While the farm’s fortunes declined, the Seekers were expanding operations at Balnasaig Lodge, restoring the house and garden and hosting visitors from England who had been alerted to the centre’s existence by an article in Serenity Times. This London-based alternative magazine, whose interests included complementary medicine, conspiracies and UFOs, had described Balnasaig as “a visionary community, based in an ancient land where the spirits make their presence felt on a daily basis.”
The visitors to Balnasaig were, wrote McWatt, “often dressed in bright mixter-maxter [motley], patchwork, fringing, beads and other embellishments rarely seen on the island, so that when one large boatload of glairily [gaudily] costumed Seekers was disgorged at the pier, a rumour went round Finnverinnity School that the circus had come to Fascaray—which, in a way, it has.”
Some visitors to Balnasaig Lodge paid for their bed, board and twice-daily “spiritual cleansing and calisthenics” with Neville and Althea by working in the house, plastering and painting walls, cooking and cleaning. Others paid in cash for their stay and rates were said by islanders to be the price of a three-star hotel in Edinburgh.
“All that money tae bide in the cold wi a bunch o bawheids,” said Effie MacLeod.
Evelyn, who had recently discovered what the Seekers described as “her gift of communicating directly with plant yakshas [angels],” was making the garden her own domain, supervising volunteer teams of visitors who toiled away in the mud hoping to make their own divine connection with the presiding spirits of potatoes, peas and turnips.
Most islanders shared Effie’s view of the Seekers but some, including Hamish McIntosh and the Campbells, who were employed respectively as builder and carpenters at Balnasaig, saw that there was money to be made from these interlopers.
“Their cash is as good, or as bad, as anyone’s,” said Hamish, who now had three children to feed.
“The wunds o cheenge are blawin,” wrote McWatt in the Compendium. “An it’s gettin awfie oorit [cold] roon here.”
Even the immutable seascape faced drastic alteration when, in 1965, substantial deposits of oil were discovered in the Clinch Straits off Plodda and Grodda and the Westminster government announced that the seabed in the Fascaradian archipelago would be opened up for exploration by global oil and gas companies. The island’s peace was disturbed, wrote McWatt in the Compendium, “by the constant clatter of helicopters ferrying Americans in sharp suits and cowboy boots on brief fact-finding trips,” causing a surge in takings at the store and inn and rumours of new local jobs in the burgeoning industry. In “Frae Mambeag Brae,” however, McWatt sounded a warning against “the exploitation of our resources by Yanks as well as Sassenachs and the desecration of the beauties of our landscape.”
In both the Compendium and his Pibroch column he gave accounts of more drama at sea, when lifeboat coxswain Mungo MacAskill was called out on the Morag May from Auchwinnie and was joined by the Fascaradian MacDonald brothers to search for a missing fishing boat from their own island. Joseph McKinnon’s son Fergus and his friend Alec “Wee Eck” Campbell, son of Alec and grandson of Tormud, were feared lost in the ferocious gale. Joseph, Tormud and Alec risked their own lives by joining the search on the Silver Darling, which was by now considered barely seaworthy even in the calmest of weather.
“It was a vicious night of clooring wind and endless rain that would wash away your very soul,” wrote McWatt in an article for the Pibroch, later reprinted in the Scotsman. “And into the mouth of this hell, the men of Fascaray launched their frail vessels, pitting kinship and friendship against the barbarous might of nature.”
The Silver Darling almost capsized several times during the night, and from the bridge of the Morag May, Mungo MacAskill and the MacDonalds watched its unsteady progress and muttered that Tormud, Joseph and Alec would soon be in need of rescue themselves. In the blessed calm of a clear, windless dawn, as the lifeboat rounded Lusnaharra Point with the plucky Silver Darling swaying in its wake, they found the boys’ fishing boat adrift and deserted.
“Their agony was beyond the reach of words,” wrote McWatt, but it did not last long—sharp-sighted Jamie spotted two figures waving from the skerries. Fergus and Eck were safe and well, though cold, wet and hungry, having found shelter overnight on a rocky islet after sixteen hours adrift in the storm. “In the end,” wrote McWatt, “simple human virtues were aided by pure luck.”
