by John Prebble
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
John Prebble
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
John Prebble
John Prebble's Scotland
John Prebble
John Prebble was a journalist, novelist, documentarian and historian. He was born in England but his family moved to Canada following WWI, later returning to England where Prebble was educated at Latymer School.
Prebble began his writing life as a journalist in 1934, and drew on his experiences as an artilleryman in WWII when he wrote his first novel, Where the Sea Breaks, published in 1944. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but abandoned it after World War II. His Canadian prairie experience also influenced his work: The Buffalo Soldier is a historical novel about the American West.
Scottish history formed the subject of many of Prebble’s subsequent novels. His Fire and Sword Trilogy, focused on the fall of the clan system in 17th Century Scotland. Culloden was the first book, chronicling the defeat of the clans in one pivotal battle. The second book of the trilogy,The Highland Clearances (1963), remains one of Prebble’s best known works because the subject matter is still one of great historical debate. Glencoe (1966), the final book, was a study of the causes and effects of the Glencoe massacre of 1692. His later works, Mutiny (1975) and The King’s Jaunt (1988) extended the theme.
Prebble also co-wrote the screenplay of the film Zulu, as well as radio dramas and documentaries. He was awarded an OBE in 1998, just three years before his death.
Dedication
For
CASPAR CLARK
my grandson
Chapter 1
Scotland first touched my mind and my imagination more than fifty years ago, when I was an English boy in the short-grass country of Saskatchewan. That bleak and open land was blue-white in winter, briefly green when the warmth of a chinook melted the snows, then yellow sere in the summer days I best remember. A sunburnt plain where hidden scrub-trees crouched close to the slough-holes, and the highest points against a cloudless sky were the tall grain elevators by the railroad track. On endless afternoons, when school was out, I sat in the black shelter of their shadows, chewing the sweet kernels that dribbled from their timbers, and until the lonely whistle of the westbound freight recalled me to the prairie I dreamed of blue mountains, dark lochs, and gentle rain. Thus had my red-haired schoolteacher, Miss Campbell, so often described her homeland, but like others in the settlement she had never seen it. The picture was a sentimental memory, passed from generation to generation, and time had long since removed the bitter pain of remembrance once felt by those exiled Highlanders whom the coffin ships had brought from Thurso, Fort William, Greenock and Loch Boisdale.
As I think of it now, the township where I lived was predominantly Scots. At the beginning of this century a man called Sutherland gave his name to what was then a few clapboard shacks, a mail office, and a Canadian Pacific engine-house. He had come west from Winnipeg, my uncle once told me, and only later did I realise that his great-grandparents must have been among the first immigrants from the county of Sutherland, ninety-six young men and women whom the policy of Improvement had evicted from the parish of Kildonan and replaced with sheep. They settled in Manitoba in 1813, by the shore of Lake Winnipeg and along the banks of the Red River. They endured a Canadian winter for which even Highland snows had not prepared them, and in the spring they wrote despairingly to their parents, advising the old people to abandon all thought of joining them. They called their new home Kildonan. The land they broke with the plough and defended with muskets had been taken from the Assiniboin Indians, and if the evicted Highlanders were aware of that irony they left no record of their feelings. Some of their descendants, I believe, joined Mr Sutherland in Saskatchewan. By then the Gaelic tongue and culture which had solaced the homesickness of the first immigrants, were forgotten. Although he was contemptuous of all emigrants, this would perhaps have pleased James Loch whose Policy of Improvement dispersed the people of Sutherland. He believed that the Highland sub-tenants of his noble English employer were ignorant and credulous, and that the changes he imposed upon their lives would deliver them from superstition and sloth. “In a few years,” he wrote, “the children of all those who are removed from the hills will lose all recollection of the habits and customs of their fathers.”
