Abandoning all the museum’s contents “as collateral,” the MacRaes fled Fascaray, Scotland and the continent to open a ceilidh pub in Nova Scotia. A quarter of a century later, it’s my job to get rid of all this junk, sort through McWatt’s junk, and start over.
Athin the Gyrie o this Yowtherin Leif
Athin the gyrie o this yowtherin leif
There incums glisks o asure hewit,
Untashit braw as is the cuckoo-brogue
Or bonnie jessamine, when strawn aboot
Stravaigin burns by voar, which maks
A gamawow o thon philosophers whase
Anely ettle is tae ease oor molligrants.
Ah hae minded when the winter cam,
Heich in ma chaumer in the rimey nichts
In skiggan licht o the kinchie muin
Oan ilka rissle, speeach an racket
The shaikle spears eiken oot their lenth
Gin the flanes o the ochenin dag,
When aw the laun aroon ligged law
Aneath a dufftie skilderin o snaw.
Sae Naitur’s bawbees gie me wealth
Tae gang aboot ma winter’s darg wi stealth.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Henry David Thoreau, 1949*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
When the island’s first tractor was delivered to Tam Macpherson at Balnasaig Farm in the late 1940s, McWatt wrote, “the mixed curse of the twentieth century finally arrived on Fascaray.” Until then, the only motorised vehicles on the island had been Montfitchett’s shooting brakes, the military trucks of the SOE training school (transported to the island with great difficulty on a steam drifter from Auchwinnie), and Donald John “the Shop” Mackenzie’s Ford jalopy, used to drive supplies from the pier to the store and to the few areas of the island blessed with a semblance of surfaced road. When the road ran out Donald John would, in the case of old and ailing customers, make the rest of the journey on foot carrying the goods in a creel basket. Younger and fitter householders would have to hoist the goods themselves from the side of the track, where Donald would leave them in boxes under a sheet of tarpaulin secured with stones.
Bicycles, often shared between families and neighbours, were prized but the potholed roads meant they could only be used by the hardy. Shuggie “the Post” MacLeod used a bike for his daily circuit of the island but had to push it, with his sack tied to the crossbar, much of the way. In fact most islanders simply walked, including the children of Lusnaharra, who hiked the six-mile round journey to school in Finnverinnity each day without complaint, carrying their lunchtime “pieces”—a can of milk and a scone or bread roll—and the regulation peat for the school fire.
In winter, when nightfall began mid-afternoon, children would be sent home after lunch before the dark descended. On moonless winter nights, Fascaradians would spear burning peats with a sickle and use them as torches, fàd air corran, trailing sparks as they travelled to and from their homes. Fields were ploughed using yoked horses—Clydesdales on Balnasaig Farm, smaller breeds on the smaller farms—to pull the harrows.
The arrival of Macpherson’s tractor, a Ferguson TE20 costing a scandalous £200, was greeted with scepticism. Many old hands shook their heads and prophesied that the thing was a fad, couldn’t do the work of a good team of horses and wouldn’t last. Calum Donald “the Plough” MacEwan, now reduced to helping out Seumas “the Byre” McKinnon, remained confident to the end of his days that the “tin beast” was a temporary interloper and told McWatt that for months after the arrival of the newfangled machine, before remembering to apply the brake, Tam would still shout “whoa.”
Mail and supplies—food, sundries, coal, building materials, cattle feed and, on sombre occasions, coffins—as well as the occasional passenger, were delivered twice a month to the island by the Gudgie, a steam puffer boat whose crew—skipper Ali Hume, first mate Malkie McTavish and deckhand Pat Boy Cairns—always received a welcome in the inn. A small open scaffie fishing boat, the Silver Darling, a two-masted lugger, built at the turn of the century and owned by father and son fishermen Tormud and Alec Campbell of Finnverinnity, served as a passenger ferry for unscheduled crossings. Such was the difficulty and discomfort of the ten-mile passage—in bad weather no amount of oilskin or waterproofs could prevent passengers and crew getting a soaking on the shelterless deck—that few undertook the journey voluntarily. The trip was mostly made by the sick, who had to be stretchered down to the ferry with great care from the rickety wooden pier lest—as happened to the bad-tempered old mother of Donald John the Shop—they slid head first into the bow of the boat.
