It’s two months since I’ve been here but Johanna has been checking the building weekly and it still seems watertight. A beam of light slants through the west window and for the first time I appreciate what a pleasing space this is. All these books, all this quiet order. I could move in here right now and shut out the noisy chaos of the world for good.
Under the west window is history—900, according to Dewey—with Toms Devine and Nairn heavily represented, as well as Fraser Darling, Smout, Mackie and a four-volume set of The Edinburgh History series. Opposite them is the Carmina Gadelica, the six-volume facsimile; my tidy mind—rigid, uptight, according to Marco when he was still enthralled by Karmic Kate—takes pleasure in the fact that the series has been correctly labelled, 398, under folklore.
Niall has climbed one of the ladders and is standing on a platform, three loosely jointed planks, above biography (921) where I find Alan Bold on Hugh MacDiarmid, Antonia Fraser’s life of Mary Queen of Scots, studies of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, James Hogg, Mackay Brown, Robert Burns and several editions, hardback and paperback, of McWatt’s own two volumes of memoir, Forby and Ootwith.
Next to the anthologies of English verse and selections of Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, and taking twice the shelf space, are collections of verse by MacDiarmid, Mackay Brown, Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig and Sorley Maclean as well as scores of copies of McWatt’s own collections. Here his personal filing system departs from Dewey. In libraries they would be numbered, like the Palgrave’s, the Quiller-Couch and Keats and co., under 821—“English and Old English literatures.” Here McWatt classifies Scots poetry under 890—“other literature.”
Shuggie the Post was right. He took better care of these books than he did of himself in his frugal home next door. Better care than he took of his friends too. I think of Lilias nursing her thwarted love in her squalid basement in Edinburgh. Inevitably, she quarrelled with her parents when she returned from her calamitous trip to Fascaray. She signed on at the Labour Exchange and moved into two rooms owned by Archie Aitken in a condemned tenement building in Bedford Street.
How Lilias would have loved to have been permanently filed here in this beautiful place by her “Fascaray Heathcliff.” On the shelf, but in the best possible way. Cherished and classified: 152 (psychology, perception, emotions) perhaps, or better still 808.80 (erotic literature). And always with the consoling prospect that some evening he might choose her from all the others, bring her out, run his finger down her spine, and sit quietly alone with her for a few hours. She didn’t ask much. “And she got nothing,” I hear her sister’s reproach.
I step back, taking in the scale of the library. I can’t decide whether it represents the collection of a scholarly completist or the hoard of an acquisitive monomaniac with pretensions. Either way, the Grigor McWatt library is worth preserving, and he knew it. But I need more than books to furnish the museum in Finnverinnity and flesh out the narrative of his life.
The only furniture in the room is a single cane-seated chair, a rosewood desk—its drawers are empty—and a swan-necked brass reading light. No obvious place for hiding treasures.
“Ah!” Niall calls from his perch above me. “Might this be of use?”
He reaches precariously above the top shelf and prises from the space between bookcase and rafter a brown attaché case that, a billowing cloud of dust suggests, has been crammed in there for some time. Coughing, he descends the ladder gingerly and hands me his find.
It’s locked, of course. And the chances of locating the key must be zero.
Niall produces a penknife.
“A little light breaking and entering, in the interests of poetry?” he says. “Or maybe, in the interests of Fascaray?”
“Okay, but try to minimise the damage.”
With a deft twist of the blade he opens the case.
I’m about to ask him jokily if he’d ever tried his hand at burglary when I’m stopped in my tracks.
Inside, tied in two neat bundles, are dozens of papers and documents secured by rubber bands. My eye is drawn to a handwritten note on the top of the smaller pile. The paper is peach-coloured and the signature, plain and childishly round, reads “Yours, Jean.”
Aw naitur haes a feelin
Aw naitur haes a feelin; firth, hauch an ben
Are vieve ayebidin: an in seelence they
Speak cantieness ootwith the sillereds’ ken;
There’s nae thing mortial in them; their mozin
Is the grein vieve o chynge; bygae awa
An come agane in bluims floorishin.
