Based on genuine historical figures and events, as well as legend and folklore, this novel is seeped in shadowy medieval mystery. During the wars of independence in fourteenth century Scotland, people are driven to extra-ordinary lengths to survive, whilst power is exercised with cruel pleasure.
Extract from The Bogeyman
By Craig Watson
Published by Thunderpoint Publishing
“When the mortcloth of a regal brother,
Begins the Annals of Egglespether;
First the prior’s house will fall,
To the overlord of Balliol.
The wicked Norse wind usurps the west;
Two grains from a seed of wheat, at best.
Orphans of war; fiends in a den.
Blood will fill the scribe’s inkpot and pen.”
6th Day of December, 1335
Curled in the dirt like a dog booted in the ribs by its master, I watch as de Moray’s men strip my father of his skin and divide it among themselves in small parts. I lie tethered to our standard: the Christies of Finzean, who forwent their obligation to join the army of de Moray in the battle at Culblean. If I turn and lift my head just off the ground, I can see it: my father’s black, yellow and red pennon against the white clouds above, the pennon twitching one way, the clouds rushing the other. I breathe in dust, a fowl scratches and pecks loudly just beyond my ear. The burning house crackles as loud as a hundred pigs on a spit. The smoke mixes with the dust, the heat from the inferno dries my lips and burns at my eyelids. I close my eyes as my mother and sister are ravaged and beaten by one, two, five or ten men-at-arms. Peck, peck, peck. Scratch, peck. ‘…you fucking treacherous, cursed quean…’ He squeals with pleasure, or laughter. Or is it a swine being slaughtered? ‘…suck on it, I command…you will be wide enough for a cat to hibernate for a year when the victorious army of de Moray has finished its business…’ The other men say nothing. The fowl moves away. Amid sobs, my mother screams: ‘He made payment during peace! To commute service during war!’ Over and over she shouts it. ‘My husband made payment…he made payment…he made the wretched payment.’ No-one responds. My sister moans and mumbles: something pathetic, not defiant. Heavy footsteps move close. I open my eyes. I have seen enough to know it is the squealer; he has a thick, broad-bladed knife in his right hand, hanging by his side. He is much bigger and more thickset than his giggly squeals suggested. He turns to say something to my mother/sister, a question of some sort: ‘…make a trumpet of his arse…you want me to?’ He points the knife at me. Then swings it away. Then back again. Perhaps fearful where and when it will next come down, I follow the line of the blade. And beyond, behind Squealer, in the direction of the river, I see him! A small boy crouched in the reeds, gesturing wildly. My brother, who is not yet twelve years, is waving his arms madly, almost as though he wishes to be seen by the despoilers. His lips are wide, then pursed, again and again. He is mouthing my name: An-drew! An-drew! He half stands, clearly visible now, points at the river and pulls his arms to and fro, bending and straightening them. He is pleading, as though he has been waiting for this moment since we were woken by cries of ‘Havoc!’ before even dawn, as if willing his eyes to burst into a yell. My gaze travels farther. The boat: he is pointing at the logboat. The knife has moved closer; it is so close I can no longer see it without straining my neck. Squealer is standing over me. He follows my bulging stare. More fear-filled than at any moment since the first, I look back to my brother’s hiding place. He has ducked down, hidden again. Squealer hacks at my bonds: two, three times, then a final sawing motion. He catches a finger. It is not greatly sore so difficult to tell which one, probably the small one on my left hand. But my hands are free. And now my feet. Squealer drags me into a standing position and hands me the knife. Hands me the knife. ‘Son of the packsaddle – end your mother’s pitiful drone,’ he says, with no hint of a squeal. He holds a long-handled halberd confidently in his left hand. The curved axe head faces the ground, like a jester’s open-mouthed, leering smile. I look at the knife in my fingers, at the men around the flaming scene: no more than a score, most handling spoil. The woman still alive behind Squealer is my mother; the lifeless form is my young sister. A spear’s throw to the right, my brother is climbing into the boat. I make a decision and fall to my knees. Squealer bends down to yank me upright. Before his grip has fully tightened, I spring to my feet and cleave his skull and brain, cutting down through him beyond his feet until the blade hits hard ground below and the handle shivers in two. I take the bare blade in my hand – it cuts into my palm – and bring it down between his legs, into his boneless flesh so that the thing will never swell again, in this life or the next. Then I run to the boat and my brother kicks off from the shore.
