When Alastair Elliot’s father died, this poem by his son was used as an obituary for him in the British Medical Journal – “not the normal thing.” The poem which so beautifully catches the flavour of life in Sutherland a century ago, was included in Turning the Stones (Carcanet, 1993).
MCMVI
In Memoriam James Adam Elliot, MD ChB (Edinburgh)
Glencoul, August 1901- Clatterbridge, August 1991
~
The postman used to shout across the loch
till they rowed over. Once it was for Will,
from Carnegie. ‘He’s somewhere on the hill
getting our dinner. Who’s this Carnegie?’ ‘Rich.’
~
Will was fifteen, the eldest, trying to teach
my father (five) his letters. In Glencoul
their lonely house was technically a school.
Their textbook might have been the Pentateuch.
~
Carnegie offered a fiver and a bookcase
for the School Library. So when Will came back
with the pony, the muzzle-loader and a carcase,
the boys composed a letter. They sent the cheque
to a bookshop, with two clippings from the Herald:
Everyman’s Library Classics a Shilling Each,
and someone’s Hundred Best Books of the World.
They’d fetch them in the boat, from Kyle, next week.
~
The boys have disappeared; the teacher, Will,
in France, of the same plague as Pericles;
my namesake died when No-Man threw a shell;
my father, of Medea’s skin disease.
~
The books may well survive. The one I’d like,
perhaps on a tray in the rain now, marked ‘10p’,
is Vanity Fair, in which the boy got stuck
half up the tree of knowledge. I would look
for the words to read to everybody’s glee,
‘He was a man of charming gravy-tea.’
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