Entry Island by Peter May

out. At the end of each winter I would help my father break down the gable at the end of our house to shovel the cow shit on to a cart and haul it to our wee strip of land to use as fertiliser. It was always shit and seaweed we used to grow barley. And the thatch from the roof, blackened and thick with the sticky residue of peat soot, that we laid on the lazy beds with kelp to feed the potatoes. The oats seemed to grow fine without any encouragement. We reroofed each spring with fresh sheaves of barley stalks, then covered the thatch with fishermen’s netting and weighted it down with hanging stones. The smokefrom the peat fire somehow managed to make its way through the roof eventually, and the few hens we owned found warmth and comfort in winter by roosting in it.
    The walls of our blackhouse were thick. Two walls really, drystone-built, with earth and rubble in between, and turf on top to soak up the water that ran off the roof. I suppose that to someone who wasn’t accustomed to it, the sight of sheep grazing along the top of the walls might have seemed a bit odd. But I was used to seeing them up there.
    All these things I knew because they were a part of me, as I was a part of the community of Baile Mhanais.
    I remember the day that Murdag was born. I’d been sitting that morning with old blind Calum outside the door of his house near the foot of the village. Protective hills rose up to the north and east, though we were exposed to the weather from the west. The ridge beyond the bay provided a little shelter from the south-westerlies, and I suppose that my ancestors must have thought it as good a spot as any for the settling of their village.
    As always, Calum wore his blue coat with its yellow buttons, and a time-worn Glengarry on his head. He said he could see shapes in the daylight, but not a thing in the darkness of his blackhouse. So he preferred to sit outside in the cold and see something, rather than be warm inside and see nothing.
    I sat often with old Calum and listened to his stories. It seemed there was very little he didn’t know about the peoplethere, and the history of Baile Mhanais. When he first told me that he was a veteran of Waterloo, I didn’t like to say that I had no idea what a veteran was, or what Waterloo might be. It was my teacher who told me that a veteran was an old soldier, and that Waterloo was a famous battle fought a thousand miles away on the Continent of Europe to defeat the French dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte.
    It made me view old Calum in a different light. With something like awe. Here was a warrior who had defeated a dictator and he lived in my village. He said he had fought nine battles on the Continent, and was blinded in the last by his own misfiring flintlock.
    It was cold that morning, with the wind blowing down from the north, and there were spits of rain in it with a hint of sleet. The winter could be wicked sometimes, and mild at others. My teacher said it was the Gulf Stream that stopped us from being under permanent frost, and I had a picture in my mind of a hot stream bubbling through the sea to melt the ice of the northern oceans.
    I heard a voice carried on the wind. It was my sister, Annag. She was just over a year younger than me, and I turned to see her running down between the blackhouses. She wore a pale-blue cotton skirt beneath a woollen jumper that my mother had knitted. Her legs and feet were bare like mine. Shoes were for Sundays. And our feet were like leather on the soles.
    ‘Sime! Sime!’ Her little face was pink with exertion, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘It’s happening. It’s happening now!’
    Old Calum found my wrist and held it firm as I stood up. ‘I’ll say a prayer for her, boy,’ he said.
    Annag grabbed my hand. ‘Come on, come on!’
    And we ran together, hand in hand, up between the black-houses, past our stack yard and into the barn at the back. We were both still wee and didn’t have to stoop to enter the house, unlike my father,