The Campbell sisters had the naughty habit of hiding behind the sheaves in the barn where the local swains did their courting, and they found delight in chronicling the progress of each courtship, and since few island girls married before they were pregnant, there were some fascinating reports. Some natives took umbrage at this unseemly behavior of the Campbells, but Morag, the older of the Macneil sisters, was more generous: ‘They’re young. They have to learn about these things. Let them have fun.’
Morag was an extraordinary woman. She had been born in an era before rural doctors knew how to correct clubfeet, but this deformity did not keep her from enjoying life, although it had prevented her from finding a husband. Somewhat overweight, decidedly blowsy and without any teeth, natural or false, she did not look prepossessing, but her warm heart, her desire to participate in whatever was happening on her island, and her love of both storytelling and singing made her a special person whose memory I cherish.
She was inordinately proud of being a member of the Macneil clan, and she felt that the ruined castle perched on a rock in the middle of the bay was in some strange way her domain. Walking with me to the waterfront, she prevailed upon a fisherman to row us out to the castle. As we sat amid its ruins she told me of the great days in Barra. She knew English only imperfectly, but I had picked up enough Gaelic to manage the drift of her recitations as she shifted back and forth between the two languages.
Gaelic is incredibly difficult for an outlander to master. The lovely chorus of one of the great songs illustrates the problem—cruidh mo chridh is pronounced crooch muh kree—but when Morag told a tale, the words seemed to whisper their own meaning: ‘In the time of troubles, when evil men roamed the glens, there was confusion over there,’ and she indicated the mainland of Scotland, across the Minch. ‘They forced good Catholics to become Protestant or lose their lives. All the fine Catholics in Oban and Mallaig and Glencoe had to deny the Pope and bow to John Knox. Then the evil ones crossed over to our Islands, and Skye turned color, The Lewis became Protestant and so did North Uist and Benbecula.’
At the end of this mournful recitation she keened: ‘Ach me! the deadly wrong that was done in those days, with even stout members of the Clan Macdonald changing their religion, but then the evil ones came to the two islands they could never subdue, Eriskay and Barra, for under the leadership of our Macneil, none braver, these islands remained true Catholic. We are jewels in the Crown of the Pope.’ And as we lingered amid the ruins of that castle in the safety of the bay, she told me of how the Macneils of Barra had resisted the full strength of the Protestants from both Scotland and England, remaining true to the ancient faith that had reached them many centuries ago from Ireland.
But the more I moved about with Morag—and she did not allow her crippled feet to keep her from stomping wherever she wanted to go—the more suspicious I became that her religion was more complicated than a mere Catholicism that had withstood Protestant pressure.
When we went together to the peat bogs not far from Castlebay, she told me: ‘My father cut his peats from the bog. Dried them in piles over there. Kiltag and I hauled them to our cot, where they baked in the sun before we placed them in the fire in winter.’ She showed me where men of the island still cut their small rectangles of dark, aromatic peat, which made a Scottish cottage such a warm and friendly place with its unique smell of burning roots.
However, it was not peat that was on her mind when she led me to the bogs: ‘Here the wee folk live. In that glen my father saw them many times. Standing where you are now, James, I heard them sing like whispering angels. When men from my family had to leave Barra, no jobs here, we would walk with them to this bog for the last time to say good-bye to the hills and to the glens and ask blessings from the wee folk.’ Then, for the first of several dramatic times during the next months, she lifted her face, turned to the low hills and cried: ‘Uh to the hills, uh to the glens, uh to the folk who guard them, this is my friend James from America. Guard him while he is with us.’ She did not cross herself, nor go through any ritual other than facing the hills, but her round face with its tousled hair was ecstatic and she was content that she had done her best to ingratiate me with the little people who had guarded that glen since the days of her father and those earlier peat cutters who had worked this bog for the past thousand years.
