Archie and the North Wind Read online

  ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL has been described as the Mark Twain of modern Gaelic literature. He has won many awards for his writing, including the Bardic Crown and a Creative Scotland Award, and starred in the acclaimed Gaelic film Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle. He now lives at Reul-na-Maidne with his wife and children. Archie and the North Wind is his first novel in English.

  Archie and the North Wind

  ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL

  Luath Press Limited

  EDINBURGH

  www.luath.co.uk

  First published 2010

  eBook 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-906817-38-1

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-909912-98-4

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  The publisher acknowledges the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume.

  Drawing of Gobhlachan by Liondsaidh Chaimbeul

  (C) Angus Peter Campbell

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  A’ cuimhneachadh R. agus sluagh na sgeòil

  Remembering R. and the workers in the wind

  Acknowledgments

  Le taing do Chailean MacIlleathain bhon a chuala mi sgeulachd bheag Eairdsidh an toiseach. My thanks to Cailean Maclean who first told me the joke about Archie.

  ‘The Wee White Bull’, as told by Betsy Whyte, Montrose, to Barbara McDermitt, transcribed in Tocher 54 and 55; I translated the original Scots story into Gaelic and then ‘re-translated’ these into Gobhlachan’s English. Thanks for permission to reproduce these stories to Dr Cathlin Macaulay, Archivist, and Dr Margaret MacKay, Director, School of Scottish Studies.

  ‘Hector and the Balloon’, as recorded from Angus MacLennan, Frobost, South Uist, on 30 April 1958, by John Lorne Campbell. This extract from Stories from South Uist by Angus MacLellan, translated by John Lorne Campbell, is reproduced by permission of Birlinn Ltd, www.birlinn.co.uk. Thanks also to Magda Sagarsuza at the Canna Archive, and the National Trust for Scotland.

  ‘The Red Book’, ‘Connal’s Tale’, ‘Hurrah for Kintail’ and ‘The King of Lochlann’s Three Daughters’ can all be found in J.F. Campbell’s great nineteenth century collection, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, gathered from carters, servant-girls, fishermen, nursemaids, drovers, tinkers, shoemakers, blind fiddlers and others.

  The little story about the snowball and the rabbits (in a different form) from Eòghainn MacKinnon, Elgol, Isle of Skye.

  Thanks to my wife, Liondsaidh Chaimbeul, for the cover drawing and for the picture of Gobhlachan, to Pàdraig Tarscabhaig for technical help, to Jennie Renton for her sensitive editing, and to the excellent team at Luath Press for all their support and encouragement – Gavin MacDougall, Leila Cruickshank, Tom Bee, Christine Wilson and Nina Haese.

  1

  THE OLD STORY has it that Archie, tired of the north wind, sought to extinguish it.

  He built a house, then a wall, then a doubling-wall, and fences and hedge-barriers, but the whining whistle of the winter wind still filtered through. The more he refused to listen, the louder it roared.

  So he planted a forest to the north side, then dug deep to establish a lake to absorb some of the wind’s force, then another thick forest on the far side, but as he lay in bed on those long January nights he could hear the whole world move.

  ‘Was that a sparrow, somewhere to the north?’

  ‘Impossible, in the depth of winter.’

  ‘Maybe it was to the south, with the swirling gale carrying it through the barriers? To sound as if it was coming from the north?’

  He looked out the attic window where the universe was quiet and white in the snow.

  Lying back in bed he listened again. The sound of breathing downstairs, where his wife rested. The distant throb of a television in his son’s bedroom. How loudly the snowflakes fell onto his window. He was a thin man. Like a wisp of grass really, all short and stubbly in the winter, lush and long in the summer. Where sheep grazed, and cows munched and the speal – the scythe – mowed. How precious grass is in this bare, rocky place.

  Years ago, in a Geography book in school, he was told that the snow came from the east. Born in Siberia, it travelled across Russia like an army, recruiting flakes to fall gently on these western shores as a soft blanket on a bed, pure and pristine and white. Virginal they called it then, which now seemed such an archaic word in a world where everyone was born knowing.

  And then the thaw would come and the white world grew ugly, messing up the streets and muddying the socks inside the shoes until all the snowmen had gone, leaving only a fractured stick here, a disused scarf there.

  When he was born, Archie knew nothing. Slowly he realised that the sweet thing in his mouth was his mother, and that the dark thing that hid the world from him was the inside of a drawer in which he slept, and that the stranger who came home from sea every year-and-a-half was called his father.

  When he was five he was sent to school and was told that other worlds existed beyond the fank and the hill and the shoreline. They had different colours from the one he inhabited. An elongated green one was called Canada, while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was red and the United States of America light blue, just like the sky on a bright summer’s day.

  His republic was divided into quarterly segments, called earrach and samhradh and foghar and geamhradh – spring and summer and autumn and winter, though the old people never tired of telling him that these were modern divisions which made no sense to them, who calculated by the old dispensations beyond the Gregorian calendar.

  ‘In our days,’ they would say, ‘we measured differently. By the moon and stars and the sun and tide.’ And they would chant out old names to him, which made as much sense as saying Pluto or Mars or Saturn – names which he had once detected on an atlas hidden in the teacher’s room, tucked behind the blueish globe.

