Broken by the plough

When the ground was worked and the seedbed defined by the sunken rig marks, five yards apart, on would go your sowing-sheet, shaped like a kidney to fit into your body, two broad bands of canvas criss-crossed over your shoulders and the sheet tied lower down in the small of your back. And you would kneel in front of the sack of seed-corn, and gowp the corn with both hands into the sheet and you would rise, the weight of the corn buckling your kneecaps. And off you went down the centre of the rig, one-yard strides, and your hands dipping alternately into the sheet and taking up the grain, and your arms swinging in time to the opposing leg, and the grain a golden curtain on either side of you, the small arc from the back of your fist sliding out to cover the soil at your feet, and always the sideways pressure on your knees as you swivelled from side to side, riving the tendons.

And after you, in those days, came the wood-tined harrows, scarting the tops off the weathered furrows and smooring down the seed that had flickered and rolled into the vees, and were flattened to firm its bed and allow the fragile roots to expand into the cycle of growth in security; without the twists and torsions of shifting crumbs of soil and the hazard of the ever-present stones. And if you worked the horse that pulled the harrows, your heels would sink into the saft mool', double-stressing your legs, to raise them, once more seeking out the weakness.

And when the grain had ripened and the flutter of green panicles had mellowed into a russet-gold: that was when the real test arose and out came the scythes, and as soon as the dew was lifted, the long blade was sharped with the stone, and you had this wee bit tremor of fear that you wouldn't last the day, keeping the heel of the scythe in against your right heel and the tip raised as it sliced through the semi-brittle stalks to avoid these stones, which would buckle the tip of the blade. And again you would have to sharp it, and return to the long, powered swing, down the triceps of your right arm, and the force translating to your left to complete the cut, this constant swing from the waist, and all against the knee joint which had never been allowed to heal.

And Ellisland was full of stones: flat stones, oval stones, stones the size of soup plates, puddocks' e'en, water skimmers, bowling balls, paving flags and boulders as big as an elephant's bum, as if the Devil himself had cowpit the contents of all the quarries in Hell there to break Burns' heart, instead of the Edinburgh conmen who tricked him into taking the damned place, which surely hastened his death. Ellisland, the Scottish gulag, almost as if it had been designed to ruin him and crush his spirit and silence him.

Not content with that, after he had pulled the thistles out of his fingers, Burns then had to sit in his ben-room and write up four sets of Excise books, and ride up to 200 miles a week to cover his district and work as a hated gauger, despised by ordinary folk as a government spy, him watching his hard-won money leaching into the Nith, beneath the scaurs on which stood his new farmhouse. A poet's choice of farm, the townie sages yelped, not knowing a farmer always sees a field in terms of work, and never in some urban fantasy of rustic beauty. You don't lift your head to admire the view; you do it to wipe the sweat out your eyes, and there had to be a sting.

The first time I walked Ellisland was not long after I qualified in agriculture, and I marvelled how a clever young farmer like Burns ever stirred it with his boot. A great cairn of gathered stones rose beside the farm loan as you came in, and the redd ground was white with even more stones, as if it had been the victim of a late fall of snow. It took me years to work out the Excise had been part of the sting and once he was in he was oathed and thus silenced. He duly took the oath of allegiance on October 27, 1789, at Dumfriesshire Quarter Sessions and never published another politically controversial piece under his own name in his own lifetime.

But it was not only Ellisland that was worsening his broken knee. When he went up the near-side of his horse, closest to its heart, to start his day's Excise work, he had to raise his left leg to slide his foot into the stirrup and put his weight on it while he swung his right leg over the horse's back, and it didn't matter which knee was bad, it must have hurt like hell, and the upshot was he couldn't keep his legs clinched round the barrel of his horse, and he kept falling off, yet in all the letters and verse of his that I have read, he never moaned, not once.

And when he had been twice roupit, that cruel word the farmers, and Burns in particular, have always feared and hated, for it meant they had failed and were sold up in public disgrace and poverty, why, Robert Burns, his bad heart trembling like a grassed salmon and his worse leg trailed ahint him, presented himself at Dumfries for his new Excise duty.

And they gave him a foot-walk.