The Bogeyman by Craig Watson is published on November 10 (PB, £13.99) by Thunderpoint Publishing
For Celtic fans George McCluskey ranks alongside Kenny Dalglish, Tommy Burns, Johnny Doyle and Paul McStay in a generation of greats. From the introduction by McCluskey himself, here he reveals how playing in the hoops for the club was a life-long ambition.
Extract from Playing For The Hoops
By Aidan Donaldson
Published by Luath Press
Personal Introduction by George McCluskey
I first met Aidan Donaldson in Cassidy’s Bar in Belfast about 15 years ago. I had been in Ireland speaking at a function organised by Beann Mhadaghain csc the day before and it was suggested that I should pop into Cassidy’s Bar if I got a chance. So I did and was warmly greeted by the people there. While I was discussing some aspects of Celtic and football, Aidan came into the conversation with a list of facts and statistics to which my response was, ‘You must be a bloody anorak, buddy!’ There was an embarrassed silence in the bar before Aidan retorted, ‘Nobody ever said that to me before, George.’ Despite that rather awkward first meeting Aidan and I have become great friends over the years and he’s now very much part of our family. Indeed, it is only through our friendship that this work has appeared. It was Aidan’s constant cajoling and encouragement that led me to agree to have my story told. His determination, hard work and knowledge have done the rest and I thank Aidan from the bottom of my heart for the wonderful job he has done in getting my story in print.
From the very start I wanted the book to be about my family and friends and everything else that has shaped me to be the person I am. In football biographies the reader often only sees the player and not the real person. I was extremely fortunate to play football for the club I supported my entire life. My great friend Tommy Burns once said (about himself) that he was ‘a supporter who got lucky and wore the shirt’, and I am sure that the same could be said about me. Coming from a Celtic minded family and community it has been an absolute privilege to have played for Celtic on so many occasions and to have shared in their joy, hopes and dreams – as well as in their disappointments. It is true to say that when you pull on the green and white hoops and run out in front of a packed Jungle you are playing for your family and friends as well as for Celtic and there is no feeling like that. And I wanted to get that sense of club, community and family across in this book.
I have many wonderful memories and made many friends among players and supporters alike. Yet the footballer’s life is not always about the great moments and matches. I have had many great moments in football and also many low points too and not just when bitter defeat was experienced. It’s only when you hit life’s ‘bumps’ that you really understand who your true friends are and I have been blessed to have been surrounded by so many close friends who have stuck by me over the years. So sincerest thanks and love to the Dollichans, McAteers, McCormacks, Paul Brannan, Gerry Green, John Kirkwood and all others whose loyalty and friendship means the world to me.
It is to my family that I owe the greatest debt. My mother and father sacrificed so much for all of us when we were growing up and an awful lot to help myself and my brother, John, as we pursued our dreams to play for Celtic. They taught me everything I know and have tried to pass on to my own children. Both Anne and I are proud of each and every one of them as they make their own journey in life. Anne and I have been together since we met in St Catherine’s High School 44 years ago. She has been the rock that has kept me going when times are difficult and has made our house a loving, caring and happy place, home for our children and grandchildren. She has the patience of a saint and the wisdom and understanding that has helped me enormously throughout our lives and I thank her most sincerely for that.
