Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Or maybe it was a trick, and he was a pussycat, and it was James the Laid-Back Buddhist Vegan Hippy who kicked everyone’s head in. But, as you might expect with the home of the ba’, whereas most places might think, ‘Hmm we’d best draw a veil over that Skull-Splitter chap,’ in Orkney they celebrate him. There’s even a beer called Skull-Splitter that, I can testify, lives up to its name. It’s so strong the Portman Group, which regulates drinking guidelines, insisted it shouldn’t be classified as a beer, to which I hope the reply was, ‘Oh, if only there was some sort of warning we could give people that a beer called Skull-Splitter might be on the strong side. IT’S CALLED FUCKING SKULL-SPLITTER. Do you think anyone’s going to go, “Ugh that’s unexpectedly potent. I thought it would be mostly lime”?’

  I found an account on a website called ‘Gays out in Orkney’ that went: ‘I enjoyed a stay at Woodcock House in Evie where your gay-beckoning hosts were lovely young James and his snow white cat, Thorfinn.’ So even the gay cat-loving community’s hero is a bloke who split skulls. I bet Orkney Buddhists believe that if you live a truly good and spiritual life, creating only positive karma, as a reward you’re reincarnated as a psychopath. Then you can do what you like.

  The story of the first Norse settlers isn’t what I expected, as the Vikings settled in Orkney quite happily, then used it as a base from which to attack Norway. So the Orkney Vikings were known as nutters, even amongst the Vikings. Ordinary Vikings presumably said, ‘Don’t go near the Orkney Vikings, they’re fucking mental.’

  Apart from Thorfinn there was Sigurd the Mighty, grandson of Ketil the Flatnose. With Thorstein the Red they fought a Pict called Tusk, who got his name from a huge protruding tooth. Sigurd cut off Tusk’s head and brought it back home on his horse, but on the way the tooth pierced his leg and he died from blood poisoning. Incidentally, Thorstein the Red’s mother was Aud the Deep-Minded, whose daughter went on to marry Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter. Maybe they complemented each other: Thorfinn would split someone’s skull, which would help Aud to contemplate the nature of dying in screaming unimaginable agony.

  In the twelfth century there was a claim on the islands by someone called Erland, son of Harald of the Poisoned Shirt. And there was Palnatoki, who once trained his men by chopping off the heads of thirty of his enemies in a row.

  Most of this is known as a result of the Icelandic Sagas, which have a branch of sagas specially about Orkney. It feels as if every page goes: ‘Sigurd tricked Clontarf and plucked out all his men’s eyes with a crow but then was ambushed by Knut the Mental who’d drunk a field of fermented thistles and after killing Sigurd’s men fed them all to Olaf the Light Eater, whose name may have been ironic.’

  Orkney stayed Norwegian until the 1460s, when the islands were pawned to Scotland in exchange for a dowry for the Norwegian king’s daughter. Since then they’ve cultivated their own world, but their distinct history is what’s kept their society in existence at all. Because it seems strange, when you’re enjoying the merriment within this setting, that there’s much here at all. Why is it that after Inverness there’s very little human life, but when you get right to the top of the country and then over the sea, in a place even more inaccessible and rainy, there a community that’s survived and is growing? The answer revolves around the property booms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Land became more profitable if it was used for sheep or industry than if it was farmed by people, so the owners of the Highlands, most notably successive Dukes of Sutherland, decided to go along with the free market and drove out tens of thousands of people who were living there. Thousands were forced to live by the sea, many emigrated, some refused to go and were starved.

  Starving people can be a laborious process, so to hurry things along the landowners burned down the houses of their tenants. One Sutherland crofter recorded that ‘Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them.’

  Until this episode the top half of Scotland wasn’t seen as an empty, desolate region of natural beauty, but as an area populated by people who had their quirks and customs like any other. Without the Clearances, the north of Scotland wouldn’t seem a remote hideaway only visited by ornithologists and Tornado jet fighters on training exercises, but another vibrant region with the usual arguments about whether it needed yet another Tesco. Now, due to the Duke of Sutherland’s efforts, those pages in the road atlas are nothing but a series of contour lines. But Orkney, due to its different historical roots that stemmed from Norway, wasn’t part of the Sutherlands’ domain and wasn’t trashed in that way, so there it remains, looking down on everyone, except for Shetland.

