Cultureshock

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Video transcript

The Goodnight Poem

The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert Service.    “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou. ”

My name is Ali Finlayson and my story is of two women who have never met, but who are united in their love of a poem. It comes from a book called “Songs of a Sourdough” by Robert Service, a Scots poet who travelled and wrote extensively about the North West gold-rush region of the United States.

The first woman is my mother, who, born in 1909, would have been one hundred years old this month. Her name was Helen Paterson, she was from the Highlands of Scotland and she was the youngest in a family of nine. Hers was a long and very full life - one full of hard work.  In the space of her eighty-eight years she very rarely complained but we all knew that she had known both great sorrow and great joy.

One of the joys (which she passed on to me) was a love of reading, including poetry – and one piece of parlour poetry, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert Service - was a particular favourite of hers. It tells a tale of bravery, love, good fortune, but also treachery, loss and rough justice – a heady mix of experience told in fine narrative style by Service and full of vivid description and drama, set in the beautiful and lawless land of the gold-rush frontier.

The second woman is my grand-daughter. She was five years old this year and is everything that a grand-daughter should be – gorgeous, intelligent and loving, curious, exhausting and cheeky. She, too, loves books and is already very good at reading. Like her great grandmother Helen, she is particularly fond of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”.

From the time she was a few months old she has been in the habit of staying with my wife and myself on Saturday night, to give her Mum and Dad a wee break. Over that period of time one of my regular tasks has been to settle her down to sleep at night, usually with the help of a goodnight story or two.

One evening about a year ago I introduced her to the poem as an alternative to a story and from the very first hearing she was hooked. As she gradually drifted drowsily off to sleep I could tell she was spell-bound by the poem’s magic. Since then I must have read it to her at least two hundred times. She is never content with hearing it just once; she always insists on hearing it until she falls asleep. And of course, she regularly asks for it at other times of the day when she is with us.

You might think that a tale with “grown-up” themes would not be appropriate for one so young, but all of its themes appear in the long-established tradition of children’s fairy stories – and many of them are far more terrifying and graphic than Robert Service’s saga of the wild northwest.

Having heard it so often, my grand-daughter herself knows the poem nearly off by heart, and has started to read it to me now. The joy on her face as she reads it is the same as I remember on my mother’s many years ago when I first heard its words. How I wish those two women could have met and shared that joy.  But it makes me happy to think that, in time, their enjoyment will once again be shared - for I know that my grand-daughter, in her turn, will pass on the magic of those verses to her children.

“These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know; They say that the stranger was crazed with ‘hooch’, and I’m not denying it’s so. I’m not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two---- The lady who kissed him – and pinched his poke – was the lady that’s known as Lou.“