Memory and Straw

by Memory

  Magnus was employed by the estate as a ghillie – helping the nobility on their fishing and deer-stalking adventures, though he was also a jack-of-all-trades on the property, able to put his hands to everything from building bothies to establishing the orchards. He was class-conscious, knowing from the first day he set foot on the estate that everything and everyone had its place, and though he knew that order was established by man, he also believed that it was ordained by God. Not that he couldn’t see the nobility’s folly and stupidity – for wasn’t everyone in the world from the King down to the lowest commoner a sinner? However, that didn’t extinguish the law.

  Magnus himself was gentle, knowing that his job was neither to establish nor to abolish the law, but to see that it was obeyed. He was also the gamekeeper. One of his main tasks was to prevent poaching on the owner’s lands and to control unwelcome natural predators, such as foxes and otters. He would trap and kill them with due care and efficiency. He was the guardian of things that could be caught and eaten: deer and salmon, pheasants and trout.

  Gardening changed him. He then began to nourish and protect things for their beauty alone. For their colour and fragrance, not their taste or value. For the pure pleasure of smelling the jasmine, and seeing the primroses covering the river-banks. For the delights of the eye, the sounds of bees on the clover, the smell of wild garlic in the air, the soft touch of petals as he pruned the roses.

  What colours each season brought! The white of winter and the purple of autumn, the bright yellow of spring and the thousand colours of summer. He learned that no colour existed on its own. The snowdrops were only white because they were on green grass. The roses were redder the greener the stalks. Everything was relative to its immediate neighbour, varied depending on what was around. Nothing was solid in its own ground. He became less certain of things. Of himself.

  ‘For to be sure of yourself is to be sure of nothing,’ old Joe the Master Mariner told him one evening. ‘To be sure of himself is the last thing any man ought to be sure of.’

  Maybe that’s why Magnus liked rain. When the heavens opened and the streams overflowed, everything changed instantly. Solid rocks became wet, steam rose from the thatch. Like a parched horse at the trough, the earth drank in the rain. Things would, after all, grow.

  His favourite season was winter, those crisp mornings when he’d leave his stamp on the frost like the first man who’d ever walked the earth. When he breathed out, a small globe of mist rose slowly into the air. And he especially liked the wind, whether coming lean and snell from the north or wild and fierce from the west. He would stand facing it, letting the full force of the gale and rain lash his face. The sting of the rain and the strength of the wind was life, life in all its fullness. Hailstones danced as they fell on water and grass and rock.

  He’d done such a good job working in his spare time in the orchard that when Hamish the old Head Gardener retired, Major Fraser appointed Magnus in his place. Things grew. Slowly, gradually, one thing led to another. Things evolved. If you cut this bit from a plant and grafted another bit from a different plant, sometimes they would become a new plant – a hybrid – and Magnus discovered that if you nurtured and shaped and engineered things, all kinds of miracles could happen. A plant which wouldn’t grow in sandy soil could be grafted onto a plant which did, and you then had a plant which would flower in all kinds of conditions. He developed roses which bloomed in the rockiest of soils, potatoes which grew in the wettest bogs, trees which flourished in the poorest of ground.

  ‘Work changes destiny,’ Joe told him.

  Magnus turned what had been a sporting estate into one of the gardening wonders of the north, and his beautiful handwritten notebooks (which are now on display at Kew alongside the later ones from the south) bear witness to his meticulous ways. He had lovely round handwriting and the mixture of science and poetry in these notebooks makes fascinating reading.

  His love of order is evident, not least in his drawings, which display a wonderful line and a delicate sense of architectural proportion. In the photographs that have survived – from the early ones of him lying in the heather with the gun firmly set on his shoulder, to the ones of him in his tweed suit and fore-and-aft taken in Kensington Gardens in the early 1970s. What a gorgeous moustache he had – neither military nor showy, but droopy, like the one Lloyd George had when Magnus himself was a child.

