Love and Music Will Endure (11 page)

It was Sunday morning and Màiri was sitting on a hard bench with Effie, now sixteen years old, in the Gaelic chapel. She was glad of the hardness that numbed even her well-upholstered bottom. It meant that she was too uncomfortable to fall asleep, or even worse, start snoring, during the minister’s lengthy sermon. It was a relief to be sitting still, whatever the discomfort. She was finding midwifery draining, much harder than the ordinary nursing had ever been. The worst part of the nursing had been the feeling that she was sinking in a sea of English, its brackish taste swilling in her mouth and making her thirst for a chill, clean stream of Gaelic. Still, by degrees it had become easier, like the light nibbling away at the edges of January darkness. She had looked forward to the midwifery training for it meant that she could work outside the hospital with its stiff rules and insist on her own standards of cleanliness. However, she had not realised what a toll it would take on her ageing body. A midwife was rightly called a ‘
bean-ghlùine
’ for she spent so much of her time cramped on her knees, watching and waiting on the labouring woman. Màiri would either be crouching low down or more often having to clamber up to balance on the edge of a box bed set into the wall of a tenement. If all went well there was joy in welcoming a new life into the room but during the waiting period there were the louring fears, knowing how things could so suddenly go dangerously wrong. Would both souls survive the ordeal? She remembered how she had first learnt of the risks of childbirth.

She was a young girl when she had come skipping inside to find Mamma and Seonag poring over the contents of her sister’s wedding chest. Curious and attracted by the smell of the dried heather and herbs nestled among the cloth she had edged her way in between the two women and reached in to finger the garments. The shifts, sheets and shawls had rustled like petals in her fingers. Then at the bottom her hand bumped against some heavier fabric. She asked what it was and saw the hesitation in Mamma’s eyes while she considered her words, ‘It’s a shroud,’ she had whispered.

‘But that’s for a dead person. Seonag’s’s much too young to die. Why would she need it?

‘Well, we have to be prepared because sometimes a mother dies when she gives birth.’

Màiri snatched back her hand. Mamma reached out to her but she tore out of the house and ran without stopping until her lungs were searing. She’d flung herself down among the startled cattle, kicking and punching the ground as if it were to blame for burdening her with this terrible, unbidden knowledge.

‘We are sinners from when we are inside our mothers’ wombs,’ the minister intoned, jolting her back to the present. Màiri couldn’t believe that. How could a new baby be sinful, any more than a newborn calf or lamb?

‘Then Satan collects from our childhoods a further productive crop of sins: insolence, covetousness, malice and self-conceit.’

Rather than feeling at odds with the minister she let her thoughts drift away. She imagined herself to be a selkie, one of the seal people who could pass as a human being. She would hide her seal skin so that she could return to the sea at times like this. She would lift her supple coat from its lair, smooth it over her back and glide under the water where no voices could reach her. Today though, although she could drown out the minister’s
voice, she couldn’t rid herself of the memories of the last birth she had attended.

There was no joy to be found in that grim room. The woman was expecting her ninth child. When Màiri arrived the two youngest children, wan faced and bent-legged, were peeping around the door. She led them to a neighbour. The
cailleach
took them in with a lot of tutting. If only those children lived in the Highlands, Màiri thought, they would still be barefooted but their legs would be straight and they would have some colour in their cheeks. She greeted the groaning mother and set about her first task, evicting the husband who was lying sprawled and snoring across the box bed, next to his suffering wife.

‘Go away you interfering old witch. I need my sleep,’ he shouted when she shook him.

‘Are you going to get out of there or do I have to haul you out myself?’

He muttered and swore but she stood her ground until he got up and stamped out. His wife managed a grin between contractions.

‘You’re the first midwife to get the better of him. When he sees the cape and apron he thinks it’s a do-gooding lady he can frighten out of her wits.’

