As the Women Lay Dreaming

Donald S Murray

• Publisher: Saraband
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781912235391
• eBook ISBN: 9781912235407
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Narrativa storica

WINNER OF THE 2020 PAUL TORDAY MEMORIAL PRIZE.

A powerful, beautiful novel, set across two decades, in the wake of a devastating maritime tragedy.

"Full of memorable images and singing lines of prose." Sarah Waters

Tormod Morrison was on board HMYIolaireon the terrible night as 1919 dawned, when the ship smashed into rocks and sank: some 200 servicemen drowned on the very last leg of their long journey home from war. For Tormod—a man unlike others, with artistry in his fingertips—the disaster would mark him indelibly. And for the stunned islanders, who had so joyfully anticipated the return of their sons, brothers and sweethearts, no shock could have been greater or more difficult to live with.

Two decades later, Alasdair and Rachel are sent to the windswept Isle of Lewis to live with Tormod in his traditional blackhouse home, a world away from the Glasgow of their earliest years. Their grandfather is kind, compassionate, but still deeply affected by theIolaireshipwreck—by the selfless heroism and desperate tragedy he witnessed. A deeply moving novel about passion constrained, coping with loss and a changing world, As the Women Lay Dreaming explores how a single event can so dramatically impact communities, individuals and, indeed, our very souls.

Tormod’s Journals

December 1918

There was a confession folded away in one of my grandfather’s journals, a few soaked, salt-stained sheets of paper he must have written during the nights and days before he returned from the war – scribbled notes and drawings he kept inside an oilcloth package telling of how the closer that he came to home, the more he remembered both sparks and the stink of cow-dung. The first was drawn in countless little sketches of the trade to which he would have to return when he arrived home. Dark tongs being cooled and doused in water. Sparks struck off an anvil. The continual whack and impact of a hammer on iron. Recollections inspired by Eilidh’s letter when Calum became paralysed on one side.

Our father says to tell you you’ll have to be the blacksmith now. There is no choice.

And shit too. There are constant drawings of that substance, caked on the backsides of cattle, little deposits left upon the grass, smearing, too, the soles and uppers of his boots, wads of straw thick with the stuff becoming embedded in his clothing, the sleeves of his jackets; his trouser-ends attracting, too, the yellow dung flies that clustered on horse, cattle and sheep muck littering ground, bracken, heather. It is as if he wanted to familiarise himself with it, provide little reminders to himself that in a few days’ time, now that the conflict was over, he would be back among it, cleaning out the byre that stood at the end of his father’s home instead of swabbing and washing the decks of the Glengarry, swishing them clean, checking that – if the occasion demanded – the barrel of each gun was clean enough for salvo and shell to whistle through. He would wield his three-pronged dung-fork as well as he used a pencil or a long-handled scrubber on deck, shovelling shit and straw into a wheelbarrow, heaving this out, too, to the heap behind his home where he would hear the slap of dung against dung, shit against shit, as he emptied his load on top of the one he had gathered the previous day. And all the time, his back and shoulders would be aching. The acrid smell of urine would fill his nostrils, gagging in his throat.

There would be a gathering of flies like the ones he drew that morning as he sat on the pavement outside Inverness railway station, his back against his kitbag next to the outside wall of the Station Hotel. Brown and black. Midges and bigger ones, those that settled on both milk and meat. Thousands of them would be swarming round his face on still summer evenings, when he had no free hand to swat them away, his grip tight and sure on the wheelbarrow’s handles. Even if he could raise his arm, there was the thought that his skin would be smeared with cow-shit if he smacked one, dirt remaining on his cheek or forehead till he had the chance to wipe it clean.

The hell with it. He tried to wash his anger from his mind, concentrating instead on sketching his last few glimpses of the world he was set to leave behind. He made small, brisk pencil strokes on the sheets of paper propped upon his lap, outlining a few of the objects and figures he could see. The clock above the station entrance. The Cameron statue in the centre of the square. The crowd of men in their uniforms, dark naval collars and bell bottoms, huddling around the doorway of the Highland Railway office as they waited to go home to take in the New Year in places like Stornoway, Tarbert, Portree. They laughed at the English, who had all chosen to go home for Christmas and were now back on board ship again. Around them all, the sound of music ebbed and swelled, echoing from the man they called the Forres Fiddler as he played for the returning servicemen inside the station or for the lips of his fellow islanders as they sang their Gaelic songs. There was even one man – a fellow called Jockie – who pranced upon the pavement, performing his own version of a tune Tormod had heard all too often during his years away.

‘It’s a long way to Portnaguran,

It’s a long way to go...’