I am not happy with the way I have rendered the first words of her invocation. I have it as ‘Uh to,’ but it was more guttural and not separated into two words; perhaps ‘Ugh- to the hills’ would be closer, but the g does not look pretty. In any case the phrase was uttered as if it were special greetings to cherished friends and powers. That it was part of some ancient and valued relationship to the wee folk I have no doubt, for to her they were real. They had occupied the glens for generations. They had fought on the side of the Macneils when the family battled to hold off the Protestants, and in Barra life they were a force to be considered.
One night when the singing was strong and I sat with an arm around each of the saucy Campbell girls, Morag started a simple song that beguiled me until in the end it overwhelmed me. In her husky voice with her toothless mouth ill forming the words she sang a simple refrain:
Vair me o-o rovano,
Vair me o-o rovanee,
Vair me o ru o ho,
Sad am I without thee.
The Gaelic words, I learned later, meant nothing; they were just a chain of syllables wonderfully suited to the simple melody that suggested an aching heart. However, the song also had a verse in English, and its words were little short of magical:
When I’m lonely, dear white heart,
Black the night and wild the sea;
By love’s light my foot finds
The old pathway to thee.
But it is in the second verse that the two lines occur which capture the essence of one of the greatest Hebridean songs:
Thou’rt the music of my heart,
Harp of joy, o cruidh mo chridh.…
With head thrown back and gazing upward as if lost in dreams of girlhood, Old Morag sang in a husky voice this storm-whipped love song, and when she finished, the Campbell girls cried: ‘Let’s sing it again.’ And under the thatched roof with the Atlantic storm howling outside as it roared across the peat bog, we repeated this marvelous song until I had mastered the words.
‘What’s it called, this masterpiece?’ I asked and the Campbells explained: “The Eriskay Love Lilt,” named after the wee bit island east of our north tip.’ I have often wondered why this simple statement of love has not caught on as a universally acclaimed folk song. But occasionally when I hum the melody absently someone overhears it and joins in, for he or she has learned it in a singing group, and once or twice I have heard it on the radio. It is a gift Morag gave me, which has been of inestimable value as much for its romantic aura as for its musical virtues.
When she saw that I had been captivated by the song, she told me about the island that was its source: ‘Eriskay is a real island, you know. You could visit it. Just walk to the farthest end of Barra northward and find a fisherman eager to earn a few bob, and you’re in Eriskay, a holy island it is, for it was from there that Flora Macdonald, may God rest her Catholic soul, took Bonnie Prince Charlie under her wing and sneaked him back to Skye past all his English enemies.’
Seeing that I was enthralled by her fantasies, that night she taught me the lyrical ‘Skye Boat Song’:
Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Over the sea to Skye.
Carry the lad that’s born to be king,
Over the sea to Skye …
Flora will keep
Watch o’er thy sleep …
The drama of the dauntless crofters of Barra and Eriskay clinging to their Catholic religion in the face of tremendous pressures from the mainland had already gripped me, and to learn that an island maiden like one of the Campbell girls had succeeded in smuggling Bonnie Prince Charlie to safety in Skye made a visit to Eriskay obligatory. One m
orning, with the blessing of Old Morag and her wee folk, I set out to walk to the extreme northern end of Barra where, as predicted, I found a fisherman who would ferry me across to tiny Eriskay.
I carried with me the name of a family with whom I could stay, and the three days I spent on that exquisite little island with the fairy-tale name infected me forever with nesomania, the mad passion for islands. I walked every road in Eriskay, and this in midwinter with the Atlantic hammering the west coast. I listened to an account that was true but that sounded like some medieval French roman as an Eriskay fisherman spoke:
‘There never was a future king more handsome and brave than our Bonnie Prince Charlie, heir to the thrones of Scotland and England. His loyal troops fought to the death, but at Culloden in 1746 they were overwhelmed, leaving him unprotected. With courage unbelievable and often alone in some pathetic disguise, he escaped the English army and fled in a small boat to our islands.
