The Cuts of Loch Thom
a short story
Alistair MacDonald lay down with his back on the heather slope. The day was sunny again, west-coast warm and nicely too windy on the high hills at the back of growing Greenock for attacks from the swarms of midges. As a plus the cleg season was now over; these were the enormous, dirty-grey, flying stupids which bored huge holes in the skin from late summer to early autumn. Stick your hand out and they'd opt to land, only to die horribly with a slap of the other hand, leaving behind bits of insect body parts and human blood. Alistair's sun-darkened flesh was mottled - bhreachaidh - with white spots about a quarter of an inch in diameter, marking the many places where a cleg had landed, drunk its fill and, all-too-rarely, died.
Such was the definitive mark of the builders of the Greenock and Kelly Cuts, bringing water from the furthest edges of the Muirshiel Hills to the rapidly-expanding towns of Gourock, Greenock and Port Glasgow. Rain? There was ample of this too, as anyone living there could attest. It rushed down the hillside burns, past the growing towns, into the Firth of Clyde and out past Arran, twice a day, sweetening the water for more than twenty miles from the ford and bridges of Glasgow right down to far-off Fairlie Roads. The workers of Greenock and Port Glasgow were thirsty, as were the factories, shipyards - and the breweries - that had become the staple local employment for west Renfrewshire. The rain fell, seemingly every day, sometimes so hard it bounced up off the muddy streets and stones; but it was also a soft, gentle and copious blessing.
A local man, one James Watt, had first made an attempt at damming up the burns into reservoirs during the hectic years heady with Scottish invention and financial purpose that followed the violent and unsuccessful Highland Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745. Watt was to be there at the heart of the ever-expanding British industrial revolution, as was Greenock; and Greenock was his home town.
People came pouring in, driven by poverty, famine and the Hanovarian militias. They came from the lands north, south and west of the Clyde, seeking jobs, food and the new life promised by now-prosperous returnees to glens steadily emptying of people. Many miles beyond the mountains that bore him Alistair MacDonald sat up to eat his lunch of boiled egg, washed down with a cup of heather tea.
As he dozed in the midday midsummer sunlight of this Year Of Our Lord 1825, he was again a boy at home in the far-off Uists. His mother was washing the baby's clothes at the burn near the house, whose waters flowed quickly into the ever-crashing surf of the Atlantic Ocean which had sucked so many away across the sea in boats bound for the Americas. It was the same blue sky then as now which he saw from beneath his flat cap as he sat near the growing waters of the new man-made loch. "A wonder", the newspaper-man had penned it. "There is nothing like this anywhere in North Britain today", the piece in The Scotsman had run.
Joe Love, a native English-speaker from near the borderlands, kicked his boot. "Get up, laddie. Yon's Mr Thom himself comin' bye." The crew stood up by their picks and spades as the great man came over. Instantly recognisable by his tall top hat and his short stature. "Fancies hissel as another Isombard Brunel, thon ane does! He's smaller than thon hat he wears ...", hissed Joe. Alistair and the other men smiled.
Five years had changed much in the Hebridean islander. Such lip was unheard of in the tightly regulated and safe society that had long existed before the lands were cleared by The Ranald. For hundreds of years little had changed, except for language - from Norse to Gaelic - and religion - from Catholic to Presbyterian. Yes, there were still clusters of stubborn Nord speakers and Papists in the Uists, but the order of life had continued, unchanged behind these superficial events.
Until the elders came to see his mother. The house was hers since her husband had died six months earlier. He went off with The Ranald to raid the MacLeans for cattle, but was killed, so it was said, by a sword blow to the head and right shoulder. Only his battle targe and plaid had been returned to the family. The MacLean had paid a travelling MacDu'phee tinker to return it to them. Such was old honour in the islands. A tinker was often chosen as in the Gaelic tongue his clan are the children of the black spirit, bringing only gloom to households.
The elders waited to speak to his mother, who spoke little since her husband, Roderick, had died. She finished her washing and returned to the house. She stopped to look at the elders, then continued to hang up the washing. The elders sat down on some drying peat and shared a pouch of tobacco as they waited the woman's time. Alistair watched this all from his seat by the sleeping baby, cutting grass into twelve-inch squares to repair the roof where the Atlantic storms had again created holes.
Mary mhic Aengus bided her time. These men never brought good news. There were no suitors for a middle aged woman with a boy of fourteen and a nursing baby in her arms. The elders could wait. "Men are the rulers of the kingdom of sitting, waiting and doing nothing", she said to herself. She went up to her son, Alistair og mac Roderick, picked up the baby, loosened her top, drew her breast out and, sitting down, put the hungry baby to feed.
