Hame

by Annalena McAfee

  “We would welcome the funds to extend Balnasaig Tower Room,” says the old woman in a voice more used to issuing commands than making requests.

  She is unmistakably Home Counties English and for that I feel a wild sense of relief. My accent may be mid-Atlantic but my connection to this island is unassailably stronger than hers. Gathering strength, I remind myself that I’m more of a Fascaradian than most of them here tonight.

  “It’s too small for our Mindfulness workshops,” she continues, “and we’ve had to hold our Sacred Dance Circles outside, which isn’t easy with the weather.”

  “It would be helpful,” I say gently and disingenuously (for who else could she be?) “if we can all introduce ourselves—name, job, address—before making our suggestions.”

  Evelyn Fletcher, éminence grise of the Balnasaig Seekers, announces herself, followed by her acolytes, Jeremy Gortz and Jinny Aubrey.

  A middle-aged man, lean and rugged with a terracotta tan, wearing a sweater that might have been knitted from frayed rope, stands and introduces himself as Nigel Parsons. He is also English.

  “The pier should be upgraded. Larger boats still have to anchor offshore in high tide and send out a tender,” he says.

  Again, it’s a command rather than a request.

  A bearded man in wire-rimmed glasses and army fatigues stands now. He is Piers Aubrey—is it only the English who speak out at public meetings here?—and he makes the case for a permanent office for No Fascaray Array, the campaign against the Trondfjord wind farm. His partner Alison—ah, a Scot, at last—argues that the money could go towards setting up a weekly newsletter for the campaign. The first indigenous Fascaradian to speak is Margaret Mackenzie, who overcomes her reticence, or distaste, to press for a bench outside the store, “and a wooden shelter, with a seat, to protect old folk and young families from the rain.”

  Kenny MacLeod, landlord of the Finnverinnity Inn, suggests a music festival for the island, “it’ll bring in some custom to the pub,” while Chic McIntosh argues that a new central heating system for the Bothy bunkhouse will bring in more tourists. When he is not working on the ferry, Chic McIntosh manages the Bothy. Niall Kennedy suggests that a computer in the school would benefit the children as well as their families, while Lorna McKinnon, a soignée nineteen-year-old redhead, briefly visiting her family from nursing training in Edinburgh, makes the case for a village defibrillator.

  From the back of the hall, the haggard buccaneer shouts to introduce himself. He has the rasping voice of a heavy smoker—not necessarily tobacco, his get-up suggests—and his accent is German.

  “Reinhardt Schneider. Finnverinnity House. Artist…I support Kenny’s proposal for a music festival. We could do with some livening up in the village.”

  Ve could do viff some life-ening up in the willage.

  Two young guys standing near the door, both gangly and glowering, raise the question of the local fishing industry. They introduce themselves as Shonnie MacDonald, prawn fisherman and, I know from my research, great-grandson and namesake of the piper who died in World War II, and Donal MacEwan, who runs the local scallop-diving business. They’re backed up by a voice from the front row; an older man, a hulking figure with weather-beaten face and faded knuckle tattoos, asks me if I can give any assurances about inshore fishing quotas. He expresses concern, as others nod their heads and murmur support, about the effects of the Fascaray Array, and any future marine renewable technology, on the fishing industry. He gives his name as Eck Campbell, owner of Fascaray Fish Farm.

  This is way beyond my brief but I conceal my doubts, make bland and reassuring noises and turn to the next questioner, Kylie Macfarlane, a wispy brunette in her twenties wearing an oversized field jacket and combat boots, who wants more support for the pony-trekking business she runs with her brother Darren. I assure them all, as Nesbitt instructed me, that their fish, horses, rock festivals, Sacred Dance Circles, et cetera will be given serious consideration. As long as they think their personal projects stand a chance, they’re on my side.

  A woman in a yellow rain slicker, round and pink-cheeked as a matryoshka doll, stands to argue for a professionally designed website for the island: “It would help us communicate better. We can notify each other of events and services and it could also be an advertising gateway, bringing more visitors to Fascaray.” She introduces herself as Dot McKerrill, co-owner and chef of Watergaw House Hotel.

