Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. Cal Flyn
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had struggled to Edinburgh in the hope of appealing to the colonel himself, who kept his headquarters there. But Gordon was not to be found.
Even if he had been present to meet his former tenants, it is unlikely that compassion would have been forthcoming. The next year he would call his poorest tenants to a public meeting to ‘discuss rents and arrears’, with a threatened £2 fine for non-attendance. The meeting was a ruse: 1,700 people from Barra and nearby South Uist were forced – begging, pleading and struggling – onto an emigrant ship bound for Quebec. Those resisting were dragged from the caves and mountains and handcuffed together on a boat that carried them from the tiny, windswept island to a vast, unknown wilderness of dense, dark forest and frozen wastes. When, finally, they were let loose on dry land there was an ocean between them and everything they had ever known.
In Balnabodach, all eight families still resident were forced on board ship, with only the clothes they had on. Not one of those recorded as living there in 1841 was to be found in the census of 1851. Today the name Balnabodach can still be found on maps – a label for the smattering of modern white-harled cottages set high and apart along the road, far back from the ruins at the water’s edge, to house people who have come here for the peace, the quiet, the tranquillity.
Standing there in the dell, out of sight, I realised that I had not spoken to another person all day. For the first time I appreciated the bittersweet nature of that Highland solitude I had thought so quintessential, so central to its character. Many of the most silent spots in the Highlands and Islands today were once the most densely populated – indeed, the devastating impact of the crop failures and the kelp-industry collapse had been attributed by some commentators to overcrowding. The emptiness of the glens is as artificial as once was its congestion.
I was alone that trip, but I had not felt lonely until now.
These lost generations maintain a presence in Scottish culture more than 150 years later. Songs and poetry written in the times of the Clearances circulate and recirculate, the hot breath of each singer taken in by the next, a constant oral reliving of that turbulent age.
The most famous, perhaps, is Sorley MacLean’s 1954 Gaelic poem ‘Hallaig’, an elegy for an abandoned village on the author’s native island of Raasay (‘Mura tig ’s ann theàrnas mi a Hallaig/a dh’ionnsaigh Sàbaid nam marbh,/far a bheil an sluagh a’ tathaich,/gach aon ghinealach a dh’fhalbh’; ‘I will go down to Hallaig,/to the Sabbath of the dead,/where the people are gathered,/every single generation gone’). Or perhaps it is The Proclaimers’ hit 1987 song ‘Letter from America’, which addresses the emigrants directly (‘I’ve looked at the ocean/tried hard to imagine/the way you felt the day you sailed/from Wester Ross to Nova Scotia’).
They are songs of loss, of heartbreak, of the pain of being left behind. The departed wrote songs too, songs filled with the crash of the sea and the tug of the heart. Thoughts of home pull from deep inside, behind the navel, somewhere delicate and bruised and inarticulate. The emigrants are rootless, anchorless, their homesickness trailing like a long lead behind them, with no one holding on to it. Oh! for our dispossessed brothers. Oh! for the land of bleak beauty. Oh! for the touch of soft rain on the skin, for the peat smoke from the hearth, for the mud of the well-trodden path.
They have a saying in Nova Scotia, an expression of longing: Ach an cuan – But for the sea. But for the sea we’d be together again.
At Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college in Skye, I watched a group of singers who stood stiff-armed at the centre of the dance floor; their leader alone at first, tapping her foot, eyes to the ceiling, harsh Gaelic consonants chopping through the low, rich tones of her voice.
Thoir mo shoraidh dhan taobh tuath
Eilean Sgithanach nam buadh
’N t-eilean sin dan tug mi luaidh
Àit’ is bòidhche fo na neòil
Thoir mo shoraidh dhan taobh tuath.
Bear my greetings to the north
To the Isle of Skye and all its graces
That island to whom I gave my love
The most beautiful place under the clouds
Bear my greetings to the north.
From those exiled abroad, this song had crossed the miles and the years to pop up among us like a message in a bottle. Heard now afresh, it was a mournful keening to a long-lost homeland which sat only a few miles to my north, behind the Cuillin ridge, the Macleod estate: Dunvegan, Duirinish, Glenbrittle. The land of Angus McMillan’s childhood.
A sharp intake of breath, and then the others were singing too, the warbling, flat-noted melody calling to mind the nasal tone of the chanter. And then, all around me, one by one, the voices of the audience were coming together too, soaring loud and clear and high up into the rafters above:
B’fheàrr leam fhìn na mìle crùn
Mi bhith nochd air tìr san Dùn
Mi gun coisicheadh le sùnnd
Rathad ùr aig clann MhicLeòid
Thoir mo shoraidh dhan taobh tuath.
I’d pay a thousand crowns
To be tonight ashore in Dunvegan
I would happily walk
Clan MacLeod’s new road
Bear my greetings to the north.
Many of the singers that night had themselves travelled from what was once the New World back to the Old World, to rediscover their lost links to the Highlands. So many studying at the college were Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, with names like MacDonald, Fraser and Munro.
They felt a tie, they confided by the bar late at night, a complex bond that is difficult to explain or understand. They felt compelled to return to a homeland they had never seen. Thousands of the diaspora return to Scotland every year; I watched them in my childhood, trooping through the village in their tour groups, keeping the tweed shop in business, cheering for the pipe band. Many are better-informed on the ins and outs of Scottish history than Scots themselves. Clan membership, particularly, is now dominated by overseas members who trade notes on the minutiae of family trees that have spread their branches across continents. Perhaps the locals feel they have nothing to prove; the visitors, with their foreign accents and long-lensed cameras, much.
But it was hard too for those left behind – those left standing in empty glens, watching first as the thatch of the empty homes collapsed, and then the walls. Imagine the desolation of the empty township, the abandoned schools, the silent churches. In Croik church in Sutherland, the dispossessed scratched messages in the glass of the windows as they sought shelter from the driving rain: ‘Glencalvie people, the wicked generation’. They thought they were being punished for their sins.
The old ways were dissolving under their feet. The warriors who had once commanded fear amongst even the most stout-hearted Englishmen now found their skills and courage in battle repurposed for the furthering of the British Empire. What else could they do to earn money, in a world that now seemed to revolve around it? They knew of no other way to live.
The old tongue too was in the process of being phased out. Since the seventeenth century, the Highland nobility had been obliged by law to send their children to English-speaking schools in the south; more recent attempts to Anglicise the wild and rebellious population of the Highlands and Islands had resulted in the prohibition of the Gaelic language in schools, even in solely Gaelic-speaking areas – a ludicrous policy resulting only in classrooms filled with uncomprehending faces and dire literacy rates.
By Angus McMillan’s time, Lowland policy had been relaxed somewhat, in that it allowed the teaching of the scriptures in Highlanders’ mother tongue, so as not to inhibit their