An ordinary genius

Bill Boyd
Norman MacCaig didn’t want lunch. A cigarette would do

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For biographical reference:
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An ordinary genius

Bill Boyd

Norman MacCaig was born on 14 November 1910
Drawing by Bob Smith

The handwriting is scratchy, like that of a 10-year-old coming to grips with joined up writing, but there is no mistaking the warmth and generosity of the message: ‘For Bill, for the pleasure of your company (and help) and my best of good wishes – June 1991’.

     When I open my copy of the ‘Collected Poems’ that is the first thing I read, and when I read the poems it’s his voice I hear, slow and measured, higher than you might expect. It was a day like the day in Summer Farm when I picked him up at the railway station in Maybole.
     Waiting for him on the platform I was aware of some of the ghosts of my childhood hanging around with me. There was a group of them standing on the bridge screaming and laughing and choking as the last of the steam trains passed underneath and covered them in smoke and soot. Another lot, older now, were hunkered down behind the station wall, passing round a lit cinammon stick like the peace-pipe in the Saturday morning matinee, while over there by the ticket office I saw the would-be hippy student self in his great-grandfather’s Navy coat, blowing on his hands and waiting, on a cold winter’s Sunday evening, for the train to Glasgow and another week ‘up at the university’.
     Now here I was waiting to greet the great poet, like a nervous teenager at a Take That concert. What do you say to a great poet? Does he talk in poetry? I had returned to my old school as head of English, and Norman MacCaig was coming to talk to the senior pupils. I wasn’t the only one that day who felt there was someone and something special amongst us, as I introduced him to my colleagues in the staff base. We had prepared a modest buffet lunch, which he declined politely, preferring instead – with an ‘if you don’t mind’ – to light up a fag and create a version of what had become the iconic portrait of himself wreathed in smoke.

Here, after all, was not the distinguished poet but the former schoolteacher, 80 years old, as playful and mischievous as his young audience, and they loved it.

     Much to the delight of the pupils and the consternation of the school jannie, our guest continued to smoke in the assembly hall later in the afternoon, as he sat reading poem after poem to an enchanted audience, patiently answering their questions in between, and teaching them a lesson in irony (if only they knew it), with a glint in his eye and a smile never far from his lips. Here, after all, was not the distinguished poet but the former schoolteacher, 80 years old, as playful and mischievous as his young audience, and they loved it.
     At the end of the session I drove him along the high road into Ayr, the same road, I pointed out, that William Burnes must have walked or ridden to meet Robert’s mother, Agnes, at the fair in Maybole; he was happy to indulge my eagerness to impress.
     We spoke about the rolling Ayrshire hills and the variety in the trees, quite a contrast to his beloved Assynt, before I dropped him off for his next engagement, a talk to the members of Ayr Writers’ Club. As I waved and watched him walk away, clutching the bottle we had given him in one hand, and the battered leather briefcase full of poems in the other, I was aware that I had been in the presence of ordinary genius, and that I would still be talking about it 20 years later.

Bill Boyd is an independent learning consultant, specialising in literacy and English. He has been an English teacher, principal teacher and depute headteacher, and spent four years at Learning and Teaching Scotland where he was an education manager.