Bard to the bone

Pub owner and writer Bill Watkins is a staunch advocate of Celtic traditions. In Auckland for World Book Day earlier this month he talked to MARGIE THOMSON.

When you're 16 or thereabouts and your dad says, "Come outside for a walk, son, I've got something to tell you," you assume you know what he's got on his mind. Petrified, embarrassed, you trail him out the door thinking you know more than he does, anyway, so what's the point.

The relief is huge, then, when he starts talking not about sex but Celts. It's heady stuff, but it hits the mark to the extent that 35 years later you're still wearing the kilt and speaking the Gaelic, like Bill Watkins.

"Have you any idea what's going on?" the dad asked, and Watkins, now middle-aged and the author of A Celtic Childhood and, most recently, Scotland is not for the Squeamish (HarperCollins, $34.95) listened carefully as his beloved Irish dad expounded that the Gaelic culture was "on the verge of collapse.

"If your generation doesn't do something, then what the Romans failed to achieve Hollywood is about to achieve.

"It's up to you," he finished grandly, "to build the Camelot of the mind, the once and future Celts."

Shortly after that, Watkins was expelled from his school, nabbed by the Post Office Radio Interference Division for running a pirate radio station from the lab at the top floor of the science block, and he took off from grim Birmingham, where the family had moved to find work, and headed "back home" to Ireland.

In orthodox terms, it didn't look so good for "the Camelot of the mind", but appearances can be deceiving. No matter that he was eventually expelled from the Emerald Isles, too; arrested for vagrancy (only one shilling and sixpence in his pocket, no fixed address and some incriminating evidence that he'd been writing rude things about the Pope) and shipped back to England.

In the months spent wandering the small towns and seething pubs of Ireland, he had served his apprenticeship for his life to come, "singing for his supper in the green womb of Holy Ireland, where so much music and poetry have been conceived, nurtured, and often banned by the BloodyEnglish". He found that what his father had told him was correct.

"The Lamp of the Gael is burning at an all-time low. Poetry is becoming the province of academics, and traditional music is disappearing from areas of the countryside, like frost on a fire grate."

While still at school, back in Birmingham, Watkins received a "pleasing ripple of applause" when he sang a new song he'd heard over American shortwave radio stations: Blowin' in the Wind by "Tom Dillon", as he erroneously announced.

Bob Dylan was not yet a household name and no one corrected Watkins. Yet Dylan, of course, was part of the folk revival that sprang to life in the 1960s and, while Watkins soon moved away from the new folk music into more ancient fields of lyricism, it was almost certainly a "right time, right place" convergence.

He had been brought up by a Welsh mother who had a song or a verse for every conceivable event or situation. He had absorbed thousands of songs and poems in the Gaelic languages of his parents and, thanks to the words of his father, he had a fire in his belly and was eager to rekindle his culture. He met others of like mind and was amazed to find himself in the thick of a "mass movement, the great folk music scene".

The 1960s were a tumultuous time for the British Isles. At last there was money to start rebuilding the cities following the Second World War, so people were migrating from Ireland, Scotland and Wales to where the money was.

Irish labourers from the countryside were pouring into the pubs and folk clubs of the cities, keen to sing the songs of home, and thereby setting in place a cross-fertilisation of influences never seen before.

New songs were being written. Watkins himself has written many, in the idiom and metre of the old verse and, all in all, it really seemed as if a new golden age was dawning for the Celts.

Watkins' life has been lived for this purpose, advocating Celtic dignity and the richness of Celtic culture and history.

He considers his books, which are the first two of an autobiographical trilogy called The Once and Future Celt, to be an exploration of the Celtic mind and an attempt to solve the puzzle of cultural atrophy his father expressed to him all those years ago.

It says something about our stereotype of the Celtic races that we almost expect some kind of buffoonery or larrikinism from Watkins.

Well, he sets himself up for it. "Wild Bill Watkins," he calls himself - it's in his web address, too - and we know he wears a kilt for public appearances and quite frequently in private as well.

His books to date are full of good humour and the self-deprecating wit that is the Celtic birthright.

But he is no Billy Connolly, and has no intention to be. He's wry without being hilarious; his objective is serious and his emotions run deep and strong.

He offers us a keyhole into a way of being: the English are always "the BloodyEnglish"; the Celts are full of spirit and pride and poetry. The sixth sense is alive and well ("It has a bearing on the Celtic psyche, whether you believe it or not," he says) and many traditions linger on.

For instance, Watkins is a druid - a fine confluence of personae, given that he also owns a pub, which simply means he is a keeper of the old ways, a kind of "Celtic agony aunt" to whom people can come with their questions and problems. It most assuredly does not mean a long white beard and robes. He can keep his kilt on.

His pub is in Minneapolis, of all places, where he now lives with his American wife. The Celtic revival is tremendously strong in the United States, he says, and contrary to his expectations, he feels he has "forged the understanding that being too close to your subject can be distorting, and distance, indeed, brings forth focus".

Perhaps it's appropriate that the "once and future Celt" should be making his home in the New World.

With so many of the people dispersed to the four corners of the globe, the wailing pipes and jaunty jigs of the coming Celtic golden age must indeed be heard further than the shores of the Old Country.

It's not easy being a subordinate race, but with a cultural self-confidence that would have made his father proud, Watkins insists, "like the Jews, we won't go away".