So I do. I collect my notebook and tape recorder, and return to the room where Rosalind Munlochy is waiting to be interviewed.
EXTRACTS FROM TRANSCRIPT OF AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN DOUGLAS FINDHORN ELDER AND ROSALIND MUNLOCHY, CONDUCTED ON 29TH AND 30TH OCTOBER 2014 AT GLENTARAGAR HOUSE, GLENTARAGAR, ARGYLL
ELDER: Do you mind if I record our interview?
MUNLOCHY: I don’t mind what you do, so long as you tell the truth and don’t leave anything out.
ELDER: Well, I won’t be able to include everything. We have a lot of ground to cover and the Spear’s editor will give me only so much space.
MUNLOCHY: I understand that, of course. All I ask is that you do not lie by omission.
ELDER: I will try not to do that. There is one matter that the editor was most insistent I should ask you about.
MUNLOCHY: I thought that might be the case.
ELDER: But I’m not sure I’m going to.
MUNLOCHY: Why not?
ELDER: Because there’s a principle involved. The principle of privacy.
MUNLOCHY: No, no, I’m beyond that. I want to be completely open about everything.
ELDER: Well, we can come to that later.
MUNLOCHY: As you wish. What do you want to discuss first?
ELDER: Well, I’ve been reading your memoir, Some Life –
MUNLOCHY: An inconsiderable book.
ELDER: I’ve been enjoying it.
MUNLOCHY: I dashed it off. I omitted most of my life up to that point. Hence the title, in part.
ELDER: Why did you write it like that?
MUNLOCHY: Because I was too occupied with everyday things to dwell overlong on the past. I was on the County Council. I was running this house unaided. There were various campaigns requiring my attention. That book was a pause for breath, but only a very brief pause.
ELDER: Did you never think of expanding it, or writing another volume of autobiography?
MUNLOCHY: Certainly not. One was quite enough.
ELDER: Are you writing anything now?
MUNLOCHY: Such as?
ELDER: Poetry, fiction?
MUNLOCHY: Good Lord, no! I said everything I had to say in those departments long ago. Writing was never a compulsion with me as it is for real writers.
ELDER: You didn’t regard yourself as a real writer?
MUNLOCHY: I don’t.
ELDER: And you stopped writing because you had nothing more to say?
MUNLOCHY: No. Writing is only one mode of expression. I stopped writing because I had nothing more to write.
ELDER: Can we go back to Some Life for a moment? You wrote it half a century ago, and much of it concerns the trip you made to northern Canada the previous summer. Let’s start there. Why did you make that trip?
MUNLOCHY: I explained all that in the book.
ELDER: Yes, but hardly any of the present readers of the Spear will have read the book.
MUNLOCHY: How fortunate for us all! Very well. I had an ancestor, a great-uncle called Gilbert, who was in the fur trade. I never knew him – he was born in 1820, the year George III died, and he went to Canada in the middle of the century and never came back.
ELDER: I was going to mention, by an amazing coincidence I too had a great-uncle called Gilbert.
MUNLOCHY: What’s amazing about that? Gilbert’s not so unusual a name. It would be amazing if they were one and the same, but they can’t be.
ELDER: No, they can’t. But it does amaze me that here am I talking to you in 2014 and if your great-uncle hadn’t gone away you might have known a man born in 1820.
MUNLOCHY: Then you are easily amazed. After all, I did meet his sister Gladys, and she was born a year earlier. She died when I was three and she was ninety-eight. All I remember about her is that she dressed in black from head to toe and creaked when she moved. No doubt that was her stays.
ELDER: You go back two generations and you’re almost at Waterloo.
