RESCUED

   The sky had already darkened. The wind was whistling through the wires of the fence beside me, it was humming overhead through the cable that brought the telephone down to the garage and behind me it was furiously rattling some loose tin on the corner of the roof. Quite apart from this cacophony the sea was no longer blue, it was as grey as the sky, and the island seemed even more distant behind bursts of spray and beneath the low ceiling of clouds. And then the sun out there in the West must have dropped below its level and as if some director had shouted "lights!" the island was suddenly lit up by a blaze of yellow light and was glowing an astonishing emerald green like a vast jewel against the still dark backcloth of the mountains beyond. It was easy then to see why the Norsemen might once have imagined it an entrance to Valhalla, and the Scots also saw it is a proper burial place for their chieftains and kings.
   The sight lifted my spirits, and this I needed, for losing the damned boat was a perfect way to puncture my ego. As soon as I had recovered from this humiliation I was further embarrassed to realize that I had also most callously abandoned Niall.
   It was true that he now had a working baler, and that any hired engineer would have done the same - left as soon as their job was done. But it now occurred to me that possibly it was not quite the same up here as in the more affluent, time-driven South. Possibly any Highland mechanic called to a farm as remote as this - as late as I had called; on an afternoon ending like this one - such a mechanic, having pocketed his cash for the job he had been called to do would know that this was still only half the day's work. Niall would soon have up to a hundred bales to collect and store alone; and although of course he would have Marie to help him, it was going to rain. He was far too shy to have asked me to stay; perhaps he also thought this would be too low a task for such a master mechanic.
   "Oh, bollocks!" I swore at myself. An elderly ewe ambling by at that moment broke into a hurried trot at this - but also gave me a censorious yellow glance. She seemed to think I should have had the sense to work all this out an hour ago.
   There was certainly no reason now not go back. The island was still lit up from end to end by this fantastic light. It looked like another world It was superb. But the sea was still bursting on the central reef in great white explosions although the tide was half-way out. The need was for a Zen-like calm. Without a boat to carry me, I was bound to be staying here at least throughout the night.
   For just such emergencies as this there was an old Army wind-up telephone at the bottom of an old feed-bin at the back of the garage. There was no main telephone; the overhead cable from the road dropped down from its last post just beyond the garage and then ran on under the sea. I used the wind-up to report my situation to Sandra, and then drove back to the farm a lot more soberly than I had left.
   I was pleased to find that three of the MacFadyen's neighbours: Archie and Ian, had also turned up. Both were also named MacFadyen, but claimed to be no relation and although Niall and Mairie seemed to be on good terms with both, Archie and Ian rarely spoke to one another, despite living less than a mile apart with no-one in between. They were already collecting the bales whilst a man I didn't know was trundling them off to the barn with his trailer.
   It seemed that the barn would be the best place for a spare pair of hands in, so I went where to help. I found Marie pulling the bales from the trailer, which left them there in heaps, whilst the men were soon vying with each other to throw them higher and higher on the stacks and neatly in place.
   Finally it was all done, and it was also nearly dark. The rain was coming in a fine curtain from the sea producing a rich yeasty scent as it darkened the mowed field and reached dry earth that had long been shielded by the hay. Later that evening after supper in the warm bright kitchen - with a couple of heat-drunk cats sprawled beside the Aga, sticky fly-papers spiralling from the ceiling - Marie brought me from the warmth - and a wee dram or two - to a neat small bedroom high up in the back corner of the house: "where the children'll not wake you in the morning. And the bathroom's just down around the corner. I'll put out a towel for your bath.."
   I was too tired for a bath. I stripped to my underwear, trying my best to drop all the broken stalks and hayseeds from my clothes onto the bare linoleum in a corner of the room fell into the narrow little bed - and knew no more. The next morning I slept until after the milking and despite my week of shovelling cement and shingle, my back was aching when I got up. But now I knew what tossing the caber is all about. It had always seemed an odd way for a very warlike nation to demonstrate its warriors' power.
