St Magnus Festival, Stromness and Kirkwall, Orkney, 16-21 June 2006

Children and Cat (Shona Ritch), Hamnavoe Man. © Sue Tordoff

TEN YEARS AGO, George Mackay Brown, writer and well loved son of Stromness, Orkney, was laid to rest in Warbeth Kirkyard overlooking Hoy Sound. This year the St Magnus Festival paid tribute to the man and his work.

Morag MacInnes gave the Festival Lecture ‘The Sea, the Street and the Story’. Inviting the audience to accompany her on a journey of celebration, she pointed out that journeying is a key element in GMB’s writing. ‘It is impossible in his work to stay put, the characters must voyage, to come back.’

Morag’s father Ian was George’s best friend at school, a friendship which lasted almost 70 years. For George, the MacInnes family home became a haven of poetry, books, singing, political discussion.

He had a particular story-telling ritual for Morag and her sister. Lighting up his pipe, he lined up the spent matches along the chair arm, as many as it took to get up a good fug. Only then would the story begin, the first match becoming Grandpa Matches and continuing until all the matches had been brought into the story. (Matches is an old Orkney name.)

George’s father worked part-time as a tailor in Peter Essen’s shop in Stromness. The boys would sit quietly under the work table, listening to the men chatting as they worked. If the men knew the boys were there, the talk was all of politics. If the boys sneaked in unseen, the men would gossip about the latest scandal. GMB’s future writing began to be shaped.

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The quiet unassuming poet of Stromness is held in high esteem, both personally and as a writer, and the town did their son proud, this midsummer of 2006

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George was often seen around town doing his messages, sitting talking in a group which became known as the Pierhead Parliament. He knew everyone’s name, and ‘made himself private but companionable’, a popular figure in Stromness. He saw himself differently, with a poor body, a weak constitution; he felt he had to be journalist, it gave him voice to get rid of anger and frustration he felt at being (as he thought) useless.

Later he used poetry in a similar way. As he got older and realised what his mother, Mhari, had sacrificed to support him, he tried to redeem himself through poems for her.

He was absorbed in the Orkneyinga Saga, and as a writer, he learnt from that tradition to hone his work, to ‘cut it to the bone’, to get down to the essence. Morag explained that in spite of critics saying otherwise, this is the way he was able to write about ‘eternal verities’ – compassion for toil and poverty, humanity, loneliness and pain, conditions identifiable in many cultures.

Morag described George as a philosophical moralist of the human condition, and ended by reading the poem ‘Gray’s Pier’, the passage of a life perfectly caught in eight couplets, from the first:

I lay on Gray’s pier, a boy
And I caught a score of sillocks one morning

to the last:

I smoke my pipe on Gray’s pier now
And listen to the Atlantic

At the Phoenix Cinema in Kirkwall, the 2005 BBC film ‘An Orkney Friendship’ explored the relationship between GMB and the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, from their first meeting on the boat to Hoy, after Max had stayed up all night reading ‘An Orkney Tapestry’.

Max was looking for a place where he could write in peace. GMB suggested an old croft house at Rackwick, the ‘valley of light’, and during twenty five years working there, their friendship flourished. The St Magnus Festival was born of that friendship in 1977, soon growing to the international status it enjoys today.

Max introduced the film by citing two of the many things he’d learnt from GMB: firstly that commonplace things may be imbued with divine ritual, and secondly humility. The film expands the theme: ‘GMB makes ordinary everyday words do a great deal of work, tending towards the numinous’.

Max admires the poet, craftsman and human being, and there is perhaps a tinge of wistfulness when he says though he himself has difficulty with faith, George’s faith allowed him still to ask questions. George’s ease with such themes in his work is perhaps one of the things that drew Max to set so many of his poems to music. He is always careful in setting GMB’s work to allow the music already in his words to flow.

GMB was in touch with the rhythms and cycles of life, most beautifully shown in the poem he wrote for Lucy, in 1980 the first child to be born for 32 years in the valley of Rackwick. Max wrote the music. Lucy herself read the lullaby:

Rowan and lamb and waters salt and sweet
Entreat the
New child to the brimming
Dance of the valley

In the film, George himself is seen sitting at his kitchen table – his work station – describing his daily writing ritual; he’s seen walking down the street in Stromness in his eternal duffle coat. He looks uncomfortable in front of the camera, his youthful shyness still in evidence. Gunnie Moberg, photographer and friend, confirms George’s diffidence whenever she produced her camera. It is largely due to her efforts to ease his fears that there is a photographic record of his later life.

Max told of the day, 13 April 1996, he was finishing his ‘Symphony No. 6’. Checking his answering machine, he heard Archie Bevan say that George had died, just about the time he was writing the last notes. The symphony is dedicated to GMB.

The funeral was fittingly held on St Magnus day. George made his last journey past the places he loved to write about – Brig o’ Waithe, Stenness, Maeshowe. Requiem Mass was said in St Magnus Cathedral; Max played ‘Farewell to Stromness’ before George completed the circle, back to eternal silence at Warbeth.

The ‘Trilogy of Films: Orkney’, based on stories by GMB and made by the BBC in 1970, played to full houses. ‘A Time to Keep’ is set in Orkney 50 years ago, ‘The Whaler’s Return’ 100 years ago, and ‘Celia’ refers to present-day Orkney, or rather the 1970’s when it was made.

