Only the Men
When asked about ‘Only the Men’ I have often said that the idea for the show was born when I visited the village of Sanna in Ardnamurchan on the west coast of Scotland. What is nearer the truth is that the show is the story I needed to tell about my own family, the small farm my father owned and my urge to get off the land as quickly as I could. And the feelings I now have about why that happened.
When I was a child my father often told me that I should ‘get a job in a bank’ and never once gave me even a hint that my future should be working on the land. This was from a man who loved birds, would scour through the pages of the expensive bird books he had saved to buy for interesting facts, would lie on his stomach in a damp woodland photographing a rare mushroom and would never be happier anywhere other than in the middle of a loch with his old fishing rod. But according to him working the land just wasn’t an option for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.
When I had put on a few years I learnt that my father was sad. The death of my sister had shaped my father’s emotions as well as my family. My closest brother and I had been born after her death when the local GP had advised my father that the best thing would be to give my mother another baby as soon as possible. My father never stopped mourning even though we arrived. The family home and the small farm that went with it were sold when Dad finally admitted that he couldn’t live there any more. My sister had died on the road outside the house, hit by a lorry full of rubble.
Adulthood also opened my eyes to the way Dad liked to be alone. And that he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met in my life and ever likely to meet (and I used to work for the Dalai Lama!). I don’t know whether Dad spent so much time alone before Sally’s death but it certainly fitted his general demeanour afterwards.
In my middle age I have felt an attraction back to the rural. I live in the city and enjoy that life but I can feel
my shoulders drop with relief when I get into the green open space and my head is once again turned by bird song. The trouble is that I no longer feel that I am ‘from the country’. It is a different language but one I recognise from my childhood.
When I went to Sanna I saw the places of my childhood in the surreal but beautiful geography. The wildlife and the wind were familiar. It was a shock. The evident history gave this reaction a greater resonance. The beautiful sands of Sanna Bay are surrounded by some new homes but even more ruins of old crofts. Some of the new homes have a shadow of an abandoned stone house. When the stone was usurped by concrete the old houses have been left standing, right next to the door of the new home. History ever present. Sanna is a beautiful natural place but it has a sadness that the humans brought with them and left hanging around after when they left.
When I became resolved to write a play set in Sanna I went back for a longer period, several in fact. I set out to meet residents of Sanna and to hear as much of the first-hand history as I could. The story that then unfolded wasn’t a surprise but it came at me with some force. That Sanna was never a place that people should have lived and that it was inevitable that they have left. That the village grew from the clearances and the injustice of that period was finally brought to its conclusion when the last crofter finally gave up and left in 1970s. My father’s voice telling me to get off the land bounced around my head a great deal when I did this research.
There is a modern truth for Sanna that is not necessarily defined by its history. The village now has electricity, telephone, internet, roads and potential of some tourist income. I understand that there is some contention about the modern development of Sanna but my own personal belief is that if people want to live there they should be allowed to change the crofts to accommodate their needs, work the land as efficiently as possible and develop into a real community. But that was not the truth in the 1970s when life was very hard, almost as hard as it had been 100 years earlier, and the outside world had changed.
In all of this I saw the story of a family that had mixed motives for staying on the land, was rejecting it but at the same time could not leave its isolation. A father and son who both felt the inherited attraction of Sanna but who had both rejected it when they were no more than children and had gone to Glasgow. They were Glaswegians on the surface but Sanna was still in their fabric.
That was my starting point for ‘Only the Men’. If you saw our production I hope you enjoyed it.