   It is a demonstration of power, but it has nothing to do with war. Virtually everything a farmer has to do - with very few machines, and even fewer hands - involves lifting: bales, calves, drains, grills, lambs, sacks, sheep, stones, tyres and trailer trails, posts, pipes, wire - hundreds more. It takes much the same strength and skill to toss a caber nicely as to throw a hay bale six to twelve feet into the air: not once, but dozens of times. Hernias and cancers are the commonest complaints. It was cancer, I heard, that did for Niall, who was one of the gentlest men I ever met.
   The wind was still blowing strongly from the south, but it was no longer gusting as madly as before, and after I had refused all offers of help from Niall I went down to examine the painter's remains more closely.
   By now I had nearly recovered from my gloom. Averaging thirty miles an hour, I had thought that the boat would be nearing Murmansk by now. But it might be much closer. Its stern-board was of marine-ply, far heavier than wood, and two inches thick, it weighed more than the rest of the boat. My errant boat balloon might have flown no further than the first headland across the Lough. So I hoped.
   Squinting along the painter, I marked its possible landfall as best I could. There was too much spray to see more clearly, and in that jumble of rocks and heather the grey wreck would be invisible without very good binoculars. But there and back would be only about twenty miles. It would be worth the investment.
I found it in an hour later thirty feet down from the road and about the same height above the sea. It had a rip in it somewhere, for it had partly deflated and was plastered limply over the rocks where the wind had thrown it.
   I deflated it entirely; rolled it up around the stern-board that had stopped it flying into Soviet airspace and starting a thermo-nuclear exchange, hefted the whole bundle onto my back and clawed up the cliff to the car. An hour later I was back at the garage where I had noticed an old Dunlop Rubber Company repair kit in a cob-webbed corner. The inflater inside the boat had also survived the flight, and another hour later I was bouncing back across the channel just in time for lunch
   The lesson was elementary: never trust a rubber boat in strong winds. It would be forgotten within a week with - almost - serious results.
   The concrete was now hard and strong enough to take the full weight of the tractor, and I was anxious to begin the next task I had set myself. The winter tides were steadily eating away the bank at the top of the harbour. I wanted now to set a barrier of boulders across the whole of the harbour stretching out from both sides of the slipway. I had had to build the slipway because the tractor was most frequently used to ferry supplies from the barge to the house and the farm. It was also used to move the other boats about in the harbour but that did little damage. It was climbing the same bank with a heavy load - of oil, for example, which came in five hundred gallon drums - and because the gradual exit from the harbour's beach had been lost, its big cleated tyres were cutting great gullies in the steep bank that remained.
   Puffin, the Redesdale's old blue cutter, lay upturned under the ash trees in the upper corner of the harbour where it was slowly rotting away. It was now far too later to try to save her. I had no skill in building boats. Some bits of her engine were still in a box in the workshop, as if someone had had a notion to put her together again. It would never happen now. Below her the sea had taken another big bite out of the bank and had even shown us a hole that, from the scatter of bones and feathers around it, had probably been an otter's. Another winter would see the spring tides undermining the fence posts of the house field, and replacing them would be a far greater deal of work. I thought instead that I could make the sea rebuild what it had destroyed.
   The tractor was one of the Doctor's most useful investments. On the front it was a wide dozer scoop lifted and lowered by hydraulic rams on either side of the cab. At the back was device, called a hay rake, almost as strong and also powered hydraulically. Looking like a massive toasting fork, this was intended to be slid under hay bales - or anything else of the same weight - which it could then lift almost chest-high. It was a very versatile. It could also be operated whilst stood on; the most important precaution then, of course, was to keep you feet on it. The bars were three inches across, which meant they could not hurt as much as being stepped on by a horse - as I know for certain - but the briefest contact made one very alert that it should not happen again.
