Seasons on Harris (21 page)

“Flora MacDonald in South Uist wasn't quite so lucky, though, was she?” I said, trying to remember my island history. “I know she tried to help the prince escape after Culloden—dressed him up as a servant girl, or something…but wasn't she caught later on and imprisoned?”

Andy laughed. “Well, no—actually not. She told such a good story to the judges in London that they let her off. Then she went to America for a while but came back and met Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell on that famous trip o'theirs. An'one o'them, I think it was the Boswell fella, said she was ‘a little lady of most genteel appearance, mighty soft and well-bred…,' an' 'e said that she will be remembered forever and ‘if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honor.' So she turned out to be as canny and as lucky as the MacNeils!”

Again we had the sense that history to Andy was alive and almost tactile. These were not just legends to him. They were rather a source of pride and island identity that for him remain right up to today.

“But you had good times here too,” I suggested. “Y'know, after the
Napier Commission—much better conditions for the crofters. And the kelp and the herring and cod fishing in the last century—they were pretty lucrative.”

“Ah, yes yes—an' all those lovely herring girls…scores of 'em at the curing stations on shore…beautiful creatures…”

Andy's eyes seemed to water a little as he recalled memories of an obviously private nature.

“Yes—but weren't they always on the move…following the fleets to the English ports?” asked Anne.

“True, true, some were but…they always came back, y'know,” said Andy, “always came back.”

We didn't want to disturb his reveries, so we sat quietly watching the gulls wheel over the harbor and looking out for seals, which we'd been told occasionally frolicked around the rocky shallows here.

And then he was off again. “An' y'know, at one time in the late 1800s, our little harbor here held more fishing fleet boats than Stornoway! Sometimes more'n four hundred boats.”

“And didn't old Compton Mackenzie help keep the industry going with his Sea League?” I asked, hoping I'd got my history right.

“My, my, you've been doin' a wee bit o' readin'!” chuckled Andy. “Tha's good—ver' good. Most visitors 'ere know nothin' 'bout us. They come fer a few days o' scenery an' eatin' an' drinkin' an' then they're off again. But y'right, Mackenzie did 'is best to stop the foreigners—the Spanish were the worst and the English—from overfishin' The Minch. But even he couldn't stop that stupid use of the big nets and the dredgin' which wiped out the spawnin' beds and killed off the whole damn thing…so bloody stupid!”

He sat quietly again. This was a sad tale of greed, shortsightedness, and the insidious political clout of big trawling companies and we'd heard it many times before throughout the Hebrides.

“Tha's the whole history of these islands—stupidity, cruelty, and no power for the wee folk—we had so little power…y'should listen to some of our Gaelic long songs and stories. They tell y'all about it—an' they tell it in a way that's so much richer than English, so many levels o' meanin' in the words and the way they're said. Coddy MacPhearson up
at North Bay—he helped us keep them, and Angus MacMillan on Benbecula, and Angus MacLellan, a great storyteller, an' books like Colm O' Lochlainn's
Deoch-slainte nan Gillean
. But I don't suppose y'understand the Gaelic s'much.”

“No,” I admitted, “we've listened to many of the songs but it's a complex language…although y'know, we keep hearing about efforts to keep Gaelic alive. Our friend Dondy MacAskill—she's one of the teachers at the Tarbert School on Harris—she and others have worked with the students on Gaelic projects. In fact they've won all kinds of awards.”

“Right,” said Anne, “and just last week we went to a presentation they made of a little book they've produced on life in Tarbert. All in Gaelic. A beautiful publication which won another big prize.”

“Aye,” murmured Andy, “I heard about that. But y'know, it'll be a struggle. What with the young folks leavin' because there's no jobs an' forgetting it all so fast, y'know.”

Of course there were many throughout history—even notable Scottish writers like George Buchanan in the sixteenth century—who are remembered by Gaelic speakers with scorn for their snide dismissal of the language. “I can perceive,” Buchanan wrote, “without regret the gradual extinction of the ancient Scottish language, and cheerfully allow its harsh sounds to die away and give place to the softer and more harmonious tones of Latin.” (Latin!?)

A suitable refutation, however, can be found in the wonderful “Ode to Gaelic” words of Duncan MacIntyre in the eighteenth century:

I quoted that to Andy and he roared with laughter.

