Adam Maxwell-Farquhar (Tale 3) - A Voice from the Future

The Year of Our Lord 1915

After years of being the priest at  St Peter’s in Torry, Aberdeen, I felt a  calling from the Good Lord God to minister to the sick and wounded of the Great War over in France,  I passed the interview to become a padre to the British Army , a task which provided me with a new fervour for my vocation, as I felt that I could provide comfort and succour to all those poor lads wounded while serving their King and Country. I passionately believed that my years in Aberdeen had stood me in good stead for dealing with the wounded and disturbed across the English Channel. I had been to England many times in my life, but France was my first time abroad. I hoped I would not have any exorcisms to perform, as that activity often depressed me, as if I were being drawn to the dark side, to the shadowy domain of evil which I often sought deliverance from in prayer.

My French was passable I thought, which would no doubt get me through, and if I were preaching to the Scots and English soldiers, I would be fine, as my long-departed mother might have said.

In my time in France, I met many troubled souls, in the hospital there, those tormented and crying out at night for loved ones, while cursing God for allowing this dreadful war to happen.

One stood out among the multitudes for me, his name was Jimmy Pirie, a young sapper from Aberdeen. I heard his accent first, and was glad to hear a voice, a weak one at first, but one from my homeland, and the city I had called home for many years. He had been babbling on about seeing angels and bowmen as he and his compatriots were ambushed by German snipers. I had read the recent article by Mr. Arthur Machen in the London Evening News on the train as I was travelling down from Scotland, and Pirie was giving the impression that this weird occurrence had really happened. I had read Machen too, and was quite enamoured of his work, as my father before me had. This was not the reason I was drawn to his conversation. He had said something about seeing a man from the future, it was not a dream, he assured me, but like something from the works of H.G. Wells, whose works  both he and I were familiar with, this was clearly someone who had taken a voyage in a time machine, for there was no other rational explanation, that even a man of the cloth like me could give for this.

Jimmy Pirie was born in Aberdeen in 1897 and lived in the Torry district where I had my first church, he was from a working-class family, the only son in a family of seven. His sisters were a lot older and looked after him, but he wanted to get away from that, so lied about his age and enlisted for the army as a boy soldier, a sapper. He told me about his brief time in the army, and in common with me, he was an Episcopalian, a ‘pisky,’ as some folk in Scotland would say. Jimmy was well versed in scripture and knew all his bible stories from when he was a child at Sunday School, and he was a keen reader with a furious intelligence, if he was reading Machen and Wells, he must have a powerful imagination.

 Anyway, he told me of a ‘visitor from the 21^st century’, a man who appeared to emerge from the ruins of a building which had been bombed, it was a miracle he was still alive, but he was disorientated, and was babbling incoherently about his time machine being damaged and irreparable.

Jimmy told me that the man had a Scottish accent also, he reckoned, Glasgow, or around about there. The ‘Time Traveller,’ Frank Scott was his name, told him about  a dreadful pandemic that had shattered the world in his time, in the year 2021, a year that to be honest neither Jimmy nor me, could envisage in our minds, despite being intelligent men. Scott had described a strange world to Jimmy, which in turn Jimmy told me of. The streets of the future were empty, due to lockdowns, no shops, no taverns opened their doors, the churches were even closed, as this pandemic was highly contagious. As a priest, I could not begin to imagine what a world without religion would be like. But Scott had told Jimmy all about the rules the government had put in place, with lockdowns and people ‘working from home,’ using machines called ‘computers.’ Jimmy laughed at the thought of working in your home, which was not something that would work in a crowded house like the one in which he lived with his mother and sisters. Scott painted a horrific picture of the future of the world in the next century; in addition to the pandemic, the climate was changing, the weather warmer in summer, and colder and unpredictable  in winter, with  apocalyptic storms battering the world, especially the North of Scotland with trees being blown down, buildings being damaged and untold destruction being visited upon the cities and towns of the country. This was more disturbing than what H.G. Wells had written, according to Jimmy.

After meeting with Jimmy several times, and saying prayers with him each evening, I got to know him well, and believed what he had told me of this traveller from the future. As Doctor Clarkson, the physician in charge of the hospital had told me, Jimmy was just shell shocked, there was nothing wrong with him mentally.

‘Faither Adam, fit ah’ve telt ye is true,  it’s a’  in this book here, which he gied me before he disappeared back into the ruins’, Jimmy had said as he rummaged in the kitbag under his hospital bed , and produced a book, lavishly illustrated with what I could only assume were the 21^st century’s equivalent to what we called a ‘photograph ‘ in these times. Entitled 'Life In the Time of Corona' ,  Scott’s book described his life in Glasgow in 2021, all about the Coronavirus pandemic, the Climate Change Protests, his hopes and aspirations for the future, whatever that held, it was far from Utopian, quite the opposite.

Jimmy’s notebook fell out at the same time, his stories, scrawled out in pencil, his attempts at emulating his literary heroes, Machen, and Wells. He had written one about Scott, which was exceptionally good, a written account of all he had recounted to me. I told him that he should try his hand at writing once he was back in Aberdeen, he smiled and said that his family were poor so there would be no way that could be a future for him. They couldn't afford university , that was the preserve of rich folk, so work in the shipyards or fishing were Jimmy's immediate future, once he returned home.

We said a prayer for Scott and his soul, and for those in the future more than a century from now.

I silently prayed and thanked the Lord that I would have shuffled from this Mortal Coil before 2021

Jimmy left the hospital the following day and left his address with me.

I hoped he would pursue writing as a career, but perhaps that was not to be, meantime, I would continue preaching the gospel and writing my own tales of the wonderful characters I meet and have met in this life.