Authors: Iain Banks
It may not exactly be the Serengeti, but living on any farm, especially one in a place with as many wild animals around as Islay, seems to constitute a rapid lesson in the brusque realities of animal life and death; if you didn’t accept the red-in-tooth-and-claw stuff before you get involved with country life, you very soon will. I suppose it’s one reason why farming seems to be a largely hereditary occupation, and why many people who think it’ll be nice to work with animals on a more permanent basis end up having a very short career in the business.
I’ve never met a farmer yet who didn’t have a whole herd of grisly animal horror stories (often as not involving choice phrases like ’prolapsed uterus’ or ‘maggot-infested wounds’). They are only too willing to share these tales with you in gaspingly forensic detail, presumably to remind you of the non-monetary cost of the food in your belly (food which, given the sheer gawd-awfulness of some of the stories, they are often in considerable danger of shortly being able to inspect for themselves). Even the purely arable farmers without a true beast to their name seem to have a stock of tales fit to turn the stomach of a starving vulture.
Life at Ballivicar strikes me as a complicated, often physically and emotionally strenuous but ever-involving and
frequently
rewarding existence of sustained bucolic chaos, surrounded by chemicals and feed stuffs, hay and manure, machinery, vehicles and tack, by chickens, cats, dogs, sheep, cows, ponies, horses, that ever-present cornucopia of local wildlife and a glorious, bewildering squall of absurdly apple-cheeked children running roaring around in dusty paddocks; barefoot, yelling, caked in muck and generally having what certainly looks like a totally brilliant time. You find yourself having an engrossing conversation with a bright, happily snot-nosed four-year-old who’s come up to ask your name and show you a length of plastic pipe they’ve decided is a trumpet; you look around in the sunlight at the primary surroundings; bright green grass, rich red earth and pure blue sky and you think, Grief, who’d raise a child in a city?
Then you think, Well, billions do, because they have to, because that’s the way the modern world’s been moving for centuries and there doesn’t look like much around to reverse that course. And suddenly you worry about the child you’re talking to, imagining this sunny openness, this cheery, inquisitive innocence being transplanted to the big bad city where instead of being one of the most happily beautiful things you’ve seen, it becomes a liability, a point of weakness, to be exploited by those unscrupulous enough to treat trust as gullibility and people as collateral, to be damaged.
Finally, though, with a little more thought, you accept that what you see before you still represents such a great start in life, that just as a childhood spent in the muck and glaur, eating dirt and falling into the nettles turns out to be a much more effective way of inoculating a child against infections and allergies to come than keeping them antiseptically spotless and clean, so this farmyard, outdoorsy life of crowded rough and tumble must have its own full suite of lessons about trust and betrayal, allegiances and self-reliance that will translate to any future situation; children are more resilient than we fear and wiser than we think, and we probably worry more than we need.
* * *
Childhood: a sentimental detour
.
It seems to me that almost nothing in life is so important as being loved and cared for as a child. Maybe only an early death ever means more, has more bearing on the ultimate shape of an existence. Even a vast lottery win or some other great stroke of fortune means little in comparison, because the legacy of one is liable to affect so profoundly the reaction to the other.
Somebody who’s been loved, who has been brought up to feel respect for themselves and to feel and show respect for others, who has felt cherished and cared for and has been sheltered from harm as much as possible while never being deceived into thinking that life will essentially always be painless, has something more valuable than inherited fortune or title, and stands a far better chance of coping with whatever challenges life subsequently throws at them than somebody with only material advantages. Nothing guarantees success or even survival, and any auspicious start can be overwhelmed by future calamity, but the chances of avoiding tragedy are better – and even the journey to any eventual bitterness all the easier – with a childhood informed by love.
I have to confess an interest here; I had the great good fortune to be born to parents who loved me and did all they could do to give me the best possible start in life. I was an only child and so I suppose I had all the love they had to spare, and perhaps I was even more cherished than I might have been otherwise because my parents had had a child a couple of years before me, Martha Ann, who was born with spina bifida and died after only six weeks.
