19
Both Scotland and Northern Ireland experienced major political shake-ups in the latter part of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first. Wales experienced a smaller shift. But in all of the geographically lesser partners of the United Kingdom there was a rising nationalist sensibility, reflected in vigorous and sometimes very fine poetry, from the 1950s right through to the current day.
After the bloody civil war known as ‘the Troubles’, which killed more than 3,500 people between 1969 and 2001, John Major’s Conservative administration eventually repealed the Government of Ireland Act. The 1993 Downing Street Declaration stated that Britain had no ‘selfish economic or strategic interest’ in Northern Ireland. Early the following year, the IRA responded by announcing a temporary ceasefire, and complex negotiations began, covering issues such as the decommissioning of weapons, the status of the largely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the practice of marching into rival communities in a mixture of celebration and provocation. It was a tortuous process, nearly derailed by further terrorist atrocities, rows over prisoners and the mutual distrust of unionist and republican leaders. Yet, shepherded by the American Senator George Mitchell, agreement was finally reached on Good Friday 1998, during the premiership of Tony Blair. It was then overwhelmingly ratified in a referendum, and Northern Ireland got a new devolved assembly, bringing in previously excluded Catholic republicans, including former gunmen, alongside Ulster Protestant unionists. In 2005 the IRA officially announced an end to hostilities and the decommissioning of its weapons.
In Scotland, the struggle for home rule had gone on through most of the twentieth century, though largely at the margins of politics. By the 1970s and 80s pressure had grown, and eventually, in 1998, again under Tony Blair’s government, a referendum was held which overwhelmingly endorsed the idea of a Scottish parliament with substantial powers of its own, but working under the overall authority of Westminster. Far from quelling Scottish Nationalism, however, devolution appeared to drive it forwards. The Scottish National Party won power in Edinburgh in 2007, and swiftly renamed the Scottish executive the Scottish government. Support north of the border for both the Conservative and Labour parties crumbled. In 2014 the Scots voted in a referendum on independence, and for a few heady weeks it seemed as if they were about to choose to leave the United Kingdom. In the end the vote was firmly against independence, by 55 to 45 per cent.
And yet, as I write this in early 2015, it is clear that these matters are far from over. SNP support, and support for Scottish independence – they’re not always the same thing – have risen substantially since the referendum. The general election story has centred on the almost explosive rise of the SNP, virtually wiping out Scottish Labour, and there must be a substantial chance that Scotland and England will divorce at some point over the next decade. If that happened, it would start a cascade of change elsewhere in Britain. The Northern Irish settlement is probably not forever: the number of Catholics with republican sympathies is growing, and Scottish independence might well have a big knock-on effect, encouraging a revival of Irish nationalism. Wales, with its own devolved assembly, is looking on attentively. So for the first time in more than two hundred years, the question of Britishness – What is it? Does it really exist? – is alive again.
In this collection I have tried to show that the people of the British Isles, whatever their governance, share a lot in terms of their history, landscapes, religious prejudices and experience of social change. But if poetry tells us important truths about how people actually feel, we would expect Irish and Scottish poetry of modern times to reflect profound changes in attitudes to identity. And they do.
Seamus Heaney was born on a farm in County Londonderry on the eve of the Second World War, the son of a farmer and cattle dealer. His mother’s side of the family worked in the local linen mill, and all were Catholics. He went on to study English at Queen’s College, Belfast, where he discovered the poetry of Ted Hughes. Later he was talent-spotted by the same Philip Hobsbaum who had formed the Group. By the mid-1960s he was regularly publishing poetry. His breakthrough collection, Death of a Naturalist, came out in 1966, and from then on he was a star in the world of verse. He spent much of his life in the United States and in Dublin, accumulating so many awards and prizes that even before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 he was known jocularly at home as ‘famous Seamus’. By the time he died in 2013 he was probably the best-known poet in the world.
