There’s mauny a bowsie fermer that wauchts less cantily,
There’s mauny a free French paisant mair walthie an waesome than we.
There’s nae fowk in the hail warld sae mauchtless an sae cannie
There’s hunger in oor pechans, there is lauchter in our een;
You lauch at us an loue us, baith quaich an een are wet:
Ainlie, ye dinnae ken us. Fur we havnae spaiken yet.
We hear men speakin for us o new laws strang an douce
Yet nane o them can speak the leid that we speak ben the hoose.
An mebbe we’ll rise hinmaist as Frenchmen rose afore
Oor radge comes efter Russia’s radge an Ireland’s michty roar.
Mebbe we are meant tae merk wi oor rammies an oor rest.
God’s geck for aw high heid yins. An mebbe whisky’s best.
But we are the fowk o Scotland; an we havnae spaiken yet.
Smue at us, pey us, bygae us. But dinnae aye forget.
—Grigor McWatt, efter G. K. Chesterton, 1950*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
14 September 2014
“Is this really it?” Agnes asks, as we pick our way across the moss-furred rubble in Killiebrae Glen. “People actually lived here?”
“Yes. People lived here. Including your great-grandfather.”
“But where are the houses?”
“At your feet. These stones were once walls that supported roofs thatched with heather. Whole families—parents, sometimes four or five kids, sometimes more—lived in these houses, with their dogs and their cattle. And look, those smaller stones—the line of them across there by the burn—must have been an enclosure or a wall round a small garden. Maybe a pigpen.”
I hadn’t briefed her properly. Clearly she’d thought we’d be visiting a cute cottage and peeping in at the room where ninety-one years ago Hector McPhail, her ancestor, lay gurgling in his cradle. I’ve brought her here under false pretences.
“But there’s nothing here!” she says indignantly. “If anyone ever did live here, if it ever really was a village, a giant must have stomped his way across it, flattening houses, and all those families and cattle.”
“Well, in a way, that’s what happened.”
“Not a real giant?”
“No. Your giant is a kind of metaphor, a figure of speech, meaning he, she or it represents something else—it could be progress, economics, politics—trampling heedless across small lives in these communities.”
I lose her at metaphor. She is weaving between the stones trying to make sense of this place in her own way. As am I; a global citizen, choosing to renounce the pleasures of the world, getting down on my knees, metaphorically, and burrowing back to the dank omphalos, to someone else’s past, to the dead poet’s retreat and my grandfather’s unhappy home. Not a bad response to heartbreak. Original, even; swapping one desolation for another. But watching my daughter running through the ruins, I chide myself for putting her through it too.
She stops at a large boulder stained with yellow lichen.
“This is it!” she says. “My great-grandfather’s house.”
“How do you know it’s his house?”
“I don’t. It’s a metaphor.” She pats the stone tenderly. “Poor Hector.”
Tomorrow I’ll revisit another dead man’s house, though there will be plenty of material evidence—too much, maybe—of the life lived. Oppressed by the prospect of all that sifting and cataloguing, I wonder if Hector’s home, and the entire clachan of Killiebrae, sets a better example than An Tobar. Let it all decay. Ashes to ashes. The future’s the thing.
Agnes, though, is enthusiastic.
“Can I come with you to the poet’s house tomorrow? Please!” she begs.
“Come on, Agnes. You know it’s a school day tomorrow.”
“But it’ll be like a treasure hunt!” she says, then pauses, struck by a fresh thought. “Is that another metaphor?”
The Dishantit Clachan
Douce Killiebrae, bonniest clachan o the glen,
A place o unco sonsieness tae all wha ken,
Where smuin spring arrayed her kilt o flooers
An simmer hung her chairms frae ilka bouer,
Where bairnies ran aboot in blithesome play
An birdies sang their joy ootthrou the day.
Hoo aften hae Ah daundered oer yer green,
Where couthie cantieness wis ayeweys tae be seen.
But sonsieness has fled, aw chairms awa,
Yer bouers are broukit, bairnies gone an aw.
