Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  Mum glammed up for the cremation by putting her make-up on the way he had liked. In-your-face emerald green eye shadow and thick sweeping eyeliner. She had his own music playing. The Third Ear Band, with the lyrics and the curtain draws across sounding as the curtains closed around the coffin. It occurred to me that it was fitting, really, that Paul should go into the flames after so many years of shovelling fuel into the Esse, but I was shocked at the force of my grief. That was the day Mum had giggled and giggled, but I understand her giggles better now. There was so much about her that I understood better now. Two weeks later I lost the baby I was carrying. Later, much later, I wondered if it had been for the best. The baby would have absorbed my shock, and it wouldn’t have been great to have carried such memories in its cells. I doubt I’d be able to say that if I hadn’t gone on to have three gorgeous healthy children.

  A movement up the hill caught my eye, the Ewe and Lamb were still up there, biding their time until I left. The Ewe was alert. She bent her muzzle around and checked in with her Lamb. I stood up, straightening my stiffening knees, wiping my tears. I looked around for Shuna, who had set off across the hill and was now small in the distance, heading towards the other archaeological site marked on the map, ‘Dun-Bharpa’.

  I got out the bead purse again. I was feeling raw, part of me wanted to leave all the beads here and be done with it. Mum’s presence was so strong, maybe I could leave her and my memories here. Just like that. I imagined pouring the rest of the beads over the stones, into the caved-in entrances to the tomb chambers. But I knew I couldn’t. I needed to make this journey through the Hebrides with her, to be with her, bead by bead. I took out a tiny, asymmetric piece of amber that glowed like an ember and pressed it into a fold in the large upright stone near me. It was held precisely, gently, in the flank of that rock. It burned brightly in the water-laden air, and would perhaps burn brightly there way beyond my lifetime.

  Then I picked out a small black pearl and laid it on the capstone I’d been sitting on. It shone too, but darkly, like a bear’s eye inside a cave. The wind or a rubbing sheep might move it sometime soon, so I picked it up and bent to place it inside the tomb. I withdrew quickly, my forearm welting with the fierce bite of a stinging nettle. I had been warned. I placed the pearl back on the horizontal slab, let the Sheep or the wind or the Faeries have it then. I set off to join Shuna.

  We traversed the hill back down towards the pickup. The tops of old dykes, the rest of them long since sunk, lay across the boggy slopes like strings of pearls. I stopped beside an old Massey Ferguson like the one Martin does most of the farm work on at home. A 1964 model, it is the same age as him. Just the wheel rims of this Barra tractor were visible, and its red-rusted engine, and the aluminium clutch housing gone chalky with age. A trailer was still attached, its struts visible, the wooden boards mossed over. It had come a cropper who knows how long ago and I wondered what else was buried under this shifting time-steeped hillside.

  Back near the car I slowed my steps. A small grey Eriskay mare was standing ahead of us. I have a sweet spot for Eriskays. I have one at home and am full of admiration for this feisty breed which at one time was a mainstay of life in these islands, carrying seaweed and peats and people. The Mare was standing in the lee of a white container, one of those transport containers that are recycled all over the Highlands and Islands as workshops, feed stores, field shelters. I hadn’t seen the Mare on the way up, she must have been out of sight at the gable end. The ground was poached around the container and there was evidence of old hay. It looked like this was where she’d spent the winter. No sign of another pony, just some sheep further up the hillside. I looked at her, she looked back. She was sway-backed, ribby and probably very old. I wondered how long she’d been on her own. How long it had been since her companions died, or were sold? Had she ever had companions in the decades since running with her mother? I wondered if she’d been born on Eriskay and brought here. Turning away I kept on walking but my footsteps were dull, my legs hollow. It’s never easy seeing a horse on its own.

  ‘Hello, Shuna, how are you?’ The man’s voice was soft, west coast. Shuna’s face lit up. ‘Cubby! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Beady, this is Cubby, he used to live in Kilmelford.’

  His handshake was warm. We were leaning against the railings, our backs to a biting-cold wind while we kept an eye on the ponies in the trailer on the car-deck below.

