Hame

by Annalena McAfee

  In Fascaray—the nou.

  An efter April, follaes May,

  An the laverock nests, an the swallaes play,

  An the haw-buss by the drystane dyke

  Hings oer the gress an chucks its flooers

  Like faws o snaw neath buchtit bouers.

  The canny throstle gies an encore,

  In case ye think he minds nae mair

  That first braw fashless boch!

  Though the hauch looks coorse wi cranreuch dew

  It’ll luik sae cantie when the sun gilds new

  The gowan, flooer o blythesome herts

  —Brichter than flooers frae furrin pairts.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Robert Browning, 2000*

  * * *

  * Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.

  History was on Fascaray’s side. In late May 2000, the new Scottish government passed a bill abolishing feudal tenure and set up a fund to help communities buy out their land. Word was that the MSPs down in Edinburgh would match whatever sum the Fascaray Trust managed to raise. The fight for the island moved to a new stage. Publicity attracted by the highest profile supporters (a Harry Potter star and a James Bond villain threw in their lot with the islanders) drew in thousands more individual donations, mostly from Canada and New Zealand, amounting to a total of £520,000.

  A logo for the Trust was designed—two linked circles in green and blue representing an aerial view of the island, with a splash of red in the top right to denote Calasay. Mugs and posters were produced and T-shirts, with slogans including “Fascaray Freedom Fighter” and “Nae Lairds Here!”, were printed. Demand for the mail-order merchandise was so high that the abandoned Fascaradian Museum of Island Life was co-opted by the Trust and volunteers worked for three weeks sorting, packing and dispatching the items. It was the nearest Fascaray had ever known to full employment.

  One T-shirt bearing a quote from McWatt, “An End tae Clearance and Interference,” became a global best seller after it was worn by an American rock star at the Glastonbury Festival in June. It raised £4,000 for the Trust in two months before it became a victim of its own success; pirated copies were made and a few could still be found for sale on stalls in Argyle Street, Glasgow; Canal Street, New York; and Petticoat Lane, London, long after Fascaray finally faded from the news.

  There were benefit concerts in Auckland, Sydney and Toronto, and nearer home, as part of the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow, a distinguished roster of Scottish musicians including Dick Gaughan, Michael Marra and Shooglenifty “sang out for Fascaray,” along with the Chieftains from Ireland, harpists from Brittany and a group of Canadian step dancers. Van Morrison was busy but sent a message of support, and rumours that Bob Dylan was going to turn up at the festival and perform—“paying his dues” for “Hame tae Fascaray”—were useful for ticket sales but proved unfounded. Even without Dylan, however, the Celtic Connections concerts raised a further £13,700 for the Trust.

  On the morning of 12 September 2000, as the sale of Fascaray was taking place in London, islanders ventured out in a rainstorm to gather in the village hall where they would learn their fate. The estate agents were accepting bids over the phone but Izzy Wallop had gone down to the Knightsbridge auction house to guarantee fair play—and additional publicity—for the Fascaradian cause.

  In Finnverinnity Hall, the focus of attention was not on Fergus McKinnon, who stood tense and alone on stage, but on the satellite phone in his hand, which would ring as soon as the result of the sale was known. The main competitor to the Trust’s bid was a property tycoon from Qatar with, it seemed, unlimited funds. In the tense silence of Finnverinnity Hall, the phone rang. It was Izzy. The tycoon had abruptly pulled out of the auction.* Fascaray was now owned by the people of Fascaray.

  The community buyout was marked that night by a raucous session at the Finnverinnity Inn and the following week by the erection of a new standing stone—the Clach na Saorsa, or Freedom Stone, engraved with the names of the Fascaray Five—on Mammor’s slopes, launching four days of drinking, dancing, feasting and fireworks that would not have disappointed the most dissolute Viking marauder. A flotilla of boats sailed to and from Finnverinnity over the next two weeks, disgorging high-profile supporters, members of the Scottish Parliament and Westminster MPs getting in on the act, folk from neighbouring islands and the mainland who didn’t often get the chance of a good hoolie, as well as journalists who came to file stories and ended up partying with the rest of them, staying on in the Fascaray Hotel. Like its owner, the hotel was getting increasingly seedy but the art deco cocktail cabinet remained well stocked and prices were still advantageous for expenses purposes.

