Hame
Page 5
He’d initiated the whole thing as a joke. The notion that I might actually apply for the job never occurred to him. It wasn’t so funny when I was offered it, and accepted. But as I unpacked the boxes from Auchwinnie in our tiny apartment in Degraw Street and saw the scale of the task, I began to have serious doubts. All the lexicons and inventories (of moss, seashells, birds…); all that history (surely told better and more impartially elsewhere?); the perpetual drafts and redrafts of poems and essays; the journal entries with their minutiae of local gossip, decade after decade; recipes. Recipes, for chrissakes—I nearly chucked the job on the spot. Then Marco walked in and saw me on my knees, hair scraped out of my eyes in a bun, peering over my reading glasses (a recent and aesthetically unhelpful addition), sorting through the slew of pastel-coloured notebooks on the floor. He laughed and made some slighting comment about a schoolmarm grading papers, and that did it; our fates were fixed. I was Fascaray-bound within a month.
The remaining 176 notebooks currently in Calasay are soon to join their companions, packed up and returned by me via courier from New York, in two fireproof safes in the Fascaray Trust office. A selection of them will eventually be shown in the museum, where they’ll rest in climate-controlled, UV-screened display cases on electronic cradles which will allow their pages to be turned every few months. A colleague at the National Library of Scotland has offered to talk me through some of the conservation issues. I can combine a meeting with her in Edinburgh with my planned interview with Donald MacInnes, McWatt’s former assistant, in October. Lilias Hogg’s sister Dolina McPartland, a retired math teacher, has finally agreed to talk to me, too. I should set up the interview with her soon before she changes her mind, or dies. It’ll be tricky—both interviews will be tricky—but even so, the thought of leaving Fascaray is accompanied by a treacherous heart-leap of pleasure. Three days after we get here, I’m already plotting my escape.
I can leave Agnes with Johanna, a busy, functioning single mother whose daughter Ailsa is Agnes’s age. Agnes will be fine, I tell myself. By some miracle of genetic recombination, despite the neuroses of her embattled parents, despite the upheaval of their break-up and relocation to this strange place, Agnes will always be fine.
On cue, reinforcing my guilt, the door opens and my daughter stands there, eyes wide, a look of delight brimming on the perfect oval of her face.
“Mom! Look!”
She holds out her hand and something glints in the curve of her small palm.
“Treasure!” she says.
“It’s pyrite,” I tell her. “Fool’s gold.”
She bites her lower lip, downcast.
“That’s mean,” she says. “I am so not a fool.”
“Oh, Agnes. That’s its name. Fool’s Gold. A common mineral,” I explain. “You can find it all over the Scottish Highlands.”
“It’s pretty, anyhow,” she insists, still injured by the imagined insult.
She places the rock in her bowl of shells and pebbles on the windowsill as I look out at the shifting sea, grey as the Finnverinnity roof slates and sealed beneath a lid of grubby cloud.
Top Floor
33 St. James’s Square
Edinburgh
11 July 1959
Griogal Cridhe [Beloved Grigor],
Why so cold and silent? What have I done? I know you need to work. I know you need your island and your sea and your space and solitude. But I thought you needed me too. When I saw you walk into Menzies’ unannounced, my heart leapt. You’d come for me, I thought. But all night, as you talked to the boys, and glanced over at me only fleetingly, I was in agony. And then I did the stupid thing and flirted with Sydney. What an idiot I was. If I couldn’t ignite your desire I wanted to inflame your jealousy. I’m covered with shame and I despair that instead of drawing you to me, I’ve driven you away forever. Please forgive your Flooer. Life would be intolerable without you.
Yours (always, whether you like it or not), Lilias
An Tobar
Calasay
Fascaray
14 July 1959
Leal-hertit Lilias,
I’m sorry that I caused you such pain. I give what I can give. You understand my work more than anyone and know that, like the thistle, I evade the grasp and thrive in wild places.