"And, what are you lot wanting here?", she shouted across the yard. The men were discomfited, unused to having to shout to be heard and unwilling to approach a woman in such undress. This was Mary's game, not theirs, and they'd just have to play it her way. After a silence one of the men spoke to Alistair, "Come over here, Alistair og, so we can talk with you for your mother." She let the baby's head drop away and turned to her son, "Just you sit there, mo ghraidh, and watch the washing dry."
Nothing was said for some time, then the youngest man spoke, "Mary mhic Aengus, you have to go away. The Ranald has decided that this land is for sheep. You need to leave by the end of the summer. If you don't go the redcoats and the sassenaich ruadh soldiers, the redcoats will come and burn you out."
Mary knew this already. The elders came every week to tell her. Once they were the local servants as leaders of the clann, with The Ranald as the athair mhor, the great father. But now they all worked for King George, and their fine new clothing was paid for with the sterling shilling. Money speaks, it speaks only English, and it can buy anyone, it seemed to Mary.
She put the baby down on the heather, adjusted her shawl, and slipped off the child's soiled clothing. She fetched water from the burn and washed the little girl clean, both mother and child giggling in the shock and purity of the fresh mountain stream. Alistair fetched a clean set of clothing from the black house and took the dirty clothes to rinse downstream from the house. His mother sang a Gaelic lullaby that echoed right to the boy's heart, softening him inside for the life to come in this harsh, fallen world. In a week they were packed and had gone to her sisters house in the new settlement of Lochmaddy.
"What is that song ye are aye singin', laddie?", Joe asked him as they watched the great little man in the black frock coat walk slowly past the work done over the past week. "Och, its just a tune such as my mother sang to me", replied the shy islander. "My mother lives in Glasgow now", Joe added. "She works in a mill on the Broomielaw. Conditions are shocking. We were farmers before the clearing. What did your family do?"
Alistair smiled, "Much the same as yours, I hear said, mainly we stole our neighbour's cattle too - Ach! ... farmers, indeed ... !"
The gaffer's whistle broke the joke. He shouted, "Back tae work, everyone!" The men fitted their caps on tighter against the wind coming off the hills, saw the grey clouds again rolling in, and turned to dig another few yards of the canal.
Mr Thom had, as usual, brought his measuring stick, can and hose. He knocked a stake into the ground where yesterday's work had been completed and carefully attached the hose to the notch near the top. He walked precisely one hundred yards and drove in the second stake. He then attached the hose to a similar notch, but slightly lower than the one on the first stake - one inch lower. He took the can, filled it with water from the nearby burn, and began to pour the water into the lower end of the hose. Several can-fulls later he stopped and then checked the hose at both ends. Yes - the water at the higher end was precisely one inch lower, indicating just the right slope of descent for the canal to carry the water regularly and safely from the upper reservoir - apparently to be called Loch Thom - to the lower one just above the town.
"One inch!", he declared happily. Everyone stopped working and sighed in relief at the ritual. The little man in the black top hat thanked the workmen, shaking each of them by the hand. He then began to dismantle his scientific apparatus. When the drop was right, they each got a farthing bonus.
Robert Thom had walked these hills for days seeking inspiration. The new British canals were all flat. He knew that fifteen hundred years ago the mighty Roman armies had marched across these hills. They had built forts, camps, settlements and great walls, much of which still remained. These ambitious men also had discovered a way to check the gradient of their mighty aqueducts. He had even visited the famed Pont du Gard aqueduct in France. There he had learned of the required rate of fall of the Roman water course. Thom's genius was to adapt the modern canal-builders' technique for checking a water course is level, to one that checked if it was descending at just the right rate.
He had quietly given thanks for dominie McAuld at Paisley Grammar School for making him read Julius Caesar, Virgil and Ovid. Despite the beatings he often got for being unable to conjugate that most basic word servus, when faced with the severe master's command, "Responde Latine!" He hated all the dead Romans at the time, and truth be told, he still did. Who would have imagined that these dusty dead scribblers would have helped him to go up - even beyond his 5’ 1" - in this exciting new field of 'engineering'.
Each of the work teams had to build fifty to a hundred yards of aqueduct each day, Monday to Saturday, for twelve hours a day. The town fathers' ambition was to divert the water from the hills and burns into a series of great reservoirs which would supply Greenock for a hundred years and more. Each day or so Alistair had to dig a hole two yards square and line it with Clyde mud, Largs clay and Ailsa Craig granite setts. It was back-breaking work, and many men succumbed to exhaustion, bad backs or crushed fingers.
Mr Thom took good care of his workforce, paying and feeding them well, and even having some widows on stand-by to treat the wounded. They were hardened women, who treated the men like their own sons or brothers. Any hint of misbehaviour was treated as a reason for immediate dismissal. But good workers were treasured. Alistair and Joe had both been up before him shortly after they started. Despite severe warnings, they had taken their Saturday earnings and headed down to The Port. Two naïve country boys in a town for the first time. The women had been too friendly and were easily avoided, but some men off the construction site, so they said, had taken them into a bar.
