Infection, Pascal grudgingly assured me, was not inevitable.
“I’m the one with the diagnosis here,” he said. “Why does it have to be about you?”
I didn’t bother to argue. I had to have my own blood test to check whether my fetching young lover had left me with a toxic parting gift.
—
My office door swings open. It’s Agnes, pink-cheeked and giddy, on her way round to Kirsty Campbell’s. School finished early today and Kylie and Darren Macfarlane are taking them pony-trekking with Aaron Schneider.
“They really liked it!” she says.
“Great!” I say, stalling.
Who “they” are and what “it” is should become clear if I let her keep talking. But my daughter, too subtle for me, guesses my confusion and bears me no grudge.
“My project!” she says. “They really liked it. All the kids and the teacher. I got to read it out and it was passed round the school and everything.”
She takes the folder out of her bag and dumps it on my desk before running off to join Kirsty outside.
“See you later, Mom! Love you!”
In the folder are eight pages of unlined A4, taken from a spiral-bound sketchbook, held together with a single pink paper clip.
On the cover is a drawing of a mountain, Beinn Mammor, a green cone with a tiny Saltire flag on the peak. At the base of the mountain are the words, in purple felt tip, “My Hero—Hector McPhail.” Inside is the story of the Fascaray Five and of “my great-grandfather—my mom’s grandpa—who fought from [sic] freedom on Fascaray.” There is a painting of the Big House, a sinister grey hulk with smoke curling from its many chimneys, and one of a thatched blackhouse with a family—mother, father and small boy, all wearing plaid—at the door with a caption: “Hector’s house in the clackan [sic] of Killiebrae.”
There is a battle scene of soldiers in trenches, their guns spouting tongues of flame, in a landscape whose gentle hills, umbrella pines and piercing blue sky tell us that this is Italy, not Scotland. Then we’re back in Scotland again, under thick grey cloud, with five men in kilts wielding spades—“The Famous Five of Fascaray, who staked their claim to the land.” On the facing page is a suited figure with a monocle and a pantomime-villain moustache—“Laird Montfitchett, who hated the people of Fascaray but was a friend of Hilter [sic].”
The biggest image, painted with great care in small strokes of muddy greens, greys and browns across two pages, is an empty glen—Killiebrae reduced to rubble.
Under it, she has written “The Five Men lost in the court case and it was like a giant stomped his way across the island, flatening [sic] houses, and familys [sic] and cows.”
The last page echoes the cover, with a close-up of a tiny bearded man in kilt and bunnet waving a Saltire.
“But even though he’s dead, my hero great-grandfather Hector McPhail won his battle in the end.”
I return to my work, and to Lilias Hogg’s battle, in which there were no heroes and no victors.
Written in her increasingly shaky handwriting, Lilias’s letters to Grigor in the mid-eighties are full of sadness and regrets, as well as recriminations.
“When you and I were young…Maybe if we’d stayed the course, if bloody Jean hadn’t bewitched you, we would have had a couple of bairns by now. They’d be going to the Big School in Auchwinnie and I’d wave them off on the boat on Monday mornings and welcome them home on Fridays. I’d keep house for you all in Calasay, feed the hens, make pancakes and clootie dumplings and give you warm company in bed. You could ‘scrieve tae yer hert’s delicht.’ Paradise it seems now. But I was foolish and madly jealous and I failed you.”
He doesn’t get drawn on the subject and instead writes to her about his work, sending her drafts of his latest verse.
“Real narrative drive,” she writes, “thrilling pulse, with the horses’ hooves thundering through the cadence. Knocks old Rabbie B into a cockit hat. And gosh, what woman wouldn’t want to be Bess the tapster’s dochter, with her crammasie loue knot and her dashing whilli-wha [highwayman].” Lilias is pleased to be invited in, to participate, however tangentially, as “a grateful geisha, happy to serve the grand project.” But she can’t resist a sarcastic aside, asking “if Jean has much to say on the subject of the lyric arts. How is she on the villanelle, or is she more of a terza rima quine?”
In another letter from this period Lilias writes, “I did think you and Bonnie Jean would be shacked up by now, cooried in, enjoying cosy conjugality in Calasay. Maybe you are, and you’re keeping it from me for fear of breaking my heart. Dinnae fash yersel—the heart’s lang gone.”
Her anger at this point is reserved for her parents—“the heartless, soulless Hoggs who surely got me into this mess in the first place, with their life-denying strictures and bourgeois shame. How else could I have turned out?”
McWatt, perhaps sensing that if it weren’t for her parents some of this anger would be heading straight for him, is unusually frank and stern.
“Your parents might have made a guddle of your childhood. I don’t doubt it. But, pace Larkin, I think, though yer maw an paw may fuck yer heid, when we reach adulthood it’s over to us. We become the authors of our own lives, and with our brief first chapter as a given, we can make a comic novel of it, or a beautiful haiku, a Gothic horror story, an exalted tale of high romance or a shabby little penny dreadful. What’s it to be, Lilias? It’s not too late, midstream, to switch genres. What about a redemption story?”
