Minister and priest reluctantly agreed, only after the Reverend Paterson received private assurances from Jessie that their children would be brought up according to the tenets of the kirk, while Francie told Father Col in confidence that any offspring would be baptised and raised as Catholic.
A day was set for a morning blessing at Finnverinnity kirk, to which Francie would be driven from Lusnaharra on a trailer hitched to his cousin Donnie’s old Fordson tractor. The austere ceremony would be witnessed by Jessie’s family, who would then wave her off as the couple were driven the three miles back to Lusnaharra for a blessing at the Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary in the presence of the MacDonalds.
But on the eve of the ceremonies, the weather turned wild and the island, usually protected from the cruellest winters by the benign influence of the Gulf Stream, was buffeted by the fiercest blizzards in living memory. Several steamers seeking shelter from the gales dropped anchor out beyond the bay and islanders woke the following morning to white silence. The Big Snow had spread its dazzling canopy over glen and hill, smothering the landscape and muffling all sound.
The road between Finnverinnity and Lusnaharra, an extended cart track, was obliterated by three-foot drifts. Older members of both congregations muttered that it was God’s way of showing his disapproval for a headstrong young couple’s shocking disregard for tradition. The younger generation was more forgiving—and resourceful.
At Lusnaharra, Donnie MacDonald, handed out shovels and spades, while over at Finnverinnity, Alec Campbell’s son Wee Eck organised a work party with the bride’s brother, John Donald “the Fish” Mackenzie, and the groom’s brother, Jamie, “borrowing” tools from the Big House gardener’s shed.
Two hours later, the two work parties, Presbyterian and Catholic, broke through the tunnel of snow and met a mile and a half from their respective villages, shook hands, shared a dram from a hip flask and waved through the Fordson, its trailer, now decorated by the McKinnon sisters with garlands of holly and ivy, bearing a relieved Francie on his way to join Jessie at the kirk. There Ranald Paterson, swept up by the wave of goodwill, overlooked the fact that the blessing was finally taking place two and a half hours later than scheduled while over in Lusnaharra Father Col was similarly accommodating when the party finally arrived there after nightfall. He made a point of warmly welcoming John Donald and Sarah Mackenzie, who had, despite the earlier veto of their parents, chosen to accompany their sister, the new Mrs. MacDonald, to the blessing at the Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary.
The memorable dance that followed in Lusnaharra was enlivened by the music of Murdo “the Fiddle” McIntyre and the bride’s cousin Iain McIntosh, who played on the family violin which had, two decades earlier, almost been consigned to flames by a minister who would have taken a far sterner view of the celebration of the MacDonald-Mackenzie union.
—Grigor McWatt, 1957, The Fascaray Compendium
14 October 2014
By 1 p.m. the rain has cleared and the sun is stirring behind a thick wedge of cloud. Agnes and I leave the office and take our sandwiches and flask of tea outside and sit on a wooden bench by the pier.
“It’s okay to talk now?” she asks.
I laugh. “Of course, honey. It’s lunchtime!”
“Just checking…”
She swings her legs as she stares out to sea where a faded column of rainbow shimmers on the horizon.
“Watergaw!” she says.
“What?”
“Watergaw. That’s what they call a broken rainbow here. That’s the name of Dot and Lori’s hotel, too.” She turns and points at the former Temperance Hotel, refurbished and reopened last year, above the harbour.
“Nice word. And clever of you to pick it up. You’re really getting the hang of this place.”
“Mmm…” she says. “It’s not hard if you just listen. You know Oonagh? She’s Catholic, which means her favourite colour is green, and she supports Celtic soccer club? That’s Glasgow Celtic. Like kind of Irish Scottish? Not the Boston Celtics that Papa likes. That’s basketball. Kirsty Campbell is Presbyterian, which is kind of Protestant, and her favourite colour is blue because she supports Rangers soccer club? That’s Glasgow Rangers. Not the Texas Rangers. That’s baseball.”
“What about you? Who do you support?”
“I guess I’m like you and Papa? I don’t really have a religion so I don’t have a soccer club…And my favourite colour is a rainbow. A watergaw.”
