“I ken that to the modern way of thinking the arrangement was unusual—older man, teenaged lad, unrelated, living thegether in an isolated place. There was talk on the island too. There’s always talk. You’d spit in the face of one Fascaradian and thirty would wipe their eye. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to tell smutty-minded interviewers—‘no impropriety whatsoever took place.’ And in case you’re still wondering, Miss McPhail, I repeat—Grigor McWatt never laid a finger on me. Not in that way…”
“He wasn’t the easiest man, especially in drink, I give you that. But who is? And compared to my father, believe me, he was a model of douceness and sobriety. There was no badness in him. He looked out for me. Remembered me in his will, too, despite our falling-out. Enough to see me comfortably through to my own end, anyway, and my daughter…”
“Aye, I mind Lilias. I mind her well; heaven and hell in one neat wee package. As lovely a lassie as any you’d clap eyes on. She came over to Fascaray just the once. Grigor was all for sending her away the minute she arrived. She just turned up with her bags and a bottle on the back of Mikey MacRae’s tractor, hair streeling in the wind, singing some raucous ballad. Worse for wear, I think. I made up a bed for her in the byre…
“She was a good-hearted lassie. Nice wee figure, too. But she could be tough. Knew what she wanted. Dug her heels in. Stayed for a fortnight, tried to make herself a fixture. She’d a good way with the animals, a dab hand. Patient and cheerful, when she wasn’t creeping about, bluitert or reeling from the effects of the previous night’s session. But she was never a nasty drunk. Not to me. She bubbled a bit—she was the greetin [weeping] kind of drunk. Tearful and affectionate. Hands everywhere…!
“She got stuck in with the chores too. Shared the burden of work with me. I got on fine with her…But she was no for Grigor. Too wild for Grigor. He could match her dram for dram—and he did most nights—but she was seeking some kind of rapture in the bottle and if rapture wisnae available, which it wisnae, oblivion would do the trick. Grigor, though, rarely lost control. He was cold, see. Fascaray, Scotland, they were his only real passions. Maybe it was his poetic calling, or his childhood, or his commando training or whatever terrible sights he’d seen in the war, but he was inward; a life-o-the-mind man. A stoic.
“She tried to stir him up, sunbathing on the brae in the scuddie—a fine sight, I tell you—chapping on his bedroom door in the wee hours more than once. He would shout at her tae clear off. I heard her greetin many a night. And then she took a shine to me. What healthy young fellow could resist?
“And that was when Grigor and me had our big fall out. It had been brewing between us for a long time. There were problems with the otters. Those craturs were wild, dangerous, should never have been taken into a domestic setting. They caused havoc, almost burned the place down twice and attacked me. Nearly had the leg off me. I could have bled to death. It was a doomed project and he didn’t like me pointing it out. You can be sure that story never made its way into his columns, or his compendium. Didn’t fit the myth.
“Lilias, that summer of 1972, was the breaking point. He found us, her and me, thegether in the byre one morning and it all blew up…He ordered her out of the house. Ended with me and him scrapping on the floor, tearing lumps out of each other, while Lilias stood wailin and greetin by the door, suitcase in hand. I walked her back over to Ruh where Mikey picked her up in his tractor and took her to Finnverinnity. That was the last I saw of her. And a week later I was gone from Calasay myself. Alec Campbell offered me a job on the boats and I made myself useful in Finnverinnity for a year or so. Grigor and me, we’d see each other around the island. We’d nod, be civil, but we never exchanged another word…”
“You’re living in Fascaray now? So you can imagine how it must have been for a young man like myself coming up from one of the miserable mining villages of the south—lungs full of coal dust, heart full of hate—stepping off that boat at Finnverinnity. The curve of the harbour drawing you in like a welcoming arm, the surge of the sea, the hills, and mighty Mammor putting us in our place, reminding us of the pettiness of our problems and the fleeting nature of human life.
“It was a sudden admission to paradise and, to a young man hungry for knowledge as well as freedom, it was a chance to sit at the feet of genius. Everything I learned, I learned from McWatt. He opened his library and his mind to me. I was a daft boy, no idea what I was doing, where I was going. It was hard, often lonely work. But, whatever happened between us at the end, Grigor McWatt made a man of me.”