   I had been regularly taking the tractor along the shore to the highest bank of shingle that I could reach for my concrete. Thrown up at the base of the cliffs in the worst of the storms, I hoped they would be more free of salt than shingle covered by the tides twice a day. On these journeys I had also been noticing which of the boulders that I passed might be suitable for my next task. Now that the first was finish, I began to find routes across the rocks and weed-beds to collect them.
   It was slow, methodical, and rather mindless work. In the old days it would probably have been work for a team of two or three men with crowbars, a wooden sledge, and with a horse to pull it. The tractor was a lot noisier, and I had no-one to talk to - but it was pleasant to be trundling back and forth under a pure blue sky, with the oyster-catchers flashing black and white along the shore, making their curious piping cry from bright orange beaks, whilst I added ton after ton of rock to my harbour guards.
   One day I was surprised to see a dog trotting along ahead of me along the shore. It was a little higher than I was, just at the base of the cliffs on the rocks, and was clearly unconcerned by the noise that I was making. It was a low, dark, quick moving dog with an unusually long tail. I stopped the tractor, and even cut the engine in order to call it. Most dogs respond to a whistle, even if it is only to stop and look for its source,. This one did not look around for a moment. It vanished into the rocks.
   Of course because of the sheep unless the owner had it in sight and also in control there should be no dog on the island. Sometimes yachts might creep into the Lough in the evening and moor for the night in the channel. This dog might have come from there. I looked for a new-anchored yacht. There was none.
   So, a dog; no master: and now no home. Still curious to know where it had disappeared to, I climbed from the cab, walked across to the rocks where I had seen it last. There was a thin horizontal crevice across their front. This was common locally. Most of the old sedimentary strata were horizontal. In deeper water lobsters lived in many crevices like this. In front of this crevice one was a shallow puddle of water leaking from the cliff. Above it and beyond it were no paw-marks on the rock. The dog must have ducked under here and gone through some kind of passage to the other side.
   I knelt down to look, pushing my face forward to see better in the dark. From just two foot away appeared the bared white teeth, glittering eyes and bristling muzzle of a very alarmed adult otter. It hissed at me angrily like a cat.
   "Oops!" I said, idiotically, "Sorry." He - or more probably a she - was not much impressed and only hissed again. I left her to her with another apologetic gesture, I retreated to my cab to get on with my work. No doubt she got on with hers. We rarely saw any sign of them, but coming home late one afternoon we saw a man struggling in the sea. He was clearly in great trouble, for his arm was beating the water frenziedly and what we had first seen was the rainbow in the spray he was kicking up. When I steered closer, however, it was to discover that the 'arm' was a fine big salmon that an otter had taken around the middle and was still attempting to subdue. I am moment both had disappeared and we were never certain whether it escaped or whether the otters dined well that night.
   There was no proper roof on the tractor - when it was fitted it was just too high to get the tractor into the barn - but it was almost as enjoyable to work in the rain: so long as the rain was a proper Scots drizzle not a downpour. I could also make myself a plastic sack roof, or wear a flat cap myself, as most of our neighbours. Rain or shine, however - although the tractor's tyres would slip and slide with a full load in the wet - the work went on regardless. I had only to stop when the tide got too deep to drive through.
   With a whole beach to myself, and with a bucket and spade that could move up to half a ton, I was as happy as a kid building sand castles. There are always dangers for tractor drivers working alone: getting caught in the machinery, trapped by a rock, to slip off the seat and under the wheels. Tractor drivers have amazing and often very ugly accidents, but so long as I thought twice - and then thought several times again - before trying anything risky, I was safe enough.
   There was also a conscious sense of privilege in what I was doing. I don't mean anything about the dignity of the working man - although in fact I do think there is little dignity without work. I mean that when I moved one of my pebbles from here and put it over there: there is exactly where it would probably stay until the Earth turned over. I was in one of the remotest corners of the Western world. This is why all those graves were up there along the spine of the island: mounds like an upturned boat. They were waiting too. So were the knights in the chapel, only their gravestones were there and their bones lay elsewhere on the island.
