Diary of a Shopkeeper, 14th February
Photo courtesy of Orkney Library & Archive
In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote a column about a favourite Edwin Muir poem, ‘The Horses’. Its picture of a strange, silent, post-apocalyptic Orkney was eerily prescient of the spring lockdown, when shops were shut, roads were empty, and birdsong was the loudest thing I heard on my delivery rounds.
Now, in the biggest freeze we’ve seen for decades, another Muir poem comes to mind: ‘Scotland’s Winter’.
Muir often wrote about a golden age in the distant past and contrasted it with a leaden here-and-now. Sometimes he talked about Orkney this way, sometimes the country: ‘Scotland’s past is a romantic legend, its present a sordid reality.’
Usually, he blamed the Scottish Reformation for the destruction of much that was good, repeatedly castigating 16th century zealots like Andrew Melville and John Knox. It’s a mark of how thorough the social liberalisation of the 1970s and 80s has been, that Knox, who Muir considered a crucial influence on the nation even in the mid-20th century, is now of interest to no one but historians and theologians.
Often Muir looked back to medieval times, holding up noble figures like Douglas, Wallace and Robert the Bruce as symbols of a healthier, happier country:
All the kings before
This land was kingless,
And all the singers before
This land was songless.
In ‘Scotland’s Winter’, he imagines them lying dead but attentive, frozen under Scotland’s icy surface, while we moderns walk carelessly over their graves, our footsteps tapping on the ice, inadvertently mocking men who should be revered as heroes.
Worse, Muir thought, the average contemporary person lived a ‘poor frozen life’, one of ‘shallow banishment’ from a rich past of freedom, culture and content.
I’ve been reading Muir for more than 30 years and admire a lot of what he wrote. But I do think he got brain-freeze sometimes, including in Scotland’s Winter. It’s a vividly imagined landscape, but does it really make sense?
Why should we worry about being kingless? What, as Professor M. Python said, have the kings ever done for us?
And when were Orkney or Scotland ever songless? Never, if you had ears to listen.
As for the majority of us leading poor, frozen, shallow lives, that’s just condescending.
The heroes of the moment are the men and women, ordinary Orcadians, who drove snowploughs, gritters, tractors and 4X4s this weekend to keep Orkney moving. They cleared drifts, made roads safe for essential travel, pulled vehicles out of ditches – more than likely preventing loss of life in the harsh conditions. I didn’t see many kings driving loadalls up the Howe Brae.
When Muir belittled the ‘common’ people, represented in his poem by an emblematic ‘miller’s daughter’, he was probably writing more in sorrow than in anger. Scottish history and literature are more widely taught in Scottish schools than they were in his day. And Orkney literature and language are no longer shunned in the classroom. That’s progress.
Muir, who grew up on a small farm in Wyre, described himself as having been born before the Industrial Revolution. He had a gentle, unworldly manner, friends said, leaving his more assertive wife, Willa Anderson – a notable writer herself – in charge of most practical matters. I suspect he would not have felt at home in the internet age.
But if he did return to Orkney in February 2021, what kind of poem would he write? He might begin the same as he did seventy years ago:
Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill
The sun looks down from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.
The end of the poem would surely be less pessimistic, despite the troubles of the moment – health, economics, politics – piling up as high as snowdrifts.
The miller’s daughter would not be wandering aimlessly with a basket over her arm. Rather, she’d have a laptop in her bag, and be heading off to UHI to do some research for her MLitt at the Institute for Northern Studies. Knox is gone, and deference to long-dead aristocrats is disappearing as quick as snow off a dyke.
The heroes are not buried under the ice: they are clearing the ice so we can all move forward.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 18th February. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions. You can read all of ‘Scotland’s Winter’ here: https://allpoetry.com/Scotland's-Winter