Calum's Road Read online

  There followed the familiar litany of overcrowding, of too many people obliged to eke out a livelihood on too little bad land. But although he was still a relatively young man John Nicolson had no desire to emigrate.

  ‘There are more of my friends in America and Australia than there are in Raasay,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t feel encouraged to go to any of these places?’ asked Sheriff Alexander Nicolson.

  ‘No, I would like to have a place in the land of my birth.’

  ‘But is it not a fact that there are men who went from Skye without a penny, who are now members of parliament and rich men in Canada and Australia?’

  ‘I cannot know about that, but I have no mind to go abroad.’

  ‘You would rather stay in Rona, bad as it is, than try your chance in these places?’

  ‘It is likely. I am there for some time past at any rate, and I am trying sea and land, and every one in the place is in the same way. We have gone to the east coast fishing with our bags to sell ourselves there to the highest bidder, and after all I have known many coming home, and the [east coast] masters could not, after the fishing was over, give them one shilling of their own earnings to bring them home. The fishing is only a lottery.’

  That was the situation of the MacLeods of Arnish and their neighbours in Torran, Umachan, Kyle Rona, Fladda, Eilean Tighe and the island of Rona in 1883. They had either been sent north of the deer fence to overpopulate a place that could barely sustain human life, or they were native to that place and had been incrementally, over recent decades, obliged to share their thin ground with scores of the dispossessed of southern Raasay.

  They were given no thanks and little or no practical assistance for surviving in this hopeless condition. The people of Fladda were denied a small bridge across thirty yards of sea. The people of southern Rona had no road ‘except a track among the rocks and bogs’ between themselves and the school and anchorage at Dryharbour. The latest proprietor, Edward Herbert Wood, was comparatively well regarded for employing local men in such initiatives as the construction of a four-mile-long, six-foot-wide cart track, at a cost of £395, between Torran and Kyle Rona.

  But, in essence, Edward Herbert Wood was no more than the last of a quick succession of private landowners, all of whom either passively accepted or actively continued the MacLeod–Rainy policy of depopulating central and southern Raasay, sending as many people as possible overseas, and removing the rest to the rural ghetto north of the deer fence. Edward Herbert Wood showed no inclination to apply an obvious and often-suggested solution to his Aboriginal Question: to permit the hungry and homeless of Rona and northern Raasay to return to the southern arable land and good grazings of their grandparents.

  This was because at least one interest had benefited from the ‘removings’ policy. The landowner himself was presently in possession of an increasingly valuable financial asset. In 1846 George Rainy had paid £27,660 for the estate, almost £1.8 million in today’s terms. Just thirty years later, in 1876, Edward Herbert Wood paid £65,000 – equivalent to £4 million today – for exactly the same acreage, and that during a period of national deflation rather than inflation, a time when the purchasing power of the pound sterling had actually increased. In order to maintain or improve the value of the landowner’s investment it was clear that the status quo must be maintained, and the status quo by the 1870s and 1880s was that the arable land and grazings of the majority of Raasay was devoted to sheep and game.

  The Napier Commission’s report did result, three years later, in the reforming Crofters Act of 1886. This gave sitting tenants the right to security of tenure and a fair rental adjudicated by an independent commission. It was a considerable advance for those who had managed to hang on to a decent croft. But it did little or nothing for those who had little or nothing. It did not put the demographic clock back to 1830. It did not restore their descendants to Hallaig and Fearns. It did not solve the conundrum of Rona, whose population continued to grow. Ten years after Napier, in 1893, yet another Royal Commission would be angrily informed by Alexander Gillies of Kyle Rona that ‘I know there is land on the other side of Raasay, of the breadth of the sole of my shoe, which would be almost better than half an acre of the land I have now. It is not soil, but rocks we are occupying.’

  But that ‘land on the other side of Raasay’ was not forthcoming, and as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century it showed no further signs of being reallocated to the descendants of its original inhabitants. Tired of profitless toil and with no predictable solution to their decennial crisis, those descendants began to leave. Between 1891 and 1921 the population of Rona fell from 181 to 98. In the same period the population of Fladda declined from 51 to 21, and the populations of Kyle Rona, Torran, Umachan and Arnish collapsed by similar degrees.