“It’s a hard life, this island life,” wrote McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium in 1949, “and it breeds a hardy people.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
31 August 2014
Even Agnes feels she has to duck against the low beam of the porch, a brick sentry box which puts a small but useful distance between the Calasay rain and the front door of An Tobar, Grigor McWatt’s home for almost seventy years.
“What does it mean? An Tobar?” Agnes asks.
“It’s Gaelic for ‘the source.’ ”
“Like ketchup?”
The house would originally, in the time of McWatt’s ancestors, have been a single-storey, windowless taigh dubh, built with its back to the steep grass-edged cliffs, the ocean beyond and the scouring north-easterly winds. The drystone walls would have been topped with a heather thatch secured with ropes and weighted with stones gathered from the shore. The peat fire was built on the floor in the centre of the single-roomed dwelling and above it there would have been a hole in the roof through which the smoke escaped, inefficiently—hence the name “blackhouse.”
When Grigor McWatt first saw it in the 1940s, it was derelict, a roofless shelter for foxes and wildcats. He sublet it for a nominal rent from Tam Macpherson, a “tacksman” farmer with the unique privilege on the island of a long leasehold and security of tenure. For a decade McWatt lived there with sheets of corrugated iron laid over the beams in an attempt to keep out the rain and cold while he set about reclaiming what he maintained was his ancestral home, hacking away at the vicious briars that clung to its walls, using stone from the clachan’s other derelict houses to patch it up, and making furniture from stacks of fish boxes washed up on the shore in the violent equinoctial gales.
Now the blackhouse is white, a taigh geal, a limewashed country cottage with faded red trim that would make a charming, if rudimentary, vacation let.
“These days I have a slate roof, a fireplace with a flue, windows, a functioning bedroom in my loft and a compost toilet,” McWatt wrote in the Auchwinnie Pibroch in July 1962. “Embourgeoisement is finally upon me.”
I put the rusty key in the lock and find that the door is already open.
As Agnes steps into the front room, she looks around and says wonderingly: “Just like a dollhouse! A dirty little dollhouse!”
Dirty is overstating it. Where does she get her exacting standards of domesticity? Not from her father, anyway. The flagstone floors could do with a sweep, I suppose, and the broad hearth which fills almost the whole north wall, with its swinging cast-iron arm and cooking pot suspended by a rusty chain, is blackened with years of accumulated soot and carbonised grease.
“A witch’s cauldron!” says Agnes.
I don’t imagine the bachelor poet went at the pot too often with a wire brush. But otherwise the cottage is—to my eyes—surprisingly neat and well preserved, without any of the unpleasant smells associated with neglect.
Johanna has done a good job, but not good enough to satisfy my daughter, who surveys the room with awed disgust. Her expression softens and is replaced by a familiar, wide-eyed look of curiosity.
“What does that mean?”
She is pointing at the inscription “Ou Phrontis,�
�� carved on a stone slab above the fireplace.
“Who cares? I don’t give a damn,” I say.
She lowers her head and frowns.
“I only asked,” she says.
“No. No,” I say. “That’s what it means. ‘Ou Phrontis.’ Who cares? I don’t give a damn. It’s Greek. A quote from a historian. Herodotus.”
It was also carved in the house of the English adventurer T. E. Lawrence—an improbable inspiration for McWatt.
“Look!” Agnes, fully recovered, wrinkles her nose as she points above the hearth. “A bedpan.”
All my fortunate child knows of hospitals, she has seen on television.
“No. You put hot coals in it,” I explain. “Then you wrap it in cloth and slip it into your bed to warm it before you get in. Like an electric blanket.”
She nods, distracted; she’s lost interest—a bedpan would have been more entertainingly gross.
