Seasons on Harris (18 page)

“Ah, but now there's changes…,” interrupted Donald's wife, prepar
ing the traditional
strupach
tray of tea and shortbread as we sat in their cozy kitchen.

“Yes—yes, y're right there. Now things are changing—there's a new Gaelic Language Act goin' through the Scottish Parliament to increase its official usage. An' they've started teaching it again…and collecting all sorts of stuff from the old Gaelic…maybe teachin' people not only a different way of talkin' but also a different way of seein' and thinkin'…who knows—m'be even a different, a better, way of livin'…An' even Prince Charles is helpin' us y'know. He was up on Skye just recent…I saw it in the paper…” Donald searched through a small pile of newspapers and magazines on a stool by the table. “Ah—here it is…he said he uses Gaelic now for part of his official Web site an' he made this speech:

“Good for Charles! A true Highland loyalist. Listen, do you think you could sing me one of your songs?” I asked, hoping I wasn't stretching hospitality too far.

Donald paused, looking a little uncertain.

“Ah' g'on,” said his wife, with a warm grin. “Y' love to do that…”

So, as the tea was poured and the shortbread rapidly devoured (mainly by me), Donald sang two of his songs in a deep, mellow voice and the rich sounds of that ancient language, throbbing with layers of meaning well beyond my comprehension, filled the kitchen. And this was no gloomy “old” man singing. Maybe this was the “new man of the blazing lantern” in that poem told to me by the quiet gentleman on the porch.

T
HE SILENCE OF ISLAND
S
UNDAYS
is both comforting and disturbing. Comfort comes from the virtual absence of traffic on the narrow, twisting lanes and the almost obligatory strict Presbyterian Church Sunday observances that preclude the most innocent of recreational activities and even the purchase—indeed, the reading in more orthodox households—of newspapers. Normally we would find such restrictions irritating to the point of open rebellion, but for some odd reason, on Harris it feels right. Time is given over to quieter, more considered meditations on life, family, and the welcome absence of any real choice of activities. On Sundays you go to church, celebrate familial intimacy at home, usually eat a little more simply than during the week, drink in moderation, if at all, restrain excessive mirth, and go to bed early.

To say Sundays are silent here would be like saying winter nights are dark. But the silence is not like the darkness of night, which comes in gradually as lights are dimmed, TVs turned off, and pillows plumped for rest and slumber. Here it is a sudden, self-imposed silence. As Derek Cooper in his book
Hebridean Connection
suggests: “Many people here observe Sundays with almost Jewish fervor, denying themselves the pleasure of a cooked meal or any activity not directly motivated by worship of the Lord.” A regimen of strictly regulated behavior is imposed from midnight on Saturday in many homes, time-honored for generations and bound by deep fears of fire and brimstone and terrible retribu
tions and eternal scorchings in the furious fires of damnation. Of course, few would express it quite so dramatically, except perhaps the ministers of the local churches, whose words are still regarded by many of the older residents as virtually the issuances of the Creator himself. (A few are less complimentary, with one elderly gentlemen “of no particular religious affiliation whatsoever” suggesting to me that some island ministers were “like leeches on the human soul sucking out the music, the song, the sweetness, and all the abundant joy to be had in this one wonderful life we've all been given!”)

Even the normally hysterical screeches of seagulls are silent on Sundays. Maybe it's the lack of any action on the fishing boats, the paucity of enticing tidbits and freebies from the fleet, the absence of people, cars, and open garbage cans at the backs of stores, now all shut tight as clamshells.

Joseph Pennell, a visitor to Tarbert in 1887, recorded this dispirited scene:

The only activity was indeed the flurried arrival and departure of congregations at the churches. Straight from home and straight back with barely a chance for an exchange of pleasantries or a little gossip about last night's dance or whatever other devilish diversions had been selected on that particular occasion. All the “And did you see” s and “Can you believe” s would have to wait until Monday. Even the Sunday dinner had often been cooked the night before in many homes. Any noise or levity, certainly out on the streets, was frowned upon. And of course there were no Sunday papers because ferries from the mainland didn't run on Sundays due to the determination and the pride of most Harris residents—and much to the frustration of the ferry companies. So the
Sunday papers, and the tourists, didn't arrive until Monday. And there were no pubs open, no meals at the hostelries except for residents, and no buses. Even—so someone told me—the swings in the playgrounds were once padlocked, although I didn't believe Tarbert had many of those, so that was possibly a Stornoway joke. Not that you'd laugh at it. Because, on Sundays, you didn't laugh.