“Saw your article,” wrote Lilias, who was struggling to hold down a job in the soft furnishings department of Goldbergs department store. “Glad to read the surly troglodyte of Calasay celebrating friendship and kinship. Might we raise a glass to the ‘simple human virtues’ when you’re next in Edinburgh?”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
11 November 2014
Today I receive a deputation from Balnasaig. Evelyn Fletcher sweeps in with her two assistants, Jinny Aubrey and Jeremy Gortz.
She tells me she has “received a sign” that the Seekers should become involved in the Heritage Centre and Museum.
“It came to me in my morning communication with the plant yakshas,” she says. “They told me this will be another way of spreading the influence of the spirit kingdom and promoting the energies of nature for the good of mankind.”
I smile politely. Jinny takes a velvet pouch from her belt and casts an assortment of small rocks on my desk.
“Healing crystals,” she explains.
“From Balnasaig,” adds Jeremy.
I touch them lightly, knowing from my dealings with Agnes and her collections that my job is to admire them.
“Beautiful,” I say.
“We can sell them in the museum gift shop,” says Jinny. “Along with our organic herbal infusions.”
“We haven’t really got to the gift-shop stage yet,” I say. “But when we do, I’ll be in touch. Locally grown dried herbs, attractively packaged, might well appeal to visitors but—”
“The crystals,” Evelyn reminds me. “Harnessing all that positive energy…”
I riffle through the pile of dusty stones and put them back in Jinny’s pouch one by one.
“Rose quartz, granite, fool’s gold…yes, a really interesting proposal. Thank you for dropping by. I appreciate it.”
Evelyn, undeterred by my brush-off, enquires about the Trust’s funding for the Balnasaig Tower Room, receives another polite brush-off, and invites me over to the centre for a Past Lives workshop. I tell her I’ll let her know when I’m free. She is so supremely confident that I imagine nothing will shake her self-belief, or the belief of her followers. I watch them make their way back to their Land Rover and it occurs to me that Evelyn and I are both in the past lives business.
As they drive off, I notice Margaret Mackenzie loitering on the beach across the road. She sees me watching her and hurries off. That’s all I need. A Fascaradian stalker.
I go to the shelves and take down the two Balnasaig books. Evelyn’s The Wisdom of the Wilderness Within and her former partner Neville Booth’s Reflections from the Pilgrim Path: The Balnasaig Story. Her book was written in 2007—with, I see in the acknowledgements, the help of Jeremy Gortz—the year after Neville had fled the island on a permanent detour from the Pilgrim Path. I skim through Evelyn’s self-regarding froth about visions, yakshas and spirit communications to get to the facts—here was another woman dumped by another faithless man. How did she get through it? Her unwavering egomania must have helped.
“Neville had been straying from the path for a long time, forsaking the spiritual for the corporeal as the plant yakshas had warned me. I needed to grow and expand, establish my identity fully as the pure channel for the spirit world, and he was holding me back. It was necessary and purging to let him go.”
We all tell ourselves consoling stories. When I realised Marco was having an affair, my first response—before the landslide of rage and despair—was a thrilling sense of liberation, a giddying lightness. He ha
d set me free. I could do whatever the hell I liked, with whomever. I was single again.
Single. With an eight-year-old child and a live-in nominal partner who slept in the spare room, when he slept in the apartment at all, who mumbled a curt apology when his hand accidentally brushed mine over the coffee machine in the morning. Agnes’s face, pale and tremulous, tethered my helium elation. How did I think this could possibly work?
