An Orkney Tapestry E-Book

George Mackay Brown

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 368

Beschreibung

First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown's seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the writing from a unique perspective and went on to produce a rich fusion of ballad, folk tale, short story, drama and environmental writing. The book, written at an early stage in the author's career, explores themes that appear in his later work and was a landmark in Brown's development as a writer. Above all, it is a celebration of Orkney's people, language and history. This edition reproduces Sylvia Wishart's beautiful illustrations, commissioned for the original hardback. Made available again for the first time in over 40 years, this new edition sits alongside Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain as an important precursor of environmental writing by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Malachy Tallack and, most recently, Amy Liptrot. 

Leseprobe

AN ORKNEY TAPESTRY

George Mackay Brown (1921–96) was one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished and original writers. His lifelong inspiration and birthplace, Stromness in Orkney, moulded his view of the world, though he studied in Edinburgh at Newbattle Abbey College, where he met Edwin Muir, and later at Moray House College of Education. In 1941 he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and lived an increasingly reclusive life in Stromness, but he produced, in spite of his poor health, a regular stream of publications from 1954 onwards. These included The Storm (1954), Loaves and Fishes (1959), A Calendar of Love (1967), A Time to Keep (1969), Greenvoe (1972), Hawkfall (1974), Time in a Red Coat (1984) and, notably, the novel Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Book of the Year.

His work is permeated by the layers of history in Scotland’s past, by quirks of human nature and religious belief, and by a fascination with the world beyond the horizons of the known.

He was honoured by the Open University and by the Universities of Dundee and Glasgow. The enduringly successful St Magnus Festival of poetry, prose, music and drama, held annually in Orkney, is his lasting memorial.

TITLES BY GEORGE MACKAY BROWNAVAILABLE FROM POLYGON

NOVELS

Greenvoe

Magnus

Time in a Red Coat

The Golden Bird

Vinland

Beside the Ocean of Time

SHORT STORIES

Simple Fire: Selected Short Stories

NON-FICTION

An Orkney Tapestry

POETRY

Carve the Runes: Selected Poems

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

For the Islands I Sing

First published in 1969 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2021 byPolygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House10 Newington Road

Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978 1 84697 480 9

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 235 7

Copyright © The Estate of George Mackay Brown, 1969

Illustrations © The Trustees of Sylvia Wishart R.S.A, 1969

Introduction and notes © Linden Bickett and Kirsteen McCue, 2021

The right of George Mackay Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

To Charles and Carol Senior

Contents

Introduction

Foreword

1. Islands and People

2. Rackwick

3. Vikings: ‘The Transfixed Dragon’:

Warrior

Martyr

Crusader

4. Lore:

The Midsummer Music

The Midwinter Music

5. Poets:

The Ballad Singer

Robert Rendall

6.The Watcher, a play

Notes

Acknowledgements

List of Drawings

Stromness

Rackwick Valley

Ploughed Field, Melsetter

Harvest of Corn

Old Houses, Stromness

St Magnus Church, Egilsay

West Pier, Kirkwall

St Magnus Cathedral

The Ross Puma ashore in Hoy

Crawnest and the Craig Gate, Rackwick

Fishing Boats, Kirkwall Harbour

The Double Houses, Stromness

Introduction

In 1969, the Orcadian poet, short story writer and novelist, George Mackay Brown (1921–96) published his seminal work entitled An Orkney Tapestry. Described by the composer Peter Maxwell Davies as ‘the most wonderfully poetic evocation of a place I’d ever come across’,1 this rich fusion of ballad, folk tale, short story, drama and environmental writing was a landmark in Brown’s development as a writer. This new edition celebrates more than fifty years since the Tapestry’s original publication by Victor Gollancz in 1969.2 Although Quartet books released a smaller paperback edition in 1973 (reprinted in 1974 and again in 1978), the text has remained out of print since the 1970s. While Brown must have been content with the paperback reprints, he appears to have been unenthusiastic about reprinting the Tapestry in his later life. Yet this text captures, at an early stage in his career, a number of the key themes of Brown’s later work and is now frequently referred to within Scottish literary and cultural criticism.3 Moreover, it sits, alongside such works as Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (first published in 1977), as an important precursor of new nature writing by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Malachy Tallack, and, most recently, Amy Liptrot.

Brown’s first collection of published poetry, The Storm, was produced by the Orkney Press in 1954, and in 1959 a second collection entitled Loaves and Fishes appeared, published in London by The Hogarth Press. They then published Brown’s next poetry volume, The Year of the Whale, and his first collection of short stories, A Calendar of Love, in 1965 and 1967 respectively. All three productions were critically acclaimed. It should thus be little surprise that Gollancz would think of approaching Brown, already closely associated with his native archipelago, to produce a new and definitive introduction to the Orkney Islands.

