Hame

by Annalena McAfee

What trap is she setting me here?

  “No. Not really. Grown-ups don’t miss their parents.”

  “Well, I’ll miss you. Even when I’m an old lady.”

  “That’s nice, honey,” I say. I don’t add “Don’t count on it.”

  She has my attention now. Tomorrow, she tells me, she is going for tea at Ailsa’s house, where they plan to boil some plants to make perfume.

  “We’re going to use the yellow broom. That’s what Ailsa calls it. Like a brush, though it doesn’t look anything like a brush. Have you smelled it? It’s like coconut? It’s all over the hills behind Lusnaharra. Finn calls it win, or whin, but he’s Irish I think. And Henry Aubrey says it’s gorse. But he’s English. Mr. Kennedy says it’s called genista, like Jennifer, in Latin. But he’s a teacher. What do we call it, Mom?…Mom?”

  “Shh,” I tell her. “Mom’s working…”

  Indulge me for a moment if I turn my fire away this once from our southern masters’ many shortcomings and examine instead an area of weakness closer to home: our own hamartia, or tragic flaw, cringing in a cobwebbed corner of our psyches. Scotland is strong. Scotland has given, and will continue to give, much to the world. Scotland’s claims to nationhood are unassailable. So, let us, as one English poet might have said, roll all our strength into one ball and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life…to independence, the natural state of our self-reliant people, and stop, once and for all, fighting amongst ourselves.

  History tells us that our origins are various, that we contain, as the American poet Walt Whitman said of himself, multitudes, that we are, at the very least, Picts and Gaels with an admixture of Viking…

  These days, though, it seems, we have but two tribes—Catholic and Protestant—mutually exclusive, with their own customs, culture and territorial claims. Across the Irish Sea, in Ulster, where the IRA have launched a military campaign on the border with the Irish republic, such religious affiliations could be a matter of life and death. On the mainland of Scotland, the religion of your birth can determine your name, your schooling, your friends and your career prospects. Sometimes, it gets nasty and on these occasions it becomes a playground fight between two child psychopaths asserting the supremacy of their respective imaginary friends. Blood—good Scottish blood—has been shed. Lives—good Scottish lives—have been lost. For what?

  On my island home of Fascaray, the sectarian divide is exemplified in a generally benign but no less baffling way by our two main clachans or villages, Lusnaharra and Finnverinnity, and is most evident after major sporting fixtures in Glasgow involving Scotland’s most famous football teams.

  Three years ago it seemed, when we celebrated the first marriage across the divide, between Jessie Mackenzie, daughter of the kirk, and Francie MacDonald, Catholic former altar boy, that the Big Thaw had set in and that such absurd and arbitrary religious divisions had been consigned to the past.

  Sadly, the Big Thaw has been succeeded by an even Bigger Freeze as the old prejudices and patterns seem to have been hardened in permafrost.

  Any first-time visitor to the island with the most rudimentary knowledge of Scottish football will be able to tell on which side of the sectarian divide each village falls. West of our main harbour, the papists of Lusnaharra, who worship at the oldest extant holy building on the island, the former Teampull Beag, now the Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary, festoon their homes with the green-and-white favours of Celtic, while to the east, Finnverinnity is gay with the cerulean colours of the rival team. Lusnaharrans refer to the Finnverinnitians as “Huns” or “Blue Noses” while Finnverinnitians, most of whom are nominally members of the “Wee Free Kirk,” call Lusnaharra “the village without a Sabbath” and its inhabitants “Fenians” or “Taighs.” Abusive adjectival intensifiers are frequently used when drink is involved, which it usually is whenever the two teams clash in Glasgow, although a few devout Finnverinnitians share their minister’s view of alcohol as the devil’s work.

  I like to remain provocatively even-handed, identifying with the football equivalent of the Scottish Liberal Party (which offers an option to those myopically disdaining nationalism but weary of the Labour–Conservative divide) by wearing the red, yellow and black scarf of Glasgow’s other football team, the non-aligned, unofficially agnostic club of Partick Thistle.

