“Can we do that again, Mom?” Agnes says. “Please!”
* * *
* Smeddum Beuks, 1994.
1 September 2014
INVENTORY OF GOODS BROUGHT BY AGNES BARTOLI FROM NEW YORK TO FASCARAY, AUGUST 2014.
Neptune: her stuffed dolphin. A souvenir of babyhood.
Her comforter: which she calls her “cuddly,” a small and disintegrating patchwork quilt, another souvenir of babyhood.
Blue trinket box: a present from her Italian grandmother, Nonna Lucia. When the box is wound with a silver key and opened, a tiny mermaid with a golden fishtail pirouettes to the tinkly sound of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” In the box, Agnes keeps her small collection of postage stamps—Italian, British and American—and low-denomination banknotes and coins from the respective currencies. Scottish five-pound notes showing Burns’s mouse are especially treasured. Total value, at current exchange rates: $37.25.
Books: miscellaneous, cited in my journal entry of 20 August. These were the stories her father and I teasingly fought to read to her—she was always such an appreciative listener—before the teasing stopped and we just fought.
Planisphere: a star wheel, plus telescope with tripod—both presents from her father who encouraged her new interest in night sky-watching, despite my opposition on the grounds that it was a diversionary tactic devised to delay bedtime.
Clothing: various, mostly wind and waterproof.
Shoes: various, including—despite my insistence on their unsuitability for the journey—a pair of pink tooled calfskin cowboy boots. Another present from Marco, bought at the rodeo during his stint at Tucson.
iPhone (with pink rubber case): a present from her father, also. I am obviously too busy actually raising my child to buy her presents.
When McWatt’s daily chores were done in Calasay, by the light of a paraffin lamp he began his apprenticeship as a writer, penning essays and polemic, “reimagining” classic verse and prose into Scots, making it entirely his own, and—through the “lang and lanesame nichts”—compiling his masterwork, The Fascaray Compendium, his definitive anthology, or “vade mecum,” as he called it, of the island’s history, culture, folklore, flora, fauna and community life.
He was, he wrote, “a true son of Fascaray”; the island’s long dark winters, with brief flashes of daylight, and its summers of never-ending brightness had given its name to a particular psychiatric condition—Morbus Fascariensis: spells of deep and burrowing gloom alternating with frenzies of elation, often exacerbated by alcohol. In his depression, even the coming of spring—“thon fause freend” to McWatt—could not cheer him, as the opening of his 1945 poem The Ort Laun,*1 a reimagining of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, indicates.
Sheuchin o the Deid
April is the fellest month, breedin
Laylocks oot o the deid laun, kirnin
Mindin an wissin, eikin
Dreich roots wi voar rain.
Winter glaised us, happin
The yird in ill-mynded snaw, feedin
A wee bittie life wi dried tubers.
For McWatt, as he wrote in Forby, the hardships endured in the late 1940s echoed those of the mid nineteenth century when his great-grandfather Aonghas, then a shawl-wrapped toddler, had been driven out with his parents—McWatt’s great-great-grandparents—from their small clachan on the islet of Calasay in the terrible times of the fuadach nan Gàidheal, the clearance of the Gaels, by Montfitchett’s grasping predecessors, who regarded the islanders as “primitives,” standing in the way of progressive, lucrative sheep farming, deer forests and sporting tourism.
Eviction notices were served but the Fascaradians, already suffering the consequences of the potato blight—like their Irish cousins—had nowhere to go, and one October night, the factor arrived with his henchmen and torched the heather-thatched roofs.
McWatt quoted one eyewitness account:*2 “Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them; next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire…A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole island by day, and even extended far out to sea. I ascended Beinn Mammor about eleven o’clock in the evening, and counted 250 blazing houses, many of the owners of which I personally knew, but whose present condition—whether in or out of the flames—I could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins…”
The islanders were urged to emigrate and Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, who had, in McWatt’s words, “honed his genocidal inclinations as a colonial administrator in Calcutta,” was charged with setting up the Highland and Island Emigration Society and expressed the view that a “national effort” would now be needed to rid the land of “the surviving Irish and Scotch Celts,” to make way for racially superior settlers. He welcomed “the prospects of flights of Germans settling here in increasing numbers—an orderly, moral, industrious and frugal people, less foreign to us than the Irish or Scotch Celt, a congenial element which will readily assimilate with our body politic.”*3
A century after his ancestors’ eviction from the island, McWatt wrote at his desk in Calasay: “We’re dispossessed and deracinated, but we’re nae done yet!”
The nineteenth-century McWatts failed to board the boat to Nova Scotia with most of their compatriots and instead took the road south where factory work was found and distant family provided temporary lodgings in a Glasgow tenement. Their story was succinctly told in Forby, the first of his two autobiographical volumes, later made into a two-part drama series by BBC Scotland, starring Bill Paterson and Phyllis Logan, with Alan Cumming as the young McWatt.
