Diary of a Shopkeeper, 22nd August
I can’t think of another Orkney shopkeeper who wrote a regular column for The Orcadian, but two of Kirkwall’s most notable authors were shopkeepers.
Robert Rendall – poet, nature writer, conchologist – worked all his life in the family drapers, George Rendall, at 1 to 5 Albert Street, currently occupied by The Brig. Just across the road, historian and folklorist Ernest Marwick served for several years in Stevenson’s bookshop, now Aalfiredup, before becoming a journalist with the Orkney Herald.
And a couple of doors down, Christina M Costie worked as a clerk in Macrae and Robertson, where Scholes CA is now located.
What a literary powerhouse was contained in those few yards of shopping street!
Strangely, they rarely wrote about Kirkwall, where they lived and worked, and certainly not about their daily toil in shop and office. Marwick’s historical writing did of course involve occasional tales from the town’s ancient past, but I’ve never read anything by him about the experience of daily life in 1950s Albert Street and Willowburn Road.
Similarly, Robert Rendall was always drawn to the shore – often Birsay and the Head of Work – for his prose, and his poetry took inspiration from there and other rural locations, notably Westray. I’d love to read his observations on measuring up a suit or assessing the quality of a bolt of Harris tweed, but as far as I know he never committed this kind of thing to paper:
He was aye vaigan b' the semmits,
An' climman roond the coonter,
Swappan among the socks,
Or takkan up some baggy breeks.
Chrissie Costie, too, favoured rural locations for her stories and poems – some recognisable, some abstracted into generic north or south isles settings. And none the worse for that: It allowed her to pierce to the heart of a character or story without their real-life origins being detectable.
However, it has left something of an empty space in Orcadian literature where Kirkwall should be. A void you might say.
On the night of Saturday 21st August, a significant contribution to filling that hole was made by the publication of a debut book of poems by Kirkwall-born poet Kevin Cormack: Toonie Void.
Kevin’s poems namecheck Mounthoolie Lane, Buttquoy, and the back bar of the Kirkwall Hotel, amongst other well-known locations. But even when there’s not a name to signpost the reader, the atmosphere of The Toon is everywhere, and unmistakeable.
Kevin read from and spoke about his book at a launch event upstairs at Kirkjuvagr, as Saturday nightlife surged and ebbed the length of Shore Street, outside the distillery’s plate glass windows.
It was a fitting backdrop, for the life and language of contemporary Kirkwall surges through every line Kevin writes. His work is unmistakeably Orcadian, and connected to the great dialect writers of the past, but it’s also completely at home in the 21st century:
The planes clear thir throtts
tear doon the runway
an tak off above the shipwreck.
And:
Wur doppelgängers welcomed us
wae cult-like smiles, trestle tables
decked oot wae wur stoor-blind
bruck, at the Hell’s Half Acre
ker boot sale.
There’s a lot of humour in the poems, and a lot of emotion too. There’s work, religion, youthful bravado, mature refection, threats and fears and mystery. There are tributes to Margaret Tait and Jim Baikie. There is illness, death and love. And there is one striking phrase after another, one clever rhyme after another, a startling image that captures a feeling or an insight – and then another, and another.
But this isn’t a review of the book. It’s a celebration that the book exists, and that the ‘toonie void’ that is Kirkwall’s place in Orcadian literature is starting to get filled in. Further evidence for this was provided by two other excellent Orkney-language writers, who read in support of Kevin, Simon Hall and Alison Miller.
Alasdair Gray famously wrote in his landmark novel, Lanark, ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city. Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ His answer was: because nobody imagines living there. The same could be said, adopting Gray’s lines, of Kirkwall:
Think of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because they’ve already visited them in detective novels, films, the Beechgrove Garden. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
What is Kirkwall to most of us? A house, the place we work, the show park or the golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the Picky and the old library.
And when our imagination needs exercise we use it to visit Muirhouse, River City, Rebus-land, Hamnavoe a hundred years ago, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively, Kirkwall exists as a bad song about a bay, and a few tourist leaflets. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.
Not any longer. Now we have Toonie Void.
You can buy Toonie Void and other Abersee Press publications from Stromness Books & Prints, Kirkness & Gorie or here:
Thanks to Mark Jenkins of Kolekto for the beautiful video. And to Alison Miller for the thumbnail portrait of Kevin at the launch of his booklet.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 25th August. 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.