Why? At first sight, many of his poems are humble accounts of rural life and the people he knew, close to the earth and close to the commonplace. He very rarely writes about the great events, the bloodshed and treachery, the idealistic hopes and messy political compromises, that overwhelmed the Northern Ireland of his time. As a famous Catholic voice, Heaney was under great pressure to speak out for ‘his people’ – to become a propaganda mouthpiece, in effect, for the IRA. While himself no admirer of the British state, Heaney stubbornly refused to take on that role. Like many Ulstermen, he was dry, shy and occasionally sly. He rooted his politics in the land and the people he knew, and their human value. He did, at the worst moments, directly address what was happening, but always in his own way, as in the lovely poem ‘Casualty’, as fine as the political poetry of W.B. Yeats, written in the immediate aftermath of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1972, when British paratroopers shot thirteen protesters dead in Londonderry (a fourteenth would die later of his wounds). It appears to be about a fisherman Heaney knew in the pub – a real man, as it happens – and the poem reveals its true subject with gentle but deadly deliberation, like a line being cast out:
I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II
It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse …
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond …
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
He could be more direct. In ‘The Frontier of Writing’ from 1987, Heaney reflects on what had become a completely routine event in Northern Ireland, stopping at a military checkpoint. But if you want to know how it felt, that sense of all-round mild paranoia and unfreedom, here’s the answer:
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration –
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road
past armour-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
Apart from being a great poet – he made words and their sounds mimic the natural universe and mankind’s engagement with in it as nobody had done for centuries – and a fine essayist and critic, Seamus Heaney was one of the greatest translators of the late twentieth century, from Anglo-Saxon to ancient Greek. And it was in The Cure at Troy, a translation of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, that Heaney gave his definitive verdict on the peace process, one pithy and memorable enough to catch the ear of Bill Clinton in 1995:
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Heaney is such a fine poet, speaking from a rural Catholic tradition outside the mainstream of British poetry, that it’s tempting just to carry on quoting him. That would be very unfair, however, to the other Irish poets of recent times. It would be unfair in particular to Patrick Kavanagh, an older poet who hugely influenced Heaney. Kavanagh grew up not so far away from Heaney’s family, but on the southern side of the border, in the county of Monaghan. Born in 1904, he worked as a farm labourer and a shoemaker until his late twenties. He eventually moved to Dublin, and literary circles there, working as a journalist and barman, publishing novels and poetry. Had it not been for Heaney, he would probably be the best-known Irish poet after W.B. Yeats – a very different man, a genuine son of the soil, who suffered almost as much misfortune in his life as that other great Irishman Jonathan Swift. He was taken ill at the first performance of a play adapted from his novel Tarry Flynn, and died in 1967. It isn’t hard to see what Heaney learned from him, not least the belief that the big truths are rooted in ordinary soil and common people’s lives, not in the abstractions or academies. But to say that Kavanagh doesn’t romanticise rural life is something of an understatement. This poem is called ‘Having to Live in the Country’:
Back once again in wild, wet Monaghan
Exiled from thought and feeling,
A mean brutality reigns:
It is really a horrible position to be in
And I equate myself with Dante
And all who have lived outside civilization.
It isn’t a question of place but of people;
Wordsworth and Coleridge lived apart from the common man,
Their friends called on them regularly.
Swift is in a somewhat different category
He was a genuine exile and his heavy heart
Weighed him down in Dublin.
Yet even he had compensations for in the Deanery
He received many interesting friends
And it was the eighteenth century.
I suppose that having to live
Among men whose rages
Are for small wet hills full of stones
When one man buys a patch and pays a high price for it
That is not the end of his paying.
‘Go home and have another bastard’ shout the children,
Cousin of the underbidder, to the young wife of the purchaser.
The first child was born after six months of marriage,
Desperate people, desperate animals.
What must happen the poor priest
Somewhat educated who has to believe that these people have souls
As bright as a poet’s – though I don’t, mind, speak for myself.
For an essentially urban people – and the Irish have become almost as urban as the English and Scots – it’s all too easy to look back softly at the lost Arcadia of rural life; which is why poets like Patrick Kavanagh, who actually lived it, are so important. This is a kind of ballad of hate to the ‘Stony Grey Soil’ of Monaghan where the poet spent so much of his life:
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick tongued mumble.
You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life conquering plough!
The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards’ brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food.
You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!
But you would hope, wouldn’t you, that there was more to Patrick Kavanagh’s story than that – that all those years of rackety behaviour in Dublin and elsewhere would have produced more bounce, more money in the bank of youth; and his best-loved poem, ‘On Raglan Road’, is indeed full of bounce and zest, as well as regret. It reminds me of Swinburne – or it would, had Swinburne had much to say beyond the music.
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
Closer in time to Seamus Heaney, and a friend who shared the experience of the Troubles, is the Belfast poet Michael Longley. Nobody, including Heaney, has written better about the violence of the time, bringing consolation to the bereaved. This is a short poem about the murder of an ice-cream seller by the IRA:
Rum and raisin, vanilla, butterscotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.
Longley was both classically trained, fascinated by Ovid and Homer, and a disgusted observer of Northern Irish sectarianism. In the following poem, ‘The Butchers’, he brings the two together:
When he had made sure there were no survivors in his house
And that all the suitors were dead, heaped in blood and dust
Like fish that fishermen with fine-meshed nets have hauled
Up gasping for salt water, evaporating in the sunshine,
Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood
From his chest and cheeks after devouring a farmer’s bullock,
Ordered the disloyal housemaids to sponge down the armchairs
And tables, while Telemachos, the oxherd and the swineherd
Scraped the foor with shovels, and then between the portico
And the roundhouse stretched a hawser and hanged the women
So none touched the ground with her toes, like long-winged thrushes
Or doves trapped in a mist-net across the thicket where they roost,
Their heads bobbing in a row, their feet twitching but not for long,
And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard
And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner,
Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant,
Fumigated the house and the outhouses, so that Hermes
Like a clergyman might wave the supernatural baton
With which he resurrects or hypnotises those he chooses,
And waken and round up the suitors’ souls, and the housemaids’,
Like bats gibbering in the nooks of their mysterious cave
When out of the clusters that dangle from the rocky ceiling
One of them drops and squeaks, so their souls were bat-squeaks
As they fittered after Hermes, their deliverer, who led them
Along the clammy sheughs, then past the oceanic streams
And the white rock, the sun’s gatepost in that dreamy region,
Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels
Where the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.
