Jackie Kay was only five months old when she went on her first march. There’s photographic evidence of her being carried in her mum Helen’s arms at an anti-nuclear protest. Her brother Maxwell is also in the picture, in a pram being pushed by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid no less.

In fact, Kay tells me as she sits at home in Manchester on the other end of our Zoom call, she found a newspaper article the other day in which Helen, her adoptive mother, had drawn an arrow on the photo pointing to Kay and added the legend “your wee bald head.”

The date on the paper was April 1962. “So she must have just got me,” Kay explains. “And straight out on a demo.”

Kay was adopted by Helen and John Kay, committed socialists, the pair of them and grew up in Glasgow. That march against Polaris was the first of many Kay would attend down the years. In A Life in Protest, the third poem in Kay’s new collection of poetry, entitled May Day, she records some of them; Back to the Night marches. Pride marches, kneeling in remembrance of George Floyd.

The Herald: Jackie KayJackie Kay (Image: free)

In short, a whole line of Marching Jackies, holding banners and singing, singing, singing down the years. Venceremos. Free Nelson Mandela. Sing if you’re glad to be gay.

“Marching Jackies, I like that,” Kay says in that soft, familiar Scottish voice of hers that sounds like a warm hug.

“And some of the demonstrations I’ve been on through my life I have no memory of,” she continues.

“I met up with this old boyfriend recently who’s a farmer in Dumfries and Galloway. And he said to me when he came to Stirling [University] to visit me, he loved it. He found it all very exciting.

“I’d taken him on a Back to the Night march and I was dressed up as a backstreet abortionist. I was like, ‘What? What was I actually wearing?’”

Kay smiles and it’s good to see. May Day is a book full of defiance, but it has a heavy weight to it, too. Kay’s mum Helen died in 2021, the year after her dad John. Kay, as she writes in May Day, is currently “walking grief’s long corridor,” trying to find the words to ease the journey.

“There’s nothing now between me and the sky,” she says, reciting a line from a poem in the book, Mother’s Day, 2021.

“I came across that line in my head. It describes what I feel like having lost my mum. There is nothing now between me and the sky.”

Protest, pain and poetry are the themes of today’s conversation. The former feels more urgent than ever given the increasing restrictions being placed on those who would challenge the status quo by the current Westminster government.

“We live in heinous, terrible times with the most despicable government. Just when you think it could get no worse it gets worse. Just when you think that they wouldn’t do another thing they do another thing. And it’s really deeply, deeply shocking to the core. Some things that you would think are basic human rights we’re losing.”

READ MORE

Will Romesh Ranganathan make a go of Radio 2's Saturday morning show?

Vincent Friell obituary: Actor known for cult film Restless Natives

10 Scottish gigs to blow your mind in May - and where to get tickets

Which is why she marches, why she has always marched. Kay looks back on her life in protest with a mixture of pride and frustration. “Change has come about,” she points out. “There is now gay marriage. We live in a society where on radio phone-ins you’ll have a man asking for such and such a song to be played to his husband.

“But then you can look at the lack of change, at the change you would have expected. When I was 17 and joined the Anti-Nazi League and was on Anti-Apartheid marches I didn’t think I would be here kneeling in my local park after the death of George Floyd. I thought that racism was a battle we could fight and we might win.

“I thought we wouldn’t have a world that’s at war in the way it’s at war now.”

She pauses, sighs. “It’s really harrowing, the world at the moment. To me it’s never been more harrowing. I’ve never been closer to feeling hopeless about it.

“But I do really feel we have a duty to cling onto hope.”

May Day is a collection of poems that not only corral all those marching Jackies in their dungarees, red Kickers and Angela Davis Afros, but also gather up parental love and loss, political heroes (Paul Robeson, Jimmy Reid, Jimmy Airlie, Annie Besant, Mick McGahey all appear) and the odd poet too.

Like MacDiarmid. A family friend.

