Dachlin frae the mornin’s haar tae whaur the chirker sings;
There midnicht’s in a glimmer an nuin’s a heather glawe,
An forenicht’s fu o the lintie’s weengs.
Ah’ll awa aff an gang the nou, for aye thru nicht an day,
I hear loch watter laippin wi laich soonds ’gin the shore;
While Ah staund in the city wynd an oan the tarmac grey,
I hear it in ma sair hert’s core.
—Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 1944*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
24 August 2014
When I first told friends and colleagues in New York about my move, they were appalled.
“Taking time out to think things over, we understand,” said Hobi. “Getting away for a while, maybe. But two years? Where the hell is it anyway?”
I pointed out the island on a map.
“Wow!” she said. “The He-brides!”, pronouncing it as if it were a community of transgendered newly-weds. “Isn’t that where they made The Wicker Man? I love that movie. All those crazy islanders! Hey, are you sure about this?”
There was some curiosity about my publishing deal, which made me uncomfortable until I hit on the perfect way to shut down the subject. Asked what the book was about, I would reply “poetry and identity”; it cleared a room in seconds.
When I phoned my parents in Toronto to tell them about my new job they responded with the same wary approval they’d expressed ever since ninth grade when, after a series of cyclonic rows, I’d made it clear that all future decisions about my life would be taken by me, and only me. I should have known better than to expect them to be pleased that their daughter was returning, garlanded with academic and professional success, to their homeland from which they had high-tailed, without a backward glance, many decades ago.
“Well, if you’re happy about it? And Agnes is happy about it…?” said my mother.
“What about Marco?” was my father’s tentative question.
“Marco doesn’t come into it,” I said.
They didn’t press me further.
“A major sulk…” was Marco’s response when it was clear I was serious.
This was rich. He’d seen the job advertised online—the Auchwinnie Regional Development and Enterprise Board in north-west Scotland was looking for a curator, archivist and editor to set up the new Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre and Fascaray Museum. He printed out the ad and left it on my keyboard—we weren’t speaking at the time—as a provocation. He never expected me to act on it.
“Don’t do this to us,” he pleaded. “To Agnes…”
“Who is this ‘us’ of which you speak?” I replied. “Is this the ‘us’ you were thinking of while you assayed the Downward Dog with Karmic Kate?”
“I don’t remember you giving much thought to our family while you were scaling the peaks of ecstasy with De Quincey.”
De Quincey was Pascal, my revenge romance. Typical Marco—now you needed a thorough grasp of English Romanticism to navigate his insults.
“Oh, lay off. You started it…” I began.
He changed the subject.
“Fascaray!” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it. It’s thousands of miles away. It’s cold and damp—and random.”
“Random it is not. Maybe you’ve forgotten—you’ve forgotten so much else over the last year—my name, my family, my birthplace…”
“Give us a break, Braveheart. You’re no more Scottish than you’re a New Yorker. Get over it. You’re an uptight, risk-averse Canadian. Deal with it.”
“Okay. I can take that from an Italian-American whose closest connection to his homeland is the occasional plate of red-sauce pasta in a Bed-Stuy luncheonette.”
That seemed to hit home. He paused, picked up his backpack and turned to leave the apartment. At the door, he swung round with an afterthought.
“Are you seriously going to bring up our daughter in a country where the three major food groups are cookies, fries and liquor?”
That did it. His single sentence expressed years of unspoken contempt for my family, for me.
“You snob!” I shouted. “So what’s this? Pizza Pride? How dare you!”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’m actually quoting you, for chrissakes.”
He was but, at the time, that seemed beside the point.
Pilar, my closest friend at the Museum of the Printed Word, at least bothered to research my move before venturing an opinion.
“Don’t go all New Age on us,” she said.
Her confusion, it turned out, was general. Those few people in New York who had ever heard of the island, or bothered to google it, assumed I was going to work for the Balnasaig Centre, not the Fascaray Trust. It’s a branding issue. In some circles—international, bohemian baby boomers and Generation Xers—Fascaray is known not for its native bard or its Land Raid heroes but for the batty cultists, the Balnasaig Seekers, a group of English eccentrics who came to the island in the 1960s to commune with spirits from other realms and went on to create a small empire offering bed, board and cosmic enlightenment to like-minded etherealists.