Dinnae greet
Oor twa sauls, whilk are ane,
Tho Ah maun gang, arenae
Breuken but expandit
Like gowd tae spirlie thinness clourt.
Gin they be twa, they are twa sae
As stieve twin diacles are twa,
Thy saul the siccar fit, maks nae shaw
Tae flit, but doth, if th’ither dae.
An tho it in the middlins sits,
Yet when th’ither hyne stravaigs,
It heelds an glaggers efter it,
An staunds upricht, as that comes hame.
Sic wull thou be tae me, who maun
Like th’ither fit asclentit pairt,
Thy stieveness maks my circle suith
An maks me feenish whaur Ah stairt.
Aefauldlie, Grigor
Lilias Hogg pinned the handwritten verse to her wall and it survived her chaotic life and many house moves to hang above her bed in her final, pitifully threadbare flat in Shrub Place Lane. The poem* was eventually published in 1992 and the original is in the Fascaray archive, yellowed by time and cigarette smoke, with the rusty ghosts of thumbtacks in each corner.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* “Valediction,” efter John Donne, 1959. Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
22 August 2014
INVENTORY OF POSSESSIONS I HAVE HAULED 2,600 MILES EAST FROM NEW YORK TO THIS REMOTE BOULDER IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN.
Correspondence between Grigor McWatt and Lilias Hogg: Digital scans and printouts of postcards and letters from McWatt to Hogg—25. The letters were preserved in their envelopes, on which the postage stamps were, as on all McWatt’s correspondence, carefully attached upside down. Digital scans and printouts of carbon copied letters from Hogg to McWatt—134.
Photographs: 12 prints—spanning 1945 to 2011, showing McWatt from 25 to 90 years old—taken from scans of the originals, held in the National Library of Scotland archive in Edinburgh.
One laptop: containing aforementioned scans of letters and a compressed file of 2,000 pages scanned from The Fascaray Compendium; draft chapters of A Granite Ballad (I also have an edited printout of the first two chapters); audio recordings and a transcription (maddeningly inaccurate) of my interview with Effie MacLeod, as well as every recorded version of “Hame tae Fascaray” that Ailish has managed to unearth. (She’s located 53 so far and I’ve only managed to get through half of them. Agnes calls it “that hee-ra-haw song” and puts her hands over her ears whenever she hears it.)
One memory stick: containing copies of some of the above.
My journal: Pilar suggested I write a blog from my new island home. I’d rather perform open-heart surgery on myself with a sgian-dubh. Suppose it doesn’t work out here? A public, online, real-time account of my mental and physical disintegration, from self-loving boasts to self-harming sorrow, might please Marco but it would mortify me. I’m holding back for now with a carbon-based, A4-format, lined, green spiral-bound hardback; plenty of scope for second thoughts, private regrets and emendations. The first entries are 19, 20 and 21 August. Apart from them, nine pages of notes and this inventory, the rest of the journal is vertiginously empty.
Books: Miscellaneous. Cited in 20 August entry.
Clothing: various, mostly water and windproof.
Midge hoods: two khaki net shrouds, said to be the only defence against Scotland’s pitiless no-see-ums.
Toiletries: various, including noxious sprays which claim (falsely, I now know) to provide a chemical defence against the midge.
My daughter: who comes with her own
inventory.
And, taking up more time and mental space than all of these—
My cerebral swagbag: an airport carousel’s worth of guilt, hopes, anxieties, regrets.
By the mid 1930s, even the English had begun to baulk as the Laird of Fascaray’s High Toryism veered towards home-grown fascism and then Nazism. Montfitchett was not alone, of course; his friends and fellow peers, the Lords Rothermere, Redesdale and Brocket, members of the notorious Anglo-German Fellowship, were also taken by the new German Chancellor’s bracing style and visionary outlook. Redesdale’s daughters, Unity and Diana, pin-ups of the movement, had visited Finnverinnity for a week of grouse shooting; photographs taken on Mammor ridge show them windswept and comely in tweeds and lisle stockings, jaunty pheasant feathers in their felt halts.