“That big head of hair, an enormous ego and when you went to Brownsbank [MacDiarmid’s home near Biggar], the cottage was full of the green spines of the Penguin detective series. He loved his detective books.

“I know that he had lots and lots of faults. He was terribly flawed as a man. But the big head, the big hair and all the contradictions I kind of embrace.

“The particular poems of his that I really love - because a lot of his work I really didn’t like - are these little short lyric poems. I just feel that they are all wonderful; six lines or seven or eight.”

The Herald: John and Helen Kay, mother and father of Jackie Kay at their home in BishopbriggsJohn and Helen Kay, mother and father of Jackie Kay at their home in Bishopbriggs (Image: free)

“Mars is braw in crammasy …” I begin, reciting the opening line of McDiarmid's The Bonnie Broukit Bairn.

“Actually, if you read that again it’s a warning about the planet,” Kay reminds me. “He was often very prescient in the things he wrote about. I’ve got that in my bathroom. I read that poem every day.”

There’s a poem in May Day I want to ask her about. Inspired by a sketch Kay came across in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Fanny Eaton, The Pre-Raphaelite Muse is the story of a real-life 19th-century woman, a working-class mother of 10, who, though forgotten now, made a huge impact in her time. She posed for the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her image was used on the cover of an edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And yet she ended up in a pauper’s grave.

Eaton’s is not the kind of Black British story we hear enough of, let's face it. “I felt we need to honour our complex pasts,” Kay agrees. “We need to have more Fanny Eatons. We can’t tell a single-note story.”

There’s a postscript to the poem, she adds. One of Eaton’s descendants heard Kay’s poem whilst visiting the Fitzwilliam and as a result the family invited Kay to come and read it when a headstone for Eaton was finally erected in 2022.

It’s been three years now since Kay stepped down from the role of Scotland’s Makar. Does she miss it?

“No, I don’t miss having a big public role. Although I’m good at talking I am actually quite shy.

“But I absolutely loved it. And I loved people stopping me in the street and going, ‘Makar.’ “And I liked the sense of belonging, an easy sense of belonging that I’ve never felt in my whole life in Scotland. I liked that, finally feeling that I belonged to my country.”

The years since she stepped down have been tough for the arts and culture in Scotland and the UK in general. Kay is horrified by the cuts that have impacted on the arts and closed libraries. When we speak in early April Aye Write has just been cancelled (the partial reprieve was still in the future).

“We need the arts to understand ourselves, it's as simple as that,” Kay argues. “We need stories, we need poems, we need easy access to libraries, to festivals. I think it can’t be overestimated how important they are to people or what a change they bring about in people’s lives.”

The Herald: Nelson Mandela on stage at George Square, Glasgow, with the singer Mara LouwNelson Mandela on stage at George Square, Glasgow, with the singer Mara Louw (Image: free)

I wonder what Glasgow, the city of her childhood - a city that now contains a Jackie Kay Plaza at the University of Strathclyde - means to her now?

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this. When you lose people, do you belong to the place in the same way? I’ve still got to discover what Glasgow means to me now that my mum and dad are both dead.

“If I’m in some other city - Newcastle or whatever - and the announcement comes over the tannoy, ‘The train for Glasgow Central is leaving …’ it actually hurts.

“That’s personal. But beyond that, Glasgow is a city full of contradictions. A city with a fine radical past, a shipbuilding city, a city that grew the likes of Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie into the national heroes that they were. A city that welcomed Paul Robeson, welcomed Nelson Mandela, and a city that had an extraordinary arts tradition. Still does.

“Glasgow is a really vibrant city, a city that’s got a huge big heart and it gets up and back on its feet again after every random disaster.

“But on the other hand there’s Buchanan Street, there’s Virginia Street, there’s the tobacco lords, there’s the fact that the average Glaswegian doesn’t know the city is founded on the slave trade and there’s all these complicated things to say about Glasgow too.”

There is no one better placed to say them. Jackie Kay is 62 now, but she will still march when required. This is a protest.

May Day, by Jackie Kay is published by Picador, £10.99