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The living pastElegy for a vanishing worldTHE LIVING PAST This is about the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides during the 1940s and 1950s, though the author goes back and describes something of the historic momentum of religious and social influences which helped create the situation into which he was born. There are anecdotes and extraordinary personalities on every page. Here is one snapshot of the community 60 years ago: young Donald was taking part in a poetry recitation competition in a Gaelic Eisteddfod and there was a rule that after you had ended the adjudicator would ask you a few simple questions to ascertain whether you had any clue as to what you had been reciting. Donald’s piece must have been a love poem and Bella Morrison asked him what the poet was writing about. He didn’t have the remotest idea, but digging deep into his Ness Gaelic he answered, ‘A chlig!’ Bella (who later married the Rev. Angus Finlayson) collapsed into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. It was totally colloquial Ness slang for something like ‘His bird!’ So Donald’s days of competitive recitations came to an end. UnconventionalThe Living Past is not a conventional memoir but a series of impressions, scraps of memory that build into a picture of an idyllic childhood on a Scottish island. The literary device the author employs is 28 letters purporting to be written by the aged Macleod, starting in the year 2020, to a Canadian lady whose mother had been in school with Donald and who is inquiring about the kind of life her mother knew 75 years earlier. The intimate letter genre enables the author to write on a variety of themes in a personal manner. His love for the Western Isles, and particularly his devotion to his parents, is wonderfully moving. His early lessons were written on slates. How we remember them. Then on he went to the famous Nicolson in Stornoway which grammar school, we are informed, actually won BBC Radio’s Top of the Form in 1953/54. In the following year our school was knocked out in the first round by Cardiff High School for Girls (oh, the shame of being beaten by girls) by one point, 41 to 40. Phil Williams, who knew everything, didn’t know what was the Calgary Stampede. Macleod’s grandfather was a great giant of a man with steel-blue eyes, enormous hands and the stamina of an ox, a fisherman all his days. Macleod’s mother wrote an occasional Gaelic poem for a deceased friend which was published in the Stornoway Gazette. One of these was for someone called John Murray, an extraordinary man of God. Donald writes that, ‘One of the abiding regrets of my life is that I was ashamed or at least embarrassed when it was published. I never gave her the encouragement she deserved. Even today, years later, the memory of that is almost unbearable.’ ThrowawaysThen there are the Macleodisms: ‘I would be perfectly happy to allow all those baptised as infants to the Lord’s Table . . . I never had any problem with children taking Communion, whether by profession of faith or on the same ground as they receive baptism; their covenant link with their parents.’ Oh, Donald, why spoil this beautiful book with such airy throwaways? Why has this not been done? Did our fathers not have good reasons for this? This is an elegy for a world that has vanished — a world of snow in Lewis, peat fires, schoolboy cricket near Stornoway, houses without chimneys with the smoke finding its own way out through the thatch, poverty accepted as shared with all except the posh, tinkers, horses, the family cow, arriving in church half an hour early, the omnipresent bi-lingualism, and so on. Reading alongside it Iain Murray’s life of Kenneth A. Macrae (Banner of Truth) you will receive a comprehensive portrait of the grandeur of Hebridean Christianity and culture in the 20th century. Geoff Thomas,
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