Campbell Electricity

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80425-089-1
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

'In pencil-written and drawing-spattered notebooks intended for her Australian granddaughter, an elderly woman, now in Edinburgh, remembers and relives her Hebridean childhood. The community thus recreated is one where modernity - its emblem the Electricity of Angus Peter Campbell's title - collides and overlaps with all sorts of linguistic, cultural and other continuities. But this is no sentimental or elegiac excursion into a long-gone past. What's evoked here is a powerful sense of what it was, and is, to grow up amid family, neighbours and surroundings of a sort providing, for the most part, both security and happiness.'  JAMES HUNTER

Angus Peter Campbell is from South Uist. He has worked as a kitchen-porter, lemonade factory bottle-washer, labourer, forester, lobster-fisherman, journalist, broadcaster, actor and writer. His Gàidhlig novel An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn was voted by the public into the Top 10 of the Best Ever Books from Scotland in The List/Orange Awards of 2007. His poetry collection Aibisidh won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award in 2011, and his novel Memory and Straw the Saltire Scottish Fiction Book of the Year in 2017.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Angus Peter

Leseproben

3

Mam

MAM’S NAME WAS Cairistìona, though we never called her by her first name. That was for others. Cairistìona Nic Dhùghaill NicNeill. Cairistìona nighean Dhùghaill ’ic Sheumais ’ic Nìll ’ic Alasdair ’ic Dhòmhnaill an Tàilleir. Cairistìona daughter of Dugald son of James son of Neil son of Alasdair son of Donald the Tailor. Though I can also name her genealogy through her mother’s side – Ciorstaidh nighean Sheònaid nic Ealasaid nic Oighrig nic Chatriona nic Chiorstaidh Bhig. Ciorstaidh daughter of Janet daughter of Elizabeth daughter of Euphemia daughter of Catrìona daughter of Little Ciorstaidh. Usually, children were only taught their father’s genealogy, but Mam made sure we also knew her side of the family on both sides. All these women who stood around her day and night showing her how they’d sheared sheep and baked bread and gleaned the fields and made beds and nursed the living and the dead, telling her what to do and how to do it and what to sing and how to sing it.

Her birth certificate told her differently. There, she was Christina MacNeil. Mr MacLeod the old registrar insisted on the Englishlanguage version. Otherwise, he told her parents, it would lead to trouble later on.

‘If she ever goes to the mainland, people will not be able to say her name. And besides, when it comes time for her to register for a job or even get a passport, it will be better in English, in a normal language that everyone understands.’

‘Why on earth would she ever need a passport?’ Grampa said. ‘We never got one when we went to Gallipoli.’

When Mam went to school her teachers verified that her proper name was Christina MacNeil, though her own family and all the local people called her variants according to who they were and where they met her. I still have some of her old school jotters with that lovely name on it. It was as if everyone went to school so that they could write their names properly. The priest called her Cairistìona. Her parents, Curstag. Her friends, Chrissie. Mam.

When she left school, aged fourteen, she went to the Domestic Science College on the mainland where she registered herself as Christine MacNeil. Some of her friends there called her Chris, though she told me she always despised that, as a man’s name. She enjoyed the college and the course. It was situated on beautiful grounds in Kintyre. There was an orchard, and when the girls picked the apples in autumn they made all kinds of things from them. Pies and pickles, sauces and strudels. Her favourite was the caramel apple pie oatmeal that they could have for breakfast or supper.

The ingredients were really simple – one tablespoon of butter, one diced apple, one teaspoon of ground cinnamon, half a pint of milk or water, one carton of rolled oats, one tablespoon of brown sugar, a sprinkling of salt and some caramel for drizzling. When she brought the recipe home, her own mother dismissed it.

‘Where on earth would we get any of these things here? Cinnamon and caramel?’

Mam simply said, ‘It tastes equally as good without those two things.’

And it did.

She then worked in the hotels for a while. Not as a cook, but as a cleaner and maid. Those big white-washed hotels that used to be full all summer long. The best thing, she told me, was the friendship and fun with the other girls and the one day off when they all went shopping or to the pictures or to a dance together. She served a season in the Imperial Hotel in Fort William, then three seasons in the Great Western and the Regent hotels in Oban, before going further south to work in the old Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. Her friend Marion got a job there as Head Housekeeper and pleaded with Mam to join her.

