The Eternal Present of Boyhood
'What was summer?  A half-forgotten dream. A boy lives in an eternal present.'
     from Under Brinkie's Brae

One of George Mackay Brown's favourite words was marvellous.  He used it about the weather, his friends, music, the Dounby Show, the landscape, and about his penn'orth of sweeties and The Hotspur comic for boys.  He thought it an intense word, shorthand for the kind of state described by poets such as Dylan Thomas, Muir and Wordsworth.  So here we have an introduction not just to what he called his scraps of journalism, but to George himself; his lyricism showed through whatever he wrote.  His modesty is revealed too, and his love of those writers who had a dimension which transcended the ordinary and saw the magic in nature and in life. 

The OED definition of marvellous is 'such as to excite wonder or astonishment' and it seems that George's attitude to life, in spite of his periods of ill health, incorporated a willingness to see beyond the everyday, and to see the wonder in the commonplace. 

George was born in Stromness, Orkney on 17^th October 1921 to John Brown, Postman, of Stromness, and Mary Jane Mackay Brown from Braal, Strathy, Sutherland.  John registered the birth giving the address in Victoria Street, naming the baby after Georgina Mackay of Braal, the maternal grandmother. 

The sixth child in the family, George was to be the last, the one who stayed at home [except for a few years at college] with Mary until her death.  His sister Ruby was born in 1910 [see end note], with Hugh, John [Jack], Harold and Richard [Norrie] following at approximately two-yearly intervals.  Harold, born in 1916, died in infancy. George never knew this brother.  

                        Sing an unknown brother,
                           whose bead of light went out
                        Before the first star. 

In his newspaper column spanning more than 25 years George wrote often about his childhood, in glowing terms except for school.  He refers to school as prison and the holidays as miraculous deliverance for the small prisoners.  

He set off as late as possible, having washed his face in readiness the night before.  Along Ness Road, Alfred Steet, Dundas Street ... his metaphors grew ever more fanciful as he described meeting up with other souls in pain, but always bringing it back to earth by mentioning the syrup and breadcrumbs on their mouths.  Most mornings the bell began ringing when he was still in Boys Lane.  Imagine the scurrying of boots over stone flags and cobbles in the desperate attempt to avoid trouble.  

But in summer they ran in bare feet.  They knew nothing else, did not know they were poor. They found their riches in fields and summer sun.  A revealing passage in Rockpools about the summer holidays, describes a moment which perhaps was indicative of the turn his mind would take in the future.  On a summer afternoon he went alone to a quiet place where he felt a pure joy.  Looking back on that time, he felt it a rare thing, an essential ingredient in poetry. 

In many ways, his childhood sounded idyllic, not just in the way that long golden summers are remembered, but with gentle long-gone pastimes.  Chasing butterflies on Brinkie's Brae,  'dipping' and picnics, first at the Tender Tables and the West Shore and later as teenagers further along at Warbeth, where the Atlantic song was all movement and sound.  And there was the inevitable sand in the sandwiches, flies in the tea.  

And messing about in boats was part of the golden summer.  A time in the early 1930's stands out particularly as the summer of the rowing dinghy, borrowed from a friend's father who was engineer on The Pole Star.  Rowing to the Holms – he likened it landing on some Treasure Island – over the Ola waves, a dizzyingly exciting and fearful journey over the wake of the ship.  At other times, they would drift idly along the waterfront from Stanger's old boatyard in the south, to the New Pier in the north.  Mostly the boat they could borrow was a simple flattie, which perhaps afforded the same fun with less dash.  In the end, George knew that time made such happenings treasures while erasing the dross of life,  but still he held onto his sun-blessed memories. 

One of the boys' favourite sports was fishing for sillocks off Gray's Pier, using limpet or mussel bait on simple hooks.  If the fishing was good, the young fishermen called at houses known to have cats, selling the sillocks for 4 or 5 a penny.  Flower collecting was popular too.  While the girls gathered daisies for necklets and coronets, the boys collected flowers they called soldiers, striking the herb against one another, fighting to a headless death.  Stromness children also collected wild fuchsias, sucking nectar from the bloom, and they gathered mayflowers, taking them home to decorate the windowsills in jam jars.  How could such days not be marvellous?    

Winter's gift of snow was welcomed by the youngsters, described by the 'old ones' as Old Mother Carey's plucking her chickens. Sledging was pure enchantment, occupying many hours until stars filled the night sky.  