The details of the commission were shared by Brown in his correspondence with the book’s dedicatees, Charles and Carol Senior. Brown had met Charles Senior, one of the Edinburgh Rose Street poets and writers, during his time in the city in the 1950s and the two wrote regularly to one another from that point on. In his letter of 28 December 1967 Brown announced that he had ‘been asked by Gollancz to write a book about Orkney’. He continued that this ‘isn’t the kind of work I like doing but it should bring in a couple of hundred quid or so, and will take me to parts of the islands I haven’t been to before’.4 This was only a few weeks after he had told the Seniors that the Hogarth Press had accepted another book of stories, namely A Time to Keep which would also appear in 1969.5 Maggie Fergusson rightly concludes that Brown’s various payments for the Tapestry amounted to a ‘handsome sum’ when one considers that Brown’s annual rent for his last home at Mayburn Court was a total of £34 16s.6 Brown himself recalls, in his autobiography For the Islands I sing, that he agreed to the commission at once because ‘At that time I was still poor, and £200 was a lot of money’.7 His apparent anxiety about the commission was conveyed to Senior in his letter of 8 January 1968 with the comment: ‘I don’t know whether I’ll be good at that sort of thing or no’. But Brown may have been protesting a little: he had already produced the text for an illustrated tourist guide in 1948 for the Fort William-based publisher William S. Thomson, entitled Let’s See the Orkney Islands and, regardless of his apparent lack of enthusiasm for the Tapestry later on, he also produced the text for a photographic Portrait of Orkney (published by The Hogarth Press) in 1981 and the foreword for Patricia and Angus MacDonald’s The Highlands and Islands of Scotland (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson) in 1991.8

Throughout January 1968 Brown was ‘busy’ planning his new book, regularly expressing his doubts to the Seniors, and confessing that he was not so good with research and re-appraisal and that he had ‘no idea where the drift of history is taking the Orcadians’. He spent time trying to find ‘some valid and original way to tackle’ the project,9 deciding quite quickly that he would not ‘write some kind of glorified guidebook’,10 but it was not until Candlemas Day (2 February) that he ‘made a start’. Brown began with a chapter on local Orcadian poet and naturalist Robert Rendall, who was a close friend and who had just recently died. Brown wished to ‘contrast him with a medieval Orkney poet’ – eventually to be ‘The Ballad Singer’. 11 He planned, from the start, to have a chapter on Rackwick, the isolated coastal community on the east side of Hoy, that he visited regularly, and he also thought ‘tentatively, of a chapter on Birds and Flowers’, telling Senior that for this he would rely heavily on him and other friends, Becky Bullard and Bessie Grieve. By 9 February he had drafted out the Rackwick chapter and woven in some of his own poems and he proudly stated that he ‘finished with a flush of achievement’ even though ‘the cold light of a second scrutiny will no doubt discover a hundred flaws’.12 That month he also struggled with finding ways of working in elements of the sagas, noting that this creative process ‘was very difficult’.13 His letter of 22 February mentioned his excitement that the Seniors would be moving to Orkney in just five days. Brown may well have decided to dedicate the book to them as a welcome gift. After many years living in Edinburgh and Inverness, the Seniors had decided to make their home in a newly-renovated house not far from Brown in Stromness.14

Further correspondence with Giles Gordon and other members of the production team at Gollancz reveal that publication was planned for July 1969, to catch the ‘summer tourists’ to Orkney.15 Nan Butcher typed up copies from Brown’s manuscripts in Stromness and these were sent backwards and forwards to Gollancz.16 The working title, until Brown changed his mind in December 1968, was Orkney Heritage. Across September and October there was much discussion of illustrations and a cover image for the book. On 8 November Livia Gollancz wrote that Brown should not worry too much about a cover image because the Orkney Tourist Board had sent some photographs for consideration. Ultimately Gollancz chose a picture of Rackwick, credited to ‘Meyer, Stromness’, showing the roof of one of the uninhabited houses, and the fields around (featuring Brown’s close friend Ian MacInnes in miniature)17 and looking out across the bay to the pink sandstone cliffs beyond. Several of Brown’s letters to the Seniors also mention his friend Sylvia Wishart (1936– 2008) and her escapades to visit Rackwick with Brown (and on her own) to paint during the winter of 1968. This was an intense period of Brown’s friendship with Wishart and he recommended her work warmly to Giles Gordon, resulting in the inclusion of twelve new drawings to accompany Brown’s text.18 In 1992, in preparation for a major exhibition of Wishart’s work at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Brown recalled that Wishart had actually been born in the ‘very next house to the one I was born in’. The two ‘got to know each other well’ when they were both in Edinburgh. When they first visited Rackwick together Wishart fell instantly in love with the North house, which she rented and where she produced many of her best works.19 By the Autumn of 1968 Brown wrote enthusiastically to Stella Cartwright that the Tapestry was progressing ‘by fizzes and leaps, like a jumping firework’.20 On 21 January 1969 Giles Gordon sent an advance payment of £125 and on 31 March he wrote to Brown to tell him that the Scotsman had agreed to publish an extract which would appear the weekend before the scheduled publication on 26 June. Brown’s enthusiasm for the project is clearly articulated across these letters, yet, as Fergusson rightly comments, his initial hope to see parts of the islands he had not already visited remained unfulfilled. This was, for Brown, an imaginary and creative, rather than physical, journey.21

