I read this poem by Alastair Reid (1926-2014) in 20th Century Scottish Poems selected by Douglas Dunn, and it made me laugh. It captures two of the cardinal features of Scotland: it’s beautiful landscape, and the sometimes gloomy outlook of its natives. On a lovely sunny say, the poet walks into town and meets “the woman from the fish shop” who says three times “We’ll pay for it.” Her sour view comes from “the ancient misery” of her ancestors raging in their graves.

I identify more with the upbeat start to the poem, but my wife, a Scot, is more familiar than me with the second half. P G Wodehouse said that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’ “The woman from the fish shop” seems to have no immediate grievance but gloom is in her genes inherited from her ancestors. I remember meeting a woman on the Hebridean island of Islay at the end of a highly unusual spell of a warm and rainless weather, and when we greeted her she said “If it doesn’t rain and get colder soon I’ll have to move further North.”

Scotland
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’