  The missing people did not so much go abroad, this time. They travelled south and east instead, to the jobs and wages promised by the burgeoning heavy industries and trading vessels of Aberdeen, Lothian, England and – more than anywhere else – Clydeside.

  Two such emigrants, typical of their time, were Donald MacLeod of Arnish and Julia Gillies of Fladda. Donald, that grandson of the Charles MacLeod who had been the first man to testify before Lord Napier at Torran Schoolhouse in 1883, worked as a merchant seaman out of Glasgow. There, the couple married and appeared to settle. On 15 November 1911 a son was born to them in the city. Donald and Julia christened him Malcolm, after Donald’s father, which forename in their Gaelic-speaking household was rendered as Calum.

  They might, like so many others, never have returned. But Calum MacLeod was a sickly infant, and within a year or two Donald and Julia were advised to remove him for the sake of his health from the urban fumes. Upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the young MacLeod family returned to the birch trees, scrub, inlets and rough croftland of northern Raasay, to Donald’s father’s township of South Arnish.

  At least, Calum – carefully nursing his father’s silver watch, which he would treasure for the rest of his life – and his mother, Julia, returned, to the croft and house adjacent to that of Donald’s father. Donald MacLeod himself, by now a quartermaster in the merchant navy, served his country at sea throughout the First World War. It was a period not without incident. ‘At one time’, his youngest son, Charles, would say, ‘the ship he was sailing in was stopped by a submarine off the Spanish coast. The submarine allowed the crew to get off in the boats, and then they put time-bombs in the ship. They didn’t waste a torpedo on it, but they allowed the crew to row ashore in Spain – I think it was at Vigo – and they got home from there.’ That ship, lost to enemy action in 1917, was the MV Aislaby of the Harrowing Steamship Company of Whitby in Yorkshire.

  Donald MacLeod would continue to serve beneath the red ensign in peacetime; ‘that was his life’s work’, said Charles MacLeod. ‘He kept going away to sea up until about 1930. He only returned permanently shortly after I was born in 1929.’ Before Charles’s birth and her husband’s retirement from the merchant navy, Julia MacLeod raised four children – Calum, his other brother Ronald and their sisters Katie and Bella – on the Arnish croft. Calum had another sister, Bella Dolly, who died in infancy during the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. ‘Donald’s wife [Julia] was a most capable crofter’s partner’, their neighbour John ‘London’ Nicolson of Torran* would write, ‘and with her knowledge of herbs, plants and medicaments, could cure man and beast . . . She looked after the cash and was said to be tight with it. In fairness to her, she knew it was hard-earned and was being careful.’

  After moving from the unhealthy urban atmosphere, Calum MacLeod’s strength returned. He would always thereafter appreciate northern Raasay as the apotheosis of both physical and moral health and vigour, in direct counterpoint to what he perceived as the endemic corruption of urban society. Between the ages of six and fifteen he attended Torran public school, along with thirty-two other scholars from all across north Raasay and Fladda. Their sole instructor at this single-t
eacher school was a former customs and excise officer from Glendale in Skye named James ‘Seumas Ruadh’ MacKinnon.

  Seumas Ruadh was, even for his time, an idiosyncratic dominie. He was crippled as the result of a childhood accident and could get about only with the help of a walking stick. He was not a strict disciplinarian. In the words of another of his students, ‘He must truly have been the forerunner of liberal studies. The children certainly had the benefit of an unfettered outdoor life, and when the older boys felt that there was a tightening up of school discipline, for some mysterious reason the chimney began to have “blowdowns”, and this always heralded the end of another school day.’ The ‘blowdowns’ were caused, naturally, not by a swirling and unpredictable wind, but by the artful placing by one of Seumas Ruadh’s pupils of a turf on the Torran School chimney pot.

