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 roderick watson

For what better than death in battle

(Thesick voice said in the belly,

‘What better than death in battle?’)

And the heart had been numbed long ago.^23

In complete contrast to Fraser’s sense of melancholy exile—of exile even from
himself—Hamish Henderson’s poetry has a dynamic engagement with the dust and
confusion of a modern mobile war. His work is wholly in keeping with a soldier’s
experience on the back of a lorry or under the stars at night, with irreverent army
songs and barrack-room bawdry, with a direct hatred of fascism, yet a grudging
respect for the human enemy over the horizon. All of this is reflected in Henderson’s
forthright ballads and in the large scale and almost epic address of his free verse
‘elegies’ from the desert.
As a child brought up by his mother and grandmother, Henderson was steeped in
traditional Scottish and Gaelic culture and the oral wealth of the berry-pickers and
travellers around his home in Blairgowrie, Perthshire. This inheritance was never
to leave him, for he was lifelong socialist, an early translator of Antonio Gramsci’s
‘Prison Letters’, and a political activist on behalf of the common folk.^24 After the war
Henderson became a pre-eminent scholar and collector of Scotland’s oral culture,
one of the first members of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, and a
leading light in the folk-song revival (working with Alan Lomax) in the 1950s and
1960s. Henderson’s mother died when he was only 12, and, as a gifted child, he was
sent to boarding schools in the South and eventually went to Cambridge in 1938
to study European languages and literature. When war broke out, he immediately
volunteered, and his service began with the Pioneer Corps, building coastal defences
in the South of England:

From Spain return the Clyde-red brave Brigadiers.

I clench my fist to greet the red flag furled.

Our hold has slipped—now Hitler’s voice is rasping

From small square boxes over all the world.

There’s fog. I climb the cobbled street of Oldham

With other conscripts, and report to one

Who writes with labour, and no satisfaction

That I’ve turned up.—From now, my boyhood’s done.^25

Henderson’s interest in the folk-song tradition led him to collect popular songs
of the day and to write broadside verses about the horrors, alternately comic and

(^23) Fraser, ‘Rostov’, ibid. 54.
(^24) Henderson discovered Gramsci’s work while he was with Italian partisans in the War. He
returned to Italy to study Gramsci further in 1948, but was repatriated by the authorities worried about
his possible communist sympathies. His version of thePrison Letterswas finally published in 1974.
(^25) Henderson, ‘Ballad of the Twelve Stations of my Youth’, inCollected Poems and Songs,ed.
Raymond Ross (Edinburgh: Curly Snake Publishing, 2000), 24.