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GEORGE
MACKAY BROWN
Greenvoe
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was very little news in the village, on account of the weather.
The shop was as quiet as a mousehole all morning and afternoon.
Alice Voar came in for a twopenny candle, with peedie Skarf
half-draggled among her skirts. Ellen Kerston came in just on the
dinner closing house for a half-pound of tea and a pound of margarine:
to be paid for on Saturday. In the afternoon Ivan Westray
deposited on the floor a flaccid mail-bag, a carton of tomato sauce, a
carton of detergents, and a box of new bread still fragrantly
smoking. Mr. Joseph Evie sat at his desk between the sack of
potatoes and the column of plastic buckets and wrote out the minutes of
the district council meeting. Mrs. Olive Evie stood at the kitchen
table with her spectacles at the end of her nose and a flat iron in her
fist. The mince pot and the potato pot and the cabbage pot bubbled
on the moons of the stove. © GMB 1972 |
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| Reviews A lilting, glorious story ... The Times ....Greenvoe, his first novel, is a poetic, distinguished and totally delightful Orcadian story ... full of humour and sensitivity and of the unsentimental poetry of raw experience ... Mr Brown brings to the great tradition of English social realism a strong poetic impulse. John Whitley The Sunday Times |
