Hame Read online

  ALSO BY ANNALENA MCAFEE

  The Spoiler

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Annalena McAfee

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2017.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material can be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941441

  ISBN 978-1-5247-3172-4 (hardcover)

  Ebook ISBN 9781524731731

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Annalena McAfee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Pairt Ane: Incomers

  Pairt Twa: Cauld Handsel

  Pairt Thrie: Oor Ain Fowk

  Pairt Fower: Haste Ye Back

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Guide

  Glossary

  Select Bibliography

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Author’s Note

  Permissions Acknowledgements

  To Ian

  “Here’s tae us! Wha’s like us?

  Gey few, an they’re aw deid.”

  —SCOTTISH TOAST, TRADITIONAL

  “A language is a dialect with an army.”

  —ATTRIBUTED (ERRONEOUSLY) TO LINGUIST MAX WEINREICH, 1944

  PAIRT ANE

  Incomers

  Hameseek

  Ah lang fur hame,*1 lang fur the keek*2 o hame.

  Gin onie goad has merked me oot agane

  Fur shipwrack, ma ruchsome*3 hert can dree*4 it.

  Whit haurdship hae Ah lang syne tholed,*5

  At sea, in fecht! Brang oan the trial.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Homer, 1942*6

  * * *

  *1 home

  *2 sight, glimpse

  *3 tough

  *4 suffer

  *5 endured

  *6 From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.

  The first sight of the island from the east has remained essentially unchanged since the Vikings arrived in the eighth century, crossing the Clinch Straits in their longships with rape and pillage on their minds.

  Today’s visitor, travelling on the ferry and anticipating a little hiking, sightseeing or a dish of prawns and a sing-song in the pub, sees the same distant wide green platter surmounted by a central conical peak that greeted Sigtrygg Barelegs and his warriors when they hastened across the sea to lay waste to the island and its inhabitants.

  The low whitewashed buildings of today’s Fascaray were, of course, absent in 795 when the Pictish natives, alerted by lookouts on Beinn Mammor to the curved prow purposefully skimming the waves towards Finnverinnity Bay, cowered in their summer settlement on the western strand of Lusnaharra, while up at the Priory, on the tidal islet of Calasay, sandalled monks scrambled to conceal chalice, paten and reliquary casket before the heathen onslaught.

  Much of the land would have been forested with Caledonian pines, “majestic green cluds, cumulonimbi pierced by heiv’n-aimed spears,” as McWatt later described them. Local needs for fuel were then modest and the timber industry, which was to denude the indigenous forests, was more than a thousand years in the future, as were the dark regiments of Sitka spruce sent marching over Fascaray’s hills in the twentieth century by modern plunderers—English accountants exploiting tax loopholes for their clients.

  But these changes, along with the single-storey croft houses and byres, the fishermen’s terraced cottages, the Big House, kirk, manse, rudimentary howff, or inn, the nineteenth-century innovation of Finnverinnity Pier and the narrow granite Temperance Hotel, the twentieth-century arrival of general store and post office, primary school, gift shop, tea room and museum and the architectural extravagances of the Balnasaig Centre in the north-east, have no more shaped and defined Fascaray than has the spindrift blown in on its storm-lashed shores.

  The island, part of the Fascaredes archipelago, is a remnant of an extinct Neoproterozoic ring volcano rising from a forty-metre seabed plateau to the 874-metre peak of Beinn Mammor, comprising granite, gneiss, pyrite and gabbro igneous Moine rock—“a granite ballad,” in McWatt’s phrase—and has been inhabited for more than eight thousand years.

  Fascaray’s diverse geological features, its lochs and hills, highlands and lowlands, peat bog and forests, its beaches of blonde machair grass and ivory sand, scattered shells and strewn boulders, its steep cliffs and deep caves, contained within the span of a small island that can be circumnavigated on foot in a single summer’s day, have in more recent times earned the island the sobriquet “Scotland in Miniature.”

