To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  For a long time, I found myself ducking this process with some woolly clichés, something along the lines of ‘I’ll just go on as always, only maybe a bit more slowly (daytime naps) but I will just keep on keeping on’. That is little better than a New Year resolution and not a preparation for anything. All of this is difficult territory and probably not worth mapping out with statistics and attitudes that are near impossible to measure. Instead, I began thinking much more seriously at Old Melrose about what my own feelings and attitudes are as I approach my eighth decade. Perhaps this is a second gift from Cuthbert.

  As they often are, my thoughts were drawn back to the ghost in my heart, the shade of a little girl I was never allowed to know but who carried some of my blood and my genes. A few days ago, I noticed that the dry summer had turned the crown of Hannah’s Tree brown. Through lack of rain from May to July, it had been struggling. We had to keep it alive, and Lindsay did, because the rowan tree was planted behind Adam and Kim’s house in memory of their first child, our first granddaughter. Hannah was stillborn, a clot having blocked her umbilicus and starved her to death. I find this difficult to write because the sadness floods back, the tears come, and nothing has hit any of us harder. Her funeral was the blackest, most difficult day of our lives and the image of her little wicker basket coffin will stay with me until the end of my days. It is all I have of her.

  As I followed Cuthbert through a landscape so familiar to me and so much a part of my family’s experience of life, I found myself thinking a great deal about the wee girl, about those who would have been part of her, those who made me and meant so much to me. Sometimes I can’t seem to shake this bitter darkness. It is not her death I mourn so much as the complete loss of her future, and eventually a past. She had neither. When contemporaries die, we remember our shared past with them, and through the clouds of grief there is something to latch on to, something even to smile about. But we have nothing but loss with Hannah. She would have been three years old now.

  There are photographs of Hannah Lindsay Karen Moffat, and Adam and Kim have a lock of her black hair, a handprint and other sad shreds of what she was and might have been, but I am so fragile about this that I have not yet been able to bring myself to look at these pictures and her things. Lindsay went to the hospital to see Hannah and told me she was perfect, but I feel the image of the little baby will haunt me. It is a variety of moral cowardice I am not proud of, but the memory of the profound sadness of two years and more ago (I cannot even bring myself to work out the precise date of her death; all I remember is that I had to go to London the day after she died to make a speech) is enough for me to cope with for now.

  Little more than a year after Hannah died, her sister was born. One of the many joys of Grace is a prosaic but important one: she inherited all of the clothes and some of the things that were bought for her older sister. It took great courage from Kim and Adam to try for another baby so soon after Hannah’s death, but it was the right thing to do because forcing themselves to look to the future, and the happy fact that Grace is a girl, made the pain a little easier to bear. A surprising and even more painful part of what happened does stay permanently with me, something more that was lost. Hannah was dark-haired like Kim, and Grace is very fair, like Adam, and I would so liked to have seen them side by side, Hannah teaching her little sister about the world. We shall never forget her, but we have lost her – almost completely.

  Before we sat down at the table on Christmas Day last year, Adam asked if we had any tea-lights and his mum found some in the boiler room. He then lit and placed one in a small metal holder with Hannah’s name engraved on it. He and Kim are determined that she will not be forgotten or her presence left out of important occasions and I had to swallow hard at the other end of the table as her little sister shrieked with excitement. Sadness amidst joy is simply how life is, I suspect, and I was glad to remember the wee lass and what might have been. As the years pass, the pain of her death grows no less sharp.

  Instead of putting Hannah’s death and the cruel robbery of her future to the back of my mind, I wanted to honour her by learning something from it. She is dead and I cannot reach across the snows of eternity and help her, but perhaps the wee lass can help me. I began to think more and more that we should keep the dead close to us. Hannah is buried on our farm in the garden of her parents’ house, the place we all made and invested with memories, and her first lesson for me is the firm decision that I will be buried alongside her, where she is waiting for me.

  When we all decided that Grace should have a naming party (her parents are not believers in any religion), I asked to say something. What follows was an early attempt I made to describe a different sort of afterlife, and unusually I wrote it down, wanting to be precise and clear. It did not work out that way.

  Katherine, the lovely humanist celebrant who had married Kim and Adam, had also come down to the crematorium to help us with Hannah’s funeral and she seemed the right person to be with us on Grace’s day. Unexpectedly, she began by saying something about Hannah and suddenly, waiting to speak, I was overwhelmed by a tide of sadness at a moment when I wanted to try to bring the living and the dead together. Having managed to hold back the tears until I reached the last paragraph of what I had to say, I simply had to stop for a long moment to gather myself. Afterwards, I was disappointed, since I felt that what I had to say might be the beginnings of learning something from Hannah’s death, something not about immortality but about a life after death, and these attempts were diluted when grief engulfed me. Here is the text of the short speech I almost failed to make:

  As Grace Moffat begins her journey into the future, she takes the past with her. It is an immense past, reaching far back beyond memory, much of it lived amongst these sheltering hills and rolling river valleys. Her people walked their lives under the big skies of the Borders, skies that seem to fascinate her now. Grace’s gaze is often upwards, beyond the immediate, her deep blue eyes lifted towards to the blue yonder of the sky. The ghosts of Grace’s past will walk beside her as she skips down the track to the stables or walks out with the dogs on a summer morning.