The work was a veritable ‘tapestry’ of ideas, themes and preoccupations which became the central drivers for much of Brown’s creative work in the decades after the book first appeared. Brown was aware of and heavily influenced by a group of contemporaries whose publications on Orkney played a central role in the Tapestry. He was close friends with the scholar Ernest Marwick (1915–1977), whose deep knowledge of Orkney folklore, tradition and history was unrivalled. In the Tapestry Brown reproduced a number of the texts included in Marwick’s Anthology of Orkney Verse (1949), including verses of Old Norse poetry, Orkney folksong and more recent works by his contemporaries, including Ann Scott-Moncrieff and the older poet Robert Rendall. Indeed, Rendall was so important to Brown that the Tapestry contains a section dedicated exclusively to his memory and his poetic craft. Brown appears to have wanted to celebrate these Orcadian contemporaries and their work within the Tapestry and he also relies on John Firth’s evocative compendium of ritual, agriculture, and custom entitled Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish (1922), J. Storer Clouston’s A History of Orkney (1932), John Mooney’s St Magnus, Earl of Orkney (1935) and last, but possibly most important of all, A.B. Taylor’s translation of Orkneyinga Saga (1938).

Orkneyinga Saga (and Njal’s Saga) is a powerful presence in An Orkney Tapestry. In his autobiography, Brown describes the Saga as a literary ‘realm of gold’22 and, after discovering it as a younger man, he feasted richly on its accounts of Norse battles, feuds, poetry and martyrdom. Brown wrote to Senior, in February 1969, that he had been ‘translating (or rather, freely adapting) Norse heroic verses for the Gollancz book’. This process, he stated, ‘stretched all my faculties to the utmost, but it’s good for writers to tackle something hard now and again’, and he added, ‘Nothing like it for wiping off the complacent smile’.23 Brown’s admiration for the austere but often humorous tales and heroic cadences of the Icelandic sagas remained with him over the next three decades. But it was the story of the martyrdom of St Magnus – described so richly in the Saga – which was the cornerstone of Brown’s imaginative oeuvre and perhaps even his faith.24 Brown’s first sustained retelling of the story of Magnus Erlendson’s death and subsequent miracles appears in the Tapestry, and this becomes the literary DNA for a large number of future works dealing with Orkney’s Patron Saint – including his play The Loom of Light (1972), the novel Magnus (1973), the opera libretto for The Martyrdom of St Magnus (created by Peter Maxwell Davies and based on Brown’s novel), the son-etlumiére A Celebration for Magnus (1987) and poetry spanning his whole career. Brown’s first attempt at telling the story of Magnus’s passion and death was not easy, and he wrote to Senior: ‘I’ve been tangling all week with Saint Magnus (how does one try to present holiness to a godless generation? [. . .] especially as I know nothing about it myself.’25 However, Brown did situate this story in the centre of his Tapestry, and in presenting Magnus’s martyrdom in both prose and dramatic formats, he created a powerful, modern and idiosyncratic account of a medieval story. The legacy of his various treatments of the martyrdom of St Magnus has proved to be a lasting one, so much so that the most recent translation of Orkneyinga Saga (by Pálsson & Edwards) is dedicated to Brown.

While the sources of An Orkney Tapestry are a significant part of its creative genesis, the book also provided a fertile ground for much of Brown’s future writing, and its themes matured within Brown’s imagination across the years. As his close literary friends, Archie Bevan and Brian Murray, have noted, Brown ‘seemed to have regarded all his verse as “work in progress”, regardless of whether it had been published – and even when it had been in print for as much as forty years’.26 Much of the poetry in the Tapestry found a new creative home in Fishermen with Ploughs in 1971. The Tapestry depicts martial and devout Norse heroism, and this can be traced across Brown’s short stories and notably in his novel Vinland (1992). Orkney’s gentle pre-Reformation Catholicism is a key seam of the Tapestry, published eight years after Brown’s conversion in 1961. The text’s blending of pre-Christian ritual and Catholic liturgy and devotion were to be a consistent feature across the range of his work. The influence of his early teacher, the poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959), can certainly be traced in the ‘Rackwick’ sections of the text, which present a stark, even polemical account of the Reformation in Orkney.27 This criticism of Calvinism in the Tapestry was, however, considerably softened in Brown’s corpus as the years wore on. The myth of progress is also a concern within the early chapters and this is something that Brown railed against – to one degree or another – in many later writings. Brown’s apparent antipathy towards a reprint of the Tapestry later in his life may well have reflected his view that this was a young and experimental text, and that later versions of some of the Tapestry’s warp and weft better represented Brown’s art. But it might also mirror Brown’s growing discomfort (also seen in his later journalism) with expressing his political views quite so freely and stridently.28 In addition, Brown may well have been bruised by some of the critical reception of the Tapestry in 1969.

