by Jill Stark
At times, the rain falls so hard that I can barely see the car in front of me. I’m annoyed that this precious time with Mum should be so rudely blighted. But this is home; it’s always been this way. Ask a Scotsman what he calls six weeks of rain, and he’ll reply, ‘Summer.’ Scotland is often at her most dramatic when enveloped in mist or drizzle. Ours is a history of struggle, a past steeped in bloody battles and violent uprisings. It’s only fitting that the weather should match that.
We arrive in Pitlochry, gateway to the Highlands, and head up a narrow road to the hotel where we’ll be spending the night. When I see it, I think Mum must be having a laugh. As if travelling through the Highlands — where there are more pubs and distilleries than people — completely sober isn’t enough of a challenge, Mum has booked us into a brewery for the night. The hotel, which has been a travellers’ rest since 1695, boasts some of the region’s finest ales, with evocative names such as Braveheart and Old Remedial, none of which I’ll be enjoying. Over lunch, Mum giggles, telling me, ‘I wanted it to be authentic for you,’ as she clinks her delicious-looking amber ale against my sad glass of Diet Coke. When I ask her why we Scots don’t always look each other in the eye when we say slàinte mhath (the equivalent of ‘cheers’, meaning ‘your very good health’), as is customary in Australia, she’s not sure, but suggests perhaps it’s because the priority is to keep an eye on your drink so you don’t spill any.
In keeping with the tone, we decide to while away the wet afternoon in a distillery. We trundle down a snaky single-track road until we arrive at Edradour, the smallest distillery in Scotland. This is the very type of business the alcohol industry claims will face closure should a minimum price for alcohol be introduced. That would be a sad day indeed. This place is charming beyond words. Unlike the larger operations, which use computerised systems to mass-produce a drink that has a global market, Edradour is the last distillery in Scotland where you can see malt whisky made by hand. They use the same traditional copper-pot stills as the bigger distilleries, but they’re much smaller, the largest one holding just 800 gallons of whisky — which, to my mind, still seems like an enormous amount of Scotch. But here at Edradour, our kilted tour guide tells us, they produce in a year what the big distilleries make in a week: just 15 casks. The whisky sits in the warehouse in its cask for ten years. About a quarter of each barrel will evaporate over that time. This is called ‘the angels’ share’. It’s not hard to see how we developed a national obsession with drinking; the language of alcohol in Scotland is heavenly. We pay the amber drop so much reverence; is it any wonder I’ve grown up to be such a prolific drinker?
Our guide tells us that, unlike wine, malt whisky doesn’t mature in the bottle, so ‘if you buy it, drink it’. When the tray of sample drams is handed around, I don’t have to be told what to do. I accept the glass, nose it — breathing in the fumes of a drink that, despite Mum’s marketing campaign, has always smelled to me like drain cleaner — and pour it, discreetly, into her glass. Even with my unpatriotic palate, I still feel like I’m missing out. Any other time I would down that dram, just because it’s there; refusing a free drink just isn’t in me. And at 63 per cent alcohol, if nothing else it would warm me up.
When we wake the following day, it’s still overcast, but the rain has stopped. I stick my head out the window of our top-floor room (a place that isn’t without charm but, with its wall-to-wall tartan, invokes a claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside a shortbread tin) and inhale the cleansing air. I feel energised in one breath. We head out early and sit on the banks of the River Tummel, a mesmerising, fast-flowing expanse of water. The salmon making their way to spawning grounds upstream are battling a strong current, occasionally leaping out of the water on their epic journey. I watch in admiration, knowing how hard it is to swim against a tide that tries so intently to pull you back the way you came.
To get a bird’s-eye perspective of the area, we head up to Queen’s View. This scenic lookout was made famous by a visit from Queen Victoria in 1866, but is actually thought to have been named after Queen Isabella, wife of Robert the Bruce. It’s a sight fit for a queen: lush greenery hugs the banks of a loch as clear and still as glass, stretching all the way into the Glencoe mountains to the west. It’s staggeringly beautiful. Other than the electricity pylons and the narrow road that winds through the hills, there’s little sign that the landscape has changed in centuries. It’s hard to believe a place so tranquil has such a savage history.
