Seasons on Harris (39 page)

Alasdair paused. The Gaelic language was obviously a key touchstone of his life and his art—but frowns kept forming on his forehead. “Y'see—this is one of the last places in the world where the language is used on a daily basis. Maybe a little in Wales too, with the Welsh language. But we're not going to be able to fully revive the Gaelic because we're being taken over and more and more outsider people are settling here who just won't learn it. So Gaelic is dying. It's moribund, despite the efforts to legally revive it. People who sold a leaky garage in London can move into a full croft up here and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no way of stopping it. This is the way of the world and that's it. I mean, y're not gonna put a house on the market and stipulate that only Gaelic speakers can bid! Very worthy idea—but no. Och, the remnants of us will be ready for the grave soon, wasted hopes and tattered dreams—jibbering to one another in Gaelic—and no one knowing what we say.”

“There's a great Gaelic spirit in the way you describe the land, the island topography, the moors…”

“Ah, the moors. I know these moors. I've lived on these moors and among all the remnants of ancient cultures around here. You don't have to be very long on the moors before you realize…y'become very quiet in y'self…what Yeats called ‘peace dropping slow.' The proud Gaelic melancholy of all that wild blackland…and all that silence. It gets into you. It was wonderful on the sheilings up there in the summers—with the cattle. My mother taught me so much…the lowing of the cattle, the birds, y'see the weather comin' for miles…and all that silence. The silence of the moor. The silence is what the old people always talk about and they all say the same thing about the moor—you didn't want to come off it, you only wanted to stay. Y'know what it does t'you? When you come off the moor? If y'been in a shieling or suchlike for a month…it's all so bloody noisy when you come off…why's everybody so churlish and talking so loudly! All that shouting!

“I know people from Ness—they'd wait for April and then they'd be up there and that's where they'd all stay until October. Maybe walk back once a fortnight or so for eggs and suchlike. I would love—before I die—to spend a lot more time up there, but the paths we took are now
heathered up because there are no sheep left—I'll need to take a young folk or two to clear the way and someone with second sight to warn us of all the dangers!”

“Second-sighters keep creeping into your books…and ghosts too.”

“Ah, yes—they're good, good stories. This is what the
ceilidh
was great for. I mention the ghost stories in my books just as it was in our house. I know Lewis people with second sight. Many people. They didn't think it was anything special. But today—they've really gone and mucked up our ghosts. Electricity, cars, TV, telephones, and all those things—a decent ghost wouldn't hang around here with all this palaver. How can a ghost survive? What would be the point?!”

Our meandering conversation moved on to other things—stories of Alasdair's life on the oil rigs in the North Sea, his two failed marriages, and his still optimistic activities to recharge the Gaelic spirit and language against all the rampant odds of a faster, more fluid, open-to-change world.

Then he paused for a moment. “But y'know, I'm just thinking about those ghosts and things…I reckon I'm so tied into this place that even when I'm gone…there'll still be a part of me floating around here, haunting these moors…”

E
VERYONE HERE KNOWS THAT
C
HRISTMAS
is not a particularly popular celebration on Harris due to staunchly Presbyterian ethics that virtually dismiss the season as a paganized irrelevancy—or, as one friend put it, “a peculiar period of wavering agnosticism”!

Everyone knows this. Everyone, apparently, except me.

On a recent trip to Stornoway, I'd seen plenty of Christmas decorations in the stores, spontaneous demonstrations of affection for the Yule-tide in the pubs, and people dragging enormous bags of brightly wrapped gifts up and down Cromwell Street.

On Harris, however, things were far more subdued. True, there was a single modest line of colored lights strung out by the stores overlooking the harbor and a few hesitant attempts at holly wreaths and the like on the doors and porches of some of the homes. But you could tell the hearts of the
Hearaich
were not particularly galvanized by this particular season.

Talking with the old salts down at the Clisham Keel (where else?), I got a hearty dousing of Calvinistic diatribes about the “Catholic frivolities of Christmas” and the fact that most islanders regarded Christmas as merely a kind of lukewarm interlude prior to the year's major celebration of the Scottish New Year, better known as Hogmanay.

As soon as the magic “H” word was mentioned they were off, filling my uninitiated Yorkshire head with tales of ribald indulgences and unfet
tered frolicking among the homes of Tarbert and in the isolated croft cottages along The Bays and on the road to Hushinish in North Harris.

“Ne'er stops f'a week or more,” claimed one elderly man who invariably sat at the bar wearing what he proudly called “m'Aussie desert hat.” This was an ancient, sweat-dissolved remnant that admittedly had some tattered bits of netting dangling from the brim, so I guess it might once have been the traditional Australian outback “fly screen” headgear.

