I think it was this memory that made the accounts of the D-day landings on Sword Beach grip my imagination so tenaciously . Veterans described how, through the chaotic sounds of war, 21 year old Bill Millin’s bagpipes  could be heard as he walked up and down the beach playing  well known scottish melodies.  For most it gave them hope; a laugh even.  Some thought he was a liability and the Germans tended to think the war had all got a bit too much for him, which might have saved his life.

I had never before had the urge to listen to a celebrity or famous person but I had to find Bill Millin.  It was like an obsession.  When I finally tracked him down I wrote and told him about the piper on the castle.  He agreed to meet with me, even emailing to remind me a few days beforehand!

I’d wanted to find out about his childhood.  I’d wanted to find out about who this crazy piper had been – before that day.  He told me about his early years in Canada, about the boat ride back to Scotland when he was eight: “There were berths for the rich, the poor and the very poor,” he told me.  ”The very poor slept on deck, they had just kind of a square each.”  ”Which were you?”  I asked.  He chuckled, “Poor,” he said.  He and the other children spent the week long voyage running up and down the deck; there was nothing else to do.

Bill Millin had a great many interesting things to say and I’ll not let them go to waste.  But perhaps the strangest of all was this:

I asked him whether he had been afraid of dying that day on the beach: after all he’d been walking up and down like a human target.

“No,” said Bill, “I knew I wouldn’t die.”

There had been a woman named Fiona.  ”My girlfriend,” said Bill proudly.  She’d lived in a croft in the highlands and he’d found her fascinating even though at first she pretended she spoke only gaelic and ran inside and slammed the door whenever she saw him.  When, through Bill’s persistence, they finally had tea together she told him she had “the second sight”.  At the time Bill didn’t even know what it meant but she said that he must have it too.    People with second sight, she told him, are drawn to people with second sight.

Bill Millin stopped and looked at me: “Do you have the second sight?”  He asked.  ”Is that why you’re here?”

Piper Bill wasn’t as I’d expected.  I’d thought to find a down to earth, tough Scotsman.  One day I’ll do justice to the stories he told me, but for now all I’m going to say is this: I had to go and see him and, with a sense of urgency, I went as soon as I knew where to find him.  I wanted someone to have asked him about his childhood and all those things that weren’t just about the war: how he came to play the pipes in the first place:  the little strands of life and his personality that had twisted and intertwined until one memorable day they made one sound; one day on a particular beach in France: Only a few minutes really, but they marked him out in history.  And for reasons that are hard to define his is the sort of story that makes us feel immensely proud.

They say you should let people tell the tale that they want to tell, not the one that you want to hear.

Fiona had told Bill he would survive the war and he believed it.  Later she wrote to him to say that she would be dead by the time he returned.  ”Nowadays they’d call it cancer,” said Bill, “But in those days no one knew, you see?”  He came home to find the croft boarded up.  At dinner that evening the gamesman for the Lovat estate told him she’d been taken to Fort William hospital where she  died.

Piper Bill died two months after I went to see him.

AGAIN!!!

THIS TIME IN THE FORM OF ONE OF THE GREAT CHOICES FROM BOOKED UP 2010