Norman Maccaig(1910–1996)

Return to Scalpay

T h e ferry wades across the kyle. I drive

T h e car ashore

On to a trim tarred road. A car on Scalpay

Yes, and a road where never was one before.

T h e ferrymen's Gaelic wonders who I am

(Not knowing I know it), this m a n back from the dead,

W h o takes the blue-black road (no traffic jam)

From by Craig Lexie over to Bay Head.

A m a n bows in the North wind, shaping up

His lazybeds,2

And through the salt air vagrant peat smells waver

From houses where no house should be. The sheds

At the curing station3 have been newly tarred.

Aunt Julia's4 house has vanished. T h e Red Well

Has been bulldozed away. But sharp and hard

The c h u r c h still stands, barring the road to Hell.

A chugging prawn boat slides round Cuddy Point

W h e r e in a gale

I spread my batwing jacket and j u m p e d farther

T h a n I've j u m p e d since. There's where I used to sail

Boats looped from rushes. On the jetty there

I caught eels, cut their heads off and watched them slew

Slow through the water. A h — C a p e Finisterre5

I called that point, to show how m u c h I knew.

While Hamish sketches, a crofter 0 tells me thattenant farmer

T h e Scalpay folk,

Though very intelligent, are not Spinozas . . .6

We walk the O u t End road (no need to invoke

That troublemaker, Memory, she's everywhere)

To Laggandoan, greeted all the way—

My city eyeballs prickle; it's hard to bear

With such affection and such gaiety.

Scalpay revisited—more than Scalpay. I

Have no defence,

For half my thought and half my blood is Scalpay,

Against that pure, hardheaded innocence

That shows love without shame, weeps without shame,

Whose every thought is hospitality—

Edinburgh, Edinburgh, you're dark years away.

Scuttering snowflakes riddling the hard wind

Are almost spent

W h e n we reach Johann's7 house. She fills the doorway,

Sixty years of size and astonishment,

Then laughs and cries and laughs, as she always did

And will (Easy glum, easy glow, a friend would say) . . .

Scones, oatcakes, herrings from under a bubbling lid.

Then she comes with us to put us on our way.

Hugging my arm in her stronger one, she says,

Fancy me

Walking this road beside my darling Normanl

And what is there to say . . . We look back and see

Her monumental against the flying sky

And I am filled with love and praise and shame

Knowing that I have been, and knowing why,

Diminished and enlarged. Are they the same