The Big Music (40 page)

And what was left for Mary then? Helen wondered about her, gave stories to her, for what had occurred there, in that woman’s life, after she’d turned her own daughter away?

Of course those actions of hers, coming from her strength and
independence
, had brought a consequence upon her she could not have forseen, otherwise surely would not have allowed? That was Helen’s realisation, years after her mother had first started telling her about her grandmother’s life. How she came to understand that a desire for freedom itself, and independence, can cause a straitening, a limitation that shows itself as narrowness and lack of feeling … Is what would happen in time to Mary.

For, as Margaret said, the way her mother came to end her life was to be without both a daughter and a granddaughter – though surrounded still by her own perceived and wasted freedom. For to be a mother of a daughter without a daughter … What loneliness there, what cutting short. That by judging her daughter so hard for following the conditions of her heart she would lose her, that by punishing her because she would leave her to follow a man, so that Mary herself would never see her own daughter, meet her granddaughter … What possible freedom could there ever be to make up for that, ever? In casting Margaret from her the way she did, what effect? What result? Only sadness.
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This sadness has been described already, of course, in an earlier embellishment,
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and other papers describe how the music of
piobaireachd
and the remote Highland landscape itself promote feelings of loss and loneliness. The line ‘People are lonely enough’ comes to mind here, along with countless other phrases that describe emptiness and longing – there is Callum’s return home to see his father, driving up the long road in the gathering dusk, there are the implacable hills, the empty skies. So Mary’s sense of loss here could be seen as one aspect of a larger landscape. Certainly she is not alone in her stubborn refusal to let tenderness guide her actions. But the significance here of her will is the way it played out upon her daughter’s life. How, because Mary herself had never allowed a man to direct her actions in the way that Margaret was so affected, she became narrow towards Margaret and unyielding – is what Helen came to learn from her story. That independence could lead to judgement then to loss. Indeed she has made notes about this:
How sometimes everything you want,
she has written,
only draws you closer and closer inwards, takes you away from the open air and puts you inside.

Poor Mary.

By the time she died, it was as though she had never known Margaret, never given birth to a daughter, or held her. Had never known her at all.

So the consequences played out in that woman’s life – a particular effect of a particular kind of love:
That’s a story many women tell,
writes Helen on a paper,
though never Mary.

Is why she writes it down and keeps it here instead. ‘In books’ she says, ‘in papers.’
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The history of women in these places is always a quiet story, it’s quietly told.

The story of her mother, her mother’s mother.

All caught up in those domestic papers. Embellishments. Variations.

The history of women in these places …

Writing everything down that the children might learn from the history, as Helen herself might learn from her mother’s story: what strength is. And love. To be strong like a Mary, but with an understanding, too, of that which is tentative and can be frail. Therefore to treasure love and return to it, going back and back again to that invisible thing, even when it has no currency in the world, when some may say it has given you nothing, so you go back to it, says Margaret’s story in the end, return, to find the richness there.

It’s not to give the impression that the land up in this part of Scotland, connected to this family and developed over the years away from the
estate
system of leasehold and rent, quite separate in its management from the rural systems established in the North East at the turn of the
nineteenth
century,
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not to imply that any of this put the Sutherland family in a position that could be regarded as elevated, in the district. This was not the case. That old John ‘Elder’ challenged in market for better prices for his animals was not to make him grand in any way, or standing one better than his neighbours. Rather, he was able to charge more for his livestock and so challenge the market because the animals were those he himself had raised and looked after – so better by far than any a shepherd might mind for the laird he was working for, and better, too, than leasehold beasts, for these sheep and cattle were his own. So, in all, this would put him in a better position than most with his enterprises – and gave others in the district a kind of template to follow: that you could raise more for your own stock by bringing in the kinds of innovations and care that were being adopted on the big estates down on the Black Isle and in Nairn,
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that it was all about paying attention, success, being responsible for the development of your own land and beasts and not just letting them lie, in the old ways, unchanged, just making do with getting by.

