by Kirsty Gunn
All this, Helen thought, and more, coursing through her mother’s mind. All stories of the past and asking herself: Was it worth it? Was it right? Her daughter could read these questions of her mother by the look on her face as she stroked her daughter’s forehead, telling brick by brick, stone by stone, the small events of family life that build to houses, monuments. Thinking about Mary’s strength, perhaps, Margaret was, because she herself could not break free of the man she had been with, her first. Thinking, too, maybe, that though she could have been like her mother in one way, when, just like her, she had been a young girl when she had met someone she wanted, how, in the end, unlike her mother she was in finding in that same man someone who would be in her mind and stay there from the beginning and she would not want him ever to leave.
‘Mum?’
A man she would have lived with, in that way, every day.
‘Mum?’
Who she thought about, cared for.
‘Mum?’
Though could she ever say ‘loved’?
‘Mum?’
Could she, ever?
‘Mum?’
Though there, at the end of her thoughts – Helen’s voice – was their child.
‘Did you hear what I just said to you? Mum?’
Helen herself there as proof of love – still could she use that word?
Love?
‘Mum?’
How could she? When he was married to Sarah all the time and living away and it was only his House she had, to look after, its rooms and kitchen and windows and hearth, the House the only part of him that was constant.
‘Mum?’
Though he was tender with her, when they were together, and they’d find ways of being together and he said he loved her as he lay with her and put gently back in place the coil of hair from where it had come undone from behind her ear.
‘Mum?’
For was it love? A swift time together that brought about a child? That caused her to leave her mother and live apart, staying on in the House this man might return to in the summer, for a few weeks each year? That, love? That took thought from her and feeling, still making that charge, after all these years? When love was care, thoughtfulness, kindness. As her marriage to Iain was, and his taking care of her and Helen, taking care of Helen from when she was small … That … Surely … Was love. But not the other, how could it be? The creeping up stairs to the room at the top of the House when her husband and her daughter were asleep, when Iain and Helen were asleep, her dressing gown gaping open as she ran from them, quietly so they would not hear … That … Not … Love …
Surely …
That –
My darling …
– though something lovely … Was not –
…
It could not be, could it? Though it was also …
Love.
gracenotes/piobaireachd, a music to be played outdoors, brought in
The house is a place of safety, shelter, warmth. It was that for Margaret MacKay when she first came there, as a young woman, and returned there, pregnant and unmarried, to work and have her child. For her husband Iain Cowie, too, a shy, awkward man who had never been at ease in the world and who’d found it hard to find employment, The Grey House from the beginning described these qualities of shelter to him exactly as it had to the travellers and shepherds who sheltered within its walls, stopping off there on their way west and south and finding in the stone small rooms of what was, in the beginning, a modest home, comfort, companionship and, though Iain himself had never cared for it, a music that was played and given as a gift to strangers.16
This music, the House had always been known for. Iain Cowie respected that, despite his lack of interest in the pipes – close as he was to old Callum Sutherland for whom he worked until that man’s death. In his lifetime Callum Sutherland had developed The Grey House into an internationally known piping school through what became known as his ‘Winter Classes’. It is true, as far back as records of the House show, that the Sutherlands’ home was a place known for piping, and more especially, for piobaireachd – and from the beginning there were ceilidhs and recitals held, outside yes, when the weather was fair, according to tradition, but also, as was practice at the great house of Skye,17 there was a history of playing piobaireachd indoors, within modest rooms.
This was unusual. The story of bagpipe music, generally, throughout the world, is that of an instrument that is played outdoors. Historical papers relating to the history of bagpipe music note how the end of the Middle Ages signalled a way of life that was more urban than rural – so that social life was now conducted indoors and no longer on the village green. Loudness, therefore, of a loud-sounding pipe that could be heard across the fields, was no longer a necessary quality of music; sweetness and delicacy were more highly prized. Chamber music and, in time, the modern orchestra and its pleasures were to follow the new social patternings that emerged after the end of medieval times and the beginning of the early Renaissance. This new era was when our definition of all the aspects of what we now call Western music was laid down.
As Seumus MacNeill notes:18 ‘The bagpipe of course did not give up without a struggle.’ In some countries the instrument was altered, to make it smaller and lighter-sounding, introducing certain new devices that might extend its range and so cope with the new array of musical instruments on offer. But demise was inevitable. Slowly, year by year, in every country except one, the bagpipe either disappeared completely or was left ‘to the lonely hill-men or the occasional crank’.