  It’s not a bad idea. None of them are truly bad ideas—though I think the Balnasaig Seekers make enough money to finance the extension of their own Tower Room—but the truth is when it comes to distribution of funds, the Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre and Fascaray Museum will have to be my priority.

  As I issue my final bland reassurances, Margaret Mackenzie and Reza Shah lay out tea and biscuits and the pub regulars slink away disappointed. Evelyn Fletcher and her assistants have brought their own herbal infusions, which they spoon into an earthenware pot, also brought over from Balnasaig.

  Evelyn comes over to suggest that I might like to visit one of their Mindfulness workshops. I thank her for the invitation.

  “We tend to be oversubscribed so you should book early,” she says.

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Thanks.”

  Kenny MacLeod intercepts me, his teacup an absurd doll’s-house miniature in his ham-shank fists.

  “We don’t see you much in the pub,” he says.

  Ten years ago, it might have been the minister or the priest challenging me about my non-attendance at church. But the clergy have gone and any remaining practising Catholics and Presbyterians must travel to Auchwinnie for their services. Balnasaig is the only religious centre left on the island. Balnasaig and the Finnverinnity Inn.

  “I’m not really a pub person,” I say.

  “It’s the heart of the island,” he says. “The real community centre. You can’t avoid it if you want to fit in here.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Thanks.”

  I walk home to number 19 in the drizzle just as Johanna brings back Agnes, an hour earlier than planned. As I’d guessed, their guising hadn’t yielded much bounty.

  “No one was in. They were either at your meeting or just not answering the door,” said Johanna. “It was raining heavily, too. But we had plenty of treats at home.”

  Agnes is full of it.

  “We did apple bobbing, only they call it apple ‘dooking.’ And we wore blindfolds and pinned tails on a paper donkey and told stories.”

  “Agnes has a great imagination,” Johanna tells me. As if it will be news to me. “She had them all going. I thought I should break it up before things got out of hand. How was your evening?”

  “Let’s just say apple dooking sounds more fun.”

  As I prepare our supper, Agnes tells me more about her evening.

  “Aaron Schneider says he has a ghost in his house. You know, the Big House? It walks down the corridor at night rattling its chains? But Oonagh says it’s just the plumbing. Kirsty says there used to be ghosts on the island but they’ve all gone, like the fishing.”

  I have a long way to go here, but my daughter’s own programme of community integration seems to be coming along nicely.

  Hallowe’en, the feast of All Saints’ Eve, has long been a significant event in the local calendar. It owes its origins to our ancient Celtic autumn festival of Samhuinn, when, according to the Irish medieval manuscript, the Book of Lismore, “from sunrise to sunset, all the gods of the world were worshipped on that day.”

  The recently harvested fruits and crops were consecrated, great bonfires were lit to purify communities from evil influences and the dead awoke from their graves to consort with, or admonish, the living. Torch-bearers would process around houses in the deiseal, or right-handed direction, to protect property and prevent fairy thieves from snatching infants and replacing them with ugly changeling children.

  Before the great fires were lit, small stones would be placed at their base to represent members of each househo
ld and the following morning the ashes would be raked and each stone carefully accounted for. If a stone was missing, that family member, it was said, would be dead before the kindling of the next Hallow-Fire. Futures would be told from stalks of kail pulled blindfold from the earth, from the riddling of corn and the burning of hazelnuts, and from the uncoiling of an egg white dropped in a glass of water.

  The old folk on the island can still recite the invocations made in secret by lovers bestowing charms upon each other against malign forces:

  Seun roimh shaighead,

  Seun roimh chlaidhe,

  Seun roimh shleagha,

  Seun roimh bhrùdh ’s bhàthadh,

  Seun roimh shìodhach,

  Seun roimh shaoghlach,

  Seun roimh bhiodhbhach

  Seun roimh bhaoghal bàsach.