   The boulders were scattered all over the wide shelf of the harbour and along the shore, and very few were bare. Nearly all were covered with barnacles and weed, so that one could only tell how much they weighed by attempting to pick them up. They were all different. All around the island a great ring of mountains and islands millions of years ago had been a great volcano, and as it had exploded again and again through the earlier strata it had blasted their fragments around itself for hundreds of square miles. One of the curious geological features this violence left behind are black basalt sills which rise vertically out of the sandy bottom between the reefs. They look exactly like ancient walls, with cracks and seams also making them look man-made. Deep grooves that match them mark the cliffs behind, whilst across the reefs where the surf has always broken most heavily the walls have been entirely destroyed and deep channels as wide as the walls and with vertical sides run through the rocks instead.
   Some of the rocks were of this basalt. Some were sedimentary. Some were the horrible gabbro. Like Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop, I kept transforming this into grabbo - for this describes it exactly. It is a dense dark brown concretion of fragments smashed to pieces then glued back together by terrific heat and pressure. Massive boulders of this gabbro as big as bungalows composed the whole southern end of the island. Even walking on it was dangerous, for it was so aggressive one might think it alive. After the first time of falling on it and lacerating my palms, I always gave it a wide birth, or wore a thick leather gloves in case I had to handle it.
   Heaviest of all were the lumps of granite that the sea had also rolled about for millennia until they were smooth and which a few thousand years and a camouflage of weeds and shells had made indistinguishable from their mates.
   The half a ton was the most the tractor could lift at the front, whilst the rake could lift only a quarter. My practice was to drive up to any boulder I could reach that was of an approximately correct size, wedge the edge of the bucket or the points of the rack under a corner of it - sometimes I would use a great six foot crow bar to move it sufficiently to do this first - and then to try to pick it up. Usually this would work. Sometimes, however, instead of the bucket or the rake, the front or the rear of the tractor would start to rise with a low hydraulic groan. Almost always, I would find that it was trying to lift granite or basalt.
   After three of four days of this, the breakwaters rocks were finished. They stretching out on either side of the slipway like lumpy wings. Then I began collecting loads of sand and shingle and heaps of the rotted seaweed that lay in deep drifts high up on the beach. These were feet thick in places. These loads I dumped behind the boulders in layers. My idea was that this rich humus would soon be colonized by grass and weeds. Within a year or two it would form a tongue of new bank with the boulders as its protective teeth; and as the tides moved to and fro they would bring in fresh harvests of weed to be trapped behind the rocks. In this way, I planned and hoped, the sea itself would continue the rebuilding.
   Whenever the tide was out I was continually having to manoeuvre around a tall mooring post smack in the middle of the harbour. I began to dislike it a lot. Came the day that I almost collided with it for the hundredth time, I decided that it must go. It was an ugly rusting iron post seven or eight feet in length, set in a cube of concrete several feet square. Sticking out from the top at a drunk angle was a much thinner shaft: rather mysteriously, not rusty at all. I decided I would move it to the left wing of my breakwater. Once I also straightened it up it would make an excellent finale. If it turned out to be too heavy to lift, I would get the rake prongs under it and drag it over there.
   It was too heavy. I would have to drag it. It was only as I stood on the base to rock it back and forth onto the rake, that I recognized what it was. The iron was just pipe, very barnacled and rusty, but the unencrusted upper end, a delicate light green in colour and still perfectly round and smooth, was once the bronze shaft driving Puffin's propeller. Impatient now to move it, I gripped the pipe and began to jerk it back and forth to try to lift the bottom of the concrete onto the rake. I had managed this only once or twice, when there was sudden swift movement above me, like a bird crossing the sky, then a ringing clang and a crunch, and I was knocked backwards from my perch.
