Middle age? Bring it on

At the age of 43, in a hotel  in Abuja, Nigeria,  Jackie Kay had her first and only encounter with  Jonathan, her birth father.  After  decades wondering about his identity,  she  had found him  by the miracle of Google, a  prominent  ethnobotanist in his working life, and a full-time evangelical zealot.   


The poet  is grinning as she describes the  scenario to her  audience at a  reading in Glasgow.   Jonathan, it turned out was ashamed  of his long-lost daughter’s existence, the personification  of his past sins, and agreed to meet her only if she would allow to perform a religious rite in private.

And so it came to pass, chuckles Kay, that she finally found herself in a cramped bedroom, with this strange man waving, dancing, and shouting all around her:  “Oh God Almighty!  Oh God Almighty! We welcome Jackie Kay to Nigeria.  She has crossed the water.  She has landed on African soil for the very first time. Thank you God Almighty!”    

And then, hoots  Kay,  he was off,  whirling, twirling around the hotel room for the best part of two hours.  She remembers he  was “incredibly speedy”  for a man of 73, but that wasn’t the only surprise. when he kicked  off his shoes  she had a flash of genetic recognition: she had inherited his toes.

The story she recounts is from Red Dust Road,  the autobiography she published last year.  In that book, she set  out to reconcile her  childhood cocooned in the loving home of her adopted parents, with the baby girl, given away at birth by her natural mother, a Highland nurse who had slept with the younger Jonathan, when he was a student.     

Her  new volume of poems, Fiere, from the Scots word for companion, is literally that, the  companion piece to her memoir.  The title should be pronounced “Fear”, but  from Kay’s mouth it comes out as “Feary”.    “Better rhymes”, she explains with her huge grin.

In person, Kay  proves to be a force of nature. She effortlessly persuades  a friend in the front row to sing a Burns song to a room full of strangers. A little later, tears spring from the eyes of her audience, when she describes the evening in 1969, when,  as a girl of seven , she asked Helen, her mother, why they didn’t share the same skin colour.  The answer – “because you were adopted” – left  both mother and daughter weeping.  

If some of these stories would melt a heart of stone,  Kay also reveals an unsentimental side.    She wearies of questions about her private life, and  her 15 year-relationship with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, whom she lived with in Manchester. 

In Red Dust Road, she had planned a chapter on this lost love, but in the end reduced her account to a sentence.  In Fiere, Duffy is referred to directly in a single line, which records the fact that the pair remain good friends.  Kay’s new  lover  - she is not named - is celebrated at greater length, in her whole poem of her own, Valentine.

Ever since she was a child, people have been quick to emphasise the differences that seem to surround Kay. She was racially abused as a child, growing up in Glasgow, and later even endured a brief awkwardness with Helen when she came out as lesbian. In her first collection, the Adoption Papers, Kay went questing for a sense of identity,  but  in conversation after her reading, she won’t accept notion that she is any more concerned with the subject than other  authors.

 “All writers carve out a piece of turf for themselves, and they re-evaluate it again and again, exactly as I do,”  she says.  “For some reason, there is more attention on me, because the territory that I’m exploring is more specific.  In actual fact, lots of writer do it: Sarah Waters writes about identity; Dickens wrote about identity; so did George Eliot.   Who we are? Why are we here?  These are the big  questions, I suppose.

“ I would quite like people to read the Adoption Papers, Red Dust Road and Fiere all together.  They are all different aspects of one central question: what makes us who we are.”

In her  new collection, she shows the ability to transcends every chain that might confine her.  A few of these poems imagine her life as it might have been.  In Granite, she fantasises about  the courtship of her natural parents  while  Longitude conjures up her holding hands with an imagined African twin, “two young lassies, /the breeze on our light-dark faces.”     Other poems have  a harder edge. The absurd Jonathan, in real life too ashamed  of his youthful  to introduce Kay to his own family, is put away by one entitled  Burying My African Father. 

The  cumulative effect is to make clear that nurture, not nature, has  focussed this poet’s eye.   A couple of the 40 or so titles here are for Matthew, her own grown-up son, but the most touching and delightful f of Kay’s  poems  celebrate her “real mum and dad” John and Helen, the Socialist couple who  raised her. These poems drip with love.

In    85^th Birthday Poem for Dad, in one verse she has her father  skimming  across a dance floor like Fred Astaire. In the next he is invoking Tom Paine and the Rights of Man: “Nobility is not hereditary, aye”.  In Windows, Lakes, she smiles at her mother’s yearning  for a house with a bay window: “Imagine – sitting in the sun and reading a Simenon – heaven!”

The warmth of the language is a debt repaid. “The thing you need in life, above anything else   is to know that you are loved,” says Kay, with an urgency in her voice. “You  need to know that as soon as possible when you are a boy or girl! If you don’t have love, you don’t have the confidence to find out who you are.  I can only write about all these things because I got that love.”    