  ‘Mr MacKinnon ran the Post Office as well,’ said another pupil. ‘It was in the residents’ part of the school. When the postman went past the school window with the day’s delivery for him to sort, there was great hilarity – with everybody shouting “post”, and Mr MacKinnon went off then to do the post, and of course that’s when everybody went haywire – [writing] slates and pencils and everything went flying all over the place.’ The Torran School tawse, that painful enforcer of Scottish school-teachers’ authority, was on such occasions tossed up into the building’s roof ventilator.

  Whether or not Seumas Ruadh MacKinnon was a pioneer of liberal studies, he was certainly a rare early twentieth-century practitioner of Gaelic Medium Education. Calum MacLeod received most of his schooling in his native language. ‘ “Ginger James” . . . taught his pupils in Gaelic and had little time for English!’ reported one former pupil. MacKinnon’s successor, Miss Rita Campbell from Scullamus in south Skye, discovered upon arriving at Torran in 1929 that ‘children at the age of ten and over . . . had the barest knowledge of the English language’.

  Which might partly be why, at the age of fourteen, in 1925, his last year at Torran or any other school, Calum MacLeod was entered in an annual Gaelic essay competition organised by the Celtic Society of New York.* The influence of ‘Ginger James’ perhaps explains why Calum’s writing was posted hopefully across the Atlantic Ocean. But only the application and literacy of the teenaged Calum MacLeod explain why, after the American adjudicators had deliberated over scores of entries, he was awarded first prize in the competition and the Celtic Society of New York’s G. Duncan MacLeod Medal, engraved with the words ‘Torran School 1925, won by Malcolm MacLeod’, was mailed back to South Arnish.

  On the Sabbath he and his family worshipped at the Free Presbyterian Mission Hall in Torran, where the lay preacher conducted services entirely in Gaelic except during the Glasgow Fair holiday in July, when relatives from the urban south would be visiting and a few words of English might be inserted to make them feel welcome.

  Calum MacLeod was a curious, intelligent, imaginative and articulate child. He devoured knowledge hungrily. He learned, as empirically as any energetic child in an open countryside, all that there was to learn about the natural history of his environment. He learned, chiefly by word of mouth, chiefly in Gaelic, the recent and ancient histories of his people, and he never forgot a word. His cinema, theatre and television were the legends told by older people at night, in their house or in his. ‘That was how time was spent in the winter time,’ a neighbour and contemporary recalled. ‘People going visiting. We used to call it “tighinn a cheìilidh a nochd a dh’Arnais” (“coming to visit tonight in Arnish”). When we were young we looked on the ceilidh as just going visiting and talking and telling stories. Today you look on a ceilidh as singing and playing and drinking and whatever you like. But in those days it was a “visiting” that we called it.’

  ‘When I was young’, Calum MacLeod would tell the BBC radio presenter Alan Hamilton in 1980, ‘all the young boys gathered to a ceilidh in a crofter’s house. And there would be a competition amongst the boys as to who could make this knot or that knot, or who could mend a herring net. And next night perhaps we would go into another house where there would be an old soldier who was in the First World War, and he would entertain us telling how he bayoneted the Germans, being left-handed, and whatnot. There was a storyteller in each village, if not more.’

  There were occasional dramas in this bucolic childhood. Bulls were the biggest and, human beings excepted, the most valuable domesticated animals to enter a crofting township. They were a fearsome, unforgettable feature of any such rural upbringing. Bulls evinced a visceral physical power. Bulls were testosterone on the hoof. The presence of bulls was inevitably immortalised in oral legend.

  ‘One evening,’ Calum would recall, ‘two girls went to look for their cows, and reported that there was a tin stuck on the bull’s nose.

  ‘The bull found it on the beach and seemingly was licking it on the inside, and two or three of his teeth penetrated it. Well, I didn’t know what to do. When anybody touched it the animal gave a terrific roar and cleared everybody away and out of it. But finally my father went home and he got a coil of rope, 120 fathom. And he says, “Put a bowline on this rope and round the animal’s neck and then direct it into the potato land, soft land.” And he tied the other end to a big rowan tree.