“Usta be a lot more fun than 'tis today,” murmured another, and told me tales of the “real traditional rituals of
Challuinn
,” originally held on the twelfth of January—the “
old
New Year's Day.” Apparently, in many communities, the young boys would form into bands and select a leader who was made to wear a sheepskin or cowhide on his back. Others carried sacks and off they'd meander from home to home, reciting Gaelic rhymes that began:

All being well, the festive group would then be invited in and the leader would walk clockwise around the fire (my informant was referring to the old black-house days when central peat fires were commonplace), his followers striking his sheepskin with sticks. Then they'd all be given their bannock cakes or whatever else the “good wife” could muster up, bless the house, and move on into the night, filling their sacks at house after house until they finally sat and gorged on their collected goodies at the end of their meanderings.

“Aye, that was fun enough,” agreed another elderly gentleman at the bar, “but when y'got to be an adult, the real games started!” And he gave me a rather racy tale of the men setting out with whisky bottles and oatcakes to “first-foot” as many houses as they could through the long, fes
tive, and raucous night. Whisky was given and received in abundance; food was offered everywhere as a symbol of expected plenty for the coming year. But there were cautions too: “Y' never brought in a red-haired man—ver'bad luck that could bring [maybe, due to what remains of my Irish-red hair, that's why my invitations to “first footings” were a little sparse], and a woman! Och, that's much worse—'specially if she's a blonde!”

The old salts were right. Christmas indeed was a rather limp and languid affair, although I did enjoy a splendid dinner at Katie's hotel with the MacAskill family, buoyed by seasonal blessings and awash in fine whiskies, as Roddy insisted on giving me yet one more lesson in the “magic of the malt.”

“An'if y'just wait a few more days,” he said, “we'll do it all over again for Hogmanay!”

 

T
HE NEXT DAY, THIS LONG, DARK
season of almost-perpetual night became distinctly white.

These first bouts of winter during the New Year Hogmanay period came at a most inconvenient time. First, Anne was away. Her mother had taken ill in Yorkshire and she'd headed south again to be with the family. Second, although we'd finally returned to our Ardhasaig cottage after that idyllic interlude on the Seilibost sands, we'd had to move out for a few days due to a prior booking by some Londoners who wanted to experience a riotous Hogmanay in Harris. (They should have gone to Edinburgh instead. The whole thing there is a true tourist happening.)

So, I was stuck in an unfamiliar rented house with no wife and no heat and trying to engender emergency warmth through the magic of strong Yorkshire tea. But then I looked out of the window, and all pending
duldachd—
a sort of melancholy Hebridean winter depression—floated away. It was a glorious early morning—a low, horizon-bound sun, bronze-burnished clouds, the North Harris peaks salted with snow and their lower slopes still in their traditional tweedy colors of ochre and moss green. And I was suddenly happy. If this is winter, I thought, I'll survive it quite comfortably.

Then things changed. Dramatically. Admittedly a Hebridean norm, but it certainly took me by surprise as I turned to look again at the gentle morning scene half an hour later to be met with…white.

Obviously steam on the window, I thought. I'd made a real fog in the kitchen as I boiled water for the tea, so I carefully cleared the glass surface of condensation…and noticed not a scintilla of change. If anything the white was even more pronounced. Except there was movement in this white. Furious horizontal flurries in the form of snow, the hiss and crackle of hailstones like small golf balls, and a rapidly rising scream of gale-force winds.

It was a true, authentic whiteout. I could see nothing of the mountains now, the sea lochs, the small boats, the salmon farm, or the crofter's cottage just down the grassy slope. I couldn't even see the grass outside the window, and my tiny car parked below had vanished into this eerily blank, bleach-white world.

I turned back to make more tea, amazed both by the ferocity of the snowstorm and the rapidity of its arrival. I couldn't have been more than five minutes or so in the kitchen preparing the brew, and selecting a couple of very English-style cookies for my breakfast. And then I thought I'd check on the storm's wild progress.

Only now there was no storm.

And nothing to reflect its prior demonic presence except a luscious, velvety coating of sun-sheened snow across the whole glorious vista from the tops of Clisham to the slate windowsill outside, a few inches from my bemused face.

I don't think I've ever seen such rapid shifts in weather anywhere. And it continued on through this strange day—one idiosyncratic montage of brilliant sun-bathed interlude in which the snow sparkled like gold-dusted ermine, then another whiteout, followed by a glorious winter sunset at three o'clock in the afternoon that created a world so golden, silent, and mystical I felt I'd slipped into a soft dream.

