“We’re beekeepers. Or aliens,” Agnes says. “Is that a metaphor?”
At first, we try to continue with our picnic, sneaking our cheese sandwiches under our drapery, but the insects are fiendishly persistent and swarm on our unshielded hands. A few find their way inside our hoods and we make a comic turn of it, slapping theatrically at our faces. Then we give up and hurriedly pack the picnic away. Agnes reaches for my hand, threads her small fingers through mine and, laughing and breathless, we scramble down the hill together in our net shrouds.
By the late spring of 1958 the Big House wasn’t the only place on the island where you could find a television set. Effie Morrison, now Effie MacLeod and mother of a four-year-old girl and two-month-old twin boys, had a brother who repaired sets for Rediffusion in Glasgow and had brought her one all the way up from Strathbungo as a birthday present.
The television didn’t have an imposing wooden cabinet which concealed it when not in use, as in Finnverinnity House, but Effie’s set seemed to fill one corner of the MacLeods’ cottage and, in our interview, she told me of the night Shuggie first plugged it in, with newborns Barry and Kenny asleep, top-to-tail in their cradle behind the couch, and wee Moira struggling to escape her mother’s lap. It seemed that half of Finnverinnity crowded in the house with them, while several “strays from Lusnaharra” stood outside on tiptoes peering in through the window.
Sheena Macpherson was over from Balnasaig Farm with her husband Stevie MacEwan, showing off their own newborn, Innes, “round and swaddled as a wee Eskimo doll.” But Effie’s adult visitors were restless, doubtful about the merits of this newfangled machine, wondering if they were ever going to get a cup of tea, or something stronger, and they barracked Shuggie as he struggled to adjust the aerial, a plastic dome with two protruding wire antennae. “It’s like something out of Buck Rogers,” said Roddy McIntosh, a regular at the mainland picture house.
The snow on the screen finally cleared to reveal a snub-nosed man in a kilt bantering with a pair of handsome young guitarists, one fashionably bearded, the other whose severe Plantagenet hairstyle suggested to Effie that “his mammy had cut it, using a skellet [saucepan].” The programme was a variety show, the White Heather Club, and Andy Stewart, the chirpy master of ceremonies, was introducing a popular folk duo. Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor smiled shyly, fixed their eyes heavenwards with a gaze of secular piety, strummed a gentle three-bar intro, and launched into song.
Within seconds a thrilled silence gripped the room and outside the house, standing on tiptoe and “keekin in through the windae,” according to Effie, eight-year-old Fergus McKinnon and his cousin Mikey gasped as the earnest crooning harmonies twined around a song of shocking familiarity—their song.
Hee-ra-haw, boys,
We’re awa, boys,
Gangin hame
Tae Fascaray.
Meanwhile, seven and a half miles north in his Calasay croft, wearing beret and scarf against the chill, the poet was at work by the bilious light of a Tilley lamp, recording the nesting habits of the peregrine falcon, expressing trenchant views on the latest barbarities of Westminster, recalling the heroic, vainglorious and tragic history of Scotland, and reimagining classic verse into Scots, unaware that at that moment he had just been touched—scorched, he would later say—by the hot breath of fame.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Ode tae a Nichtingall
Ma hert yauks an a drousie dowfness pynes
Ma virr, as tho o hemlock Ah hae slocht,
Or whummelt some dreich opiate tae the sheuch,
Ane meenit syne, an lethe-wards Ah hae cowped:
It’s nae fer eelist o yer cantie share,
But bein tae cantie in yer cantieness,—
That you, licht-winged Dryad o the trees
In some braw hinnied kailyard
O bonnie emerant, an shaidaes stentless,
Crood o summer in fu thrappled saucht.
Och, for a waucht o bevy! That hae been
Cuild lang syne in the deep-howked yird,
Gustin o heather an the emerant glens,
Reels, an waulkin songs, an lauchter shared!
