But it sufficed, and the young people who listened and danced lapped it all up anyway, for it made little difference to them as long as the music was fast and furious and they could laugh and talk and drink and have a good time. And she didn’t blame them, for she too was young and free. Who the hell really wanted all that serious stuff anyway, with some poncey critic sitting there musing over whether the A-flat major allegro had a sufficiently determinative quality or whether the subsequent adagio had enough pathos and cathartic passion?
Though she knew now it mattered. That it was the difference between life and death, art and kitsch, heaven and hell, greatness and stupidity – all those mirrors. She’d drifted, and here she was, in consequence, sitting back where she’d started, at Waverley Station waiting for the train westwards. And how different it all was: digital and clean.
She walked over to where the bench had once been which was now the beginning of the direct escalator leading up to Princes Street. For a moment she considered leaping on to the escalator: who knows that she might not find the violin sitting there waiting for her at the top of the stairs? But the information screen and a disembodied voice announced her train and so she passed through the ticket barrier and rolled her suitcase down the platform towards her destination. She sat backwards facing east.
The castle passed, and they went through a tunnel, and stopped at Haymarket. Murrayfield Stadium to the left,
PC World to the right. She reversed through Linlithgow and Falkirk and Polmont and Croy and found herself back in Queen Street. Ten paces to the left and she was on the Oban train. This time she sat forward facing, at a table.
She took out her laptop and checked her emails and scanned the news sites and looked out the window as they chugged towards Westerton. How little had really changed: this train still moved slowly, the high rise flats were still there, the Clyde estuary still grey when glimpsed from the bridges. Joe had once said to her that Alf Tupper lived there, behind the garages in Dumbarton.
She’d had a choice. One of the bands wanted to go full-time and she was tempted. A German promoter had signed them up and was offering worldwide gigs on a professional basis – a three-month tour of Japan, as well as some concerts in Singapore and Hong Kong and then some more dates in Australia, and perhaps Canada to follow. The other members of the band pleaded, but she wanted to travel alone for a while without the need for schedules and rehearsals and late night sessions and all the rest of it. She’d done enough of that already throughout her childhood and youth, playing in all the orchestras that were available, touring the Nordic countries and throughout Europe on long overnight bus journeys.
Instead, she saw an advert. One evening after a lecture at the Botanics she saw the advert in a shop window on Byres Road. She must have seen the notice a thousand times before, because she called into the shop most days for her milk and paper and stuff, but it was the first time she read it.
It was nothing startling either: just one of those ordinary VSO posters asking young people to volunteer a year of their life to help the poor in the developing world. She noted down the London address and number and phoned the following morning, and a girl said she would send her some information and leaflets and brochures though the post.
She smiled, looking out through the window. How quaint it all seems now! Writing down an address and phone number, then phoning and waiting for a day or two for material to come through the post, in the days before instant access and downloading! Anyway, it came, with details about all the projects they were involved with all over the world. Teaching in Northern Finland, dam construction in Thailand, a thousand and one other projects in Africa and Indonesia and South America and elsewhere.
They were looking for volunteers to work for up to a year in Peru on a river reclamation scheme alongside the indigenous Yagua Indians in the western Amazon basin near Iquitos. It was the usual global story – loggers and highway builders and oil cartels had plundered the area causing enormous damage to the ecosystem, and the indigenous people in this previously remote district had suffered terrible crop damage and flooding as a direct consequence of unregulated developments. This particular project would involve helping the local population to counteract bank stream-erosion and build up a riparian banking system which would try and restore the river flow to its predevelopment level.
She was there within the month, joining up with a number of other young people from all over the world. The local people, working through the church, welcomed them with open arms and of course in no time at all she knew that the RRSP (the River Reclamation Scheme Project) which she’d seen advertised in the VSO magazine could not be separated from the thousand and one other things which made up the community and which needed to be engaged with, from health to education and justice. The indigenous language needed – or at least ought – to be learnt, to make anything worthwhile.
She stayed with a local family – husband, wife and seven young children – who were a joy to be with. She helped nurse them; she got her mother to post books and toys over for them; she helped teach the mother and the father to read and write. For several weeks she herself fell ill and became completely reliant on them for everything; they encouraged her spirit; they sang to her; they taught her, once she got better, which foods to eat and which to avoid; they taught her how to spin in their traditional manner and how to sow using the shaved-down horn of a cow as a kind of super-needle; they taught her some of their stories and charms and recipes and cures. In turn, once she got better, she helped them to extend their vegetable patch and again got her mother to post over some seedling crops which they tended not to use – including the dry Kerr’s Pinks potatoes – which they spat out as inedible.
Gradually, the river itself was buttressed and banked, and with the help of some Swiss engineers an entire water-cleansing filter system was fitted which made it cleaner than it had ever been. The Swiss engineers alongside some Canadian volunteers also introduced an elementary piping system through which clean water, for the first time ever, was actually piped into some of the village homes.
