After young Donald MacInnes arrived in Calasay in 1959, McWatt was freer to spend time in Edinburgh, knowing that back home the earnest lad—he was fifteen, but the concept of teenagers had only recently been invented—had proved himself a fit custodian of An Tobar, happy to run the house, till the soil, tend the animals and ensure that the place was clean and relatively dry when the poet returned home, “begrimed with soot, deafened by city noises,” as McWatt wrote, his ears ringing from the competitive chatter of poets in drink.
McWatt had a love-hate relationship with the nation’s capital that had once been, as he liked to point out, the hub of the European Enlightenment. But by the middle of the twentieth century, after the adversity of war and economic hardship, it had become an inward-looking and unforgiving city. “It’s no surprise,” he wrote, “that Edinburgh is the most English of our cities. In this huddle of architectural conceit and squalor, chilly commerce, Presbyterian rectitude and middle-class conformity strive to ignore the adjacent misery of its pitiful slums.”
The city earned its nickname, Auld Reekie, as smoke from thirty thousand coal fires—“black pennants streamin frae heich lums,” McWatt wrote—mingled with the stench from the breweries and turned the air yellow. “Sometimes the smog is so thick, I cannae see ma ain haun in front o my coupon,” McWatt complained in a letter to Hogg in 1963. In such a city of perpetual night it was inevitable that men and women—though it was mostly men—would gather for comfort in the intimate warmth of a public house.
McWatt’s journey to the capital, first by foot, bicycle or tractor, then ferry and rail, was usually made in high spirits as he anticipated the cheer of good company and stimulating talk after months of silence—when Donald arrived on the island, he was instructed to “speak only when spoken to”—broken occasionally by “Fascaradian blether” at the inn. One of McWatt’s best-loved translations, “Tae a Wee Bauchle,” was written on the steam train from Auchwinnie to Fort William, en route to Edinburgh in 1965.
Och why do you daunder throu glens in gluives
Missin sae much an sae much?
Och pudgetie wee bauchle wham naebdy loues
Why do you daunder throu glens in gluives,
When the heather’s as saft as the diddies o doos
An chitterin douce tae the touch?
Och why do you daunder throu glens in gluives
Missin sae much an sae much?*
In the early years of McWatt’s relationship with Lilias Hogg, he spent several nights at her flats and bedsits (she moved four times in the first five years of their friendship), but we have no account of their precise sleeping arrangements. In his bet-hedging biography, Knox-Cardew high-mindedly refuses to speculate as to whether their relationship was ever consummated: “Theirs was a complicated love, a mutual passion for their native land and its history, a loathing for its enemies, and a shared spiritual yearning at once encompassing and transcending the physical.” In other words, he found no definitive evidence of intercourse.
The couple spent a weekend at an inn in the Campsie Fells together—the plan was to hike the hills but because of “foul weather and strong drink,” they didn’t stray far from bar or bedroom, though it seems they had separate quarters. Two decades later, he was to write about the trip in one of his best-known and most poignant poems, “Strippin the Willow,” which is the only indication from him that their bond had ever been sexual as well as intellectual and emotional.
The correspondence we have from the early sixties points to a generalised frustration on Hogg’s part: wanting, wishing, never quite achieving. McWatt, when he isn’t rhapsodising about nature or history or ranting about politics and England, can be playful and flattering. But the pattern is established—the closer Lilias moves towards him, the further he retreats.
“Shakespeare—or was it his simpering Juliet?—got it wrong. Parting is such bitter sorrow,” she wrote on 23 September 1964. “There’s nothing sweet about it.”
She seemed to take as compliments his complaints about the journey back to Fascaray from Edinburgh. “It’s hard, I know,” she wrote, “but we must both be strong, Griogal Cridhe, until we can meet again…Just say the word and I’ll join you. I have all the time in the world these days since Beattie gave me the heave-ho.”
The kindly manager at McDuff’s had retired and his replacement, who took a dim view of Lilias’s absences and unpunctuality, had summarily fired her one morning when she had arrived for work half an hour late.