  Watching an Old Firm game, as these hot-tempered Celtic–Rangers clashes are known, is like witnessing a full-scale re-enactment of the ancient wars between Ireland and England over ninety minutes on a two-and-a-half-acre field in Scotland. The Celtic fans, waving the tricolour flag, sing ballads celebrating the Irish rebellion of 1916 and denouncing the English Queen, while Rangers fans, flying a thousand Union Jacks, cast aspersions on the Pope, sing the English national anthem and make slighting references to the Irish famine.

  Now this rivalry is plain daft, as well as grotesquely ahistorical. For Scotland, as any attentive student of our nation’s history knows, takes its name from our country’s founding tribe, the Scotti, who came from Ireland; until the late Middle Ages the west of Scotland and Ireland fell under the same jurisdiction. These polarities, features of what my friend Hugh MacDiarmid has called the Caledonian Antisyzygy—the unity of contradictions that characterises the Scottish psyche—are but “twa haffets o the wan bawbee” (two sides of the one coin).

  It was Julius Caesar who wrote divide et impera—divide and rule—and it is a maxim that the English ken all too well. The tribalism of religion is a distraction and any Scot should put aside such infantile animosities and, regardless of affiliation, follow the example of his Irish cousins to pursue a destiny of mature self-determination.

  —Grigor McWatt, 1959, The Fascaray Compendium

  5 November 2014

  Mr. Kennedy has asked to see me after school. By the time I arrive, the other children have already left. He wants to speak to me privately so we leave Agnes alone in the empty classroom finishing her homework and we go outside to sit in the dusk, shivering in the sharp wind on a bench in the small play area behind the school.

  Niall Kennedy looks tired.

  “I’m a little concerned…” he says.

  “Concerned?” I feel a throb of panic.

  “She’s a bright child, Agnes. How do you feel she’s adapting to life here, away from her life in New York?”

  “She’s fine. Happy even. She likes nature, the outdoors. She’s made some friends…”

  “Well, forgive me…I don’t mean to pry, but I gather there’s been a recent change in family circumstances.”

  I bristle.

  “I don’t see what my break-up has got to do with anything. My ex-partner and I have done all we can to protect Agnes from the fall out.”

  “I’m sure you have, Miss McPhail.”

  “Mhairi.”

  “I’m sure you’ve done all you can. Mhairi.”

  “It’s not exactly an unusual situation. Or perhaps everyone you know is a member of a functioning two-parent nuclear family?”

  He folds his arms and sighs.

  “You’d be surprised,” he says.

  Now we’re both bristling. He tries another tack.

  “Her father is Italian, I assume.”

  “Italian-American. You worked that out from her last name? Bartoli? All by yourself?” I say, unable to restrain myself.

  “Look…Mhairi…I’ve no wish to create problems for you, or to impugn your parenting skills. We’re on the same side here. Agnes is our concern and she’s been exhibiting classic symptoms of emotional distress.”

  For a moment, I think there’s been a mistake. He’s talking about someone else’s child. Not sweet, open Agnes. He holds my gaze. I am astonished and seriously alarmed.

  “What symptoms?”

  He answers my question with one of his own.

  “Have you any idea where all the other children on the island are right now?”

  “Not doing homework in the classroom while their mothers are interrogated by
their teacher, that’s for sure. At home with their parents, I assume.”

  “No. You’re wrong. They’re all at a fireworks party—Aaron Schneider’s party at Finnverinnity House. They’ve all been invited. Every child on the island, except Agnes.”

  I am outraged. My poor, guileless, eager-to-please daughter, snubbed and excluded.

  “That is so mean,” I say, tears of anger springing to my eyes. “It’s bullying.”

  “Up to a point. We’re very vigilant about bullying here, on the lookout for it. We aim to stamp it out at the first sign…”

  “Well, you haven’t done so well in this case, have you?” I say, turning to look through the window at Agnes, diligently bent over her books while the island’s children make merry without her.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” he says.

  “How complicated can it be? My daughter’s been singled out and treated like a pariah. It’s your job to do something about it.”

  “As I say, she’s been displaying symptoms of emotional distress. The other children find it hard to deal with.”

