There was a vigorous black market in game—salmon, trout, venison, red grouse and capercaillie—poached unchecked, by islanders and commandos, from the River Lingel and the Finnverinnity Estate since Sammy Nelson, the factor, and his two ghillies had left to fight the enemy in Italy and North Africa. There was money to be made from the Receiver of Wrecks for flotsam washed up on the beach—bales of raw rubber were spotted on Lusnaharra Strand by young Francie and Jamie MacDonald, playing truant from school, and salvaged by their father, bringing in the equivalent of a month’s rent and a year’s feudal dues for the family. An enormous steel drum containing forty gallons of pure spirit, found at low tide half sunk in the sand below Doonmara cliffs, failed to make its way to the Receiver and was instead shared between the islanders. Some of it was used neat in the Tilley lamps; some, coloured and sweetened with treacle, made a passable dram in social emergencies.
Business on the island had never been better and, reflected McWatt in Forby, there was, despite the privations, and anxieties about the island menfolk fighting battles far from home, a “hectic gaiety—a gather-your-harebells-while-you-may quality—to island life during the war years.” Only Miss Hughina Geddes, proprietor of the Finnverinnity Temperance Hotel, which had fallen on hard times, and Ranald and Wilma Paterson, the island’s minister and his wife, longed for the return of the more law-abiding and deferential ancien régime. Three miles west up the coast, in the papist enclave of Lusnaharra, Father Col Maclennan, parish priest at the Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary—built on the site of the pre-Christian shrine of Teampull Beag—was ambivalent; the SOE boys were lively company in the pub but he was suspicious of their intentions towards the island’s young women.
Once the war ended, however, the old order was swiftly restored as Fascaradians returned home from overseas military and naval service and the commandos and SOE officers (“all but one,” wrote McWatt in Forby, with a reticence approaching coyness) left the Big House and waved goodbye to the island from the deck of a trawler.
On America’s East Coast, Percy Mere-Stratton, Lord Montfitchett of Godalming and Mayfair, was packing up after this wartime sojourn, preparing to reclaim his British assets, while across the Atlantic in the laird’s Scottish island fiefdom, in a Nissen hut in the grounds of the now-deserted Finnverinnity House, Grigor McWatt shouldered his kitbag and tramped eight miles north to stake a more modest claim on an abandoned clachan on the tidal islet of Calasay.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
This wee patch of earth we call Fascaray is a bonsai Scotland, a diminutive Dalriada, an atomic Alba, a bright flake of Caledonian confetti in which all our country’s marvels, her landscape of unrivalled variety and intensity, her majestic vistas, are shrunk as if by faery command to a manageable human scale, to a perfect snow globe of emerald, amethyst, sapphire and topaz held in the hand of a wonder-struck child. To be in Fascaray is to know and truly understand Scotland in a way that is denied us on the mainland where we are dwarfed by her fabulous immensity.
Just as all of Scotland’s natural wonders are contained, condensed, in Fascaray, so is its history. To live here is to inhabit a granite ballad. Brave warriors and barbarous incomers, tribal conflicts and stirring romance, benevolent chiefs and cruel overlords, happy chance and great misfortune are all here in the Fascaradian narrative. Read the story of our island people and you read the story of Scotland.
The year 843 saw the accession of Cinaed mac Ailpin, Kenneth MacAlpin, first King of the Scots. He was the son of a Pictish mother, Máel Muire, a Fascaradian “dark-eyed daughter of Mammor,” and a father from Dal Riata, Kingdom of the Gaels, encompassing much of the west coast of modern Scotland and part of what is now known as Ulster. MacAlpin fused the traditions of both great tribes, subdued and united the warring kingdoms of Alba as well as the seven Pictish kingdoms of Cait, Ce, Circinn, Fib, Ficach, Fotia and Fortriu. His reign saw the weakening of political connections with Ireland, the severance of links with England and several decisive clashes with native rivals in Melrose and Dunbar. Thus, thanks to a daughter of Fascaray, our nation’s story could begin.
