Read an Excerpt

An Excerpt from Hame

19  August 2014  

My own first view of the island is unpromising. I barely glimpse Fascaray during  the rough crossing from the mainland  port of Auchwinnie. 'Look!' I say with sham cheerfulness, pointing through the rain-streaked port­ hole at a distant grey strip of what I take to be terra firm a tipping crazily on the churning sea. 'Land ahoy!'

My nine-year-old daughter, Agnes, a valiant traveller who's never been carsick, chooses this moment to reveal she's a poor sailor in a swe ll. We huddle in the cabin of the ferry and I stroke her hair as she throws up in a paper packet provided by the skipper, our pose a parody of an art-history cliche - Madonna and Child in Wet Anoraks with Sick Bag. For this we've left New York shimmering in the heat under a cloudless sky.

It's still raining heavily when the boat finally pulls into Finnverinnity Harbour and we join the queue of passengers waiting to disembark. A sudden hot panic grips me as I realise I've lost sight of our luggage. It's not in the corner afthe deck where I had carefully placed it, half hidden under a tarpaulin sheet with other cases and backpacks, next to a sack of post, bags of grain, boxes of groceries and containers of engine oil. Now it's my turn to feel sick. I knew I should have kept it with us. There was no space to stow it near our wooden bench in the cabin when we boarded. But we could have held on to some of it, instead of following the other passengers' leads and piling our bags at the  back  of the  boat. Our luggage has gone. Vanished.

This is serious. It's not just all our carefully chosen possessions (the pre-packing selection and  editing process was especially painful for Agnes) but my laptop, edited  printouts of draft  chapters of my new book - not all of them emailed or copied to the memory stick in my purse - copies of the precious letters, photos, documents, and 70,000 words of The Fascaray Compendium notebooks, typed up by me over two months, printed out and marked up with my own irretrievable pencilled annotations.

I can almost hear Marco's voice from 2,600 miles away rising above the clamour on the boat. 'Why the hell didn't you just use Track Changes'? Then at least you'd have all your work on a memory stick?' 'Because,' I mutter to myself, a stereotypical screwball Ainerican lady, 'I like working with pencil and paper, goddammit!' Agnes, recently prone to embarrassment over her parents' behaviour in public, doesn't seem to have heard me, nor have my fellow passengers who, until now, appeared to be benign young families, wisecracking construction workers, a bunch of teenagers recovering from a heavy night on the mainland and hikers in primary-coloured waterproofs frowning at the view. Suddenly they're all recast as villains.

The disappearance of our luggage feels a greater crime than mere theft; it's an existential assault, a vengeful god's payback for my wilful obliteration of our life in New York. You want to trash your life? Here - try this.

I'm making a mental inventory of what we have left in my carry-on bag - passports, check; credit cards, check; cash, check: phones, check; iPad, check. No! I slipped my iPad into my black case before we got on the ferry - when I see Agnes's purple suitcase: bought for this trip after hours of deliberation in Bloomingdale's with her father. Someone towards the front of the line, one of those ingratiatingly jocular con­ struction workers, is holding it and I'm making my way towards him, incensed.

In New York - yes - we expect this sort of thing and we're on constant alert for opportunistic raids by the needy and the greedy. When so many Haves exist in close proximity to so many Have Nots, it's the Have a Littles - the ones without good security and insurance - who lose out. So we're careful. It's part of the deal in high-density city living. But here? So much for 'the Friendly Isle'. How low can you get? Stealing a child's suitcase!

My way is blocked and I'm about to shout (do they have cops here?) as the bag and the thief's  broad back shrink into the distance, when I look up and see a group of islanders in glistening rainwear standing on the dock above us. Teenagers loll against the harbour wall while a grinning old couple look down at the boat and wave an umbrella at a red-headed young woman in front of me. Now, as if choreographed, the teens walk over to join other islanders and together they form a chain with the ferry's skipper, the first mate and the passengers at the front of the line, who are beginning to climb the pier steps onlo what is disin­ genuously called 'dry land'. They're passing the boat's cargo, the sack of post, bags of grain, boxes of groceries, the cans of engine oil, and all the luggage, our luggage, Agnes's bag, mine, the document box, up the stairs and along the dock to the harbour wall where they set it down gently in an orderly pile.