Its howdiein, afore oor day, was auncient,
Its stay ayebidin, wi sun and muin,
Lang past oor nicht that comes tae suin,
Aneath the michty unforgien skies abuin.
—Grigor McWatt, efter John Clare, 1972*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
There was a degree of reconciliation between Hogg and McWatt. He returned to Edinburgh twice in the winter of 1972 to meet up with the poets and, the letters indicate, with Lilias in Menzies’. But he stayed with Archie Aitken and his wife in Gilmore Place or in a cheap bed and breakfast close to Waverley Station. Lilias had found temporary work in August handing out leaflets for the Edinburgh Festival’s fringe shows but she was “back on the booze,” as she admitted, and essentially unemployable. She was now living in a room in a Leith hostel, where her domestic set-up had become too chaotic for the increasingly fastidious McWatt.
“Lilias, Lilias,” he scolds in one letter dated 18 December 1972, “at the risk of sounding bourgeois, I was alarmed to see you in that state. Even the lowest beast does not foul his own nest. I do not expect to find the Flooer o Rose Street blooming on a midden.”
Increasingly, an unattractive note of bitterness enters Lilias’s letters—“and how is Bonnie Jean? Is it, after all, her stieveness [firmness] that maks your circle suith? Is it Jean who makes you ‘feenish whaur ye stairt’? Daft thing is, I thought it was all about me!” she wrote in January 1973. “Tell me, does she ever come across with the goods or is she too perjink [fussy] for all that farmyard stuff? Well, if she won’t, you can tell her that others will. Though maybe you think me too old for all that now.” Lilias was thirty-two.
We can only guess at his response. By the time he received this last letter, he, and the rest of Fascaray, would have had bigger tragedies than mere heartbreak to address.
On Tuesday 13 March 1973, in a force-ten south-easterly gale, the Auchwinnie lifeboat was called out to assist a Panama-registered 1,800- ton cargo ship, the Lara, which was in severe difficulties west of the Mhor Sgheir reef. The Lara’s Greek captain had radioed for help and fired distress flares that were seen all the way up to the northern isles. Lifeboat coxswain Mungo MacAskill launched the Morag May from Auchwinnie with five crew. On their way to the stricken vessel they picked up two further hands, Fascaradians Jamie MacDonald, Mungo’s son-in-law, and Jamie’s brother Francie, two of the most experienced lifeboat volunteers in the region.
But as the Morag May made her way towards Mhor Sgheir, a rescue was already underway. The Lara had foundered just offshore by Doonmara Cliffs and Tormud Campbell’s Silver Darling, aided by a flotilla of smaller fishing vessels, was able to help the crew of sixteen, mostly Filipinos and Portuguese, across the rocks to safety. Two months later Tormud was to receive an award for his courage from the owners of the Lara, but by then there was little appetite for honours or awards of any sort.
As the storm worsened that night, the Morag May, intent on its mission, buffeted by hundred-mile-an-hour winds and tossed by sixty-foot waves, lost radio contact. By 9:30 p.m., as the crew of the Lara and their rescuers were recovering from their ordeal, drinking tea and huddling under donated blankets in Finnverinnity Hall, the lifeboat was last sighted by Duncan Maclean, keeper of the Fascaray Head lighthouse.
Du
ring the long night that followed, coastguards desperately tried to make radio contact with the Morag May but she remained silent. Three bigger lifeboats, from the west coast and the northern isles, joined the search backed by two RAF planes and a helicopter. It wasn’t until noon the following day that the Morag May was seen floating, hull upturned, out beyond the Carracorry whirlpool. All hands were lost.
