Granny Ower The Green (Part One)

For most of its history Gulan was as much a neglected idea as an actual place.  One Victorian eccentric said the name of this humble fishing village came from the hero Ulysses, blown further than any ancient source admitted, to be shipwrecked on this squalid part of the Scottish coast. Another antiquarian insists the original form was ‘Wolf’s Harbour.’  Old maps dogmatically mark it as ‘Gullan Beach’, while modern atlases ignore it entirely, for the good reason that it ceased to exist a hundred years ago.

    ‘It seems greedy to me,’ Tiny said, staring at the information board by the coastguard tower. ‘Somewhere so small having so many names. Maybe it got fed up not knowing what it was called and just gave up the ghost.’

    ‘That’s too fanciful,’ his mum said, tugging him away from speculation, ‘I’m sure it had more to do with the shoals of herring leaving this wee bit of the coast.’

    ‘Who would blame them for leaving here?’ her elder son Johnnie said bleakly.  As a counterblast for his scorn, a wave of ocean ozone abruptly howled up around them.

    His mother Helen adopted a stoically sour expression after being assaulted by the wind.  Then Tiny’s eyes caught some furtive shadows scuttling across the shingle shore.  Clouds?  Black bags?  Randomly blown black sheets?  He could not decide what they were. 

    ‘It’s a miracle,’ Helen said.

    She stared at the shell of the rebuilt village shining before them:  dull as a hundred school books to Johnnie’s eyes.

    ‘No signal!’ he whined.  He pocketed his offending phone and checked the other family mobiles.  Mum’s and brother’s handsets were also comatose.   ‘Nothing on three networks,’ he moaned, disbelievingly. ‘The biggest black hole in east Scotland; which is bloody saying something.’

     Then Tiny suddenly bolted across the road after the shadow he saw, then down a steep pend between rows of reconstructed fishermen’s cottages.  He came back like a disgruntled terrier five minutes later, disquieted, muttering about something strange scuttling around down there.  ‘Dirty water rats,’ his brother suggested.

    Helen inhaled the haar, a momentary intoxication, until it was overlaid by the smell of something rotten, which was then overblown by an odour of fresh paint from the still unoccupied houses.  Amazing to think that this place had come back to life after being dormant for decades.  Stranger still that she had managed to secure a house – a home – somewhere so peaceful through sheer chance.

   The scheme for rebuilding the village had been discussed for years, but the original plan aimed at the upper end of the market, second homes for city people, interspersed with retirement units for well-heeled pensioners.  When the economic downturn sunk the proposals the local newspapers, bored with the lack of progress, invented dubious rumours.  One columnist said the government had vetoed the project because there was a secret facility in the area.  Another hack claimed building activity was halted because mysterious mineshafts had been discovered.  Stray animals were said to be disappearing down suddenly revealed chasms at an alarming rate, though  a straw poll of local farmers found no such occurrences.  A more clued up correspondent claimed a connection with old folklore tales about mazes or secret tunnels beneath the village, used by smugglers, and a dramatic legendary elaboration stated the works had been stymied because the village had been cursed by a witch for some forgotten cause.

     ‘I got hexed by a witch once,’ Johnnie boasted when Helen told him about the newspaper’s speculation. ‘It was no big deal.’

    Following the press frenzy there was a lull in activity before, with a minimum of fuss, the place slowly came back to life.  The resurrected village was a more modestly realised development, funded by the council and housing associations.  Families would have a chance of gaining a tenancy for one of the new properties if applicants could show a connection to the local area.

    Helen lived in a town ten miles up the coast, but her parents had come from a place near the deserted village.  She also ticked all the boxes in terms of personal worthiness, being a classic single parent of the sort who is symbolically tied to the stake in the outraged columns of right wing tabloids.  A mother or two, who eldest claimed to have behavioural difficulties (but only when confronted with proof of his congenital laziness), she was horribly conscious that she statistically atypical.  On top of her jobless, hopeless, mono-parental stigmata, there was also the abuse suffered in the past and threatened in the present from the ex, Steve.

    Relocation, she hoped, would end the trouble from him, since he had never been known to crawl further than the town’s outskirts.  There was an actual court order confining him within the burgh’s boundaries.  The offer of the house came through a phone call from a local housing charity, so unexpected that she initially assumed it was a hoax.  The reaction from her seventeen year old son was nuclear. You would have thought that she had asked him to move to a satellite of Neptune rather than a new build house several miles down the coast.  But a combination of blackmail and his realisation he had no choice allowed Helen to defeat him.  The house was ready, bar a bit of painting, when she accepted the tenancy.