The one country was Scotland – in particular, the Highlands of Scotland … Which is why today when one thinks of bagpipes one thinks of Scotland. Not because that is where they came from – but because this is where they remain.
Why?
Seumus MacNeill gives us this reason: that the lifestyle of the Middle Ages continued in the Highlands of Scotland for much longer than in the rest of Europe. Despite some interchange with the outside world, the way of doing things had not much altered in the subsequent years: houses were still shelters, and in general – which is what makes the Grey Longhouse of the Sutherland family exceptional – not places of recreation and entertainment. Work and leisure both were carried out in the hills and glens. So in these circumstances the bagpipe could and did flourish – for no instrument can compete with it for a party outside at night, in the summer air, or during the day for a wedding march or a country dance across the grass. It was used to rally spirits when times were hard, keep the rowers in time as they battled foul waves on the Pentland Firth or across the Minch. The music carried the elderly to their graves and cried the arrival of a newborn baby. And in a sheltered strath between the hills of Mhorvaig and Luath, a family established a home that was not so much a place, as a world – somewhere that could hold both the beginnings and endings of a music that had always been composed to be played somewhere much larger than one small room could ever contain.
insert/John Callum MacKay Sutherland of The Grey House
Though many papers and notes are filed and kept in archive as a record of the life and compositions of the Sutherland family, and of John MacKay Sutherland in particular, there is little in the way of personal information. Journals and diaries that have been kept tend to give an inventory – of lessons taught, provisions bought, visitors, trips, accounts etc. – that summarises the activities of a family rather than giving an insight as to what that family were like, how they expressed themselves, what they thought.
However, a number of letters have been held in the House (the significance of the correspondence between John Sutherland’s father and mother has been noted already), as well as certain fragments gathered from the Little Hut,19 that give us a more intimate portrait of those who lived at The Grey House and show the workings of John MacKay’s mind as he brought together his composition ‘Lament for Himself’.
He was afraid of his father, we know this, and he longed to escape that man’s musical and physical dominance.
He flourished, emotionally, under the influence of his mother but this was not something that could be encouraged by the society of the time, in particular the Highland society into which he was born that valued discipline and restraint and a withholding of emotion as being key attributes of manhood. So those aspects of himself, of feeling and sensitivity, that came back to him as he lay dying – in memories of the Schoolroom his mother had created for them both, the pictures on its walls and the toys he kept to play with there, and in memories of his mother herself, how she seemed to him when he was a young boy to be a source of gentleness and softness and fragrance – were never let out to express themselves, not fully, in his life.20
‘I’ll not be back!’ he called out into the air as he drove down the road away from the House, a young man of only eighteen, on his way to university but not intending ever to revisit that place where his father lived. So he cut himself off from the past – and though he was made to travel up to the House when his mother seemed to be gravely ill, this some years later, when he was a man, and he met Margaret then, and again, after he was newly married, to introduce his mother to his bride … That was never going home. He barely spoke to his father on either of those visits, or the older man to him. It was only many years later, after his father’s death, when he came back for the funeral to look after his mother and the affairs of the House, that ‘well, started the returning’.21
The ‘Lament’ shows all of this, of course: the sadness that there is no note for John’s father, Callum Sutherland, any more than there is for his son who goes by his grandfather’s name. The singling and the doubling of John MacKay’s own theme – for his father and son – is what we have instead. The same notes, one might say, that might speak for all three men together.
narrative/4
The people at the House and what they thought of him (appears as dialogue/possible fragment of a play)
Helen:
All of today has gone into the past. Already the early morning, going up to my room and seeing she was gone – it’s like that happened in another life, to another woman. The baby … She was some other woman’s baby.
Yet the feeling of the leap into nothing, into vacancy – the jump of my heart when I saw the empty basket – that’s with me. I’ll remember that.
I’ve never felt such absence like it.
Margaret:
But you were calm. You didn’t cry out. Later – yes. But not at first. When you saw that she was gone …
Helen:
Though anything, anything! Could have happened to her! And I myself knew at that second of the empty basket that I could have done anything. Killed. Gone mad. If I could have protected her.
And if John had kept her longer, Mother …
If he’d had her longer with him out on the hill …
Mother?
