AKALA:Our imaginations are incredible things. If you've ever pictured a new life for yourself or taken a few moments to swap reality for a daydream you can thank your imagination. 'Maybe when we're young we use our imagination more. We follow it without thinking. But as we get older, the world of adults,'
AKALA:'of facts and hard truths, sometimes gets in the way.' Imagination can get squeezed out and reality bites back.
JACKIE KAY:'He was seven and I was six my Brendon Gallacher.'
JACKIE KAY:He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher.
JACKIE KAY:His father was in prison, he was a cat burglar.
JACKIE KAY:My father was a communist party full-time worker.
AKALA:'The poem seems quite autobiographical, would that be an accurate statement?'
JACKIE KAY:'It is an autobiographical poem.' Brendon Gallacher was this childhood friend really, an imaginary friend. 'My whole family believed he was real for two solid years' so that even now the word for lie in my family is Brendon Gallacher. "She told a great big Brendon Gallacher" means she told a whopper. 'He had six brothers and I had one, my Brendon Gallacher.'
JACKIE KAY:'He would hold my hand and take me by the river where we'd talk all about his family being poor. He'd get his mum out of Glasgow when he got older. A wee holiday someplace nice.' Some place far.
AKALA:That's in there, that kind of definitive, right at the beginning my, my, my.
JACKIE KAY:I suppose I was trying to explore what a private thing the imagination can be and how, when someone else comes into your imagination, it can kill it off. You know, a lot of kids have imaginary friends and the imaginary friends can be, as real if not more real sometimes than the real ones.
JACKIE KAY:I'd tell my mum about my Brendon Gallacher.
JACKIE KAY:How his mum drank and his daddy was a cat burglar. And she'd say, "why not have him round for dinner?"
JACKIE KAY:No, no, I'd say he's got big holes in his trousers.
JACKIE KAY:I like meeting him by the burn in the open air.
What I was trying to capture, apart from anything else, was the spoken voice. I get a lot of my inspiration just from how people talk. From the repetitions that they use. Like my mum will say "I'm not tired tired, but I'm tired." "I'm not hungry hungry, but I'm hungry." And I quite like these kind of real–
JACKIE KAY:the poetry you can find in ordinary speech.
YOUNG DEACON:So I don't know if you guys noticed as well like
YOUNG DEACON:the half rhyme that she used? So like Gallacher, hair, river.
MALE IN LEATHER JACKET:The ER especially, the 'er' sound, the repetition of that is, is–
MALE IN HOODED COAT:It's got like a jolly sound as well, she must have specifically chose it.
YOUNG DEACON:It kind of represents the identity of the poem as well 'cause when you put it into context she's scottish- if you kind of read it in her accent or if you hear her read it it makes complete sense.
JACKIE KAY:'When it turns around and you find out that this boy is a figment of the speaker's imagination then it's quite a shock but it wouldn't have been such a shock' if it'd been fanciful in the beginning so the beginning has got to be kind of really dead ordinary.
AKALA:So all of these quite specific details about Brendon's life were they things you imagined as a child or are they things you've embellished later?
JACKIE KAY:No these were things I imagined as a child I imagined a cat burglar, I imagined his whole family was quite exciting but also so completely different from my family so in fact, when I had to write a story about my dad in school I wrote "my dad is a party man." As a kid at that kind of age I didn't properly understand
JACKIE KAY:what the communist party was I thought my dad spent his day kind of blowing up balloons and giving out wee cocktail sausages and things. Anyway I–
AKALA:You literally thought the communist party was a party?
JACKIE KAY:Yeah.
AKALA:That's quite funny.
JACKIE KAY:'Then one day, after we'd been friends two years,' One day when it was pouring and I was indoors,
JACKIE KAY:My mum says to me, "I was talking to Mrs. Moir
JACKIE KAY:Who lives next door to your Brendon Gallacher
JACKIE KAY:Didn't you say his address was 24 Novar?
JACKIE KAY:'She says there are no Gallacher's at 24 Novar' There never have been any Gallachers next door. 'And he died then, my Brendon Gallacher,' Flat out on my bedroom floor, his spiky hair, 'His impish grin, his funny flapping ear.' Oh Brendon. Oh my Brendon Gallacher.
SOPHIA THAKUR:At the very end like she changes my line-- she's using a progressive pronoun,
SOPHIA THAKUR:'my' the whole time but at the end she changes it to "oh Brendon"
SOPHIA THAKUR:which is the first time she does that and it's a bit like- oh, he's no longer mine 'cause now it's found out that he's not real kinda thing like he's not mine anymore, he's also my mum's so it kinda dies there, it's a bit sad.
AKALA:'I find it interesting the way, you know the whole poem's quite rhythmic and then that rhythm's sort of broken and the language becomes very conversational' when your mum literally butts in and says that there are no Gallachers at 24 Novar. It jolts you out of the poema little bit.
JACKIE KAY:So it's like she's really punching the point through to you. Which is to kind of give the reader or the listener that extra kind of blow.
AKALA:Yeah the sense of cruelty of it.
JACKIE KAY:Yeah the sense of cruelty you know, when people are wanting to be cruel they often repeat things to you. 'It's a love poem to this friend that's gone but then you realise at the end of the poem that the friend never existed in the first place so then it becomes an ode to childhood and to losing parts of our self'
JACKIE KAY:'but then again, as long as we can access it with a tiny key and go back into our pasts and write about it or do anything that's creative' from our childhood then we've still in a sense, got it.
AKALA:'Jackie Kay's poem is an elegy a poem of loss, for something that may never come back. But a poem is a celebration too.' Reminds us of the power of creating something and as we're reading it we're bringing Brendan back to life. 'And as we grow up, our imaginations are ready and waiting waiting for us to follow.
Hip-hop star Akala meets with Jackie Kay to explore her poem 'Brendon Gallacher', about Jackie’s childhood imaginary friend.
We hear how the text is a love letter to childhood and the power of imagination, while young poets help Akala break down the language and meaning of the poem.
This clip is from the series Poetry: Between the Lines.
Teacher Notes
After watching the clip, encourage pupils to note down examples of imaginary people/worlds/ experiences from their own childhoods and the moment (if there was one moment, as in the poem) when reality encroached upon their creations.
Pupils could then explore these incidents in more detail, expanding their description to include colour, imagery, and remembered dialogue before experimenting with some of the techniques mentioned in the clip: repetition, possessive pronouns, the child as narrator.
Pupils could write their own poem, addressing whichever memory they have explored.
Curriculum Notes
This clip will be relevant for teaching English Literature.
This topic appears in OCR, Edexcel, AQA, WJEC KS4/GCSE in England and Wales, CCEA GCSE in Northern Ireland and SQA National 4/5 in Scotland.