So his sheep were cross-bred to create his own breed – hardy and fat, and with wool that could be clipped twice in the year; the effort worth it for the yield. So in the same way he slowly sold off the black cattle and brought in the slower, heavier red cows that could be driven for greater distance without losing body weight. And one should not give the
impression
either, in this paper, that any of those working for him resented the additional labour that these innovations brought – for the recompense was there, in money or in livestock. And not to suggest either that any resented the tithe he took, this John Sutherland, known also as Callum, following in his father’s habits, in taking a tithe instead of payment in exchange for the land sub-contracted – any more than any would have resented the tithe asked for the shelter provided by the House back in the old days, when it was a necessary stopping-off place for shepherds on the Lairg sheep or cattle run.
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For just as the shepherds of that earlier time would rather be paying a man they viewed as a friend in tithe, so as to reflect a fairness, a
reciprocity
, in payment and in receipt, so those in later generations who were given work on the land regarded the extra clipping, the time taken with the lambs or the greening of the pasture by the river, as necessary and developmental to their own success – it came to be that way – as helping them in time with their own ventures. In this John or Callum was a sort of mentor, you might call him, someone they could go to for advice and help and who would give them a start, too, if they needed it, more often than not out of their own tithe. In all this, then, so you could say, he was the kind of man as they themselves were, is how they regarded him, straightforward, you might say, and with simple education, and though he had the House and with land and hills and a river going through it all … He had none of the glitter and empty cast, as they saw it, of the landed
classes with their big ostentations hidden away in the hills and there only for the autumn shooting, or for the salmon, just. This man, by contrast, the great-great-great-grandfather of this book’s John Callum MacKay, lived here through the year, he stayed here: a man who had used his wit and cleverness, it was said, to take back some of the goodness of the land that in the course of time the Big Clearances may have lost.
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And it’s written like that, ‘Big Clearances’ – though this is something to argue with, of course.
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Whether we are to think of what happened in this part of Sutherland as a straightforward ‘clearing’ – a sweeping away, and all that the word hints at and implies, the adjective containing within it, as it were, the force of necessity. For there are many
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will say that this was a natural thing, in its frank brutality, a force of nature that occurred by human agency – for the land was never going to continue to support the kinds of numbers were breeding and living like wild things in some of the conditions present up there in the back hills and valleys of the darkest Caithness and Sutherland Hills.

Or, on the other hand, whether one is to agree with the many others who say that the very scale of the operation has weeping in it, the echo of which carries in the empty hills to this day. They will say, those who argue to this side, that it would have been far better to have left things alone there, that they themselves had family who would have liked to have been left alone, that it’s no one’s right ever to turn people away from their homes when they were living in a way they were used to and could even say were accepting of and fond – for they knew no other. They had their family there, they will say, who gave birth to their babies, and gathered around fires to talk, exchange information: these were communities – and who can have the right to break these up into pieces, make the people
go away?
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Also, it will be argued, that it was in the very days before the Clearances, when families would have their couple of sheep and their cow, would have some milk and cheese and some wool and the women kept looms and wheels, that there was a civility, dignity, to life. That, in the way these remote and impoverished people put themselves together, clothed themselves, told all their stories and made their music, was a culture that was lost to the mills and factories and gin houses of the town, a way of life that would be hard to find again, put back together again.

So it will be said.

So it is said.

For in those stories …

In that music …

Is where an Urlar might start.

Where you might make for yourself a ground upon which to stand.

And from that beginning, the rest can come.

So what I am getting at here
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– in the idea of the home as ground, as the starting place – is an image of a group of people with a certain ‘sound’ to them, you could say, a particular clustering of notes that comes through the tune as a recurring theme. And there’s a certain appearance to them, also, these people – in their story and that sound – certain genes cast down from the time of the Viking invasion
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hundreds of years ago, from inter-relations with those Northern armies, and with something left too from the original people of this place that’s fast and animal, with a quick-foot-ed’ness
that made them excellent for the hills and for getting over a river at spate or dodging the exciseman when he came. So that when parts of the Highlands were cleared in a mass of clans and groupings … These certain families wrested out a living just so much longer.

You can say, then, for these families – for this man – the Clearances didn’t happen in the way of others. Yes, much was lost, much swept away, but, in the sense that this particular man used his cleverness to avoid the fate his neighbours were commanded by, he was not affected by the large scope of the operation. He and his family were let alone. For by offering at that point in history – when all was falling away for so many, for those he must have known and loved – to run the sheep that were being brought in, that were part of the great change that was affecting so much in the region, and to offer to manage the flocks himself for an absent laird on a piece of land that that man had perceived to have no value …

Was the beginning of his own ground, for sure.

His advantage gained, his place upon the land made good.

Though there may be some cannot understand this. How good can come out of ill, when so many others are suffering. But the fact is that this man’s foresight and strength of character, of decision, cleverness – that word again – will always keep a family safe. So when the great House of Sutherland carved up that part of the Highlands and placed builders at the coast and inland through Strath Naver for certain fishing and shooting pleasure, starting work on building the fine lodges and estate buildings and bridges that you can see to this day in various places through that landscape … They had taken no account of this particular strath where the foundations of The Grey House are lying now.
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To that extent cleverness can be a hidden thing. For that little mark of stone you see from a great distance on the low side of the greyish-green hills – you could barely make it out as a place where a man may start to think about creating something more for himself. Yet that is where it had begun for
him, this one man. That first Sutherland’s own grandfather’s croft was that stone, his history already there, an understanding of the land already established in that most inhospitable place. So there was a stone you might not think any more than a stone but it had been where a whole family had kept itself protected, where generations of their forebears had grown and flourished – that, this family understood, knew about and could work with, this particular part of the hills.