While most critics hailed the chapter on Rackwick as the text’s finest moment, several reviewers remained unconvinced by the unevenness of the work and Brown’s outspoken views on progress. Fellow Orcadian writer Erik Linklater’s review in the Guardian (10 July 1969) opened with the harsh comment that Brown ‘is a poet, and a poet cannot be expected to compose a guidebook’.29 He was critical of Brown’s preoccupation with the Orkney of the past rather than the present, though he did praise Brown’s retelling of A.B. Taylor’s translation of the sagas and liked Wishart’s drawings. Janet Adam Smith, in The Times Saturday Review (12 July 1969), stated that the Tapestry is a ‘rich, uneven mixture of poetry, drama, history and jeremiad’. She underlined Brown’s aspiration that his readers, and modern Orcadians, recognise the value of community and of their past, within a fast-moving world, but she concluded that Brown is a ‘far better poet than preacher and some of his diatribes on the present run too glibly’.30 Iain Hamilton’s piece ‘Orkney Paradise?’ in The Illustrated London News (2 August 1969) began more positively, noting that Brown was asking ‘questions of the present and the future that have a relevance far beyond the bounds of the archipelago’. Hamilton was keen to underline that the reader would get little from the text if they ‘merely skim its pages’. His review is more of a call to arms to engage deeply with Brown’s ‘historical continuum’ and appreciate his poetic handling of his themes which he states: ‘deliberately eschewed the journalistic, the social-scientific, the progressivist approach to the intricacies of his subject’.31 Pat Barr’s review of the Tapestry in New Society (7 August 1969) criticised Brown’s focus on history, described here as a ‘romantic, misty-eyed nostalgia for the “seamless garment” of the islands’ vanished past’. But it was Barr’s final conclusion that may have been difficult for Brown to swallow. Admiring Brown’s idea of weaving a variety of literary forms together, Barr commented that ‘this patchwork tapestry with its somewhat strident, ill-supported opinions on the nature of demon progress, its snippets of verse and pretentious dramatics, may well prove a disappointment to his [Brown’s] admirers’.32

We have been unable, so far, to find any of Brown’s comments on this mixed critical reception, though undoubtedly he would have been disappointed by such criticism. That said, as Fergusson has noted, the sales of the Tapestry were far in excess of those of Brown’s next poetry collection Fishermen with Ploughs: within just two weeks the Tapestry had sold some 3,000 copies,33 and the paperback reprints suggest that there was still a market for this text in the years to come. Many readers of Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry have travelled north to visit the islands as a direct result of reading and loving this text. The most famous of these was the aforementioned composer Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016), who happened to be carrying a copy of the Tapestry as he headed over from Stromness on the Hoy ferry. Brown’s guest Kulgin Duval was also on the boat, recognised the book and offered to introduce Davies to its author. That evening, in Rackwick, with the help of Brown’s close friends Archie and Elizabeth Bevan, the plan to renovate a Rackwick house was born. It would be here that Max would produce many of his finest works in the decades to come.34

One reviewer for the Listener (21 August 1969) did, however, see what Brown intended and was able to appreciate it. He described Brown’s imagination as ‘heraldic and formal’, ‘stirred by legends of Viking warrior and Christian saint’. He commented on Brown’s poetic voice as being that of the twentieth century but that ‘it utters with the excited plain confidence of the ballad’. He suggested that some readers might find Brown to be ‘eccentric, even exotic’. And he understood that, if Brown’s poetry was, at this point, regarded as ‘the peak of his work’ then this book ‘represents the geology that projects and sustains it’. The reviewer was the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. For Heaney the Tapestry was ‘a spectrum of lore, legend and literature, a highly coloured reaction as Orkney breaks open in the prisms of a poet’s mind and memory’. It was a ‘social history compressed into imagery, imagery expanded into elegiac reverie’. ‘The whole thing’ he concluded, ‘is a kind of loosely organised poem although there isn’t a loosely written sentence in the book. The style is what holds the essays together, plain and carefully locked as a dry-stone wall’.35

Presenting this new edition fifty years on as part of Brown’s centenary, will hopefully give readers a chance to re-evaluate this work in the context of Brown’s complete oeuvre and to decide if, in Heaney’s words, Brown does indeed ‘transform everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney’.36

Linden Bicket and Kirsteen McCue

Foreword

To write a new book on Orkney is no easy matter. Nearly every facet of life in the islands has been described and discussed and catalogued over and over again: the towns and villages, the churches, the fields and waters and skies, the animals, the birds, the shells, the rocks, the weather, the old stones, the language and the place-names, big islands and small holms – above all the people, ‘their gear and tackle and trim’.1

Most writers on Orkney have been practical in their approach. Excellent studies have been published – Hugh Marwick’s Orkney2Norn and Orkney Farm Names; Robert Rendall’s Mollusca Orcadensia; Storer Clouston’s History of Orkney; John Firth’s Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish; and many others.

