The Crofter and the Laird

More John McPhee to be listed soon…
Second Edition.
THE CROFTER AND THE LAIRD, a depiction of a small Scottish island, its terrain, its history, its legends, and its present people (two in particular the crofter, working our his existence in this last domain of the feudal system, and the laird, who is English and owns the whole island and in a sense owns everyone on it). The anthor, who is an is an American, has his own reasons for going there, and be gives them as the book begins:
The Scottish clan that I belong to or would belong to if it were now anything more than a sentimental myth—was broken a great many generations ago by a party of MacDonalds, who hunted down the last chief of my clan, captured him, refused him mercy, saying that a man who had never shown mercy should not ask for it, tied him to a standing stone, and shot him. The standing stone was in a place called Balaromin Mor, on Colonsay, a small island in the open Atlantic, twenty-five miles west of the Scotish mainland… sole territory of a small clan, never more than a few hundred people, whose title to the island had come by immemorial occupation.
Not long ago, it occurred to me that although all my clansmen in America had talked for so long about Colonsay, as far as I knew none of them had ever been there. For that matter, all that I knew about it was that it was one of the Hebrides, in the islands of Argyll. As soon as I could, I took my wife and our four young daughters and went to live for a while on Colonsay.
Donald McNeill’s father, Gilbert MeNeill, worked the same croft, and so did his father, Donald McNeill, and his father, Gilbert McNeill, and his father.
Donald McNeill. In each of these generations were siblings who emigrated to the mainland or to America, and sometimes everybody in the family went except the one who stayed with the croft. Donald has one brother, and he is now a policeman in Dunbartonshire.
Donald once had a calendar on his kitchen wall that showed, in irresistible color, the mountain forests of British Columbia. It was Donald’s wife – Margaret MacMillan MacArthur McNeill – who put the calendar there, and even before its time had run out she knew that her daydreams of British Columbia were aimless ones, because Donald would never leave Colonsay.
There are seventeen crofts on Colonsay and seven farms (a farm has more than forty-nine tillable acres), and a hundred and thirty-eight people, of two castes. About eighty are islanders, like the McNeills, and the rest are incomers. The incomers, for the most part, are people who were born on the mainland or on other islands or whose fathers or grandfathers were born on the mainland or on other islands. What constitutes an islander, apparently, is a familial history of unbroken residence on Colonsay for two or three hundred years. The islanders, for the most part, are crofters and farmers. The in-comers are the doctor, the postman, the postmaster, the schoolteacher, the innkeeper, the storekeeper, the minister-the permanently unestablished establishment.
The school day begins at nine-thirty-in a low, gray, roughcast building that has only one classroom. The hour is so late because of the distances that some of the children have to travel. Wee lan, of Balnahard, whose age is twelve, has to drive a tractor three and a half miles to a point where the school bus can pick him up.
The doctor, tall and spare, is a thinker, and his mind drifts. As he neared the laird’s farm in his Land-Rover, his thoughts were far, far away. After a long straight stretch, the road takes a hairpin turn to the left, and there the doctor made a slight right.
The usual frictions, gossip, and intense social espionage that characterize life in a small town are so grandly magnified on Colonsay that they sometimes appear in surprising form, in the way that patches of skin magnified a hundred diameters may appear to be landscapes of the moon. Air and water, sea and sky, life is imploded on the people here by the blue bottle that surrounds them. Everyone is many things to everyone else, and is encountered daily in a dozen guises. Enmeshed together, the people of the island become one another. Friend and enemy dwell in the same skin.
Under the brooding absence of the laird, there are great men here, within their context-masters, for a few pounds rent a year, of considerable domains, with an independence that must go beyond any usual sense of that word elsewhere, except on another remote small island.
Donald Garvard—who is a big and powerful man, with speckled skin and a handsome, weathered face-strides alongside his two dozen beef cattle in a heavy mist on the grasslands of Balarmin Mor.
Ross Darroch is an uncompromising companion when he is having a dram at the pub. “Have a drink,” he says, and if Neil or anyone else says no, Ross says, “You’re going to have a drink!” Neil sometimes picks Ross up and tosses him into another part of the room.
The laird is younger than nearly all the men who have come to pay him their money and their respects. He is good-looking, tall, athletic, a bit heavy in the cheek, with long swept-back straight hair, amusement in his eyes, and the accents of Eton and Cambridge in his voice.
“The laird is an evil man in several senses of the word.”
“As a boy, he cook his sweets off and ate them by himself in the woods.”
“That, I should say, is characteristic of him today.”
“Mean, parsimonious, close-fisted is the laird.”
The laird, with his legs stretched our, is sitting, sipping whisky, on a low bench before a log fire at Colonsay House in late evening, his wife beside him. He has been considering, with only minor signs of emotion, the fact that he is the least popular man on the island he owns.
The book ends with a section on the early life of the island clan, its chiefs and tanisters, involving elements on both sides of the thin partition that separates superstition and fact in the Hebrides. In form and structure The Crofter and the Laird is similar to The Pine Barrens, one of the author’s earlier books. Others are: Levels of the Game, A Roomful of Hovings, A Sense of Where You Are, Oranges, and The Headmaster.
John McPhee is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.