Murray The Italian Chapel, Orkney

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-85790-963-3
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Thousands of visitors go to the Italian Chapel in Orkney every year, witnesses to a series of remarkable acts of transformation. Among these are the Churchill Barriers nearby, straddling the ocean to link a number of Orkney's southernmost islands to its mainland. Constructed to protect Britain's naval fleet in Scapa Flow during World War Two, its builders included a group of Italian soldiers imprisoned in this bleak and windswept part of Scotland. In the course of this, they not only played a part in changing Orkney's way-of-life forever but also transformed a simple Nissen Hut, constructing through their labours a place-of-worship that still stands till this day a remarkable symbol of their identity and faith. The Italian Chapel: Orkney tells the story of the strength and tenacity, laughter and tears of the men who built the Italian Chapel, showing how spirits defeated and despondent during years of exile were lifted by its creation. It does this with its own artistry and grace, using folk-tale and myth to provide a fitting counterpart to the wonder and beauty of the building that inspired it.

Donald S. Murray was born in Ness in the Isle of Lewis. A teacher, author and journalist, his poetry, prose and verse has been shortlisted for both the Saltire Award and Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. Published widely, his work has also appeared in a number of national anthologies and on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland. He lives and works in Shetland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Murray, Donald S.

Leseproben

2

FOUNDATIONS

LAMBHOLM WALTZ

‘It was only for the first year or so of the war,’ Archie Wylie declares as we sit together in a small cottage in Holm at the southern end of the Orkney mainland, ‘but there’s no doubt that for a wee while, Orkney was in the front line. No doubt about it at all.’

He stretches out his hands as he recalls what it was like to be a young boy in the Kirkwall of these years. From time to time, he chuckles, his broad head – almost bald, apart from his grey temples and a few wisps of hair standing upright at its centre – nodding with amusement. His face lightens at the recklessness he displayed back then, eyes sparkling behind his glasses. ‘I remember the fuel tank near the town going up. I remember being in school one day and watching the German planes coming over, dropping their bombs on the island. There used to be our guns, too, firing at them, trying to stop them. I wasn’t scared of it at all. I must admit I used to really enjoy it . . .’

Looking out his window at the quietness of the scene outside these days, it would be easy for me to convince myself that Archie was making this all up, a product, perhaps, of years dreaming at the wheel of his Co-op van as he took groceries to the good people of Burray and South Ronaldsay. But there is something in the heartiness of the man’s voice, his sheer solidity and bulk that impresses and gives conviction to his words.

There is also the testimony of Dorothy Rendall, sitting at the other side of the fire, talking about the bombs landing on the foreshore of Holm, a short distance from the cottage that at one time also served as one of the local shops. ‘Were you not scared?’ she mutters, ‘There’s no doubt I was. I used to hide away and keep my eyes shut until it was all over.’

The books provide their own evidence of the reasons why it might have been more sensible for young Archie to have done the same. In , local historian G.L. Esson notes that ‘air raids were frequent during the early part of the war’ on Orkney as a whole ‘and South Ronaldsay and Burray were bombed several times.’ He outlines how a number of these incidents took place not far from the cottage where Archie and Dorothy sat that day in April when I spoke with them. There was the moment the farmhouse of Ladywater in Burray suffered damage when a landmine exploded nearby. A civilian was injured, too, after the Luftwaffe dropped a series of bombs on an army hut and a farmhouse in Deerness. Young, red-headed Dorothy must have kept her head down and screwed her eyes tight shut the day an enemy aircraft dropped some twenty bombs in a line from Widewall to St Margaret’s Hope, doing her best to pretend that all these blasts and explosions were not disrupting the peace of her world.

