“Yes, most of the time he’d be walking around with a face that could have tripped you up it was that long. It was the poetry, I suppose. Thinking all those big fancy thoughts can’t make you too cheerful. He’d no time for incomers, either. That was me. Up from the south. I was lucky I wasn’t English or I would have got dog’s abuse from him. But he was surly and I won’t take rudeness. I told him ‘I suppose you think I came up the Clyde on a water biscuit?’ That shut him up.”
“Aye…Thinking those big fantoosh thoughts…”
“But he could be awful kind too. I mind him giving away a catch of herring to Marsaili and Jessie MacDonald, who’d been widowed by the Big Storm. That was some night. Sea nearly as high as Mammor, the Morag May lost, with Marsaili’s father and Jessie’s brother too. Wee Margaret in the shop lost her daddy too, poor soul. McWatt wrote a poem about that, if I remember correctly.
“If I mind right…”
“He wrote a good song, too, I’ll give him that. ‘Hame tae Fascaray.’ A fine tune as well, but the fellow who played it, Murdo McIntyre from Doonmara, Murdo the Fiddle, never got any credit for it. A good-looking fellow Murdo in his youth, but a devil when drink was taken. Like all the men, except my Shuggie. That was the only way to get McWatt out of the pub—if any visitor to the island, knowing no better, saw him in the inn and asked him for a verse of his song, he would rush out the door, deeply offended. Some of the local children, little devils they were, used to shout to him in the street—‘Gangin hame!’ You should have seen the look on McWatt’s face!”
“Breenge oot the door, black-affronted…The local weans, wee devils…”
“So is it the poetry you like, Mhairi-Ann? I’m keen on a good poem myself, though I always prefer the cheery sort. They always had a nice wee verse or two in the Sunday Post. Francis Gay. Do you remember him, Mhairi-Ann?
“Count your blessings instead of your crosses; Count your gains instead of your losses; Count your joys instead of your woes; Count your friends instead of your foes.”
“There’s a lot of comfort in a poem, Mhairi-Ann. Do you not think?”
6 September 2014
I overlooked Larkin/McWatt’s advice about reproduction (doan’t hae onie weans yersel), and I wouldn’t dematerialise Agnes now if I could, but I made it my project to “get oot” early and fled my family at the first opportunity. Books were my exit permit, my get-out. So I got out, though I’ve spent a lifetime waiting for an entry visa to get in. Somewhere. Anywhere. As I address the difficulties of my new job in this isolated place, a place with which I can at best boast a theoretical connection, I feel a sudden billowing bleakness. This, I remind myself, was my partner’s idea. Or rather my ex-partner’s. Marco has set me up. A trap. And I’ve walked right into it.
I have to watch for this misery, make sure it doesn’t erode Agnes’s lovely blitheness.
After a morning spent with Oonagh McKinnon at her family’s small sheep farm in Lusnaharra, Agnes announces that, no, she won’t have lamb cutlets for lunch today.
“Have you ever actually held a lamb?” she asks with passion. “Like, in your actual arms? They smell a bit funny but they are so cute. Papa always says my name means lamb in Latin. Why would I want to eat myself?”
Thus, my daughter informs me she is now a vegetarian.
“Though I suppose since I eat fish that makes me a fishetarian.”
“Pescatarian,” I tell her.
“Pest?” she bridles. “How am I a pest?”
“You’re never a pest. Put your boots on again. We’re going to Finnverinnity House.”
“To Aaron’s house?”
“To his garden. We’re going to do some more research.”
“I love research.”
She scrambles to lace her boots, zips up her jacket and is at the door. She can’t wait to get going. Looks like Morbus Fascariensis has skipped this generation after all.
—
Lady Montfitchett’s post-war efforts to rid Finnverinnity House of any association with its proletarian occupiers were not entirely successful; a remnant of the obstacle courses and shooting ranges set up by the army to test the skills of would-be commandos can still be seen in the grounds of the Big House today. An abandoned bothy on the east side of the walled garden was deployed by the SOE as a “mystery house” with pop-up tin targets to sharpen the reflexes of apprentice snipers. These days it is used as an overspill junk room by the twenty-first-century owners of Finnverinnity House, described by Johanna as “a couple of harmless old German hippies and their kids.”