MUNLOCHY: And actually are at Peterloo. If the Strivens aren’t killed in war or by accident they tend to live long. One shouldn’t make too much of this – these are only numbers after all. Gilbert was much talked about in the family. We admired him, partly because he survived being mauled by a grizzly bear and partly because he was a rogue. Perhaps that helped when he met the bear. He had a complete disdain for people in authority. He worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company but he didn’t like their monopoly of the trade and so he ran his own business, quite against the rules, alongside his official job. He had lots of children by different Indian women but there was no shame in that, in fact there was pride, and he looked after them all, which was another mark in his favour. He sent letters in brown ink from time to time, with little sketches and maps in the margins, and I was allowed to look at these when I was a girl and they fired my imagination. All this is in the book. Well, I decided to have a look at some of the places he’d been – to follow in the footsteps of my infamous ancestor. It’s important to do that, I think, to go where your people have gone before you. Why are you looking at me like that?
ELDER: My Great-uncle Gilbert wasn’t much talked about in our family but when he was it was with a wagging finger. He wasn’t admired, and I certainly wasn’t meant to follow in his footsteps.
MUNLOCHY: Why not?
ELDER: Well, I …
MUNLOCHY: Yes?
ELDER: Well, I was told that my great-uncle was mad. And it seems he walked into the sea and drowned himself. I’m sorry.
MUNLOCHY: Why are you sorry? It must have been a long time ago.
ELDER: I was remembering what happened to your father.
MUNLOCHY: I see. You thought you would upset me. That, too, was a very long time ago. I was only nine.
ELDER: And I was thinking of your daughter, Poppy’s mother.
MUNLOCHY: Georgina? Well, we will come to her, won’t we?
ELDER: Yes, if you are prepared to talk about it.
MUNLOCHY: I’ve been preparing for that for a long time. ‘Mad’ is a loose kind of word, isn’t it? Convenient, but seldom helpful. It means so little, and yet it implies so much. Do you ever think that you might be mad?
ELDER: Sometimes. Do you?
MUNLOCHY: There hasn’t been a day in my life when I haven’t. But one has to work on the basis that one isn’t, that the world really is as one perceives it to be. Otherwise everything would be impossible. That’s all life is really, a matter of perception. Of course, the world itself is mad.
…
ELDER: Tell me more about your time in Canada. Why did you choose to go that year, in 1964? Did you perhaps feel you wanted an adventure?
MUNLOCHY: Why would I want an adventure?
ELDER: Because of your circumstances, the age you were?
MUNLOCHY: I’d already had plenty of adventures. I did need a change, though. Ralph and I had parted, and I decided to get away from here for a while. Everybody else had, or was going to. My children were gone. So were most of the people in the glen. I was depressed, I suppose, although I didn’t think of it like that at the time. I don’t like feeling sorry for myself, you see. Do you know, Douglas, that when I was born there were a hundred and fifty people living in Glentaragar? There was a school at Glen Araich, and a church, and goods of all kinds came in by puffer and cart every week. The war changed everything – the first war. The young men went away to fight and many didn’t come back and that was when the real decline set in, though in truth folk had been leaving before the war. Even in the 1930s there were a dozen families still in the glen, with children and grandchildren, but the Depression took some away and the War took more, and Canada and Australia yet more when it was over, and by the 1960s only a handful were left – mostly the old who had no reason to go. Life would be better elsewhere, or so it was said. I’m not sure that it was, but it seemed that way, and certainly that it would be easier, so people went.
ELDER: Corryvreckan said something about the old days when he drove me up this morning. He talked about there having been a real c
ommunity in the glen.
MUNLOCHY: Corryvreckan is a splendid fellow, but he doesn’t know what it was like when the glen was full. He likes to think he remembers, but he doesn’t. It was almost all lost before he came – the church, the school, the language. There was an old lady who had no English at all when I was a girl. Now only Corryvreckan has the Gaelic, and he doesn’t have much of it, and nobody to speak it to but himself.
ELDER: You and Poppy don’t have it?
MUNLOCHY: I have a few scraps, that’s all. Childhood leftovers. It wasn’t our language, it was theirs.
ELDER: So, as a child of the big house, did you feel part of the community?