Wee Aonghas’s first language, Gaelic, was forbidden at school and like most children of his social class his education ended at fourteen, when he took a job in a textile factory. “My great-grandfather’s exile was complete,” wrote McWatt. “Internally, he was denied his mither tongue, externally, the wide skies, wild seas and soft green braes of his native land were lost to him and in their place loomed the charred factory chimneys and sandstone tenements, dark as chambered burial cairns, of Glasgow whose Gaelic name, Glaschu, in cruel irony, means ‘Dear Green Place.’ ”
At twenty-three, Aonghas met and married Jeannie McDougall, a seamstress, and when they had their first and only child, Forbes—Grigor’s grandfather—the family moved to a tenement in Bridgeton.
Forbes, a sickly child, left school at fourteen like his own father and after a series of manual jobs on the shipyards of the Clyde, married Ina Mackay, who worked in the wafer room of the Gray Dunn biscuit factory. Their son Ossian—Grigor’s father—was born in 1900. A childhood bout of TB spared Forbes the greater peril of conscription in the First World War and he went on to find work as a warehouseman in the Templeton Carpet Factory.
Ossian, naturally clever but obliged by economic pressures to continue the family tradition of an abbreviated education, became a fitter on John Brown’s shipyard in his teens. By the time he was twenty, he had joined the Communist Party and his political activism cost him his job. He was later taken on as a driver on the Corporation trams, where he met, and subsequently married, Morag McCluskey, “a pretty young clippie,” as McWatt described his mother in Forby.
The young couple, who lived in a “single end” in Maryhill, saw education as a means of self-betterment, having been denied it themselves, and ensured that their son, Grigor, should be better equipped than they were to “make something of himself.”
In Forby, the picture the poet paints of his parents is compassionate—simple but good folk who did their best, within their own limitations, for their precociously clever only child. When he won a scholarship to the local academy, Ossian and Morag “were that proud, you’d think I’d single-handedly retaken Flodden,” he wrote, th
ough he was “subjected to ribbing from local youths” once his school set about flattening his broad Glasgwegian accent into an acceptable version of English (a “pan loaf voice,” was the dismissive term) with only a light inflection and a comprehensive mastery of the old Braid Scots vocabularies—from the Lallans of the Central Belt and Lowlands to the Doric of the North-East—to hint at his origins.
In his scant prose descriptions of his childhood there are few shadows—apart from those cast by the dark cloud of “poverty and dispossession.” But a fragment of verse, a “reimagining” of Larkin, enclosed in a 1970 letter to Lilias Hogg, suggests another story.
They fuck yer heid, yer maw an paw.
They dinnae mean tae, but they dae.
They stech ye wi the fauts they haid
Chuck in some extra, jist fur ye.
Man hauns oan meeserie tae man.
It deepens like the loch o hell.
Get oot as early as you can,
An doan’t hae onie weans yersel.*4
To lovelorn Lilias, who would have been nearly thirty when she received this poem and—as at least one subsequent letter showed—dreamed of having children with McWatt, this letter must have felt like a dagger in the heart.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
*1 From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
*2 Gloomy Memories in the Highland of Scotland by Donald McLeod, Archibald Sinclair, Glasgow, 1892.
*3 Letterbook of Highland and Island Emigration Society, 30 June 1852, National Archives of Scotland.
*4 From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
Delicht in Rauchle
A douce raivelment o the duds,
Kittles a list tae see the scud
A slippit shawl, an oxter flashed
Maks aw desire fair unabashed.
A keek o simmet gets ma vote,
As does the trailach petticoat.
Straigly cuffs an loorach snuid
Speak mair to me o womanhuid,
Than donsie quines in kythe perjink
Whase airtful weys mak manhuid shrink.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Robert Herrick, 1959*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
Lilias Hogg, the second child of Keith and Sandra Hogg, was, she liked to say, “born on Hell’s Hogmanay”: 1 January 1941. On that morning, as the infant Lilias screwed up her eyes against the alien light, opened her mouth and emitted her first protesting yell, four hundred miles to the south, Londoners woke to a changed world and surveyed the damage inflicted by German bombers—the Old Bailey, the Guildhall and a handful of Wren churches had all been hit.
“I was a war baby,” she told Archie Aitken, “and life’s been a battlefield ever since.”
She always described the family home—sandstone, three-bedroomed, single-storey, built in 1935 in Liberton, a southern suburb of Edinburgh—as a bungalow. To her parents and her sister Dolina, it was “a villa.”
Sandra Hogg was a trained midwife and in later life she would remind her husband and their daughters of that fact and, in particular, that she had given up her career to look after them. Keith Hogg, who endured a quiet war supervising stores at Redford Barracks on account of his flat feet, later became a senior bookkeeper with Jenners department store.
Lilias couldn’t wait to flee the suburbs for the city two and a half miles down the road and saw school—a genteel girls’ academy—and secretarial college as irritating interruptions in her progress towards the centre of the capital, to the hub of an intellectual and creative world full of colour and free of restraint.
