Ghosts

For God's sake,

will you give me

another whisky

 

Lorn Macintyre

When we moved from Dunstaffnage House, Connel, in the late 1950s, on my father Angus's appointment as manager of the Clydesdale Bank in Tobermory, Mull, he had arrived in nèamh, his Gaelic heaven. A native speaker, this brilliant charismatic Gael, poet and raconteur wasn't interested in arranging overdrafts.
     While a hyperventilating estate owner would be in the front office, demanding an audience with his bank manager to that he could borrow even more money to buy more buckets to augment the dozens he already had in his loft to catch the leaks from his ruined roof, my father would be ensconced in his office with an old woman. She didn't have one of her own teeth in her head, or a penny in his bank, but she had inexplicable stories in exquisite Gaelic.
     'My dear brother Archie was drowned at Jutland in 1916, but lo and behold, he walked into the house a week later, with his kit bag on his shoulder, and he's sat in the same chair ever since, a great comfort to me, Mr Macintyre.'
     My father brought up the stairs to the bank house many such stories; of an old man seeing a funeral approaching and removing his cap in respect. As the coffin went by and taking good care not to get caught up in the procession to the cemetery, he worked out from the men carrying it that the absent brother was inside the box – except that he was on his croft, two fields away, scything his hay, until his heart stopped that evening.
     When I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great novel 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', set in the mythic village of Macondo in northern Columbia, with its mixture of the humdrum and fantastic, its ghosts and gypsies, I thought: but we've been living in a magical realism community on Mull for years; it's integral to Gaelic tradition. The first magical realism works of literature were surely the ancient Ossianic epics allegedly collected by James Macpherson.
     My paternal grandparents and my aunt both had second sight. My father told us how his father was lying in bed in a house on Loch Awe when he heard an auctioneer outside the window asking for a bid of five shillings for the bed. The dispersal sale didn't take place until a year later, and the auctioneer got his price for my grandfather's bed.
     My aunt didn't like to talk about her visions in case she brought one on. Just before the second world war she was walking with her future husband in her native Taynuilt. As they approached Kelly's Bridge she cried out: 'There's a coffin blocking the bridge!' – and then fainted. A day later a motor cyclist was brained on the bridge.

 

     Years later, my aunt came downstairs one morning to announce: 'The minister across the loch is going to die next week'.
     'I don't think so,' my uncle said.
     'Oh yes, he'll die, and he's such a big man that they'll have to take the window out of the front room to get the coffin in and out.'
      How right she was. Don't such stories subvert the fundamental law of physics that the future cannot be viewed?
     A winter's night near Christmas in the Western Isles Hotel, above Tobermory Bay in the early 1960s. John Kennedy, captain of the boat that plies between Tobermory and Oban is sitting opposite me at the fire, drinking whisky. Above the bar door is a small skull, believed to be that of a young negro boy, perhaps a servant to one of the officers, which was dredged up from the bay below the hotel in the search for the bullion of the Spanish galleon.      That summer I was in the bar, having a cigar compliments of the affable host Donald MacLean, a Skyeman (we were both addicted to Romeo y Julieta coronas), when the assistant cook came in to ask for cigarettes. As he was going out he banged the door and the skull toppled. That afternoon there was a phone call to say that he had suffered head injuries through falling off his scooter. Some years later a new proprietor of the Western Isles Hotel decided to display the skull on the bar wall. He drilled into it and was left with excruciating headaches which were only alleviated when the skull was returned to the waters of the bay, with due prayers.
     'You've no idea what I see and feel when I go home through some of these lanes in Tobermory,' Captain Kennedy said that stormy winter night, with the wind soughing in the chimney of the bar.
     'So what was the worst thing that has ever happened to you?' I asked.
     It was the end of October 1940, and he was home on Tiree on holiday. He was strolling along the western shore when he became aware he was walking among a group of five seamen. 'The hoods of their duffle coats were up, but I could see against the sky that there was something wrong with their faces. And I couldn't hear their seaboots on the shingle.'
     That night, on passage to meet an incoming convoy from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the destroyer HMS Sturdy ran on to rocks off Tiree's west coast. Five men were drowned trying to reach the shore. The men John Kennedy had been walking with on the western shore the previous day were the same men he now helped to lift from the ocean, their faces blemished with salt.
     'They were making for their graves at Soroby,' he added, his voice trembling. 'For God's sake, give me another whisky.'

Lorn Macintyre is a writer and poet