roderick watson
the War he sought a better use for his gifts by asking for a transfer to the Intelligence
Service,but his early record and his nationalist sympathies made him unacceptable
to the authorities. So it was that he found himself stacking supplies and acting as an
unofficial interpreter when his company landed in North Africa at the end of 1942.
Hay loved the bustle and ethnic diversity of native life, reflecting in a letter
to Douglas Young that the local people ‘show qualities here which would greatly
benefit Western Europe, but W. Europe having all the machine guns doesn’t worry
about unmaterial qualities. She peers thru the sights and sees nothing beyond
but phosphates, cork, cheap labour and what not.’^54 Such sympathies were soon
to cost him dear, but in fact his best war poetry was inspired by the fate of the
local population, caught up in the machinery of colonial rule and conflict. These
themes and his North African experience came back to him with particular force
in 1944 in the south of Italy, where his unit was stationed in the aftermath of the
Allied invasion. The poem ‘Atman’ is titled after an Algerian peasant in hard times
who was condemned by a comfortable magistrate and whipped and imprisoned
for stealing. Faced with the complacencies of power, Hay identified with this man
of humble origin, not so different from crofting folk in Scotland: ‘I know you
Atman,|the woman of your house and your five youngsters,|your little clump of
goats and your ass,|your plot of rye and your cow.’^55 The same interest led him
to write the Gaelic poem ‘Meftah Bˆabkum es-Sabar?’ addressed to an Arab friend,
the title of which is taken from an Arabic proverb meaning ‘patience [is] the key
to your door’. Hay sympathized with the spiritual aspects of Islamic culture, but
could not agree with its requirement to submit to Providence as the will of God.
Thinking almost certainly of his own Gaelic inheritance, he counselled resistance,
and ended the poem with a cry to rediscover
the book where we will write new poetry below the last verse
put in it by the poets of old—
such will be our land. Or if there be no struggle,
a mean thing of no account, hidden away in a corner,
which another people drained dry and forgot.^56The Gaelic poet’s identification with Arab life reached its greatest expression in
his long, although uncompleted, narrative poem ‘Mochtar is Dughall’/‘Mokht arˆ
and Dougall’. Using a bardic ‘keening’ metre in more than 1,000 remarkably
empathetic lines, Hay imagines the Arabic cultural inheritance via a family history
over three generations encompassing trade, exploration, violence, and philosophy,
but all leading to young Mokhtar’s death, killed by a German mortar bomb in aˆ
minor desert encounter. The ‘Dougall’ section was to do the same from a Scottish
perspective, leading to Dougall’s death in the same skirmish and drawing on Hay’s
(^54) Hay to Douglas Young, 20 Apr. 1943, ibid. 32.
(^55) Hay, ‘Atman’, inCollected Poems and Songs, i. 163.
(^56) Hay, ‘Meftah Babkum es-Sabar?’, ibid. 195.ˆ