Longley is himself an agnostic, but comes from the Protestant side of the Northern Irish divide, born in 1939 to parents who had arrived from England. He clearly loathed the IRA, but had no more time for the bigotry of the loyalist tradition. Here’s his ‘Wounds’ of 1972, another poem which conflates the then and the now:
Here are two pictures from my father’s head –
I have kept them like secrets until now:
First, the Ulster Division at the Somme
Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’
‘No Surrender!’: a boy about to die,
Screaming ‘Give ’em one for the Shankill!’
‘Wilder than Gurkhas’ were my father’s words
Of admiration and bewilderment.
Next comes the London-Scottish padre
Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,
With a stylish backhand and a prayer.
Over a landscape of dead buttocks
My father followed him for fifty years.
At last, a belated casualty,
He said – lead traces flaring till they hurt –
‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’
I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.
Now, with military honours of a kind,
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
A packet of Woodbines I throw in,
A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Paralysed as heavy guns put out
The night-light in a nursery for ever;
Also a bus-conductor’s uniform –
He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before they could turn the television down
Or tidy away the supper dishes.
To the children, to a bewildered wife,
I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.
After all this horror, what hope remains? And yet the story of Northern Ireland is of a stumbling but determined and courageous attempt to find some form of reconciliation, a journey that can be followed in Michael Longley’s poetry: his ‘Ceasefire’ is, characteristically, half-rooted in Homer:
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Seamus Heaney was to bring new generations to adore the meat and muscle of poetic language – those blunt-nosed, square-fingered, hard and slippery words he specialised in. Like all major poets, Heaney subtly changed the trade itself.
Harri Webb’s poem for St David’s Day is a relatively rare example of Welsh nationalist poetry from before the 1970s. Wales, sharply divided between the Welsh-speaking north and west and the industrialised, English-speaking south and east, did not provoke the kind of constitutional crises facing Scotland and Ireland. But there was, from the 1960s onwards, a growing Welsh nationalist movement, arsonist in its extreme wing but for the most part much more focused on culture and poetry. Webb was a working-class boy from Swansea who was educated at Oxford before joining the British forces in the Second World War. He was demobilised to Scotland, where he met Hugh MacDiarmid and was converted to militant nationalism:
On the first day of March we remember
St. David the pride of our land,
Who taught us the stern path of duty
And for freedom and truth made a stand.
So here’s to the sons of St. David,
Those youngsters so loyal and keen
Who’ll haul down the red, white and blue, lads,
And hoist up the red, white and green.
In the dark gloomy days of December
We mourn for Llywellyn with pride
Who fell in defence of his country
With eighteen brave men by his side.
So here’s to the sons of Llywellyn,
The heirs of that valiant eighteen
Who’ll haul down the red, white and blue, lads,
And hoist up the red, white and green.
In the warm, golden days of September,
Great Owain Glyndwr took the field,
For fifteen long years did he struggle
And never the dragon did yield.
So here’s to the sons of Great Owain,
Who’ll show the proud Sais what we mean
When we haul down the red, white and blue, lads,
And hoist up the red, white and green.
There are many more names to remember
And some that will never be known
Who were loyal to Wales and the gwerin*
And defied all the might of the throne.
So here’s to the sons of the gwerin
Who care not for the prince or for queen,
Who’ll haul down the red, white and blue, lads,
And hoist up the red, white and green!
Scotland was spared the bloodshed of Northern Ireland, and enjoyed a more complete cultural revolution than Wales; but it too became increasingly uneasy inside the United Kingdom during the second half of the twentieth century. We’ve already met two of the supreme Scottish poets of the century, the fiercely nationalist and Marxist Hugh MacDiarmid, and the un-fierce Edwin Muir. Discussing the Second World War, we met the wonderful Robert Garioch, one of the supreme Edinburgh poets of the period: many of the Scots who became well known in the 1950s and 60s had been war poets, either serving or observing; war is a terrible thing, but it got many Scots out, forcing them to look at Europe and the wider world around them as never before.
Sydney Goodsir Smith was one of the most colourful and convivial figures of the Scottish poetry scene, a host whose Edinburgh flat was crammed at night with whisky-drinking and argumentative bards, and whose own work in Scots is unique. Although he was born in New Zealand, nobody, except possibly MacDiarmid himself, was so saturated in and captivated by earlier Scottish poetry – the medieval bards Dunbar and Henryson, and then Fergusson and Burns, all of whom we met earlier. But Smith, the son of a professor of forensic medicine and himself a medical student for a while, had a delight in wordplay and an interest in Modernist experimentation which also found him compared frequently to James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. Relatively late in his career, in 1965 – he died at the early age of fifty-eight in 1975 – he wrote a political poem about Edinburgh, then without a parliament or assembly of any kind, called ‘Kynd Kittock’s Land’. It deals with exactly the self-hatred and cultural insecurity we somtimes find in Wales. The Scots, in this case, isn’t very difficult, but to help English readers, the first stanza means something like: ‘This disreputable, wretched city, deflated from its old importance, half of it smug and complacent but having lost all its pride in race or spirit, and the other half as wild and rough as ever it was in its secret heart, has also lost all of its gumption. The independently minded man now sits on Edinburgh’s craggy spine, begging cap in hand, enduring the wind and the rain that has always watered the city’s genius.’ The rest is obvious, or at least not difficult.