While to some outsiders the Seekers have become the main event, they’re antithetical to Fascaray’s history of pragmatism and, above all—as the most cursory reading of McWatt indicates—its hostility to the English. If the Seekers could survive there for so long, I was surely in with a chance.
There’s little crossover between the solemn pilgrims who visit the Balnasaig Centre and the folk-music fans who stay in the Bothy bunkhouse, drink single malts at the inn, sing The Song with a warrior passion and follow the McWatt Walk around the island in the footsteps of the late poet. But both are good for business. The bulk of the money for the Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre and Fascaray Museum has come from McWatt himself, who bequeathed his estate—and the substantial royalties from his popular song—to the people of Fascaray. Though the poet had no time for the Seekers, I was told by Gordon Nesbitt of the Auchwinnie Board that “developments at Balnasaig are part of the modern story of the island and must be represented somewhere in the new museum.” I wasn’t going to argue. Pilar needn’t have worried, however; I’ve never had any time for the New Age, a misleading term for a bunch of lazy narcissists who jettison reason and hard-won science in favour of Old Age “intuitions” and cod medievalism. My views, long held, have nothing, almost nothing, to do with the fact that Marco’s squeeze was a teacher of what she called “Mystic Yoga.”
The cover photograph of Neville Booth’s book, Reflections from the Pilgrim Path: The Balnasaig Story, taken in the 1960s, shows the author newly arrived on the island in his early thirties, spindly, prematurely bald and dressed with odd formality in a suit, frowning meaningfully at the ancient standing stones of the Ring of Drumnish. He looks the sort of meek, conventional type that the Seekers’ hippie followers might, in another context, have described as “a straight.”
Other photographs show the co-founders of the community in its early years—Booth’s then wife Althea, tall and gaunt in a black cloak that gives her the appearance of a resting pipistrelle, and their secretary Evelyn Fletcher, a chubby matron in a floral flock.
The book, with chapters headed “The Quest for Selfhood,” “The Journey Begins,” “In Search of Soul,” doesn’t inspire close reading. But McWatt’s name isn’t in the index—that’s my get-out; I don’t need to read it.
Of course Marco eventually did his research too. He mocked the whole project—“McWatt was an obsessive; the guy had hypergraphia. He needed psychiatric help, not a museum devoted to his so-called legacy.” I stood my ground. “You do realise,” he went on, “that climate change has meant a 67 per cent increase in rainfall on the island since 1961,” to which I pointed out coldly that we’re not completely unfamiliar with heavy precipitation in New York. Then he seized on the Balnasaig Seekers as another reason
why I shouldn’t take the job.
“So you’re throwing up everything, travelling all that way, removing our daughter from the life she knows and the people she loves, to hang out in the Brigadoon boondocks with a bunch of obscurantist kooks.”
I could have answered that I would have nothing to do with the Seekers, reminding him that my main task was to organise an archive, set up a museum, write a book, edit and publish another, and that, in pursuit of this end, I would be “hanging out” with perfectly rational researchers, curators, academic publishers and funding bodies. Instead, I said: “At least I have no plans to sleep with any obscurantist kooks. Incidentally, how is Karmic Kate?”
INVENTORY OF THE BIRDS OF FASCARAY
cuckoo (Cuculidae): locally called the gowk, or fool, though we know it is the sleekit cuckoo who is the clever one, since she cannot be fashed to raise her own weans and so lays her eggs in the nests of other birds—meadow pipits (moss cheepers) and dunnocks (whin sparraes)—who make more committed parents and are too gowkit to notice the striking dissimilarity between their own brood and the interloper.
jackdaw (Coloeus monedula spermologus, Viell): known as the cae. Resident. Frequently seen in the vicinity of Finnverinnity House. Also sighted in woods above Tilliecuddy by Rab McNab in May 1948. Author and ornithologist Murdoch McMurdo, in his History of the Fascaradian Archipelago (1886), mentions it in connection with the Lusnaharra district.
lesser redpoll (Carduelis linaria, Caberet): rose-lintie. Seen by Father Col Maclennan near Loch Och, October/November 1946.
magpie (Pica pica pica): pyot, pickie-turd. Rarely seen scavenger, though observed by McMurdo in the Doonmara locality. He also surmises from the place name Sguid Pioghaid (Shelter of the Magpies) in the south-east of Calasay that the species was once prolific here.
