by Memory
Intellectually opposed to the rule of thumb as a junior reporter with the Inverness Courier, the call of the wild took me away from my calculations for the lightening-up times and tides. I became more and more erratic as our music certainly got the girls excited. Some of the 45’s we got in discarded sections of record stores cost as little as 20 pence (1 shilling sixpence). It was still a lot! – My wages were only about 13–14 quid!
At age 15 we created a quartet called Size 4. We won the Buckle Beat Contest, making sure one of the judges – Nigel ‘Benson Beat’ Benson – got drunk with us in our 15cwt Commer van on the way there. The prize was eight gigs from Albert and £40 guineas! A fortune in today’s money. And we became part of the Northern Red Shoe Soul Shuffle ‘Vinyl North!’ The ‘Shuffle’ involved travelling to the venue for 7.30pm, getting started for 9pm, break for tea at 11pm, back to work till 1am. Sometimes 2am! It was exhausting but the bouncers had your money and frequently told us to ‘Screw it Doon! – Doon!’
Some of the best gigs were Sunday night at RNAS Lossiemouth and RAF Kinloss where the GIs and pilots were black dudes who seemed to like our White Boy Soul! – this would have been about 1966! – l remember The Impression’s ‘Big 16’ album from then – l thought I’d died and gone to heaven when we ‘heard it’ – so then we played it! – Buckie lads, The Copycats – did great covers, and the incredible Pathfinders from Glasgow (who I‘d later join as White Trash and Cody), did credible versions of ‘Going to a Go Go!’ and ‘Sweet Talking’ Guy’.
You needed many, many skills to survive the Shuffle – and when bands from Manchester and London came up we were very respectful and generous with each other. What did the Nashville Teens and The Pretty Things feel like in that Commer Van travelling through the snow’? Time travellers?
Some bird from Lossiemouth asked us to play ‘Bend It!’ one night, we told her to fuck off! We were warriors and cosmic spirits! My My Ma Ma MO town Fanatics! Musical intellectualists? The Who of the North! I used to smash an old VOX guitar up for sensational effect! The crowd loved it! – the crowd were Mods!
Inverness is such a strange! Place? The Beatles changed their name from ‘Bee–’ to ‘Bea–’ here, Gene Vincent played at the Northern Meeting Rooms in 1961, when l was 12. The queue went round the corner to Woolworths!
Time and Moment!
The Ghurkhas
It’s worth noting here that my late father’s imaginary vodka-induced wars were ‘military and domestic!’ – he was – particularly! Domestic with me! Do something! he’d say! What, dad?!”
He had an intense dislike of ‘The Indian!’ the ‘Indian!’ was ranted about all night sometimes! … so up his own arse with his ‘the Indian!’
Binges! It seemed to keep him alive a good… ‘the Indian!’ binge was stronger than Smirnoff!
Sikh! West Indian! Bengali! Native! He didn’t care! They were coming to Dalneigh to get US!
Yet he started Crying Uncontrollably when the word ‘Ghurkha!’ was mentioned… ‘Ghurkha! Ghurkha!’ This made me very uneasy! So I took 3 blue valium instead of 1. Then a couple of mandrax – to help me over the shock of it all!
I’d been jamming with Sam Gopal a cosmic phschikdelic Sikh who I’d had an audition with in London courtesy of Lemmie the Rocking Vicar who gave me Hitler’s methedrine! This made my father very very uneasy and ME very HIGH BABY! The Hitler’s methedrine had me pinned to the roof for days! I thought I was choking to death when I came down! It was terrible! Between Hitler’s methedrine and ‘The Indian!’ There was no escape! Except the great escape.
I was most relieved when I was diagnosed with a nervous breakdown!
Nice little nurse! Three meals a day! 60 mgs valium, 2 mandrax at night! These were the days you’d get a script for mandrax and valium for a sore back!
The British wanted rhythm… they always wanted rhythm! someone to march in step! So we could remember the ‘fallen?’ who were probably like the ‘Indian!’
He never liked Germans either!