The islanders disperse and Agnes and I are alone. The rain has inten­sified - it's like standing under the power shower in my Cobble Hill gym. My former gym. Agnes puts up her hood and gamely insists on manoeu­ vring her own case, which has wheels and a long handle. 'A granny bag' she calls it, approvingly. My own two suitcases, also wheeled, are larger and I balance on them the sealed, waterproof box containing my copies of the rudimentary archive that's more valuable than any of our possessions.

Still smarting with shame. at my metropolitan misanthropy, my first response to the vista - the long, low line of whitewashed crofts curving round the bay, the dark hills whose tops are hidden in clouds - is dismay. This is to be our home for two years. For this we've given up our comfort­ able rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, Agnes's place at a friendly public elementary school with excellent math scores, our friends, stores and cafes, concerts and cinemas, proximity to airports, railroads, other cities, other lives? My daughter's father? My relationship?

Agnes, though, has perked up. She's seen the grocery store, distin­guished from the other whitewashed buildings by the red pillar box at its entrance and a faded advert for ice cream in its window.

'Ice cream!' she says, instantly won over.

We go inside and I announce myself to a cautious young South Asian man behind the till. He directs me to the post-office counter where a woman, pale, middle-aged and unsmiling, looks up briefly from a stack of parcels and asks: 'Are you Mhairi McPhail?' As if another American with a nine-year-old child would abandon her life, travel all this way and put up with the discomfort and  grim weather in an effort  to pass herself off as me. At least the postmistress pronounces my name correctly: Mhairi as in Marry, not Myri, or Mary, or Marie. Not even, as some Gaelic purists insist, Varry, or any of the other weird variations that made me, as a chippy teenager, consider changing my name to Jane. 
                                                                  .
She rummages in a drawer, hands me the key and points left, in the direction of our rented cottage, number 19. I let Agnes choose an ice cream - a strawberry cone scattered with beads of coloured sugar - and as she laps it rapturously in the rain I feel another stab of guilt. Poor kid. What have I let her in for?

Our new home is four doors down from the Finnverinnity Inn which, even now, at 10.30 a.m., is crowded. A group of men - scarlet cheeks, florid noses, sepia teeth - make their way outside with their drinks to smoke and talk and stare at the sea. They gaze at us as we walk past, their heads turning in chorus-line sync to follow our progress and gauge our destination. Inside the pub an accordion wheezes prissily, leading some scattered singing. I hope the noise doesn't travel. My key jams in the lock and when I manage to push the door open a gust of musty air almost fells me. Agnes looks back at the smokers and waves. One of them returns a small, uncertain salute.
The light switch doesn't work and outside the storm has wors­ened, casting a deep midwinter gloom. Everywhere else in the UK, in Europe, it is summer, the season of warmth and heady languor. At home in New York it's heatwave time - riot weather, Marco used to call it - when the  city empties, leaving it to those of us who actually enjoy the chaleur or are too poor to head for the  Hamptons. It's my favourite time of year in Brooklyn. Anyone who spent at least part of their life in Scotland will never take a spell of cloudless skies and unbroken sunshine for granted. And I have brought my daughter here to this place, dark as a subway tunnel, cold as Alaska (in August1). What kind of mother am I?

I grope my way to a side table, tripping over a large cardboard box - our groceries, ordered in advance, sent over by boat from the main­ land supermarket and presumably conveyed here by the altruistic human chain - and switch on a lamp. The room springs into relief.  There is a coal-effect electric heater in the fireplace flanked by two threadbare tartan armchairs. Next to the side table is a floral couch with suspicious stains suggesting incontinence or violence. The rug,  patterned with a series of concentric purple and  grey swirls, looks like a weather map: a deepening band of low pressure in the West Highlands, squally showers, gale-force eight, imminent.  I sigh as I scrutinise the pictures on the wall - Highland taLLle peeriug winsomely under ginger tresses in a variety of native settings: by water­ falls, hoof-deep in heather, mooching in machair - when I hear Agnes upstairs. She is squealing with pleasure. I find her in the smaller of the two attic bedrooms, bouncing on her narrow bed.