What makes Kay even more fortunate is her parents have maintained their vigorous health down all these years. It means that she herself has been able to mature without the pain of parental loss and embrace the joys  – yes the joys, she shrieks -  of middle age.   

 Look at like this: you get a bit like a cow, don’t you?  “Cows have pivotal vision,” she says, by way of explanation. “You get to that point in life when it feels pivotal, that same  sense of vision.  As a child you see straight ahead; as an older person, you look behind.  Your vision in middle age is to look both ways.  You can see back and forward.

“Some people are frightened of being 50, but I think ‘Bring it on.’   To know what it is like to have 80-year-old parents; to remember what it’s like to have childhood friends; to be bang there, filled with all this extra emotion that comes from being your age.  It’s almost as if your heart is full, because you are looking backwards and forwards in equal measure.”

There is an obvious down side. Now her parents sit in the back of her car, when they go driving with their daughter.   “The tables turn around, and you notice it happening,” says Kay.   

She has just driven to Glasgow from Manchester, a journey she has made a thousand times and more. “There is something about crossing the border, but today the light was exceptional, “ she says. “As I was driving I was thinking how would I feel if I was coming to Scotland and  mum and dad were no longer alive.   

“All the time, the weather went from sun to fog to sleet, it was like the thoughts in my head.  I have a poem, The Shoes of Dead Comrades, which is about anticipating my dad’s death.  He  don’t like it,  He said, ‘I bloody die in it.’  But I am petrified of them dying.  It’s up ahead of you.  It’s stupid thing but it almost affects the quality of your life now.”

Kay has already has spelt out were consolation lies in the title of her book. Fiere is dedicated to the novelist, Ali Smith. She  was the rock when Kay’s relationship with Duffy died,   the constant voice of consolation, whose steadfastness  is recalled in  one of the sequence of Fiere poems that form the spine of this book.  Fiere in the Middle is among the finest of this collection, and there, in the final  couplet, is Kay’s core belief:   “Should you be lost in the middle years . . ./ the true fieres appear: able, sound, equally good.”


* The article appeared in The Times Weekend Review, 22 January 2011 

Thomas Hardy's house of secrets thrown open to the madding crowd

For the first time since Thomas Hardy’s death in 1928, the Dorset house where he wrote Tess of the D’Urbervilles and composed his most poignant love poetry is to be opened in full to the public. From mid-March, visitors will be able take in all three floors of Max Gate, designed and built by the author himself.

Moments of real revelation are in store for literary pilgrims who make the trip to Dorchester, said Jacqueline Dillion, the American PhD student who this month was appointed scholar-in-residence. Hardy, she said, is in the very grain of Max Gate, and almost every facet of his life is revealed in its structure.

Take the drawing room with its long windows allowing inspiration to flood in. J. M. Barrie, one of many famous writers to visit Max Gate, said: “Hardy could scarcely look out of the window at twilight without seeing something hitherto hidden from mortal eye.”

Visitors will be able to see two studies, the first where the author wrote Tess, a tale of love, pre-marital sex and murder that scandalised Victorian society, and the second where, over 40 years or so, he completed some 900 poems.

From the first floor, they can climb to the attic where his first wife, Emma, retreated as the marriage collapsed. The couple became estranged in the 1890s and in later years Emma occupied this second storey. “She wanted her own personal space, and she got it,” said Ms Dillion. “She was up there writing, and below in his study, Hardy would be working too.”

The son of a stonemason, Hardy trained as an architect, but only came to design Max Gate in his forties, by which time he had secured his literary reputation with a succession of novels including Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

In configuring every detail of the house, Hardy brought his own personality to bear on its design, said Ms Dillion. “He lived out half of his life in a house that was designed for his own specific purposes, his dreams,” she added. “He lived out two marriages here, and died in Max Gate. You sense his presence as soon as you walk in.”

Today, the nearby ring road can mask the significance of its location. In fact, Max Gate, with its “wild, bleak look”, is just three miles from the cottage where Hardy was born, which in turn stands on the edge of ominous, glowering moorland that was the basis for Hardy’s Egdon Heath, the setting for The Return of the Native. Yet for all its original rural setting, Max Gate was close enough to Dorchester for Hardy to observe the comings and goings in his fictional “Casterbridge”.

Everything about the house reflects Hardy’s idiosyncrasies, said Ms Dillion. He was so absorbed with the construction process that he drove his easygoing father, Thomas, to distraction as he helped to build it.

Hardy had one turret built when he commissioned the house, then, years later, another. As time passed, and his successes grew, he added more rooms and by the time of his death Max Gate had doubled in size.

Ms Dillion, who has an MA in Victorian studies from the University of Hull, will spend the first 18 months of her tenancy completing a PhD for the University of St Andrews on folklore in Hardy’s literature. For the rest of the time she will concentrate on restoring the house’s original interior design and furnishings.