“Na' tha's ver' good. I'd not heard that! But poor ol' Gaelic seems to get blamed f'so much—there was a fella here couple o' weeks ago. Studying the language an' all. And I remember he told me that almost anywhere in the world he's found a language dying, those from outside will always say the people are lazy, rude, and too much into the alcohol!”

I laughed but also remembered blurry events of the previous night at the Castlebay Bar and decided not to touch that rhetorical firecracker.

“Well,” said Anne, “maybe it's time…”

“Yes, right,” I agreed. We'd just had three cups of Mairi's strong coffee and the caffeine surge was making us restless for the road again. There was a long journey ahead for us all the way back to Harris.

“Well…I'm ver' glad y'both sat down wi' me and listened to all this idle chatter o' mine.”

“No, no—it's been fascinating,” I said truthfully. “You've helped us understand a lot more about this little island.” Anne nodded in enthusiastic agreement.

And then, as a parting gift of sorts, Andy spoke a few lines of gentle, lyrical Gaelic.

“And that means…?” asked Anne.

“Well, roughly translated, and it is rough because Gaelic never translates so well, y'know, it says:

“Thanks, Andy,” I said, trying to think of a suitable response. “Oh…and I have one for you…if I can get it right…goes something like…

Andy's white mop of hair shook vigorously as he chuckled. “Tha's good…tha's ver' good. I thank you…although mi' bairnin' days are long gone—and the brood I have are not so wee these days!”

“Ah well,” I said, “just keep remembering those lovely herring girls.”

“Och, I'll have n'problem with that…I married one of 'em! A lass from Vatersay,” Andy said, with a wide grin, and pointed southward
beyond the castle floating in the middle of the bay to the misty outline of yet one more island—the last inhabited place on the 130-mile-long Outer Hebrides chain. “Have y'bin out there yet?”

“To Vatersay—no,” I said. “But we plan to before we leave. If the mist eases up a bit…”

“Och—mist or no mist—take a wee trip over. There's a causeway now. Y'don't need a ferry anymore. I think you'll find the place…ver' interestin'…”

And he was right.

Vatersay is indeed interesting—and intriguingly beautiful—even in capricious morning mists. In fact, the mists added to the magic here as we crossed the narrow causeway. They eddied in ghostly filigrees around the base of bosky, four-hundred-foot-high hills cloaked in heather and brittle grasses and dotted with ancient duns and chapels. Sheep grazed contentedly on the lower, bright green
machair
where the Siamese twin–shaped island—barely three miles long and a mile wide—is almost divided by an isthmus of two gently curved bays, each graced by more of those brilliantly cream-colored Hebridean beaches.

We could see a few scattered cottages on the
machair
fringes, but today Vatersay can only claim ninety or so residents. Once there were hundreds here but, typical of all the Hebridean islands' sad history, they were subjected to the cruel “clearances” of the late 1800s by the owner of the island (and much of Barra and South Uist too), Lady Gordon Cathcart.

In later years many crofts and cottars returned and, with growing power and outrage, threatened to retake possession of their lands by force. Using an old Scottish law, many hastily erected wooden shelters “roofed and with a hearthstone fire and built between sunrise and sunset of the same day.” This was usually enough to confirm “possession” and, although Lady Cathcart attempted to have the “Vatersay Raiders” removed and imprisoned, such was the outcry of the islanders that most were given early release and eventually achieved a government buyout of the land. Landowners throughout the islands trembled at the implications of such a “socialistic” solution, but a flourishing island community was reestablished here and became famous for its annual “cattle swim” event in which island animals were made to flounder across Vatersay
Sound to the ferryboat dock at Barra for transport to mainland markets.

Such colorful traditions gave the island a gloss of “romantic” crofterlifeways. But—in typical Hebridean fashion—there were other hard times and misfortunes in island history and tales here. Not least on September 28, 1853, when 333 of 385 emigrants bound for America as “redemptioners”(indentured workers) were drowned as their ship,
Annie Jane
, ran aground in a violent storm and was torn apart on the vicious west coast reefs here.

Anne and I walked up to the ponderous granite monument to this terrible event, similar in the scale of its death toll and island impact to the wreck of the
Iolaire
on the Beasts of Holm rocks near Stornoway harbor in 1919.

