The flat, deep blue Atlantic stretches out before me, next stop: Europe. And it's really not that far. John Cabot and 1497 don't seem so far away either. I belong to this great movement of people. It's really not that far. The world in my mind is being at last knitted together - this place an important link. Nova Scotia, New Scotland. Truly this is a new Scotland - a Scotland renewed. The evening sun slants onto the tree-clad coast, the low, buttressing hills.
Last night, at the bus terminal in Sydney, a local girl heard me calling my hotel and asked me where my accent was from. I hesitated and said Australia. She looked slightly disappointed and said she thought I might have been from New Zealand because my accent was nicer, softer. I smiled and told her that actually I was from New Zealand but my accent had been influenced by living in Australia and elsewhere for most of my life. She brightened considerably and told me she had spent an exchange year in Dunedin and still had a number of good friends there. My father was from Dunedin, I said.
Hector is Gaelic Director at the Gaelic College, St. Anns. We chat for over an hour about the language. His father was Gaelic-speaking but didn't pass it on. There are only 200-400 fluent speakers of Gaelic left in Cape Breton. In 1900 there were 75,000, in 1920 60,000 - that number has halved each decade since. Hector remembers old men when he was young, talking to each other behind their hands in the back corner at a party or some other do - there was one main party and then they were having a party of their own in their language. The last 20 years have seen the effective end of Gaelic as a community language. So-and-so, he was important, he knew the traditions handed down orally, he knew the whole Finnian Cycle, oh, well he died in 1996 or '97.
Hector was the last MA Celtic Studies from St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish. He learnt Gaelic as a second language - it is very possible to become fluent in it, it is a myth that it must be the mother tongue. His wife is Acadian and a staunch supporter of that culture. He spoke only Gaelic with their two sons until four years ago. It took 16 months to fully switch to English and now they speak no Gaelic, much to the chagrin of his wife. The boys attend a French school. Their Gaelic fluency and improvement dropped off slowly from about the age of four. They weren't able to express complex ideas in it so eventually Hector reluctantly decided to make the change to English.
"Yes, but your relationship with your children is vastly more important even than a beautiful and ancient language", I say quietly.
He nods and smiles. "Yes. Yes that's right."
I mention my experiences learning my mother's language as an adult in Switzerland, that I often felt like a baby, dumbed down, unable to show people my real, full self. That's a good way of putting it, he says. He is tall, thin, has a full ginger-white beard and wears glasses. His "r"s are, like most people's here, very Irish - car is said "care" but with the top teeth almost touching the bottom lip.
Gaelic learners in Cape Breton do so mostly due to their own family history but increasingly also due to the revival in Celtic music here. Hector recommends that I spend a maximum of 20 minutes a day learning the language but every day. Leave the table hungry so that you come back for more.
Once again, night has fallen. Venus and Jupiter, low in the western sky, mimic, mirror, parody Castor and Pollux above them, so much fainter, so infinitely more distant.
There are 500 fluent speakers of Manx Gaelic, even though the last native speaker, Ned Madrell, died in 1974.
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