Gin
Gin you can dwaum—an no mak dwaums yer maister,
Gin you can think—an no mak thochts yer mynt,
Gin you can tryst wi Sonse an wi Mishanter,
An haunle thaise twa mak-ons jist the same…
Gin you can staun tae hear the trowth ye’ve spaiken,
Pirled by reivers tae mak a fank fur fuils,
Or watch the things you gied yer life tae, breuken,
An lootch tae build agane wi dashelt tuils…
Gin you can mak a bing o aw yer gettins
An chance it aw upoan a gem o cairts,
An tyne, an stert agane aw over
An nivir girn or show embdy yer feart.
Gin ye can gar yer hert an virr an smeddum
Tae ser yer shot lang efter they hae gaun,
An sae haud on whan there is naething in ye
Binna the wull that says tae them “Haud on!”
Gin ye can gab wi thrangs an keep yer virtue,
Stravaig wi kings or fowk wi but a puckle
Gin naither faes nor louing pals can skaithe ye,
Gin aw men coont wi you but nane sae muckle;
Gin ye can colf the unforgeein meenit
Wi saxty saicants’ wirth o hynie rin,
Yours is the Yird and awthing that’s in it
An—whit is mair—ye’ll be a Man, ma son.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Rudyard Kipling, 1960*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
30 October 2014
A real Wicker Man moment. I walk into the store on a busy Thursday morning—must be a dozen people in there, talking, confiding, laughing—and the whole place falls silent. Margaret Mackenzie eyes me shiftily as she serves me. I’m so weary of feeling that I have to justify myself here but my anger at this unspoken hostility to outsiders is matched by a corrosive sense that my silent accusers are right: I don’t belong here. I’ve always been a fraud. I don’t belong anywhere.
When I arrived at the age of five for my first day at convent school in Canada, I was asked to recite a nursery rhyme from memory. I meekly obliged and was puzzled by the response. This was the nursery rhyme that determined my fate:
Wee chookie birdie, lol, lol, lol,
Sittin on a windie sol,
The windie sol began tae crack,
Wee chookie birdie, quack, quack, quack.
The nuns treated me with kindly concern and arranged free elocution lessons. My Professor Higgins was Miss Garrahy, an Irishwoman with a gift for mimicry and an odd passion for English royalty. I learned to purse my lips as I spoke, eliminate my rhotic “r”s by taming my tongue, truncate my “ch”s into a hard click and stretch out those telltale vowels. Miss Garrahy taught me well. Too well, it seems, as I negotiate the hostile preconceptions of fellow Scots and the narrow-eyed exasperation of my egalitarian American daughter.
The language question set me apart from my own family—my parents retained their Glasgow accents and as I grew older I caught in my mother’s flashes of impatience the sense that I had become the enemy within—a strange bird cuckooing away in a nest of doves, or doos as they would call them. My brother, who went to a co-ed high school and always saw himself as a straight-on uncomplicated Canadian—his classless North American accent was acceptable to my parents—teased me without remorse for what he saw as my vocal af
fectation.
My newly acquired diction could be a source of entertainment, too. Home from a hard day in the steel mill, after a meal grudgingly cooked by my mother and eaten in silence, my father would hand me a copy of the Globe and Mail and ask me to read out news items I was barely old enough to understand. He would listen to me, ear cocked, with quiet attention as if I were the BBC World Service. He was much taken with a term of disapproval I picked up from some of the wealthier girls at school, and his impersonation of me became a family joke, especially relished by my younger brother. At news of some minor inconvenience or disappointment, our father would draw himself up, flutter his eyelashes and utter, in the manner of, say, Billy Connolly playing Lady Bracknell: “How ghaaarstly!” He would drag out my extended “a” for a full four seconds as if retching.
Three terms in Oxfordshire, England—I sat, and won, the scholarship in open defiance of my parents—completed the process. Surrounded by Henriettas, Serenas and Venetias, I couldn’t join in their talk about ponies, or hunt balls, or skiing holidays with any confidence but I could mimic their accents. The mask became the face.
