Silence of the Lambs

Silence of the lambs

Five years ago, the composer James MacMillan caused controversy at the Edinburgh Festival when he argued that Scotland was riven with anti-Catholic bigotry. Now, prompted by a book on British Catholics, he revisits the issue and finds the sectarian divisions as troubling as ever

James MacMillan
Saturday February 28, 2004
The Guardian

"There's a sheep loose on Dumbrochan Road!" the cry went up around the Barshare estate, and dozens of teenage and pre-teenage boys rushed to take in the spectacle. Although Cumnock is in rural Ayrshire, there was sufficient separation between the bustling mining town and the rolling farmlands around it for such an event to be rare and incongruous. Although everyone seemed to be running with great purpose; Angus and I had no idea what we would do when we got there. Others did have ideas or would allow the moment to develop naturally.

A crowd had gathered at the far end of the Flush - a badly maintained football pitch provided for the kids in the new houses and flats at that side of town. The animal had fallen into a ditch and the bigger boys had brought their dogs. When Angus and I eventually glimpsed it through a small forest of limbs we could see it was more of a lamb than a sheep, crazy with fear, and had already damaged a leg.

The bigger boys could not believe their luck. Their dogs - a sexually aroused alsatian and assorted mongrels - were let loose. Jaws and teeth went scything into belly and throat. The lamb looked up at us, eyes black, first with terror then blacker with despair. The alsatian was most persistent and determined - vein or artery was burst and the victim's gaze turned blacker still with resignation.

Mouth wide open, I recoiled as the beast was torn apart. The boys' faces were radiant and engorged with a primal pleasure. Angus turned one way without a word and ran full-pelt back to his mother in River View; I turned the other and rushed home to mine in Bank Avenue.

A few weeks before this incident, my mother had been feeling sorry for herself because I thought I was too old to need her cuddles. I was a big boy now, and a 10-year-old didn't need all that sissy stuff. She was flabbergasted, therefore, when this lightning bolt came through the front door, flying into her arms, clinging on for grim death, and apparently very reluctant to let go.

I was grateful for my mother at moments like this. There had been an accumulation of these frightening incidents at that time. A craze had developed for pulling legs off frogs. I thought I was going to set a new world sprint record when I first saw that. And the catching of fish in the burn - not to eat, but to smash off rocks. Another fad I had forgotten, understandably until now, was the hunt for birds' nests - not to steal the eggs, but to drop nails down the fledglings' throats as they opened, expecting worms from their mothers. Hilarious.

Cumnock had a thriving working-class culture in the 1960s - I remember the Berlin Octet giving a concert at the local music club, and there was great community pride in local amateur operatic and oratorio societies - performances of Handel and Gilbert and Sullivan. However, there was another side to life there, dominated by machismo, hard-drinking and sporadic violence.

I once witnessed a hapless motorist who had strayed unintentionally into the slipstream of an Orange Walk, catching one of the fife-players with his front bumper and bringing him crashing to the ground. The marchers fell on the driver with an excited malevolence and began to wrench him from the car. He was seconds from the same fate as the Dumbrochan sheep. The police turned up, visibly terrified, and spirited him away.

As a fledgling composer the musical dimension of these demented scenarios left an enduring impact. Turning away in fright from the sheep in the ditch I had just discovered what being knee-deep in blood actually looked like. But one of the most celebrated "folk-songs" sung in places like Cumnock, and still belted out with gusto at Ibrox Park, wallows in the image of being "knee-deep in Fenian blood" - that's the blood of people like me - Catholics with Irish ancestry.

We had our gory battle-songs too of course - not as raw or nakedly sectarian - but recalling the victories and defeats of the endless republican war. These were sung with equal visceral energy on terraces and streets all over the west of Scotland. This was the musical soundtrack to the disturbing, testosterone-charged context of growing up in Cumnock.

In the midst of all this, my father seemed strangely out of place. He didn't drink (much), and was quiet, thoughtful and sensitive. He preferred the company of his family to that of hard-drinking men. One of my earliest memories of him is observing him on his knees before a statue of Mary, lost in a distant humble introspection. The first time I saw him weep was at the death of Sister Clarissa, a feisty, eccentric Sacred Heart nun who had taught him in Primary One and me a generation later. These moments showed me more about being a man than any of the other masculine madness surrounding me at the time.

