The Morag May reached the scene in an hour and battled to secure her anchor in white-out conditions before a rocket line attached to a life raft could be fired onto the stricken trawler. “The first eight trawlermen managed to jump into the rolling life raft which was pulled back towards the Morag May, hand over hand, by Mungo MacAskill, his Fascaradian son-in-law, Jamie MacDonald, and Jamie’s brother Francie. Waves swamped the raft twice but the crew of the Morag May managed to haul the men to safety before the exercise was repeated and the remaining seven men were rescued,” wrote McWatt.
For his part in plucking the trawlermen from certain death in the most perilous conditions, Mungo MacAskill was awarded another RNLI medal while the MacDonald brothers and the other eight Morag May crew members added to their collection of vellum commendations. In his Pibroch column, McWatt reflected that there was irony in the fact that brave local fishermen had risked death to rescue the very men—“trawlermen on the big boats from distant ports who prey on our precious resources”—who would rob them of their livelihoods.
Meanwhile, in the Compendium, McWatt noted that the Balnasaig Seekers had expanded their operation “after reports of a personal encounter with the god Pan in Evelyn’s healing flower patch.” Neville Booth and a team of volunteers, from mainland Europe and America as well as England, began constructing a “hydroponic nursery to grow exotic vegetables and fruits” while his wife Althea now offered “Rebirthing and Past Lives Therapy” to growing numbers of pilgrims lured by articles in esoteric magazines and “the endorsement on a TV chat show of an actress who had, before joining an ashram in India, once played Doctor Who’s sidekick.”
The Seekers were picked up at the harbour by Balnasaig’s new assistant, Izzy Wallop, described by McWatt as “a loud, hearty blonde—a young Margaret Rutherford without the charm or subtlety—from Berkshire, England.” She was a former chalet girl who was said to have undergone a mystical awakening in Gstaad “after overdoing the schnapps.” She drove the new pilgrims in a Transit van over the rutted track to the Lodge, where, according to an advert in the “Mind & Body” pages of Time Out magazine, they would have enjoyed “a macrobiotic supper, a Tarot reading, collective chanting and guided meditation before a week of intense spiritual parturition in a magical glen.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Efter John Masefield, 1969. Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
The folk at Balnasaig have been at it again. Readers will be acquainted with the antics of the community, some call it a cult, which has taken over the old Balnasaig Lodge. Their members’ common-sense-to-cash ratio errs towards the monetary and they spend most of their time engaged in “workshops” communing with spirit guides, extraterrestrials and what I assume must be their own inner demons.
They were drawn to our island firstly, I suspect, because no one else would have them. And then our folklore—stories of second sight, of sidhe fairies, of kelpies and bogles—sealed it for them. The self-described Seekers say they feel a kinship with “our spirituality,” overlooking the fact that our stories were devised by a people enduring lives of harshest poverty, subject to the caprices of climate and challenges of terrain, whose folklore sought to explain the whims of nature and the transience of life and had the additional purpose of entertaining them during long hard winters. The spiritual tourists appreciate our isolation in Fascaray and the sublime emptiness of the landscape, failing to recognise that if it hadn’t been for brutal absentee lairds, who found sheep, deer and grouse more profitable than human tenants, our clachans and glens would be peopled with thriving communities.
But the enlightened interlopers of Balnasaig intuit that they know us better than we know ourselves. They like our sense of tradition, up to a point. They oppose the ancient practice of guga hunting, disdain the local pub, have little interest in the local “unenlightened” folk and would, if they could, shrink us to the status of harmless elves capering among the standing stones of Drumnish. Only last week, I returned from a morning’s fishing to find a party of Seekers, dressed in exotic robes as if performing a Christmas pantomime, standing in a circle in my back field holding hands with their eyes closed. I went up to their leader, Neville Booth, a villainous Abanazar in his embroidered fez, and asked what they were doing. He released one hand from an earnest-looking Widow Twankey on his left, put his fingers to his lips—I was interrupting an important meeting—returned his hand to his partner and began to hum tonelessly.
