Diary of a Shopkeeper, 19th September

There’s been no dramatic announcement of its arrival, but autumn is definitely here.  I noticed it when I opened the shop first thing on Thursday: a chill in the air as I unlocked the door.

And after the coolness came the crunch.  The leaves from Gorie’s Oak, gathering in drifts in our courtyard, crackled and krowed underfoot as I pushed the wheelie sign onto Broad Street.

Not for the first time, a tourist stopped to admire the oak and ask some questions about it.  Luckily, it does have an interesting life story.

In 1859, James and Margaret Kirkness opened their grocers and wine merchant at 15 Broad Street, where The Longship clothes shop is now.  They had seven children, but most moved away to Glasgow or London, at a time when employment opportunities were shrinking in Orkney, so it fell to bachelor son John to take over the shop after his parents’ retirement. 

Margaret Kirkness died in 1915, and James in March 1918, aged 87.  Sadly, John only had a few months in sole charge of the shop, as he died unexpectedly in September 1918.  He had no children, so there was no one obvious to inherit what was a well-established and successful business.

Not quite as far away as Glasgow or London was Peterhead, and it was there that John’s sister Mary lived with her husband,  John Gorie, a Stronsay man, who had also left Orkney due to shortage of work.  (Different from 2021, when the shortage is not of job opportunities but of people available to fill them.)

After lengthy deliberation – for they liked the bustle of Peterhead – John and Mary Gorie decided they would come home to Orkney.  And on 1st February 1919, James Kirkness, Grocer, became Kirkness & Gorie, as it remains to this day.

‘And where is the oak tree in all of this?’ you ask.  The oak tree is still an acorn, and the acorn is in the crop of a pheasant.   

The family legend is that a friend somewhere in the Highlands sent John and Mary Gorie a gift of two pheasants wrapped in newspaper.  When Mary prepared the birds for roasting, she found a large seed in the crop of one of them, and went downstairs from the flat above the shop.  Where Kirkness & Gorie is now, as well as the Deyanov Dental Clinic, was their backyard and garden, stretching down to Castleyards.

But Mary didn’t walk that far.  She stopped just a few yards from her back door and pushed the acorn into a flower bed there.  Within a few years a sapling was standing strong and slender.  By the 1980s, when Ola Gorie Jewellery was expanding its offices and workshop, the oak was so big and beautiful that cutting it down was unthinkable: the buildings were arranged around it.

And now, a century after it was planted, Gorie’s Oak fills our courtyard every summer with cool green shade, and is frequented by blackbirds and wood pigeons.  It’s never grown particularly tall, just five metres or so.  I always imagine it pushing a branch up above the height of the surrounding buildings and thinking, “Oh!  Too cold and windy up there – better coorie down here in the shelter.”

It’s not an exotic species.  It is, after all, the Common Oak, Quercus robur.  But it’s a beautiful old tree, right outside our shop door, and it connects us back in time to our great-grandparents and the early days of Kirkness & Gorie.

And because of that, we forgive it the hundred thousand leaves it sheds every autumn, which we have to crunch over, and sweep into piles, and shovel into binbags, and take home to the compost heap – day after day, year after year, shopkeeper after shopkeeper.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 22nd September. 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.