At school, they sat on the classroom hot pipes to warm up.  The infants began to make coloured paper chains.  At home, the tall paraffin lamp threw a circle of light from the dresser, for reading or mending socks by.  Stories were told beside the blackened range.  Summer was forgotten, for a boy lives in the eternal present.  He relished winter storms as long as he was tucked up warm in bed.  He wrote his letters to Santa, sending them flaming up the lum. Sometimes they fell down again half scorched but it didn't seem to matter, and the bulging stocking materialised at the foot of the bed: games or a book, an apple and orange, a poke of sweeties, a silver sixpence.   

Occasionally, before his school day began, George stood in as milk delivery boy with a local milkman, delivering by horse and cart, ladling milk from the huge metal churn.  Housewives left a basin covered by a plate with tuppence on it.  Sometimes he had to go into the kitchen where the whole family sat round with plates of porridge, waiting for their milk.  

One memorable day, the horse on the milk cart bolted, wild-eyed, making a thunder of hooves on the cobbled streets, churns clattering in the back.  George thought it the greatest thrill of his life.  The playground must have been alive with story telling when he finally got to school that day. 

George admits to naughtiness or worse, vandalism, with a friend breaking all the window panes in an empty cottage, reassuring themselves that it's emptiness made the act less naughty.  There is undisguised joy in the hurtling fusillade of stones and breaking glass. He recognised the that young boys have a kind of innocence bordering on wildness. 

Sports Day was a welcome relaxation of the school regime.  He records with certain satisfaction that he and his friend Ian MacInnes won sixpence each a few years running for coming first in the three-legged race. 

Sports were also a feature of the annual Sunday School Picnic, an event much anticipated by young George.  Transport to the chosen venue – Skaill or Swanbister – was by horse drawn carts, an aluminium mug tied round his neck.  George and his friends revelled in the slow dusty delights of such progress.  Once there, sandwiches and lemonade, cakes and milk before races on the grass above the beach, again for sixpenny prizes.     

George and his friends were passionately devoted to football.  Communal radio listening was still commonplace; the Brown household didn't get their first wireless until 1936.  So they would listen to the Saturday afternoon commentary at the house of some 'rich kid', or at St Peter's Church [eventually the Community Centre] and later, strain to listen via crackling headphones.

They played football with small rubber balls in the streets, always on the lookout for the two policemen, Mainland and Manson.  More formally, they played a game in the fields with little heaps of coats for goalposts and a dozen times a year, battle took place between the North and South Ends of Stromness. For that they managed somehow to get hold of a real leather football and a few of the richer boys had proper football boots. 

He had his heroes: John Thomson [Celtic being his chosen team] who died saving a goal in a match with their arch-enemies, Rangers.  The stadiums themselves had legendary names – Wembley and Hampden – on a par for excitement with Bannockburn and Flodden in the young mind.  The world of magic extended to local teams and players: Stromness Athletic and the Kirkwall teams Hotspurs or Thorfinn or Rovers.  

The best thing about the local teams was that he could actually see his heroes walking about the streets of Stromness.  The heroes might even speak to the boys from their great height.   

It's evident from George's writings that, as a child, Stromness was the centre of his universe.  His first trip away was when his mother took him, aged 5 or 6, and Norrie [Richard] to Braal in Sutherland where she was born and grew up.   In Rockpools he remembers his grandfather reading aloud from the big Bible, and saying long Gaelic prayers each day.  His grannie gave them milk warm from her cow. He found the area bleak and barren, and lonely compared to Stromness which he said seemed like a throbbing metropolis in comparison. The long trek to the lonely peat moor left him feeling desolate.   

He was 8 or 9 before he even went to Kirkwall on the bus. There was much excitement when his father announced the outing as if, George writes, hehad said Cathay or Xanadu.  He and his brother, dressed in their best Sunday suits, had pockets full of pennies.  The 15 mile journey was pure rapture for George.  John Brown took the boys to meet the proprietor of the St Ola Hotel, a Stromness man who generously gave the boys tuppence each.  The memory which prevails for George was of a group of teenage boys standing round in Albert Street, near the Orkney Herald shop.  He thought their accents strange and even years later thought that the Kirkwall accent stood out from that of the rest of Orkney.  

Another early memory – gleam – was of a few summer weeks spent in the country.  He found things strange and frightening: angry barking dogs, bulls, horses.  He missed the streets and the people, the confines of the piers and closes.  He must have been around 9 years old, but still the kindness and gentleness of the countryfolk made an impression on him.  The highlight seems to have been the day in the week when 'the van' came, and he could trade his penny for sweeties.  Half a century later he describes it in glowing terms as a beautiful moment of exchange.

