Alan Riach: Mist, travel, time, and Scotland as a miserable place, right enough

The preface (“To the Illustrious Reader”) to his book Faith (1909) perhaps suggests both the irony and the dedication in the title. It begins: “Everything that a man writes brings sorrow to him of some kind or another.”

We should not be exclusive. The observation applies to any author, not only men. Graham goes on: “All we write is but a bringing forth again of something we have seen or heard about. What makes it art is but the handling of it and the imagination that is brought to bear upon the theme out of the writer’s brain. It follows therefore that all writing, as I said before, brings sorrow in its train.”

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This might not apply in quite the same way with the other arts. “It may be that a painter with his long stroke of the brush, so different to the niggling of the pen, is differently affected; but then his work is beautiful in itself, and must remain perforce a thing of beauty, even to himself. Painters, I fancy, are the pleasantest companions of all the race of men who follow any kind of art” (and as we said, not only men).

“To record, even to record emotions, is to store up a fund of sadness, and that is why all writing is a sort of icehouse of the mind, in which that which was once a warm and living action, a feeling, scene, experience, joy, or sorrow, is now preserved, as it were, frozen, stiff, deprived of actuality, and a mere chopping block on which fools exercise their wits.”

Speaking as one whose professional life has been largely devoted to developing my skills as one of those “fools” I can see the truth in Graham’s contention and endorse it. “Cooped underneath the sky, like butterflies shut up by schoolboys under a finger-bowl, we can but flutter, or if we fly, rise only to the middle of the glass. What we can do, is to look out as far as possible through the imprisoning crystal and set down what we see.”

Very well, then. In keeping with the misty melancholy but looking further afield we might, as a diversion, settle on the work of Graham’s contemporary the Canadian Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), whose “Nonsense Novel” of 1911, Hannah of the Highlands: or The Laird of Loch Aucherlocherty, might raise our spirits and tickle our fancies appropriately.

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We first meet Hannah singing as she paddles in the water, “gathering lobsters in the burn that ran through the glen”: “It was here in the Glen that Bonnie Prince Charlie had lain and hidden after the defeat of Culloden. Almost in the same spot the great boulder still stands behind which the Bruce had lain hidden after Bannockburn; while behind a number of lesser stones the Covenanters had concealed themselves during the height of the Stuart persecution …

“Through the Glen Montrose had passed on his fateful ride to Killiecrankie; while at the lower end of it the rock was still pointed out behind which William Wallace had paused to change his breeches while flying from the wrath of Rob Roy.”

In fact, “most of the great events of Scotch history had taken place in the Glen, while the little loch had been the scene of some of the most stirring naval combats in the history of the Grampian Hills.”

Historical tableau deftly established, our story closes in on Hannah but not before the climate, weather conditions and general atmosphere are carefully annotated: “It was a gloriously beautiful Scotch morning. The rain fell softly and quietly, bringing dampness and moisture, and almost a sense of wetness to the soft moss underfoot. Grey mists flew hither and thither, carrying with them an invigorating rawness that had almost a feeling of dampness.”

And Hannah herself, “the beautiful Highland girl” is “a beautiful picture”: “Her bare feet were in the burn, the rippling water of which laved her ankles. The lobsters played about her feet, or clung affectionately to her toes, as if loath to leave the water and be gathered in the folds of her blue apron.”

But before too long, sorrow and melancholy return. We are whirled along with Hannah, the hapless heroine, into the conflict of the clans, the McWhinuses and the McShamuses, with Hannah caught in the crossfire. It does not end well. Our hero Oyster McShamus is found dead in the grass, soaked in “whiskey” and Hannah is discovered lying “among the sand and seaweed, her fair hair soaked in gasoline”.

Perhaps it is simply our fate in this autumn season to be drawn to the damp and dismal and to remember the unpredicted visitations of such weather in the unlikeliest of circumstances. I recollect a trip to Skye, travelling with friends, many, many years ago. One pal, snoozing in the back seat of the car, grumbled himself awake on the outskirts of Fort William, or, as it should be better known, The Garrison.

“Where are we?” came the hoarse voice from behind us. “Approaching Fort William,” we told him. “It’ll be raining in Fort William,” said Chris.

The sky was cloudless, blue and bright, the sun shining warm, and rain seemed simply impossible, inconceivable, a million miles away.

As we drove into Fort William, vast dark storm clouds suddenly came over and let loose their downpour everywhere, torrential, unceasing – until we came out the other side of the town. Chris woke up some time later. “You were right,” we told him. “It was raining in Fort William.”

“It’s always raining in Fort William,” he said.

