The Horse Fair
Miss Instone said, ‘Children, you were all at the Fair yesterday, I’m sure. Out slates! Out slate pencils! Write a composition on the following – My Day at the Fair…’
Twelve slate pencils squeaked and squealed on slate like mice in a barn.
Willie rubbed honey-of-sleep out of his eyes. He wrote.
I went to the Horse Fair.
I sat in the cart beside old Da.
In Dounby
We left Daffodil in the Smithfield yard.
A policeman was holding on to a man that could hardly stand.
Old Da gave me a penny and a farthing.
Old Da went into the inn.
I bought a bottle of stone ginger at an old wife’s tent.
I saw hundreds and hundreds of people.
I saw Skatehorn the tramp.
Mr Sweyn went on with a long stick and a deer-stalker
And the women curtsied in his wake.
I saw Old Da in the crowd at last.
His face was like a barn lantern.
We stood and watched the tug-o’-war.
What red faces, bulging eyes, what staggerings!
It came on to wind and rain.
The whisky tent
Blew out like a ship in a gale.
Old Da had dealings with the blacksmith,
Nails and a new plough.
The blacksmith wrote numbers and words in a ledger, after he had
licked a small blunt pencil.
The blacksmith
Took a bottle and two glasses from a stone shelf.
He gave me sixpence!
We went home in the cart, Daffodil
Danced all the way!
She struck many stars from a stone.
The fiddler! – I nearly forgot the fiddler.
The whole Fair
Seemed to go round his fiddle. I saw
A coal-black man stretched on a board of nails.
Three farmers,
Quoys and Grayarth and Longbreck,
Seemed like they had red patches sewn on their faces, coming out of
the whisky tent.
Daffodil
Whinnied at the stars, ‘What are you,
Nails or mayflowers?’
The moon was a skull.
Then the moon was bees and honey.
I woke up.
Old Da carried me out of the cart to our fire.
‘Spelling and punctuation need special attention,’ said Miss Instone. ‘Few of you, it seems, had a really enjoyable day.’
Sprinkling of water on eleven slates, rag rubbings, sighs.
Willie spat on his slate and wiped out that day with the sleeve of his gray jersey.
The Orcadian poet, playwright and novelist George Mackay Brown was also, as Douglas Dunn noted in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, “a scholar and historian of his place”. Mackay Brown’s place was Stromness, his birth-town, soul-landscape and life-long home. As several commentators have observed, the small geographical circumference his writing occupied was offset by the span and vividness of his historical imagination.
The Horse Fair is from Mackay Brown’s 1989 collection, The Wreck of the Archangel. Its title poem concerns the occasion when a heavily laden immigrant ship, bound for America from Archangel, or perhaps simply called “Archangel”, ran aground on Westray. One small boy survived the wreck – and, as the poet wrote in his Portrait of Orkney (2014), “there was a family called Angel in Westray until recently.”
There’s a sharp, bright glitter about the poems in The Wreck of the Archangel, an Orcadian stoniness and sea-light. Mackay Brown never conceals or glamorises the facts of working lives devoted to corn and fish, the “ten thousand brutish days/ yoked with clay and sea-slime”, but much in the natural world he records is unadornedly beautiful. Certain images recur: stars, roses, daffodils, honey, spindrift, fierce seas, ice and stone, stone, stone. Lost childhood and lost children are a significant motif, and Mackay Brown’s sense of time is always about to darken the edges of his more transcendent or enduring emblems.
Perhaps, in The Horse Fair, the novelist-poet is imagining a day in the life of the young Archangel-survivor and his adoptive Old Da. The setting is the village school, with a tiny class of 12 pupils under the tutelage of a harsh schoolmistress, the aptly named Miss Instone. The tone of her commands – “Out slates! Out slate pencils!” – reveals a pedagogical method as chilly grey and antiquated as the pupils’ writing materials.
Grittily framed by her italicised pronouncements, the poem purports to be young Willie’s account, as commissioned, of his Day at the Fair. He cuts to the chase, as a child well might: “I went to the Horse Fair./ I sat in the cart beside Old Da.” The most acute observations are directed at the adults. The child makes no judgments about their behaviour: he simply writes what he sees, beginning with the policeman holding onto a man already so drunk he can hardly stand. Mr Sweyn, by contrast, sweeps by grandly, his wealth perhaps, rather than his looks, garnering the appreciative curtseys. The forthright, spontaneous style, often keeping to one short sentence per line, studded with exclamation-marks, carries conviction as a child’s voice but in fact is only a notch plainer than the style the adult poet would often favour. That’s why it’s effective: it’s true to his voice – or one of his voices. The poem’s rhythms are carefully varied, and into their weave are threaded miniature, three-syllable lines (“In Dounby”, “The blacksmith”), as well as a couple that employ the story-teller’s longer breath: “The blacksmith wrote numbers and words in a ledger, after he had licked a small blunt pencil.”
The Horse Fair still has its moments of poetic, almost literary emphasis. “What … staggerings” recalls a characteristic use of the gerund. Later on, nightfall brings out the child’s latent imagination more fully, and there’s an excited, almost ecstatic passage, moving with the quick, uneven trot of Daffodil herself, in a wonderful combination of vision and memory, as if the very moment of a poem’s inception had been captured on the slate:
We went home in the cart, Daffodil
Danced all the way!
She struck many stars from a stone.
The fiddler! – I nearly forgot the fiddler.
The whole Fair
Seemed to go round his fiddle.
As the child grows more thoughtful, observation merges with speculation – what does Daffodil make of the stars? – and there’s a dreamlike experience in which the moon’s skull morphs into bees and honey. The season cycle seems now to impinge, and so too does the Christian calendar. Easter is summoned in the imagery of nails and mayflowers. Surely there’s an intimation of the Three Magi in the reference to the three named farmers – or, at least, the Magi as played by house-to-house Yuletide mummers, with that whisky-glow like “red patches sewn on their faces”.
The tale reverts from the warm fireside of home to chilly Miss Instone and her italics. The children have meanwhile handed in their slates, and now judgement is pronounced. It’s not merely that the spelling and punctuation are criticised, but that the children’s truthfulness is undermined. A sinister comedy lurks in the indictment, “Few of you, it seems, had a really enjoyable day.” We know what joy has infused Willie’s writing, but Miss Instone, expecting sentiments more conventional and possibly less alcohol-laced, has been as immune to the joy as to the literary talent.
The children sprinkle water on their slates and, in dispirited obedience, rub out their compositions with rags: only Willie spits and uses his sleeve , showing a rebellious streak which just might be a note of optimism in the sorry conclusion. If Willie’s story is a version of Mackay Brown’s own, perhaps it contains the seeds of his determination never again to erase his written day. But the reader is left thinking only about the boy whose talent was crushed, and who perhaps never joyfully wrote or read another word after his first, dismal exposure to creative writing, Victorian-Presbyterian style.
Formally, the poem is a microcosm, triumphantly fusing the various arts of poet, playwright and storyteller. It shows Mackay Brown’s affinity with Seamus Heaney and with their common ancestors, Wordsworth and Clare, all of whom found their poetry’s “fair seedtime” in rural childhood. Perhaps one reason that nature poetry passed from English to Celtic hands in the 20th century is that fewer English poets have been able to look back on such a childhood, and the lore and traditions bound up with it. Such poetry might one day be all of nature that remains.
• The Horse Fair is from The Wreck of the Archangel by George Mackay Brown, reproduced by permission of John Murray Press, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton Limited. Copyright © 2014 George Mackay Brown / © 2014 David Dixon.