“Can you believe it? Half an hour?” she wrote. “And for the first time in my working life I had a genuine excuse—my bus had broken down. The old bastard was longing to get shot of me.”
She was given a pay-off of £17—a week’s wages—and spent it over six days in Menzies’. “Bugger the job. The wee windfall helped ease the separation pangs.”
But McWatt’s letters suggest that it was not the sorrow of parting from Lilias that made the homeward journey so miserable. “I was done,” he wrote to her on 29 September 1964. “Talked out, social energy exhausted, hangover stupendous. I sat scowling on the train to Fort William in a cold carriage reeking of cigarettes, urine and stale beer. Then on the Auchwinnie branch line train I saw Effie and Shuggie MacLeod get on with their twins, a pair of blooters in short trousers with scabby knees, wee fat hands ramming sweeties into pudgy faces. The last thing I wanted was an hour of their company. I nodded and got back to my book.”
Waiting for the Gudgie at Auchwinnie, he kept a distance from the MacLeods and paced the harbour, wincing at the shrieks of the seagulls which, he wrote to Lilias, seemed to mock his mighty hangover. There was more discomfort to endure once he boarded the puffer which, “stout as a child’s bathtime boat, bounced mercilessly over the waves, with both MacLeod lads boaking—one on each side of the boat, Kenny port, Barry starboard—all the way to Finnverinnity Pier.”
McWatt was the first to alight, “jostling the MacLeods aside and scrambling onto the pier, to freedom.” On dry land he “sniffed the air, sighed deeply, turned my face from Finnverinnity and skiltered [scurried] up to Calasay to stare in grateful silence at the indifferent sea and resume my work.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
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* Grigor McWatt, efter Frances Cornford, 1965. (Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.)
Strippin the Willow
D’ye mind thon wee howff,
Melinda?
D’ye mind thon wee howff?
An the pou’in and the spreidin
O the scrimpet auld beddin,
An the midgies that bite in the high Campsie Fells,
An the whisky that garred us tight?
An the gallus keelies makin gowks o theirsels
Chappin aw nicht on the bedroom winda?
D’ye mind thon wee howff,
Melinda?
D’ye mind thon wee howff?
—Grigor McWatt, efter Hilaire Belloc, 1981*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
McWatt had his critics; chief among them the Dundee professor Alastair Galbraith, who wrote in the Edinburgh literary magazine the Quill & Thistle, in May 1964, that “McWatt was always a good hater and he turns his hates into political ideology and literary theory. He doesn’t much like the English (did some cheeky Sassenach keek up his kilt as a boy, perhaps?) so he celebrates the blowing up of postboxes bearing the insignia of England’s Queen, seeks to cut Scotland painfully adrift from its southern Siamese twin and promotes a bastardised invented language—a sort of Woolworths Pick’n’Mix assortment of half-remembered barely spoken words from innumerable incompatible dialects across Scotland (and, though it would cost him dear to admit it, some northern counties of England)—in place of the beautiful, organic, globally recogn
ised language of Shakespeare.”
McWatt, in the Auchwinnie Pibroch the following month, returned the compliment and went some way to proving one of Galbraith’s points by denouncing the Dundee professor as “a quisling…a collaborator…a hireling, and a man so devoid of cultural and poetic sensibility that one has to assume that this rogue has fully renounced any claim to Scottish nationality. Galbraith is clearly an Englishman under the skin…”
In his Pibroch column of 15 September 1964,* McWatt revisited the subject, after Galbraith made another slighting reference to him, as “the kilted curmudgeon who hates the people of England so much he has devoted his life to kidnapping, torturing and killing their poetry,” in the Quill & Thistle. McWatt wrote:
Literary criticism is rarely a theme for discussion on this island.
The weather, the brewing and abating of storms, winchings and wanings [romance and illness], the price of fish, ditto of liquor, the iniquities of feudalism, the wanderings of cattle and sheep and the depredations wrought on hens by foxes are all regular subjects for consideration by our panel of experts at the Finnverinnity Inn. As to academics down south and their axe-grinding views on poetry, here, as a topic, they rarely come up.
