The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald

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      “Pipe-sergeant, tell you what,” said the General. “I have been told that back in the ’nineties the First Black Watch sergeants danced a thirty-twosome. Always doubted it, but suppose it’s possible. What do you think? Yes, another whisky, please.”

      The pipe-sergeant, flattered but slightly outraged, gave his opinion. All things were possible; right, said the General, wiping his mouth, we would try it.

      The convolutions of an eightsome are fairly simple; those of a sixteensome are difficult, but a thirty-twosome is just murder. When you have thirty-two people weaving and circling it is necessary that each one should move precisely right, and that takes organisation. The General was an organiser; his tunic came off after half an hour, and his voice hoarsely thundered the time and the changes. The mess shook to the crash of feet and the skirling of the pipes, and at last the thirty-twosome rumbled, successfully, to its ponderous close.

      “Dam’ good! Dam’ good!” exclaimed the General, flushed and applauding. “Well danced, gen’men. Good show, pipe-sarn’t! Thanks, Tom, don’t mind if I do. Dam’ fine dancing. Thirty-twosome, eh? That’ll show the Black Watch!”

      He seemed to sway a little as he put down his glass. It was midnight, but he was plainly waking up.

      “Thirty-twosome, by Jove! Wouldn’t have thought it possible.” A thought seemed to strike him. “I say, pipesarn’t, I wonder … d’you suppose that’s as far as we can go? I mean is there any reason …?”

      He talked, and the pipe-sergeant’s eyes bulged. He shook his head, the General persisted, and five minutes later we were all outside on the lawn and trucks were being sent for so that their headlights could provide illumination, and sixty-four of us were being thrust into our positions, and the General was shouting orders through cupped hands from the veranda.

      “Taking the time from me! Right, pipers? It’s p’fickly simple. S’easy. One, two, an’ off we go!”

      It was a nightmare, it really was. I had avoided being in the sixty-four; from where I was standing it looked like a crowd scene from “The Ten Commandments”, with the General playing Cecil de Mille. Officers, mess-waiters, batmen, swung into the dance as the pipes shrilled, setting to partners, circling forwards and back, forming an enormous ring, and heughing like things demented. The General bounded about the veranda, shouting; the pipe-sergeant hurtled through the sets, pulling, directing, exhorting; those of us watching clapped and stamped as the mammoth dance surged on, filling the night with its sound and fury.

      It took, I am told, one hour and thirteen minutes by the Adjutant’s watch, and by the time it was over the Fusiliers from the adjoining barracks were roused and lined along the wall, assorted Arabs had come to gaze on the wonders of civilisation, and the military police mobile patrol was also on hand. But the General was tireless; I have a vague memory of him standing on the tailboard of a truck, addressing the assembled mob; I actually got close enough to hear him exhorting the pipe-sergeant in tones of enthusiasm and entreaty:

      “Pipe-sarn’t! Pipey! May I call you Pipey? … never been done … three figures … think of it … hunner’n-twenty-eightsome … never another chance … try it … rope in the Fusiliers … massed pipers … regimental history … please, Pipey, for me …”

      Some say that it actually happened, that a one hundred and twenty-eightsome reel was danced on the parade ground that night, General Sir Roderick MacCrimmon, K.C.B., D.S.O., and bar, presiding; that it was danced by Highlanders, Fusiliers, Arabs, military police, and three German prisoners of war; that it was danced to a conclusion, all figures. It may well have been; all I remember is a heaving, rushing crowd, like a mixture of Latin Carnival and Scarlett’s uphill charge at Balaclava, surging ponderously to the sound of the pipes; but I distinctly recall one set in which the General, the pipe-sergeant, and what looked like a genuine Senussi in a burnous, swept by roaring, “One, two, three,” and I know, too, that at one point I personally was part of a swinging human chain in which my immediate partners were the Fusiliers’ cook-sergeant and an Italian café proprietor from down the road. My memory tells me that it rose to a tremendous crescendo just as the first light of dawn stole over Africa, and then all faded away, silently, in the tartan-strewn morning.

      No one remembers the General leaving later in the day, although the Colonel said he believed he was there, and that the General cried with emotion. It may have been so, for the inspection report later congratulated the battalion, and highly commended the pipe-sergeant on the standard of the officers’ dancing. Which was a mixed pleasure to the pipe-sergeant, since the night’s proceedings had been an offence to his orthodox soul.

      “Mind you,” he would say, “General MacCrimmon had a fine agility at the pas-de-bas, and a decent sense of the time. Och, aye, he wass not bad, not bad … for a Campbell.”

       Night Run to Palestine

      I had two grandmothers, one Presbyterian, the other pagan. Each told me stories, in her own way. The pagan, an incredibly old, bright-eyed creature from the Far West, peopled the world with kelpies and pixies and giants, or fair cold princesses and their sea-rover lovers; these were the tales her people had brought in the long ships centuries ago. And sometimes she would tell of our more immediate mainland ancestors, of the Red Fox and Robin Roy Macgregor and the caterans of the Highlands and the dirty tricks they played each other. But always her stories were full of passion and fighting and magic and cunning stratagems, and above all, laughter. Watching her old, wrinkled face, so eager, and the play of her ancient thin hands, it was easy to believe that her own grandmother had known a woman who had seen the men coming back from the ’45, thrusting their broadswords into the thatch for another time, and stamping while the tears ran down their faces. Afterwards she would give me a penny or a potato scone, which she baked with great skill.

      My other grandmother had only one story, the point of which eludes me still. She was a Glencoe MacDonald, strong and of few words, worshipping a stern God on whom she kept a close eye to see that he didn’t get up to anything the Presbytery wouldn’t have approved of, like granting salvation to Catholics and Wee Frees. She frightened me, for she was hard and forbidding and insisted that we walk miles to church on Sundays. On these walks I was naturally forbidden to take my ball; on weekdays I could dribble it along beside her, and on one occasion she even condescended to kick it, watching it with a cold eye to see that it rolled straight. It did. And it was on that occasion that she told me the story; the sight of a distant train puffing along the hillside had brought it to mind.

      It appears that on the West Highland railway near Tyndrum there was a steep hill. A train of cattle in open trucks was steaming up it, when a coupling broke and the trucks began to run back downhill. In the rear truck was the elderly guard and a young assistant, and the guard, as the train gathered speed, cried to the young man:

      “When you see me shump, you shump too. Better to be killed on the bank than smochtered among the cattle.”

      They had both jumped, and the young man broke his ankle and the old guard smashed his watch, and the train thundered on to the bottom of the hill and glided gradually to a stop in perfect safety.

      At this point my grandmother paused, and I waited for the punchline. She stood gazing out across the glen with that stony look that she would fasten on the minister if he looked like letting up in his sermon after a mere forty minutes; her mind was away somewhere else.

      “And that,” she said impressively at last, “is what happened on the West Highland railway.”

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