‘A Time to Keep’, filmed in Rackwick, tells the story of Bill, a young man ostracized by his village for not marrying a local girl, instead taking an outsider for his bride. Misfortune follows as a storm wrecks his barley field and his new wife dies in childbirth.

Here GMB’s recurring theme of the hard life of a farmer-fisherman takes another familiar turn – Bill drinks hard to escape the difficult times and his own helplessness. The villagers rally round when he is widowed, but he spurns their compassion. The story ends with an uneasy rapprochement when he and a neighbour’s sons agree to share labour according to their skills; Bill to do the fishing, while they do the farming, for both crofts.

‘The Arctic Whaler’ is the story of Flaws returning from the whaling, stumbling homewards to his betrothed, Peterina. He cannot resist the call to take a drink along the way, learning in the process that Peterina’s father has died and the funeral expenses are still to pay.

He digs deep in his pocket for his hard earned money, seeing it trickling through his fingers for drinks and debts alike. Finally he arrives at the croft where Peterina sits spinning. Flaws tells her the debts are settled, that he has saved 6 months rent and a few shillings beside, and the wedding fee is paid too. Peterina, content, settles down to make a blanket for their bed, a christening shawl for their first born and shrouds for the two of them ‘for no man can tell the day or the hour’.

‘Celia’ is a stark telling of a young woman’s decline due to alcohol dependence. There is a suggestion that the character Celia was based on Stella Cartwright, a young woman briefly engaged to GMB in Edinburgh.

Celia lives with her stepfather Thomas, local shoemaker, and entertains men in return for the drinks they bring. Thomas (a poignant performance from Fulton Mackay) is sick, desperate to see Celia married and her future assured before he dies.

In a heart-rending monologue when the minister comes to visit her, Celia (played with depth and sensitivity by Hannah Gordon) tells of the suffering she sees around and can’t endure, of her childhood when she lost her father, and of her need for alcohol.

Ultimately Celia is redeemed by her compassion for the dying Thomas, finding strength to turn her back on alcohol and the men who used her. If this is truly a reflection of Stella, then perhaps GMB expressed his dearest wish for her, that she could find her own way of redemption.

Drink and redemption are at the heart of the three stories, and at the heart of George’s own story. GMB’s own redemption came through writing with hard won understanding and compassion. Additional themes of toil and the hardship of poverty are universal and timeless. The films captured the essence by spare use of dialogue, by inviting local people to take part, and by allowing the landscape to speak for itself – the shots of rough sea and small boats speak eloquently of peril.

‘A Hamnavoe Man’ is the dramatised story of GMB’s life, using extracts from his writing. And like GMB’s own work, the drama sets his life in the context of the people of Orkney, and Stromness in particular. Promenade theatre works well here: the story unfolds as the audience journeys along the main Stromness thoroughfare, ‘a street uncoiling like a sailor’s rope’.

Scenes from the Flattie Bar to the Pierhead and along the street to Clouston’s Pier move effortlessly with the help of two narrators, the Cat and the Man. Cats make regular appearances in GMB’s work, (whole books devoted to them) and the duffle-coated Man is a sort of everyman figure with a nod to the writer.

On the steps of the Stromness Hotel, we see John Brown meeting Mhari Mackay and learn that though she initially thought John ‘forward’ for stealing a kiss on their first meeting, Mhari soon fell for his charm and married him.

At Clouston’s Pier we see young George at different ages, fishing for sillocks off the pier, playing football, but already with an interest in words and an ear for a good tale. In adolescence George becomes introverted, suffering agonies of insecurity and shyness, illustrated with passages from his autobiography ‘For the Islands I Sing’: ‘it is certain that parts of my mind were unhinged.’

The promenaders next enter a darkened Town Hall where children and adults weave words, dance and music into a mystic pattern of circles, representing the timeless rhythms of life and death. Redemption, with the figures of Christ and Magnus the Martyr, is at the heart of the circle, and the prayer echoes ‘St Magnus, keep for us a jar of light, beyond sun and star.’

GMB’s poem ‘Hamnavoe’ is portrayed in an old sea close, a moving testimony to his father who died when George was 19 and just beginning to get to know him as an adult.

Themes dear to Geoge’s heart make up the last scenes. Childhood games and carefree innocence (energetically played by the children of Stromness Primary School) are interrupted by the arrival of Ikey, a vagrant, who portrays a darker careworn side of life, scavenging along the beach for things to sell.

And at last the audience is led by Ikey and the children to the steps of Mayburn Court, where GMB lived for almost 30 years. Ikey senses his life is coming to an end, the circle is almost complete. Man, the narrator, speaks of the coming silence at the heart of all things.

The performances and scenes, though ambitious, worked well to evoke a wonderful atmosphere and flavour of GMB’s life and work against the backdrop of Stromness.

There were other GMB related events in the Festival: several exhibitions, a performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ ‘A Hoy Calendar’ by Capella Nova, and a Johnsmas Foy featuring new Orcadian writers, all paying tribute to GMB for his influence and inspiration. But the Lecture and ‘A Hamnavoe Man’ stand together as a synopsis of his life and work, informative, often amusing, touching and above all affectionate.

The quiet unassuming poet of Stromness is held in high esteem, both personally and as a writer, and the town did their son proud, this midsummer of 2006.

Sue Tordoff edits the website www.georgemackaybrown.co.uk

© Sue Tordoff, 2006