The Phoney War Myth: Lewis's Enduring Wounds from WWII Losses
If there is one phrase I have detested throughout my entire life, it is the casual reference to the so-called 'Phoney War' – those months between September 1939 and June 1940 when, according to popular misconception, hardly anyone in Britain's armed forces paid the ultimate sacrifice. This notion feels particularly offensive when viewed through the lens of my own community's experience.
Avoiding Local Funerals and Confronting Grief
Since losing my father in May 2023, I have done my utmost to avoid traditional Lewis funerals with their raw, essential rites. The viewing of remains, processing the coffin, taking your turn to carry it, another turn with a shovel, and not departing until the grave is completely filled and a Swiss roll of grassy sod has been carefully unfurled atop it.
This process is raw, real, tough, and – in its own profound way – healing. As the old Alcoholics Anonymous proverb wisely states, the best way of negotiating any strong emotion is through it, not around it. Until last Thursday, I desperately limited my outings for those manly handshakes, the squeeze of a widow's hand, and that ghastly drumming sound as I flung yet more sandy soil on an uncushioned coffin lid six feet under.
When Personal and Historical Grief Collide
Then, that Thursday, both fierce impulses hopelessly collided. I have sadly few memories of my Marybank neighbour, Alex Dan Nicolson. He was a kindly man who would hail me on the road and once rejoiced to bump into my father, his old Laxdale schoolfellow, though a couple of years behind him.
Alex Dan, 87, had been out of circulation for a long time, though until the very end – collapsing on the Sabbath by his devoted wife of 65 years – he retained a vital wi-fi connection with a beloved 22-year-old grandson, who coaxed forth chuckles right to the final moments. There exists a recent photograph of three generations – Alex Dan, his son John Murdo, and grandson Sam – where mutual regard is beautifully evident.
Alex Dan not knowing quite where and when, but profoundly aware he was with close kin who loved him dearly.The Fatherless Generation of Lewis
He had no memory whatever of his own father: lost on November 23, 1939, with HMS Rawalpindi. Having approached my 60th birthday wondering if I was blessed with an eternal father figure, I cannot possibly imagine what that must have felt like for a little boy in the 1940s growing up on an island so knee-deep in orphans from both German wars that genuine sympathy would have been scarce indeed.
Lewis knew no 'Phoney War.' Something between a quarter and a third of the entire Royal Naval Reserve in September 1939 hailed from this single island. So esteemed were these men for their pluck, self-discipline, seamanship, and dignity that tales persist of captains at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Harwich, Rosyth, and other ports hitting quaysides and hailing mustered reservists with the specific request: 'I want Stornoway men... any Stornoway men?'
Family Legacies of Loss
My own MacLeod grandfather was one of those men. His widow, who survived him by a full decade, could never touch on the memory of one particular lad from her own Lewis township – among Britain's earliest casualties in Hitler's war – without melting into uncontrollable tears. She composed a heartfelt song for him, as Lewismen drowned in their hundreds even before Churchill became Prime Minister.
In defiant opposition to cultural child-naming rules of that era, she even named her firstborn son after his father. To her very last days, she never forgot the terror, holding her infant daughter in her arms as her man, with scant 1939 notice, strode away at the Govan call-up, completely unsure they would ever embrace again.
That baby girl would be dead by July 1940, a suffocating, unfixable fact my father, born that November, would bear all his days.My father should have been named Angus, not Donald, but my grandmother held little hope her man would survive the war, perhaps even fretting that some future grandson might end up writing material like this in German. Remarkably, my grandfather did survive the conflict.
Selective Memories of Trauma
Oddly, he could freely discuss the 1919 Iolaire disaster with his grandchildren – when nearly two hundred returning Lewis veterans of the Great War were drowned on their Stornoway doorstep due to Admiralty incompetence. 'Cart after cart after cart,' he murmured when I was just ten years old, 'cart after cart, every cart passing our house with coffins...'
In stark contrast, he was almost completely incapable of discussing that same tragedy with his own offspring. Yet his own 1939-45 naval service he could only discuss with them. What particular brain wiring did that psychological division reflect? I never managed – he died in 1986 – to draw him out much on these matters.
I do know that, rising from naval-rating ranks, he achieved Chief Petty Officer status, which suggests considerable intelligence and capability. Thanks to my father's recollections, I also know he carried terrified memories of serving as a 'powder monkey' – a term likely dating back to Henry VIII, describing the dangerous job of loading shells into externally bolted, pivoting gun turrets, with the certain knowledge that if HMS Doomsday were sunk, you would join Davey Jones's Locker with her.
Alex Dan's Different Experience
In happier experiences, my grandfather served aboard HMS Glasgow in the determined pursuit of the Bismarck. Alex Dan Nicolson had no such paternal memories; no father's knee to lean against, no father's comforting caress through his hair. He was simply another little boy, ambling through the village in shorts, who had lost his Da in the war without even the memory of his smile, his touch, his voice, or his scent.
And – as Constant Reader might remember – just scant weeks ago, he lost his best Marybank friend: his schoolfellow, my next-door neighbour Al MacDonald. Though latterly too frail to pad the hundred yards down the road for a visit, 'Titch' phoned Alex Dan faithfully to the very end.
The Last Contemporaries
In Aignish cemetery last week, in a biting eastern wind, their last township contemporary – 'Murdo Lava,' as we affectionately call him – was in determined attendance. Remarkably, three strapping descendants – a son, grandson, and a willowy great-grandson fond of fly-fishing – all hold full-time jobs while Murdo Lava still strims his own grass at an advanced age.
Hitler's war cast an enormous shadow upon my generation. It had ended just two decades before my birth. My schoolmasters included many men who had served directly in the conflict. My mother, for as long as I can remember, has breathed in horror of the Holocaust; thousands upon thousands of her small European contemporaries were murdered in it – and my grandparents' horror at any waste of food continues to haunt me to this day.
But Hitler's war has long since poured over the sill of our collective memory: fewer than two hundred Scottish veterans still survive, and no doubt, not a few in desperate circumstances lied about their age to enlist. My parents had their memories, nevertheless; Alex Dan, up the road, we laid to rest without the recollections he longed for most of all – of a Da whose only known grave is the vast, unforgiving sea.
The retiring collection at his funeral last Thursday was designated for the RNLI; the final item of praise was the hymn 'Nearer My God To Thee' – and that poignant choice whispers everything about the enduring connection between this community and the sea that both sustains and claims them.