At dinner, I’m faced with a dilemma. The traditional Scottish menu offers few options that haven’t been fried, baked, stewed, poached, or otherwise doused in alcohol. There’s venison with a port-and-cranberry jus, salmon in a chardonnay-and-chive cream sauce, duck with black cherries and blackcurrant liqueur, and an Angus fillet of beef in a whisky sauce. It feels almost traitorous to go for boring old chicken, or vegetarian lasagne, so I pick the local salmon, hoping that the cooking process will render the alcohol content of my meal negligible. As we tuck in, I feel conspicuous not drinking with my meal. Like us, most of the people in this quaint dining room, with its tartan tablecloths and pictures of native birds and fish, are visitors to the area. They’re marking their holidays by drinking bottles of wine and sampling the local beer and malt whisky. I feel as if I’m not getting the full Highland experience by sipping water.
Mum says it’s funny that I feel so exposed when it wasn’t that long ago the sight of a woman drinking would have scandalised the locals. In the 1960s, when she was young, Scottish women didn’t drink in public. Drinking out of a bottle would be enough to classify you as a loose woman. Pub windows would often be blacked out, or have the lower halves frosted, to prevent people from looking in. This, Mum says, was partly to protect children from witnessing the effects of the ‘demon drink’, but also so that men could enjoy a beer without their nosy womenfolk knowing where they were. ‘It was a man’s right to drink and not be seen,’ Mum says.
It sounds archaic. But then I compare it to what my friend Joanne told me recently about the way some Scottish women carry on in pubs these days. Having worked as a manager in the Glasgow pub trade for more than ten years, she’s seen it all. On Old Firm match days — a football derby between archenemies Rangers and Celtic that has a shocking history of sectarian violence — she’s seen alcohol-fuelled fights become full-scale riots. Predominantly, they involve men. But what really shocks her is the way that some women are now behaving. You would think that the reunion of a ’90s boy band would be a sedate affair, but when English pop group Take That staged a comeback tour in June, the streets of Glasgow were overrun with wasted middle-aged women. Many had been on marathon drinking sessions before the gig even started; some were so boozed, they collapsed. Others flashed their boobs at passing cars and urinated in the street. Joanne says that they were feral in the pub after the show: verbally abusing bar staff and generally being obnoxious. It’s hard to say what’s more offensive — women being branded as sluts for daring to have a drink in a man’s domain, or women getting so tanked that they relieve themselves in the gutter and pick fights with strangers.
After dinner, instead of setting up camp in the bar, Mum and I climb the twisty stairs to our bedroom and drink cups of tea while we huddle together over my laptop, watching Downton Abbey on DVD. It’s not very rock ’n’ roll, but these moments shared with Mum are special.
Throughout our journey, the scenery continues to amaze us. We pass Ardverikie House, more famously known as Glenbogle Castle in the BBC series Monarch of the Glen. Its fairytale turrets are even more impressive in real life. We travel miles without seeing another car, stopping occasionally to admire the stately homes and grand buildings nestled among the forests. In Australia, 1950s bungalows and austere office blocks are often heritage-listed attractions; in Scotland, centuries-old properties are so plentiful that many don’t even merit a mention on the map.
As we get closer to Whitebridge, we mistakenly take a tr
ip down a gravelly road that leads us deep into another Highland estate. Our only companions are sheep, ambling across the unsealed road. We pass another grand residence, perched next to a river that runs under a stone bridge and into an expansive inlet flanked by mountains. It’s the kind of scenery that’s hard to comprehend: a view so impressive that it feels like a guilty pleasure just being there. I get out of the car and absorb the serene silence, not a soul in sight. The stress of city life, the redundancies, my troubling thoughts about addiction, and my past and my future, all drift away from me like mist. After months of noise, finally some peace.
