Her final fall from grace came after a profile in a weekend newspaper interview, which described her appearance (“as if one of Macbeth’s witches had been cast as Titania”) and her home (“a version of Doctor Who’s Tardis in which the exterior gives no clue to the dispensation within; this handsome Georgian house proves to be a shambolic five-bedroom landfill site on which Izzy Wallop perches, a prattling Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days”), and the heap of discarded bottles at the bottom of her garden (“to achieve ‘spiritual equilibrium,’ she tells me, she meditates three times a day. There is evidence that the regular application of Sauvignon Blanc also plays a part in her personal path to enlightenment”).
“She has,” wrote McWatt, “held the island up to ridicule,” and her attitude and presentation were not going to help Fascaray’s future applications for government funding. Izzy Wallop had become a liability. McWatt argued in his Pibroch column of 18 October 2003: “The sooner a certain blow-in blows out of Fascaray, the better it will be for all of us. This is not so much a case of the merchants in the temple as the bampots in the basilica. I hesitate to say that one yearns for the return of the Montfitchetts but there is no doubt that, after all our struggles for self-determination and justice, the dignity and peace of our lovely island have been severely compromised by the antics of recent incomers.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Calasay
In ma gab is ma hend.
Ane efter th’ither
Hooses heeze an faw, crottle, are eiked,
Cleared, malafoustert, sturkened, or in their steid,
Is bog, midden, bungalow or gowf links.
Auld stane tae new schemes, auld wid tae new gleed,
Auld gleed tae yask an yask tae yird
Which is awready flesh, fur an keech,
Bane o man an beast, windlestrae an leaf.
Hooses leeve an dee: there’s a time fer biggin
An a time fer leevin an fer breedin
An a time fer wind tae crack the lowsin windae
An tae shoogle the skiftin where the mousie pugs
An tae shoogle the loorach hingins braidit wi seelent ensenzie.
—Grigor McWatt, efter T. S. Eliot, 2003*
* * *
* Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.
7 December 2014
For a recluse, McWatt seemed better attuned to the island scuttlebutt than I could ever be. In this he is like my daughter, whose curiosity about people is limitless. We are both at work at our respective wings of the kitchen table—she is setting out paints, brushes and a jar of water—and I’m tuning out her chatter about the latest insights and revelations from school. “And then Finn said…So Kirsty told him…And Henry butt in…But Oonagh…And Mr. Kennedy…” Gradually, it fades to distant generic birdsong, of the soothing, non-territorial kind.
The Compendium entry for 2006 is particularly detailed: a sign, perhaps, that after more than six decades McWatt had finally fully integrated on the island. Or maybe it’s just that more happened that year.
“The blow-in has finally blown out, taking another long-standing settler with her,” he wrote. Evelyn Fletcher was apparently stoical when Neville Booth failed to return from his evening’s meditation by the standing stones of Drumnish.
Nor did Fletcher flinch “when it emerged the following morning that Neville had picked up a suitcase, packed and secreted in an empty tepee the previous week, and left the island at midnight with Izzy Wallop on a chartered speedboat from Auchwinnie.” The pair were said to be heading, via Glasgow Airport, to a Cycladic island in Greece to found a new community “based on love and light” and funded—“though the police could never pin anything on the pair”—by donations diverted from the Fascaray Trust.
Agnes interrupts: “You know Nigel who does the boat trips?”
“Hmm…”
“Well, Kirsty said he saw some sharks. Just near Fascaray? Like real sharks, only this kind don’t have teeth so they won’t bite you?”
“Imagine that!” I say, too preoccupied to imagine anything. With all this documented reality to contend with, I’ve no time for speculation.
In the Auchwinnie Pibroch, McWatt recorded another, sadder departure from the island—Marsaili MacDonald, widow of the Morag May hero Jamie, mother of three and plucky owner and manager of the Bothy hostel, died of cancer aged sixty-eight. Relatives flew in from England, Canada, America and New Zealand for the requiem Mass, held in Auchwinnie’s Catholic church before a “sombre sea crossing” for a blessing at Fergus McKinnon’s byre chapel and burial next to the grave of her late husband Jamie in Lusnaharra churchyard. “It was,” wrote McWatt in the Auchwinnie Pibroch, “the nearest thing Fascaray has had to a state funeral.”
