Hame

by Annalena McAfee

  A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)

  She Gangs in Brawness

  She gangs in brawness, like the nicht

  O cloodless climes an starnlicht skies;

  An aw that’s best o derk an bricht

  Meet in her coupon an her eyes;

  Aw saftened tae that neshie licht

  That heiv’n tae glormach day denies.

  An oan her brou, an ower her een,

  Sic douceness, man, ye’ve niver seen,

  Her daizlin smouch it beirs the gree;

  This paragon o womanhuid,

  A mynd entranced by aw she sees,

  A hert whase loue is nocht but guid.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Lord Byron, 1959*

  * * *

  * From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.

  After Fascaray, and Scotland—a long way after, by her estimation—Lilias Hogg was said by many to have been the love of Grigor McWatt’s life. But, as she complained in one bitter letter to him in the seventies, “I always thought I was a poor third, and I settled for that. Now I realise I was even lower in your ranking.” According to the feminist narrative, Hogg, creatively thwarted and romantically spurned, was driven to take her comforts where she could find them, among the poets in their hangouts in the smoky bars and rackety flats at the edge of Edinburgh’s New Town. The poets, or makars, if they did not fall for her, were certainly charmed by her in the early years and she flits through their verse, evanescent, gay (in the old sense), sometimes unreachably sad, but always ornamental.

  When describing her, admirers often alluded to masterpieces of Western art—“A luscious Ingres on a bar stool,” “Manet’s Olympia with a glass of malt,” “Botticelli’s Venus in the crepuscular manly world of a Scots pub,” or, according to Archie Aitken, “in contemplation, and even in drink, possessing the luminous beauty of a Vermeer.”

  In his frequently anthologised poem “She Gangs in Brawness,” McWatt described his first sight of Lilias Hogg in 1958 in the gloom of a Rose Street pub where the cigarette smoke swirled like dry ice: “saftened tae that neshie licht / That heiv’n tae glormach day denies.”

  Hugh MacDiarmid hymned her eyes, “dark as peat, bricht as the North Star.” Norman MacCaig saw her as “lonely and loveless as the moon.” Sydney Goodsir Smith, when he wasn’t talking poetry and politics with the men or running after his latest girlfriend, was all over Lilias, panting like a puppy. Ian Crichton Smith lent her money during hard times and never asked for it back, while shy, courteous George Mackay Brown delivered her safely home after several nights of barbarous drinking. Willie McCracken compared her to Millais’ Ophelia—“white gowan pale, as the ghaist o’ loue”—and broke the nose of Archie Aitken in Menzies’ Bar over a disputed glance from “Bonnie Lilias, the Flooer o Rose Street.”

  She was, when she first came into their lives in the late 1950s, an auburn-haired beauty of seventeen, a warm-hearted, big-bosomed Edinburgh lass with an easy laugh, poetic ambitions and inchoate yearnings, enduring her secretarial course to appease her conventional family.

  Taken by a racy friend to Menzies’, where the poets presided like knights in a Caledonian Camelot, drinking competitively and jousting noisily over literature and politics, Lilias was drawn to them as to a blazing hearth in a northern winter. The racy friend—not a looker—fell away but Lilias became a regular, thrilled to be the lone girl, exalted, in the company of these bohemian alpha males, awed by their “sublime blether.”

  The artist Billy Drummond recorded one of those immortal evenings in a sketchbook and later painted the scene in oils from memory in the 1980s, long after the Menzies’ Bar set had vanished, some to the “ayebidin lock-in abuin,” as McWatt put it. The finished canvas, an enormous work of 8ft by 6ft rendered in bold, Matisse-like colours, now hangs in Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Modern Art.

  The painting, called Makars’ Menzies’, shows a group of ten men of various ages, formally posed in an ill-lit pub. Some are standing, others are seated on bentwood chairs. Seven are smoking (two pipes, five cigarettes), seven are holding pint glasses containing beer—“heavy”—five have, alone or in addition, stubby glasses of liquor.

