A Hebridean funeral

Michael Bywater

This is the story of a man's death and his burial. There is not much to say about the man's life. He lived on an island some twenty miles out in the sound of Arisaig. In middle age he married a woman from New Zealand who presently became in- distinguishable from the other women on the island. He was a quiet and modest man. He played the pipes moderately well. Like many of the islanders, he drank a great deal.

In the end he fell ill. His doctor feared `OK, lads, Christmas is over.' that his liver was affected, and sent him to London to see a specialist. I have never seen anyone so nervous as the man before his appointment. Afterwards, he took me to lunch. The specialist had told him that, if he laid off the drink, he would completely recover. It was the last time I saw him.

Back on the island, he began to drink again. For some time he had been hearing voices; now they began to get worse; he spoke of seeking peace in a monastery, or of becoming a priest. Then he fell ill again, and was sent to hospital in Inverness. They stopped him drinking; there were hints of some possible disease of the brain; the voices became more insistent; and one day he simply jumped from a window and died.

One might believe that such an island community has no place in 1982. The at- tempts to turn it into a tourist attraction have so far failed, manifesting themselves in a few caravans and a refusal by its owners to grant long leaseholds on the island's houses to mainlanders. There is lit- tle for the people to do. They are rather poor. Most of the time they appear to exist in a torpor of drink-sodden apathy. You could regard them as a people cut adrift from their traditions who have not yet found moorings in the modern world. One might smugly pity them, on their cold, wet island.

The crossing from Mallaig normally takes an hour. But the ferry boat Western Isles is small and old, and in the heavy weather it took two or three times as long. By the end of the first five minutes, everyone was soaked with spray. To go below was worse; the cabin was tiny and foetid; so people stayed on deck, with the man. At first it was possible to sit on the life-rafts and get some comfort that way. Soon, though, the sea grew wilder and even the rafts began to slide about the deck. It became a matter of hanging on. Only one man stayed on his feet: a tall man in a kilt, wrapped in a huge overcoat, he stood throughout the crossing in the bows of the ship; most of the time he stared across the water to where the island lay; occasionally he cast a glance at the coffin lashed by the rail, shrouded in tarpaulin, attended not by professionally mournful undertakers, but by a few who loved him; a priest and a young minister; a mother and daughter from London; the watchman in the kilt; an ancient and ruined beauty, quite toothless, who lived on the mainland and had in her age, it was said, become a saint.

When he was brought home to the jetty he was carried, without false reverence, to the Land-Rover which was to take him to the kirk. The others made the two-mile journey in the island bus, a curious wooden structure on a rusting chassis with doors that swung and banged on every corner.

The whole island was waiting in the kirk. They brought the main in and laid him carefully on the wooden bier. The minister, a stern young Scot with a neat beard, his clothes still wet from the crossing, read the funeral service. He did not dwell on the manner of the man's death, nor did he in- vite the mourners to ask themselves why it should have happened, or feel sorry for themselves; they were there, he said, to pay heed the power of God; he spoke as one who had no doubt.

Then they carried the man back into the Land-Rover for the journey across the island to the graveyard. At the foot of the hill, they stopped, and carried him the rest of the way, his friends taking it in turns to bear his weight, holding his coffin between them, not ostentatiously upon their shoulders, but gently and with love, as you would carry home a friend from the hun- ting field.

The grave had been dug the previous day. They lowered him in and the minister said the final prayers. A friend produced the man's old hat and laid it on the coffin; his wife, who had been holding herself with dignity, went white and rocked as if she had been slapped in the face; several of the women wept.

Now, without any signal, the men began to take handfuls of the sodden earth and drop them gently into the grave, as though they were by this means doing the man a last kindness; impassive, controlled men, grimacing under the compulsion of their grief. Things moved faster now, as they

took up spades and began to fill the grave. Nobody left. The doctor stripped off his mackintosh; picking up his pipes he began to play a lament over the grave. He was the only piper on the island now. The man had been better than he; they had spent many hours at the piobaireachd together; but he had not been able to cure him. Now he lay near the doctor's wife; she, too, had killed herself.

Then this happened: as the doctor stood there in the driving rain in his kilt, legs like a dancer's in his black stockings, something, either the high wind or his grief, made a sudden catch in the pipes, a high wild cry of anguish repeating with each phrase. Now people openly wept as the men stamped down the last of the earth on the grave, as though performing some strange ritual dance. Then it was all over.

A few weeks ago I went to the funeral of an old woman whom I loved. She was brought to the municipal crematorium in a black Daimler by men sleek as seals in their practised smooth solemnity. They carried the coffin with surrogate pomp to a veneered catafalque in a neon-lit room, a clergyman intoning the flat proletarian phrases of the new Anglican funeral rite. An electronic organ played intermittently; presently, with a slight whirring noise, and to the accompaniment of the organ, the catafalque withdrew vertically on its piston, coming to rest about three feet below floor level. It reminded one horribly of a cinema organist descending as the main picture came on. We filed out into the sunshine, past this piece of glossy furniture sitting in a sanitised simulacrum of a grave.

What happened to her after we left? What did they do? Where did she go? Were the ovens burning already, or were they lit specially? Why do people become under- takers, or crematorium operatives?

There are no such questions for the man's friends. They saw him into his grave themselves. They know that he lies in the hillside below the rain and the wind. They know where he is, and that he is no longer with them.