I peer through the gloom, unable to make out what I’m meant to be looking at.
Eck turns on a flashlight and plays it over a large wooden structure which fills the shed. I’m still not sure what it is. He shines the beam over one end, picking out some faded lettering in flaked red paint: S..v.. D.rl.ng.
“The Silver Darling!”
“You know about her? My grandfather’s old herring drifter? Built in 1903 by Forbes of Sandhaven as a two-masted lugger. A beauty.”
My eyes have adjusted to the gloom and now I can see it clearly. Eck strokes the peeling wood lovingly.
“Saw some action, too,” he says.
“Yes, I’ve been reading about it.”
Kirsty pats the stern with a fond proprietorial air, as if it’s a family pet.
“The last laird, de Uytberg, ordered my father to burn it,” explains Eck. “Said it was an eyesore. But we couldn’t do that to her, not after all she’d done for us, for Fascaray, so we hid her in here. I always thought I’d restore her if I ever won the lottery.”
“Well,” I say, “maybe you just have.”
INVENTORY (INCOMPLETE) OF FASCARADIAN FARMING, INDUSTRIAL AND DOMESTIC ARTEFACTS IN THE COLLECTION OF GRIGOR MCWATT—5 DECEMBER 2014
Ferguson TE20 Tractor c. 1947, donated 2011 by Innes MacEwan, grandson of the late Tam Macpherson, formerly of Balnasaig Farm.
head yoke 2ft 10in, Found in Mammor bog by Calum Donald “the Plough” MacEwan in 1968. Oak, with a large central rectangular opening set against a narrow comb. At each side of the neckpiece is a broad groove to which horn restraints would have been attached.
bow yoke withers yoke for draught oxen, 3ft 8in long, with tubular iron semicircular shafts. Retrieved by author from Peigi MacEwan’s byre in Doonmara, 1954.
flauchter spade for turf cutting. Unearthed by author in Calasay on the banks of Loch Aye, 1972.
bog butter keg made from alder wood, found by Rab McNab in Killiebrae, 1954. Radiocarbon dating to come.
clibber wooden saddle, donated by Joe Macphee of Lusnaharra in 1947.
kishie straw peat basket, made and donated by Wullie Maclean of Killiebrae, 1957.
seaweed sickle bought from Joseph McKinnon of Lusnaharra in 1950.
boulsgan a holed handstaff for threshing, made from two partly peeled branches hinged with leather. Mid nineteenth century. Found by Tam Macpherson, Balnasaig Farm, 1980.
self-acting back-delivery reaper Scotia model, horse- or oxen-driven, with manual reaping and mowing attachments, 1855. Retrieved by author from Auchwinnie scrapyard, 1994.
iron laundry mangle c. 1905, donated by Jessie MacDonald, 1973.
copper laundry tub c. 1882, donated by Marsaili MacDonald, 1973.
diesel generator Muir & Sons model, c. 1968. Used to provide electricity to Finnverinnity 1975–2001.
The setting up of the Fascaray trust, which became known as the “Militant Tendency” of the Fascaray Preservation Society, could not have come at a better time in terms of political will and public opinion. McWatt, too, seemed to be ready for another fight and threw himself into public life with relish. At the organisation’s inaugural meeting in Finnverinnity Hall he quoted his own “reimagining” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality:
The first loon wha fenced the laun and thocht o sayin “This is mine,” an found fowk gowkit enough tae trowe him, was the suith high heid yin o civil society. Frae how many crimes, wars and murders, frae muckle grue an mishanter micht Jock Tamson’s bairns hae been saved, by pouin doon the fence, an yollerin: “Dinnae mind this mak-on: the fruits o the earth belang tae us all, an the Yird itsel tae naebdy.”
Rousseau, McWatt told the local crowd, swelled by a few activists from the mainland, was writing in 1754 from France at a time when, across the water from continental Europe, on the islands of Britain, fresh horrors and misfortunes were being visited on the other half of the Auld Alliance by the English landowning classes who had begun to drive local inhabitants from vast tracts of the Scottish Highlands.
