gmb website - anecdotes

If you would like to contribute an anecdote. memory or photograph
please email
suevic@freenetname.co.uk

It was October 1976. I had made the crossing in the old St Ola to Stromness the day before and was settling in at a local farm B&B. Since the weather was foul, I spent some time in the local bookstore and saw the work of George Mackay Brown featured. I had heard of him from my guidebook as the local poet, but knew nothing more of him other than the photos on the book dust wrappers.

Stepping out into the horizontal rain, I saw Brown himself walking toward me. I was suddenly giddy at the neatness of it all: Local Poet appears on cue. I think I asked if he were the poet George Mackay Brown. When he warily assented, I congratulated him for his excellent work – nothing of which I had read at that point. Mutual embarrassment over, we went our separate ways.

There is a coda. Twenty-three years later, I read Greenvoe, Magnus, and a selection of the poetry. I felt that, years before, a premonition of future grace had opened up briefly in 1976 and snapped shut again.

A reader from Los Angeles, USA

My mother came from Eday in Orkney and I visited that beautiful island from the age of six months until I was sixteen. ( I am now 55 yrs old).

About ten years ago, we returned to the islands and have now bought a ruin, my mother's old home. Thanks to the local builder, we've had it restored. In the intervening years I read the Orcadian [which my Mother had delivered to our local newsagent] and it was through that newspaper that I discovered 'Under Brinkie's Brae'.

I was totally captivated by George Mackay Brown. He transformed what was only a strange vague aching inside when looking at nature into the most beautiful of pictures and I miss his weekly articles more than words can say. For me he put into words the beauty and often the barbarity of the Orkney Islands; from my armchair I could be there head down, facing a howling wind with the rain stinging against my face or warming myself in the sun, growing sleepy with the sweet smell of clover and the sounds of sea and curlew.

I have his books 'Under Brinkie's Brae' and 'Rockpools and Daffodils' among others and so can re-read his articles again but how I wish I could continue to share the changing seasons with him.

MS

cartoon by Spike
In the early days, GMB wrote a weekly column called 'Island Diary' for the Orkney Herald. Bob Johnston (alias Spike) often took up GMB's theme in his witty cartoons; here he depicts the determined jut of the chin and the now famous scarf.

I discovered George Mackay Brown fortuitously during a day trip my family took from Caithness to Orkney. On such trips to places far from home I always look for writers who evoke the locality. G. M. Brown joins a list of writers that includes Hardy and Dostoevsky who, one might say, think globally, but write locally.

JV from Kensington, MD, USA

My husband and I and our daughters spent a year in Stromness in
1976-1977, while my husband taught on exchange at Stromness Academy.

I read all the GMB novels published until we left, and we brought our
copies home. I met George once, in fact, we entertained him to dinner
along with his niece Alison. He was a quiet man, but pleasant company.

I remember seeing him sometimes sitting with cronies on a bench by the harbourfront and hearing him calling out "Aye Aye!", the local greeting, to folks he knew, who were passing by in the street.

HB from Belleville, Ontario, Canada.