The mists were lifting now. Shafts of sunlight dappled the hills and beaches. The land glowed green and lush. And once again we were moved to silence by the beauty of such solitudinous scenery. But also by that hard sadness of history—those old stories of doom and disaster that cast bittersweet shrouds over all these idyllic isles.

We stood by the rail on the ferry back to Eriskay, watching Barra recede into the sea haze. It had taken on a wild and barren look, with clouds massed ominously over the rocky summit of Heaval. But we knew differently—despite the sadness we experienced on Vatersay, we had found its softer heart, its Catholic levity, and its generous spirit.

“Add Barra to the list…,” said Anne.

“Of?”

“Of ‘must-returns'!”

R
ODDY AND
I
WERE WELL
into our third glass of Johnnie Walker lue. Actually, that's not quite correct. Roddy was on his third and I was sliding hesitantly into my second—more as a matter of respect than restraint. Johnnie Walker Blue, at around $250 a bottle (including of course an elaborate presentation box decorated coffinlike inside with blue satin) is not a whisky one normally imbibes on a regular basis. It's a classic of its kind. Blended, it's true, not a single malt, but regarded by the cognoscenti as one of the finest produced in Scotland.

“Come on, Dave, you're laggin', man,” chuckled Roddy, his pink flushed cheeks and nose gleaming and his mischievous leprechaun grin wider than ever.

“No—not lagging. Merely leisurely sipping, as one should with such a superlative concoction. How can I ever return to the lesser brands when I have enjoyed such splendid nectar?”

“Weeel…,” said Roddy, “so long as you're drinking in this house, there'll never be a need to. No compromises allowed here.”

“I'll drink to that. No compromises!”

Joan giggled. The heat from the peat fire had turned her face rosy. Dondy, sitting beside me on the old leather sofa, feet curled under herself pixie-style, smiled her usual demure smile. She had resisted, as usual, all of Roddy's invitations to join us in the delights of whisky sampling. She exuded that air of placid self-containment and I often wondered
what she would be like if she ever lost her temper. I'd been told she could be a firebrand—an alter-ego contradiction—but I'd never seen her in any other mood than pleasantly mellow and benignly smiling.

“Well, as I'm getting up I might as well fill y'glass, David,” said Roddy. I didn't resist. There was no point. It would be filled anyway.

But it wasn't…

The phone rang, interrupting our pleasantly meandering conversation. Roddy rose, not exactly unsteadily, but certainly slowly and deliberately. His evening drams were never wee ones, unlike the ridiculously meager shots poured in the local pubs. These are said to be precisely measured as one-sixth of a gill, but as few people had any idea what a gill was, the expression was pretty meaningless. All I knew was that if you whirled one of these official pub drams around your glass, it was so wee as to disappear completely for a moment before slowly “legging” back down into the bottom of the glass.

Roddy vanished into the kitchen to answer the phone and Dondy and I resumed our ongoing chat about the building of her new home across the road. It was on a superb high site overlooking the MacAskill compound of large family home, our cottage, storeroom, petrol station, shop, Katie's guesthouse farther down the hill, and the huge MacAskill contracting offices, plant machinery garage, and storage yard—not to mention his large rock quarry up the road in the North Harris hills. For reasons far too legally convoluted for me to grasp, there had been delays and all that was in place after four months was a rough foundation for her house.

“It'll be done, it'll be done.” Dondy smiled placidly. “There's no rush…I'm trying to get a grant to drill for ‘thermal heating'—using natural hot water in the rocks hundreds of feet down. It's a new idea for energy conservation.”

Roddy returned. His face had changed. The warm glow had gone from his cheeks. He looked stooped, tired, and ashen. He flopped down in the chair by the fire and gave a deep sigh. “She's gone,” he said quietly.

Joan and Dondy looked at him, understood, and nodded.

“Ah, well,” said Joan slowly. “That was to be expected now. We knew it wouldn't be long, didn't we?”

Dondy bowed her head and then said, “Peggy Ann was a lovely person. I'll really miss her.”

There were no tears. At least, no outward tears. Just looks of resigned acceptance. Then Joan turned to me and explained that Peggy Ann Stewart, a ninety-five-year-old friend of the family, had been living in a small nursing home at Leverburgh for many years. She had been well loved in the community and renowned for her stories and remarkable energy—an energy that was said to have “kept most of the others in the home alive!”

