Rear Window
and the August Poem
Photograph by Islay McLeod
It is a challenging language, but we need challenges at my age to keep the grey matter active. I gradually discovered what a beautiful and expressive language it is, and it slowly dawned on me that it seemed rather strange that I, a Scot, should have learned French, German, Russian and Italian, but had never given a thought to Gaelic.
The answer lies in my politics. Since early manhood I have leaned to the left, or more explicitly, I abhor anything to do with nationalism. Gaelic became wrongly and perversely associated in my mind with Scottish nationalism, a movement which I always repudiated.
After becoming more and more enthusiastic about learning Gaelic, I complained to my talented Gaelic tutor, Neil MacGregor: ‘They taught us French, German, Latin, Spanish and [in the case of Neil’s school] Russian, so why didn’t they teach us Gaelic in our fine Edinburgh schools?’
He pointed out that under the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act, Gaelic was ignored, although its use had grown. Zealous dominies interpreted the act to mean that an English-only rule in teaching all subjects must be rigorously enforced. What followed was surely a form of cultural barbarism. The suppression of a language and a culture.
The writer Neil Gunn, of the same generation as my father, brought up at the opposite end of Scotland from my father, namely Dunbeath, underwent the same fate as my father: Gaelic was forbidden in school. I don’t know whether Gunn himself preserved any knowledge of Gaelic. But in his novel ‘The Silver Darlings’ in a bizarre alienation of a writer from the original language of his region, he poignantly describes in English, dialogue and all, a 19th century generation in Caithness who spoke Gaelic as its first language.
I stress, I am no nationalist, but I was shocked to learn how Gaelic was once treated, and cheered that so much has been done recently to revive it in schools, colleges and in the media.
Part of the problem of the perception of Gaelic was to be found in misconceptions harboured by Scots, men of goodwill but apparently misled from birth, as I was. One friend, a Borderer with whom I graduated in 1962, a language schoolteacher fluent in French, German and Spanish, told me recently, ‘Donald, Gaelic is a dead language!’
Then only the other day, a friend from schooldays, an Edinburgh architect, learning of my new enthusiasm, produced exactly the same words over lunch, ‘Donnie, Gaelic is a dead language! All these English words they keep having to throw in, telev – ee – shun, polis, tit-sher, sta-shun, it’s hardly a language!’ he continued in scoffing tones. I had to remind him where English came from, and how Clemenceau described the English language as ‘French badly pronounced’.
At another lunch two more Edinburgh schooldays’ friends insisted that Gaelic had been only the language of the Highlands, and had never had a place in the Lowlands. I had to put them right. Gaelic was widely spoken all over Scotland until the Middle Ages. That great Renaissance patron of the arts, King James IV, who reigned until cut down on Flodden Field in 1513, was a Gaelic speaker.
And as to the charge of Gaelic being ‘dead,’ I find 70,000 native speakers a perfectly respectable statistic. Other governments and societies make painstaking efforts to preserve minority languages with far fewer native speakers. What is at stake is not demographics but the cultural imperative of keeping alive the language of an ancient civilisation.
Who has been brainwashing otherwise fair-minded Scots into such prejudices? It’s interesting to note a certain suspicious similarity with the attitudes of friends in other countries with ethnic minority languages. France, that great democracy, once went to great lengths in the name of centralised rule and cultural conformity anchored in its classic ‘republican idea’ to discourage the Celtic language of Brittany, and more recently the German spoken in Alsace-Lorraine.
Today it has changed its policy and minority languages flourish in France. However, an old French friend of mine had not changed his policy. He had been a communist when I first met him, but ended up a rather xenophobic nationalist. Although hailing from Brittany, Pierre was a French nationalist and not at all a Breton nationalist. Throughout his long migration from extreme left towards the right, the republican principle of France had remained forever dear to Pierre. Invoking this, he continued to find reasons to reject local patriotism and thus to justify the past suppression of the Breton language, no matter how much this might seem to this graduate of the Sorbonne like the deliberate killing-off of a culture.
I’m glad to say that it has not taken me long to realise that the culture of Scottish Gaelic and the politics of the SNP are not necessarily the same thing, and that only the stupid prejudices of my youth (influenced not least by the mood of polite Edinburgh of that time, Sandy Bell’s and Milne’s bars always excepted) had barred me from earlier acquaintance with a wonderfully lively, colourful, resounding language.
I make no apology for having first learned French, German, Russian and Italian, but I’m glad I’ve come back to keep faith with my father’s origins as a farmer’s son in Kintyre, from a household in which Gaelic was the tongue – until he and his sisters and brothers went to school.
Will I soon be able to boast that I can speak five foreign languages? No, I think not. I’d like to say that I speak four foreign and two native languages.
Donald Armour is a retired journalist
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