“I might be persuaded to meet you, Miss Spark, in your native Edinburgh and give a reading there. But London? Never!”
According to Knox-Cardew, McWatt “always maintained that his inspiration, the wellspring of his art, was his love of Scotland, and of Fascaray in particular, but some have argued that it was his hatred of England—like his friend MacDiarmid, he cited ‘Anglophobia’ as his hobby—that was the greater passion.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
The Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny or, to give it its correct Gaelic name, the Clach Sgian, is the ancient coronation stone of the kings of Scotland. It was given to our people by Fergus Mòr Mac Earca of Dalriada in the fifth century. Seven centuries later, in 1296, it was stolen from us by the thuggish English warlord Edward I, who had anointed John Balliol, a Frenchman with estates in England, Scotland and France, as a puppet King of Scotland.
It was this same Edward, who rejoiced in the designation Scottorum malleus (hammer of the Scots), who had recently demonstrated his strength and moral courage by expelling England’s Jews and confiscating their property to finance his acquisitive ambitions. Having equipped a large and barbarous army, Edward swept into Wales. This brutal invasion was a mild warm-up for his adventures in Scotland, where the marionette King John surrendered without a fight and Edward’s progress was merciless; he sacked towns, massacred inhabitants, razed castles to the ground and slaughtered the Scottish army with his superior forces until two thousand Scots nobles and landowners, including my own shamefully pusillanimous forebear Dougal McWatt of Fascaray, were compelled to gather in Berwick and sign the “Ragman Rolls,” a document acknowledging Edward as their king. The tyrant appointed an English viceroy to rule us, English officials to run our administration and left English soldiers garrisoned in our towns. The theft of the Clach Sgian was the final indignity.
The measure of the man, Edward, of his sneering coarseness, can be seen in his parting remark as his henchmen conveyed the sacred slab of red sandstone southwards. “Bon bosoigne fait qy de merde se deliver.” That he spoke in Norman French does not lessen the insult. The most polite English translation would be “to divest oneself of faeces is a good thing.” And what did he do with this self-described manure? Why, he took it to Westminster, put it under his throne and sat on it. Centuries later, there it remains, warming the posteriors of English monarchs who still lay egregious claim to Scotland’s land and Scotland’s people.
—Grigor McWatt, May 1950, Auchwinnie Pibroch*
* * *
* Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
18 September 2014
Outside, Glasgow is en fête. Flag-waving crowds mingle in the sunshine as a bagpiper, red-bearded, wearing T-shirt, kilt and hiking boots, tunes up—long, ominous drone followed by penetrating squeal—then blasts into “Scotland the Brave.” Inside, this cool glade of improbably tall, skinny chairs is hushed and decorous, a shrine to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scotland’s foremost architect and designer, if your taste runs to art nouveau, japonisme and improbably tall, skinny chairs.
Dolina McPartland’s insistence that the only day she is available for an interview is Referendum Day, when all of Scotland has been granted a holiday, suggests that she is a “No” supporter; while the affirmative tendency make merry outside, for her it’s business as usual. She pours her tea and glances out of the window at the good-humoured throng below. Excited children, faces painted blue and white, hold blue balloons and wave small Saltire flags while their parents carry banners declaring “Yes!” Agnes, staying with Johanna and Ailsa while I’m away, would have loved this. Dolina McPartland, née Hogg, shakes her head, tuts—confirming my hunch about her sympathies—and turns her sceptical eye across the narrow table to me.
She is a neat elderly woman in unseasonal lilac tweeds pinned at the lapel with a brooch of silver, amethyst and white fur—a rabbit’s foot. Agnes would be scandalised. I strain to see a trace of the Flooer o Rose Street in Dolina’s small, crimped face but the Lilias I’m hoping to glimpse in her sister is the sensuous laughing girl caught in a single photograph in one moment of happiness fifty years ago, before her heart was broken and chaos took its toll. Of course Dolina doesn’t look like Lilias. Even Lilias didn’t look like Lilias for long.
