Red Star Over Hebrides is a unique book where Donald Murray looks back at his childhood in Lewis through prose, poetry and song inspired by the deep-rooted social and cultural connections of the island with Russia and the Baltics. He explores aspects of Hebridean life, such as the fishing industry and crofting land raids with the stories of literary giants such as Dostoevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy. Below, Donald remembers a dominant community figure.

Red Star Over Hebrides
By Donald S. Murray
Published by Taproot Press

From ‘Capone and Dostoyevsky’

Hypocrisy is a dying art in these islands. Every weekend, there’s a queue buying scratchcards and DVDs at the local shop. ‘Give me those lucky dips, Martin,’ they announce to the shopkeeper. Or, ‘I’ll take this film. And that one,’ they say, placing the empty cases on the counter. ‘I need something to pass the time on a Sunday afternoon.’

Duncan Macdonald – the church elder that some twenty years ago we all knew better as Capone – would have stood for none of that. A tall powerful figure in his grey overcoat and hat, his eyes had the sharpness of a gannet’s gaze. For all that he was in his seventies, one look would have been enough to terrify the likes of Martin, his hand sweeping over these goods like Jesus chastising the moneychangers in the temple. ‘What do you mean selling stuff like that? It may do a lot for your profits, but it won’t do much for your soul!’ And then his glare would swirl round his fellow-shoppers. ‘Gambling! Breaking the Sabbath! What do you mean by doing such things?’

One time I was on the wrong side of this look was a few short weeks before he died. A young student, I was reading Crime and Punishment near the back of a crowded bus when he came to sit beside me.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

I told him.

‘Now tell me … Do you ever spend time reading the Bible? I bet you never spend much time doing the likes of that.’

I smiled weakly in response. There are some people with whom it is a waste of breath to quarrel.

Yet in his youth, Capone never spent much time studying the Bible. If rumours are to be believed, he was never still long enough to lift the Good Book. Instead, he would be scaling rocks on the shoreline; balancing on one leg or combing his hair while standing on a stone outcrop that jutted out a hundred feet over the ocean and daring others to follow his example.

‘I bet you couldn’t do that.’

He would clamber on the roofs of the village blackhouses too, blocking the chimney with a large flat stone or a piece of turf or wood. As the inhabitants ran from their smoke-choked home, he would be hiding behind a nearby wall, trying to choke down his own laughter.

‘I bet they don’t know what’s happened to them.’

‘I bet …’ Even in his years as a church elder, this phrase would be like a nervous tic on his lips. ‘I bet you don’t think often of your salvation … I bet you don’t read the Bible like you should…’ In the years before he found the Church, however, these words were more than habit. They clicked continually on his tongue as he played cards and dice with the men with whom he worked on the Hydro schemes in places like Cannich, Cluanie and Glencarn. Phrases like ‘I bet’, ‘I raise’, ‘Ace of Hearts’, and ‘Jack of Diamonds’ formed part of the only common language of their camps.

People from the battered ends and edges of all over Europe learned to use it. There were Highlanders and islanders; poor Irish from the ragged coastline of Donegal—coming from communities where steady work was rare and intending to return when things had changed. And then there were those known as the ‘Poles’ – the displaced men of not only Poland but also countries the others never knew existed – like Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia. Unlike the West Coasters and Irish, they had been forced to surrender many of their dreams of return. Looking over their shoulders at nations lost either to bloodshed or tyranny, they had little choice but to try and begin new lives on the strange and alien landscape they had chanced upon.

For all their differences, the groups had much in common. In slow and faltering English, they could each tell stories about the frailty and precariousness of life. Poverty and weakness had helped to make them that way; the sound of money in their pockets – crisp notes and coins – a more comforting rhythm than the pulse of their hearts. Only a good wage in their hands could grant them a short spell of security, a time of calm and ease.

The author Capone caught me reading, Fyodor Dostoevsky, would have known much better than me how they felt. Never from a rich family, his father, murdered by serfs, left little for his widow and children. This turned the young Fyodor into a radical—so much so that he was imprisoned for political reasons by Tsar Nicholas I. He made, too, an early, disastrous marriage to a widow who suffered from consumption and had a son from her first husband. He was also involved with a magazine banned by the Russian government. A short time later, his wife and brother died. At one stage, he even had to pawn his clothes for food.

And throughout all this, there was gambling. The gaming tables at Weisbauden in Germany. The spinning roulette wheel. Roll of dice. Cut of cards. Eyes shut and hoping for a glimpse of luck. A change of life. It was the same with the men in the hydro camp. The boredom of isolation. Stench of sweat and grime. The prospect of poverty when this spell of work came to an end. All this made them gather nightly at a table in the centre of their hut; the words ‘I bet…’, ‘flush’, ‘pontoon’, ‘I raise…’ never requiring any translation for this multinational group of men whose blackened fingers stained the cards within their hands. As they coughed up the dust of earth and boulder that had gathered in their lungs, the pile of coins gleamed brightly. To have it in their fingers meant the oblivion of whisky. Or another kind of oblivion—a new life that would help them escape the horrors of the old.

Red Star Over Hebrides by Donald S. Murray is published by Taproot Press, priced £14.99.