Again the minister’s voice broke through, ‘“And if your right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee; for it is profitable to thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Hell”. What this text means is that it’s not enough to say, “I did not commit murder,” if you have committed murder in your thoughts or if you have wished another soul to die. Those thoughts make you a murderer because you have committed a terrible sin in your heart. Even if you only commit murder in your heart it’s as if you had done the deed itself.’

His voice was becoming more insistent and beads of cold sweat were gathering on her brow. She couldn’t ignore him any longer. She was swept back onto dry land and forced to take off the sealskin. She knew that she had not committed murder. She hadn’t put a smothering hand over the baby’s face.

She had knelt there, on that stinking bed, urging the exhausted mother to bear down, cradling the baby’s head as he emerged. Then the horror of seeing the cord squeezing his neck. As she started to gently uncoil it the rest of the child emerged and she saw that poor crippled foot bent inwards. She had paused to wonder what sort of life he would have – lame, with a worn out mother and a brutal father. She stayed frozen for what seemed a lifetime before her numb hands fumbled to release the cord from the limp little body. He made no sound and she tried to rouse him, rubbing his back and then slapping it. Eventually she stopped and wrapped the tiny body gently in her apron for there was nothing else. She handed him silently to his mother who opened the covering to look at her child. Her face was tossed flotsam, thrown from grief to numbness and back again.

At last his mother spoke, in her native Gaelic, ‘Maybe it’s a blessing he didn’t survive. What sort of life would the wee mite have?’ Màiri encircled them both in her arms and the two women wept silently together.

Now she was here drenched in a guilt that she couldn’t speak about. Had she hesitated in unwrapping the cord because she had wanted the baby to die? Had she murdered him by neglect?

The sermon had finally ended. Sunlight spilt through the windows. She closed her eyes but the outline of the windows was still branded on them. I shall have to throw myself on God’s mercy when the Day of Judgement dawns, she thought. She was roused by Effie’s small warm fingers nuzzling into her palm.

‘Don’t worry. I’m still here. I was only thinking about God’s forgiveness and mercy.’

The girl frowned. ‘But that wasn’t what the minister was talking about. He was saying how terrible God’s wrath is towards sinners.’

‘But I know He is a forgiving Father to those who truly repent. You remember how kind your own Pappa was?’

‘I still miss him every day. Every night I take out the last pair of boots he made for me.’

‘I remember how I had to make you stop wearing them. You were hobbling because they became too small.’

‘I didn’t want to take them off, though.’

‘God’s mercy and love is as wide as the ocean, as strong as the wind and as high as the Cuillin, don’t ever forget that.’ Màiri squeezed her daughter’s hand so tightly that Effie winced.

The three people walking up the aisle of the hall were a mismatched group. Leading them with his long stride was John Murdoch. Now in his late fifties, his tall broad-shouldered figure and vigorous white beard suited Highland dress. The sprouting thickets of badger hair on his sporran swung against his heavy kilt as he walked. Above it he wore an elaborate, silver buttoned jacket with a wide plaid pinned across his chest.

Close behind him was Màiri, also tall and upright, her solid trunk jutting forwards like a ship’s figurehead. She looked queenly in a dignified gown which rippled in dark folds to the floor. Her round face was stern and her hair was scraped back under a tightly fitting turban topped with feathers that jiggled like a cockscomb. Her small, brightly defiant eyes warned that she had a sharp beak and claws.

Trotting along after them on his short legs was Professor John Stuart Blackie. Older than his companions, he was clean shaven with a filmy waterfall of snowy hair pouring over his shoulders. He wore a hairy shepherd’s plaid and narrow tartan breeks that drew attention to his spindly shanks.

Màiri shuddered, thinking how the professor’s long nose and free flowing mane made him look like a water horse caught in the act of transforming himself from human to beast. The water horse was a fearsome creature which would lure an unsuspecting person to mount it. Then it would plunge into deep water and drown its rider. John, thinking that she was nervous about the meeting, sought to reassure her, ‘Don’t fret. This Highland
Society is full of friends. I’ve said that no word of English is to be heard on stage tonight,’ he whispered, his eyes gleaming.

