Around the Rowan Tree, Day 20

My mother died after being four years in the nursing home. She was 82. In these four years she never regained the use of her limbs nor her speech

At the same time I was progressing with my underworld of poetry magazines. Margaret Munro Gibson had advised me on some of the best ones to get; Poetry Nottingham, Envoi, Outposts and I was beginning to get more and more of my poems published. Margaret warned me: “Outposts,” she wrote, “is the most difficult one to get into.

Howard Sergeant, the editor, has a great reputation, he’s started off some now famous poets. His magazine is the longest running, largely selffunding magazine. It won’t be easy to get in there but you can try. Most of the poems he uses are in free verse.

“Try free verse,” she wrote, “send them to me and I’ll tell you honestly what I think.”

This was the release I needed, the poems came. This was the medium I could work best in.

I’d never really considered it before having been brought up largely with poems that were more formal. I sent some of my first free verse poems to the editor. Collection He didn’t accept any of these first poems for his magazine but wrote saying he felt that since I had reached a certain level in my poetry, would I consider publishing a collection.

He offered to do it. I couldn’t quite take in what I read and even then I didn’t realise what an honour it was to be taken on by Howard.

He got so many poets asking him, both here and in the States, to publish collections for them and he refused. I wrote back agreeing to his suggestion. “Send me about 40 or so and I’ll probably choose about 25 for a first collection.”

But I hadn’t got 40. I hastily began to write more, hoping they would be good enough. I sent them off in trepidation. The answer came back, he would publish 28 of them.

And so my first book, Give Me the Hill-Run Boys, was born.

Howard did three collections for me before he sadly died. He was a great help.

The letters he sent were always short and often contained a rebuke for something wrong 1 had done and this way I learned. But he was a truly great man and did so very much for his poets.

He really cared about the poetry, making, I suspect, very little from it financially. He had a daytime job as an accountant and had many hard knocks in the poetry world.

He was an excellent poet himself but left very little time for his own writing.

I remember once saying in a letter how wonderful the world of poetry was and how kind and helpful poets were.

He wrote back and said, “You do not know the half of it. There are no depths to which some poets will not go to get their work into print.” He did not agree with me at all.

At a later date Donald Campbell, the Scottish playwright, said: “You think it’s good at the top. Well I can tell you it’s not. It’s hell at the top.”

So poetry and writing in general wasn’t all roses. But I had much more modest aims in mind. To be published was enough. I didn’t want to enter into a nasty arena. Crashed Centuries ago a French trading ship was wrecked on the treacherous rocks off the east Aberdeenshire coast.

Miraculously, the captain’s twin baby sons were saved, along with the ship’s log. The boys were brought up by local fisher folk and married into the community.

My mother lived a legend. Dark-haired, vivacious, vivid as November’s morning star, she claimed to be a hark-back to the French (the other half of that ‘Auld Alliance’), to one of the twins snatched from the roaring seas.

She did much to make this myth come true, brought foreign thought to young parochial minds, inspired us with French stories. Her imagination lit our lives. Once we saw her weep the day France fell and for a while light vanished from the courtyard, yet after the first strong shock her faith returned. “One day!” she said, “One day...”

My mother died after being four years in the nursing home. She was 82. In these four years she never regained the use of her limbs nor her speech but she could understand well enough when we spoke to her.

She enjoyed our visits. Often when we were in visiting, Dad would read her a chapter or two from books that he knew she liked.

Looking back it always seemed to be sunny in that room with the big bay window overlooking the river and Perth. Always the swifts seemed to be screaming overhead in the summer air but there must have been grey days.

There were three other patients in the room mother was in. All variously incapacitated. Special friend The one I remember most was Sheila Duffy. She became a special friend of mother’s, used to speak for her when we came to visit and loved to listen to the stories my father read out.

Sheila was half my mother’s age and incapacitated from the neck down but her mind was as agile and alert as a young girl.

She was a true romantic and loved nothing better than to relate to us stories of her youth on the west coast of Ireland, the house with the turf roof she was brought up in and the peat she gathered for the winter fire.

Hillside Home was a nice place to be. The nurses were kind – couldn’t do enough for their patients and the food was good. But there was a lack of outside company.

Not many people came to visit so visitors were shared and clung on to. The patients never wanted us to go, desperate to know, to be a part of outside life.

The novice priests from the monastery up on the hill used to visit the patients. They were young and always full of good cheer. Sometimes they would dress up and put on a play.

Losing mother made a huge gap in our lives, especially mine. Perhaps it isn’t until your mother’s no longer there that you realise just how much you owe her. I owed mine a very great deal. She and father had given me a happy childhood and I don’t know anything better than that to get people off to a good start.

She had had a tough life herself. Brought up on a small Aberdeenshire farm, one of seven children, with money often in short supply, they had to fight to get what they wanted. Mother wanted to go to university. More tomorrow.