The glens were full of frost and fog. Fog lay in pillows in the folds of the hills; the distant mountaintops shone dazzling pink and white beneath rays of low sunshine that didn’t touch the Spitfire’s wings. The haar, the North Sea coastal fog, was closing in. It was so cold that the moist air crystallised inside the Plexiglas hood, so that it seemed to be lightly snowing in the cockpit.
Maddie landed at Deeside just before sunset. But it wasn’t sunset, it was twilight grey and turning blue, and she would either have to spend the night in a cheerless, unmade spare bed in the guestroom of the officers’ billet, or she’d have to find a guesthouse in Aberdeen. Or she’d have to spend half the night on an unheated and blacked-out train and perhaps arrive back in Manchester at 2 o’clock in the morning. Unwilling to face the loneliness of the airfield’s spartan accommodation, or a dour, granite-faced, Aberdeen landlady who wouldn’t accept her ration coupons for an unarranged evening meal, Maddie opted for the train.
She walked to the branch line station at Deeside. There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, ‘If you know where you are, then please tell others.’ There were no lights in the waiting room because they’d show when you opened the door. The ticket seller had a dim banker’s lamp burning behind his wee cage.
Maddie straightened herself out a bit. The girls in the ATA had been given a good splash of publicity in the papers and were expected to live up to certain standards of neatness. But she’d found that people didn’t always recognise her navy uniform with its gold ATA pilot’s wings, or make sense of them, and Scotland was as foreign a land as France to Maddie.
‘Is there a train any time soon?’ she asked.
‘Aye, there is,’ agreed the ticket seller, as cryptic as the platform posters.
‘When?’
‘Ten minutes. Aye, ten minutes.’
‘Going to Aberdeen?’
‘Och, no, not to Aberdeen. The next train’s the branch line to Castle Craig.’
To make this easier, I am translating the ticket seller’s speech from Aberdeen Doric. Maddie, not being fluent in the Doric herself, wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.
‘Craig Castle?’
‘Castle Craig,’ this bogle of a railway employee repeated laconically. ‘Single to Castle Craig, miss?’
‘No – No!’ Maddie said sensibly, and then in a fit of pure insanity brought on, no doubt, by loneliness and hunger and fatigue, added, ‘Not a single, I’ve got to come back. A return, please. Third-class return to Castle Craig.’
Half an hour later: Oh, what have I done! Maddie thought to herself, as the antique and ice-cold two-coach stopping train lurched and crept past a number of pitch-dark, anonymous station platforms, bearing Maddie further and further into the haunted foothills of the Scottish Highlands.
The compartment in the railway carriage was dimly lit by one blue light overhead. The carriage was not heated. There were no other passengers in Maddie’s compartment.
‘When’s the next train back?’ she asked the ticket collector.
‘Last one in two hours.’
‘Is there one before that?’
‘Last one in two hours,’ he repeated unhelpfully.
(Some of us still have not forgiven the English for the Battle of Culloden, the last battle to be fought on British soil, in 1746. Imagine what we will say about Adolf Hitler in 200 years.)
Maddie got off the train at Castle Craig. She had no luggage but her gas mask and her flight bag, containing a skirt which she was supposed to wear when she wasn’t flying, but which she hadn’t been able to change into, and her maps and pilot’s notes and circular slide rule for wind speed computations. And a toothbrush and her last flight’s 2 oz bar of chocolate. She remembered how she’d nearly wept with envy at Dympna’s description of having to spend the night in the back of a Fox Moth and nearly freezing to death. Maddie wondered if she’d freeze to death before the train she just got off finally went back to Deeside two hours later.
Here I think I should remind you that my family is long-established in rather the upper echelons of the British aristocracy. Maddie, you will recall, is the granddaughter of an immigrant tradesman. She and I would not ever have met in peacetime. Not ever, unless perhaps I’d decided to buy a motorbike in Stockport – perhaps Maddie might have served me. But if she hadn’t been such a cracking radio operator and been promoted so quickly, it’s not likely we’d have become friends even in wartime, because British officers don’t mingle with the Lower Ranks.
(I don’t believe it for a minute – that we wouldn’t have become friends somehow – that an unexploded bomb wouldn’t have gone off and blown us both into the same crater or that God himself wouldn’t have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn’t have been likely.)
At any rate Maddie’s growing misgivings on this particular ill-conceived rail journey were mostly based on her certainty that she simply could not go and knock on the door of a Laird’s Castle and ask for accommodation, or even a cup of tea, while she waited for the return train. She was only Maddie Brodatt and not a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots or Macbeth.
But she had not taken the War into account. I have heard a good many people say that it is levelling the British class system. Levelling is perhaps too strong a word, but it is certainly mixing us up a bit.
Maddie was the only passenger to get off at Castle Craig, and after she’d dithered on the platform for five minutes, the station master came out to greet her personally.