The third- and fourth-generation Scots-Canadians who lived in the township of my boyhood had no apparent recollection of their Gaelic roots, but their emotional attachment to Scotland was strong and persuasive. It coloured my day-dreaming and made that country more of a reality than an England I could scarcely remember. The feeling was encouraged by the common sight of tartan, flame-red or blue-green against the snow in winter. My father and my uncle, the men who worked with them on the railroad, farmers who came into town on the high seats of box-wagon sleighs, all wore tartan mackinaws. I knew, as did my friends, that this short winter coat had been so named for a Scot who had created it, a beaver-trapper who once lived with the Cree and the Assiniboin. We did not believe Miss Campbell when she told us that mackinaw was a corruption of Michilmackinac, an island on Lake Huron where British soldiers in the War of 1812 had tailored their blankets into coats. I know now that this is true, except that the blankets had not belonged to the soldiers but were intended for distribution among their Indian allies.
Mr Sutherland was still alive when I was a boy. He was the mayor, the fire-chief and the police-constable. He also delivered water to the houses of the township. In winter this came as ice, sawn in blocks from the Saskatchewan River three miles away. I cannot clearly recall his face but I remember the white icicles on his beard and eyebrows, on the mane and fetlocks of his horse. I think of him sometimes when I drive past the lonely kirk in Strath Kildonan where the young people of the parish, having marched in protest and retreated before the threat of artillery and bayonets, at last accepted their eviction and their bitter exile. The great herds of Cheviot sheep which then replaced them are now gone and the red deer moves higher into the hills above Borrobol and Suisgill, away from the black furrows of afforestation. Mountain sedge and yellow trefoil mask the scattered stones of vanished townships, but the grass still grows greenest where the people once tended their small potato-patches.
The thought of Scotland during my early boyhood was undoubtedly an escape for my longing spirit. I was not always happy in Canada. I still had not seen it when I first wrote about it. I was now a schoolboy in England and my romantic Jacobitism was a refuge, too, from the arid streets of West London. The short story I wrote, for which I received the astonishing fee of nine guineas, more than thrice the weekly income of my parents, was partly inspired by the legend of Roderick Mackenzie. A fugitive from Culloden, he was skulking in Glen Moriston when one of Cumberland’s patrols came upon him and concluded from his appearance that h
e was the Young Pretender. He encouraged their error and by defending himself forced them to shoot him. A cairn marks the spot where he died, recovered from natural decay and the sport of unnatural vandals, and when I pass it I not only acknowledge his self-sacrifice but also my own personal debt.
When I did visit Scotland for the first time I was twenty-one and determined to see as much of the Highlands as I could, on foot with a Swedish pack, a Grenfell jacket and a kapok sleeping-bag. I sailed from Wapping to Leith on a ship of the old Dundee, Perth and Edinburgh Line, thirty-six shillings for as many hours afloat and the support of an upper-deck stanchion for my back at night. The little vessel was the Royal Scot and I had known her black hull and red-barred funnel since my childhood, from a coloured print my father kept in a tin with his medals, his Naval record and discharge papers. As a Petty Officer Guns he had served aboard her in the Great War when her innocent appearance had tempted U-boats to the surface and their destruction by his marksmanship. Her crew were Hebrideans for the most part, and my father remembered their alarming habit of prising fuses from the shells with the points of their fishing-knives. But he always spoke of them with admiration and gratitude. When he was washed overboard to port in a North Sea gale one of them plucked him to safety from the return wave that was carrying him to starboard. A generation and more later, northward to the Arctic Circle, my son was saved in the same manner, and by a Hebridean.
At Leith harbour I walked to the tram-head along the crescent curve of The Shore, not knowing then that here on its cobbles in 1779 Highland soldiers had resisted with musket and bayonet rather than submit to a breach of the promises made to them on enlistment. The bodies of those who died were taken to Lady Yester’s Church where young Walter Scott and his friends from the High School next door paid the sexton a penny apiece to see “the highlanders lying stiff and stark.” Their bloody corpses, wrapped in plaids, gave him nightmares for a week, and remembering them fifty years later his sympathies were still with his kinsmen in the Border regiment which suppressed the revolt.