This rortie wretched city
Sair come doun frae its auld hiechts
The hauf o’t smug, complacent,
Lost til all pride of race or spirit,
The tither wild and rouch as ever
In its secret hairt
But lost alsweill, the smeddum tane,
The man o’ independent mind has cap in hand the day
Sits on its craggy spine
And drees the wind and rain
That nourished all its genius
Weary wi centuries
This empty capital snorts like a great beast
Caged in its sleep, dreaming of freedom
But with nae belief,
Indulging an auld ritual
Whase meaning’s been forgot owre lang,
A mere habit of words – when the drink’s in –
And signifying naething.
This rortie wretched city
Built on history
Built of history
Born of feud and enmity
Suckled on bluid and treachery
Its lullabies the clash of steel
And shouted slogan, sits here in her lichtit cage,
A beast wi the soul o’ an auld wrukled whure …
That’s just the opening of a much longer poem which, for anyone prepared to search it out, remains well worth reading, full of warmth and oomph; but that introductory tirade against modern Scotland reflects a political and cultural despair common at this period. Maurice Lindsay, from Dunbartonshire, wrote in English and in a more jocular vein, and adored Goodsir Smith:
Dear Goodsir Smith, who sang of drink and women,
a connoisseur of laughter, wit and art;
of Scotland’s writers warmly the most human,
moneyed and monocled to play the part …
That tribute comes from ‘A Net to Catch the Winds’, Lindsay’s autobiographical reflection (not unlike John Betjeman in tone) on a musical childhood and a career spent in journalism and television. In the course of it, he too grumbles about Scotland’s post-war status:
A shadow that has lost its substance, feeling
as well supported as a verbless clause,
the Scottish spirit’s been too long congealing
in banknotes, sour religion and thinned laws,
while roundabout, the busy world is dealing
in purposes that were a living cause.
Though Scots pretend they long for devolution,
they vote unchanged the London Constitution.
That frees them from the burden of decision,
allowing them complain when things go wrong …
… One must stay positive, though Scotland’s slipping
beyond retrieval to provincial status;
for what will not return it’s no use weeping.
Mankind’s long march goes on. It should elate us
that slowly fairer values are out stripping
those with which privilege could still negate us
if democratic rule became dictation,
to tyrants’ or Trade Unions’ subjugation.
It was, perhaps, as wild a piece of dreaming
to visualise of virile Scotland, free
to make its choices, as the thought that scheming
among the globe-trotting statesmen could decree
a peaceful balance for the world’s redeeming,
the universal, equal vis-à-vis.
Since history is the sum of spent confusion,
all human life must end in disillusion.
In a pithier mood, Maurice Lindsay responded to the 1978 devolution referendum, when Scots voted narrowly for a devolved assembly – but too narrowly for it to come about. Scotland the What? was a popular comedy revue at the time – and is the name of the poem. For the uninitiated, the tawse is a heavy leather strap traditionally used to punish Scottish schoolchildren; and to girn is to whinge, or complain. This poem demonstrates that worries about Scotland’s place in the UK were not confined to the left:
Is Scotland a nation, or not?
Is a question that troubles the Scot,
since our banknote and laws,
our religion and tawse
don’t add up to self-confident thought.
Where’s the What for which Scots keep on yearning?
We strike when we ought to be earning;
An Assembly! we shout
then vote the thing out
and get back to the business of girning.
Yet no matter how deeply one delves
through what history is stocked on our shelves,
at least we still joke
of the pig in the poke
we buy when we treat with ourselves.
A much more substantial poet was Edwin Morgan, one of the big figures of the Scottish literary renaissance. Born in Glasgow in 1920, he became the city’s first Poet Laureate in 1999, and five years later was named the first Scottish equivalent of the Poet Laureate, the Scots Makar. A conscientious objector who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, and a gay man in Scotland when that was a difficult thing to be, Morgan was first associated with the radical performance poetry and experimentation of the 1960s. He would go on to write highly political poems and be a major influence in Scotland during its transition and the devolution years; ‘The Coin’, one of his meditations in Sonnets for Scotland, imagines an entirely different republican history:
We brushed the dirt off, held it to the light.
The obverse showed us Scotland, and the head
of a red deer; the antler-glint had fled
but the fine cut could still be felt. All right:
we turned it over, read easily One Pound,
but then the shock of Latin, like a gloss,
Respublica Scotorum, sent across
such ages as we guessed but never found
at the worn edge where once the date had been
and where as many fingers had gripped hard
as hopes their silent race had lost or gained.
The marshy scurf crept up to our machine,
sucked at our boots. Yet nothing seemed ill-starred.
And least of all the realm the coin contained.
The bulk of Morgan’s poetry was playful and experimental, mining science fiction and sound effects, and commenting more on the big social changes going on in twentieth-century Scotland than on constitutional questions. A good example of his earlier poetry is ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, one for everyone to try at home:
Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl –
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok – doplodovok – plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok! Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl – blm plm, blm plm, blm plm, blp.
