Mary Jane Mackay Brown

 
A Fountain of Endless Cheerfulness

Mary Jane Mackay Brown [Mhari Sheena]
1891-1967
'There was in her a fountain of endless cheerfulness that no reverse or disaster could choke for long.' 
     from Northern Lights:  a poet's sources

George Mackay Brown's mother came from Sutherland on the North coast of Scotland.  She was one of nine children, born 4^th June 1891 [see end note] to Hugh and Georgina Mackay in a hamlet of half a dozen crofts, called Braal, near Strathy in Sutherland.  Hugh, nicknamed Gow, was a crofter-fisherman, a common combination for hundreds of years in Scotland and the islands.  George was named for his maternal grandmother.   

George believed his branch of the Mackay clan was uprooted during the clearances in the 19thC, moved to the 'bare and bleak and stony' land northwards, on the Pentland Firth coast.  Their old skills were not fitted for boat building and fishing.  They had rarely dealt in money, but bartered chickens and pigs.  

Mary spoke only Gaelic until she started school: 

                        There, sixth of nine children,
                             Mhari spoke the ancient Gaelic
                             Till the English schoolmaster came
                             To cleanse their tongues of that music.  

The schoolmaster punished the children with the tawse [leather strap] for speaking Gaelic, even in the playground.  It must have been bewildering and fearsome for a tiny girl whose only words of English were 'yes' and 'no'.  Little Mhari Sheena had to become Mary Jane. 

When she was about 15, Mary travelled to Stromness in Orkney on the St Ola to find work in the new Stromness Hotel built and owned by a Mackay from the same area as herself, a distant relative.  It wasn't an easy crossing in any sense; George describes her as grey-faced from the Firth, and many questions must have filled her mind about the sin of working on the Sabbath and the propriety of the Stromness Town Hall dances – she had, by today's standards, a strict religious upbringing in the Free Presbyterians, one of the sterner Calvinist sects.   

In time, Mary Jane Mackay was drawn to John Brown, perhaps at one of those dances.  They married on 23^rd June 1910 in the Free Presbyterian Church of Strathy; she was 19 and he was 34.  A passing company of tinkers played the fiddle and danced at the wedding celebration, while  

The bridegroom, he was drowning
            In a sea of lovely Gaelic.  

John Brown was a popular figure in Stromness, and to Mary's astonishment the St Ola crew paid him the honour of decking the ship with flags for the voyage back home with his bride.  They made their home in Alfred Street where their first child, Ruby, was born. 

In For the Islands I Sing George describes Mary as a beauty with blue eyes and dark curls who had an expression of great sweetness and gentleness.  She was a woman who was well-liked all her life, with one exception.  When the Browns lived in a little rented house at Clouston's Pier [where George was born], the owner lived further down the pier.  The woman became deranged, reputedly because she narrowly avoided a bigamous marriage to a naval man, and she took against Mary for no apparent reason.  George aged 6 came across his mother in tears; in that instant he felt his mother turn into a stranger, a shattering experience for him.  
They had to leave Clouston's Pier,                                                             Alfred Street, Stromness
and moved to Melvin Place.

Around the same time, Mary took George and his brother Norrie [Richard] to Braal for a summer visit.  He hadn't even travelled as far as Kirkwall at that time.  By his own admission, he was sensitive, upset by people or events not part of everyday Stromness life, so much so that he once fainted on the doorstep when a tinker woman came selling haberdashery.  What effect would this first venture over the sea 'south' have on such a child? 

He relates that his childhood is remembered in 'gleams' an apt term for those highlights of memory. One of the gleams was of the area around Strathy which he found bleak and barren compared to the green Orkney hills. He made it sound a fearful place where the 'rone monster' lived on the sea cliffs, where he fell into a burn, and there wasn't even a sweetie shop to make it endurable.  Stromness seemed like a  throbbing metropolis by comparison.  He remembers his stern Grandfather reciting long Gaelic prayers each dinner time. 

Today, the sole inhabited house in Braal is of a later date and the Mackay croft is in ruins, along with all the old houses. The line of house walls is still visible, and an occasional adjacent barn or byre.  It is a scene he conjures many times in his writing, the death of the hearth-fire, the rusted pot and kettle, fallen roof stones.

Managing a household of six children must have been hard for John and Mary.  One child, Harold, died in infancy.  They lived in little stone houses in various parts of Stromness; after Alfred Street came Clouston's Pier off Victoria Street where George was born, then Melvin Place.  Space was at a premium as well as money, but though they had little, the cupboard was never actually bare.  Mary liked flowers and would bring indoors a jar of bluebells or maybe 'curly doddies' (white clover).  Amid the smells of steamy washing. hot ironing and the cooking of oatcakes and bannocks, she kept a sense of beauty in her little cramped houses.  In Well Park, a new council development in the 1930's, Mary finally had a bit of space indoors and out, with gardens front and back and a riot of blooms. 

