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Under Brinkies Brae
 | Price: £7.50 Supplier: Steve Savage |
This is the second collection of GMB's columns from the Orcadian.
Paperback, 224 pages
First published 1979
ISBN 1904246077
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First Sight of Kirkwall
22.2.1979
Orkney children go to Norway and Italy and France nowadays, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. A generation ago, when we were boys, Kirkwall was as far as we dared hope for, once a year, in Couper's or Nicholson's bus
Stromness being a sea-thirled place, it was easier to get to Hoy than to Kirkwall; for fishermen went back and fore every day, and other townsmen with boats.
I must have been about eight when my father said: 'We're going to Kirkwall tomorrow in the bus'... What excitement - it was as if he had said Cathay or Xanadu! - it was our firsst trip to Kirkwall.
my brother and I were dressed in Sunday suits next morning. Our pockets rang with pennies.
as Couper's bus rattled off from the Pier Head, no astrnauts from Cape Kennedy could have been more tense and enthralled.
The fifteen-mile journey was pure rapture. Suddenly my father said, 'There's Kirkwall.' Our hearts turned over with joy and surprise. Perhaps we expected a bigger version of Stromness; not that sprawl of houes in the hollow about the Cathedral.
My father took us to visit the proprietor of the St Ola Hotel, a Stromness man called Andrew Johnston, an old friend of his. Munifence was everything that day. Andrew Johnston expressed his wonderment at seeing two small boys he had probably never clapped eyes on before; then he dug deep in his pocket and gave us twopence each!
The rest of that wonderful day I only vaguely remember. It must, I suspect, have been a confusion of sweets, ice cream, lemonade. The Kirkwall 'goodies' seemed, because of the novelty, infinitely tastier and more mysterious than what the Stromness shops sold.
All I really remember is agroup of teenage boys conversing round a window in Albert Street, near the Orkney Herald shop. Their accents seemed strange to us. (of course it is true that there is no single Orkney accent - each island and parish has its own peculiar utterance. It is easy enough, still, to tell a Kirkwall voice from the rest of Orkney.)
And I don't remember coming home. Heavy with sweetmeats and wonderment, I wouldn't be surprised if we slept most of the way in the bus.
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