The Schneiders, through Johanna, have given me permission to root around in the outbuilding to look for anything that might be of use to the new Fascaray Museum. The Schneiders are in Auchwinnie for the day and there’s no sign of life at Finnverinnity House as we walk up the drive, an unkempt swathe of gravel, ground elder and thistle. Rain-sodden Tibetan prayer flags flap limply from the peeling porte cochère and a Saltire and a skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger fly at half-mast from the turret.
In the bothy, Agnes is entranced, stepping past the old bicycles, the upturned Silver Cross pram, outgrown toys—“Hey! Elmo from Sesame Street!”—rusting tools, seatless cane chairs, empty preserve jars and the paraphernalia of innumerable abandoned hobbies: a fretsaw, a candle-making kit, a knitting machine.
Leaning against the far wall is a six-foot coffin-shaped strip of sheet metal—one of the original targets for the trainee agents’ shooting practice. It’s rusty and pitted with bullet holes but you can still make out the crudely painted facial features and the faded lettering which identifies this target as “The Laird.” Cleaned up, it will make a quirky addition to the museum.
“That is so creepy,” says Agnes, delighted.
I have my doubts about Mr. Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innisfree. It cannot always be said of my own island that “peace comes dropping slow.” Fascaray—and my sub-insular corner of it, Calasay—is not invariably a serene place in which to work. My house rattles in the ninety-mile-an-hour winds like the tin cup of an unregarded mendicant. In gales and hailstorms I think of my time as a commando—it is as if I have come under sustained machine-gun fire from all sides. Of the unremitting rainfall we have endured, at best it can be said that drought is never a problem here.
We do, however, suffer a drought of another kind—the intellectual variety. The only reading material one is likely to see on Fascaray, apart from the Bible, is the Sunday Post newspaper, or Film Weekly magazine, or the occasional detective novel by Agatha Christie. The island minister has, of course, a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures and Psalms, in both Gaelic and English; our island schoolteacher might, I imagine, stretch to a novelette or two, and while the parish priest of Lusnaharra has a sound knowledge of the classics, in the original Latin and Greek, as well as the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Banjo Paterson, he remains indifferent to my passion for the rich tradition that originates here beneath our very noses.
I have to travel south-east, to the Sassenach-haunted streets of Edinburgh, to find compatriots who share my ambition to revive the great Scots literary tradition, championed in that city in the eighteenth century by Robert Fergusson, whose gutsy varse in our native language inspired the insipid imitator Burns. We hope to do Bold Rabbie Fergusson better service. Such is the caprice of posterity that few have heard of him in Fascaray, though even the most drouthie toper in the Finnverinnity Inn can recite a line or two of Burns.
Yet among unlettered men on this wind-buffeted island, there is real poetry to be found—a living poem, in the elemental moments of daily existence. There are few more exhilarating, manly pleasures, and few greater challenges to character and human resourcefulness, than those called upon the sailor by the demands of the sea.
To join the crews of the small herring boats, skirting the Carracorry whirlpool and sailing thirty miles out beyond the Mhor Sgheir reef, is to jettison the superfluities of the modern world and inhabit one of the great Norse sagas, or to journey with Odysseus himself acro
ss the Aegean’s wide back. The ocean is bestial behemoth and beckoning odalisque many times over in a single voyage.
And a journey on a Clyde steam puffer—the stumpy cargo boat that brings essential supplies to grateful islanders in all weathers—is more than a Neil Gunn short story; a simple-minded Para Handy cannot do justice to this narrative. It would take a capacious novel, by Margaret Oliphant or John Galt, or even that big blusterer Scott, to begin to delineate the full range of characters, settings and experiences the average puffer deckhand encounters in a single week.
