Uncle Timothy's Traviata by Alastair Reid

He was already immersed in poetry, but his wartime experience brought the welcome revelation that the rules and rigidity of Scottish life, particularly for a son of the manse, were not universally fixed. It divided my life.'īack in Scotland, Reid studied classics at St Andrews University. He believed that it saved his life, but he also felt that 'the war changed us. 'We were put to sea, and opened sealed orders only afterwards – so nobody knew where we were going.' His ship was headed for action in the far east when news arrived of the bombing of Hiroshima. I used to ask my father, 'Where are they going?' And he would say, 'They don't know.'' Seventy-five years later, Reid could still relish his response: 'How exciting.'Ĭonscripted into the navy in 1944, Reid took a course in ciphering and coding.

'They always came by our house next to the church. A taste for the itinerant life, to which he would eventually dedicate himself, was acquired from the 'tinkers' who came from Ireland to Galloway for seasonal labour. His father was a Church of Scotland minister, his mother a doctor. Reid was born in Whithorn, in Galloway, south-west Scotland. Memoirs of his stormy friendship with the writer Robert Graves, chronicles of his life in a village in Spain, and latterly excursions into contemporary Scottish life, among other essays, appeared first in the New Yorker before being collected in books, including Passwords (1964) and Whereabouts (1987). Reid was also a superb writer of prose, the larger part of which appeared in the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for 40 years during the magazine's heyday.

He was at least as well known for his translations of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and other Spanish-speaking writers as for his own poetry. Alastair Reid, who has died aged 88, was a Scottish writer whose imagination dwelt in the Hispanic world.

Uncle Timothy's Traviata by Alastair Reid