Here, on Fascaray, the island of the great Land Raid of 1946, we have long been Monsieur Rousseau’s children. We know the full truth of this: “Wha loues the laun, awns the laun, an the laun awns him.” Let us pay homage to the philosopher and honour our forebears—McNeil, MacEwan, McPhail, McPhee and MacDonald—by launching our own Reverse Highland Clearance, defending Fergus McKinnon’s right to remain with his family on the island of their birth, and finally driving the southern tyrants from Fascaray.
It was clear to the islanders that their skirmishes over the Mammor pine plantation and the bigger battle against Sapphire’s superquarry a decade earlier had been mere test runs for the all-out war to come. This time, though, they had tactical expertise and an army of supporters to draw on. “All we had to do was push a button,” wrote McWatt in the Compendium, “and the whole thing went off like Stephenson’s Rocket.”
Llew Evans, caretaker of the Big House, had returned to his family in Pontypridd, and Izzy Wallop—“roused by the new millennium,” as she told a news reporter from the Auchwinnie Pibroch—volunteered as secretary of the new organisation. Once again, no one publicly stood in her way, though, wrote McWatt in the Compendium, “there were some concerns about her recent performance on behalf of islanders.” The school’s head teacher, Wilma Macmillan, was appointed press officer of the Fascaray Trust, and Netta “the Shop” Macfarlane took on the role of treasurer. In a shrewd political move, Izzy Wallop nominated Hamish McIntosh—one of the oldest and more sceptical indigenous Fascaradians—as chairman of the management committee. He was elected unopposed.
Using the list of addresses harvested during the Sapphire years, they sent out mailshots to potential supporters and within a month had raised the £2,000 needed to register the Fascaray Trust as a charitable fund, produce a manifesto and call a press conference in Auchwinnie.
Pictures were taken by the Pibroch photographer of the McKinnon family (the youngest child, Lorna, a pretty six-year-old putto with red curls, was strategically placed in front of her less favoured older siblings), standing in the flickering shadows of a bonfire which blazed outside their croft. Despite the heroic improvements a generation ago by Fergus’s father, Joseph, the house now looked serviceably (for the purposes of the campaign) decrepit. The photograph was used by the Guardian as the centrepiece of a double-page spread on “the iniquities of Scotland’s land laws.”
Even the Daily Telegraph, whose natural sympathies were with the feudal overlords rather than their serfs, and who failed to send a reporter to the press conference in Auchwinnie, felt compelled to use the photograph, albeit with a brief caption: “The McKinnon family on the Scottish island of Fascaray: their eviction notice has prompted a local rebellion. Baron Giles de Uytberg, Laird of Fascaray, who has plans to modernise the remote island, has hit back at ‘socialist hotheads fomenting trouble.’ The island’s most famous export is the hit song ‘Hame tae Fascaray,’ composed by local poet Grigor McWatt.”
This time, the campaigning islanders had a new ally—the World Wide Web. Izzy Wallop arranged a dial-up Internet connection in Finnverinnity. There were some teething problems, and the service was erratic, but when it worked, word of the islanders’ cause spread around the globe almost at the speed of light. A dedicated bank account was set up to accommodate donations sent in from all over the country, as well as from Canada, New Zealand, America and Ireland. Famous and would-be famous personalities from the world of television, film and radio queued to join the cause.
A London chef with two Michelin stars and a Scottish grandmother devised a dish, the Fascaradian Fish Supper, to lend his support. Sean Connery was said to be interested in the campaign, as were a championship golfer, an Olympian cyclist and two Scots Premier League footballers (one dedicated his hat-trick at Hampden Park “to the people of Fascaray”). A Hollywood leading man volunteered to be the “face” of the Fascaray Trust but, for the first time in his career, didn’t even get a screen tes
t: the role was already taken. The unmistakable, wind-blasted features of Grigor McWatt, grimacing under a beret, briar pipe clamped between his teeth—“The Popeye of the North” as the Daily Telegraph unkindly called him—conferred what the marketing men called “brand awareness” on the cause.
Izzy Wallop, unconventionally telegenic with her wild hair and Gypsy Rose Lee style, was regularly interviewed as “island spokeswoman” on the regional television news, although her patrician manner and “booming English accent” continued to jar with some islanders.
