McWatt disapproved, writing in his column: “We have a new status symbol on the island—the kitchen tap. Like all status symbols it is a triumph of vacuous consumerism over common sense. Here we have burns and buckets and the finest water on earth in its natural setting at our disposal. The arrangement was good enough for our ancestors. What need do we have of pipes and taps? If any of modernity’s contrivances make a jot of improvement to our lives, I’ll eat my bunnet.”
He did his best to hold out in Calasay but, ironically, it was his lyrical celebration of the island that ensured he could not entirely keep the modern world at bay. “Hame tae Fascaray” had been recorded by the folk singer Ewan MacColl and the song was becoming a standard in the smoky cellar folk clubs of the UK. Occasional parties of bearded men, Scottish city-dwellers wearing fishermen’s sweaters, would make pilgrimages to the Finnverinnity Inn to drink and sing the song in situ. Though McWatt was scornful of MacColl’s credentials—“He’s an Englishman! A fake. His real name’s Jimmy Miller!”—he did not return the royalty cheques that came in, along with regular letters from Lilias in Edinburgh.
She gave him news of the Menzies’ set—“George brought in his new fiancée (Sydney’s old flighty-piece Stella C) and we circled each other, teeth bared, like lionesses. She’s smart, has a fine head of hair, can hold her drink and will run rings round the Orcadian hermit.” Lilias herself had embarked on an affair with Archie Aitken. “He’s not you, but he’ll do,” she wrote. Aitken’s wife Meg, a bony, highly strung university librarian—described by Lilias as “crabbit”—later retaliated by having an affair with Willie McCracken and within three months the love quadrangle spun apart, culminating in an undignified scrap outside Menzies’ which left all four bloodied, bruised and facing criminal charges for breach of the peace and assault.
Up at Calasay, Grigor McWatt, who was never given to open displays of emotion and shied from personal drama, must have felt glad to be out of it.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Spaes o Aefauldness
Tae see a warld in a puckle o saund,
An a heiv’n in a machair flooer,
Haud mairchlessness in your haun,
An ayebidin time in an oor.
The lairdie’s robes an tinker’s rags
Are puddock-stuils on miser’s bags.
A truth that’s tellt wi ill intent
Dings aw the whids ye can invent.
Joy an dule are brawly flaucht,
A fykie tweed for beekin thocht.
Ablo oor ivery dule an pyne
Rins threids o seil like gowden twine.
The hoor an gemmster, by the state
Appruived, swall up the nation’s fate.
The limmer’s yowt frae brae tae knowe
Maun flaucht auld England’s winding sowe.
The winner’s heuch, the loser’s feuch,
For England’s corpse will dig a sheuch.
—Grigor McWatt, efter William Blake, 1962*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
6 November 2014
“Get oot as early as ye can,” wrote the poet. I got out all right, fleeing family, class and culture. Out, and so far away I am comprehensively deracinated. So what have I become? A self-loathing Canadian? A bogus Brooklynite? Or just another counterfeit Celt? In a globalised age of dissolving borders, devolution, fabulous racial and cultural meldings, multiple identities and sometimes murderous alienation, I know my confusions amount to no more than a little local difficulty. Nothing to “greet” about.
But then I abandoned my relationship too, fleeing all the way here, looking for a sense of connection that now seems spurious, the consequence of childhood bewilderment and a career spent sifting through dead people’s garbage. I’m in danger of becoming a heritage apostate. I need to prioritise my present and my daughter’s future, not the past of some misanthropic stranger.
Watching Agnes collect seashells on Lusnaharra Strand, humming quietly to herself, I feel a wounding guilt. We should have given her a sibling. She’s such a reflective, inward child. The problem was timing. Marco and I wanted the same thing but not at the same moment. When I was broody, watching my friends with new babies, remembering only the blissed-out hyperspace that attended Agnes’s arrival and forgetting the shock, chaos and sleep deprivation, he was too caught up in his work and anxious about money. Or maybe he recalled all too keenly the shock and chaos and, perfectly reasonably, didn’t want to go through that again. But when he felt more secure in his job and was ready to contemplate fatherhood once more, my career was lifting off and I was reluctant to take time out.