God has always played an important role in my life from my childhood to today. I am most certainly not the best Christian in the world but I pray every day for my family, friends and those in need. In particular I pray to Our Lady. It was a teacher at St John the Baptist Primary School called Teresa Maxwell who said that if you ever wanted to ask Jesus for something then you should always pray to his mother since no son would refuse a mother’s request. When I think of the two most important women in my life – my own mother and my wife – I am certain that Mrs Maxwell gave a young boy great advice all those years ago. She also told us that her favourite saint was St Jude – the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. St Jude is now one of my favourite saints whom I pray to especially in times of difficulty. I recommend him!
I hope that those who are kind and patient enough to read this book will enjoy it and see part of themselves and their own story in it. The world we live in is a challenging and often confusing place. Yet there are values and gifts that are passed on from one generation to the next. Celtic has always been an extremely important part of my life and continues to be so. So too are my family, friends and community. All of them are intertwined and interconnected. I was indeed a fan who got lucky and played in the Hoops. I also hope by doing that I played for you.
Hail! Hail!
Playing For The Hoops: The George McCluskey story by Aidan Donaldson is out now (HB, £16.99) published by Luath Press
In this new book Richard Reed, the co-founder of the Innocent Drinks company, asks a host of remarkable household names – including Sir David Attenborough in this exclusive excerpt – to impart some of their hard-earned wisdom and insights into life.
Extract from If I Could Tell You Just One Thing…
By Richard Reed
Published by Canongate Books
Introduction
When I was young my father often took me fell walking. We spent misty days climbing the gentle peaks of the Yorkshire Dales and Lakeland crags. Each trip a new route, a different summit to climb, always a bar of chocolate at the top.
I don’t remember him teaching me per se, but I inherited from him the rituals of the Great Outdoors: close the gate to keep the sheep in, walk at the edge of the field to protect the crops, stand aside for those coming uphill.
My favourite tradition was placing a stone on the cairns, the small pile of rocks that walkers create to help mark the way. A simple, easy practice, both altruistic and self-preserving in its aim: to help others find their path, knowing that the next time the lost fell walker could be you.
We benefited from those cairns ourselves many times, when the clouds came in and the path was unclear. And even on bright days, those cairns provided welcome reassurance, while more distant ones hinted at different paths still to explore.
Off the mountains, I’ve come to appreciate that sometimes a few words of advice can act as cairn stones in life; a wise sentence or two that get you back on course when you’re lost in the fog or stuck in boggy terrain, knowledge from a fellow traveller who can point out the best views of the safest route.
On at least three occasions a single piece of advice has changed my life. And over the years I’ve gained a deep appreciation of learning from people both wiser and more experienced than myself. So ten years ago I made a simple promise to myself: whenever I met someone remarkable, I’d ask them for their best piece of advice.
The result is this book.
If I Could Tell You Just One Thing . . . walks the full spectrum of human experiences and emotions, from those of Simon Cowell at one end to those of Lily Ebert, an Auschwitz survivor, at the other. In between, you’ll find the considered wisdom of presidents and popstars, entrepreneurs and artists, celebrities and survivors; from people who’ve made it and from others who have endured incredible hardships, from those who’ve climbed as high as you can go in life, and from people who’ve witnessed the worst of what humans can do to one another.
Good advice is like a nutrient-rich broth, made from boiling down the bones of life. And being fed so much of it, sourced from such remarkable people, has enriched my life and understanding of my fellow homosapiens immeasurably. If chosen well, a few words can capture and disseminate the main insights gained from someone’s hard years of experience, thereby allowing us all to benefit from them. That is certainly the aim of each of the encounters in the book.
Every person is someone I’ve met, either through running my own business, or from my subsequent varied career working in government, charities, the arts and the media. Some people featured are friends, some are people who generously agreed to be interviewed, and a few are unsuspecting folk I ambushed when fate put us in the same room at a party, a conference or, in one case, at a urinal.