This will be no easy job. To the dismay of scholars, Hardy ordered that his papers be burnt after his death and his sister, who inherited the house, sold off most of the furniture.

Max Gate passed to the National Trust in 1940, with the stipulation that it should always be occupied. Public access began in 1993, when Andrew and Marilyn Leah became custodians, and the next year opened up the ground floor to the public, two days a week in a short summer season.

Earlier this year, Dillion heard that the Leahs were planning to move on and, with their support, she was installed on a three-year tenancy. Under her care, Max Gate will open five days a week between March and October.

“This part of Dorset repays anyone who has read Hardy and loved Hardy,” said Ms Dillion. “When Max Gate opens up, it will complete a wonderful picture.” 

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Travels with Tess - Arkansas to Dorset via Baghdad 

Jacqueline Dillion may not be the first custodian of Max Gate since Thomas Hardy’s death, but at 28 she is probably the youngest. And she is certainly the first US Army veteran to take up residence, Offering proof positive that great literature endures even the most extreme circumstances.

“I kept a battered, dirty copy of Tess under the seat of the Humvee in Baghdad. I snuck it out when mortars were hitting,” said Ms Dillion, a former military intelligence specialist with 1st Cavalry Division.

For the National Trust, the owner of Max Gate, she is clearly not just some academic caretaker. Her age and enthusiasm offer much more: marketing power. “I guess there is something about promoting ‘Hardy country’,” she said. “Maybe the notion is to inspire a younger generation of readers.”

Quite how a former frontline soldier will cope with rattling around alone in a huge Victorian pile is anyone’s guess. Iraq was full of danger, excitement, noise, comradeship and fear. “Maybe the Dorset countryside will have a calming effect,” she said. “It’s kind of a hard act to follow.”

Ms Dillion grew up in the Arkansas Bible Belt and took her first degree in America before she was called up in 2003 as a reservist. She was already a “lifelong Hardy advocate”, converted by her first encounter with Tess of the D’Urbervilles at the age of 14. “My grandparents were poor bean farmers,” Ms Dillion 

explained. “When I went back to the farm, with the smell of horse manure, it was another world. Reading Hardy was a way to see the beauty in that rural place — to see that people aren’t just backward farmers, they have real literary worth, they endure tragedy and drama. Everything you find in the best literature you also find in that landscape.”

For years, she loved Hardy’s Dorset from afar: the hidden passions, the human anguish, the brooding presence of nature. “But you can romanticise anything — then you have to live it.” 

Prisoner of his own conscience

Scotsman 17 June, 2002 

It’s a special kind of contrarian who can irritate all sides in politics, but then, for all his languor over lunch, Christopher Hitchens is what you’d call an especially contrary fellow.

This is a journalist whose meticulously documented contempt for Mother Teresa caused him to be summoned to the Vatican to play devil’s advocate against her memory. He followed that attack with a blast against the cult of Princess Diana which disgusted the Daily Mail. 

But if these shafts cut through the narrow minds of the Right, Hitchens takes no prisoners on the Left. The oleaginous Gore Vidal has anointed Hitchens his natural heir as Grand Pantomime Dame of the American Left, but his successor has no compunction about dismissing Vidal’s latest political work. "Badly written and ponderously argued," he booms in his rich, bass voice. "I’m not looking for a quarrel with him. I’ve tried to avoid it as long as I could ... "

This counts as a mild assault from Hitchens, whose witty, passionate and bellicose outpourings in the aftermath of 11 September stood out as the finest journalistic response to the terrorist massacres. No-one surpassed him in his assault on al-Qaeda, on "Islam with a fascist face". Equally, many on the Left were numbed by his fierce contempt for appeasers in the war against terror.

Even now his enemies are forced to fight a rearguard action. Two weeks ago, the 53-year-old Hitchens was labelled "the poster boy of ‘principled opposition’" by the New Statesman, and derided as the "dishonourable policeman of the Left". His response was to invite the author, Scott Lucas, to "look me up in Washington any time - I am in the book - and have an unscripted exchange with neutral witnesses present".

These days, as George Orwell’s centennial approaches, it is almost inevitable that Hitchens is compared to his literary hero, whose ambivalence to parties and ideologies he has himself adopted ever since he left the International Socialists in 1975.

In a fine London restaurant, it is easy enough to conjure up some clear distinctions between the lean, ascetic Orwell of the 1930s and the robust and bibulous Hitchens, who even now is happily ordering us up a second bottle of red wine. But according to "Hitch", the fundamental difference is one of moral and physical courage. Orwell was the self-denying reporter whose journeys into misery still colour our views of the 1930s and 1940s, a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, who took a bullet in the throat. For his part, Hitchens, a witness to the Portuguese revolution in 1974, and a foreign correspondent who has been shot at in the course of duty, was never in such danger.

