I HAD travelled up from the south for Annie's funeral. On the other side of the grave I caught sight of Frank looking at his watch. It was a large pocket watch; a good railwayman's sort of watch.
He was listening and looking down the railway line which ran close by. I guessed there was a train due and habits of a lifetime die hard. Frank, now a couple of years retired, had spent his working life driving engines and had seen steam give way to diesel and electric.
I caught his eye, and aware of being under scrutiny by a closer relative, he gave his attention to the business in hand. But I knew what was on his mind. Not just a train due any minute; well not entirely; he was thinking of Annie and the many times he had thundered past her little cottage.
Frank had memories ... but the minister was talking "...and so in her 97th year Annie decided to leave us. She lived among us for much of her life but in some ways she never left the Isle of Skye where she was brought up. Even now I can imagine her soul winging its way over the sea to the Misty Isle. She was a dear friend and a very special person, ashes to ashes ..."
Earlier in the little church he had given a thumb-nail sketch of her life. Pulling harrows with her brother on the croft; working in service; operating a crane in munitions during the first world war; work on the cars as a conductor. She had seen monarchs come and go since Victoria; the coming of the motor car; aeroplanes; television; so many things
The organ had played softly "Over the Sea to Skye" and lumps formed in many throats. I was struck by the small size of the coffin, and reminded that all this life had been packed into one rather slight body.
As we turned away from the grave, the Carlisle to Glasgow express thundered through. A few hundred yards up the line it screeched its banshee diesel whistle as it scorched by Annie's empty cottage. I saw a small smile play on Frank's face; it had started so long ago and it had started with Frank.
Marrying into the fringes of the family, Frank felt that the least he could do was pull on the steam whistle as he passed. Annie would respond with a wave from the door. The rail was not close enough to recognise the driver but she would see Frank waving.
"That's Frank," she would say happily to whoever was visiting. Annie had been a widow longer than she had been married, but had a stream of people popping in.
Frank's fireman became a driver and he, feeling by now that he knew Annie quite well, whistled in his turn. And so the numbers grew. "That's Frank" Annie would say, and slowing in her later years, she would wave from the window.
From now on the window would stare back blank and empty. A few of the older drivers would remember Frank's relative and why they whistled, but to new generation of "whistlers" the origin would be lost in the passing of time. They would whistle by custom as if paying heed to an old superstition.
In time, like a legend, stories would build on it, theories would be advanced. No one would remember that it all started as a railwayman's cheerful greeting to a little old lady living alone within sight of the line.
Superstition would creep in. Drivers would remind each other. "Don't forget to whistle at the cottage; it's bad luck not to. It's on up the line just past the distant signal."