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Intimate portrait of a
maligned and forgotten people
Lorn Macintyre fondly remembers the Gaelic-speaking tinker folk who take
centre stage in his new novel The Summer Stance.
(Adapted from The Herald Magazine, September 21, 2019)
When I was a boy at Dunstaffnage House, Connel, Willie the tinker arrived
with the cuckoo. He came over the hill one morning, descending to our house,
The Square, where my father spoke with him in Gaelic and gave him money. He
proceeded 300 yards down the drive to my grandmother’s residence. Angus
Campbell, 20th Captain of Dunstaffnage Castle, lived nearby in a modest
chalet, his mansion house having burned down in 1940. My grandmother, who
was Angus’s housekeeper and confidante, was told by him to serve Willie his
breakfast. She told me that she set out the tray, with a Spode eggcup, two
boiled eggs to Willie’s liking, toast and silver cutters to remove the tops
of the eggs for the honoured wayfarer. The spoon would also have been
silver. All items were returned with grateful thanks.
Tinkers were always welcome at Dunstaffnage House. A brilliant man who had
fought against the Bolsheviks in Russia, Angus Dunstaffnage, who had a
profound influence on my brothers and myself, knew that tinkers were a rich
part of Highland culture. His mother Jane, who resided at historic Inverawe
House at Taynuilt, ordered the cook to leave the larder open so that the
visiting tinkers could have their pick. How many would leave a door, far
less a fridge, open for a tinker nowadays?
I prefer the word tinker (and
particularly the Gaelic word ceàrd, because that was what my father called
Willie) to the more politically correct Traveller. Surely the term Traveller
is a misnomer, because they no longer travel and because the name refers to
other groups. The name ceàrd-staoin, a tinsmith, has in its acoustics the
echo of their skills, a delicate hammer fashioning tin into kettles and
teapots, and repairing these items when they came round the doors in early
summer. They sold clothes pegs and wooden flowers which they had fashioned
themselves, and they were a source of labour for farmers, helping to bring
in the harvests of fruit and crops. Some of them wintered in the city, at
sites such as Vinegarhill in Glasgow, before going on the road for the good
weather, in the days before motorised traffic increased, their carts pulled
by horses at a leisurely pace towards their traditional stances where they
had pitched their bow tents and lit their campfires for generations.
That is the appealing way of life that my new novel The Summer Stance
celebrates. It is set in the present century, and the main character is a
boy, Dòmhnall Macdonald, raised in a tower block of flats in Glasgow where
his tinker family resides, no longer moving out into the countryside for the
summer. Dòmhnall spends a lot of time with his blind grandmother, his tutor
in Gaelic. He learns about their summer stance, Abhainn nan Croise, the
River of the Cross, so named because a stone cross was found there by a holy
man and paraded for veneration round Scotland. The site becomes a place of
enchantment to the boy as he learns about the horses that brought the
Macdonald family to there, some of the animals buried there; and the Gaelic
names for the otters, birds and plants that the old woman, the Cailleach,
remembers.
When she is diagnosed with terminal cancer Dòmhnall is determined to take
her back to Abhainn nan Croise so that she can die there, surrounded by her
precious memories. After much opposition the other members of the family
agree to go to the former site, but when they reach there, they find that
they are no longer welcome. The situation descends into violence and bitter
recrimination.
I wrote this novel because of
my veneration of tinkers, and the fascination I have for them, from my
earlier years at Connel, where tinkers came each year to a stance at
Kilmaronaig, and, we were told, went out to the nearby island on Loch Etive
to collect gulls’ eggs for their own consumption. I never heard that they
caused any trouble.
When my father Angus was appointed manager of the Clydesdale Bank in
Tobermory in the late 1950s we met a charismatic tinker by the name of
Donald MacAllister, known as Dykes. His partner Agnes from Oban he called
affectionately “the long haired mate.” He wore my father’s cast-off suits
with pride, as if he had been transformed into a financier, and Agnes had
the choice of my mother’s cleared-out wardrobe. I watched from the window of
our house the couple setting out in an open boat on a voyage to Tiree, and I
remembered him in a poem called Dykes, maintaining, with his “ingratiating
charm” that “He could have been a courtier at Urbino/instead of gathering
whelks at Camas na Bò.”