Yet it would have difficult for anyone in Orkney to do this for long. Houses like Graemeshall, looking out on Lamb Holm, had their windows blown in. Corpses were occasionally washed up on the shore, reminders of the reality of men ‘lost at sea’. There was suddenly a population of 60,000 on the island, as opposed to the 20,000 living there before the war. At no time was the pretence less possible than in the days and weeks following the moment the HMS was sunk in Scapa Flow. It was an event that occurred on 14 October 1939 when the German U-boat sneaked through Kirk Sound, the narrow stretch of water between the village of St Mary’s and Lamb Holm, threading its way through the sunken merchant-ships designed to prevent the enemy entering the waters of that largely landlocked bay. Once the twists and turns of this journey were complete, it found itself in a sheltered, north-eastern corner of the anchorage, its periscope turning in the direction of one of Britain’s most legendary battleships. The was positioned to protect the important RDF station at Netherbutton near Kirkwall, its anti-aircraft guns bristling to prevent any airborne assault on the building. It was not, however, prepared for any attack from sea. Its men had not yet become accustomed to the grim routine of a war which had only just begun. Useful in the First World War, their vessel was now only fit for second-line duties as opposed to the full hurly-burly of armed conflict. And these attitudes affected the crew. Its officers had not, for instance, made sure all the watertight doors and hatches were slammed shut.

At around 1 a.m., these errors were to be among those that cost the lives of 833 men. According to an unnamed survivor mentioned in David Turner’s book , ‘A torpedo from the scored a direct hit on the ’s starboard side, another torpedo started a fire in the magazine, while yet another blew a huge hole in the engine room. Almost immediately, the mighty battleship that had fought in the battle of Jutland keeled over 45 degrees and went to the seabed.’

The informant goes on to describe the chaos that ensued: an inferno raged through the mess-decks with crowds of men racing through flame and fire to leap into the waves of the harbour; in the boiler room, stokers scrambled through clouds of smoke and steam to try and find ladders to allow their escape, only to discover that many of them had been snapped and broken in the overwhelming heat, trapping them below. By this time, the work of the German torpedoes was almost complete. Those who were not killed in the intensity of the initial blaze would meet their end in the chill of the ocean’s depths. Some of those who worked on fishing boats and drifters fished them out of the harbour, the fire and oil coating the ocean’s surface hindering them in their search. A few searchers were fortunate enough to find the living, but most made the grim discovery of the dead. These included many young boys between the ages of 14 and 18; 137 boys of that age were casualties of the . It was this loss that led to the decision shortly afterwards that no one under the age of 18 would be allowed in future to serve on a Royal Navy warship during times of conflict.

There were other ripples from the story, small myths and legends constructed in its wake. Some of these even came from the direction of Berlin where the submarine captain Günther Prien was welcomed home by cheering crowds and an equally cheerful handshake from the Führer, Adolf Hitler. He spoke of how their plans had nearly been foiled by the arrival of a car coming along the road at the water’s edge when they surfaced near Graemeshall while making their way out of the confines of Scapa Flow.

‘It stopped,’ he is quoted as saying in the of 19 October 1939, ‘and the driver got out, apparently to take a good look at us. Then he jumped in the car and drove off at a great pace.’

Clearly his remarks must have generated their own rumours. There had been a dance in the village hall that night and there might have been late-night carousers in the vicinity. People asked each other who the driver of this vehicle might be and why, having seen a submarine making its way out of what, from his description, was clearly Kirk Sound, the individual had not seen fit to report this to the authorities. This was especially the case because the person might have witnessed, too, the blaze of smoke and flame over Kirkwall and would certainly have read the newspapers the following day. What possible reason did they have to remain silent? Clouds of suspicion trailed the rare car-owners of the community with the same steady persistence as the fumes of their exhausts. They must have pointed out in their own defence that, as it was wartime, car headlights were dimmed. They might not have noticed the submarine as they stood outside their vehicles, ‘taking the midnight air’.

They were even some who questioned the truth of Prien’s words in the paper. Could this be an attempt to mislead the British naval authorities about the true direction the submarine had slipped in and out of the harbour, deliberately trying to point them in the wrong direction in terms of Scapa Flow’s flaws and weaknesses? Or was it an attempt to increase his own heroic stature? As if the sheer nerve and daring of Prien’s raid wasn’t enough, there was the added drama of having carried out his escape under the gaze of some befuddled onlooker who had stumbled upon the scene. Orcadians shook their head as they pondered this, contemplating the smoke and mirrors, the endless questions and suspicions that are always created in the midst of war.

And then there was the paranoia generated in these times. The tale of the Swedish yachtsmen whose boat, the , sailed ‘from Gothenburg to Dublin and back’ and was thought to be probing the security of channels leading to the harbour while undertaking that voyage. The story of the young men of...