Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

she seems so certain that I consider accepting her version of events until my cousin Cait and I discover a telegram in the bottom drawer of the Welsh dresser in the Langlands dining room:
    Priority Mrs. EMB Huntingford
c/o Mrs Macdonald
Waternish House
Isle of Skye

    Report received from India that Lieutenant R.L.
Huntingford Queens Own Cameron Highlanders posted
Black Watch serving with Nigeria Regiment was
wounded in Burma on 7 th March 1945. The Army
Council express sympathy. Letter follows shortly.
Under Secretary for State for War.
    Underneath the telegram my grandfather has written, “Correct report should have read ‘wounded but remains on duty.’ The R.A.F. dropped a 500 Ib bomb on the road in the middle of 5NR instead of on the JAPS!!!”
    Cait and I turn the paper over, but that is all that has been written. The telegram leaves the cause of the lump on my grandfather’s hip almost as confused as it was before. In the end, it seems safest to say that my grandfather was wounded at least once and possibly twice during the war, but whether it was a rock in Nigeria or the five hundred pounds of friendly fire in Burma that gave him the lump, we’ll never know.
    In 1943, my grandfather was posted briefly on the west coast of Scotland to guard against German warships in the Minch. His batman was from Inverness and so for a few glorious months from the late summer to the early winter of 1943, the war became a family affair—the batman able to visit his people in Inverness and my grandfather able to spend time at Waternish. The crofters on the Isle of Skye took to calling my grandfather “Major Macdonald,” perhaps because he bore such a striking resemblance to my grandmother’s gentle, shell-shocked brother Allan. “I think it must have been a happy time for my parents,” Mum says. By which she means she was conceived.
    In late 1943, my grandfather returned to Burma, and my grandmother—finally able to hold on to a pregnancy in the malaria-free chill of a British winter—went to the south of England for her war effort. She worked as a farm laborer near Southampton and boarded with a rich widow in a grand old house nearby. The widow, Catherine Angleton, had a wooden leg as a result of a bout with cancer, “but she dressed very nicely with stockings, tweed skirts and very good shoes,” Mum says, “so you really couldn’t tell.”
    As a major port and industrial area, Southampton had been a particular target of the Luftwaffe during the war. At the end of February 1944, when my grandmother was four and a half months pregnant, there was a major raid on the city. “Apparently, every time there was a bomb I jumped,” Mum tells me. “I’m very sensitive to loud noises. It’s why I always look a bit sour at children’s birthday parties in case someone pops a balloon.” Recognizing that air raids didn’t suit the temperament of her fetus and fearing there would be more attacks on the town, my grandmother took the train up to Waternish to wait out the pregnancy.
    Telegrams jolted from Skye to Burma to inform my grandfather about the birth of his daughter. “I saw a letter he wrote to his mother from Burma saying that he was very excited about having a little girl,” Mum says. “But of course he didn’t see me until I was over a year old, and when he did finally see me, he picked me up and promptly dropped me on my head.” Mum preempts my wisecrack, “Yes, well a lot of things have been blamed on that little incident.”
    But the clearest thing I learned about my grandfather’s war—and about his character—was from an undated letter written to him by one of his Nigerian troops whose obviously warm relationship with my grandfather seemed to exceed the startling, colonial-era salutation that begins:
    Dear Master
    Will you tell me your present condition? And what news of your family? I hope everyone is 50/50. As for myself, I want to report to you of this: we are no longer at Sandoway but in a