  He worked alphabetically, much like his half-brother, John. His notebooks start with Annuals, then Bulbs, Climbers, Hedges, Herbaceous and Perennials, and on to Shrubs and Trees, and within these categories other sub-categories with the names of all the varieties he planted, from Asters to Zinnias. He put green circles round some of them. How luscious the bird of paradise must have sounded after the heather, and the japonica and the bougainvillea after the bracken.

  Magnus moved south in 1933. For years, Lord Berkshire, who used to come fishing and shooting in Scotland every spring and autumn, had tried to persuade him to move south.

  ‘There’s such an amount of work to be done there,’ Lord Berkshire would say, ‘and you, Magnus MacDonell, are the very man to do it. In fact, the only man who can do it.’ And he promised Magnus great things. ‘Any plant or tree from anywhere in the whole world to decorate the gardens. From China, Mongolia, the Amazon. Money, you see, my dear Magnus, is no problem. And there’s a lovely cottage on the estate which you can have for life.’

  He was tempted, but his mother’s ill health detained him. He still lived at home with Anna in their bothy and nursed her as well as he could when he came back after a hard day out on the moors or on the windswept lochs. The winter nights were best: she’d sit by the fire and tell him about Diarmuid of the Red Beard and the ring his great-great-grandmother lost on the floor of the loch seventeen hundred years before; or how to make a shirt out of bog-cotton gathered from the moor, carding it, then the spinning and the winding, and while making it you were not to speak a word to anyone, for if you speak everything falls apart; and how a grain of salt is always blessed and has a virtue against every enemy, and that if you had an itch in the palm of your right hand, a letter was coming to you.

  During the day his sister Mairead would take care of Anna, before returning to her own home. Anna began to lose her memory with time and place dissolving and recognition becoming momentary and partial. She would sit in her wicker chair by the fire, reciting Hiawatha, and suddenly say, despite the surrounding wonder of electricity, ‘Oh no. I must light the lamp, or I’ll be late for school.’ Mairead or Magnus would accommodate her delusion. They would light some candles and give her a book which she’d open carefully and then read out loud. She was still a beautiful reader with a lovely rounded Highland voice, so that in English her vowels were extended, with the emphasis always on the last word of any phrase or sentence.

  ‘Once upon a time there were two brothers’, she would read, with the emphasis on the word brothers; ‘One was called True, and the other Untrue’, and again the weight would go on the last noun.

  Anna often spoke of things that were no more. Of Mr Johnstone the teacher and bushy-bearded MacKenzie and Miss Tulloch and the laird’s factor.

  ‘A pock-faced man called Souter, with the heart of a mouse,’ she’d say, and ask when Andrew was due home. Andrew, who had the heart of a lion and the bonniest laugh this side of heaven. And she would always smile at the thought. And she would ask where John was:

  ‘That special, special boy.’

  Her mental wanderings became physical, and Magnus would sometimes wake at night to find her gone, and he’d go out with his lantern and search the woods and find her sitting in her gown down by the well or gathering sticks from the fallen trees and bring her back home, reassuring her that Andrew would be back soon. She was a danger to herself, lighting candles instead of turning on those alien switches, and the time came when they had to put her into a home where she was taken care of. Mairead and Magnus visited day about, with occasional visits from Isobel and Sandra and John when they�
��d manage up from Edinburgh and Glasgow or over from Stornoway.

  The nursing home was situated by a river-bank. Anna’s favourite thing was to sit beneath the ancient oak tree in the centre of the garden. She’d close her eyes and listen, sometimes to what only she could hear: a cow bellowing, the sound of ploughing, a horse neighing, bells ringing, potatoes boiling in the pan, her mother singing.

  And those stories about Calum, the father she’d never seen. He’d been a small man, they said. Dark skin and dark hair and one day, they said, when food was short because it had been raining and snowing forever and nothing had grown, he decided to go and tell the North Wind to stop being so cruel and starving them. So off he went but the way was long and he walked and walked, but at last he came to the North Wind’s house and the North Wind said to him that it was impossible for him to stop blowing, because that was his nature, but that he would help him by giving him a cloth which would get him everything he wanted. All he had to do was to say: ‘Cloth, spread yourself, and serve up all kinds of good dishes.’