  ‘This is Anne,’ he introduced us to the fresh-faced woman standing beside him. Shuna and Cubby got to catching up. With their heads close together, and the wind snatching their words, it was hard to hear them,

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name. Is it Biddy?’ Anne asked.

  ‘It’s Beady, as in a string of beads. My real name is Leonie, but most people call me Beady.’

  ‘How did you get Beady from Leonie?’

  ‘My mum called me Beady when I was a baby. Beady eyes.’ A familiar look of confusion passed across Anne’s face. I added, ‘It wasn’t a bad thing. Mum loved beads. She said my eyes were shiny like beads.’

  It turned out Anne was an archaeologist, and a font of knowledge about the ancient history of the Uists. She and Cubby had lived here together for a couple of years now, but she’d been coming for years before that. She was in love with both the archaeology and the music of the Uists. Place names rolled off her tongue with quiet assurance. She said to get in touch anytime if we needed more information, and by the time we docked at Eriskay my imagination was spinning with aisled houses, wheelhouses, standing stones, barps, long cairns, cup and ring markings.

  During the forty-minute crossing the wind had steadily been getting stronger, and now, back in the pickup, the rain came on in a heavy burst, a proper thunder-plump. With windscreen wipers thrashing and the heater on full blast we drove off MV Loch Bhrusda and up the long steep hill away from the pier.

  ‘Look at that?’ I said, pointing below. The ragged coastline glowed with an aura of turquoise sea. Through the rain there were splashes of colour: a red roof here, a scattering of day-glo pink fishing buoys there. I recognised a green shed from the last time I was here. Martin and the children and I had come across from Barra with our bicycles for the day. We’d climbed to the summit of Beinn Sciathan where the water bottle had blown away. It had been another windy day but the views across the causeway to South Uist had been crystal clear. We’d swum and our sun-and-wind burn had stung for the rest of the day.

  ‘We’re looking for Garrynamonie Church on the right,’ said Shuna. ‘Morag says we can’t miss it, it’s a big grey building where her croft is. She sounds really keen to meet the ponies.’

  ‘That must be the church,’ I said. It looked like a super-sized military bunker but for the cross on top. We pulled in beside it. The engine died and, parked in the shadow of that building, the rain lashing the window, my spirits dropped.

  ‘Quite weird,’ Shuna said simply.

  We pulled on our waterproofs and stepped outside. The rain eased just as a small silver car pulled up. Morag came up to us, all smiles and exuding good health. Her skin was tanned and her hazelnut-brown eyes were luminous. She was full of delight at the ponies. We moved away from the church towards a roofless low stone building. One gable end was gone.

  ‘This is my croft house,’ she said, her pride lighting up the dreich afternoon. She showed us around, pointing things out: the reach of raised ground where she thought the remains of a Neolithic long cairn were: the march boundary between her croft and the common grazing: a patch of boggy ground that she hoped the ponies would know to stay away from. Months later I’d learn that two possible meanings for Garrynamonie are ‘garden of the moorland’, or ‘the wall that separates the peat bog’.

  Morag dragged an old bath to a tap, saying it was a good water supply. As the bath filled with clear water, she told us stories about the croft and her ancestors, but I wanted to know about the church. My eyes kept being drawn back to it and I thought it even uglier from this an
gle. In the end I just pointed at it and lifted my eyebrows. ‘Our Lady of Sorrows, the brutalist Roman Catholic Church.’ Morag laughed. ‘You know, a lot of people really love it, I’m told. It’s a famous modernist building, Category B listed. It’s got a cross that lights up at night and guides sailors out at sea.’

  ‘But it’s so close to your house, and right between you and your view of the sea.’

  ‘Aye, well, they got hold of the site while my great uncle was away serving in WWI, and some joukery-pawkery that was.’ I wanted to hear more, but we needed to get the ponies settled and put up the tent. Morag left us to it, saying how much she enjoyed seeing animals on the croft and that she was hoping to get some sheep this summer. She wished us well on our journey and sprang away across the rough ground towards Easabhal. ‘An incredible hill for views,’ she’d said, shrugging on a backpack. I hoped we’d see her again.

