We get closer and see geysers of spray spouting over the tanks as threshing fish, large and muscly as wrestlers’ forearms, leap vertically three feet out of the water, twist in the air and crash back down before repeating the display seconds later.
“Are they playing?” asks Agnes.
“Not here. No,” says Niall. “They like leaping when they’re free, but here, because they’re living in such a small space, they all get fleas, which drive them mad with itching.”
“So they’re jumping in the air all the time to get rid of the fleas?”
“That’s right.”
“But they never will?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
She bites her bottom lip. “That is so sad.”
“Not so sad, maybe, as all the fishermen who used to die braving rough seas to put fish on our plates,” he says.
That night as I set out supper—grilled salmon—she tells me she can’t eat it.
“I’m a proper vegetarian now,” she announces. “No meat. No fish. Just vegetables.”
INVENTORY OF FISH FOUND IN THE WATERS OF FASCARAY
cod known as coddie, shingle, stockfish, slink or soushler. A large cod is called a keelin while a young cod is called a cabelew. A poor specimen, usually thrown back in the water by disappointed fishermen, is a drowd. Boat fishing north of Mhor Sgheir reef can produce good catches with crab and mussel baits.
dab lang fleuk. Flatfish, found near Calasay and Lusnaharra strands.
dog fish sea dug. Aggressive feeder, responds to crab and fish baits.
flounder craig fleuk. Found from early spring at the mouth of the River Lingel.
haddock haddie, cameral. Identified by “thumbprint” mark behind head. Abundant, particularly in the island’s western waters.
hake gairdfish. Predator, with a sharp set of teeth found in deeper waters towards Plodda and Grodda.
herring herrin or sgadan. The silver darlings of song and legend.
lesser-spotted dogfish Blind Lizzie. Always keen to take the bait off Calasay.
plaice plashock or beggar fleuk. Bright orange spots. Abundant from early spring and summer, especially off Calasay, where they feed on crabs.
turbot the bunnet fleuk. A flatfish, abundant around Fascaray.
—Grigor McWatt, 1967, The Fascaray Compendium
The fishing industry, the heart of Fascaray’s economy for centuries, was in serious trouble. One spring weekend in 1968, the men put out to sea as usual and came back five hours later, empty-handed for the first time in living memory. There was much discussion in the inn: tides were normal and the winds were moderate—none of the harsh easterlies that could be the bane of the fleet. “The sea has fallen silent,” wrote McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium in May 1968, “and a sense of terrible foreboding pervades the island.”
For ten days, the fishermen ventured out in hope and returned in despair, then one day the fish were back, island life resumed and within days the “vainishin” was forgotten. But by the end of the following month it happened again; after a day at sea the fishermen returned to the island with empty creels and nets as light and clean as they had been on departure. In the inn there was much dark talk and head-shaking, according to McWatt. Some older fishers blamed the oil exploration going on in the Clinch—a 5,000-ton converted barge with a helipad, living quarters and a steel tower, visible from Finnverinnity and Lusnaharra, was drilling for oil east of Plodda.
“I wouldn’t fancy that carry-on myself if I was a fish,” said Francie MacDonald.
Others attributed the barren catches to supernatural forces. Some argued that Seonaidh, the sea god, had not been appeased in the traditional manner for some years, while the righteous of the Free Church suggested it was punishment for recent lax observance of the Sabbath and the absence of morals among the young. The new dance, the twist, had come to Auchwinnie and by all accounts this “unwholesome craze”—the “work of Satan” and an inevitable consequence of the hula-hoop fad—was in danger of crossing the water to Fascaray.
The prosaic truth was revealed by an unexpected source. After an all-night hoolie in Finnverinnity, Murdo “the Fiddle” McIntyre was returning uncertainly to his cottage in Doonmara by flashlight in the early hours of the morning along the cliff path when he made out the menacing hulk of a big boat, its navigation lights turned off, surreptitiously trawling the inland waters of Fascaray. Some doubted Murdo’s account at first—“a man who spends all his waking hours in the company of a whisky bottle might not be the most reliable witness,” wrote McWatt—but the following day the fish had gone again.
