Hame
Page 44
It was not a true son of the island, not a McWatt or a scion of the immortal Five—neither a MacDonald, nor a McPhail, nor a McPhee, not a MacEwan or a McNeil—who took up the banner against the wind farm but an Aubrey, the English incomer Piers, energised by the campaign against Tupper, who seized the latest chance to mobilise popular support in what McWatt called “this new fight for the soul of Fascaray.”
In his column for the Auchwinnie Pibroch on 18 September 2013, a year to the day before the planned referendum on independence, McWatt extended a hand to those 500,000 English people now living north of the border and therefore deemed eligible to vote for or against Scotland’s freedom. It is surely not fanciful to suggest that Piers Aubrey’s pivotal role in the Scupper Tupper campaign and in the new No Fascaray Array movement prompted this sudden softening in McWatt’s attitudes to the English. Certainly, the article suggested a surprising cessation of old hostilities and a more forgiving, inclusive politics. His veteran literary enemy Professor Alastair Galbraith, writing in the Quill & Thistle, took a different view, describing McWatt’s opposition to the Array as “the absurd performance of a Caledonian Quixote tilting at wind turbines,” and suggested that the poet’s new conciliatory tone was “either an example of senile benevolence or, more credibly, the tactic of a wily old Nat desperate for independence at any cost—even civility to the English.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
This may come as a shock to some of my regular readers, but I ask them to bear with me as I make the case for the non-Scot. This is not, I hasten to add, an eleventh-hour epiphany. I have not finally, with life’s last cairn in view on the final bend in the track, come round to the English. The hoar frost of age may be upon me but I am not completely gowkit. No, the non-Scots of whom I speak are those with roots outwith our land who fell in love with our glens, straths and hills, rubbed along quite well with our people, and strove to serve them and their land.
Their place in our history is assured, from the time of the Norse settlers who took our native Celtic women as their brides. Their children were called Gallgaels, foreign Gaels. Since then, many a Gallgael has worked to shape our nation. Robert the Bruce was, of course, of Norman extraction; William Wallace was, as his name suggests, Welsh; Mary Queen of Scots was to all intents and purposes French, and the Italian-born son of a Polish mother and English father became Scotland’s Bonnie Prince Charlie.
More recently, our independence movement has included such distinguished figures as Sir Compton Mackenzie (English); James Graham, the (London-born, Eton-educated) Duke of Montrose; and Gwendoline Emily Meacham, the redoubtable Scottish patriot who adopted the name Wendy Wood when she left her native South Africa and gained fame and notoriety for tearing down the Union Jack at Stirling Castle. The Summer Isle–dwelling pioneer of Scottish ecology, Frank Fraser Darling, was an Englishman whose Scots-sounding middle name was acquired thanks to a brief early marriage.
In the sphere of Scots music, folk singer Hamish Imlach was born in Calcutta; his near namesake, the folk-song collector Hamish Henderson, was actually baptised James and raised in England; Margaret Fay Shaw, another great folk-song collector, described as the “saviour of Scotland’s Gaelic tradition,” was from Pennsylvania, and her husband, John Lorne Campbell, self-styled Laird of Canna, was himself half American, while Ewan MacColl, the singer and songwriter who celebrated the Scottish street song in such a curious accent, was in fact an Englishman named Jimmy Miller.
In my own field, Charles Murray, author of much-anthologised Scots poems including “The Whistle that the Wee Herd Made,” though Scots-born, was another man of the veldt, and the inestimable Sydney Goodsir Smith, who did so much to advance the cause of Lallans with verse including “Under the Eildon Tree” and “The Grace of God and the Meth-Drinker,” was a New Zealander, educated in an English public school and at Oxford which, when I last looked, was firmly located in England.
Even the great Hugh MacDiarmid, whose real name was the more anglophonic Christopher Grieve, was born just six miles from the border with The Enemy and it does not seem completely implausible, indeed geography and human nature suggest it, that somewhere, at some time in his past, there was a little Sassenach penetration into Grieve’s otherwise irreproachable genealogy. Perhaps this also explains his later-life desertion of the Scots language for the sort of fantoosh vocabulary that might be heard in the science departments of English universities.