“An' also…,” Roddy had told us on one of our Friday get-togethers, “y'didn'a take the fire ashes out, or use a knife, or shave…oh, an' for some strange reason you could only peel potatoes if they were already boiled—not raw. An y'couldn'a read—except, o' course, the Bible…”

You were meant, in a word, to reflect. Seriously. Sententiously. And surrounded by this barren, wind-blasted, rain-ripped landscape, devoid of all distractions, empty and ragged at all its edges, uninviting in places even for brief walks because of its pernicious bogs and ankle-snapping heather roots—inward reflection and religious meditation came far more naturally here than in the fleshpots and shopping malls and tantalizing seductions of the heathen mainland.

Drinking, however, in pubs or hotels on Sundays has recently been a cause célèbre, particularly in Stornoway, where chinks in the Sabbath armor have been appearing. And there has indeed been some secularizing of other once-rigid rules, much to the dismay and disgust of letter writers to the local paper:

And another:

An even sterner correspondent wrote:

But just once in a wee while, someone with a more pragmatic take on the matter gets to make his case:

It took Anne and me a long while to get used to these strange “Sunday Silences.” We even tried attending the church services with a kind of “if you can't beat 'em…” acceptance of local mores, but a combination of Gaelic-laced presentations, dirgey and instrument-less hymn singing, odd protocols of sitting and standing (we invariably found ourselves doing the opposite of whatever the rest of the congregation did), and the harshly strident reminders of individual retribution and eternal damnation made the exercise feel foreign—even a little frightening. So, doubtless risking the welfare of our eternal souls, and much to the disappointment of some of our local friends, we eventually gave up on the services and found our own way to celebrate the silences of our many Sundays.

We knew that farther down the Outer Hebridean island chain, particularly in the last major inhabited island of Barra, the Catholic Church still held sway and things were significantly different. Pubs and restaurants were open, even some shops, cars buzzed around, ferries ran to and from the mainland, people laughed and frolicked and romped about with children and, I'm sure, had a gay old time on the unpadlocked swings and roundabouts in the local parks.

“Ah, weel, tha's Catholicism f'ye, d'y'ken,” one elderly gentleman told me at the Harris Hotel bar one evening. “They've got a real kooshy setup down there.”

“Kooshy? That's an interesting word.”

“Aye, well, tha's what 'tis. If y're Catholic y'can go about an' do all manner o'sins—fornication, intoxication, adultery—who knows, m'be a bit o' mayhem, too! An' then it's all this ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned' an' off they go, mumble a few Hail Marys, an' it's all written off, so to speak. Forgotten. Clean slate, y'ken. Free to go off an' do it all over again…”

“Well, I think they have to have the intention, when they go to confession, of not committing the same sins again…”

“Says who?”

“Well…,” I faltered, “that's what I've heard…”

“Bollocks! An' double bollocks!”

“Yes…well. I see your point…” I was floundering now.

“T'my mind it's jus' no fair. No right, y'ken.”

“What—you mean we should just let all our sins pile up and then—”

“Tha's exactly right. Let 'em pile up an' up. An' those wi' the biggest pile go down an' those wi' the littlest piles get their just rewards…”

“In heaven?”

“Tha's chust right. In heaven. Where else, f'God's sake.”

“Yes. Well—yes—where else indeed…”

I was curious to get his reaction to the ideas of divine forgiveness, love conquering all, and the fact that the New Testament I'd read makes little, if any, reference to hell. There seems to be an assumption that, as we're such a pathetic lot of “born into sin” sinners and that we've already been forgiven anyway by Christ's self-sacrifice, we'll all more than likely nudge our way into the heavenly hordes without getting crisped in the eternal fires.

But I didn't ask him. I had a feeling I wouldn't like the answers and I was tired—very tired actually—of the infinite schisms, not only of Christianity but of all so-called religions.

It was time for a change of perspective and place—a place supposedly
awash in Catholic benevolence, tolerance, and forgiveness. A place like Barra maybe…

“Fancy a trip down through the Uists to Barra?” I asked Anne at the tail end of a particularly somnolent Sunday.

“Wonderful!” she said. (I do enjoy her sudden spontaneities.) And so—we set off to Barra to see how other islanders lived…

E
VEN THE MOST CURSORY GLANCE
at a map shows the Outer Hebrides as a wiggle-tailed, fishlike (one outsider suggested “an overanxious sperm in hot pursuit of an elusive egg”) archipelago, with the broad expanse of Lewis as the head, Harris as a kind of neck, North and South Uist and Benbecula as its spine, and tiny Barra as its tail—slightly, and appropriately, off kilter.

