And the Land Lay Still Read Online Free Page B

exchanging jokes and ideas and opinions, and how he shared the general view that when it was over and they went home things were going to change. ‘We were all for Labour. It was our war, and it was going to be our peace. Some of the senior officers hated us. Thought we were fraternising with the enemy, politically speaking. But there wasn’t much they could do about it.’
    Apart from a commitment to Labour, Angus brought something else back from the war – a Leica IIIc, a hefty camera of impeccable German design, bought for next to nothing in occupied Berlin. It was the camera with which he made his name, and he used it for twenty years until the mid-1960s when he replaced it with a Nikon F, a virtually indestructible beast much favoured by photographers in war zones. Both cameras still sit in their hard, burnished-leather cases on a shelf in the sitting room at Cnoc nan Gobhar. They are antiques now, or soon will be; as redundant as darkrooms or Kodachrome film. But Mike keeps them, because of their intrinsic beauty, and because – who knows? – one day they may come into their own again.
    §
    There were eighty boys at Bellcroft House, aged between seven and thirteen, doing time in deepest Perthshire because their fathers had before them, or because – as in Michael’s case – one or both parents believed such an incarceration a necessary prelude to a successful social and professional career, or because the parents were overseas with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank or the British Council or the Foreign Office, or because they hadn’t managed to secure a place for their offspring in one of a dozen better prep schools, outposts of an alien education system, dotted about the Scottish countryside. Of those eighty boys, some were bright and others stupid, some fat and others tall, some athletic and others athletically incompetent, some musical and others growlers, and all of them were
white. Perhaps because neither of them quite ‘fitted’ with the crowd, Freddy Eddelstane and Michael began to go about together. If they were not close friends, they were at least mutually tolerant companions.
    Back from that half-term break, Michael told Freddy about the election battle – the one between his parents – and how it had come about. Freddy had actually met Sir Alec Douglas-Home, because his father was a Tory MP too, or had been until the election, in the next-door constituency of Glenallan and Somewhere Else, Freddy forgot where. Had he been beaten? Michael wanted to know. It seemed to him that if your father went around in public asking people to vote for him, the overwhelming likelihood was that they wouldn’t, and he would lose. ‘Of course he wasn’t beaten,’ Freddy said, ‘he retired.’ ‘Is he very old then?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddy. ‘I suppose he is, he’s fifty-something. How old is yours?’ ‘Forty.’ ‘That’s not so young.’ ‘It’s younger than fifty.’ But even though fifty was a great age, Michael knew people didn’t retire until they were in their sixties, practically dead. ‘But what’ll he do?’ Fathers earned money. Freddy and his family might starve. Freddy was not in the least concerned. ‘There’s always something,’ he said.
    Gradually, by such exchanges, they learned about each other: how both sets of parents fought incessantly but only Michael’s were splitting up; that Michael was an only child whereas Freddy had an older brother called David and an older sister called Lucy. What was it like, having a sister? Terrible, because she was insane. Freddy’s brother was weird and his sister was insane. In fact, Freddy said with pride, his whole family was insane: his father was barking, his mother was bonkers, and even the gardener was a bad-tempered old lunatic. The gardener! If Michael hadn’t been laughing so much already he would have been astonished at the idea of a gardener. Freddy could make him laugh very easily. He had a plummy voice, the face of an