A few poets – Walter Traill Dennison, Edwin Muir, Robert Rendall3 (he was that rare kind of being, poet as well as scholar) – have been more interested in essences; they have described the vision by which the people live, what Edwin Muir called their Fable.4

This book takes its stand with the poets. I am interested in facts only as they tend and gesture,5 like birds and grass and waves, in ‘the gale of life’. I have tried to make a kind of profile of Orkney, which is not a likeness of today only; it has been worked on for many centuries. ‘I lean my cheek from eternity . . .’6

The facts of our history – what Edwin Muir called The Story – are there to read and study: the neolithic folk, Picts, Norsemen, Scots, the slow struggle of the people towards independence and prosperity. But it often seems that history is only the forging, out of terrible and kindly fires, of a mask. The mask is undeniably there; it is impressive and reassuring, it flatters us to wear it.

Underneath, the true face dreams on, and The Fable is repeated over and over again.

*

I have had to wrench skaldic verse into a shape acceptable to modern readers. Any attempt to reproduce something like the original is impossibly difficult; the Vikings’ poetry is not poetry as we understand it. A. B. Taylor, in his translation7 of The Orkneyinga Saga – which I have read with delight many times – gives Armod’s poem, on ship-watch, off Crete, like this:

We watch o’er the sea-steed

While o’er the stout gun-wale

The billow breaks wildly.

Thus duty is done.

While the lazy land-lubber

Sleeps by some maiden

Soft-skinned and kind,

Over my shoulder

I gaze towards Crete.

It is doubtless a faithful rendering. But wouldn’t the Norsemen who heard the poem for the first time next morning have been delighted, much as Ayrshire farmers when Burns recited Go Bring to me a Pint o’ Wine8 to them? I expect no delight at all for my very free paraphrase; only that perhaps it is more in accord with modern taste; so with all the verse renderings in the ‘Crusader’ chapter.

Night. Sheets of salt.

Armod on watch.

A heave and wash of lights from the island.

The lads of Crete

Toss in hot tumbled linen.

This poet on watch,

Cold, burning, unkissed.9

I have used poet’s licence with the translations of the saga, especially in the ‘Martyr’ chapter, in order to round out a meaning.

*

Edwin Muir is a more important poet than Robert Rendall; some readers will think I should have chosen to write about him. But much study has been devoted to Muir, and there will be more books about him and his poetry in the years to come. Robert Rendall is a fine poet who has been neglected. Half a dozen lyrics from Orkney Variants hold most of the essence of Orkney.

In the ‘Rackwick’ chapter some of my own poems are included.10 They are taken from a long unfinished sequence called Fishermen with Ploughs. Some of those in the present book have appeared in The Scotsman and Transatlantic Review,11 and have been broadcast in the Third Programme. Poems in other chapters have appeared in The Listener and Extra Verse.

*

The book tries to recount some of the events and imaginings that have made the Orkney people what they are, in a sequence of vivid patterns: as women with looms and coloured wools sat in the earl’s hall and wove the events surrounding Hastings, perhaps, or The Stations of the Cross. The predominant web-imagery of the Warrior and Martyr chapters finally decided the title.

*

My thanks especially to Mr Ernest W. Marwick,12 who read over my manuscripts and proofs and, out of his deep knowledge of the islands, made many helpful suggestions. I have mined deeply13 from his Anthology of Orkney Verse: in particular I have tried to resurrect a great unknown ballad, The Lady Odivere, which I first read there. My thanks also to Mr Robert Rendall, East Kilbride, for permission to quote extensively from his uncle’s poetry; to Messrs Faber & Faber and Mrs Willa Muir14 to quote from Edwin Muir’s The Ring; to Mr George Scott-Moncrieff15 to quote from Brig o’ Waith, by Ann Scott-Moncrieff; and to Mrs Nan Butcher for deciphering and typing a difficult manuscript.

Sylvia Wishart’s drawings evoke beautifully the Orkney landscape; they have much enriched the text.

The play The Watcher was suggested by Tolstoy’s marvellous story, What Men Live By;16 otherwise they are as different as a skerry from a steppe.

