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Letters From Hamnavoe
 | Price: £7.50 Supplier: Steve Savage |
For many years, George Mackay Brown wrote a short column in the Orcadian, called Letter from Hamnavoe. As he said in the introduction, they were intended to entertain the people of Stromness and to “kindle home thoughts in the minds of the thousands of Orkney folk who live outwith the islands.” This first collection of pieces was published in 1975, four years after the column was begun in February 1971.
He wrote entertainingly of the Stromness of his youth and about old Orkney stories but he also commented upon Orkney in the seventies. This makes the book even more interesting today than when it was first published. It is absolutely fascinating to look back over thirty years and see what has changed and what has remained the same. There are pieces on the early tourist industry, the changing face of Stromness, Stromness Shopping Week and trips around the island. Still, the best pieces are the lyrically evocative hymns to his childhood in Stromness.
Paperback, 192 pages
First published 1975
ISBN 1904246015
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The Boys of Summer
20/7/72
The long narrow sun-splashed street is choked with cars three or four times a day. The town is swarming with tourists from the five continents. In the evening the bars throb and thrum with pop-groups. On Friday of last week the first full heat of summer was turned on. In the late evening tongues of sea-haar felt along the hills, promising more heat on the Saturday…
I am trying to remember how a summer day must have been in Stromness in the 1930s - for a boy of a generation ago it was vastly different from today. It was more restricted for one thing. You lived in Stromness and in Stromness you stayed, unless by some rare stroke of luck you were taken to the Dounby Show or the Kirkwall Market in Couper’s bus. As for a holiday in Aberdeen or Edinburgh, such fabulous adventures were not to be thought of.
In those days the “St Ola” - not the present boat, but a small black narrow vessel - brought only small numbers of visitors to Orkney. They, and the local children, looked at each other with equal curiosity. Sometimes a fine-spoken lady would set up an easel on the street - you could, in those days; there was a slow cautious car only every half-hour or so - and do a water-colour of Melvin Place or Puffer’s Close. The small boys thought how strange and exotic the visitors were, like folk from another planet.
As for the boys themselves, they ran all summer long with bare feet on flagstones hot as pancakes. (Or so they dream nowadays, looking back - it is a classic case of how all the bad things are suppressed in the mind - the days of rain and wind and fog.) But certainly those eight weeks of the summer holidays were outside time; there was a sense of boundless freedom; for school was much more of a prison then than it is now.
We fished from the end of piers. The caught sillocks were sold to wives with cats, four for a penny. We bathed from slips, and were so innocent we knew no evil of the sewers that kept spilling into the blue water. We drifted across the fields to Warbeth, and rummaged in the pools for whelks, and dared each other to crawl deep into the Miners’ hole, which was said to end somewhere under the farm of Clook…
And on the way home we blew “clocks” and fought each other with “soldiers”; while the girls (whom we shunned as if they were an alien race) made daisy chains and held buttercups under each others’ chins.
Summer in Stromness was quieter and more innocent in that distant age.
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