I do not romanticise about tinkers in my novel, because one of the
characters is a persistent lawbreaker. But many people judge tinkers by the
actions of the lawless few. In some places where it has been proposed to
establish permanent sites with modern facilities for them, there has been
angry opposition. Little wonder that tinkers who have moved into permanent
housing don’t declare their origins for fear of reprisals, as I discovered
while researching a programme for Gaelic television. We have forced tinkers
to deny their identities because, as one female residing in the city told
me: “If my husband knew I was of tinker stock he would leave me.”
If anyone doubts the continuing hostility towards tinkers, look at the
YouTube site The Truth about Life as a Young Scottish Traveller by the
eloquent Davie Donaldson. He asks: “Is it right that my people are still
banned from shops like dogs? We’ve been in Scotland for over 1,000 years. We
have our own language, our own customs.”
The other related theme of my novel is about the destruction of parts of the
Scottish countryside through indiscriminate development. On a legendary day
in July 1921 Major George Huntington of Bonawe House, Taynuilt, with my
grandfather John, hooked a very large salmon in the pool known as Casan Dubh
near to where the railway bridge crosses the River Awe. When it was landed
safely and hung on the scales the salmon weighed 57 lbs., a record that will
never be beaten because the barrage across the river at the Brander has
destroyed spawning pools. Furthermore, fish farms are accused of passing on
disease to wild salmon.
These are the environmental problems, in particular the ruination of the
site at Abhainn nan Croise, which concern the tinker Dòmhnall Macdonald in
my novel. He is a well-informed nature lover who cares passionately about
the river and its inhabitants at the old summer stance. He fears that the
evocative Gaelic name for the place will disappear because no one will know
how to pronounce it.
By turning against tinkers and isolating them, we are destroying a precious
part of our heritage that links up with European gypsies who perished in the
ovens of the Nazis. We forget that the recordings made by folklorists such
as the late Hamish Henderson and the late Dr John MacInnes form a priceless
part of the archives of the School of Scottish Studies. We forget that we
have been blessed by great tinker story tellers and singers such as Jeannie
Robertson who have preserved the imaginative tales told round the campfires,
the stories of the phenomenon known as second sight which I can relate to,
because my family, and, most notably my late aunt Margaret, had the ability
to see into the future.
One of the reasons why tinkers have been demonized in the past, particularly
in Gaelic speaking areas, was because superstitious people felt threatened
by them, believing that tinkers had the ability to place a mallachd, a
curse, on those who denied them food and a place to camp.
We need to be more tolerant towards Travellers, to reinstate the term
tinkers to what it was when I was young, a term of fraternal respect. We
must welcome them into our communities, and make sure that these ancient
summer stances are returned to nature, the bones of dead horses left
undisturbed.
Lorn Macintyre
The opening section of my new
novel The Summer Stance, about a family of tinkers (Travellers) who live in
a lawless housing scheme in Glasgow and who decide to take their matriarch
to their traditional summer stance in the Highlands, so that she can die in
the place she adored. However, their move leads to prejudice and violence.
The Summer Stance, paperback
by Thunderpoint Publishing, is available from bookshops and Amazon at £7.99.
A Kindle version at £1.99 is
available from Amazon.
Lorn Macintyre
___________________________________________________
One
The convoy of five caravans
led by a motorbike passed through Speyside in the July afternoon of 2009,
the remnants of the old Caledonian pine forest straggling below mountain
slopes served by chairlifts. A stag limped away at the sound of the
backfiring exhaust. The previous winter it had been ambushed by an Italian
syndicate with lethal repeating guns in a high corrie.