Vocabulary was trickier; it took me some years, weathering the confusion of friends and scepticism of strangers, before I could identify which word or phrase belonged at home and which in the wider world. At home, we “got the messages,” while my friends went shopping; my family “redd the table,” rather than cleared it; were “scunnered,” rather than sickened; I was “thrawn,” rather than stubborn; we were “clatty” rather than untidy; we “greeted” rather than wept. We ate “champ” with “sybies” (mashed potatoes with spring onions), “pieces” rather than sandwiches; and the washroom, known by the nuns in Canada as “the lavabo” and the girls at Turville Chantry as “the loo,” was called at home “the cludgie.”
I had a “spirit of the staircase” moment today when I read an entry in The Fascaray Compendium aimed at those “gallehooing gowks, mostly—though not exclusively—non-Scots, who dismiss the Scots language as a regional dialect of English.” McWatt, making the case for Braid Scots in its Doric and Lallans forms, explained that it’s “no more a dialect than Catalan is a local variant of Castilian Spanish.” If only I’d read this before I’d met Ailish, I could have countered her smug Hibernian certainties. Like Grigor McWatt’s grandfather Aonghas, denied his Gaelic “mither tongue,” my education stifled my Scottish self and was the first stage of my long journey away from home. I lost my voice and became a permanent exile, internally as well as geographically.
Arriving in the teeming Babel of New York was liberating because no one, or almost no one, belonged there. It was as good a place as any for a confused, estranged itinerant like me to end up; everyone I knew, bar Marco, was a confused, estranged itinerant. We were all stateless orphans and here in this great city of self-invention, we could make ourselves up as we went along. Marco, of course, arrived in the world complacent and fully formed; the nearest he ever got to an identity crisis was when he mislaid his driver’s licence. He describes himself unselfconsciously as an Italian-American, in that order, though he possesses little of his ancestral motherland’s language and few of its culinary skills. “You got to face it,” he said to me. “Italy is a state of mind as well as a nation. It’s about home and family and friends and food and la dolce vita. And Scotland? If your family’s anything to go by…Plus, it’s not even a nation. And don’t get me started on the food.”
This Fascaray venture is my crack at proving him wrong and coming home. I may be an incomer, but many of the islanders today are incomers themselves and, as the child of Dougal McPhail and the granddaughter of Hector McPhail, I have as much claim to a place here as Margaret Mackenzie or any of them.
The Pirlin Scottish Road
Afore the Roman came tae Tyne or oot tae Falkirk strode,
The pirlin Scottish drunkart made the pirlin Scottish road.
A reelin road, a trinnlin road, or sae we’ve aften heard,
An efter him the meenister ran, the factor an the laird;
A blythsome road, a birlin road an such as we did tread,
The nicht we ganged tae Plockton by way o Peterhead.
Ah kennt nae harm o Bonaparte an plenty o the laird,
An fur tae fecht the Frenchman Ah widnae hae a care;
But Ah wid gie them laldie if ere they came arrayed
To straighten oot the creukit road a Scottish drunkart made,
Where you an Ah went doon the wynd, aw bevvied tae oor lugs
The nicht we ganged tae Clachtoll by way o Candleriggs.
His sins they were forgien him, or why dae flooers rin
Ahint him: an the bruim-buss aw strengthenin in the sun?
The skellum ganged frae left tae richt nae kennin which was which,
But the clonger was abuin him when they foond him in the sheuch.
God forgie us, nor gang by us; we didnae see sae clear
The nicht we ganged tae Arisaig by way o Ardersier.
Ma pals, we wullna gang agane or gamf an aunceant radge,
Or rack oor haulflin gowkerie tae be the sheem o age,
But we’ll stravaig wi shairper een this paith that wandereth,
An see ungubbed in e’en licht the dacent howff o death;
For there is guid news yet tae hear an braw things tae be seen,
Afore we gang tae Paradise by way o Pittenweem.