'Awesome, Mom! Look. I can see the sea.'

You can see the sea, okay. Grey and foam-flecked as dirty suds. You can see nothing but the sea.

 
* * *
 
 
'When a man stands on the shore looking out to sea, he stands at the littoral  of his unconscious,'  wrote McWatt.  Up in Calasay, he would walk the machair strand daily in all weathers, scooping up handfuls of small bright shells, 'the puir man 's traisure', gathering  kelp and dulse seaweed in a wicker creel, and searching for useful flotsam tossed ashore by recent storms. He would watch the seabirds  engage in their 'genocidal airborne ballet', turn his poet's eye on the 'benign jaun­ dice' of the wild primrose, the 'Parkinsonian tremor' of the harebell, or on the Fascaradian orchid, with its 'cluster of tiny livid mouths silently ululating on pale stems'.

Even in the wildest weather, he never tired of the view from the back window of his croft house, An Tobar, past the low stands of birches, oaks and alders huddling for comfort against wind and storm, across the sweep of cliffs to the ocean in all its moods under its 'turbulent twin' the sky, and out beyond the skerries - the uninhabited rock islands which rose from the sea like so many 'fantastic beasts couchant, inspiration for the winged griffons and twisting hell-hounds of Celtic art'. In the distance the Fascaray Head lighthouse - built in 1844 by Robert Louis Stevenson's uncle Alan and manned, until automation replaced them in 1989, by a succession of bearded recluses with drink problems - swept its nightly 'Cyclopean beam' over the phosphorescent seascape.

The most familiar photograph of McWatt, a black-and-white portrait taken in 1981, is used by Charles Knox-Cardew in A Vulgar Eloquence, 10 a scholarly survey of world vernacular literature. The portrait shows the 'Bard of Fascaray' aged sixty, in his late-middle period - he still had more than three decades of writing life to go - squinting sceptically  at the view, a fat sleek-haired otter in his arms and a Border collie at his feet. McWatt is a grizzled, kilted figure with fierce blue eyes blazing under a lofty brow. A briar pipe is clenched between his teeth and tendrils of unruly grey hair escape from a beret, which he wore instead of the tradi­ tional tam-o'-shanter 'bunnet', Knox-Cardew suggests, 'in tribute to the Auld Alliance and the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud'. In addition to the beret, McWatt's idiosyncratic version of Highland dress substitutes  the lace  jabot at  the throat with a spotted handkerchief of the sort tied to a stick as improvised hand luggage by fairy-tale vaga­ bonds, and instead of cross-laced ghillie shoes and knee-length socks he wears mud-crusted rubber boots; we can't, therefore, vouch for the presence or otherwise of the ornamental sgian-dubh dagger, customarily tucked into the right sock.
 
A Granite Ballad- The Reimagining ofGrigorMcWatt,
Mhairi  McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)

 
  * * *
 
 
3 a.m., 20 August 2014 . . .
 
Agnes is asleep and I sit, jet-lagged and haggard, at the kitchen table in our new home staring at the picture of McWatt in Knox-Cardew's daunting book as if it might vanquish my night terrors and offer a clue - justification would be too much to ask- as to what the hell I'm doing here.

McWatt's kilt - in McWatt tartan, as the captions always say - is unre­markable but the sporran seems comically large, like the pelt of a scalped Pomeranian. Knox-Cardew is an American  academic who, to judge by his author photo, wears a bow tie, horn-rimmed glasses and a pocket square in tribute to the Wasp Ascendancy. He derives the  title of his  book from de vulgari eloquentia - 'the people's language' - Dante's approving term for literature written in Italian rather than Latin. Alongside reflec­tions on Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer, van Maerlant, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Barbour and the non-Tagalog literature of the Philippines, Knox­ Cardew devotes a 110-page chapter to the 'Bard of Fascaray', treating McWatt with patronising deference throughout.