It is to the inhabitants of my tidal isle that I turn for wisdom on such small but occasionally irritating matters. Last Monday, Shuggie the Post delivered the miscellany of second-hand books, small magazines, press clippings and bills that make up my regular mail delivery. My eye fell on a self-styled literary journal whose name suggests a public house in Edinburgh of the sort frequented by tourists. In it, a critic with a Scots name and an English sensibility was once more, and for reasons that only Sigmund Freud might guess at, taking issue with my verse. He questioned my right, as a dispossessed and drouthie Scot—denied autonomy, language and respect—to dip my simple quaich [cup] into the brimming well of English verse. Did I wish to dignify his insult with a defence? In Calasay there were more pressing matters to attend to. It was a beautiful day and the lobster pots needed checking.
I was out on the boat beyond the skerries with my able young assistant when the sharp-eyed lad alerted me to an agitation on our starboard bow in the otherwise placid sea. It was an improbably large and muscular cat, swimming desperately towards us, back arched and tail high out of the water. It had the variegated fur of a tabby, but it was definitely not of the domestic variety. It was in fact a wildcat kitten (Felis silvestris grampia) and how it got there we could only speculate, although it is not unknown for wildcats to take to the water when survival demands it. Donald swiftly managed to get a hand to it without so much as a scratch and dumped the writhing creature in a lidded creel by the tiller.
As we made our way back to the shore the wildcat, whose comparative meekness we had ascribed to gratitude, was reverting to type and emitting the warning yowl of an air-raid siren while hurling itself at the lid of the basket with impressive ferocity. I was aware of the species’ reputation for savagery but, as readers of this column know, I always relish a challenge.
I kenned too that our existing menagerie—one collie dog, two pine martens, an otter and a recently rescued fulmar—might be more sceptical about this new arrival, a lacerating, spitting, howling coil of muscle and fur, with steel-trap teeth, claws like sprung-tine harrows and the manners of a Glasgow corner boy with a fistful of razors and a grudge.
So it was decided that night that I would leave my bedroom, which was easiest to secure against ingress and egress, to the reluctant house guest, whom we had christened Attila. I placed a skellet of milk and three opened cans of sardines by the creel, loosened the lid a little, ran for it and bolted the door behind me.
My night downstairs in the sleeping bag by the fire was not the most restful, disturbed as it was by hectic scamperings and knockings and strange rendings upstairs. But by dawn all was quiet and, wearing falconer’s gauntlets, I tiptoed into my room to find a scene of utter desolation. Shredded curtains, a disembowelled armchair, trashed bedding, papers and letters reduced to sodden confetti and on my bed the Edinburgh literary journal, open and unread as I had left it the previous day. Now it would never be read because Attila the Wildcat had delivered his own damning and extremely foul-smelling verdict on Professor Galbraith’s criticisms.
Attila and I, I then knew, were going to get along just fine.
There was a more harrowing incident involving the menagerie around that time, which McWatt never referred to in his Pibroch column. He continued to promote in public the narrative of Calasay as a paradise in which man and wild beast lived together in mutual understanding and respect. I found a truthful account in anguished journal passages, dated November 1964, in The Fascaray Compendium, later confirmed in my interview with Donald MacInnes. That month, one of McWatt’s two new otters, Darnley and Mary, bit through a cable and caused a fire that burned out An Tobar’s kitchen. Grigor was in Edinburgh but Donald, who had been down in Finnverinnity with the Campbells getting supplies, returned in time to fight the fire with buckets of water filled from the burn.
Darnley, enraged when Donald climbed a ladder to unseat Mary from the crossbeam in the byre, savaged the young man’s leg, nearly cutting an artery, and bit clean through the boot of his right foot, severing three of his toes. An emergency crossing to Auchwinnie Infirmary on the Silver Darling failed to save the digits. It was “the end of the days of freedom for the otters, who [had] become so aggressive that they [had to be] confined to a cage,” wrote McWatt in the Compendium.
