He leans back in his chair, unfazed.
“You’re still looking for primary sources?”
“That would be nice, but I’ve exhausted them all.”
“You give up too easily,” Niall says.
Now I’m really annoyed.
“Maybe,” I say, biting back my anger. I don’t want this evening to finish on a bad note.
“Well, you’re looking at another one,” he says.
“Another what?”
It’s late, I’m tired and I really want to get to bed.
“Another primary source,” Niall says.
He laughs at my frown.
“Not me. Jamie.”
Jamie smiles, shakes his head at Niall, and says, “Don’t torment her.”
He turns to me with an apologetic shrug.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you all evening.”
“Tell me what?”
“I knew Grigor McWatt—pretty well, as it happens—and I’m happy to help you in whatever way you want.”
So now, just as the evening is ending, I take in Jamie’s full name for the first time. Jamie MacDonald. James Frances MacDonald, son of Jamie MacDonald, hero of the Morag May, and of the late Marsaili MacDonald.
“Jamie the Hose!” I say.
“You know the story?” Niall asks. “The Fascaradian David who felled the Big House Goliath?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I say.
And so Jamie’s story unfolds, of McWatt’s generosity to his widowed mother and his aunt Jessie after the Morag May disaster, of the poet’s continued financial support of the families—“food, clothing, rent, utilities, presents at birthdays and Christmas”—and of Marsaili’s business—“he kept the Bothy afloat really. It would have gone bust without him”—and how McWatt encouraged and enabled Jamie, his siblings and cousins to stay on at school, then gave them each an allowance when they went to university.
“He supported me through my postgrad studies, too, and did the same for two others. I’m not saying he was a saint. He hated change, modernity of any sort, could be bigoted, especially about the English, and he had some hare-brained schemes—that crazy menagerie! He was waspish and bad-tempered and he was fanatical about his privacy. If anyone spoke about him to the press he’d cut them dead. He was difficult, no question. Lilias Hogg suffered, I know, though she wasn’t the pure martyr-to-love the press have made her out to be. But there’s a counter-narrative to the tale of the misanthropic recluse. Here’s the good word that no one has had to say about McWatt—he was a generous man. He transformed my life and the lives of my siblings and cousins. We’ve most of us done well—one’s a marine biologist in Edinburgh, two are working in the tech industry in America, one’s a cardiologist in Canada—and there is no question that we owe it all to Grigor McWatt.”
It is not until he stops speaking that I notice the candles have gone out. We sit on in silence in the darkness before I realise it’s time to go.
McWatt’s need to retreat to Calasay and recollect in tranquillity had never been in greater jeopardy. A team of construction workers arrived and set up camp in a large tent on the Calasay cliffs. Under orders from Tupper International, they erected a 6ft-high wooden fence behind An Tobar, cutting McWatt’s access to the cliffs and obscuring his view, and the poet was sent a £2,000 bill—“for labour and fencing materials.” The workers also cut the pipeline to An Tobar’s water supply, apparently accidentally. “I tried to engage with them,” McWatt wrote in the Pibroch, “but they are under strict instructions to avoid contact with locals.”
Tupper, a flamboyant figure “with the petulance of a spoiled child,” had not reckoned on two factors—Fascaradian weather and the stoicism of a Scottish veteran commando. For McWatt, the loss of piped water at An Tobar was an inconvenience that, he wrote in the Pibroch, “became an unexpected pleasure. For years I took my bucket to the burn to draw water direct from the source and it has felt good, these past months, to return to this simple early-morning and late-night ritual which confers a special intimacy with the natural world.”
For the construction workers, shivering under tarpaulin in the fierce north-easterlies, this intimacy with the natural world wasn’t going so well. One morning at 3 a.m., when a force-nine gale ripped their tent from its moorings, they sheepishly knocked on McWatt’s door seeking shelter. He made them tea laced with whisky and let them sleep in the byre. The next day, after reconnecting An Tobar’s water supply, they walked off the job and took the ferry back to the mainland. The gale had also blown down Tupper’s fence, providing McWatt with enough firewood to keep him warm for the next two months.