WE ARRIVE TO spend the night in a lovely bed and breakfast, where the owner recommends we try the pub at the end of the road. Mum tells him that I don’t drink. ‘I don’t drink just now,’ I clarify, perhaps a smidgen too hastily. After all this time, it’s weird that I still don’t want to be judged by strangers as a boring teetotaller. Living so far from my homeland, I feel my Scottishness is being slowly chipped away with each year that passes. I worry that my abstinence only highlights my foreignness.
We wake to see a family of pheasants pecking around outside our bedroom window. The stillness of the Highlands is soothing. I feel my body and mind relaxing into the endless space around us. We head off to visit Aunty Cissie’s house, an old croft at the end of a single-track road, nestled in a thick forest. The trees were knee-high saplings when Mum was a girl. She remembers running in and out of them with her brother and sister during their school holidays. Cissie, who Mum always called Atta because as a child she couldn’t pronounce ‘aunty’, died in 1964. Mum has been back to visit her home a couple of times, but not for many years. As we stand outside the house, an elderly neighbour, with ruddy cheeks and billowing cotton-wool hair, approaches. He greets us with a broad smile. When Mum tells him who she is, he bundles her into an embrace and says he knew of Aunt Atta. His nephew now owns the house Mum spent so much of her childhood in. He asks if we want a dram. ‘I find it very lubricating,’ he says. ‘It eases the joints. Very good medicine.’ We politely decline. It’s ten o’clock in the morning.
Everywhere we go, we’re greeted by strangers as if we’re family. My Scottish accent, tinged with that upward Aussie inflection, returns with full force. It’s no longer ‘yes’ but ‘aye’, ‘cannae’ not ‘can’t’, ‘tatties’ rather than ‘potatoes’. The scenery grows more breathtaking with every bend rounded. Driving near Whitebridge, we see deer grazing on a hillside, just metres from us. As we pull over, they stop eating and look up, the stag staring directly at me, transfixed. Later, at the Falls of Foyers, a waterfall that feeds into Loch Ness, something unexpected happens: the sights, smells, and sounds of my homeland prove too much. As the water thunders, I look across the canopy of trees to a deep gorge, which rises up to a cliff top lined with pine trees. It’s a view of such uncompromising beauty that I find myself in tears. As I take in the vivid green fields and the storybook mountains beyond, the emotion pours out of me. I am home, at peace, and totally alive. I have a sense of my place in the world that seems to ground my soul to the Highland soil. Mum puts an arm around my shoulder and I rest my head against hers. We look on in awe at the show our country is putting on for us. I’m so lucky.
Later, as the late-evening sun sets and the horizon turns to fairy floss, we crank up the volume on Frankie Miller’s version of Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’, an unofficial Scottish national anthem, and belt it out as we drive through twisty roads carved into a glen that stretches on for miles. ‘Let me tell you that I love you / That I think about you all the time / Caledonia, you’re calling me / And now I’m going home.’ In that moment, fingers intertwined, we are the only two people on the planet. I worried that a homecoming without alcohol would make my national identity disappear, but I’ve never felt more Scottish. I know now that national pride is not built on alcohol. I worried that not drinking would prevent me from reconnecting with the ones I love, but my heart’s so full there’s no room for booze.
WHEN WE RETURN from the highlands, it’s not long before we’re back on the road. This time, we’re off to the Lake District for Mum’s sister Kitty’s 70th birthday party. Dad’s coming too, and Neil and his family. It will be the first time all of us have been together in the same country at the same time for many years. We’ll be staying at an old mansion that my cousin and her husband have bought and turned into holiday-rental accommodation. We leave Edinburgh in convoy for the three-hour journey, and I drive with dad.
