A Memoir by Angus Macmillan

We live in an age of change.  That is obvious to us all and becomes more so with every passing day as one gets older. Indeed, the world in which one first became conscious can seem like a  ghostly memory which bears only a tenuous connection to the present reality of one’s life. 

This theme of change and memory runs through Angus Macmillan’s memoir, Between the Echoes, a meditation on his childhood and growing up in the village community of Lemreway on the Isle of Lewis in the 1950s. Macmillan’s early years are notable for being embedded in a transition from a subsistence way of life, lived without the conveniences of electricity or running water, into the modern era. 

Whilst we all share, to some degree, in this  change, this particular transition as it occurred in the Outer Hebrides was  experienced by a relatively small number of people. We are fortunate then that Angus Macmillan has chosen to commit his reflections on this period of his life to a beautifully written and reflective memoir. The inclusion of poems, many from his published volume, The Ways of Salt, adds richness to the picture. 

One of the changes which impacted Angus Macmillan was an education which was eventually to take him away from the island life. In an era previous to that in which he came of age, his life would have been circumscribed by the island, save perhaps for the intervention of war or migration. Instead his education brought him eventually to Newcastle University where he earned a doctorate in psychology. This was the gateway to a life as a clinical psychologist lived for the most part in Dumfries in South West Scotland.   

During the pandemic, he records his impressions on revisiting Lemreway.  

From my high vantage point, I can see many houses in the village, on both sides of the bay, many now empty or taken over by people from all parts of the UK and around the world. Of some 130 people who lived here when I entered primary school, all Gaelic speakers, I realise that at the time of writing that only six remain. I remember them all, remember them saying ‘Thig a-steach, thig a-steach. Suidh sìos. Dè do naidheachd?” (Come in, come in.  Sit down. What is your news?)

Who can extend that invitation now?

Central to this passing  is the loss of Gaelic as an integral aspect of daily life on Lewis.  But there are many more poignant details in the account. For example, the changing meaning of ceilidh, at one time an informal gathering of members of the community in one or other of their households, where there would be an exchange of news, stories and song.  But with the coming of television this informal meaning was to become anachronistic, replaced by the ceilidh as a more formal gathering most likely situated in a village hall. 

A similar  transition is expressed in the story Angus Macmillan tells when, as a boy of ten or eleven, he recollects his elder brother and sister preparing for a dance at the crossroads—a dannsa rothaid, under the light of the moon.  He could hear from his home the accordion music which heralded the event and describes how he

… smouldered with resentment at missing out on all this…

However, he goes on to say:

…they reassured me with ‘When you’re older…Your turn will come.”  

But it was not to be. As Macmillan tells it:  

…my turn never did come.  By the time I was old enough to join in, and understood the pushes and pulls of adolescence, the world had moved on. We danced in town and village halls, barns, at ceilidhs. But I never danced at the crossroads, under that magical autumn light.

There is in these stories the unmistakable sense of treasures lost. And yet the record is balanced by other recollections of hardship or custom not so readily embraced. Macmillan’s instincts are rebellious, seeking a way round the obstacles he encounters. In the days before taps could be turned for the purpose, he seeks a better way to manage the daily grind of collecting the water for the household by using his bicycle – not it must be said with great success, but the impulse to find improvement is clear.  

And then there is his impatience with the rituals of  church and religion as exemplified by the  poem, Pandrop.  

And it rolled, and it rolled,
all the way from Mount Ararat to Gethsemane

In relating these stories Angus Macmillan shows no hint of sentimentality or nostalgia. He is not at any point suggesting that we should restore a subsistence way of life, nor even is he suggesting that there is a need to rebalance our current way of life.  And yet Between the Echoes clearly prompts us to question our dependence on the material paraphernalia that so dominates modern life. Indeed, when reading the book,  the phrase getting and spending  came into  my mind insistently. You may be ahead of me here, but I wasn’t quite sure from where this had bubbled up, but a quick Google search provided the answer: William Wordsworth’s poem,  The World is too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

Wordsworth’s poem suggests that, though writing in the very early stages of the industrial revolution, he felt strongly that something was  being lost as people moved away from  a subsistence life in agriculture towards the promise of prosperity in towns and cities. This seems to me also to be a theme of Between the Echoes which describes a world in which the things that sustain life, though hard won, were available to all, and the things which made a life rich—open space, nature, community, sociability—were available in plenty. 

In these times where the search for identity often fuses with ideas of heritage, we have come  to expect simplifications and elisions in the cultural record. Between the Echoes offers a nuanced antidote to this reductive tendency. I dare say, as someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, where identity has so often been reduced to flags and associated emblems, this  aspect of the book has a particular  appeal. The  centrality of Gaelic to the story Angus Macmillan tells, is of special interest.  In Northern Ireland just now the Irish language continues to be disputed territory, with unionists inclined to regard it as alien, whilst nationalists demand that it be given a place in street signs and in the shared  political life of the community.  

The connections between Irish and Scots Gaelic are obvious, but the Scots footprint of Gaelic is little accepted or even understood in the Unionist community where Irish is associated so strongly with the Roman Catholic faith, with nationalism and with the culture of Ireland as an undivided country. There is an irony, however, in that the community in which Angus Macmillan grew up was Presbyterian—indeed to Macmillan’s evident frustration— radically sabbatarian in its practice. Some of the Scottish Islands where Gaelic is spoken are home to Roman Catholic communities, it should be said, and so the cultural and historical legacy is clearly a complicated one. That is a lesson from which we all may learn something useful. 

Between the Echoes: place – home – Lewis, Angus Macmillan—highly recommended. 

Endnotes

Between the Echoes: place – home – Lewis:  available from Islands Book Trust

The Ways of Salt – Angus Macmillan, published by Drunk Muse Press– currently sold out. 

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth, full text of the poem available on the Poetry Foundation website. 

Featured Image cropped from an original By David Wake, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=457868