‘Think of the temptations my ancestors faced! Twenty thousand English troops trying to find him and thirty thousand pounds promised the man who would betray him! Dressed as a peasant he roamed our isles, and we knew who he was but no one spoke. Slipping at last into Eriskay, he lay hidden in the croft of my ancestors, until the daughter of our family, Flora Macdonald, whose soul surely rests in heaven, dressed him in the clothes of her serving maid, Betty Burke, and in a small boat she and the Prince sailed over the sea to Skye, like the song says. When English soldiers stopped them as they landed and asked: “Who’s this one?” she said: “My maid Betty Burke,” and the Bonnie Prince was safely on his way to France.’*
To have visited Eriskay when I did was the kind of adventure that can set a young man’s imagination galloping down paths he would never otherwise have known. To sleep in the croft of Flora Macdonald while the great ocean thunders outside is to know dreaming and the awesome power of old tales retold.
Some months before visiting Barra and Eriskay I had become acquainted with another folk song, more sophisticated in both words and music, the Russian ballad ‘Stenka Razin.’ It told of a Cossack revolutionary who swept the Volga regions in the 1670s, had a tempestuous love affair with a Persian princess and met his end by being drawn and quartered before a huge throng in Moscow. It was a happy coincidence that these two notable songs reached me simultaneously, for in a sense between them they encompassed my world at that time: ‘Eriskay,’ delicate and haunting, ‘Razin,’ bold and terrifying; ‘Eriskay’ whispering of love, ‘Razin’ shouting of battle; ‘Eriskay’ filled with the Gaelic tristesse that restrains Irishmen and Hebridean seamen; ‘Razin’ with the brute force that thrusts Russians forward.
I have sung these two songs in every corner of the world—‘Eriskay’ when I was feeling lonely or sentimental, ‘Razin’ when I was trying to visualize past empires and the vast movements of people. I have known many of the distinctive songs from all parts of the world, yet these two still represent for me the best in folk music. I have collected unusual songs and have been able to produce two highly professional records offering the best of Hawaiian and South Pacific music. But if I had known only ‘Eriskay’ and ‘Razin’ I would have sampled the very best, and that would have been sufficient.
The two songs had an effect upon me that I had not anticipated: they inspired me to compose a love song of my own. After devising a good simple melody, I wrestled with the lyrics:
Soar, nightingale! soar to the stars above.
Sing, nightingale! sing her my song of love.
Fly, nightingale! fly through the silvery sea.
Bring, nightingale! bring back her promise to me.
And then I decided to add an extra touch by rhyming the first words of alternating lines, and this produced the following:
Fly, nightingale! fly to the blue above.
Sing, nightingale! sing her my song of love.
Sigh, nightingale! sigh for a love that’s fled.
Bring, nightingale, bring back her promise we’ll wed.
Alas, my nightingale served me poorly, for while I was chanting my song through the glens of Scotland, my young lady, who I thought was waiting for me back in the States, married the other fellow. But the song remains and I sing it still.
Old Morag’s other gift cut deep. For while living with her in that little thatched cottage whose stone walls were two feet thick—and well they had to be, considering the Atlantic gales—I began to understand all those women who struggled against incalculable odds, those sterling creatures who hold so much of the world together. In Morag I saw the essence of many valiant women I would later present in my works of fiction: Nyuk Tsin, Nellie Forbush, Ellie Zendt, the one-tusked mammoth of the Arctic, the South African aborigine herding her tribe across the barren desert. Old Morag would live in all of them, because her will, like theirs, was indomitable.
But most of all she revealed for me the heroism of my own mother, who also had to cope with handicaps of an even more disastrous kind. I had known the misery she suffered, had indeed participated in it, but I had never allowed it to traumatize me permanently; however, when I witnessed this island woman’s struggles I appreciated more acutely the price my mother had paid for her survival—a story I shall save for the final chapter.