The same year also saw the death of the island’s former postman, Shuggie MacLeod. McWatt was a pall-bearer at the kirk service in Auchwinnie, “at which,” he wrote, “we delivered our beloved postie to the final sorting office.”
Another family of what McWatt called “Sassenach dreamers” arrived, “threatening to destabilise our cultural ecology further.” Piers Aubrey, a former probation officer and local councillor from London, and his partner Jinny, a homeopath, moved into the old McGregor croft in Tilliecuddy with their daughter Seren and newborn Henry.
Aubrey, “rangy, raw-boned and earnest,” wore “wire-rimmed glasses of the type popularised by John Lennon,” devoted himself to the restoration of the croft and cultivation of organic vegetables and, McWatt noted disapprovingly in the Compendium, was “rarely seen in the pub and has made it plain that he disapproves of our guga hunt.”
As the Aubreys arrived, the Taylors left—“signalling, I hope, the start of an English evacuation,” wrote McWatt—selling up their kirk B&B and moving to Gibraltar where “presumably they’ll find the politics as well as the climate more congenial.” In September that year there was more sensational news of an “island flitting” that made national headlines after a midnight police raid—“the first time the polis have been seen on the island since the postbox explosion of 1953,” according to McWatt. Following a local tip-off, a team of policemen arrived at Doonmara at midnight from the mainland on a fleet of inflatable boats and, after a thorough search of their premises, escorted the van Donks from Fascaray in handcuffs. The couple had, it emerged, been selling not cornflowers and cowslips grown in their polytunnel nursery but marijuana.
“If only they’d been more respectful of local traditions and customs, these Dutch incomers might still be flogging their exotic wares on the quiet from Doonmara and the authorities would be none the wiser,” McWatt wrote in 2007, when the van Donks’ case came to trial. “After all, in this part of the world we have an ingrained suspicion of authority and regular recourse to mind-altering substances, in the form of a warming dram or two at our local howff. But there is a lesson here for all incomers: whatever their origins, ambitions and inclinations, Fascaray must come first. More than eight thousand years of community and culture cannot be ignored and overridden by money-grabbing outsiders with their own agendas.”
Local news, national news, history, polemic, but no mention of Jean here nor, as far as I can see, in the whole of The Fascaray Compendium. I must phone Ailish. Time is running out.
Agnes, brushing a watercolour wash over a new page in her sketchbook, is still at it: “…and then Kirsty’s granddad, you know, Eck? They call him Wee Eck even though—”
“Sorry, honey. Mommy’s got to work.”
Ah Mind, Och Aye, Ah Mind
Ah mind, och aye, Ah mind,
The huis whaur Ah wis born,
The booral windae whaur the sun
Cam keekin in at morn;
He niver cam a prink too rath,
Nor brocht too lang a day,
But hou Ah aften wissed the nicht
Had wheeched ma pech away.
Ah mind, och aye, Ah mind,
The clonger crammasie,
> The cuckoo-brogue an lilikins,
That grew alang the wynd.
The laylock whaur the rabbin bigged
An whaur ma faither sheuched
The rowan on ma birthday
Ah scrieve ablo its beuchs.
Ah mind, och aye, Ah mind,
Whaur aince Ah used tae swee,
An thocht the air maun breenge as fresh
Tae swallaes flichtin free;
Ma smeddum flew in fedders then,
That is sae wechtie nou,
An simmer burns could barely cuil
The fiver oan ma brou.
Ah mind, och aye, Ah mind,
The bunnet firs sae heich;
Ah used tae think their spirlie taps,
Were scuffin up the sky:
It wis a bairnie’s fancy,
An noo it gars me pain;
I’m faurer nou frae paradise
Than when Ah wis a wean.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Thomas Hood, 2008*
* * *
* Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.