For whatever reason, I started life with all the taken-for-granted advantages of the only child, plus a few more, maybe, because my father – faced, say, with the best cut of meat from a joint – would smile and wave it aside and say, ‘Oh, let the boy have it. He’s growing.’
And that was always the way it was, and so I grew up kind of assuming that matters should be arranged largely for my convenience and I should have the pick of things. In fact, this assumption of superiority was so ingrained that I usually
wouldn’t
even mind if somebody else was occasionally given precedence. I’d just smile tolerantly and think that was nice for them; really whatever they’d just got should be mine, obviously, but it was good that other people got a share of the spoils now and again, even if they didn’t really merit it, and I could even take pleasure in my own – albeit imposed – magnanimity.
The only area where I conceded rank on a continuing basis was in general smartness; there was a pretty blonde girl in my class in North Queensferry Primary School called Mary Henderson. Mary always came top in tests and I was always a worshipful second (there was one time after she’d been off school ill for several weeks when the positions were reversed, but even in Primary Two I knew that didn’t count). Brains and beauty. Naturally I fell as completely in love with her as it’s possible to fall at such an undeveloped age, and Mary became my first girlfriend, from the age of five to when we were both nine, and I left the village. It didn’t entirely end there – not that she ever knew – because I kind of fell hopelessly in love with her when I was fourteen, but that’s another story. We kept in sporadic touch and, years later, when she was working for a firm of lawyers in Edinburgh, she sold me my first flat in the city.
In any event, I had a happy childhood.
A lot of people who’ve read
The Wasp Factory
and have fallen for those old nonsenses about people only writing about what they know and first novels always being autobiographical seem to think I must have had a really awful, disturbed and even abused childhood, but it just ain’t true.
Years ago the launch party for
Canal Dreams
was held in Edinburgh. This was a first for me; all my book launches until then had been in London, however my publishers had finally given in to years of me whining that we always had these shindigs in London where they were frankly a bit lost in amongst all the other launches and general media clutter; wasn’t it time to have one in Scotland where it might be a bit more of an event? So they’d relented. Desperate, after my years of wheedling, to make sure that the evening wasn’t some awful
one-man-and-his-dog
affair where almost nobody turned up, I’d invited as many of my family as possible along, including my parents. The book shop was full, I’d done the usual reading and answered various questions, everybody seemed happy and I was sitting signing copies at a table when a young male exchange student from the States said, as I scribbled over his book, ‘Gee, I just read
The Wasp Factory
; you must have had a really disturbed childhood.’
Ha-ha! I thought. For once I can deny this with
witnesses
! ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘And I can prove it.’ I pointed. ‘See that little old grey-haired lady there? That’s my mum; ask her about my childhood.’
The guy wandered off and, a few signed books later, I heard my mother’s voice floating over the assembled heads; ‘Och, no, Iain was always a very happy wee boy.’
Consider my case well and truly rested.
3: Exploding Custard Factories
‘BANKSIE, THIS TRUE
you’re writing a book about whisky?’
‘Yeah, they’re going to get me to drive—’
‘You’ll be needing a hand. Count me in.’
Mr Jarrold and I, slightly hungover, spend a quiet, pleasant, sunny Saturday going round lots of closed distilleries so I can take photographs of the distillery names in VERY BIG LETTERS painted on their whitewashed walls. At first I’m a bit mystified that the distilleries are closed on a Saturday – I’d kind of been hoping to get off to a flier here and be able to tell Oliver the Editor how determined I’ve been to start doing my research – but then these are basically light industrial units with a five-day week which happen to have guided tours and Visitor Centres as well; they’re not – certainly before Easter and the start of the season – full-time tourist haunts, and that is part of their charm.
