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Overview
Margaret Fay Shaw’s life spanned a century of change. Orphaned at eleven, she left home and school in Pennsylvania aged sixteen, crossing to Scotland to spend a year at school near Glasgow. It was there that her love for Scotland was born. After studying music in New York and Paris, she returned to live for six years with two sisters in South Uist. Life on the island had changed little from previous centuries, and material comforts were few. But the island was rich in music and tradition, and Margaret Fay Shaw’s collection of Gaelic lore and song are among the most important made this century, while her photography evocatively captures the aura of a vanished world.
Her autobiography is the remarkable testament of a remarkable woman, as well as a powerful plea in defense of a Gaelic culture and world under threat. It is written with a sharpness of observation, directness of humor, and zest for life—and it is also a marvelous record of the twentieth century.
“[A] gem of an autobiography.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Brilliantly capture[s] the twilight world of the Hebrides in the twentieth century.” —The Guardian
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857902856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Birlinn, Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Glenshaw, Sewickley, Bryn Mawr, Helensburgh
It was in 1782 when my great-great-grandfather, John Shaw, arrived in Philadelphia from Scotland with his four sons. He was given a large grant of land in the west of the state to be divided among the sons. The one who was my great-grandfather, Thomas Wilson Shaw, chose the low-lying valley of Pine Creek and there, in 1823, built his house of bricks fired on the place – the walls four bricks thick – and a small factory where he made sickles, hoes, and ploughs for the settlers who were opening the new land. Two young surveyors arrived from Scotland and stayed with him. A survey map of the whole property was needed and there was to be a post office, so a name for the place had to be found and one of the surveyors named Munro suggested 'Glenshaw'. In time, Thomas Wilson Shaw prospered. He built a church in a field near his house and set aside a piece of ground for his grandson, my father, to build a house. There I was born, the youngest of five daughters.
Glenshaw is a narrow wooded valley with a stream we called 'The Crick' and a road made of planks. The two hillsides were thick with trees, mountain laurel and sassafras, with trillium and jack-in-the-pulpits in spring. The shallow creek with the flat rocks was where we played, catching crayfish and shivering at the sight of the occasional water-snake. The wide lawn stretched from our house on past the old house with its giant elms and maple trees, the apple trees, and then the barn, big and mysterious with the lovely smell of horses and leather. Up above was the hayloft where we would climb onto a beam at some peril and jump off into the mountain of hay.
By the barn grew an apple tree which bore what we called the July apples for they were the first to ripen. We children would gather the first that fell and hide them in the hay-mow to ripen. They were small, yellow with red stripes, and I have never tasted their like – the best ever. There were other apple trees, Northern Spy was one, and they were for cooking or eating, and some for making apple butter. A huge iron cauldron was placed on a wood fire outside, under the sycamore tree, and filled with sour apples flavoured with cinnamon, spice, and sugar. The great aunts, Maria the cook, and anyone tall enough would take turns stirring with a long-handled paddle with several holes in it. Shaped like a hoe, it was pushed back and forth for hours until the mixture was a dark ruddy brown. Then it was put in Mason jars. I have never found the recipe in any cookery book. It may have been made only by country people who could have an outside fire and the large pot and paddle – a recipe handed down.
The family legend is that Mrs Heinz first made her ketchup in a copper cauldron borrowed from the Glenshaw kitchen. It is now in the museum of the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society.
Behind the barn there was a narrow path above the hayfield made of two narrow planks with a wooden railing. It was overhung with elder bushes, first laden with white blossom and then the masses of deep purple berries. The path ended at a little wicket gate that I was forbidden to pass, for there was the high bank and the tunnel through the hill – the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The trains came roaring up the valley, blowing their whistles and ringing their bells, rushing like thunder into the tunnel. A great cloud of black smoke would come out after they passed. How I longed to see what was on the other side of the tunnel! For me it was through the tunnel that the great wide world lay. I watched the long line of freight cars with their steady slow speed and the little house at the end that had a chimney called a caboose. I heard that that was the way to travel: hop a freight and lie flat on the top. Then the fast trains with the sleeping cars bound for Chicago came streaking past and away through the tunnel. Billy White was the engineer, and his mother lived in Glenshaw.