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And on every single occasion since then, whenever I’ve been in Fort William, it has been raining. At least, so it was until a few years ago, when driving through once more, the sun decided to stay out. We immediately sent a text message to Chris, who was at that moment in another part of the world. “We’re in Fort William – and it’s sunny!” we told him. The reply was a terse acknowledgement of surprise.

One week later, returning, we were astonished to find that it still wasn’t raining. We texted again: “Fort William again. Sun still shining.” Chris’s reply was more extensive this time: “What on earth are you still doing in Fort William? What could have kept you there for a week? Have you been kidnapped? Are you all right?” We assured him that we’d been in Skye all week, not in Fort William, and he seemed relieved.

The anecdote is salutary. There are places we associate with particular weather, emotional atmospheres, specific events and people. These are, or at least can be, helpful.

I can’t think of the Sound of Islay without remembering travelling through it by sail in a force-nine gale, the yacht tipping over until the mast kissed one side of the sea, then rolling over to kiss the other. In the cabin, the portholes on one side were underwater, then looking up towards the sky, then the other side in turn.

When I asked the skipper what would happen if she did overbalance, he replied: “It’s never happened to me and it won’t happen this time, and you’re securely connected, securely wired up, so you won’t be lost – but you will get wet.”

We got through all right.

Strange as it might seem, I can’t think of Leven in the Kingdom of Fife without recollecting a day in my boyhood when we went swimming and the water was so warm and exhilarating and the sunshine was so wonderful and ubiquitous that we all suffered terrible sunburn and spent the evening in agonies of ointment application, lying on our fronts in our beds in the caravans and waiting for the welcome cool to come back.

And there was one summer when I and my wife and our first son drove all around Scotland, from Edinburgh north to Elgin, then to Caithness, by ferry over to Orkney, then back south to Skye, to Mull and back to Glasgow, and the good weather followed us everywhere, while on the TV news and weather reports in the evenings we heard of snowstorms and hail in all the parts of Scotland we’d just left or were going to. But we met only benevolence, good air and warmth and welcome at every stop and on every part of the way. Such things cannot be predicted.

But if you were to consider the state of Scotland as a whole, these days, with all these different memories in mind, and Cunninghame Graham’s cautions, Stephen Leacock’s humour, and the many vicissitudes of travel and sunshine and storm, you’d have to conclude that it’s a miserable place, right enough.

Lourd on my hert as winter lies

The state that Scotland’s in the day.

Spring to the North has aye come slow

But noo dour winter’s like to stay

For guid,

And no’ for guid!

Hugh MacDiarmid (above) wrote that in 1930. “Lourd” simply means “heavy”. So, since then, what’s new? You might say, quite a lot, actually. The frustration for those of us declared for independence is even heavier today because the prospect is closer and more tangible than ever. In 1930 it must have seemed a fantasy, realisable, but the long, slow process towards that realisation meant that urgent action was less practical.

The last time I met him, in the final year of his life, I asked with the fury of youth, “When?” MacDiarmid raised his eyebrows. Chris, he said I should call him. That wasn’t quite right. And “Dr Grieve” was too formal. I think I remember that I called him Christopher. “You’ve called for all these things, and argued, written so much, so passionately, Scotland’s independence, socialism, a better place to live in, the wellbeing of people, all these things, when do you think it might happen?”

He smiled and nursed his pipe, puffed, and said, “Alan, when you get to my age, the urgency is less important.” In 1930, he went on:

O wae’s me on the weary days

When it is scarce grey licht at noon;

It maun be a’ the stupid folk

Diffusin’ their dullness roon and roon

Like soot,

That keeps the sunlight oot.

What marvellous sweep! “All the stupid folk / Diffusing dullness!” And that has surely escalated incrementally since 1930. An entire government. A complete political party. More than one. A “majority” of the English voting population opposed to the “majority” of the Scottish voting population. Another little saw: “There are only two problems in the world: ignorance and stupidity, however the votes are counted. You can do something about ignorance, but stupidity …” And sigh.

There’s an antidote in John Buchan’s autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door (posthumously published in 1940), where Buchan tells of Prime Minister Gladstone visiting Tweedside in November, going out for a walk when a snowstorm was threatening, and observing a flock of sheep moving out from the burnside in a glen to go up to the barer hill where the snows could not settle.

Gladstone remarks in his pontificatory, pompous way, to an old shepherd leaning on a gate, watching the scene, “Are not sheep the most foolish of all animals? Here is a storm pending, and instead of remaining in shelter they are courting the fury of the blast. If I were a sheep I should remain in the hollows.”

To which the shepherd replies: “Sir, if ye were a sheep, ye’d have mair sense.”

So MacDiarmid concludes:

Nae wonder if I think I see

A lichter shadown then the neist

I’m fain to cry: ‘The dawn, the dawn!

I see it brakin’ in the East.’

But ah

It’s juist mair snaw!