  And they would patiently explain to him how February really began in what was now January and never finished until what he called March was almost done, and how April used to be in two parts, pre-sowing and post-sowing, and how August was the month of both the harvest and the badger moon, and how Samhain marked the beginning of winter, which would always be long and wet if it happened to fall on a Wednesday. Most of his life these remained glorious truths as well as mysteries, like the name Tanganyika which he recalled from the story of David Livingstone, and the name Aix-la-Chapelle which he remembered from the war stories of his uncle, his father’s brother, who returned with one leg and one shiny medal from a muddy place called France.

  Archie himself was no hero. He had never done much, neither college nor university. Leaving school at fourteen he had been apprenticed to the local smithy, a wizened old man reduced to the nickname ‘Gobhlachan’ – literally, ‘Crotch-ridden’. Some said this was merely because he always sat astride his anvil like a horseman, others alluded to withered balls; some argued through age, others through natural disposition, some seeming to recall an accident of long ago when his testicles were crushed by the back-kick of a Clydesdale horse he was shoeing out in the open yard.

  Whichever it was, Gobhlachan’s trade was a dying art. In the twinkling of an eye, all the horses were gone and the little work he procured was a mixture of welding for the emerging cars and the re-moulding of iron railings for garden furniture.

  Archie was taken on as an apprentice in a golden moment, when a woman from Poland arrived in the area with a string of horses, intending to open a beach riding school down by the shorel
ine. The woman – Olga Swirszczynska – had once been a ballet teacher and musician, but a back injury – caused in an air accident, she claimed – had finished her career and forced her to try all kinds of exercises, from yoga to gentle horse-riding, in an effort at regaining fluidity.

  Instead, she fell in love with horses: their smell and physical presence, their power and beauty, their raggedness and temper, their sheer hard-earned intimacy. Sure, there were some who nuzzled up and cooried near like well-behaved children, but these were never the best: when put to the test out in the dawn air, they were too soft and lazy.

  It was always those other ones – the awkward bastards whose trust had to be earned – who proved best when the rain hammered down at 5Am and you led them leaping over the down hedges.

  That was in England, of course, before the stable failed and went bankrupt and before she moved north, picking up horses here, there and everywhere on the way, from dealers and circuses, from farmyards and the RSPCA, finally arriving in this godforsaken, windy spot on a cold April morning when the Atlantic was brewing like a kettle, preparing for the storm that went down in history as An Siabadh Mòr, The Great Shaking.

  Those who lived through it described it as you would describe the moon: as a marvel placed above your garden. ‘It came,’ they said, ‘unexpectedly, from the north, though the sea had been thrashing in from the west all night. By that time, everything was tilting eastwards – the haystacks and the peatstacks and the carts and byres – but just when we thought it was all over, it suddenly moved northwards and the icy wind blew as if you could see God’s cheeks bellowing in and out, and it left nothing standing. We survived because we hid, in the hollows burrowed out in the machairs where the little-people once lived, though the bones we shared the hollows with are now all gone, taken by the later storms and the erosion.’

  Naturally, of course, some folk blamed the strange Polish woman, who had arrived that very day with her string of horses. ‘How did she survive anyway?’ they muttered, not really believing that the horses had corralled themselves into a magic circle round the woman, nose to tail, their shiny flanks offering her all the world’s protection from the hurricane.

  Once the wind abated, this was the first sound the survivors heard: the thunderous roar of the hooves on the hardened machair as the horses ran southwards, away from the cradle of the remembered storm. She herself arrived later, on foot, dressed in man’s clothing – something unheard of in the district except in the sailors’ tales of women in far-off lands who wore turbans on their heads and wielded scimitars as wildly as the Turks.

  By that time the horses were subdued and grazing on the seaweed-strewn thin grass. They snorted and neighed quietly when she came in sight, continuing their slow munching as if nothing had ever happened except this eternal chewing, here, in this stubbly sand, on the very edge of the world.

  When the woman came to Gobhlachan, the talk was inevitable: the strange horsewoman and the unballed man. What a fine match they would make, she with her long wild hair and he with his small, sharp claws. The meeting of fire with earth, or of ‘òrd le ighne’, hammer with anvil, as they named it.

  In actual fact, despite their physical differences, Olga Swirszczynska and Gobhlachan were the perfect match. Not so much fire with earth or hammer to anvil, as hand to glove and swan to lake. They were gentle with other, like wild horses tamed, or like sheared sheep.

  ‘Of course, he’s the woman,’ the men sneered enviously, watching Olga each morning as she harnessed the horses, tethered the ploughs to their haunches then set off to furrow the ancient fields between the two rivers which had lain unused for generations. And she would be seen in the thin dawn light leading her horses through the phosphorescence down to the seashore, where they could be glimpsed moving through the misty binoculars like ghosts in an old story.

  She did all the work which had hitherto belonged to men, from peat-cutting to thatching the byres, from line-fishing to burying the horses when they died.