The two young men woke the next day by the docks, cold, wet and skint. Their week's wages were gone. Their friends of last night nowhere to be seen - vanished like their wages. They had both trudged back up the hill to find Mr Thom waiting for them. He had roasted them with shouting and throwing his arms about, but it was more for the other workers than for the two boys. He then sent them back to work on the watercourse. It never happened again.
"What will you do with your money when The Cuts are done?", asked Joe. Alistair, lent back, stretching his legs, "I'll just suppose I'll buy a boat and I'll sail home." "I'll go back to Annan and buy the farm back from the Earl of Buccleugh. He owns most of Scotland at the border now, I hear", Joe replied. But they both knew they wouldn't. The past is, as Greenock once was, a foreign country. A lost land of dreams and idyll, fit only for poetry and sad songs.
"The day will come soon when this is all over." Joe was surveying the granite snake of the Kelly Cut winding ever closer to the new loch. "By my numbers she should be done by the start of the snows", Alistair spoke as he lay down another sett in the south wall. Joe watched the other man, checking the canal's progress with his eye. "Do you still think in Gaelic before you speak in English?" The islander stopped for a drink of water, "No. I stopped about a year ago. I remember the day well. I just looked at the river and the bheinns and thought, 'That's a bonny sicht'. Gave myself a fright, so I did."
There was a pause for work before the men spoke again. "But, I dream in Gaelic. I dream in different colours: the green of my mother and sister's eyes, the yellow of the sands, the blue of the ocean, the white of my father's teeth, the black of his eyes. I sing of dead people, who are alive to me; and the living who may all be dead now. It keeps my soul alive in this foreign land."
The gaffer whistled sharply and everyone stopped working. Mr Thom was still there, idly watching the work, enjoying the sunshine, and earwigging in to the workers along the line. He came over and sat with the two men and spoke, "We're all foreigners here. My grandfather came down from Argyll, near Dunardry on Loch Fyne. The family was driven off the land by the redcoats. He walked to Ardrishaig, hid on a fishing boat, and jumped off in Paisley. Of course, he had no idea where he was. Must have been about twelve or thirteen years old. The MacTavish had sold their land to sheep farmers. He worked as a knot-tier in a mill until he got too big for that, then joined the Renfrewshire Artillery."
Mr Thom opened his tobacco pouch, offering it to the two men. They lit their clay pipes and drew in the rich, warm fumes. Further down the line a man had got out his fiddle and two others were loosening their limbs, dancing to a fast reel. The long gloaming of summer had begun for the day. In truth, it wouldn't get properly dark again for a few weeks.
"He took the King's shilling, put on the red coat, and followed King George. His grandfather had followed The Prince." Mr Thom coughed, trying to cover up his laughter at this family about-face. "I'm surprised you two don't consider this option when the job is over." He stood up to walk away.
"No. I'm only going home in my memories", Alistair spoke. "You see these ships down there, Mr Thom?" The young Gael pointed at the Firth of Clyde, filled with shipping. "They aren't going to anywhere in Scotland. They go to the Americas. I've heard that the future is there. That a new Scotland is being built on the other side of the Atlantic sea. Every day I used to watch that sea when I was a child. Every day I'd wonder how to get to the other side. Now, Mr Thom, I know. Every day I see these ships appearing down in Greenock, and new-built ones being tested in the Skelmorlie Mile. Then they head out past Arran and Ireland, and go to the Americas. That's where I'm going."
The three men stood and watched the sun dying over the Clyde. The huge red ball settled slowly behind the hills of Cowal. The canal would soon be done. The tobacco pipes they used today broken and left in the water-logged soil. The sounds of the docks now rippled up the quiet hillside, the ships lit up by dockside beacons and fires. This would continue for an hour or two more to ensure the ships would catch the high tide at midnight and the evening south-easterly off the land.
The seed of the future was planted. Unspoken, as they sat feeling the comfortable chill at the day's end, they looked and listened. All three knew where they would go next. This would be their last winter in Greenock. Joe Love's voice cut clean through the air as he sang,
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
And leave auld Scotia's shore?
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
Across th' Atlantic's roar?
Further down The Cut a violin added a minor chord to the sad melody. Men familiar with the works of the lowland Scots bard, Robert Burns, joined in the song in harmony, filling the hillside with loss, regret, hope and promise.
I hae sworn by the heavens to my Mary,
I hae sworn to the heavens to be true;
And sae may the heavens forget me,
When I forget my vow.
The night grew darker. The day was ended. Men began to leave, heading down the hill towards the lights of the docks and the departing ships.
We hae plighted our troth, my Mary,
In mutual affection to join;
And cursed be the cause which shall part us!
The hour and the moment o' time!