  One poet, identifiable by his heroically jutting chin as the Orcadian George Mackay Brown, puffs at a cigarette and holds a pint of cream-topped stout while leaning in to listen to the central figure, a dark, wild-haired shaman who points skywards like an Old Testament prophet with his right index finger while his left grips a tumbler of what we assume is whisky. Grigor McWatt has taken the floor and is commanding the attention, if not the direct gaze, of his nine compatriots who seem to be caught in his force field. Directly facing McWatt stands a pipe smoker with small, terrier-like features and a lion’s mane of white hair. This is Hugh MacDiarmid, “looking like a Caledonian Einstein,” according to McWatt. In the painting, MacDiarmid’s face is creased in an attentive scowl as he listens to “the Fascaradian in fu flaucht.”

  Edwin Morgan, bespectacled, the collar of a flamboyant lime-green shirt visible under his dark jacket, sits in profile at the edge of the group, apparently reflecting on McWatt’s words, and sips a glass of wine: a defiant double affectation in 1950s Scotland where, in the spartan, masculine world of the public house, to take one’s alcohol—only beer or whisky permitted—sitting down was regarded as effeminate. English even. Long, lean Norman MacCaig, his sombre demeanour giving no hint of his warmth and humour, is drinking his beer in the acceptable male stance. He looms over McWatt but looks away, perhaps lost in thought, while Sydney Goodsir Smith, “a degenerate cherub,” according to McWatt, plump, ruddy-cheeked and glistening-eyed, is just behind McWatt, leaning towards him, mouth half open as if about to interrupt.

  Two other figures in the picture, ascetic and drinkless, have been identified as Iain Crichton Smith and Sorley Maclean, while glowering at each other in the right foreground, fists bunched, “twa pugilists in duffel coats,” are Willie McCracken and Archie Aitken.

  The only woman in the painting, a lambent beauty with smouldering eyes, stands to the left of the picture and is naked, save for a Saltire flag which covers her hips and thighs. Her breasts, “perky as the Paps o Jura,” according to Willie McCracken, are on full display. Continuing the mountaineering metaphor and in reference to the striking western peaks of Staic Pollaidh, Archie Aitken called her “Oor ain Stacked Polly.” This is Caledonia herself, in the person of young Lilias Hogg. The poets, rapt in thought and argument, ignore her.

  A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)

  Hogmanay, 1958

  Ah hae met thaim at the dit o day

  Comin wi bricht coupons

  Frae counter or lettern amang grey

  Embra New Toon hooses.

  Ah hae passed wi a nod o the heid

  Or pit-on haiveless wirds,

  Or hae daedled awhile an said

  Pit-on haiveless wirds,

  An thocht afore Ah hae done

  O a jamphi yairn or a sneist

  Tae cuitle a cronie

  Aroon the gleed at the howff,

  Siccar that they an Ah

  Bided where mixter-maxter’s worn:

  Aw cheenged, cheenged thortout:

  An unco brawness is born.

  Tae lang in thrall

  Can mak a chuckie o the hert.

  Soond oot the bagpipes:

  That is heiv’ns pairt, oor pairt

  Tae hishie name onwith name,

  As a mither cries her wean

  When dowre at last has come

  Oan skellum limbs.

  Ah write it oot in varse—

  MacDiarmid an MacCaig,

  An Morgan an MacLean

  Nou an in time tae be,

  Whaurivir plaid is worn,

  Are cheenged, cheenged thortout:

  An unco bra
wness is born.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 1958*

  * * *

  * . From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.

  Lilias wrote in August 1959 to tell Grigor that she had found a new job: “a part-time, temporary arrangement that will not—not too much, anyway—interfere with my work at McDuff’s. You’re always telling me that I need to hold down a steady job so I will do as you say, my liege, even though I die of boredom each day. But this unsteady job is a bit of fun.” It was also, she said, her “bid for stardom” after a chance encounter in Rose Street.