  And according to Orkney, that’s not a place to go. Because my first lesson in Orkney–Shetland relations was during an interview on Radio Orkney, when the presenter asked me, ‘How do you know ET is from Shetland?’ And the answer was, ‘Because he looks like he is.’

  It could be rapidly addictive, this combination of quirky liveliness and utter remoteness. Even as I was leaving from the cuddly Kirkwall airport, I had just placed my bag in a tiny, token security machine that might as well have been a chest of drawers when the pilot came over to say he’d been at the show the night before, and wondered when it would be going out on the radio. I was slightly surprised that he didn’t have some boots and nails in one hand, and say, ‘I mend these while I’m flying, you see, as the plane doubles up as a cobbler’s.’

  Dumfries

  On the face of it the Scottish have cause for complaint against the English. It can be summed up in the verse of the national anthem that goes: ‘May He sedition hush, And in a torrent rush, Rebellious Scots to crush, God save the King.’ Apart from anything else this is clearly out of date, and should be amended to: ‘Each World Cup you’re dreamier, But your odds couldn’t be teenier, You always lose to Armenia, Or somewhere with a population of nine.’

  But the relationship between England and Scotland is complicated, because Scotland wasn’t just a victim of the British Empire, it helped to run that empire, sometimes against other Scots. These complexities are embodied in the hero figure of poet Robbie Burns.

  In Dumfries, for example, where Burns spent the last five years of his life, they seem to have agreed on one issue of how to remember him, which is to stick him up everywhere. So there’s a huge statue and a smaller statue and a mausoleum and a statue of his wife and a Burns memorial and a picture of him on every road sign and a Burns Street and in every pub they say ‘Robert Burns drank here’ even though it was built in 1969 and you daren’t ask for the public toilet because it’s probably called the Robert Burns Dumpery and I bet in Dixons they go ‘Robert Burns spent many hours here, he wrote “Ode to an iPod” – “O ye wee doonloadin’ beastie”.’

  If a shrink was to analyse Dumfries, he’d say, ‘I think it’s time you let him go.’

  All this is because Burns spent the last part of his life there, until a local doctor advised him to deal with his fever by walking into a freezing river and he died soon after.

  Dumfries is called a ‘Borders town’, because it’s only a few miles inside Scotland, west of Carlisle. It’s part of a region called Dumfries and Galloway, and it’s not always sure what it’s meant to be. Outside the town you can ramble in any direction to a stately home or a castle, and the solid, magisterial tourist book of the area has a grand mansion on the cover, so you get the impression you’re not allowed inside the parish boundary unless you’re at least ninth in line to the throne; but the town itself is grey, mostly working-class and properly Scottish.

  There are thousands of grey stone houses either side of a fast-flowing river, and dozens of pubs with a yellow light telling you they sell Tennent’s beer, and hills in the distance and a shop that sells fishing rods, and unlike outside Waverley station in Edinburgh, no one plays the bagpipes.

  This combination of urban and rural heritage was illustrated in a story told by the writer Frank Cottrell
Boyce, who said: ‘I discovered this stately home – Drumlanrig Castle – which has a Da Vinci, a Brueghel, a Rembrandt. The opening hours were a little eccentric, but you could walk right up to the paintings. I kept telling people about this place and somebody obviously listened to me, because this person drove up in a Vauxhall Nova, took Da Vinci’s Madonna with Infant off the wall, threw it in the back of the van and it’s never been seen since.’

  There’s a Facebook page for teenagers to discuss Dumfries, and it’s called ‘I know Dumfries is wank but it deserves a page on Facebook’. It includes a lively youthful discussion about the facilities there, that goes: ‘There’s nothing to do except kick the seagulls,’ to which someone has replied, ‘Hee hee, that reminds me of when I was with my young son by the side of the road and a lorry ran straight over a seagull.’

  This is something not mentioned on the tourist website, that one of the main forms of entertainment seems to be watching seagulls suffer. Mike Russell, the Scottish Environment Minister, even announced a plan of action in Parliament, saying, ‘Dumfries has a particular problem with seagulls, with regular reports of divebombing.’ To which you can’t help thinking, ‘Oh for God’s sake, they yell, “We are mighty Scotland, home of the brave, our blood runs blue and white with the spirit of Braveheart, ooo a wretched seagull, it’s fair divebombed doon and pecked my wee sandwich, I’m frightened.”’

