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Meeting Mrs McBain
On 24th we drove north from Skye to Ullapool and then plunged up the ‘mad wee road of Sutherland’ to Inverkirkaig. Scott knew that his grandmother Alexandrina MacLeod, known as Alice, had gone to Glasgow as a domestic servant, from a croft in Badnaban, where his great grandfather Alexander Alistair MacLeod, known as ‘Ally Alistair’, had farmed. Our expectations soared as we drove along the beautiful coastal road, but clouds had gathered and the sun went in, and when we reached it Badnaban, whose Gaelic place name means ‘the place of women’, looked a dismal place.
We found No. 22, supposedly the family croft, but found a fairly modern-looking bungalow, near an unnumbered old croft, which had clearly been renovated very recently. Nobody was in: looking at the rainswept croft, we weren’t surprised Alice and her sister Barbara both left to enter domestic service in Glasgow. An indoor servant’s life was a hard one, for sure, but it didn’t involve scrabbling about in boggy mud uprooting turnips and gutting net-fulls of fish.
We left, too, rather downhearted, and found our Bed and Breakfast, ‘Davar’, at Baddidarrach on the other side of Lochinver harbour. The proprietor, Mrs McBain, was very friendly, so we told he why were there. ‘I knew the MacLeods of Badnaban!’ she exclaimed. She knew Scott’s great uncle Jimmy as ‘Jimmy Alistair’ and said ‘I knew Jimmy and Greta very well – in fact I was at their funerals’. Jimmy was Alice’s brother, who took over the croft when Ally Alistair died.
‘And of course', Mrs McBain said, 'I remember poor Sandy’. Sandy was Jimmy and Greta's adopted son, who was killed in a car accident, aged only 24. ‘Och, everybody loved Sandy’, she added, sadly, and told us where on the road just outside Lochinver he had driven his car straight into a cliff face. ‘He hardly ever drank, but he did that day…’, she told us: she had been to his funeral too, and his burial up the coast at Stoer.
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