On my last visit to Orkney—my third—driving between Orphir (birthplace of John Rae) and Stromness (birthplace, and also death place, of George Mackay Brown) I hit and killed a curlew. It ran out just in front of the car; both it and I were going at a lick; I barely had time to notice it and it was gone, split off like a mottled feathered billiard ball into another universe, with the lightest of memorial thuds.
The curlew, when it is not scampering across the Orphir-Stromness road, is a bird of the watery margins, next-world adjacent.
Numenius arquata, it is called, bird of the curling new moon beak; bird of the ghostly cry. Not a bird which makes ghosts.
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James Whitley, in questioning the ubiquity of the ancestors in British Neolithic archaeology, marshals another argument. If, he wonders, the barrows dotting the British Isles are the locales of the ancestors, why is it that they are almost always associated in folklore, not with ancestors, but with ghosts, spirits, fairies, or trows?
Who is to say, however, that ghosts and ancestors are not self-same? Or that the further back you go, the more volatile, en-spirited the ancestors become? The more etherealised, imperceptible their bodies, the more removed their worlds? The God of the great monotheistic religions might, in the end, be nothing more than a distillation of the million-boned ancient ancestors, stone-axe hominin forebears become pure spirit in the slow seep and drip of compressed millennia.
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In Orkney, it is certainly true, there are a great many ghosts. Notwithstanding my rational contempt for the supernatural, I spend the most frightened half hour of my life exploring Noltland Castle on the island of Westray, a ruinous 16th fortress haunted by the weird drumming of the invisible snipe outside and a sequence of explosive pigeons startled from the black shadows, within. The building feels as if it hasn’t been entered for generations; its yard-thick walls are pierced only by empty loopholes through which the wind blows; loose stones and rubble crunch underfoot in the great dark empty rooms; it is, even on this sunny Saturday morning with golfers teeing off a couple of hundred yards down the road at the links of Noltland, terrifying: a howling empty angry dark repository of nothing.
Perhaps the old Scottish ghosts that surely wander its courts and rooms, those Duncans and Banquos, are angry and scared themselves, because they are unwelcome. Alien. Orkney has its own, mainly Norse-derived, fauna of adverse and benign spirits. There is the Nuckelavee, a horse-like demon who will destroy your crops with its breath and spread pestilence among your livestock; it is kept in check for a brief spell in the summer months by the Mither o’ the Sea, a more ancient spirit, perhaps, with deeper powers. And there are many others, spirits underpinning or perhaps expressing the disquiet of these windy, stormy islands, the Stoor Worm, the Teran, the selkies and kelpies.
But most of all there are the trows.
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In An Orkney Tapestry, Brown relates a version of a well-known Orkney story of trows (known as hogboons, from the old Norse haug-búinn)—earth spirits akin to Norse trolls, who inhabit the grassy barrows which blister the islands. One night two fiddlers are walking home from a wedding when they pass a grassy burial barrow. In an instant one of the fiddlers disappears, dragged into the underworld by the trows. Years pass, and the remaining fiddler is walking the same dark road past the same infernal barrow, and then suddenly there is his companion again, finishing the sentence he had begun so long before, untouched by the years that have since rolled over the land.
No coincidence, says George Mackay Brown, that the abducted man was a fiddler, and the better of the two. The other, the inferior musician, was left to wander the surface of the earth in the usual way. True artists are always bobbing for apples in the other world.
The fiddle, the skull, and the cornstalk yield their full significance only when they are seen in relation to each other.
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Some of the dead in Orkney are buried in little churchyards, some in ancient hidden barrows or under the corners or walls of ancient stone houses, some in war graves, some in the wrecks of ships and boats. In June 1916, days after the battle of Jutland, General Kitchener, sailing to Russia on a diplomatic mission aboard the battle cruiser HMS Hampshire, was killed along with seven hundred of the crew when the ship struck a mine in a storm and the lifeboats were dashed to pieces as they were lowered into the heaving seas. A dozen men survived, washed up on the Mainland coast clinging to floats. The ship, upside-down in two hundred feet of water a mile and a half out to sea off Marwick Head and the Brough of Birsay, is a registered war grave.