  This is Grace’s day, a day of names, the names of memory and the names of love. Grace Moffat is the great-great-granddaughter of Bina Moffat. In the late nineteenth century she too was born on a Borders farm, at Cliftonhill near Kelso, not far from here. Grace will come to know what Bina knew – the snell winter winds whipping off the hills, the butter-coloured sun spreading over the dawn fields, the summer bummies buzzing in the warm breeze, the robins picking at the midden in the hungry months of the late winter. Although Bina was born in 1890, 126 years ago, Grace will come to know something of her life.

  Ellen Moffat is her great-grandmother. Hawick-born and raised as one of seven sisters and a solitary brother, she lived in the body-warmth of a busy industrial town, working in the rattle and clack of the textile mills and in the culture of the close community of the common riding, where women could put men in their place with a single freeze-frame, old-fashioned look. Her great-granddaughter has yet to perfect that necessary art, but like Ellen Moffat, Grace Moffat has a smile that could light a darkened room.

  On this day of names, Grace’s grandmothers, Lindsay and Karen, have wrapped their girl in love and memory. Grace wears Lindsay’s own christening gown and she is wrapped in a shawl made by Karen’s mother, Kim’s much loved Nana. The grannies have much more to give her, but the detail of that will be far beyond the understanding of any man. Love has secrets, and Grace and her grannies will giggle and smile while father and grandfather shake their heads and shrug.

  Kim Moffat gave Grace Moffat the greatest gift. Her bond with her baby is unbreakable, forged in the gazes and glances of love, in the fitful sleep of broken nights, in the burble and chatter of wakefulness. Grace is beautiful and Kim made her beautiful.

  Grace has changed us all, directing us to a different future, but she has changed Adam utterly. I have never seen a father so involved, so shar
ing of the necessary burdens, so confident with his wee one in his protecting arms, so attentive and so expert. You are a fantastic father, Adam, and your mum and I are so proud of you.

  But there is one obligation we can share as a dad and grandad. We should help Grace remember things she cannot know. You should tell her about the generations that have gone, about her great-grandparents, Jack and Ellen Moffat, Malcolm and Helen Thomas, while Kim can tell her about her own beloved Nana. And I’ll make sure that Bina Moffat takes Grace Moffat’s hand as these two children of the land walk around the edge of a circle that leads from Cliftonhill in 1890 to this farm in 2016. And they will share a secret: both will know that on moonless nights, you can find your way by starlight.

  Keeping the dead close can make the future come alive. No matter how painful it is to remember the death of Hannah – and I have struggled all morning with tears as I wrote this – we make our dead live much longer if we keep them alive in memory, anecdote and even with the passing on of inherited characteristics, names, hair colour, facial expressions, phrases and much else. In an increasingly atomised society, shaken up and slackened by social mobility, these precious threads that bind the present to the past are often broken. Too few, for example, can name all four of their grandparents. Some years ago, I was involved in an ancestral DNA project where we asked a large sample exactly that question and I was shocked at how few could answer without first doing some research.

  In order to keep the dead closer, we do not need to rewind history, return to an impossible bucolic Brigadoon of farming folk who never went anywhere. We just need to remember more and better, and change the way we think. Some years ago I did an immersion course in Scots Gaelic and was struck by how well and simply its usage caught the body warmth of the communities in the Western Isles where the old language is still heard. When Gaelic speakers meet someone new, they don’t ask where they live or what they do, the sort of standard exchange between strangers at parties or functions. Instead, they enquire, ‘Cò as a tha thu?’ Which loosely translates as, ‘Who are your people?’ That is surely a much better question, one that will elicit a personal, perhaps even unique response. There are many teachers, road sweepers and software designers in the world, but in telling someone about your family and not your job or your address, you fill in a background that is yours alone. And you keep the dead close.

  Death loomed much closer for Cuthbert and the monks at Old Melrose. In an age before all the blessings of modern medicine, life in the seventh century was considerably shorter and could end abruptly and painfully. A great pestilence several times stalked the land. In 541 what is known as the Plague of Justinian broke out in Constantinople. A version of bubonic plague, it devastated populations and its first wave killed about twenty-five million people, perhaps 13 per cent of the world’s population at that time. Historians believe that its spread to Britain fatally weakened post-Roman society and made it easier for the Angle and Saxon invaders to defeat native kings and take over their territory.

  Plague broke out again in the middle of the seventh century and the pandemic is thought to have affected Britain particularly severely in the decades after 660, not long after Cuthbert dismounted at the gates of Old Melrose. Bede wrote simply ‘the pestilence came’, and to some its visitations seemed apocalyptic, a manifestation of God’s anger at the sinfulness of men and a prelude to the end of days, the Last Judgement.

  Not only did the plague encourage the devout in their prayer and privation, making their preparations for a life after death more urgent, it also encouraged them to think about what the world would be like after the apocalypse, what was sometimes thought of as the Second Creation. Being closer to God than ordinary mortals, saints were believed to have insights, to understand something of how the world and all its creatures would be remade anew by the hand of the Almighty and how heaven on Earth would be restored.

