Not much German was spoken in Fascaray, but when the grisly story was confirmed, via a week-old copy of the Aberdeen Press and Journal which arrived on the mailboat, Schadenfreude was the only word to describe local reaction to the news. “The motor car has usefully served the purpose of the guillotine,” wrote McWatt.
Rab McNab had largely relinquished the running of the pub to young Jamie MacDonald—now a strapping 21-year-old with the valuable characteristic in a barman of a personal distaste for drink—but on the night the news broke, McNab was helped down the stairs from his attic room, to which gout and liver trouble now confined him, and he raised a trembling glass in the bar to the Fascaray Five as the pub rang to the sound of McWatt’s song. Hamish McIntosh, the original boy tenor on the night of the ballad’s debut a decade ago, was now a wiry fisherman and construction worker in his twenties and he belted out the words with tuneful passion. On this evening of tears, rage and laughter, “Hame tae Fascaray” seemed even more of a battle cry than a love song or lament.
Heather’s bloomin
On the braes,
This is oor ain land.
The bonnie hame
Where we belang.
Let’s stake oor claim.
The celebrations may have been in questionable taste. They were also premature. Montfitchett’s son Torquil, a weedy fellow who had been glimpsed more than two decades earlier as a teenager in the garden of the Big House sullenly swatting midges during one of his father’s visits north, had inherited the title and the estate. The laird was dead. Long live the laird.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
30 September 2014
In my early twenties, having acquired an education and the beginnings of an interesting career in New York, I became the sort of wild child against whom, when the time comes, I will warn my daughter.
To my Stakhanovite curriculum vitae—anthropology at UC Toronto; an MA in museum studies from NYU; a semester in library studies in Illinois and a course in curatorship in Grenoble; placements at the British Museum and the Pergamon; my monograph on Isobel Grant—I added drugs, drink and reckless sex. I had spent my teens being a good girl, striving for and mostly achieving A grades which, I suppose, in my doggedly unaspirational family home amounted to a kind of rebellion. Now I was an A-grade bad girl. But though I partied all night in Manhattan and Brooklyn with the smart club kids—art students and actors, always between jobs and mad for pleasure—I had a shameful secret. Though I tried, I could never entirely extinguish my work ethic. While my amusing friends languished in bed moaning theatrically, only rising at 4 p.m. to attend to costume and make-up for the evening’s revels, I’d been doing drudge work since early morning at an ill-paid post uptown in the stacks of the Marquand Archive.
By night we were flappers at the brink of the twenty-first century, hitting the contraband hooch and Charlestoning our young lives away. But with dance music still pulsating in my skull, the taste of the last cocktail and who knows what else in my mouth, my mind straining for clarity through a cataclysmic comedown, I always managed to haul myself out of whatever bed I happened to find myself in, shower off the excesses of the night, swap my gaudy party clothes and Doc Martens for unexceptional corporate threads and mid-heeled pumps and report for duty. And here’s the thing—I enjoyed duty.
Apart from the fact that the job helped pay the rent on my crummy room in Hell’s Kitchen, I liked my colleagues, who were superficially staid but had arcane expertise and complicated needs and rivalries. I liked their private dramas. I even “liked” the colleagues I disliked. The workplace was one big dysfunctional family and I liked big dysfunctional families—as long as they weren’t my own, didn’t get in the way of the work itself and I could leave them at the end of each day. There was structure. I yearned for structure. I enjoyed teamwork, or the process of attempting to herd a disparate group of people with competing interests towards a single purpose, and above all I took pleasure in the quiet discipline of reading, sorting and categorisation. My party friends, many of them the beneficiaries of trust funds, would never have understood.
Hal, an on–off boyfriend with vague ambitions to work in film and a father in oil, lay in bed one morning at 7:30 watching me dress for work. His expression was quizzical and, raising his index finger with exaggerated effort to point at his own handsome face, he said, “Consider the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Yes, standing in my cut-price approximation of a business suit, last night’s thrift store indiewear stuffed in a holdall, bracing myself for the morning subway ride, I felt shame; a drab worker bee trying to pass in a hive of magnificent queens.