MUNLOCHY: We were part of it but also apart from it. We weren’t the same as the people of the glen, but nor did we fit in with our own class, who thought we were a bad lot. The Strivens were too sympathetic to the people, that’s what the rest of the gentry thought – but they were nearly all incomers. The local children walked down the glen to school every day, and sometimes we went with them, my brothers and sister and I. We had governesses but we were so ungovernable that they were always giving notice and so then we went to the school at Glen Araich. We behaved ourselves there, it was the strap across your palm if you did not. On the whole, though, our education was extremely informal. One wouldn’t get away with it today, but we belonged to a caste that could get away with almost anything … Sometimes, Douglas, I think that cat is actually dead. Would you prod her for me?
ELDER: No, not dead. You were saying you could get away with things, because of who you were …
MUNLOCHY: Yes. We will come to that. When we were older we were sent away to boarding schools, though not very good schools because our mother couldn’t afford them. But we were talking about Canada. I went there to retrace Gilbert’s footsteps, as far as I could. He died in a cabin beside the Great Bear Lake, and I wanted to see that place. There was no cabin, no grave, no marker, but paddling a canoe on the water, camping on the shoreline, I felt a connection. And that’s why I went, to feel that connection.
ELDER: And when you came back, did you still feel a connection with Glentaragar? Or did you return to a place that was dying, or perhaps had already died?
MUNLOCHY: Well, it had, in a way. You only had to look around. The distances in Canada were simply vast, the scale of everything was so much bigger, so it was hard to think that here we were only a hundred miles from Glasgow and yet we might as well have been on the moon as far as people in Glasgow were concerned! How could we be so far away when we were so close? It’s one of the things I’ve always argued for – not just maintaining the glen road but better communications generally between Highlands and Lowlands, better land links and better sea links. If you break those links it is not surprising that people leave.
ELDER: Because of the remoteness?
MUNLOCHY: I dislike the word ‘remote’ intensely. It is very pejorative, like that other phrase people use, ‘the back of beyond’. When we go out later, I will show you how we used to communicate with Glasgow and everywhere else. It wasn’t by land, which has always been difficult. It was by water. There’s a map on the wall over there, do you see it? It looks odd, doesn’t it? That’s because it challenges your way of imagining the world. It’s a map of Scotland and Ireland on a vertical south-west to north-east axis, and what it makes you realise is that before there were roads there was water, and the Minch and the Irish Sea were the main thoroughfares. That’s how people moved around, trading goods and ideas and, yes, fighting and stealing too. And what is right in the middle of the map? Look closely. It’s Iona, Columba’s island. He didn’t wash up there by accident, he chose it. It wasn’t some remote, hard-to-get-to place. It was the centre of his world. And Glentaragar is just a couple of lochs and a short sea trip away from Iona. And this is why I have never given up on this place, my home, the home of my ancestors, because even though it looks as if we are dying we are not dying. We continue to be here. We are still here.
ELDER: That’s a powerful opinion, but do you not think that it is, in the end, a romantic one? The modern world isn’t Columba’s world. Iona is remote, and Glentaragar too. I’m not being pejorative in saying that, it’s a fact. And, forgive me, but you are about to be a hundred, and your granddaughter and Corryvreckan are the only people who will be here after you have gone. Can there really be any hope for a place like this?
MUNLOCHY: Yes, there must be. In the far north of Canada I felt that people had hardly made an impression on the land. It was wilderness and you were lucky if it let you keep a foothold in it. But here in the Highlands it is quite different. The land and people coexisted and then the people were ejected – not by the wilderness but by other people. People of my class. You asked whether I still felt a connection with the glen on my return, and my answer is that I felt it even more strongly than before. And I still feel it and that is about hope for the future. If you don’t have hope you don’t have anything. If you don’t believe there’s a future then what good is the past? It’s a waste of time thinking about it.
ELDER: But for you, at your great age, don’t you spend a lot of time thinking about the past?
MUNLOCHY: Only when I’m asked to. Why would I?
ELDER: Because, in the nature of things, you have much more past than future to think about.