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I am no stranger to the anxiety of ghosts.
My mother lived all her childhood in haunted houses, in a haunted land. In the west of Ireland, in the 1930s, the ghosts were always fretful and busy. The stories were told and retold through my childhood, but have lost their sharp edges for me now, and bleed into another.
There was one about my grandfather who, coming home from the pub one night (!), saw a man down the road in front of him turn and walk through a solid brick wall; or was it a fence, or a five-bar gate?; for a while my mother’s family lived in a house where they could hear furniture being moved around in an empty room upstairs; in another there were forever people walking about outside, or talking, but there was no one there. My mother’s sense of the dead around us followed her through life. When she was very ill in the early 1970s she spent several weeks in an intensive care unit, and one night had a conversation with the woman in the next bed who couldn’t sleep and came over to talk to her; in the morning she learnt that the woman had died in the night. And then when I was seven we moved to a house which, my mother swore, was haunted by the ghost of my grandfather, who died there shortly after we arrived. Lights turned on unaccountably, doors slammed, spectral footsteps passed this way and that. You never felt quite alone in the bathroom. And a sick fox took up residence at the end of our garden, and sat there during the day, impassive, just staring my jittery mother down. Spooked and harried, we moved after a year.
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My mother used to tell us a rhyme around that time, about Brian Boru, George Mackay Brown's great saint of Christendom, which ran as follows:
King of Munster, Brian Boru,
Did a fart and away he blew
In Ireland it is customary to hold a wake and a swift burial of the dead. When my uncle, my mother’s little brother, died a decade ago, he lay in state in the front room of the house for a day or two, and the whole town, it seemed, streamed through at one time or another, and had a drink and shook everyone’s hands. Sorry for your troubles.
In England, the body typically lies in cold storage for a couple of weeks waiting for a slot at the crematorium to open up. That is where my mother was lying, on my first trip to Orkney. In cold storage.
Brian Boru’s bones, meanwhile, are said to be lodged in the walls of the Cathedral of St. Patrick in the city of Armagh. Holding the building up, doing ancestral work. But his free, etherealised spirit was wafting around us still in the 1970s, accompanied by gales of my mother's laughter.
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In early 1956, Benjamin Britten paid a visit to Japan, during which he witnessed for the first time a Noh drama. The drama in question was called Sumidagawa (Sumida River). Britten sat through two performances and it made, in his words, a "tremendous impression" on him: "the simple, touching story, the economy of style, the intense slowness of the action...".
In 1964, the composer's reworking of Sumidagawa was premiered at the Aldeborough Festival. What he and the librettest William Plomer wrote—Curlew River—was a filtering of deep revenant dramatic forms, a mingling of medieval English and medieval Japanese mystery and Noh drama.
The story tells of a madwoman who arrives at the banks of the Curlew river in the East Anglian fenland, searching for her lost son. Her son had been abducted by a heathen Norseman somewhat more than a year prior, and her arrival at the Curlew coincides with a festival in honour of a local saint, a twelve-year old boy who had died and been buried by the chapel by the river on this day, one year ago. It is of course her son, now a saint, and when she prays at his graveside she is answered by his ghostly voice, emerging from the texture of the curlews which swarm their melancholy song above her head.
"this mad woman seems, though her mind be wandering, to know what she seeks..."
The madwoman's song, with its obsessive repetition of let me in, let me out, let me in, let me out, is the burden of all grief, the burden of all separation. We are kicked like billiard balls, or like my dead curlew, into different spheres of being, but remain psychically entangled thereafter. Which means, I suppose, that my curlew is still tugging at me, with his great moon beak, from the other side.
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One of Britten's innovations for Curlew River was to use a small conductorless ensemble of flute, horn, chamber organ, viola, double bass, harp and percussion. From time to time a specified instrument will lead, and the others will follow; and from time to time the ensemble will split into two groups, each in control of its own tempo; until, one or other player, prompted by a piece of notation created by Britten for this work and known as the curlew sign, will linger a little until the other players have caught up, and a re-consolidated tempo is established; and so, the drama can continue.
