THE LIFE STORY OF SARA’S GRANNY

b’ e Mairead Ann Ross Mckay an t-ainm a bh’ oirre

Sara Salyers

(First printed in iScot magazine)

She was born Margaret Anne Ross McKay in 1902, on the Tarbat Peninsula, Easter Ross, the first child of a mother who would die in childbirth two years later. Her father would remarry shortly afterwards, honouring his dying wife’s command, but the second was not a happy union and Meg was haunted by the loss of her mother for the rest of her life. She was, nonetheless, an outgoing, confident, cheerful child and woman. Above all, she was a Scot, a highlander to her very marrow. Not that she declared this as her identity. I doubt she gave ‘identity’ much thought at all. But in her values, her loyalties, her loves and her longings she epitomized all that is most precious in that Scottish highland heritage while in her stories, personal and ancestral, she reflected the experience of a people under the heel of colonisation. 

When we speak in abstract terms about what colonisation means for national identity, for a people’s culture, values and history, it can be difficult to understand this in terms of real lives. How do we relate the word ‘colonisation’ to the human stories of those whose way of life was deliberately extinguished, whose strong bonds of identity within a community, a place and a common history were seen as subversive, a threat, to the power and control of a foreign, colonial power, something to be stamped out? For many of us the answer to this question may be a simple one. Look again to the lived experiences of our own grandparents and great grandparents for this is where it is writ large, hidden from us only by over-familiarity.

My grandmother was a Gael, forbidden to speak the common tongue of her parents so that, while she understood much that was said by the adults around her, she lamented, until the day she died, that she did not ‘have the Gaelic’. Her own grandmother, who would answer questions that could not be asked at home without incurring a stepmother’s wrath,explained why. There had been a time, not so long ago, she said, when not a word of Gaelic was permitted. Not a book or a pamphlet or a newspaper could be printed in the language. And a time before that when anyone heard speaking it would be boarded into their homes along with their whole family. Then the house would be burned down, the family with it. The names of those burned to death in this manner were remembered. 

I do not know the words her grandmother used but she made Meg understand that her parents wanted her to thrive, not to have to hide or pretend to be a part of a world to which she did not belong. She would ‘belong’ in this other world where only English was spoken, where the coarse, primitive language and customs of the rustic Scot had no place. My grandmother understood but never accepted this necessity. All her life she guarded, at the centre of her soul, the very things that her parents tried to free her from, the things that made her part of a community and of a continuous tradition. She passed them on to her own children and grandchildren through stories and songs that told not just her own tale, but the story of a people.

She told of the grandmother who taught her to ‘read the tea leaves’, a woman who despite being a faithful member of the Free Kirk, was known to have the second sight and assured Meg it had passed to her too. This dangerous talent was tolerated because Catharine Ross was a kind of ‘wise woman’, the person to whom the people of Portmahomack turned in every emergency. So she was called to the body of a boy who climbed and fell from the church steeple, only to discover that it her was her own, 14 year old son, Nicholas. (He is buried in the family plot, in the cemetery of the old, Portmahomack kirk.) My great-great-grandmother was a kind of ‘left over’ from a very ancient past. That her kind survived at all into the 20^th century is something of a puzzle. But my grandmother ‘read the tea leaves’ for family, friends and neighbours until dementia took her gift from her.

She told of her schooling at Tain Academy, where she won ‘Dux in English’ to her father’s immense delight and pride. It enabled her to apply to become a nurse in Glasgow, and gave her hope that this might lead to her becoming a midwife,helping ensure that other little girls did not lose their mothers in childbirth. (Sadly she would have to give up that dream, forced to choose between her vocation and marriage as nurses, like women teachers, were not permitted to marry.)  

She told of the double tragedies that overtook her family. First came the loss of all financial security when her father‘s business partner absconded with the profits. This left my great grandfather, John MacKay, with a burden of debt he could not pay. The fraudster had not been an active partner in the running of the business, a small but successful general store in Inver. Rather, the partnership had been a condition of the loan, stipulated by the bank. An English partner was required, they had said, and he would have to own 51% of the business. It was my great grandfather, of course, who was held liable for the debt. 

The family struggled but survived. Instead of taking up her scholarship when she left school, Meg went to work. She was offered a job as a waitress, in a tearoom run by a family friend. For two years she handed over her weekly wages until they had paid off the last of her father’s – or the absconding partner’s – debt. And it was while her time as a waitress was ending that, aged eighteen, she would meet the man she would later marry. Whenever she recounted stories of this period of her young life, she did so without bitterness or resentment at what she might well have regarded as an imposed servitude. Instead, she spoke of it with gratitude, always, to the friend who had made her father’s emancipation possible. She spoke of it as she saw it, in the highland way.

A few years later, her younger brother John set off for the gold mines of Australia. Newly engaged, he planned to earn enough to start his own business and marry. Eighteen months later he was dead. Chronic obstructive pulmonary diseasecaused by inhalation of gold dust was certainly the cause. The British company who had recruited him informed the family that he had died of TB and had arrived in Australia with the disease. This invalidated his contract which meant they were not liable for any compensation nor for the repatriation of his body. The fact that before he left Scotland Meg, a nurse in Glasgow by now, had tested him for TB at the hospital where she worked, made no difference at all. John was buried in Australia. Her darling little brother became just another dead Scot in the service of an Anglo-British enterprise. His fiance, Elice, never married and was buried with the ring he had given her.

My grandmother Meg married, at age 26, a man who had waited eight years for her until she finally chose marriage – and him – over nursing. She would have two daughters but never the son she had longed for. She would live, until she died in 1988, in Rosyth, Fife, instead of returning to her true home, in Easter Ross, as she dreamed of doing. But a few years before dementia set in, a young and enthusiastic SNP supporting grand-daughter talked her into voting with her heart instead of with her husband’s politics. And for the one and only time in her life my grandmother voted for her past and for her great love, Scotland. She voted SNP. When she came back from the polling station she put her hand on my arm, leaned into my ear, her eyes glittering with delight and said, “I did it Sara! I voted SNP – and I’m glad!” Neither of us ever told my grandfather. 

Post Script

What neither she nor I understood all those years ago was that my grandmother’s story, like that of all our Scots ancestors, was and is Scotland’s story. It is the story of a deep grief and deeper resilience, of injustice met by pragmatism and generosity of spirit, of uniquely Scottish values and perspectives which persist today and above all, it is the story of hope.

MY COMMENTS

Anyone who has read Alf Baird’s excellent book Doun Hauden will recognise in much of this story the colonialism which is highlighted in his book.. Alf crafts his book to expose the subtle and all encompassing nature of the pressures from childhood right through life. Education, language, work, social status are all engaged on “conditioning” the population. In Sara’s story above it has been harsher times than today, amid the poverty it was less necessary to hide the facts than nowadays when long term “conditioning” blinds many to their true status. Make no mistake the “conditioning” is still there and becomes obvious when examined. My thanks to Sara for sharing her family story here. I got angry reading it at the blatant injustice. We watch “Westerns” about the Native American tribes, often these days telling the story of the appalling treatment and blatant theft of their land and other assets, yet blind to here in Scotland where the same or similar thing is happening…to this very day.

I am, as always

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