Authors: Kirsty Gunn
Is how the years passed, one to the next. This one woman’s life running from season to season, with stories told every night and the children listening, the children were taking them in. This story and that. Who was well, who unhappy. The house that stood empty because it was haunted; the granny who killed herself, back in the time of the Uprisings, for love. The story of the twin brothers who never spoke a word but to each other in their own language and had power of second sight. All told to show the children how people lived, the choices that they made and what became of those choices. Stories told that may be stripped back, some of them, to bare detail that is so raw, so full of feeling, that no matter how many years have passed in the telling, the people in the stories still seem to show their pain: this one whose babies all died of typhus; this other who was called a witch and was made to live alone. Each small history of every one of these people tells the children who are listening something they need to consider, have in their own memory that they may think about the consequences – of personality, of action. To wonder: Could it be made different, that story? Would they themselves behave in another way? So the children can learn by hearing about the lost lives of others. So the mothers, in the stories, by revealing the wrecked and damaged parts, help the children understand how life – their own – might be made whole.
Is how Margaret, listening, grew up to understand. As she, too, passed on the telling of her mother to her daughter,
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that Helen herself was made familiar with all these stories, these quietest of histories, narratives unwinding at home and in kitchens, bedrooms, those scenes and dramas and epics that might play out on a stage that no one can see.
‘She was ahead of her time’ Margaret would say, stroking her daughter’s forehead as Helen lay in bed, for perhaps she had been sick from school that day or needing to get to sleep or needing again some kind of comfort, her mother’s presence.
‘Was she clever?’ Helen asking. ‘My granny? Did she read and talk about her reading? Tell me something about her cleverness and how she was strong, on her own when you and Uncle George were little children.’
‘Oh, she was clever’ her mother would say. ‘Sometimes she would tell me: Be quiet, so I can think my own thoughts, be inside my own mind and be free there. She would have this look in her eye, as she spoke to me, fixed on a part of the wall, maybe, or out the window at the way the wind was pulling on the branch of a tree. As though I wasn’t even in the room …’ And Margaret herself would take on that same look then, as she described it. Fixed and distant. Deep in her own imagination and memories, and thinking – what? About the decisions she’d made in her own life? To leave her mother in the way she did and go out on her own into the world and stay there? How she never saw her own mother again? And so thinking, too, about her mother and her mother’s will? That woman who became so set in her ways that she ceased even seeing the man who’d fathered her children because his thoughts could not keep up with hers? So she was considering all these things, then, Margaret? How she herself showed equal will that she would leave behind her own mother to go and live at the House of the man she wanted to be with and had never returned to visit Mary, not even before she died. How she had also left behind her brother, a man who had lived on at their mother’s house after her death before selling up and emigrating to New Zealand and so she never heard from him then. So thinking all these thoughts, perhaps, Helen wondered.
How her mother and her grandmother could have come so far apart that they could cast each other off in the way they did. Mary’s judging and deciding that her daughter’s staying in a place for the sake of a man was not worth the inheritance she could gift her; Margaret’s own stubbornness and pride preventing her from ever returning.
All this, Helen thought, and more, coursing through her mother’s mind. All stories of the past and asking herself: Was it worth it? Was it right? Her daughter could read these questions of her mother by the look on her face as she stroked her daughter’s forehead, telling brick by brick, stone by stone, the small events of family life that build to houses,
monuments
. Thinking about Mary’s strength, perhaps, Margaret was, because she herself could not break free of the man she had been with, her first. Thinking, too, maybe, that though she could have been like her mother in one way, when, just like her, she had been a young girl when she had met someone she wanted, how, in the end, unlike her mother she was in
finding
in that same man someone who would be in her mind and stay there from the beginning and she would not want him ever to leave.
‘Mum?’
A man she would have lived with, in that way, every day.
‘Mum?’
Who she thought about, cared for.
‘Mum?’
Though could she ever say ‘loved’?
‘Mum?’
Could she, ever?
‘Mum?’
Though there, at the end of her thoughts – Helen’s voice – was their child.
‘Did you hear what I just said to you? Mum?’
Helen herself there as proof of love – still could she use that word?
Love?
‘Mum?’
How could she? When he was married to Sarah all the time and
living
away and it was only his House she had, to look after, its rooms and
kitchen and windows and hearth, the House the only part of him that was constant.
‘Mum?’
Though he was tender with her, when they were together, and they’d find ways of being together and he said he loved her as he lay with her and put gently back in place the coil of hair from where it had come undone from behind her ear.
‘Mum?’
For was it love? A swift time together that brought about a child? That caused her to leave her mother and live apart, staying on in the House this man might return to in the summer, for a few weeks each year? That, love? That took thought from her and feeling, still making that charge, after all these years? When love was care, thoughtfulness, kindness. As her marriage to Iain was, and his taking care of her and Helen, taking care of Helen from when she was small … That … Surely … Was love. But not the other, how could it be? The creeping up stairs to the room at the top of the House when her husband and her daughter were asleep, when Iain and Helen were asleep, her dressing gown gaping open as she ran from them, quietly so they would not hear … That … Not … Love …
Surely …
That –
My darling …
– though something lovely … Was not –
…
It could not be, could it? Though it was also …
Love.
