggots out of those bowls and tins or did without any food.
    We had billet guard and picket on horse-lines to do. The ponies were tied six feet apart to a rope stretched between two strainers and heel stops on one rear leg and a pin hammered into the ground to keep them from turning round and kicking each other to bits. Those on guard when off duty slept under the belt for driving the threshing mill and often the rats slid down the belt and jumped off to land on a sleeping body.
    One chap who had some grease spilt on his puttees (we wore puttees, britches and spurs) had the strap of his puttee eaten clean through by a rat. We eventually got good at killing them with our bayonets.
    At first they kept their horses and stayed in the Highlands. Second Lieutenant Michael Leslie Melville remembered that during the winter of 1939–40, ‘Training was carried out in riding and horse-management, drill both mounted and on foot, weapon-training and shooting, spying and observation, map-reading and compass work, signalling and reporting, night training, anti-gas