Six women were widowed and thirteen children were left fatherless by the Morag May disaster. Jamie MacDonald’s widow Marsaili, eight months pregnant with their third child, also lost her father, Mungo MacAskill. Francie MacDonald’s widow Jessie, mother of three, also lost her brother, lifeboat bosun John Donald Mackenzie, father of seventeen-year-old Margaret, who worked in Finnverinnity post office.
Mourners of all denominations attended the MacDonalds’ requiem Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary in Lusnaharra, where seventeen years earlier, in the face of snowstorms and defying sectarian hostility, Francie and Jessie had received a marriage blessing from Father Col. Among the congregation at the funeral was Albert Smart, captain of the Fleet Flourish, the Grimsby trawler that, three years earlier, had been saved by the Morag May. Smart, in conjunction with the Seamen’s Union, launched a nationwide disaster fund to help the bereaved families of Auchwinnie and Fascaray. Tormud Campbell donated the £500 he received for his part in the rescue of the Lara.
A black border was printed around the front page of that week’s Auchwinnie Pibroch, which carried an interview with Marsaili MacDonald. The new editor of the paper, a Skye man with a strong feeling for the fishing community, conducted the interview himself. Marsaili told him that there was great sadness but no bitterness among the bereaved families. “We know those happy days of our family life are over but we can’t regret that our men died trying to help others and that the crew of the Lara were saved.”
In McWatt’s column for the Pibroch that week he honoured the widows as well as their husbands for “selfless stoicism in the face of such personal catastrophe.”
Three weeks later, on 2 April, Marsaili gave birth to her third child, a boy. She named him James Francis MacDonald.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Fur the Fawen
They ganged wi sangs tae their baits, they were braw,
Sonsie, stalwart an strang, wi youthie lowe ableize.
They were stieve frae end tae wynd an braved the maw,
But fell in wild rumballiach seas.
They’ll niver lauch wi pals agane,
Nor see kenspeckelt sichts o hame;
In daily darg they shallna jyne us;
They dover forby Scotland’s faem.
They shallnae dwyne as we that bide shall dwyne:
Age shallnae forfecht them, nor the lang years duim.
At the gangin doon o the sun an in the mornin
We wull aye mind them.
Where oor whumleeries an deepest thochts,
Rin like a dern burn datchie frae sicht,
Tae the howie hert o their ain laun they are kennt,
As the starns are kennt tae the Nicht;
As the starns that wull be bricht when we disemberk,
Ootower the braid skies they glaister an glide,
As the starns that flichter in the days o oor mirk,
Tae the end, tae the end, they bide.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Laurence Binyon, 1973*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
23 November 2014
Agnes is asleep upstairs as I sit at the kitchen table at 2 a.m. sifting through the latest documents retrieved from Calasay. I’ve sorted them into two bundles now, one of them archivist’s gold (or this archivist’s gold): letters from the elusive Jean.
There is the faintest tremor in my hands as I finally unfold the paper carefully. Though the salutation cannot compare to Lilias’s Griogal Cridhe, “Dear G” strikes a hopefully familiar note. Excitement—professional pride tinged with a cheap jolt of voyeurism—turns to dismay. That they are all undated and the address is simply given as Abbotsford Drive is disappointing enough—the Walter Scott echo a coincidence McWatt surely wouldn’t relish—but it’s the content of these letters, written in royal-blue ink on lined peach A5, that truly vexes: the prose is uniformly pedestrian.
Reports on the weather—“mild for the time of year,” “raining stair rods,” “a glimpse of sun at last”; developments in the garden—“the first snowdrops,” “putting the bedding plants in,” “lobelias and narsissi [sic] in my hanging baskets”; and what seem to be veiled requests for money—“the conservatory extension is costing more than we planned. It seems we must hope for a pools win to complete the building work. How are you fixed at the moment?”; “We had so hoped to take a little foreign holiday this year after my mishap with my leg. Majorca looks particularly appealing but things are tight and we cannot run to it ourselves. Heard your song again on Radio 2. You must be raking it in.”
