GMB

Almost 40 years syne, my sister-in-law ventured to work as a primary teacher in Orkney. She had a flat in the school hostel, and the matron - who took her under her wing and became a close friend - was one Hazel Brown. Hazel was the widow of George Mackay Brown's brother, Norrie. I met him once in Stromness - he was a shy man. But through the connection have a dozen of his works on my shelves, birthdays and Christmases mainly, each with a personal word on the flyleaf.

There's no doubt about it - George was a strange and enigmatic man. But what sublime skill with words and with thoughts. His life was hard, and he didn't do a lot to make it easier. But he did see to the heart of things in an Orcadian way.

Into the hands of every unborn soul is put a lump of the original clay, for him to mould vessels - a bowl and a lamp - the one to sustain him, the other to lighten him through the twilight between two darknesses, birth and death. He refreshes himself, this Everyman, with mortal bread; he holds his lamp over rut and furrow and snow and stone, an uncertain flame. Now and then the honey of a hidden significance is infused into his being. By the vessels that he has moulded to his wants he calls this mystery of longing The-Immortal-Bread, The-Unquenchable-Light . . . At death he leaves behind the worn lamp and bowl, and (a peregrine spirit) seeks the table of the great Harvester, where all is radiance and laughter and feasting.

And some there are - God take pity on every soul born - that love their lamps and their bowls more than the source from which clay, corn and oil issue for ever; and, their vessels failing at last by reason of age or chance, they set out dark into the last Darkness, a drift of deathless waiting hungers . . .

from An Orkney Tapestry.... George Mackay Brown. 1969

The biography just published by Ron Ferguson will be read soon.