Songs of the north wind

he presents a personal appreciation

of the man and introduces five of his

previously unpublished poems from his forthcoming book Following a Lark

IT WAS himself who came to the door. We had never met, but he made me feel welcome. ``Come away in Gavin, it's good to see you,'' he said. It was early November, and a cold wind was blustering through the old harbour town of Stromness, but in his living room a fire was crackling in the hearth.

I had long wanted to meet George Mackay Brown. For years I had been enchanted by his tales of seafarers and warriors, and crofters and mystical characters with the second sight, that he conjured from the history of his native Orkney. They were so real, it was as if he had travelled back in time to observe them. To me he was a magician.

The figure sitting opposite me in an old armchair was slight, and seemed shrunken from illness. The lantern jaw was still there, but his other features were softened by old age and a mane of white hair. With a shawl around his shoulders, he looked like a mischievous elf.

The room was small and undistinguished, but it was cosy and it had a window with a view over a cobbled square and a jetty dotted with lobster creels. If you opened it, you could hear the sea washing on the shore.

I had been told he had a reputation for being shy, difficult to interview, and occasionally taciturn. In fact he was courteous, patient, and obliging. In his latest book, Winter Tales, he had lamented the decline in the tradition of oral story-telling before ``the basilisk stare'' of television and radio. We spoke of this, and of the gradual loss of old words that had enriched regional dialects.

``When I was a boy the country folk had a beautiful way of speaking, full of rich, meaningful words, but that's all been eroded,'' he said. ``Much of the pungency and flavour of the language has gone.''

The image of a time-traveller became stronger than ever; an old man who was uncomfortable with the pace of change in his own age, and was happier among the Vikings and Gaels of his stories. He confirmed this indirectly, when he admitted that the time he spent writing was the best part of the day.

He had just explained how he still wrote by pen on his kitchen table, when a curious thing happened. Without any warning, Mackay Brown turned into an old woman; the very image of a spae-wife from one of his tales. The illusion was so complete, and so sudden, that I was startled and averted my eyes. When I looked back Mackay Brown was himself again, wearing an expression of faint amusement.

It must have been a trick of the light, streaming through a window facing the bay. But for an instant, I realised how easy it must have been for a writer like Mackay Brown to step in his mind's eye through the Looking Glass of history in Orkney.

He was a modest, gentle man who regarded his literary success with wonder rather than pride. He lived in a council house just off the meandering main street of Stromness, and until the end his manuscripts were typed by a lady up the road. He hardly ever left his remote islands, but he didn't have to, because in his imagination he travelled further than anyone could ever do in reality.

When we met, he was working on a collection of Christmas stories and a volume of poetry. ``I wouldn't carry on doing it if I didn't like it,'' he said. ``If I begin to feel my powers waning, I'll call it a day then.'' Before leaving, I asked him to sign a copy of his latest book which I had just bought in a local shop, and he obliged in a small, spidery scrawl. At the door, he thanked me for coming and said: ``Come back in the summer when the days are long. We'll talk again then and have a drink.''

We won't now, because Mackay Brown has gone off on his travels again. Eventually somebody might fix a commemorative plaque to the grey wall of his house by the bay, and one day you might see an old man with white hair regarding it with a bemused smile. Don't be alarmed if he disappears - it will just have been George paying a visit from the place he calls the Ocean of Time.

A Country Boy Goes to School

THERE he is, first lark this year

Loud, between

That raincloud and the sun, lost

Up there, a long sky run, what peltings of song!

(Six times 6, 36. Six times 7, 42

Six times eight is...)

Oh, Mr Ferguson, have mercy at arithmetic time

On peedie Tom o' the Glebe.

There's Gyre's ewe has two lambs.

Snow on the ridge still.

How many more days do I have to take

This peat under my oxter

For the school fire?

(James the Sixth, Charles the First... Who then?)

Oh, Mr Ferguson, I swear

I knew all the Stewarts last night.

Yes, Mistress Wylie, we're all fine.

A pandrop! Oh, thank you.

I must hurry, Mistress Wylie,

Old Ferguson

Gets right mad if a boy's late.

I was late twice last week.

Do you know this, Mistress Wylie,

The capital of Finland is Helsingfors...

Yes, I'll tell Grannie

You have four fat geese this summer.

When I get to the top of the brae

I'll see the kirk, the school, the shop,

Smithy and inn and boatyard.

I wish I was that tinker boy

Going on over the hill, the wind in his rags.

Look, the schoolyard's like a throng of bees.

I wish Willie Thomson

Would take me on his creel-boat!

``Tom, there's been six generations of Corstons

Working the Glebe,

And I doubt there'll never be fish-scales

On your hands, or salt in your boots...''

(Sixteen ounces, one pound. Fourteen pounds, one stone).

A sack of corn's a hundredweight.

I think a whale must be bigger than a ton.

Jimmo Spence, he told me

Where the lark's nest is.

Beside a stone in his father's oatfield,

The high granite corner.

(``I wandered lonely as a cloud...'' Oh where? What then?)

I could go up by the sheep track

Now the scholars are in their pen

And Scallop and Mayflower are taking the flood

And the woman of Fea

Is pinning her washing to the wind.

I could wait for the flutter of the lark coming down.

The school bell! Oh, my heart's

Pounding louder than any bell.

A quarter of a mile to run.

My bare feet

Have broken three daffodils in the field.

Heart thunderings, last tremor of the bell

And the lark wing-folded.

``Late again, Master Thomas Corston of Glebe farm.

Enter, sir. With the greatest interest

We all await your explanation

Of a third morning's dereliction.''

1 Daffodils

Ho, Mistress Daffodil, said Ikey (tinker)

Where have you been all winter?

There was snow in the ditches last night

And here you are.

