Such an Air (I)
“As soon as I could, I went to Orkney, where I started to write poetry.”
Ian Hamilton Finlay, c.1965
HE HAD DREAMED and spoken about it for months, for years. But at last, one evening in early March 1959, the 33-year-old writer and playwright Ian H. Finlay found himself on his way back north. His dear friend Mary had seen him onto the steamer at Leith, reassuring him in the taxi that yes, she'd visit as soon as he was settled.
Agoraphobic, prone to nervous exhaustion, and broke, more or less—the trip already postponed by a bout of flu—he'd found it almost impossible even to get this far; without her help, or someone’s, he could hardly have left his place in Rose Street. Yet he knew he’d be fine when he reached the islands, somewhere he’d long thought of as home, and where a home in the most practical sense was waiting. That the clinic could not understand this… Well, social integration on the terms they proposed was not for him.
A steward—”Izaak they cry me, an Ah answer tae it, but it’s Rob really”—helped him on board and saw to his luggage. The same army kitbag as he’d hauled from one place to another these past three years. The one he'd taken on his first visit to Orkney, going up to join Marion, his now-estranged wife. Since his return, and then hers, and the bitter aftermath, he’d hardly left the city, never on his own and never anything like as far.
In November ’55 he travelled by train, taking the P&O from Scrabster: impossible now, even accompanied. But this time he was planning to stay. If he could. He’d brought a grip filled with his books and papers, bits of a manuscript, a title and some 78s. An HMV portable—there was no mains on the island—and his fishing gear. Rob saw him to his cabin, taking his frail arm. He remembered Ian's stories from the Angler—"pity that folded, eh? Ah've kept aw ma copies"—and an article he'd read in The Daily Mail—”Aboot a new book? Last year sometime?”
The Sea-Bed and Other Stories, from Castle Wynd, had been Ian's first, published in October. It had been years in the writing, up on their hillside in Perthshire. Rob remembered a couple of the pieces gratifyingly well: the title story—"some size'eh a cod! I mind that"—and the one about the boy and the old man. Ian would see about sending him a copy. He'd been glad to get the book out at last. Chris Grieve and the Milne's Bar crowd had ignored it of course, but George and Crombie and others were in favour. As indeed was The Mail.
Rob soon returned with cocoa and biscuits, and there was a pie if Ian wanted, that he could heat up? The “symbolist in tackety boots”—so he’d called himself in the Mail—smiled, wryly, and considered the shoes he’d just discarded, wiggled the hole in his toe. Suede, city slicker. He’d worked last year in advertising, as the article had said. Rob laughed too when Ian told him about the Lawsons campaign, but said he’d fetch it anyway—"Cannae dae ony herm, eh?"—though Ian, who’d hardly eaten all day, doubted he could manage much.
°°°
He felt the steamer cast off, and lay back, smoking, sleeplessly. Heard through the night the foghorns, each out-moaning the last. At Aberdeen he stayed put, picked at his breakfast, drifted off, and awoke to the lights around the Pentland Firth, pulsing: Duncansby, Stroma, Cantick… Malin, Hebrides, Irish Sea… Mary, Gillian, Janet. Marion, out there on her own with a horse—his home too, as it used to be, his shed and the old table, the mountains and the pines. Sutherland the shepherd. The sleekit, sullen gamekeepers.
It had been calm coming up, though the sea had never troubled him, except philosophically, by its vast size. And how a boat floats. “Going along lightly and containing its own air inside its dark hold", he’d put it once: a bit long-winded, he thought now.
Before he took the job at McCallum’s he had been planning to sign up on a trawler, till in Princes Street one day he lost his moorings, and could hardly get back to his feet. Had to stagger along the wall, head averted, up to Edward’s. Humiliating, and absurd. That it came from nowhere made it all the more terrifying. Going along lightly indeed. His friend had seen him back to Marchmont in the evening. He’d never been out on his own in daytime since, certainly not in the city.