  The story was long and complicated and confused and involved rams and sticks and golden ducats, though everything worked out in the end, for nothing could be solved unless there was a puzzle in the first place, and in the sudden clarity that comes just before death Anna knew that this story was about power and poverty. The power of nature certainly, but also the power of people to scheme and steal and rob the poor. The story said that justice was magic. That the very things which brought shame were the same things which brought triumph. Justice was always in their own hands. She heard a tune and stood up and ran across the garden to the knoll by the river, where Andrew was waiting, looking ever so bonny in his kilt and tammy and playing the pipes – a wonderful dance reel called ‘Anna’s Welcome to the Fairy Knoll’, which he had specially composed for her, for this moment. Andrew, being a fisherman, was standing in the river and once he finished the tune stretched out his hand, calling her over to himself.

  ‘Be careful,’ he shouted. ‘Just walk steady, and here – here’s my hand.’

  Lord Arthur Berkshire increased the pressure on Magnus once his mother had gone. At the end of the following deer-stalking season he agreed to move south and join the gardening team at Cliffville, though his real work for Berkshire was much more diverse, from chauffeuring to stabling the horses. But the real reason Lord Arthur Berkshire wanted him was for the fishing. He knew that Magnus MacDonell was the finest fishing-ghillie in the land, with an instinctive knowledge of rivers and lochs and the ways in which salmon and trout moved in these waters.

  Of course, that knowledge was no more ‘instinctive’ than any other knowledge; it had been acquired by long experience. Yet who can tell what primitive oceanography ran through his veins, for had not his father Andrew been a fisherman, and had his forebears not eked a grim living out of the sea, dependent on tides, winds and weather?

  Magnus could read the rivers and the sea much as Lord Berkshire could read the FT Index. Just as stocks went up and shares went down, so did trout and salmon. They would spawn and migrate and return, and a keen and knowledgeable eye like Magnus’s knew where the breeding grounds were and where they returned to and the times and pools they’d use on their voyages.

  It was all dependent on conditions, as with the stock market itself. In the shade was always best, out of the glare of the full sun, early morning or late evening. High noon was best avoided, and everything depended on the flies used to deceive and attract the fish, so that they imagined, like the general public when it came to investment, that they were about to have a tasty meal when, in reality, a deadly hook was piercing their gills.

  You had to have the right temperament – there was no point in taking an idiot fishing, for no matter how wise the ghillie was, the fool would always spoil things by splashing, or shouting, or flailing or the thousand and one other tiny things which would alert the salmon and trout to the fact that danger was present. Stealth and quiet were essential. And then too you had to have skill to reel in the fish – it was never a matter of brute force, but of gentleness and persuasion, making the fish believe that what was happening to him was all for the best, that resistance was ultimately futile. The sport of fishing made death reasonable.

  Lord Arthur was a good fisherman. The best thing about him was that he took advice. He’d call Magnus into his smoking-room of an evening and give him a large dram and ask him to sit up by the fire and tell him again some of the old fishing yarns. The ones that got away, certainly, but also that time the Duke of Buccleuch caught the fifty pound salmon, and the other time when out sea-fishing with Sir Anthony Stokes and Lady Bracknell they caught the biggest skate ever, almost seven feet long and weighing in at seventeen stone. Berkshire always liked Magnus finishing that story with: ‘a fish almost as big and heavy as Lady Bracknell herself!’

  Lord Berkshire gave Magnus a car so that he could drive round England and make a private inventory of the best rivers and pools and lakes for fishing. All the famous ones are on Magnus’s hand-drawn maps – the Trent and the Avon and the Wye and Ullswater and so on. The delights and jewels are the little secret ones which no-one else really fished, charted by Magnus on his travels. He did so by simply following his instinct and getting to know local people who would take him to out-of-the-way pools and streams where the best fish were. The informants were richly rewarded in kind, for Lord Berkshire was well aware that everything had a price – especially those things which were freely given.