Which of course is one of the reasons we responded to a serendipitous urge to leave Harris for a few days and see if all the rumors about that rambunctious little Catholic isle way down at the bottom of the Hebridean chain had any validity. Rumors, as we've often discovered in our wanderings, have a habit of galvanizing into reputations, and reputations into distinctly biased and self-fulfilling realities. And the rumors about Barra were indeed rife on Harris: “Och, they're soo diff'rent from us up here—'s MacNeil territory, d'y'ken. S'wha'd'ya expect?” (with a sly wink, the significance of which eluded us completely at the time); “'S'more Ireland than Scotland—and not the best of the Irish either…”; “Oh, it's a wild, barren, boggy place”; “Now what kinda place would put an airport runway on a tidal beach, ah ask?”; “Well, y'should read Compton Mackenzie's
Whisky Galore
—he lived there, so he knew about all their drinkin' an' their blasphemies…”

The first time I remember reading anything about Barra was in one of Isabella Bird's magnificent nineteenth-century travel odysseys,
tic sea views…honestly, my wee island's jus' 'bout as good as it gets…anywhere!”

The hourlong ferry ride was a sinuous wiggle between the islets and shoals of the Sound of Harris. I wondered why on earth Lord Leverhulme ever thought of trying to make Leverburgh into one of the main ports in western Scotland. This gauntlet of ragged rocks could hardly suggest a safe haven for large vessels. Even Andrew Johnson, who takes tourists out to see the seal colonies among this labyrinth of islets in his small sailing boat, admits after years of experience that he still finds the place “a little treacherous.” He particularly dreads the sudden smotherings of sea mist “that can emerge out of perfectly normal days and turn the sound into a thick soup in a matter of minutes.”

Fortunately ours was a soupless journey, although it was fascinating to see how wide a berth the captain gave some of the shoals. Way off to the east, on the far side of The Minch, the towering cliffs of Skye were bathed in early-morning sunshine and behind them rose the frost-shattered peaks of the Cuillin Hills, purple hazed against a dome of cloudless blue. There was something majestic and proud in their massive jagged profiles, but, as always in the Hebrides, beauty rarely comes without its inner layers of Gaelic melancholia—a mood captured to perfection in the strong, sinewed Scottish poems of Sorley MacLean and Louis MacNeice.

“Captain's a canny one,” commented a fellow passenger, crouched by the rails in a stiff breeze, apparently intrigued by our serpentine wake.

“That's fine with me,” was all I could think to say before going off to the ship's store to buy a detailed map of this southern section of the Outer Hebrides.

And if ever a map was worthy of an art gallery hanging, this was the one. It was hard to tell land from lochans in the intricate lacework of abstract shapes. Even Finland's beloved Lakeland region has nothing on the detailed meldings and scribbly patterns of islands, lochans, pools, and puddles here. Thousands upon thousands of them pockmarked the land from Lochmaddy at the northern tip of North Uist, through Benbecula and South Uist, to the new bridge across to Eriskay (a small island described by one writer as “a lumpy huddle of grass and heather, croft
and beaches” and a haven of escape for Bonnie Prince Charlie after his disastrous campaign to restore the Stuart monarchy) and the second ferry crossing point to Barra itself.

In the days, not too long ago, when movement across this strange, boggy waterland topography was a hazardous process along pernicious paths and across fickle tidal fords, the old Gaelic blessing to travelers of
Faothail mhath dhuibh
(May you find a good ford) characterized the tenuous spirit of life on the Uists. Despite the presence on the eastern side of significant upland terrain, most of the land here is pool-table flat, treeless, and blasted by ferocious Atlantic winds. And the farther westward you look, across the vast sweeps of green
machair
, the more you sense the eerie infinitudes of the terrain.

Crofter cottages were dotted about in irregular fashion, but despite evidence of grassland fertility characterized by the presence of cattle (a relatively rare sight in Harris and Lewis) as well as sheep, Anne and I sensed a distinct loneliness here. This became even more evident when we left the security of the single main road down the island's spine and meandered off along narrow backroads and rough tracks deeper and deeper into this flat dreamscape. The loopy edges of the lochans merged one into the next; round patches of
machair
nestled together like green pancakes in the shallows; sheep hopped from one to another like agile rabbits. Eventually a slight rise in the land of low dunes signaled the final western merger of
machair
and ocean. We stopped the car by the side of a gravelly track, strolled through the dunes, and walked out onto vast, slowly curving strands of almost pure white sand, fine as baby powder, and utterly unoccupied for mile after mile in both directions.

“There's enough seaside frontage here for the whole population of Scotland!” I remember exclaiming at one point as we sat in a sand hollow, staring southward from Ardivachar Point on South Uist down twenty-five or more miles of virtually unbroken beach. With not a soul to be seen anywhere.

“Yes—but those gales here. They'd blow them all back to the mainland!” said Anne, which at the time seemed an amusing retort. However, a while later, in unexpectedly ferocious hurricane-force winter storms, we learned that a whole family of five in a car had been literally lifted off
the road in a gale-created tidal surge and drowned while trying to cross the two-mile causeway linking Benbecula with North Uist.

