7 November 2014
With the paucity of documents or photographs from McWatt’s early life, I turn to the Internet. Broadband only came to the island last year and can still be maddeningly sluggish. I’ve set up my laptop on the kitchen table and, with Agnes’s help, using a password and username provided by Ailish, log on to Scotia’sFolk, a genealogy website used mostly, I imagine, by fellow Canadians and New Zealanders agonising over which tartan they’re entitled to wear at Burns Night suppers. The website gives access to digital scans of statutory birth, marriage and death records from 1855, old parish registers of baptisms, weddings and funerals, some dating back to the sixteenth century, as well as wills and censuses from 1841, all handwritten. Those Presbyterians were punctilious record keepers.
In 1850, the year of McWatt’s grandfather’s birth, the old parish records of Auchwinnie and Fascaray list, as far as I can make out (the calligraphy is challenging), several newborn McWatts, Macquats, MacWatties, McQhauts and MacWhitts—two Anguses (born in January and September), a Duncan, an Isobel, an Ishbel, an Elspeth and a Euphemia as well as a Mary (listed as “Elizabeth Campbell and Archibald Macquat’s natural child,” meaning illegitimate; Mary would be destined to carry the stigma of sin for life). The fathers’ occupations are given as crofter (four), fisherman (two) and “gardner.” Their mothers’ occupations—though even with newborns at their breast they would have helped with the fishing and crofting—were left unsaid. Using the five surname variants, I turn to the Glasgow census records for 1861, the first census for the city after the family’s clearance from the island in 1853.
In the city parish of Barony, now known as Anderston, at number 3 Grace Street—a long-vanished tenement, I guess—an Aonghas McKwitt is listed as one of twenty-six residents. His age is given as eleven, his place of birth Inverness-shire, and his occupation “scholar.” It seems a pretty good fit. But the birthplace of the head of the household, “a shipbuilder’s labourer” called Roderick McKwitt, presumably Aonghas’s father, is listed as Enniskillen, Ireland. Roderick’s wife, Margaret, whose occupation is given as “an earthenware painteress”—city records were more scrupulous and less sexist than their rural counterparts—is also described as Irish by birth. Five other children are listed in the family—from eight months to seventeen years old—which definitively rules out a Grigor McWatt connection. He was, he said famously, “a Scots singleton, from a long line of Scots singletons.”
I search the register of Glasgow deaths, now using the five surname variants and two forename variants of Aonghas. Nothing comes up, though I note in passing that Roderick McKwitt, widower, ended his days in the Barony workhouse and died of “senile decay,” that Archibald Macqhuatt, an unemployed iron planer, aged fifty-six and single, died of “asphyxiation by suspension”—the poor guy hanged himself—and on the same page, William McWhittie, aged seventeen, described as a coal miner, is recorded as dying of “inflammation of the bowel,” while two and four pages on, the causes of death of Helen MacWat (aged two) and Margaret McQuitt (aged nine—Agnes’s age) are listed, respectively, as “croup” and “acute lobar pneumonia.” So much tragedy—it reads like the outline of a Zola novel.
I turn to the statutory register of marriages for the city hoping to find a little cheer, as well as a few facts. I’m searching for the late-nineteenth-century marriage of a McWatt, Macquat, McQhaut, MacWhitt or a McKwitt to a McDougall. Or possibly a MacDougal. Or even a McDugel. No luck and little cheer—I’m distracted by the number of couples whose names are signed with an “X—his/her mark.” The statutory birth record for Ossian should be more fruitful—it’s an unusual name with few possible spelling variations. Using Grigor McWatt’s chronology, it seems his father was probably born around 1885, but again, with a ten-year time frame, using all the surnames, I find not a single match, nor any name that comes near to it. And of Grigor’s own birth in November 1921 there is no trace.
I feel the familiar welling despair and self-loathing generated by too much Internet activity—I’ve just spent ninety minutes exhuming fragments of dead strangers’ pasts and, apart from illuminating the general misery and deprivation of earlier generations of Scots, all it has revealed are the idiosyncrasies of spelling, the comparative unreliability of record keeping and the infinite variety, and frequent illegibility, of nineteenth- and twentieth-century handwriting. I log out.