The house is a place of safety, shelter, warmth. It was that for Margaret MacKay when she first came there, as a young woman, and returned there, pregnant and unmarried, to work and have her child. For her husband Iain Cowie, too, a shy, awkward man who had never been at ease in the world and who’d found it hard to find employment, The Grey House from the beginning described these qualities of shelter to him exactly as it had to the travellers and shepherds who sheltered within its walls, stopping off there on their way west and south and finding in the stone small rooms of what was, in the beginning, a modest home, comfort, companionship and, though Iain himself had never cared for it, a music that was played and given as a gift to strangers.
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This music, the House had always been known for. Iain Cowie respected that, despite his lack of interest in the pipes – close as he was to old Callum Sutherland for whom he worked until that man’s death. In his lifetime Callum Sutherland had developed The Grey House into an internationally known piping school through what became known as his ‘Winter Classes’. It is true, as far back as records of the House show, that the Sutherlands’ home was a place known for piping, and more especially, for piobaireachd – and from the beginning there were ceilidhs and recitals
held, outside yes, when the weather was fair, according to tradition, but also, as was practice at the great house of Skye,
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there was a history of playing piobaireachd indoors, within modest rooms.
This was unusual. The story of bagpipe music, generally, throughout the world, is that of an instrument that is played outdoors. Historical papers relating to the history of bagpipe music note how the end of the Middle Ages signalled a way of life that was more urban than rural – so that social life was now conducted indoors and no longer on the village green. Loudness, therefore, of a loud-sounding pipe that could be heard across the fields, was no longer a necessary quality of music; sweetness and delicacy were more highly prized. Chamber music and, in time, the modern orchestra and its pleasures were to follow the new social
patternings
that emerged after the end of medieval times and the beginning of the early Renaissance. This new era was when our definition of all the aspects of what we now call Western music was laid down.
As Seumus MacNeill notes:
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‘The bagpipe of course did not give up without a struggle.’ In some countries the instrument was altered, to make it smaller and lighter-sounding, introducing certain new devices that might extend its range and so cope with the new array of musical
instruments
on offer. But demise was inevitable. Slowly, year by year, in every country except one, the bagpipe either disappeared completely or was left ‘to the lonely hill-men or the occasional crank’.
The one country was Scotland – in particular, the Highlands of
Scotland
… Which is why today when one thinks of bagpipes one thinks of Scotland. Not because that is where they came from – but because this is where they remain.
Why?
Seumus MacNeill gives us this reason: that the lifestyle of the Middle Ages continued in the Highlands of Scotland for much longer than in
the rest of Europe. Despite some interchange with the outside world, the way of doing things had not much altered in the subsequent years: houses were still shelters, and in general – which is what makes the Grey Longhouse of the Sutherland family exceptional – not places of recreation and entertainment. Work and leisure both were carried out in the hills and glens. So in these circumstances the bagpipe could and did flourish – for no instrument can compete with it for a party outside at night, in the summer air, or during the day for a wedding march or a country dance across the grass. It was used to rally spirits when times were hard, keep the rowers in time as they battled foul waves on the Pentland Firth or across the Minch. The music carried the elderly to their graves and cried the arrival of a newborn baby. And in a sheltered strath between the hills of Mhorvaig and Luath, a family established a home that was not so much a place, as a world – somewhere that could hold both the beginnings and endings of a music that had always been composed to be played somewhere much larger than one small room could ever contain.
Though many papers and notes are filed and kept in archive as a record of the life and compositions of the Sutherland family, and of John MacKay Sutherland in particular, there is little in the way of personal information. Journals and diaries that have been kept tend to give an inventory – of lessons taught, provisions bought, visitors, trips, accounts etc. – that
summarises
the activities of a family rather than giving an insight as to what that family were like, how they expressed themselves, what they thought.
However, a number of letters have been held in the House (the
significance
of the correspondence between John Sutherland’s father and mother has been noted already), as well as certain fragments gathered from the Little Hut,
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that give us a more intimate portrait of those who lived at The Grey House and show the workings of John MacKay’s mind as he brought together his composition ‘Lament for Himself’.
He was afraid of his father, we know this, and he longed to escape that man’s musical and physical dominance.
He flourished, emotionally, under the influence of his mother but this was not something that could be encouraged by the society of the time, in particular the Highland society into which he was born that valued
discipline
and restraint and a withholding of emotion as being key attributes of manhood. So those aspects of himself, of feeling and sensitivity, that
came back to him as he lay dying – in memories of the Schoolroom his mother had created for them both, the pictures on its walls and the toys he kept to play with there, and in memories of his mother herself, how she seemed to him when he was a young boy to be a source of gentleness and softness and fragrance – were never let out to express themselves, not fully, in his life.
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‘I’ll not be back!’ he called out into the air as he drove down the road away from the House, a young man of only eighteen, on his way to
university
but not intending ever to revisit that place where his father lived. So he cut himself off from the past – and though he was made to travel up to the House when his mother seemed to be gravely ill, this some years later, when he was a man, and he met Margaret then, and again, after he was newly married, to introduce his mother to his bride … That was never going home. He barely spoke to his father on either of those visits, or the older man to him. It was only many years later, after his father’s death, when he came back for the funeral to look after his mother and the affairs of the House, that ‘well, started the returning’.
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The ‘Lament’ shows all of this, of course: the sadness that there is no note for John’s father, Callum Sutherland, any more than there is for his son who goes by his grandfather’s name. The singling and the doubling of John MacKay’s own theme – for his father and son – is what we have instead. The same notes, one might say, that might speak for all three men together.