The convoy passed Aviemore
with its chalets and barbecue pits and went through the high pass of Sloc
nam Muc (Hollow of the Pigs), where wild boars had roamed in the time of
heroes. An eagle out of the Monadhliath Mountains rode the thermals as it
watched the convoy coming through the glen. The motorcyclist was overtaken
by other machines, new models of Yamahas, Ducatis and BMWs ridden by elderly
men who had salivated over DVDs of the film Easy Rider, but who hadn’t been
able to afford bikes until they were made redundant or retired early.
Exhausts blasting, they reached the ton on long straights, but slowed down
too late for the looming bend and broke their necks, or killed the occupants
of oncoming vehicles.
The motorbike leading the
convoy of caravans was a classic machine, a Triumph Bonneville of 1959, with
a sidecar which was occupied by a woman in Ray-Ban sunshades and black
leathers, a transfer of the Glasgow singer Lulu plastered to her helmet. The
rider of the Bonneville was careful to stay within the 70 mph speed limit,
to let the elderly bikers, low on testosterone, but high on the octane of
illusion, roar past. The Bonneville turned off on to the loop of old road
where drovers had grazed their cattle on their way to southern trysts and
which had been left as a halt for touring buses to film the panorama.
The radiator of the leading
vehicle, a Bedford van, the name of its previous owners visible under a
white wash, was boiling. Blue jets were lit under kettles in the caravans
and while they sat in the sun drinking their instant coffee, waiting for the
radiator to cool, the motorbike rider opened the front door of the van and
lifted out an old woman the size of a child. She had her arms round his neck
as he carried her to the shade of a dyke, settling her down tenderly and
kneeling beside her with the mug of tea.
The two greyhounds that had
been slithering around the back of the Bedford were lapping the burn with
noisy tongues. The sidecar passenger appeared from the bushes, zipping up
her leathers. She kissed the rider on the cheek, took out a cigarette and
tossed the packet over her shoulders. He retrieved it and pushed it down
between her breasts.
He carried the old woman back
into the van, kissing her forehead before settling her in the seat, leaving
the belt off. The cooled radiator was filled with peaty water from the burn
before the motorbike turned out on to the highway.Two hours later they
turned west, entering a glen, the roofs of the caravans scraped by the
overhanging hazels as they swayed round the bends on the narrow road. The
river, whose Gaelic name meant grey, perhaps because it reflected the
clouds, was dark as it flowed through the tight ravine.
The motorbike’s indicator was
winking. The convoy turned off, crockery rattling as the caravans went
through the open gate and bumped across pasture. The motorcyclist lifted the
old woman out of the van and carried her to the standing stone by the river.
‘We’re here at last.’
He put her hand on the stone
and she ran her fingers down it as if she were feeling the spine of a lover.
‘I was married at this
stone.’
He carried her back to the
caravan where her daughter-in-law Maisie made her strong tea from a kettle
drawn from the river. Before departing for Africa a cuckoo in the glade on
the other side of the flow was calling for the last time, as if asserting
its intention to return to the same secluded place as the men collecting
windblown branches. They soon had a fire going in the centre of the pasture
and carried their supper plates from the caravans, sitting round the blaze
with the kids and the boisterous dogs. The old woman was in her wheelchair,
with a shawl round her shoulders, toasting her toes, breaking with ancient
arthritic fingers the sparse food on her plate on her lap as she reminisced
in Gaelic to the gathering. The others understood Gaelic, but had never used
it in the city because they wanted to be absorbed, their tinker roots torn
up.
‘I remember one day we came
through the glen, it was so hot, the horses would have drunk the river dry
if they could,’ the old woman was reminiscing in the language to which she
had been loyal since infancy, with Dòmhnall the only one who was listening
intently.
‘Our horse looked as if he
was going to collapse with sunstroke. Do you know what Seanair (grandfather)
did? There was a party of fancy people from a big car having a picnic, with
bottles of wine cooling in the river. They had fallen asleep because they
had drunk so much. Seanair crept up and took a straw hat off one of the
heads. He cut holes in it for the ears and put it on the horse’s head. We
laughed all the way here. Oh those were the days.' |
