The disappearance of our luggage feels a greater crime than mere theft; it’s an existential assault, a vengeful god’s payback for my wilful obliteration of our life in New York. You want to trash your life? Here—try this.
I’m making a mental inventory of what we have left in my carry-on bag—passports, check; credit cards, check; cash, check; phones, check; iPad, check. No! I slipped my iPad into my black case before we got on the ferry—when I see Agnes’s purple suitcase: bought for this trip after hours of deliberation in Bloomingdale’s with her father. Someone towards the front of the line, one of those ingratiatingly jocular construction workers, is holding it and I’m making my way towards him, incensed.
In New York—yes—we expect this sort of thing and we’re on constant alert for opportunistic raids by the needy and the greedy. When so many Haves exist in close proximity to so many Have Nots, it’s the Have a Littles—the ones without good security and insurance—who lose out. So we’re careful. It’s part of the deal in high-density city living. But here? So much for “the Friendly Isle.” How low can you get? Stealing a child’s suitcase!
My way is blocked and I’m about to shout (do they have cops here?) as the bag and the thief’s broad back shrink into the distance, when I look up and see a group of islanders in glistening rainwear standing on the dock above us. Teenagers loll against the harbour wall while a grinning old couple look down at the boat and wave an umbrella at a red-headed young woman in front of me. Now, as if choreographed, the teens walk over to join other islanders and together they form a chain with the ferry’s skipper, the first mate and the passengers at the front of the line, who are beginning to climb the pier steps onto what is disingenuously called “dry land.” They’re passing the boat’s cargo, the sack of post, bags of grain, boxes of groceries, the cans of engine oil, and all the luggage, our luggage, Agnes’s bag, mine, the document box, up the stairs and along the dock to the harbour wall where they set it down gently in an orderly pile.
The islanders disperse and Agnes and I are alone. The rain has intensified—it’s like standing under the power shower in my Cobble Hill gym. My former gym. Agnes puts up her hood and gamely insists on manoeuvring her own case, which has wheels and a long handle. “A granny bag” she calls it, approvingly. My own two suitcases, also wheeled, are larger and I balance on them the sealed, waterproof box containing my copies of the rudimentary archive that’s more valuable than any of our possessions.
Still smarting with shame at my metropolitan misanthropy, my first response to the vista—the long, low line of whitewashed crofts curving round the bay, the dark hills whose tops are hidden in clouds—is dismay. This is to be our home for two years. For this we’ve given up our comfortable rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, Agnes’s place at a friendly public elementary school with excellent math scores, our friends, stores and cafes, concerts and cinemas, proximity to airports, railroads, other cities, other lives? My daughter’s father? My relationship?
Agnes, though, has perked up. She’s seen the grocery store, distinguished from the other whitewashed buildings by the red pillar box at its entrance and a faded advert for ice cream in its window.
“Ice cream!” she says, instantly won over.
We go inside and I announce myself to a cautious young South Asian man behind the till. He directs me to the post-office counter where a woman, pale, middle-aged and unsmiling, looks up briefly from a stack of parcels and asks: “Are you Mhairi McPhail?” As if another American with a nine-year-old child would abandon her life, travel all this way and put up with the discomfort and grim weather in an effort to pass herself off as me. At least the postmistress pronounces my name correctly: Mhairi as in Marry, not Myri, or Mary, or Marie. Not even, as some Gaelic purists insist, Varry, or any of the other weird variations that made me, as a chippy teenager, consider changing my name to Jane.
She rummages in a drawer, hands me the key and points left, in the direction of our rented cottage, number 19. I let Agnes choose an ice cream—a strawberry cone scattered with beads of coloured sugar—and as she laps it rapturously in the rain I feel another stab of guilt. Poor kid. What have I let her in for?