But such tragedies, past and present, have obviously not discouraged settlement along these shores. The rich
machair
was just too tempting for ancient Neolithic (up to 2000
BC
), Bronze Age (to 300
BC
), and Iron Age (300
BC
to
AD
200) settlers—a heritage of over five thousand years—whose bold remnant structures and standing stones still litter the island chain today. Then came the marauding Vikings in the eighth century, and subsequent generations of crofter-farmers who maintained a subsistence way of life here for centuries. The population increased rapidly, as in Harris, during the peak of the kelp industry in the early 1800s, and in the lucrative herring era. But then, crisis and calamity came just as it did to so much of Scotland, particularly the island communities. It's the same story over and over. The overcrowding of the crofter populations, the terrible potato famines of the 1850s, the decline of kelp and fishing, and the frantic maneuvers of the clan chiefs to introduce widespread sheep farming by “clearing” the crofters off the land and shipping them off to Canada or Australia. All led to a decimation of the “old ways,” the destruction of the small crofts, and the creation of a
machair
plain inhabited only by sheep and cattle.

Today, although the crofters are back following dramatic reforms and tenancy laws after the passing of the 1886 Crofter Act and subsequent “social enhancements,” their numbers are few compared to the old days. And while prosperity is evident in the well-kept pastures, the neat fencing, and the newly whitewashed homes, the vast green
machair
still possesses an empty aura punctuated by the grass-smothered humps and bumps of long-abandoned black houses. Yet one more place of whispered tragedies and cruel evictions.

“We had to do it,” claim descendants of the clearance-era lairds. “There were just too many people on too little land and they were starving and the industries were dying—and we were going bankrupt too! So—we tried to help our crofters get a fresh start somewhere else.”

The crofters, of course, tell a far different story. And even today in bars and community halls all around the Hebrides, you can still sense their anger and resentment and their “never again!” spirit.

We got a smattering of it when we stopped briefly at the Politician pub in Eriskay to see what more we could learn about the famous story that made Compton Mackenzie's book
Whisky Galore
an international best-seller and movie and put these remote islands well and truly on the tourist map.

“Y'wanna hear the story, d'ye?” An elderly, stooped man approached us as we were studying the old sepia-tinged photographs on the walls of the modern-looking pub, whose windows faced out across the Sound of Barra and the wide Atlantic. He gave a sort of lopsided leering sneer when he noticed we were reading the “official” history of the event framed beside the photos, and stood close enough to drench us in pungent whisky fumes.

“Aw, f'get a'that. Ah'll tell'e wha' really 'appened.”

“Why—were you there?” I asked. The event took place in February 1941, so as I guessed he was well into his seventies (but looking more like a hundred with his wrinkled, line-etched face), I assumed he might well have been a participant in this hilarious episode.

He gave a kind of “What kind of daft question is that?—Of course I was” grimace and proceeded to describe how the twelve-thousand-ton cargo ship
Politician
had been grounded by an errant navigator “on the last bit o' rock between here and America” at the eastern end of the Sound of Eriskay and was quickly found to contain over twenty-four thousand cases of whisky ultimately bound for New York.

“This wa' the war time when whisky—we called it the
cratur
—was a wee bit rare in these parts so y'can imagine what a lovely surprise this was for us all. And quick work we made of that liquor too—dropped those boxes off fast as lightnin' and hid 'em in places like y'wouldn'a believe.”

“But it says here that the customs men were able to requisition most of the cases and very few were stolen…,” I said, pointing to the “official” story on the wall.

“Rubbish!” the old man responded with remarkable vigor, dousing us once again in a noxious smog of whisky fumes. “Tha's wha' they had t'say, weren't it?! But even today y'still find people sellin' them ol' bottles fer enough cash t'fill this bar with the
cratur
fer a year or more. Oh,
no—w'got a nice lot o' the stuff off long before the customs got 'emselves up 'ere.”

“And it says that many of those that were caught got prison sentences…”

I waited for another blast of fumes but he decided to sulk instead at my tactless interruption.

“Och—believe wha' the hell y'wanna believe.”

He moved away. I wondered if I'd been a little rude and Anne was nudging me with a kind of “do something” urgency, so I followed him to the bar and offered him a drink. “Och, weel—I'll jus' have a large one then, seein' as y'askin',” he replied, and I felt I'd been caught once again in a little local trap for gullible outsiders. But I bought a round for all of us, including the barman, and the old man started up again.

“Y'see, what they don't really tell you in all this official history is what else was on board that poor ship. Y'won't believe—there were boxes of cigarettes—real expensive ones—an' silk dresses, an' fur coats, an' perfume, an' fancy shoes an' all kinds o' cases—travelin' cases like y'take fer a holiday. An' can y'guess who all this stuff was for?”