The novels of Scott and his distant cousin and imitator, James Grant, had locked my mind in the past and unprepared it for the Edinburgh I saw when I stepped from the Leith tram that August morning, although the silhouette of Castle Rock, smoke-hazed and glistening with fragmented sunlight, must have been as they had often seen it. I had an hour or so before I left for the Highlands and instead of using it to look at the hot and noisy city I spent most of it reading on a bench in Waverley Station. I would like to think that I was reading Scott, or Kidnapped which I carried with intent in my pack, but it was a novel by Grant which I had found in a second-hand shop on North Bridge. I had read it before, with an uncritical hunger I had consumed all of his monumental output of second-rate books. I cannot believe that this was entirely a waste of time, for he opened doors through which I later passed to make my own discoveries. He is now a forgotten writer, perhaps charitably so, but he is also a link in the circling chain of coincidence that holds me to Scotland. He was the great-grandson of a Grant of Corrimony and an Ogilvy of Kempcairn. After Culloden a platoon of the 21st Foot came to burn Corrimony’s house in Glen Urquhart but its commander, an Ogilvy it is said, saw the arms of his name quartered with those of Grant above the door and he turned away, leaving the house untouched. Seventeen years ago, by chance in Robbie’s Bar at the Station Hotel in Inverness, I renewed an old friendship with Hamish Wallace whom I had not seen since a perverse decision by Lord Beaverbrook separated us in Fleet Street. We dined pleasantly that night in Corrimony House, which his family now owned and where that protective quartering is still set in stone above the door.
When I first went to the Highlands they were not the holiday-ground they have become, or the caravan speedway they sometimes seem to be. There were few cars on the narrow roads, but tall-funnelled steamers passed through the Caledonian Canal by Telford’s twenty-eight locks, and black Hornby engines trailed smoke along cuttings and embankments now abandoned. I walked toward Glencoe. John Buchan’s story of the Massacre had been published three years before and because I had read it and re-read it I was obliged to see the valley itself. I came to it through the indigo shadow of Meall Mor, by the water of Loch Leven where Prince Albert had studied the glen’s dark gateway from the deck of the Fairy and concluded, so his wife recorded, that “it was fine, but not quite so much as he expected.” It is hard to imagine what the man expected to see, but if it was a realisation of the preposterous Gothic engravings then popular, and not the simple honesty of a Daniell aquatint, his insensibility is explained. It was past sunset but still light when I came to Achnacone, where the glen is green with timber and grass before it turns towards the black escarpment of Aonach Eagach. I climbed to the south up the slope of Gleann-leac-na-muidhe and slept the night in the shallow ruin of the house where old MacIain spent his last summer before he was slaughtered by King William’s command. There was no moon, I remember, but a sky scattered with stars. In the morning I awoke to a silent, bone-chilling mist, to such a Highland day as that which provoked Samuel Johnson to miserable complaint, “O, sir, a most dolorous country!”
But when I went down to Achnacone in search of breakfast columns of sunlight were already lifting the clouds above the nave of the valley, and the air was loud with the gossip of a hundred streams. I spent the day in the glen, walking to Rannoch and the sturdy isolation of the Kingshouse Inn where I took my breakfast at noon. The broad highway from the south had been built only recently but I followed the old track when I could, where black cattle from Ardnamurchan, Morvern and the Isles were once driven through the autumnal haze to market at the Falkirk Tryst. With John Brown on the box of her barouche, Queen Victoria had also travelled this stony way and felt a frisson of horror at the thought of how the MacDonalds had been betrayed and murdered. “Let me hope,” she said, “that William III knew nothing of it.” When she saw roadside heaps of stones that had once been homes she thought they vividly illustrated “the bloody, fearful tale of woe.” Her emotions were admirable but her chronology was inexact. The cottage-stones had been piled there when valley and people were cleared for sheep, not long before her late husband had viewed the glen from the Fairy and thought it less dramatic than he had expected.
