To the Vikings, the anchorage in front of the small Orkney port of Stromness was known as Hamnavoe, Old Norse for Haven Bay. By the sixteenth century, the settlement which grew up along its shore had become Stromness: a nes being a headland (again in Old Norse), and a straum (like our stream) a powerful current – in this case the current that runs out into the Atlantic in the narrow strait between Stromness and the island of Hoy.
This place, then, is either Hamnavoe, the peaceful harbour, a refuge from the storms (and streaming currents) of the battling Atlantic Ocean and North Sea; or Stromness, the headland which projects into the powerful stream which, if you push your little coracle out into it, will propel you off to the wide world. Take your pick. They are two sides of the same coin. A settlement.
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Teetering Stromness is where I usually choose to stay, on my various passages through Orkney. Barbarous with gulls, the poet George Mackay Brown called it. It straggles along a little bay at the western end of Scapa Flow, a small town promiscuously alternating houses of jaunty, tobacco-yellow, narrow-coursed stone with plain-walled new-builds of prison-grey cement. It has one long street running the length of the town, disarticulate, like a limb broken in multiple places, the name of it changing for no clear reason as you move along it, South End Road becoming Alfred Street, becoming Dundas Street, becoming Victoria Street, becoming John Street, becoming, as you pass the harbour, North End Road. Strung along this many-knuckled street are the town’s businesses and shopfronts: something called the Orkney Television Enterprise, John’s Rae’s the stationer, a Chinese take-away, the Waterfront Gallery, a knitwear shop with alien Icelandic jumpers and tartan knits in the window.
Stromness is the second town in size to the more ancient capital Kirkwall. If Kirkwall looked north and east to the Norse homelands, Stromness looked to the Atlantic, to New Worlds. It was always a point of departure, and return. Departure for whalers from Hull or Dundee, crewing up and taking on last stores before heading for Greenland and the Davis Strait; or departure for the ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company which imported furs to Europe and exported Orkney names – Muir, Rendall, Leask, Linklater – to the North of Canada. On South End Street there is a well – Login’s well, sealed up in 1931 – which watered the ships of these fleets.
The little museum in Stromness is a record of these departures and arrivals, a repository of cultural flotsam, of Inuit bone and ivory carving and South Sea harpoons. And on the ground floor there is a life-sized diorama of the explorer of Canada’s arctic coast and discoverer of the fate of the Franklin expedition (whose ships, Erebus and Terror, had watered at Login’s Well in 1845), the Orkney native John Rae, paddling a Halkett Boat with a couple of tin plates. The Halkett boat, designed by Peter Halkett of the Royal Navy in the 1840s, was considered ideal for travel in the boreal forest: the inflatable rubberised hull could be rolled up and worn, in necessity, as a sort of protective cloak; its sail doubled as an umbrella, and its paddles could be used as walking sticks (a later, larger version was designed to be used as a waterproof ground sheet). But the man deputed to carry the paddles on one of John Rae’s four epic trans-Canadian journeys found them too heavy, not much use as walking sticks, and therefore ditched them; Rae was forced to improvise his crossing of the Richardson river with a couple of tin plates.
Just opposite the John Rae diorama the museum has placed the rocking chair of the Stromness poet and writer, its genius loci, George Mackay Brown: an upright, dark, wooden-framed chair with broad-striped cushions and a bolster supporting the lower back. The arms are dark wood too, turned on a lathe, each with its plump chocolate-coloured cushion tied to the top of it. It sits now on a plinth guarding a little stair, overlooking John Rae's mad endeavour.
The chair has not come so far as John Rae’s Halkett boat. George Mackay Brown lived just opposite the museum in the top flat of a cement-clad house set into the steep hill which rises behind the town. He moved into it in 1968, following the death of his mother (with whom he had lived elsewhere in Stromness); and spent the rest of his life there.
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Mackay Brown’s Stromness becomes in his poetry, and often in his prose, Hamnavoe. Haven Bay. The point of departure becomes the quasi-monastic retreat. As a young man, Mackay Brown was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and was unable to work in any of the trades common in Orkney. He turned his hand instead to writing and poetry. He spent some years at the university in Edinburgh and the adult eduction centre at Newbattle Abbey, Dalkeith, but otherwise almost never left his native islands. Much of his young life settled into an oscillation between sanatoria, where he recovered from bouts of TB, or in bed in his mother’s house in Stromness, writing and reading and waiting for the pub to open.
His version of eremitic monasticism was vitiated by disappointment, depression, and alcoholism. He spoke of large tracts of his life as a sort of limbo, a long contemplative pause between birth and death. He came to regard his tuberculosis, for which he received a government allowance for some parts of his life, as his ally, keeping him from the war, or from sliding into teaching work after he took his degree in Edinburgh. His entire life was a convalescence, from which precipitated, as though through a sort of slow sedimentation or settling, little mineral poems, stories, prose strung out into corals of novels. In the last decades of his life, on fine days, he would often lounge around outside the museum; or he would walk ‘north’, to the Royal Hotel for a drink, past the house on the corner of Pinnie’s Close where he was born, not two hundred yards from where he would spend his last years.