After midnight that night, Tormud Campbell, with his son Alec and grandson Wee Eck, launched the Silver Darling from Finnverinnity and steered her round the island until, just as Murdo had said, the outline of the phantom boat loomed ahead in the darkness. Tormud turned off his outboard engine and they rowed up to the behemoth—more than 900 gross tons, with a low-slung rail and high bulwarks—where they saw that its name, number and builder’s plate had been obscured by paint, its bell had been shrouded by cloth and the crew were masked as they hauled in their catches onto the open foredeck. They were masked but they weren’t silent and their northern English accents were unmistakable.
This was poaching on an industrial scale, stealing from impoverished locals rather than wealthy lairds. Islanders were enraged and furious representation was made to Auchwinnie Council, the port authorities and the owners of the big commercial fleets on the east and west coasts, in England as well as Scotland, reminding them of the statutory limits protecting local fishing. The interlopers were, it transpired, from Fleetwood in Lancashire and a fine was eventually imposed on the boat’s owners. But it was only a quarter of the value of the illegal catch, which had long been sold to Billingsgate market in London and dispatched in the usual way.
This was, as McWatt wrote, the start of the “fishers’ faw.”
Meanwhile the seas around the island were despoiled in another way by the arrival of yet more unsightly drilling rigs. “Sea-girt pylons, spewing monsters, the de’il’s brochs,” McWatt called them.
Their proliferation, at a time of change and uncertainty, when the fishing industry seemed gravely imperilled, gave an undeniable boost to the nationalist movement. In the 28 September 1968 issue of the Auchwinnie Pibroch, the headline on McWatt’s “Frae Mambeag Brae” column read: “FASCARAY’S OIL FOR THE FASCARADIANS.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
The Sang o Stravaigin Aengus
Ah ganged oot tae the hissel wid,
Acause a gleed wis in ma heid,
An cut an pilked a hissel scob,
An cleeked a brammle tae a threid.
An when white mochs were flichterin roon,
An moch-like starns were blinterin oot,
Ah drapped the brammle in a burn
An claucht a braw wee siller troot.
When Ah had set it oan the groun
Ah went tae blaw the gleed alicht
But somethin reeshelt oan the groun,
An sumbdy cawed ma name aricht,
It had become a gliskin quine
Wi aiple flirry in her hair,
She cawed me in a vyce sae fine
Then dwimisht throu the brichtenin air.
Nou Ah’m auld an hae stravaiged
Thro glens an michty mountain launs,
I’ll scart her doon tae where she’s pugged
An pree her moue and clesp her hauns;
An gang amang lang dappelt gress,
An pouk tae time itsel is done
The siller aiples o the muin
The gowden aiples o the sun.
—Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 1969*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
A craving for reassurance becomes apparent towards the end of t
he sixties in Lilias’s self-deprecating humour and the madcap accounts of late-night escapades, mishaps with drink and ruinous romantic adventures.
A stramash with Syd last night—Stella came to claim him, again—somehow ended in a bleary breakfast with Archie (I was too scunnered to face his clootie dumpling and fried-egg special) and a livid Rothkoesque bruise on, of all places, the big toe of my right foot. The administration of Johnnie Walker, topical and oral, did not help and Archie took me to the infirmary, from which I emerged on crutches, bandaged like a cartoon gout victim.
Alluding to the colloquial designation of Protestant and Catholic, she added “my Episcopalian granny would be mortified to know I am now, officially, a left footer.” Despite the merriment, even in the dewy glory of her twenties, when she was still McWatt’s “lanely, anely Flooer o Rose Street,” there were signs of encroaching mental distress and it is hard to avoid the sense that her stories of reckless nights spent in the company of other men were at that stage part of a desperate ploy to make McWatt jealous and bind him to her.
She had taken a job, temporarily she insisted, in a betting shop.