  McWatt was the man of the hour and only mildly protested when he was cheered at the unveiling of the Clach na Saorsa and presented with a parchment scroll from the Trust which declared him a “Freeman of Fascaray.” That evening, for the only time on record since the 1960s, the poet sat without protest as visitors, islanders and press roared out all five verses, with choruses, of “Hame tae Fascaray” in the Finnverinnity Inn. It was even reported that a triumphant smile flickered briefly over the poet’s otherwise impassive face.

  The anthem was sung so loudly it was said that the dolphins fled the bay, the guga abandoned their nests on Plodda and Grodda, and over in Auchwinnie, children were woken in their beds by the din of celebration carried by the steady westerly wind over the water from the newly liberated island.

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

  * * *

  * Thierry Malouf, owner of Severine Investments, later revealed in an interview with the Herald that he had been misinformed about Fascaray’s location and on learning, mid-bid, that the island was in the inhospitable north rather than the Mediterranean, and that in the milder months “small biting insects known as midges swarmed to such an extent that protective clothing had to be worn,” he withdrew his offer.

  Tae Saorsa

  We kennt ye of auld,

  Och Saorsa sae bold,

  By the licht o oor eyes

  An the stories we told.

  Ye’ve been exiled a while,

  Frae Scotia sae puir,

  We’ve waited sae lang,

  Fur this happiest oor.

  Och, slow brakt the day,

  An naebdy cried oot,

  Fur the dead hand o tyranny,

  Claucht at oor throat.

  But then ye returned,

  Wi tears doon yer face,

  When you saw oor oppression

  An England’s disgrace.

  Frae the tuims o oor deid

  Yer smeddum inspires,

  Nae mair English scoonrels

  Can smuir oot oor fires.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Rudyard Kipling, 2000*

  * * *

  * Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.

  Forty years ago, in these pages, I wrote: “If any of modernity’s contrivances make a jot of improvement to our lives, I’ll eat my bunnet.”

  Well, dear reader, it is time for me to remove my titfer, present it on a platter, apply knife and fork, chew vigorously and swallow it. For I have been persuaded finally by the enthusiasm of fellow islanders that modernity has its place, even here, on our wee island of timeless wonders.

  Recently, on a glorious September evening when the rain had cleared, the wind was just brisk enough to keep the midges away and the setting sun was bruising the sky behind Beinn Mammor, a group of locals stood at the head of Finnverinnity Glen silently gazing towards a view in which I have long exulted.

  Chic McIntosh was the first to speak.

  “Will you look at that…” he said.

  “Superb,” said Fergus McKinnon.

  “Takes the breath away,” added Kenny MacLeod.

  “Aye,” agreed Eck Campbell. “Fantastic. Makes a hell of a racket but, by God, it’s worth it.”

  The object of their admiration was not the evening flight of the corbies
towards the mountain, which reared majestically against the spreading contusion of the sky, but a noisy metal drum housed in a wooden shack below Kilgurnock Falls. The new island hydro turbine plant, bought and installed twelve months after the buyout with a loan from the recently elected Scottish Parliament, has given Fascaray its first island-wide supply of electricity. Last month, when the hydro was switched on, the old generators were moved into storage and the newly rewired lights remained on in the inn, it was the occasion of another celebratory party that saw in the dawn. And I rejoiced with them, washing down my old bunnet with an emollient dram.

  —Grigor McWatt, October 2001, Auchwinnie Pibroch*

  * * *

  * Wittins: Mair Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 2011.

  He Wisses fur the Cloots o Heiv’n

  Gin Ah’d the heiv’ns browstert cloots,

  Enwrocht wi gowd an siller licht,

  The blae an the mirk an the daurk cloots

  O nicht an licht an the gloamin,

  Ah wud spreid the cloots aneath yer feit:

  But Ah, bein skint, hae anely ma dwaums;

  Ah hae spreid ma dwaums aneath yer feit;

  Stramp doucely fur ye stramp oan ma dwaums.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 2001*

  * * *

  * Thoog a Poog, Smeddum Beuks, 2010.