When I ask people for their best piece of advice, I urge them to really think about what they consider to be most important. I put the exact same question to everyone: Given all that you have experienced, given all that you now know and given all that you have learnt, if you could pass on only one piece of advice, what would it be? There is something about asking people to stand behind just one nugget of wisdom that gets them to reflect harder, dig deeper and be more candid in their response. And it has led to some extraordinary answers. The material is diverse and wide ranging, and covers everything from achieving success to dealing with failure, from finding love to having better sex, from getting the best out of people to surviving abuse. There should be something in this collection that speaks to everyone.
Most people when asked for advice are happy to give it. This desire to help is a manifestation of the better part of human nature; it costs nothing, can be shared infinitely and will last indefinitely. And I hope that this is the first of several books. For there are countless remarkable people on the planet, and this first collection only captures the insights of a fraction of them. There are endless stories to be told and wisdom to be captured.
Over time I hope to help create a global commons of advice, a shared pool of wisdom that everyone can both contribute to and gain from. After all, as a species we are much more alike than we are different. And while everyone’s path through life is unique, we can all benefit from the knowledge of more experienced walkers ahead, who can tell us of the most beautiful things to see and guide us to the safer places to cross the river.
Richard Reed
June 2016
The Lesser Spotted Sir David Attenborough
Illustration by Sam Kerr
All I can hear are the sounds of nature. The air is filled with mysterious chirpings and squawks, exotic whistles, tocks and clicks. In quick succession, a Ghanaian Giant Squeaker Frog, a Madagascan Side-Necked Turtle and a Pakistani Snow Leopard dart past in front of me. Then a Papua New Guinea warrior in tribal headdress appears. Our eyes meet. He gives me a friendly smile and comes towards me, extending his hand in a traditional greeting. And I think, not bad for a Tuesday evening in West London.
Admittedly the sounds are recorded and the animals are on film, but the warrior is very much real and enjoying both his first trip to London and his first-ever gin and tonic. We’re at the Whitley Awards for Nature, an Oscar-lite awards ceremony for rising stars in the world of conservation. The venue is the Royal Geographical Society, an appropriate choice given the far-flung origins of tonight’s nominees, each of which has dedicated their life to defending their threatened native species. The Ghanaian chap protecting the Giant Squeaker Frogs has even learnt to mimic their mating call and does so loudly when collecting his prize. It makes for a memorable acceptance speech.
While the evening is shaped around celebrating these conservationists and their projects, the biggest draw of the night is guest of honour and the world’s most revered naturalist Sir David Attenborough. He’s dressed on-brand in a crumpled cream linen suit, looking for all the world like someone who has just come back from exotic travels, which of course he has. He’s at the event to support the conservationists and wants no limelight for himself. Like his documentary subjects, he seems more comfortable hiding in the long grass and remains in the audience, avoiding the stage.
To talk to him one-on-one, he is the charismatic yet humble man you would imagine him to be. He says he gives time to these awards every year, including narrating each of the conservation project’s films, because ‘local people with local knowledge and a vested interest’ do the best conservation work and ‘it’s more important than ever to support those who protect the planet’. It’s lost on no one that the room is full of people inspired to do just that because of the films Sir David has made. The effect is global: President Obama credits Sir David with awakening his fascination in the natural world as a boy and asked Sir David to the White House to pick his brains on conservation and fulfil a childhood ambition of getting to hang out with Nature’s commander-in-chief.
According to Sir David, the growing encroachment by man on our natural habitat and the ever-increasing demands we place on the environment has got progressively worse over his sixty years of film-making. And he’s clear-sighted about the fundamental driver of the issue: ‘there’s no major problem facing our planet that would not be easier to solve with fewer people’.
He also underlines the importance of appreciating what is around us: not just our natural history, although that is of course of fundamental importance, but also our art, other people too. He recommends what he calls an ‘explorer’s mentality’, delighting in and savouring all the richest of life as we journey through it. And while doing so heeds ‘it’s a good idea to create more than you consume’.