1

ISLANDS AND PEOPLE

Islands and People

There is the Pentland Firth to cross, first of all. This is looked on as a fearsome experience by some people who are visiting Orkney for the first time. In Scrabster they sip brandy or swallow sea-sick tablets. The crossing can be rough enough – the Atlantic and the North Sea invading each other’s domain twice a day, raging back and fore through the narrow channels and sounds, an eternal wrestle; and the fickle wind can be foe or ally. But as often as not the Firth is calm; the St Ola dips through a gentle swell between Scrabster and Stromness. George Bernard Shaw1 visited Orkney once in the nineteen-twenties. He was impressed by that mighty outpouring of waters. There was power enough in the Pentland Firth, he wrote, to provide all Europe with electrical power. A pair of millstones2 at the bottom of the Firth grind the salt that makes the sea the way it is; the maelstrom called The Swelkie whirls above the place where the querns forever turn (or so the old people believed).

The cliffs of western Hoy rise up, pillars of flame. This coast has some of the tallest cliff-faces in the world, St John’s Head, The Kame, The Berry, Rora Head: magnificent presences. There among them, standing out to sea a little, is the rock-stack called The Old Man of Hoy; very famous now since a team of climbers tackled it before television cameras in 1967, and got to the summit after sleeping a night in the bird-fretted crannies. An imposing presence; but from some aspects the Old Man looks comical, with his top hat and frock coat, like a Victorian gentleman, the last of the lairds turning his back on Orkney.

The Kame of Hoy, and Black Craig in the south-west of the main island, are the wide pillars of the doorway. The ferry-boat turns between them into Hoy Sound, past the green island of Graemsay with its two lighthouses, the dumpy octagon and slim dazzling cylinder. Small brown-and-green humps appear, Cava and Fara, the Scapa Flow islands; and the hills of Orphir. A tall iron beacon, wanly winking, stands in the tide-race. The St Ola turns into Stromness harbour. The engines shut off. The boat glides towards the pier, the gulls, the waiting faces.

This is one way to arrive in Orkney.

Another way is to take one of the cargo-and-passenger boats from Leith or Aberdeen. That way, you arrive in Orkney in darkness. You wake up and already dockers are busy at the cargo. Through a porthole you can see a bustling waterfront. This is Kirkwall, the commercial and administrative centre of the islands.

Or, if it’s speed you’re after, you can drop out of the clouds on to Grimsetter runway by B.E.A. This is not the best way to get a first favourable impression. A gloom of moorland and low hills lies all about the airport. But after three miles the bus tops a rise and Kirkwall is spread out beneath, between its own bay and the most famous of all war-time anchorages, Scapa Flow. From the heart of the town rises the twelfth-century cathedral church of Saint Magnus the Martyr.3 It is, after all, a good way to arrive.

Scapa Flow,4 as the name implies, has been an anchorage since the first longships came out of the east, and possibly earlier. That quiet stretch of water suddenly became the most famous anchorage in the world in July 1914, when the ships of the British Navy took up their silent stations there; issuing out only once to do battle, at Jutland in 1916. In 1916 also Kitchener sailed from Scapa Flow to his death in the Hampshire, round the corner, off Marwick Head. In 1919 a boat-load of children, out of Stromness on a school treat, saw the suicide of the German High Fleet, warship after warship filling and heeling over; the children clapped their hands and cheered at the lavish treat that had been laid on for them . . . In the Second World War, Scapa Flow was still important enough to be a target for bombers and submarines. The most famous victim was the Royal Oak, sunk with four daring midnight torpedoes. Bombs fall everywhere; in the little hamlet of Bridge-of-Waithe was killed the first civilian of the Second World War, standing in his doorway. Ann Scott-Moncrieff wrote a poem about that night.

. . . They were

Flying doon the twa lochs

Following the sheen o’ the water

– Dost thoo mind? Ah, that time o’ night –

And they winned at last to the brig,

Wide Waith that wreaths the salt tide wi’ the fresh,

Whaur swan and eider sweem,

Whaur weed meets ware.

It’s no a bonny place, nither here nor there,

Twa-three hooses and a dull-like shore . . .

Here John Isbister got his death,

Maggie o’ Cumminness wi’ many more

Fearful running to the door

Were stricken doon by door itsell,

Wall o’ hoose, bombazement, shell,

The flying stove, the studdering road . . .5

Kirkwall is a prosperous market town with about 5,000 people in it, a quarter of the total Orkney population. The town has many fine old buildings, one of them a jewel of great price: Saint Magnus Cathedral. It is beautiful, in spite of a clutter of plaques and memorials – the Victorians worshipped themselves in Orkney too. It stands in the centre of the islands, splashed with the red of martyrdom, and the years and the generations fall behind it. Unmoving still, it voyages on, the great ark of the people of Orkney, into unknown centuries.

