Miavaig in Uig
By LAIN HAMILTON
FOR the first hour of the journey there was no talk. It was too early in the morning, too cold and comfortless. ,But at Arrochar, where the train halted briefly on the isthmus between the fresh water of Loch Lomond and the salt of Loch Long, the rising sun was tinting the snowy peaks and a little of • this rosiness filtered into the compartment. I stirred in my corner and held out my cigarette-case to the lanky man opposite, a crofter-sailor from the west coast of Lewis going home with something in his pocket after eighteen months at sea, We talked for a time of the Outer Isles; and then I asked him if he happened to know a song about Miavaig in Uig. Some years before, my memory had been oddly disturbed by a translation of this song quoted by Louis MacNeice in his book about the Hebrides : " I would sail with you to Miavaig in Uig," it began. The ghost of an earlier acquaintance had nagged me, as such ghosts do, and here at last was a possibility of laying it. He knew the song well and hummed the air of it as we went along the swaying corridor. I was pleased because I recognised the melody as one heard somewhere before, perhaps once only ; and it occurred to me that it was not the English verses seen in MacNeice's book that had seemed familiar, but something in their rhythm.
In the restaurant-car, empty but for ourselves, the Lewisman sang the first verse and the chorus in Gaelic. Two of the English lines came to mind : " I would sail with you to Miavaig in Uig, Even through the dark and the sea-mist" It is a bridal song, light and dancing, and the lanky man sang it well enough in his high tenor, almost falsetto, the true male singing voice of the Islands. By the time we were well across the Moor of Rannoch the world was full of sunshine, and Schichallion, white in the east, had as keen an edge as Fujiyama in a sharp print. The com- partment was now full, for there were many Islanders of the lanky man's acquaintance on the train, and some of them had come in from the corridor. They had a lot to talk about. I was out of this, for they were all hard at it in Gaelic, and I had long since lost the greater part of the small fragment I once had of that language. But I did catch the mention of Miavaig in Uig in the lanky's man's conversation • and then„ sure enough, a little sandy-haired fellow who had been taking frequent swigs at a half-bottle began to sing the song in a melancholy fashion. A sober companion corrected him, and then they all began to sing, gently at first but soon with great vigour. " Yes,' said Sandy mournfully when they had finished, ' it is a fine song, that" Then the lanky one asked me if I would not be making a note of it, since I was so interested. This seemed expected of me, and they were all anxious to help • so I began to take the Gaelic words down phonetically. The first two lines were entered something like this in my notebook: " Glialaeeng late a Veeavak an Oeik, Gydd a vig e anamoch, gyed a vig e anamoch."
The mainland mountains were icy, and Loch Hourn, living up to its name, looked like hell-mouth. But the winter sun can be warm in the west, and it was mild enough to stay on deck, watching the strange crest of the Sgurr of Eigg recede. But soon I fell into conversation with a plump, well-dressed man smoking a black cheroot. What was I going to Lewis for, if I didn't mind the question, he asked me after a little. 'His accent was of the Isles, but there was a touch of the flat Glasgow tongue in it. I told him that I was writing some articles on the Highlands and Islands. " Ach," said he quietly into my ear, "it is not worth bothering your head about them at all."
" Why so? " I asked.
" Well, now," he explained complacently, " the plain truth of it is that the Highlands and the people that are in them are beyond all hope. Just trash ! "
But he was himself of the Islands? Ah yes,' but long ago he had gone south and into business. Now he had five butcher- shops and was canng well enough. Every year he returned on holiday, but these were trips he enjoyed no longer.
At Kyle of Lochalsh lay the bigger ship that crosses the Minch to Stornoway. The sun had gone by the time she left the quay- side, and a wind was rising ; heading diagonally across the march of the waves, the ship began to make long lurches. After a meal I went along to a little wedge-shaped bar in the bows where the Lewismen who had been on the Mallaig train were drinking. The lanky one said when I came in: " We will have another go at that song now, and you will always have it in your head." So he began to sing it, and everybody in the bar joined in, and it seemed as though the ship itself moved to the dancing rhythm, appropriately enough, for the English version has lines like: " How shall we fare in the whirl of the gale Out in the midst of the Islands? "
But I never got to Miavaig in Uig, that remote western parish of Lewis. The butcher and I happened to be spending the night in the same Stornoway hotel. In the morning I met him at breakfast, and during the meal mentioned the song I had been learning on the journey. He knew it, too, and asked me if I would show him my notebook.- He sounded his way through my phonetic spelling, and in the end announced that it was full of mistakes, many of them obviously the fault of the Lewismen who had dictated the words to me. " See here," he said in disgust, " they cannot even speak their own language properly. They are just trash, the lot of them." Nothing in the world could have whetted my appetite for a visit to Miavaig in Uig more than the butcher's wholesale verbal butchering of Lewis in general and Uig in particular ; but there was, in fact, no time for the long trip. So Miavaig in Uig was still a name only. • For some time it held for me a richness of indefinite romantic association sustained by the irritant of the knowledge that once in the past, in circumstances which I could remember not at all, I had heard the song of the same name. But recently, in London, I was with a woman famous for her singing of Irish ballads. She asked me if I knew any Scottish songs, unfamiliar ones, that might be worth her attention. I hummed the air of Miavaig in Uig to her, thinking as I did so that she did not seem im- pressed. No wonder, for she told me that the tune I had been humming was a well-known Irish song and the speciality of a certain Dublin singer ! She could not, for the moment, remem- ber the title or the words, but insisted that it was far too well- known in Ireland for her to bother with it. Now I was off on another track ; the memory of an afternoon in a sitting-room in Dungannon, County Tyrone, had returned to me. The girl of the house had sung a few songs then. Had this been among them, but with an Irish subject and a niood remote from that of Miavaig in Uig? That name already began to lose some of its associative magic.
It was to lose more. In Piccadilly a few days later I passed a man in the gutter singing the Scottish song called Bonny Strathyre. The tune ran on in my head as I turned up into Bond Street—and then, by itself as it were, it rephrased itself and took a different time and was, 'with one or two adjustments, none other than Miavaig in Uig! Another illumination, and not the last. Since then I have discovered that this melody can, with equal facility, assume the title and style of Eilean Mo Chridhe, Tam Glen and The Mackin' o' Geordie's Byre, all songs that I have known since boyhood. It is also the original of two songs in English, one of them very popular recently in Scotland. In the Children's Hour of the B.B.C. not long ago a choir broad- cast an Irish-Gaelic song to the same tune ; and I have been assured that the identical melody—which I had thought so exclusive, so rooted in one place, so saturated with one particular mood—is the basis of a Breton song.
Are there also Manx, Welsh and Cornish versions? And what are their verses about? Not, we may take it, about Miavaig in Uig.
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