In Fascaray, getting my daughter ready for school, feeding her, keeping chores and laundry under control and sifting through the detritus of Grigor McWatt’s life, partying is no longer an option—raucous late-night revels at the Finnverinnity Inn have little appeal—and I have all the work I need.
As for Handsome Hal, he’s no longer handsome. He’s dead. After his third time in rehab, each stint the price of a good college education, he picked up where he left off, acquired some oxycodone pills, crushed them, diluted them and injected the solution—a respectable party dose by his usual standards but fatal after his recent clean-up.
That’s when I climbed off the carousel. Just in time. That’s also when I met Marco Bartoli, then an aspiring playwright working as a summer stock stage manager. As it turned out, Marco liked working too.
The devil, they say, has all the best tunes and here in Fascaray, where the extended wake for the late laird continues unabated, it seems the papists of Lusnaharra are even closer to Black Donald of the Whids than the rest of us and have access to his beguiling songbook.
I did not have the dubious privilege of meeting William Buchanan, a true Holy Willie, late minister of the Finnverinnity Free Church of Scotland in the parish of this island until 1941. He arrived here in the late 1920s, one of the missionaries sent by the Free Church to scare the daylights out of sinful islanders and turn them towards the stern mercies of his god. Buchanan’s influence lingers, even under the comparatively benign regime of his successor at the manse, the Reverend Ranald Paterson.
Above Finnverinnity Harbour, the Temperance Hotel still stands, where the ageless Mistress Geddes still presides over unimpeachably clean rooms and substantial though joyless repasts. But there is more custom, as well as life, down the road in Rab McNab’s boisterous howff, ably managed by young Jamie MacDonald—nephew of Fascaray Land Raider Murdo and of Shonnie, the piper soldier who perished in the war—and the Finnverinnity Inn has been permanently en fête, as our Auld Alliance partners might say, since news of the departure to the Great Ayebidin Grouse Shoot of our late and unlamented laird.
Music and dancing may still be frowned on, officially, by the most God-fearing Presbyterians, but attitudes have relaxed since the 1930s when the Reverend William Buchanan refused to solemnise the marriage of Morag McIntosh and Donald MacEwan, two devout young members of his own congregation, until Morag’s family destroyed the handsome violin—“the devil’s recruiting machine”—that once belonged to her grandfather and hung over the fireplace in the family home. In the event, Iain McIntosh, Morag’s younger brother, burned an old fiddle—donated for the purpose by Murdo McIntyre of Doonmara—and hid the treasured instrument in the byre. It has since been brought out and dusted down to perform good service at many a local hoolie, though never on a Sabbath.
Times change, but in this matter not sufficiently quickly to my mind. The inn, of course, has long existed outside the pale and accordingly serves the devil’s drink to the sound of the devil’s music. And some Wee Free affiliates can be seen there on weekday evenings, tapping their feet to a cantie reel and imbibing “a richt guid willie-waught.” But Saturday evening—Sabbath Eve—and the Sabbath itself are dreary and silent as the tuim throughout the e
ast of the island. Around Finnverinnity on the Lord’s Day, harvests are suspended, peat gathering stops, no boats set sail, no washing is hung, no cows are milked, no eggs are gathered, no children play, no flowers are picked, no cheerful youth purses his lips to whistle a merry tune. Instead, in Presbyterian households, the long days and longer nights are spent in close Bible study and it is still to Lusnaharra and its Romish denizens—whose priest, who enjoys a tune himself, permits his parishioners to milk their cows after Sunday Mass and turns a blind eye to the occasional Sabbath ceilidh—that one must look for any sort of weekend divertissement.
