Machtihanish
By LAIN HAMILTON MACHRIHANISH has its romantic associations for me. Vivid flowers sprinkled over the velvet machair ; a heavy - swell coming in past Islay and shattering itself on the tawny beach ; and the fine rain of the west spreading blandly across the narrow sea from Jura. All that and the rest of the twaddle. Anyhow, they are sinking a new coal mine there, accord- ing to the White Paper on A Programme of Highland Development.
A new coal mine at Machrihanish—" at Machrihanish in Argyll," the White Paper said or stated. At Machrihanish in Kintyre, it should have said or stated. Kintyre is indubitably a part of Argyll ; and Machrihanish, being in Kintyre, is unquestion- ably also in Argyll. But Kintyre is not such a negligible lesser entity that it should be swallowed up entirely in the greater, and denied proper mention. It could never be contemptuously ignored, that long limb of Scotland, so nearly an island, by anyone who really knows it. But then the authors of White Papers on Highland development or any other sort of development are necessarily less concerned with the concrete than with the abstraction from it. It 13 enough for them that Machrihanish is in Argyll, the administra- tive area. But we shall not quarrel any more about that. You are now quite certain that I am going to complain—in a Spirit of sentimental whimsy, not of bitterness—about coal mines being sunk at Machrihanish, in Kintyre, in Argyll. You are mis- taken. It is many a long year since I last stepped on the springing turf and yielding sand of that place, but I clearly remember the existence of a coal mine there, or very near there. At Drumlemble, I think, a little to the east of Machrihanish. I seem to recall that it was not working then ; but it was a coal mine nevertheless, and a challenge to the imagination of an over-romantic child whose head was rather too full of Fionn and Cuchulain and the Lords of the Isles and what not. But, bless all romantic hearts, the coal mine was assimilated without any trouble. I never gave it a thought. It interfered nowise with my daydreams.
I am certainly not going to complain. Why complain ? One should rather be mildly pleased that they have not set the open- cast experts loose to rip open the whole of the fertile Laggan of Kintyre, gut it, and then " restore " it. A new coal mine is nothing by comparison, nothing at all ; and it will surely be a year or two before the spoil-hill, or slag-heap, or whatever you call it, mounts high enough to rival the conical perfection of the Paps of Jura across the water. - The news, however, brought me to the realisation that the chances of recognising in the Machrihanish of today the paradise of my childhood are dwindling. But was there any real chance in the first place ? For it is only too true (and I offer no apology for the allusion, since everybody else has been quoting Wordsworth frantically all year) that the " glory and the freshness of a dream " are not to be rediscovered simply by barging back in adult daylight. " It is not now as it bath been of yore "—even if the physical details of the place have not altered by so much as a blade of bent. If the glory and the freshness are to be recaptured at all, and senti- mentality skirted, then it must be by subtler, more oblique methods.
If I were to go back to Machrihanish, by train and steamer and car, in search of the essence of le temps perdu, I should (such is my fear) be defeated by the thick crust of the golf-course and its golfers, the airfield, the ice-cream chariots, and (let me admit it) the coal mines. To say nothing of the midges. Once upon a time I did not mind midges at all. Now I do, and realise why everybody used to smoke tobacco so desperately or open bottles of eucalyptus oil. The sea would certainly be unspeakably cold. The sun would not appear. Visibility would be so poor that I should get never a. glimpse of Ireland or Islay, Jura or Gigha. The fine rain would worry me, and I should find neither rain nor worry in the least romantic. (Besides, I am myself half Gaelic, and it should be More widely known that the Gaelic race is not at all a romantic one.) I should spend more and more time drinking Irish whisky (the native liquor being unobtainable, probably) with plump, red-faced chaps who would tell funny stories about chambermaids in Oban. Already I can visualise my decline into eccentricity. If I did not escape quickly enough from the plump, red-faced golfers and flee eastward to Glasgow and away, away, Irish whisky and melancholy would hasten my reversion to Celtic type, and I should quickly become the West Highland equivalent of a beachcomber —a cross, that is, between a Chekhov hero and someone like.Charlie the Tink, who used to spend his nights on top of a midden for the sake of the heat generated in the depths of the decaying matter. I should write nothing ; my money would melt ; my voice would soon be too hoarse for singing in the streets of Campbeltown. My wife would divorce me ; my children would forget me ; my friends would disown me ; plump, red-faced chaps would spurn me when I tried to touch them for the price of a dram ; and at the time of the Glasgow Fair the decent city folk come " doon the wafter " would stare at me just as I used to stare at the eccentrics so common in Kintyre in the days of my boyhood. I can hear them whispering: " Mrs. MacSporran telt us that yon fella dosses on the midden." " Whit for, in the name ? "
" Fair aff his heid, the poor soul I " " Fancy that! "
"Aye, and him wance a nice young fella! Mrs. MacSporran telt us that . . ."
You see how it is. No, no ; I don't care if they sink, or do not sink, fifty new coal mines at Machrihanish, in Kintyre, in Argyll.
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