In her early, glory days as an avid teenager skipping college in Edinburgh’s bohemian pubs, Lilias struggled to keep up with the talk and the drink. She had more success with the latter than the former. Episodes of melancholy in one so young and winsome were permitted by the middle-aged poets to stand in for a poetic disposition, in the absence of any worthwhile poetry.
Willie McCracken, stung by rejection, cruelly quoted Wordsworth at the capricious seventeen-year-old: Oh! many are the poets that are sown / By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine; / Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.
Ironic, then, that McCracken’s blustery doggerel is forgotten while Lilias Hogg’s reputation survives today, if only as the Flooer o Rose Street and the Muse o Menzies’, who inspired the twentieth-century renaissance of Scottish poetry.
Recent scholars of feminist studies have suggested that Hogg’s letters, and the scraps of her verse that survive, reveal a slender, tentative gift that if properly nurtured might have made her the equal, if not the better, of any of the Rose Street poets. But, the Women’s Studies’ argument goes, even if Lilias had possessed the talent of a Sylvia Plath or an Emily Dickinson, the exclusively male Menzies’ Bar set would have celebrated her beauty, delighted in her winning nature, admired and encouraged her capacity for alcohol in those early years and completely overlooked her verse.
Her career path was clear—she wanted to be part of the literary and artistic narrative. In order to finance her progress and pay for the occasional round in Menzies’, she found a job as a secretary and receptionist with a printing firm, McDuff’s, whose manager took a shine to her and continued to overlook her unpunctuality and regular Monday-morning absences.
“Calendars, menus, cattle market catalogues, orders of service, the odd programme for the Edinburgh Festival gentry, a pamphlet or two for the cracked Fringe set,” as she told McWatt. “See me! I’m in the publishing business too!”
It was, reflected McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium, the French writer Alphonse Daudet who observed in his Memoir*1 that “in southern climes the sun warmed the human core, but ‘we, the transplanted ones, are seized upon by this homicidal North with its mists and rheumatism, its mournful rains and sleet,’ and, without any external heat source, we ‘must resort to hard liquor’ to guarantee an interior summer. While winter winds howl through the lanes and wynds of Edinburgh, temperatures are tropical during the long late-night lock-ins in the pubs of Rose Street.”
McWatt, a celebrator of the Auld Alliance (though, to him, any alliance against England would have done) liked to quote another French writer, Baudelaire: Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! / Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, / enivrez-vous; / enivrez-vous sans cesse! / De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.*2 McWatt translated the exhortation for the benefit of the company, into robust Scots: ’Tis the oor tae be bluitert! / Tae jouk oor thirlage tae the knock! / On uisge, poetry, virtue, as ye wish, / G’aun yersels, get rairie, mairchless pished.
[“It is the hour to be drunken! / To escape our fates as martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. / On wine, on poetry, on virtue if you wish.”]
Virtue rarely came into it.
Drunken excesses that would have been grotesque in a woman older and less favoured than Lilias were indulged and sometimes encouraged. She was picturesque even when intoxicated to the point of unconsciousness, her curls tumbling over her eyes, her rosy lips parted, pale limbs wantonly arrayed.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
*1 Éditions du Soie, 1872.
*2 Le Spleen de Paris, 1869.
32 Melville Street Lane
Edinburgh
15 August 1958
Dearest G,
A joy to see you. That white night, you in full flight in Charlotte Square, singing, dancing and declaiming your own divine Book of Revelations like a secular, sexier Billy Graham. And moved by your message, I come forward every time to Testify! Yes, Lor
d, a joy. But a joy burned through with pain, like a red shot silk in which the slightest movement and glancing light reveal the black depths beneath.
We are, my heart’s twin, two minds with one vision. Griogal Cridhe, our separation feels like an amputation, or a cardioectomy, if there is such a thing. All is tired and grey here, since you left. Sydney’s high-tailed it back to Stella. Hugh’s burrowed into Biggar with Valda for the season, George’s away back with his mammy in Orkney and Norman’s up in Sutherland en famille, murdering fish and punishing his knees on the hills. That leaves the hardcore. Willie and Archie tore into each other again in Rose Street. Over me! Daft to think my true gallant knight is 300 miles away over the water, while these two bletherskites tulzie to claim me. I seek you nightly in the golden warmth of Menzies’…When will you be back to ignite this drab pile of tinder and make a merry bonfire of us all?
Your Ayebidin Lilias
An Tobar
Calasay
Fascaray
23 August 1958
Leal-hertit Lilias,
The willow warblers are back. I feel it is my duty to count them in, to encourage their return. I fancy that if I were not here to welcome them they wouldn’t return from their African pit-stop.
Edinburgh was a rare pleasure, as it always is. I come to drink at “the gowden mile” of Rose Street as a Bedouin lost in the Sahara might stumble into an oasis. After months of solitary toil in this intellectual desert, the talk and companionship of my peers in that sheikh’s palace of brass and mahogany is like a cooling draught of purest water to my parched mind. And this oasis also has the advantage of dancing girls—chief among them your fair self.
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