Transcription of Interview with Dolina McPartland,
Willow Tea Rooms, Buchanan Street, 18 September 2014.
Conducted by Mhairi McPhail.
“I’ve strong views on the man, as you can imagine. He was a fraud. All bluster and bombast. His poetry? I wouldn’t give you a penny for it. Doggerel as far as I can see. But that’s not the point. He could have been Robert Burns for all I care. He destroyed my sister’s life. That’s all that concerns me. I’ve been badgered by the press and by that puffed-up American biographer to speak about McWatt countless times. I wanted nothing to do with it. They printed lies, painting my sister as a nymphomaniac, an alcoholic, a hopeless hanger-on, an autograph-hunter with a father fixation and a daft passion for anyone calling himself a poet. But Lilias, for all her shortcomings, was far more than that, before and after she knew McWatt.”
“…Don’t push me. I’ve agreed to this conversation under duress. I don’t have long left myself now and it seems this is the only way of restoring my sister’s name. But if for a moment you try my patience, it’s over. You understand?…”
“…The feminist perspective? The feminists have been every bit as bad as the other sort. Sometimes worse. Instead of presenting Lilias as a victim of her inadequacies, a dipsomaniac fall-girl whose life was a cautionary tale against the evils of drink and unseemly ambition, they make her out to be some sort of martyr-for-the-cause. But she wasn’t ‘oppressed by the male sex.’ It was one man who did for her and one man alone. Your precious poet, McWatt…”
“…No. We weren’t what you’d call firm friends throughout our childhood, Lilias and me. Sisters—siblings—rarely are. She was too wild for my taste. I was always the cautious one, obeyed my parents, applied myself to schoolwork. She was cleverer than me but hated any kind of confinement. She was keen to provoke and explore. She led me into trouble more than once. And usually ensured that I got the blame. But when you get older you see things more clearly. She was an innocent too, hungry for life, for experience, and for love.”
“…She could have done anything. She wrote beautifully—you’ve seen her letters. She was gifted. She tried her hand at poetry and, though I’m no expert I can tell you her poems were every bit as good, if not better, than anything McWatt ever wrote. She’d a beautiful singing voice and a sharp wit. She also had the makings of a successful painter, according to people who know about these things. If only she’d applied herself. But she never applied herself to anything, except her doomed love for an unworthy man who was incapable of returning any affection. She was a romantic soul and he saw that and preyed on her. He led her on.”
“What drew him to her? I’m more interested in the other question: what on earth did she see in him? She was seventeen, for goodness’ sake! Half his age. They’d call it child abuse now. I know he wasn’t the only ‘poet’ in her life—that whole shower in Rose Street took advantage of her, saw her as an adornment, a bauble, and delighted in her for a moment then cast her aside when her lustre faded. But McWatt, from the safe distance of his precious island, played her, and his other women too, I’m sure, like a fisherman reeling in a salmon. And how he reeled her in. Then he left her floundering on the bank and walked away.”
“He would flatter her and make promises, then there would be months of unexplained silence. Maybe his distance played a part in her yearning. The others—all the self-important poets—fell for her, one by one, in their different ways. But McWatt was always just beyond her reach. She could never have him, and the more she realised this, the more she wanted him. She became convinced he was The One, tha
t the pain she felt was a kind of transcendent love. She thought his meanness and elusiveness were the signs of great genius and the torments of a soul too sensitive for this world, a soul that could only be healed with the balm of her love.”
“And then there was the final blow. The other woman, Jean. Lilias’s rival. The discovery of this other woman’s existence, of his parallel affair, was really a death blow to Lilias. She chastised herself as a fool and felt she’d been the dupe in a long, bigamous marriage. This Jean assumed a mythical power in Lilias’s mind. From the skewed perspective of her misery, my sister exalted the other woman and debased herself further.”