The island faced a bigger challenge from “profit-seeking outsiders” in 2009, when Archie Tupper, a billionaire leisure-complex magnate from Atlanta, Georgia, alighted on Calasay as a perfect location for his most northerly golf resort. Tupper, whose great-grandmother, a Maccree, was said to be distantly related to the Lusnaharra MacRaes, finding himself between divorces, had visited the region in May 2009 on a sentimental journey by private plane, landing at an airstrip near Auchwinnie (Fascaray Airport runway was too small to accommodate his luxury executive jet). He travelled on to the island by speedboat on a midge-free day of remarkably fine weather, was amazed by the sapphire seas and alabaster beaches and decided that the island’s satellite islet, Calasay, was the perfect location for a Tupper Links Leisure Resort.
“This place beats the Caribbean,” he told a reporter from the Auchwinnie Pibroch. “It’s a real peach, waiting to be plucked. A world-beater.” He planned to build a causeway and bridge across the strand from Ruh and a clubhouse with “five-star boutique hotel facilities” on the cliffs. He didn’t mention directly the inconvenient presence of An Tobar, its land and ancillary buildings, but made a passing reference to “a few tumbledown shacks.”
The Fascaray Trust rejected the plan outright, but Tupper, undeterred, applied to Auchwinnie Council, which had a veto over development in the region. Despite the promise of new jobs and the ancillary benefits of high-spending tourism in the area, Auchwinnie Council bowed to pressure from local lobbyists—and several impassioned columns from McWatt in the Pibroch—and also turned down Tupper’s plan.
Celebrations in Fascaray were short-lived. The tycoon, aided by his Wall Street law firm, was used to getting his own way and appealed directly to the Scottish government, now installed in its expensive new Parliament building in Holyrood. To the dismay of many and the outrage of McWatt, the national government acceded to Tupper, citing progress, and the jobs and revenue the development would bring to the region.
“Calasay’s protected status as a Site of Special Scientific Interest has proved to be as much use as a caunle in a hairiken,” wrote McWatt in the Pibroch. Once again, he cited Burns, adapting the famous 1791 poem to read: “We’re bought and sold by Yankee gold / Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!” The islanders of Fascaray faced a new fight and their own devolved national government, Scots to a man and a woman, had sided with the enemy.
To McWatt it was a shocking paradox that while Holyrood had given a green light for the desecration of Calasay, it was an Englishman who came to their aid. “Tapsalteerie is lowsed ootower the warld,” McWatt wrote in the Compendium, quoting his own 1946 reimagining of Yeats.
Piers Aubrey, according to McWatt, “exudes the kind of agonised middle-class asceticism associated with Anglican vicars.” But when Holyrood overrode local protests and gave the American billionaire the go-ahead for a golf resort on Calasay, Aubrey, despite his ethnic disadvantage, showed a steely determination and ingenuity “worthy of Wallace himself,” wrote McWatt.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
INVENTORY OF CHEMICALS USED ON GOLF COURSES
fertiliser: ESCO Iron (Agri-Plex)
fungicides: Dithane F-45, iprodione, carbendazim, chlorothalonil, gamma-HCH, chlorpyrifos, carbaryl
herbicides: Princep Caliber 90, Scott’s Fungicide VII Bentgrass Selective, KERB 50-W, Scott’s Goosegrass-Crabgrass, Trimel Bent, Surflan, pendimethalin, Simazine Pre-Emergent, MSMA—Bulgrass Formula, IMAGE, LESCO Three-Way Selective, Ronstar G, Scott’s Fluid Broadleaf, 2,4-D/dicamba, 2,4-D/mecoprop, fluroxypyr/mecoprop-P
insecticides: Orthene R 75 S and 90 S, Triumph 4E, Sevimol 4C, Dursban 2-5-6, Crusade 56
in addition: bleach “to burn off algae”
Analyses taken from a U.S. Office of Public Health report, based on samples taken from a single golf course in the American south, and from the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ Central Science Laboratory study of 650 golf courses.