For all that he did not share his spirit, Tormod grinned at the man’s antics, the way that he sang this song and another one he called ‘Iain Murdo, won’t you please come home?’. In truth, his own home was not somewhere to which he longed to return. Instead, he sickened each time he thought about it, recalling how it felt the last time he was home on furlough or when he had his period of rest and recovery after the Aboukir had gone down. His daughter shy of his approach, cleaving more to Catriona than she ever did to him. His wife foreign and strange. His father wild and furious. Looking back at his life there, it seemed to him a place without grace or sweetness. One in which Calum limped around, dragging the right side of his body, fated to be crippled all his days. One to which Catriona belonged, her thoughts and feelings as tightly coiled and controlled as the grey bun upon her head. One in which his father still swaggered round like the harshest and most unpredictable of kings, barking out contradictory instructions in the direction of his son.

‘Whoa! Whoa! Don’t pile the barrow up quite so high! Better one more trip out to the byre than a back that’s out of kilter...’

Yet if he ever tried to put a little less on his load, the older man would shake his head.

‘Steady on! Steady on! You can put some more in it than that.’

There would be nothing contradictory, however, about the way his father would react to what Tormod was doing now. He could imagine the man padding over in his direction, the puff of his breath as he sneaked a glance over his son’s shoulder, noting the detail he was adding to the drawing of the Cameron statue he had etched out on the page.

‘What are you wasting your time on that nonsense for?’

He blew on his fingers, clenching his fists, trying once again to concentrate on his drawing. It was harder than ever to do now that he had noticed John Macdermid skulking on the edges of the men gathered on the opposite side of the square. The Harrisman had been on the Glengarry with him for most of the war, his dark face menacing him with quotations from the Bible every time he picked up his pencil to try and draw, his brown eyes as sharp and judgemental as the Shorter Catechism he had learned at school. What is forbidden in the seventh commandment? The seventh commandment forbiddeth all unchaste thoughts, words and actions. Tormod did the same now as he had done back then, ignoring the man’s mutterings and warnings. Instead, he heard only the words of approval from the others around him as his pencil glided and rubbed across the page, noting the folds of the stone kilt the figure was wearing, the fine detail of the rifle that was hanging from his hand.

‘That’s good. God... I wish I could do the likes of that.’

There would be nothing like that when he reached home. No artistry. No release. Just days and days of listening to the same voices, working on the same tasks. His world would be a continuous shade of brown – the shade of peat on his fingers as both he and his father worked out on the moor with all its miles of heather, the colour of rotting straw and dung, the splattering on the hind-quarters of his cattle. The only contrast in shade would be the black and red of anvil and forge, the unrelenting rhythm of the hammer in his grasp.

And that would be it. So different from the pattern of the days he had spent on the Glengarry. So different, too, from his first ship, the Aboukir, which he had been on before, the one that he tried not to think about when recalling the war. On the Glengarry, all seemed still and peaceful. There was one occasion when the captain had ordered the guns to fire at what he believed was a U-boat a short distance out from Rosyth, only to discover it was a whale, its carcass scarred and broken by shells, the stink of scorched blubber remaining in the air for ages. On another occasion, off the coast of Antrim, they narrowly missed a row of mines the Germans had placed in those waters. He had seen one close by as they moved away, marvelling as the vessel avoided it.

Only the places that the ship sailed towards altered during his time on board. There were the visits to different ports: Leith; the London dockyards where he had been a week or two before, loading munitions from Silvertown; the times they sailed to Rouen bringing stores to the men stationed there. Trying always to dodge and avoid the German U-boats and ships, the sea-mines that might be skulking in deep or shallow waters. And throughout these voyages, the many different sights and scenes. Light upon the water. Dusk upon the land. The grey docks encountered; the shingle on the shoreline; the wind-worn, salt-blown harbour buildings; the rocking, creaking boats tied up at the quay. The different accents and languages he had heard around these places. The hours, too, spent at sea with men like John Macdermid accompanying him on watch. At first, he had spoken to him, but over time, he had grown weary of his unrelenting confidence, the warnings he doled out daily on his tongue.

‘I’ll tell you, Tormod, it’s shocked me. How little these others know of their Bible. They’ll suffer for their ignorance one of these days. The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead.’

It was at times like these it was good to know he could escape into sheets of paper and draw. The longer Macdermid’s words and sermons stretched to match the length of his face, the more likely Tormod was to pi...

Table of contents

• The Outer Hebrides and the British Isles
• Map of Lewis and Harris
• 1936
• 1992
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1992
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1936
• Tormod’s Journals
• 1937
• 1992
• Author’s note
• From The Stornoway Gazette, 5th January, 1919
• From The Scotsman, 6th January, 1919