“You say your Heritage Centre will preserve McWatt’s legacy? Well, here’s his legacy—lies, treachery, a promising young life destroyed, and all the grief and guilt I feel for failing to save my sister. Grief and guilt I will take to the grave. Put that in a display case in your museum.”
INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS DESCRIBING WIND
attery stormy, bitterly cold wind
bensill violent storm
blaud buffeted by wind
blenter wild, gusty wind
blowdir sudden blast of wind
bluister squally, violent wind
dreeffle a sudden, brief gale
dyster a stormy wind blowing in from the sea
flaff a puff or gust of wind
gandiegow a squally wind, usually accompanied by rain
gousterous dark and blustery
gowl howling wind
grashloch wild, blustery storm
grumlie unsettled, blustery
gyndagooster a sudden, sweeping storm
hash a strong wind usually accompanied by rain
jauchelt tossed about in high winds
katrisper extremely strong gale
kav stormy winds throwing up sea spray or spindrift
nizzer wild, blustery blizzard
peuch a light puff of wind
reeshle whistling wind
snirl bitter wind
souch soft sound of wind
spindrift sea spray swept by violent winds (Scots word now in general use)
teuch rough and windy
ventulacioun air current
winwersht low spirits brought about by constant buffeting of wind
—Grigor McWatt, 1951, The Fascaray Compendium
19 September 2014
Yesterday Glasgow was a carnival. Today it’s a funeral. I cross George Square from my hotel, weaving through groups of stricken kids wrapped in flags. They hug each other or squat on the tarmac, silent as the statues around them: of the Scots—Robert Burns, James Watt and Walter Scott—and of the non-Scots—Gladstone, Prince Albert, and an equestrian Queen Victoria, whose raised sceptre and haughty stone features seem to carry an extra charge of triumphalism.
Two pretty student girls, Saltires painted on their cheeks, carry a home-made placard—“We Will Not Bow Down”—and pose for photographers hunting images for press post-mortems on the referendum and tourists snapping the zeitgeist for Facebook posts. There are a few morning drunks on a Braveheart binge, topping up from the night before, political defeat lending a heroic quality to their drinking. Outbreaks of defiant singing rally the crowd; “Flower of Scotland,” that woozy lament, “Freedom’s Road” and “Caledonia.” Yesterday’s bagpiper is here, still shrilly asserting Scotland’s bravery.
I’m meeting Ailish nearby in the merchant quarter of the city, where imposing eighteenth-century sandstone warehouses that once sheltered bales of slave-grown tobacco, sugar and tea have been turned into imposing sandstone malls selling bespoke toiletries, designer clothing, and cups of coffee costing the annual income of an eighteenth-century merchant’s footman.
Ailish is a sharp, chillingly earnest brunette who exudes brisk disdain—for McWatt, “he’s not exactly Yeats”; for Lilias, “she was her own worst enemy”; for the Scots, “they don’t have the gumption to have a decent Rising. They’re way too fastidious,” and, I sense, for me.
But she is doing the work the Auchwinnie Board is paying her for: tracking down documents, digging out recordings of McWatt’s songs and attempting to trace anyone still living who might have something illuminating to say about the Bard of Fascaray. So long as she is doing her job, that’s fine. I don’t have to like her, or she me.
Tentatively, for I know I’ve already lost the battle, I raise the subject of her transcription of my interview with Effie MacLeod. I don’t want her neutering any more Scots-language material. I cite the support for our project from the Scots Leid society. She is unrepentant.
“It’s all daft,” she says. “There’s no Scots Leid, or language, or whatever they want to call it, except maybe Gaelic, which is derived from Irish anyway and is spoken by one per cent of the population.”
I’m taken aback by her hostility.
“Well, that wasn’t Grigor McWatt’s view,” I say.
She doesn’t ease off.
“All this language pretence is pure politics. There are about four Scots dialects and ten subdialects, and they’re all variants of English with a bit of Norse thown in.”
