Secret words of love see the light of day after 40 years

Fresh evidence has emerged of the close ties between the poet and author George Mackay Brown, a larger than life figure in 20th-century Scottish literature, and the leading landscape artist Sylvia Wishart, that culminated in a “volatile affair” kept private for decades.

Wishart’s family has revealed Mackay Brown wrote an unpublished play for the artist, about a whisky-fuelled funeral where tipsy mourners get stuck in the peathills with a coffin. He sent the 80-page handwritten work to her in Fraserburgh, where she was teaching art, on her birthday in 1962. A poem whose first letters of each line spell out Wishart’s name was published in Mackay Brown’s autobiography after his death.

The Scotsman revealed at the weekend how Mackay Brown had an apparently tempestuous affair with Wishart in the early 1960s, part of a long and close relationship dating back to her childhood that influenced both their work.

A new book speaks of an intense meeting of “creative spirits” along with “drink-inflamed conflicts” amid a group of boisterous artistic friends on Orkney. While the poet’s island writings have made him an icon of Scottish letters since his death in 1996, Wishart’s own recognition as a painter is growing.

A major retrospective exhibition of her drawings and paintings is now on show at the Royal Scottish Academy building in Edinburgh. It includes her illustrations for Mackay Brown’s 1969 book An Orkney Tapestry.

Wishart was born 15 years after Mackay Brown, but was a childhood neighbour of the painter and his family. Wishart first exhibited a picture at the age of 12, encouraged by Mackay Brown’s friend and her art teacher Ian McInnes.

While Mackay Brown helped Wishart with her schoolwork, friends say, she later typed manuscripts for him. From about 1962 to 1965, it appears the pair had a sometimes tumultuous affair which, he later wrote, “expired in a violent flare-up”.

Mackay Brown wrote many dramas, but Wishart’s sister, Bunty, said the play, To Whinny Muir Thou Comest At Last, had surfaced in the attic of a family home. It was signed To Sylvia, on 11 February 1962, her birthday, and sent to Fraserburgh, where she was teaching at the time.

Written in broad Orkney dialogue, Bunty Wishart said, it opens on an Orkney moor surrounded by peathills, where mourners are carrying a coffin, including the dead man’s son. A minister follows with a case of whisky. “They are all a little tipsy,” the stage directions said.

His acrostic poem, For Sylvia, where the first letters of the lines spell out her name, appeared in his autobiography For the Islands I Sing, published shortly after his death.