If history is wealth, we Scots should be millionaires. It might have been envy of our characterful, plot-rich story, or anxiety that the regicidal tendency might be infectious, that provoked Sir Christopher Pigott, the irascible seventeenth-century English parliamentarian, to observe that “the Scots have not suffered above two kings to die in their beds these two hundred years.” Another outsider, albeit from the more sympathetic nation of Spain, wrote: “Scots go to war, and when they run out of wars, they fight each other.” While our native hostility and suspicion of each other may be ingrained, it is as nothing—a mere shadow dance—to the contempt we hold for our arrogant southern neighbours.
The English essayist Charles Lamb wrote in 1822: “I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.” The feeling is mutual, though in my case the experiment was abandoned early, at my mother’s knee, before I ever had the misfortune to meet an Englishman face-to-face. By their works you shall know them, and the works of our English masters were visible all around my childhood home in the benighted city of Glasgow. And here in Fascaray, ancestral home of the Clan McWatt, the Sassenach continues to plunder our resources and traduce our people.
—Grigor McWatt, 1946, The Fascaray Compendium
25 August 2014
“It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
My reassurances, uttered to my daughter, are, I realise, aimed at myself. It’s Agnes’s first day at Finnverinnity Primary. Her new classmates have already been back at school for a week. Term starts early here. In New York, her friends are still on vacation for another two weeks. She’s taking it well. If she’s nervous, she’s doing her best to spare me.
The school is in a converted two-storey Georgian house, broad and austere, whitewashed stone with black trim, set in woodland above the village. It was once occupied by the factor of the Finnverinnity Estate, a figure inspiring fear and hatred, responsible for evictions and rent collection, the scourge of poachers and, in the first Lord Montfitchett’s time, of children. It’s a sweet revenge that the island’s under-twelves have now claimed his house. Today, the long sash windows which once sternly surveyed the laird’s dominion are papered with the pupils’ colourful and heart-warmingly inept paintings of red and white boats on a curly blue sea.
The ground-floor rooms—sitting room, drawing room, parlour, kitchen and scullery—have been knocked through and turned into one large classroom with four tables around which children sit, ranked by age, ostensibly absorbed in their work. Upstairs is the headmaster’s flat. Despite the reproductive efforts of the island’s younger incomers, the steady flow of emigrants leaving Fascaray to seek work on the mainland has meant the school is now almost too large for the meagre population of thirteen children aged between five and twelve.
The head teacher, Mr. Kennedy, comes to greet us. He is, in fact, the only teacher, helped out by part-time teaching assistant Johanna McAllister, when she isn’t helping me out with the museum and working as part-time administrator of the Fascaray Trust. Niall Kennedy is spare and harried, in his early forties, with professorial glasses and an Irish accent. Agnes takes his hand and walks with him to a table where three girls and three boys of about her age look up briefly then get back to their work. My daughter sits down, gives me a small, fluttering wave—farewell or dismissal—and turns away to open a schoolbook.
I leave the school, walk three hundred yards back past the store and the pub, call in at number 19, where I retrieve my box of documents and head down the road towards my own first day. The Fascaray Trust and the Fascaradian Museum of Island Life (as it is presently called) inhabit two adjoining cottages similar to my own, opened up and extended into the adjacent herring shed, outside which fisherwomen once worked, singing, up to their elbows in blood, wielding the little cutag
dagger to gut, cure and pack in salt their menfolk’s catch before it was transported for sale to the mainland.
Half the street-facing wall of the Trust office has been given over to a large plate-glass window, which lets in little light since it is covered with photographic charts of local birds, fish, wildlife, trees and flowers as well as handwritten cards advertising local services—cleaning, babysitting, pony trekking, rubbish clearance, bed and breakfast, reiki massage—and private sales of gardening tools, a fax machine “barely used,” and frozen venison steaks.