Och for a quaich fu o oor michty Scotia,
Fu o the sonsie watter o aw life,
Its gowden promise glimmerin at the lip,
A douce ambrosial waucht;
That Ah micht drink an think o nocht,
An gie aw strife an fasheries the slip.
—Grigor McWatt, efter John Keats, 1958*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
22 October 2014
I look up from my desk to see a figure lingering outside the window in the rain. It’s Margaret Mackenzie. Our eyes meet and the postmistress dips her head and hurries away.
Johanna told me that locals call new arrivals to the island “white settlers.” Who’d have thought, with my sketchy past, family disadvantages and genuine Fascaradian connection that I would be viewed as a colonial carpetbagger, patronising the natives and pillaging their assets?
For all his misanthropy, Grigor McWatt eventually had some success at integration here and his journal entries in The Fascaray Compendium show a curiosity about the lives of fellow islanders I could never share. Away from the edgy society of office life, I’ve never been much good at “community.” As a child, I was always in permanent flight from family get-togethers of both sorts—visits with the disputatious, noisy Gallaghers or the silent McPhails imposed their own agonies. At St. Maria Goretti’s I had my small group of particular friends; there were four of us, intense, secretive girls with intellectual pretensions. My year at Turville Chantry consolidated my introvert tendencies; boarding school was a forcing house for cliques—passionate, self-sufficient and hostile to outsiders.
As an undergraduate in Toronto, grabbing at the chance to get away, I worked so hard (waitressing, bar work) to pay for my course and to get a good degree that I didn’t—couldn’t afford to—get swept up in student life. Which, as it turned out, was a blessing. Because when I finally looked up from my books and noticed what my peers were up to, when scholarship money delivered me as a postgraduate to New York and Europe, I took to the sybaritic life. I wasn’t a natural. I had to work at it—even at play the ingrained work ethic had its place—and that’s where the drink and drugs came in. Useful for blurring edges, eliminating inhibitions and anaesthetising private pain.
But I was always a weekend Generation Xer and when Hal died, and I decided it was time to get serious again, I quickly acquired a whole new set of friends—steady, interesting and sober—mostly through my work. Off duty, I never liked to see them in groups of more than four; I got enough community in the course of my day job and by evening my small store of gregariousness was exhausted.
Agnes, who has none of her parents’ failings and all of their strengths, is fine here in Fascaray, as she is fine in New York. She is an assiduous and generous friend yet content in her own company. She goes to school each day without complaint, her wide green eyes untroubled by anxiety.
I’ve sometimes flinched to see Marco so vividly in her, in her sudden enthusiasms and quick delight, her expressive hands and easy laugh, her reckless runs at life and her way of reading intently, cupping her sweet chin in her hand. From me, I suppose she has a certain focus and seriousness, the iron will to see a task through to the end, no matter how dull (homemaking excepted). Her colouring—dark hair, the green eyes, skin that can take the sun (a trait that’s wasted here)—she owes to both of us. But she is also entirely her own creature and surprises me every day with her difference. Where did this person come from, with her subtlety, her instinctive tidiness, her acute awareness of the feelings of others and a sometimes disabling desire to please? Not from me. Certainly not from Marco.
I seem to have spent my entire life aspiring to sol
itude; as children, my brother Aidan and I slept in bunk beds—I claimed the top on account of seniority—but I campaigned for years for a room of my own, not easily achieved in the small apartments my parents could afford. I didn’t take easily to dorm life in Turville Chantry, though it did have the advantage of being thousands of miles from home. By the time my parents acquired a three-bedroom tract house and my wish for a room of my own could have been granted, I was out of the door, on my way to college.
At work, my ambition for promotion has never been primarily about salary or even responsibility; what I’ve always aspired to is an office of my own. I don’t have a problem with colleagues, mostly, and I enjoy collective work and office banter, but I also prize the freedom to be able to walk away and focus on singular tasks in silence. I’m not greedy—a cupboard with a desk and chair would be just fine. All I want is a space where I can shut the door for an hour or two, sit down and hear nothing but my own sighs of relief.
