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Smuaintean
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An introduction by Henry Marsh from the book THOUGHTS UNDER EISEAVAL. Donald MacDonald of South Lochboisdale died in hospital in Glasgow on 5th March, 2000. The youngest of a family of four, he was born on 12th December 1926, and raised on the family croft. It is a spot of great beauty but it is now difficult to imagine how health and happiness could be sustained on four acres of such moorland with its characteristic admixture of rock and bog. There was enough to sustain two cows and an adequate supply of potatoes. The sheep had access to common grazing and peat for fuel was plentiful. It is interesting that Donald often talked about the hardness of such a life - with its monotonous winter diet of salt herring and potatoes - but, in common with many of his island contemporaries, he had no sense of poverty. This suggests that whatever the circumstances their lives were associated with fulfilment. Indeed, he referred to crofting as 'a beautiful life'. Getting to school involved a walk of two miles over the moor to what he affectionately described as the 'tin hut' at Glendale. The children went barefoot in summer. They ate their pieces as soon as they arrived and, except for some milk at lunchtime, went hungry for the rest of the day. Margaret Fay Shaw, the American who collected songs and made a remarkable record of life in South Uist in photograph and film, was gratefully remembered as having made soup for the children at lunchtime. Donald recalled his schooldays with great affection and considered that he had been well taught. It is remarkable that many islanders of his generation are not literate in Gaelic because they were taught to write only in English. Theirs was a home where Donald's imagination was shaped by the songs, stories, music and talk that he recalls in his poem 'Tales of the Ceilidh House'. Unusually for a bard amidst this tradition Donald, unlike his mother, was no singer and composed few songs. It may have been that his schooling, which was in English, brought to his sensibility something of the Romantic tradition. He talked warmly of his young teacher, Annie Macphee, introducing him to Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and, particularly, to Byron. It was to nature, then, that he looked for his inspiration and to the beauty of women - he carefully distinguished such celebratory 'praise poems' from love poetry. Yet 'nature' is hardly an adequate concept. Though no self-conscious explorer of language, Donald resembled Gerard Manley Hopkins in this - much of what he wrote was in celebration of the Creation. Perhaps it was the influence of both the Gaelic and English traditions that made Donald's work so distinctive. Yet the price of this departure from orthodoxy, in a naturally shy man, may have been his great reticence regarding his poetry. For much of his life he composed in secret and, indeed, he destroyed his early work. His sister, Chrissy Campbell, had married into a family of bards and singers and perhaps this too generated its own pressures. It was Mary Maclean, the bardess from Grimsey, who recognised the quality of his work and encouraged him to have his poems published. They appeared in the Stornoway Gazette, in Am Pàipear, published in Benbecula, The Scotsman and in the Gaelic literary magazine, Gairm. In 1983 he won first prize for Gaelic Bardachd at the National Mod, the annual Gaelic festival of music and literature. Towards the end of his life Donald began to achieve wider recognition. He did a number of radio broadcasts and appeared in television programmes including 'Myth and Magic' and Bill Bryson's, 'Notes from a Small Island'. The invitation to open the new museum at Kildonan gave him very great pleasure. For once he was 'the big shot'. He posted wee pieces of the ribbon to his friends. Perhaps most significantly, he featured as one of fourteen bards in Timothy Neat's beautiful and evocative book, The Voice of the Bard. A haunting photograph of Donald was used for the front cover. The profile could have come from a Renaissance medallion. The book was launched at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August 1999. On that occasion, as he stood to recite some of his poems, he was a shy, rather frail figure. Then with his sonorous, beautifully cadenced Gaelic poetry he caught his audience. A few evenings later, in a BBC studio, he won all hearts and minds with his stories and reminiscences. The staff simply delighted in him. Donald stayed for a week with us at that time. He had never been to the capital before. Worried that we would not recognise him at Waverley Station he gave us a careful account of how he would be dressed, down to the dark blue tie 'with the small design of a crown'. He would also wear his cap which 'very few people wear these days.' But the stamp of his face could never be missed, even at a busy station. He took great delight in the beauty of Edinburgh. At first, we were disconcerted by the modesty of his requirements. Every evening he ate 'boiled steak' and potatoes and, otherwise, had the occasional piece of toast. We now realise that this regimen was the only way he could cope with his illness. Donald never knew his father, Angus Macdonald, who had died from a stomach ulcer, seven months after the child was born. Margaret Fay Shaw mentions in her book that many people on the island had stomach ulcers and suggests that one of the reasons was the salt ingested with the salt herring - the fish were washed rather than soaked before cooking. Though Donald was known as a strong man in his prime - Donald 'the crane'- he was plagued by ill health himself. He wrote in a letter, 'My hospital life goes like this. Seven times in our own hospital, twice in Cannisburn, twice in the Western Infirmary, once in the Royal Infirmary, the County Hospital Invergordon, the Lewis Hospital and Raigmore.' When an ulcer was removed in 1961 there followed what he described as the happiest days of his life. He was released both from the terrible pain and from drinking to relieve it, a habit, which no doubt had contributed to his worsening condition and his accompanying depression. Poetry came from this release and, as always, it was associated with times of fulfilment and happiness. |
