A Delicate Wildness

1. Nairn in Darkness

'All the Irish should be hanged!' said Granny in a louder voice than usual. She was known to everyone as kind and gentle.

This fragment of a breakfast-table conversation, recounted in Nairn in Darkness and Light, echoed through David Thomson's life, and with it the fraught relationship between the two islands. He remembered it as a seven-year-old from a morning when his household in Nairn was discussing the impending arrival of David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, to holiday in the Highlands that summer of 1921.

But David's grandmother was asked to clarify her remark; did she mean to include the family's local acquaintances in Nairn, the O'Toole's? That family was related to Saint Laurence O'Toole, the twelfth-century Abbot of Glendalough and Archbishop of Dublin, some of whose descendants in this part of Scotland had decided, in order to disguise their Irish background, to change their name to Hall, after Ireland's Easter Rebellion of 1916. Granma stood firm.

Far away from this town in the north-east of Scotland David Thomson's life had begun, five thousand feet above sea level, in the city of Quetta, then part of British-occupied India. His father, Alexander Guthrie Thomson, a Scottish native born in 1873, had obtained his commission into the Indian army as a 2nd lieutenant in 1893. His posting was with the 5th Regiment of Punjab Infantry founded in 1849. The regiment later became part of the army of the new state of West Pakistan in 1947, and Quetta, close to the Afghan border, is now part of the Punjab region of Pakistan. The two Pakistan states were created, controversially, as part of the Indian independence settlement in 1947, in the two regions of India that had Muslim majorities.

The Indian army had been established for the colonial purpose of subduing a subcontinent, controlling its warring factions and maintaining it as part of the British empire. There were different wars during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; uprisings by Sikhs and Muslims, then the Mutiny of 1858, which nearly ended British rule. The Indian army's rank and file largely consisted of Indian men, as Britain and Ireland alone could not have supplied the army manpower needed for a country of India's size. At the time Alec Thomson got his commission in 1893, the ratio of Indian to British servicemen was two to one.

When Thomson had graduated from Sandhurst, he ironically couldn't afford to remain in the British army itself. Officers at that time needed a separate income if they were to live the 'appropriate' life, to be 'like well-off gentlemen'. For the privilege of being officers, the men had to buy their own uniforms, day-to-day and ornate ceremonial ones, as well as swords for battle and state occasions. The Thomsons were well-to-do, but the Finlays, the family he would marry into, were in a different league financially and in terms of connections. Why there was no 'dig out' by the wealthier side of the family at the Newton estate in Nairn for the young Thomson is unclear. But India was perhaps attractive on its own merits. The Indian army, which was usually short of officers, provided everything free. Also, in India, infantry officers were mounted, and that appealed to Alec Thomson. India was an adventure for men like him. The polo was apparently better, too.

The Indian army maintained British power in the subcontinent by at times benign, but mostly firm and sometimes brutal means. It carried out a notorious massacre in April 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh, in the city of Amritsar, opening fire on a crowd protesting at the arrest of local leaders. Exact figures for casualties are disputed but hundreds of peaceful protestors, including children, were mown down. Ninety-four years later, in 2013, David Cameron became the first British prime minister to visit the site and offer apologies, describing it as a 'deeply shameful event in British history'.

As the young Alec Thomson began his military career stationed in British Baluchistan, where Quetta is located, he was thinking of someone back home in Scotland. Before he'd left, Thomson had fallen in love with Annie Finlay, his first cousin, when she was aged just fifteen. She was born in 1880. When they became engaged during one of his home leaves, her family, on both sides, disapproved. The Episcopal Church of Scotland had only just changed its rules to allow marriage between cousins.

Annie Finlay managed to follow her fiancé to India, chaperoned by her aunt May, whose husband was in the Indian Civil Service. She married Alexander Thomson on Christmas Eve, 1907. The newly-wed Annie was to move from her native Scottish Highlands to a very different and exotic mountainous region of the world.

