Kate Armstrong: Scottish Poetry

Here is what the author writes about the linguistic background in which she grew up, why she decided to write poetry, and why she uses Scots in her poems.

'My father, a Scot from Edinburgh, first met my mother in southern England in wartime. I was born there in 1944, but on my father's demobilisation we moved to Edinburgh. Two of my mother's sisters and eventually my grandmother also ended up there. For many years I was the only child and surrounded by larger than life English-speaking female relatives. They were big, talkative women.

My father's family had come, way back, from the fishing town of Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders. My paternal grandfather had been a clerk. He spoke a very precise Scottish English and was fond of Latin tags and quotes. Even as a young child I was dimly aware of his coming from a different culture. I felt uneasy with him.'

It's a cryin' shame - when Granpaw needs a lift home.

'Working class Edinburgh people spoke Edinburgh Scots. The Sunday Post, then as now Scotland's best-selling Sunday paper, ran two weekly cartoon strips. In one, the Broons (Brown) family spoke Scots, lived chaotic and cheerful lives; in the other, Oor Willie (our William) spoke Scots and survived a small boy's normal misadventures. A Scottish Education Department document of the nineteen-fifties warned teachers, "Beware of the use of the Doric as a form of insolence." There seems to have been around a real fear and anger directed to the eradication of spoken Scots.

At the age of my transfer to secondary education, my parents moved to Caithness, mainland Scotland's northernmost county. A different, almost impenetrable vernacular there. Not Gaelic, Caithness Scots. At school I was exposed to the writings of Burns, Henryson, Dunbar. Nobody explained the language. We just read it, as we read Chaucer. My parents returned to Edinburgh when I was eighteen.'

'When I was 35 or so, my mother and I returned to Caithness on a visit. I looked up an old school acquaintance, William Wilson, who was running an Arts Centre. "You were rather literary at school," he said. "Are you publishing anything?" I laughed in embarrasment. He misremembers me, I thought, and told him I wasn't even writing, though I'd quite like to, and tried to get him talking about the community tapestry work he had instigated. He wouldn't play. "You should be writing," he insisted.

Back in Dundee I joined a creative writing class at our local Arts Centre. The tutor, the poet Harvey Holton, a Borderer, wrote only in Scots. I was utterly astonished. I'd never thought of Scots as a written language in the contemporary scene. But everything fell into place - from my grandfather through to my work in teaching - and I started. It was all there in my head, poetry and prose in both languages.'

'I suspect everyone of Scottish origin, as well as many others living in Scotland who are sensitive to linguistic structures, comes equipped with a microchip enabling him/her to understand Scots. That 'chip' may be a bit rusty. It may only receive or it may both send and receive, to mix metaphors. I find it hard to talk about language without using metaphors. Language for me is a house people live in.'

 Read more ... About The Poem

Picture of Fireplace:© Robert Atkinson

Picture of The Broons:© The Sunday Post

Picture of the House:© Tom Steel

Picture of the Cow:© Alasdair Alpin Macgregor

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