I’d booked sleeping berths to Fort William, onward tickets for the scenic passenger line to Mallaig, and a double bed in a country-house hotel. But at the last moment she said she couldn’t come. So on my birthday I woke from a drugged sleep in an upper bunk on the Caledonian sleeper and there was one less person in my romantic Scottish Highlands sleeper-compartment fantasy than planned.
I climbed down the ladder, released the window shutter and looked out. We were travelling slowly across a frozen bog. In the far distance, mountains; their snowy peaks glowing orange in the weak early-morning sunlight. Between the strand of barbed wire demarcating railway property and these far-off peaks, not a single sign of human endeavour could be seen. I might have been looking out on the end of the Ice Age. A pair of red stags, looking anxiously at the train over their shoulders, cantered away. A red stag is a fine sight at the best of times. Two spotted from a train at sunrise on my birthday raised my spirits for the rest of the day.
Just over an hour later, after more bog and snowy mountain, we passed at a walking pace beside a new Morrison’s supermarket and lurched to a stop. Fort William. It was the end of the line for many, but not for me. I slid my suitcase into a left-luggage locker, scoffed a full Scottish in the station buffet, then boarded the last train (of two) bound for the fishing and ferry port of Mallaig. The scenery on offer through the windows of the impudent little two-carriage train, that plies back and forth between Fort William and Mallaig at the end of the West Highland line, was, if anything, even more spectacular. It had the lot: mountains, glens, lochs and, finally, what I imagined was yet another exquisitely picturesque loch, but was in fact the Atlantic Ocean in one of its more placid moods, with secluded little half-moon coves of silver sand, and rugged islands in the offing.
We decanted from the train into the salt air of the tiny fishing port of Mallaig. In early February it felt well and truly like the end of the line. Frankly, I was glad I’d only come for the ride and the bed I’d booked for the night was back in Fort William. The train was scheduled to return there at 11 minutes past four. It was now 1.45.
I walked out of the station and turned right at the Fishermen’s Mission. The high street consisted of a couple of shops (closed), a visitors’ centre (closed), a marine engineer’s workshop, a public lavatory, a boarded-up pub and a Portakabin selling books and fishing tackle — catering, presumably, for those of us still struggling to decide between a life of action and the life of the mind (closed).
I’d brought swimming trunks, goggles and a towel with me. A couple of dozen lengths of Mallaig’s indoor pool would be as splendid a way as any to celebrate my birthday. It would pass the time, too. The pool, when I found it, was also closed. I pushed on as far as a small development of new-build houses on the outskirts. Clearly the Scots like to celebrate the lives of anyone fortunate enough to inflict damage on the Sassenachs. The uninspiring development was named Gordon Brown Place.
Returning back down the hill to the harbour side, I passed by a Church of Scotland kirk set imposingly on a high crag. A funeral service in progress inside was being broadcast from the porch to the world at large via a large, rock band-style amplifier. The minister was reading from the book of Revelation and his apocalyptic words — about a new Jerusalem and no more nakedness — rang out over the town and across the Sound of Sleat towards the Isle of Skye and the smaller islands of Eigg, Rhum and Muck.
He had a hypnotic voice. I leaned on the gate at the foot of the steps and listened. The sexually immoral, he read, were to be condemned to a fiery lake of sulphur. Then they sang a hymn. Standing alone in a street listening to a funeral service had not been part of the fantasy of how I would be spending my birthday. Quite the opposite, in fact. But I continued to lean on the gate and look out over Sleat Sound towards Skye, Muck, Eigg and Rhum and listen as he narrated the good and useful life of Dorothy, whom we were burying today. She sounded like a wonderful woman. According to the minister, she was ‘one of the world’s great knitters’. I stayed and listened right to the end. When the final hymn ended, I looked at my watch. Almost three. Only another hour to go. I wondered if the Fishermen’s Mission might be open for a cup of tea.
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