It couldn’t, of course. I barely slept, agonised as I heard him leave the apartment at midnight, lying rigid and alert till early morning, straining to hear him return. I yearned, pitifully, to hear his footsteps falter outside the bedroom door, then a soft knock that would signal an end to misery. I also longed to lay waste to his new pinball machine with a crowbar. Four excruciating months later it was over with Kate. Marco was abject and mortified, or he said he was. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I was crazy. I’m so very sorry.” But it was too late. By then I’d met Pascal and hurled myself into an affair of my own which, apart from the obvious pleasures, provided an excuse for satisfying tit-for-tat elusiveness—“Where are you going?” “Out…” “Who with?” “Never you mind.” My rage at Marco, nursed during all those sleepless nights, mutated into ravening lust for Pascal. The deeper my anguish about Marco, the wilder the sex with The Other. The father of my child may have dumped me for a skinny contortionist, but this beautiful boy finds me attractive, therefore I’m attractive. I fuck therefore I am.
I should have seen it coming. Two woozy months later, the beautiful boy, like once-loyal, personable Marco before him, began to tire of me. Not of my company, it seemed—Pascal didn’t seem embarrassed about introducing me to his friends (decorative dullards) and was happy to have me round backstage at his gigs, or to hang out with me at his place, that unexpectedly glitzy loft, watching black-and-white movies and picking desultorily at the vegan takeouts I brought over. It was my body he tired of. We were like a gender-swapped fifties comedy couple, sulking in bed; Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball between the sheets, with Desi excusing himself from conjugal duties on account of a headache and mad-for-it Lucille folding her arms in a huff.
Was a pattern emerging here? To be cheated on by one man may be a misfortune, but two? In succession? Carelessness couldn’t explain it. Pascal reassured me; there was no other woman. No man, either; good to get that clear. He loved my energy, my life force, he said. He even maintained that “we were meant to be. I knew it the moment I saw you. I felt this spiritual connection.” I winced, but let it pass. He wasn’t interested in other women, or men, that was the thing. He adored me. Loved my body. He’d been sick, low-level stuff, a virus, and hadn’t got the energy for sex right now. It happened. We had a great relationship, didn’t we? Wasn’t it worth weathering this awkward patch?
“Only after Neville left,” wrote Evelyn Fletcher, “once I was truly alone, as my plant yakshas had counselled me, could I focus on my work, truly achieve transcendence and lead others unencumbered towards the light.”
Transcendence, alas, is not an option for me. All I have is my work.
We Scots are modest types. We cringe at the first blast of a boastful blowhard’s trumpet and the cold brass of the instrument of self-praise rarely grazes our lips. But the question does come up: Big England—our southern master—would like to know by what right does Wee Scotland claim nationhood and independence. Who, they wonder, do we think we are and by what means do we imagine we can successfully go it alone?
Where do we start? Our self-evidently superior legal system? It’s not evidently superior enough to the purblind Sassenach. Our more rigorous and egalitarian education system? It doesn’t cut much ice or pierce the cerebral permafrost down south either, where egalitarianism is seen as akin to Bolshevism. Our natural resources? Our oil? The black stuff gushing from our north-eastern seabed is, as far as Westminster is concerned, Their Oil. Our majestic landscape of hill and loch? The insipid Sassenach, apparently, prefers the pretty and pastoral; give them nature tamed in mild fields and trimmed hedges over true wilderness any day. Apart, that is, from the few weeks a year they like to travel up here and slaughter our wildlife.
Perhaps, in response to their question—who do we think we are and by what means do we imagine we can successfully go it alone?—a better starting point would be our native riches; our people, who have given the world, among many things, anaesthesia, the aeroplane, the bicycle, cordite, canals, kaleidoscopes, cotton reels, colour photography, the electric clock, economics, fingerprinting, fridges, lawnmowers, lightbulbs, logarithms, marmalade, the mackintosh, postage stamps, penicillin, the piano footpedal, radar, the steam engine, steam hammers, steamboats, syringes, tarmac, telephones, television, tyres, toasters and flush toilets, down which we can consign the patronising assumptions of the English. Our ingenious indigenes were the first to come up with the theory of electromagnetism, to measure the distance to a solar system outside our own, to identify a cell’s nucleus, to discover a vaccine for typhoid fever and track down the cause of malaria.
We created the Bank of England (an act of perversity, I grant you) as well as the Bank of France, we can claim responsibility for the prototype police force of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in America as well as the American navy, and it was a Scot, the Aberdonian Thomas Glover, who was behind the industrialisation of Japan.