   My left hand hurt. It took me a moment to realize what had happened. The iron had rusted to nothing where it joined the bronze shaft, and my jerking it had caused it to had snap completely just above my hand. Then the much heavier round bronze shaft had hinged down like a eight-foot scissor blade onto my gloved left hand. Below it, the right hand was untouched.
   Just for a moment it was too soon to hurt too much. I pulled off the glove. The thick leather had saved my fingers, but they were fairly squashed. I had left behind the nail of one finger in the glove. "Oh," I said, "You silly old concrete" - or something rather like that; and I decided I would need a plaster.
   The tractor engine had been silent whilst I was working, and Eve had heard the clang that echoed off the harbour's overhang. She was already hurrying down to open the gate as I drove one-handed up the slipway. "What did you do?" she mouthed. I held up my hand to show her, and parked off the track. Down from the cottage came Sandra too, wearing her red bandanna; after her galloped Mrs Thatcher; and after her lolloped her lambs. I began to feel like Hector before the walls of Troy. But Hector never had an audience like mine.
   Ten minutes later, I was sipping Old Mull - oh-duh-vee: my grandfather had called it - whilst Sandra wound more bandages around my paw, and Eve was in the other front room phoning the mainland. She came back looking as if she had been told to sink the Bismarck. "Apparently we have to go across," she told us. "Your fingers must be x-rayed."
   Sandra and I looked at one another. The wind was banging the windows behind me. Its force would triple once we left the harbour. It did not seem Such A Good Idea. But Hector, I reminded myself, was always ready for battle. I drained my glass; stood up. "That's fine by me," I said.
   But it was the oh-duh-vee.
   We made the most elaborate preparations. This was a mistake. He who travels most safely at sea is not burdened with every conceivable item of kit. Secretly, I suppose, we were both impressed by the sea. Wind was scything off the tops of the waves and, as the tide was coming in, the waves themselves were getting impressive. We decided that we would take the heaviest wooden boat, an ancient ark was so massively constructed that not even I could lift its prow, let alone its stern. And then we decided we should also have a rubber boat. If the tide had gone out again when we returned, the two of us could never drag the dinghy down to the water. We would need the lighter boat to get to and from the shore.
   Then madness must have intervened. The lightest rubber boat was a fluorescent orange RAF life-raft. It had its own little sun-canopy and a thirty foot mooring line was already attached. Fighting the temptation to tell Eve: "You go and get x-rays! I'll stay here" - I let her tie it to the dinghy's stern, whilst I took the seat by the oars. I was not going to row. My left hand was now swathed in bandages the size of a football and the whole was in a plastic bag to save it getting wet.
   The Seagull roaring full throttle, we left the jetty, Sandra and Mr T. Eve was now leaning forward to search the surf breaking on the nose of the first reef we had to steer past. I was enjoying the rolling swell, the brilliant sunshine, the warm glow of Old Mull, the sparkling rainbows in the spray. It was another of halcyon Hebridean days: brilliant sky above, green seas and death below.
   As soon we cleared the headland, the full force of the wind hit the prow, and two misfortunes occurred at once. The boat lurched through ninety degrees, to head straight for the reef; the Seagull said "erk!" - jumped and stopped. The dinghy's line had dropped when the prow came around, the prop had lifted at the same time, and now there were several turns of thin RAF mooring line tightly wound around it.
   And that was why - as eny ful knos - it had stopped.
   Eve was already moving to change places with me, was pulling out the oars and banging them in the rowlocks. There was a small hope of steering us away from the rocks, and we could never make headway against this wind, but it might still give an expert resident engineer time to get the motor working again.
   Strangely, it almost never seems to occur to city-folk that they may drown. They are always more concerned about damaging the boat. We were about three minutes away from both possibilities - the water was deep out her - when Eve asked me, surprisingly calmly and still rowing hard, what I thought we ought to do.