In April 1939, when pictures appeared of Montfitchett in Nuremberg, grinning at Hitler’s side during the Führer’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations, revulsion was expressed in every newspaper except the Daily Mail, whose proprietor, Lord Rothermere, warmly congratulated their mutual Austrian friend on his annexation of Czechoslovakia.
But with the outbreak of war, Montfitchett had the grace to pipe down. He went to America to join his ne’er-do-well son Torquil, who evaded military service by making a startlingly young but advantageous Yankee marriage and was dabbling in real estate in Connecticut. “Lord Montfitchett sat out the conflict, bickering with Muriel over martini pitchers, in a rented Italianate mansion with a nine-hole golf course on the north shore of Long Island,” McWatt wrote in The Fascaray Compendium. The laird’s unappetising alliances were, however, not forgotten. Back in the UK, the War Office’s decision to requisition Finnverinnity House as a training school for commandos and Special Operations Executive agents seemed to islanders like natural justice.
“This dreich land o bog, hill and bracken, riven with secret glens and girt by a mercurial sea, is an invigorating paradise for those of us of a Spartan disposition,” wrote McWatt. The north-western region of Scotland encompassing Auchwinnie on the mainland, Fascaray and the scattered clusters of uninhabited islands that encircle it, is known in Gaelic as na crìochan cruaidhe—the harsh frontier or, in the idiomatic Lallans Scots of McWatt, “the marounjous ootlaund.”
Its enfolded glens guarded by crags and peaks, its treacherous bogland and dense woods, fast-flowing rivers and plunging waterfalls, serrated coastline and inaccessible coves walled by tumbled rock, its capricious seas and wild weather, made it a perfect training ground for Winston Churchill’s elite troops of commandos and special agents.
In the wake of the catastrophe at Dunkirk in 1940, the British government developed a new military strategy. Men and women, some from enemy-occupied countries overseas, were to be trained in guerrilla methods of sabotage, silent killing and survival then sent abroad to aid the resistance movements.
Whitehall dispatched military officers to Scotland, looking for likely headquarters where officers and other ranks of both sexes could be billeted while undergoing the arduous selection process which would qualify them for admission to the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, a crack corps schooled in the art of ungentlemanly warfare. The large houses of the region—castles, Victorian shooting lodges, Greek-revival mansions and Edwardian baronial follies—were earmarked; usefully they were already empty, since even in peacetime their owners, based in England, visited infrequently and, with the outbreak of war, had decamped entirely. The blandly named Ministry of Works conducted the requisitioning on behalf of the “Inter Services Research Bureau,” a cover name for the SOE.
The new military strategy became known in the north as “Ssh…”—not a reference to the secret nature of its work but an acronym of “Scotland’s Stately Hames.” Na crìochan cruaidhe was identified as a Restricted Area and road and rail routes were patrolled by the army and in some places sealed off entirely with barbed wire and armed security posts. The two railway stations at Auchwinnie—Auchwinnie East and Auchwinnie West—gave access to trainees, munitions and supplies, and in addition provided useful targets for demolition practice. Population in the region was minimal and those who lived there had the habit of discretion—“they had managed to keep secret the presence of Bonnie Prince Charlie some years before,” as McWatt later pointed out.
There was little protest from most of the usurped aristocrats, who consented to do their patriotic duty when they received assurances that, after the war and British victory, their property (in most cases their third or even fourth “home”) would be returned intact. No such guarantee could be offered to them in the event of a Nazi victory. Given his politics, Montfitchett was more ambivalent and wrote a letter of complaint, nobbling an old school friend in the War Office to register his protest at what he called “this Bolshevik appropriation and wholesale destruction of private property.”
