It is not through the stories of kings and queens, battles and covenants, warriors and statesmen that we understand ourselves best but from folklore, the people’s history, passed down by our ancestors, preserved and embellished by local storytellers, seannachie bards, enshrining in story and song the beliefs and customs that continue to shape us, define our sense of right and wrong, good and evil, sustain us through inevitable sorrows, lighten dark days with seditious humour and celebrate the numinous glory of the natural world around us. You can tell a country by its folklore. We have a living tradition of stories, music and song, orain luaidh waulking songs, weaving songs, fishing songs, ballads of love and lament, puirt-à-beul mouth music and the ceilidh. And the English? They have the Home Service, The Archers, cricket and morris dancing.
—Grigor McWatt, 1952, The Fascaray Compendium
29 September 2014
No childhood pictures of McWatt survive. In Knox-Cardew’s book, the earliest photograph of the poet, the original of which is in the National Library in Edinburgh, is a studio portrait of an intense young man in his mid twenties whose inordinately high forehead, under an asymmetric pelt of black hair, seems to have been stretched by the burden of thought, and the features—the fierce eyes underscored even then by shadows, the surprisingly feminine nose, the pursed mouth—crowd towards his resolute chin. He is wearing a stiff suit (this is his pre-kilt era) with a silk tie and some kind of floral buttonhole—heather and harebell, at a guess—and his formal pose, one elbow uncomfortably crooked on a shelf or mantelpiece, is a photographer’s cliché of the day intended to evoke manly self-possession. Instead he looks like an under-slept schoolboy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes. Ninety-two pages later the poet is transformed into the familiar bad-tempered, pipe-smoking wraith in his sixties wearing beret and kilt.
Between these two poles of age, we have a photograph of McWatt in his early thirties, fully kilted by then but hatless, puffing at a pipe and glaring across the sea from the Calasay cliffs behind his croft. Ten years later, in 1962, he is in the same outfit, with the addition of the beret, addressing a political rally at Auchwinnie, where he stood, unsuccessfully, as Scottish National Party candidate for Westminster. By his side is a bashful young man in long shorts, holding a sheaf of papers. The caption identifies him as Donald MacInnes, then aged seventeen, McWatt’s “assistant” and leader of the party’s local youth wing.
Young MacInnes features again—photographed from above as he lies laughing on grass starred with daisies, wearing a kilt himself and a fisherman’s jersey, playing with what looks like a strangely attenuated smooth-haired cat—Marty the pet pine marten, whose antics were the subject of some of McWatt’s more homespun columns in the Auchwinnie Pibroch.
The teenager is also photographed standing solemnly with McWatt at the head of Loch Shiel on the Scottish mainland, framed by the hills of Sunart and Moidart, beneath the Glenfinnan Monument which marks the spot where Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard to claim his rightful kingship of Scotland and where, as McWatt wrote in Forby, one of the poet’s ancestors, Alexander McWatt, served as piper to the prince.
The only photograph of Lilias Hogg in the chapter—the only photo of her unearthed so far—is faintly blurred, giving the impression of movement, of someone always on the run, evanescent and impossible to pin down. She has the minted prettiness of youth: bright eyes—the photographer’s flash gives her a look of bedazzlement; pale unblemished skin; wide full lips; abundant curls and generous breasts. Attractive enough, though I wouldn’t have had her down as the Muse that inspired a generation of poets. Her head is thrown back as she laughs at something or someone to the left of the photographer; I find it hard to believe that the joker is McWatt. There isn’t much evidence so far that comedy was one of his strengths.
I may be wrong, as in so much else. There’s the poet in another photograph with a wide vulpine smile, full pint in hand, with MacDiarmid and MacCaig, leaning against a bar—Menzies’, the caption tells us. Above them on a wooden shelf, a long brass rail supports a row of bottles which glint festively. On the same page, McWatt, in his mid thirties, is photographed alone with MacDiarmid. Both are smoking pipes and grimacing at a tea trolley in the hospitality room of BBC Scotland’s studios in Glasgow.
I mustn’t be distracted. I should be looking for new material, not retreading the old. I put the book back on the shelves in the alcove.