Father was like a 50s Sub Post Mistress! The type of frustrated Sub-postmistress who had a Bun in her hair and a Rage in her stomach!
Ghurkhas! Ghurkhas! I nearly vomited with the sincerity! How could you!’ he wailed!
‘The Indian! ‘The Ghurkhas!’
‘The Fallen!’
In fact he was nothing more than a Sub Post RACIST!
At least him and grand3ad were kind enough to take me to Ward 11 – the ‘blue’ room – Inverness District Asylum that sad day in 1969 I had my ‘Break-down!’
Voila Cie Bonne!
Jeep Solid.
I smile, knowing that the original Albert would have loved the memoir.
Grampa was looking rested and relaxed when I got back from Culloden. We went for a meal and then for a stroll down by the river. Tomorrow we would head further north. It was a dark starry night. By which I mean that as Grampa and I walked over the wooden rickety bridge to the hotel we could see the stars twinkling in the dark sky. They looked tiny, like candles, even though we knew each twinkle was larger than the whole earth. Grampa and I looked up and we both smiled, and held hands as we walked slowly over the shaking bridge.
14
WE CONTINUED TO travel north.
Cold weather came from the north.
‘When the wind is lost, seek it from the south,’ said Grampa. ‘And do you know how to curse someone? Wind without direction to you. Bad tidings for fishermen, Gav.’
I asked him about the wind as we drove north.
‘The stuff about it is almost endless,’ he said. ‘South wind, heat and plenty. West wind, fish and milk. North wind, cold and tempest. East wind, fruit on branches. And it all depended on which direction the wind was coming from on the last night of the year – wind from the spring star; heat from the summer star; water from the autumn star; frost from the winter star.’
You learned everything about what sustained you and made it pretty with sounds.
‘Weather is just weather. Rain, snow, sun, hail, wind. We need them all. Just that people have gone soft. Make such a fuss over it, with their brollies and shelters. They’re all beautiful in their season. Except we’ve destroyed the seasons with our greed.’
Fire, Air, Water, Earth: the four elements. As we drove north, I asked him about them. What had he heard about them when growing up? He laughed.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I heard nothing. I just saw. Felt.’
‘What did you see then?’
‘Oh – the power of fire. Heat and food. The power of the sea.’
‘All power then?’
‘Aye. Till we tamed them.’
‘And have we? Tamed the elements?’
He laughed again.
‘Well just look out the window.’
I did. Hundreds of windmills adorned the hillsides.
‘And the other side.’
I glanced to my right, down towards the sea. Five tankers moving south.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘this car wouldn’t move without fuel.’
‘Do you know where they stayed?’ I asked.
‘Of course I know where they stayed!’
‘How?’
‘I was taken there. By my mother. It’s on the other side of this hill. We’ll need to park the car by the old church at the bottom of the hill, then walk the rest of the way up by the river. There’s a path, but only for horse and cart. And where will you find these nowadays, except at posh weddings and funerals? The poor horses.’
The path led us through a green glen with low hills caressing each other on both sides. It was like walking through an old postcard. A stag, startled by our presence, leapt out of the bracken ahead and raced up the hill. Skylarks were singing high overhead. The streams were running, flies buzzed about our ears, I could hear Grampa breathing steadily a yard ahead of me. Three trees grew by the river. A birch, a hazel, a rowan.
Grampa paused, pointing into the sky.
‘See!’
I couldn’t see a
nything.
‘There. Just above the cliffs.’
All was blue sky to me.
‘An eagle!’ Grampa said.
I cupped my eyes and caught sight of the great bird hovering high overhead.
‘As well it’s not lambing time, Gav. Though we all need food to survive.’
We walked on, with the smaller birds singing in our ears. Rabbits ran across the lower parts of the slope. Something stirred in the thick bracken and a roe deer stood, unafraid. Everything made a sound. The grass squeaked as we stood on it. Stones clacked as we stepped on them. Bees buzzed in the clover.
‘Imagine it in the dark,’ Grampa said as we sat down, ‘on a winter’s night with the wind howling. Everything grows bigger then. Every gust of wind brings a bòcan.’