I turned away, puzzled, and went to attend to the goat, whom I’d tethered in the next field. By the time I had fed Puck her scraps, the humming had stopped. Neville Booth hurried over to me to explain.
“Wonderful news!” he said. “I was leading a party on a walk to the Calasay cliffs and I came across this! Your croft is a place of special enchantment!”
He indicated the area in the corner of the back field where he’d been conducting his ceremony.
“Look!” he said.
I looked.
“Don’t you see it? The fairy ring!”
He pointed at a patch of flattened grass, a perfect circle, two and a half feet in diameter.
I shook my head and led him to the next field where Puck was tethered to her post, around which was another perfect circle of flattened grass, trampled and cropped by the goat since I’d moved her from her previous patch in the back field that morning.
Neville Booth swiftly moved his party on in search of the next place of enchantment, leaving me to reflect on an old Scots saying—of the Balnasaig Seekers and their ilk, it can be truly said they are “away with the faeries.”
—Grigor McWatt, July 1970, Auchwinnie Pibroch*
* * *
* Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
Yink
Ma first an hinmaist handsel,
Ah yink this toosht o sangs,
The anely plack Ah hae,
Jist as they are, tae you.
Ah speak the suith, ungubbed,
Ah’d raither licht a gleed in yer bricht een,
Had raither hear ye ruise
Ma bosie fu o sangs
Than that the hale warld, in wan vyce,
In an ayebidin queir o cheers,
Skinks ower ma hummel haffet
Splairges o fleech fer aw ma years.
Ah pen this end agin ma hert,
Ma loue’s bonailie an her tuim.
Here the road pairts an we maun gang
Oor separate weys till crack o doom.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Robert Louis Stevenson, 1971*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
In Edinburgh, Lilias’s extended summer of love was giving way to an autumn of anxiety. With little comfort in her personal life, hard drink was an anaesthetic and a solace.
“Oh, Grigor,” she wrote in November 1971, “it seems so long ago when you and I rampaged through the streets of Edinburgh, inflamed by love and poetry.”
She had fallen out badly with her boss at the betting shop.
“He sacked me for being drunk on the job. Drunk! Like him and all his customers. The real reason, of course, was I wasn’t up for any of the old hochmagandy. Not with him, anyway.”
She could no longer afford the rent on her apartment and, humiliated, had gone back to live with her parents.
“They see my temporary retreat to Liberton as the return of the bloody prodigal daughter. They’re bursting to declare, through their sanctimoniously pursed lips, ‘We told you so!’ ”
She was hurt to learn that Grigor had left the island to join the strikers at the Upper Clyde shipyard and hadn’t troubled to make the extra hour’s train journey to see her.
“Jimmy
Reid’s a handsome fellow. Nae doot. Charismatic too,” she wrote. “But I can’t believe that you would entirely forsake your Flooer for him? And now you’re back in your island sanctuary, stomping the hills alone like a Fascaray Heathcliff.”
He may have repented of his distance from her and, the following spring, they were both part of a Menzies’ Bar “works outing” that travelled to Aberdeenshire for a reading and rally by MacDiarmid and McWatt. Willie McCracken, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Archie Aitken came too and they stayed at the Monymusk Inn. There is no information about the sleeping arrangements that night but whatever happened between McWatt and Hogg, she always looked back on the trip with pleasure as well as sadness. “Do you remember Monymusk?” she wrote at the end of one anguished letter the following August, a month after her disastrous visit to Fascaray. “A whole sea of bad blood, most of it mine, has welled up between us since then. Will you ever forgive my grievous carnaptiousness?”
His reply was elliptical, and in verse; a reimagining, later published in Kowk in the Kaleyard and reprinted in Warld in a Gless,* of Edward Thomas’s more famous poem “Adlestrop.”
Aye, Ah mind Monymusk.