“Of the pesticides applied,” according to John Burnside, writing in the Guardian on 28 July 2001, “carbaryl is considered moderately to very toxic; it can produce adverse effects in humans by skin contact, inhalation or ingestion. Direct contact with the skin or eyes can cause burns, while inhalation or ingestion damages the nervous and respiratory systems, resulting in nausea, stomach cramps and diarrhoea. Though the herbicides mecoprop and mecoprop-P have long been used in agriculture and amenity horticulture in the UK, the Danish EPA considers them ‘seriously damaging’ to health, the environment or both, and has placed bans or severe restrictions on both. The U.S. Institute of Medicine’s study, Veterans and Agent Orange: Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam (National Academies Press, Washington D.C., 1993) has linked exposure to 2,4-D/mecoprop with incidences of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and soft tissue sarcoma.”
—Grigor McWatt, 2009, The Fascaray Compendium
8 December 2014
Tonight, Agnes is sleeping over at Kirsty’s and Niall has invited me to meet his boyfriend. What would be a commonplace but delightful dinner date in New York feels an almost transgressive novelty in Fascaray. Perhaps I’m too immersed in McWatt’s Compendium and his early accounts of fundamentalist Presbyterianism—what would the Reverend William Buchanan have made of the invitation?
The apartment over the schoolroom offers more New York echoes. It’s light and uncluttered, with Danish furniture and a wall of books separating the bedroom from the dining area and kitchen. Jamie is in his early forties, sandy-haired, stocky and good-looking in a jockish sort of way—that’s athletic jock, not the Scottish type, although he’s also Scottish. In conversation, he is anything but a U.S.-style jock. He talks softly, with modesty and authority, about his work at Auchwinnie, about carbon dating and geomorphology and, while Niall prepares supper, he quizzes me for details about the museum and archives.
“That’s some deadline you’ve got there,” he says. “I hear your administrator’s on compassionate leave. That’s tough. We’ll be spending Christmas on the mainland but before then I’m sure I could take some time off—the idea of being a lowly intern in a museum start-up takes me back to student days. Really, anything we can do to help…”
I thank him.
“So what have you learned about Grigor McWatt?” he asks, pouring me a glass of wine. “The man I mean. Not the poet.”
“Not enough, to be honest,” I say. “I’ve got nothing concrete on his early life. He guarded his privacy fiercely and even his memoirs seem evasive.”
“Do you have any primary sources apart from the Compendium and his newspaper columns?”
“I’ve got some letters, a Festschrift pamphlet of contemporaneous reminiscences of McWatt by locals, and I did some audio interviews—with the old postmistress here, Effie MacLeod, and Donald MacInnes, his lodger, who helped him out with the animals, as well as Dolina MacPartland, the sister—�
�
“Ah yes, sister of the star-crossed lover, Lilias Hogg.”
“You know the story?” I say.
“Doesn’t everyone?”
Over dinner—Donal MacEwan’s hand-dived scallops—we talk of their trip to New York for a family wedding in City Hall. Like a true exile, I’m avid for news of the old country. Just hearing the names of neighbourhoods gives me pleasure; Bushwick, Battery Park, Bed-Stuy, Cobble Hill, Williamsburg, the West Village—my Blessed Litany.
Niall, clearing the plates and setting out coffee cups, steers the conversation back to Fascaray.
“Jamie’s keen to hear more about the museum,” he says.
“I’m not sure I am,” I say. “To be honest, right now I feel I’ve reached a dead end on this one.”
“Well, tell me about your primary sources. The interviews,” says Jamie.
“Effie MacLeod was entertaining, but more on island history than on McWatt himself. Donald MacInnes was borderline hostile—to me, not McWatt—and Dolina MacPartland…”
“I can’t imagine she had much to say in McWatt’s favour.”
“Who does?” I say.
“You’d be surprised,” says Niall, pouring my coffee.
“Okay.” I’m suddenly irritated by this teasing hint of prior knowledge. I’ve been working on this for months. “Surprise me.”
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