Yesterday, in one of McWatt’s notebooks I came across an old Scots word: “katterzem.” He’d underlined it and written the definition in brackets—“[someone willing to go out dining at a minute’s notice].” It would never have applied to McWatt but it would work for Marco, who was incapable of being alone. “I’m a social animal, a macaque monkey—we hang around in packs,” he told me. “You’re more of a solitary creature, a bear or a bobcat. You only meet up for mating and breeding.” I think it was meant to be funny. We would have been out every night of the week, seeing bad off-Broadway plays then downing compensatory drinks in bars or clubs or at crowded theatre parties, if he’d had his way. Well, he has his way now.
How did we ever think our relationship could have worked? We should have seen it coming and ignored those friends who reassured us “opposites attract”: his fearlessness balanced my timidity, and vice versa, they said; his reckless head for heights was tethered by my vertigo; his tendency to chaos balanced by my instinct for order. But opposites also repel. So I came to Fascaray looking for my own room once more, hoping to close a door on the clamour and disarray of my love life, gather strength in tranquillity and listen to the ocean surging and withdrawing in an amplified version of my own sighs.
Looking out at the sea’s grey swell under the incessant rain, I know that John Donne was right—no man is an island—but he told only half the story; no island is an island either. Here there’s no escape, no privacy. We’re all sharing the same small space, the same room, encircled by the same uncompromising sea.
Tomorrow, once again, I’ll abandon my daughter and flee the oppressive intimacy of Fascaray, seeking sanctuary in the anonymity of the mainland. Sanctuary, purely in the interests of work, of course.
Solitarnes
Tae dowp on crags, tae muse oer loch an glen,
Tae huily scart the forest’s mirky deep.
Whaur things dae dwell forby oor narra ken,
An human fit is seendil tae be keeked.
Tae sclim the paithless mountain aw unseen,
Wi the wild deer stravaigin free;
Oer skooshin linns an steep ravines
Ah’m nae alane, perlustrin cantily,
Bletherin wi Naitur, nae alane
But corrieneuchin wi her chairms,
Far frae clannish meddlin an pain
Frae clashmaclavers an aw hairm.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Lord Byron, 1950*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
24 October 2014
The address takes me to a fifties maisonette block, part of a dispiriting low-rise ochre project with a view of the town retail park. The woman who opens the door is, I guess, in her forties, thin and nervy with a badger-streak of white in her dark bobbed hair. Speaking in a whisper, she leads me into a small overheated front room where an elderly man sits in an armchair scowling over a crossword, one slippered foot stretched out on a low stool.
Transcription of Interview with Donald MacInnes,
Taigh na Mara, Ballantrae Drive, Oban, 24 October 2014.
Conducted by Mhairi McPhail. Unedited.
“No. I’m sure it was tomorrow. I had it down in my diary as tomorrow. Flora? Flora! What did you let her in for? She’s a day early. If she wants her interview, she’ll just have to go away and come back tomorrow. I’m a busy man. I can’t just drop everything because she’s too gowkit to get the date right…Flora?…[INAUDIBLE]…A mix-up in my diary. Must have been Flora, my daughter. She took it down wrong. As usual. What’s the point of keeping a dog and barking yourself?…No, no. You might as well stay, now you’re here…”
“So it’s Miss McPhail, isn’t it, scion of Hector, one of the Five Immortals? I never met your grandfather—I was barely a year old at the time of the Land Raid—but Grigor will have known him. My late wife Nancy’s family would have known him too. She was a Fascaradian, one of the Finnverinnity Campbells.”
“You’ve one of those awful American accents though…Canadian? Same difference. A Yankee McPhail. Hector wouldnae have been too pleased about that. Nor Grigor. But it could be worse, I suppose. You could be English.”
“You’re not exactly a fair-skinned Celt ‘wi’ the bloom of the gowan on your haffet’. I might have had you down as a ‘BWT’ at first glance, no offence. A Bloody Wee Tally—that’s what we used to call the Italians who came to the west of Scotland to run the ice-cream vans and chip shops. No?”