There’s also a boyish mischievousness about him. When I ask for his best piece of advice, he feigns ignorance and says he’s never been able to think of anything clever to say his whole life, and then winks. When I push a second time for his most valuable advice, he continues in the vein of what he has been saying about appreciating the miracle of what life on earth has to offer, and it fits exactly with the endless fascination he exhibits in every second of his films:
‘I have never met a child that is not fascinated by our natural world, the animal kingdom and the wonders within it. It is only as we get older that we sometimes lose that sense of wonderment. But I think we would all be better off if we kept it. So my advice is to never lose that, do what you can to always keep that sense of magic with our natural world alive.’
And no one does that better than Sir David.
If I Could Tell You Just One Thing… by Richard Reed is out now (HB, £15.99) published by Canongate Books
Published by Sandstone Press as part of the unique Lasag series for Gaelic learners, here we meet Anna who is fed up buying extravagant presents for yet another friend’s wedding. When she meets Donald, who is equally cynical about weddings, they set out to plot an ultimate act of deception.
Extract from Banais na Bliadhna
By Maureen MacLeod
Published by Sandstone Press
Anna finds herself relegated to the singletons’ table at her friend’s wedding. The bride hopes some of her single friends will pair up together, but for Anna it’s an ordeal. She falls into conversation with Dòmhnall, a friend of the groom, and it turns out they have the same cynical attitude about extravagant weddings and the expensive presents that couples feel they’re entitled to. Their drunken conversation leads to an audacious proposition.
Dè bha ceàrr air fhàgail aig fuids[1] an cumadh cridhe? No uisge-beatha, no bràiste[2] mar chomharra gun robhas air airgead a thoirt do charthannas às do leth? Cha robh sin gu leòr do thòrr chupal an-diugh, ge-tà. Bha leithid Seonag agus Niall ag iarraidh fàbhar eile a thoirt do dh’aoighean singilte – gaol a lorg dhaibh. Lùigeadh[3] Anna bòrd nan singilteach a chur bun-os-cionn.
Choinnich Anna ri Seonag air a’ chiad latha san àrd-sgoil, iad nan dlùth charaidean bhon uair sin. Do Sheonag, bha a h-uile càil dubh agus geal, i gnothachail agus fada na ceann mu iomadh rud ach bhiodh e duilich tè na bu dhìleas neo còir a choinneachadh. Anns na mìosan dorcha às dèidh do Chaomhain a fàgail, ’s iomadh turas a chleachd i cluasan agus sòfa Sheonaig.
Cho luath ’s a thilleadh iad bho mhìos nam pòg, dhèanadh Anna cinnteach nach biodh teagamh sam bith air Seonag dè a beachd air bòrd nan singilteach. Cha mhòr nach cluinneadh i Seonag, ge-tà. Bhiodh freagairt chlubhar air choreigin aice – ’s dòcha àireamhan air a teanga mu cia mheud neach a phòs ann am Breatainn sna deich bliadhna mu dheireadh às dèidh coinneachadh aig bainnsean. Sin an seòrsa tè a bh’ ann an Seonag.
Choimhead i mun bhòrd, air na mì-fhortanaich eile a bhathas den bheachd a dh’fheumadh cuideachadh. Nuair a bha iad ag ullachadh plana nan suidheachan, dè an ùine a chaidh a chosg air a’ bhòrd seo? Bha e a cheart cho dòcha nach tug Niall an dàrna smuain dhan seo neo mòran eile, gach nì air a chur air dòigh mus fhaigheadh esan an cothrom a bheul fhosgladh.
Dè cho tric ’s a thàinig air Seonag am bòrd seo atharrachadh sna seachdainean a chaidh seachad a rèir ghluasadan ann an suidheachadh dhaoine? Freya, mar eisimpleir, a bha na suidhe mu coinneamh – cò a chumadh suas leis an robh neo nach robh fireannach na beatha-se, sin ag atharrachadh nas trice na na mìosan! Dh’fheumadh Seonag ùidh mì-fhallain a chumail ann am beatha phearsanta an ochdnair a bha aig a’ bhòrd gun fhios nach robh feum aca air seat aig bòrd nan singilteach tuilleadh!