Even one brother or sister might have taught Agnes the true art of friendship, desensitising her in a useful way and showing her that it is possible to fall out with someone and still love them—though I have to face the fact that, even with the foil of Aidan, my good-natured, uncomplicated brother with whom I quarrelled on a regular basis, this might not have been a lesson I’ve learned so well myself.
Tonight, we’ll Skype her father. Or rather she’ll Skype her father. I have emailed him, polite but distant, and received a reply in the same tone. Agnes has installed the software. We’ll check the connection and then I’ll dress the set. The look I’m aiming for is happy, functioning, Appalachian Rustic Chic—a fire in the grate, Agnes’s shell collection in prominent view, a duck-egg-blue mohair blanket over her chair and, I can’t resist, a passive-aggressive vase of dried flowers, papery white discs, whose name, Lunaria annua, I didn’t register until after I’d bought them at the Auchwinnie craft fair. Marco will recognise them straight off, and instantly summon their common name, honesty. With luck he’ll wince, but I won’t be there to see it. I’ll transfer my centre of operations, my papers, to my bedroom, out of range of screen and webcam, and leave them to it.
FRAE A CALASAY PANTRY—A BRIEF INVENTORY OF SCOTS VICTUALS AND DISHES
The superiority of our educational and legal systems over those of our southern neighbour is widely known. So it is with our cuisine. These receipts, or recipes,* are the folk varse of our womenfolk, part of a long oral tradition that proves once more the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of Scottish culture, despite the suppressions and depredations following the Act of Union.
Athol Brose
black bun
clapshot
clootie dumpling
cock a’ leekie
cranachan
crappit heid
Cullen skink
Finnan haddie
Forfar bridies
fruit pudding
guga
het pint
hot toddy
mealie creashie
neeps and tatties
nettle soup
oatcakes
pancakes or drop scones
partan bree
pea brae
roastit bubbly-jock
rumbledethumps
Scots broth
Selkirk bannock
skirlie
sowans
stovies
tablet
tattie scones
Robert Burns, to whose cult of personality I do not subscribe, did to his credit extol the virtues of Scottish fare, especially in relation to the cuisine of our European neighbours. He dismissed “French ragout, / Or olio that would sicken a sow, / Or fricassee would make her vomit.”
Robert Bird, writing in the nineteenth century, praised parritch and damned fancy foreign fare.
Gie France her puddocks and ragouts,
Gie England puddings, beefs, and stews,
Gie Ireland taties, shamrocks, soos,
And land sae bogie,
True Scotsmen still will scaud their mou’s
Ower Scotland’s cogie.
Close to my own home, the humblest provender has inspired the most l
yrical varse: the wild carrot that grows abundantly in my far corner of Fascaray is the staple of many local soups and stews, and it is also the subject of a Gaelic praise poem (my owersettin follows):
Is e mil fon talamh
A th’ anns a’ churran gheamhraidh,
Eadar Latha an Naoimh Aindreadh agus An Nollaig
Honey underground
Is the winter carrot,
Between St. Andrew’s Day and Christmas.
The English—and here I feel a rare pity for our southern neighbours—have neither the tradition of praise poetry nor the cuisine that could inspire it. The cockney music-hall standard “Boiled Beef and Carrots” simply makes my point.
As they say round here: “Ken the scran, ken the man.”
—Grigor McWatt, 1960, The Fascaray Compendium
* * *
* See Appendix I.
PAIRT THRIE
Oor Ain Fowk
There were sudden, seismic changes in the island’s places of worship in 1962. Ranald Paterson’s wife Wilma died in July, “keeling over while tending the heathers in her rockery garden,” according to McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium, and her grief-stricken widower left the manse and returned to Milngavie to live out his retirement with his niece.
