The Sea! The Sea!

In the olden days, my father began. It was 1931 and I was six. We were waiting in the car for my mother, who didn't yet drive. He was a doctor, he had a car, we lived in an industrial town in the north of England. "In the olden days there was a terrible battle deep in Persia [he said Per-zia, not Persha as did everyone else] between the Per-zian emperor and his younger brother, who wanted the throne for himself, and the younger brother and his army were defeated. This younger brother had hired ten thousand Greek soldiers to fight for him with his own troops, and after the defeat the ten thousand had to make their own way home, through the mountains, over the passes, always westward through what is now Turkey toward Greece—a weary time, a long long march. Then one day while they were in the high mountains a soldier saw a gleam in the distance, a gleam of the sea that lay between them and their homeland, and he cried out, 'Thalassa! Thalassa!' Thalassa means the sea. When they saw the sea they knew they were within reach of home. They all cried out and embraced one another and wept."

"Oh."

"Thalassa. The sea! The sea! A famous moment."

"Oh."

"They had been far from home. Imagine their joy." He fell silent. I saw nothing to get excited about. "The hills and the sea together," he added. "That's what I like. Real hills. Mountains. And the sea at their feet."

"The mountains and the hills and the seas of Skye."

"That's right. Well, those Greeks were nearly home. Of course they had to find boats and go across the sea, but they could imagine their home was not far off." He paused, and when I looked, I saw he was in tears.

* * *

Dear God, to be six years old and see your father cry, your great tough father! What do you make of that? Well, you wait for the answer to turn up, and it duly did about 1950 when I was in my twenties and a free agent. Not before. Because of the war, when Skye was in a restricted zone; because I was too young; because my mother was wrong-footed there when she went to Skye as a bride; because my grandmother didn't care for any of her sons' wives; because of my grandmother's extreme religiosity; because my mother didn't approve of Highland women or of masterful women like my grandmother. Take your pick of reasons.

In the end, just after the war, I became friends with a biochemist who was a keen mountaineer. Her home was in Trieste, and when she went home she would go off on weekends and climb in the eastern Alps. During the war she'd been a courier for the partisans who hid in the mountains. Now she had a fellowship in London. Where could she put her expertise to use, where could she climb? That's what prompted us to go to Skye and the finest mountains in the British Isles.

We must have taken the train to Oban and then a MacBrayne's steamer to Kyle of Lochalsh: because I remember as if it were yesterday standing on deck in the sunshine as the puffer, low in the water, made its way past Morvern, among the isles of Muck, Eigg, and Rum and eventually up the Sound of Sleat along the southern edge of Skye. The seas were purple and bottle-green, and the mountains on mainland and Skye, on either side of us, bare and tremendous. So that's what it's all about, I thought. No wonder. And I've never seen anything more beautiful since, unless it's the Italian lakes from the train, which represent Botticelli's sweetness rather than Michelangelo's strength, and I prefer Michelangelo. And there on the quay at Kyle were my uncle and his wife, who ran the post office at Broadford as my grandfather had done till his death in 1918: we belonged here.

Was...