Angus and Michael I spent the weekend absorbed in the
stories* of two remarkable old men (one from South Uist, the other from Donegal) who had said their pieces fluently into tape-recorders. The Scot is Young Angus MacLellan, 'son of Angus, son of Hector, son of Donald, son of Calum, son of Donald.' He was born in 1869 by Loch Eynoet in a black house with an open fire in the middle of the floor. He had a little school- ing before the age of seven, and then no more. Some years of his youth were spent labouring for a few pounds (with meal and milk) on farms in various parts of the Highlands, and then he returned to South Uist to live by crofting and * THE FURROW BEHIND ME. By Angus Mac- Lellan. Translated by John Lorne Campbell. (Rout- ledge, 28s.) THE HARD ROAD TO KLONDIKE. By Michael MacGowan. Translated by Valentin Iremonger. (Routledge, 25s.) fishing. The Irishman was Michael MacGowan, and he was born in 1865 in the townland of Derryconor at the foot of Crocknaneeve, where the humdrum privations of daily life must have been almost identical with those of watery South Uist away in the North. The Ulsterman went farther afield than the Islesman, though: first beyond the mountains to the Lagan, where he slaved as a child labourer on farms, then to a hostile Scotland, and at last to the United States and the Yukon, whence he returned to the Rosses of Donegal in his middle thirties with enough gold to buy a house and put a fine wife in it. Thereafter, like MacLellan up in Uist, he became a famous story-teller in his native Gaelic.
Previous page