What distinguished Morgan from most of the other Scottish poets mentioned here was that he was always distinctively and proudly Glaswegian, rooted in the industrial west. He wrote a lot about Glasgow in its industrial decline and revolutionary fervour. Generally a taut, formal poet, here is his sonnet ‘Clydegrad’:
It was so fine we lingered there for hours.
The long broad streets shone strongly after rain.
Sunset blinded the tremble of the crane
we watched from, dazed the heliport-towers.
The mile-high buildings flashed, flushed, greyed, went dark,
greyed, flushed, flashed, chameleons under flak
of cloud and sun. The last far thunder-sack
ripped and spilled its grumble. Ziggurat-stark,
a power-house reflected in the lead
of the old twilight river leapt alive
lit up at every window, and a boat
of students rowed past, slid from black to red
into the blaze. But where will they arrive
with all, boat, city, earth, like them, afloat?
Scottish home rule and nationalist politics have become so charged and controversial recently that I can’t resist including Edwin Morgan’s optimistic poem written for the opening of the new Scottish Parliament on 9 October 2004. The building itself was radical, expensive and controversial. Morgan’s poem is a celebration of democracy and what it can achieve, and a stern injunction to the new generation of Scottish politicians to be brave and bold. To my ear, it is public poetry of a very high order:
Open the doors! Light of the day, shine in; light of the mind, shine out!
We have a building which is more than a building.
There is a commerce between inner and outer, between brightness and shadow, between the world and those who think about the world.
Is it not a mystery? The parts cohere, they come together like petals of a flower, yet they also send their tongues outward to feel and taste the teeming earth.
Did you want classic columns and predictable pediments? A growl of old Gothic grandeur? A blissfully boring box?
Not here, no thanks! No icon, no IKEA, no iceberg, but curves and caverns, nooks and niches, huddles and heavens, syncopations and surprises. Leave symmetry to the cemetery.
But bring together slate and stainless steel, black granite and grey granite, seasoned oak and sycamore, concrete blond and smooth as silk – the mix is almost alive – it breathes and beckons – imperial marble it is not!
Come down the Mile, into the heart of the city, past the kirk of St Giles and the closes and wynds of the noted ghosts of history who drank their claret and fell down the steep tenement stairs into the arms of link-boys but who wrote and talked the starry Enlightenment of their days –
And before them the auld makars who tickled a Scottish king’s ear with melody
and ribaldry and frank advice –
And when you are there, down there, in the midst of things, not set upon an hill with your nose in the air, This is where you know your parliament should be
And this is where it is, just here.
What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.
A nest of fearties is what they do not want.
A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.
A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.
And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.
Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians, you are picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem that has been almost but not quite, oh no not quite, not ever broken or forgotten.
When you convene you will be reconvening, with a sense of not wholly the power, not yet wholly the power, but a good sense of what was once in the honour of your grasp.
All right. Forget, or don’t forget, the past. Trumpets and robes are fine, but in the present and the future you will need something more.
What is it? We, the people, cannot tell you yet, but you will know about it when we do tell you.
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we have no mandate to be bold.
We give you this great building, don’t let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.
So now begin. Open the doors and begin.
Liz Lochhead is another Glasgow poet, who succeeded Edwin Morgan as the country’s national poet or Makar. Though much younger, she too emerged with the new wave of 1960s poets – Adrian Mitchell was a lifelong friend. An excellent performance poet, who still likes to read her poems to public audiences, Lochhead is first and foremost Scotland’s leading woman poet. Funny, bawdy, theatrical and tender, she is at the opposite pole to the whisky-sodden, hectoring male certainties of the original Scottish Renaissance poets. She writes well and frankly about sex and relationships, but even more important, she records women’s experiences in modern Scotland. This poem, ‘For My Grandmother Knitting’, deals with a woman who had moved from being a fisher girl, gutting the catch, to a knitter; it’s really about, however, what has happened to the Scottish working classes, with their skill and their dexterity, in a world de-skilled and driven by shopping.
There is no need they say
but the needles still move
their rhythms in the working of your hands
as easily
as if your hands
were once again those sure and skilful hands
of the fisher-girl.
You are old now
and your grasp of things is not so good
but master of your moments then
deft and swift
you slit the still-ticking quick silver fish.
Hard work it was too
of necessity.
But now they say there is no need
as the needles move
in the working of your hands
once the hands of the bride
with the hand-span waist
once the hands of the miner’s wife
who scrubbed his back
in a tin bath by the coal fire
once the hands of the mother
of six who made do and mended
scraped and slaved slapped sometimes
when necessary.
But now they say there is no need
the kids they say grandma
have too much already
more than they can wear
too many scarves and cardigans –
gran you do too much
there’s no necessity …
At your window you wave
them goodbye Sunday.
With your painful hands
big on shrunken wrists.
Swollen-jointed. Red. Arthritic. Old.
But the needles still move
their rhythms in the working of your hands
easily
as if your hands remembered
of their own accord the patter
as if your hands had forgotten
how to stop.