“That’s my girl. You don’t have to choose.” I put my arm round her. “Keep your options open.”
Even now, though I grew up in North America, where we have bigger fish to fry in terms of community conflict, I’m conscious of the tribal traditions here. Sunday in Finnverinnity is still the “dreichest” day, whatever the weather, a legacy of centuries of dour churchgoing, despite the absence now of any place of traditional worship on the island. Perhaps it’s race memory, or too long spent in the company of my parents, despite my best efforts, but I have an ear for the distinctions, the subtle gradations of names and preferences that can give away faith affiliations; the Irish whiff of incense and the panoply of saints—Kieran, Brigid, Anne-Marie—the resinous tang of Scots Presbyterianism—Malcolm, Jean, Duncan, Effie. But the old boundaries are dissolving and these days, in former zones of Catholic holdout and Wee Free redoubt, names can cut both ways and all the recent Hebridean Kylies and Darrens and Chantals are usefully mixing up the old certainties.
“But Oonagh and Kirsty are really good friends. I mean really good friends,” Agnes says.
“Well, that’s an advance.”
“What’s an advance?”
“Going forward.” I watch her frown. “Never mind. It’s good, is all.”
Marco was, like most Italians, a happy and unconflicted ex-Catholic but I’m the anxious product of what used to be known as a “mixed marriage”: in my case, Protestant father, Catholic mother. The Gallaghers, my mother’s family, were Irish immigrants who came to work in the Scottish coal mines just after the First World War, and my father, Dougal, was, like his own Fascaradian father, nominally, a Presbyterian. Dolores Gallagher, a typist in a law firm, first met Dougal McPhail, a steelworker, in the early seventies at a dance in Green’s Playhouse, Glasgow. The improbably named Sensational Alex Harvey Band were playing. Dolores had told her parents she was going to a special novena at St. Andrew’s Cathedral and was staying over in town with a friend.
It was rare in those days for couples from either side of the religious divide—and there were only two sides—to get together. They were Capulets and Montagues, transplanted from the plains of medieval northern Italy to the west of Scotland’s late-twentieth-century industrial sprawl. In Glasgow in the 1970s, star-crossed romances rarely ended in double suicide but young people caught dating “one of them” were in serious breach of community protocol. Your religion was instantly identifiable by your name, the school you went to, the songs you sang and, as is apparently still the case, the football team you supported. Wearing the wrong colour or bawling the wrong ballad in the wrong part of town could get you in serious trouble. Though the signs and signifiers have become blurred—there are laws against sectarianism now and the old songs have been cleaned up—there are apparently still those who regard religious hatred as a cherished part of Scottish heritage and feel it’s their personal mission to keep the flame alive.
“And Aaron Schneider, he says he’s a Druid, which is like the really old, old religion here? But he’s from Germany and he supports Munster, which is like monster only different?”
“Does he have a favourite colour?”
“If he does, he won’t tell me.”
The first dance my mother attended was in the parish hall of her local Catholic church in a mining village in Lanarkshire. Teenagers came from miles around—the youth club passed for nightlife in those days—to queue outside for admission to the church hall, where they were met at the door by the parish priest who asked the
m each in turn to recite the Hail Mary. Those who stumbled over the words were sent on their way. Only the faithful, those who could recite the entire prayer as fluently and rapidly as a tobacco auctioneer, right down to “Now and at the hour of our death…,” were admitted—boys to the left, girls to the right—for an evening of chaste jigging to the sounds of Amen Corner and the Yardbirds on the parish Dansette.
“Black!” Agnes declares.
“What?”
“Black. I think that’s my favourite colour. And I support the Boston Celtics. I don’t care if it’s not soccer.”
“That’s right. Stand your ground.”
