He took me from a fearful pit, And from the miry clay, And on a rock he set my feet, Establishing my way.
The 40th Psalm’s second verse as in ballad metre we sang it in the Church of Scotland – are the words in which my maternal grandfather would express relief and gratitude when he felt himself rescued from tribulation by a loving God. Yet stronger even than religious conviction was a strain of romantic longing betrayed in his dedication to our national poet.
Robert Burns, his life and work, were never far from his thought. My grandfather, gifted craftsman and designer was by his care and example the nearest I would ever come to having a father. My mother had been widowed when I was barely two and she and I, her parents and her maiden sister lived together in a house by the Dee, named by my grandfather ‘Lea-Rig’, lovers’ trysting-spot of a Burns song. Aged 60, he was operated on for prostate cancer, a procedure which, as I much later learned, involved at that time castration.
This. I now realise, was what embittered him beyond belief. His loving God had treacherously failed him, and our devoted minister became then a particular focus of his loathing. Unhappily wed besides, he relied on his romantic longings alone for emotional sustenance, and spent the enfeebled years till cancer’s return in perfecting his last sculpture. It would capture in granite the final parting of Burns from the woman whom, following her death, he would long after recall in words which were more dear to my grandparent than any psalm could ever be:
Aberdeen Granite Works, 1930s. Grandfather standing, third from the right William Imray remembers his sculptor grandfather.
You were barely an hour at work that morning when we saw you return, step firm enough, but deeper by years the rut in cheek, lips pursed invisible, eye taking leave of us for the long caves of dread.
You'd passed blood, entered your decade of withering – and I of my blossoming.
I was twelve at the time, and little knew, as you lay that winter in the one room we had coal to warm,
why my each manlier step, each word in manlier key would earn its scowl of you.
('So weak!' they'd tell me. 'You must try to understand!')
Little could see either why you, who'd welcome in elder and preacher once,
quoting them text for text, claiming how many a time from fearful pit,
mired clay you'd known rescue, once more on rock established,
would curse them now or clutch silence, brow to the wall.
They took your part – mother, maiden aunt, grandmother.
I alone would defend our hero of better days, the minister. No mention then of ‘understand’!
I’d won that argument. Or so I thought – so thought tens of winters to be. By slowly gathering drop only has understanding seeped down through a thinning thatch, have I myself known the hypothermias of shivered belief, know in myself the shameful envy of some whose forces push to floruit, known from what fearful pit you eyed my own thrusting.
Is it true what I read: that they took but one way with prostate cancers then – and no more humbling scar could they brand a man with? Had I known in those years when I’d see you, briefly restored, shamble daily to the shack, there to tell granite a secret grief, and see the block startle under your chisel-blows to likeness of parting lovers, of love denied – had I deciphered then the dialect of your stone, I think I’d have falsettoed back childhood again, content to sit by you and prattle childhood things!
William Imray William Imray (Brown) is a member of SOF.He was a lecturer in classics and an organist-choirmaster in the Episcopal Church of Scotland,now retired.
O Mary, dear departed shade, Where is thy place of blissful rest? Seest thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?
Seest thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?