  A year after the buyout, Fascaray was looking in better shape than it had done for centuries. The new hydro plant was up and running, providing twenty-four-hour power to the island for the first time in its history, essential repairs had been carried out, crofts and cottages were restored as new residents arrived—romantic idealists and borderline survivalists escaping cities, former lives or encroaching doom, or pragmatists in search of cheap housing, new lives and business opportunities. An extension was built at the school to accommodate the surge in pupil numbers, a new system of rubbish disposal was put in place with a landfill site behind Lusnaharra Point, the plastic debris washed up on the shore was regularly cleaned by parties of schoolchildren and adult volunteers, and the Scottish government had agreed to underwrite the cost of a new pier, which would allow bigger boats, with facilities for cars, to visit the island.

  De Uytberg’s Finnverinnity Airport now had a passenger lounge—a recommissioned bus shelter—and GaelAir had begun to run chartered flights, in an eighteen-seat De Havilland Twin Otter, from the mainland. The herring-packing shed became the permanent office of the Trust with Izzy Wallop retaining her post as full-time, salaried secretary.

  It seemed fitting that, while the islanders were enjoying the benefits of self-determination and sprucing up their homes, the Big House was crumbling further. Apart from its leaking roof, collapsing chimneys and broken windows, burst pipes had brought down ceilings, wrecked rooms and covered walls with a stinking slime. The Trust had investigated the possibility of applying for government money to restore it and turn it into a community centre or a hotel—the former Temperance Hotel was up for sale again (the owner had gone bankrupt) while Marsaili MacDonald was struggling to keep the Bothy going. But that was a grant too far. There were other demands pressing in on the new parliament and the Big House had to be sold.

  Occasionally a helicopter would bring in parties of potential buyers attracted by the notion of being “a genuine Scottish laird.” But none returned for a second viewing. The title of laird was now only honorary—instead of the entire island, the new owners of Finnverinnity House would be acquiring an impenetrably overgrown nine-acre garden and an enormous, ugly shell of a house in need of urgent repair.

  Finnverinnity House was eventually sold in 2002, at a third of its asking price, to Reinhardt Schneider, a German wholefood entrepreneur turned artist. Schneider had seen a photograph of the island in a Sunday supplement and flown in from Hamburg with a chequebook. Proceeds of the sale would go towards repaying the government loan for the hydro plant. Schneider planned to turn the stables into a studio while Greta, his third wife, a former dancer, wanted to create a “sensory garden” in the shrubbery.

  Schneider was said by McWatt, writing in a May 2002 entry in the Compendium, to have “cut a flamboyant figure with his ponytail, earrings and blue tartan suit, when he first entered the Finnverinnity Inn. But Fascaradians, by now used to the idiosyncratic costumes of the Balnasaig crowd, turned to stare only when Schneider asked the barman, Kenny MacLeod, for ‘a Perrier vater.’ ”

  Schneider told the silent drinkers that he and his wife planned to live full-time on Fascaray with their three-month-old daughter. “The city is finished,” he said. “The pollution, the vibrations. All wrong. Here we can be free.”

  He explained that he had Scottish roots—“the first wife of his mother’s great-grandfather had once been married to an Armstrong. Hence the tartan suit.”

  According to McWatt, “the new laird claimed he had ‘grown up with the great Walter Scott and Bobby Burns,’ pronouncing Walter as Valter. He then raised his glass of Irn-Bru (no Perrier to be found) in a toast to ‘Ivanhoe! Auld Lang!’ ”

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

  INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS DESCRIBING FINE WEATHER

  daak a lull in bad, windy weather

  deow gentle rain

  gludder fleeting sunshine between showers

  Maag’s thirl light in the south-west after storm indicating clearer weather

  maumie soft, mild

  pet day day of fine weather in the midst of a long spell of bad weather

  roosie glint of light through clouds, portending storms

  soneblenk a short spell of sunshine, usually followed by showers

  Tormud’s thirl brief interval of fine weather before heavy rain

  —Grigor McWatt, 2002, The Fascaray Compendium

  Within three years of the community buyout, divisions were beginning to emerge and Fascaray was showing signs of descending into what McWatt later termed “uncivil war.” There were four main factions: English incomers, Scottish incomers, Balnasaig Seekers (past and present) and the natives, among whom was counted McWatt, whose ancestral connections, fame and more than sixty years’ residence had finally conferred on him indigenous status.