In Lusnaharra Father Maclennan breathed his last during Benediction a month later, subsiding to the floor of the altar, McWatt wrote, “in a heap of frayed ecclesiastical vestments after the Tantum Ergo.” The altar boys, Fergus McKinnon and Padruig MacRae, “nudged each other and bit their lips to stifle their laughter before they realised that this collapse was not simply the stumble of an old man partial to whisky. Then they began to weep.”
Father Maclennan’s wake at the Finnverinnity Inn was, McWatt noted, “according to those few present who remembered it, a memorable affair,” attended by drinkers of both persuasions and, as in McWatt’s case, of none. As he recalled later in the Pibroch: “We marked Father Col’s death not with three minutes of silence but three days of mayhem.”
McWatt composed the memorial poem “Coronach for Father Col” (based on the Gaelic dirge “An Tuiream Bais”), which is now one of the most requested verses at Canadian and New Zealand funerals for those claiming Scots descent.
Yer awa hame this nicht tae yer hame o winter,
Tae yer hame o hairst, o spring, and o simmer;
Yer gangin hame this nicht tae yer ayelastin hame,
Tae yer bed for ayeways, tae yer ayebidin dover.
The requiem Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary was, by McWatt’s account, “beautiful and dignified,” conducted by a monsignor from the mainland accompanied by Fascaray’s new Catholic priest, “a pale and watchful young man with an Irish name and a background in the coal fields of North Lanarkshire.”
The arrival of Ranald Paterson’s successor, George Ferguson, “a stout bachelor with a waxed moustache,” wrote McWatt, prompted an unprecedented event—an invitation extended to the Reverend Ferguson and his congregation to a tea party on the lawn of the Big House. It was, according to McWatt’s description in The Fascaray Compendium, “a balmy May day of blue skies and soft breezes. Unsmiling servants covered trestle tables with white linen cloths, on which were arranged urns of tea, rows of china cups and plates piled with sandwiches, buns and biscuits.”
Grigor McWatt, though not a member of the Free Church congregation, had been invited on account of his celebrity—the popular Scottish tenor Kenneth McKellar had recorded “Hame tae Fascaray” on his new album, propelling the island from total obscurity to mere isolation and, according to Effie MacLeod, bringing in more envelopes to Calasay, “a fair few of them containing cheques, as well as the odd bit of fan mail. Awful odd in some cases—they’d came up with the strangest names and addresses for him. I don’t know how they found their way to Fascaray. He’d hand them back to Shuggie, ‘return to sender,’ without even opening them.” McWatt didn’t return the laird’s invitation and failed to attend the party, sending his young lodger, Donald MacInnes, in his place. Donald brought home to Calasay “a handful of tea cakes and a first-hand account of the event,” which McWatt recorded in the Compendium.
“The laird, in scarlet corduroys, walked round the garden, hands behind his back, making small talk with the men, ‘warm for the time of year…salmon biting yet? jolly good, jolly good…’ while Minty Montfitchett asked Effie MacLeod for the recipe for black bun—‘Is it like meat loaf?’ asked Lady Montfitchett, ‘I can’t abide meat loaf.’ ”
The laird’s sons, Clarence and Peregrine, “shared cigarettes in the shrubbery with Mary-Kate and Shona McKinnon, lively Lusnaharra girls who had managed to sneak into the party despite their affiliations to the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary rather than the kirk.” Jamie MacDonald had helped Rab McNab over to the Big House and settled him into a wicker bathchair by the croquet lawn, “from where the former landlord of our island howff surveyed the scene with a glazed and benign look, his mouth covered with cake crumbs.”