My new office contains an unsteady melamine desk, two plastic garden chairs, a computer of some antiquity with an insanitary keyboard and a printer of similar vintage and unwholesomeness. On top of a metal filing cabinet an electric kettle stands next to an unopened carton of long-life milk, past its sell-by date, a box of tea bags and four “Fascaray Trust” mugs, chipped and so grimy they must be a biohazard. Over my desk is a bookcase containing a less well-preserved version of my own Fascaray library, as well as “Fascaray—the Island in Time,” a badly foxed photographic booklet compiled by the Fascaray Preservation Society in 1986, and two box files marked “Boat trips” and “Local Walks” containing pamphlets, some illustrated with clumsy line drawings of a small figure I take to be McWatt, with kilt and pipe, others with crayoned seagulls, dolphins and an idealised croft cottage, puffs of smoke issuing from its chimney like comic-strip thought bubbles.
I open the filing cabinet and find no files but an unsorted miscellany of papers, some of them bills and invoices, under a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky and an open packet of shortbread cookies. I notice a sickening, sweet odour—dead mice?—that seems to be emanating from the museum, separated from the Trust office by a linking door. I push it open tentatively. The smell is overpowering.
Once my eyes adjust to the gloom I make out what must be rows of display cabinets covered with dust sheets, stacks of chairs, three old suitcases, tottering piles of cardboard boxes and, leaning against the back wall, what looks like a giant sarcophagus draped with canvas. Next to it looms a wide kitchen cupboard, its open shelves cluttered with crockery and rusting cooking utensils and, leaning against it, several bulky objects, also shrouded. I peek under the dusty drapery and see a wooden barrel, a garden rake minus most of its tines, a yard brush, an industrial-style fan, big as a jet engine, and a stuffed sheep whose single glass eye peers at me balefully under a hank of crusty ringlets.
The place is festooned with cobwebs and looks like an abandoned junk store. If I had a shred of susceptibility to the supernatural, I’d find it sinister. Instead I find it depressing. More housework. But the abandoned Museum of Island Life, which it is my responsibility to somehow transform into the Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre and Fascaray Museum, can wait. Having spent three days getting our new home in decent shape, I now need to sort out my office.
I fill the kettle and wash a mug. The water, which gushes straight down from the Kilgurnock Falls, fed by incessant rain, makes a fine cup of tea. Well, that was one thing you couldn’t get in New York—good fresh water, decent tea. I feel a pang as I remember my keen little helper, who is getting her bearings in her new environment up the road. I hope she is finding her own consolations.
Hame and Loue
Jist Hame an Loue! The wirds are wee,
A bickety peerie puckle o letters.
And yet in aw oor leid’s braw glossary,
Ye’ll nae find twa wirds better.
Hame an Loue sae cannily proclaim
The muckle pleasures ben the hoose.
There arenae wirds mair douce
Than Loue an Hame.
Jist Hame an Loue! It’s hard to spae
Which o the twa wirds bears the gree.
Hame wioot Loue is nae a prumros path.
But Loue wioot hame is fire wioot a hearth.
If ye can, chuise baith. But since I couldnae,
Whit tae dae? My Loueless nature wis nae shame
And here at last in Fascaray,
I find, Loue is Hame.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Robert Service, 1946*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
27 August 2014
By November last year, our relationship—bowed under the strains of his affair with the unhinged yoga teacher and buckled further by my payback fling with Pascal, a young musician with movie-star looks and mayfly mind—had seemed to spring back and resolve itself into solid, sustaining companionship. Love even. We had been tested by a moment of mutual madness and we had survived. We thought we could make it work, Marco and me. Marco, Agnes and me.
He accepted a teaching post in the drama department at Austin, Texas, starting the following May, but as we went through the motions of telling friends, giving notice on our apartment and my job, and packing up our lives, I began to have doubts. Maybe I didn’t want to travel with Marco after all, not at the expense of my career. Not to Texas. Not anywhere. Ever.