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As he recounted his stories it was often very difficult to establish when the events had taken place. When he first told us a tale of Clanranald of Ormaclate being haunted by a toad it was as if the events had occurred the previous week. This was fascinating testimony that Donald was, in important ways, the practitioner of a living tradition. |
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It seems that Clanranald had built a fine house for his aristocratic French bride who was not too delighted with her situation on the machair, surrounded by mountains to the east and an ocean to the west. Some items went missing in the house and a servant girl was seized and tied to the seaweed by her hair so that she would reveal the culprit. She never did and was drowned as the tide rose. Ever afterwards, everywhere he went, Clanranald was accompanied by a toad. Only on one occasion, when he was about to set sail for Skye, did he seem about to escape its company. The toad was nowhere to be seen. But contrary winds delayed the sailing. After a frustrating week the toad hopped on to the quay and boarded the ship. At that moment the wind changed and the ship could set sail. Donald told his stories with a gentle but almost incantatory intensity - indeed the Clanranald story loses much of its effect when deprived of the exceptionally long vowel that he gave to the 'toad'. Listening to the conversation and tales he exchanged with Mary Maclean, was it safe to assume that in the Uists bardesses were still regarded with great suspicion and buried face down to prevent them from uttering maledictions? Could people still find themselves magically transported twenty miles without the aid of car, helicopter or whisky? Could this explain why, despite the tramping of generations, there was no path to Donald's door? If time collapsed for the listener in such circumstances so too did the concept of the nuclear family. Donald lived in a community and, in his distinctive way, helped to foster and sustain it. I remember him talking to a complete stranger, brought up in North Uist, and after two hours of meticulous genealogical research, a great network of mutual friends and family connections was unearthed and the health and well being of all concerned duly exchanged. Like his forebears, he was the keeper of a genealogical tradition and in that, and many other ways, he represented for us a world that has largely been lost, so that he was far more important for us than he could ever, in his modesty, have imagined. This is not a matter of nostalgia. In the passing of Donald and people like him we are losing touch with important ways of being in the world. After leaving school at fourteen Donald did a number of odd jobs about the crofts. It was while he was engaged in the fishing out of Lochboisdale that he became involved in the events that were recorded Sir Compton Mackenzie's Whisky Galore. The SS Politician came to grief in the Sound of Eriskay. Because of the oil associated with the wreck, salvaging the whisky was a difficult and dangerous business. The crates were spirited away and buried by the crofts. Gardening in the dark became unusually popular that summer. But there was, in the end, a price to pay. Because of the 'distraction' the harvest was poor - 'It did nobody any good.' For a time he worked on the mainland on building sites, at a hydro electric scheme and with the Forestry Commission. He returned to the islands to work with contractors in Lochboisdale and Benbecula. Later in life he gave up work to look after his mother while she was suffering from senile dementia. His sister and the neighbours were a great support. Until near the end his mother remained physically strong. She was often very active at night. At one occasion she took a stick to him while he was asleep thinking he was an intruder. He looked after her for five difficult years. In a fundamental way he was exhausted by the experience but, typically, he had no regrets. The last year of his working life was spent on a job-creation scheme but before that, for nine years, he worked at the alginates factory. The work was very heavy and boring but concentration was needed to keep the machines working. To get there involved a walk of four miles, which, many a time, because of shift work had to be undertaken on pitch dark winter nights in wind and rain. Donald was also aware that one of the dips in the road had the reputation of being haunted. He very much enjoyed excursions into the supernatural and this emerged in the television programme 'Music and Myth' where he talked about traditional stories involving fairies and water horses. |
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He was eventually to receive a small pension from the company. It was through this and the state pension that Donald in his latter years at last found financial security. It was a measure of the man that with this modest provision he considered himself entirely contented and better off than he had ever been in his life. |
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There was something compelling about Donald. It was not only that he had roots in the community and in his faith and in the bardic tradition - he was also, somehow, at one with the landscape. He had the authenticity of a tree or a rock. It was as if he had survived the hardships and suffering in his life somehow strengthened. The constant stream of visitors was, no doubt, attracted at first, by his reputation as a bard or his picturesque thatched cottage. But people returned again and again. He had an international correspondence. His kindness and natural courtesy were enriching - people left the better for having encountered him. This was felt by everyone who knew him - shop assistants, nurses, family and friends. After he died my wife sat down to write that most difficult of letters, of condolence, to his sister Chrissy. I felt moved to contribute. After twenty years of silence I found myself writing a verse. A few days before we had been at the memorable first Scottish performance of Wagner's opera, 'Parsifal'. There was no magic to heal Donald, though, in a certain way, death can make a life more vivid.
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For Donald MacDonald of South Lochboisdale Parsifal sang as you
lay dying. Henry Marsh
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