  Are we really talking about the same child?

  “What symptoms?”

  “Exaggerating, fantasising, lying…”

  This can’t be Agnes he’s talking about; sweet, transparent, pure-hearted Agnes.

  “What lies?” I say.

  “Well, she told the class her father was a cowboy, a rodeo rider…”

  I rock back on the bench, incredulous.

  “Is that it? Really? For chrissakes, she’s a highly imaginative child. Give her a break.”

  “Then…” He pauses, “…she said he worked for the Mafia.”

  I laugh. The idea of Marco as a hit man is hilarious.

  “Do you have something against imagination here?” I ask. “It’s storytelling. Simple storytelling. That’s what kids do. Make stuff up—until humourless, conventional adults stamp it out of them.”

  I’ve gone too far but instead of taking the bait and snapping back at me, he lowers his voice and talks in the slow, measured way of a therapist dealing with a volatile client.

  “The class had a project. The theme was celebration and they were asked to write and draw scenes of family feasts and parties.”

  Ah. The project she was working on the other night; another night in which I pored over letters and documents and wrote another chapter of my book while Agnes companionably got on with her schoolwork, the lamp illuminating her solemn, determined little face while I deflected her questions.

  “Some chose the Auchwinnie Highland Games,” he continues. “One boy chose his uncle’s wedding in Lusnaharra. Finn O’Kane did St. Patrick’s Day. Ailsa, whose grandmother is Lithuanian, did St. Casimir’s Day and Aaron Schneider chose a music festival by Loch Ness. Agnes drew a rocket on the moon.”

  I laugh.

  “The Little Prince…” I say. “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. One of her favourite books…Is there a problem with that?”

  He shakes his head.

  “No. And yes. The project was supposed to be about family. She also told the class her father was an astronomer—she gave us a presentation about the night sky. And now she tells us he’s an astronaut.”

  “Right.” I put my hands in my pocket for warmth. It really is cold out here. “So you have a problem with fantasy?”

  “Not personally, no. But children are very alert to confabulation. Fibs. Whids. Lies. She won’t make friends this way and it will lead to a further sense of isolation.”

  He reaches for a stack of exercise books and hands one to me. I recognise Agnes’s distinctive writing, a series of splayed verticals and jostling lassoes. Several phrases leap from the page—“We waved goodbye to Dad and cryed, but not a lot.” And “We doant know how long he’ll be away but.” There is the rocket, nose deep in the pocked surface of the moon, and next to it a grinning figure in shorts and T-shirt, wearing a helmet like an upturned goldfish bowl, holds a purple suitcase. Below the picture, she has written “Bye Dad!”

  She must have shown the finished work to me that night for my approval. And, it occurs to me, I must have given it without even looking at the page—“Very good, Agnes…”

  I look up at Mr. Kennedy whose head tilts inquisitively. I feel winded. All I want to do is collect my daughter and go home. He hasn’t finished with me yet.

  “Children who are unhappy, isolated, who are going through difficult times at home, often resort to fantasy. They can brag, exaggerate and sometimes create another identity entirely for themselves.”

  “She’s okay,” I say, rising from the bench. “She needs to talk to her father, is all. She’ll be fine.”

  As I walk home with Agnes in silence, fireworks pop and flare over the night sky.

  Sang o Solitude

  Cantie the loon, whase cark an wiss

  His kin’s ain croft is tae him bliss,

  Cadgy tae pech his hamelt air,

  In his ain hauch.

  Whase kye gie milk, whase fairm gies breid,

  Whase baurley fills his quaich tae brim,

  Whase shaws in simmer gie him scug,

  In winter wairmth.

  Seilie wha kens an disnae fash,

  As oors an years gang douce agley,

  A sonsie hert an saucht o mynd,

  Wheesht aw day,

  Soond roo by nicht, his thochts his ane,

  Thegether mixt wi naitur’s chairms,

  An solitude, alane at last,

  Awa frae hairm.

  Sae lat me live, no seen, unkennt,

  Sae ungrutten lat me dee,

  Skyced frae the warld, and nae a stane

  Clype whaur Ah lee.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Alexander Pope, 1960*

  * * *

  * From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.