As an adult, George had a sensitivity and fondness for the seasons and their ritualistic celebrations.  He recounts with relish an early experience of being allowed to stay up long after normal bedtime, at Hogmanay.   Wrapped in a muffler and overcoat he was allowed down to the Pier Head.  At midnight, rockets burst over land and sea, all the boats sounded their sirens and simultaneously the silent crowd burst into life. 

First-footing [the custom of bringing good luck for the year to every home] went on until daybreak. Boys shouted to each other:  'A Happy New Year, a bottle of beer, and a box on the ear'.   

He describes the custom of kissing under the mistletoe, associated with Hogmanay.  A man kissed by a lady had to give a pair of gloves. The lady in return presented a pair of socks. 

Unfolding Mysteries
'New mysteries were about to be unfolded to us:  geometry, Latin, science.'
     from Rockpools and Daffodils

At twelve George was old enough to move from the Primary to the Secondary School.  The transition from the freedom of summer to the restrictions of the classroom was embodied in the donning of stockings and boots, which lent a sense of dignity to the occasion.  Instead of one teacher in one classroom, they were to have several teachers and the excitement of moving from one room to another between times.  

For the first time he was at school with children from outside Stromness; the Secondary School served the West Mainland and South Isles too.  The classes were streamed according to perceived potential. He had a sense of importance with new mysteries to learn: geometry, Latin, science.  In reality, the first sight of cases and declensions on opening his Latin grammar filled him with dismay.  

Boys had to undergo an initiation called dumping;  two older boys – he calls them louts – seized the trembling newcomer by the wrists and ankles and dumped him painfully on the ground several  times.  After that, he was an accepted member of the Higher Grade. 

His taste for reading was developing, not just comics which were generally disapproved of by his elders, but in joining the library he discovered a world of stories about English public schools which became firm favourites.  Later he saw this as his way of entering the world of literature.  

At Secondary School he grew to enjoy the once-hated mathematics, seeing the shapes and forms unfold as pleasurably as music, and he became enchanted by Shakespeare.  In his autobiography he describes how the first line of Shakespeare he ever encountered was so entirely appropriate to his life and his way of looking at things that he felt it should be carved over his door.  'In sooth, I know not why I am so sad / It wearies me....'   He traces the growth of his interest in literature from Grimms' Fairy Tales to Shelley and Keats whose poetry intoxicated him even though it would be another decade before he began to understand its meaning. 

Around the age of twelve, two things occurred which were to have an impact on the rest of George's life.  He started smoking, describing himself as dedicated and dependent on Woodbines at five for tuppence.  At the same time, a severe epidemic of measles hit the school.  George's ears, eyes and lungs were affected and he emerged very much physically shaken.  After a year of semi-deafness, his hearing returned to normal, but his eyes and particularly his lungs didn't recover.  He noticed that he could no longer run around as he had, and often became breathless going up the steep lane to school. The weakness in his lungs was exacerbated by smoking; he was to have many periods of ill-health which he related directly to these early events. 

According to his autobiography, George suffered greatly in adolescence, becoming agonisingly inhibited in class, hiding his face behind his hand.  With no one to talk to about the changes he was experiencing in body and mind, he felt that a part of his mind was unhinged.  He yearned back to childhood, feared what lay ahead, and became convinced every time his mother left the house that she would not return.  He took to shadowing her down the street.  In this state, and with no aptitude as far as he could see for any trade or profession, he remained in education until he was 18.

So when war was declared in 1939, George was still at school.  The English teacher told the class that German forces had invaded Poland. He and his friends found it rather exciting, not understanding the implications, having no knowledge then of places like the Somme and Passchendaele.  He remembers how, in their political innocence and idealism, they had originally been all for disarmament.  Then the confrontation between Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1938 gave rise to outrage at the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.  How they eventually reconciled the hawk and the dove in themselves, he can't quite remember. 

Islanders appeared in Territorial uniform, Ness Battery was made on a slice of the golf course, and Marines arrived to camp at the Point of Ness.  The community was issued with gas masks.

Children were let off school but given work to do, filling sandbags on Warbeth beach.  The weather was glorious and free lemonade made the little interlude delightful as summer gave way to autumn. That winter, The Royal Oak was sunk in Scapa Flow and the first bombers came.  It dawned on the light-hearted sandbag-fillers that after all, this might be a long and terrible war.