Hame
Page 38
Many suspected that wayward teenagers were responsible for the house’s broken windows and smashed fanlight but no one was going to call the Auchwinnie police to investigate. Even if the “polis” were to be summoned, would they bother to make the journey across the Clinch to protect a property with no owner?
As for the Big House garden, the lawns—unmown for years—were infested with molehills, all that remained of the first Lady Montfitchett’s Elizabethan knot garden was a clump of blighted box hedging, and the overgrown shrubbery had become a trysting place for local youths and, judging by the empty bottles in the rhododendron bushes, an al fresco saloon bar for underage drinkers. The island’s resident moral arbiters, priest and minister, had long gone and their homes, the simple presbytery cottage in Lusnaharra and the imposing manse in Finnverinnity, were also empty.
The congregations of both denominations now had to travel to Auchwinnie for services but, since sabbatarian tradition prohibited Sunday sailings, the devout would cross the Clinch to attend special Masses and services on Saturday mornings, return in the afternoon and spend Sabbath’s Eve and the Lord’s Day at home in private reflection and prayer.
The empty kirk in Finnverinnity was bought by a couple from London who turned it into a pottery workshop and gift store. But, wrote McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium, locals, Balnasaig Seekers and the occasional visiting hikers, “showed little interest in Fauvist teapots, humorous knitwear, tartan aprons and thistle-shaped bookmarks.” The couple parted eighteen months later and sold the building at a loss to an Auchwinnie developer, who went bust within months of the sale. Empty once more, the kirk was, wrote McWatt, “a silent, mouldering rebuke to consumerism and avarice.”
The Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary was also derelict and, in The Fascaray Compendium, McWatt reflected that it would “soon revert to its Neolithic state as the roofless pagan shrine of Teampull Beag, decaying with the rest of Fascaray as a reproach to our criminally negligent lairds.” Evoking Shelley’s Ozymandias, McWatt saw the decay of Finnverinnity House, once a “monument to vanity and greed,” as a symbol of the systematic neglect of Fascaray by its absentee owners: “Forby bides naethin. Aroon the clatty murl / O thon undeemous midden, mairchless an scabbit / Streeks oor disjaskit isle, far oot ayont their ken.”
And then came the news, in early 1989, that the island had been sold; Fascaray had a new laird. Ozymandias was back.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
3 December 2014
My first row with Agnes. I’m in shock.
She asked if she could Skype her father and I told her it wasn’t convenient. I had some work to do—more, no doubt false, leads to pursue on Bonnie Jean—and I needed my laptop.
Thackeray Press are pushing for another chapter of A Granite Ballad, there are many more pages of the Compendium that need typing up and I need to transcribe some of the letters.
She stood her ground.
“But I said I’d speak to him tonight,” she said.
“Sorry, honey. It’ll have to be tomorrow. Mommy has to work.”
Then there was the Exorcist moment, when my biddable child metamorphosed horribly: her face contorted, her cheeks reddened, her eyes narrowed and she shouted—Agnes shouted!—at me:
“Why is it always all about you? What you want? Can’t someone else have a chance?”
She ran upstairs to her room, slamming the door so hard that the picture of the Highland cattle fell off the wall. I picked it up. In the circumstances, the corny portrait of a big-eyed calf with its mother has never looked more ironic.
She’s still up in her room and I’m sitting at the kitchen table with the Compendium notebooks, my typed-up pages, my book, the letters, fending off the thought that Agnes is uncannily re-enacting my own adolescence five years ahead of schedule, and I’m doing the only thing I know how to do when faced with turmoil: working.
What am I actually good at? Not relationships. Certainly not motherhood. But sitting quietly alone in a room with a stack of thin sheets of pulped wood incised with symbols, methodically trying to make sense of someone else’s messed-up life; maybe I’m okay at that.
Mindin
They rin frae me, wha bytimes did me seek
Wi scuddie fit, stalkin ma chaumer.
I hae seen them cannie, saft an douce,
Wha noo are camsteirie, an dinnae mind
That wance they risked a killie-shangie
Tae tak breid at ma haun; an noo they gang
Aboot, seekin the new-fangle.