‘A bòcan?’
‘A ghost, panting in the dark.’
‘And during the day? On a beautiful summer’s day like today?’
‘Listen,’ Grampa said.
And I listened, to the soft wind blowing across the stream. To the curlews crying overhead.
‘Gav, the thing is – if you’ve no one else to talk to, you talk to the birds. To anything that will listen to you. And do you know the miraculous thing? They talk back to you. Even the rocks. See the marks on that stone? That might be your future. Three vertical lines and all will be well. Beware the horizontal lines though.’
We stopped and sat down by the river. I took my walking boots off and dipped my feet into the water. It was ice-cold. I stood on something gritty, bent down and picked up a blue shell. It was whorled and serrated and rough in my hand. Seven layers to it, ground together across time. I’d read that if you put a conch-shell to your ear you could hear the ocean. I listened and heard my heart and all of nature singing within the cavity of the shell.
I lay back in the grass and closed my eyes and listened to Grampa.
‘I’m going to tell you my favourite story. This glen is called Gleann na Beatha in Gaelic. Beatha means life. As in uisge-beatha, the water of life, which is whisky. They say that Adam and Eve lived here first. But if they had, they wouldn’t be called Adam and Eve but Adhamh and Eubha. Or maybe Naoise and Deirdre. I don’t know. Sometimes my mind gets all mixed up.
‘This glen was a garden then, with trees of every sort and fruit growing on every tree. Apples, pears, oranges, lemons and hazelnuts and the older people used to say that on a warm spring day you could smell the orange blossom as far away as Inverness itself. This is where I come from. You too, Gav.’ They were an old man’s words. Forever going on about paradise lost. The eternal quest to regain his childhood.
After a while he got up.
‘It’s a terrible thing to be poor,’ he said as we walked through the scree. ‘Never believe the delusion. That to be poor is to be virtuous and to be rich is to be evil. There are poor bastards and rich bastards and rich saints and poor saints. It’s what you do with what you have. Columba was a king and Francis a pauper.’
The old church was roofless. Grampa led the way, round the outside of the crumbling old cemetery stone walls. Uphill for a bit, then the path levelled as it crossed the moor below other ruins.
‘That’s where the mill was,’ he said. ‘The miller was always called Johnny.’
We followed the river inland, through heather and moss until we came to some old buildings in the shelter of the rocks.
‘This is where the laird stored his fleeces,’ Grampa said. ‘The laird’s mansion itself is in ruins over by the loch.’
The garden fountains with their bird-baths were cracked and broken and a chipped whisky decanter sparkled in the grass. We stood in the empty doorways and fallen halls and looked through the broken window frames where MacPherson had stood one hundred and fifty years earlier absorbed by the lady’s long white fingers tinkling the piano keys. She always held the last note long and sustained, her fingers pressing down slowly as hard as they could.
We walked over small green hillocks.
‘Fairy mounds,’ Grampa said. ‘The computers of their day. I suppose we all live inside a sìthein of one sort or another. Bankers, politicians, the media…’
We sat in the shade of an old stone dyke and shared tea and sandwiches from my rucksack.
‘Tired?’ I asked Grampa, but he shook his head and stood up.
‘No. Not yet.’
We walked on, past other roofless bothies.
‘Shielings,’ Grampa explained. ‘They used to take the animals up here for the summer pasture.’
He smelt the air.
‘No cattle. The fragrance has gone.’
Something glinted in the sun over by the stream. I walked over and found a small oval mirror which you could hold in the palm of your hand. I brushed the dust and dirt away. A delicate carving of grapes on a vine ran round the edge. As I held it, it caught the sun which sprayed into a thousand splinters and I had that childish moment when I realised I could send its rays in every direction. I could set fire to the grass. I raised it up into the air and could see my tiny grandfather far off, lighting his pipe. I put the mirror in my pocket, then put it back where I found it. It wasn’t mine to take.
I glanced at my watch. Midday. Grampa stopped and sat down on a stone. He plucked a blade of grass.