The name, acause wan efternuin
O leep, the fest train poued upby,
Unettled. It was ahint Juin.
The steam fuffed. A fellae redd his thrapple.
Naebdy left and naebdy came
On the bare stance. Whit Ah saw
Wis Monymusk—anely the name.
An widdies, widdie-yerb, an reesk,
Queen o the meidae, an hayrucks freuch,
Nae whit less lown an lanely braw,
Than the heich wee cloods i the sky.
An for that glisk a merlie sang,
Naurhaun, an roon him, haarier,
Faurer an faurer, awra birds
O Aiberdeen an Morayshire.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Virr Press, 1975. Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
19 November 2014
Niall walks Agnes over to my office after school. They find me in a state of agitation—my laptop has frozen and I fear I’ve lost a day of work. I try to appear calm but I feel hysterical. Niall makes tea while Agnes deals with the problem—a frown and five keystrokes restore everything.
They go into the museum to tackle the last of the MacRaes’ junk, leaving me to get on with my typing. The door is open and I tune in and out of the music of their conversation and laughter.
I’m envious of their easy relationship and wonder whether, surrounded by all this documentary evidence of blighted love, I’ve “caught” Lilias’s misery. Coupled with my pre-existing Morbus Fascariensis, the prognosis is not good.
I’m avoiding emails from friends—I’ve had two from Hobi and three from Pilar, all unanswered. Marco’s emails have become more expansive, actually asking me how I am. I only answer his questions about Agnes.
I’ve tinkered with a telegraphic email template—“Hi, all well here in the ancestral land, weather not withstanding. Work absorbing. Agnes content. Fuller email soon. How you?”—but even that sounds inauthentically cheerful.
A more truthful template might read: “What the hell am I doing here?” It could, I realise, have come straight from the pen of Lilias Hogg.
Emboldened, perhaps, by their trip to Monymusk, Lilias made a surprise visit to Fascaray in the late summer of 1972, arriving on the Bonxie. The new puffer was carrying a cargo of alabaster that had covered boat, crew and passenger with a coating of fine white dust.
Pat Boy Cairns and ship’s mate Donnie MacDonald were both flushed through their frosty pallor as they handed a giggling, unsteady Lilias, white as a marble nymph, down the gangplank. She had paid for her passage with a bottle of whisky and it had been a merry voyage. Young Chic McIntosh gingerly set down her scuffed vinyl suitcase on the quay and tried to dart away, but she was too quick for him and gave him a theatrical kiss on the cheek, which he never lived down. She was a “game lassie,” he said later, “but we were awful glad to see the back of her. She’d make trouble at a kirk purvey [church tea].” Until he could stand up for himself, McIntosh became known as Chic the Pòg. Pòg, of course, is Gaelic for kiss.
Lilias booked to stay in the Bothy that first night—it was too late to travel on to Calasay. She had a bath there, left her bags with Jamie and Marsaili MacDonald and went out to the Finnverinnity Inn. The next morning, the bunk she’d paid for had been barely slept in. She spent much of the night at the pub, where she must have hoped to run into Grigor. He never appeared but she didn’t waste time in morose reflection. She was a roaring girl on a spree and matched the regulars drink for drink. Accompanied by Murdo McIntyre on fiddle, she sang ballads bawdy and sad into the small hours. A party of visiting folk-music fans, including a journalist writing up their journey for the Scots Magazine, thought the striking girl with the “ready laugh and lovely voice” was a “marvellously authentic Fascaradian, a daughter of those braw, bawdy fisher lassies who once travelled the coasts of the north in search of seasonal work.”
She hit it off with Mikey MacRae and the next morning when the tide was out he took her over to Calasay on his tractor. We have no record of the poet’s reaction when he opened the door to find the Flooer o Rose Street temporarily transplanted to his native soil. Donald MacInnes, by then a restless, lanky 27-year-old with a pronounced limp, was out collecting wood at the time, and when he returned to An Tobar, he opened the door to “a hostile silence” and found Grigor sitting opposite his surprise visitor “with the look of a caged man, rattling at the bars.”