Whit cruel hert can tak sic braw delicht
An turn it intae derk an hooshit nicht?
In this dishantitness we see a tyrant’s haun,
As mirkest meeserie stegs the sculdered laun.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Oliver Goldsmith, 1960*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
PAIRT TWA
Cauld Handsel
As he settled into Calasay after the war, most of McWatt’s forays down to Fascaray were made to the Finnverinnity Inn, where an increasingly infirm Rab McNab still presided in the rosy glow of candlelight. McNab thought McWatt a “queerie fish,” but he was used to irascible customers—some of the fishermen could get carnaptious after a few nights at sea—and the publican handled the poet efficiently when drinking got out of hand, calming McWatt’s outbursts while avoiding condescension. More than once McNab, not entirely sober himself, transported his cantankerous customer home on a cart hitched to Tam Macpherson’s cuddie [horse], mindful of the tides on the Calasay Strand.
McWatt visited the village store rarely, calling in only to buy tobacco, or paraffin for his lamps, a few slices of bacon or a pound of mince, or stamps from the post-office counter. The young sales clerk was Effie Morrison, known as Effie the Shop, to distinguish her from Effie “the Milk” Maclean at Balnasaig Farm. (After her wedding to Shuggie the Post, Effie the Shop became Effie MacLeod.) Once she took on the job of running the island’s telephone exchange, she could claim a comprehensive knowledge of every islander’s joys and travails. McWatt, however, remained an enigma.
“He just came in for his messages [shopping] and left. He wasnae one for the local gossip,” said Effie MacLeod, although his observations in The Fascaray Compendium show he had a keen eye for local news. In his early years on the island, his lack of Gaelic would have been an impediment to social intercourse in the store, where locals who had been happily conversing in Scots would switch to Gaelic as soon as an outsider walked in.
“He could be gey thrawn [very stubborn]. But he was aye mannerly,” Effie MacLeod told me.
McWatt occasionally helped out at the Balnasaig harvests and communal peat cutting—exercises in reciprocal altruism for all the islanders, who were rewarded in kind with labour on their own smallholdings and peat banks, with seed potatoes, a pat of crowdie and, in McWatt’s case, a guaranteed welcome and occasional dram at the farm with Tam Macpherson on his way to Finnverinnity. McWatt also joined in several of the traditional “guga hunts,” in which the men of Fascaray sailed to the rocky islets of Plodda and Grodda, scaled the cliffs and caught, skinned and smoked young gannets, though he was said to have had no head for heights and remained in the boat during these annual excursions.
He ventured out with the fishermen only “when skies were unclouded and seas were calm,” according to Tormud Campbell, owner of the Silver Darling. The poet was “neither use nor ornament when it came to hauling in the herring,” Tormud reported in a humorous aside in Poet in a Landscape. McWatt, unusually for a commando though not for a fisher, could not swim and some felt he didn’t pull his weight when out on the boat; challenged by Roddy McIntosh for failing to help the crew with the lobster pots in a force nine, McWatt was said to have replied
that he was “here to observe, rather than to participate.” Tormud and his son Alec had to intervene before a fight broke out on the bucking boat.
At Calasay, McWatt’s labours on his croft gradually began to pay off. He rebuilt the crumbling north wall of the house, glazed windows, made his home as watertight and windproof as it could ever be and, using an old boat mast interleaved with struts made from salvaged barrels, built a staircase to a loft bedroom. He fertilised the land with seaweed and cattle dung and grew kale and turnips as well as potatoes and carrots.
He had few visitors. According to Effie MacLeod, McWatt “mostly kept himself to himself in those days. He was the loner type of fellow. Not much of a conversationalist—except in drink. Then you couldnae stop him. Sober, though, he liked to listen, and he went round collecting the island yairns and receipts and the like. He always had time for the old ones, listening to their crack, stories about ghosts and fairies. They maybe thought he was a bitty touched, but they were aye glad of the chance tae blether. Most of the time, though, he cooried doon in Calasay.”