  ‘Chaidh an tarbh beag a’ spothadh,’ they said of Gobhlachan – ‘The small bull has been truly castrated’ – though he was as happy as Fionn the Warrior resting on the Hill of Plenty and continued daily to sit astride his anvil, a cup of tea in one hand and in the other a hammer, which he regularly rattled against the iron, imagining the sparks flying as in the believed olden days.

  But none of this had happened when Archie was first taken on as Gobhlachan’s apprentice, for at that time Olga had just arrived in the district. Once the storm had ceased, much repair work needed to be done and Gobhlachan’s services were required everywhere, to fix broken axles and wheels and carts and bits-and-bobs for which Archie had no name but which were essential for survival, from the small chain which hooked the pot to the fire to the anchor-hooks which held the boats fast against the tide.

  The day he was fourteen he left school forever, as he was legally entitled to do. ‘The law has its uses,’ the schoolmaster said to him when the bell rang for the last time.

  It was now Monday. Instead of lying in bed as usual till sunrise, he rose while the sickle moon still slept in the sky. Instead of the woollen school clothing, he put on his dungarees and wellingtons and went outside where the arc of his urine perfectly reversed the sickle of the lying moon.

  He smelt the air, which was frosty and sweet, a mixture of rain and manure, and looked up at the expanse of the skies where the stars were twinkling in all their beauty. The Great Bear dancing to the north, dragging the Plough behind him. What an eternal job, with Andromeda sparkling high to the south like a cran of herring flung into the skies.

  He went into the byre, where the cows snorted smoke into the air. Their dull eyes looked at him, knowing that it was still the middle of the night, and they lay their heads down again in the straw, waiting for the real dawn and the cockerel’s call which would come at the proper time.

  Archie went back outside, suddenly realising that this was it: his life was to be made here, between the byre and the shore, between The Great Bear and Andromeda. He thought of that place – that institution – he’d been in for the past nine years: the school, and what it had all meant. A hot lunch each day – broth – and lots of things told him by the one teacher, which sounded magnificent, but made little sense.

  How Richard the Lionheart – what a hero he was! – had conquered Jerusalem and tamed Saladin and had had his heart taken across Europe after his death by a singer called Blonden who had found his body abandoned in the Forest of Rouen. At least, that was the version Archie heard, well before the later versions emerged depicting The Lionheart as an unfaithful homosexual war criminal.

  Like leaves of a book, the two things which lay before him were the land and the sea. The earth, from which came the few things which sustained life – potatoes and sheep and cattle – and the sea, from which came the sweet things – herring and cod and saithe and lythe, as well as death.

  They were married, of course, the earth and the sea. Mating like the bull and the cow, which he’d seen so often in the rocky fields. The cow bellowing for days and then the bull rising high and thrusting that stiff red thing inside as they slithered forwards in the drizzly mist.

  Without the sea the earth was dry and barren, and that morning he could see the spindrift wooing the earth, spraying it with its salty mist. Archie walked down through the winter fields to the edge of the machair, where the mating was remorseless, the huge Atlantic waves thrashing on to the shore, the beach strewn with the debris of the thrusts – tangle and seaweed and nets and bottles and fragments of broken timber.

  This was no division between land and sea: such a choice was unimaginable. To survive on land was to rely on the sea, and Archie had long known that his adult life would begin here, gathering the sea’s jewels to fertilise the land for the spring sowing. So as the sun rose low to the east above Ben Mòr, he bowed to the task, back to the Atlantic wind.

  ‘Never wear gloves,’ had been the chant since childhood, ‘they make your hands soft.
’ So Archie bent into the seaweed, striking at its roots with the curved sickle in his bare hands, beginning to build up the first real heap of his life. The heap which would grow and lengthen, then be carried inland on his back in a creel and spread thin on the ground out of which emerged the potato in early autumn.

  But the real work was the tangle, each root like snatching a hair out of the giant’s head. The story was that the sea was merely the sky for the Fuamhaire Mòr – the Great Giant – who had been exiled beneath the waves for once having touched the sky above with his outstretched arms. The full story was that when the earth heaved into shape, dividing itself into continents, it rose up in giant form and stretched itself its full length, the fingertips which subsequently became China and America inadvertently touching the sky where the gods dwelt, disturbing their slumber.

  In their anger, the giant was exiled back down to the bottom of the ocean, and as he fell from the sky back into the sea huge lumps fell off him which – of course – became the earth as we know it today, melted and moulded and forged by time and heat and tide.

  ‘The giant’s arse,’ they say, when someone mentions England.

  ‘His toe,’ when Italy is displayed.

  ‘A snot from his nose,’ when they see Iceland.

  Though, of course, the giant’s parts are all moveable, depending on time and place and tribe and prejudice.

  Archie knew all that to be nonsense, though that knowledge did not diminish the myth. The sea’s power was evident whether a giant stayed beneath it or not. The sky’s infinity was obvious despite the blue school globe which contained it all. The Earth’s ultimate willingness to be harvested, in spite of the frost and the blight and the hard soil, was proven year after year. Archie knew that life had always been a contest with the giant, and that to pluck a single hair from his head, or yield a corner of his toenail away, was a constant triumph.