Good timing. At that moment, my present and my future walk through the door. Agnes is wearing one of her secret smiles, which gives her face a pixieish cast.
“Can I Skype Papa again?” she asks.
She has her own more pressing genealogical quest to attend to.
The locals didn’t learn of the laird’s sale of Balnasaig Lodge until the arrival on the pier, shortly after the 1962 Big House Tea Party, of three English visitors wearing what McWatt described in the Compendium as “ill-fitting oilskins.” Neville Booth, “balding, long-nosed and mild in appearance and manner—a nervy oystercatcher of a man,” fussed over their suitcases with Evelyn Fletcher while his wife Althea, “an aloof heron to Fletcher’s bustling puffin,” gave orders.
They didn’t look like the usual visitors to the island. In the early 1960s, apart from the laird’s shooting parties and inspectors from the Fisheries Board, the only outsiders who came to Fascaray were occasional parties of venturesome birdwatchers, or archaeologists, sent by the Museum of Scottish Antiquities to scratch away at the soil above Lusnaharra and exult over mud-caked fragments of Neolithic pottery. Among the numerous bags of the Booth party, no guns, binoculars or spades were on view.
It soon emerged, as the trio squeezed into Francie MacDonald’s Ford Anglia with their luggage, “that they were not visitors but new residents, having taken possession of Balnasaig Lodge at a knock-down price; a consequence of Torquil Montfitchett’s recent embarrassments at the baccarat table.”
They planned, they told Francie on the drive north, to set up a “study centre” in the Lodge. Asked what subject they would be studying, the visitors exchanged looks that Francie described to McWatt as “gey shifty.”
McWatt recorded Francie’s account in the Compendium:
It was Neville Booth who finally spoke.
“We’re here to pursue the study of truth,” he said.
“Aye, right.* Aren’t we all?” said Francie, as they rattled along the potholed track to the Booths’ new home.
Althea Booth felt that more explanation was needed. Her spirit guide, she said, had brought them to “this ancient place of mists, myths and mountains in search of ancient wisdom.”
“If it’s wisdom you’re looking for, your best bet is the Finnverinnity Inn,” Francie told them as they pulled up outside the grey crenellated bulk of Balnasaig. “You’ll find plenty of ancient spirit guides there, dispensing wisdom every night for the price of a decent dram.”
The most generous Fascaradians regarded the island’s first permanent English residents as harmless but dotty curiosities—“bampots,” who, it was thought, wouldn’t stay long but in the short term might bring some welcome revenue to local business.
Cynics, chief among them McWatt, regarded the new occupants of Balnasaig with open hostility as incomers, the enemy within, threatening island traditions with their bizarre Sassenach ways. “They are English,” he wrote in the Compendium, “which is bad enough, but also pan-loaf English, and unlike their compatriot, coeval and vendor Lord Montfitchett, they do not have the ameliorating virtue of spending two-thirds of the year in England.”
Even among the more easy-going islanders, the Balnasaig Seekers’ quest to return to “ancient truths and certainties” elicited bafflement. The real struggle for Fascaradians was to overcome the ancient certainties—feudalism and a creaking infrastructure that hadn’t changed since the Middle Ages—and enter the modern world.
Joseph McKinnon, lobster fisherman and father of seven from Lusnaharra, proved to be a pioneer in this respect. With a new Department of Agriculture grant, he installed a septic tank and b
uilt a generator shed from railway sleepers taken from the recently closed Auchwinnie East station. McKinnon seemed to have provoked a brief island rage for home improvement. Cottages and blackhouses were re-roofed with slate, leaking byres were patched up and several old Nissen huts that had housed the lower-ranking soldiers at the Big House during its SOE days were retrieved from a dump east of Finnverinnity House and redeployed as grain stores and piggeries.