More than a million Facebook users registered with Piers Aubrey’s “Scupper Tupper” page and signed its online petition against the development. The world’s press besieged Fascaray and McWatt’s photograph, kilted and uncompromising at the door of An Tobar and lit by the ominous flare of a Calasay sunset, became a contemporary emblem of Scottish grit and of that universal story: the small man of integrity pitted against monstrous avarice.
Tupper, irritated by the protest campaign, applied to a now-quiescent Auchwinnie Council for a compulsory purchase order on McWatt’s croft.
“It does not make business sense for my high-end guests at the Calasay Tupper Links Leisure Resort to look out on this slum,” he told the Pibroch.
In response, Piers Aubrey came up with a scheme whereby Scupper Tupper supporters could, for the sum of one pound, purchase a square foot of McWatt’s two-acre back field. The scheme, launched with another Facebook page, was oversubscribed; it took less than a month to raise £87,120 and a further six weeks for all 87,120 donors to be registered as owners of the land and receive their official title deeds. Even Tupper’s dedicated lawyers blanched at the prospect of the volume of paperwork required to press ahead with compulsory purchase orders.
Aubrey, for all his eccentricities and Englishness, was a man of probity, and ploughed the money back into the campaign. He rented a derelict one-roomed cottage in the grounds of Finnverinnity House from the Schneiders, renovated it to use as an office, and engaged the services of a public relations company in Glasgow to promote the campaign. He also commissioned a documentary on the issue which went on to win a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. A fifteen-minute trailer for the film was viewed 152,132 times on YouTube. Unusually, without demur and waiving royalties, McWatt consented to the use of “Hame tae Fascaray,” in the recording by the Corries, during the documentary’s closing credits. As the issue of the island’s future received worldwide attention, McWatt dug in deeper in Calasay, continuing to record in The Fascaray Compendium the imperilled natural world around him.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
INVENTORY OF ANIMALS AND SHELLS OF THE FASCARAY SHORE
chitons (Mollusca polyplacophora): known as cradills, coat-of-mail shells, sea-sclaters, lunschochs or jocky coats. Flattened molluscs with articulating plates which allow the creature to curl up defensively, like the domestic woodlouse or sclater (Millepes asellus). Found on rocky shorelines, particularly beneath the Calasay cliffs, clinging beneath loose boulders and stones. Unpleasant ammonia tang on the human palate. Their chief predators are crabs and fish.
limpets, whelks, winkles (Mollusca prosobranchia): called bishop, fiorin, rooklo, spikilurie, spick, foofacks, wulks, catties, kitties, gulsoch or pirlie. Characterised by shells, of various sizes, made up of a single whorled unit with ornamental ridges, ribs and spires. Abundant on rocky shores, particularly under seaweed. Their culinary uses are well known. The spikilurie (limpet) also makes invaluable bait, known as furto, forebait (when crushed, or chewed, before scattering or spitting on the water), ligny, saithe or kupi. The creatures are prised from rocks using a knife known as a muttle or sprud and the bait is then kept in a box called a krobbek. When the bait is cast on the sea, it creates a smooth, oily surface on the water known as an oothy or smelt.
mussels, cockles, clams, scallops (Mollusca bivalvia): known as missels, crocklins, horsos, maddies, clabbydhus, yams, echans, gaikies, cracken, gaubertie-shells, dobs. As their Latin name suggests, these creatures are encased in a shell of two halves, hinged by fibrous ligaments or byssus threads. Mostly sedentary, though the scallop can swim by flapping its two halves together, castanet-style. Found abundantly at sea or onshore. Culinary uses immeasurable.
jellyfish (Cnidaria hydrozoan and Cnidaria scyphozoa)
Portuguese man o’war (Physalia phisalis): known for its gas-bubble float, livid Medusa-like tentacles and deadly sting. Called locally a scowder, a Fascaray bramble, a bangi, a selch and seal-skitter. Traditionally thought to be the saliva of seals.
common or moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita): distinguished by its four violet horseshoe-shaped gonads. Known as the barnet, the slub and the skulp. After warm spells they can be washed up on the shore and stranded in rock pools in their hundreds.