“Mom?”
I turn to see Agnes holding out a small posy of yellow flowers, bright as a fistful of morning sun. Marco would have given us their Latin names, species and genus. So, it now occurs to me, would McWatt; he’d throw in the Scots and Gaelic names for them too. We find a vase and put them on the mantelpiece.
“There!” she says, head cocked, stepping back to appraise the vase, the room and me. “That’s better.”
INVENTORY OF THE FLOWERING PLANTS OF FASCARAY
bog cotton, cotton grass (Eriophorum angustifolium): known as mappie’s fud. Food for butterflies. Used to dress wounds, stuff pillows and make wicks for candles. Ubiquitous by Beinn Mammor.
buttercup (Ranunculus): known as yellae gowan. Ubiquitous. Favours, like all Fascaradians, proximity to water.
butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris, Lentibulariaceae): known as modalan, badan measgan and steep-gress. Used as a charm against witchcraft. Cattle that eat it are said to be immune from malevolent elvish arrows. It is also said to protect the bonniest bairns from kidnap by covetous fairies, who like to replace healthy infants with wan and sickly substitutes. Maggie MacGregor of Kilgurnock tells of a woman watching over a newborn baby in a croft in the clachan of Tilliecuddy who overheard the conversation of two passing sidhe at the window. One said: “We will take it.” The other insisted that they could not because “its mother partook of butter made from the milk of a cow that had eaten the badan measgan.”
common ling or heather (Calluna vulgaris): known as fraoch, or ling. Ubiquitous. Used for making brooms, creels, ropes and thatched roofs, etc. The staple diet of grouse. Cattle prefer the mion-fraoch—the young growth that emerges once the old growth has been burned. The green tops were once used to make heather ale, mangan, favoured by the Vikings (see the Fascaringa Saga).
gorse (Ulex): also known as broom and whin. Lemon-hued, coconut-scented, ubiquitous in the spring and, with the million-starred constellations of celandine, the tender primroses and the yellow crotal lichen—the poor man’s saffron, used to dye woollen cloth—turns Fascaray into a shield of shimmering gold.
lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum): a froth of yellow, honey-scented flowers in high summer. Grows in the machair of Lusnaharra and Calasay and on the grassy shore west of Finnverinnity Harbour. Used as a dye for wool, to heal skin disorders, ease childbirth, stop bleeding and calm the troubled soul. A rare blue variety flowers in winter and is found on a ledge below Calasay cliffs.
lesser meadow rue (Thalictrum minus): known as ruebeag. Found in rocky outcrops in Killiebrae Glen. Tea made from its dried flowers is said to cure rheumatism.
marsh chickweed (Stellaria palustris): known as fliodh-uisge mór. Grows in puddles and pools and can be mistaken for watercress. Heated on stone it is used to cure festering wounds on hands or feet.
syme, meadow rue (Thalictrum maritimum): grows on the rocky shore east of Finnverinnity and beneath Doonmara cliffs. Flowers in August.
tansy (Tanecetum vulgaris): yellow flat-topped button-like flowers. Flowers late summer through to autumn. Ubiquitous. Aromatic, used as a strewing herb with southernwood (Artemisia: laddie’s loue) on taigh dubh floors to make the house smell sweeter.
trefoil (Lotus corniculatus): known as triffle, cocks an hens, bairnie’s baffs, birdie’s fit. Cluster of yellow pea flowers, often with red streaks, pollinated by the “common blue” butterfly and seen all over the island from April to September.
violet not for us Wordsworth’s solitary “violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye!” In Fascaray, the sweet violet (Viola odorata), wild pa
nsy (Viola tricolor), common dog violet (Viola riviniana) and bog violet (Viola palustris)—known locally as cuckoo-brogue (Gaelic bròg na cuthaige)—come mob-handed, turning our banks, braes and woodland into vivid, scented cerulean plains that dizzy the senses and reproach the grey spring skies.
wood anemone (Anemone nemorosa): known locally as jessamine.
yellow-flag iris (Iris pseudacorus): known as the seggie flooer. Flowers in June. Abundant in wet habitats and on shorelines. Fringes Calasay Strand and Loch Aye.