—Grigor McWatt, efter G. K. Chesterton, 1958*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
Rumours began to circulate on the island in the late 1950s about McWatt’s occasional “lost weekends” in Edinburgh. He was said to spend his time there getting drunk with fellow poets in the cramped bars of Rose Street, arguing about prosody and Home Rule. He was also thought to be soft on a girl he had met. But on Fascaray he remained a solitary figure, tending his croft, reading his books and, as he said himself, “writing, writing, writing. Only with a pen in my hand do I ever feel truly alive.”
To local children he was a wild-haired bogeyman, best avoided—especially when in drink. Young Fergus McKinnon once claimed he’d seen McWatt bite the head off an otter, a story which, according to Effie MacLeod, earned the boy a swift smack from his teacher, Miss Elspeth Millar.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive, Fergus,” Miss Millar was said to have told the boy, before adding, by way of illumination, “Scott. Marmion.”
McWatt’s national fame—and notoriety—had another boost in 1959, the year he published his first collection of verse, Kenspeckelt. It was also, coincidentally, the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Burns.
Roy Fraser, editor of the Pibroch, planned to launch a Burns celebration in the area—Burns’s great-aunt Isabella Blaine was said to have married a Fascaradian—and Fraser thought Fascaray’s “resident poet” might want to honour his predecessor.
“We’ll have a Burns Supper at the Finnverinnity Inn and you could give a reading of his work. Perhaps ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’?” Fraser suggested over a three-hour lunch in the Fisher’s Airms. “We could also have a poetry competition and you could choose the winner.”
The poet described their meeting, and Fraser’s proposal, in the Compendium. “As is so often the prelude to questionable ventures, strong drink was taken,” he wrote. He declined the invitation to the supper, though he agreed, “following several further persuasive rounds of whisky,” to judge the competition. After a week spent sifting through verse by local schoolchildren and pensioners, McWatt declared in an intemperate column in the Auchwinnie Pibroch that all the entries were doggerel, unfit to be considered poetry. He went further, taking a sideswipe at the national poet—“Burns was a man of contradictions, an egalitarian who courted elites, a fine lyricist and a cheap songster, aye trembling on the brink of a sentimental, dishonest tear. And let us not forget he made his money collecting taxes for the
English.”
McWatt might have felt he had a supporter in his friend Hugh MacDiarmid, who consistently attacked the Burns cult for its reactionary kitsch and “kailyard” whimsicality. It was, after all, MacDiarmid who wrote—“You canna gang to a Burns supper even / Wi-oot some wizened scrunt o a knock-knee / Chinee turns roon to say, ‘Him Haggis—velly goot!’ / And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.” But even MacDiarmid felt moved to defend Burns, while acknowledging his “shortcomings” (among which MacDiarmid identified, somewhat contradictorily, “a tendency to jeer at foreign things and express a sort of xenophobia”). The national poet, however, could not be blamed, MacDiarmid argued, for the “Church of Burns,” which “denied his spirit to honour his name, denied his poetry to laud his amours, preserved his furniture and repelled his message.”
MacDiarmid did, though, endorse McWatt’s view of the appalling standards of literary skill in contemporary Scotland: “The horde of Burns imitators have…reduced Scots poetry to an abyss of worthless rubbish unparalleled in any other European literature,” wrote MacDiarmid. He exempted himself, and McWatt, from that abyss.
In London, the Times Literary Supplement, the Listener and the New Statesman reported the controversy with undisguised pleasure. But the support or condemnation of metropolitan English critics was of little interest to McWatt. A letter at that time to Lilias Hogg, to whom he had dedicated Kenspeckelt, suggests he was more concerned with news that his opinions and poems had received respectful attention in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that Burns was held in great esteem there as a poet of the people.
“Mother Russia seems to have taken me to her bosom,” he wrote. “Oh, clever, lucky Mother Russia,” replied Lilias. McWatt’s satisfaction in seeing his name in Pravda—an Edinburgh-based member of the Scottish USSR Friendship Society sent the cutting and the translation—must have been tempered by the description of him in the article as “the British folk singer Gringer McWat.”
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