Choimhead i ri a companaich – còignear bhoireannach agus triùir fhireannach. Nach robh seo mar chomharra air mar a bha cùisean an-còmhnaidh – tòrr a bharrachd fireannaich na boireannaich?
Nam biodh sùil aig barrachd na aon bhoireannach anns an aon fhear, dè thachradh? Am biodh farpais neo sabaid ann gus a’ chùis a rèiteach? ’S dòcha nach robh dragh aig Seonag cho fad ’s gum biodh cupal neo dhà ùr air an cruthachadh bhon latha. An dùil a bheil farpais dìomhair ann a tha a’ toirt bhoucherean Debenhams dhut a rèir cia mheud cupal a chruthaicheas tu aig do bhanais? Cha robh ann ach fèill-mhart[4] am beachd Anna.
Phew – bha aon bhoireannach nas lugha san fharpais! Cha b’ fhada gun robh e follaiseach gun robh sùil aig Freya ann an cuideigin aig an ath bhòrd, i a’ dol a-null gus bruidhinn ris gu cunbhalach. Cha bhiodh sgeul oirrese tuilleadh cho luath ’s a bhiodh am biadh seachad.
Bha dithis de a dlùth charaidean aig a’ bhòrd a bharrachd air Freya agus co-ogha do Sheonag. Bhiodh an triùir fhireannach a’ cluich ball-coise còmhla ri Niall agus bha beagan eòlais aice orra tro bhith gan coinneachadh aig tachartasan eile còmhla ri Seonag agus Niall. Cha do dh’adhbhraich gin den triùir aca buiceil[5] na stamaig neo na cridhe.
Ghluais i seo uile gu cùl a h-inntinn oir bha gach nì mu latha mòr Sheonaig àlainn agus bhiodh e duilich gun tlachd fhaighinn às. Bha Seonag ag itealaich timcheall mar dealan-dè[6] bòidheach, eu-comasach a’ ghàire, a bha cho mòr ri coille, a chumail far a h-aodainn. Bha coltas oirre gun robh i a’ sanasachd fiaclair sònraichte neo uachdar-fhiacail[7], Anna a’ sùileachadh gun nochdadh rionnag ghleansach os cionn a beòil bho àm gu àm mar a chitheadh tu air an telebhisean.
Tha ùidh às ùr aig daoine anns na h-òraidean an-diugh – airgead ri dhèanamh às a’ chùis dhan fheadhainn a chuireadh geall air am faid. Bhiodh deagh sporan a’ feitheamh air an neach a b’ fhaisg a ghealladh.
Rinn Dòmhnall, a bha cuideachd aig bòrd nan singilteach, oraid. Nearbhach an toiseach, bhlàthaich e chun ghnothaich às dèidh lachanaich a chluinntinn bho na bha an làthair. A’ gabhail air a shocair le sgeulachdan èibhinn agus a’ crìochnachadh le dealbhan sgoinneil de Niall a chaidh a thogail air an oidhche ‘stag’, dh’aithnicheadh tu gun robh e air mòran ùine a chur seachad air an oraid. B’ ann gu math goirid a bha na bh’ aige ri ràdh ach ghlac e daoine leis an dòigh tharraingich a bh’ aige air sgeulachd innse. ’S dòcha gun robh i ceàrr ach shaoil Anna gum faca i deòir aig amannan.
