Lillias Scott Forbes

LILLIAS Magdalene Scott Forbes, who has died aged 94, was the daughter of composer Francis George Scott, the crucial elder figure behind the modern Scottish Literary Renaissance movement led by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s. Her whole life was energised by the vitalising force that typified that movement. She maintained her self-determined, feisty, festive appetite for life, Scotland and the best in all the arts, until she passed peacefully away on October 2, serene in the knowledge of the unstinting efforts that she and her family and friends had made to take that movement further and pass its spirit on.

Asinger and poet, Lillias was born on 1 December 1918 at 103 Woodville Gardens, Langside, Glasgow, and had one sister Francise and two brothers, George and Malcolm. Home was a flat of a few rooms, the kitchen being the focal point, with a big recess bed for Lillias and her sister. There were maids. As a little girl, Lillias imagined that one of them, Agnes Healy, who looked after the children, must have been a nun, she was so quietly spoken, quoting from her own treasury of poems, including Thomas Decker’s Sweet Content: “Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers? / O sweet content!”

It was a happy household. Neither of the girls liked school much and were glad when they arrived home and their father would focus them on the study of music and song-writing, with his wife Burges singing the melodic line to his piano accompaniment. Aged around nine, Lillias was introduced to the poems and songs of Burns, tuned in sharply to the Scots language and began to write her own early verses.

In 1921, her father met the French scholar Denis Saurat, another champion of the Scottish Renaissance movement then lecturing in French in Glasgow, and they became fast friends. In 1924, their parents took Lillias and her sister to Knocke-sur-Mer on the Belgian coast and both girls acquired good French. They used the language at home at the dinner table and when they went on holiday to Saurat’s grandparents. Living chez famille in France was a memory Lillias treasured ever after.

In 1931, the family moved to 44 Munro Road, near Jordanhill Training College, where FG taught until his retirement. This was the home in which countless visits by MacDiarmid and others, high-spirited evenings of music, poetry and political discussions continued regularly throughout the 1940s. Lillias took an MA at Glasgow University then studied to be a teacher, working in schools at Wolseley Street, Knightswood, and Drumchapel.

In 1949-50 she returned to France to teach at the Lycée de Jeunes Filles in Le Mans, and wrote poems which later appeared in the Glasgow Herald. In 1950, she worked in New York, as editor and proof-reader for the publisher Prentice-Hall, returning to Glasgow to Maclehose printers, then Chambers publishing in Edinburgh, and after her father’s death in 1958, she continued to live with her mother and earn a living as a teacher, but she never much liked the profession.

In 1962, she met the major modernist Scottish composer Erik Chisholm when he was on sabbatical leave in Glasgow. By the end of the year Lillias decided to marry and move to live with him in South Africa, where he was professor of music at the University of Cape Town and director of the South African College of Music. Lillias supported Erik’s commitment to music and his exhaustingly productive life as a composer. His drive was immense, and Lillias was at his side, helping and delivering her husband’s and her father’s songs. Paradoxically, in the early 1960s, at concerts in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, the music of Scotland’s two greatest modernist composers was more appreciatively received than in their native country.

But overwork exhausted Chisholm. He died in 1965. Lillias returned to live in St Andrews with her mother and after her death, bought a ruinous prop- erty and converted it into an art gallery, Kynd Kittock’s Kitchen, in Falkland, Kynd Kittock being the name of an elderly woman whose thirst led her to sneak out of Heaven past St Peter in search of ale, in an old ballad once attributed to William Dunbar. It was opened by Richard Demarco and exhibited work by William Gillies and the poet Sydney Goodsir Smith.

Here she met and married John Forbes, “the kindest of men”. They shared their love of music, in domestic evening concerts with friends, and could not have been happier. After John’s death, Lillias never seemed to retire. Her dedication to poetry sustained her. She loved travelling and felt a real affinity with Yorkshire people, relishing and matching the vigour and directness of their conversation. She would go into coffee shops not just to drink coffee but to strike up a conversation with the owner or anyone interesting she might spot. She was elated by the people she met on trains and buses while travelling, the Scottish glens and mountains, the Yorkshire dales, and France. She was never fond of the sea, having felt she spent too long on the ship travelling over to South Africa, and then again returning to Scotland three years later, after Erik’s death. She thrived on convivial company, high jinks and straight talking. In her late 80s and early 90s, she was quite capable of travelling long distances by public transport to attend a lecture, book launch or reading, anything that connected vitally to the Scottish Renaissance movement she was born into. She was a living presence of the meaning of the word Renaissance.

When Signum produced a CD of FG Scott’s songs, Moonstruck, in 2007, Lillias spent hours listening and singing along to it, phoning friends to extend her contagious and ever-welcome enthusiasm. The first of her four books of poetry, Poems of Love (1966), was warmly introduced by Hugh MacDiarmid and dedicated to Chisholm, whose daughter Morag, Lillias’s friend in later years, recalled attending several concerts with Lillias and how she always loved to sing, spontaneously breaking into song at any moment. In 2010 the Erik Chisholm Trust produced a CD of settings of Poems of Love.

Lillias’s second book Turning a Fresh Eye: Poems (1998) was followed by A Hesitant Opening of Parasols: Poems (2009) and the comprehensive selection of her best work, A View from the Bench: My Life in Poetry (Grace Note, 2011). This is obliquely autobio- graphical, accessible, direct and tender. MacDiarmid characterised her poems above all as works of integrity, but her lyric grace and wicked sense of humour are there too, reminding us how to chuckle and take pleasure in the everyday, see through all shams and pretences, reach deep into memories, delight in subtle and flamboyant colours, to take on the difficult things, and always be open to love.