  The centre of the town is yet another predictable row of familiar outlets, with a lost-looking building called the Midsteeple sat in the middle, and an eighteenth-century toll-booth and jail whose elegant clockface and delicate brickwork seem to be saying, ‘Do you want to hear my story again about when the Jacobite Rebellion came through here?’ to a bored Vodafone and Boots the Chemist.

  But leaning over the edge of the centre is a unique token of local pride, the football club called Queen of the South. How can you not love such a club, when its name is not even the town but a poetic description of it. It makes you wish all clubs were named like this, so if Liverpool played Middlesbrough the announcer would say, ‘Port of the West 2, Dump of the North 0.’

  An example of the esteem in which the club is held locally is the book I bought, Queen of the South: The History, a solid, anvil-like structure, with surprisingly few pictures and very close type and much longer than your average history book that deals with relatively minor concerns like the eighteenth century. It’s brilliantly full of pointless obsessive detail about every game ever. For example: ‘In the second half Stenhousemuir pressed forward and won a corner, but the Queens withstood the pressure,’ which would be too much detail if it was happening now and you were at the game, never mind that it was in a pre-season friendly in 1928.

  But the book was worth reading for this magnificent sentence: ‘In 1939 there wasn’t just concern for the future of the country, it was also a troubling time for Queen of the South.’ I’d put that alongside the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of the great sentences in the English language.

  The book contains other nuggets of genius, such as: ‘Queen of the South left Forfar having clinched the title, with a goal average of 1.9714285 compared to Stirling Albion’s of 1.772.’

  Say what you will about Queen of the South, they’re not like those half-hearted clubs that only work out their goal average to six decimal places.

  Everyone in Dumfries seems to take at least some interest in supporting Queen of the South, maybe because the club is so eccentric. When I asked the audience if there was a song or chant for when the players ran out of the tunnel, someone shouted, ‘It’s, “Oh God, he’s not playing again is he?”.’

  Also, for all the talk of nothing happening, the history of this area seems to be one long series of feuds and battles. According to The History of Dumfries and Galloway by Herbert Maxwell, in 1286 ‘Dumfriesshire was dragged into civil war, the Earl of Carrick attacked the Castle of Dumfries with fire and arms and banners.’ Then, ‘In 1297 the eleven wretched men of Galloway were confined in Lochmaben Castle and from that terrible fortress only one left alive.’

  Then Robert the Bruce met rival landowner John Comyn at Greyfriars church in 1306. So he stabbed him, obviously. But Comyn was still alive, so Robert ran out of the church, where he met Sir Roger de Kirkpatrick, and said, ‘I must go, for I doubt I have slain Comyn.’ Kirkpatrick told Robert the Bruce to wait a moment, went inside and plunged another dagger into Comyn, saying, ‘I’ll make sure,’ the way you might help an old person with their shopping – ‘Excuse me, love, are you having trouble with your stabbing? Come here, I’ll help you out – what are neighbours for?’

  This is a celebrated incident now, a tourist attraction. If someone working class stabs someone it’s ‘Broken Britain’s Sword of Shame’, but if you’re a noble the whole incident’s painted on a commemorative box of shortbread and sold in the gift shop.

  Page after page goes on like this, informing us, for example, that ‘In 1353 William, Lord of Douglas, had devastated the country before him so completely that he had to withdraw to save his army from starvation. In revenge he burnt every abbey, church and town on his line of retreat.’

  It seems that living in Dumfries has been like wandering through a play in which everyone gets stabbed, and you only have to pop out for some teabags to run into the murderous McAndrews laying siege to Poundking.

  At one of the touristy old ruins, called Sweetheart Abbey, I thought, ‘Ah, there must be a nice story behind that.’ But it’s called that because after John Balliol was killed by Robert the Bruce, his lover Lady Dervogilla had his heart embalmed and kept it in the abbey in a casket of silver and ivory. You can’t even have a love story in Dumfries without it involving internal organs in a box.