But in the Pibroch, McWatt continued to write his charming accounts of otter, wild cat, pine marten and man living companionably in harmony and freedom in their Calasay Eden. Donald MacInnes, who was left with a permanent limp after the incident, was “a stoic,” according to McWatt in the Compendium. He refused to be drawn on the subject in private or public, until my interview with him in 2014.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
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* Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1980.
INVENTORY OF GAELIC WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS IN COMMON USE IN FASCARAY
balg-buill: ball bag, in which witches were said to keep balls of twisted wool used for raising storms. The most famous Fascaray folk tale involved the witch Gormshuil (Gormal) Mhòr na Mòighe who was said, at the bidding of Alisdair McWatt, to have thrown the balls which conjured the storm that wrecked Cromwell’s English fleet in 1653. Today, in especially wild weather, Fascaradians will say, “The balg-buill is empty…Gormshuil’s no knittin the nicht.”
ballan-buaile: the wooden tub suspended from a pole in which milkmaids carried home the milk from the herd to the clachan. The milkmaids marched in step and sang a milking ballad, “crònan-bleoghainn” (my owersettin below).
Bò lurach dhubh, bò na h-airidh,
Bò a’ bhàthaích, màthair laogh,
Lùban sìomain air crodh na tìre,
Buarach shìod’ air m’ aighean gaoil.
Ho m’ aghan, ho ma’ agh gaoil.
Bonny broon coo, pride o the sheilin’
First coo o the byre, mither o braw calves,
Wisps o straw roond the coos o the townland,
A fetter o silk roon my beloued heifer.
Ho my heifer, ho my douce heifer.
bòrlanachd: twenty-one days of free labour once exacted from tenant crofters on the “king’s highway” on the mainland by the factor, or bailiff, even though the only time most Fascaradian crofters set foot on the “king’s highway” was when they were obliged to go to Auchwinnie to mend it. The most infamous factor on Fascaray to exact this “statute labour” was Red Roderick of the Hens, about whom a Gaelic satire was written (my owersettin below—Black Donald of the Whids, or lies, is another name for the devil).
O gun robh do spiorad fiar
Gu sìorraidh a’ ruith nan cearc!
Agus Dòmhnall Dubh nam breug
Gad riasladh air sliabh nam peac!
May your camsheuch saul
Chase the teuk fur aye!
And Black Donald of the Whids,
Rive you abreed oan the Ben o Sin.
dùthchas: the native system of land tenure by which clan members are entitled to occupy their ancestral land; the place of birth, spirit or blood, in which one is engaged in a mutually respectful relationship with the land.
—Grigor McWatt, 1964, The Fascaray Compendium
The pace of change on the island accelerated, with or without the assistance of its absentee landlord. Calor gas cookers were installed in the humblest kitchens and by the mid 1960s the old black ranges had mostly fallen out of use, while septic tanks and inside toilets were no longer regarded as the costly affectations of a privileged few. External television aerials were seen for the first time, sprouting from the “lums” of the modernised cottages in Finnverinnity (though reception remains bad to this day). But the population had sunk to a new low—sixty-eight adults and twelve children—with an exodus to the mainland not seen since the nineteenth-century clearances. Peigi MacEwan died in her sleep in Doonmara—her neighbour Hamish McIntosh was alerted by the clucking of her hens anxious to get out of her house in the morning—and the clachan of Killiebrae now stood empty after the death of Wullie Maclean and the emigration of his children and grandchildren to a newly built town, certain work and uncertain futures in what McWatt described as “the badlands of central Scotland.”
Those who stayed, however, seemed determined to make a go of it and the fad for home improvement, often with poor materials and improvised skills, continued. At Balnasaig Farm, Tam Macpherson, now a rheumatic 63-year-old, badly hit by the foot-and-mouth outbreak five years earlier, reluctantly accepted that there was little money in cattle, sent his remaining herd away to the mainland abbatoir—the bellowing of the cows could be heard all over the island as they were loaded onto the Gudgie in three separate journeys—and acquired a large flock of sheep whose wool would service the mainland tweed industry.
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