Again and again, Lochhead writes poems that trip off the tongue and seem delightfully simple but which, again and again, are composed of layer upon layer of meaning. She is a poet who knows the Scottish tradition inside out. In this wonderful poem, she imagines the mouse in Burns’s famous verse talking back to her in her own kitchen. Using Burns’s own favourite stanza, Standard Habbie, Lochhead manages to make a poem about environmental degradation and animal rights, Scottish male chauvinism and the joys of Robert Burns. It’s full of details any modern Scot will enjoy, from Daphne Broon, the hapless unmarried girl in a famous Scottish cartoon strip, to the contemporary obsession with the national poet’s virile member. It starts with a short explanation:
The present author being, from her mother’s milk, a lover of the poetic effusions of Mr Robert Burns and all creatures therein (whether mouse, louse, yowe, dug or grey mare Meg) was nonetheless appalled to find, in her slattern’s kitchen, sitting up washing its face in her wok, the following phenomenon:
It’s me. The eponymous the moose
The To a Mouse that – were I in your hoose,
A bit o dust ablow the bed thon dodd o’ oose
That, quick, turns tail,
Is – eek! – a livin creature on the loose,
Wad gar you wail.
Aye, I’ve heard you fairly scraich, you seem
Gey phobic ’boot Mice in Real Life yet dream
Aboot Man-Mouse Amity? Ye’ll rhyme a ream!
Yet, wi skirt wrapt roon,
I’ve seen ye staun up oan a chair an scream
Like Daphne Broon.
But I’m adored – on paper! – ever since
First ye got me at the schule, at yince
Enchantit – wha’d aye thocht poetry was mince
Till ye met Rabbie,
My poor, earth-born companion, an the prince
O Standard Habbie.
For yon is what they cry the form he wrote in
An’ you recite. Gey easy, as you ken, to quote in
Because it sticks. I will allow it’s stoatin,
This nifty stanza
He could go to sicc lengths wi, say sicc a lot in
Largs to Lochranza,
Plockton to Peebles, Dumfries to Dundee,
If a wean kens ony poem aff by hert, it’s Me!
Will greet ower ma plough-torn nest, no see
The bit o’ a gap
Atween the fause Warld o’ Poetry
An baited trap.
Get Rentokil! Get real! Wha you love
’S the ploughman in the poem, keen to prove
Saut tears, sigh, sympathy – he’s sensitive.
Wee sermon:
Mice, men, schemes agley, Himsel’ above
Cryin me Vermin.
Ploughman? That will be right! Heaven-taught?
He drank deep o The Bard, and Gray, and Pope – the lot.
I, faur frae the spontaneous outburst you thought,
Am an artifact.
For Man’s Dominion he was truly sorry?
Not! ’T was all an act.
Burns, baith man and poet, liked to dominate.
His reputation wi the lassies wasna great.
They still dinna ken whether they love to hate,
Or hate to love.
He was ‘an awfy man!’ He left them tae their fate,
Push came to shove.
Couldnae keep it in his breeks? Hell’s bells, damnation,
I wad be the vera last to gie a peroration
On the daft obsession o this prurient Nation,
His amatory antics.
He was – beating them tae it by a generation –
First o th’ Romantics.
Arguably I am a poem wha, prescient, did presage
Your Twentyfirst Century Global Distress Age.
I’m a female mouse though, he didna give a sausage
For ma sparklin een! As for Mother Nature?
Whether yez get the message Remains to be seen.
Thus far we’ve been describing urban poets, and that’s right, because modern Scotland is an overwhelmingly urban country, most of whose people speak an urban, demotic Scots, used by most of Scotland’s poets. Before we leave this kind of poetry, there’s one final poet who needs to be quoted, because he deploys that gritty, plosive, hard-edged language more enthusiastically than anyone else. Tom Leonard comes from a solidly working-class Glasgow family – his father was an Irish train driver who moved to the city, and his mother worked in a dynamite factory. Part of the same generation as Liz Lochhead, he burst onto the poetry scene in 1969, and is particularly famous in Scotland for his satirical attack on the English voices of BBC newsreaders (such as, I suppose, the current writer). It’s very funny, and if you can’t follow a word of it, you are part of the joke.
this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.
The modern Scottish experience, however, isn’t simply urban, and isn’t all political. The country’s best-loved poets include Gaelic speakers such as Sorley MacLean, and poets who focus on rural life, from the Orcadian George Mackay Brown to the arch proponent of what we might call Scottish Highland Zen, Norman MacCaig.
Sorley MacLean, or more properly Somhairle MacGill-Eain, was born on the island of Raasay, off Skye, in 1911. He went to Edinburgh University, and was writing fine poetry in Gaelic from the 1930s onwards, at which time he was, broadly speaking, a communist. He fought during the Second World War with the Eighth Army, and was badly wounded at the Battle of El Alamein; along with Hamish Henderson and Robert Garioch, he’s one of the talented platoon of Scottish war poets. After the war, he returned to the Highlands and spent most of his life as a schoolteacher. His real significance is that, following a long period of relative quiet in Gaelic writing, he proved that it was possible to be a committed, thoroughly modern and serious poet writing in Gaelic rather than in English or Scots. To that extent he was a one-man cultural renaissance.
