To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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a dip between two ridges, lies Bemersyde Moss, a small loch surrounded by tussocky wetland, the perfect habitat for these fishermen, relatives of the heron. The place-name is an example of transference. In Old English, the language of Cuthbert, ‘bemere’ means ‘to trumpet’; its call, instead of the bird itself, found its way onto the map. It is likely that the hamlet existed in the seventh century during the Anglian takeover of the Tweed Valley, and after I had walked out of the tree-shaded lane, the C road I had been following joined a B road bathed in bright sunshine, where its houses clustered.
Most of these are modern, strung out on either side of the road that runs east to west, and their views must be sweeping. Around each are arranged neat and colourful gardens, the deposit of much care and effort. As I passed, a dog leaped up and barked suddenly at a gate and the owner came to calm the old collie and apologise. There was no need, but what struck me was the sense of contentment the lady seemed to have as she talked about the remarkable summer and I praised her beautiful garden of roses, geraniums and hydrangeas and the pots, baskets and borders of rich colour. As I walked off down the road, I wondered about my own choices in life. A comfortable modern house with long views, a decent pension, plenty of time to indulge interests and no need to keep striving, pushing and hoping – all of that suddenly seemed very attractive, something my wife Lindsay and I could easily have opted for.
Instead, of course, we took the harder and, more than occasionally, I think, the dafter path. The joys have mostly outweighed the difficulties, but the life of a freelance and its income is precarious and has significantly diminished over time. More than once, we have had to scrape through a tough year. And at sixty-eight, I worry that my earning capacity is beginning to slacken. More and more often, I look at bungalows like those at Bemersyde and wonder about comfortable sofas, lie-ins on a weekday, playing at writing something I don’t need to finish because I don’t need the money, and joining a book group. But so far these thoughts are fleeting, driven out by the likelihood that I would soon become bored, vastly overweight and possibly over-fond of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, if I am not already. For me at least, for the moment, hard work, no holidays, only the occasional day off and bouts of intermittent anxiety are probably healthy.
And probably inevitable. Just as Cuthbert may have been surrendering to his essential nature, recognising that his piety, his wish to leave the world and strive to know the mind of God, would always prevail over his inherited status as an aristocrat of some sort, so I have begun to realise that I could have lived no other sort of life. I am a risk-taker, someone who sees how well things can turn out and never seriously considers how badly wrong they can go, or if that sounds a little melodramatic, someone who could not bear to be too safe and take refuge in the false securities and certainties of routine. I could not have stayed in a salaried job, served my time until my pension had fattened up, for I would have lost my life if I had wasted all those years just turning up every Monday morning, ticking off the months and years until retirement, wishing my life away.
Instead, I took the risk of depending on myself, not leaning on the support of an institution, and trying to make a living from what was in my head. I don’t much care if that sounds self-aggrandising or even puffed-up; it is nothing less than the truth. I had to be true to my nature – although that sounds a little pat and premeditated. At the time it didn’t feel like that, it was just something I had to do. Even though I had not properly thought out the consequences of diving into the depths of uncertainty twenty years ago, I knew I had to get out of corporate life and accept all the insecurities that came with that decision. And even though the life of a freelance is very dependent on the wishes, whims and appetites of others, those who commission our work or grant money to support it, I suppose I am content with the conditional truth that I have at least been my own man.
But alternative choices can sometimes be surprising and illuminating. At the end of 2017 I met a man I had not seen for fifty years. We played representative schoolboy rugby together in the Borders before he went off to Edinburgh University to take a degree in geology and then a job with De Beer in South Africa. Very dashing, but certainly uncomfortable and almost certainly risky, as well as a radically different choice from mine to stay and make a life in Scotland. When we met for supper in Melrose, I worried that we would have little or nothing to say to each other. In fact, it turned out to be fascinating.
Alone for weeks on end in the African bush, taking sample cores, looking for likely places where diamonds might be mined, my old rugby-playing friend often found that he had spoken to no one for long periods. Instead, he began to read the novels of Walter Scott in publication sequence, and not only worthwhile in itself, it was a habit that reconnected my friend with the Borders. The famous Scott quote, ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’ was precisely apposite. My friend’s mother is still alive and he flies north from his home on the coast near Cape Town to the Scottish Borders at least two or three times a year. His connection to our home-place is powerful. As is mine. When I resigned my job, there was no other choice I could consider except to come home, to return to the sacred land.
Continuity and attachment to place are rarely more evident than in the story of Bemersyde House. Turning downhill from the hamlet, I passed its gates and saw the sixteenth-century tower house in the distance. The same family has lived there for eight centuries since it came into the possession of a Norman warrior called Petrus de Haga. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the name had changed slightly but become so established that Thomas the Rhymer could recite:
Tyde what may,
Whate’er betyde
Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde.
And so it has come to pass. Alexander, the grandson of Field Marshal Earl Haig, the commander of the British army on the Western Front during the First World War, now lives in the old house.
Below the gates, the road begins to run down gently off the ridge and becomes deep and heavily shaded, a sign of real antiquity, since it has sunk far below the level of the fields beside it simply because of the centuries of feet, hooves and wheels, the tread of people, horses and the ruts made by carts. Powerful knots of tree roots cling like octopuses to the high banks and their thick foliage shades the road for a few hundred yards. It eventually leads to an oddity, a dissonance.
When the sixteenth century and the Reformation signalled the end for Scotland’s monastic communities, abbeys often fell under the control of commendators, usually aristocrats who eventually appropriated their lands. The holdings and power of many aristocratic families are built on the patrimony of the church. The Erskine family, earls of Buchan, were given Dryburgh Abbey and much of the nearby property that had been gifted to the monks over many years. By the early nineteenth century, David Stuart Erskine, the 11th earl, had become fascinated, even obsessed by Scotland’s history and heroes. He founded the Society of Antiquaries, whose collections formed the basis of those of the national museums of Scotland. Walter Scott knew Erskine well and was uncharacteristically ungenerous, saying that he was a man whose ‘immense vanity obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talents’. On that sunny day below Bemersyde, it seemed to me that an understanding of what made good art was not amongst them.
The deepened lane leads downhill to a brown sign on the left that points to ‘Wallace Statue’. At the end of a winding wooded track, perched on a high, precipitous bank, is a monstrous red sandstone sculpture of one of Scotland’s great heroes. William Wallace, the victor of Stirling Bridge in 1298, stands twenty-one feet high on a ten-foot plinth, staring sightlessly westwards over the Tweed Valley. Made by a local sculptor, John Smith of Darnick, no doubt to a precise prescription from the Earl of Buchan, it could never be mistaken for the work of Michelangelo. In fact it is profoundly ugly. Holding a broadsword almost as tall as himself in one hand and a shield bearing the device of the Saltire in the other, the hero looks more than a little gormless, a slightly puzzled expression above his bushy beard, as though he were lost. On his head, and therefore difficult to make out from thirty-one feet below, a version of an iron helmet that owes more to the Wehrmacht than anything medieval has some sort of winged creature attached. Perhaps a pigeon. Mercifully, the hardwood trees around this thoroughly duff object have begun to hide it. From a distance, to the west, all that can be made out is the head – until autumn sheds the friendly leaves.
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