    ‘Do we have to start going to church now?’  Tiny asked plaintively the week before they flitted.

    ‘I don’t think it’s compulsory.’  Helen frowned.  ‘Why do you ask that?’

    ‘Because we go the cottage through a Church charity,’ Tiny said.

    She laughed.  ‘No, that’s nothing to do with it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you started attending church before your little soul gets blackened beyond redemption.  I wonder where the charity got our details from, though. I never spoke to them before.  Must have been through the council, but it all seems a bit odd, data protection wise.’

    Tiny ignored her last bit of waffling and considered the alluring notion of eternal damnation.  Johnnie unexpectedly contributed the information that there was no church of any denomination in the village, and even before its desertion there had been no kirk for decades.  Helen, in the process of packing stuff away for the removal men, nearly dropped the box she was carrying.  She had no idea that Johnnie realised there were such things as places of worship.  He said that he had done a bit of research on the internet (investigating more cogent reasons to despise the village) and had acquired some dark information.

    ‘The watch tower’s haunted and they tried to burn a witch, but she was a water witch, so they couldn’t get her alight and threw her in the sea.  Then she made the waves come over and flood the place, then the kirk and the evil minister were washed away.  She didn’t die, but stayed out there in the waves, on a sandbank or something, watching everyone for years on end.  And that’s why there were no more churches afterwards.’

    Such an avalanche of information, on any subject, was unusual, so Helen tried to encourage him by asking if the everlasting witch was the reason why the settlement was eventually abandoned.  But Johnnie was exhausted with excessive communication and would not field any additional enquiries. That was their monthly conversation done with then, she thought archly.  But she was more concerned with the logistics of moving the household.  She had sadly few belongings and little in the way of things designed to make the new house amenable.  Many of her possessions had either been smashed by Steve or sold by him in exchange for drink money.  

    The day they moved was curiously subdued.  It was a Saturday of blue stillness that shivered her out of bed at dawn.  Even the summer birds were solemnly formal in their chorus, orchestrating prayers.  The removal lorry had shifted their heavy furniture on Friday, so it was only a matter of rousing the lads and waiting for her brother-in-law Dave to arrive with his car.  He was late, so she left off disturbing the boys until as late as possible.  Dave caught her by surprise while she was sitting by the kitchen window.  She must have dozed off, because she came round with a start and saw Dave’s bruised hand resting on the back of her chair.

    ‘Have you been at it with Steve again?’ she asked.

    He smiled mildly.  The good brother, she always called him.  That was the term for an in-law in the old days, wasn’t it?  But he was good and at the other end of the evolutionary spectrum from Steve.  She should have married him; that was a bitter joke between them.

    ‘He’s been trying it on with me again,’ Dave said wearily.

    ‘Fighting over me, eh?’

    He gave a laugh, then sighed.  ‘It’s old trouble, him and me, going back centuries.  He’s a wee laddie inside, but an unholy swine of a bad laddie.’  She heard the clatter of her sons falling out of bed and shook her head.  Dave clammed up, unwilling to say more.

     ‘I don’t think you should be moving anyway, just for the sake of avoiding him,’ Dave said urgently.  She was in the process of denying this when the boys tumbled in.  She thought that he intended to give her some warning about the place they were moving to.

    In the car the lads fell back into a stupor. It was a good half hour drive from town, and the traffic dwindled to nothing when they neared the village.  Dave damned the potholes and Helen sympathetically wondered why the smarty pants developers had not set aside some of their budget to facilitate reasonable access.  The last bend before the village was on the brow of a low hill and they stopped to take in the view.  There was not much to the actual buildings in the settlement.  The main terrace of fishermen’s cottages ran in a dipping line towards the sea, then turned sharply left, parallel with a ridge of dunes which blocked sight of the shore.  Across from the main row was a truncated row of houses, in the middle of which was the great, black, jutting watch tower, crenulated like a castle.  It looked like a military church tower which had been exiled from its natural setting after committing some heinous sin.

    But the sight of the cottages overcame the stark prospect of the tower.  The whitewashed walls sparkled in the morning sun, and she found tears in her eyes.  The lads were still drowsing in the back seat of the car and Dave, standing beside her, frowned at the landscape as if it was an untrustworthy puzzle.