She doesn’t answer him directly and instead writes back that he “was aye the diffident one. The others would be sparking and fizzing, rapping the table to make their point. You could outquote and outbluster any of them when roused, but many’s the time you’d sit there with an enigmatic smile and a distant look in your eyes, a look that I could only describe as longing. I fancied, hoped, that the longing was for me but I soon learned that, though you enjoyed your Edinburgh gilravages [romps], you were certainly yearning—yearning not for me, not even for Jean, but for home. For Fascaray.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
The Whilli-wha
The win wis a scriddan o mirkness amang the blashy trees,
The muin wis a bogle birlinn fung ower gruggie seas.
The road wis a rebin o muinlicht athort the pairple mair,
An the whilli-wha cam ridin—
Ridin—ridin—
The whilli-wha cam ridin, up tae the auld howff door.
He’d a cockit-hat on his forebree, a toosht o lace at his chin,
A coat o crammasie velvet an breeks o broon buckskin.
He wis snoddit in his guid claes, a braw an bauld-daur coof,
An he rode wi a gillum glaister,
His gun it was a-glaister,
His sgian-dubh a-glaister, ablow the gillum sky.
Ower the cobbles he brattled an clished tae the mirk howff yird.
He chapped at the widden shutters, but aw wis lockit an baured.
He sowfed a tune tae the windae, an who should be bidin there
But the tapster’s dark-eed dochter,
Bess, the tapster’s dochter,
Braiding a crammasie loue-knot intae her lang daurk heir.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Alfred Noyes, 1985*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
With a Tory woman prime minister installed in Westminster, governing Scotland with little electoral support from the Scots, Fascaray went through what came to be known as the Corporate Era. After Torquil Montfitchett, Laird of Fascaray, died of cirrhosis in a Swiss clinic in 1985, Clarence, Montfitchett’s first-born son, inherited the estate. Unfortunately Clarence had also inherited another family weakness and, within months, he lost the island in a gambling debt. The servants were dismissed overnight and left on the next afternoon’s mailboat.
Fascara
y was bought by a City consortium, Sapphire Holdings, which installed a factor from London to oversee the estate and a ghillie from Devon to facilitate recreational shooting breaks for the company’s international clientele.
At first, life seemed to carry on much as before for the islanders; the factor, an impatient cockney, made it plain that his brief did not include management of Fascaray’s tenanted properties, and he left them alone except when rents were overdue. The Big House stood empty and shuttered, as it had been for years until the start of the season. Temporary staff were shipped in to clean the house, greet and cater for the new shooting parties up from London—City brokers and Wall Street types, loud and emphatically cheerful in their expensive field coats, multi-pocketed vests and twill breeks. They pacified locals with thick wads of banknotes, with which they bought drinks “on the house” in the Finnverinnity Inn.
Bigger changes were on their way, however, and when news broke of Sapphire’s longer-term proposal for the island it was greeted with incredulity. The company was planning a “large-scale job-creation scheme” for Fascaray. Good money, too. The young folk would no longer have to sail to the mainland to secure their futures; the island’s economy was about to receive an unprecedented boost thanks to Sapphire, which was going to open a quarry on the island.
But the Fascaradians soon learned that there was to be a cost. The quarry would, in fact, be a “superquarry,” based in the green core of the island. Beinn Mammor was to be blasted and scooped out to provide a mountain of stone chips to aid the construction boom and road-building programme down south.
“Once more the future of our beautiful island sanctuary is in jeopardy for the sake of the City boys’ bawbees,” wrote McWatt in the Pibroch. “To destroy Beinn Mammor would be a monstrous disfigurement which, if we agree to it, will call to mind Mother Abbess Ulla’s horrific self-mutilation a thousand years ago in the face of another barbarian invasion. The difference is, she saw off the marauders with her desperate act. We are inviting the pillagers into our home and offering them our treasures to despoil in whatever way they please.”
The economic arguments were, however, irresistible to 95 per cent of the islanders—what else could a fisherman do in these hard times? Fascaray needed jobs, argued Paddy and Mikey MacRae in a Residents’ Association meeting in the village hall. Nearly three decades later, in 2014, Effie MacLeod gave me her account of that acrimonious evening. Jobs apart, Sapphire’s scheme would bring extra business to the island, the MacRaes said. “We needed to move with the times or die,” Effie told me, paraphrasing the cousins’ argument.
The superquarry would also bring custom to the shop, the inn and the MacRaes’ fledgling Museum of Island Life. “They said it was only incomers like McWatt and the Balnasaig bampots who opposed it.” McWatt did not attend the meeting and could be safely criticised. Ignoring the hostility of the MacRaes, Neville Booth spoke out, making the case that Mammor was “a sacred site whose primal energies have drawn us here…It cannot, must not, be defiled in the name of worldly gain.” An embarrassed silence greeted his speech, according to Effie. “For most islanders, worldly gain was the reason we got up and went to work each morning.”
Up at Calasay, McWatt, who made no claim for the sacred status of Beinn Mammor, studied Sapphire’s plans closely. Then he travelled to Auchwinnie to make use of the Carnegie Library for further research and finally, forcefully, presented his case not in a Residents’ Association meeting in Finnverinnity Hall but more publicly, in a fiery “Frae Mambeag Brae” column in the Pibroch on 11 January 1986.