  We’d stopped off earlier and booked a table at the Polochar Inn. There had been a football game playing on the wall-mounted screen in the corner of the bar, and the room had smelt of woodsmoke and Duck toilet cleaner and old beer. The place had been empty, apart from three men and a woman standing at the bar watching the game. The woman had been drinking a pint of Guinness, tapping her Crocs in time with ‘Parachutes’ by Coldplay. A few hours later, the place was buzzing and we realised how lucky we’d been to get a table. We were soon buoyed by delicious food and the swell of laughter and chat all around us. It felt like we were the only diners not speaking Gaelic there that night.

  ‘There’s a text from Morag,’ Shuna said, wiping rain off her face as we returned to the pickup. ‘She’s invited us to camp on her floor if we want.’ If we’d been cold in the tent the other night at Tangasdale I dreaded to think what it would be like in this weather.

  ‘Yes, please!’ I answered. We drove back towards the lit-up cross high on the roof of ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, slowing to check the ponies as they sheltered in the lee of the croft house. Shuna passed me her phone so I could read out Morag’s directions.

  ‘Keep going to Daliburgh, turn right past the office supplies store, I’m just past white fire station on way to Lochboisdale, you’ll see the car…’

  A milky-skinned statue of Jesus lifted out of the gloom on our right. We were both feeling blessed as the wind buffeted the pickup and Jesus sank back into the darkness.

  DAY FIVE

  Garrynamonie to Bowmore

  Rain squalls spluttered against the west-facing windows as we packed our sleeping mats. Wind pushed under the sills. Morag’s house was spartan, bare floorboards, bare walls. Everything was pleasingly minimal. Yet on the mantelpiece a string of little fairy lights twinkled in the low daylight, and amongst them rested a postcard of Kevin MacNeil’s poem in Gaelic and English words. Seahorses. I picked it up.

  I dreamt I was the seafloor and you were the weight of the ocean pressing down on me

  your quiet words of love in my ears now and again

  golden, elegant and strange, like seahorses

  like grace-notes, tiny floating saxophones.

  Morag was sitting at her desk by the window, tap-tapping on her laptop. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I have to get something off to the Scottish Land Court this morning.’ She’d been telling us the night before about the case she was preparing to take to the Scottish Land Court to ensure no more of her croft was appropriated. ‘I just have to do this, this wee piece of land, well, it means the world to me.’

  As well as safeguarding the boundary of her croft she was also trying to resolve a ‘machair share’. Machair is the more fertile, arable, low-lying coastal land by the sea where crops are grown for feed and animals are often grazed in winter. Morag said that many records show that a machair share exists but that it was taken while a widow occupied the croft. She talked at speed about the Land Records Agency, Highland Archives, archives of the Scottish Land Court, formerly known as the Crofters Commission, the National Archives of Scotland on Prince’s Street in Edinburgh, and the Land Registry of Scotland. She talked about land parcels, landowner records, the Freedom of Information Act, heritable tenures, the 1886 Crofting Act, national maps at Sighthill in Edinburgh. Her knowledge was immense.

  When she was working ‘off-island’ she took every opportunity to research her case. She spoke warmly of the amazing number of people out there who were willing to give her ‘a wee steer’. She exuded intelligence and courage and, as she spoke, a salt-burned willow thrashed against the window next to her.

  Shuna and I went through to the kitchen to make coffee. Next to the light switch was a yellow heart-shaped Post-it note: ‘I am independent of the good opinion of others.’ Tears prickled behind my eyes. Morag had talked to us about ‘visibility in a small community, and the church’, she’d told us how since her case was notified in the local papers she’d got a new mobile phone, was locking her front door and had come off social media. I was in awe of her determination to see this through and see justice done for herself and her ancestors. As she typed, Shuna and I ate porridge, charged our phones and repacked the saddlebags. We pottered and chatted happily, not in any hurry to go out into that grey gale-force day. I picked up a stone from the windowsill, iridescent in hues of blues and greens. ‘That’s labradorite,’ Morag said. ‘They say it’s a master healing stone. It raises consciousness and dispels illusions. It’s a crystal to help combine logic and insight.’