Margaret:
I know.
What would have become of her then, our little girl – although people say that babies are hardy and your daughter is hardy. Still he’s an old man and he could have perished up there on the hill and that would have been the death of our Katherine Anna, then, would have been.
Could have been.
Helen:
But the day – it tided over, changed. Iain went out there …
Margaret:
He did. He was like lightning, he was gone.
Helen:
And he found her …
Margaret:
Iain brought her home.
Helen:
He did – and he gathered John up, I watched him, he gathered him up in his arms. So carefully, Mother, he was so gentle with him. He was so careful, and he laid him in the back of the Argo – and she was fine, our baby was safe. She was wet and cold and cross but she was safe, she was well. The hours that had seemed like hundreds of hours, the long, long morning since breakfast and the terror of realising she was gone … All those hours turned back into an ordinary day then, unbelievably, just an ordinary day, when I fed her, put her to bed …
Margaret:
And then I told you that Callum was on his way.
Helen:
Yes. Callum.
And what must it be like for him now? With his father the way he is? When it’s been so long ago since he was last here? Poor Callum. That family of his so spoilt with their own dissatisfactions that they never see each other, look out for each other.
It’s been that way with them as long as I can remember.
Margaret:
When he first started coming up here, he was perhaps eight or nine.
Helen:
I thought he was such a city boy.
Margaret:
And he was. But he was his father’s boy, too, who was born here. And the two of you together. You showed him all over the hills. And he loved the dogs, he had dogs that he looked after while he was here. He was just a boy.
Helen:
And I loved being with him then.
Margaret:
You two were together all the time.
Helen:
All the time, those summers.
Margaret:
The two of you, I never saw you all day. You were together all the time. Then the years went on and the summers went past and he was starting at university. And you yourself had left to go to Glasgow by then. It became harder after that, didn’t it? For him to keep up the visits here?
Helen:
And by then I had gone away.
I could no longer help him, look after him.
Margaret:
So how old were you then, when you last saw each other?
Helen:
I was seventeen.
(aside:)
Going up there to his father’s place …
Margaret:
You were still very young.
Helen:
I was seventeen.
(aside:)
And no one guessed. No one knew …
Margaret:
And you went away then.
Helen:
First Glasgow. Then Edinburgh. All those papers I wrote. All the time while I was away. In Glasgow, the exams and all the papers. Then Edinburgh, it was the same. I worked so hard, I was always working, writing. Then back to Glasgow again for my PhD … And all the time, all that writing on the pages. I missed you, Mother. I was away for years.
Margaret:
But now home again.
Helen:
Where I want to stay.
Margaret:
And all that time – in between then and now –
Helen:
Like nothing.
(aside:)
Because I know where that place is, where we used to go. And he knows, Callum. We could go back there now, we would both remember the way.
(as before, to her mother:)
Because for all the years in between … Callum and I … We get along fine, don’t we?
Margaret:
You’ve always got along with him fine.
gracenotes/piobaireachd, the theme of the return, including a general account
Everything about the music of piobaireachd indicates a turning back to its origins – from the structure of the music and its return over and over to the ideas of its Urlar or first theme, to the anatomy of the pipes themselves that creates limitations in key and octave that must keep the variety of the notes to certain repetitions and rephrasings – and it is this turning back, while going forward with a tune, that, perhaps, lends the music its great melancholy and sense of feeling.
For to return, to return … This idea runs all the way through the pages and the lives of John MacKay Sutherland and those who knew him. Remember the lines in the opening section of the Taorluath: ‘Certain roads, you get to a part of them, turn a corner, say, come over some kind of a hill, and you feel … No going back now. The road there to take you and all you can imagine is the place that lies ahead and who’s there, who’s waiting.’ The tone of those words sounds exactly the inevitability of t
he pipes’ own song that brings the piper home.
‘To the make of a piper go seven years’ wrote the novelist and short-story writer Neil Munro. ‘Seven years of his own learning and seven generations before.’
So … Return
Return
Return.
‘Look for us in the windscreen of your car and we’re waiting for you.’22
Now follows a ‘General Account’ of piobaireachd by Douglas MacDonald of Strathglass. He begins his remarks, too, with a reference to ‘The Lost Piobaireachd’, the short story by Neil Munro: ‘To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before. At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs.’