  ‘So this was done. The bull ran out of the sand with the noose round its neck and careered into the arable land. So every crofter was on top of him, taking off the tin! But while it lived that animal would not care to see anybody going near its head again. And throughout the night I woke up several times imagining a raging bull charging me in bed!’

  There is no need to mythologise or search for metaphors in the fact that bulls and the dreams and stories attached to bulls would pursue Calum MacLeod up to and including the very week of his death. That was the nature of bulls. Bulls in Arnish and Torran backed over cliffs rather than be dusted with delousing powder – and climbed back again unscathed. One white bull lost its balance, rolled down a hillside and came to rest against a stone wall with its legs in the air. The crofters rushed to demolish the wall; the bull rolled over once again, got to its feet and walked away with no greater damage than a twisted horn. Bulls seemed indestructible. Seventy years after his boyhood, Calum MacLeod’s friends and relatives would be taught in the most Hebridean of fashions that bulls were not.

  The dutiful, attentive young Calum MacLeod also watched his father pursue the family craft of stonemasonry. ‘In my younger days I was often working with my father, you see, building stone dykes and outside buildings and the like of that, and I took some note of what was being done – how they were joined together and how they were put together and the like of that.’ Both his father, Donald, and his grandfather, Malcolm, worked with two other men to create finely crafted stonework, such as the striking wall that they built in the late 1890s around the Free Presbyterian Manse at Holoman in central Raasay, which would stand proud into the twenty-first century. The young Calum MacLeod would come to understand that this skill, and its usefulness to the estate, was largely responsible for his family’s continuing presence in the island being tolerated by successive notoriously intolerant factors. ‘Our family were left on Raasay in the olden times because they were dry-stone dykers,’ he would say in 1973. ‘And maybe that’s in their blood going back a long, long way, as the saying goes.’

  * Castle was where the road stopped. Castle was where Calum MacLeod set out to remedy that omission in the 1960s. Castle’s population fell from 69 in 1841 to 14 in 1891, and never recovered.

  * In 1989 John ‘London’ Nicolson of Torran recalled how, at the age of seven in 1942, he had first encountered the vividly symbolic ‘Rainy’s Wall’. ‘I had not seen such a high fence before’, he wrote, ‘and it was so well made compared with the fences in Torran and Arnish: talk about the Berlin Wall! Little did I appreciate that the fence had been placed there to keep people off “game ground” rather than to stop game from creating havoc in crofters’ “cabbage patches”.’

  * Two John Nicolsons of Tor
ran, each born and brought up there in the 1920s, have given accounts which will be quoted from in this book. The first and (by a couple of years) the youngest is the one mentioned above. To distinguish him from his cousin, and all other John Nicolsons, he was sometimes given the cognomen John ‘London’, on account of his long and distinguished service to the Gaelic Society of London. For the same reason he will be referred to as John ‘London’ in this text. Plain John Nicolson is his slightly older relative.

  * The Celtic Society of New York, or Comunn Gaidhealach New York, was founded in 1892. One of its aims was ‘to provide a means by which the members of the society can become better acquainted with their mother tongue in order to speak it precisely and eloquently’. It held monthly Gaelic literacy classes and was the first body in the United States to offer prizes for Gaelic song and recitation. Its annual Gold Medal for Gaelic writing was, clearly, open to overseas entrants.

  The Book of Hours

  Submitted Petition dated 3rd June by residenters of Raasay appealing for the construction of a Road from Brochel Castle to the Island of Fladda – a distance of 3½ miles or thereby . . .

  Minutes of Roads Committee of Inverness County Council, 1 July 1931

  The first fifth of a mile of the old footway from Brochel Castle to Arnish wound northwards up a short but steep and densely wooded incline. In the 1960s it presented Calum MacLeod with possibly his sternest challenge. The pathway immediately beyond the end of the adopted council road, an existing thoroughfare for which the council had accepted responsibility for improvement and maintenance, was little more than a sheep-track through trees. The initial, essential act of widening it by ten feet did not just involve clearing shrubbery and levelling land: it required the excavation and removal – all by pick and shovel and hand – of the deep and stubborn root systems of elderly birch. And then the resultant pits had to be filled in with boulders and surface stones.