Now in his latest book, Orwell’s Victory, Hitchens has sought to rescue his subject from critics who either claim his legacy or scorn his worth. And while he saves much of his spleen for those on the Left who have cast Orwell as a fellow-traveller with the establishment, Hitchens vigorously slaps down the Right, whenever they stumble into view.

Take John Major’s pitiful attempt to link "Eric Blair’s" 1984 with the "doublethink" of one Tony Blair. Hitchens was on it like a flash. "I was delighted when I discovered Major had linked the two Blairs. If he’d have read a word of Orwell, he would have known the huge snorting pig in Animal Farm is called Major. But I felt I shouldn’t point it out - it does Mr Major too much credit." He lets go a throaty chuckle: "Old Major is a fine old pig, rallying the piglets for a struggle."

In contrast to the last prime minister, Hitchens appears well-disposed to Tony Blair, although he says he deplores his "official piety". He applauds the constitutional changes of the past five years and approves of British foreign policy in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, contrasting it with the failures of the Bush administration.

And despite barbs to the contrary from his left-wing critics, he does not bury criticism of Bush, not least because he fears the struggle they have embarked upon may not go well. Therefore, "It matters to point out when they mess up. I wrote a long piece from Kashmir last autumn saying we should worry about the next war.

"America has already committed itself to getting things wrong in Kashmir and Pakistan, for it has for so long neglected the idea of India."

This international outlook has been a constant in Hitchens adult life and he has spent the past 25 years in America ("I felt early on I’d been born in the wrong country," he grunts through a glass of Macallan). The son of an English naval commander, who had worked his way up through the ranks, he was brought up by his mother as the family moved from base to base. She nurtured his love of books before he was sent away to a Methodist boarding school near Cambridge.

By the time he went up to Oxford, Hitchens had dabbled with verse, and thought about writing fiction, but found he couldn’t. At Balliol College he shared rooms with the poet James Fenton. He went on to become friends with novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Very quickly it became apparent he could learn about writing just by spending time with his companions.

Thirty years on, would he accept that journalism is the lesser art? The question is posed three times before he answers head-on. "I would rather put it like this. I think the ability to write a novel or a sonnet is a superior ability. James, Martin and Ian have all written essays and reviews which would stand comparison with anybody’s.

"That is their spare-time work but it’s not their calling. They knew something that I didn’t know.

"I have to say journalism is second-best. It’s not false modesty. I have one idiom in which I can write - James has three.

"Gore Vidal has made political writing an art by fictionalising it, but you can’t keep it in the form it commonly exists in and claim it for art," Hitchens says.

But with all the fire and humour, the angst and aggression that marked his work after 11 September, surely there’s artfulness to be had from that kind of journalism? "But you’re not going to remember it like Mozart, are you?" He counters. "You must realise, at whatever cost to yourself and however much you think you’ve seen, that you have to be able to recognise a new situation when it happens.

"One of my main criticisms of people on the Left like Noam Chomsky and JohnPilger after 11 September was they thought: ‘Here’s a new event, but it just reminds me of what I was going to say anyway and what I’ve been saying all along.’ That was their failure."

We are back to the events which could come to define his career, just as they immediately rearranged his priorities. On 10 September it seemed a Hitchens sponsored campaign to have Henry Kissinger indicted for war crimes was coming to fruition. That day, a group of Chileans had been given leave to bring a lawsuit for murder against Kissinger, and others, for their role in the 1973 coup in the country. The same evening Hitchens delivered a triumphal lecture at Washington State University and, to a standing ovation, concluded: "This day will be remembered for a long time in the struggle for justice."

He awoke the next day to find the world falling apart on his television screen. The Evening Standard rang, and Hitchens responded instantaneously with the first of a sequence of articles whose passionate clarity made sense of the shocking, confusing scenes for thousands of readers around the world.

"It was one of the most beautiful mornings in the history of the world. But the most perfect crystalline view of Manhattan had suddenly been totally obliterated from the air by this ghastly cloud. I wrote that it was ‘as if Charles Manson had been made God for a day’. If you’ve thought that, you aren’t neutral about things. I dumped my campaign - I don’t think the subject of international human rights will go away, but you’ve got to realise when things have changed."

We’re back, more or less where he started, and the question of another whisky is being raised. Does he ever worry he’ll lose his fire? Through a great throaty laugh, he has advice for contrarians everywhere. "If you don’t get up every day whimpering with fear, thinking this is the day they’ll find you out, and say, ‘Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ you’re not doing your job. You should be in a state of permanent fear about being discovered as a blowhard, or as an irrelevance." He decides against the whisky, because the BBC are waiting to speak to him. A blowhard, perhaps, but he’s not an irrelevance yet.

Orwell’s Victory is published by Penguin, £9.99.

Premier league poet

Scotsman, 5 October 2000

Warming up, as any decent coach will tell you, is the key to a good performance and if that's true for footballers it might just hold good for poets.