Brown’s Orkney settlement was profound, not peaceful. In his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, written in 1985 but not published until the year after his death, in 1997, he wrote “I am often chided nowadays for my passivity – why don’t I go to beautiful places; why don’t I travel to Norway or Iceland, even, whose cultures have influenced me so much? I don’t have an answer. Travelling even the short distances I have gone bores me… Some kind of ancient wisdom whispers always, ‘Stay where you are. What is good and necessary for you will be brought or you will be led to it. Wait. Have patience. What has been written down for you will happen when the time comes.”
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What more could I ask for?
A little white room
A bed, a chair, a lamp.
I sit at the window
Writing verses on small white squares of Pluscarden paper.
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Brown had been drawn to Roman Catholicism as a young man, in part repelled by the bare austerity of the Presbyterianism of his youth, and in part drawn by a sense of Catholicism’s antiquity and Italian vivaciousness. In his autobiography he quotes with relish the Hilaire Belloc verse:
Wherever a Catholic sun doth shine
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
…although elsewhere he adds “A cradle Catholic is quite different from a convert. Textures of Calvinism, generations old, are still part of me and I think I will never be rid of them: ancient guilts, rebukes in the silence of thought, or when I am reading or writing.”
It was a long while before he formally converted. He had been put off, he said, by his occasional attendance at Mass, where he had “got lost in the Missal, among the long silences and the whispers… . In the end it was literature that broke down my last defences…The beauty of Christ’s parables was irresistible. How could they fail to be, when so many of them concern ploughing and seedtime and harvest, and his listeners were most of them fishermen?”
Catholicism offered a shaped past. Not just any past. Brown had little time for sentimental or romantic interest in the Vikings, for instance, nor much for the Neolithic. “History can tell us nothing; not a word or a name comes out of the silence – there are a few ambiguous scratches on a wall at Skara Brae. We wander clueless through immense tracts of time.”
For George Mackay Brown, the two great pivotal moments of Orcadian history – or perhaps better, given the use he made of them, of Orcadian mythology – were the battle of Clontarf (1014 AD) and the martyrdom of St. Magnus (1117 AD).
The former was fought outside Dublin between, in Mackay Brown’s telling, broadly Christian forces assembled under the leadership of the elderly High King of Ireland, Brian Boru, and broadly pagan forces including those fighting under the Raven banner of Orkney. At the end of the battle – “as vital to the course of history as Lepanto or Waterloo or Stalingrad” – Brian Boru, who had refused to bear arms himself because, as Mackay Brown relates, the battle was fought on Good Friday, was isolated and killed by fleeing pagan stragglers (although this is very much George Mackay Brown’s version: most other accounts have him simply too old and frail to wield a sword he had not been afraid of brandishing, with lethal prejudice, through the rest of his life). But the battle was won, and the defeat of the Vikings checked the spread of Pagan-Viking, rather than Christian-Norse, power in North West Europe, just as Lepanto checked the spread of Ottoman Islam, and Waterloo and Stalingrad that of more modern tyrannies.
And then there was the martyrdom of Magnus Erlendsson. Magnus was a Norse earl, a Christian. He was executed on the orders of his cousin, Earl Haakon, with whom he shared the earldom, outside a church on the island of Egilsay on Easter Monday, probably in 1117. He and Haakon were supposed to be meeting in good faith to discuss their differences, but Haakon had other ideas. Haakon and his followers surrounded the church where Magnus had taken refuge, and Magnus, after offering to go into exile or on pilgrimage to Rome, submitted with great composure to his execution. He was struck on the head with an axe by Haakon’s cook, a man called Lifolf.
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Everything meaningful in Orkney – for Brown – sprang from Clontarf and the martyrdom of Magnus, two halves of a medieval passion story, falling as they did on Good Friday and Easter Monday respectively (albeit a century apart). “Clontarf was all darkness and horror. What remained after the fall of the axe in Egilsay was a sense of boundless release, an entire people raised from the grave of its history, a cornstalk bursting from a choked furrow.”
If he was beached here, trapped by illness and powerful disinclination, it was like being beached or stranded in a faded and broken Alexandria or Venice or Tyre. A place where the whole world came once, and still occasionally made its presence felt.
Take one step too far, however, as George Mackay Brown knew, and Hamnavoe, the quiet haven, becomes Stromness, the port where the boats stream out to the wide and turbulent world, where the cycles and patterns are much harder to read. One step too far, and you get swept away on the fast current, like John Rae to Canada. The far arctic places.
And in this sense his poems and his novels are spells, little labyrinth word dances that tread always the tricky threshold of Ness and Voe, save you from toppling over and away, binding the banal and the everyday to eternal patterns of meaning.
No need to go anywhere. So here he sits for now, in his purple-brown chair, stub of a pencil in his hand, inner ear cocked to the rumour of far-off, cosmic battle. The ticking clock marks, not the fleet passage of time, but its thickness, its calm, repetitive settling around a still moment.