  And it has to be said that the exchange was mutual. For not only did Magnus teach the Lord everything he knew about fishing, but Berkshire, in return, taught Magnus how to play the markets, which were as alien to him at first as England itself. Lord Arthur took him aside, showed him the Sporting Life and the Financial Times, and explained that horse racing and the stock market worked on the same principle – the race was to the strongest and the fastest, but there were ways of finding out, even fixing, which were the strongest and fastest. Though the word ‘fixing’ itself was never used. Facts were the thing. It was all down to ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. You never really profited from mere hunches, even though they gave you an occasional dose of adrenaline. Contacts mattered.

  ‘It’s very simple,’ the Lord said to Magnus. ‘You put a pound on a horse at five to one, and if the horse wins you get your pound and an extra five back. But if you put a pound on a company in the morning, you could have one hundred in your pocket that afternoon, depending on your friend within the company. And the more you put in, the more you can take out.’

  But Magnus was a canny man and refused to stake big. Berkshire urged a portfolio of a thousand pounds on him – ‘guaranteed to make ten thousand for you by the end of the month, man’ – but Magnus refused the offer and said that a hundred pounds to play with would be more than enough. What his poor mother would have done with one hundred pounds, he thought. Or his brother John, stuck in his thatched hovel in Lewis, though he seemed happy enough out there on the edge of the world listening to the eternal surge of the sea.

  So Magnus accepted the agreed sum from Lord Arthur and signed a covenant that as soon as he had reached his target from that initial investment, he would pay back double the original advance. Berkshire sat with him and circled the companies he should invest in – British American Tobacco, British Petroleum, the Whyte and Mackay Whisky Company, Ford, Kellogg’s and Uniliver. They all made a hundred per cent profit within the month and Magnus wondered whether Lord Berkshire had circled the companies for him before or after he knew their shares would rise. So he asked him.

  ‘I know all these chaps,’ was the reply, ‘just as you know all the streams and rivers and pools. So I’ll ask you a question – do you put the rod into the pool because you know the salmon is already there, or does that special fly you use attract the salmon into the pool and on to your hook?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Lord Arthur.

  Magnus met Rachel in the Lake District. She serv
ed him breakfast one morning, and had the added distinction of not calling him ‘Sir’. She was dark and pretty, the only daughter of an immigrant tailor from Lithuania and his seamstress wife. Born and brought up in Manchester, she had come to Ambleside for the summer to work in the Temperance Hotel, where the owners insisted on calling the guests Mr and Mrs rather than the usual sir or madam. She always learned the guests’ names off by heart. Her own name was on a badge on her uniform – Miss Gilbank.

  ‘Good morning, Mr MacDonell,’ she said.

  He looked up from the menu and smiled.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Gilbank.’

  She smiled back at the folly of it all.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Magnus said, ‘you would have porridge?’

  ‘No, Mr MacDonell. I’m sorry. We don’t.’

  But what she served was excellent. Kippers, followed by bacon and egg and good strong tea with toasted home-made bread.

  He asked her out on the third day and they went for a drive to the Lakes. They walked and talked and then sat by a waterfall for a picnic. Like Magnus, she spoke English as a foreign language, the accent falling in unexpected places, giving it precision and grace. They both had to really listen, because both dropped words into unexpected vacuums. Even in his old age, after more than half a century in England, Magnus would sometimes begin sentences with the verb, as in Gaelic, and catch me unawares. He’d speak in a roundabout way. So that if I was looking for The Times, instead of asking directly ‘Do you want the paper?’ he’d say ‘Is it the paper you are after?’ And Rachel would occasionally construct her sentences after the Yiddish fashion. So what have you learned out from that, Magnus? And like all of us, they constructed their own lingua franca, where the translated pauses and silences are as meaningful as the spoken words. It was a delight, in their old age, to watch their rhythm of speech.