The Labour politician Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare in Churchill’s coalition government, had been given the task of setting up the SOE and he replied to Montfitchett expressing polite sympathy. “But given the current circumstances, we regretfully have to proceed with this arrangement. We will, however, use our best endeavours to ensure that the property is returned to you in the condition in which we found it.”
In a memo*1 for his departmental files, attached to a copy of his correspondence, Dalton was more forthright. “Lord Montfitchett appears to own a number of alternative residences throughout the British Isles, in Europe—occupied and free—and in Africa. I cannot believe the requisitioning of Finnverinnity House will cause him undue hardship.”
Under the laird’s orders, telegrammed from London, Mrs. McIvor, the widowed housekeeper of the Big House, arranged for much of the furniture to be sent into storage at Fort William before she was mothballed herself to wait out the war with her invalid sister in Peebles, and Finnverinnity House began to receive its first intake of would-be commandos and SOE agents.
Although Mrs. McIvor had done her best to clear the house in the time available, senior officers and high-status instructors—civilian and military—were able to make use of several guest bedrooms which were still comfortably appointed, while women trainees (seven in all, over five years) were given Mrs. McIvor’s quarters: two windowless rooms and a bathroom off the scullery. Other officers slept on camp beds laid out in a dormitory arrangement in the main bedroom and in the attic nursery and servants’ quarters where, because of their distance from the first-floor bathrooms, the men used a large blue-and-white porcelain bowl decorated with dragons—later identified as a priceless Chinese Qianlong dynasty jardinière—as a communal “chantie” or chamber pot.
The ballroom was turned into an officers’ mess with an improvised bar built from the hull of an abandoned fishing boat, wedged under a presiding portrait of one of Montfitchett’s ancestors who had made his fortune selling opium in China (the jardinière was a spoil of his trade). His permanent expression of displeasure seemed appropriate. Outside, for lower ranks, tents and Nissen hut bunk rooms were erected on the lawns and bathroom facilities set up in the shrubbery.
The recruits were a disparate bunch: professional soldiers and gung-ho amateurs, volunteers from British battalions, among them McWatt, who joined the SOE at twenty-one, after a brief period of schoolmastering in the Borders. Fate or fortune brought him home to the Highlands, “to which,” as he wrote in Forby,*2 his first volume of memoirs, “as with Rabbie Burns, my heart has always belonged.” There were also exiles from Continental Europe, men and women determined to tough out the final gruelling selection process and earn the right to stay on in this unforgiving place, acquiring the lethal skills required to return home and aid the resistance.
In addition, “Warfare Weekend” courses were set up for volunteer members of the British Home Guard, described by Jim Struan in Silent Killing for Cubs and Scouts*3 as “a rag-tag bunch of part-timers most of whom had failed to get into the regular army.” They served as “demonstration troops,” showing real recruits what was required, playing the part of the e
nemy, guarding targets or pursuing the trainees across the hills.
The Home Guard’s lack of soldiering skills made them the butt of jokes for the trainee commandos from the regular army, who were themselves mostly regarded as low-status “drones” by senior officers who had more in common with the absent Lord Montfitchett, leaving aside his unpalatable political views, than with many of the trainees. McWatt later noted that “even here, in extremis in the marounjous ootlaund, the social stratification of the British class system was as ancient and inexorable as the Ring of Drumnish,” though foreigners were exempted and stamina and courage, or their opposites, were not, as events proved, the prerogative of a single class or nationality.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
*1 Released to public scrutiny by the UK National Archives in 1971 under the thirty-year freedom of information rule.
*2 Virr Press, 1962.
*3 Buirlie Books, 2003.
The Isle of Fascaray
Ah’ll awa aff an gang the nou, an gang tae Fascaray
An a wee bothy build there, o cley an simmen straw;
Nine bean-raws wull Ah hae there, an hinnie bees an aw,
An bide alane in the bee-lood shaw.
An Ah shall hae a wheen o saucht, for saucht comes dachlin slaw,