There seemed to be no dispute over which homes along the river delta received this benefit: it was simply chosen arithmetically, with every tenth home, beginning from the hut nearest the riverbank, receiving the blessing. Helen suspected that it would only cause trouble in years to come, but kept quiet about it. Her fear was that every arbitrary tenth house would therefore become more ‘valuable’ and would set in flow an obnoxious market system in which people would begin to barter for and buy and sell these water-privileged homes.
But that was over forty years ago, and she hadn’t been back, so she didn’t know. She toyed with the idea right there and then of simply Googling the name of the village and she would instantly know what had happened, but resisted the notion. It seemed, somehow, sacrilegious. It would be like invading the past with a weapon of mass destruction, and for what purpose? Curiosity? Everything had been done in good faith, and hindsight would only add righteousness or regret to it.
Instead, she simply remembered their music. Their basic instruments were the sutendiu, which was a kind of flute, and the chinu – the drum. But they’d had a fiddle too – a simple little three-stringed instrument which made the most ridiculous sound when played badly – by her – and the most delightful sound when played properly by one of the local musicians. She tried it, of course, and they loved the effort and the ridiculous sound she made, and all the immediate neighbours gathered to share the joy.
Then the local expert, a middle-aged man called Túpac, raised the instrument and wove magical sounds out of it. His speciality was the gua in which he could more or less reproduce the sounds of all the beasts of the forests and the birds of the air through these three strings.
The evening before she left, when the whole community gathered for a feast of maize and yams and sweet potatoes and sugar cane liquor, he played through the night, replicating the sound of a jaguar’s growl as the moon rose high over the Andes. She cried tha
t night, certainly. Partially because of the farewell moment, partially because of the sugar cane, but also because of the pure sound of the music which brought dreams to life as they all danced them into existence.
When she returned to Scotland, simply going back to being a gigging musician round the clubs seemed somehow petty and ridiculous. She searched the international pages of The Times and The Guardian and applied to several organisations which were working worldwide in the environmental sector. They all gave her an interview, and they all offered her jobs, and she finally settled on the Government’s own Overseas Agency which dealt with a host of global developmental issues.
Her first posting was, bizarrely she thought, to the Rock of Gibraltar where the British Government was researching the marine ecology of the straits. The particular study was whether the marine biology of the Straits of Gibraltar were significantly different on the two sides of the rock: on the western Atlantic side, and in the eastern Mediterranean side.
They were: there was more evidence of a richer ecosystem in the western stretch, and another study then followed to try and work out the causes, which proved indecisive, some evidence suggesting that the Gulf Stream was the primary beneficial factor, other evidence clearly pointing to the fact that the heavier maritime traffic within the Mediterranean sector led to the inevitably greater pollution.
Helen struggled with the whole thing anyway. Compared to the earthy experience of Peru it was far too abstract, and she knew that a political fudge over the issue was inevitable. The raw data and the statistics and the analysis would be despatched back to Westminster where it would be swallowed up in the endless bureaucracy of the civil service or ultimately stifled by political posturing and compromise.
After a year there, she was posted to another assignment, this time working in Madagascar on the development of a fruit exporting scheme to Europe. Her job, basically, was to help the local people establish their own networks so that they wouldn’t be ripped off by the existing large export merchants who tended to be based in South Africa working through self-appointed agents on the island.
The job was dangerous enough: she was warned off and threatened several times, but through time earned the complete trust of the local people who then ensured her safety. She stayed for five years by which time the fat merchants of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and Durban were corralled into a twenty per cent share of the market with the main eighty per cent being in the complete control of the indigenous growers and producers.
It was a necessary and useful compromise, meaning that the big merchants still retained an interest, while the locals could use their European and worldwide contacts for brokering some of the deals. In many ways it was the beginning of the Fair Trade movement, though none of the history books have seriously acknowledged the part played in that great development by Helen O’Connor.
Her father, Sean, had been part of the major postwar exodus from Ireland to Scotland in search of work. Arriving initially as an itinerant field labourer, he had travelled the fruit and tattie fields of the Carse of Gowrie and Perthshire, but then found work at the new hydroelectric scheme which had just started at Loch Sloy, then at Cruachan, in Argyll.
Fantastic work – long hours, hard, but with good pay. He lived in a caravan. His great advantage was that he didn’t drink, so he was able to save up and after some time bought himself one of the little former railway cottages by Loch Awe.
He met Helen’s mother at a dance in Oban. He danced well, moving with grace and freedom, rather than with any precision. She was up with her family for the summer’s holiday from ‘down south,’ as she put it when he asked her.
‘How far south?’ he asked.
‘South of here,’ she replied, and I suppose it was the fun ping-pong of words which first drew them to each other.
‘There’s a lot of south.’
‘And as much north.’
‘Ah, but I’m from the west!’
‘Which must be east of somewhere…!’
He was from the south himself, of course. County Clare, to be precise – the son of the famous seann nòs singer Máire Ní Chonaola, whose father was the fiddler Seosamh Mac Eòin – and though he could sing, and play the fiddle, his own preference was for the squeezebox which he took with him everywhere he went to play parts of the thousands of tunes he knew, though he never left out his favourites, the ‘Foggy Dew’, the ‘Fields of Athenry’, the ‘Kesh Jig’ and the ‘Rakes of Kildare’.