Our daughter took on the role of UN peace negotiator, attempting to bring these two warring nations together to discuss their demands. We woke up one morning from our respective wings of the Super Kingsize after another frosty night—no talking, no touching—to find Agnes at the foot of the bed with a breakfast tray.
“Happy anniversary!” she said.
Naturally, neither of us had remembered. Even when our relationship was a going concern, we never marked the day of our first meeting. But Agnes loved to hear us retell the story of the awkward exchanges at the off-Broadway after-party, my faux pas, his mock proposal, how we very nearly didn’t get together—“which would mean I wouldn’t even exist!” she would marvel.
It was ostensibly the prospect of relocation that finally broke us. I had no job to go to in Austin and though the Harry Ransom Center was, and remains, an archivist’s mecca, they weren’t recruiting. I didn’t see myself leading a happy housewife’s life in the broiling heat of Texas, with only the drop-off and pick-up times at Agnes’s school to measure out my days. What would I do with myself? Take up yoga? The arguments, inevitably, began to focus on the question of trust. The old wounds became inflamed and we fought the old war all over again.
“Why don’t you apply for that Fascaray job?” Marco finally said in March—his first words after our latest, week-long, silence. “Seems perfect for you. Bracingly cold—full of Calvinist miserabilists. You’ve always said you wanted to go there.”
After I got over my indignation and read the job advert again, I was mildly intrigued.
My bluff had been called and I counter-bluffed. Within two months, after a further post hoc marital squall—he accused me of selfishness—two interviews in Glasgow and a trip to Pennsylvania to secure my book deal with Thackeray, the job was mine. Perhaps the inherited Scots trait, or vice, of thrawnness—a perverse, sometimes self-destructive stubbornness—played a part in my decision to take up the job. I have to watch this inclination to slice off my nose, Mother Abbess Ulla–style, to spite my face. The injury to the Vikings, and Marco, is only psychic. It’s plain who’s really suffering here. It only struck me later, when we first boarded the ferry for Fascaray, that I was also holding a blade to our daughter’s mignon features.
I had thought that Marco might have been stauncher in his defence of our relationship. His affair with Karmic Kate was in the past, as was mine with Pascal, but though Marco was undeniably attached to Agnes, and she to him, he finally seemed to give us up without a fight. It was as if my own affair—simple retaliation, I could see now—had been the greater transgression and my reluctance to jettison my career had been the ultimate betrayal.
In the end, my family history, the need for an anchor, a fixed point in a spinning world, must have had some role in my decision. I was drawn, too, by McWatt himself, as well as by Lilias Hogg, the project, the island, the whole story. But in my dismal new office in Fascaray, with the unseasonal rain
slanting down outside, as I contemplate the work that lies ahead, it’s comforting to blame Marco.
The Seicont Comin
Birlin an birlin in the braidenin gyre
The seabhag cannae hear the seabhager;
Things brak awa; the middlin cannae haud,
Tapsalteerie is lowsed ootower the warld,
The bluid-dreiched tide is lowsed, an orraboots
The ceremony o aefauldness is drount;
The Scots are wabbit, whiles the skellum English
Swee wi virr.
—Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 1946*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
It was as if a spell had been broken and the serfs were finally waking from a 200-year sleep: by September 1946, a year after the war had ended, the social contract which had held for so long in Fascaray was unravelling.
Seven of the crofters had served with the Seaforth Highlanders in France and Italy, where they met many men for whom feudalism was, at best, a quaint historical quirk. Two of the islanders—Ali Mackenzie and Shonnie MacDonald, the laird’s young piper—had lost their lives on the battlefields of Europe and their five surviving comrades returned in a rage to the island, to the damp and primitive homes they did not own, to their needy families, to the ancient rules and social hierarchy that constrained them. They could take no more.
“We’ve won the war for them. And what have we come back to? Nothing!” said Ewan McNeil of Killiebrae, that night of 9 September 1946, in the Finnverinnity Inn, recalled by McWatt in Forby. “Damn all!” He thumped the table and the whisky shuddered in every glass in the bar.
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