A new memoir by the Herald’s former Highland Reporter David Ross recalls his father-in-law, Sorley MacLean.

Driving was not one of Sorley’s greatest skills. He was at the wheel one Christmas Eve when the family was young. They were heading for Inverness when they hit ice and almost ended up in Loch Cluanie. It was probably not his fault, but the episode did nothing to instil confidence in his driving amongst his daughters. As he got older [his wife] Renee did more and more, progressively limiting where he was allowed to drive. The mainland became a no-go area, but he would still drive up and down to Sabhal Mòr Ostaig when he was writer in residence. Eventually he only drove around Braes, although he remained confident in his own ability. On one occasion he was telling me that in snow and ice one should always drive in as low a gear as possible. I said I understood that while you should use low gears rather than brakes in wintery conditions, in general you should drive in as high gear as possible and try to take off in second gear. He was not at all convinced and told Renee of our debate when she came into the room. She told me to ignore her husband’s views on driving, and cited how twice they were about to leave Plockton to go on holiday and he had taken the car to Kyle of Lochalsh to fill up with petrol for the journey only to crash it. Sorley had a defence: ‘On the last occasion, technically speaking, Tommy [the other driver] was in the wrong. He was going too fast but, admittedly, I was on the wrong side of the road.’

Sorley’s main responsibility at home was to clean and lay the fire. He took great pride in having roaring fires to greet any visitor. His control centre for these operations was his shed, where he kept the wood, peat and kindling, with the coal nearby. He made a lot of improvements to the shed, with many reinforcements he christened ‘flying buttresses’ as homage to the Gothic cathedrals he loved so much. There were so many that Renee was terrified it would collapse on top of him and persuaded his son in law Donald and myself to demolish it, which was actually a lot harder than we thought it would be. Sorley was later made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, which he loved to attribute to his work on the shed.

There was nothing Sorley himself liked better than to make his family laugh. Eyes twinkling, he would happily bear the brunt of familial ridicule, the younger his tormentor the better. That never changed, even when he became very ill. His cancer seemed to be more of a nuisance to him than anything else. When he was asked by his consultant at Raigmore hospital whether he was managing to sleep at night, he admitted there was something keeping him awake – not his own impending mortality but the fact Skye Camanachd had promoted a grandson of his to the first team at not much more than 16. As honorary vice president of the club, he thought this far too early for senior shinty.

To this day numerous conversations among his six grandchildren (Somhairle, Aonghas and Gilleasbuig MacDonald; Calum and Catherine Ross; and Donald Mackay) still begin with, ‘Do you remember when Seanair [grandfather] . . .’ and a narrative is recited of Sorley having done or said something plain daft, underlining his normal eccentric behaviour. That was true to the end. He had come to our home, to recuperate from treatment. Either because he had spilled a drink or because he had been sweating, he had been complaining about feeling the bed damp and to underline the point declared, ‘Renee, it is so wet in here it’s like the Pontine Marshes before Mussolini drained them.’ This was a frequent element of his humour, to associate the epic and exotic with the ordinary and commonplace. The immersion heater in the house in Braes was always known as ‘the Renaissance’; a friend from North Uist had the face of ‘the Christ on the south portal of Chartres Cathedral’. On hearing that I had given a complete wreck of a car to my uncle for use on his croft on Iona, he declared: ‘How fitting that the càr mòr buidhe [‘big yellow car’] goes to lie with the kings of Scotland on Iona.’

Despite all this, Sorley of course was a serious man who wanted to talk about serious matters. When we were by ourselves no subject seemed off limits, from the personal to the political: the Land League, Gaelic, the Spanish Civil War, his war service in North Africa. But it was when he talked of his despair in the 1930s and how he came to believe the Red Army was all that stood in the way of the whole of Europe succumbing to fascism that I really began to understand the forces that had forged him. He had utter disdain for the treatment meted out to Anthony Blunt when uncovered as a spy in 1979 by certain newspapers which had once presented a rather more positive image of Hitler and Nazi Germany than they would now care to recall. He would have been proud to die fighting fascism. Very real ties prevented that being in Spain; at the time he was sending most of his teacher’s salary home to Raasay, where his father’s tailor’s business was failing. He tried to volunteer in September 1939. His employers, Edinburgh Corporation, however, proved difficult; he was conscripted later. Wounded three times in the North African campaign, it was amazing that he ever walked again, and he carried bits of metal in his legs ever after. He saw great courage there, such as the Englishman in Egypt – ‘A poor little chap with chubby cheeks and knees grinding each other, pimply unattractive face – garment of the bravest spirit.’ But unlike others he managed to see courage, far away from the battlefield, in ordinary people making the best of their everyday lives.

Sorley retained his suspicion of what he saw as the establishment and its trappings. He turned down an OBE, refusing to be associated with anything which celebrated the British empire and colonialism. It was a decision Renee never really understood, and we believe he accepted the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1990 for her. He told us that he got on well with the monarch when he received his medal at the Palace of Holyroodhouse and that they had discussed their respective grandchildren. I am pretty sure Sorley would have voted Yes in the 2014 independence referendum, but one can never be absolutely certain. He died before New Labour came to power, and the only observation I can remember him making about it was that he found it impossible to know what Tony Blair really believed in, which was important to him.

He took great pride in saying that when headmaster he had made Plockton High a comprehensive school long before any others in Scotland; that he would present any child for ‘O’ Grades or Highers unless they had learning difficulties. But if he was ahead of his time in this respect, he had no time for newfangled educational thinking which understated the need for sheer hard work. Befitting a man who had read the three volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution before he was 12 (he said he had run out of books to read on Raasay), he couldn’t really understand students who didn’t embrace what had been to him the joy of scholarship – this writer included. He was proud to receive seven honorary degrees from universities in Scotland, England, Ireland and France.

Highland Herald: Reporting the News from the North by David Ross is published by Birlinn, £12.99