Monday is the market day in Kirkwall, and the farmers come in from the parishes in their cars. There is no longer a typical Orkney farmer or farmer’s wife; year by year they tend to look more like the town people. But you can still see an old countryman in Kirkwall on a Monday morning; he has red polished cheeks, he looks awkward in his best suit, he speaks in a slow rich wondering lilt, the sentences rising and breaking off at the crest: a good language for narrative and dialogue. In Scotland when people congregate they tend to argue and discuss and reason; in Orkney they tell stories.6

‘Ah,’ said the Hoy minister, consoling an eighty-year-old crofter whose wife had just worn away – ‘ah, now, Jacob, look at it this way – the Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away . . .’

Jacob considered for a while.

‘Weel,’ said he at last, ‘what could be fairer nor that?’

*

The authorities in Kirkwall got to know about one old woman who sold whisky of her own making without a licence, in her peedie place among the hills. An exciseman wandered as if by chance to her croft and asked for a refreshment. A cup of hill-distilled spirit was put before him. He laid a sovereign on the table and drank the wild grey stuff down, and waited for a long time for his change. ‘Na,’ said the old body, when she got to know what he was lingering on for, ‘what I gi’es I gi’es, and what I gets I keeps.’

*

‘We’d do weel to pray,’ said a North Ronaldsay fisherman to his crew as another huge wave broke over them.

It had been a fine day when they launched the boat. Then this sudden gale got up.

Willag was a kirk elder. The skipper told him to start praying.

Spindrift lashed in and over.

‘O Lord,’ said Willag, ‘Thou are just, Thou art wonderful, Thou are merciful, great are Thy words, Thou art mighty.’ Willag faltered in his litany of praise.

The boat wallowed through a huge trough.

‘Butter Him up!’ cried the skipper. ‘Butter Him up!’

*

Two Flotta brothers worked their croft together. They didn’t have much to say to one another.

One of them got tired of the hard drudgery. One day he slipped off without saying a thing to his brother. He enlisted in Stromness for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was in Canada for a dozen years, as trapper and whaler. He got tired of that hard drudgery and decided to come home. He got a passage one autumn.

He arrived back in Flotta. His brother was sitting at the croft fire. He went in at the door.

‘And mercy,’ said the stay-at-home, ‘whare are thu been all this time?’

‘Oot,’ he said.

*

‘Come back,’ cried the fierce young woman from the end of a Hamnavoe pier. ‘Come back and pay for thee bairn.’

She was shouting across the water to Andrew. Andrew had fathered her child, but had refused to acknowledge it.

Now Andrew was in the harbour, rowing the skipper of his ship – a very dignified old man – to shore.

The fierce young woman hoped to shame Andrew before his captain. ‘Pay for thee bairn!’ she cried.

Andrew turned to the skipper. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘there’s a young lady on that pier over there who appears to be addressing you.’

*

The parish of Harray is the only parish in Orkney that has no seaboard. So Harray men are supposed to be very ignorant of the sea.

A Harray-man called Mansie was going to Hamnavoe when he saw a crab on the road – a shell with monstrous claws that slithered diagonally across the road towards him.

Mansie backed away.

‘Let be for let be,’ cried Mansie.

*

Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s son, in his naval uniform, a splendour of gold-and-blue, attended by a glitter of officers, decided to see Maeshowe.

The old caretaker showed His Royal Highness the great stone dome, the tombs, the runic writings.

A young lieutenant of the retinue, thinking to awe the old man, whispered to him that the fine gentleman was the son of Queen Victoria, no less.

The caretaker turned to the prince. ‘And what way does thee mother the queen keep?’ he said. ‘She’s a fine aald body, deed is she. Tell her I was asking for her, be sure noo.’

All the Orcadians had a grave mild wondering speech a generation ago; except of course the professional people – doctors and ministers – most of whom came from the south. But in the towns the shopkeepers began to use a clipped curt basic speech, as if they were imitating business letters, and now this has become increasingly the dominant kind of speech. But in the Kirkwall Mart on a Monday morning, or in a Stromness pub where the older fishermen sit at the beer tables, or in the remoter islands – Westray and Hoy – the fine original speech can still be heard; the slow laconic surging sentences; the few words considerately placed like stones on a dyke.

Farmers and crofters were poor a generation ago, but their poverty was not like urban poverty. They had as little money as the poor of Glasgow; their wealth was in their few acres and animals and children. There was always meat and drink in a farm house – the bere bannocks7 and butter, the dried cuithes, the white cheese, the home-brewed ale – and towards strangers a hospitality almost boundless.

The fishermen sold their haddocks along the street in the nineteen-thirties at threepence a pound. If anything, they were even poorer, living in their little houses above the harbour water, with nothing between them and hunger, between them and drowning, but a yawl.

Nowadays the people are much better off. The farms have been mechanised; land which formerly it was impossible to cultivate has been brought under the plough all over Orkney. A first glance will show how fertile the islands are – a chequer-work of pasture and cultivation from the shore half-way up the hills. The fishermen have bigger boats; they can fish in moderately deep water. They have their own co-operative and so get a secure price for their cod and lobsters and scallops. The life and prosperity of fishermen have always been more uncertain than the farmers’; probably it must always be that way.