She was glad she did, for she met Dad there. He was a bosun in the Merchant Navy, sailing regularly out of Liverpool on one of the cargo ships run by the Palm Line. Curstag met him in church. The Sunday 7am Mass. She needed to be at work at eight, and Seumas had just arrived overnight from Panama. She recognised him when he entered the church, crossing himself and genuflecting before sitting over on the other side. He hadn’t seen her. She looked at him when everyone bowed their heads.

Curstag knew him from childhood, though he was older. Primary Seven when she was in Primary One. By the time she was on Primary Seven he’d already left school and gone to sea. But she’d see him occasionally when he was home on leave. He used to hang around with a group of young men who had scooters. Such unsuitable things for the place. Noisy and flimsy machines which blew half over in any wind. That was probably the challenge and the joy for them – trying to hold these small fragile bikes upright against the north-westerly storms. Isn’t it wonderful how nothing is dangerous when we’re young and daring? You don’t have enough memories yet to hold you back.

The scooters were beautiful looking things. Full of colour. Red mostly, though Dad and his best friend Angus had silver ones. They glittered and shone in the rain and sun. He once gave Mam a lift home on it. Sat her on the pillion while he stood and steered all the way down the hill, leaning sideways to counteract the wind. She was terrified and thrilled. She was nine then and he was sixteen. She noticed that one of his ears was slightly bigger than the other. The left one.

She met him in the aisle as folk filtered out of church. Nodded to him. He smiled back. It’s what we remember. It’s what she best remembered in her final days.

‘That smile,’ she said. ‘As if he was seeing an angel!’

‘Curstag,’ he said outside, shaking her hand. ‘What a surprise to see you here.’

He had slim, exquisite hands. Always did, no matter how many bales of seaweed or how many scythes or spades he handled.

‘And you.’

‘What…’

‘Working. At the Adelphi. Started a month ago. You?’

‘Same. Here today, Panama tomorrow. Or Glasgow. Or wherever. Have you had breakfast?’

‘No. But I’m on shift at eight.’

They both looked up at the church clock.

‘Lunch then?’

‘I’m finished at two for the afternoon.’ she said. ‘Back on again at six.’

‘Right. Two it is then. At the Adelphi? Main door?’

‘Aye.’ She smiled.

They went to a tearoom. She had an omelette and orange juice. He had chops and chips and cabbage and tea. Mam had such remarkable memory of those early days, even to the very end. All the little details of long ago. It’s what she always talked about then. Living it all again. She’d hand Dad the knife and fork as if he was still there. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘I’ve stopped drinking,’ Seumas said. ‘It was beating me. Too many nights in cells in strange ports. Feel all the better for it.’

‘You’re looking well,’ she said. ‘Though you should maybe lose a pound or two. Too many chops?’

‘Curries. We have these wonderful Indian cooks on the ship. Amazing curries. I eat too many chicken masalas. Even for breakfast.’

‘Porridge is better, a Sheumais. You know that.’

‘I know.’

Afterwards they went for a walk.

‘Not by the Mersey,’ he said. ‘See too much water every day as it is.’

So they walked to the Botanic Gardens where they sat on a wooden bench next to one of the water fountains by the conservatory.

‘There’s the bench over there,’ she told me, pointing to the wooden chair in the corner where her dressing-gown lay. Things become what we imagine they once were. The older Mam got, the more she lived in a magnified past. We walked the same familiar road again and again, each of us gracefully astonished by every old surprise.

‘I don’t know anything about trees,’ he said. ‘Can’t distinguish one from the other.’

‘That’s ash,’ Curstag said. ‘And those over there are willows. The Chinese used to break off a willow branch and give it to a departing friend. They grew in the grounds of the Domestic College, though we weren’t allowed to break any branches. Argyll is full of trees. Less sheep maybe? The branches are soft and bendy. Make wonderful baskets. Weave together like fingers.’

Seumas was holding her hand. Racking his brain for something to say about trees.

‘There are stories about the rowan,’ he said. ‘The sacred tree. If you have one by the door no evil can enter. Rowan tree and red thread make the witches lose their dread.’

‘But more songs about the apple tree,’ she said. ‘About love.’

‘Hah!’

‘I remember you singing,’ he said. ‘At the school concert.’

She laughed. For singing wasn’t the same as saying. She couldn’t know if he loved her if he was just singing about it. Maybe he was afraid to say it. Just as she was.

‘Ha! That nonsense? What was it? “Heart of Oak”? Or maybe “Shenandoah” that old witch MacAllister made us sing every year?’

‘No. I think it was “The Gypsy Rover”.’

‘Who came over the hill, down through the valley so shady…?’

They both hummed it for a...