“That’s not the view of the Scottish government either,” I offer weakly, thrown by her aggression.
“Of course not. It’s not in their interest, is it? We’ve got the same thing in Northern Ireland with Ulster Scots. All that ‘hamely tongue’ Ullans bull. If you can say you’re a minority language, there’s European Union money in it.”
“Well, maybe there is,” I say, counting out coins to tip the waiter. “And maybe some of that money’s paying our wages. So let’s try for a more positive attitude?”
—
Making my way to catch the train north I recross George Square. There’s a sudden jostling as a group of skinheads—ruder elements of the “No” campaign, one holding a Union Jack aloft—run jeering through the dispirited band of “Yes” supporters. Skirmishes break out and I dodge through the traffic to watch from the safe distance of North Hanover Street as the police arrive. Good thing I didn’t bring Agnes, I tell myself.
The crowd thins and peace is restored swiftly. The only real damage inflicted seems to be on the dignity of City Chambers, whose grand Italianate facade has been sprayed with graffiti reading: “Obey Your Queen.” Mourning resumes. The bagpiper starts up again and, under the monument of Walter Scott, a young guitarist strums and begins to sing in a high, nasal whine. The two girls with painted cheeks stand next to him, their arms around each other, their placard at their feet, swaying gently as they sing the chorus.
Hee-ra-haw, boys,
We’re awa, boys,
Gangin hame
Tae Fascaray.
Towards the end of his first decade on the island, one of McWatt’s mysterious jaunts to the mainland coincided with the disappearance of the Stone of Scone—the traditional coronation stone of the ancient kings of Scotland—which was removed on Christmas Day 1950, from beneath the English throne in Westminster Abbey, London.
After news broke of the theft (or “restitution of the monumental soul of Scotland,” as McWatt brazenly described it in the Auchwinnie Pibroch) five beefy men from London in dun overcoats and trilby hats arrived on the ferry. They spent a good deal of money in the inn, where an attentive Rab McNab also furnished several rounds of drinks “oan the hoose” in an unprecedented display of generosity. This gave young Jamie MacDonald, earning pocket money working as a “pot boy,” enough time to borrow Shuggie the Post’s bike and get over to Calasay to warn the poet that the polis were on their way.
The men in trilbies didn’t suspect a thing, and after dispatching three bottles of malt and a number of Scotch eggs, they persuaded Tam Macpherson to drive them up to McWatt’s croft on a trailer hitched to his tractor. It was no one’s fault that the tides were against them and that, once the trailer got stuck in the mud on the Calasay Strand, the five Special Branch officers had to dismount and walk in their city shoes through sea, san
d and bog all the way back to Balnasaig Farm, where they spent the night in the silage byre on a bale of straw.
In the morning, once the tide was in their favour and they finally reached An Tobar, the officers’ interrogation techniques were said to have been compromised by the previous night’s ordeal. They left the island in a hurry—Rab McNab waved them off from the pier with a cheery “Haste ye back!”—and no charges were ever brought.
When questioned on the subject in the inn, McWatt would give an enigmatic smile, shake his head and draw deeply from his glass. In his column for the Pibroch the following week, he cited Lord Byron’s condemnation of Lord Elgin’s theft of the Parthenon marbles: “In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Aberdonian poet Byron laments that the antiquities of Greece had been ‘defac’d by British hands,’ ” wrote McWatt. “For Greece, read Scotland, for British, read English.”*
The Stone of Scone was found at Arbroath Abbey the following April and four Glasgow university students were identified as the culprits. McWatt was finally in the clear as far as the authorities were concerned. For some Fascaradians, however, the island’s eccentric poet had as good as lifted the Stone himself. He never contradicted them.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Auchwinnie Pibroch, 17 March 1951. Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS DESCRIBING MIST, FOG, HAZE
ask sky covered with grey clouds or haze; slight rain
domra veil of clouds; obscuring fog or mist
fowg variant of fog
gloor faint sunshine through haze or rift in clouds
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