Let us not forget that even the Scots-born can get it wrong, as demonstrated by our politicians’ recent collaborations with Yankee billionaires, as well as their support for the bird-slaughtering, peace-destroying, landscape-blighting Fascaray Array. We should remind ourselves that many sons of Caledonia—lowlanders, granted, but Scots nonetheless—served under the Butcher Cumberland at Culloden and slaughtered their Highland kinsmen on behalf of their English masters.
Conversely, many Irishmen enlisted with Charlie’s Jacobite army to fight for Scottish independence. We cannot deny the well-intentioned Gallgael’s contribution to our nation’s life. It is their tragedy that they are less Scottish than they, and we, would wish. They might never be truly one of us, these outliers and incomers—folk of whom we say in Fascaray they are “frae away”—but, surely, some respect is due.
They must not be confused with those incomers who see themselves as old imperialist “white settlers” living in hostile terrain and treating the natives accordingly, or the absentee landlords—English lairds and their descendants—who twice a year tramp across our nation’s hills in quasi-military garb, with hip flasks of malt and polished guns, slaughtering our wildlife. Annual attendance at a ceilidh and a familiarity with the steps of the Dashing White Sergeant do not a Scot make.
These colonising incomers are like the rhododendrons that their status-conscious Victorian predecessors planted in their gardens here. They take to our soil, these rapacious foreign blooms, and then they take over, escaping their cultivated confines, rampaging through the wild, leeching the soil of nutrients, destroying the habitats of our native species and threatening the delicate balance of our entire ecosystem.
So what makes a Scot? Or, more to the point, what makes the worthiest faux Scot a Gallgael? It is in the end about a modest stoicism, a sense of social justice, a distrust of rank and the trappings of fame and an unbragging appreciation of the beauty and majesty around us. It’s about accepting the challenges of climate and terrain and knuckling down and getting on with it. It’s about loving the land, accepting our subservience to it, and giving to it, rather than taking from it. Wha loues the laun, awns the laun, an the laun awns him. Oor ain laun fur oor ain fowk!
—Grigor McWatt, 18 September 2013, Auchwinnie Pibroch
We’ll Gang Nae Mair Stravaigin
We’ll gang nae mair stravaigin,
Sae late intae the nicht,
Though the hert be aye as louin,
An the muin be aye as bricht.
Fur the sgian-dubh rusts ower
An the saul ootwairs the breist,
An the hert maun paws tae pech
An loue itsel maun rest.
Tho the nicht was made for louin,
An the dawk back-comes tae suin,
Yet we’ll gang nae mair stravaigin,
By the licht o the muin.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Lord Byron, 2013*
* * *
* That’s Me Awa, Smeddum Beuks, 2013.
The manner of his death seemed profoundly out of character; he slipped away, on 15 January 2014, without fulminations or protest, meekly acquiescing for the first time in his life. Barry the Post was the last person to see McWatt alive. The poet was fishing for grayling on the Lingel that final morning and Barry, pausing from his rounds “for a wee cigarette break” by the river, had waved to McWatt who was wandering with his rod across the stones to the far bank. Barry stamped on his cigarette butt and was getting back in his van when he heard a cry—“
more a soft moan than a shout,” he said later. He looked up to see McWatt keel over, hand on heart, head first into the water.
The poet’s pulse had already given out by the time Barry reached him, turned him over and dragged him to the bank. McWatt lay there, mud-spattered, eyes closed. “He’d a sleekit smile on him,” the postman reported later, “as if he was about to deliver a punchline.”
Barry desperately tried to pound the old man’s heart back into life but McWatt lay cold and unresisting. There was nothing to be done but to drive for help and return, load the body onto a trailer and, in a grim parody of McWatt’s regular commute, convey him to the Finnverinnity Inn.