  Its ancient sites—the Ring of Drumnish, a jagged circle of standing stones west of Balnasaig; the rubble of Mammor hill fort; Killiebrae’s broch tower guarding the northern sea passage towards Doonmara cliffs; the Mesolithic shell middens, dating from 6,700 BC, found in the caves of Slochd and Clochd; the remains of the Neolithic village above Lusnaharra, uncovered after a storm in 1902; the ruins of St. Maolrubha’s Priory on Calasay; the Heuchaw cairn burial chamber and the roofless cleared clachan villages scattered across the island—suggest their own narratives.

  Tacitus gave the first account of the archipelago when he described the fleet sent north in AD 80 by Agricola, his father-in-law, who, as recently appointed Roman Governor of Britain, wished to chart the boundaries of his new territory. They must have sailed in the time of Junius, the month we now know as June, for Tacitus describes the never-ending light of high summer in the empire’s northernmost insulae.

  “The length of their days is beyond the measure of our world: the night is clear, and…so short one can scarcely tell the twilight from the dawn. But if the clouds do not hinder, they say that the sun’s brightness is seen all night, and nor sets nor rises but passes across the sky.”*1

  If the fleet had sailed in December—a month of deepest mirk, affording a brief chink of grey light, like the “swift clang o a dungeon door,” as McWatt wrote, in a seemingly endless night—it would have been a different story. Tacitus noted the fertility of the soil, a sky “foul with frequent rain” and the wide dominion of the sea—“not only against the shore does it rise or fall, but it flows in deeply, winding and piercing among hills and mountains, as if in its own habitation.”

  The Fascaradian Picts and their Neolithic and Mesolithic predecessors left no written account of their time on the island, and in the eighth century, on Calasay, the peaceful and literate monastic followers of St. Maolrubha (pronounced Mail-ruva; sometimes Latinised as Rufus) were more interested in reflecting on the meditations of their order’s founder, and his martyrdom at the hands of pagans in 642, than in recording temporal matters. It was left to asset-stripping Norsemen to give the first description of Fascaray (from the Gaelic foisneach—friendly, peaceable—and the Norse ey—isle).

  You can read a near-contemporary account, wrapped in a caul of the bombastic supernaturalism they went in for, of the Vikings’ 795 expedition to the island in the Fascaringa Saga. This was virgin, fertile land—En groenn ey av fridr og blidr—and if it harboured an unviolated maiden—moer—or two, and a shaven-headed pa
cifist munkr in sackcloth quivering over a hoard of treasure, so much the better. The invaders, men of appetites, might have been briefly diverted by the Finnverinnity Inn if it had been there, but they had no need of a pub; they brought their own carry-out, mangat—sewed in leather sacks—a dark ale brewed from heather, which stiffened their purpose and gave a murderous edge to their enterprise.

  The Fascaringa Saga, compiled by unknown scribes sometime between 800 and 820, is an unremitting inventory of lust, greed, casual brutality, sorcery and power struggles among Viking gods at vengeful play. It incidentally delineates the island’s topography, its hills, watercourses and early settlements as precisely as any twenty-first-century hikers’ handbook but is reticent on the precise nature of the mortal warriors’ activities on Fascaray, under the leadership of the infamous Sigtrygg Barelegs, of whom it was written: “no edged weapon could harm him, and there was no strength that yielded not, no thickness that became not thin before him.”

  A better guide to historical fact was the Benedictine monk Cedric Horven, a lucky survivor of Sigtrygg’s massacre at the Dalriadan mainland monastery of Achadh an Uinnseann (Field of the Ash Tree), now Auchwinnie. Cedric emerged from his hiding place to write of the invaders’ progress across the western Gaelic kingdom and described subsequent events at Auchwinnie’s neighbouring convent of St. Dorcas.