Scottish crossbill (Loxia curvirostra scotica): bowsie spink. Britain’s only endemic bird species. It has the good sense never to be seen in England. Resident, breeding grounds in the vicinity of Loch Och. Recently sighted on a Sabbath in the Finnverinnity kirk graveyard by Ranald Paterson, minister of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Sighting not recorded until the Monday.
shorelark (Eremophila alpestris flava, Gm.): according to the Official Handbook of the Birds of Scotland these are unknown in the West but the author saw one in 1944, at dawn, feeding on a heap of decayed seaweed on the shore in front of the Finnverinnity Inn.
siskin (Carduelis sinus, L.): totie spink. A small and agile finch with a narrow bill, yellow streaks on its wings and distinctive forked tail. Seen by Tam Macpherson on his farm woodpile at Balnasaig Farm in winter 1947.
skylark (Alauda arvensis arvensis, L.): known as laverock. Resident. Most frequently seen by the author on Beinn Mammor. Also sighted by Rab McNab above Lusnaharra Strand.
—Grigor McWatt, 1948, The Fascaray Compendium
Grigor McWatt was to maintain his silence on details of his SOE work all his life, but sixty years after the war, Jim Struan, a former commando, published his vivid memoir of the Big House war years, Silent Killing for Cubs and Scouts.
“The whole establishment was capable of providing training and accommodation for 150 officers and more than 2,000 other ranks. There were catering staff, administrative staff, domestic staff. It was a world unto itself, an enormous extended country-house party with mud and munitions,” wrote Struan.
“In fieldcraft classes, hard men of the hills taught trainees how to survive in the most brutal weather: making rudimentary shelters; wild fishing for brown trout, sea trout and salmon; trapping, skinning, gutting and cooking rabbits on small fires built with a couple of sticks and foraging for edible fruits and berries. There was bigger game, too, and it was on the hills of Fascaray that the men and women of the SOE learned to stalk, kill and gralloch—disembowel—deer, and by extension to dispose of human quarry.” On these expeditions, Grigor McWatt would have learned the skills of self-sufficiency that later served him well in Calasay.
“It was Fairbairn and Sykes, known as the Heavenly Twins, two ex-policemen with distinguished service records from the Shanghai Municipal Police, who, in the wrecked splendour of Finnverinnity House, taught us the art of silent killing and reflex shooting,” Struan wrote.
“We learned how to use knives creatively, how to administer a cosh, wield a deadly catapult, make lethal weapons from tin hats and shovels (excellent for decapitations), how to break free from opponents’ holds, get a prisoner in an intractable grip, hog-tie him, dislocate limbs, split mouths, burst eardrums, gouge out eyes and break necks. We called the course ‘Murder Made Easy.’ ”
On their first day on Fascaray new recruits were sent out on a “walk,” which gave them some idea of what they were in for.
“Carrying our tommy guns and fifty-pound haversacks we slogged a dozen miles in three hours non-stop in driving rain, had a twenty-minute halt for lunch, assailed by infernal midges, then hauled ourselves up to do another four miles in an hour. Our feet were like burning bricks. That night when we finally stopped, famished and exhausted, we ignored our rations. We had other priorities and limped to the riverbank, unlaced our boots and plunged our feet in the pure cold waters of the Lingel. I can still hear the sound, a sweet Gregorian chant of gratitude, as fifty men, trousers rolled to the knees, sighed in unison. We bedded down under the stars while the frost turned our kip mats and blankets into sheets of solid ice, but we were so glad to be no longer walking that we slept like bairns.”
