Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. Cal Flyn
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‘the hill of the old woman’, with her grizzled and scree-strewn face, then Marsco and finally the perfect, conical Glamaig. The black Cuillin ridgeline loomed up in the west beyond, jagged and forbidding.
To our right we looked out across the water to the tiny isle of Pabay and her big sister Scalpay, then the south end of Raasay rose out of the water, with the familiar shorn crown of Dun Caan, flat like a tabletop.
Portree is a small town – a big village, really – clasped between the three steep sides of a fishing harbour. We wandered along the water’s edge between stacks of green-stringed lobster creels and the neat cottages that line the quayside; painted baby-blue and rose, sage-green and amber. The evening sun caught the sides of the fishing boats and buoys that speckled the sea loch further out, and burnished the rocky slopes of the isles beyond.
On the way back through the village we passed the butcher’s (‘New recipe!!! Irn Bru sausages: £6.98/kg’, a handwritten sign promised) and then the courthouse where my grandfather – my mother’s father – was the procurator fiscal for many years. Her family lived just outside Portree in a big, chaotic house of brothers and sisters and animals.
Heading north out of town towards the house, we rounded a bend and the Old Man of Storr swung suddenly into view – a startling pinnacle of rock jutting from the hillside so abruptly it seemed almost to stand up.
‘There –’ said Mum, knocking me out of my reverie. She slowed the car and craned her head to look past me out of the passenger window. ‘Our house was just behind those trees.’ But it wasn’t there any more: the line of trees turned out to screen a cul-de-sac of modern bungalows. We stopped the car.
‘Creag an Iolaire,’ I read aloud from the street sign. Craig an yo-lara. Eagle Rock.
‘That was the name of my house,’ she said, and stopped as if to catch her breath. ‘I remember when they planted those trees.’
At the top of the little street, her former driveway, on the site of the family home, was a stubby, white-harled block of flats. A sign outside declared it ‘Macmillan House’, after my mother’s maiden name.
You often hear about people who return after long absences to their childhood homes and knock on the door to ask if they can have a look around. They try to remember what it looked like under the coats of paint, the new wallpaper, before the extension was built. The house is the same, but not the same, as if one day you had miscounted the steps and walked into a neighbour’s home: in the image of your own, but the colours all wrong, and everything in the wrong place. What a curious sense of loss this is, when we know that things cannot stay the same.
We drove on glumly, past the Storr and along the coast road, echoing the curve of the ridge, until Portree and the cul-de-sac were long behind us. The land there is stark and bleak, grass holding to the slopes where it can, wrinkles in the hillside where the earth has slipped and settled again, peaty water settled in the clefts levelling the uneven pitch of the ground. Further out on the headland, white cottages cling on to the rocks like limpets.
We spent the night in a B&B that sat out alone on the heather near Staffin. The scale of the place unsettled me – the great malevolent forces that shaped the earth writ large across the land. And the colours too: the vegetation was not green, but crimson and orange and gold. ‘Like the surface of Mars,’ said Mum.
It was late by the time we arrived, the sky the strange dusky twilight it will stay all night this far north in the summer, and we realised we hadn’t brought anything for dinner. There was not a shop or pub for miles around. Too embarrassed to beg for food from the landlady, we pooled our resources and split a pack of breath mints and a cellophane gift bag of tablet between us in a bedspread picnic. All that was missing were the plastic cups and the cuddly toys.
I noticed with relief that I had no signal on my phone. For the first time in months I felt safe.
Back in Portree, we found ourselves drawn in by an A4 poster promising an exhibition on the Skye diaspora in the new archive centre, in the old boys’ boarding house at the high school.
The exhibition was small – photocopied documents pinned up on blue felt display boards, black-and-white photos of kilted Highlanders in their brave new worlds: America, Canada, Africa, India – and the archive smelt of carpet tiles and the chlorine from the school swimming pool across the carpark, but we dallied, reading each label slowly, waiting for the rain to die down outside.
There were aged, curling registers in glass cases that recalled in long lists the names of those who sailed from the west coast of Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in search of a new life. They were the refugees from the Highland Clearances, an agricultural revolution that saw the removal of thousands upon thousands of Highlanders from their traditional land by their clan chiefs. In Gaelic they call this time Fuadaich nan Gàidheal: the expulsion of the Gael.
From Skye, most left for Nova Scotia, Canada, where even now one can still hear the lilt of Gaelic song and the beat of the bodhran – almost a third of its population still self-identify as ethnically ‘Scottish’, as opposed to Canadian. But not all. The emigrants fired off in every direction, and the displays in front of me charted how the thin tendrils of kinship stretched out from this island across the world.
I was enchanted by a copy of an old, hand-drawn map, a segment of coastline blown up on the photocopier to cover an A3 sheet. Seas and rivers had been delicately shaded blue by some devoted archivist with a pencil. A mountain range stretched across the top of the page, coloured purple, and a set of unknown straight-edged boundaries upon the land had been rendered in green.
The 1845 map of Gippsland on display at the Portree exhibition. (National Library of Australia)
There was something fantastical about it, like a real-life treasure map, with names straight out of J.M. Barrie’s imagination: ‘Snake Island’, ‘Shoal Lagoon’, ‘Mount Useful’, ‘Sealer’s Cove’. But there were names I recognised too: one peak was labelled ‘Ben Cruachan’, like a mountain in Argyllshire; a settlement called ‘Glengarry’, like the Lochaber village; another called ‘Tarradale’ – wasn’t that in Ross-shire? The green squares too bore names I knew: Campbell, Macalister, Cunningham.
I couldn’t identify the country by its coastline. In thick copperplate, carefully traced and filled in with a pink coloured pencil, the words SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN rose out of the empty space of the sea.
I gave up, let myself check the information tag: ‘Robert Dixon’s map of Gippsland, Australia, showing the stations occupied by the squatters, 1845 … The detailed insert shows the Macalister River, named by explorer Angus McMillan after Captain Lachlan Macalister (1797–1858), a grandson of Alexander of Strathaird. Angus McMillan was born in Glenbrittle, Skye in 1810.’ There was a monochrome portrait of the explorer stapled to the board alongside: a sober, severe-looking man with strong features and a white chinstrap beard. He wore a tweed three-piece and cravat, and looked off into the middle distance from under heavy brows.
I smiled, watching the rain lash against the windowpane. I tried to imagine sailing all the way from Skye to the South Pacific. Landing on Snake Island.
‘Angus McMillan,’ came Mum’s voice from behind me. ‘He’s a relative of ours.’
I wasn’t listening. The thought was still turning itself over in my head. ‘Get on a boat here, and don’t get off until you get to Australia,’ it went. ‘Sealer’s Cove,’ it said. ‘Mount Useful.’
‘What?’ I asked, belatedly.
‘He’s a relative of ours,’ she said again. ‘I remember my father telling us about him when we were children. He was very proud of it. Angus was an explorer in Australia when it was first being settled. There are whole areas named after him. You’ll have to ask your uncle Myles, he’ll know more about it.’
‘Huh.’ I looked at the map again, impressed. There was a