Heritage

Origins in England and Scotland
    Kelton Crest

Migratory Patterns

Texas Families

Scotland: Real and Imagined

Irish Diaspora

Geddes MacGregor, Scotland: An Intimate Portrait, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980, 276 pages paperback, with photographs, $9.95.

The difference between Homeland and Diaspora attitudes is profound. Diaspora Scots have been, in the vast majority of cases, thoroughly naturalized and attached to the country of their adoption. While they look with affection (especially perhaps after the second generation) on the Homeland, sometimes even with passionate devotion, their whole life is geared to their adopted land, to its laws, customs, and ways of thought. There is certainly nothing remotely like a Scottish Zionism. They look to Scotland more as an American Catholic looks to Rome: a place of pilgrimage, not a home. No matter how many planeloads of Diaspora Scots descend upon Prestwick Airport every summer, these Scots have almost all returned to America or elsewhere before the first nip of frost. (p. 226)

Most Scots have a kindly disposition toward all their guests. However, the fact that you or your ancestors have left Scotland, and that the exodus has been for Scotland the most unprofitable export she has ever made, will be always before the minds of your hosts, consciously if they know their own history well, unconsciously even if they do not. Most Scots in the Homeland know very little about the history or the character of the Diaspora. They do sense, however, that the Diaspora is a credit to Scotland. They do not blame us. If they did, the relationship might be easier. What makes it awkward is that they blame themselves: not consciously, of course, but, which is psychologically far more potent, unconsciously. So even as the Homeland Scot and his Diaspora guest clink glasses and join in the toast,

Here's tae us. Wha's like us?

Damn few, and they're a' deid,

It was the cream that was lost, constituting the richest export Scotland has ever made, the one for which she has received absolutely nothing in return and can never reap any reward, since no monetary or other such reparation could ever compensate for the loss of generation after generation of a country's most enterprising citizens. (p. 228)

One of the great virtues of the Scots of the Diaspora has been their adaptability. This does not mean that they have been eminently assimilable, as have been the Irish and the Italians, for instance. But their adaptability has made them look assimilated. A young Scots couple who came last year straight out of Muthil or Tobermory to take up life in Nebraska or Tennessee will be as likely as not to be seen sauntering down Fifth Avenue next year with the nonchalance of Americans who came over on the Mayflower. Their relaxed adaptability captures all hearts before they have had an opportunity to exhibit their even greater qualities. Their adaptability may spring from the fact that to them London and Los Angeles, Bombay and Paris, are all the same because they are not Scotland. No matter. It endears them nevertheless to their hosts from the first day. The Diaspora Scot who has seen this in recent immigrants may expect to find it in the Homeland. If so, he is likely to be much disappointed. He has changed; they have not. . . . The upshot is that the Homeland Scots, for all they may talk of Scotland, often know less of it than many a Diaspora Scot gets to know of it in a month. Yet almost all Homeland Scots, of whatever station in life, will chide (not to say rant at) their Diaspora counterparts for not seeing Scotland the way they do. . . . Beneath the curt and laconic speech of many Scots lies a unique kindliness that the Scots of the Homeland are half afraid to show only because they are afraid their own warmth will carry them away. Once you see that and set it in the context of your own devotion to your ancestral land, you will fall in love with the Homeland Scot almost as much as you have already fallen in love with the Homeland itself. Once that happens, Scotland your mother will never let you go. You will have been captured forever in the arms of her encompassing love. The irritants will chafe no more than your mother's Harris tweed coat. Her love will haunt you wherever you go. Even in moments of exasperation, you will know that you have found your way home at last and that your heart will be forever there, although your body and your brain be firmly established in Chicago or Berne. Robert Louis Stevenson, a literary genius as thoroughly Scottish as Scott or Burns, whose travels took him to Monterey and to the island of Samoa that he came to love so much and where he died, wrote for himself an epitaph beloved by all who have found freedom:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Yet even as you may wish to make the epitaph your own, for use wherever you die, in Antarctica or Athens, Siberia or the Sahara, Park Avenue or Bel Air, your heart, on its last beat, will go home to Scotland. (p.233-235)