My great-grandfather lived to be ninety-six. He told my father how as a little boy his father had lifted him up on his shoulders to see General Washington pass by on a white horse, when he came to Pittsburgh. My grandfather, Thomas Wilson Shaw, was a surgeon at Gettysburg and a doctor for the immigrants in the slums of Pittsburgh who had come to work in the mills. He was a man who never sent out his bills and was greatly loved. He served as an interne and then stayed as a doctor at Mercy Hospital, the first Catholic hospital in Pittsburgh, where the nurses were nuns. Thomas Wilson Shaw was a Presbyterian but the nuns adored him. When my sister Kay first went as a pathologist to work with Dr Willetts in the 1930s, an elderly nun came in with a young nun who needed attention, saw my sister's name on the door and said, 'Are you by any chance a relation of a Doctor Thomas Shaw?' They were still making up his purge pills, known as 'Dr Shaw's Little Black Devils'.
My father, Henry Shaw, was the eldest son and his father's pride. He was a civil engineer, a graduate of Rensselaer, already a famous college of engineering. He had wanted to be an artist and had shown some talent in portrait painting, but my grandfather regarded artists as Bohemians in velvet jackets and flowing ties, supported by their parents. My father bought pictures to enjoy and his greatest delight was seeing the International Exhibition of paintings that came to the Carnegie Museum once a year. It was famous and brought visitors from Europe as well as from the United States. He longed to visit London and when he was recovering from pneumonia and in need of a change from Pittsburgh's foul air, he and my mother sailed in February to London, the worst of climates. People in the hotel were shocked that he wouldn't stand in the cold to see King Edward pass by but had gone through snow to hear Campbell Bannerman, the famous leader of the Liberals, speak in Parliament. And he returned with a fine collection of etchings which he greatly prized. One was of Dr Samuel Johnson's house in Gough Square. The Doctor was his idol.
John Shaw and his sons had continued their trade as iron founders. It was said that John iron-cast the first cannon west of the Alleghenies. The small factory started by his son, the first Thomas Wilson, produced a sickle which must have been to his own design, for there isn't its like anywhere in the United States. His grandson, my father, continued the family tradition: he was the head of the Garrison Foundry, a steel mill in Pittsburgh on the south side of the Monongahela River. He knew every man in the mill – many were Czechs, and the warmth and good feeling among them was my father's pride. The mill made steel rollers used in the manufacture of, among other things, Peters Chocolate silver paper wrappers and Kellogg's Corn Flakes. When I was seven, my father took me to see the fiery molten steel being poured into the sand moulds – a fearsome sight – and to meet the mules which pulled the heavy loads. They were black and enormous, but they bent their heads to allow me to stroke their soft white, velvety noses.
My father was extremely well read. Every Christmas, his five daughters would give him a novel of George Eliot in the Nelson green leather edition. He and my mother gave each other books and marked for one another passages they'd enjoyed. They were both very active in the Pittsburgh Civic Club, trying to improve housing for the immigrants who'd come to work in the mills. He voted for Wilson because he liked the man; he couldn't abide Teddy Roosevelt – forget just why, but I'm sure he'd have opposed anyone who was so pugnacious. I remember his reaction to an incident at school. We once had a substitute named Mrs Good, who looked like an American Indian, with black hair and eyes and a long dark face. She laboured to teach us the parsing and constructing of sentences, but her temper was violent. One day she said, 'Charles Hanlin, if you don't shut your mouth, you'll see your length on the floor!' I thought it was a wonderful sentence, but when I told my father at the dining table that evening, he was not only horrified at Mrs Good's language but that I should repeat it.
