The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan

There are relics a family keeps because they cannot be replaced, and there are relics a family keeps because they cannot be used. The hardest custody is the one that allows a single act, knowing the act will end the keeping. A chief who inherits such a thing inherits a clock that has been counting since before the chiefship was a word. Sooner or later the clock runs out, by use or by refusal, and the question is only which hand it is in when it stops.

THE INHERITANCE

The Bratach Sìth, the Fairy Flag, came to Dunvegan in a story no MacLeod has ever needed to defend. A chief's fairy bride at the bridge of Beul-àtha-nan-Trì-Allt, a parting, a folded square of yellow silk pressed into his hand for the line. Three unfurlings, the legend gives, and the third returns the cloth to the place it came from. Two are remembered: Glendale, about 1490, when the men of MacDonald were thrown back from the cliffs above the loch; Trumpan, 1578, when the church was burned with the worshippers inside it and the flag was raised against the burners. After Trumpan the silk was folded again and laid by. For three and a half centuries it has lain in its case, in successive drawing-rooms of the castle, while modern conservators, holding it up against the light, have placed its weave in fourth-to-seventh-century Syria or Rhodes, older than the surname that keeps it, older than Skye's Gaelic, older than the church at Trumpan. The Twenty-Eighth of MacLeod, Flora, daughter of Sir Reginald, succeeded to the chiefship in 1935 by judgment of the Lyon Court, the first woman to hold it in the recorded male succession of the line. She had been keeping the flag five years when France fell.

THE SEVENTH OF AUGUST

Skye is in good weather on the seventh of August, 1940. The sun has come round to the west window of the morning-room at Dunvegan, and the sea below the curtain wall is the bright unconcerned blue of a coast that has not yet been bombed. The post boat from Portree brought yesterday's Times: the Wehrmacht on the Channel coast, the assessment of the army that Sea Lion will come by September. On the side-table, on a silver tray, the flag in its glass case, the saffron silk pinned out flat and faded almost to white at the edges. She is sixty-two. She has on a cardigan over a tweed skirt. There is a fountain pen in her hand and a sheet of the castle paper before her, and she has not yet written anything on it.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

Two of her three sons are in the Royal Air Force. John, the heir, in Bomber Command. Hugh, in Yorkshire, sitting at readiness on a Hurricane this afternoon. The case on the side-table is the thing she has been given to keep, and one of the hands working the catch of that case, in any account the legend tolerates, would be hers. Glendale is accounted for. Trumpan is accounted for. There is one unfurling left, and the legend is precise about what happens after: the flag returns to where it came from. The thing in the silver case is gone. She turns the pen over in her hand and notices that she is doing it, and that this is the gesture of a woman not yet decided. To refuse is to keep the relic and lose the country, perhaps; to offer is to spend the relic on a fight her own sons are flying. There is a third consideration, less easy to name in a sentence, and she names it to herself in the morning-room: the country needs to hear that the old things are committed. There has not been an old thing in this country in forty years that has been clearly committed to anything. If the chief of MacLeod will not put the Bratach Sìth into the war, what is the Bratach Sìth for. She uncaps the pen. She will not order the flag to a fighter station; she has no authority to. She can offer it, in writing, to the office of Sir Hugh Dowding at Fighter Command, and let the Air Staff decide what is to be done with the offer. Twenty minutes is what the letter takes. The terms are plain. Should the German invasion come, the chief of MacLeod is willing to send the flag to be flown over the cliffs of Dover, that the country might have, in the event of last resort, the third and final unfurling of the flag of the line. She signs it. She blots it. She addresses the envelope to the Air Ministry in London.

THE GARDENER GOES DOWN TO THE POST

The gardener takes the letter down to the post that afternoon. The lane from the castle to the village is the one the laird's letters have gone down for two hundred years, between fuchsia hedges into the sea-air. He has no idea what is in the envelope. The acknowledgment from the Air Staff comes back in late August, courteous, non-committal, the formula of a department which has had unusual correspondence from civilians since June. The flag is not in the end sent. The invasion does not come. By the autumn the squadrons across southern England know the story; small photographs of the Bratach Sìth, taken from a copy Dame Flora has had made and circulated through the clan associations of the diaspora, begin to ride in the tunic pockets of MacLeod-line airmen on operations, by the air-force habit of personal-luck items in single-seat fighters and bomber crews alike. They go up over France in the photographs of Skye men born in Cape Breton, Otago, the Transvaal, Manitoba. Several come home with the photograph in the wallet; several do not. John MacLeod, her eldest, the heir, is killed over Belgium in 1944. Hugh finishes the war in Bomber Command and comes home to Skye.

THE DRAWING-ROOM

The flag is still in the drawing-room at Dunvegan. The case has been moved twice in the eighty years since the letter, last in the refurbishment of 1994. The conservation readings, taken at intervals through the postwar decades, agree: the textile is as it has been for the past century, and almost certainly very much longer. The chiefship has passed, since Dame Flora's death in 1976, to her grandson John, and on his death in 2007 to his son Hugh Magnus MacLeod, twenty-ninth of the line. The third unfurling has not been claimed. The MacLeod tradition holds, and the present chief holds, that it is for the country's last need and not the clan's, which is a distinction the line has kept clear for six hundred years and intends to keep clear for as long as the country exists to need it.

RETURN

The decisive hours of a family's history are not always the hours in which it acts. Sometimes they are the hours in which it offers, and is not in the end called upon, and the offer becomes part of the keeping. Dame Flora wrote her letter to Fighter Command in twenty minutes on a summer afternoon, with the post boat's newspaper folded on the desk and a son in a Hurricane in Yorkshire, and the offer was a thing the country heard about and a thing the clan heard about, and the relic remained in its case. The yellow silk is two feet square, pinned out flat, the edges faded almost to white, kept under glass on a side-table in the drawing-room of Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, waiting for the country to decide what its last need is.