The city skyline spiked by spires

The silence ripped by siren choirs

Riding the Marches,walking the Mat

Walking forward , walking back

Exercising  ghosts , the hidden city,

Forgotten sites where Byron walked,

Rabbie Burns supped reaming swats,

Boswell and Johnson took Holy Communion,

Seumas Mor heard Jeannie Robertson

singing  folk songs in Causewayend

Exercising ghosts , through these streets

Heroin hoodies with ‘heroin gait’,

The changing face of Langstane Place ,

Half built buildings loom in space.

Grass grows out of the Uptown Baths

the smell of chlorine long gone now

Uber-awake in a changing city,

Baristas punt their caffeine fixes

Windmill Brae , a hill of nightclubs

road to the Green, a hill of violence.

In the gardens, the crows await

dark guardians of the Corby Haugh,

Kelly’s cats stand smart with bow ties,

waiting in line for possible change.

Exercising ghosts , down through the Green

Walking the paths of folk  from the past.

Up  ‘Vicus Fraxini’ , the ash tree’s way,

The earliest street in young Aberdeen.

Round the Mither Kirk, as facts fade in time

and bones are scattered in underground graves.

Above our city , the sky continues, as always,

grey and cloudy.

( From my ages old chapbook ‘Back Wynd of the Mind’ from 2011, this one was my idea of a historical walk around Aberdeen at that time)

(An Adam Maxwell- Farquhar Tale)

The Year of Our Lord 1915

After years of being the minister in charge of St Peter’s in Torry, Aberdeen, I felt a  calling from the Good Lord God to preach to the sick and wounded of the Great War over in France,  I passed the interview to become a padre to the British Army , a task which provided me with a new fervour for my vocation, as I felt that I could provide comfort and succour to all those poor lads wounded while serving their King and Country. I passionately believed that my years in Aberdeen had stood me in good stead for dealing with the wounded and disturbed across the English Channel. I had been to England many times in my life, but France was my first time abroad. I hoped I would not have any exorcisms to perform, as that activity often depressed me, as if I were being drawn to the dark side, to the shadowy domain of evil which I often sought deliverance from in prayer.

My French was passable I thought, which would no doubt get me through, and if I were preaching to the Scots and English soldiers, I would be fine, as my long-departed mother might have said.

In my time in France, I met many troubled souls, in the Hospital there, those tormented and crying out at night for loved ones, while cursing God for allowing this dreadful war to happen.

One stood out among the multitudes for me, his name was Jimmy Pirie, a young sapper from Aberdeen. I heard his accent first, and was glad to hear a voice, a weak one at first, but one from my homeland, and the city I had called home for many years. He had been babbling on about seeing angels and bowmen as he and his compatriots were ambushed by German snipers. I had read the recent article by Mr. Arthur Machen in the London Evening News on the train as I was travelling down from Scotland, and Pirie was giving the impression that this weird occurrence had really happened. I had read Machen too, and was quite enamoured of his work, as my father before me had. This was not the reason I was drawn to his conversation. He had said something about seeing a man from the future, it was not a dream, he assured me, but like something from the works of H.G. Wells, whose works  both he and I were familiar with, this was clearly someone who had taken a voyage in a time machine, for there was no other rational explanation, that even a man of the cloth like me could give for this.

Jimmy Pirie was born in Aberdeen in 1897 and lived in the Torry district where I had my first church, he was from a working-class family, the only son in a family of seven. His sisters were a lot older and looked after him, but he wanted to get away from that, so lied about his age and enlisted for the army as a boy soldier, a sapper. He told me about his brief time in the army, and in common with me, he was an Episcopalian, a ‘pisky,’ as some folk in Scotland would say. Jimmy was well versed in scripture and knew all his bible stories from when he was a child at Sunday School, and he was a keen reader with a furious intelligence, if he was reading Machen and Wells, he must have a powerful imagination.

 Anyway, he told me of a ‘visitor from the 21^st century’, a man who appeared to emerge from the ruins of a building which had been bombed, it was a miracle he was still alive, but he was disorientated, and was babbling incoherently about his time machine being irreparable. Jimmy told me that the man had a Scottish accent also, he reckoned, Glasgow, or around about there. The ‘Time Traveller,’ Frank Scott was his name, told us all about a dreadful pandemic that had shattered the world in his time, in the year 2021, a year that to be honest neither Jimmy nor me, could envisage in our minds, despite being intelligent men. Scott described a strange world to Jimmy, which in turn Jimmy told me of. The streets of the future were empty, due to lockdowns, no shops, no taverns opened their doors, the churches were even closed, as this pandemic was highly contagious. As a priest, I could not begin to imagine what a world without religion would be like. But Scott had told Jimmy all about the rules the government had put in place, with lockdowns and people ‘working from home,’ using machines called ‘computers.’ Jimmy laughed at the thought of working in your home, which was not something that would work in a crowded house like the one in which he lived with his mother and sisters. Scott painted a horrific picture of the future of the world in the next century; in addition to the pandemic, the climate was changing, warmer in summer, and colder in winter, and apocalyptic storms battered the world, especially the North of Scotland with trees being blown down, and untold damage being visited upon the cities and towns of the country. This was more disturbing than what H.G. Wells had written, according to Jimmy.

After meeting with Jimmy several times, and saying prayers with him each evening, I got to know him well, and believed what he had told me of this traveller from the future. As Doctor Clarkson, the physician in charge of the hospital had told me, Jimmy was just shell shocked, there was nothing wrong with him mentally.

‘Father Maxwell- Farquhar, fit ah’ve telt ye is true,  it’s a’  in this book here, which he gied me before he disappeared back into the ruins’, Jimmy had said as he rummaged in the kitbag under his hospital bed , and produced a book, lavishly illustrated with what I could only assume were the 21^st century’s equivalent to what we called a ‘photograph ‘ in our times, taken with a ‘camera’. Scott’s book described his life in Glasgow in 2021, all about the Coronavirus pandemic, the Climate Change Protests, his hopes and aspirations for the future, whatever that held, it was far from Utopian, quite the opposite.

Jimmy’s notebook fell out at the same time, his stories, scrawled out in pencil, his attempts at emulating his literary heroes, Machen, and Wells. He had written one about Scott, which was exceptionally good, a written account of what he had told me. I told him that he should try his hand at writing once he was back in Aberdeen, he smiled and said that his family were poor so there would be no way that could be a future for him.

We said a prayer for Scott and his soul, and for those in the future more than a century from now.

I silently prayed and thanked the Lord that I would have shuffled from this Mortal Coil before 2021.

Jimmy left the hospital the following day and left his address with me.

I hoped he would pursue writing as a career, but that was perhaps not to be, meantime, I would continue preaching the gospel and writing my own tales of the wonderful characters I meet and have met in this life.