“Tuig thus’ an t-eathar, ’s tuigidh an t-eathar thu,” they say. Ken the boat and the boat will ken you. Here on Fascaray we are all men of the sea, subjects not of some foreign monarch or remote parliament, but of the weather and the tides. The Finnverinnitian, they say, is a crofter with a boat, and the Lusnaharran a fisherman with a croft. Up at Calasay I also try my hand at both disciplines, with modest success. I get by. My daily darg [work], however, is retributive larceny. I pick the pockets of the English tyrants who have robbed us of our birthright, take the best of their verse, with all its unjust advantages, and, by a process that is part linguistic, part alchemical, I reimagine it, offer it to my people and make it Scotland’s own.
My chief aim is to reclaim a poetry worthy of the Fascaradian fisherman, the peacetime commando of the waves, who can know both the profound terror and the euphoria that come from mastery of nature at its wildest. My varse—this is my hope—will be like the ocean: timeless, capricious, elemental and indomitable.
—Grigor McWatt, 1948, The Fascaray Compendium
10 September 2014
Despite close scrutiny of the official records and Ailish’s long hours at the SOE archives in London (after which we had a small wrangle over her expenses), we still haven’t come up with anything on McWatt’s war service.
Jim Struan arrived as a trainee to the Big House in 1941 and stayed on as an instructor until late 1943, when he was sent to Italy and the Balkans. I tracked him down to Aberdeenshire, where he has been living for the past 25 years with his partner, Eric. Jim, as historian of the Fascaray SOE alumni, keeps in touch with the dwindling and ancient band of survivors dispersed throughout Europe and America, and arranges annual reunions in London. He has tried to be helpful to our project here in Fascaray and we’ve had several friendly but fruitless exchanges of letters and phone calls.
“McWatt…McWatt? I’ve heard of the poet, of course. And the song. He wrote that, didn’t he? The Hogmanay standard. Gives me the boak [makes me sick] to be honest. Bit of a character, by all accounts, wasn’t he? But I can’t recall him at Finnverinnity for the life of me.”
Jim has asked around, he says, but so far no one has any recollection of Grigor McWatt at Finnverinnity House. He promises to ring me if he hears anything useful. In my office I pick up Jim’s memoir. The only photograph, a black-and-white picture taken on the grounds of the Big House in 1943, shows a group of young men and women in attractively distressed fatigues, grinning, arms draped around each other’s shoulders as if on some hearty summer camp excursion, or a Ralph Lauren photo shoot, rather than enduring a dry run for hell. It occurs to me that most of them were younger than I am now.
I check the index again. Magical thinking. Do I honestly believe that McWatt’s name, which wasn’t in the index when I last looked, which Jim can’t recall in this context, will suddenly appear there? No mention. Of course not. It’s as if Grigor McWatt, before “Hame tae Fascaray” brought him his unwelcome fame, had not existed, though several islanders have testified, then and since, to his presence at the Big House, and particularly at the inn, during the war years, and his poem “The Sodger” is eloquent evidence of his active service. It’s another missing link, which McWatt’s biographer conveniently passes over in a few glib sentences.
“His return to the island was as a hero,” writes Knox-Cardew, “one of that exceptional, courageous band of men and women, an elite corps of spies and saboteurs, destined for dangerous work assisting local resistance movements in occupied Europe. Based in Finnverinnity House, appropriated for the purpose from the absentee landlord Montfitchett, McWatt plotted and played his part in the defeat of Nazi Germany.”
The Sodger
Gin Ah shud dee, ween anely this o me,
That there’s some neuk o furrin lea
That is aye Scotland. There shall be
In thon fouth yird a fouther smurach derned;
A smurach Scotland buir, collit, mak’t awaur,
Gied her flooers tae loue, her paiths stravaiged,
A bouk o Scotland’s souchin Scotland’s air,
Dicht by the burns, blest by suns o hame.