I nodded and also sensed a little wave of sorrow sweep over me. Not because I knew Peggy Ann personally but precisely because I
didn't
know her although she had been high on my list of people to meet. Her name had come up many times in conversations with others, each one insisting that I must visit her at the nursing home and listen to her tales and her memories of island life. “She'll take you right back to the crofting times,” one person had told me. “You'll be right there with her in the black house, eating her crowdie and cream and salt herrings and boiled potatoes and weaving the tweeds…”

I'd finally planned to visit her the following week, but it was too late now. I'd left it too long. Maybe I believed others who'd insisted, “She's got another ten years at least left in her still!”

Roddy tried to think of something to cheer us all up: “Weel,” he said finally, with a chuckle, “at least Historic Scotland will be happy!”

Joan and Dondy smiled. Was this some in-family joke? “No—you wouldn't know about this, David, but Historic Scotland, which owns Rodel Church—you know—‘The Cathedral of the Isles…'”

“Oh, yes—I know the place well. I made a couple of sketches down there.”

“Is that a fact? Well, y'see—it's a story everyone on Harris knows—Peggy Ann's family, the Stewarts, have a family plot down there and there's been a space waitin' for her since she was born. It's the last official plot in the cemetery and they had to keep it open 'specially for her. They weren't happy about it. They've been waitin' for years. Peggy Ann used to joke about it. ‘Well—they're just going to have to wait a wee bit longer,' she'd say. ‘I've no plans at all to leave just yet.'”

We all laughed but then the silence returned. Peggy Ann's passing represented something more than just another sad burial. She was one of the last of the old true crofting generation and a touchstone of the ancient traditional ways of the island. It was not just a person dying. It was the ending of an era.

The peat fire glowed. The three clocks in the lounge ticked almost in time. Everything went quiet for a while. Even Chico, the MacAskills' normally hyperactive Scottish terrier, lay quietly on the hearth rug watching us nervously. He was apparently unused to long silences in this house.

“You know, it's really strange,” I said finally. “I'd planned to go down to Leverburgh next week to see Peggy Ann and to hear some of her stories…”

Roddy smiled and nodded. “Aye…she had plenty of those. That she did, indeed.” Then he stood up again, took a deep breath, and walked back into the kitchen, telling us he had “best get on with the phone calls now.”

Joan explained that as Peggy Ann's executor, Roddy had the job of organizing everything—making countless sad calls, arranging the funeral service, the wake, the burial. “So much to do,” she said quietly. “But well…you know all about that now, don't you, David?”

And of course I did, because of our prolonged summer journeys to England when my mother's sister, Cynthia, had died in Yorkshire of inoperable cancer. She too, like Peggy Ann, had been a feisty, independent lady and the last link with our family history—a history I thought I knew but that became colorfully “revisionist” in her torrid tales.

“Are you sure we're talking about the same people?!” I once asked her after a particularly ribald series of stories. She laughed and twinkled. (Tales of family derry-doings always seemed to make her twinkle.)

“Ah, well, you see, you were too young to know about all these things and”—she added mischievously—“maybe you still are!”

Cynthia's passing seemed to suck some of the fun and vitality out of my world. And, as with Peggy Ann, I felt annoyed with myself for not trying to learn more about a family history that was now all but closed to me. But such regrets were quickly submerged as I realized that Roddy
was about to run the same executor gauntlet as my sister and me and I wondered what I could do to help.

“Och, there's nothing, David,” said Joan softly. “Just come round and sit with him from time to time…oh, and please come to the funeral. If y'wish, that is. He really enjoys your company.”

“Ah—well, that feeling is mutual. Very mutual. But I've never met her, I don't know her…and I'm not part of the family.”

“Oh yes, you are, David,” Joan said quietly, with a warm smile. “Indeed you are.”

“Well, then—yes. I'll definitely come. I'd be honored to. I feel I owe Peggy Ann at least that much…a first and a last visit all in one.” I was sorry, though, that Anne was currently off-island for a while, visiting her parents in Yorkshire. She'd also looked forward to meeting Peggy Ann.

 

T
HE FUNERAL WAS SET FOR
the following Tuesday at the Church of Scotland in Leverburgh. “
Not
the Free Church,” Roddy emphasized. I didn't ask why. Religious convictions in the Hebrides are not matters for idle curiosity and outsiders best keep away from that subject if they wish to attain the goodwill of the stalwart islanders.

