Sandstone Press

The Neil Gunn Viewpoint

Posted by RLD on 7th June 2009

On Thursday 4th June 2009 a small group gathered outside the new Optical Express shop on Inverness High Street.  I say new; in fact, the building is far from new.  Before the optician moved in it was a bank and, way back in the 1930s, it housed the Excise.  Among the excise employees was the novelist Neil Gunn and that is why we were gathered.  Some years ago the Neil Gunn Trust prompted Highland Council to have a commemorative plaque fixed to the wall.  This they did but the Highland capital has much the same share of spoilers and naysayers as has any other city.  That negative attitude, let me use the word ‘viewpoint’, acted through some poor soul’s drink or drug blasted, depressed spirit to make him tear the thing off the wall and destroy it.

One day the Trust’s Patron, the author Katharine Stewart, at a youthful 93 (or so), years of age was toddling along the High Street and noticed the absence.  Since then the Trust has been cajoling to have it replaced and was eventually successful.  So, now we were gathered with Provost Jimmy Grey, Councillor David Henderson, Jim Alexander of Inverness Heritage, Trust Convenor Ann Yule and some of the Trustees, Katharine (supported by two of her towering grandsons), Gunn enthusiast Gary Culver from Massachusetts who happened to be in the area and was our honoured guest, and a scattering of press.  We cleared a van out of the way, Ann and Provost Jimmy made their speeches and Katharine for whom, at 95, Velcro holds no fears, tore away a length of Gunn tartan to reveal the new, sky blue plaque.

While the speeches were being delivered my eye wandered through the shop’s glass door to where two of the female staff were practicing their disco dancing behind the counter.  One was making like the wiggly wings of an insecure bird and the other was holding her nose and submerging below the counter.  Big smiles all round, Neil would have loved it.  Probably they were just at play, but they might possibly have thought they were puncturing pomposity.  If so, they got it wrong.  Pomposity has zero to do with Neil’s life and work.  In fact he was an adept at puncturing balloons.

Watching them though, reminded me of the day we opened the Neil Gunn Viewpoint on the Heights of Brae, 31st October, 1987, and of Jessie Kesson as she and Sorley MacLean drew the cover from the Memorial Stone before three busloads of spectator participants.  Jessie was indebted to Neil for early recognition, as is Katharine, and remembered him well.  So long did she go on about Neil’s description of a love bite in one of the books I began to wonder how well.  Elsewhere, Naomi Mitchison wrote at enthusiastic length about his effect on the ladies, notably herself.  Whatever it takes, it looks like he had it.  I’m jealous.

We had a big do that night in the Royal Hotel in Dingwall, of readings, music and speechifying and it was my given job to chair the proceedings; given, that is, by the Trust’s originator, founder and Convenor of that time, Dr Kerr Yule.

Jessie had a way of disappearing to another bar with her cronies but Sorley and our other literary guest, James Caird, gave brilliant speeches.  I will never forget Sorley straightening to his full height beside me, his head thrown back and his eyes disappearing into that distant place at the back of the head where poetry resides and beginning in his inimitable Sorley-ish fashion, ‘Ne-ee-ei-l Gu-uu-uu-nn was an un-dou-ou-bted genius’.  Years were to pass before I learned that James’s wife, also present, was the poet Margaret Caird.

Founded by Kerr and Ann in 1986 as the Neil Gunn Memorial Trust to build the Neil Gunn Memorial Viewpoint on the Heights of Brae, the name was later shortened to the Neil Gunn Trust.  The idea was never to build a remembrance pillar to Our Glorious Dead, rather it was to celebrate the lives of both Neil and his wife Daisy, promote the work and form a space where people could retune.  The Viewpoint itself affords big views down the Cromarty Firth and across the mountains.  Twenty years on, the small forest we planted is now mature, the stone and carvings are weathered and the car park has no doubt witnessed the conception of any number of Highland weans.

The whole thing has been consistently positive and creative with a photographic competition and the fantastically successful writing competition.  I guess we run what is now Scotland’s longest lived such competition, these days with entries coming in from countries such as France, the US and Brazil, to name only three.  The Neil Gunn Lecture (sponsored by Sandstone Press) at the Inverness Book Festival will this year feature Owen Dudley Edwards when he follows in the voiceprints of Kenneth White and Lesley Riddoch.

