The winter’s first hailstorm and iced rain cocktail greeted visitors disembarking from the Gourock to Rothesay ferry on Friday morning. In the next week or so, 15 Syrian refugee families, fleeing bombs and bullets in their homeland, will make the same crossing, seeking security, compassion and the Arabic for winter woollies.
The families, including up to 50 children, are among a first large group of refugees who will begin arriving in Scotland this week. More than a thousand are expected initially and they will be dispersed throughout west central Scotland. Most of the scrutiny, though, will fall on the little batch of families who will soon be making their homes at the foot of the Argyll peninsula. The west of Scotland is not unaccustomed to taking in refugees and asylum seekers but never has a small island community hosted them.
This island of Bute and its main population centre, Rothesay, is one of the most beautiful places to live in Scotland. The last leg of a journey that has taken many months and on which Rothesay’s new Syrian residents have endured levels of loss and suffering few in the UK will ever encounter, will not be unpleasant. There will be a half-hour ride from Glasgow through Greenock to Gourock and then a one-hour ferry trip where hills and mountains will form a guard of honour into the harbour and a quiet welcome from their new neighbours.
In Rothesay there is a palpable sense of anticipation and excitement among local people, eager, it would seem, to show their new neighbours what a good Scottish welcome feels like. There is too, though, a barely discernible patina of unease. When Argyll and Bute council announced that Rothesay would soon be hosting 15 Syrian families, not everyone was happy. A few unsavoury comments began to appear on the website of The Buteman, the esteemed local paper. These were of the “let’s look after our own poor first” type but they can often mask more sinister attitudes. They were soon slapped down in a leader column written by the paper’s editor, Craig Borland. “Mostly, these are just not-very-thinly-veiled ways of people saying ‘I don’t want them in my back yard’. Well, I do. I want Bute to be a place where people who come here with little more than the clothes they are standing in can feel safe and at home.”
Few other newspaper offices in the UK possess a view as beautiful as that which greets Borland when he comes to work every day and he is confident that the Syrian families will feel welcome here. “There is space in our schools and there is spare social housing, and many, many people want to help our new neighbours to settle here. I would love it if some of them wanted to stay in our community and put down roots here.”
The island’s population, which numbers 6,300 souls, has been in steady decline for years from its 1960s and 1970s heyday as a favoured west of Scotland holiday destination. Rothesay provides a snapshot of the social and cultural challenges facing Scotland in the 21st century: young people leave here for better-paid work and rarely return, and so the community is left to support an ageing population. Around 99% of the population is white and few have any experience of what it’s like to live in a multicultural society.
Angela Callaghan runs Bute Oasis, a secondhand furniture and bric-a-brac shop which funds a foodbank that she runs from the floor upstairs. Last year she provided 50 food parcels for residents in need at Christmas, and this year the figure will be nearer 100. “Make that 115,” she said with a smile. “These people will become part of our community and will not have much time when they arrive to organise meals. I know what it’s like, and it’ll be no different for them, so we’ll all rally round.”
On 13 December the community will come together at a film night in the cinema for a special screening of It’s a Wonderful Life, the nation’s favourite Christmas movie. The cinema has provided its premises, and Aidan Canavan, owner of Bute Brewery, will provide mulled wine. It’s already a sell-out, and money raised will go to help provide the new Syrian neighbours with any other material basics they might need. How many of the villagers who attend that night will be aware that, in real life, some of them are about to re-enact the principle roles in Frank Capra’s 1946 classic tale of community compassion and human redemption?
Canavan, a former teacher who left the profession to pursue his dream of making craft beer, is thrilled at the prospect of welcoming the refugees. “When I was a teacher,” he said. “I visited Rwanda with some of my pupils. It took me weeks to recover from the experience. Not a single person we met was unaffected by the genocide. What these families, and many others like them, have endured is beyond our comprehension, and it will be an honour to give them respite and shelter. I am so proud that this island has stepped up to the mark to help.”
Canavan is already planning another community event. “I can’t wait to taste Syrian food. Once they’re all settled in, I want to ask them to have a Syrian food night in the church hall. It would be great if they could introduce us to a few new tastes and aromas.”
There’s a lot of love in this place, and a picture begins to emerge of a community, all douce and upstanding in its Scottish rectitude, taking a sense of pride in how it will respond to the needs of 80 fellow human beings whose nightly television travails two continents away have moved them. It’s as if they feel they are representing Scotland. Nor, though, do they want to smother their guests.
In St Andrew’s church hall, John Dunion, a retired social work manager, is marshalling around 25 volunteers into a skills bank to help the Syrians meet the cultural and social challenge of dropping into a small island off the west coast of Scotland in the middle of what’s expected to be one of the worst winters in many years. “We simply want to work with the statutory agencies to provide any help we can. But we also don’t want to smother our new arrivals. We want them to feel welcomed into our community but we want to give them their own space too.”
When Rothesay’s citizens settle down to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, they will see George Bailey, played by James Stewart, berate the flint-hearted bank manager, Mr Potter, for a lack of humanity to his fellow townsfolk: “Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.”
For the citizens of Rothesay, bruised a little and buffeted in harsh times, the arrival of 15 wretched Syrian families could be the best Christmas gift any of them will ever receive.
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