Even McWatt, who a decade earlier had railed against the disappearance of vernacular architecture and the “restless urge to modernise” and only two years before had questioned whether any of “modernity’s contrivances make a jot of improvement to our lives,” was stirred to upgrade An Tobar and finally replace his corrugated-iron roof with slates, install a fireplace with a flue, pipe water from the burn into the house, glaze windows, put in stairs to a new attic bedroom and take delivery of a newfangled compost toilet. But these changes were, as he noted in the Compendium, superficial. Fascaray remained—to the satisfaction of McWatt as well as the incomers of Balnasaig—an island “bound by ancient tradition to our ancestors who lived here at the dawn of human history.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Scots double positive denoting scepticism.
For centuries male Fascaradians have sailed in the autumn, at the time of the ripe barley and the fruiting buckthorn, to hunt the plump young solan geese or gannets—the guga—near their nesting sites on the uninhabited rock pinnacles of Plodda and Grodda. No true Fascaradian can suffer vertigo since the scaling of these granite towers is done without the aid of mountaineers’ crampons or picks. Using long poles we prise the birds from the nest, kill them instantly with a rock, then remove their heads and pluck them. Peat fires are lit and any remaining feathers are scorched from the skin. We split the carcasses with a knife, gut them, rub them with salt, stack them up in tall broch towers and cover them with tarpaulin until we have sufficient pickled meat*—usually about two thousand birds in all—to see us through the winter.
One distinguished visitor to these islands, the clergyman Donald “Dean” Munro, observed this practice in the sixteenth century with a commendable even-handedness that our censorious southern neighbours would do well to emulate today.
Be sex myle of sea east from Fasquarhay lye two iles callit Ploethe and Groethe, ane myle lang, without grasse or hedder, with highe blacke craigs, and black fouge thereupon part of them. This ile is full of wylde foulis, and quhen foulis hes ther birdes, men out of the parochin of Lusnaharra and Finnverinnitie will sail ther, and stay ther seven or aught dayes, and to fetch hame with them their boitt full of dray wild foulis, with wyld foulis fedders.
Squeamish southerners of the sentimentalist tendency, including recent arrivals in Balnasaig, might baulk at this ancient practice, but their domestic cats kill many more birds than the most accomplished team of Fascaradian guga hunters could ever hope to in a lifetime. The solan goose population is thriving and the guga hunt fosters a greater sense of community, history and a link with landscape than does the breeding of flightless birds for ritualised killing on the laird’s moors, the mass slaughter of our stags by public-school types in tweed trews, or fox hunts led by tally-hoing scurryvaigs from the English shires.
Strange to think that just as Scotland’s movement for political independence begins to grow, Fascaray should be infested by a new gang of colonialist relicts: the English occultist bampots of Balnasaig Lodge.
—Grigor McWatt, 1964, The Fascaray Compendium
* * *
* See Appendix I for recipes.
9 November 2014
New York may have felt more like home than any other place I’ve lived but I could never truly pass as an American. Marco spotted it straight away. It wasn’t so much my accent; what gave me away as an incomer, or an outsider, was my habit of self-deprecation.
Marco insisted, though I have no memory of it, that on our first date, when he complimented me on my hair—then long and comparatively lustrous—I told him I had a bald patch; I even went to pains to point it out, he said, though when he looked he failed to find it.
Any dress I wore that he liked I would dismiss, citing its thrift-store provenance and price or pointing to a poorly repaired zipper or a moth hole. At first this beguiled him. Later it irritated him, along with my general wariness.
“Relax, can’t you? Just this once? Can’t you take a compliment with good grace? Do you have to smack it right back in my face? It’s an insult to the complimenter, another form of poor mouth, this habitual public self-laceration. It’s modesty to the point of grandiosity.”
My trait did not serve me well in job interviews. Asked to outline my strengths, I preferred to elaborate on my weaknesses. The fact that I did so in a patrician accent may have neutralised the effect, but then, bolstering the negatives, there was the public-speaking problem. I don’t suppose Karmic Kate had difficulty accepting admiration or addressing her class in anything but tones of silvery self-confidence. Nor can I see her admitting to a bout of flatulence during her morning’s sun salutation or confessing to a debilitating outbreak of athlete’s foot or thrush.