Did you light your lamp in that blizzard?

When Ikey came back

Next day, with his pack, from windy Njalsay

The yellow hosts

Were cheering and dancing all the way to the inn.

2 Idle brute

That idle brute of a man of hers

- Jean's phrase -

Has gone to the garden shed this morning

Instead of to the Arctic Whaler.

And Jock has scraped

Rust and cobwebs off a spade

And there he stands, idle ale-man, in the sun

Leaning on the spade, eyeing

That square of sodden sand and clay.

After his broth and fish

He asks Jean for half-a-crown.

``For drink? Nothing doing''...

``For seed tatties from the village shop, woman.''

3 Stone

The stone that wore darkness like the minister's coat

All winter,

Where the crow furled, where

Snow lingered longest -

Look, now, sunrise

Is tilting its jar of light over the world

And now, this noon,

A random splash has hit the winter stone.

4 School

In the island school

The children's heads

Are like green sheaths that will open soon.

And one of the seven shadows

Has left Mr McSween's face.

A lark glitters out song along the lift of the hill

And the bird

Is louder today than the chanted

Multiplication table.

And the globe of the world

In the dark corner, has a splash of light.

And Mr McSween says, like

A solemn song, ``This

Afternoon the Easter holiday begins

But now, again - and better this time - the three-times table''...

And twenty-one faces

Open like daffodils.

5 Monastery

Monkerhouse, is this it,

The ruin among the tombstones

Where once

The sanctuary light glowed like a ruby

And the sanctus bell

Beckoned, from winter, corn folk and fish folk?

Hoy Sound

Swallowed the good stones long ago.

Four and a half centuries

In the angels' hour-glass

Are but a whisper of time between

Good Friday and Easter morning.

The sea will give up its dead

The rock will break into cornstalks

The drowned bell will cry:

Laudate dominum in sanctuario.

6 The Ruin

Scollie, Baltic merchant, he built the house,

Clean new stone,

A garden with roses and hives.

When does a house begin to rot?

After the blessing

Flies out like a bird, then

The strongest house is open to worm and rot.

Smiley, lawyer, lived here. Eunson,

Grocer and smuggler,

Stewart, a poor dominie

(For three generations

Not a child laughed in the long hall),

Smith the carter,

Ronaldson with trauchled wife and twelve bairns,

All kept by the poor fund.

That grand house,

It's like a skull for thirty years now.

Strangers - who? - have bought the ruin.

I saw, last Sabbath,

A new rooftree inside the walls.

7 Spring Blizzard

An April northerly. I sit

In the lee of the crag

Tarring my yole, Charity.

Another flake flurry - old Bessie Millie

Plucking her hens. I sit

In the lee of a rock

Tarring this yole, Charity.

(trauchled: bedraggled

yole: fishing boat)

1 Hebridean

``A book of poems is it?''

Said the old man in Uist.

``When was it ever known

Songs between boards like caged birds?

Tell me more about this Burns -

Has the wild rose

Spilled over his hand ever, like heart's-blood?

The oppressor and the hypocrite,

Has he driven them, with bitter laughter, out of the glen?

Has he run his eye along ploughshare

And broacher of blood, those edges?

But poetry should be given on the wind, like a lark or a falcon.''

2 Minister

Rev Wm Clouston of Stromness:

One box books

From McCriven, booksellers, in the Canongate of Edinburgh.

The carter goes away with his fee.

Mr Clouston: ``Pope's Iliad,

Not a patch, I warrant, on the far-horizoned Greek,

But worthy the perusal.

Blair. Rousseau. Shenstone.

What, here? Poems and Songs Mainly in the Scottish Dialect...

Yes, Jane, the snuff-horn.

And light, if you please, that lamp on the table.

3 Skipper

What, Simpson, what's that they're singing below?

What - repeat, please -

``A man's a man for a' that''...

There will be none of that Jacobinry on this ship.

Tell them, find better words.

A man

May be king or beggar, Simpson,

It's better so, every man

Locked in his place in the great music of society.

It was thus from the beginning of things.

A man's a man for a' that

On this ship a man is a sailor

And Simpson, I am the skipper.

4 Bride's Father

Lermontov. Byron. Burns.

The poets

Drop fruits from the great tree of poetry,

Lemon, pineapple, pear

And the roots locked in the hearts of men.

The Scotsmen,

Their poems are the wild sweet berries that purple the tongue.

Adieu for evermore, my dear...

Even here, in Petersburg

As the coach comes to take Nadia away.

5 Sugar Planter

``To Robt. Burns, Mauchline, Ayrshire, Scotland -''

There's no such place as Scotland more,

Write, ``North Britain''.

Has written poems, has he?

Rest assured, Mr Burns will write no poems in Jamaica,

Mr Robert Burns

Will be too taken up with account books, ledgers.

Here the black slaves do the singing.

Proceed ``Dear Sir,

We are in receipt of your letter of application of 16th ult''...

6 Professor

Was at the professor's last night, was he,

The rustic bard?

I thought Professor Blackie

Might open his door to worthier guests.

Here is one professor of law

Will not be entertaining

The wild warbler from the west.

Mr MacAndrew, listen.

The cloak of poetry is ancient and rich and jewel-encrusted.

It is not to be hung on a scarecrow between

The plough and the sickle.

7 A Looker into the Seeds of Time

In the starswarm is a world

In that world is a country

In that country is a mountain

In that mountain is a quarry

In that quarry is a stone

On that stone is a name

The stone lacks chisel yet

That quarry is unbroken yet

The mountain has no root yet

The country is the floor of a lake

The world is a wheel of dust and fire,

It turns

Through chaos, blackness, silence.

Now read the rune of the stone

ROBERT BURNS POET