Our new home is four doors down from the Finnverinnity Inn which, even now, at 10:30 a.m., is crowded. A group of men—scarlet cheeks, florid noses, sepia teeth—make their way outside with their drinks to smoke and talk and stare at the sea. They gaze at us as we walk past, their heads turning in chorus-line sync to follow our progress and gauge our destination. Inside the pub an accordion wheezes prissily, leading some scattered singing. I hope the noise doesn’t travel. My key jams in the lock and when I manage to push the door open a gust of musty air almost fells me. Agnes looks back at the smokers and waves. One of them returns a small, uncertain salute.
The light switch doesn’t work and outside the storm has worsened, casting a deep midwinter gloom. Everywhere else in the UK, in Europe, it is summer, the season of warmth and heady languor. At home in New York it’s heatwave time—riot weather, Marco used to call it—when the city empties, leaving it to those of us who actually enjoy the chaleur or are too poor to head for the Hamptons. It’s my favourite time of year in Brooklyn. Anyone who spent at least part of their life in Scotland will never take a spell of cloudless skies and unbroken sunshine for granted. And I have brought my daughter here to this place, dark as a subway tunnel, cold as Alaska (in August!). What kind of mother am I?
I grope my way to a side table, tripping over a large cardboard box—our groceries, ordered in advance, sent over by boat from the mainland supermarket and presumably conveyed here by the altruistic human chain—and switch on a lamp. The room springs into relief. There is a coal-effect electric heater in the fireplace flanked by two threadbare tartan armchairs. Next to the side table is a floral couch with suspicious stains suggesting incontinence or violence. The rug, patterned with a series of concentric purple and grey swirls, looks like a weather map: a deepening band of low pressure in the West Highlands, squally showers, gale-force eight, imminent.
I sigh as I scrutinise the pictures on the wall—Highland cattle peering winsomely under ginger tresses in a variety of native settings: by waterfalls, hoof-deep in heather, mooching in machair—when I hear Agnes upstairs. She is squealing with pleasure. I find her in the smaller of the two attic bedrooms, bouncing on her narrow bed.
“Awesome, Mom! Look. I can see the sea.”
You can see the sea, okay. Grey and foam-flecked as dirty suds.
You can see nothing but the sea.
“When a man stands on the shore looking out to sea, he stands at the littoral of his unconscious,” wrote McWatt. Up in Calasay, he would walk the machair strand daily in all weathers, scooping up handfuls of small bright shells, “the puir man’s traisure,” gathering kelp and dulse seaweed in a wicker creel, and searching for useful flotsam tossed ashore by recent storms. He would watch the seabirds engage in their “genocidal airborne ballet,” turn his poet’s eye on the “benign jaundice” of the wild primrose, the “Parkinsonian tremor” of the harebell, or on the Fascaradian orchid, with its “cluster of tiny livid mouths silently ululating on pale stems.”
Even in the wildest weather, he never tired of the view from the back window of his croft house, An Tobar, past the low stands of birches, oaks and alders huddling for comfort against wind and storm, across the sweep of cliffs to the ocean in all its moods under its “turbulent twin” the sky, and out beyond the skerries—the uninhabited rock islands which rose from the sea like so many “fantastic beasts couchant, inspiration for the winged griffons and twisting hell-hounds of Celtic art.” In the distance the Fascaray Head lighthouse—built in 1844 by Robert Louis Stevenson’s uncle Alan and manned, until automation replaced them in 1989, by a succession of bearded recluses with drink problems—swept its nightly “Cyclopean beam” over the phosphorescent seascape.
The most familiar photograph of McWatt, a black-and-white portrait taken in 1981, is used by Charles Knox-Cardew in A Vulgar
Eloquence,* a scholarly survey of world vernacular literature. The portrait shows the “Bard of Fascaray” aged sixty, in his late-middle period—he still had more than three decades of writing life to go—squinting sceptically at the view, a fat sleek-haired otter in his arms and a Border collie at his feet. McWatt is a grizzled, kilted figure with fierce blue eyes blazing under a lofty brow. A briar pipe is clenched between his teeth and tendrils of unruly grey hair escape from a beret, which he wore instead of the traditional tam-o’-shanter “bunnet,” Knox-Cardew suggests, “in tribute to the Auld Alliance and the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud.”