When we arrive, on a beautiful, blue-sky afternoon, I do feel like a beer, but the moment is fleeting. I immerse myself in our family reunion and enjoy a weekend full of laughter. Previously, I would have marked this occasion by drinking my weight in wine; but being drunk can muddle some of the rich detail. This time, when I watch my aunty — who was widowed before I was born — slow-dance with her new partner, there are no beer goggles to obscure the sight, only my happy tears. The entire family, Scottish and English, bounces around the pub’s dance floor, singing Proclaimers songs at the tops of our lungs, and I don’t need wine to keep up. Later, as Mum clambers onto the bar — fuelled by malt whisky and an unwavering determination to cram as much fun into this lifetime as possible — I jump up with her, linking arms, partly to make sure she doesn’t fall off and hasten the need for a second hip replacement, and partly because dancing on the bar with your 65-year-old mother just seems like something we should all do at least once in our lives. It’s a reminder of the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last six months. When you take alcohol away, you have a choice: you either do the things you’re scared to do completely sober, or you don’t do them at all.
This weekend, I also tick off a goal I’ve been putting off for a very long time. For years, Mum has been asking me to sing for her. I’ve always made excuses. The last time she heard me sing publicly was at my high-school concert in my final year, when I was 18. Since then, due to a lack of confidence, the occasional drunken karaoke song is the closest I’ve got to live performance. When I stopped drinking, I ran out of excuses. So, every Monday night for the past few months, I’ve been brushing up on my skills by taking singing lessons, practising the song that Mum wants played at her funeral. ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’ is a sultry old jazz number that speaks of one woman’s refusal to play by society’s rules. It’s an anthem for the way Mum lives her life, and the way she and Dad taught me to believe in myself and follow my own road, no matter what anyone says. If I wait until they’re no longer around to hear me sing it, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.
So, in a pub full of people, mostly family, I get up and belt it out. I’m so nervous that it doesn’t turn out to be the best performance I’ve ever given: I’m breathy, and my voice breaks a little when the emotion of the moment catches up with me. But I look at Mum, with tears streaking down her face, one hand over her mouth and the other raised in rhythmic salute to the music, and it’s worth it. Few moments in life have given me greater satisfaction.
LEAVING DOESN’T GET any easier. Just when I’m wearing my scottishness like a comfortable pair of old slippers, I’m off again. I’m lucky to have two incredible countries to call home, but this endless tug of war is no good for my heart.
I meet Fiona and her son, Jude, for a farewell coffee. I won’t be here for his fifth birthday next month, so I give him his present now. His face, when he opens the gift, is a picture of delight. As I watch him, this good-natured wee boy with deep-blue eyes and a mop of blond hair, I’m in awe of my friend, who has raised two such wonderful children. She’s not one for public displays of emotion; I’m the sappy, demonstrative one. I’ll usually wait till we’ve had a few glasses of wine before I start gushing. But now, I say it anyway: I tell her those children are an absolute credit to her, and I’m proud of the family she’s created and the success she’s made of her life. We live on opposite sides of the world and I miss her terribly, but I’ve never seen her more contented — and that makes me happy.
When I get back to Melbourne, the first few weeks are hard. It’s the same every time. I miss my parents, I miss my friends, and I miss my homeland. I vow, as I always do, that I will keep my accent. This time, without alcohol, which usually brings my Scottish enunciation charging back to the surface, it’s even harder to hang on to. For a fortnight or so, I amuse my Melbourne friends by defiantly using Scots slang, and talking in a lilting brogue that’s somewhere between an east-coast Billy Connolly and Begbie from Trainspotting, but it doesn’t last. The Aussie inflections come back, my vowels lose their edge, and I’m once again fighting the urge to pound my chest and scream, ‘Freedom!’ when strangers hear my accent and ask if I’m American.
As I settle back into Melbourne life and reflect on the trip, I can’t stop thinking about my past. Realising that I was drunk for much of my youth was confronting. I call Jon Currie and ask him to make arrangements for the brain scan and tests. That might be the only way to know if all that partying and waywardness has taken its toll. He tells me that it may take several months to get an appointment. That’s okay — I’m curious, but I might need time to prepare for the results.