After ushering his guests to their seats he stood up to speak. Màiri was enthralled. The only public speeches she had heard before were sermons, apart from Mr Lister’s lecture. But that was like a sort of medical sermon. John’s speech was a call to arms. He demanded that the landlords change their evil ways. It made an entertaining change from listening to the minister urging the congregation to repent of their sins. He spoke with conviction, ending with a demand for action:

‘Where once the Highlanders of old put their shoulders together we must put our heads together. Here is work for our Highland Associations to do wholesale good by raising their voices. The voice of the country must be raised in protest, especially the voice of our Highlanders driven to the big cities. They must give forth a sound which can neither be mistaken nor resisted, demanding that our Parliament consider the state and condition of our rural population.’

In the interval afterwards she was delighted to find herself surrounded by members of the audience, talking eagerly about her Bernera poem published in the ‘Highlander’ and asking her what other songs she would give them that evening.

‘Would you mind singing next, before the Professor speaks? It looks as if everyone is keen to hear you,’ John asked.

So she stood on stage, gazing at the audience and trembling, like a dog desperate to be released to run out on the moor. So many people! Most of them strangers too and gentlefolk among them. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes, waiting for her starting note to ring out its clapper inside her skull. Then she unfurled her voice as she told the story about the men from the small island of Bernera, off the west coast of Lewis. They had been goaded beyond endurance by Sir James Matheson’s factor
telling them that for the second time their grazing land was to be taken from them and replaced by a barren plot. They refused to comply and so fifty eight eviction orders were sent out, one for each family. Her voice was firm and resonant as she described how they marched to speak to their landlord:

She paused before singing the next verse in a peevish tone, keeping her voice quiet so that they had to strain to hear,

She unleashed her war cry,

As she held onto the last note she stood motionless, her feet braced against the swelling tide of excitement in the hall. As the note faded the waves of applause surged around her. Now she could understand why ministers preached such long sermons. They wanted to gulp down the attention until it was sucked dry, but singing was better than sermonising. She had the joy of the applause, spilling and streaming towards the stage. Each time it ebbed a little she would move to leave the stage but then it would swoop and roar once again. She scanned the rows from front to back and from side to side; the flushed faces, the glistening eyes and the open mouths hungry for her words. So many of them – Gaels and the children of Gaels, all exiled to the clatter and grime of this big city. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, braced together like the skiltrons of spearmen waiting for the fearful English at Bannockburn.

Still they kept calling, clamouring for more songs.

‘I’ll sing you my new one, the one I’m still working on.’ Well, why not? Hadn’t she often as a child drunk milk still blood hot and bubbling rather than waiting for it to cool and settle? She felt a little shy for this new song expressed so many of her own feelings that she feared breaking down. She imagined Pappa whispering in her ear, ‘Go on lass, they’re eating out of your hands.’

So she sang again, her voice at first struggling to rise, like a swan’s frantic flapping to get airborne:

A soughing wind rippled through the audience. She paused and allowed the currents to hold her floating in the air, wings outstretched. Then slowly beating them again she continued,

Her voice hung in the air until it was lifted up by gusts of applause. As they died back she landed softly again on the water, folding back her wings and dipping her head. Again the audience stamped and cheered only letting her return to her seat after she
promised that she would lead them in the communal singing at the end.

John rose to introduce Stuart Blackie and the audience slumped into silence. The professor smiled, undaunted, ‘I can’t pretend to emulate Mrs MacPherson’s display of emotion,’ he began, smoothing down his straggling locks, ‘To start with I don’t belong to the fairer sex and …’

‘So why do you wear your hair long?’ a voice called out from the back of the hall.