His research didn't apparently extend to a trip to Fascaray, or even Scotland. I guess the Glenton University  Press  advance  didn't  cover  the fares. Nor has he read a single volume of The Fascaray Compendium manu­ scripts. Nobody has.  That's  my  job  -  though  Knox-Cardew  alludes  to their existence, describing McWatt as 'a Hebridean  Pepys  whose  master­ work, a magisterial survey of his island through time, remains as yet unpublished'.
A Vulgar Eloquence is described  on  the  jacket  as a 'collective critical
biography', and it's heavy on criticism, of the reverential literary sort - too much trocheeing and spondeeing for my taste or purpose - and light on the lives. It's also, unsurprisingly, out of print. My research assistant in Glasgow, Ailish Mooney, a diligent Irish postgrad, managed to track down a copy from Innerpeffray Library - borrowed only twice according to the date slip on the inside cover and stamped 'withdrawn' - and sent it to me in Brooklyn. I didn't, in the end, have time to open it until Agnes and I were on the plane here from New York and even then I found myself drawn to the inflight magazine and the safety instructions card - 'in the event of landing on water .. .' Who are they kidding? - before I finally gave in and opened Knox-Cardew's book at the McWatt chapte r. My eyes fell on the last paragraph of the third page.
 
His  reimagining of world literature through the multifaceted prism of the Scots language may have been his life's work; his celebrations, in his columns for the Auchwinnie Pibroch as well as in his sweeping, as yet unpublished, magnum opus The Fascaray Compendium, of the culture and flora and fauna of the island may have provided the connection with community and the natural world that sustained him in bleakest times and awakened many to the beauties of his corner of the Highlands; his rumbustious menagerie may have met the emotional needs of this solitary man, brought some warmth and humour into his life and inspired a generation of naturalists; his spare and elegant memoirs may have redefined the  genre; his popular histories, polemical   journalism and political activism undoubtedly sharpened his understanding of his own past and enriched modern Scotland's sense of its iden­tity; but it was five verses and a four-line refrain -  dismissed later by him as 'thon skitterie wee sang' - scribbled on a pack of Sweet Afton cigarettes during a 'lock-in' in the Finnverinnity Inn, which earned Grigor McWatt his fame, whatever wealth he managed to accrue, and the priceless freedom to pursue his Muse.
 
I resisted a surge of dismay, closed the book and turned to my child, who was now asleep, her head resting against my arm as we sped, six hundred miles an hour, towards our new home. Looking at the tender curve of her cheek I wondered again - did I really want to spend  the next two years alone with my daughter, sequestered in a remote corner of the planet, serving as handmaiden to a dead poet, accidentally famous for a single pop song which he disowned, a reclusive graphomaniac who might have loved the natural world but, from everything I've read, didn't care too much for people?

 
  * * *
 
 
Thrawnness
 
Oot o the nicht that haps me, Mirk as the cleuch.frae pow/ tae pow/, Ah thank whitiver goads micht be
Fur ma unvinkishable saul.
 
In the fyle claucht o mishanteredness Ah havnae jouked nor greeted.
Ahlo the lounderins o chance Ma bluidy heid is nae defaited.
 
Ayont this place o/ash an tears Lours but the grue o hinmaist scug, An yet the assizes o the years
Wull airt me wicht. Ah wullnae pug.
 
Ah dinnae care if bampots prate, Aw haurdships Ah can thole.
Ah'm the high heidyin o mafate, The skipper o ma saul.

Grigor McWatt, efier William Ernest Henley, 1946 11  
 
 
  * * *
 
 
McWatt began his life's work towards the of of World War II, in an army tent pitched in the grounds of Finnverinnity House, the northern seat of Fascaray's absentee laird, Montfitchett. The  house, known locally as the Big House, had been taken over by the British government for use as  a secret training school for commandos and Special Operations Executive agents. It was a gruelling course but somehow, on a narrow camp bed under canvas in the shrubbery, between Herculean manoeuvres, remorseless tests of strength and endurance and late-night instruction in the dark arts of sabotage and murder, McWatt began to write the first of the notebooks that would become Tbe Fascaray Compendium.