He translated most of his own poems into English, and it’s the translations I will give here; when he was reading, it was his practice to read a poem in Gaelic first, and then in English. As someone who doesn’t understand a word of Gaelic, I can say that the former sounded like wind coming over a hill, or the distant noise of breaking waves. And the translations, somehow, don’t sound like the work of any English-speaking poet I know. Here, first, is ‘Death Valley’, one of his poems from the war in North Africa:
Some Nazi or other has said that the Fuehrer
had restored to German manhood the
‘right and joy of dying in battle’.
Sitting dead in ‘Death Valley’
below the Ruweisat Ridge,
a boy with his forelock down about his cheek
and his face slate-grey;
I thought of the right and the joy
that he got from his Fuehrer,
of falling in the field of slaughter
to rise no more;
of the pomp and the fame
that he had, not alone,
though he was the most piteous to see
in a valley gone to seed
with flies about grey corpses
on a dun sand
dirty yellow and full of the rubbish
and fragments of battle.
Was the boy of the band
who abused the Jews
and communists, or of the greater
band of those
led, from the beginning of generations,
unwillingly to the trial
and mad delirium of every war
for the sake of rulers?
Whatever his desire or mishap,
his innocence or malignity,
he showed no pleasure in his death
below the Ruweisat Ridge.
And here, by contrast, is the opening of ‘Hallaig’, a magnificent lament for his people, the MacLeods, and by extension for all the Gaels of north-west Scotland who were driven from their land and culture not just by the Highland clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but by the great economic shifts which made subsistence agriculture on poor soil intolerable. Raasay’s dozen townships were cleared during 1852–54 and its entire population, some ninety-four families, driven from their homes and forced into exile: Hallaig was the name of one of the deserted towns. Rich in symbols and music, this is the authentic verse of the Gaelic people, the poetry that W.B. Yeats tried to imagine into existence from English, largely unsuccessfully:
‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’
The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,
a birch tree, and she has always been
between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-Chuirn:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.
In Screapadal of my people
where Norman and Big Hector were,
their daughters and their sons are a wood
going up beside the stream.
Proud tonight the pine cocks
crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,
straight their backs in the moonlight –
they are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up by the cairn,
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.
If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,
to the Sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.
They are still in Hallaig,
MacLeans and MacLeods,
all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
the dead have been seen alive.
The men lying on the green
at the end of every house that was,
the girls a wood of birches,
straight their backs, bent their heads.
Between the Leac and Fearns
the road is under mild moss
and the girls in silent bands
go to Clachan as in the beginning,
and return from Clachan,
from Suisnish and the land of the living;
each one young and light-stepping,
without the heartbreak of the tale.
From the Burn of Fearns to the raised beach
that is clear in the mystery of the hills,
there is only the congregation of the girls
keeping up the endless walk,
coming back to Hallaig in the evening,
in the dumb living twilight,
filling the steep slopes,
their laughter a mist in my ears,
and their beauty a film on my heart
before the dimness comes on the kyles,
and when the sun goes down behind Dun Cana
a vehement bullet will come from the gun of Love;
and will strike the deer that goes dizzily,
sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes;
his eye will freeze in the wood,
his blood will not be traced while I live.
Hugh MacDiarmid told Sorley MacLean before his death that he considered the two of them the finest poets modern Scotland had produced. It’s interesting that he didn’t include his other friend and sometime drinking partner Norman MacCaig, even though MacCaig is probably more read by today’s Scots than either of the others. Born in Edinburgh in 1910 and a conscientious objector during the war, MacCaig was, like MacLean, a teacher. He divided his life between Edinburgh and Assynt, in the north-west Highlands. A fanatical fisherman, he wrote poetry that is limpid, simple and often informed by a spiky mysticism: he called himself, only half jokingly, a Zen Presbyterian. MacDiarmid’s caution about him may have been related to MacCaig’s resolute lack of interest in mainstream politics or Scottish nationalism. Here is his short poem ‘Patriot’:
My only country
is six feet high
and whether I love it or not
I’ll die
for its independence.
Like some other good poets, MacCaig takes the small and, by staring at it hard, unpacks the big within it. Here is his 1985 poem ‘Small Boy’:
He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.
And another, and another.
He couldn’t stop.
He wasn’t trying to fill the sea.
He wasn’t trying to empty the beach.
He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.
Like a kitten playing
he was practising for the future
when there’ll be so many things
he’ll want to throw away
if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.
Though he also wrote a lot about Edinburgh, MacCaig was above all a nature poet, responding to the vast spaces and watery landscapes of the Scottish north-west Highlands. Here is a poem set on the north side of the great, mysterious mountain called Suilven:
The three-inch-wide streamlet
trickles over its own fingers
down the sandstone slabs
of my favourite mountain
Like the Amazon it’ll reach the sea.
Like the Volga
it’ll forget its own language there
its water goes down my throat
with glassy coldness,
like something suddenly remembered.
I drink
its freezing vocabulary
and half understand the purity
of all beginnings.
That’s MacCaig, with his huge bony forehead and dark, challenging eyes. If you like that poem there are hundreds more, just as good.