  Chairm agin arraes,

  Chairm agin claymores,

  Chairm agin schiltrons,

  Chairm agin birses an drounin.

  Chairm agin faerie bairns,

  Chairm agin bogle bairns,

  Chairm agin th’ill-kyndit yins,

  Chairm agin the gloam o the deid.

  Even now, in this post-war Jet Age, Hallowe’en remains for many Fascaradians a day of divination, and on the evening of 31 October a young girl will still stand before a mirror, cut the peel from an apple in a single strip, cast it over her shoulder and see in its fallen shape the initials of the name of her future lover. The guising and apple dooking that delight children today are benign remnants of the early festival, in which wild dancing and general drunkenness would take place round bonfires high as hayricks. By the end of the nineteenth century, Presbyterianism imposed its stern will on the practice and it was discontinued, though a bowdlerised version of the ancient customs of merriment and misrule was considered acceptable for schoolchildren.

  Thus, today, we must be tolerant when confronted with excitable bairns in their tattered costumes who approach us demanding treats with menace. A handful of nuts or a boiled sweetie should suffice to keep any mischief at bay. We should be grateful that some remnant of one of our great traditions has not been entirely vanquished by the homogenising influence of our southern neighbours. Our exiled ancestors, cleared from the land by the lairds, took Samhuinn to America and Canada, where it continues to be observed today in a sanitised form and, in a reversal of the usual tidal flow of cultural imperialism, there is some evidence that a variant of our Hallowe’en rites has even been taken up in small pockets of England, surely the death knell of any tradition.

  —Grigor McWatt, 31 October 1958, Auchwinnie Pibroch

  The name of the bar where they first met, Menzies’, usefully served the function of outing any infiltrating English, who gave themselves away by pronouncing it phonetically, to rhyme with frenzies. To the Scots, and those in the know, it was always “Ming-us.”

  At that first meeting in 1958, Hogg wrote, “The constant din of the place suddenly ceased, the crowd vanished as if by sorcery, the poets turned to pillars of salt and only we two existed, talking and talking through that first fond night.”

  The following evening they met again at a late-night hoolie in Willie McCracken’s seedy flat in McEachen Place. “I don’t remember what we talked about,” she wrote. “Poetry must have played a part, I suppose—but I remember the laughter, the sudden, conspiratorial, cataclysmic hilarity that robs you of sense and dignity, makes your lungs ache and slicks your cheeks with tears,” she wrote.

  They saw in the dawn, picking their way unsteadily across the cobbles of Grassmarket in search of a store where they might buy her cigarettes. By noon they were back in Menzies’—favoured for its brazen flouting of Scotland’s draconian licensing laws—and were inseparable until the Tuesday train to Fort William.

  Whatever McWatt’s true feelings for Lilias Hogg—and it is hard to imagine, given the paucity of female company on Fascaray, that her rapture at that first meeting was not shared—the letters we have indicate that from the start it was not an equal relationship. He seems to value her admiration—what lonely bachelor poet would not be flattered by the attentions of an adoring girl twenty years his junior?—and he uses her as a sounding board for his ideas and his poems rather than as an intimate friend. The more she moves towards him, the more he retreats. Her pain, and her need for more, is all too evident in her replies.

  In June 1961 he wrote to her, “The seggie flooers are out, gilding the shoreline and the sight of them has forced me to drop the history and rhapsodise in verse:”

  Stravaigin lanely as a clud,

  That fleets on heich ower glens an braes

  An aw at aince a daizzlin croud,

  A thrang, o gowden seggie flooers

  Forby the loch, aneath the firth

  Flauchterin and birlin in the souch.

  Her response followed swiftly:

  “I loved your seggie flooers and how I wished I was wandering among them too. Such stravaiging need not be lonely. You only have to ask and I’ll be over in an instant, ferry permitting.”

  McWatt’s reply, in July, changes the subject. He sends her his Scots “owersettin” from the Latin of the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath. “As lang as a hunder o us bide abuin the muild, niver will we be brocht ablo English owerins. In suith it’s nae for glory, nor bawbees nor mense that we ficht but for freedom—for that alane, whilk nae aefauld man gies up but wi life itsel.”

