On Writing for the Hands

Niall Campbell writes about grit and an island funeral

What are we trying to capture in our writing? A snapshot of the moment or something of the feeling connected to an event? I ask because on finishing the piece on peat-gathering I remembered an early comment from the poet Robert Minhinnick. ‘Even in your bad poems, there’s still the grit in the wash.’ It was kind, forgiving criticism to three underwhelming poems that I proffered to him on a writing retreat in the north of Scotland. A poem potentially having grit in the wash seems a lovely idea. The expression comes from the time of handwashing clothes, when you added grit to the water and lather so that its abrasiveness would help the removal of mud or stubborn grime. The phrase taps into something else a poet might capture or preserve: not the snapshot or the view or the observable but, instead, the texture of the moment. Writing, in this gesture, becomes an attempt to make some past world touchable again.

Such thoughts of smoothness, coarseness, friction on the fingertips, bring me to the last funeral I attended on the island of Eriskay. It was my grandmother’s. I travelled from Leeds, where I lived at the time, arriving late on the night before the funeral. In the mourning house, family members filled both the hallway and the sitting room. Only in the lower-floor bedroom, where the body lay, could you stand free from the press of the other visitors. The main light was off. The room lit instead by a side lamp and a few wilted candles. Hers was the first dead body I had seen.

In Emmanuel Carrère’s Lives Other Than My Own, he writes about the surprise of how quickly a body grows cold after death. Life, it appears, disappears in a moment – and the warmth follows within minutes. In the room on Eriskay, by the time I touched her hand it was already a few days since her death. I don’t recall any great shock of coldness; there was no remarkable chill to her skin. I touched the back of her hands which were bound in a local parish rosary. Not cold, they had that quality of toughened leather that still retains some aged softness. She had been born in Edinburgh and moved to Gaelic-speaking Eriskay when she married my grandfather. Her wedding photo has her in a suit and not a wedding dress since she was thrown out of the house when her family discovered she was marrying a Catholic. Her husband was to die at forty and she would raise their nine children on a widow’s pension. She was a war child and so, when we visited, she would make those small ration-sized scones that bore the indentations of a fork’s tips as their pattern on their top.

What can the living do for the dead? Beyond the prayers, and beyond the remembrance candles, the eulogy, there were two moments that seemed a fitting farewell. The first was on the walk from the church door to the island graveyard. There was no hearse, and no pallbearers but her own family. Six men carried her coffin from the church doors – but by the end of the drive six others had swapped into their place. Taking hold of the brass handles and bearing the weight (lighter than expected) on their shoulders. Every twenty or thirty paces a swap would occur as new people shared the weight. This last walk changed into something like dancers cutting in at a dance. A ferry had come in on the other side of the island so younger family members were sent ahead to usher the oncoming cars from the road. They parked onto the verge grass that served as a pavement on the island, their confused faces peering out of the windshield glass. The modern world was asked to pause, this once, as she went finally past.

To return to touch and grit. At the graveside, the priest said his prayer for parting, and must have read that section from Genesis, By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. Here is where we were to take up a clod of soil and earth from the pile dug for the grave and throw it onto the coffin lid. Only, because the graveyard on Eriskay was situated on the machair by the shore, what was in our hands was as much sand as soil. This pale gritted sand amongst the dark earth. It felt the most fitting tribute that, an islander, she would have this scattered on her grave. There was a spade with a black handle that we used to fill in the plot. It threatened to rain but it would hold off for an hour yet. Standing to the side, our hands were empty, but when we rubbed our fingers against our palms, we could feel the remnants of the grit.

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