Free The Last Wolf by Margaret Mayhew

playing soccer, boxing, fencing, gymnastics, horse riding, and drilling out on the parade ground.
    They make it very hard for us. We have only a few hours sleep each night and are very busy all day. Some cadets leave because it is too difficult for them, but I am still here. You will be happy to know that we are also given lessons to improve our English so perhaps you will not have to make so many corrections to my letters. I hope you will write soon.
    He hadn’t mentioned Austria at all. Or helping General Franco in Spain.
    In late July, Hamish and Stroma travelled up from London to Islay. They took the night sleeper to Glasgow, then a bus to Paisley and another bus to Gourock. From Gourock they hitched a lift in a fishing boat across to Dunoon and picked up another lift in a farmer’s cart. The horse, head bowed, clip-clopped slowly up the steep and windy glen between banks of purple heather, craggy rocks, dry-stone walls and tumbling burns. The farmer was going to Kilfinan and, from there, the post bus took them on to Portavadie where a ferry boat carried them across to Tarbert. They stayed the night in a small hotel at West Lock Tarbert and were up early in the morning and on the bus to Kennacraig to catch the twice-weekly paddle steamer for Islay. Sometimes, if the sea was too rough, they had to wait for several days to make the four-hour crossing, but this time they were lucky.
    Grandfather was waiting for them on the quayside at Port Askaig and drove them the last part of the journey in the old Humber. Since there was no direct road along the east coast to Craigmore, they had to go west across to Bridgend on the other side, then down to Bowmore and Port Ellen and past the Laphroaig distillery to Ardbeg. After that, the road petered out into a track and the off-shoot that led down to Craigmore was so rough and stony that the Humber dipped and rolled like an ocean liner on a stormy sea. Once past the peat moors, they descended into the woods and, when they emerged, there in front of them, beyond the fields and the grazing sheep and the dry-stone walls, stood the house and the rocky inlet and the sea.
    One thing was not quite the same: Grandmother. Instead of being on the doorstep to greet them, she was lying upstairs in bed. She had caught a chill that had gone to her chest and Dr Mackenzie had recommended that she stay in bed for a few days.
    â€˜Nothing to worry about,’ Grandfather said. ‘She’ll be up and about again soon.’
    They went off fishing and sailing and swimming on the loch and they walked down through the woods to Glas Uig. When they were younger, they’d pretended to be smugglers or pirates but they didn’t play childish games like that any more. Hamish kept talking about joining the Navy, and he kept on saying that there was going to be a war. Stroma maintained stubbornly that there wasn’t going to be anything of the kind. They argued over it quite a lot.
    â€˜You won’t believe it because of that bloody German chap,’ Hamish said. ‘Just because he writes nice letters to you, it doesn’t mean a thing. He’s joined their Navy, hasn’t he? He’ll probably end up in submarines, like his father, so he’ll be busy torpedoing our ships. Maybe you won’t think so much of him then.’
    â€˜I don’t think much of him now.’
    Actually, she thought of him quite a bit but she wasn’t going to admit it.
    â€˜Well, I bet you still write to him, don’t you?’
    â€˜Only when he writes to me.’
    â€˜So, don’t answer his bloody letters. Simple.’
    Colonel Crawford came over to dinner. He was an old friend of the grandparents, a widower who lived in Bowmore and had fought in the army in the Great War. Grandmother was feeling well enough to come down but Stroma thought that she looked awfully thin and pale, and she hardly ate a thing. Colonel Crawford didn’t seem to notice; he was too busy talking