A contemporary account describes one aspect of life for women in the Raj, as British-administered India was known.

The honey smell of the fuzz-buzz flowers, of thorn trees in the sun, and the smell of open drains and urine, of coconut oil on shining black human hair, of mustard cooking oil and the blue smoke from cow dung used as fuel; it was a smell redolent of the sun, more alive and vivid than anything in the West.1

In the late nineteenth century, thousands of young men left Britain for India to serve as administrators, soldiers and businessmen. Many young women followed in search of marriage - and even love. These young women were known as 'The Fishing Fleet'. They endured discomforts and monotony, but also found an intoxicating environment, the sky aflame with vivid colours, pungent scents from, to them, exotic shrubs and flowers.

The Indian sub-continent Alexander Thomson and his family were to leave behind in 1914 was about to experience a great upheaval. In 1915, one of that country's great sons, Mahatma Ghandi, returned from Europe to his enormous native country to champion the Indian masses and begin his unique independence struggle, based on civil disobedience.

David Thomson's sisters, Mary and Joan, were born into this colonial environment in 1908 and 1911. Their only brother, David Robert Alexander, to give David his full name, was born on 17 February 1914. A third daughter, Barbara, was born later in Surrey and a fifth child, Lily, died in infancy in England. Stephen Bober, David's sister Barbara's son and David's nephew, recalls his mother speaking of her father as a kind and just man, driven by the best sort of Christian values.

Alexander Thomson's regiment, the 58th Vaughan Rifles, was active in France during World War I. He was decorated with several medals - some for service in particular campaigns, but he also received a Distinguished Service Medal and the French Croix-de-Guerre. Philip Mason in his book on the Indian army, writes of gallantry and devotion to duty, and at one point refers to 'clearing a German trench' to describe a much more brutal activity, almost casually describing the loss of life involved. He recounts a particular engagement involving Thomson's battalion. Sir Arthur Wauchope of the Black Watch saw his regiment's flank exposed, but the 58th came to their aid: 'And a fine sight it was to see the 58th pushing forward, driving all before them. A year's experience has taught our men that there was no regiment that ever served in the brigade they would as soon have as the 58th to come to their aid.'2

Alexander Thomson was seriously wounded at Rue-du-Bois on 9 May 1915. He was mentioned in dispatches on 31 May 1915, 'for gallant and distinguished services in the field'. He returned to England where he lay for weeks, his body mutilated, in a darkened room, as his wife nursed him, between May and September 1915. He recovered and returned to the army, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in October 1919. He retired in May 1920. The family then lived mostly in Buxton, Derbyshire, and he 'commuted' by train for years to Manchester to different jobs. One of these was managing a factory, which employed disabled soldiers. Later he became secretary of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. This was a far-sighted early-twentieth-century progressive town-planning project to create a model community in this part of north London, with people of all classes living together in 'beautiful houses set in a verdant landscape'. By 1935 the Suburb comprised a large swath of about 800 acres stretching from Golders Green in the south to East Finchley in the north.

In the winter of 1914, David's mother left India with her two daughters and her nine-month-old son. It was a long voyage on a troop ship bound for France. Since secrecy prevailed after war was declared in August that year, his mother had no idea where her husband had been ordered to go, except that it was to the front. Alexander Thomson, not yet thirty, acting undoubtedly with personal bravery, carried out his duty, which involved willingly ordering other young men to almost certain death, as his wife nursed their only son, an infant who in time would quietly reject all of his father's military values.

Annie Thomson brought the baby David and his sisters to her mother's house, Tigh-na-Rosan, in the town of Nairn, the home of David's Granma - she of the 'hanging' remark. A short walk away was Newton, the large family seat owned by Annie's brother, Robert Bannatyne Finlay. The house was later converted to a hotel, and frequented by, among others, Charlie Chaplin, who holidayed there several times in his later years during the 1970s. Robert Bannatyne Finlay, later Viscount Finlay, had bought the house in 1887 during the first period he was MP for the area, the...