His column (printed in full below), with its devastating conclusion, received national and international attention, but more importantly it persuaded most Fascaradians that Sapphire’s superquarry, whatever short-term financial security it might bring to the island, would be disastrous. He became a figurehead for the opposition to the scheme and found himself, once more, in uncomfortable concord with the Balnasaig Seekers and with Izzy Wallop, who now employed all her energy, derived—she maintained—from Mammor itself, to overturn Auchwinnie Council’s approval of plans for the superquarry.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
PAIRT FOWER
Haste Ye Back
First there was Beinn Mammor, and then there were the Himalayas, the Alps and the Rocky Mountains. What claim, faithful readers of the Auchwinnie Pibroch might ask, even those of a justifiably chauvinistic bent, can our Fascaradian molehill make over the mighty mountain ranges of the Himalayas, the Alps and the Rockies? Bear with me and I will show that in matters geological, as in so much else, Scotland leads the world.
Our story, known in scientific circles as the Highland Controversy, involves nineteenth-century skulduggery, vainglory, scientific enterprise and valour. The cast comprises moustachioed, frock-coated geologists slugging it out in scholarly papers over the age of the origins of the Moine rock that makes up much of our region of Scotland.
In one corner was Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, a Scots-born, English-educated geologist, a London resident and president of the Royal Geographical Society, who looked at samples of rock layers from Beinn Mammor and concluded that the mountain was a comparatively recent feature of Highland terrain.
In the other corner were geologists Benjamin Neeve Peach, an Englishman (though in this context we can forgive him that), and John Horne, from Glasgow, who took the trouble one hundred years ago to actually travel to our island to investigate further. After a sojourn in the Finnverinnity Inn and days of fieldwork at the base and north face of Beinn Mammor, sketching the enfolded rock formations flecked with the glinting pyrite known as fool’s gold, they discussed their findings over copious drams at the inn and came up with the radical theory of the Moine Thrust, in which the earth’s movement in certain conditions can result in older rock being pushed on top of rock of a more recent vintage. Their conclusions, recorded as an addendum to their seminal book The Geology of North-West Scotland, revolutionised global understanding of the subject, established Scotland as a key site in its study, and, incidentally, made the case for thorough field-mapping, as opposed to abstract speculation, as a tool for research into tectonic movement.
Eduard Suess, the famous Alpine tectonicist, remarked that the work done by Horne and Peach on Beinn Mammor “had made the mountains transparent.” Transparency. Lucidity. This is a service we Scots can perform.
But now, on Fascaray, we have another Highland Controversy as Sapphire Holdings threaten to dynamite our mighty mountain, our fulcrum, and to our great shame, a majority of Auchwinnie councillors and a few unprincipled islanders—a “parcel of rogues bought and sold by English gold”—have supported the company’s bid for the superquarry.
My research shows that over the proposed forty-year lifespan of the superquarry, Sapphire will be dropping on the Friendly Isle the equivalent of almost five times the amount of explosives used on Hiroshima. The peace of the island would vanish and birds and wildlife would flee as fifteen tons of dynamite would be expended weekly, finally reducing Fascaray’s highest peak to a “rubble-filled hole” several hundred feet below sea level. The English have bled us dry for years. Now the southern vandals want to bomb us, blast out our heart and leave us for dead. Though turncoats might make their accommodations, true Fascaradians will not stand idly by.
—Grigor McWatt, January 1986, Auchwinnie Pibroch*
* * *
* Reprinted in Wittins: Mair Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 2011.
Bainisht
Sairchin ma hert for its suith sorrae,
This is the thing Ah find it tae be:
Ah’m forfauchelt by blether an fowk,
Scunnert by toun, glaggin for sea.
Glaggin for the claggie, saut douceness
O smattert skoosh an the wind’s wild pech;
Glaggin for the lood rair an the saft skirl
O muckle waws that gurge an brek.
&nb
sp; Lang syne Ah sprauchelt the waws in the mornin,
Shoogelt saund frae ma shoon at nicht
An noo Ah’m fankelt by tenements,
Stricken wi din, doitert wi licht.
Gin Ah could see the machair strand,
Stravaig the cliffs o Calasay,
Hear agane the sea’s ayebidin souch
An the birdies’ cruin oothro the day.
Ah should be cantie, that wis cantie
Aw the while in Fascaray.
Ah’ve a yen tae haud an haunle
Shells an jetsam in braw saut spray.
Ah should be cantie, that am cantie
Niver at all since Ah cam tae toun.
Ah’m too lang awa frae watter.
Ah need the sea an Ah need it suin.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1964*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
Surviving letters to Lilias from this time give no clue to McWatt’s new and very public life.
“All is sere, dry and silent here,” he wrote to her in 1985. “I sit at my desk in Calasay and work because that is all there is.”
Perhaps he is exaggerating the loneliness of his life to cheer her up in her misery. It’s also possible that he’s simply trying to get her off his back. Lilias’s letters were increasingly ugly and importuning. In a note from that period, scrawled on the back of a milkman’s bill, she asks if he can spare some money for household repairs.
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