[1] fuids fudge
[2] bràiste brooch, badge
[3] lùigeadh desiring, longing
[4] fèill-mhart cattle market
[5] buiceil fluttering
[6] dealan-dè butterfly
[7] uachdar-fhiacail toothpaste
Banais na Bliadhna by Maureen MacLeod is published by Sandstone Press on November 17 (PB, £7.99)
Meet the scribe. Acting as God he forms the happy little island of Fagero and creates human beings to live there. The people of Fagero were often divided against each other but united in their appreciation of their happy little island. Until the dead bodies began to arrive…
Extract from A Happy Little Island
By Lars Sund
Published by Vagabond Voices
In the beginning the computer screen was without form, and void; and the fingers of the scribe rested upon the keyboard.
The scribe chewed his lower lip, his glance flitting like a fly between the stuffed bookcases of his study, the rocking chair over by the window, the framed colour prints of birds on the walls. He went out to the kitchen and drank some water. Then he sat down at his computer again. To create a fictional world from nothing, using only the tools that language places at our disposal, is truly a great and demanding undertaking!
The scribe hesitated and pondered for a long time before finally writing the first word: “Heaven”. After thinking again for a long while he wrote the following word, which was “Seas”.
And with that the heavens and the seas were created, but they were still not divided. The scribe solved that by laying out a horizon in the far distance, and he let it lie there unbroken, for the open horizon of the sea was the most beautiful view he knew.
Now the scribe became more and more energetic. In the firmament of the heavens he set a sun to light his new world and he scattered some cumulus clouds, the latter mainly for decoration.
Furthermore he made a light breeze blow from the south-south-west and he made it Force 2 on the wind scale created in 1805 by Commander Francis Beaufort while he and his vessel lay in Plymouth Sound awaiting orders to sail. The rays of the sun danced on the small waves that were driven along by the breeze.
The scribe needed a piece of dry land to anchor his story and so he wrote in a skerry in the sea. It was no more than a long narrow granite ridge, in shape and form rather like a capsized ship about to sink. On its north-west side flat slabs, rounded and smoothed by the inland ice, rose gradually from the waters, but on the south side the cliffs fell steeply down into the sea. The scribe created plants and animals on the skerry. Down at the waterline he stuck a fringe of saltwater lichens and blue-green algae on the rocks. Higher up he planted salt-marsh grass, sea campion and scentless mayweed, and then stonecrops and rock campion. On the rocky hillocks he laid low scrubbycarpets of juniper, sea buckthorn, crowberry and heather; hairgrass, sheep’s fescue, sea speedwell and common toadflax were also permitted to grow there. In the crevices and hollows in the rocks, where cushions of sphagnum moss retain moisture, cotton grass, sundews and marsh lousewort flourished. Next the scribe brought forth herring gulls, common gulls and razorbills on the skerry, and also a colony of Arctic terns because he liked their elegant flight and their shrill, easily recognisable call – krii-ay, krii-ay, krii-ayay. He pencilled in the veins on the eggs ready to hatch in their downy nests hidden away among heather and crowberry. Common sandpipers, redshanks and ruddy turnstones completed his birdlife.
On the highest point of the skerry the scribe placed a stunted pine, scraggy, gnarled and crooked. The reason he chose that sort of gnarled undernourished variety of Pinus sylvestris is because it has often served as a symbol for the exposed life of the islanders, for their struggle to keep their distinctive identity and their right to their language. The stunted pine fits in very well in a story like this.
It occurred to the scribe to give the new land a name while he was at it. He called it Skogsskär, that is Forest Skerry. That, he thought, was the sort of name the islanders themselves would probably choose for a rocky little island on which there was nothing but a solitary windswept pine.
The scribe looked at his work and thought: “Right, that will have to do.”
And he set about creating the first human being. Now, it might have been a relatively simple matter to create the heavens and the seas and a little skerry of an island with all the appropriate plants and birds, including a stunted pine on its top, but the scribe soon discovered that creating a human being was much more troublesome. When, after much toil and trouble, he finally completed his Adam, he was a sorry sight to behold.
Adam lay there on his belly in the shallows below the steep southern point of Skogsskär, the sea rocking him lazily and softly. The swell washed him gently against the cliffs, his forehead touching the rocks, then the swell sucked him back a little way before pushing him towards the shore
again. The first human being submitted patiently to the sea’s game. He had one arm stretched out as though trying to grasp firm ground.