MUNLOCHY: It’s true that I don’t look very far into the future. That really would be presumptuous. Sometimes I only think half a day or half an hour ahead. But I very seldom look back. Dwelling on the past – what’s the point if your conscience is clear? We will, however, as we’ve already discussed, come to that.
ELDER: To what?
MUNLOCHY: To the matter your editor sent you to ask about.
ELDER: I’m not sure I understand.
MUNLOCHY: Do you wish to talk about it now?
ELDER: Well, I was planning to leave it till later.
MUNLOCHY: Then let’s not disrupt your plan.
ELDER: Okay. Where were we? So, if you don’t dwell on the past, what do you do? You seem to be in remarkably good health, but there must be many days when you are housebound by the weather, and you yourself said that you haven’t left the glen for a long time.
MUNLOCHY: I am in remarkably good health. I sometimes don’t quite believe it, and have to pinch myself. But then again I heard on the radio the other day about a woman who abseiled down a tower in Plymouth to celebrate her hundredth birthday. Why she wanted to do such a thing I have no idea, but she did. And I’ve heard of others who have jumped out of aeroplanes or gone scuba-diving, so there are more of us than you might think, keeping reasonably well. The thing is not to worry about it. Worry kills everything. I just wake up and get on with things. I am warm and comfortable in this room, and if it’s too wet or windy to go outside I walk up and down the corridors for exercise. For six months of the year Poppy and I work in the garden – I’ll show it to you later. We grow a lot of vegetables, and there are some fruit trees, and a greenhouse, and some adorable hens which give us eggs and are themselves eventually quite good to eat. The garden is our domain. Corryvreckan does the heavier work – chopping logs and repairing the roof and so on. You’ll notice we don’t have a television. We tried it once, in the 1970s, but the reception was terrible and I expect it wouldn’t be any better now. Not having a television is good for the health, I think. I have the radio for news if I want it, and for music. The BBC, whatever else it has come to, still makes some excellent radio programmes. And there are always books to read, or to reread. My eyes get tired in the evening so Poppy reads to me, which I like very much. So you see, there is never really a shortage of things to do.
ELDER: Your own centenary is just a few days away. How do you intend to celebrate it?
MUNLOCHY: I don’t.
ELDER: Not at all?
MUNLOCHY: A hundred is only a number to which some humans have attached undue significance. Actually it means nothing more than five sets of fingers and toes.
ELDER: So receiving a telegram
from the Queen will mean nothing to you?
MUNLOCHY: Less than nothing. I am a republican.
ELDER: Some people, picturing you as the lady of a big house in the Highlands, would say that that is merely a conceit.
MUNLOCHY: They can say what they like. I am not interested in their opinions. I couldn’t help what I was born to any more than they could, or the Queen for that matter. That doesn’t justify the continued existence of queens.
ELDER: Or of Highland estates.
MUNLOCHY: I agree. As you will have noticed, we are much reduced. However, abolishing Glentaragar House will not repopulate the glen. If it could, I would be the first to reach for a sledgehammer.
ELDER: You said you admired your great-uncle’s disdain for authority. Do you share that disdain?
MUNLOCHY: Yes, but I would qualify it. I respect authority that’s been earned, that knows what it’s talking about and is not complacent. If someone is an authority on herons, say, or the works of W. B. Yeats, that is admirable and useful.
ELDER: As well as a republican, you’ve been many other things politically. You once espoused the radical socialist cause. Do you still hold those extreme views?
MUNLOCHY: In principle, yes. They weren’t extreme then. They were extreme times and one’s ideas were shaped by the times. In the 1930s, with fascism raging across Europe, what choice did I have but to take the opposing view?
ELDER: Do we live in less extreme times now?
MUNLOCHY: You must ask the young that question, not me.
ELDER: You were accused by Willie Ross of political promiscuity. You were a communist, a socialist, a Scottish Nationalist, an Independent with Liberal sympathies – was his accusation just?
To Be Continued Page 27