Ian McMillan, the poet-in-residence at Barnsley FC is playing away from home today. He's been limbering up for nearly an hour in the staff-room of Carmel School in Darlington, and it looks like he will be ready to hit top form when he finally takes the stage.

Even before he opens his mouth there's a presence about the man - it would take a while to walk around him - but rattling through anecdotes and jokes, he cuts an extraordinary figure, reflected in the what-have-we-here faces of the teachers around about him.

One butts in - she recognises McMillan from a writing course in Heptonstall: "Do you remember," she asks, "Ted Hughes was there?" - another wants him to explain a poem from his last-but-one volume, Dad the Donkey's on Fire.

He answers the first: "Yeah I remember. Are you well?" He tells the other: "Say it out loud, you'll get it."

Then he's off again into his own world, explaining to no-one in particular how he's ambitious to write a hit song.


"My mate Dave Low, he wrote the theme tune to the Nine O'Clock News. He gets #10 every time the news is on. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not."

Twenty minutes later the pace gets even more frenetic when he's on stage, in front of a couple of hundred 13 and 14-year-olds. There's still a hubbub as McMillan begins his act, but like a top stand-up he opens with a tirade of one-liners about local rivals, infant schools and every other natural enemy of his audience, the modern teenager.

"I did this poem at a school in Middlesbrough," he yells, "because they've got one there now ..." and the cheers begin. "I can see the headmaster at the back there with that look on his face. He's thinking, 'I should have spent the money on software ... he's thinking: 'Death to fat men from Barnsley.'"

He disappears behind curtains, hides behind plants, does tricks, vanishes again and among the laughter, commands the kids' rapt attention. They think he's fooling, but it's poetry in motion. He runs a couple of verses past them just to prove it and then has them join in with two more. Suddenly he shouts: "Right. I've finished now. I bow and you clap."

This is a game of two halves, mark you. After a break for oranges and tea, McMillan is back in a classroom, this time helping the members of the school football team write and perform a poem of their own. Delighted with what they have already seen, they greet him with a round of applause and he turns in another bravura show.

Afterwards, when he's on his way home and we're talking in the station buffet, he's relaxed and explains more about his work, divided as it is between schools and gigs at arts centres and comedy clubs.

The routines, he admits, owe as much to music hall and pub banter as anything. From those two rich veins of verbal dexterity he mines his verse.

For the son of a teetotal Scottish sailor, he gains a deal of inspiration from the pub. Take the poet-in-residence idea, that was just one of those notions you have over a drink of an evening. Normally they don't make any kind of sense next morning, but McMillan rang up his local club and asked the question.

"Being Barnsley they said: 'Will it cost owt?' I said: 'No I'll do it free, gratis. I'll do it to get loads of publicity."

They agreed and the poet's instincts were nicely judged. The Yorkshire Post ran a headline 'Barnsley's first Premiership Signing' and after that the phone never stopped ringing. He appeared live on Danish TV, he was gifted a regular 16-line spot in the Barnsley Chronicle - he always wrote 18 to see what they'd do - a career on local and national radio flourished and Yorkshire Television made him a familiar face.

It brought recognition, but not everywhere. He produces a poster from a gig at Melton Mowbray library.

"Funny Poet Here On Thursday" he reads, "that was the entire publicity. They put one on each door of the building. Only three people turned up, and one of them said: 'I thought it would be you.'"

McMillan was undaunted. After all, the performances have gone on for 20 years now, and no stage is too challenging. With his friend Simon Thackeray he dreamt up the notion of a Yorkshire Pudding boat race. "We made a flour and water paste and strengthened them with chicken wire and yacht varnish. They were like coracles, and there was [saxophonist] Snake Davies doing music on one while I did poems on another.

"We had a diving society along for safety, so we're floating a long in giant puddings with bands and poets and a load of kids and there's blokes with snorkels in the water. It was different."

Football brings another kind of recognition. He's become a kind of spokesman for Barnsley fans and whenever something happens - a controversial penalty, an offside goal against the Tykes - people ask him to write a poem.

Sometimes the specifications are exact. "We beat Man United 3-2 in the Cup and this bloke leaned over and said: 'You'll not write a poem about this, you'll write a bloody sonnet.' I said 'I will lad, aye.'"

In fact, sonnets are hard, he admits, and though his books include plenty of serious verse, these days humour and performance are more important.

"Comedy and poetry are very close, they both tickle the same part of your brain," he says. "For years, I had a dilemma because I'm quite a serious chap, but I love making people laugh.

"I'm not melancholy. I'm a relentless optimist, but I'm serious. I was thinking should I be doing this funny stuff? I went to a school once and a teacher said 'We've got an author coming next week'. I thought 'Bloody hell, I didn't find this stuff on the street'."

But in a way he does, and street-wise as McMillan is, that's what makes it work.