—Grigor McWatt, 2010, The Fascaray Compendium
9 December 2014
It’s now 2 a.m. and, with Agnes away on her sleepover, I’m sitting at my laptop with a mug of coffee, having spent the past hour dithering over drafts of an email to Marco—veering between conciliation and recrimination—before steering myself back to McWatt and to Fascaray’s recent history. I don’t know exactly how Jamie’s new information will fit into the story but it certainly makes me feel better disposed towards my subject. I’m rereading another McWatt inventory when I’m startled by the sudden ping of a new email.
For a moment I think it might be Marco again. But no, it’s Ailish. She’s up too, also working apparently. She wants to know if she can call me on the landline.
“I think I’ve traced McWatt’s Jean,” she says. There is, for the first time since I’ve worked with her, real excitement in her voice. “She’s still alive. Still in Woking. In Acacia Crescent, just round the corner from Abbotsford Drive. Her last name, her married name I imagine, is Turner.”
“Turner”—not exactly redolent of the misty Highland hills of home. Stolidly English, I would guess. A double treachery for McWatt. Had the mysterious Bonnie Jean, the unimpeachable Muse and victorious rival of poor Lilias, married an Englishman and moved south like a perfidious swallow?
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“The age fits. First name and address too. All on the electoral register. I’ve got her phone number too. I’ll ring her later this morning.”
“No,” I say. “You’ve done enough. I’ll get in touch with her.”
If this is Bonnie Jean I need to see her quickly. She must be in her eighties. With her testimony—I hope she’s still neurologically intact—and an interview with Jamie, I could at last start to build an authentic picture of the Bard of Fascaray. After this evening’s talk of New York, I welcome an excuse to get away from the island again. Woking is a long way from Williamsburg. But it’s away.
While the legal battle with Tupper dragged on, the island broke with centuries of sabbatarian tradition when Sunday ferry services were finally introduced in December 2010. Tempest, pestilence or flood did not afflict Fascaray as a result of the flouting of the Lord’s Day, despite the predictions of the Reverend Angus Cumming, a hard-line Free Church minister in Auchwinnie, who lay down on the harbour slipway in protest at the ungodly innovation. McWatt observed, “Archie Tupper’s plan may be the nearest thing to a plague that has ever been visited on this island, but it pre-dated the Sunday ferry.”
Some islanders were now in the awkward position of betraying their own sabbatarian views by catching the Sunday ferry in order to worship in Auchwinnie. Other, less devout Fascaradians welcomed the convenience of an extra weekend’s sailing to get supplies from the town’s supermarket, which had been open for business on Sundays since 2009, despite protests from the Reverend Cumming, who lay on the pavement outside the supermarket’s automatic doors on its first morning of Sabbath business until heavy rain forced him to abandon his one-man demonstration.
In his Fascaray Compendium entry for January 2011, McWatt recorded that Netta and Sandy Macfarlane had moved to Argyllshire and the lease on Finnverinnity Shop and Post Office had been bought by Akbar Shah, owner of the Raj, “the popular curry house in Auchwinnie.” Akbar installed his son and daughter-in-law, Iqbal and Reza, to run it, retaining Margaret Mackenzie as postmistress.
McWatt’s appetite for local gossip seems undiminished. That year, he notes: “At Lusnaharra, Ben Guthrie has tired of insular life and, defeated by the task of turning the wrecked church into an arts centre and tea room, parted from Alison and moved to London to take up a job as a senior civil servant, while Alison has set up home with Piers Aubrey and their respective children in the manse. One wonders what the Reverend William Buchanan, late of this parish, would have made of this new ‘bidie-in’ arrangement at his former home.” Meanwhile Jinny Aubrey had moved into the Lodge as a full-time Seeker and member of Evelyn Fletcher’s personal staff.
The Balnasaig Seekers had undergone another expansion, taking over Tam Macpherson’s farmhouse from his grandson Innes, who was moving to Wales. Evelyn Fletcher announced that Tam’s old farm would be refurbished and opened as a residential College of Mindfulness and Past Life Studies.
The kirk had been sold to a Swiss restaurateur who planned to convert it into holiday flats, while two women from London, keen sailors and vegetarian cooks, had bought the former Temperance Hotel, purged the building of its baronial artefacts, repainted it in polychromatic stripes and renamed it Watergaw House Hotel. Within months of its opening, recorded McWatt in the Compendium, there were enthusiastic reviews in the travel pages and food columns of the national papers. He was ambivalent about the increase in tourism on the island. “It does bring in money to the islanders, I suppose. As long as the day trippers stay well away from Calasay, I won’t complain,” he wrote.