The recruits abseiled down cliffs and waterfalls, and from the roof of Finnverinnity House, practised “scree running” on the north face of Beinn Mammor and learned, in the calm waters of Loch Och and the rough seas by Plodda and Grodda, to handle kayaks and “folbot” folding canoes, which would enable them to approach enemy vessels undetected and place magnetic limpet mines on their hulls. Manhunts, known as “Spider and Fly,” were set up—punishing versions of hide-and-seek in which “quarry” would be given a head start and sent off into the hills with no provisions for days at a time, left to fend for themselves as best they could, regardless of midges, gales, rain and snow, while their colleagues, equally sparsely equipped, would be charged with tracking them down.
“There’s nothing like real bullets to sharpen the reflexes. As far as I know the only fatality was a chap who slipped in the snow and fell to his death on Mammor. They brought him down from the hills tied on a pony like a stag. But there were a few near misses, I can tell you, and these games could get pretty rough.”
Occasionally, the commanding officers had to remind the ranks, when they manhandled the “prisoners” back to HQ, that they were all, in fact, on the same side.
Sick and numb with exhaustion after long slogs in remorseless rain across bogs perfidious as quicksand, tormented by a fizzing nimbus of midges, dodging friendly fire in some of the most inhospitable terrain in Europe, they would file into the Nissen huts to hear lectures on night navigation and sabotage before grabbing a barely edible plate of bully beef and boiled potatoes and collapsing on their camp beds to get some shut-eye before the next day’s onslaught.
“There was no let-up,” Struan wrote.
All this physical work in extreme conditions took its toll. “That was the plan. Eliminate the laggards. It was a test of character as well as of physical fitness. Not everyone received the coveted green beret at the end of the course.” Many—more than 20 per cent of the intake—had the humiliation, after the five-week ordeal, of eventually being “returned to unit.” The faint-hearts, according to Struan, “were identified and weeded out pretty sharply. This was no place for weakling boys and girls.”
After such an apprenticeship, the rigours of post-war self-sufficiency on a derelict croft must have seemed a cakewalk to Grigor McWatt.
Fascaray, he wrote in Forby, “had a good war.” The bombing of cities to the south and naval battles to the north in the 1940s were distant rumours, fuelled by occasional news bulletins delivered over Tam Macpherson’s crackling wireless at Balnasaig Farm, p
assed on and embellished in pub and store.
The island was, though, “buffeted by regular explosions and bursts of gunfire loud enough to rattle crockery and break windows,” wrote McWatt, and by night “the sky was a son et lumière of flares and tracer fire.”
“It was like Guy Fawkes Night every night,” recalled Effie MacLeod. “The farm collies were driven wild by it. The weans too. I don’t think embdy slept through the night the whole time the boys were up there at the Big House. Not that the lassies were complaining.”
This was what the Fascaradians called “the wee pretendy war”: the dress rehearsal, with live ammunition, being conducted by trainee commandos and SOE agents at Finnverinnity House. Whatever secret business they got up to in the baronial pile at the head of the bay, on their rare nights off duty in the Finnverinnity Inn the commandos were thirsty, loud, disputatious and free with their money.
Rab McNab, the landlord, worked all hours, serving beer and whisky—of which there was a mysterious abundance—by candlelight long after the electricity generator had shut down for the day. The commandos liked a song, too, and Murdo “the Fiddle” McIntyre from Doonmara was paid in drink for melancholy airs that would, according to Effie MacLeod, “bring a tear to a glass eye,” or for wild reels that accompanied energetic interpretations of the Highland fling by Paris diplomats, Norwegian academics, Canadian engineers, Czech schoolteachers, Danish farmers, a Jewish mathematician from London’s East End, a concert pianist from Krakow and a tulip-growing publisher from Amsterdam, as well as British recruits and officers of every class and background.
Like all Britons in that time of official rationing, Fascaradians faced shortages of sugar, tea and flour, but they were used to a degree of self-sufficiency and continued to produce a surplus of milk, butter, eggs and potatoes. No one went hungry and the recruits up at the Big House were happy to barter chocolate, cigarettes and nylon stockings in exchange for the islanders’ bounty of dairy produce and vegetables. The modern invaders brought their plunder to Fascaray and left it there, and if any local maidens were pressed into wantonness, it was with their full consent.
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