The 'vandals' playing around with Mary Queen of Scots' golfing legacy

It is, they say, the oldest golf course in the world. Mary Queen of Scots is said to have played a round of golf at Musselburgh. As did her son, James VI, days before he decamped to England. The East Lothian course hosted six Open championship in the 19th century, and the first ladies tournament in history.

But now – in the aftermath of Ryder Cup hysteria - Musselburgh Old Course is being “vandalised” by the local council, according to local sportsmen.

Across the expanse of rolling grassland, enclosed by the town’s horse racing circuit, dark brown scars cut into the grassy links, attest to works already underway, aimed at realigning the ancient links to a huge £4.5 million sports pavilion, on its northern fringe.

The building – an ungainly, four-square affair – opened in July and primarily services the race course, housing accommodation for horses and jockeys. Eventually it will make space for golfers’ changing rooms and an office for the golf club “Starter”, who for decades has been housed 400 yards away, in a hut close to the first tee.

The new facilities have prompted changes to the nine-hole course, carried out by the green-keeper, without the support of a golf course architect.

The first tee will be moved, so that it is visible from the pavilion, bunkers will be filled and the hole lengthened, from a short 146-yard par-3, to a much more challenging par-3 230 yards. The dog-leg on the approach to the par-4 ninth hole is also being adjusted and its tee position moved.

Alterations on this scale may seem minor to non-golfers, but send the game’s aficionados into apoplexy.

“It is an act of vandalism” said Brian Ramsay, 57, a member of the Musselburgh Old Course Golf Club. “Everyone knows the great history of the course, but the council seem hell-bent on developing the commercial side of the race track, and forgetting the course. The course shouldn’t be turned over just because of a new building. It’s madness.”

To understand this level of feeling, the uninitiated need only consult Golf World, the Bible of the modern game.

“Musselburgh is to golf what Mecca is to religion,” it concludes, listing it among the world’s Top 100 courses. “The very roots of the game are founded on this hallowed turf. As the oldest playing links course in the world, it captures a wonderful sense of nostalgia.”

Mr Ramsay and his supporters are quick to point out that East Lothian Council have an undistinguished record when it comes to safeguarded their golfing Mecca.

The course, like the race track, stands on common land, administered for the community by the local authority. Five years ago the council sanctioned the creation of an £11 million all-weather horse racing circuit complete with floodlights, a development that would have required shearing off sections of the old course.

Cue uproar. The development was called in by the Scottish Executive, and eventually thrown out to the delight of golfers all over the world.

This time around the council insist it consulted with the golf clubs that use the course, and had not faced objection. Moreover, a spokesman insisted that even the historic short first hole, had been altered over the years, so it was hardly breaking with tradition.

And it is true, acknowledge the council’s critics: most courses change over time, even, occasionally, the most venerable. St Andrews was lengthened for this year’s Open and nearby Muirfield bears little relation to the course first constructed on its site, east of Gullane.

But on Musselburgh links history hangs heavy on the air. The first recorded game was documented here, revealed in the account books of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston, who paid for three golf balls, and hired a horse to carry him to the burgh.

There are older traditions. Mary Queen of Scots is said to have been indicted for the murder of Lord Darnley while she was playing here. Soldiers slain at the Battle of Pinkie are reputed to be buried under the second hole – known to sportsmen as “The Graves”. Cromwell billeted his troops on the course.

This is heritage to the max. Underlying the sense of grievance among critics is a sense that the council, along with public bodies – notably VisitScotland – simply do not value a sporting destination that resonates all around the world. Yet, in the tiny Starter’s hut, the visitors book is crammed with signatures from all around the world – Americans, South Africans, Canadians and Germans joining the Scots and English visitors who have played the course in the last few days.

It is this global reach that is constantly overlooked, said Sir Charles Fraser, a keen golfer who lives locally and is well acquainted with the course’s history.

“This is a national treasure,” said Sir Charles. “It is a terrific place. When you walk on it, you walk on history. If this golf course was run by Americans, can you imagine the fuss that would be made over it? But nothing in life is frozen in aspic – people just have to find a way between minor change and damage to a national treasure.”

Mr Ramsay agrees, and proposes a simple solution. “Why don’t they just stop and think. If they simply convert ninth hole in the first, and the first into the ninth, there will no need to keeping digging the course up.”

Lost letters reveal Morgan's muse

The trauma of unrequited love, the pleasure and pain of friendship and the sheer beauty of language emerge powerfully from a collection of “lost” poems and letters written to his student friend and muse by the young Edwin Morgan.

The poems — most unpublished — are revealed for the first time today by The Times and were composed for Vivian Linacre.

Now 82, Mr Linacre was in his early twenties and a final-year student at the University of Edinburgh when he met Morgan, then 29, who had recently been appointed as an assistant lecturer at Glasgow University.

Morgan, Scotland’s Makar (or National Poet), died last month, aged 90. His English counterpart, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, described him as irreplaceable, “poetry’s true son and blessed by her”.