‘You could travel to the other side of the world on a wisp of straw,’ he said. ‘Pop a bonnet on your head and shout “London” and you’d be there. It worked the other way round too. Murchadh Mòr from Kintail was held prisoner in the Tower. He took off his cap, shouted “Hurrah for Kintail”, and there he was, back home.’
The magic of words.
‘Are you returning home after this?’ he asked.
I wanted to say ‘I am home’, but didn’t.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to see Emma.’
15
GRAMPA LIVED ANOTHER year. Though it was a quick decline in the end, the way primroses suddenly wilt, or the way in which the sun suddenly sets at the end of a long summer’s day on the beach. Meantime you continue to sit there with the remains of the barbecue fire while the sea turns orange, then red, and softens and becomes a huge grey expanse fading to the horizon.
I miss his voice terribly.
‘Ah!’ he’d say. ‘Ah!’ breathing out the promise of a revelation. He told me a story about a place called The Parish of Nowhere. It was about a foreign girl who worked as a cook in a big house, but it was really just his way of telling me that he loved me. Miracles happened in the story: a little wizened old card-playing man came along, and if you beat him at cards he’d give you your wish. And if you closed your eyes and wished a thing, the thing was there when you opened them. And the old man gave this boy a ball and if he rolled the ball along the road in front of him the ball would lead him over rivers and mountains and oceans and give him the power to leap high over insurmountable walls to where his lover was kept captive. And they finally met and married and escaped wrathful parents and had a huge feast and lived happily ever after.
How else do you tell someone that you love them except by giving them your best story or singing them your best song?
Latterly his memory failed. He’d rise and make his own breakfast and then walk for a while in the gardens. I set a wicker chair for him down by the orchard and he spent hours sitting safely in the shade.
He might cut some roses and then take them inside, fill a vase with water and place them in the conservatory. He would read The Times, which continued to be delivered to the house as it had been for the previous fifty years.
Nothing and everything had changed. I’d watch him reading the articles one by one, carefully, as if each word mattered. I loved the way his lips moved slightly as he read the words. Not because he wasn’t completely literate, but because he remembered his mother reading that way. Words were like sweets to him, to be sucked and savoured, rather than chewed and swallowed. He’d frown or smile and laugh, put the paper down and stretch out his legs and have a snooze. The sun through the blinds washed him with light,
but he seemed most at peace when it rained and he’d lie there oblivious to the great noise rattling against the roof and windows. He was already resting in God.
That day, after he told me the story, we walked down into the glen.
‘There were two places,’ Grampa said. ‘The original village and the new settlement.’
We followed the sheep tracks and waded across a few burns and began to climb the moor. Grampa led, taking us round the edge, so that the walk was gentle enough. At the top he led me down the scree towards the cliffs on the far side. Knee-high bracken and silence. A few stones half-hidden in the grass.
‘This is where the MacDonalds were. George and June.’
We walked towards a fuller ruin.
‘The MacInnesses.’
And over in the shelter of the old temple mound we stood in the nettles where Calum and Elizabeth had lived, once upon a time. We walked the old drove road to the other settlement where Grampa’s mother and father had been brought up. Andrew and Anna MacDonell. The ruins here were more substantial. Gable-ends and walls could still be seen and touched.
The lives led, the fires lit, the babies nursed, the stories told. The voices of those silenced by their time.
‘It’s freezing outside.’
‘How’s the bairn?’
‘Are you feeling any better today.’
‘Aye aye.’
‘I’ll need to kill the cow tomorrow.’
‘He’s just a wiffer-waffer o’ a man.’
He too only knew scraps, fragments of the story.
‘I just know that these were the settlements, and that these were the houses,’ he said. ‘She took me here once, when I was young. Much younger than you are now, Gav. So I don’t really recall much, except the buildings themselves. They were in much better shape those days, most of them inhabited. The MacMillans over there. The MacIsaacs next to them. Old Geordie Cowan. Isabel Gowdie. The MacTavishes. Let’s go home.’