Reaching Helmsdale
If it weren’t for
this red tweed jacket
I bought in Brora
I might well wonder
if we’d ever gone
north of Inverness.
We shouldn’t need proof
but do, it not being
normal to crowd in
so many slow years
to three or four hours
cuffed by a sea-wind
and buffeted by
non-highland music
from the Highland Games
up on Castle Park
(now called Cowper Park
– no-one can say why).
We’d come a long way
to look at gravestones:
we could read father
was ‘devoted’ while
mother was ‘beloved’.
Weren’t both ‘beloved’?
Wandering I saw
Andrew Rutherford
had four doctorates
(honorary) chipped
on his stone. And Nan
MacLeod my once fierce
maths teacher, mother’s
best friend and bête noire,
had an out-of-place
middle name: Percy.
Her mother Lizzie
sat by a peat fire
trapped and arthritic.
Unmoving the stones
turn their backs on us.
Blind they look through us.
This brash easterly
from the Moray Firth
is not going to stop:
the longer it comes
to blow in my mind
the harder it will
tug at my coat-sleeves
my hair my eyelids.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2004. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2004 was Hamish Whyte.
Editor’s comment:
Fulton is a poet I admire very much and feel is still underrated – is this because he lives in Norway? In a perhaps more conversational mode than usual this is still a typically tightly controlled syllabic piece, a meditation on past and present, how we can only read history and ask unanswerable questions.
Author’s note:
In 1948 my father began a three-decade stint as C. of S. Minister at Helmsdale on the east coast of Sutherland. I spent six years of school holidays and four of university vacations there: I felt isolated and frustrated and needed many years to shake off the effects. I still have nightmares about the harbour. In August 2002 I went there after an absence of seventeen years: I still had my private version of Helmsdale in my head but in the interval something had cleared up and I could now see the place as more or less normal.
Andrew Rutherford’s parents had had a shop in the village and he became a Professor of English in London. Lizzie (wife of Jimmy MacLeod the blacksmith) was related to my maternal grandfather, Murdo Macpherson. Nan (Agnes, or Ag) left a teaching post in Glasgow to be Head of Maths at Golspie. She combined kind-heartedness with a vigorous temperament: ex-pupils of the kind who had perhaps preferred to treat school nonchalantly would thank her afterwards for having bulldozed them through their Highers.
Learn more
Best Scottish Poems 2004
The first issue of Best Scottish Poems, edited by Hamish Whyte.
Robin Fulton Macpherson
Arran-born poet and translator Robin Fulton Macpherson has spent much of his life in Norway, and has been active in the translation of Scandinavian poets into English.