Nigel and Gill Parsons were also drawing new visitors to the island with their Whale Watching Cruises. “Actual whales have yet to be spotted,” noted McWatt, “but the sightseers seem happy enough pointing at the shoals of dolphins and porpoises seen off the north-west coast of the island.”
In January 2012, while Tupper’s lawyers were still grappling with the stalled Calasay project, the tycoon announced further plans for the island. “He is seeking permission from Auchwinnie Council to extend Fascaray Airport runway to accommodate planes large and luxurious enough to carry his golfing clientele over the Atlantic,” reported McWatt in “Frae Mambeag Brae.” “Tupper has now demanded that the council impose a compulsory purchase order on Fergus McKinnon’s croft, which sits on what would be the southern edge of the expanded airport.”
Piers Aubrey and Alison Guthrie got to work immediately and within weeks had ensured that two acres of the McKinnon smallholding was now owned by 10,000 supporters worldwide. A new recording of “Hame tae Fascaray” in 2012 by the singer KT Tunstall, with backing by classical violinist Nicola Benedetti, brought timely publicity to the island’s cause. Barry MacLeod, “of whom,” McWatt wrote in the Pibroch, “it can truly be said that he has followed in his father’s footsteps,” had returned from Glasgow after a scrappy divorce and was now the Fascaray postman, regularly delivering sacks of letters from all over the world, some simply addressed to “The Poet McWatt, Scotland.”
Finally, news broke in February 2013 that, in a fit of pique, Tupper had withdrawn his plans for the island. The Scottish government had granted permission for an offshore wind farm within sight of the Calasay cliffs. “Archie Tupper, the rampaging King Kong of kitsch, who has so far demonstrated little concern over the aesthetic and environmental impact of new development,” McWatt wrote, “is incensed that the turbines would spoil his golfers’ views.” Tupper announced that he would now focus on his political ambitions in America. “Pity America,” wrote McWatt.
In Fascaray, “the blustering billionaire” had been defeated. But at a price.
“Can it be that for once we are in accord with Archie Tupper?
” wrote McWatt in the Auchwinnie Pibroch on 7 February 2013. “We are, naturally, delighted to see the back of him and his vulgar holiday-camp proposals but this is a pyrrhic victory. The vast wind farm, three times the size of our island, will blight the seascape, destroy bird life and be as disfiguring, alien and unwelcome in our beautiful home as a gargantuan golf course and leisure complex.”
The Trondfjord Fascaray Array would comprise 160 turbines, each 600ft tall, rising from the seabed three miles north-west of the island, within full view of the cliffs of Calasay and Doonmara.
“As technology, it is pitifully inefficient and grotesquely expensive, but the greatest cost of the Array would not be financial,” McWatt wrote. “It would industrialise our landscape, threaten its fragile ecology and diminish forever the timeless quality of a place in which we can look around and see in its topographical features, its hills, glens and burns, its machair grasslands and the wide unvanquishable sea, the lineaments of a beloved face; the same face that our Fascaradian ancestors gazed on eight thousand years ago. Dùthchas, the tender respect for the land born of a sense of birthright and belonging, has always, for the Fascaradian, also applied to the sea. Wha loues the sea, awns the sea, an the sea awns him. My hope is that the Scottish government in Holyrood comes to its senses and puts the long-term future of its island peoples and our precious marine resources first, before the quick hit of a fast buck.”
For some old and combat-weary Fascaradians, however, the new battle against the wind farm seemed a fight too far. Even McWatt, as he wrote in the Pibroch a week later, conceded that finally, at the age of ninety-one, he could no longer take a front-line position in the ongoing battle for Fascaray: “We old-timers, bodachs and caillachs as we call ourselves here, have been struggling for nearly seventy years to preserve our island from the whims and depredations of feudal lairds and from ravening corporate greed. Is it cowardice, now our personal gloamins are upon us, to finally step aside, pass on the fiery baton, urge a younger generation into battle and wish them well in the fray?”
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