  In this context, it is hard not to read his Declaration as a call to freedom not just from southern tyranny but also from the shackles of love.

  A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)

  3 November 2014

  “Mom…?” Agnes asks, looking up from her end of the kitchen table, an improvised workstation strewn with paints, brushes, felt pens and coloured pencils. She’s tackling a school project with her usual gravity.

  Down at my monochrome end of the table are my laptop, draft chapters from my book and the forbidding stack of my typed pages from The Fascaray Compendium awaiting a final edit. I’m sorting through the latest batch of documents, lifting them one by one from the box at my feet and putting them in orderly piles. Letters from Grigor to Lilias. Lilias to Grigor. One from Grigor McWatt to Willie McCracken. No envelope. Written but never sent perhaps. One from McCracken to McWatt. Bills. Receipts.

  “Mommy?”

  “What is it?”

  “How do you spell celebration?”

  I tell her.

  “You know, when we were living in Brooklyn…?”

  “Shh. Not now, honey. Mommy’s working.”

  In one of the new letters from McWatt, dated 1970 and returned to him by her, scored through with a red cross, he tells Lilias firmly that he can’t join her on a weekend trip to London.

  “You know by now, surely, that such a jaunt will never happen,” he says. “It is not just the time away from work that I can ill afford, it is the place, and the people. Edinburgh remains as far south as I’m prepared to venture and I’ve a fresh head of steam on with my work right now, so I’m even reluctant to make that journey. Try Archie or Willie.”

  England was hostile territory to my parents too. Along with my Scots origins and Fascaray roots, I have that much in common with Grigor McWatt. To my Glasgow-Irish mother, Dolores, England was a nation of snooty, deferential, Catholic-hating, Irish-persecuting Protestants. Scots Protestants were bad enough, but they were the forelock-tugging slaves of the English. Dolores of the Many Sorrows, as I’ve come to think of her, had defied her religious upbringing to marry my father but she nominally kept her faith—taking me and my brother to Mass every Sunday, insisting on my convent education. In later life, I suspect she has come to regret her decision to “marry out.”

  For my father, Dougal, despite his lack of curiosity about his father’s Fascaradian roots, ancient familial loyalties also ran deep, and while privately he may have thought that the English had got it right about the feckless Catholics and the Irish,
he shared my mother’s view that England was a nation of snobs and willing serfs. On that they could agree. And then, thanks to the nuns, their first-born child learned to speak “Broadcast Standard U.S. English,” a fancy North American version of the enemy tongue.

  We grew up in Canada with a sense of embattlement. Despite my parents’ unsentimental natures and their reluctance to return to the homeland that had forced them into exile—rare family holidays in Scotland would be preceded by long campaigns of attrition—my brother, until he was old enough to physically resist, was made to wear a kilt to Mass each Sunday and we were sent to school wearing the little silver badge of the Scottish National Party, its blue loop like an inverted AIDS ribbon, pinned to our blazers. It must have been some other, ideal Scotland, that they longed for, a Scotland free of family grudges and tribal hostilities, in which the only enemy was the country south of the border.

  We committed McWatt-style acts of sedition at home, turning the English Queen on her head on all our mail, and knew more verses of the English national anthem than most monarchists, that the “knavish tricks” the English were planning to “frustrate” had originally been “popish tricks,” and that the final, rarely sung, verse called for the crushing of “rebellious Scots.” Accordingly, we were taught never to stand for “the Queen,” which caused some awkwardness, particularly as we grew older, among commonwealth loyalists.

  “Mom…?”

  My daughter, thankfully, like her father, has no struggle with identity. An early childhood in New York, city of immigrants in a country of settlers, must have built up her immunity to the cheap and illusory comforts of belonging. She is a happy outsider, delighting in the exoticism of her new life in a place with which she has only the most abstract connection.

  “Do you ever miss your mom and dad?” she asks.