An think, this hert, all evil chucked awa,
A pulse in the ayebidin mind, nae less
Gies somewey back the thochts by Scotland gien;
Her sichts an soonds; dreams cantie as her day
An lauchter, lairned o pals; an douceness
In herts at saucht, ablo a Scottish heiv’n.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Rupert Brooke, 1944*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
12 September 2014
“So your grandpa was a hero too, like the poet?” asks Agnes, looking up from her schoolbooks.
“Kind of…”
My grandfather, Hector McPhail, was two years younger than Grigor McWatt. They probably shared a dram and exchanged a few gruff words in the Finnverinnity Inn after Hector returned to Fascaray in 1945 from war service in Italy. They might have fought together in mainland Europe, but back on the island they certainly would have worked side by side, sleeves rolled, sweat breaking on brows furrowed with purpose, each spadeful of soil avenging centuries of injustice as they defied the law by staking out the “reclaimed” acres during the Fascaray Land Raid. Hector might even have sung “Hame tae Fascaray,” McWatt’s ballad of pride and belonging, at its first airing in the Finnverinnity Inn in 1946.
But I’ll never know what Hector thought of McWatt, whether my grandfather found him a kindred spirit or an oddball, whether the poet inspired respect, scepticism or grudging affection. I never knew my grandfather well but, from what I remember, he was always better at the grudging than the affection, and his hostility—to his neighbours, his children, to the English (he could have made common cause with McWatt on that one), to Catholics, to “the quisling Labour Party,” to intellectual pretension, to unlettered imbecility, to people—was one of the reasons my parents emigrated to Canada in 1979.
“Was my grandpa Dougal a hero?” asks Agnes, pen poised over an empty page.
“In a way, I suppose.”
If heroism consists of building some kind of life with few advantages, turning your back on a family that made you miserable, starting again among strangers and never, ever complaining, I suppose my father qualifies.
We’d heard that Grandad McPhail “drank,” especially so after Grandma’s death, and though we intuited our parents’ disapproval and, on our rare visits back to Scotland, we heard him speak in a funny, indistinct way and once saw him stagger and fall like a cartoon character—a strangely menacing cartoon character—as children we had no understanding of what this “drinking” actually meant. Didn’t everyone “drink”? That’s what you did when you were thirsty.
As we hit our teens and began our own experiments with chemical mood-changers we understood at last and Hector’s unwholesome thirst gave him an outlaw glamour. It didn’t last. Hector foreswore drink, adding alcoholics to his list of hate figures. This was probably fortunate for him in health terms, and for his relationship with our parents, which defrosted to a state of dutiful chilliness, but for my brother and me it was a loss. In sobriety, our grandad became an uninteresting old man.
When I won the scholarship to Turville Chantry, the expectation was that during vacations I would travel north of the border to stay with family in Scotland—A
unt Bridie in Blairgowrie or older cousins in Cumbernauld—and visit Grandad, who had become a punctilious sender of birthday postal orders. But the competing offers of holidays in the swanky London town houses, country estates or French villas of my wealthy classmates—who had taken me on as you might an exotic pet—were irresistible.
Towards the end of my grandfather’s life, I remember enduring a starchy visit to his tenement flat in Govan where he lived alone with a small dog—a live yapping version of the staring porcelain “wally dug” twins on the mantelpiece. The flat smelled of furniture polish and disinfectant and I remember feeling only boredom, embarrassment and a fierce yearning to get away.
“And is Papa a hero?” asks Agnes.
“Maybe, honey…Maybe to you, anyway.”
In my twenties, when I visited the UK my life was too busy and interesting to find time to call on an old relative whose connection with me felt purely notional. He became, like many lonely people, a monologuist. Now, of course, I wish I’d had more patience, and curiosity. If he did give me his first-hand account of the Fascaray Land Raid, or his impressions of the Bard of Fascaray, I wasn’t listening. My sweet-natured daughter would have listened. But I was always too arrogant and engrossed in the small dramas of my own life. Now I’m paying for my carelessness. I must unearth this story the hard way.
The Hidlins Fowk
Smue at us, pey us, bygae us: but dinnae aye forget;
Fur we are the fowk o Scotland, that niver hae spaiken yet.
Hame Page 12