  “I bumped into—collided with, really—the merriest bunch of fellows. They were travelling players up from London for the Fringe Festival, keen to see the city’s sights, so we trailed up and down the local hostelries, your Flooer a tour guide to four rampaging thespians. You should have seen the look Sydney gave them. Archie got gey obstreperous and was all for asking them to step outside to settle the matter with fists, but they administered copious quantities of whisky which took him over the threshold of rage to the vestibule of insensibility. I cannot tell you how I came to wake next morning in an unfamiliar flat in Stockbridge with a pneumatic headache and mentholated breath in the (entirely innocent) company of two loons who, in the crisp light of an Edinburgh morning, were not nearly as witty, and certainly not so merry, as I remembered. But they did offer me a job!”

  The director and leading actor of the Balham-based Catalyst Collective had invited her to appear in their experimental theatrical production over three nights at the Edinburgh Festival and her manager at McDuff’s printworks was giving her two afternoons of unpaid leave for rehearsals.

  McWatt’s reply was laconic.

  “If there is one thing worse than an Englishman it is an English actor—snobbery with an admixture of insincerity.”

  Lilias, in a subsequent letter, was defiant.

  “You always tell me I should find purposeful work. Everyone else of our acquaintance, it seems—yourself included—is permitted to swan around, playing languid martyr to his own genius. But I must pay my way with office drudge work. You say I’m a Muse. Have you noticed that this revered status is one consonant away from Mute? Well, here’s my chance to shine and speak out—not literally, alas. Not yet. Mine is a non-speaking role in this production. A non-costume role too. But from little acorns…”

  The revue, A Masque for Calliope, featured jazz scat singing, a mock crucifixion and satirical references to Harold Macmillan, Cyprus, the new sixty-mile M1 motorway, Margot Fonteyn’s imprisonment in Panama, and the Aldermaston “Ban the Bomb” march. The cast of fifteen performed in the nude. The production attracted some publicity, and a boost in audience figures, after outraged Edinburgh councillors and clerics tried to close it down on the grounds of indecency and blasphemy. The revue completed its three-night run before its cast and crew disbanded and journeyed southwards into obscurity and eventual respectability, leaving Lilias to return, chastened, to work. She expressed no further ambition to work in theatre, and never mentioned the experience again.

  A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)

  31 October 2014

  A big day. For Agnes and for me. I’m making my maiden speech to the residents of Fascaray tonight. For her, the real event is Halloween.

  “Ailsa said the Scottish people invented it. And we’re just copying them,” she says, indignant, trusting I’ll contradict her friend.

  “Ailsa’s right. But we gave the world Walt Disney.”

  Her pride is restored. She’s dressed in costume—an old cotton nightdress, hiking boots and a witch’s hat (from the pound store in Auchwinnie). She hisses, waving her hands with their stick-on luminous talons (also from the pound store). Under her hat, she has painted her face white and rimmed her eyes with black. Though she wouldn’t like to hear it, she makes an endearing ghoul.

  “Scary!” I say.

  “They call ghosts ‘bogles’ or ‘bogies’ here, and trick-or-treating ‘guising,’ ” she says.

  My own guise this evening is calculatedly conservative. Skirt, shirt and jacket—my unexceptional corporate threads—instead of my preferred uniform of jeans and sweater, and low-heeled pumps rather than sneakers; my Invisible Woman interview costume. I’m hoping no one will film my speech and post it online. Even under favourable conditions, with the most well-disposed audience, when I know my brief and have no fear of being exposed as a fraud, I’m a timorous public speaker.

  While my Pygmalion transformation hasn’t hindered my career, it’s left me with a terror of addressing an audience, which has been something of a handicap. The most hostile crowd could never trash my performance as effectively as I do myself. I open my mouth to speak and, though to some I might sound plausible enough, if a little quiet, my inner Scot is hooting at my pretensions. I’m overcome by a sense of inauthenticity. With a concentration I imagine approaches that of a recovering Tourette’s sufferer, I mentally rehearse each word, iron flat the relevant vowels and prune my consonants hard before I speak, and I enunciate just as Miss Garrahy taught me, forcing my mutinous mouth into the necessary cat’s ass. I can “do” Scots just as I can “do” North American English, but I’d feel fraudulent. Face it, I’m a fake in both tongues, only truly myself when silent and alone in a closet with a laptop and a box of index cards.