The owner, a madly uncultivated bear of an Irishman, has a fondness for me and guesses, rightly, that I am reasonably numerate and that gambling is the one vice I do not possess. The customers are all desperate men, squiffily handing over pay packets or broo [dole] money each week in hope of the life-transforming Big Win. Now I think about it, I’m not so very different. I squandered everything, gambling on the Big Love that would transform my life. The odds were rotten and I lost the lot. Still, like them, I continue to live in hope…
Her subtle reproaches were still leavened by memories of the best of their affair and a sense that even now, ten years after their first meeting and their happiest times, their love might be revived.
“Oh, Grigor,” she wrote in 1969, “if only you and I had been French…We could walk barefoot in the sand in St. Tropez like Bardot and Delon, and toast our happiness in champagne. Instead we’re cursed with the ayebidin dusk of cold Caledonia and drink McEwan’s and Johnnie Walker. Come and keep me warm! How darkness descends here. The nights draw in—and so do I.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
17 November 2014
I’ve hit a wall here. I still have little on the poet’s early life, less on his time with the SOE and nothing at all on Lilias’s rival, to whom McWatt’s biographer makes only the briefest reference: “there were other loves, chief among them the elusive Jean.” Knox-Cardew enlarges on Lilias’s caustic comparison between Grigor McWatt’s Jean and Robert Burns’s wife, Jean Armour—the “Belle of Mauchline” and “the lassie I loue best”—but doesn’t provide further details. Knox-Cardew had no luck in tracking down Lilias’s rival either.
Unless I make some kind of breakthrough, A Granite Ballad is going to look like a feeble rehash of Knox-Cardew’s chapter, with a few documents and quotes thrown in.
I keep despair away by diverting myself back to the letters, the poetry and the Compendium. I’ve plenty of material, I tell myself. It’s just a matter of putting it in the right order. And then there are the lexicons and inventories, with incantatory echoes of those oddly soothing prayers we were made to learn at school: the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Litanies of the Saints.
“St. Mary Magdalene—Pray for us…St. Lucy—Pray for us…St. Agnes—Pray for us…”
No St. Jean. Nor St. Lilias. And I might as well be asking McWatt’s birds, or seashells, or mammals for divine assistance with this project.
INVENTORY OF THE MAMMALS OF FASCARAY
Order, Lipotyphla. Family, Talpidae:
mole (Talpa europaea, L.): mowdie, mowdiewort, mowdiewarp. Said to have been accidentally introduced into the island in the early nineteenth century in a boatload of top soil from Mull that was destined for the walled garden of Finnverinnity House. Now common, sighted most recently (July 1972) in author’s vegetable patch in Calasay.
Order, Carnivora. Family, Mustelidae:
marten (Martes martes, L.): tuggin, mertrick, mairtin. Once common, now rare. Can be lured by a “piece and jam,” i.e. a jam sandwich. Four rescued and reared as household pets by the author. The species is referred to in the place names Suidhe an Taghain (Marten Den) and Lèana an Taghain (Marten Meadow) in Calasay.
otter (Lutra lutra, L.): formerly common, now rare. Author and ornithologist Murdoch McMurdo, in his History of the Fascaradian Archipelago (1886), recorded that two had been seen “disporting themselves” on the banks of the Cannioch “after an apparent absence of almost half a century.” Five cumlins rescued and reared as household pets by the author.
polecat (Mustela putorius, L.): fozel, thulmard, thoomart. Dean Munro, the sixteenth-century cleric and travel chronicler, who called the creature “foulmart,” observed its abundant presence on his visit to Fascaray in 1548. Now rare, though its existence is reflected in the place name Lag nam Feocullan (Polecat Hollow), near Tilliecuddy Burn.
Order, Carnivora. Family, Phocidae:
common seal (Phoca vitulina, L.): selch, selkie. Relatively rare, though Murdo McIntyre, musician, claims to have seen a family of them basking off Doonmara Cliffs.
grey seal (Halichoerus grypus, Fab): selch, selkie. Once rare, now common. Breeds in the autumn, frequently seen on rocks just above high water off east coast of Calasay. Young sighted by author as early as the second week in August. Enshrined in local folklore as the selkie “seal women” who lured many sailors to their death.