This is not the stuff of high romance. Or any romance at all. I can’t possibly include these letters in the exhibition. That McWatt favoured dull Jean over wild, witty Lilias hardly suggests sound poetic judgement. Jean must have had something, I guess. She could have been a remarkable beauty but that alone, so we’re always told, would hardly be enough to sustain a long-term passion. She might have been a powerhouse in the sack, but there’s little evidence of sensuality here. Perhaps McWatt was simply seeking an antidote—Jean’s stability against Lilias’s volatility. The headlong stampede to self-destruction, exhilarating to watch until the chasm yawns, rarely coexists with a fondness for hanging baskets.
I’m unreasonably annoyed with Niall for finding these letters. Far better if they’d remained where they were, if Bonnie Jean had remained a cipher, the enigmatic Dark Lady of McWatt’s sonnets. Exposed, her trite correspondence will undermine our story. Of course I’ll do my duty and catalogue them; to do otherwise would be a grossly unprofessional act of deception, to which Niall would be a witness. Again, I feel a prick of irritation. Why hadn’t he kept out of it? The letters will have to be made available to any PhD students or future biographers. But unless I can turn up McWatt’s replies to Jean’s mind-numbingly mundane letters, at least placing them in context, I’ll make sure this half of the correspondence is consigned to storage. And I won’t be quoting them in A Granite Ballad.
I turn with relief to another of yesterday’s finds. Two acrostic poems by McWatt and Hogg; his, with excisions and emendations, is clearly a draft.
Love breenged
In. Ah gawked,
Like aw the rest,
In this moment
At this oor,
Saw naebdy but
Her. She o the russet hair
O the faithomless een,
Guidness in a gowen fair
Gladdened ma hert ayont repair.
I hope he sent Lilias the finished poem. It would have made her happy. Hers to him—both poems are undated but I’m guessing hers was written after the ill-fated visit to Fascaray—might have been a direct reply.
Give me.
Render me.
I’m yours for the taking,
Gleeful and quaking.
Or would you forsake me?
Redact me. No faking.
Make me.
Collate me.
When do we start?
All right—here’s my heart.
Take it. Don’t break it.
Too late—it’s apart.
Perhaps I should draw up a proposal for a Lilias Hogg Heritage Centre. We might pull in the contemporary art crowd with a faithful re-creation of squalor and squandered dreams, with added poetry, in a dim and airless basement flat.
INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS AND PHRASES DESCRIBING GLOOM AND DESPAIR
dour
douth
dowie
&
nbsp; dreich
dule
glunch
gowstie
gurrie
hasnae sorraes tae seek
hert-sair
hert-scaud
if it’s no clegs, it’s midgies
if it’s no scab, it’s skitter
manefu
mirk
misfeuchal
misfure
misglim
mougre
sair-aff
stoom
syte
wae
wanhowp
—Grigor McWatt, 1973, The Fascaray Compendium
25 November 2014
Grigor McWatt’s birthday. He would have been ninety-three. The Scottish government has chosen today to announce plans to memorialise him on the Parliament building’s Canongate Wall. Tipped off by Ailish—“Yes,” I fudged, “of course I know. I’m on my way”—I go to the post office to buy all the newspapers for the office. McWatt’s grim face, briar pipe jammed in bristly undershot jaw, is pictured on the front page of the National, the new pro-independence newspaper. All the Scottish press feature the story inside, with the quote that will be engraved on the wall in a slab of Fascaray granite—“Wha loues the laun, awns the laun, an the laun awns him”—alongside lines by MacDiarmid (on Lewisian gneiss), Norman MacCaig (Bressay sandstone), Robert Burns (Ardkinglas) and John Muir (Ross of Mull granite).
The press reports include several mentions of the Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre and Fascaray Museum—which will please Gordon Nesbitt and the board—and the National, in a “souvenir double-page spread,” runs two poems in full, “The Pirlin Scottish Road” and “The Paith No Taein,” and retells the story of Lilias Hogg, “the love that never died.”
Hame Page 32