  Among the new English contingent were the Taylors, Dick and Sandra, a couple of empty-nesters from Hampshire who planned to use their savings, his construction skills and her culinary artistry to open a tea room and B&B in the old Finnverinnity kirk, while Nigel Parsons, a retired naval officer from Wiltshire, bought two neighbouring fishermen’s cottages which he was converting into a single home with his wife Gill. As McWatt noted in the Compendium, both couples unwittingly offended local sensibilities within a month of their arrival; the Taylors by hoisting a Union Jack flag above the kirk and the Parsons by letting slip their plan to operate a private ferry service on Sundays to and from Auchwinnie. By now, few Fascaradians who identified themselves as religious, Catholic or Protestant, made the journey across the Clinch to attend church services on Saturdays, settling instead for twice-monthly prayer meetings led by a peripatetic preacher in Finnverinnity Hall or monthly Masses in Fergus McKinnon’s converted byre in Lusnaharra. But old sabbatarian habits died hard and in many Finnverinnity households, work, or play—as well as running, humming or whistling—were still forbidden on the Lord’s Day and any incomer careless enough to peg out their laundry on a clothes line on a Sunday could expect a stern reprimand from church elders.

  The Lusnaharra population was boosted by the arrival of a young Scots family from Edinburgh. Ben and Alison Guthrie moved into Father Col’s old presbytery cottage with their three children and planned to turn the derelict Church of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Mary into an arts centre, restaurant and pottery workshop—“Just what the island needs: more damned pottery!” wrote McWatt.

  Balnasaig Sanctuary had expanded further and, to create overspill accommodation for the influx of visitors, the Seekers acquired fifteen acre
s from Tam Macpherson’s old farm to create a “tepee campsite.” Several Balnasaig pilgrims went on to become permanent residents, moving into the old servants’ quarters of the Lodge to assist with the burgeoning business and set up a print workshop to disseminate the teachings of Evelyn Fletcher and Neville Booth to a wider audience.

  McWatt noted in the Compendium that there were also several “outliers” on the island: new residents whose uncategorisable origins meant that “all factions are equally cordial, or equally hostile, towards them.” This party included Mr. Kennedy, the head teacher at Finnverinnity Primary, “a young Irishman who keeps a diplomatic distance from the fray”; the Schneiders, “whose free-ranging transcendental inclinations are not to the taste of the Seekers and whose fondness for tartan and commitment to their indefinable art perplexes the Scots”; and the recently arrived van Donks, a Dutch couple, “aloof introverts in their forties,” who were running an Internet company selling wild-flower plug plants from their nursery garden and polytunnels on Peigi MacEwan’s old croft in Doonmara. McWatt reported that the van Donks were never seen in the pub or shop and avoided any contact with locals, making trips on their speedboat to Auchwinnie for supplies.

  At first, as Trust secretary, Izzy Wallop was a popular figure around the island with those residents, mostly English incomers, whose kitchen extensions and double-glazed conservatories she offered to finance, and her release of a grant to assist the construction of a series of “eco cottages” at Balnasaig finally healed her thirty-year rift with Evelyn over the affair with Neville.

  But native Fascaradians and Scots incomers were less successful with grant applications to the Trust and, wrote McWatt, their scepticism became mutinous when funds were allocated to restore the derelict manse in Finnverinnity and, once building work was completed, Izzy herself moved in. Wallop had, noted McWatt in a Compendium entry in January 2003, earned “the unique distinction of making enemies among all parties on the island.” She had become increasingly eccentric and indiscreet, describing the indigenous Fascaradians in one newspaper interview as “ungrateful aborigines.” (Her defence was that she had thought this part of the interview had been “off the record.”)