My dreamlike mood is matched in the fine book
The Islanders: A Hebridean Experience,
by Rosemary Millington, who expresses the mystery of the Hebridean weather in a paean of prose poetry:

I suddenly realized, after the sun had vanished, that the house was becoming distinctly chilly. When I'd first moved in a couple of days previously, the rather stern lady proprietor had pointed to an enormous square cast-iron contraption full of little doors and vents and pockmarked with knobs. It crouched ominously in the corner of the kitchen. I thought it looked distinctly unfriendly. A Stephen King type of thing. She smiled a sort of wan half-smile and almost dismissively told me, “Oh, and that's your central heating stove.”

“Stove? You heat the water for the radiators in this?”

“Yes. It was once an oven, too, and other things, but we only use it now for the central.”

“It's what? Oil, propane…”

“No.” She gave a patronizing smile. “Of course not. It's coal.”

“Ah. Coal…”

“And dross.”

“Ah, dross…”

“The instructions are around somewhere. It's quite straightforward. Just read them. Carefully.”

When she left I searched for the instructions and finally found them under a pile of “how not to make a mess of things” manuals for all the other bits of equipment around the cottage. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to master the subtleties of this strange and complex item and so I left it alone, silent and glowering in its corner.

And the same went for the peat fire in the living room. How delightful, I thought, when she showed me the tiny fireplace all ready with kin
dling and paper and two fat slabs of peat waiting to be lit and burned merrily in traditional Highland fashion, bestowing a pleasant peat-reek aroma to the room. I'll luxuriate tonight…

Before lighting, I paused to admire the peat squares. I lifted one and it was almost as light as polystyrene. The sodden, wet moussey stuff they cut from the peat banks in May, then dry on the moors during the summer, then carry back to the house and pile up in great herringbone-patterned stacks (
cruachs
) for winter, seemed so dainty and crumbly now. Little roots of ancient growth stuck out and I thought, this could be hundreds, maybe thousands, of years of rotted, compacted moorland vegetation here. A beautiful organic, environmentally correct, and sustainable slab of nature's bounty.

Only it wouldn't burn.

The paper did. Beautifully. And the kindling. And the flames licked the peats, and licked and licked and then finally gave up. Ten minutes later the big fire pile was reduced to an ashy residue in the grate, with the two pristine peats apparently untouched. And try as I might over subsequent days, I never learned the art of getting these things to do any more than give off a lot of smoke and smolder—but no flame. And no heat. And certainly no peat-reek.

And—at the very beginning of the Hogmanay week—there was no power either. A furious Atlantic gale had apparently felled a number of electricity poles high up in the North Harris hills and it took two long and chilly days before power was restored. Not a pleasant predicament, and despite the glimmering light of the candles, the room in my temporary new home seemed ominously dark and full of looming shadows. If Anne had been around, we'd not have even noticed and doubtless would have been drinking hot mugs of Christmas cheer and reminiscing about other Christmases we'd spent in exotically odd places around the world.

But Anne was not here and, despite the kindness of a few newfound friends around Tarbert who'd plied me with invitations to join them for seasonal celebrations, tonight I was alone. And a little lonely too.

Normally I have no problems being alone. Which is perhaps a good thing, because so much of the traveling life consists of inner journeying with only yourself for company. But on that particular night, my alone
ness in that dark room—in a dark and strange house, in a dark town, with not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere because of the power cut—felt distinctly maudlin and oppressive.

Wham!

The front door suddenly started to rattle and shake, and if this had been a Disneyesque cartoon, I think my body would have shot vertically out of the armchair, ramming my head straight through the plaster ceiling (with those little cheeping birds and stars flying around my head to emphasize my dazed predicament).

As it was, I remained firmly seated but my eyes were focused on the door. What the hell was that!? Was it some errant blast of a winter williwaw? Was the handle moving? And was that a scratching sound, like long nails being drawn slowly down the worn wood outside…?

Stupid! I thought. Forget it.

But I couldn't. I was, as they say in Yorkshire, becoming “half a bubble off plumb,” and for some dumb reason I rose slowly from the chair and tiptoed across the floor to the now silent door. I waited. The handle was not moving.

“Hello,” I said in a voice so low and hoarse I hardly recognized myself.

Silence.

“Anyone there?”

More silence.

So—nothing to do but open the thing and take a quick, nervous peep outside.

Which I did. And there was…nothing.

Nothing, that is, except a small plate wrapped in cheesecloth sitting off in the shadows by the winter skeleton of a small bush.

I leaned down and picked it up. It felt warm. Which was more than I was, so I carried it inside, closed the door hurriedly, placed it on the table by my chair. And opened it.

I think it was the closest I got during that strange Christmas to a tear or two. Maybe it was Anne's absence that added a touch of drippy sentimentality to this little miracle—a plate of four warm mince pies, redolent in Christmas aromas, and a tiny miniature bottle of Chivas Regal.
But no note. No indication of who was responsible for this little gift of generous spontaneity.