The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [3]
‘What in God’s name are you doing here, laddie?’ demanded Mr Grassie. ‘Get off home. Don’t you know war has been declared? Your family will want you home.’
I did not really appreciate the gravity of those words: ‘war has been declared’. I certainly had no conception of how they would change my life. But there was a strange urgency in his voice that made me obey Mr Grassie instantly. He locked up behind me as I set off on my old bike to make the seven-mile journey home. As I hurtled along the deserted streets my mind raced with the possibilities. Chief among them: Would I be called up?
I lived with my parents, auntie, sister and two brothers in a newly built granite bungalow on the western fringes of Aberdeen, the ‘Silver City of the North’ as it was styled by dint of its glinting granite buildings. When I got home Mum and Dad, Auntie Dossie, my older brother Douglas, younger brother Bill and younger sister Rhoda were all in the living room, grimly gathered around the wireless set.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who only months before had promised ‘peace for our time’, had just announced that Britain was at war with Germany. I was born in 1919, the year that the First World War, ‘the War to End All Wars’, had officially been concluded. Now here we were a mere twenty years later taking up arms against the same foe. The irony was not lost on me.
After the disaster of the First World War, my father never imagined the powers that be would be stupid enough to lead us into another one. But it transpired that Chamberlain was no match for Hitler. When the conversation inevitably came around to conscription, Father turned to me and said, quite straight-faced, ‘At least your surname begins with the letter “U”. You’re at the end of the alphabet and the war will be over when they get to you, son.’ I thought ruefully of the troops in 1914 who were told they would be ‘home by Christmas’ and kept my doubts to myself.
Unlike so many in the north-east of Scotland, the Urquharts were not a military family. Indeed the motto of the ancient Urquharts was curiously unwarlike for a Highland clan and its admonition to ‘Speak well, mean well, do well’ could have been written specially for us. My father George was an exceptional mathematician and a teacher of English and Latin at the private commercial college he had helped to found in Aberdeen. He was a clever man. Born the son of humble textile mill workers in the Angus county town of Forfar, he had won a scholarship to the local academy and for the times his progress was an unusual example of social mobility. He was the only one of fourteen siblings to make it out of the mill. But he was systematically diddled by a business partner and his ambitions were never fulfilled. Accordingly we lived in what were politely referred to at the time as ‘straitened circumstances’.
Dad had started the business school with a fellow teacher called Billy Trail. While Dad headed the general education side of the college, Mr Trail was in charge of the clerical school, which taught typing and office skills. Mr Trail became a very close family friend. It was the third partner, Mr Wishart, the one who looked after the finances – a little too well – who did the diddling. In the early 1930s it became apparent that there was not enough money in the business account to pay the wages. Dad and Mr Trail confronted Mr Wishart. He said he would sort the situation immediately. The books were soon corrected but the thieving had gone on for many years. The police should have been called but neither Father nor Mr Trail was very business-minded and they just got on as best they could.
During the First World War Dad had become the first in our family to enlist in the British Army when he joined Aberdeen’s local regiment, the Gordon Highlanders. Like so many others of his generation, he would know the horrors of the Battle of the Somme and was discharged on medical grounds in 1916, having been gassed and