  All this explains why the website called ‘Information Britain’, a very serious affair, tells some of these stories and then says, ‘The long history of Dumfries isn’t all murder and bloodshed, wars and treachery. There were also hangings, witch trials and executions.’

  Yet it’s now a chatty town. Not only do people talk to you in the pubs, they come out of the pub to talk to you if they see you walking past. ‘Hey, come in here. This is the best pub in Dumfries,’ I was advised by drinkers from three separate pubs, a local version of the waiters who ask you to come and eat in their restaurant when you’re in a European holiday resort, except that in one case the man shouting erupted into a coughing fit halfway through, so his plea went, ‘Best pub in achremaha, best pub, aHEEEYUGH, best, ahawAAAKKKKKKKhremhrem ikkk aHOO,’ while I waited for him to finish so as not to seem impolite.

  In the Globe I immediately struck up a rapport with the barmaid, when I said I’d noticed there was a shop over the road that only sold accordions, which seemed slightly out of the ordinary. She snapped, ‘It doesn’t only sell accordions, it sells bongos as well.’

  The Globe is the pub that Burns used to drink in, and they’ve preserved his favourite room. You need permission to get in, and there’s a chair in the corner that was apparently his favourite, and a letter in which he mentioned the Globe in a frame on the wall.

  Burns now seems to represent the three founding blocks of modern Scottish nationalism: the pride, the distortions, and the desire to take money from daft American tourists. For example, a spokesman for one government tourist agency was asked what it wanted to achieve with Burns. He said, ‘You’re always looking for a unique selling point. If you look at what he did in his lifetime, you see he’s a very attractive product. Burns was ahead of his time. I came across a phrase in one of his poems that said, “Welcome, welcome again,” and that captures exactly what we’re trying to do. And we’re very careful about who we allow to use his image, so Crawford’s biscuits is fine, but not manufacturers of cheap pens.’

  He’s clearly the right man to be put in charge of Burns’s legacy, a bloke whose favourite poem is probably ‘Once you pop you can’t stop’.

  The feeling amongst most Scots is probably more respectful: that he’s a symbol of their achievements as a nation, and of
defiance against the English. Scottish nationalism is a difficult force to work out. It doesn’t seek to preserve a language, and the country it feels is holding it back has had four Scottish prime ministers since 1900.

  An English person can live merrily and safely in Scotland, but almost the entire country will vehemently support any opponent of England. If England were drawn against Al Qaeda in the World Cup, the pubs would be full of crowds yelling, ‘COME on you fundamentalists, GET INTO these infidels!’

  Burns finds himself in the middle of this contradiction. It’s often assumed that he just wrote about loving anything Scottish, and that his poems are full of stuff like, ‘I love fair bonnie lasses, And full whisky glasses, And shoving huge thistles up Englishmen’s asses.’

  But he was a child of globally radical times, and one of his earliest pieces was a ballad supporting the American War of Independence. He also wrote that ‘The man whose only wish is to become great and rich, whatever he may pretend to be, is but a miserable wretch.’

  This was in the 1780s, when radical thinkers were disputing the notion that people with noble blood were most fit to rule. As the son of a poor farmer in Ayrshire, Burns started a debating society, and wrote a poem to celebrate it that started, ‘Of birth and blood we do not boast’.

  He never made much of a living from writing, which is why he went to Dumfries, where he took over Ellisland Farm, on the banks of the River Nith, and also became the Dumfries excise officer, tracking down smugglers and illegal distilleries. During this time he was transformed by the French Revolution.

  He tied his support for the Revolution to his job as an excise-man when, in February 1792, armed smugglers sailed up the Solway Firth in a schooner. Burns became suspicious, and went to meet it with two colleagues. When they realised there were twenty-four men on board, all armed, the others went to get help while Burns stayed on shore observing the ship. Forty dragoons arrived, but when they and Burns boarded the ship they found it had been abandoned, although all the illegal goods were still on board, including four cannon. The law at the time was that anything captured in this way was sold at auction. Burns went to the auction, bid for the guns he’d captured, bought them and sent them to France to be used by the revolutionaries. Maybe that’s his ‘unique selling point’, and next to his picture on a biscuit tin it should say, ‘Campbell’s revolutionary gun-running shortbread insurrectionary assortment’.