Ah thank braw fate that lang
Syne, Ah had ma oor, and wance
In scrimpet duds, efter a cantie spiel,
Her gowen fawen frae her shouder,
She claucht me in her spirlie wee airms
An preed me doucely, speirin saft,
“Don’t haud back, pal. Dinna be sae daft.”
Ah wasnae dwauming; it wasnae happenstance.
But time is rinnin too, Ah had ma chance,
Ah watch ma furmer hinnie jyne the dance.
An nou the warld has birled, Ah’ve been forsook.
It’s time tae pack ma bags an sling ma hook.
She’s turned awa tae sonsier, newer loues
An Ah maun gang an seek anither muse.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Thomas Wyatt, 1989*
* * *
* Teuchter’s Chapbook, Smeddum Beuks, 1998.
The new laird of Fascaray, Baron Giles de Uytberg (pronounced Witberg), a short, plump man in his late forties, “slick as a seal in a Savile Row suit,” according to McWatt in the Compendium, had “a brusque manner, Belgian name and English background.” Though de Uytberg traced his title back to the First Crusade, most of his money, like that of his corporate predecessor in Fascaray, was earned in the City of London, “if ‘earned’ is the word for it,” wrote McWatt. Baron de Uytberg (named “Witless” by McWatt) was a commodities broker, trading in “futures.” There was some question, McWatt noted, “as to whether he could bring any expertise to bear on the future of Fascaray.” But, triumphant though bruised by their recent battle with Sapphire, many islanders—McWatt was not among them—were willing to give Baron de Uytberg the benefit of the doubt. There was also some curiosity about his wife, his third, Claudia, who had once worked as a hostess on a television game show.
By the summer, after a frenzy of renovation and redecoration by a team of English staff supervised by de Uytberg’s personal assistant, “a bossy lassie in breeks,” according to McWatt, the Big House was ready to receive its new owners. A poster appeared outside Finnverinnity Hall advertising the “Inaugural Fascaray Highland Games,” to which all islanders were invited.
There was already a traditional local Highland gathering—the long-established Auchwinnie Highland Games. Most Fascaradians took the ferry to the mainland each August bank holiday to watch, and occasionally participate in, the contests for caber tossing, hammer throwing, stone putting, tug-of-war, hill racing, bagpiping and Highland dancing. More popular attractions included food stalls, a subsidised bar and an evening ceilidh. But de Uytberg’s Games promised “new and innovative competitions celebrating Fascaray’s rich history” on the Big House croquet lawn.
The poster stipulated that “only those wearing full Highland dress will be admitted,” but those without the requisite costume could hire it from Finnverinnity House, “free of charge. Apply to Miss Chetwynd, PA to the Laird, rear door, stables.”
Though McWatt was the only islander at that time to possess—and routinely wear—Highland dress, he rejected this invitation from the new Laird of Fascaray. “I have a more pressing engagement that day; mucking out my byre,” he wrote to de Uytberg.
McWatt’s report of the event in The Fascaray Compendium was taken from eyewitness accounts recorded in the Finnverinnity Inn that evening. The best first-hand narrative we have of the games is from Effie MacLeod.
“The noise was somethin
g terrible,” she told me. “All they helicopters bringing in the laird’s guests for their weekend house party. You couldnae hear yourself think. But we all went along anyweys. We were curious, see.”
It was a day of fitful sunshine and a queue of Fascaradians, “frae weans tae auld wans,” assembled outside the stables of the Big House where they were handed flimsy costumes by “a snooty besom in a trouser suit,” de Uytberg’s assistant Marina Chetwynd. There were kilts, blue bunnets, ginger wigs and swords for the men; ankle-length skirts, plaid shawls and wicker baskets for the women. The costume sizes were approximate and the effect, as the islanders filed out of the stables towards the croquet lawn, was, as McWatt wrote in the Compendium: “of a comic, mismatched tartan rabble.”
De Uytberg had shunned the island’s resident piper, Sorley MacDonald, fisherman grandson of the late bagpiper Shonnie MacDonald, and instead, according to McWatt, “employed a multi-instrumentalist cockney from Mile End who had once served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.”