One day in the late winter it came time for me to leave Barra and get back to my university. Morag was sorry to see me go, as were the Campbell girls, and was appalled when it became clear that I was going to leave without saying good-bye to the little people in the peat bog. She led me back to that spot which had meant so much to me, and throwing back her tousled head she cried: ‘Uh- to the hills, uh- to the glens, uh to the folk who mind the bog, James is leaving us. Make his passage across Minch a kindly one, and guard him wherever he goes.’ After mumbling certain special instructions to the wee folk, she led me back to her cottage, where the Campbell sisters were waiting, and we walked together to the MacBrayne steamer, which was just coming past the castle ruins in the bay. Morag’s prayers that the Minch crossing be gentle were futile, for that turbulent body of water is never calm. With great heaviness of heart I left Barra and Eriskay and the ocean ford at Benbecula and the endless ceilidhs of the Hebrides.
Shortly after I left Barra I became involved peripherally with a man who helped me understand myself better. I was in the Spanish city of Valencia on a Sunday afternoon when a bullfight was being held at the traditional time of cinco de la tarde, five in the afternoon. I had never seen a bullfight, nor had I read Ernest Hemingway’s powerful Death in the Afternoon because it had not yet reached Europe, so I was not aware that my initiation was going to be with three of the finest matadors of their generation: the poetic Marcial Lalanda, oldest of the three; the tough, resilient Domingo Ortega, fighting in second place; and the flamboyant young star El Estudiante, the Student, as the beginner.
From the moment the fight began I was captivated by the pageantry, the color, the ritualism, the magnificence of the bull, the daring of the toreros and the life-and-death drama of the spectacle. Intuitively I became an aficionado, able to discriminate between the flowery display of Lalanda and the classical austerity of Ortega, which I found the more impressive. The arabesques of Lalanda I could do without, but the poignant dignity of Ortega moved me so deeply that for some weeks I followed him about the bullrings of Spain as he fought alongside most of the great matadors of that period. He eschewed bravura; he showed great respect for the bull both as an animal and as an adversary; and withal he displayed a mastery of style and substance that gave me intense pleasure.
I left Spain an Orteguista, for I had seen an artist who appeared to be in complete control both of himself and of his milieu. He seemed to have been about the same age as I. I now recall with enthusiasm the two times I had an opportunity to talk with him, for his squarish peasant face had gleamed with pleasure when in my halting Spanish I had let him know that I understood and appreciated what he was trying to do.
Through the years, in both Spain and Mexico, I followed his career and it pleased me to see
that Ortega gradually became recognized as the epitome of the classical style. New fighters would become sensations, but their flame would quickly subside into ashes, while Ortega kept going on, his quiet skills improving year by year until as so often happens with men like him who move ever forward slowly but steadily, he became recognized universally as a man of gravity—that is, of a certain weightiness and seriousness of purpose.
I decided in those years of watching him and reading about him that in my own life I would like to resemble him, a man who sticks to his job, who conducts himself with a certain sobriety and serenity, and who stays at the task until he acquires a reputation for being a serious worker with a serious purpose. Four decades after that first bullfight in Valencia, when I was a guest of honor at a great bullfight in Madrid, Domingo Ortega, then a silver-haired old man, served as honorary president and I was taken to his box, high above the crowd, where I sat with him and spoke of old times when he was forging his reputation. He was covered with honors and revered as perhaps the purest artist of his generation. It was a privilege to see him in all his accumulated glory.
My early brush with bullfighters led to two of the happiest summers I would ever know, when I traveled through Mexico with two minor toreros—never matadors—who were grand figures in their own right. Rolleri, a taut, handsome man, was a master peon de confianza, trusted assistant, who had served most of the great matadors of his time. His friend Flaco Valencia was a gangling, awkward banderillero who by force of character had made himself a master of the art of running directly at the bull, pirouetting aside at the last minute and deftly planting the long barbed sticks in the shoulder muscles of the bull to make the bull drop his head and reveal the target spot when the matador takes over. Valencia deserved his nickname Flaco (Skinny), for he seemed to have no flesh on his body, and I often wondered as we traveled about how he generated the energy he displayed in the ring.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 21