We have lunch with a view of Loch Indaal and the harbour in the Harbour Inn. This was only supposed to be a snack, but somehow it turned into a full three-courser when we started reading the menu. I stare at my pudding and consider the merits of not bothering to eat it but just strapping it directly to my waist, for which it is surely destined, but then eat it anyway. Then we wander/waddle round to the Bowmore whisky shop and stock up on a case full of whisky; basically one each from all seven of the working distilleries on the island,
plus
an old Port Ellen. Port Ellen distillery, forming the western limit of Port Ellen the town, no longer produces its own whisky but instead provides the malted barley for five of the other distilleries on Islay, and so still plays a significant part in the island’s economy and the overall quality of the Islay whiskies.
The Bowmore whisky shop is very well stocked indeed and I get a bit carried away, spending an eye-wateringly large amount of money effectively buying the oldest version of each of the whiskies on offer (actually, distillers don’t call them versions, they call them expressions, which I suppose does sound slightly classier. Also, buying the oldest was a bit stupid without doing more research; age isn’t everything).
All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time.
We drive around a bit afterwards, taking more photos and getting very good at spotting the distinctive pagoda-shaped ventilators – relics of the old drying floors where each distillery used to malt its own barley – that tend to denote the presence of a distillery.
‘That’ll be another of those distinctive pagodas there, then.’
‘It will indeed … Hey, look! There, outside that house; a life-size plastic goose! Hey, there’s loads of them! And they’re only 35 of your Earth pounds! I’m going to buy one! Maybe two!’
‘You really have lost all sense of value, haven’t you, Iain?’
‘… wonder if they light up. Hmm? Sorry, what?’
Whisky: the how-to bit
.
(If you already know how whisky’s made, you may want to skip this section. Well, unless you’re one of these know-all types who wants to look for mistakes or something.)
Whisky is made from barley, which is a type of grain that grows well in Scotland’s relatively cool, damp climate. You harvest the barley, soak the stuff in water to start it germinating, then dry it off again to stop it actually sprouting too far. The idea is to turn the starch in the barley into sugar.
(Barley’s
not much use as it is; I mean all you can do with it is let it turn into another barley plant or eat it, basically. Sugar you can do something useful with, i.e. start the process of turning it into drink.)
It’s during the drying process that you can add the peaty flavour. In the old days peat fuelled the fires that dried the germinating barley, and naturally some of the smell of the smoke got into the barley. Back then every distillery would do its own malting. Malting is what the whole process so far is called, and it produces malted barley, or just plain malt, hence the name malt whisky.
Once steeped (nothing especially technical in the word – just Scots for ‘soaked’) the germinating barley would be laid out on enormous malting floors inside the distillery and guys would walk up and down, dragging boards behind them to turn the barley over now and again, basically ploughing it to let the air get at every grain. The whole malting process can take from one week to nearly two. Only a few distilleries still do this themselves: Balvenie on Speyside, Bowmore and Laphroaig on Islay, Springbank in Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre and Highland Park just outside Kirkwall, on Orkney. The rest source their grain from specialist malt mills, specifying the level of peatiness they want.
Then you mill the malted barley – stopping before it’s milled too finely, when it would just be flour – until you have stuff called grist.
At this point distilleries have been known to explode.
No, seriously. Any fine organic dust mixed with air in the right proportions will explode if there’s a source of ignition like a spark (a bad explosion in a custard factory must sound perfectly hilarious unless you’re actually present at the time), and because barley’s grown in the soil it usually arrives with a few tiny stones in it. The stones can get caught in the metal rollers in the milling machine, produce a spark, ignite the malt-dust and Bang! So distillers take some care to make sure all the stones are removed from the barley before it goes into the milling machine.
After this you make beer in a teapot, transfer it to a bucket
and
then boil it in a kettle. Thereafter: barrel, bottle and serve.
Okay, this simplifies the process a little and glosses over vast amounts of skill and potentially decades of time, but them’s the basics.