POET and author of the crofting journal Night Falls On Ardnamurchan,
Alasdair Maclean, has died at the cottage in Falkland, Fife, where he
had lived a solitary existence for the past 10 years.
Although it was the non-fiction work, based on the diary of his
father, that gained him the widest attention when it was published in
1984, Maclean's chief gift was as a poet, and his work was recognised
from his days as a mature student at Edinburgh University.
His first book of poetry, From The Wilderness, published in 1973, set
the tone for his theme of the harshness of country life, but Maclean had
been born in Govan, Glasgow, in 1926, where his father was working at
the shipyards after the First World War.
He left school at 14 and worked at Harland and Wolff before National
Service in India and Malaya. On demobilisation he emigrated to Canada
and a series of jobs as a sailor, laboratory technician, and factory
worker before returning to Scotland and Edinburgh University at the age
of 39.
There he owned up to having written poetry for the past 20 years -- at
the rate of about one a year -- and, as he put it ''caught fire''. His
work was published in national journals and he was particularly
encouraged by New Statesman literary editor Karl Miller.
After Night Falls On Ardnamurchan, Maclean lived an increasingly
isolated existence at his Fife cottage with fewer of his regular visits
to the croft he had been left by his parents. ''He lived alone and liked
it that way,'' said one of his fellow students yesterday.
In an interview at the publication of From The Wilderness, Maclean
dismissed his characterisation as a ''ploughman poet'' but admitted to a
fear of death. ''I don't think I will become reconciled to death as I
grow old. The thought of death makes me very angry,'' he said.
Lorn Macintyre writes:
When I cross from Mull to Ardnamurchan again I will recall with
gratitude the small but precious number of poems that Alasdair Maclean
has left us. Raised in the area where Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alastair
was inspired to write the lyrical poem The Sugar Brook, Alasdair Maclean
drew on his Gaelic crofting traditions for his poems in English on the
world around him.
Though Alasdair, in his sardonic observations, sometimes reminds me of
Norman MacCaig, he had an original vision. In the poem Fiona With A
Field Mouse, with its Burnsian sensibility, he says of the little
creature: You could blow it out, this thing,/it is so small and weak;/It
is a tail dependent on a squeak,/a palpatation trimmed with fur.''
In a note to Waking The Dead, his second collection of poems, Alasdair
wrote of his belief that death is ''the noblest and most profound of the
great themes of poetry, or what the love poets turn to when they put
away childish things''.
If some of his poems seem gloomy, then that is because he saw a way of
life dying, as his prose work Night Falls On Ardnamurchan chronicled.
We now need a collection of all Alasdair's poems to show how appealing
and important this shy Ardnamurchan man was.
John Curry
FIGURE skating champion John Curry, who died yesterday aged 44, wanted
to be a ballet dancer.
But his father, an engineer and factory-owner, thought this too
unmanly for his son.
So it was ice skating which provided him with the outlet for his
artistic expression, resulting in his winning Britain's only gold medal
at the 1976 Innsbruck Winter Olympics.
His style and mastery of technique inspired a generation; his
frankness about his homosexuality was brave.
Curry was first fired with enthusiasm for skating when, at the age of
seven, he watched a television programme of the Wembley Christmas ice
show. Within six months he was taking weekly lessons near his home in
Birmingham.
His first success came in 1967 when he won the British junior title.
Three years later he won the senior title.
In 1973, at the World Championships in Bratislava (where he finished
fourth), he was offered sponsorship by millionaire American Ed Moseler
and coaching by Carlo Fassi, who was later to take Robin Cousins under
his wing.
When he returned to Britain after winning a gold medal at the Olympics
in Austria, he talked candidly about his sexuality.
''Up to last year I had fears that judges were thinking 'There's a
gay, we can't let him win.' But they were there to judge my skating
style, not my life-style,'' he said.
Curry used his Olympic fame to launch the John Curry Theatre of
Skating in London's West End.
He made his home in New York, while he continued to skate and teach,
and he flirted with a career in acting.
It was in December 1987, when he was living with friends in
Switzerland, that he learned he was HIV positive. In October 1992 during
one of the last interviews he gave, Curry said: ''I was ashamed -- I
think I was wrong to be -- but I was ashamed of having contracted a
sexually-transmitted disease.''
Curry developed skin cancer in 1991 and returned to England to be
close to his family.
''I can't look back on my life and say 'Oh if only I had been able to
do this'. I actually did it. I had everything and enjoyed every moment
of it,'' he said.