‘He played beautifully,’ her mother said. ‘A tiny little red melodeon he called Bridget. Said he liked giving her an occasional squeeze! He was left-handed of course so he’d just play it upside down as it were. Or back to front. “After all,” he’d say, “the notes are all the same whichever way you play them. C is C both this way and that.” And then he’d move his fingers ever so gently across the buttons and out would come this gorgeous music. As if it had been trapped inside the little box till then, like the fairies.’
Helen stared at her own reflection in the train window. She wasn’t that old. Barely sixty, really, which was no age at all these days. He’d hardly been half that age when he drowned, graveless unless you count the ocean as one vast grave west of the Treshnish Isles. She was so young at the time, but old enough to remember it all. ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ she heard her Mum screaming, downstairs, and when she ran down her mother grabbed hold of her and held her tight for such a long time.
His body was never found, which was surprising, as they all believed the tides would bring him ashore at some time in some place between the Ross of Mull and Ardnamurchan Point, but the sea behaved differently, and not once in the fifty years since had a body or bones or a skeleton been found to match his DNA. The world had forgotten too of course, for it was all such a long time ago.
Her mother had a burial place though: the beautiful ancient cemetery of Calaigearaidh with its astonishing view over the Atlantic towards Coll and Tiree and beyond. No one had actually been buried in this old graveyard since the third-quarter of the nineteenth century (one Mary MacDonald, described as a pauper, 1874) but Helen’s mother had been friends with old Tomas MacLean who claimed family rights to the two unused lairs in the north-east corner, and willingly agreed that she could have one of them when she died.
‘I’ll go into the other one myself,’ old Tomas said, ‘for when I rise I want to be in the company of my own people.’
How strange to be heading home to a place which was not home any more. Hadn’t been for such a long time. Though that wasn’t true: it was always home, even though her mother was now dead and the house empty and her father lost for so long. Perhaps none of it mattered. Everyone mere pilgrims on earth, moving their tents from glen to street.
She smiled, still seeing the goats on the terrace, the fresh strawberries sitting on the kitchen table, her mother bent double shearing the sheep. She still had the angora cardigan she’d made for her twenty-first. And she’d been back before: it was not that it was some kind of pilgrimage to pay homage to the past. It was only a commonplace journey, to visit some old friends, to place fresh flowers on the grave, to throw some new petals out into the ocean.
That was always the most moving thing: picking the few wild flowers, then going out in old Lachlan’s boat, who always turned the engine off and went down below while she unpicked the petals, one by one, and released them into the sea. They would always float and never sink, but eventually drift out of sight in the boat’s wake.
This train always missed the last ferry too. So she would spend the night in Oban itself before catching the first boat in the morning. Which is when I saw her again, after all those unknown years.
6
I WOULD HAVE stayed on after building the boat, had I not met Dr Margherita Johnson that night.
The launch had gone really well that morning, and everyone in the whole district had come out to watch the event. I make it sound like the launch of the QE2, when of course it was just a little bittie boat which Alasdair and Kate
planned to use occasionally for sauntering round the harbour, or – at best – to reach out to Tòrr Point to catch a few cuddies. ‘Watch out you don’t hit the Queen Mary!’ someone called. ‘To the end of the bay, then hard-a-starboard to New York!’ shouted Seonaidh Dubh, who’d spent ten years on the whalers.
Even the English word ‘boat’ sounds far too grand for the Gaelic word sgoth, which really means a skiff. The Gaelic word for boat is bàta which signifies a much larger vessel, such as a fishing smack or a cargo boat, though that tends to be a soitheach – a ship.
So the skiff was launched, without any great fuss really, except that the local priest was asked to bless the occasion, and having done so everyone then clapped and cheered and had a dram as old Alasdair and Kate climbed into it and rowed away out into the heart of the bay. It was a beautiful early September Saturday morning with hardly a breath of wind in the air, and overhead a clear cloudless sky. The sea was sulphur blue.
We all sat on little hillocks and rocks and drank from cans of beer and half bottles of whisky and flasks of tea as we watched them throw out the line in the little inlet between the slipway and Clach Oscar, where they were almost certain to have a catch. We had great joy watching them hauling them in, hearing their laughter coming across the bay through the stillness of the morning.
‘Time we lit up,’ old Archie said, and the few boys and girls left in the village ran off to gather some sticks with which to make the fire. There was a time I’d have gone with them, but I sat where I was sipping from a can of lager. Deborah stood in a polka dot bikini leaning against a tree on the side of the can. The children returned within half an hour or so, each of them with a handful of driftwood, gathered from the shore.
As soon as Alasdair and Kate saw the wisp of smoke rising from the fire they began to row home: within the hour a basketful of fish was roasting on the fire and some singing had begun amongst the women. Òrain luaidh, mostly – waulking songs, which rose and fell according to whichever woman decided to lead.
The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 5