Mattie Ferguson and Angus Y MacLellan
In the early 1970s some friends and I received a grant to collect history and folklore in Inverness County. It would have been a much better project if we had known anything about what we were doing but our motives were pure and the ghosts and the stories were many, as were the still living who remembered when the mines opened, etc.
But our budget was small. We had one tape recorder, would interview someone, take the tape back to the office and transcribe it, then ERASE IT! God, what was lost.
Anyway, I approached the family of Angus Y. MacLellan about his Gaelic poetry and his wife gave me a box of his writings. I had enough sense to know that we should transcribe and return and everything did go back to the family with a single exception.
Among the writings was a pencilled verse on both sides of a long envelope. It was in the Gaelic of which I knew nothing, but I could decipher the Gaelic for Matthew Ferguson, so I brought the envelope down to your grandfather, wanting him to translate it for me.
We sat at the kitchen table and I told him why I was there and what I had brought and he took it and read it. He became quite emotional and misty-eyed and told me it was a song about his store and how if you ever needed a friend you would find one there.
I don’t recall much more of what passed between us except that I was aware that Angus Y. was dead, that Jack D. was dead, and that the poem or song probably made him lonely, clearly made him lonely, so I left and I left the envelope with him.
Later, reading Angus Y.’s song (in translation) about Mattie’s store [see Mattie's Store is the Best] I detect a sense of fun in it, and I believe it was also a fairly well known song at the time.
The song I brought to your grandfather was unfamiliar to him from what I could see and I have wondered since then if there was a second song. The first tells of the products and the quality of service, etc, but from what Mattie said about the song, and he only told me what it was about, not a line by line translation, this was a different, more personal celebration of their friendship.
These were not emotionally expressive men in my memory, and probably the song I took to Mattie was one Angus Y. never sang for them or anyone. I don’t know that he ever sang for them ever, although they were close friends who would get together when Angus Y. was away from the lighthouse, and I know one of the projects they tackled or challenged each other with was the making of new words to encompass the changing world around them.
My father told me this, that they would come with English words for new gadgets or inventions and the task would be to find a root word in the Gaelic upon which they could incorporate the modern world as they experienced it. No record was ever kept of that ‘game’ that I am aware of.
…The song itself I am afraid no longer exists unless it is stored in whatever papers still linger from Mattie’s time because my crime was not returning it to the Angus Y.’s and deciding to leave it with Mattie instead.
Ferguson, Mattie • MacLellan, Angus Y • Stories • told by Frank Macdonald | Dave Ferguson February 9, 2006
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By Dave Ferguson, March 11, 2006 @ 8:03 am
Some time after Frank told this story, he was able with the help of my cousin Janice Ferguson to find the missing poem, now posted here as A Song for Mattie.