via VisitScotland
Over the weekend, I read And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat, his classic memoir of his time as a very young infantry officer during the Second World War. It’s a wonderful book and I do plan to write more about it soon, but I wanted to share this excerpt first.
In early June 1943, Mowat and his fellow soldiers were offered four days of leave from their base near Glasgow. It wasn’t officially embarkation leave, but by mid-June they would be on ships bound for Sicily. Rather than head to the city, Mowat set off for the countryside and found himself in a gentle, fantastical setting that could not have been more of a contrast to where he would soon be.
To me, this sounds like a wonderful plot for an entire novel and the fact that it came from real life only makes it more extraordinary and worth sharing:
Most of my friends headed south to London, but I thought it foolish to waste half of a too-brief leave riding around on crowded trains. Also it was still springtime and the countryside was calling to me. I got a map of Scotland and did something I had often done as a child – shut my eyes and pricked the map at random with the point of a pencil. Where the pencil landed was where I would go. This time fate selected a region called the Trossachs, only a couple of hours’ rail distance from Darvel. I packed my haversack, took binoculars and bird book and departed.
A meandering local train deposited me at what seemed to be an abandoned station in a valley of misted, glimmering lochs fed shining tarns that plunged down the slopes of green-mossed mountains. Things all seemed slightly out of focus behind a shimmer of rain as I stood on the empty platform wondering what to do next. There was no even a station master from whom I could inquire about accommodations. As I belted my trench coat and prepared to go in search of shelter, a rattle-trap taxi came snorting toward me. The driver seemed amazed to find that someone had actually descended from the train but when I asked if he could find me a place to stay he nodded me in beside him. Wordless, he drove up an ever-narrowing valley on a gravel road that climbed beyond the last clump of sombre spruces to end in the driveway of an ornate nineteenth-century castle crouched under the shoulder of a massive sweep of barren hills.
Once the summer seat of a rich marquis, this rococo pile had been closed since the beginning of the war but was now being given a new lease on life as a hotel. However, it was short on guests. Beside myself there were two Canadian and two New Zealand nursing sisters, a Free French naval captain and a young South African armoured corps lieutenant – surely a strangely assorted gaggle of wander-voegel to be brought together by whatever chance in this remote cul-de-sac.
The staff, which outnumbered the guests by three to one, consisted mostly of old servitors of the marquis and they displayed an almost pathetic anxiety to make us welcome. The aged butler, now acting as a maître d’, pressed on us the finest foods the estate could provide – venison, salmon, grouse, fresh goose eggs, butter, Jersey milk and clotted cream – and pleaded with us to avail ourselves of what remained of the marquis’ wine cellar. We slept in regal if slightly musty splendour in vast, echoing apartments, and dined, the handful of us, in a glittering hall beneath chandeliers and candelabra. In the evenings we danced to 1920s music from a wind-up gramophone in the richly panelled trophy room before a mighty fireplace that roared red brands into the moonlit nights.
By day, in a soft veil of warm June rain, or under the watery warmth of a shrouded sun, we climbed among the hills, saw herds of red deer on high, windy ridges; flushed black grouse and capercaillie from the redolent heather of the valleys; picnicked on venison patties, and drank bitingly cold tarn water mixed with pure malt whisky.
The mood we shared was of time out of time. We were a band of brothers and sisters and so companionable that there was no pairing-off – none of the panting, hectic pursuit of sex that usually dominated the leaves of servicemen and servicewomen. It was a world beyond reality that we so briefly knew together.
The Captive Reader 