He took regular deliveries of large parcels of books, most of them second-hand, in quantities that made Shuggie groan as he slung the sacks over the crossbar of his bike. At Ruh, Shuggie had to dismount and push the Raleigh across the strand to Calasay. If he didn’t get the tides right he ran the risk of getting his feet wet, wrecking his bike or even being stranded with McWatt for the night.
“That happened once or twice after we were married,” Effie MacLeod told me in our interview at her Glasgow nursing home. “Shuggie would aye come back with a sore head the next day. What else was there to do up in that place, if you werenae writing or walking, but drink? Though Shuggie was moderate in his habits, compared to some.”
McWatt eventually housed his books in the library he built from an abandoned bathach, or byre, sheltered by a copse of birches to the west of his croft. He plastered and rendered its interior walls, built shelves from driftwood gathered from the shore, covered the roof in neat overlapping slates and tightly sealed the windows against rain.
“He takes mair care o thon library than he does o his ain hoose. I’d rather be a book than a man up at Calasay,” Shuggie told his wife, and in later life the retired postman would put his disabling lumbago down to those years spent shouldering sacks of books to McWatt’s remote library.
When the poet wasn’t cultivating his croft, building his library, or milking Flora, his shaggy, extravagantly horned “Hielan coo,” he sat at his desk by the back window, or in rare days of fine weather on a folding camp chair by his front stoop, writing, reading and struggling to learn, or relearn as he said, Gaelic.
The more personal entries in The Fascaray Compendium reveal that when the Morbus took hold he would sit for hours morosely observing nature through the fogged glass of the window until he would be forced out of the house by his importuning collie, Luath, who would race round the bounds of Calasay while McWatt strode the hills and shores, stooped to examine wild flowers or seashells, turned over stones and examined moss and lichen “as if they contained the secrets of the universe,” gazed upwards to note the passage of birds from Iceland, Siberia and Africa and observe the unfurling drama of the clouds and the shifting moods of the sea.
In happier intervals, his personal summers, heedless of sleep he wrote his verse and laboured to improve his home further, installing a wood-burning stove, diverting a supplementary water supply from the nearby burn, and “reimagining” world literature into the Scots language.
During these most productive periods he would break from his writing only to call in on the older inhabitants of the island, who welcomed a visit—even from an incomer (a distant clan connection has never impressed the hard-line amateur genealogists of Fascaray)—in their lonely blackhouses. McWatt would take notes for The Fascaray Compendium as they reminisced, mostly in their second language, Scots, about their childhoods, the old ways, the spirit world and hauntings, and about miraculous cures at the former pagan shrine of Teampull Beag in Lusnaharra. Over cups of scarlet tea and a strupag (home-made bun), these bodachs and cailleachs (old men and women), nominally Christian—Catholic or Free Church Presbyterian—would tell stories of the island’s ghosts as if they were gossiping about neighbours. “This mix of the earthy and the numinous is the essence of Gaelic realism,” wrote McWatt.
There were tales of widows with second sight who foretold storms and predicted death, witches who blighted crops and thwarted romance, water kelpies who spirited away children, teasing sidhe fairies, selkie seal women who ensnared fishermen, and Seonaidh the volatile sea god who had to be appeased with a cup of ale.
Then, off duty, McWatt would return to the inn, wild with argument and song. He shared Father Col’s fondness for whisky—“a wee goldie”—and a stushie [bantering row] about politics and poetry in the low-beamed intimacy of the Finnverinnity Inn. Though the poet was not a man of God he was ecumenical in his acquaintances; he also liked to play chess at the manse with the teetotal Presbyterian minister, Ranald Paterson who, on account of his sabbatarian beliefs, was available for “The King’s Game” only six days a week. McWatt was even seen once in the company of the minister at the Temperance Hotel, where the elderly proprietor Miss Geddes, famous for her home-baking, laid on a special Friday high tea. It was said, though, that after ten minutes in the hotel’s chilly lounge, the poet disdained the sandwiches, thanked his hostess politely, filled his pockets with scones and made his way swiftly over to the Finnverinnity Inn.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
The Solitude O Nicht
It wis at a ceilidh—
Ah lay in a dwaum, kennin nocht.