—Grigor McWatt, 1953, The Fascaray Compendium
It’s clear from the correspondence we have, from his journal entries in the Compendium and his Pibroch columns, “Frae Mambeag Brae,” that McWatt was conscious of his place in history and of the political, as well as the literary, significance of his work.
In the early 1950s he joined the Scottish National Party, whose founders—in its earlier incarnation as the Nationalist Party of Scotland—had included his friend MacDiarmid. Whether or not McWatt had been directly involved in the “reclamation” of the Stone of Scone, he openly and habitually engaged in nationalist-related acts of civil disobedience. All the stamps on the envelopes containing his twenty-two letters to Lilias Hogg are carefully fixed upside down—“staunding the English Queen Lizzie heelster-heid”—an act of treason according to the English statute books. Between 1952 and 1954 he wrote three columns for the Auchwinnie Pibroch, as well as numerous letters to the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and the Aberdeen Press and Journal, protesting against the description of the new monarch as “Queen Elizabeth II.”
“The English may have assented to the rule of two Lizzies, but we Scots have only suffered under the yoke of one. Call this yin by her rightful name, Queen Elizabeth I, until we dispose of English monarchs altogether,” he wrote in the Pibroch in June 1953, a week after the young Queen’s coronation in Westminster.
In October that year, the old King George the Sixth, “G VI R,” red pillar box outside Finnverinnity post office was finally replaced with a modern version, bearing the Queen Elizabeth the Second, “E II R,” gold insignia. The following month, just before dawn on 30 November, the feast day of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, an explosion was heard across Fascaray. Men and women scrambled from their beds, dressed hastily and emerged dishevelled into the cold night air. Some thought buried munitions left behind by the SOE commandos were to blame. A few ex-servicemen, naval as well as army, fancied, as they struggled into wakefulness, that they were back fighting the Hun, the Japs or Mussolini’s Fascists in the darkest days of the war. Others assumed Mrs. Wilma Paterson’s newfangled cylinder gas cooker was the culprit.
In an entry in The Fascaray Compendium, McWatt described the scene.
It was Effie Morrison, running in curlers, dressing gown and slippers from her bedroom at the back of the shop, who first found the fragments of shrapnel flung by the force of the blast as far as the pier bench. She picked up a large triangular shard—red and black, vaguely familiar—and screamed as her fingers were burned by the heat. As she ran to the shore and knelt to immerse her hand in seawater, another figure emerged from the open door of the shop. It was Shuggie the Post, barefoot and bare-chested in long cotton drawers and, in the panic, heedless of the shocked stares of some villagers, who assumed he would be chastely in his single bed at his mother’s house in Finnverinnity. Shuggie pointed at the charred and twisted stump that now stood in place of the old postbox and sprinted to Effie’s aid.
“Now who would do a daft and dangerous thing like that?” he asked, as he wrapped her hand in a bandage torn from his good work shirt.
They all had their suspicions, as did the police, and the talk on the island was of little else. Effie Morrison’s brazen “suppin o the kale afore the Grace” with Shuggie, which would, under normal circumstances, have animated island gossip for months, if not years, was forgotten as Fascaradians told and retold the story of the Finnverinnity Bomb.
There were rumours that the Scottish Republican Army were involved and McWatt, in what his critics denounced as an ill-judged, crowing column for the Auchwinnie Pibroch, seemed in no hurry to dissociate himself from the shadowy movement with alarming connections across the Irish Sea. For the second time in four years, Special Branch officers descended on the island and McWatt was questioned once more. Again, police could find no evidence for his involvement in the explosion. In his writing and in person, he always referred to it with unconcealed glee as “an act of sedition,” though he expressed regret about Effie’s hand.
The replacement pillar box arrived three months later—until then residents had to bring their mail in person to Effie, who had recovered fully but, some felt, wore her bandages rather longer than was necessary. After the incident, Effie the Shop became known as Effie the Hand.