   She was so choked she could not speak for several minutes, then she stupidly said,

   ‘Prince Charles would be proud of a place like that.’

    Dave’s abrupt laughter woke the boys. 

    The first weeks in the village were like a dreaming half-life. There was only one other resident in situ, an old lady named McDonald who was lost in a cloud of sweet gentility.  She was physically distant as well, occupying the furthest cottage at the end of the row which was at right angles away from the main terrace where she was.  Helen understood, from the sparse conversation the lady offered, that she had bought her property, not rented it, and was alone apart from her wee Scottie dog.  The unconscious disdain that Miss McDonald placed on the word ‘rented’ made her smile.  Helen had a feeling that they would be friends, but only on the old lady’s terms.  Her house was a pristine doll’s house inside, with about a thousand mementoes of the Isle of Skye crowding every mantelpiece and shelf.

   Miss McDonald’s house was a lonely outpost, like the woman herself.  You could only just glimpse the sea over the ridge of dunes at the front, and to the side there was a large hill of sand, threatening to overwhelm the house, a frozen wave in appearance, except for its crown of marram grass which whispered strangely in the constant breeze.  On this side of the village there was nothing away north but a rough waste of bracken and gorse, giving way to scrub and scraggy moor land for miles.  Past the short row and tower, opposite Helen’s house, there was a square patch of unkempt, but more or less level grass, thigh high.  She guessed that this was the remains of a village green that some long ago improver had laid out for village amenities. But even in its heyday it could only have been a strange imitation of the classic type of English green.  Beyond this wild overgrown square there were indefinite, crumbling remains poking up through a sea of weeds.  She thought they may have been outbuildings for the storage of fishing equipment, but they could equally well have been squalidly small houses. 

The boys were remarkably quiet.  As it was the school holidays they were under her feet, but their presence was not as onerous as usual.  They spent most of the time either sleeping or sorting out their rooms.  Helen took the opportunity to wander and explore the shell of the village.  She met Mrs McDonald, wandering like a Gaelic waif among the dunes, and was invited to tea inside her doll’s house.  During the second week another lost soul arrived and was installed in the terrace, two doors down from her.  He was a ragamuffin looking man in his fifties who smiled and nodded manically whenever she encountered him and tried to talk.  But she could not get a sensible word from him.  It made her wonder whether she had been wrongly allocated a space in a retirement complex. 

    The third week was more interesting.  Johnnie had roused himself from his torpor and woke to the hellish realisation that he was the only teenager in a village with only five inhabitants.  He fled in hasty fashion, saying he had to stay at his friend’s in town to collaborate on an urgent musical project for school.  On the other hand, Tiny was off like a hare examining the ins and outs of the strand and the moor to the north side of the village.  One unlikely event was that he recruited Miss McDonald’s pet as a companion in scampering about.  How the pair of them hooked up, Helen did not know, but they were off together most of the day.

    ‘It will do him good,’ the old lady said when Helen queried it.  ‘He is a terrible grumpy brat of a beast, made worse by staying in most of the day.’

    ‘Yes, that sums up Tiny,’ Helen said. ‘But what about your dog?’

    Miss McDonald gave a rare, stifled laugh, and said ‘ach, away’.

    Tiny wandered for miles to the north and west of the village, and up and down the shoreline, but Helen noticed he did not stray at all in the land to the south.  Very odd, she commented to Miss McDonald, and the old lady said something strange about the south side of the island of Iona having a bad reputation:  ‘The bad spirits fly in from the south, you see.’      

   She didn’t see at all, but she was too busy to follow up the comment.  It was another stone to be added to the cairn of folklore and rumour which the atmosphere of this place seemed to engender.  Speculation was put to one side by a sudden flurry of activity in the row and tower opposite her house.  Workmen started fitting out the ground floor interior of the tower, and before she knew it there was a new door, windows, then a sign which stated that it was ‘The Tower – General Store and Post Office.’

    ‘Opening soon, not that it will last long here’ was the only arcane information the site foreman could offer.

    ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure they’ll do okay once the houses are occupied.’

    ‘They won’t all be occupied.’  He looked at her slyly.  ‘And even if they were, they wouldn’t be for long.  You can’t just put the jump leads on a ghost town and hope it sparks back into life.  It’s not the way things happen, especially here.’

   [To Be Continued]