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My grandfather had amused gray eyes and a magnificently unapologetic Roman nose. Throughout the time I knew him, he talked about Burma now and again, but in disconnected snatches, as if his memories were like the bouts of amebic dysentery that occasionally haunted him after the war—appearing without warning, sometimes violently, and then disappearing just as suddenly.

At some point during the war, my grandfather was wounded. “In Burma, I think. I don’t know how,” Mum says. “Of course, we didn’t really talk about it. I suppose shrapnel or something. He had this tennis ball–sized lump on his hip. Glug and I always begged him, ‘Show us your war wound! Show us your war wound!’ and he would drop his shorts so we could admire it. And then the next thing was, ‘Daddy, take your teeth out!’ because everyone had false teeth in those days. As soon as they turned forty, that was it—off they all went to the dentist—out with the old and in with the snappers.”

But Auntie Glug says, “No, no, no. It wasn’t shrapnel in Burma. It was a rock in Nigeria. I’m sure of it. Someone threw a rock at him and he ended up with a very impressive lump on his hip.” She waves her cigarette at me. “I’m convinced that’s how he got his wound.” And she seems so certain that I consider accepting her version of events until my cousin Cait and I discover a telegram in the bottom drawer of the Welsh dresser in the Langlands dining room:

Priority Mrs. EMB Huntingford

c/o Mrs Macdonald

Waternish House

Isle of Skye

Report received from India that Lieutenant R.L.

Huntingford Queens Own Cameron Highlanders posted

Black Watch serving with Nigeria Regiment was

wounded in Burma on 7th March 1945. The Army

Council express sympathy. Letter follows shortly.

Under Secretary for State for War.

Underneath the telegram my grandfather has written, “Correct report should have read ‘wounded but remains on duty.’ The R.A.F. dropped a 500 Ib bomb on the road in the middle of 5NR instead of on the JAPS!!!”

Cait and I turn the paper over, but that is all that has been written. The telegram leaves the cause of the lump on my grandfather’s hip almost as confused as it was before. In the end, it seems safest to say that my grandfather was wounded at least once and possibly twice during the war, but whether it was a rock in Nigeria or the five hundred pounds of friendly fire in Burma that gave him the lump, we’ll never know.

In 1943, my grandfather was posted briefly on the west coast of Scotland to guard against German warships in the Minch. His batman was from Inverness and so for a few glorious months from the late summer to the early winter of 1943, the war became a family affair—the batman able to visit his people in Inverness and my grandfather able to spend time at Waternish. The crofters on the Isle of Skye took to calling my grandfather “Major Macdonald,” perhaps because he bore such a striking resemblance to my grandmother’s gentle, shell-shocked brother Allan. “I think it must have been a happy time for my parents,” Mum says. By which she means she was conceived.

In late 1943, my grandfather returned to Burma, and my grandmother—finally able to hold on to a pregnancy in the malaria-free chill of a British winter—went to the south of England for her war effort. She worked as a farm laborer near Southampton and boarded with a rich widow in a grand old house nearby. The widow, Catherine Angleton, had a wooden leg as a result of a bout with cancer, “but she dressed very nicely with stockings, tweed skirts and very good shoes,” Mum says, “so you really couldn’t tell.”

As a major port and industrial area, Southampton had been a particular target of the Luftwaffe during the war. At the end of February 1944, when my grandmother was four and a half months pregnant, there was a major raid on the city. “Apparently, every time there was a bomb I jumped,” Mum tells me. “I’m very sensitive to loud noises. It’s why I always look a bit sour at children’s birthday parties