But when she received an eviction notice from de Uytberg’s factor, the island united behind her and even McWatt took up her case, overlooking Wallop’s origins and inveighing in the Auchwinnie Pibroch against “a southern carpetbagger who, in a grotesque replay of the infamous clearances of the last century, would, on a whim, turn Fascaradians out of their homes to survive as best they can against the harshest elements.”
De Uytberg, “provoked beyond endurance,” as he told the Scotsman and the Daily Telegraph, issued eviction notices against Wilma Macmillan at the schoolhouse, the Macfarlanes at the shop and Hamish McIntosh, whose well-situated croft on the Doonmara cliffs had been, according to the factor, “earmarked as a pied-à-terre for de Uytberg’s assistant Marina Chetwynd.”
More sensationally, and counterproductively, notice to quit was also served on Grigor McWatt. The development was described in the Herald newspaper as “the biggest own goal since Tom Boyd handed one to Brazil in the opening game of the World Cup.” Once more McWatt’s portrait graced the papers and the TV news, alongside pictures of Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart and other famous interpreters of “Hame tae Fascaray.”
Despite the outcry, de Uytberg refused to budge. Hamish McIntosh, now widowed and increasingly infirm, had no appetite for the fray and moved to a residential care home in Auchwinnie. The other eviction notices remained in place. And so did Fergie McKinnon, Izzy Wallop, Wilma Macmillan, the Macfarlanes and Grigor McWatt.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Sang tae the Men o Scotland
Men o Scotland, why d’ye scodge
Fur the lairds who keep ye laich?
Why d’ye fash yerselves tae steek
Thon tyrant’s fancy duds an breeks?
Why d’ye feed an cleid an hain,
Frae the cradlie tae the tuim
They unthankit bummers wha
Wid sook yer sweit an waucht yer bluid?
The seed ye sawed, anither hairsts;
The gowd ye find, anither reives;
The plaid ye flaucht, anither wears;
Yer ain claymore, anither bears.
Wi pleuch an pattle, howe an luim,
Scart yer graff an mak yer tuim
Flaucht yer shroud—an you maun learn,
That Scotia braw will be yer urn.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1999*
* * *
* Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.
Two tense months passed and there was no sign of a bailiff or the factor and no further communication from the laird or his lawyers.
“We have invited de Witless to choose his second for a duel and have yet to hear a peep out of him,” wrote McWatt.
It finally emerged that de Uytberg had been fighting a more bitter battle closer to home and it was this, rather than the local stramash in his northern seat, that finally dislodged the latest Laird of Fascaray.
His wife Claudia, who had recently learned of de Uytberg’s affair with his personal assistant, had moved out of their Buckinghamshire mansion, set up home in their Monaco apartment, and was demanding a large sum in alimony.
News of the marital break-up leaked out in one of the newspaper gossip columns down south, and by the time it had been confirmed in the Herald, it was as a footnote to the even bigger news that de Uytberg had put Fascaray up for sale to pay for the divorce. “You could say,” McWatt wrote, “that every Claudia has a silver lining. De Uytberg’s personal embarrassments might mean a bright new future for Fascaradians. At last we have a real chance of wresting our land from distant despots and becoming masters of our own destiny.”
The brochure produced by a plutocratic estate agency in London was, wrote McWatt, “as monumental as the Book of Kells” and full of shiny photographs of the island’s beauty spots—Beinn Mammor, Loch Och, Lusnaharra, the Lingel, Kilgurnock Falls, Doonmara cliffs—“taken at crafty angles to avoid inexpedient images which might suggest that people, as well as stags and salmon, actually live here.” There was an aerial shot of the Big House, “providing a necessary distance on some of the external dilapidation, which any prospective buyer might rightly infer promises greater dilapidation within.”
The pictures were all taken in blazing sunshine and under cloudless skies—such a rare meteorological occurrence on the island (the last spell of continuous good weather had been two days the previous May) that, according to McWatt, technologically savvy Fascaradians put the Aegean gloss down to “digital trickery.”