Let us not forget the Enlightenment, which the English like to lay entirely at the door of the French. The writings of the great David Hume, Scots born and bred, champion of philosophical empiricism and scepticism, celebrator of liberty and social progress, were inspirational to colonists in the New World whose struggle with their English masters overseas sparked the War of Independence in 1775, the year before Hume’s death.
And so, if you’ll forgive me as I rehearse my embouchure once more and raise the trumpet to my lips for a final fanfare, it was the Scots who came up with what has arguably been the most influential invention of all—America. And it is America which rules the waves these days; not Britannia, and certainly not England. Thus, when the question of nationhood arises, north of the border we find ourselves asking, who do the Sassenachs think they are and by what means do they imagine they can successfully go it alone?
—Grigor McWatt, November 1965, Auchwinnie Pibroch*
* * *
* Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
Though he rarely left Fascaray (he made the journey to Edinburgh perhaps seven times a year) and never Scotland—he said he would never travel abroad until his homeland was free and his passport bore no reference to an English queen—his reputation was becoming global. A photograph, in a May 1965 edition of the Auchwinnie Pibroch, shows a delegation to the island, organised by the Scottish USSR Friendship Society, which seemed to have overlooked McWatt’s Burnsian solecism. The visitors were led by a dough-faced woman swaddled in a large overcoat, a Mme Kropotskaya, described by the Auchwinnie Pibroch as “a teacher of Russian residing in Edinburgh.” Also in the party were several trades union delegates, the Russian novelist Boris Polevoi and Professor Samuel Marshak, the Russian translator of Robert Burns.
McWatt’s correspondents included Ezra Pound, whose poetry he admired (though there is no record of his views on Pound’s dalliance with fascism). In 1960, the American poet, newly released from a Washington psychiatric hospital, set up home in Italy and busied himself by catching up with the further reaches of European poetry. He had somehow got hold of a copy of McWatt’s first collection, Kenspeckelt, and was drawn to the Scottish poet’s outsider status. Seeing McWatt as a fellow “prophet pariah,” Pound invited him to Rapallo.
McWatt made polite noises—“Thank you for your invitation. It’s a long way from my little northern island of Fascaray to Genoa in terms of miles, but poetry makes close neighbours of us”—and turned him down.
In 1965, Pound tried again. He was coming to London to attend T. S. Eliot’s funeral. Might he see the great Scottish poet there? McWatt was polit
e. “I fear not. London is in enemy country. I wish you well for your journey. Condolences to the widow. I didn’t see eye to eye with Eliot, particularly on the matter of religion. But he had the virtue of not being English, which showed in the best of his verse.”*
McWatt also failed to take up an invitation to visit Bertolt Brecht in Berlin, though the politics of the German writer were closer to McWatt’s own. In 1973, Ted Berrigan, the New York School poet, then visiting professor at an English university, sent McWatt a letter asking if he would give a reading in Colchester. In the letter, Berrigan expressed admiration for McWatt’s “pugnacious, polychromatic language.” There is no record of any reply in Berrigan’s papers at Syracuse University or UC San Diego but the invitation was not sufficiently enticing to lure McWatt across the border.
Nearer home, he had a brief correspondence with Douglas Young, former chairman of the SNP and translator of Aristophanes into Scots, but the letters dried up in 1967 when Young moved to take up a teaching post in Canada. There is a collegiate exchange with Professor Alexander Gray, translator of German and Danish verse into Scots, and a polite but terse postcard from William Laughton Lorimer, best known for his translation of the New Testament into Scots.
Of more general interest are letters from Ted Hughes (1960) and Seamus Heaney (1975) thanking McWatt for copies of his collections Kenspeckelt and Kowk in the Kaleyard respectively. Hughes’s typed acknowledgement is politely distant—it’s unsigned and may have been written by his publisher’s secretary. Heaney’s reply is handwritten, warm and encouraging: “You are a poet and will go where you decide.”
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