The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

33 : The Key to Anchor Lake

Except from chapter 2 of The Key to Anchor Lake by Mary S Nesbitt – "A Brief Introduction to the History of Anchor Lake in the 17th – 20th Centuries"

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PART FOUR

The Events of the 20th Century: 1919 – 1994

The 20th century is living history for almost every resident of Anchor Lake: there are people currently living in the town who were alive in 1919, people who lived through the Spanish flu that swept across the world and left devastation in its wake. Many more remember the 1944 bombing, only fifty-six years ago. It has been only thirty-one years since the Moon Landing Massacre; twenty-nine since the Ben Iuchair bus crash; a mere six since the '94 slayer.

Six years is not a long time. But for some, it is a lifetime.

1919 was supposed to be a year of celebration. The first world war was finally over, after more than twenty million deaths over the course of four years. Over one hundred thousand Scots perished in the Great War, though the number of fatalities has been quoted as high as almost double that, and Anchor Lake lost several of its men to the battle.

It is a cruel twist of fate, therefore, which thrust the Spanish flu pandemic upon the world as it lay crumpled and battered and struggling to recover in the wake of a global war. Over the course of 18 months, almost half of the world's population was infected with Spanish flu – believed to have originated in Kansas, USA – and up to fifty million are thought to have died of the virus.

As a whole, Scotland suffered proportionately. Anchor Lake, however, did not. A large portion of the population was struck down by the virus, and while there is not a great deal of information about the town's deaths as a direct result of Spanish flu, various records put the death toll at around 40% of the town's population.

The pandemic devastated this town, threatening to bring it to its knees as so many disasters have tried before, but Anchor Lake is not so easily defeated. The surviving residents dealt with the catastrophic number of deaths, including, most tragically, local midwife Amelia Bell and four of her five children. Bell's husband had perished two years before, a casualty of war, and the virus orphaned her youngest child, nine-year-old Margaret.

At the time, recovering from two of the deadliest events the world had ever seen, all within a timeline of a few years, the world had no idea what was still to come. No-one could have predicted that the first world war had not left enough of a lasting impression to stop the advent of a second, but with 1939 came World War 2: six years of brutality, and over 80 million deaths.

Around 57,000 of those deaths were Scots. A mere 107 were residents of Anchor Lake. The number is simultaneously incredibly small against the grand scale of the war, and impossibly high for a rural town in the Highlands, somewhere deemed protected from war. Due to its location in a valley at the base of Ben Iuchair, some seventy miles from a major city in any direction, Anchor Lake was designated as somewhere safe, somewhere to be evacuated to from areas at greater risk.

Nobody would have consulted the history books; nobody would have seen the devastation that this town has already seen; nobody would have wondered about the town's safety. They took in children in need of a temporary home; they sheltered people escaping from Edinburgh, Clydebank, Fraserburgh.

For five years, Anchor Lake was safe. It was a remote haven away from the horrors of war. Until 1944, a year before the end of the battle, when a plane headed for Peterhead inadvertently – one can only assume, based on the geography of the area – dropped a bomb. Anyone who lives in Anchor Lake can attest to its remoteness, how cut off it seems from the rest of the world.