  Hearing news of the Norsemen’s advance, Mother Abbess Ulla had summoned her community at midnight and told them of the pagan desecration of holy sites, the slaughtering of men and boys, and the forcing of women—matrons, maidens and nuns—into wantonness. She appealed to divine mercy to deliver them from “the wrath of the barbarians and to preserve the sanctity of perpetual virginity” and exacted from her congregation a promise that they would, in all things, obey her command and present an example of chastity “not only advantageous to them but also eternally to be followed by all virgins.”*2

  Mother Abbess Ulla then “took a sharp knife and cut off her own nose and upper lip down to the teeth. The sisters witnessed this horrible sight, saw that it was admirable in its purpose and effect, and passed the knife from one to the other, each performing the same act upon herself.”

  At dawn the brigands, having plundered another nearby monastery and chapel and slaughtered the monks, descended upon the cloister to press the holy women into debauchery. The shocking sight that greeted them—the mutilated faces of the virgins, their praying hands red with unwashed blood, their robes stained and stiff with gore—banished, for the moment, all lustful thoughts. Sigtrygg and his men fled in disgust but, even in their haste, took time to set fire to the convent and ensure that the hideously disfigured nuns could not escape and offend the eyes of other Norsemen. Mother Abbess Ulla and her community, their honour intact, perished in the blaze and ascended to heaven, according to Cedric, in the full glory of martyrdom.

  Leaving behind the scorched and bloody fields of Auchwinnie, Sigtrygg’s marauders set sail from the mainland, rounded high eastern cliffs and plunged towards the giant, bird-ringed boulders of Plodda and Grodda—uninhabited islands that formed a guano-streaked corridor of rock at the end of which Fascaray, a bright hummock of green with a pyramidal peak in its centre, rose from the dark sea—“an emerant blinterin in a starnless nicht sky,” as McWatt put it.

  If, like their gods, these raiders had possessed the gift of flight, they would have looked down on a small island, eight miles by three: two overlapping ovals broadly shaped like a cloak clasp, a brosje—though coarser minds, or those with a poor grasp of Old Norse, might have characterised it as two brosjts, or female mammaries—with a coastline marked by steep cliffs in the north-west, white sand coves fringed by long machair grass in the south-west and north-east, and a wide indented harbour rimmed by a pebble beach in the south.

  Swooping down to the eastern base of Beinn Mammor mountain, which rears up from the island’s green heart, Thor or Freyja would have seen their own reflections gazing up from the wide black looking glass of Loch Och. On the western flank of Mammor’s long ridge, little Dubh Lochan would have offered an additional hand mirror for vainer gods. Across the east of the island like a broad silver sash, from Ruh headland in the north to Finnverinnity in the south, runs the fast-flowing River Lingel. The ubiquity of water—glinting through sodden swathes of peat bog, sparkling and flashing in Fascaray’s glens, forking like thunderbolts down hills—gives the impression that in this sea-girt place it is the island itself rather than the sky above it that is the source of light.

  Half a mile offshore from Ruh, airborne deities would have spotted a smaller mound of green, like the diacritical sirkel of the Old Norse alphabet. This is the tidal island of Calasay. If Fascaray is Scotland in Miniature, Calasay—with its little Loch Aye; its unassuming hill, Mambeag, “a bashful brae, bending the knee to braggadocio Mammor,” according to McWatt; its murmuring burns and trickling falls; its compact northern cliffs and its curved micro-strip of machair coastline, a nail clipping to Lusnaharra Strand’s new moon—is a Pocket Fascaray, a faint but faithful echo of its bigger neighbour, to which it was, and remains, connected by a strip of sand passable on foot twice a day.

  Some twelve centuries after Sigtrygg’s raid, Grigor McWatt first sighted Fascaray in 1942. In an inversion of the Viking experience, McWatt wrote, it was the island that conquered him. He was on a chartered fishing boat bringing elite troops to a commando training school in requisitioned Finnverinnity House. It might have been his first view of the island to which his name, as “the Bard of Fascaray,” was to become as immutably linked as Wordsworth to the Lakes, Clare to the Fens and Crabbe to Suffolk, but as McWatt famously said, it was also a homecoming—or, to be precise, “a hamecomin”—to his ancestral island, the ancient redoubt (seized after the Vikings had slunk away, sated, with their spoils and their hangovers) of the Fascaray McWatts (Gaelic: MacBhàidh), a sept of the noble clan McCawker, or MacCaulker (Gaelic: MacCuilcheachdh) whose motto is “Autem videtis me”—“Now you see me.”

