Margaret’s Hamecomin’ comes hame

KEN PORTER relates a chance encounter with a Doric poet, and looks into the origins of the word Doric

IT WAS one of those sometimes all too frequent chance encounters. There were we, sitting at a Nairn Book and Arts Festival event, waiting for Liz Lochhead, writer, poet and broadcaster, to do her heavenly thing and, as is the ritual, we all switched off our mobile phones respectfully. I turned to the twinkly-eyed stranger sitting on my right and, by way of polite pre-enlightenment conversation, asked her: “Are you a writer?”

I expected an equally polite “No, not really.…”, but my new-found lady friend opened her handbag and understatedly waggled a rather new-looking cellophane-wrapped CD at me.

“Actually, I write a bit of Doric poetry and have just recorded some of them. Fit dae you dae yersel’?”

“Umm, I drive an ambulance these days but used to be a marketer,” was all I could think of at the time. The house lights went down.

“Just the mannie I’m looking for,” she whispered, as Glasgow’s Poet Laureate took the stage.

Margaret Boyd

My chance encountress, fellow Forresian Margaret Boyd, recently published a CD of her own unique poems, Hamecomin’, written and recorded in the Doric dialect of Scotland’s north east, and is now planning to sell copies of the CD, along with mounted prints, cards and screen-printed tea towels of her written poems, at this year’s Forres Toun Mercat on the evening of 26 June.~

The CD’s title, which both reflects and contributes to the Scottish Year of Homecoming, also mirrors Margaret’s own hamecomin’ to Forres when she and her late husband John retired to the burgh in 1996 after nearly three decades living in South Africa’s Capetown, where John had worked as an engineer.

Margaret, who originally hails from the ‘Blue Toon’ of Peterhead, and who found early inspiration in the Doric writings of that town’s Peter Buchan, begins her recording by introducing her fourteen finely crafted Doric poems, most of which were written “just as a hobby” when her retirement gave her the opportunity to spend more time expressing her love of language. And languages – from English to Afrikaans.

In 2003, one of her poems, ‘Aal and Deen’ (Old and Done) was the only one in Doric published in the book Rhyme and Reason, a 176-page anthology of contemporary Scottish verse. Later, in 2008, another of her poems, ‘Healthy Lifestyle’, was published in the Scottish schools language book Fit Like, Your Majesty? and, in May 2009, ‘Grunny’s Sair Feet’ in Nae Bad Ava, the follow-up book. Margaret also read some of her poetry at an Ullapool Book Festival workshop earlier this year.

Her simple, refreshing approach to the Doric dialect is evident in her rhymes which move from the CD’s title track – a wry look at the supposed green-ness of “the grass on the other side” – through the quiet and perceptive wit in her self-explanatory odes to ‘The North East’ and ‘Fit’s the Mannie Sayin’?’, to the contemporary travelogue poem ‘Beijing Trip’.

In the short time we spent in each other’s company, I asked Margaret the inevitable question, “What makes you write?”

“When I retired, and when I lost John, I just needed to find out who I was again. I’d been a wife and mother all those years but had forgotten who I was myself. Writing in Doric just did it for me.”

That, I think, tells Margaret’s story perfectly. By way of a footnote, I find that chance encounters like this often point out some gaps in one’s day-to-day knowledge of things which we casually take for granted. Like why is Doric called ‘Doric’?

Schooldays art classes told me Doric was a classification of classical architectural column style – along with Ionic and Corinthian. In haste, I sought help from the online Wikipedia. It says: As The Oxford Companion to English Literature explains:

“Since the Dorians were regarded as uncivilised by the Athenians, ‘Doric’ came to mean ‘rustic’ in English, and was applied particularly to the language of Northumbria and the Lowlands of Scotland and also to the simplest of the three orders in architecture.”

The term ‘Doric’ was used to refer to all dialects of Lowland Scots as a jocular reference to the Doric dialect of the Ancient Greek language. Greek Dorians lived in Sparta amongst other places, a more rural area, and were supposed by the ancient Greeks to have spoken laconically and in a language that was thought harsher in tone and more phonetically conservative than the Attic spoken in Athens. Doric Greek was used for the verses spoken by the chorus in Greek tragedy.

Use of the term Doric in this context may also arise out of a contrast with the anglicised speech of the Scottish capital, because at one point, Edinburgh was nicknamed ‘Athens of the North’. The upper/middle class speech of Edinburgh would thus be ‘Attic’, making the rural areas’ speech ‘Doric’.

Laconic? Harsh? Phonetically conservative? I ken fit Margaret wad say aboot thon.

The CD can be purchased for £8.99 at Margaret’s Toun Mercat stall, or by telephoning her on 01309 676668.

© Ken Porter, 2009