The Orcadians are people of high intelligence. Compton Mackenzie8 rates them the most intelligent people in Britain. It has been said that the main exports are whisky and eggs and professors. This is not altogether a joke. Round about the turn of the century there was an extraordinary flowering of intellect in the islands, especially in Kirkwall Grammar School under a fierce talented dominie called Dr McEwen,9 though the Stromness school provided its quota too. In the course of a few years a stream of brilliant students out of Orkney passed through the universities; James Drever, later Professor of Psychology at Edinburgh; John Tait, Professor of Physiology at McGill, Canada; John Bews, Professor of Botany at Natal, South Africa, and later Principal; George Scarth, Professor of Botany at McGill; Robert Wallace, Professor of Geology at Manitoba, and later President both there and at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada; Sutherland Simpson, Professor of Physiology, Cornell; James Gunn, Professor of Pharmacology, Oxford, and Director of the Nuffield Institute; John Gunn, Professor of Pharmacology, Cape Town; John Oman, Principal of Westminster (Presbyterian) College, Cambridge; Sir John S. Flett, Director of Geological Survey; Ernest Shearer, Principal of Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of Agriculture – an impressive roll call from a few green Atlantic islands.

Another of Dr McEwen’s pupils was the poet Edwin Muir, who – he tells us in his Autobiography – was afraid of him. Possibly poets were not so well catered for.

Every island and every parish has a large proportion of intelligent countrymen who, through diffidence or poverty, left off their formal education at fourteen. Some of them are as widely read as any professor, with questing omnivorous minds. One of these self-taught scholars was Peter Leith of Appiehouse, on the parish of Stenness. Every Wednesday afternoon you would meet him cycling home from the Public Library in Stromness with a bag of books over his shoulder. You had to climb up a ladder into his book-stacked loft. No man knew more about the curious by-ways of Orkney history and Orkney character than that gentle silken-voiced farmer. From his reservoir of knowledge he left only a few published papers that he had read to the Orkney Antiquarian Society, some newspaper and magazine articles, a brief history of the church in Stenness.

Another was Robert Rendall, a draper in Kirkwall, who taught himself to be a world-acknowledged expert on shells and the life of the shore, and in the latter part of his life wrote marvellous lyrics, some of them as good as anything that has been published in Scotland this century.

There was John Mooney,10 another Kirkwall businessman of small formal education, author of Eynhallow, the Holy Island; Saint Magnus, Earl of Orkney; and The Cathedral and Royal Burgh of Kirkwall.

One crofter-composer would leave his plough in the half-done furrow when a fragment of a new tune came to him. His wife despaired while his field for the rest of that spring morning was saturated with fiddle music.

There was John Firth,11 a Finstown joiner, who mastered the plain style of prose and wrote a great book called Reminiscences of An Orkney Parish, about the agricultural cycle and parish communal life in the nineteenth century. Labour in the fields was seen as a ritual, a ceremony, a dance of bread.

John Shearer,12 a former Orkney Director of Education, used to tell his Stromness pupils about a contemporary of his, a Birsay boy called Charles Ballantyne,13 who went to Kirkwall for his secondary education. He was a brilliant pupil, unsurpassed in every subject in the curriculum, a kind of Admirable Crichton. He was killed in France in the First World War.

*

The weather is good, if you like a temperate climate. Thermometer and barometer measure our seasons capriciously; the Orkney year should be seen rather as a stark drama of light and darkness. In June and July, at midnight, the north is always red; the sun is just under the horizon; dawn mingles its fires with sunset. In midwinter the sun intrudes for only a few hours into the great darkness, but the January nights are magnificent – star-hung skies, the slow heavy swirling silk of the aurora borealis, the moon in a hundred waters: a silver plate, a broken honeycomb, a cluster of fireflies.

There can be spells of rough weather at all times of the year. Sometimes, winter or summer, the wind breaks bounds and flattens everything. In the great hurricane14 of January 1952 hen-houses were blown out to sea, cockerels raging aloft over the crested Sounds. A fishing disaster happened last century, in June – a sudden gale that caught the herring fleet off Hoy and swamped two boats.

Rain falls at all seasons, but not so persistently as in the Hebrides or the west of Ireland. A city shower is a meaningless nuisance, a liquidity seeping into collar and trouser-leg. In the north, on a showery day, you can see the rain, its lovely behaviour over an island – while you stand a mile off in a patch of sun – Jock’s cows in the meadow a huddle of ghosts, Tammy’s oat-field jewelled; the clouds a rout of fabulous creatures dissolving at last through their prism . . . Nothing is more lovely than the islands in a shifting dapple of sun and rain.