“Your mother was Glasgow Irish? Och, we’re all Irish. The Scots were an Irish tribe who drove out the benighted Picts from ancient Alba. You could be Black Irish—a descendant of the Spanish sailors shipwrecked on Ireland’s shores after the Armada. Or maybe one of our endangered aboriginals—a dark-browed Pict. Yours was a matrilineal tribe. Bold Macalpin’s mother, from Fascaray herself, was the last of the royal line. Flora! Flora! Tea please. Now she’s here, she might as well stay…”
“Aye, Miss McPhail, I can see it now, you’re a throwback to the women warriors of ancient Caledonia—pirates and raiders every one…”
“McWatt? I’d say he had a strong streak of Pict, too. Maybe not in looks, but he was born to fight. Half Pict, half Viking—a proud berserker, as he liked to say. He was a fighter all right. But a dreamer, too, and a visionary. A seannachie—descendant of the bardic class of our Dal Riatan forebears over the water in what they now call Ulster.”
“No, he didn’t have the Gaelic—always said that was another thing the English stole from him. But for me, a wide-eyed know-nothing boy, it was pure good luck that he didn’t speak it and I did. That was a service I could perform for him.”
“…Flora! We’ll take a jug of hot water too. This may take some time…”
“So, Grigor. Aye. I first came across him in 1959. I was a lad of fifteen, working for the forestry. We were up the woods by Kilgurnock Falls over towards Calasay and he came out to us—that collie of his, Luath, straining and snapping on the rope—to see what we were up to. When he established there were no Englishmen among us, and that we were not there at the behest of Montfitchett or his crew, he went back to his croft and returned with a bottle of whisky and some bannocks for us. We sat on a felled tree trunk and talked. I could have listened to him for hours. I ended up listening to him for years. Thirteen years in fact. Thirteen long years. Aye, my meeting with Grigor McWatt was my awakening. My political awakening…”
“…You could say Grigor was what they cry a mentor. A father figure. And by God I needed one of those. My own father, a coal miner, was a clever man, eaten up by bitterness and drink. He’d been forced to leave the Highlands, like so many, and was driven underground like a rat to grub for money in the pits of the eastern flatlands. He’d no education, see. Education was for the well off. They liked to keep the working men stupid, stupid and docile so they’d put up with the miserable lives they had to lead in order to keep the wealthy warm in their big mansions and their London gentlemen’s clubs. If my father had
had an education, he could have made something of himself. But he had no chance.”
“Some men in those situations tried to do it themselves—found a subscription library, filled the house with improving books, took evening classes and made damned sure their children got the education they were denied. My father, who had all the severity of Calvinism without the religious belief, went the other way. He saw books as a middle-class conspiracy, saw school as the Establishment’s way of further oppressing the proletariat and he did his best to ensure we were as ignorant, illiterate and angry as he was.”
“I couldn’t get away from my family quick enough and the first time I left home, to work with the forestry, was a revelation. The freedom, the landscape—I felt an instant and ancient connection—the companionship of men who weren’t always drunk or recovering from the effects of drink and didn’t necessarily want to hammer the lights out of you for expressing an opinion contrary to their own.”
“So when Grigor suggested I stay in Calasay and work for him as his ‘amanuensis,’ as he called it, I flew at the chance. I trailed round the island with him to the crofts and blackhouses, drinking tea with the old folk, listening to their stories, taking notes, interpreting and translating from the Gaelic for him when necessary. I also took care of the animals, helped with the crops, household stuff, general repairs, that sort of thing. Easy money, you could say. But there was no money involved. He became my legal guardian and I was happy to sever ties with my own family. I got my keep, a roof over my head, food and a bit of change—pocket money—to spend in the shop and the pub, though I was never a drinker. I jouked that McWatt masterclass. I had my father’s example to think of. And though Grigor liked a dram, he never turned violent on me. Well, maybe just the once…”
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