What MacCaig didn’t have, as an Edinburgh man, was an insider’s understanding of the history and culture of the Scottish north. George Mackay Brown of Orkney was a different kettle of freshly caught fish. The Orcadians are like nobody else in the British Isles, except perhaps their near neighbours and rivals from Shetland. Their history isn’t Gaelic, but Norse. The Earldom of Orkney was held for the Norwegian crown, and then the Danish crown, until the cluster of islands was passed to Scotland in 1468 as part of the marriage settlement between King James III and Princess Margaret of Denmark. Orkney has its own heroes, such as St Magnus, executed around 1115 after a Viking battle; and the Viking sagas were recounted over smoking peat fires for centuries. In modern times, without the oil boom that has transformed Shetland, Orkney remained a place almost cut off from modern history, islands of seafarers and subsistence crofters – or, as George Mackay Brown put it, fishermen with ploughs.
The son of an impoverished tailor, Mackay Brown spent most of his life in the small town of Stromness, though he visited Edinburgh frequently and was a friend of the other main figures in the Scottish literary renaissance, joining them on heroic Edinburgh pub crawls. He has influences – notably the other Orcadian poet we have met, Edwin Muir, and, after he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, Gerard Manley Hopkins – but his mature poetry, and indeed his novels and short stories, sound like no one else. They almost feel as if they are standing outside time, in a quasi-medieval space pinned out by rituals and the cycle of the seasons. Here is ‘Hamnavoe Market’, about a group of men who have, all too rarely, a little money to spend in what passes for the metropolis:
They drove to the Market with ringing pockets.
Folster found a girl
Who put wounds on his face and throat,
Small and diagonal, like red doves.
Johnston stood beside the barrel.
All day he stood there.
He woke in a ditch, his mouth full of ashes.
Grieve bought a balloon and a goldfish.
He swung through the air.
He fired shotguns, rolled pennies,
ate sweet fog from a stick.
Heddle was at the Market also.
I know nothing of his activities.
He is and always was a quiet man.
Garson fought three rounds with a negro boxer,
And received thirty shillings,
Much applause, and an eye loaded with thunder.
Where did they find Flett?
They found him in a brazen circle,
All flame and blood, a new Salvationist.
A gypsy saw in the hand of Halcro
Great strolling herds, harvests, a proud woman.
He wintered in the poorhouse.
They drove home from the Market under the stars
Except for Johnston
Who lay in a ditch, his mouth full of dying fires.
Mackay Brown speaks to and for all those Britons who, well into the twentieth century, were still living economically marginal lives, on the very edges of modernity. Not everybody had a car and a chequebook. Here is another of his poems, I think a very good one, about a beachcomber:
Monday I found a boot –
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.
Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.
Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.
I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.
Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.
Friday I held a seaman’s skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.
Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.
Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum. What’s heaven?
A sea chest with a thousand gold coins.
Like Seamus Heaney, Robin Robertson, brought up in the north-east of Scotland, is fascinated by the darkness, directness and bloody nature of the ancient tales. But he is as unlike a Victorian translator from the Greek as can be imagined – much sharper, considerably darker. Here is his version of the moment from the legend of Actaeon, described by Ovid, when the transgressive hunter has been turned into a stag, and is being ripped to pieces by his own hounds:
While they held down their prey,
the rest of the pack broke on him like surf,
dipping their teeth into his flesh
till there was no place left for further wounds,
and at every wound’s mouth was the mouth of a dog.
Surge upon surge, the riptide crashed and turned,
battening on, and tearing away – maddened – in the red spume.
Actaeon groaned: a sound which wasn’t human,
but which no stag could produce.
Falling to his knees, like a supplicant at prayer, he bowed
in silence as the angry sea crashed on him once again
and the dogs hid his body with their own …
Robertson’s poetry covers the gamut. He writes about sex, ageing, regret, great artists of the past, moving house and life-changing operations. In his poem ‘Hammersmith Winter’ he describes the urban loneliness which is for millions a central part of modern life:
It is so cold tonight; too cold for snow,
and yet it snows. Through the drawn curtain
shines the snowlight I remember as a boy,
sitting up at the window watching it fall.
But you are not here, now, to lead me back
to bed. None of you are. Look at the snow,
I said, to whoever might be near, I’m cold,
would you hold me. Hold me. Let me go.
Robertson can be very gentle and mild; but there’s a blackness about him that returns again and again, a recurrence of ancient savagery. Here is his short poem ‘Law of the Island’:
They lashed him to old timbers
that would barely float,
with weights at the feet so
only his face was out of the water.
Over his mouth and eyes
they tied two live mackerel
with twine, and pushed him
out from the rocks.
They stood, then,
smoking cigarettes
and watching the sky,
waiting for a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.
The most unsettling thing, of course, about the poem is the cigarettes: we are still living, some of the time at least, in Ovid’s world.
The twentieth century, and the opening years of this century, have been a fabulous time for Scottish poetry, the most exciting since late medieval times. All of the poets I’ve quoted have had an effect on yet another generation, the here-and-now poets of a Scotland that feels on the edge of reclaiming its political independence. We will meet them, and a whole host of other younger names, in the final section of this book.
* The people of Wales.