The fadin flooers fell aboot ma heid.
When Ah got tae ma feet still bluitert,
The birdies hud flit tae their nests.
Anely a few pals hung aboot.
Ah ganged alang the burn—follaein the muinwaik.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Li Po, 1949*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
15 September 2014
It’s raining steadily as I cross the strand to Calasay on the quad bike. My waterproofs are so wet I might as well have swum across in high tide. Inside the house I kick off my sodden boots and struggle out of my jacket, leaving them in the porch in the vain hope that they might dry there. This time I move around the house more methodically, opening drawers and putting documents of interest into folders. Trouble is, there seems little of much interest.
Johanna did a good job with her preliminary selection of material, now in two boxes in my office. What’s left are drawers of old pens, business cards—the Raj Curry House in Auchwinnie; “The Vital Spark,” a local electrician; a taxi firm in Edinburgh—impenetrable bank statements, old chequebooks (three fat rolls of them), leaking AA batteries, a broken flashlight and a stack of bills from an Auchwinnie vet for treatment of Gyp, McWatt’s last collie and the final survivor of his menagerie.
By the desk are two old pottery preserve jars—mass-produced, mid twentieth century—painted with kilted warriors. The glaze is cracked and there are chips on the rims. They’d probably fetch a couple of dollars apiece in a vintage sale. One is empty; the other holds a clutch of tobacco pipes, an unsavoury wooden bouquet of sticky black bowls and chewed stems. I pick one up gingerly. To real McWatt aficionados they’d be serious relics, containing the DNA of the great man. I can’t escape the feeling that my good degrees in anthropology, heritage and museum studies were meant to equip me for more rewarding and hygienic tasks than this.
I think again of the Could Have Beens. I could have stuck with the Museum of the Printed Word in New York. It might, with time, have developed into a viable concern and, once the investment and politics had been sorted out, it could even have been interesting. It had the added virtue of being located in New Yor
k, which would have avoided upheaval, allowing us to stay on in Brooklyn, though once Marco was out of the picture we would have needed to find a smaller apartment.
There was a highly paid post at the new Museum of Pet Apparel, set up in Trenton by the ex-model ex-wife of a Russian energy magnate, but the cost to my dignity would have been too great. If woman could live by prestige alone, I might have gone for the job at the Frick, but woman, and in particular single woman with daughter to support, can’t. It was only part-time and temporary and the salary would barely have covered our rent.
On McWatt’s dresser, next to a chess set—a copy of the medieval pieces found on the Isle of Lewis in the nineteenth century—I find a cork box and, dutifully, but with a singular lack of curiosity, prise it open with a screwdriver. Agnes would be beside herself with excitement. My scepticism is justified—again; it contains a neat ball of rubber bands. Next to the box is a peppermint tin filled with postage stamps, second class. Like my exiled nationalist parents, reluctant subjects of the Queen even in faraway Canada, McWatt always stuck the stamps upside down on envelopes as a protest against the English monarchy.
Outside, a wind has got up, hurling raindrops against the window like handfuls of gravel. I struggle into my wet boots and jacket and cross the courtyard to the byre, flinching at the biting cold and dismissing thoughts of Austin and that relentless sunshine. I was never going to live there, whatever Marco said. I push open the door fearing the worst, but all is clean and orderly, like the stacks in a small provincial library. I look more closely. A large provincial library. From floor to rafters the shelves cover all four walls, leaving just enough space for the wide barn doors in the east wall and two sash windows in the west. Ten feet up, accessed by two ladders, a wooden platform runs around the higher shelves. The remaining Compendium notebooks are on the middle shelves of the north wall, 176 of them, almost five feet of faded spines; 14,000 pages, maybe five million more words, demanding my attention.
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