Morgan had concealed his homosexuality until he was 70, but as a young man, for four years, he maintained an intimate correspondence with Mr Linacre, sometimes barely unable to conceal his longing, but never quite confessing his true desire.

Instead, beginning the summer of 1949, in a succession of literary letters — in which he occasionally wrote in blank verse — Morgan often made main plain his feelings.

For Mr Linacre — addressed as “Vividest Lineament”, “Vivihand” and “Vivid Liniment” by Morgan — these letters were “purely poetic”, the mark only of a strong friendship, ripened by a shared love of language.

“I was very naive at the time,” said Mr Linacre, who is twice married and has eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “Looking back I realise just how intense it was, how emotionally charged. But as far as I was concerned it was a literary thing.

“Like Robert Graves, he always needed a muse, and he had several. I served that purpose, too. He wasn’t interested in me, I think he just needed someone to address.”

One of the poet’s published pieces, A Metre-Reading, was written for Mr Linacre, and is ripe with sexual imagery: “... The groin mine groans with gold,/ Meditation is choked,/ Mine-shaft, granary-wall/Crack gold, spout grain-of-gold/ Swelling by love’s lintel / In lust’s wastrel jostle . . .”

Morgan found life particularly difficult during the 1950s, when he hid his sexuality away for fear of carrying the stigma of being openly homosexual. This week, a biography of the poet, written by James McGonigal, will suggest that Morgan became depressed and even considered committing suicide during this period.

Some of his correspondence to Mr Linacre makes clear Morgan’s discomfort. One of his letters, written in verse, reads: “The patient was a patient/ Even in Edinburgh/ And had no heart to see you/ Being in much pain and so/ Desiring only hiding/ Like the lonely forest things/ Till gaiety should return.”

Looking back, there was no doubt that his friend had suffered from a form of depression, Mr Linacre said. “In the poetry there are lots of references to illness,” he added.

“I suspected at the time that there was nothing wrong medically, but he suffered bouts of the ‘black dog’ and would withdraw himself, though he wouldn’t advertise it. If you read between the lines, you can see that he would look into himself and use all this stuff as material.”

Mr Linacre moved to London in 1953 to pursue a career as a surveyor. He lost touch with Morgan but kept many of the letters and items sent by the poet, over their four-year friendship. These include A Metre Reading and another poem Cheiromantra, apparently unpublished until today — when it is reprinted opposite.

Morgan also sent Mr Linacre copies of his first two published books,A Vision of Cathkin Braes and a translation of Beowulf; copies of then unpublished works, such as the love poem, Benedicite Omnia Opera, and Michelangelo: 4 Sonnets, as well as copies of many works in progress.

The two men first met in July 1949, through a shared interest in the Edinburgh Festival, when Mr Linacre was a month short of his 21st birthday. At the time, he was “half-heartedly reading English” while devoting the rest of his life to debating societies and dissipation.

“In Edinburgh we met in either the Cockburn Hotel or Darlings Hotel,” Mr Linacre said. “Occasionally I made the round trip by train to Glasgow and by tram to Burnside, Rutherglen, for tea with his parents at 12 Albert Drive.

“As a special treat, we would travel as far north as Drymen for a frugal meal at the Buchanan Arms. Our correspondence continued long after he had moved into his modern flat on Great Western Road, though I never visited him there.”

Mr Linacre said that Morgan was essentially a loner. The younger man was conscious both of his literary friend’s strained relationship with his parents, and of the fact that he remained distant from the famous poets of the day, such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig.

His parent simply didn’t understand him and that made him very unhappy,” Mr Linacre said.

Though he destroyed some of the correspondence, Mr Linacre kept the letters and poems which he considered most important. The first item is dated August 23, 1949, and followed an Edinburgh production of T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party, one of the highlights of that year’s festival.

Morgan attended the play, while Linacre enjoyed a drink at Darling’s Hotel, in Waterloo Place, a favoured haunt of the Edinburgh arts crowd.

The letter begins: “A little document, my dear Linacre,/ To express my resentment at the wretched angustity/ Of fate and time which tormented my feet/And hindered my dating you at Darling’s Hotel/ At the hour hoped-for: for he (Eliot)/ Kept us in the Lyceum later than cued, And cars were full, and fretting keenly/ Took me no earlier than twenty to eleven/ To the vacated rendezvous; you must recently have vanished.”

A letter of November 4, 1949 again is written in verse, and charmingly recounts the humdrum details of Morgan’s everyday life.

“My friend Sydney Graham is/ In hospital in Truro,/ Another poetry-shard/ Another crock of a Jock,/ And I worry about him/ Since he is too drugged to write . . . I am reading Gormenghast/ And the Seven Cantos;/ Saw an aquarium fish/ Exhibition yesterday;/ And have put on a yellow/ Pullover to knit up care/A little with its brilliant/ Ravelment; such my poor news. Haut les coeurs, kingfisher cries,/ ... Haut les coeurs, O haut les coeurs!” The poem is signed “Endgloom Mornagain!”