In this first volume, his focus was on island history. 'A dwelling has stood on the site of Finnverinnity House, commanding the curve of the bay to the west of the harbour, since the early sixteenth century . . .' were the opening words. Knox-Cardew, who didn't have access to the Compendium but was aware of its broad themes, speculated that 'during those dark days, it may have been a comfort to him, as it has been to others, to retreat to the past in an attempt to make sense of the chal­lenging present'.

Over the years, McWatt rewrote and enlarged his chronicle of Fascaray's ancient and medieval past, drawing on published histories and archive material. The peripatetic minister Donald Monro, known as the Dean of the Isles, visited the island in 1563, McWatt wrote, 'during what seems to have been a rare interval of peace and prosperity'. Monro noted in his Description of the Western Isles of Scotland1 2 : 'ane caftle of Fasquarha ye, pertaining to Malcolm McQyhatt by the sword but to the bishop of the isles by heritage, with ane fair orchard ... roughe country, with pairt of birkin woodeis, maney deires and excellent for fis hing'. Monro also gave the first account of the annual 'guga  hunt' - the catching, killing and smoking of young solan geese or gannets - 'a tradition that continues to this day', wrote McWatt.

Two years after Monro's visit, three months after her marriage to Darnley, Mary, Qyecn of Scots, is said to have attended the wedding of Malcolm's daughter, Mariota, on the  Isle  of Fascaray.  'Sources suggest that the doomed queen stayed in what was then a modest castle or  forti­ fied house with a walled courtyard, called simply Finnve rinn itie,' wrote McWatt. Mary is said to have visited the house again,  'seeking  refuge after her escape from imprisonment at Loch Leven  Castle  in  1568,  and left a touching  thank-you  note, written in  French, to her hosts'.
In the mid seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell sent a fleet  to sack the castle and subdue the troublesome clan McWatt, whose members had remained stubbornly loyal to the House of Stuart. 'It was  then,'  wrote Grigor McWatt  three centuries  later , ' that  God showed  his true colours as a clansman.' A  two-day  storm sank  the  parliamentarian ships in sight of Finnverinnity  Bay and  forty-two English sailors were drowned.

Subsequently, 'God's sympathies were diverted elsewhere'; within sev­enty years the clan chieftain, Aeneas McWatt of the McWatts, fell on hard times, his impoverished kinsmen were scattered and in 1698, the year of the ill-fated Darien venture that cost Scotland its independence, Finnver­ innitie and its land had been taken over by the rival McGlaisters (Gaelic: McGlabhcadair; motto: 'OJ!,id vobis quia non praeteribit' - 'Whit's fer ye'll nae gae by ye') who later set about building a new house from the ruins of the old in the baronial style, with eight octagonal turrets topped by corbelled conical roofs clustering round the central stem of the old castle. The writer Martainn MacGilleMhartainn, or Martin Martin, visiting the island in 1700 in the footsteps of Dean  Monro, found Fascaray 'in good heart, despite the recent reversal of clan fortunes', and observed: 'The Natives are generally a very sagacious people and quick of Apprehension; several of both Sexes have a Gift of Poesy, and are able to form a Satyr or Panegyrick extempore, without the assistance of any stronger 'Liquor than Water to raise their Fancy.' 13



10     Glenton University Press, New Jersey, 1987  , 732  pages.
11     From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The CollectedVarseofGn'gorMcWatt, Smeddum  Bcuks, 1992.

12     William Auld , Edinburgh,  l 774 .
13      A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland by Martainn MacGilleMhartainn, publishea   by  Andr  e_w        Bell,  Cross-Keys   and  Bible,  Cornhill, 1703. 14     Edward Black & Sons, Glasgow, 1750.