My mother was a New England Yankee from Vermont, where breeding and mental ability were what mattered. Her maternal ancestor, Joseph Patchin, came from England as a bonded servant to Connecticut in 1640. In the following hundred years, the Patchins married into well-known New England families and eventually settled in Old Bennington. I think she found the wealth, without the distinguished minds, of the Pittsburghers difficult to take. But she had in my father a like mind in taste and in books.
My two great-aunts and great-uncle lived in the house built by their father in the 1820s. They spent their summer afternoons in their splendid wicker chairs on the porch with its four white pillars. They had pockets in these chairs to hold their books and the big palm-leaf fans that they used slowly and elegantly. Once, on a hot afternoon, the two aunts were having a call from the preacher. Their conversation was interrupted by the simple-minded son of a neighbour who appeared with a bucket. 'Mum wants to know if she can have some of your well water. Our spring's warm as piss.' 'Take it, take it,' said Aunt Mat, rocking furiously.
My great-aunts were a contrast. Aunt Ellen was small and stout with a sharp tongue and a keen wit, while Aunt Martha was tall and large. Looking up beside her, it seemed a mile to her belt with the silver buckle. Her loving kindness was a warm cloud around her great frame.
The old house – the Big House, as we called it – was always cool on the hottest day. The room known as the front parlour was only opened for special callers and tea parties in summer. It was a light and pretty room with a white marble mantelpiece and the portraits of the great-grandparents. In winter it was piercing cold; one time it was said to be below zero. But the living room and dining room were warm and welcoming.
If there was illness or company in our house we were sent to stay in the Big House and this was an adventure. The beds were enormous and one sank deep in the feather mattress with a mass of bedclothes on top. A hot brick wrapped in flannel warmed the frigid feet. The first sound in the morning was the coffee mill which Maria held between her knees to grind. Then the little drawer in it would be opened and a heaped tablespoon to each cup of cold water put in the big coffee pot to boil, then an eggshell to clear it. Breakfast was always with Maria, in the kitchen: buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, wheaten cakes with hot molasses and butter, corn meal mush or porridge. We would linger on until told by Maria, 'Lick up your molasses and then you're done!'
The Nash family figures in my earliest memories of Glenshaw. Maria was the mother of Louie, the gardener and houseman, his wife Birdie was our cook and their little boy Harry, who was near the age of my sister Biddy, was our companion. Louie had interesting knowledge of his father who had been a slave on a plantation in Virginia, coming originally from Nigeria. Biddy and Harry started their first days at school together. I remember my mother entrusting Harry to pull the little wagon on which was a large glass bowl of goldfish for their class to admire.
A neighbour farmer, Mr Glasgow, always brought pork sausage when he killed a pig in winter weather. And how cold the winter! The creek was frozen hard and there was skating on the mill pond. The snow lay deep and one knew from the special squeak of the wagon wheels that it was below zero. We children enjoyed sleigh rides with the many small bells on the horses ringing; straw filled the sleigh to keep us warm, and we huddled together with the thought of hot chocolate and cake at the end of the ride. It would be so cold that we put bananas on the window-sill when we went to bed, and in the morning they were frozen as hard as stone and we chipped off pieces. So delicious! Then a thaw would come and the ice on The Crick would crack like the sound of a gun. One time it formed a great gorge a long way up the valley. My father, hurrying home from the train, warned us that the gorge was about to break and would bring a flood. We sat by the fire listening. Soon we heard the sound of water in the dark. It filled the cellar and my father, with his trousers rolled up his thin white legs, went to rescue the laundry which was afloat in the baskets. Then the water was above his knees and he came up the cellar stairs, worried about the Big House for, the year that I was born, it had come in several inches deep and the best carpet in the front parlour was frozen to the floor. We peered out the window in the blackness and could see the shine of lighted windows on the water and great white lumps of ice were banging against the house and floating away in the dark.