   First: lift and free the prop. With now power to drive it on the stern was now plunging violently up and down and I needed both hands. In half a minute the rope was unwound, and my plastic bag was full of pink water. I remembered grandpa telling me about the sea off the Dardanelles. Then: down with the prop and start the motor.
   It started without any fuss at the first pull. I changed places with Eve once more. I was now holding the line over the side, well away from the stern. As if delighted by this new game, our bright orange life-raft gave a little hop, its canopy inflated, and it flew straight up in the air like a kite. It then began to pull us in the same direction as before. Towards the reef. This ugly snout of rock was now far too close. We could hear the waves breaking over it above all the other noise. The boat would certainly smash if we hit it. Of course we could both swim: everything would depend on getting well clear of the boat if it broke up. If didn't break up, we would be safer staying inside, even if it was a wreck, until we stopped the motor and sorted ourselves out.
   Briefly I wondered whether losing a rubber boat every day might become a habit. "I need to get rid of this" I told Eve. She only flicked an impatient glance upwards. She was the owner. She nodded, and I let it go; and for a few glorious moments we watched it fly up to even greater height, then go racing away down the Lough, spinning like a brightly coloured toy with the tearing wisps of cloud.
   Only then, I think, did I realized that we might be getting into real trouble. I was not all that concerned about the boat. It was just a tool. But out here the wind and tide were in conflict over deep water that was bordered by steep rock ledges and their conflict was creating great gleaming deep green pyramidal waves. Superb to see, as transparent as glass, breaking against each other, they were impossible to challenge. The heavy old boat was bucking and rolling about like a frightened horse. This maelstrom had developed in just minutes, but it could fill us or turn us over any second. Hastily I kicked a couple of herring lines into the prow. They were the last things we would want around our legs if we capsized. I took over the Seagull again from Eve, and she started again grimly to try to row, at least to try to keep the prow pointing into the wind.
   The immediate danger, the snout of the reef, we had now left behind; but the wind was now pushing us backwards down the channel between the reef's long humped back and the ledges of rock parallel to the shore. Even with the Seagull smoking hot we were making no headway against the wind. The danger of wrecking the boat was now far less, but when the fuel ran out - I guessed in about another twenty minutes - we would be far out in the deep water of the Lough. We could be out there all bloody night, or until we ran up against the rocks again at its far end.
    The channel was far too narrow to let us tack. It might not have helped anyway if we could. We were stuck. It was ridiculous to be still in sight of the house - I could see Sandra together with her cohorts running along the shore - and still be candidates for the Oban mortuary slab. The gleaming green pyramids were now breaking beside us, smacking into the ledges, bursting over them and surging onwards into the lagoon.
   The beauty of these relatively shallow waters is very beguiling. But it is because they are shallow that tides run so fast, the wind can kick up such an uproar in them so suddenly, and they can kill. Just a few years later a similar sudden tempest as unexpected as this drowned two strong young men familiar with these waters since childhood, making a crossing from Iona no more important than ours.
   Eve was drenched. Spray were bursting regularly over her shoulders. Her hair streaked her face as she grimaced with the effort of pulling the oars. She was waiting for me to decide. I pointed my drooping football at the shore. "Either we go over the rocks - or we stay out here until we run out of fuel," I explained. "Then we should be able to get ashore at the bottom of the island, or we might miss it."
   She gave another nod. "All right", she said; and as one of those pyramids swept towards the shore I turned the boat with it. The wave snatched us up like lift, bore us sideways; there was a flash of spray, a grate from the keel, a sharp clank from the skeg of the propeller - and we were inside, the roaring was left behind, and the Seagull was already faltering as it cut through the tall weed towers on the sandy bottom spreading like dark flowers in the cloudy green water marbled with foam.
   Sandra was waiting to meet us with prayers and tears. Mrs Thatcher was waiting: without no prayers or tears. When all this new excitement clearly meant no maize, she gave a disgusted grunt and hobbled away followed by her lambs.
   Eve finally dropped her oars. "Well" she said.