In addition to the beret, McWatt’s idiosyncratic version of Highland dress substitutes the lace jabot at the throat with a spotted handkerchief of the sort tied to a stick as improvised hand luggage by fairy-tale vagabonds, and instead of cross-laced ghillie shoes and knee-length socks he wears mud-crusted rubber boots; we can’t, therefore, vouch for the presence or otherwise of the ornamental sgian-dubh dagger, customarily tucked into the right sock.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Glenton University Press, New Jersey, 1987, 732 pages.
3 a.m., 20 August 2014…
Agnes is asleep and I sit, jet-lagged and haggard, at the kitchen table in our new home staring at the picture of McWatt in Knox-Cardew’s daunting book as if it might vanquish my night terrors and offer a clue—justification would be too much to ask—as to what the hell I’m doing here.
McWatt’s kilt—in McWatt tartan, as the captions always say—is unremarkable but the sporran seems comically large, like the pelt of a scalped Pomeranian. Knox-Cardew is an American academic who, to judge by his author photo, wears a bow tie, horn-rimmed glasses and a pocket square in tribute to the Wasp Ascendancy. He derives the title of his book from de vulgari eloquentia—“the people’s language”—Dante’s approving term for literature written in Italian rather than Latin. Alongside reflections on Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer, van Maerlant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Barbour and the non-Tagalog literature of the Philippines, Knox-Cardew devotes a 110-page chapter to the “Bard of Fascaray,” treating McWatt with patronising deference throughout.
His research didn’t apparently extend to a trip to Fascaray, or even Scotland. I guess the Glenton University Press advance didn’t cover the fares. Nor has he read a single volume of The Fascaray Compendium manuscripts. Nobody has. That’s my job—though Knox-Cardew alludes to their existence, describing McWatt as “a Hebridean Pepys whose masterwork, a magisterial survey of his island through time, remains as yet unpublished.”
A Vulgar Eloquence is described on the jacket as a “collective critical biography,” and it’s heavy on criticism, of the reverential literary sort—too much trocheeing and spondeeing for my taste or purpose—and light on the lives. It’s also, unsurprisingly, out of print. My research assistant in Glasgow, Ailish Mooney, a diligent Irish postgrad, managed to track down a copy from Innerpeffray Library—borrowed only twice according to the date slip on the inside cover and stamped “withdrawn”—and sent it to me in Brooklyn. I didn’t, in the end, have time to open it until Agnes and I were on the plane here from New York and even then I found myself drawn to the inflight magazine and the safety instructions card—“in the event of landing on water…” Who are they kidding?—before I finally gave in and opened Knox-Cardew’s book at the McWatt chapter. My eyes fell on the last paragraph of the third page.
His reimagining of world literature through the multifaceted prism of the Scots language may have been his life’s work; his celebrations, in his columns for the Auchwinnie Pibroch as well as in his sweeping, as yet unpublished, magnum opus The Fascaray Compendium, of the culture and flora and fauna of the island may have provided the connection with community and the natural world that sustained him in bleakest times and awakened many to the beauties of his corner of the Highlands; his rumbustious menagerie may have met the emotional needs of this solitary man, brought some warmth and humour into his life and inspired a generation of naturalists; his spare and elegant memoirs may have redefined the genre; his popular histories, polemical journalism and political activism undoubtedly sharpened his understanding of his own past and enriched modern Scotland’s sense of its identity; but it was five verses and a four-line refrain—dismissed later by him as “thon skitterie wee sang”—scribbled on a pack of Sweet Afton cigarettes during a “lock-in” in the Finnverinnity Inn, which earned Grigor McWatt his fame, whatever wealth he managed to accrue, and the priceless freedom to pursue his Muse.
I resisted a surge of dismay, closed the book and turned to my child, who was now asleep, her head resting against my arm as we sped, six hundred miles an hour, towards our new home. Looking at the tender curve of her cheek I wondered again—did I really want to spend the next two years alone with my daughter, sequestered in a remote corner of the planet, serving as handmaiden to a dead poet, accidentally famous for a single pop song which he disowned, a reclusive graphomaniac who might have loved the natural world but, from everything I’ve read, didn’t care too much for people?