The next morning found us marooned. Enormous great cakes of ice, like plinths of giant statues, were everywhere. The whole valley was a frozen lake. My sisters put on their skates and sailed off to the Big House to find that all was well, then on across the lawn and through the meadow. What gaiety this catastrophe brought! My father managed to scramble from the back door to the hillside and found his way to the village and came back laden mostly with baked beans. There was no gas so we dined from a chafing dish, which was much more fun. There were no trains and no post, no school for my sisters for several days. Everyone was skating. So many Shaws – uncles, aunts, countless cousins, and four older sisters. I, being the youngest, was spoilt one hour and bullied the next. I was bundled up to watch the skating and just as a very pretty cousin leant down to give me a kiss, a young man put his dirty hand between her lips and my cheek.
Even in summer, the shallow creek where we loved to play and whose gentle song we could hear as we lay in bed could become a raging torrent sweeping across the lawn, surrounding the houses, washing away the planks that made the road, and the bridges, as it swept on to the Allegheny River. Then it would quietly return to its proper place and the yellow water would clear. We would wade in the pools that were left in the garden and catch the tiny minnows in the grass. Once, the water filled the cellar and washed out the mushroom beds of manure from the dark recesses. But there was little destruction compared to what happened in a village called The Flats further down the valley. Mrs Mauser was carried away while seated in her outdoor privy, which fortunately lodged between two trees. She was gallantly rescued, but I was horrified thinking of her embarrassment. I was told that that would not trouble Mrs Mauser. It was afterwards known as 'Mrs Mauser's gondola'.
Automobiles were appearing and our more well-to-do relations would come from their fine houses to call on their country kin in large Pierce Arrow limousines with liveried chauffeurs. The seats were of fine leather, but in summer they were covered in white linen. We were sometimes taken to visit these relatives and I enjoyed their elegance but was so shy that I could scarcely speak when spoken to and had a painful time swallowing at table. 'Don't you like your orange juice?' Of course I loved it but felt I made such a noise swallowing that I was ashamed to drink it.
One year my father's young widowed sister with her little boy and various uncles took our house for the summer while we lived in the Big House, the great-aunts having gone to California. The little boy brought his pony with a governess cart, a thing we had never seen before. Our world had only buggies and surreys and what we called a 'trap'. How I longed to ride in that two-wheeled contraption that looked like a giant laundry-basket, but my mother forbade me to ask. I stood in the drive watching them jump in. I could bear it no longer, and I said, 'Here's me!' The kind uncle lifted me up. I hadn't asked and I now think I was extraordinarily astute for a child of four.
On rare occasions I was taken to Pittsburgh – 'town' as we called it. My sister Martha took my nearest sister Biddy and myself to the Nixon Theatre to see 'The Bluebird' by Maeterlinck. We were so excited, dressed in our beaver hats and Peter Thomson coats, navy blue with brass buttons and an eagle on the sleeves. First the train ride and then the sight of this wonderful theatre in red plush, white and gold! I was spellbound until Tyltyl, the black cat, cried at the door to be let in. Such a passion for cats I have that I was desperate, seeing one in such a state. I cried out, 'Let him in, let him in!' Poor Martha was so embarrassed and I was soon in tears and disgrace.
Another time Martha took me to see Beerbohm Tree as Wolsey in Henry VIII. I can see him today in his long scarlet robes with his arms raised, clutching a great iron gate and crying, 'If I had served my God!' Another scene I will never forget was the dance with Anne Boleyn in a beautiful voluminous pink dress, stepping so gracefully to lovely tunes. Later I tried to play them and many years after found they had been composed by Edward German. This monumental thrill would have been in 1912.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "From The Alleghenies to the Hebrides"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Estate of Margaret Fay Shaw.
Excerpted by permission of Birlinn Limited.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Foreword,
Introduction by Hugh Cheape,
1 Glenshaw, Sewickley, Bryn Mawr, Helensburgh,
2 New York,
3 From Plymouth to Portree and Stornoway, Oxford, London, Paris, Dublin,
4 South Uist,
5 St Kilda, The Aran Islands, Mingulay,
6 Barra, Nova Scotia,
7 Canna,
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