I recently found myself on a well-worn path: the pilgrimage to my nearest stockist of Charlie Barley’s Stornoway black pudding. Amongst Scottish cooked-breakfast enthusiasts, Charlie Barley’s reigns above all other black puddings. It has even been granted protected geographical indication status (or ‘champagne’ protection) by the EU. I like this notion of a delicacy. A pudding that clogs bloodily on the plate. A strange endearing feast, not for the faint-hearted. Like a pint of Guinness it promises a bracing blast of old-fashioned, unhealthy energy.
I was buying this for my father (an islander, stranded on the mainland) for his birthday, along with other island-themed treats like Arran cheese and seaweed-infused oatcakes (I was in Glasgow’s west end so it was impossible to visit a deli without being burdened by something seaweed-infused). I trekked in the rain with my bag of island goodies and thought about paths and home.
I grew up on the mainland, so my island childhood was second-hand – passed to me from both my parents, and their parents. On my father’s mother’s side, it goes back further: generations of strangers. I imagine rather than remember them, working and living in faintly-drawn crofts.
My own memories of Lewis provide the exotic absurdities which everyone likes to have about their childhood. I remember swimming in the Stornoway indoor swimming pool which was kept at a temperature roughly as cold as the sea (there seems a Calvinist slant to that state of affairs) and visiting the swings in the play-park on a Sunday, only to find them chained and locked up to save any children from enjoying themselves.
The individuals that populate my early holiday memories stand out against a dreary Stornoway Sabbath. My grandmother went to the Church of Scotland dressed as a butterfly, in twinsets of fine, delicate fabrics, in shades of amber, bronze, indigo, iridescent green. She had studied pharmacy at university and recited poetry, perfectly, whenever it happened to apply.
The beach at the Braighe looms large, tantalisingly melancholic. It has hardly changed in the three decades I’ve known it. The remains of old iron tide defences lean this way and that, broken by the sea. The high concrete wall which protects the dunes from erosion remains intact, glaring out to sea. When I was younger I considered it, vaguely, to be a bleak relic of some obsolete industry. One night my brother and I leapt recklessly from one tide-defence marker to another as the full sea rushed spectacularly up to meet us. We were small so the waves were colossal, and the stars above seemed to collude with the spectacle.
We hold fast to family names and memories of happy days, write down all our traceable connections and draw our family tree, starting at the ends of the very last branches and working backwards. People tell stories about a shared past irrepressibly. Print may have taken hold but oral lore never completely dissolved. Creating and renewing our rich intimate histories together is not an effort – it’s an impulse.
I think partly we’re all hostage to the flimsy feeling that we’re saving ourselves and our loved ones from historical oblivion. Yet this doesn’t really explain the joy that’s in it. I ask to hear stories I’ve heard before and I don’t care if tales become embellished, or are misremembered, or misattributed. We all remember together: this happened, this is special, and all our loved ones continue to live, in one tall tale or another. So perhaps it’s not simply a way to rescue ourselves from the threat of being forgotten, but something to do with harnessing time. The years don’t have to diminish us. Storytelling and shared remembering can turn time into a process of enhancement. Stories gain weight and people become characters, truths becomes tales, which become too much fun to leave untold, and so the family myths rumble on.
The tone of voice that accompanies this kind of memory seems to me to be the same in everyone. Tender, enchanted with itself. You can hear it when someone begins to tell a certain familiar kind of story. ‘Did I ever tell you about the time…’ it starts; and I love to listen in.
By Amy Jardine | 18 May 2016