The Two Cousins: Episode 7

Episode 7: Hector goes to War

Iain Smith

In Episode 5, we left Hector MacIver teaching in Edinburgh and pursuing various literary interests.

One of MacIver’s school students, Robert Taubman, paints a vivid picture of MacIver as a very young teacher at the Royal High School in Edinburgh in 1934.

From Taubman’s description of the MacIver writings we get an impression why some of these caused Hector’s reputation in his native island to become a mixed one:-

“He wrote stories (for little magazines that are now untraceable) that were as close to the life of the Western Isles as he could go. It was the life of a pre-industrial imaginative people……… He had a certain notoriety at home as an enemy of the Kirk; but he was susceptible to the splendours and the spleen of the Gaelic pulpit and the language of damnation, and when a word like ‘fornication’ appeared in his stories it didn’t look so much stark as theological.”

Quite; but the view in Hector’s native village in the 1930s may have been just a touch less generous.

Certainly Hector was vocal in his opposition to the churches of his native island. In one piece he wrote:-

 “As interpreted by the Presbyterian ministers of the Hebrides, life is identified with ascetism and repression. The crucifixion of the body is the monotonous theme of all their discourses. Drinking, dancing, music and recreation are officially condemned. But these gentlemen in their fanatical and destructive campaign forget that such taboos cannot be imposed on country people, whose nature is to set more store on human values than on ascetic ones. And the more their human wants are denied, the more they tend to excess.”

World War II came; and MacIver joined the Navy. He writes modestly but eloquently about what was a hazardous occupation – an officer on board a destroyer on convoy duties in the North Atlantic.

“…in the midst of all this rigorous routine there were moments of pleasure and excitement-quite apart from the occasions when we were attacked- for attack and counter-attack became also part of the routine. A destroyer, by the very traits of her character, never fails to provide excitement; her movements are unpredictable, her vitality inexhaustible. In the very smoothest of seas, a shiver of life from her engine rooms runs through her whole fabric; she resembles the pulsating body of a greyhound preparing for the chase; and if she decides to turn in her tracks, as she often does, she exercises her narrow circle with the neatness of compass and pencil upon paper.

Anyway, for a whole summer, while we escorted convoys up and down the coast with our ship keeping guard, marshalling the long column of merchant ships and rounding up vagrants, I watched her with interest. I already felt that if, some day, I went back to my profession, I should often be tempted to digress from the strict theme of literature to talk for a moment about destroyers.”

 

His friend Neil Gunn writes to him “I wrote a book on the herring industry of a century ago, ‘the Silver Darlings’, and it’s to be filmed in the north later this year’.  As does Chris Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid):-

“Sorry my reply is belated. The trouble is that working as an engineer on munitions, I have excessively long hours and practically no time to myself at all….. However hard physical work (hitherto unknown to me) has suited me well enough in every other respect, physically, psychologically and pecuniarily (sic) - and I venture to hope that you have a like tale to tell…”

 

One of Hector’s naval commanders was Angus, the Marquis of Graham, later the Duke of Montrose and famous (or infamous) in the 1960s in Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government. Graham had learned Gaelic at Balliol (where else indeed would a Scottish aristocrat choose to learn Gaelic?); and went to Shawbost on leave with MacIver. There he not only conversed with the locals in Gaelic: he also addressed an assembly of Nicolson Institute pupils in Gaelic.

As in other places in his autobiographical writing, MacIver’s belief in the supernatural comes through. He writes about an American officer with whom he had become friendly:-

“One day, when I was at sea, I turned to see him coming along the deck towards me. I was astounded for I knew his presence was an impossibility. He was smiling as if eager to share a good joke with me, but as he came closer, he suddenly vanished. Later, I found that his ship had been sunk, just at that time, with the loss of all hands.”

Despite being torpedoed twice (and on one of these occasions having a fellow-officer repel with an oar his efforts to climb aboard a half-filled lifeboat -  in a sea where exposure to low temperatures gave one a life expectancy measured in minutes), MacIver survived the war. He goes on holiday to Lewis after being demobbed and heckles Iain Macleod (later Chancellor of the Exchequer) who was the – unsuccessful – Conservative candidate for the Western Isles in the 1945 General Election.

 

At this point, having resumed his job as an English teacher, MacIver’s (often sketchy) autobiographical essay comes to an end; but his story was subsequently picked up by his wife.

Mary MacIver provides a fascinating explanation why so many people were attracted to Hector:-

 “I’ve always felt I missed a great deal, losing my Irish background and Hector embodied it for me. I think this was true for other people also, no matter how distinguished they were. People like Hugh McDiarmid, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas saw in Hector not just a fascinating personality in his own right, and a wonderful raconteur, but also the representative of a world they would like to have grown up in  or, in Chris’s [Hugh McDiarmid’s] case, to have had much more personal contact with.”

In the cases of the first two, this is a plausible view; with Dylan Thomas, whose attitude to things Welsh was notoriously ambivalent, it seems more dubious.

Dylan Thomas [whose birth centenary is 2014] wrote to Hector with typical Thomas prose: “I do so hate it here in this toadish valley among slow rabbits and sly cows. Oxford is near, but full of young men. Our pub is cold and wild with dominoes.” Why Thomas disliked rabbits that were slow or cows that were sly or (for that matter) men that were young is not explained.

A later letter from the Thomas village of Laugharne does however explain one dislike “I am writing this with a vile Biro junior which cuts through paper and table-top, spits greased, mock-ink at shirt, eye and wall, and whose writing fades, sometimes conveniently, almost at once.”  The invention of László Bíró was indeed then fairly undependable.

This, as so often with Dylan Thomas, is the writing of a man at ease with words- although sadly not with himself.

 

(to be continued)

 

Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde. He welcomes feedback at i.r.m.smith@strath.ac.uk.