My parents stood their ground, courted in secret to avoid scandal and after two years announced their engagement to their horrified parents. The young couple tried to appease both sides by avoiding kirk and church and opting for a civil marriage ceremony at the City Chambers. Instead, they found they’d compounded the original offence and only close friends, and Dolores’s sister, my aunt Bridie, attended the wedding. Relations had not improved by the time my mother fell pregnant with me and soured further when I was born—my Land Raid hero grandfather Hector wanted a kirk baptism, Dolores’s father insisted on a Catholic christening. My parents held out against both. When I was four years old my father accepted defeat and a job at the steelworks in Hamilton, Ontario. Canada was neutral territory, with a long history of harbouring Scottish refugees from conflict and hardship.
“Mom?” Agnes tugs at my sleeve. “Maybe turquoise? Maybe that’s my colour? That’s like blue and green, mixed together?”
“Great idea!” I say.
The watergaw has vanished and the sun with it. It’s raining again. We put up our hoods and, as we run back to the office, the rain turns to sleet.
INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS DESCRIBING SNOW
blawthir wet weather turning to sleet
blirtin squally snow shower
feefle swirling snowfall
feuchter light fall of snow, individual flakes
flaggie soft snow in which footprints can be seen
flindrikin lacy covering of snow on ground
fyole light covering of snow
fyoonach dusting of snow on ground
glaister thin covering of snow or ice
glutherie slushy
grimet thin patches of grimy snow through which the earth is visible
pewlin blanket of snow
scruif a thin crust of ice or snow
skelfs large snowflakes
sleekie shower of rain and snow
snaw-ghaist mirage or apparition seen in snow
snaw-pouther fine driving snow
sneesl begin to rain or snow lightly
spitters light gusts of small flakes
stark dense snowfall
wridy covered in snowdrifts
—Grigor McWatt, 1956, The Fascaray Compendium
18 October 2014
A month on and the blue-and-white “Yes” posters remain in some Lusnaharra windows—hard to tell whether defiance or inertia is the guiding principle—and in Finnverinnity post office, where we go to pick up supplies for our picnic, the newspapers are still full of reflection and argument about the referendum. They won’t let it go. There’s little sign of jubilation from the victors; those who voted “No” to independence are keeping their heads down.
Margaret Mackenzie serves us with a politeness that could read as disdain. Whatever her position on the question of independence, I can’t imagine her hopes for Scotland’s future involve extending much of a welcome to outsiders.
The trail head is just west of the Big House, where the Saltire still flutters next to the Jolly Roger. At first our path is easy, wide and well defined with a gentle ascent beside a small burn flashing copper in the sunlight. As Agnes skips along the grassy track, her talk is of school, her soap opera of friendships and fallings-out, plans for Halloween, Christmas and Hogmanay.
After a while I stop listening and her chirruping voice blends with the exultant songs of wintering skylarks and snow buntings. Someone—probably Marco, who taught me to recognise birds in the first place—once told me that birdsong is not the liquid distillation of joy it appears to human ears but a shrill announcement of territorial imperatives. “Vamoose! Mine! Get outta here!” Over and over. One of several facts I wish I could unlearn.
We pause by a rocky outcrop to swig from our water bottle and Agnes clambers to the top of a boulder and takes out her phone to photograph Finnverinnity’s harbour below us, its broad indentation and long concrete pier lapped by indigo water under a blameless blue sky.
“I’m taking pictures of our walk to send to Papa.”
I step aside like a guilty starlet evading the paparazzi. Another bird, a lapwing, starts up its song, its tiny whoop-whoop like the distant call of the NYPD.
We press on and soon the path becomes narrower and steeper. The weather is changing. Low clouds race in and begin to crowd out the blue. The small burn has become a waterfall which spills over the path. We have to watch where we put our feet and Agnes’s conversation slows as she picks her way more carefully up the hill.
“Tell me again how you and Papa met?”
Suppressing a sigh I tell her the old story—the friends, the bad musical about a superhero who loses his powers and finds love, which I hated and, as it turned out, he’d written and directed, the fact that we couldn’t stand each other. Loathing at first sight.
“At first,” she reminds me. “But then you really liked each other?”
“Yes.”
“And he proposed to you within, like, five seconds?”
“Kind of. You know the story.”