   Much of that first year we spent on the island. My fingers healed perfectly well. The nails remained crooked for years, but within a week I was working with both hands again. It was a perfect life for me. The island was a good working farm. When we arrived, almost everything was broke. When we left almost everything was fixed. I could have spent many years of my life there. Every day was an adventure.
    But the more obvious this became, the more alarmed was Sandra. At first she seemed happy. Although the storms would occasionally make crossing impossible, it was not really isolated. Dr Johnson and Boswell had visited it during their Journey to the Western Isles in 1773. They had probably dined and slept where the chickens now dined and slept, but they were delighted with the hospitality of their host and his wife.
   The big house was built by a ship-owner called Boulton in the 1900s (he also composed the Skye Boat Song), but it was the Redesdales who had made it modern, in the 40s. They built the cottage for their farm manager. After Unity died they had gradually lost interest, and it was bought from them by the Doctor.
   And I had learnt of it through the Times: 'Caretaker wanted," said their advertisement, "for remote Scottish island: must have mechanical knowledge.'
   Even then I did not get the job at once. An American academic had taken it on, but then only lasted half-way through one winter. When it was time for me to leave the Army, I wrote to offer my services once again - although the truth was that we had nowhere else to go - and that is how it happened.
   Sandra's own first task had been the ponies. Napoleon was their leader; a magnificent black stallion with his long uncut mane flying behind him, he and his family had grown accustomed to thunder around the island at will. They would do this at night when they sounded like the Light Brigade.
   They were the Doctor's least successful investment. The original intention was of course to breed them and sell the youngsters for profit. They were all Shetlands, and even Napoleon was only chest high to a man. The average was around four feet. The youngsters were naturally much smaller. But they were all, without exception, far too fat since no-one could get near them, and they just ate and ate. Only Napoleon had what might be called any responsibility. He had three mares and so it was visible much of the time.
   It takes a lot of patience to tame a pony. Despite their cuddly appearance, Shetlands are no different. They were all completely wild when we arrived and it took Sandra several patient weeks to get them to feed from her hand; a month after that before any would submit to be haltered and led. But once his mares were in the paddock, even Napoleon turned from being a foot-stamping tyrant to a gentle creature who liked apples and carrots. It was his immense uncut thatch of forelock, we discovered, that had made him so skittish. It so completely covered his face that if he was approached very quietly, he could be totally surprised at suddenly discovering that he was no longer alone. He would stamp and he would rear, then whinnying with alarm he would gallop off with all his tribe.
   The sad day came finally when he and all his tribe were sold. Ferrying them across in the barge was another adventure that took a whole day. We ate lunch around the barge as it lay beached in the harbour, and the ponies were brought on and tethered one by one. The new owner got kicked on the head; one of her helpers was bitten; the tide came in, the barge was afloat - then its motor would not start because its battery was flat, and I had to bring the battery from the tractor to start it. Apart from the sadness, it was a day just like hundreds of others.
   Our plan had always been that I should become teach mathematics, the simplest of all subjects. Since the island would always need a mechanic, it seemed sensible to qualify in Scotland, to find a teaching post and house on the mainland, and be free to maintain the island all year round. I should also be able to write, of course. What else would I write about but living this wonderful life?
   This idea had the Doctor's support. Eve was enthusiastic. I should have understood much earlier than I did why to Sandra it was a perfectly horrible idea. I felt that she was being selfish. She thought the same of me.
   But then, in addition, I met Donald Mackinnon. To some extent he was a parting gift from Dame Ruth: at least she had provided the introduction that led to him. She and Cecil King by now had moved to Dublin. His letters became more and more infrequent as he became more ill. He never ceased to tell me I should expect more guidance. I never ceased to disappoint him.