  Johanna and Ailsa (for some reason dressed as Batman—another American gift to the world) arrive to pick up Agnes and I walk alone through the rain to Finnverinnity Hall to address the islanders, three decades after McWatt first roused the fledgling Fascaray Preservation Society in the same small, shabby venue.

  The hall is already dismayingly full and vibrating with animated talk when I arrive. Sparse fairy lights twinkle over the arch of the stage and tartan bunting is strung across the rafters. As I walk down the aisle towards the narrow stage, the din of conversation stops suddenly, as if there’s been a power outage. McWatt received a standing ovation here for his stirring words in 1985 but the crowd tonight seems as welcoming as a Kuna raiding party.

  I recognise, next to a piratical figure with a plaid bandana and grey bird’s nest beard, Barry, the postman. There is Agnes’s schoolteacher, Niall Kennedy, next to Margaret Mackenzie from the post office and Reza and Iqbal Shah from the store. Eck Campbell is there with Chic McIntosh and a bunch of pub regulars including Chic’s grandfather Roddy, who must be in his late eighties—his survival, he claims, a testimony to strong drink. They might be under the false impression that the free refreshments promised after the meeting will run to more than tea. I scan the faces in the hall, searching for an expression of sympathy. Encouragement would be too much to ask. I’d be happy with neutral curiosity, though mild boredom would be acceptable.

  Agnes had asked to come but I didn’t want my little cheerleader to witness a public display of her mother’s anxieties and humiliation. My socially adept daughter would have no trouble solemnly addressing a crowd of strangers on a subject in which she has some interest and little authority. Astronomy perhaps. Or Highland cattle and palaeontology. Or driftwood collecting. I wonder if she and her friends will have any luck with their trick-or-treating. Surely all the potential treat-dispensers are here in Finnverinnity Hall hoping, in sympathy with the season, to scare the hell out of this naive American interloper.

  I make my introduction, explain, as if for a job interview, my “vision,” for the museum and the island, and describe briefly, and without overt sentimentality—Scots have little time for overt sentimentality, though the covert sort has its place—my family connection with the island. Their eyes seem to narrow in unison. Then I invite them to make suggestions for developing the museum.

  No one stirs. No one speaks. I try again, my voice faltering.

  “I really would welcome your views…”

  Someone clears his throat in the lengthening silence. But I have s
omething up my sleeve. (Tip to anxious public speakers: always have something up your sleeve. There is no shame in bribery.)

  The Auchwinnie Development and Enterprise Board, tasked with overseeing McWatt’s legacy to the Fascaray Trust, has, I announce, authorised an immediate grant of £100,000 to spend on community projects.

  Surely this will warm them up. Silence. Not even a tentative cough. In another setting—a chamber-music recital, perhaps, or a funeral—this profound stillness might be welcome. I steel myself for a slow handclap and a hail of tomatoes.

  “I wonder,” I ask, fighting a faint vocal tremor, “if any of you might have any suggestions as to how we might use this extra cash.”

  My words trail away in a whisper of defeat and I face the mortifying hush. Someone in the back row, one of the pub regulars, gets to his feet and asks me to repeat my last sentence. It’s not a friendly question exactly, but it’s a question, and for that I feel cravenly grateful. I say it again, “I’m looking for any suggestions as to how Fascaray might use this extra cash?” with the over-egged declamatory style of an auditioning actress. A very bad amateur actress, playing Portia. “The quality of mercy…”

  In the front row a stout elderly woman raises her hand, setting off a wind-chime arpeggio of silver bracelets. Her wide face is framed by coiled braids of white hair, Swiss milkmaid-style, and she’s wearing a garish voluminous robe that could have been crafted from several medieval jousting pavilions. She is flanked by two younger companions, a man and a woman, sombre as tomb carvings in their more muted linen drapery. His pink skull shines above a froth of grey hair like a hilltop breaking through a bank of cloud, while the younger woman might make a credible Cleopatra impersonator, late period.