Under the narrow north-facing window there is a ladder-backed chair, cane-seated, and a small writing table—an old clerk’s desk with brass hinges securing the sloping lid. I lift it, and there, in neat rows, are four pencils—HB—a putty eraser, a fountain pen, bottle of black ink, a silver sharpener, an assortment of felt-tip pens (long dried up) and a pale green notebook, the same faded quarto softback as The Fascaray Compendium manuscripts. I open it, restraining the archivist’s thrill—like the promise of casual sex, too often followed by disappointment. I turn the pages carefully. I was right to be cautious. They’re mostly blank.
What is there in the first few pages is a record of his accounts for December 2013–January 2014. Two columns on each lined page: Expenditure and Income. The column for Income is blank. Four lines from a poem are scored through but still legible—Awa, saul, the boadie’s guest, / Stravaigin’s ower, tak yer rest. / Trith’s killt sae stap yer greetin, / Though yer whids deserve a beatin. It’s dated 13 January. I don’t recognise it as one of his published poems, nor can I guess at the original, if indeed it’s a translation. There’s not enough here to include in a new collection of his verse. The next entry, on 14 January, the day before his death, is more prosaic: “Seed potatoes. Ink. Paper.”
So, after a lifetime of hypergraphia, the Hebridean Pepys finally fell silent. The notebook is of little use to me and no interest at all to Agnes. Instead she’s entranced by a dish of shells on a small milking stool by the fireplace.
“Wow! His collection is way bigger than mine,” she says, covetously running her fingers through it.
“Don’t touch,” I say, sounding sharper than I mean to. “It’s for the museum.”
She slumps, frowning, in the armchair—wing-backed, Victorian, with a plaid loose cover. The poet’s chair. How baffled and irritated he would be to see this skinny nine-year-old in her neon-striped socks, rosebud skirt and hiking boots, sulking in his chair.
I haven’t the heart to reprimand her again. How many nine-year-olds would willingly accompany their parent on a professional trawl through an unknown dead man’s stuff? An old unknown dead man, too. It’s the only comfortable chair in the room. She’s welcome to it. On the other side of the fire is a wooden captain’s chair with a grey woollen cushion. This, I imagine, would be for visitors. No concessions to ease. No invitation to linger. I imagine him saying, as Grandad McPhail used to say—more imperative than interrogative—“You’re not for stopping?”
I tape the ledger in bubble wrap, put it in a padded bag and slip it in my waterproof backpack.
In the window above the desk, between bookends fashioned from two rocks of pyrite, are four volumes of Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language. This is the 1887 edition, published by Alexander Gardner. The red spines are intact and their board covers relatively undamaged, though the fore edge is stained black. I open the first volume—the paper is heavily foxed—and towards the back on pages 552 to 555 (“cumlin—an animal that attaches itself to a person or place of its own accord” to “curbawdy—active courtship”), there are the tidemarks of damp. But overall the books are in pretty good shape, considering they’ve been wedged in by this draughty window for so long.
“Wow!” Agnes says, pointing at the bookends. “Fool’s gold!”
The dictionaries will be useful exhibits but I don’t want to risk damaging them on the rough ride home. I put them back where I found them; they’re as safe here as anywhere. I’m beginning to worry that I haven’t judged the tides correctly. It might be a damp journey back across the strand to Ruh.
Agnes, always one step ahead, our earlier snippiness forgotten, is in the kitchen, a small, spartan room dominated by a wide stone sink with a single dripping faucet and an ancient Calor gas stove. She is standing on a stool going through the jerry-built cupboards. Apart from cartons of salt and pepper and a tin of Brodie’s tea, there are three boxes, two unopened, of oats, the old Scott’s brand whose logo is a Highland he-man in kilt and wife-beater “simmet,” about to hurl a rock into a loch.
“Porridge. Yuck. Your poet ate porridge,” says Agnes.
In his first decade on Calasay, McWatt drew water from the top of the burn before he excavated the old well, whose topaz water was, he said, “as sublime on the palate as the rarest single malt, without the deleterious consequences of the uisge beatha the following morning.”