In his column in the Auchwinnie Pibroch in April 1954, McWatt reported that the new postbox bore the image of the Scottish Crown rather than the insignia of an English monarch.
“It is a small victory, but a victory nonetheless,” he wrote.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
The 1707 Act of Union was a union in the sense that the slave’s connection with his master is a partnership of equals. It was Darien that did for us. This pestilential strip of jungle and swamp on the isthmus of Central America now known as Panama, along with the perfidy of the English, the mischief of the Spanish and—let us finally acknowledge it—the justifiable resentment of the native Kuna Indians, was our undoing as a nation. It had started so promisingly—a wildfire of optimism had burned through Scotland, from the blackhouses and crofts of the Highlands and Islands to the satanic mills of the central belt. And once more our wee, o’erlooked island of Fascaray played a disproportionately large role in this story.
We should have known better; optimism was a phenomenon rarely observed north of Hadrian’s Wall since the Battle of Bannockburn. Our seers and seannachies could have told us: it would not end well. And neither did it. The premise was reasonable enough: England had her Empire—much of it administered and policed by Scots exiles—why should not Scotland, with her ingenuity and propensity for graft, have her own?
In 1698, after years of famine and hardship, the proposal, to fund a naval fleet and set up a trading base and colony in the New World, ignited the imagination of Scots of all castes from all corners of the land. Our own wee Empire! “He won’t be looked upon as a true Scotchman that is against it,” wrote Lord Basil Hamilton. Subscriptions—amounting to half of Scotland’s capital—were raised in grand estates and Highland clachans, merchants’ town houses and Glasgow slums.
As one historian later observed, the Darien venture was “an amazing yet natural product of that curious blend of cold, thrifty common-sense and poetic idealism found in Scotsmen.” Thrawnness, our word for the peculiarly Scots quality of perverse intractability, also had a hand in it. There could have been no greater spur to the venture than the news that the English, who did not take kindly to other nations’ imperial aspirations, were fiercely against it.
Six ships set sail from the port of Leith in July—taking a circuitous route to avoid the hostile English navy—with 1,200 Scots sailors and would-be colonists on board and a cargo of periwigs, clay pipes, Bibles, serge frock coats and finest tweed. The first mate of the Capercaillie, the last ship to sail, was a Fascaray man, Farquhar McWatt.
The voyage was trying enough—one merchant was so troubled by seasickness that he sought drastic relief by tossing himself overboard to his death—but the destination was intolerable: a climate so hot and humid it was habitable only by the hardiest Kuna Indians, and infested by disease-bearing insects so large, vicious and deadly they made the colonisers nostalgic for the innocent wee midges of home. We had, it emerged, been badly misinformed. There was not a great demand for wool garments and powdered hairpieces in the relentless heat of Darien. In what must surely have been an ironic reference to the landscape and climate they had
left behind, the Scottish colonists called this malarial inferno New Caledonia.
Our Fascaradian first mate perished, probably of yellow fever, two weeks after landing in Darien. Inevitably, most of his compatriots were not long in following him. The English threatened their own trading partners in the region with war if they did any business with the Scots interlopers; the Spanish, based in neighbouring Colombia, besieged the New Caledonian port; and the Kuna, who had no time for any of the Europeans, did their best to undermine the venture using guerrilla tactics. Disease and starvation did the rest.
Three hundred survivors finally made it home to a country now so broke it became a supplicant of England. The English bribed those wealthy Scots who had lost money in the Darien scheme with a full repayment of their investment. Within a decade, the Act of Union had been signed and the long, quarrelsome, woefully unequal marriage of inconvenience between England and Scotland was officially solemnised. The Scots people, apart from the coward few bought for “hireling traitors’ wages,” became the Kuna Indians of Old Caledonia, without the necessary expertise in effective guerrilla tactics, exploding pillar boxes notwithstanding.
—Grigor McWatt, 1954, The Fascaray Compendium
By the close of 1955, Montfitchett was dead—decapitated in a crash in his convertible Riley, in which he was touring the lanes of Surrey, England, with Alicia Rivers, a vivacious Rank starlet, who also lost her head in the accident.
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