Orcadian cadences: celebrating the reclusive poet George Mackay Brown

Few journalists can have conducted such a dismal interview as mine with George Mackay Brown in the summer of 1992. The Times had sent me to Orkney, and the night before we met I sat up in my B&B reading his poetry, spellbound. So much to ask him! But that first meeting was a disaster. Brown was so shy he answered my questions in monosyllables. After five minutes he sat back and rested his lantern jaw on long hands, silent. Seamus Heaney called Brown ‘the praise singer’. There was no singing that afternoon.

But the next day I ran into Brown at Mass (he was that rare thing, an Orcadian Catholic). He invited the whole congregation — five of us — to tea. In familiar company he was transformed: a generous host, a brilliant raconteur. As I left, he showed me something that had arrived in the post: a facsimile of the letter Mary Queen of Scots wrote to her cousin the King of France the night before her execution. He drew my attention to ‘the firmness of her script in the face of death’.

Soon after I got back to London, a letter arrived with a Stromness postmark. ‘I hope you will come back often, Maggie,’ Brown wrote. ‘I feel you belong here in Orkney.’ I did go back, often, and an unlikely friendship blossomed. A few months before he died, he gave me his blessing to write his life.

On 17 October it will be 100 years since Brown was born, the sixth child of a postman and tailor, into a family so poor that he and his siblings ran through the Orkney summers barefoot. Polygon are marking this with three handsome editions of Brown’s works.