Barry’s brother Kenny phoned Auchwinnie and, while they waited for the undertakers to arrive on the Bonxie, the regulars stood solemnly round the corpse stretched across the window seat and raised a glass to the Bard of Fascaray. Chic McIntosh reflected that, while McWatt’s presence continued to dominate the inn, this was one bar-room conversation he wouldn’t interrupt.
—
His death was reported in all the national newspapers (on the front pages in Scotland, inside pages in England), was a lead item on Scottish television news, the last item on the BBC’s Newsnight and trended on social media for two days, with the hashtag #BardofFascaray.
The Scottish government issued a statement about McWatt’s “incalculable contribution to our culture and to our understanding of who we are,” and there were suggestions that McWatt’s funeral would be a national event, a rallying point for the independence movement, generating some useful publicity before the referendum in nine months’ time. But in his will and testament, drawn up in Auchwinnie six months before his death, McWatt had stipulated “a small local, secular funeral ceremony in Fascaray.” In the same will, apart from an endowment to his former assistant Donald MacInnes, he bequeathed his estate, including the regular stream of royalties for his famous song, for the “benefit of the community of Fascaray.”
On the day of the funeral, Finnverinnity School was closed and the entire population of the island filled the village hall, where McWatt lay in a closed wicker coffin garlanded with yellow spikes of early-flowering gorse picked by local children in Calasay. There were readings of his poems by older islanders and, to the young reporter covering the ceremony for the Auchwinnie Pibroch, it seemed “as if the touchingly halting recitations, the crying of babies and the whispering of bored children reinforced the sense of community and illustrated so vividly the fact that McWatt was a true poet of his people.”
At McWatt’s request, there was no mention of the song that had made his name and his fortune. Instead, eleven-year-old Marsaili-May MacDonald, niece of fisherman piper Shonnie, great-great-granddaughter of soldier piper Shonnie and great-great-niece of Murdo MacDonald of the Fascaray Five, sang unaccompanied the lovely traditional Gaelic song “Griogal Cridhe,” Beloved Grigor, with its puirt-à-beul mouth-music chorus.
’S ioma h-oidhche fhliuch is thioram,
Sìde nan seachd sian,
Gheibheadh Griogal dhòmhsa creagan
Ris an gabhainn dìon.
Sèist:
Obhan obhan obhan iri
Obhan iri, o!
Obhan obhan obhan iri
’S mòr mo mhulad, ’s mòr.
Many a night of rain or wind,
Weather of the seven elements
Grigor would find for me a rocky shelter
Where I would take refuge.
Chorus:
Obhan obhan obhan iri
Obhan iri, o!
Obhan obhan obhan iri
Great is my sorrow, great.
After the ceremony, the coffin was reverently carried from the hall and lifted onto the back of Kenny MacLeod’s Land Rover, watched by silent islanders blinking against a sudden shaft of winter sunlight. A disorderly cortège of quad bikes, tractors, trailers and pickup trucks followed the makeshift hearse through Finnverinnity Glen to Ruh and across the strand, for McWatt’s burial behind An Tobar, on the edge of the Calasay cliffs under a simple driftwood cross.
He had, presciently, written his own epitaph weeks before his death. It was engraved on a granite slab and transported across the island the following month with some difficulty by Kenny MacLeod and Chic Macintosh, using a quad bike, trailer and ropes. In a quiet dedication ceremony, on a bright windless day of light snow, McWatt’s memorial stone was erected, like the Clach na Saorsa monument to the Fascaray Five, on the slopes of his beloved Beinn Mammor.
GRIGOR MCWATT POET, FASCARADIAN, SCOT 1921–2014
Ablo the braid an starnie sky
Sheuch the graff an lat me lee,
Gled did Ah live an gledly dee
An Ah laid me doon wi a wull.
This be the varse ye cairve fur me;
Here he ligs whaur he langed tae be:
Hame is the fisher, hame frae the sea
An the hunter hame frae the brae.
