O Caledonia

That summer the sun shone through long days and it was safe to go to the beach. The great concrete blocks and rolls of barbed wire were wrenched away in carts and in lorries and the children wore bathing suits and sandals and in the late afternoon the warm, prickling comfort of a jersey. There was the delight of powdery sand on the soles of their feet, then, as they ran to the sea, a sudden cool firmness, then the mirror-bright sand filmed in water and the thrill and chill of the first sparkling waves which snatched breath away into the breeze so that for a moment they were nothing but a part of air and light and water, abandoned to the elements. On colder days when the tide was out they walked across the long shore to the harbour and saw the fishermen digging for bait and the fearful blanched and bristling worms that emerged from the depths of the clean sand. In the rock pools were jewel studs of anemones and transparent shrimp like water fairies, and sometimes the black questing pincers and antennae of a lobster lurking in myopic retreat beneath the weedy ledges.

Janet built castles for princesses with strandy green lawns and walls hung in pink shells and cowrie shells, pillared gateways of razor shells, roof-tops of mussels and limpet battlements. She ran in and out of the curving waves or sat among them, feeling the sands pull and sink away from under her and then come billowing back with a rush and a splash. Francis stood still for hours spinning flat stones across the shining water, and Rhona dug holes in tireless absorption. The dogs dug holes too, flinging up showers of sand into the wind; or they rushed after storms of seagulls barking hysterically.

The beach spread in a great curve, fringed by mournful dunes. At one end was the harbour with its high grey pier and the fishermen’s boats pulled up on the shingle; far off at the other end crags and cliffs loomed, with the scar of a lofty boulder-strewn cave where once Macduff had hidden for his life from murderous, mad Macbeth. Above, on the short turf scattered with pink thrift, stood the ruins of a tower, and there in happier times Lady Macduff and her women had gone to bathe, clambering down the secret stairway hewn in the cliff face into a glass-green cove where the wind could not reach the water for the surrounding basalt walls. In the summer you could hear the ladies’ laughter, for the sound of the sea then was an echo, a soft sighing, the hushed murmur in a shell; but in the storms of winter the air swirled and boomed with the howling of the damned, the outrage of the murdered innocents. Janet was afraid of this place and did not like its sinister jutting outline, even against the blue and sunny skies. She also knew that one must be brave and so she would walk carefully, accompanied by Rab, the heroic lion dog, each day a little further, but never very far, along the shore towards it. When she had felt brave enough, her hand plunged in the dense gold fur of Rab’s neck, she would turn around and look back at her family, diminished and vulnerable under the great sky, before the great sea — Francis still as a cormorant at the water’s edge, Rhona squat by her mound of sand, Hector and Vera laughing, smoking and flicking ash onto the lesser dog’s wiry coat. Then she would run as fast as she could, feet slapping through the wet, and hurl herself down beside them in the warm soft sand, sending it flying into Rhona’s eyes, into sandwiches, into the precious thermos of tea.