The hospitality that day at Finnverinnity House might have signalled a hopeful new era in Fascaray’s feudal arrangements, a thawing of manners and mores reflecting the mood of what would be called down south the Swinging Sixties. But, as Lilias Hogg later tauntingly observed, “apart from the weekend folk hoolies at the inn,” the only thing that was swinging in Fascaray at that time was “the laird’s kilt at the Hogmanay ceilidh.” The Big House Tea Party of 1962 reflected change, certainly—the notion of the auld laird inviting the Finnverinnity hordes to break bread with him would once have been unthinkable—and events were to prove it was the first phase of the new laird’s long farewell to the island. But the party, which had begun so well, was, according to McWatt, broken up by the arrival of “a swarm of midges which sent the laird, his family and staff, shrieking indoors, arms windmilling, while the islanders, more inured to the native pests, made their way home after helping themselves to the remaining sandwiches.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Many visitors ask me about the midge, the tiny flying insect (meanbh-chuileag in Gaelic, Culicoides impunctatus in Latin) with a bite that belies its size. It’s a social creature and swarms in great enveloping cumulonimbi from late spring to late summer, turning the well-equipped visitor into a veil-wearing denizen of some Eastern harem. (By East, I am referring here to Constantinople, not Edinburgh.) We locals are constantly devising new ways to avoid their assaults. Some take up smoking, putting their faith in the repellent effects of nicotine. Others swear by a cheap face cream sold in the village store. I knew a priest at Glenfinnan who washed himself in paraffin in a bid to deter them. (This method also had the unexpected advantage of keeping his congregation at a distance.)
The midges certainly have their uses. Wullie Maclean from Killiebrae told me of a kindly uncle whose wife was afflicted in middle age by a sudden madness—fear of neighbours, of sheep, of wind and clouds, of portents seen in fallen leaves and blades of grass. Several times Donal Maclean found Annie-Kate roaming Doonmara cliffs barefoot with a wild look in her eyes, beating her breast and keening, and he had to steer her gently home.
Then one fine summer’s day Uncle Donal was obliged to leave their isolated croft and go out on his boat to check his lobster pots. He didn’t want to leave Annie-Kate unattended but he had no choice; he couldn’t lock her in the house—then as now, home security was not a priority in the islands and she would have been out and off in a second. In desperation, he took her into their small field, tethered her with a long rope to a hawthorn tree, which would give her plenty of shade from the sun, left her with a pan of water and set out for his boat.
Once at sea, he found his creels had become entangled with a drifting buoy. To set them free again was slow and fiddly work. He was anxious about Annie-Kate but the job had to be done. Eventually, much later than he’d planned, he made his way to the shore and, now in a fever of anxiety, hurried back to his croft.
> There he found his poor wife sitting under the tree, desperately batting at the cloud of midges which had descended soon after he’d left her. She was a changed woman. Aunt Annie-Kate had endured for hours the torment which many cannot thole for more than a minute—and the experience had driven her completely sane.
There is, however, no doubt that a haar of spiteful midges can spoil a summer’s evening. But despite the inconvenience of these pesky creatures, I regard the midge as the Scotsman’s friend. I have no wish to eliminate them, indeed I celebrate them, because they perform the useful service of repelling the English.
—Grigor McWatt, August 1962, Auchwinnie Pibroch*
* * *
* Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
See Me
Ah handsel masel, an sing masel,
An whit Ah ken ye’ll ken,
For ivery gru belanging tae me as guid belangs tae you.
Ah slinge an bid ma saul,
Dwaumin ower a straik o simmer gress.
Alane hyne awa in the hills Ah snoke. See me,
Stravaigin dumfoondert at ma ain lichtness an glee.
As gloamin faws Ah seek a siccar scug tae ware the nicht.
Kinnlin a gleed an sottlin the caller-killt meat,
Doverin ower the gaithert leaves, ma collie at ma feet.
Wha has done his day’s darg an swallaed his tea?
Wha sees me, an seeks tae stravaig wi me?
—Grigor McWatt, efter Walt Whitman, 1962*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
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