From the kitchen window, I can see the old cast-iron tub he used to bathe in outside, an inconceivable prospect to someone like me who, until three weeks ago, regarded underfloor heating and a steaming shower head as standard-issue bathware. Pneumonia could be a risk here, even in August. McWatt would set a fire of sticks beneath the tub to heat the water drawn from the well and, as far as I know, never suffered any illness until his death in January. His toilet was a midden pit behind the drystone walls of an old sheep pen. He washed his clothes in the lower reaches of the burn, using stones to rub in carbolic soap, and hung them to dry on rope strung across the fire which, in those early years, blazed on the floor in the centre of his cottage, just as it had done in the blackhouses of his ancestors. Fuel was provided by peat, which he cut from the bog, or by driftwood gathered from the strand, and fallen branches from the copse of alder, oak, rowan and pine, bent by the wind gusting in over the Calasay cliffs. The thought of all that manual labour, just to get through the day, makes me suddenly weary.
He cooked in a pot suspended over the fire or on a small Primus stove balanced on a table made from fish boxes, dining, he wrote in his second volume of memoirs, Ootwith,* “as well as any laird,” which wasn’t surprising since the contents of his larder were often poached from the laird’s estate. He fished salmon and grayling from the Lingel and trout from Loch Aye, gathered mussels from the strand and, with Dougal Mackenzie, the “orraman” and ceilidh singer from Killiebrae, took part in Fascaray’s illicit deer culls. From the kitchen window you can still see the vegetable garden he dug, with feannagan lazybed rows for potatoes. He would kill and eat the rabbits that nibbled at his carrots. With no one to tend it any more, the garden has run to seed and an extended family of rabbits has moved in to reclaim it, in their own herbivorous Land Raid.
Agnes has wrenched open another cupboard and found three cans of mutton stew, a can of haggis, one of evaporated milk, a box of Cremola Foam drink powder (raspberry flavour), a pack of Bird’s Custard and a half-empty bottle of Highland Park whisky. Like my daughter, McWatt was not a gourmet, though The Fascaray Compendium includes several local recipes passed on to him by some of the older women of the island. He justified the inclusion of these “receipts,” as he called them, by saying they were “women’s varse, part of a long oral tradition that proves once more the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of Scottish culture, despite the suppressions and depredations following the Act of Union.”
His view hasn’t boosted his reputation among feminist scholars.
Agnes has seen enough. She’s now investigating the bathroom—a conventional 1970s lilac vinyl suite, part of the process of “embourgeoisement,” more practical but less aesthetically ple
asing than the al fresco tub—then races up the twisting wooden stairs into the bedroom, where, before I catch up with her, she stops short.
“Mom! Come look! He’s got a cuddly! Your poet’s got a cuddly.”
“It’s a quilt, Agnes. A cuddly to you. A blanket, or a comforter, to the poet. Poets don’t have cuddlies. Or this one doesn’t. Didn’t.”
I look out of the window and see I was right to distrust myself. I’ve miscalculated. The tide is already lapping over the southern end of the islet. We have to hurry. No time to visit the byre library and cart shed across the yard. We’ll have to save them for another day. I usher Agnes towards the door and then remember Johanna’s box of documents. It’s tucked under the desk, exactly as she said. Outside, I seal it in more bubble wrap, put the whole thing in an oilskin sack and secure it to the back of the quad bike. Then the midges descend, a thousand shimmering pixels with mean intent, and I fumble for the net hoods. Agnes puts hers on and laughs.
“We’re like those burka ladies!” she says, delighted.
“Come on. No time for this. Got to get going,” I say.
She climbs onto the pillion seat and surprises me by leaning across and turning the key to start the engine. No time to protest or ask her where she learned this trick. What else does she know? I blame her father for this osmotic absorption of random information. We ride back towards the shore, outrunning the midges, at a speed that makes us gasp, exhilarated. The last hundred yards of our journey across the Calasay Strand is through six inches of swirling seawater.
Once we reach the dunes I stop to check the documents are dry. I’ve got away with it.
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