Well, I mean, they said, it's promotion, and he could earn #70 a year, if his leg held out, of course, and if he kept out of political trouble and his mouth firmly shut, he would be put on the supervisor's list.

In Edinburgh it was a different story with lucrative rewards for other people. Adam Smith, with no experience whatsoever, had been made a commissioner of Customs, the lucrative salary allowing him to live in luxury down the Canongate of Edinburgh, about 800 yards from where Burns lodged, under a brothel, when he first came to the city.

Henry Mackenzie, who unctuously let himself be called by the title of his novel, The Man of Feeling, was paid off while symptomatically joining ``that small smirking thief'' William Creech, in swindling Burns out of his priceless copyright for 100 guineas, which would otherwise have allowed the poet to write his inflammatory stuff in security.

Mackenzie, a lawyer who may well have known how many reset beans made five, but no more numerate than the poet, was made comptroller of taxes for Scotland, and three of his sons were handed sinecures in the East India Company, all courtesy of Henry Dundas, the Scottish dictator, whose chief propagandist Mackenzie feelingly became. Creech, the literary larcenist, proved his worth in other ways and loyally served as foreman of the jury in the later sedition trials. He became Lord Provost of the city.

Adam Smith meanwhile had ordered four copies of Burns' Edinburgh edition and publicly let it be known he would give Burns an indoor post of salt officer. Far less despised than a gauger, and carrying a pay of #30-#40 a year, doubled by fees, or exactly the promoted pay of Burns at Dumfries. Yet they strangely never met, separated by an impenetrable barrier of 800 yards of cobblestones, and the morning before Burns was to receive his letter of introduction to the great man, why, Smith left for London to consult his doctor. Eh? But that's two-toned Edinburgh for you.

What does matter to us, on the 200th anniversary of his death, is that while others feasted in Edinburgh and boozed and whored (respectably, I'll have you know) and lived the life of some licentious Larry, Burns was kept in Dumfries, unable to write under his own famous name, unable to breathe intellectually but certainly able to reflect, as his pay was cut during his final fatal illness, that his intellectual inferiors, which so consistently happens, had somehow been showered with the rewards that should have been his.

The pious but prurient citizenry of Dumfries deplored his latter-day behaviour, which, on rare occasions, may well have too closely mimicked their own small-town antics for comfort, and apparently shunned him, knowing full well if they did not side with the hierarchy of the Dumfries unco' guid they would be next for the treatment.

The final insult was, in the wave of anti-French hysteria, for Burns to be forced to join the Dumfries Volunteers, the right to supply the hideously over-priced uniform apparently to go to one haberdasher, who held the sole monopoly, and fraternally hoisted the prices, while they drilled and stumbled into Burns's mocking name for them: The Awkward Squad.

His health was long gone, helped by the stone-tainted fields of Ellisland. His money, which would have stocked any well-doing small farm in Scotland, had somehow been parted from him. He was under the frighteners of the Excise and its agents not to speak out. He had to drill with the Volunteers to prove his loyalty to the Crown. And if all these insults to his system were not enough, his then trendy doctor sentenced him to sea-bathing at Brow on the Solway coast.

When he returned he knew he was dying. His wasting, which so often prefaces untimely death, had occurred and he was emaciated, yet his voice was firm enough and so was his boldness for him to sardonically exclaim: ``Have you any messages for the other world?''

Thirty-seven years of age, he was, and as he lay on his death-bed, so came the summons from the ghastly haberdasher, who must have known his end was near and hoped to collect by threats of a debtor's prison before he slid beyond his small-town, venal reach. Not one of the poet's loyal comrades in Dumfries offered to buy off the unspeakable tradesman.

It was in this state of turmoil that Burns, one of the finest poets with whom this world has ever been graced, melted inexorably into his final coma, with one last fear unresolved, perhaps at the thought of his stumble-footed and trigger-happy comrades doing the final honours at his funeral and blowing apart his coffin in their myopic desire to prove their fearless loyalty to the Crown and opposition to all enemies of the State.

``Don't let the Awkward Squad fire over me,'' Burns loudly said.

And he was dead.

n Alistair Campsie's revisionary essays on the poet and his play, Dundas, are to be published under the title Burns, the Political Prisoner.