Fraser The Christian Watt Papers

Memoirs of a Fraserburgh Fishwife
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78060-233-2
Verlag: Eland Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 265 Seiten

Caught between these covers is the authentic, forthright voice of Christian Watt, servant girl, lady's maid and fishwife. Born in 1833, her working life began in domestic service before the age of nine and ended with her selling her husband's catch from door to door. The tragic death of most of her close male family - her husband, four brothers and her favourite child - drowned by a sudden squall that sunk their boat, robbed her of her sanity. But she was cared for in the remarkable Cornhill Asylum in Aberdeen, where a kindly doctor encouraged her to write her memoirs in pencil. In 1983 this bundle of papers, which included other family documents, was turned into a book by David Fraser.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fraser, David

Leseproben

Introduction

In 1880 Christian Watt, a woman of forty-seven who was to be a patient for many years in Cornhill, the Aberdeen Infirmary for those suffering from mental disorders, started to write down recollections of her life. She wrote on foolscap sheets of paper in pencil – pen and ink were forbidden within the institution – with a firm, clear hand. Her memory was encyclopaedic, her gift of narration superb. Before she died in 1923, she had recorded the principal events and impressions of a life of ninety years, describing folk and incident of the mid-nineteenth century in a way which, six decades later, brings both before our eyes.

Christian Watt remembered a life filled with sadness. There was laughter and adventure too: she had the gift of recall with a broad chuckle, and of passing her mood to the page. But the outstanding features in the landscape over which she looked back were tragic. She was born in 1833, of an ancient family of fisherfolk in Broadsea, a village contiguous to and now engulfed by the town of Fraserburgh, in the district called Buchan, on the north-east coast of Aberdeenshire. She started work as a domestic servant at the age of eight and a half, and thenceforth seldom knew rest or peace. At ten, Christian had learned to gut fish. She spent much of her life selling, in the landward parts of the country, fish which she and her family had bought, caught or cured.

For these were people of the sea. They lived beside the sea and the sea brought to them a precarious living, and, very often, a violent death. Christian lost four out of seven brothers at sea. Her beloved son Peter, he ‘that was always up to some kind of tricks’, died far from home beneath the waters of the Baltic; and her husband, James Sim, was drowned from the family’s own fishing boat off Fraserburgh:

It was one of those strange days in August, starting bright and sunny, when all of a sudden the sky was black to its farthest reaches across the Moray Firth. I had washed all the boat’s bedding … and with the rain threatening I hurried to take in the blankets which were dry. The sea had risen mountains high. I had a grand sight then. I saw our own boat and that of our cousin … then a cluster of boats, and intuition told me something was wrong, and after nearly an hour with the rain lashing down the boats went round Kinnaird. The Congregational Minister came to the door. I asked him which one of my folk was lost. He said ‘It is the husband.’

But harsh though the sea might be, salt water ran in the people’s veins, and gave them an innate sense of their own history and calling. ‘Your fathers,’ Christian’s mother told her, ‘are grossly superior to these tradespeople who look down on you. They can navigate small boats by oar, and sail to the Hebrides, Shetland and Greenland, with nothing but the sextant set with the noonday sun, and the stars to guide them at night.’ And throughout Christian’s narrative there was a proper pride – pride of blood and ancestry, pride in the independence and sturdy self-reliance of her own Broadsea and Buchan people, pride of place and race.

Yet if Christian wrote with pride she also wrote with frequent bitterness. For her life was not only marked by tragedy but disfigured by poverty and hunger. A woman of beauty, character and high intelligence, thoughtful and avid for learning from an early age, she passed many of her years in anxiety as to whence the next day’s food would come, for her large family, dependent, in bereavement, on her alone. She grew up watching her beloved parents work until they dropped from exhaustion – no figure of speech. She herself was to tread the same mill. Pride, and anger at life’s inequity, made of Christian a fierce rebel – girning at the injustice of the world, snapping with savagery at any attempts to patronise, quick to remind the haughty that she came of blood as redoubtable as theirs, ever alert to bring down the mighty, contemptuous of pretension. And since she came through suffering to profound religious faith, she was seldom short of a telling phrase with which to rebuke the great of this world from the Psalmist’s mouth as well as from her own.