“We were all hangin aboot, eyein the tables piled high with food and drink, when suddenly there was this yell,” recalled Effie. De Uytberg, who had been hiding in the ha-ha, scrambled onto the lawn with his male house guests, dressed in the red uniforms of Hanoverian soldiers and carrying plastic blunderbusses and high-powered water pistols.
It was, de Uytberg explained later to a reporter from the Auchwinnie Pibroch, “a re-enactment of the Battle of Culloden, meant to be a bit of fun.” Those islanders who tried to make their escape found exit routes blocked by Land Rovers and sandbags as around them whooping Redcoats took aim with jets of freezing water. It was a rout.
“After twenty minutes of pandemonium, the islanders staggered from the battlefield sodden and shivering and were directed to the stables, where they were handed towels and given a glass of ginger [soda] and a biscuit before they changed into their own, dry, clothes, and were sent on their way,” wrote McWatt. “Never mind Culloden. It was Flodden, Falkirk, Pinkie Cleugh and Darien, combined.”
The only islander to emerge with any credit from the Inaugural Fascaray Highland Games was young James Francis MacDonald, described by McWatt as “a gentle and mannerly youth,” Marsaili MacDonald’s son, who was helping his widowed mother run the Bothy before starting his studies at Glasgow University in September. “In the heat of battle, under intense provocation, Jamie showed himself to be a man of mettle. He wrested a garden hose from a Redcoat and scored a direct hit, knocking the tricorn hat from de Uytberg’s head and sending him staggering back into the rhododendrons.”
That night, and every subsequent night for the next two months, James Francis MacDonald, now known as Jamie the Hose, was given a hero’s welcome in the inn.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Lines on the Finnverinnity Inn
Poets o the firmament,
Whit Elysium hae ye kennt?
Distant Edens, beauties far,
Choicer than oor island’s bar?
Hae ye bevvied till yer stocious
In a howff mair perspicacious?
Are the fruits o Paradise
Doucer than those mutton pies?
—Grigor McWatt, efter John Keats, 1989*
* * *
* Teuchter’s Chapbook, Smeddum Beuks, 1998.
It soon became clear, as McWatt wrote in the Compendium, that “de Uytberg’s flaws as Laird of Fascaray extended beyond a taste for humourless high jinks.” The island was one of his many playthings and his scant interest in it, dormant most of the year, was reawakened only during his infrequent visits. “Ootta sicht, ootta mynd,” McWatt wrote, describing the period of de Uytberg’s ownership as a regime of “malign neglect.” The new factor, a retired policeman from Margate, was another part-timer, mostly based at the laird’s southern pile—a pink stucco Beverly Hills-style mansion commanding a wooded hillside in Buckinghamshire, with a garage full of vintage cars, a reconditioned Spitfire plane and a state-of-the-art wine cellar.
It was said that Claudia de Uytberg had taken against Fascaray. “She’s no doubt troubled by the lack of shops, and the midges that, on the rare occasions when it is dry enough to sit outside, make it impossible to enjoy champagne on the terrace,” reported McWatt in a wry entry in the Compendium. During the laird’s long absences from his northern seat, Finnverinnity House was looked after by a surly Welsh caretaker, Llew Evans, who lived in the former nursery, repaired the roof, glazed broken windows, checked for burst pipes and scared off any local youths trespassing in the gardens. He also began a furtive relationship with Izzy Wallop, occasioning late-night and, according to Effie MacLeod, “rambunctious” visits to Wallop’s cottage in Finnverinnity.
This relationship, according to McWatt, accounted for the “unusual reticence of both the Isle of Fascaray Residents’ Association and the Fascaray Preservation Society to pursue the laird for improvements to the island’s shaky infrastructure and housing stock.” All requests from islanders for regular water and electricity supplies—those lucky enough to be wired up to the generator only had power between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. and many Fascaradians still had to walk a mile to get their water from a well—as well as repairs to leaking roofs, installation of inside toilets, assistance with plumbing emergencies or for help with tackling the rising damp which jeopardised the health of children and pensioners, were ignored.