I slept a second night on MacIain’s hearthstone, fitfully disturbed by a squall of rain and the melancholy cry of a night-bird. In the morning, as best I could with Kidnapped and an Ordnance map for guidance, I followed the flight taken by Alan Breck and David Balfour after the murder of the Red Fox. No climber then or since, I did not attempt to reach their high cave in a cleft of Sgur na Ciche, the Pap of Glencoe which Stevenson called Corrynakiegh, but I walked with them above Loch Leven. I saw “thin, pretty woods” of white birch as they did. I thought I heard the bubbling call of a cushat-dove that fell so pleasantly on David’s ear, and with him I looked in wonder across the dark loch-water to the thundrous mountains of Mamore. After a third night, how passed I cannot remember, I went with the fugitives over the Devil’s Staircase and down to Glencoe again by Altnafeadh. Less daunting than a map suggests, the path winds upward from Kinlochleven along the track of a military road built more than two centuries ago. From its high ground Stevenson’s characters saw only the small parties of dragoons in search of them and he did not know, or rightly preferred to forget, that this was no place to put his outlaws running. More than a thousand soldiers of the road-gangs were deployed that year between Loch Leven and Bridge of Orchy.
Another day and I went eastward by the military road below the bare brown shoulder of Stob na Cruiache. To the south was David’s “low, broken, desert land”, the wide emptiness of Rannoch Moor, twenty square miles of black peat and sky-blue water, a bog that swallowed a primeval pine forest yet now supports a railway on floating mattresses of brushwood. That day I first saw a red stag, not far above me on the brae, motionless in the spiked grass and waiting for Mr Landseer to open his sketch-book. I have since seen or heard part of the great cull that takes place here and e
lsewhere, a necessary but numbing slaughter. I have seen a muddy Cortina speeding triumphantly southward on the A82 with the carcass of a ten-pointer on its bonnet, and before a hotel on Lochaweside I once watched a party of Scandinavians as they filled their estate-car with the freshly-mounted antlers of young stags. Tri aois duine aois feidh, says the Gaelic, thrice the age of man the age of a stag. It is not true, of course, and if it is then man has given the red deer no opportunity to prove it.
It was my intention after a night at a youth hostel by Rannoch Station to go northward to Loch Ericht, to Cluny’s Cage below Ben Alder where Alan Breck and David at last took shelter with the Macpherson chief. I was dissuaded from this foolhardy attempt by time and exhaustion. And by something more, perhaps, a wish to be far gone from the brooding loneliness of Rannoch, the wide brown moor which diminishes even the granite hills that surround it.
I went to Glenfinnan on the Mallaig train. In my naive Jacobitism it was almost an act of pilgrimage to visit the marshy loch-shore where the Young Pretender raised his standard. At that age in that year I saw no unconscious irony in the monument that marks the spot, a stone Highlander on a tall pillar, looking at the empty hills with sightless eyes. A hundred yards from him, by a wooden pier on Loch Shiel, two men were sitting in the stern of a small boat, waiting to take passengers seventeen miles westward to Acharacle at the lochend. They accepted five shillings from me, their only fare, and I sat on a thwart facing the prow, my feet dry on a scattering of small branches, as the shoes of Johnson and Boswell were protected on the ferry from Mull to Oban. When the boatmen talked it was to each other. They spoke in Gaelic which I heard then for the first time, on dark water in a deep glen, deep as a sword-cut in the body of the mountains. Six miles from the pier and to the north was an opening, a gentle shelf rising between conical peaks, with a single house upon it like a white brooch on a green shawl. My map told me that it was Glen Alladale and I knew that the Pretender had slept here the night before his standard was raised. The thought of its solitude came to me often in the following years, and when I learned that the Laird of Glen Alladale had taken one hundred and fifty swordsmen to that useless Rebellion it inspired the last two sentences of Culloden.