Then he could see the islands, moonlit, reassuring. A little unreal but differently so than in Auden’s Icelandic characterisation. Mary came to mind again, dear Mary, and Gill—they would visit, he hoped, if he could manage to stay—and he thought again how it was all over with Janet. A new myth. She was married now, and maybe back in New York.
That was what had interested the Mail, of course. A chaos as usual; he’d held up the printer and changed the dedication. Asked one of the secretaries, though “we’re not engaged or anything”, she “has a boy friend ..." But at least the fact that he was married wasn’t mentioned. And it would have been too much even for Marion to write in.
Suddenly the lights at Kirkwall appeared, and he could soon see the boats in the harbour, cheerful tethered ponies. His friend Ernest, a local literary polymath, or one of them, was waiting by the pier.
Serious and good-heartedly Orcadian, Ernest was vastly well-informed, though a bit stiff, and not only with his old back trouble. He might have excelled on what with self-deprecation he thought of as a larger stage, but for his childhood illness. He too was largely self-educated, and though this was something that suited Ian’s restless self-confidence, it left his friend defensive, however otherwise committed to the place he was.
He was obviously still stricken about Muir, his former tutor at Newbattle, who'd died at the start of the year, and at first could hardly mention his name. Perhaps for that reason, who knows, he didn’t seem inclined to say much about The Sea-Bed, although he’d seen the stories before, and had even turned down Ian’s vague approach about publication. Not that The Orkney Herald was likely to have been interested.
Ian knew he didn’t really approve of the work, though not quite why. (His lack of qualifications? He'd left school in Glasgow still aged 13, had barely attended the Art School.) A “delicately ironic trifle” was how Ernest described “National Assistance Money” when The Glasgow Herald reprinted it. Compared to Muir, no doubt, and the Stromness wunderkind. He wondered what Ernest thought of his review in Gambit. Three of them, George had written, if not the "Kafka-like" "The Money", were “among the best of Scottish short stories.”
But George's name soon came up—had Ian seen him? How was he? Not too much in the pubs? He had to be careful of his health. And his book with Hogarth due out in the early summer. They’d both read some of this in manuscript, Ernest probably most of it. Ian genuinely liked the pair of them—different as they all were—George in Edinburgh but still halfway in the islands—”Islandman” had been his pen name in Ernest’s paper—and this tweedy scholar, bookseller, journalist, thirled to the place. The others here too that he'd meet again tomorrow.
And himself, looking for a new beginning, a known place, a home, a myth.
Ernest and Janette put him up till the weekly boat for Rousay, two hours in a south-westerly that finally did for his shoes.
Note on the above
This the first section of a five part narrative entitled Such an Air, which concerns the early stages of the seminal second visit made to Orkney by the poet Ian H. Finlay (as he then was) in spring 1959. It mainly provides background for a publication entitled Rousay Mending: A Footnote, the subject of which is Rousay Mending, originally a centenary homage to IHF, also published in Orkney by Brae Editions, 2026, illustrated below, and see [in preparation].
Such an Air (the title is taken from Finlay’s 1959/60 poem “Mansie Considers Peedie Mary”) is thus a speculative account of selected events, persons, and places that Finlay may have encountered in the early stages of the visit, the information being in part derived from documentary sources, interviews and visits. The story borrows here and there from Finlay's work in ways which will largely be obvious, I hope, to his readers and admirers. For the avoidance of doubt, therefore, we emphasise that a good deal of licence has been taken with what might have occurred during the period in question. Unlike Rousay Mending: A Footnote, Such an Air is not meant to be understood as factually accurate. No disrespect is intended to any person, alive or dead.
The text above and those that follow will be revised from time to time and may disappear without notice. There are no endnotes or bibliography, but reference may be made to those supplied for the Footnote, here.
Alistair Peebles, Brae Editions, Orkney, 2026