But it was the women in both our lives who were such a powerful shaping factor. We were both taught by the nuns of the Sacred Heart - whose motto, I believe is "We grip fast". This was certainly the case on the day Celtic won the European Cup in May 1967. As the sisters sat round their convent telly, Sister Austin gripped Sister Gerarda's thumb, too fast as it happened. As Celtic's winning goal went in she yanked it excitedly as the cloistered yelp went up, and broke it. The next morning Sister Gerarda, our headmistress, addressed the ecstatic hordes with a bandaged hand and gave us the afternoon off to celebrate Celtic's victory, (although I think she probably had a hospital appointment).

There was a great deal of music at our school, as at most Catholic schools. There was always a new hymn, chant or antiphon to prepare for some mass or other, liturgies coming hard and fast, week after week, shaping the community's year. I felt especially nourished by the nuns and seemed able to contribute a lot for them. Vatican II had made them less severe - made them smile more - and they seemed stronger and more intelligent for it.

Strong and intelligent is also how I would describe my mother and my grandmother. Although Catholic, they had palpable anti-authoritarian and anti-clerical streaks. One day, the priest arrived at my grandmother's house to bring Holy Communion to her bed-ridden father, my great-grandfather. There was a simmering row between them over an aspect of church-hall booking policy. I had a teenage rock band at the time, and some of the boys were not Catholic, and my grandmother suspected this was the reason he had refused us our rehearsal booking. She challenged him. In those days if the priest had the Blessed Sacrament on him he was not to speak, and no one was meant to address him. He was stunned by her boldness and produced the Sacrament in front of her. He demanded that if her conscience was clear she should place her hand over the Sacrament and swear so, and thus risk a grievous sin if it was not. She did.

The earliest memory of my female relatives gathered together - mother, grandmother, aunts and cousins - was on the day JFK was shot. All were sobbing sorely. He had been a great hope for them. The first (and only) Catholic US president, of Irish stock like them, and with such liberal promise for a better world had been so callously snuffed out, like much of their optimism for the future. My mother had a similar reaction when Martin Luther King was shot. She talked politics to me all the time - not just our "backyard" stuff, though the troubled developments in nearby Northern Ireland generated a lot of thought - but of a much bigger picture. When, at 14, I decided to join the Young Communist League, she didn't attempt to dissuade me, although a number of male relatives were incandescent.

However, when I started having the Morning Star delivered to the house she suggested I should read another paper too, to be aware of a broader range of arguments. Initially I thought she meant one of the Scottish broadsheets, and a Glasgow one in particular. She didn't. She thought them parochial, third rate and irrelevant, with some really questionable attitudes about Catholics. She suggested a "proper grown-up" paper "like the ones published in London", as they saw the world as a much bigger place. My mother was aware that there were still a lot of important people in Scotland who were unnaturally obsessed in an unsavoury way with the existence of third and fourth generation Irish Catholics in "their" country: strangers in a strange land.

I remember a relative in our house one day describing this anti-Catholicism as "the anti-semitism of liberal intellectuals". Even in those pre-PC times we knew what it meant when someone talked of "the last acceptable prejudice". But this was an acceptable prejudice in a land where it directly fed unacceptable behaviour, from bullying to murder.

I was reminded of this recently on reading Catholics: Britain's Largest Minority by Dennis Sewell (Penguin, £8.99). Citing the American writer Richard Hofstadter, who described anti-Catholicism as "the pornography of the Puritan", Sewell moulds the concept to a Scottish context. "Though never remotely hard-core, quite a lot of what [is printed in Scottish newspapers]... could seem... like the soft porn of the Presbyterian".

This is a provocative point, since real Presbyterians are happily more ecumenical than ever nowadays, making positive contributions to the harder edges of Scottish society, healing the disordered masculinity that has disfigured us all. But Presbyterian culture has laid deep weals. Regardless of religious practice and belief, there are an alarming number of commentators, apparently liberal and sophisticated, still worrying away at something. Scottish anti-Catholicism has become a self-titillating and anachronistic self-indulgence which contributes nothing to the subtlety of debates on contemporary religion and politics.

It does make one wonder if there was a sexual aspect to the anti-Catholic bullying one encountered as a boy, and even in some of the "rationalist" triumphalism of the present day. We were the "feminine" and "weaker" religion after all. All that Virgin Mary worship - and imagine allowing yourself to be belted by "penguins" (the Cumnock word for nuns). And we were the perennial losers from the Battle of the Boyne (1690) to the various Battles of Ibrox (up to c. 1966) - these "rogerings" were deserved, and the administration of them thoroughly enjoyed.

Recently, I read of yet another young Celtic fan who was slaughtered in a Glasgow street. As the knives went in, I wondered if he called for his mum, his gran, his girlfriend. Did his eyes grow black with terror, despair, resignation? Were his tormentors' faces radiant and engorged with an expression I had seen before, 33 years ago in Cumnock?