“So your friend Olivia introduces you—‘Mhairi…Marco.’ ‘Marco…Mhairi’—and he says…”
“ ‘Marry? We’ve only just met.’ ”
She laughs as if she’s hearing the story for the first time. I won’t spoil it by reminding her of what she knows already and must make her sad—that eventually we came to loathe each other again. Who said first impressions were always false?
We’ve reached the col and before the path picks up again we have to cross a wide tract of soggy peat starred with strange white flowers—small plumes of fluff on spindly stems.
She changes the subject.
“Can you make T-shirts and stuff out of bog cotton?”
So that’s what it is.
“Probably not.”
Although the land is flat it requires more care in crossing. We’re properly dressed in waterproofs and boots but it would be easy to twist an ankle or sink up to the knees in a concealed gully.
We both fall silent and concentrate while hopping cautiously towards a pyramidal cairn of stones left by other walkers to show the point at which the path picks up again.
Below us, distant Finnverinnity looks as innocent as a child’s model village, and across the sea Auchwinnie is just visible, its harbour crowded as a mall parking lot with boats, most of them idle yachts owned by city dwellers who work so hard to make the money to finance them that they rarely have the time to get up here for a weekend’s sailing. Agnes takes another picture by the cairn and I dodge out of view again. Her father won’t want a photo of me.
Ahead, the path looks badly eroded. I’m beginning to wonder if this walk was such a good idea.
“Better get on,” I say. “Weather’s changing. We might have a very wet picnic.”
Seconds later, a storm cloud above us unleashes its burden and we hurriedly put up our hoods and zip our jackets. It’s impossible to talk as the rain noisily rattles our waterproofs. We’re walking uphill again and a mist begins to swirl around us. Soon, the shower stops and it’s as if we’re moving through thick cloud. We stumble on in the eerie silence, unable to see more than two feet in front of us. Suddenly a dark shape materialises just ahead and advances towards us. Agnes squeals. A gust of wind clears the haze momentarily and reveals a young deer, as startled as we are, who takes off
so swiftly across the hill that it seems he’s in flight.
“Wow! Just like Bambi, only bigger. I should have taken a picture of him for Papa. But he was so quick. Do you think if we stayed very still for a while he’ll come again?”
“Probably not.”
The rain returns, a sharp slanting sleet that stings the face, and I’m getting anxious. We should turn back. Agnes though is irrepressible, leaping from rock to rock like that young deer.
I call her back and stand to squint at the map, which is getting sodden in the rain. Unlike Marco I’m a poor orienteer, plus which I have mild vertigo; I can’t judge from the contour lines just how steep this path might become.
“C’mon, Mom!” Agnes is off again.
As the trail rears upwards the stones are loose and water is falling in torrents. Even Agnes begins to falter as I struggle up behind her, panting. I ask myself whether my urge to turn back comes from maternal instinct or sheer self-preservation. But though Agnes is finding the going hard, she is determined. I take my lead from her.
Finally, both out of breath, we reach the top of the path and see a stone pillar, a cartographer’s trig point, which tells us we’ve reached Mammor’s ridge. And then we are rewarded. The sun returns, scattering the mist. Agnes spins round, arms outstretched, laughing and triumphant, taking in the panorama. I lean against the pillar to steady myself as I look down giddily on the tiny circuit-board cluster of Finnverinnity, with Auchwinnie across the sea and beyond it the mighty hills of the mainland. To our west stretches Lusnaharra’s pale scimitar of sand while behind us, tethered to Fascaray by its strip of causeway, the green disc of Calasay shimmers under the perfect arc of a rainbow.
Agnes takes pictures and I set out our picnic—bread, cheese, apples, chocolate and a flask of tea—on a flat stone well away from the ridge’s edge. But as soon as we sit on our waterproofs and raise the food to our lips a dark cloud sweeps over us. Midges. In October! Another effect of climate change. But we are prepared, thanks to my native pessimism. Marco would have scoffed but I made sure I packed the unseasonal midge hoods, along with ineffectual repellent spray, suncream—what was I thinking?—and a first-aid kit. We swiftly roll the khaki veils over our heads.
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