There were no flowers on the grave. As I stood there, on that clean summer morning with the sunshine making bright patterns on the stones, and making them shine like diamonds, I remembered my Father. My mother’s death had been more recent, and the ache was still there except perhaps sadness for myself, for what should have been. He was an intelligent man. He was clean-shaven and clean living.
He smoked a pipe, and had the sort of trustworthy air about him that most pipe smokers seem to have. The sort of man about whom only good things can be said, and he had those bright crystal blue eyes, so typical of many who “go down to the sea in ships and do business in great water”. The eyes of a man whose daily work was done with and for God, and because of the vastness of the waters’ is constantly working with nature and the elements and therefore believes. We had been on a short holiday to Scotland, and now here was I, after more than five and twenty years standing again where I had stood as a young lad of ten or so, and heard those about me weeping. It had been fun, at first, the long journey to Scotland with my Mother even though she had been far too distressed to be the usual pleasant companion she usually was.
At the end of our long journey we were met by a loving relation and hurried to the little village many, many more miles away where my Father was born, and now after all his years of travel upon the sea, he was to stay for his last and final sleep. The day was long and bitterly cold as only a Scottish winter day can be. The graveyard was bleak and deserted, except for our unhappy little group, and I felt even then, young, as I was, that somehow the grief of my Mother was not considered quite the same as the others gathered at the graveside. I felt no answering pity for her in the minds of the others who also wept. The church was bare and cold too, but it had a sort of reassurance about it, almost as though it could guess your sincerity of purpose, after all the years it had been used by sincere, humble and God-fearing people. It nestled in the hillside among the bleak, beautiful countryside and the world my world and my Mother’s world was bleak too. It was good to go back their on a glorious summer morning, the fears and doubts and the misery buried deep over the years had gone.
The sunshine chased away the shadows of that other day, and lit up the gravestones, and the little church. In the adjoining field a young lamb constantly called to its mother, and the birds sang, and I had the feeling that here in the glorious countryside that is Scotland, many miles away from the bustle of the city, was lasting peace. The tombstone of the family grave now bore inscriptions and I found it inspiring to read of my grandmother who had died recently at the age of ninety-nine years.
Mother of three sons that had all departed before her and left her to live without the comfort and futility of it all, when a woman bear sons and then outlive them by so many, many years. It was strange that they should travel and see the wonders of the world, whilst she should never leave the shores of her native land. I’m glad I went back, glad that I am still alive to pass perhaps on to my son, some of the knowledge my father handed down to me. Glad that my small boy stood beside me at my Father’s grave that morning in the sunshine because he gave me strength, and because he was the reason to carry on. I had re-trod, in my son’s shoes on this holiday, many of my own happy childhood days.
We walked again along the beach where my two sisters and I used to play during the annual summer holiday and found that though it had changed little, I had of course changed more, and the pleasures of yesterdays did not seem as much to the child of today as they had once done to me. The happy holidays, made even more wonderfully happy if my father’s ship had arrived on time to coincide with our holiday.
My mother’s happy laughter and the sunshine which used to fill the house when my father was home, causing a disturbance to the usual order of things and making everyone aware that the man of the house had arrived and the end to all feminine peace and stillness, and a wakening process about to begin. Visits to the local places of beauty by steamer, the typical rugged-looking highland cattle, the lochs, those glorious waters of Scotland stretching mile upon mile and as far as one could see, and then continuing on again after some bend or curve or the land just when one thinks that it must surely end right there – but most of all the people, the reserved kindly people, who once they have taken you in and given you their heart, will never let you forget them. People of my Father’s race who even remembered him after all those years and spoke kindly of him and well.
Scotland the Brave. The history. The beauty. As I stood beside my father’s grave, I felt all of this and was proud to be a tiny part of it all. Proud to be my father’s son, proud that there have been, and still yet will be, men like him. There were no flowers on the grave. I wished then that I could have brought some, to place on his grave as a small tribute to his memory. by Captain Neil John MacAlister 1959
Neil John MacAlister was born 13 November 1921 in Oxford Drive, Glasgow.In 1938 he joined Messrs. Thos. Jas. Harrison of Liverpool as a Cadet. In June 1941, he was captured by German troops in Crete, after his ship had previously been dive-bombed and sunk in Suda Bay. In April 1945 he was repatriated to the U.K. In the same year he passed his exams for 2nd Mate and returned to sea on a Harrison Line Ship.
He then joined Cunard White Star in 1946 and in 1951 passed for Master. (F.G.) He left Cunard and came out to South Africa in 1964. Thereafter he spent many years in command of a Rock Lobster factory vessel near the Island of Tristan da Cuhna in the Atlantic Ocean. He was also The Justice of the Peace there. In 1974 he joined Unicorn line and commanded the Swazi, Great Delport, Verge and the Pongola at various times in a relieving capacity. His first permanent command was the Oranjemund, which he bought from the builders yard in 1976. Thence to the Voorloper in 1978, and eventually he re-delivered her to her owners in St. Nazaire, France in November that year. Captain MacAlister was appointed to command m.v. Mkuze on February 1st 1979. His hobbies included ballet, opera and music, with particular emphasis on modern history.
Neil also joined the Toxteth Masonic Lodge in Liverpool on 15th November 1950 and became a Master Mason on 21st May 1952. He resigned in January 1979 due to ill health and died 25 November 1984.