—Grigor McWatt, 1956, The Fascaray Compendium
Torquil Mere-Stratton, the new Lord Montfitchett, had grown up to become what was called in the English and American newspapers “a socialite.” Who’s Who, a copy of which was found in Auchwinnie Carnegie Library by Miss Elspeth Millar, listed his hobbies as poker, backgammon, blackjack and baccarat. Unlike Burns, or McWatt, Torquil Mere-Stratton’s heart clearly belonged in Monte Carlo, rather than the Highlands.
But in the immediate aftermath of Percy Montfitchett’s death and without his bullying presence, his son made several exploratory journeys up to Fascaray, bringing with him his American wife Minty, a buxom woman whose family had made their fortune selling gunpowder during the civil war, and their sons Clarence, eleven, and nine-year-old Peregrine, who in photographs at the time wore identical high-collared suits, and expressions pitched between bewilderment and resentment.
On their initial visits, the new laird, his wife and sons were accompanied by an entourage of English servants whose manner so offended Mrs. McIvor that, the morning after they first arrived, she left permanently on the mailboat for Peebles.
There were, however, signs of more positive change under the new dispensation. The minister and his wife received an invitation to “cocktails” at the Big House, and although Ranald and Wilma Paterson were of the temperance persuasion and their strict sabbatarianism usually extended to Saturday evenings, they made an exception for the new laird and were able to report back that “improvements and plenishments” had been made to the house.
A “loggia”—“a fantoosh name for a big porch,” said Effie MacLeod—had been constructed, a mahogany cabinet containing a television set had been installed in the drawing room, the billiard room had been redesignated as a “den” for Torquil, and the old game pantry and flower room had been stripped out to make a “rumpus room” for the boys. Torquil and Minty, said the Patersons—despite the laird’s insistence, the minister and his wife still found it a painful impertinence to call them by their first names—had been most hospitable.
Over at Lusnaharra, Father Col Maclennan would have had no difficulty accepting the offer of a cocktail. He was now in his seventies and increasingly unsteady on his feet, but he could still say Mass, perform baptisms and marriages, mete out penances and see off the dead. Francie MacDonald and his cousin Donnie gave the priest regular lifts to the Finnverinnity Inn in their old Fordson tractor with its shattered windscreen whenever they were heading over to see Jamie, shipping fish from the pier or getting the family’s “messages” from the store. But no invitation from the Big House came for Father Maclennan. Sectarian barriers were firmly in place.
At the school, then based in Finnverinnity’s village hall, Miss Millar was struggling with the new intake of pupils. There was something of a population boom at Lusnaharra, McWatt reported in the Compendium. “Amateur ‘sociologists’ at the inn believe there is a connection with the post-war success of the Glasgow Celtic football team, which has taken the Coronation Cup, to the consternation of Finnverinnity, which has always been a Rangers village and is undergoing something of a population decline.”
The island’s older children who were fortunate enough to receive secondary education were sent over to the two mainland schools—Catholics to St. Maolrubha’s and Protestants to Auchwinnie Academy—to board each week. The non-denominational Fascaray School in Finnverinnity, which took all-comers, now had thirty children, more than double the number Elspeth Millar had taught when she’d first arrived on the island from Resolis sixteen years earlier as a naive and idealistic young schoolmistress.
Another teacher was recruited—the minister and his wife, in conjunction with the dominie (schoolmaster) at Auchwinnie Academy, had the final say on the appointment—and Grigor McWatt noted in the Compendium that “when Miss Janet Thomson of Buckie was first handed off the mailboat at the pier by skipper Ali Hume and first mate Malkie McTavish, Jamie MacDonald and his brother fought like Cain and Abel for the right to carry her suitcase to the schoolhouse.”
Torquil Mere-Stratton’s new bailiff, Lionel Spicer (he dispensed with the term “factor” but, wrote McWatt, “that was the only concession to modernisation in the arrangement”), created a stir when he arrived on the island. Tam Macpherson’s youngest daughter, Sheena, over at Balnasaig Farm was, according to Effie MacLeod, “daft on the fellow” and compared him to the Hollywood actor Stewart Granger.