  “A pall of grey smoke hangs over Balnasaig Farm,” wrote McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium in October 1960, “as Tam Macpherson stokes the funeral pyre of his Galloway and Aberdeen Angus herds.” The island’s cattle had been stricken by foot-and-mouth disease. “The choking smoke is once again proof, if proof were needed, that our wee island sanctuary is not completely immune from the scourges that beset the wider world.”

  Dramas at sea also provided McWatt with a regular harvest of stories, triumphs as well as tragedies, for his Compendium notebooks and Pibroch columns that year. The Scottish fishery protection cruiser Thor capsized in a November gale in 1960 off Mhor Sgheir reef with the loss of three lives, and two weeks later a Moray trawler, the Finlay, was lost in an easterly storm with all ten crew, despite the heroic interventions of the new Auchwinnie lifeboat, the Morag May, crewed by local volunteers including the Fascaray brothers Jamie and Francie MacDonald.

  The week after the Finlay was lost, Francie was forced to brave wild seas in an open boat on a personal errand of mercy when his wife Jessie gave birth prematurely to their second child. Baby John-Joe weighed just three and a half pounds and a nurse, bringing oxygen and other equipment needed to ensure the baby’s survival, was sent from Auchwinnie on the Gudgie. Fierce winds prevented the puffer from landing and Francie, with his younger brother Jamie, cousin Donnie, and Tormud and Alec Campbell, went out in the Silver Darling to meet the Gudgie by the uninhabited island of Plodda, where it had found shelter.

  The transfer of the young nurse, Marsaili MacAskill, and her equipment was effected in appalling conditions. The Morag May lifeboat, whose coxswain was Marsaili’s father Mungo, had been called out that morning—without the MacDonald brothers—to deal with a stranded tanker west of Auchwinnie, so it was down to the valiant little Silver Darling to save the day, and the baby. At times, the Campbells’ small launch all but disappeared under the twelve-foot waves and on the journey back to Finnverinnity the outboard motor flooded. The MacDonalds and the Campbells took up oars, rowing against the fierce currents until the rowlocks broke within sight of the harbour. They were fin
ally helped to safety by Roddy McIntosh and Joseph McKinnon, who braved the mountainous seas in small fishing skiffs to rescue them.

  The following month Francie and Jamie joined the Morag May when it was called out from Auchwinnie to aid an Aberdeen trawler, the Northern Quine, which ran aground after a nine-day fishing trip and was flooded beneath the Calasay cliffs. McWatt watched the dramatic rescue operation—“the very definition of seamanship and courage”—as the lifeboat plucked to safety all fourteen crewmen by “breeches buoy” winches, “only minutes before the Northern Quine, in full majesty, finally sank below the heaving sea.”

  Mungo MacAskill was awarded the Royal National Lifeboat Institute silver medal for gallantry and his Morag May crew were given “vellum commendations”; Jamie MacDonald, who went on to marry Mungo’s daughter Marsaili, framed his citation and put it above the bar in the Finnverinnity Inn, where it still hangs today.

  In his Pibroch column and in the Compendium, McWatt recorded lighter moments on the island that year, too. The hula-hoop craze reached Fascaray and a competition held in Finnverinnity Hall was won by a game young girl from Glasgow, Sophia McKinnon, over visiting Fascaray relatives during the city’s annual “Fair Fortnight” holiday, when all the factories closed. Concerns were expressed by church elders that “unseemly gyrations” might corrupt the morals of the island’s youth. McWatt expressed reservations about the importation of “American fads.”

  “We have, and only just, managed to resist complete cultural extinction at the hands of the English. How strange it is to see our young embrace inane Yankee ways at the expense of our own traditions of ceilidh music, dancing and storytelling,” he wrote for the Auchwinnie Pibroch in “Frae Mambeag Brae.”

  He set himself against local opinion by criticising new Department of Agriculture loans to crofters for housing improvements, which saw several Finnverinnitians constructing piping systems to pump water into their homes.