One of the most influential figures in the Scots revival of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is Billy Kay. Through radio, television, plays, creative writing and especially his hugely influential book Scots The Mither Tongue, Kay’s work helped change negative attitudes surrounding Scots and paved the way for its extended acceptance as a key element in Scottish cultural identity. In ‘Born in Kyle’ Kay goes back to his own linguistic and cultural roots and celebrates a sense of place and belonging in his native Galston in Ayrshire’s Irvine Valley.
 
Here Billy writes about working class family life and the loving environment created by his parents and extended family; about enduring cold winters in a council house where the only source of heat was a coal fire and a paraffin heater. He writes about what they ate and drank; about how children passed their time by collecting everything from football cards to war medals; the richness of the Scots-speaking world they inhabited, using words and sayings with a pedigree going back hundreds of years; the influence of American music and movies coming into the Irvine Valley; the strong sense of community that came from a still living mining  tradition; the football heights and the gambling lows; through the singing of Scots songs, the awareness of the poets who had gone before and who gave the people an identity they celebrated at family gatherings; local religious observation and the good folk from the respectable working class who looked down on the minority who indulged in ugly sectarian nonsense.

But there are other stories which will come as a surprise, one bringing in a fey incident where a woman uses the second sight to prophesy a mining disaster. There are also trips beyond Kyle to Fife in Scotland and to Russia in the East and the American South in the West. There’s even a story of the Galston boys organizing what they believed might be the last game of football at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, balanced against a true story the author got from a friend later in life who was a British diplomat in Cuba at the time, and whose job it was to inform the Americans if the Russian missiles had in fact been moved and were no longer a threat to the United States!

Included in the collection are two short stories and a prize winning poem also rooted in Kyle which were published in anthologies of Scottish literature many years ago, but which are now out of print. Famie is about an elderly middle class lady from a family that had once owned the Cinema in Galston, and who suffered from dementia in her old age. Inrush at Nummer Fower is a story of a tragic mining disaster from the 1920s that Billy got from his own grandfather’s brother – the character Matha Kay in the story.  It was first published in a collection in 1974 which also contained a story by a young James Robertson who wrote:  
 
“One of the most memorable things about Genie was your story. At that time the only other piece of prose in Scots I’d read was ’Thrawn Janet’. It wasn’t my home language and ’Thrawn Janet’ wasn’t an easy read but I recognised what was going on and that this was the same language I heard going on all round me and could even use a bit of if/when I had to.

Then I read your ‘Inrush at Nummer Fower…’ and it was a lightbulb moment. It was a direct link to Stevenson on the one hand and to everyday spoken Scots on the other. It was the standout story of the publication and it was a first step on the brae for me. Two years later MacDiarmid died and I started reading his work. Never looked back after that, but I do now and thank you, Billy, for that story at that moment in my life.”
 
Looking back too, Kay realises that his was the last of the pre television generations, and life was lived in a strong Scots-speaking environment which would be eroded when television in English was beamed into every household from the early 1960s onwards. In a vivid, gutsy and realistic Scots prose shot through with humour, Kay brings alive the characters he grew up with, some in personally recalled memoirs, others in short stories which bring out a history and a literary history inherited by local folk going back hundreds of years.

Kay acknowledges Burns in the title of the book – like the bard himself, he was born in Kyle. But perhaps the greatest influence on this work is from another Ayrshire writer, John Galt’s whose 19th Century work Annals of the Parish gave a vivid account of an Ayrshire parish at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th Century. In Born in Kyle Billy Kay attempts to do something similar for his own parish and and its life in the middle of the 20th Century.

Alec Ross is in conversation with Billy Kay at the Boswell Book Festival, Dumfries House, Ayrshire, on Saturday 11th May at 6.15pm.