  We sat in the horse trailer having a second breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and Tabasco while listening to the rain blasting against the metal sides.

  ‘We’d better get going,’ Shuna said, ‘doesn’t look like this rain is going to stop anytime soon.’ As we tacked up I noticed Chief was shivering, his haunches and flanks quivering as the rain fell off him in runnels. The ponies needed to move. We locked the pickup and set off down the township road towards the sea, lowering our heads into the wind and walking in silence. I was thinking of Morag’s courage. She reminded me of Mum, she’d been brave like that too, with a fierce fighting spirit, and would stand up for what she thought was right. She had seemed to not give a damn about others’ opinions. Except when it came to men maybe. With certain men she’d had a blind spot. Otherwise, when love or sex wasn’t in the equation, she was fearless.

  Mum and I were so different in that way. I’d always been frightened of upsetting the applecart. I like to keep the peace. I was working on changing that though, of not being so affected by others’ opinions. Having realised that I was getting more like her as I got older, I was finally accepting that we had a lot in common. It was she who passed to me this love of horses. This lifelong passion that has been my bedrock, but where she would go fox hunting on borrowed horses, or gallop with Gypsies in the South of France, I tended to play it safe. I wasn’t brave like she had been, but I was wholehearted. The etymological roots of the word ‘courage’ translate as wholehearted, so maybe, I was courageous too. Just in a different way.

  For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to go on a long ride, but didn’t manage until I was in my thirties. This was now my fifth extended trip with horses, and by far the longest. During the Cairnholy years Mum and I had planned to do a camp ride together, but it had never materialised. I understood now how tiring life had been for her, motherhood, earning a living as an artist, maintaining a marriage. Just keeping warm had been hard. Also, who knows how long her body had been fighting a tumour before we realised she was ill. The camping trip never happened, but she had laid the foundation for my lifelong love of horses, making sure I had riding lessons when I was little, even when she was going through a divorce and had no money. Later she organised ponies for me to have on loan. First there was Puzzle, then Fury, then Mr Jones. After Mr Jones Dad bought Skye Boy for me. We really couldn’t afford to keep a pony, but together they made it happen. Despite the cars being on their last legs, endless meetings with bank managers to extend the overdraft, and borrowing money from her parents for hay bills, I’d had ponies for a large part of my childhood, and for that
privilege I will be eternally grateful.

  When I was twelve Skipper came into our lives, a Thoroughbred cross who was the realisation of Mum’s lifelong dream to have a horse of her own. He was bay with a russet muzzle, the colours of the Skipper butterfly she renamed him after. There were a few years when we rode together regularly, but it became increasingly harder to get her out. I can remember cajoling her by promising to do all the grooming and tacking up. In hindsight I’m sure the cancer must have begun to exhaust her long before it was diagnosed. With the pony years, she gave me something that has been a resource through my whole life. After I left home we would never ride together again.

  When she died she left a small amount of money. Rather than doing the sensible thing and paying it into the mortgage or overdraft I bought a big bay Spanish horse, ‘Jareta Principe’, otherwise known as ‘Gorgeous George’. His mother had been a gift from King Juan Carlos of Spain to King Hussein of Jordan. He was very ‘well bred’, strong, beautiful, intelligent and opinionated, Mum would definitely have approved. After she died I found amongst her books: My Dancing White Horses, The Autobiography of Alois Podhaisky, former chief rider at the Spanish Riding School and instrumental in rescuing the Lipizzaner stallions from Russian occupation in 1945. A famous quote of his is, ‘nature can exist without art, but art can never exist without nature’. Inscribed at the front of the book is ‘March 19th 1967. To Kathryn with love, Max xx’. It was my father’s present to Mum on her seventeenth birthday. They were both still at school, in love, and unaware of what was to come: the teenage pregnancy, the hurried wedding, three children and a lot of heartache. Throughout it all a mutual love and fascination with nature endured, and they were both committed to passing that passion on to their children.