Lilias had been crying, Donald thought.
“I made them tea,” he recalled in 2014 in his interview with me. “She smiled bravely at me, emptied the dregs of a half-bottle of whisky in her mug and knocked it back. Made small talk, about the journey, her impressions of the island, asked me questions about myself. And all the while Grigor was glaring. He couldn’t wait to get her out the door.”
Under instruction from McWatt, Donald made up a bed for the visitor in the byre. She had planned to stay for two weeks. McWatt told her it was impossible but she insisted that she wouldn’t get in his way. “You owed me that much,” she wrote later, “considering all the hospitality, corporeal and otherwise, I extended to you over the past dozen years.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” said MacInnes. “I got on fine with her. Took her out walking. Showed her the special places around. She was interested. She cooked a couple of times, things out of tins mostly, and managed to get the odd conversation and even a rare smile out of Grigor. But he didn’t like the way she was getting on with me. To be honest he was jealous. They had a terrible falling-out towards the end of the second week—we all did—and he ordered her out of the house.”
Lilias’s visit may have been a final attempt to reignite her romantic relationship with McWatt. If so, by the time she left Calasay her hopes were ashes. In the byre, under a stack of books, she had come across a letter to the poet written in an unfamiliar hand on peach notepaper.
“A billet-doux from your fancy’s flight,” Lilias wrote to him from Edinburgh, still fuming, three days after she finally left Fascaray. “Your own bonnie bloody Jean.”
According to Lilias’s account, he had snatched the letter from her hand before she had time to read anything other than the signature—“Yours, Jean”—and he refused to be drawn on its contents or its author.
“You simply wouldn’t talk about her. I take that as final confirmation that I can never truly claim your heart. Never could. Well, you took your time to tell me. Dragged it out and dragged me down.”
After McWatt banished her from An Tobar, she stayed on the island for another three days. She was said to have spent one night in Murdo McIntyre’s disordered hovel in Doonmara and passed the remainder of her time in the Finnverinnity Inn, until Mikey MacRae gently escorted her onto the Bonxie back to the mainland.
“Sh
e was a cracking lassie,” MacRae told Knox-Cardew over the phone from Pictou, Nova Scotia—one of the few first-hand interviews conducted by the biographer. She outdrank several of the fishermen, including MacRae, who, aged nineteen in 1972, was twelve years younger than Lilias. He told Knox-Cardew that he had to restrain her from loudly singing “Hame tae Fascaray” outside the pub at 3 a.m. on the Sabbath and “knocking on the manse window in the scuddie” (which Knox-Cardew helpfully defines as “unclothed”).
In a letter to McWatt from Edinburgh, dated a week after her visit, Lilias wrote: “Now, as the foreign tourist in Edinburgh might say, I am understanding. The haar has cleared. You are as loyal to Your Jean as Burns was wedded to his Jean Armour. Why settle for prosaic Lilias when you could have poetic Jean? If only, though, you could have told me.”
The sole reference we have from McWatt to Lilias’s unexpected visit is a perfunctory postcard—a picture of Burns’s cottage in Alloway—that accompanied a parcel sent to her in Edinburgh a month later.
“Here are your pawkies [mittens] and gravat [scarf] which you left behind,” he wrote on the back of the card. “I’m sure they’ll be of more use to you in Edinburgh. Work on the Compendium progresses. Tremendous storms here over the last few days. Sea black and boiling. You’re well out of it. Aye, Grigor.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
22 November 2014
Niall offers to accompany me to Calasay to search the library for more material. We take the quadbike and I ride pillion. In our down jackets, beanies and walking boots we make comic bikers—Auchwinnie’s Angels—as we rumble across the strand. I call in at An Tobar to pick up the four volumes of Jamieson’s Dictionary, put them in a waterproof box which Niall straps to the back of the quad bike, then we cross the yard to the byre.
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