David Heavenor: Music

A song with many Edinburgh associations and based on the death of Anne Clark who was a good friend of my sister but who I knew and had met many times. She was killed in a car accident on the A9 travelling home one Christmas. Many years later I was staying in a flat in the Comiston area close to where Anne used to live and I found myself reflecting on those days. The characters and incidents are not always literally true. Caerketton is one of the Pentland Hills which broods over the City ( look for the scree above the artificial ski slope.). The line ‘My evening vigil’ is a direct lift from a song 'Mandala' by Mike Cruickshank who wrote many fine lyrical songs many drawn from his days living in Edinburgh. Istill have acopy of the lyric which I photocopied in a railway station in Italy. It's one of those songs that is never far away from consciousness. I wanted to direct it to Anne since at the funeral in Wick we all filed past her body to pay our last respects and I found it impossible to believe she was gone forever and that her spirit somehow lived on. Not a rational moment of course. A kind of epiphany where the empty shell of her body somehow confirmed life.

MY EDINBURGH PICTURE

My dear Michael, I’m sorry that I’m late
The framer cracked Anne’s photo
He said I’d have to wait
Her expression is shocking
She stares as if she knows
The place where we come from
The place we all must go


My dear Michael I won’t trespass on you time
You knew her differently
Your memories are not mine
But your sadness is curling like smoke around this house
Your silence throws pictures of rage
At God’s black farce

Talk to me now
Anne I long to know
Who got it right?
Whose truth gets up on show?
Talk to me now
I scarce can say your name
Beyond a throat that cloys
Beyond the words that blame

My dear Michael do you remember Guy Fawkes Day
When the embers gleamed and cracked against the Blackford braes?
I remember you smiling when she called to me
To watch the moon rockets that blaze
Then fall in to the sea


My dear Michael, I found my evening vigil hard
So I climbed Caerketton against a panoply of stars
The city lay dreaming our futures in fire
And Scotland was wrapping a wreath around Robert Louis’ spires