—Grigor McWatt, 1972, The Fascaray Compendium
The Gudgie, the old coal-burning puffer, served the island for forty years and inspired McWatt’s famous cinquain verse, “Cargoes.”*
Clatty Scottish puffer wi a smuired smoch lum,
Breengin up the Clyde in a pit-mirk haar
Wi a cargo o Shotts coal,
Gartcosh fire clay,
Cattle feed, fishmeal an claggie tar.
The boat was finally sent into retirement in 1970, along with skipper Ali Hume and first mate Malkie McTavish, and replaced by a new diesel-fuelled cargo vessel. The Bonxie, 132 feet long, “neat as a trivet” according to its new captain, Pat Boy Cairns, was equipped to carry cargo, cattle and a dozen passengers. Chic McIntosh, son of Hamish and Sarah McIntosh, “a tall, streichly [straggly] laddie,” according to McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium, was taken on as deckhand.
But within months the new boat was already too small to accommodate the increasing numbers of visitors to the island. Flotillas of small boats and rubber dinghies from Fascaray and Auchwinnie began to operate as private water taxis to and from the mainland.
The spirit of romantic nationalism, the growing fashion for folk music and developments at the Balnasaig Centre were bringing new visitors hame tae Fascaray. The “big bearded men in fishermen’s sweaters” were gradually supplanted at the Finnverinnity Inn, wrote McWatt in the Compendium, by “fey youths with long hair,” some of them carrying guitars or banjos for music “sessions.” They were often accompanied by “silent girls, with longer hair and secretive smiles,” who wore blue jeans so tight that George Ferguson was moved to deliver a sermon denouncing their “unwholesome dress.” The Seekers set tended to be older and quieter, shunning the noisy bacchanals of Finnverinnity for sedate group chanting at the Balnasaig Centre.
In the pub, the young “folkies” would sit in a haar of cigarette smoke and sing McWatt’s song, which had recently been recorded by the musician Donovan Leitch and sold in sufficient numbers to enter the Top 10 pop charts. It must have generated welcome income up at An Tobar but this new version of “Hame tae Fascaray,” with its heavy use of sitar and triangle, was thought “too psychedelic” for some purists and in the Finnverinnity Inn in 1970, the song was still sung with eyes closed, in reverent voices “of varying pitch and uncertain musical quality,” according to McWatt, to a simple strummed chord accompaniment.
Jamie MacDonal
d and his wife, Marsaili, got permission from the laird to take over a derelict byre on the outskirts of Finnverinnity, gut it, run a hardboard partition down its centre and equip it with rudimentary bathroom facilities and a dozen bunk beds. The Bothy, as it became known, “allows the hippy boys and their girlfriends to spend a night or two on the island and extra money in the pub,” wrote McWatt.
“The narrow bunk beds and the partition, with its painted signs indicating which side belongs to the ‘lassies’ and which to the ‘laddies,’ is said to ensure that there will be no opportunity for any of what is called round here ‘hochmagandy.’ ” The MacDonalds also gave an undertaking that there would be no singing on a Sunday. “George Ferguson and the church elders are pacified, for the moment.”
It is telling that, in his columns for the Pibroch at this time, apart from a satirical piece about the Balnasaig Seekers, McWatt makes little mention of these island developments and instead uses “Frae Mambeag Brae” to publicly rail against plans for the decimalisation of currency—“an English plot to raise prices and rents”—and writes about the latest losses and additions to his menagerie (two new pine martens, an otter, a pair of mating wildcats, and four seabirds incapacitated by an oil leak from a passing cargo ship).
He also records in his column the heroic rescue by the Morag May lifeboat of the fifteen-man crew of the Grimsby trawler Fleet Flourish, which ran aground on a reef west of the Doonmara cliffs in a fierce blizzard. Water was pouring into the engine room and the vessel had begun to “rock like a pendulum,” according to the Fleet Flourish’s skipper Albert Smart, who managed to send out a Mayday message as he and his men clung desperately to the pitching boat.
Hame Page 30