Thrawnness
Oot o the nicht that haps me,
Mirk as the cleuch frae powl tae powl,
Ah thank whitiver goads micht be
Fur ma unvinkishable saul.
In the fyle claucht o mishanteredness
Ah havnae jouked nor greeted.
Ablo the lounderins o chance
Ma bluidy heid is nae defaited.
Ayont this place o fash an tears
Lours but the grue o hinmaist scug,
An yet the assizes o the years
Wull airt me wicht. Ah wullnae pug.
Ah dinnae care if bampots prate,
Aw haurdships Ah can thole.
Ah’m the high heid yin o ma fate,
The skipper o ma saul.
—Grigor McWatt, efter William Ernest Henley, 1946*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
McWatt began his life’s work towards the end of World War II, in an army tent pitched in the grounds of Finnverinnity House, the northern seat of Fascaray’s absentee laird, Montfitchett. The house, known locally as the Big House, had been taken over by the British government for use as a secret training school for commandos and Special Operations Executive agents. It was a gruelling course but somehow, on a narrow camp bed under canvas in the shrubbery, between Herculean manoeuvres, remorseless tests of strength and endurance and late-night instruction in the dark arts of sabotage and murder, McWatt began to write the first of the notebooks that would become The Fascaray Compendium.
In this first volume, his focus was on island history. “A dwelling has stood on the site of Finnverinnity House, commanding the curve of the bay to the west of the harbour, since the early sixteenth century…” were the opening words. Knox-Cardew, who didn’t have access to the Compendium but was aware of its broad themes, speculated that “during those dark days, it may have been a comfort to him, as it has been to others, to retreat to the past in an attempt to make sense of the challenging present.”
Over the years, McWatt rewrote and enlarged his chronicle of Fascaray’s ancient and medieval past, drawing on published histories and archive material. The peripatetic minister Donald Monro, known as the Dean of the Isles, visited the island in 1563, McWatt wrote, “during what seems to have been a rare interval of peace and prosperity.” Monro noted in his Description of the Western Isles of Scotland:*1 “ane caftle of Fasquarhaye, pertaining to Malcolm McQuhatt by the sword but to the bishop of the isles by heritage, with ane fair orchard…roughe country, with pairt of birkin woodeis, maney deires and excellent for fishing.” Monro also gave the first account of the annual “guga hunt”—the catching, killing and smoking of young solan geese or gannets—“a tradition that continues to this day,” wrote McWatt.
Two years after Monro’s visit, three months after her marriage to Darnley, Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have attended the wedding of Malcolm’s daughter, Mariota, on the Isle of Fascaray. “Sources suggest that the doomed queen stayed in what was then a modest castle or fortified house with a walled courtyard, called simply Finnverinnitie,” wrote McWatt. Mary is said to have visited the house again, “seeking refuge after her escape from imprisonment at Loch Leven Castle in 1568, and left a touching thank-you note, written in French, to her hosts.”
In the mid seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell sent a fleet to sack the castle and subdue the troublesome clan McWatt, whose members had remained stubbornly loyal to the House of Stuart. “It was then,” wrote Grigor McWatt three centuries later, “that God showed his true colours as a clansman.” A two-day storm sank the parliamentarian ships in sight of Finnverinnity Bay and forty-two English sailors were drowned.
Subsequently, “God’s sympathies were diverted elsewhere”; within seventy years the clan chieftain, Aeneas McWatt of the McWatts, fell on hard times, his impoverished kinsmen were scattered and in 1698, the year of the ill-fated Darien venture that cost Scotland its independence, Finnverinnitie and its land had been taken over by the rival McGlaisters (Gaelic: McGlabhcadair; motto: “Quid vobis quia non praeteribit”—“Whit’s fer ye’ll nae gae by ye”) who later set about building a new house from the ruins of the old in the baronial style, with eight octagonal turrets topped by corbelled conical roofs clustering round the central stem of the original castle.
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