The Viewpoint idea was Kerr’s and he taught me many things the most important of which is this – the ideas keep coming.  This was taught by example, never a formal lesson.  Kerr was rarely all that formal.  We should keep thinking and doing because to hoard a secret ambition is to grow spiritually sclerotic.  To complete some project is not to find that thing known as ‘closure’, far less to lie down and die.  It is to have more ideas, more action, more challenge.  Have faith in this; the ideas keep coming.

Every aspiring writer, every artist of every kind, should remember it: the ideas keep coming provided you ‘do’.  Never stop.  Doing brings more.  There is no end, only the illusion of end.  It reminds me of that myth about the bag of gold coins that can never be emptied.  Every time a handful is taken out they are immediately replaced, presumably by the fairies.  For Kerr though, it would be better visualised as a bag of seed corn because he was more than just Head of Physics at Dingwall Academy, he was a great teacher.

Over the years he instigated and developed many educational and environmental projects both as a Councillor in Cumbernauld and through his schools, beginning at Dumfries with outdoor centres for pupils at Forest of Ae and Castlemaddy in the Galloway hills, and Palacerigg Country Park on the outskirts of Cumbernauld.  Later, at Glascarnoch Dam in Ross-shire, he and his band of pupils planted a wood for which they were awarded a Royal Anniversary Trust National Award.  Out there in the big, bad world the kids keep going.  Okay, they are 30 or 40 years old – but the kids keep going.

My favourite story from the years before I met him is of when he was invited back to Cumbernauld to open the swimming pool he had conceived and taken to near, but not quite, completion.  In recognition of his efforts he was asked to open the building and here is what he did.  He borrowed a vacuum flask from the school and climbed above the snow line on Ben Wyvis to gather, of all things, a snowball.  At the poolside in Cumbernauld he ceremonially opened the flask and tossed the snowball into the pool with the words, ‘Alba gu brath’.  In this way he linked the two important places of his life’s actions and the two singular sets of social effort that were really one.

I came out of formal employment four days after my 51st birthday.  By that time, one way and another, I felt I could afford to be poor.  To put it another way, I had enough to get by but no more.  The first thing I wrote was DUNBEATH WATER: an oratorio, which was eventually scored by William Gilmour and in 2003 performed three times with choir and full orchestra, at Crown Church in Inverness, Dornoch Cathedral, and Dunbeath Parish Church at the first Festival of Light.

The work is at once a melding of Neil’s HIGHLAND RIVER and THE ATOM OF DELIGHT and an extension of them.  In it, the protagonist Kenn walks uphill along the riverside to the source, thinking his thoughts.  For those who don’t know, walking the thin erosion path beside our streams is one of the great delights of Highland life.  Neil had already gone there, the imaginary Kenn followed.

Willie composed the work on piano (he is the finest pianist I have ever met) and on a programme known as Sibelius, using the trumpet sound for the tenor’s voice; that is, Kenn’s voice, and printed the music out on big white, lined sheets with treble and base clefs and all the usual musical paraphernalia.  This done he gave me a CD and copies of the score as the three movements developed.  By the time it was complete I had a fair grasp of how the choir, brass, strings, and of course the woodwind’s opening D, F sharp, C sharp, A, C natural, G natural that is Kenn’s theme, would all sound.

Kerr and Ann came up to my wee flat and we laid out the music on a folding table in front of my audio unit to sit with me in the middle, singing all the parts, pointing at the score and shouting things like, ‘the low strings come in now’ and ‘here’s the fugue!’  They attended the Dornoch performance where the composer-conductor and I were presented with bouquets and I, dumb kilted poet, in receiving mine knocked over Willie’s music stand so we and the performers stood in a snow storm of music sheets as they wafted past the choir and onto the audience’s laps.

It was one of the last times I saw Kerr.  One morning a few days later Ann called from home to say he had become suddenly ill.  By the time I arrived the paramedics were at work but to no avail.  Five and a half years later I still miss him, but the Viewpoint is still there, the ideas keep coming and I have this recurring dream.

Far ahead at the source is the unreachable, unknowable author, and out of sight on the track is his creation, Kenn, who represents him.  Up ahead and very much in sight is a man in a wide brimmed hat.  His breeks are held up with rope, which will symbolise poverty well enough, or at least the absence of a wealth ethic.  He has a small sack tied to the rope and every so often plunges his hands inside, scattering seeds as he goes.  There is no end to this task because by the time his hands return the hoard of seeds has been replenished.  The river runs and runs and, far behind, a poor lost boy follows as best he can.  The going is tough and it is hard sometimes to raise his eyes but, even so, he follows the narrow path and the trail of ideas that, however wild and diverse, carry with them a sense of convergence and lead only upwards.