Although I promised the family I'd attend, there was a slight problem with my island clothes—mainly jeans, sweaters, and sneakers. Hardly appropriate funeral garb. Well, I thought, there's nothing I can do about the clothes. I've got a dark brown pair of slacks and my new blue-green Harris Tweed jacket, both of which I'd kept around for “special occasions.” Of course I was thinking more of weddings, parties, and Saturday nights on the town. However, maybe I could just get away with them for a funeral. But definitely not the tie. The only tie in my tieless life was once bought as a gift by a friend who thought that a tie should express the essence of the inner man. In my case, I can only assume that the violent, clashing colors and discordantly aggressive geometric patterns meant that he saw me as some kind of schizoid roustabout on the verge of emotional self-destruction. Not exactly the everyday “me” I knew—and certainly not at all funereal.

So what I obviously needed was a black tie. A simple, plain, depress
ingly dour and coal-black tie. Not much of a challenge, I thought. But of course I was on Harris, not on the mainland. Stores are in short supply in Tarbert, our only community of any size—if a population of five hundred or so could be classified as sizeable. We had the Tweed Shop (of course), two grocery stores, a couple of trinket shops, a post office, a pottery, a tiny fish 'n' chip shop, and Tarbert Stores, that bizarre mishmash of a place down by the ferry dock next to the delightful First Fruits tea-room, which sold everything for the do-it-yourself crofter-builder-fisherman-carpenter. Ah, but we also had the beloved Akram's, a general store run by a family from Pakistan, which has been a mainstay of island life here for over forty years.

It's an upmarket-ish offshoot of the old Pakistani-peddler days here, when, in the crofting era, mysterious gentlemen of exotic origin would wander the outer islands on bikes, horse-drawn carts, or in clapped-out vans, selling everything from ladies' undergarments and other lacy feminine accoutrements to hair lotions, health potions, cheap cutlery and crockery, combs, shoelaces, and “guaranteed” mousetraps.

Akram's is a modest peddler's or packman's pushcart transferred into an exotic Aladdin's cave of anything and everything that one might ever need in an average island household. Thousands of diverse items fill the shelves of this long, narrow bazaarlike store overlooking the dock from the steep bluff of the town. There's no food, of course. The two grocers defend their monopolies rigorously. But if you'd like a selection of half a dozen different types of can openers, a box of bonnie wee woolen bonnets for babies, a cornucopia of costume jewelry and toiletries, cheap and not quite so cheap watches, rolls upon rolls of rugs and wallpaper, footwear galore from delicate ladies' pumps to gargantuan hiking boots—even TVs and VCRs—then this is your place.

I'd met the lady behind the counter many times before as I scoured the shelves for Band-Aids, photo frames, cuddly toy gifts for children, hard-to-find batteries, and, on one occasion, a special kind of manual masher guaranteed to produce the creamiest of potato dishes. She was a plump, warm-faced woman with pronounced teeth, always pearly-white, and she had never yet failed to help me find what I needed. But she always seemed a little distracted by her voluminous stock lists, which
she constantly checked, the requests of other customers, and the frenetic activities of family members whose job it seemed was to scurry about cramming even more items of choice onto the already overpacked shelves.

This day was different. She was in despair. A black tie was not to be found anywhere. There were boxes of brightly colored striped, polka-dotted, and paisley-patterned ties, but not a single simple funereally black tie.

“I know we had…we definitely…I saw one only last…it was right…it must have…,” she mumbled, mainly to herself, in her increasingly enervating search. “I'm so sorry…I can't understand.” Then she vanished, half whispering something about the stockroom. “Maybe it's under that pile of blankets and sheets…”

A few minutes later she returned, her face transformed into a smug smile, her eyes glowing with achievement and pride. “You see?! Here we are…I knew we had…” I thanked her sincerely and then she decided that, as I'd been so patient and understanding, she should finally, after all my previous visits, introduce herself.

“I am Bushra and my husband, who also works here with us and the family, is Ghaffar…he is really a doctor, you know. A PhD doctor. A biochemist. Very, very clever man. He worked in Japan for quite a long time. After the war, you know. And I was there too. We lived an hour or so outside Tokyo. Now, that was very interesting time, you see, because…”