“What’s wrong with a bit of modesty?” I asked Marco, before I pushed it too far. “You should try it sometime. The trouble with you and your friends, with all Americans in fact, is you suffer from self-loathing deficit disorder.”
At that point he reminded me: my daughter is an American too—blithe, confident up to a point but never bumptious, generous, concerned for the welfare of others and optimistic, she is a living rebuke to all stereotypes.
Today, Agnes has asked if she can Skype her grandparents in Toronto. I mask my reluctance and get through to my brother, who is as blithe and unsurprised to hear from me as if I were living in the next street, and he agrees to set up a call.
—
My mother and father sit uneasily side by side on their couch, a webcam version of Grant Wood’s farmer painting, without the pitchfork. Canadian Gothic says it all. Their distance seems defensive. Since my teens they’ve always circled me cautiously, as if I were a primed grenade. Then Aidan leans in and waves, softening the mood, and Agnes does the rest. After twenty minutes of her excited chatter—“…and we went into this cave where a harper disappeared and then we saw Great-Grandpa McPhail’s house in Killiebrae…”—we’re all smiling. We agree to be in touch again soon.
There seems to have been some sort of rapprochement between Agnes and the other kids. She had a sleepover last night with Ailsa and Oonagh, and on Friday, Mr. Kennedy arranged an outing to the pool in Auchwinnie followed by a matinee at the cinema (Disney. But what do I expect? Werner Herzog?). Apparently Aaron and Finn fought to sit next to Agnes on the ferry.
There’s also been a rapprochement of sorts between me and Niall Kennedy. Last night while Agnes was over at Ailsa’s we met for a drink in the Finnverinnity Inn. The decor was not nearly as brutally butch as I’d imagined, the restroom was acceptably clean and the music—fishermen Shonnie MacDonald and Donal MacEwan playing uilleann pipes and accordion—was surprisingly good.
Niall asked me how I thought Agnes was doing.
“You tell me,” I said. “She always seems fine to me.”
“She’s a lovely child,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happening at home but she seems much more at ease at school now and the other children have picked up on that.”
“I must be getting something right, for a change.”
He ignored the barb and asked me about my work. He knew McWatt slightly, he said, and had visited him in Calasay.
“We would play chess and he liked me to read to him. Mostly poetry. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Yeats. Especially Yeats. He liked to hear my Irish accent, even though Yeats himself had the most aristocratic Anglo intonation. Have you heard the recording of him reading ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’? Hilarious.”
I asked him what he’d thought of McWatt.
>
“A cantankerous old man, sure. But he had great integrity and he was passionate about the island. There are some from round here who wouldn’t hear a bad word about him.”
I’ve yet to meet them, I said.
“You will.”
As for McWatt’s poetry, Niall was circumspect.
“I’m no judge. I’m more of a down-the-line Heaney man myself. But I admired his commitment to his art and his tenacity.”
He offered to help with the museum—“any labouring, transporting, cajoling. You’ve got a big job there but this could be the best thing that’s ever happened to the island.”
I thanked him. Too curtly, perhaps. For me, there’s always been a difficult line between a simple acknowledgement of kindness and an undignified display of tail-wagging. Gratitude—something else I’ve never been much good at.
Lin
Whit is this life wi worries cowpt,
We hav nae lin tae bide an gowp?—
Nae lin tae bide aneath the boughs,
An gowp as lang as coos an yowes:
Nae lin tae see, when shaws we pass,
Whaur wee cons dern their nuts in gress:
Nae lin tae see, in braid daylicht,
Burns fu o starns, like skies at nicht:
Nae lin tae birl as Brawness keeks;
An watch her pirl, on dinkly feet:
Nae lin tae wait till her gab can
Braiden that smile her een began?
A puir life this if, wi worries cowpt,
We havnae lin tae bide an gowp.
—Grigor McWatt, efter W. H. Davies, 1959*
* * *
* 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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