To the pub regulars, recorded McWatt, “Spicer lacks humour or charm and has never bought a round of drinks. Any symmetry in facial features or signs of heroic musculature are a matter of indifference, if not suspicion.” He was also English—“another patronising southern imperialist”—and, if he was an improvement on Sammy Nelson, in that he gave the impression of listening politely to crofters’ complaints and requests, “he listens, apparently attentively, and then ignores them just the same.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
10 October 2014
Agnes is on her mid-term break. She wanted to see her father in Texas but we agreed that the journey was too long for her to make on her own and, with double jet lag to contend with, it would be too disruptive. She took it well, but while the other kids her age are meeting at Oonagh’s house in Lusnaharra today and at Kirsty Campbell’s in Finnverinnity tomorrow, Agnes says if she can’t go to Texas she’d rather spend her holiday with me in my office.
“I won’t make a noise, honest,” she says. “Please. You won’t even know I’m there.”
She brings her school bag with a stack of books, some writing paper, a drawing pad and some paints and brushes—she has a project to get on with—and we set her up with a jar of water at a table in the window. I’ve taken down the wildlife posters so we have an unobstructed view: a shaft of sun plays across the grey sea like a searchlight, then it’s gone, the sky darkens and the rain starts. She’s silent, as promised, while I get on with my work, clearing out the old museum next door—Johanna has hired a dumpster, delivered by cargo boat from Auchwinnie, and we’re slowly filling it with the MacRaes’ trash.
I return to my desk and log on to my computer. Nothing happens. I try again. The screen is dead and I curse loudly. Agnes puts her finger to her lips and tiptoes up to my desk. Her fingers play, prestissimo, over the keyboard then she presses the return key with a decisive jab and the computer whirrs into life.
I start to thank her and she puts a finger to her lips again and goes back to her work. Chastened, I return to mine.
INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS DESCRIBING AN UPROAR, FIGHT OR CONTROVERSY
bulyor
clamihewit
collieshangie
dindy
fecht
gilravage
guddle
gurryshang
habber-galyo
hubbleshew
killiemahou
klamoz
kurdy-murdy
peloo
pudder
rammie
rickibeekis
rippet
roukle
rumballiach
shangan
shicavy
speeho
steuchie
strabash
stracummage
stramash
strebogle
stushie
threap
towrow
tuilyie
tulzie
—Grigor McWatt, 1957, The Fascaray Compendium
The feudal system of landownership seemed intact and even strengthened after the judicial failure of the 1946 Fascaray Land Raid, but a decade later, even with a new laird in place, the first signs of fundamental social change began to appear on our island. The year 1956 was the hard winter and the Big Snow. It has also become known as the year of the Big Thaw, when the demands of nature at her harshest brought islanders of all religious persuasions together in an unprecedented way.
It did not start well. The courtship between Jessie Mackenzie (Presbyterian) of Finnverinnity, daughter of church elder Donald John the Shop, and Francie MacDonald (Catholic) of Lusnaharra had scandalised both communities. Stern words had been issued from the kirk pulpit denouncing “this godless union” and Father Maclennan had taken Francie’s mother aside after Mass to express his concern. “There are plenty of decent young Catholic girls around. Francis has no need to consort with a Protestant,” he told Kitty MacDonald.
But the young couple, defiant in their ardour, slipped away from their homes in November, caught the mailboat to Auchwinnie then the coach to London, where they found factory work and separate accommodation in a youth hostel. They were married three weeks later in Hendon register office with two passing strangers—a student nurse and a train driver—serving as witnesses. The Fascaradian fugitives spent their wedding night in a room above the Welsh Harp pub on the North Circular Road and returned home to present their outraged families with a fait accompli.
Accommodation for young married couples is limited on Fascaray so the newly-weds had to live apart for several months with their respective families, whose continuing fury they hoped to appease by seeking blessings for their marriage in kirk and church.
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