—Grigor McWatt, efter R. L. Stevenson, 2014
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
10 December 2014
The bungalow, set on a close-cropped lawn edged with rows of orange pansies bounded by a low privet hedge, is a miniature McMansion, its exterior as bland and tidy as a show home. I push open the picket gate and walk up the path to the front door before hesitating; I must have the wrong house. In the window is a poster declaring support for the UK Independence Party, UKIP, a wacko English Tea Party outfit. McWatt’s Jean can’t live here, surely. But the house number is correct, confirmed in my phone call yesterday to a terse Englishman who told me he was Jean Turner’s husband. When the door is opened, I’m still puzzling over the lurid yellow-and-purple poster and my expectations are low. It would be unreasonable to expect to see, after all this time, any trace of the enchantress who ensnared McWatt, and I’m only mildly disconcerted to be greeted by a wide-hipped grandmother in pastel knitwear.
“You must be Mhairi McPhail. Do come in.”
What does shock me is that Bonnie Jean seems to have gone native, adopted the inflections of the English estuaries and eradicated every trace of her Scottish accent. For Grigor, this surely would have been the ultimate betrayal.
Transcription of Interview with Jean Turner, Acacia Crescent, Woking, 10 December 2014. Conducted by Mhairi McPhail.
“How long is this going to take? My husband will be back from his golf in an hour and I have a hair appointment later…
“No, of course. I’ve been expecting a call ever since he died. You’re in charge of his legacy? You live on the island?…You’re plainly not Scottish yourself…New York? We’ve been to Florida twice. Loved it. I’m one for the sun. We head south whenever we can. Madeira. Majorca. Marbella. The Med. I can’t see the appeal of the north—cold, dark, rainy. We get enough of that here. But each to his own, I suppose.
“No. I was never invited. He was very cloak-and-dagger about it all. Scotland in general never had much appeal to me anyway. Awful climate. Filthy food. Miserable people…
“To be honest, we hadn’t been in touch for years. I did write now and again but he returned most of my letters unopened.
“No, it wasn’t so much a row between us, more a kind of falling away, an estrangement. We had a shared past, you couldn’t argue with that—though he tried—but in the end, when it came down to it, we never had much in common…
“Yes, I suppose I did know him longer than anyone. He was a romantic, if that’s the word for it, right from the start. Always away in his room, dreaming, reading…to be honest he thought he was too good for the rest of us, especially after he got into the grammar school…Others can judge the writing. I was never one for poetry. Especially not foreign poetry. Never could make head nor tail of it.
“Didn’t mind the song though. Catchy tune. For a while it was hard to avoid—every time you turned on the radio. Extraordinary, really. I liked the Three Tenors best. Some of the pop versions leave me cold. Must have made him a fortu
ne, though…
“I’m not sure that success changed him, as such. It just made him more so…more of a fantasist, more convinced of his genius. It certainly dug him in deeper to that depressing little island he called home. We were out of touch for so long, I couldn’t say whether the fame went to his head. He certainly didn’t throw his money about, I can tell you that.
“So the Scottish Parliament has actually given a grant for a Grigor McWatt museum on the island? [LAUGHS] It’s not for me to say, but surely they could find a better use for public money? Or do they just splash it about like cheap whisky up there?
“And since we’re on the subject of money, can you give me an idea of the sums involved?…You did say you were in charge of his legacy? I know the Scottish legal system’s different from ours but I thought you might have some news for us on his will…You know, his estate?…
“What? Are you serious?…The money’s going to the island? All of it?…You came all the way here to tell me that?…
“A misunderstanding? You’re talking about another legacy?…I don’t believe it!…Well, poetry and history won’t be much use to Arthur and me.
“So he was stubborn and vindictive to the end. Your phone call raised my hopes that he’d finally decided to make amends. But things were never going to be straightforward with Geoffrey…
“No. Geoffrey. You—the world—knew him as Grigor. I knew him as Geoffrey…It wasn’t a ‘pet name,’ no. We weren’t on ‘pet name’ terms.”
*
The transcription, which will not be displayed in any form in the Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre, ends here. There are another five minutes of tape—my stuttering questions, her dismissive replies—and then my notes tell the rest of the story, which was interrupted by the arrival of a coughing, bent-backed old man in khaki slacks.