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 inNairn 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, infantr