The days had an order for Mary as for most other folk in those days:  Monday for washing, Tuesday for ironing, Friday for baking. Unlike many other women of her generation and later, she neither knitted nor sewed.  Her husband, John a part-time tailor, made the children's jackets and trousers.  Saturday was for shopping.  Her days were full: 

                        She was never free, like the lipsticked shop girls
                        On Thursday afternoon;  all her tasks
                        Were like Bluebells in a jar on the window sill.                       

Mary suffered from asthma.  Prostrating attacks in the summer months left her unable to continue with her household tasks for days at a time, sometimes as long as a fortnight. 

Still, she laughed and sang as she worked and George had the feeling that the old Gaelic work chants and music still lived in her.  The rhythms and cadences of her early Gaelic surely overlaid her late-learnt English, and had an effect on the embryonic poet; his work is full of lyricism so rich that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies set over 30 pieces to music.   

When George first became ill with tuberculosis in 1941, the year after his father's death, Mary supported him for 2 years until he began to receive some benefit via the National Health Insurance, even buying him cigarettes on Fridays.  He describes those years of solitude and sickness and poverty as made bearable by his mother's generosity. He quietly and subtly praises her for her care, especially in the decade after his stay in the sanatorium in 1941 when she would bring him breakfast in bed while he wrote what he called his little poems.  By his own admission, he did nothing in the house.  Many folk, he guessed, thought he was a wastrel but Mary still looked after him 

During the war, after John's death Mary took in lodgers. The sudden influx to the islands of 60,000 soldiers plus thousands more construction workers meant that many households did the same.  Fuel was scarce but she kept on with her baking in her unflappable way. George was still at home along with his sister Ruby who became a teacher.  The three other brothers all married.

In his autobiography, written for posthumous publication and found among his papers by his executors, George wrote about the difficulties and pleasures of alcohol.  It must be difficult for any mother to witness a son's drunkenness, and with Mary's Free Presbyterian upbringing, perhaps especially so.  But George relates that she was incensed when the neighbours gossiped on one occasion when he was brought home by the police.  She refused to believe he had been brought home in the Black Maria, it was a grey van.  Otherwise he describes her attitude to his drinking as mild disapproval or silent anger.  The silent anger was perhaps justified as he was often led home and dumped on the doorstep like a sack of potatoes, while the dinner she had cooked  spoiled in the oven. 

In 1967 when his first book of short stories A Calendar of Love was published, Mary remarked that there was nothing in it but drinking and pubs.  And on reflection, George decided this was true.

There is a quirky little anecdote that might give a clue to another part of Mary's personality.  She read the tea leaves for her neighbours over the morning cuppa.  George seems to infer that she made it all up, noticing recurring phrases.  Was she a closet entertainer?  Or did she have a trace of the fabled Gaelic feyness about her? 

Mary always loved to travel, though with little money there were few opportunities apart from farm visits within Orkney.  Once she flew from Howe aerodrome near Stromness to Thurso, on her way back to the family home in Strathy.  In later life, she made annual trips to Aberdeen, and Edinburgh where she had three granddaughters and she loved to shop at Marks and Spencers.  Once she travelled as far as Dorset.   

On her last trip to Edinburgh and Aberdeen, she stumbled and fell in the corridor of the train.  Whether this fall did damage is not known, but from then on she deteriorated rapidly through periods of suspicion, untypical anger and memory loss to a great physical weakness.  Periods of relative lucidity came and went until finally she viewed George as a suspicious stranger.   

George records her death on 3^rd November 1967 in Northern Lights: 

                        At her name's telling,
                        a light breaks
                        still
                        on older Hamnavoe
                        faces. 

We can read between the lines of his feelings about Mhari Sheena.   And in the poem Mhari he writes a subtle poignant verse. 

                        The first dark petal fell,
                        The others, a cluster of shadows,
                             Flower of oblivion
                             About her gentle turning away. 

George speaks in retrospect of the complex of guilts he felt when Mary died, about causing her distress through over-indulgence in drink, for not having conventional success, for falling sick, and for converting to Roman Catholicism.  Blame and censure is often a mother's lot in today's post-Freudian society, but Mary loved and mothered George, accepted him and his lifestyle with cheerfulness and often with supreme tolerance.  He seemed surprised that, given her Calvinist upbringing, she made no objection to his conversion, in fact she enjoyed the visits of the priests.  He writes an enlightening paragraph at the end of his memorial to her in Northern Lights  where he cites his belief that what once has existed can never die.  His belief in the Eternal is expressed with his usual lyricism, and there is no doubt of its meaning for him.   

Note:
George says there is some discrepancy about her date of birth. Although she always said 4^th June was her birthday, after her death her found her birth certificate which said 2^nd June 1891.