Morgan, who announced he was gay on his 70th birthday — he said “as a present” to himself — had endured agonies and anxiety for periods of his life. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence in Scotland until 1980, and his public position called for discretion.

The 1950s had been particularly difficult, Hamish Whyte, a long-standing friend of the poet, said. He had difficulties writing and suffered from the buttoned up sexual mores of the day.

“Eddie felt the muse had deserted him, so he poured himself into his translation of Beowulf. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he had depression with a capital ‘D’, but he was probably confused. It was a very repressive time for him until the Sixties exploded.”

Morgan met John Scott in 1963, though the two never lived together, this finally, was the defining relationship in the poet’s life, until Scott’s death in 1978.

Professor McGonigal said that he had been aware of Mr Linacre from Morgan’s correspondence, which the poet kept, and from their conversations, but he doubted that Mr Linacre had been the poet’s muse.

“It would be difficult to judge the relationship from the correspondence Eddie kept,” he added. “Eddie was interested in lively people and good company, and Vivian Linacre perhaps fitted the bill. I got the impression he was bright and interesting. There was a correspondence between them, but I didn’t form the impression that it was hugely important. I could be wrong.”

Costume drama warning: Thou shalt not covert thy neighbour's hat

It was not just the Pope who claimed the streets of Edinburgh yesterday. Ninian, a fourth century Scottish bishop, ran him a close second. On T-shirts, placards and balloons, the name was everywhere, as the grand parade in the saint’s honour formed up, in the shadow of Calton Hill.

At nine o’clock, lines of obedient schoolchildren were first to arrive at the head of the march, ready to squeak their excitement. Orderly adults followed on, dignified bandsmen who joined the 1,000 pipers who made up the procession, and bashful blokes in fancy dress, kitted out as St Andrew, Robert Burns and Ninian himself.

Next up were the Knights of Malta, the oldest Christian charity in the world, all grand in their ceremonial robes and carrying flags. “It is a big day out,” said Nick Crean, the Chancellor of the Knights. “This parade demonstrates that the Catholic Church is a force for good. This parade is a tremendous symbol of its worth.”

This being secular, 21st century Scotland, not everyone agreed. In 1982, when John Paul II came to Edinburgh, the streets were jammed. This time, even the Catholic Church had to admit that only 60,000 turned out to form a thin line of well-wishers along the mile-long route down Princes Street.

Much has changed in three decades. Now there is a parliament building in the city, Scottish football is even worse, church attendances are down in the depths — but the Rev Ian Paisley, now Lord Bannside, remains immovable. For his last fixture with the Vatican on Scottish soil, Lord Bannside trekked from Co Antrim to the Mass given by John Paul II in Glasgow, where he hurled sectarian abuse at the prelate known in Paisleyite circles as “the Antichrist”.

This time out, his protest was hidden away deep in the bowels of Edinburgh’s Old Town, and, mercifully, far quieter. Indeed for an hour or more, it was entirely private, while Lord Bannside communed with 50 grim-faced clergy from the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster inside the tiny Magdalen Chapel.

The setting was suitably historic. The chapel was built by Catholics in 1541, but occupied by John Knox for the first General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. As the clock ticked on, the question arose, what on Earth was Lord Bannside doing in there? Knocking out the stained glass windows, manufactured by papist craftsmen?

He probably was, because when he finally emerged he was in high spirits. Sporting a nifty black fedora and a broad smile he stepped into the sun. Would he answer a flippant question — where did he get that great big beautiful hat? “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s hat!” boomed the voice that rattled a thousand pews. And could Lord Bannside spare a message for the Pope? “Go. Back. Home.”

That was more or less that. A quick chorus of The Lord’s My Shepherd at the nearby Covenanters’ monument, and Lord Bannside was off.

The Pope, by now ensconced in his Popemobile, and trundling through the nearby city-centre streets, was not free of his tormenters yet. By the Usher Hall, the staunch gentlemen of the Orange Order had gathered to register their silent protest at the papal visit. Across the street, a noisier faction of sceptics, humanists, gay and women’s rights campaigners had assembled to shout out their individual grievances.

For once, as the demonstrators surged, the crowd along the route swelled to four or five deep. But then, just as a frisson of opposition could be felt, the moment was gone and the Popemobile drove back into the real, and sometimes raucous, Edinburgh.

Now the crowds were different. Sikh waiters in turbans throwing curious looks from a restaurant doorway; office workers, leaning against the barrier to stare at the man in white and his tartan scarf. Even the girls at the Ambassador Sauna had time to get to their window, above the Bottoms Up Show Bar, to wave down at the Pope as he trucked past. And he was gone. In the office, the restaurant, the sauna and the show bar, it was back to business as usual — in 21st century, secular Scotland.