His eyes bulged but he swept on, ‘Neither can I claim to be a Highlander by birth. I’m a proud Aberdonian. However, I can lay claim to a number of compositions, penned in English, about the beauty of the landscape.’

He paused, beaming at the audience. The same voice shot out again, ‘Is that Greek he’s speaking? Didn’t John Murdoch say that he’s a professor of Greek?’

‘Shh. It’s him trying to speak Gaelic but his accent’s terrible, poor soul,’ his companion replied in a stage whisper.

Folk began to snigger and Màiri could feel the back of her neck tingle. She knew too well the sting of mockery but at the same time she could feel bubbles of laughter in her throat. So she bent her head down to smooth the folds of her gown. The professor seemed to droop for an instant but then he bowed and spread his hands wide.

‘I’m relieved Sir that you recognise my attempts at your venerable language. I fell in love with it many years ago when I first heard it spoken at Kinlochewe. I decided then that it was a worthy cause to champion. As you may know I’m raising funds to establish a new Gaelic Chair at Edinburgh University. Indeed, I travelled to Balmoral to ask the Queen herself if she would contribute,’ he simpered.

‘Well, I don’t know why you needed a special seat but did she give you anything?’ It was the first speaker again.

The small professor puffed up his feathers. ‘Indeed she did. She kindly promised me £200 despite my execrable Gaelic, although the Prince of Wales found himself unable to oblige.’

There was more laughter but it sounded kinder now.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I give you my rendition of, “The song of the Highland river?”’

He read in a high, wispy voice. To Màiri and many others in the audience it seemed strange to hear verses floating rudderless with no tune to steer them:

He stopped for effect. Not being familiar with English poetry Màiri was puzzling in her mind about the quality of the verse when John Murdoch jumped to his feet. ‘Thank you indeed, Professor Blackie for speaking so warmly of the beauty of the Highlands. However, I fear we shall have to savour the rest of your poetry on another occasion. If you remember I said at the outset that tonight the Gaelic language that you champion so strongly was to be the only star in the firmament. All our proceedings must be in our native tongue and not eclipsed by English. We shall show that we have no need to stand on English stilts to express our thoughts. I shall report tonight’s events in
The Highlander
,
and those who cannot understand them must submit to have the account interpreted for them. Then they shall have a small taste of the inconvenience and loss to which some of our people have been subjected because they don’t understand English.’

His words brought tears to Màiri’s eyes. She felt they had been spoken especially for her and to her. After they had all sung some of the old songs together and the audience was spilling out into the night, John turned to her and smiled, ‘They took you to their hearts tonight. I hope this is only the first of many such meetings.’

‘Well, we are a race who love music. I must say that I admired the Professor’s spirit even though he did look a fright with his witch’s hair.’

‘His wife would agree with you. One time when she could endure it no longer she took scissors to his locks while he was asleep.’ He threw his head back and laughed.

‘Like Delilah did to Samson. But the professor’s hair grew back.’

‘Aye and John didn’t lose his strength either. He’s an eccentric but people like to hear eccentric characters and he’s a good ally in our cause. I must say how much I enjoyed your ‘
Eilean a cheò
’. I’ll be delighted to print it. I thought it was magnificent, except for one detail.’

Her eyes glinted but she waited for him to continue.

‘It’s the part where you praise Lord MacDonald’s new bride and ask him to incline his ear to the needs of his people.’

She gulped. ‘And why would I not do that? His family have been chiefs on Skye since the beginning of time. He understands and defends us.’

‘How can you say that? He’s run up huge debts by living like an English lord on the backs of poor Highlanders. He clears whole villages of their people so that he can sell the land to sheep farmers.’

‘No, it’s the Lowlanders and the
Sasannachs
who take our land from us. He’s the laird who cares for his folk,’ she protested.

‘I only wish that was true, my friend,’ he said softly, patting her arm.

She pulled her shawl tightly over her shoulders at the sudden chill of the dank night air.