  A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)

  * * *

  *1 Tacitus’s Life of Agricola, quoted in Scottish Pageant by Agnes Mure Mackenzie (Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1946) and in Scotland: The Autobiography by Rosemary Goring (Penguin, 2008).

  *2 Cedric Horven, Chronica Minora, vol. 2, cited in Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover (1236) and in Annals of Invasion AD 480–1265 by Matthew Paris (Elgin University Press, 1972).

  Sea Thirlt

  Ah maun gang doon tae the sea agane, tae the lanely sea and the sky,

  An aw Ah speir is a heich boat an a starn tae gae her by,

  An the whurl’s fung and the wind’s sang and the white sail’s shooglin,

  An a grey haar on the sea’s face, and a grey dawk brakkin.

  Ah maun gang doon tae the sea agane, for the caw o the rinnin tide

  Is a gurly caw an a vieve caw that wullna be denied;

  An aw Ah speir is a blashie day wi the white cluds fleetin,

  An the skoosht spairge an the dirlt spume an the pewlie’s greetin.

  Ah maun gang doon tae the sea agane, tae the gangrel tinkie’s crib,

  Tae the pewlie’s wey an the whaul’s wey, whaur the wind’s like a snellit chib;

  An aw Ah speir is a scurrivaig wi a lauchin cantie yairn,

  An saucht dowre an a douce dwaum whaun the pliskie’s neath a cairn.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter John Masefield, 1944*

  * * *

  * From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.

  19 August 2014

  My own first view of the island is unpromising. I barely glimpse Fascaray during the rough crossing from the mainland port of Auchwinnie. “Look!” I say with sham cheerfulness, pointing through the rain-streaked porthole at a distant grey strip of what I take to be terra firma tipping crazily on the churning sea. “Land ahoy!”

  My nine-year
-old daughter, Agnes, a valiant traveller who’s never been carsick, chooses this moment to reveal she’s a poor sailor in a swell. We huddle in the cabin of the ferry and I stroke her hair as she throws up in a paper packet provided by the skipper, our pose a parody of an art-history cliché—Madonna and Child in Wet Anoraks with Sick Bag. For this we’ve left New York shimmering in the heat under a cloudless sky.

  It’s still raining heavily when the boat finally pulls into Finnverinnity Harbour and we join the queue of passengers waiting to disembark. A sudden hot panic grips me as I realise I’ve lost sight of our luggage. It’s not in the corner of the deck where I had carefully placed it, half hidden under a tarpaulin sheet with other cases and backpacks, next to a sack of post, bags of grain, boxes of groceries and containers of engine oil. Now it’s my turn to feel sick. I knew I should have kept it with us. There was no space to stow it near our wooden bench in the cabin when we boarded. But we could have held on to some of it, instead of following the other passengers’ leads and piling our bags at the back of the boat. Our luggage has gone. Vanished.

  This is serious. It’s not just all our carefully chosen possessions (the pre-packing selection and editing process was especially painful for Agnes) but my laptop, edited printouts of draft chapters of my new book—not all of them emailed or copied to the memory stick in my purse—copies of the precious letters, photos, documents, and 70,000 words of The Fascaray Compendium notebooks, typed up by me over two months, printed out and marked up with my own irretrievable pencilled annotations.

  I can almost hear Marco’s voice from 2,600 miles away rising above the clamour on the boat. “Why the hell didn’t you just use Track Changes? Then at least you’d have all your work on a memory stick?” “Because,” I mutter to myself, a stereotypical screwball American lady, “I like working with pencil and paper, goddammit!” Agnes, recently prone to embarrassment over her parents’ behaviour in public, doesn’t seem to have heard me, nor have my fellow passengers who, until now, appeared to be benign young families, wisecracking construction workers, a bunch of teenagers recovering from a heavy night on the mainland and hikers in primary-coloured waterproofs frowning at the view. Suddenly they’re all recast as villains.