Whatever the provenance of the photos, the island looked ravishing. The asking price was £1.5m, preposterously high to the islanders, even with the steady stream of donations, but well within the budget of the average oligarch looking for an amusing hideaway. It seemed, however, that the oligarchs were holding back. It was a jittery time in the world financial markets and, with all the publicity generated by the Fascaray Trust, any potential owner seeking a quiet retreat on a secluded island for a couple of months’ fishing and shooting a year might reasonably decide to look elsewhere. It was impossible to ignore the fact that there were natives on Fascaray. And they were restless.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Ma Hert it Pines
Ma hert it sairly pines
Fur pals wha’ve ganged tae soon,
Fur aw the rose-lipt quines
An mony a licht-fit loon.
By burns tae braid fur lowpin,
The licht-fit loons lie now,
The rose-lipt quines are doverin
In glens whaur roses dowe.
—Grigor McWatt, efter A. E. Housman, 2000*
* * *
* Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.
6 December 2014
There is no Abbotsford Close near Abbotsford, Walter Scott’s country mansion in the Borders, but there are three Abbotsford Drives in Fife and one in East Dunbartonshire. The electoral registers yield no further leads so Ailish, at my insistence, spends a day driving round housing projects within two hours of Glasgow, asking puzzled residents for sightings of McWatt’s Jean.
“Jean? Is it a Jean you were looking for? There’s nane in oor street but there’ll be a fair few of them aboot the toun. It’s no exactly an unusual name,” one old ex-miner told her. “But I doot any Jean roon here wid be pally wi a poet.”
There is a hint of triumph in Ailish’s voice as she phones me with news of her failure. There were Jeans all right, Ailish tells me, but they were either long-dead great-grannies decades older than McWatt, or Jeans and Jeannies way too young to fit the story. After a period of obscurity, the old-fashioned names are coming back. I guess Agnes is part of that demographic.
Ailish’s time was wasted, as was my money—her expenses’ invoice includes the cost of two meals, petrol and “wear and tear” to her car. The Auchwinnie Board, which has agreed to cover the cost of restoring the Silver Darling, is leaning on me about the project’s budget. I ignore Ailish’s petulant tone. It’s not going to be easy, I agree. But in an age of surveillance, no one can hide forever. Jean, McWatt’s lost love and agent of Lilias’s destruction, could have married, divorced, changed her name several times over, emigrated, I concede. She could be dead. But for the sake of our project, for McWatt’s legacy, for Fascaray, we’ve got to keep trying.
“Your job, my job too, depends on finding out more about this woman. Just do it,” I t
ell her.
Then this afternoon, I turn up a clue myself. It is in the 328-page supplementary volume to Jamieson’s Dictionary, which I idly open to check a reference. The word I am looking for, “schirryve,” was used as a mystifying sign-off by McWatt in a 1969 letter to Goodsir Smith (“frae aine schirryve tae anither”) that turned up at the National Library in a box of miscellaneous documents salvaged from an Inverleith house clearance.
There it is, on page 214 of McWatt’s copy of the Jamieson’s supplement; “schirryve: a poet, form of schryve, to shrive, used by Dunbar in his Tabill of Confessioun.” There also, pressed between pages 214 and 215, is an envelope, peach-coloured, open and empty. The address on the front—“McWatt, Calasay, Fascaray, Scotland”—is written in the same blue ink, and in the same handwriting, as the surviving letters from Jean. The postmark, dated 30 May 1971, reads “Woking, Surrey.”
Woking, an Internet search confirms, is a large town in the south of England, part of the London commuter belt. Bonnie Jean could, of course, simply have been visiting the town in 1971, but the Wikipedia entry suggests it’s an improbable holiday destination. A further search reveals an Abbotsford Close in the town. This has to be more than coincidence. It never occurred to me to look for McWatt’s Highland Muse south of the border. There will be time for questions about her flight from the north later. For now, at last, we’re on her trail.
Hame Thochts frae Abraid
Och, tae be in Fascaray
Noo that April’s there,
An wha stravaigs in Fascaray
Sees, wi oot compare,
That the bonnie broom is in fu bloom
While the lintie sings on the rowan bough
Hame Page 40
