A Christmas Child

It is wet in Highland Perthshire. Carols are being sung in every church and hall, but the days simply rain and rain. Behind where I live here in this corner of inland Scotland the woods are full of deer. On the cold winter nights in previous years up to a hundred deer have come to sleep in among the birch trees on the frost nights. Even though I shouldn't have done so, I have gone out to feed them. They were so hungry they even took food right from my hand. My house is called Little Narnia: it is a magical location, and there is a path leading through a wicker gate at the back of the house up into the deeper woods. Somehow the wood is Narnia. I often think of that late at night: under cover of darkness the certainties of the world change and remoteness is restored to places that are nothing during hours of daylight. I know I would have loved this place as a child: I would have been fascinated by the night woods and the owl that calls and the deer gathering silently to sleep beyond the fence. A magic is restored, but most of all on the frost nights: it's harder to find make-believe in the rain.

Late November

I have always found the days at the end of November difficult to bear; the skies seem leaden and low, and the rain relentless. Many years ago I invented a mythical season called Alumbria: it lasted between the falling of the first horse chestnut and the first snowflake. Now we are right in the middle of Alumbria and, as ever, I find the days long and melancholic.

All that having been said, I find it a very rich time from the perspective of ideas and the imagination. I am almost completely surrounded by woodland here at the heart of Highland Perthshire in the very middle of the only land-locked part of Scotland. When I go for walks up behind my house, whatever time of day, it's as though the world has ended and no-one is left but me.

The paths are misty and still left with a last coppery gold from the melted leaves. All I see, if I'm quiet enough, are one or two or three roe deer leaping away on moss hooves into the grey silence of the trees. All I hear, if I am lucky, will be the scrawling voice of a jay. Otherwise, the silence is complete, and so is the mystery of the woods. Anything could happen.

It's this part of the world, and these places, that inspired my short story 'The Ice' which was nominated for a Pushcart in the States. The story tied together all my impressions of the woods and their secrets, and my own memories of secondary school and bullying here in Highland Perthshire. Very little of it feels invented. The story's to be found on Kindle.

Fetcham

Over recent days I have been down in London. I was there first and foremost to give a reading for the charity Kids for Kids. They help struggling villages in the Darfur region to support themselves; each year they adopt more and more communities. The reading was what I like to call an inter-melding of music and words: I was joined by a professional violinist and pianist and our performance was at Leatherhead School.

Over the days I stayed with friends in Fetcham close to Leatherhead. During the time that I was there Bonfire Night was celebrated. Where I live at the heart of Highland Perthshire not much is made of this; traditionally Hallowe'en has been of far greater importance, though during recent years that has been changing. Of course both are equally exciting to children.

The other thing I'm not used to here in Highland Perthshire is the fox. That may sound almost extraordinary; I am surrounded by high hills, glens and open fields - it's country that was almost tailor-made for foxes. But the estates have a ruthless grip on the population; I've very seldom seen a red-coated gentleman in all the years I've lived here. Paradoxically enough, they're two a penny in the London area.

This poem was written through the night. I was roused out of sleep by a fox; by the barking of a fox that continued for perhaps five minutes. During that time the first draft of the poem was written. It's the best possible time to write: you're unselfconscious about the process, and somehow the words are able to flow more freely. This is dedicated to Sylvia and Richard, my good hosts over my days in England.

Fetcham

November 5th and the whole night huge;
I woke and a fox's voice was rasping
over the gardens and the sculpted woods,
at two in the morning and the world asleep.

That night the skies had bloomed with fireworks,
burst and fluttered till they fell back dark;
the parties over and the lights put out,
the doors all clicked and the streets left still.

When I woke up the night was full,
a silver brilliance with the moon's ship high;
the great sky shining and the stars red fires,
and the rasp and the rasp of a fox's bark.

The Wind and the Moon

It's a few years now since I wrote my poem 'The Wind and the Moon'. I had been working all day in a primary school here in Perthshire at the heart of Scotland. It was a quintessential autumn day: the wind was scurrying about the country classrooms and the children were as high as kites. On the way back to Dunkeld and my house beside the Cathedral, I asked the head teacher what made her pupils wildest. Without a moment's hesitation she said: 'The wind and the moon'. Later that day I scribbled the first draft of a poem about my own memories of autumn and hunting for horse chestnuts. And in the end it simply had to have the title 'The Wind and the Moon'.
The poem's to be found in my collection of selected work 'Second Nature' on Kindle; it's also in my volume of collected poems 'Island' from Amazon.

The wind woke me, the loud howl of it
Boomed round the house and I felt at sea;
I fastened my eyes and was out in a ship,
Ten miles of Atlantic. I went to the window,
Watched the whole round of the moon
Ploughing through clouds, a coin
Of silver and gold.

All night I was blown between dreams,
Never slept deep, was thinking
Of the trees crashing and rising with wind,
Of the chestnut rain that would fall
By the morning.

At dawn I woke up, went out
Into the bright blue whirl of the wind,
Rode the wild horse of it upwards
Into the wood and beyond,
To the hill with the chestnut trees,
The leaves dancing at my feet,
Russet and gold.

I ran and ran till my chest
Hurt with my heart. Under the hands of the chestnuts
That waved and swung in the air,
Saddles of leather, polished and shining,
Broken from the beds of their shells -
A whole hoard.

I went home in a gust of light
My pockets and hands
Knobbled with conkers.

Return from Iona

The days on Iona are past for another year. The light was out of sheerest paradise for the near week we were there: that light is precious when it comes as late in the year as this - often October can be stern with wind and driving rain. I was unable to visit some of the coves I have come to love so dearly in the south of the island: places like The Gully of Pat's Cow and the Port of the Young Lad's Rock. Often these little nooks to the south are treasure chests: pieces of Iona serpentine will lie here undiscovered for months and even years. I even have a tiny polished fragment of amber that was given to me in childhood days by someone who found it on one of these shingle strands. It's for this reason I wrote my book 'Iona, the other island. I and my photographer Iain Sarjeant shared the vision of telling folk the hidden stories of Iona. We knew all too well all the other books about the Abbey and Nunnery and village: but we knew too that almost invariably the rest of the island is forgotten. So we wanted to tell these stories through images and words.

www.kennethsteven.co.uk

INTRODUCTORY

I'm here on the Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides on the last day of the annual writing course I have led for many years now. We have been blessed with the most perfect of days in mid-October: hard to believe it is this late in the year. It feels appropriate too to be writing a first blog in this place that has meant so much all through my life; the place indeed where I learned to walk as a baby!