  Cuthbert loved animals and several of his miracle stories tell how they helped and looked after the saint. Both Bede and the Anonymous Life recount his journey from Old Melrose to the cliffs of the Berwickshire coast to visit the Abbess Aebbe, the sister of King Oswiu of Northumbria, but the latter’s is more eloquent and atmospheric:

  He came to the monastery which is called Coldingham, in response to the invitation, and remaining there some days, did not relax his habitual way of life but began to walk about by night on the seashore, keeping up his custom of singing as he kept vigil. When a certain cleric of the community found this out, he began to follow him from a distance to test him, wishing to know what he did with himself at night. But that man of God, approaching the sea with mind made resolute, went into the waves up to his loincloth; and once he was soaked as far as his armpits by the tumultuous and stormy sea. Then coming up out of the sea, he prayed, bending his knees on the sandy part of the shore, and immediately there followed in his footsteps two little sea animals, humbly prostrating themselves on the earth; and, licking his feet, they rolled upon them, wiping them with their skins and warming them with their breath. After this service and ministry had been fulfilled and his blessing had been received, they departed to their haunts in the waves of the sea. But the man of God, returning home at cockcrow, came to the church of God to join in public prayer with the brethren.

  The above-mentioned cleric of the community lay hidden amid the rocks, frightened and trembling at the sight and, being in anguish all night long, he came nigh to death. The next day he prostrated himself at the feet of the man of God and, in a tearful voice, prayed for his pardon and indulgence. The man of God answered him with prophetic words: ‘My brother, what is the matter with you? Have you approached nearer me, to test me, than you should have done? Nevertheless, since you admit it, you shall receive pardon on one condition; that you vow never to tell the story so long as I am alive.’ The brother made the vow and kept it afterwards and departed with his blessing, healed. But after Cuthbert’s death, he told many brethren how the animals ministered to the saint, just as we read in the Old Testament that the lions ministered to Daniel.

  What terrified the young monk who spied on Cuthbert was that he had seen something he should not, a glimpse of what might be the Kingdom of God. The behaviour of the sea otters was a memory of the harmonies of the First Creation, when God walked in the garden. After the serpent hissed to Eve that she should eat the forbidden fruit, and she and Adam realised they were naked and were ashamed, much was lost and prophets longed for a time when once more the ‘lion would lie down with the lamb’.

  It was the power of Cuthbert’s prayer and privation, his near-immersion at dead of night in the ice-cold waters of the North Sea, that brought forth the otters from the waves. And that was the fundamental lesson of the miraculous story. Night vigil, psalm singing, fasting, prayer, the pain of extreme cold and constancy of faith would eventually right the balance of Creation and compensate for the original sin committed by Eve and Adam. The old saints and their fellows underwent all sorts of painful tests not only for the sake of their own salvation but also to implore God to restore the lost harmonies of Eden for all mankind.

  In both Bede’s and the Anonymous Life there are several stories of animals helping (and initially hindering) Cuthbert. As he and a companion travelled up the River Teviot, perhaps by boat, and into the hills on a mission of conversion, an osprey or perhaps an eagle brought them ‘a large fish’, almost certainly a salmon. When the boy took it for themselves, the man of God rebuked him and instructed that the fish be divided and half given to the eagle: ‘Why did you not give our fisherman a part of it to eat since he was fasting?’ On modern Lindisfarne, Cuthbert’s bond with animals and birds in particular is fondly remembered. Perhaps because he insisted that its nests on Inner Farne be untouched, the eider duck is known as Cuddy’s duck.

  When Cuthbert first retreated to make a hermitage on Inner Farne, he dug and trenched such land as there was so that he could grow his own grain and vegetables and so reduce the frequency of visits from the outside world. Two ravens
arrived and began to tear at the thatch of a shelter built for visitors in order to build a nest. It must have been springtime. ‘With a slight motion of the hand’, Cuthbert shooed them off and told them to cease. When the ravens ignored him, the saint invoked the name of Jesus Christ and banished them from the island. And then this fascinating exchange took place:

  . . . after three days, one of the two returned to the feet of the man of God as he was digging the ground, and settling above the furrow with outspread wings and drooping head, began to croak loudly, with humble cries asking his pardon and indulgence. And the servant of Christ, recognising their penitence, gave them pardon and permission to return. And those ravens at the same time having won peace, both returned to the island with a little gift. For each held in its beak about half a piece of pig’s lard which it placed before his feet. He pardoned their sin and they remain there until today. Most trustworthy witnesses who visited him, and for the space of a whole year greased their boots with the lard, told me of these things, glorifying God.

  On the windswept rock that is Inner Farne, Cuthbert’s closeness to God, his sanctity and patience, had created a tiny Edenic enclave where the harmonies of the Second Creation were prefigured. These were the beginnings of a tradition that found its most famous flowering in the life of St Francis of Assisi. While it is easy to dismiss these tales as early medieval versions of Dr Doolittle, they suggest a different, perhaps simpler and more profound way of thinking about the world, the whole world and not just the way men and women have exploited and bent it out of its natural shape.