Above Lusnaharra, the MacRaes’ old community golf course among the dunes, machair grass, wild orchids and sea pinks, was bulldozed and the fairway disappeared under a runway for the laird’s twin-engined plane. At first local protests were quelled by assurances that what the laird called Fascaray Airport—a strip of tarmac and a windsock—would benefit the island: well-heeled mainland weekenders would bring custom to the inn, shop, the Bothy and the former Temperance Hotel, now renamed the Fascaray Hotel. Miss Geddes’ severe rooming house had been transformed by its new owner, an antiques dealer from Kirkintilloch, who had decorated it in dark baronial style with antler trophies, four-poster beds, suits of armour and stuffed animals, and, as McWatt wrote in the Compendium, “in a development that would have scandalised its former proprietor, he has equipped the residents’ lounge with a mirrored art deco cocktail cabinet, fully stocked.” Naturally, the hotelier, who had use of a business partner’s Cessna, welcomed the laird’s airstrip.
Fascaray Airport would also be an amenity for ordinary islanders, argued Izzy Wallop; they would no longer have to rely on precarious sea passage or costly helicopter journey in medical emergencies. Grigor McWatt was unconvinced—“this is no more a community airport than Finnverinnity House is a community centre,” he wrote in the Pibroch—and he was once more proved right. The runway was used four times a year and, apart from the hotelier’s occasional joyrides, the sole passengers were de Uytberg and his friends.
As in the days of the Montfitchetts, attention was only given to Finnverinnity House, and to Fascaray, the week before the laird arrived for the shooting and fishing in the summer and for the Hogmanay house party. His ghillie—another Englishman—would arrive a week before the laird and the factor to check the fishing equipment and guns while housekeeper and maids—a fresh batch every season, usually from Eastern Europe—would be drafted in to clean and air the place, and descend on Fascaray along with Marina Chetwynd, whose brief, wrote McWatt in the Compendium, “was to ensure that her master’s eye would not be offended by any unsightliness in the vicinity of the Big House, or when en route to the hills and rivers to slaughter stag and salmon.”
Sheets of iron and rolls of plastic, used for roofing and window repairs and usually stacked outside islanders’ homes, had to be concealed in byres and sheds, along with sacks of manure, tangled nets, rusting tricycles, old prams and other clutter of crofting, fishing or family life. On Finnverinnity shore, the Campbells’ old boat, the Silver Darling, was deemed to be an eyesore and was ordered to be hauled in and concealed behind the fish-drying
shed before being broken up for firewood.
Meanwhile, in the Pibroch, McWatt reported the plight of Bernadette McKinnon and her husband Joe MacRae, who were living in a caravan with their three children on the beach—“their cottage in Lusnaharra having become uninhabitable on account of damp.” During one fierce storm, an empty caravan nearby was hurled into the air and smashed against rocks. “During the gales the noise is something terrible,” Joe MacRae told McWatt. “The caravan shakes like a can of stones. The children cannae sleep. Whenever the wind turns, we’re all living on our wits. The worry’s something terrible.”
Davy McIntosh, Hamish and Sarah’s youngest son, “despairing of ever getting decent living conditions on Fascaray,” wrote McWatt in “Frae Mambeag Brae,” moved to the mainland with his young family in search of work and social housing in the council flats on the edge of Auchwinnie.
In the Compendium, McWatt noted the departure of other islanders who headed south. The school lost half its pupils and there were fears it would have to close, while the new leaseholders of the island store, the Macfarlanes, lived “in daily fear of bankruptcy.”
The empty homes soon reverted—moss crept over roofs, ferns unfurled from walls, rot devoured windows and door frames, birds and mice moved in, and finally the buildings, as if sighing with relief that the struggle to remain upright was over, collapsed back into the land. To an outsider, this dereliction could seem picturesque. After all, as McWatt wrote, “the silent empty Scottish landscapes so beloved of charabanc-party romantics, testify as much to the human cruelty and tragedy of the clearances as to nature’s magnificent artistry.” Less attractive were the heaps of primary-coloured plastic washed up on the shore at Lusnaharra and Finnverinnity—empty milk and detergent bottles, orange floats, mayonnaise cartons, the occasional sinister single trainer, discarded or lost from passing ships. Once, locals had taken it upon themselves to collect and dispose of ugly debris but now they left it to pile up in tangles of rotting seaweed. Neglect could be contagious.