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| 'Ae Spring' - Illustration for Tam o' Shanter, by my husband, Alan Lees |
Later on today, I'll be toasting the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns at a small, private Burns Supper. This year, I thought it would be nice to say something about Tam O' Shanter. Here it is.
Once upon a time, a young lad called Robert Burns (probably Rab in Ayrshire, occasionally Rabbie, Robin too, but never Robbie) was fascinated by the folk tales he heard from his mother and other relatives. This would be when he was living in the cottage in Alloway, till he was seven, and then when they moved to Mount Oliphant, not too far away. He would have filed them away in his memory. They would have fired his youthful imagination.
Later, as a teenager, he was sent to Kirkoswald to learn a form of practical mathematics associated with surveying. He stayed just outside the village, either at or close to Ballochneil Cottage where his mother’s brother lived, and walked into the village to study. With his companions, he would also walk to Turnberry Shore and Maidens, where he met Douglas Graham of Shanter farm, and his formidable wife Helen McTaggart who may or may not have been models for Tam and his wife Kate in the poem.
This was also where he heard stories of smugglers and witches, especially witches who could raise storms to wreck sailing ships. Witchcraft was still a serious allegation in 18th century Scotland, although not quite so disastrous as it had been less than a hundred years earlier. He went out in a small fishing 'coble' and was as sick as a dog. (Few of his later poems are about the sea.) Smuggling, the contraband trade, was active all along the Carrick coast of Ayrshire, and young Rab would drink his fair share of French brandy. He also discovered flirtation with Margaret – Peggy – Thomson, who was only 13 to the poet’s 16.
He may even have thought about a poem concerning witches and drunkenness, but he certainly wasn’t ready to write it yet.
Cue forward some years. Our Rab is all grown up. The family had moved from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea - ruinously for the poet's father. Not long after his premature death, Robert and his brother Gilbert took the tenancy of Mossgiel outside Mauchline (where our delicious milk now comes from) and moved there with the rest of the family.
In 1786 he publishes the first edition of his poems, plans to go to Jamaica, but goes to Edinburgh instead, where he rapidly becomes a celebrity, especially among the upper echelons of society, the ‘nabbery’ as they are still occasionally called here. Meanwhile, he is in an on-off relationship with Jean Armour, the eldest daughter of a Mauchline building contractor. She has already given birth to his twins of whom only one child now survives, a boy called Robbie. He is living at Mossgiel with his father’s family.
By 1788, Jean is heavily pregnant with a second set of twins and is staying at Tarbolton Mill, with the miller Willie Muir and his wife, sent there by Jean’s exasperated parents in a vain attempt to avoid the town gossip.
The poet arrives from Edinburgh ostensibly to see his family and his son at Mossgiel. But he can’t escape the responsibility of Jean. I always have the feeling that Willie, who had been a friend of the poet’s father, and was a good man, gave him a serious dressing down. He found accommodation for Jean in Mauchline, a room in the house belonging to a doctor friend, and paid for it – before behaving very badly, telling Jean she had no claim on him and heading back to Edinburgh in a hurry.
When the second set of twins were born prematurely, and died soon after, he suddenly reappeared in Mauchline, thoroughly penitent and asking her to marry him. The sooner the better. We don’t really know what made him change his mind so suddenly and so comprehensively. A matter of days previously, he had been swearing undying love to Nancy McLehose - Clarinda - in Edinburgh and calling poor Jean nasty names.
I think the inconvenient truth was that he loved her. He couldn't help himself. Besides, they had never not been married, ever since he had asked her and she had agreed, during her first pregnancy. It was a legal marriage in Scotland at the time, whether paperwork was involved or not. I think he knew that. Besides, Nancy was never going to be a farmer’s wife. Or his wife at all, given that she was already married to somebody else.
Rab had taken on the tenancy of beautiful Ellisland near Dumfries. He was supervising the building of a new farmhouse there, missing Jean very much, and not afraid to tell her so, in a scant handful of enchantingly domestic letters about linen and cheese as well as love, while travelling back and forth on horseback to Mauchline whenever he could. She would walk along the road to meet him. Jean was his real 'muse' - the genuine love of his life. He acknowledges it himself. 'My muse maun be thy bonnie self' he wrote in a wonderful song for Jean called O Were I On Parnassus Hill. He had confessed that he had to be 'in love' to write a love poem or song. But there is all the difference in the world between being fleetingly 'in love' and genuinely loving somebody through thick and thin.
Later, when the couple were living at Ellisland, he met English antiquary and collector of folk tales, Captain Francis Grose, along the road at Friar’s Carse (now a hotel). The two got on, even though Grose was a good deal older than Burns. Grose was collecting traditional stories and Rab had learned them at his mother’s knee. He sent the folklorist summaries of three ghostly tales about Alloway’s old ruined kirk, stories he knew from his childhood, as well as tales of witchcraft and witches summoning storms, tales that he had heard at Maidens all those years before.
So it was at Ellisland in 1790 that – encouraged by Grose - he wrote Tam o’ Shanter, one of his most famous and well-loved poems. The story goes that he was working on it as he walked beside the Nith at Ellisland. He used to go fishing in the river there, wearing a kind of Davy Crockett hat, a rakish fur hat with a tail. There’s a green path there too, and you can still walk along it. He was reciting bits of the poem to himself and laughing out loud, so that the farm workers overhearing him went to ask Jean if her husband had taken leave of his senses. She reassured them that he hadn’t – he was just in an imaginative world of his own.
It was also round about this time that a female poet called Janet Little arrived at Ellisland to find Bonnie Jean ‘drown’d in tears’ as she put it. Only a little while before Jean went into labour with a son, Ann Park, the barmaid at the Globe Inn in Dumfries had given birth to the poet's daughter, Betty. A bit of a reality check for romantic Janet and a slap on the face for Jean.
But Jean was quite capable of seizing a ladle and – as her husband described it in one of his many letters - ‘laying about her as lustily as a reaper from the corn ridge’ if domestic chaos involving children and dogs and faithless poets became too much for her. Later, Jean would take Betty into her household when Ann couldn't look after her, bringing the child up as her own and loving her dearly. The two would remain close for the whole of Jean's life which should tell us something about the quality of the woman.
It’s not hard to imagine that Rab may have had his own formidable, wonderful wife in mind, quite as much as Helen McTaggart, when he was writing about Tam.
O Tam! had'st thou but been sae wise, As taen thy ain wife Kate's advice!
The poem is a work of genius – wise and witty and real because it is stitched into a familiar landscape and concerns people that the poet knew well, and loved dearly.
We still love Tam and his creator for it.
Meanwhile, you can read Jean's story - and of course the story of the charming husband she loved her whole life long - in my novel, The Jewel. It's available on Amazon as a paperback or an eBook. And if you want to know more about the real relationship between the poet and his wife, there's a little book called For Jean, that I put together at the same time as the novel, a collection of poems, songs and letters by Robert Burns, written for and about his wife.
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