   Although I only learnt of his real importance only much later, Donald Mackenzie Mackinnon is still regarded as one of the most important British theologians of the 20th century. Unfortunately, but very typically, only other theologians know this. At the time of our meeting he was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge's School of Theology. I had sent him one of my few remaining reports typed by the Dragon-lady. He lived in Oban when he not in Cambridge. He proposed we meet at a convenient time in the Harbour Hotel.
   To me Donald Mackinnon was first of all to be extremely kind. He was solicitous of my welfare to highest degree, and I am sure that in his own mind he was saving me from several fates-worse-than-death. He had some reason to feel conscious of this. He was at odds with many of his colleagues, not least because one of his more famous papers was called: 'Can a theologian be honest?' It may have been this concern that drew him to me. His conclusion was that honesty must oblige any theology constantly to question itself.
   I had tea with him almost every Friday that I was in Cambridge and this is mainly what we would talk about. He would also urge me to eat: "Eat, eat up all these biscuits!" as we drank tea - and once he took me to his own college where he insisted I eat his strawberries as well as his own. He must have thought me too thin. In his Divinity School he once pointed out a student, telling me that this was a young man who had escaped a Uganda prison in which inmates were forced to smash others' skulls with crowbars and sledgehammers to save their guards the cost of a bullet or the trouble of a rope. I believe that young man eventually became a bishop.
   But Donald was also one of the most baffling people I have ever met. He talked with extraordinary eloquence, but in the wildest of ellipses. I never knew whether he was continuing a theme we had already begun from a new perspective he had just discovered - back-to-front, upside down, or inside-out; or whether he had abandoned it entirely, and was embarking on an entirely different theme that had burst without warning from his extraordinary intelligence and enormous memory. Reading to his students one day, he climbed, whilst still reading, out of one window of his study, walked around, still reading, to the next, climbed in again and sat down - still reading. No-one, apparently, dared ask why he did this. He, apparently, never thought it necessary to explain.
   The curious thing was that he wrote a beautifully clear English. His particular concern - and I suppose this is what brought me under his wing - was theological honesty: that no-one, especially religious philosophers, should pretend to possess knowledge they do not really possess.
   But what he wrote of course was intended mainly for professional readers - and their admiration of him might be expressed like this: 'Whilst his interrogative mood tends to dominate matters, on the one hand McKinnon's pronounced sense of fascination with reflexivity is not of a piece with a deconstruction that self-ironisingly erases ethical responsibility. Christians may be encouraged to be the most suspicious people around for iconoclastic reasons; and yet they are also suspicious of any unreconstructed suspicion. On the other hand, his deeply and uncomfortably interrogative theological mood resists shortcuts to resurrection faith, instead learning to hope beyond any refusal to face the darkness of the cross as well as any pessimism that cannot see the cross in the light of the resurrection.' ¹ Abstract: Donald MacKinnon on Why an Honest Theology Cannot Stand Still, Dr John McDowell, University of Edinburgh. It has been most carefully transcribed.
   Reading this, it is not at all difficult to understand what Mackinnon might have meant by an honesty that 'self-ironisingly' does not erase ethical responsibility.
   In the lounge of the Harbour Hotel, I myself was treated to some of his famous interrogative mood. Sandra had decided not to come with me, And in my remembrance we actually talked very briefly. Or, rather, I said very little and his eloquence rolled on and on, seeming only rarely to connect with itself.
Finally he paused, blew out his cheeks, fixed me with a glaucous stare. Then he growled: "You had better come and see me in Cambridge. Once you are there, then we may be able to help you. But be careful who you talk to otherwise. Some of the people there are killers."
He may have sensed my surprise or my doubt. "KILLERS!" he repeated, with even greater emphasis. "They're KILLERS!"
And so it was decided I must go to Cambridge. I suppose it never occurred to Donald that I might go anywhere else. But where else, indeed, would I hope to find any better help?

1    Abstract: Donald MacKinnon on Why an Honest Theology Cannot Stand Still, Dr John McDowell, University of Edinburgh.
       It has been most carefully transcribed.

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."
21/03/05

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