Christian, however, was no bigot, self-righteously warped by her own woes. On the contrary, she delightfully combined tenderness with indignation. ‘Mine,’ she said complacently of herself as a young woman, ‘was not an easy heart to win’ – but it was not a difficult heart to touch. And with her looks, her humour, her courage, her sympathy and her high spirit she must have been irresistible. Murray Fraser wished to marry her. Simon Fraser, the Master of Lovat, sought her company and was clearly enchanted by her. She also combined, in a peculiarly Scottish manner, a passionate radicalism with a deep sense of history and tradition. ‘You are,’ the ‘Waterloo’ Lord Saltoun told her, ‘a Tolpuddle Tory!’ She hated the very name of Tory, but she venerated him and he was near the mark. She loved to recall how she had abused members of the aristocracy for their indifference, their callousness, their profligacy and their arrogance. Her descriptions of such encounters, no doubt highly coloured by time, as are all such recollections (and certainly not to be taken as factual evidence for the accusations she levelled!), are among the most lively things she wrote. Yet she heard with sadness of the accidental burning in 1915 of Philorth, Lord Saltoun’s house, where she had worked as a laundry-maid, grumbled and laughed and been courted by his uncle, long dead.

In my mind’s eye it will remain the same, of how a young officer of the British India Company and a laundry-maid experienced the joy of first innocent love, as beautiful as a clump of snowdrops in the wood. From the garret window come the strains of ‘Annie Laurie’ floating over the trees, sung by Bobby Wilson, the strapper, at the pitch of his voice, or Mary Ritchie singing the 23rd psalm. One day somebody may again build there, but I am doubtful if they will capture the happy ghosts that flit about that place.

Her feelings for the Frasers of Philorth, mixed as they were, gained poignancy from her blood-relationship with them. For both Christian’s father and mother were descended, through illegitimate grandchildren, from a daughter of William Fraser of Philorth, 11th Lord Saltoun.1

Christian’s days were indeed full of trial and grief, and in the end it was too much for her stability of mind. She was admitted to Cornhill, where she wrote and where she died. Her first admittance was temporary – respite after what would no doubt today be called a breakdown – but soon thereafter she became a permanent inmate, when it was clear both to her and to the authorities that she could no longer cope with the stress and anxieties of life. Her mind was a good one but frequent confinements, physical suffering, hunger, exhaustion and bereavement had tried it overmuch. No facets of her memoir, however, compel more admiration than the frankness and sensitivity with which she writes of her own condition, together with the understanding and gentleness she brings to the description of those whose minds rather than bodies have been broken by ill-fortune. Her treatment at Cornhill was enlightened and humane, far from the grim Dickensian image with which such institutions in the nineteenth century (for she was first admitted in 1879) have been endowed. She made good friends there. She travelled from there and worked from there. Cornhill became her sanctuary and her home.

Christian’s turn of phrase when dealing with a miscreant or a humbug is masterly. Her judgements of public personages, of politics, of historic events are pithy but seldom original; but in describing scenes through which she lived her language is very much her own – splendidly evocative and strikingly undated. Her style combines the vigorous, the homely and the dignified. She was, of course, writing as recently as 1923, but by then she was ninety, and her habits of mind and speech had been formed in the early days of Victoria’s reign. Yet there is little sense of archaism. The woman who expresses so much of herself in recalling events is entirely contemporary, entirely alive. We feel her in the room as we read. Sometimes we avoid her eye.

Writing of her old age, the role of prophetess became dominant in Christian. She had always hated war; two of her brothers perished in the Black Sea during the Crimean War. The South African War aroused in her feelings of scepticism rather than patriotism. And as for the Great War of 1914–18, whose tragedies overshadowed her last years, ‘We passed through Brucklay Station [on the Fraserburgh-Aberdeen train for her first admittance to Cornhill] and as I went up that time to start my life sentence little did I dream that later so many of my grandsons would go up that line to their death sentence.’ The losses of that war brought out in Christian the passionate and eccentric visionary, diving into Scripture to show warning of the doom coming upon the world, excoriating with furious impartiality British military or political leaders as well as the German Emperor. But the somewhat demented prophetess was only one aspect. The last page of her memoir at Cornhill is...