Patches of light split by the prisms of the waves moved gently along the seabed around his body. A tuft of green algae swayed a few inches in front of his wide-open eyes. The gulls, posted on stones and rock ledges, stood guard over him like soldiers in white dress uniforms with grey cloaks.
A Happy Little Island by Lars Sund is out now (PB, £12.95) published by Vagabond Voices
Ansdell’s authoritative account examines conflict, controversy, and the church in a period of immense social and religious upheaval. Ansdell discusses how the period of 1690 through to 1900 catalysed multiple tensions between the church and Highland society.
The People of the Great Faith – The Highland Church 1690-1900
By Douglas Ansdell
Published by Acair
Introduction
The story of the Church in the Highlands is a fascinating and absorbing subject without which any understanding of Highland history would be greatly impoverished. The Church has always played a central role in Highland history and legitimately shares this with the other themes of rebellion, eviction, emigration, crofting, language, culture, clanship and land.
A period of immense social and religious upheaval from the Revolution Settlement in 1690 to the union of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians in 1900 provides the background where the tension between the church and Highland society and conflict and controversy within the church are examined and discussed.
Despite the importance of the church in Highland history there is no single text which provide a survey of the church in the Highlands in this period. The literature of the Scottish Highlands will be will be enriched with Dr Ansdell’s account, which will have wide appeal for those with a general interest in Highland or religious history.
Dr Douglas Ansdell is recognised as a significant contributor to the topic of church history in the Highlands and Islands. He has previously published numerous articles and is a thorough researcher in this field which is of such significance in the present and past life of Scotland. He is currently employed by the Scottish Office Education Department and also does work for the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Continuing Education.
Chapter 3 – The Extension of Presbyterianism
In the early eighteenth century the Church of Scotland was confronted with a number of obstacles in its work in the Highlands. These were in addition to the continued activity of illegal Episcopalians and the stubborn attachment of some areas to the Roman Catholic faith. Although these issues ensured that the Church of Scotland focussed attention on the Highlands, it also faced a number of other difficulties relating to geography, language, personnel and accommodation. These difficulties inhibited the church’s ability to extend itself adequately throughout the Highlands and Islands. The resulting patchy provision heightened the concern that Catholicism and episcopalianism could remain, thrive and expand. These obstacles, therefore, had to be overcome in order to secure Presbyterianism throughout the Highlands and Islands. Only this, Presbyterians and Government believed, would have the effect of dispelling superstition, overcoming ignorance and promoting loyalty throughout this region.
The fundamental unit of church management that would secure these improvements was the parish. A minister should be settled in every parish, and, aided by his kirk session, should attend to the spiritual needs of the people and exercise church discipline. It was, therefore, the first task of the Church of Scotland to put in place the structure, consisting of parish, presbytery and synod, that would facilitate this. It was also expected that, where possible, people would attend the church in the parish in which they lived. This arrangement was to be the basis from which the church hoped to extend religious provision in the Highlands.
There is a measure of debate as to when the Church of Scotland could claim to have successfully extended its influence throughout the Highlands. Some historians have regarded 1750 as a turning point and have claimed at this stage the task of securing the presence of the Church of Scotland had been accomplished. Other commentators have considered this assessment too optimistic. They have argued that even by the end of the eighteenth-century the religious transformation of the Highlands was not complete and there was still room for new initiatives.
The above views, however, need not be regarded as either antagonistic or incompatible. There are two different things being discussed; one relates to the development of the administrative structure of Presbyterianism and the second to the church providing adequate religious instruction for all Highland communities. Thus, some historians have identified mid-century as the point at which they recognise that the structure was in place. Others have made the observation that the benefits which this structure wad to deliver took a little longer.
In some places the Presbyterian structure, once in place, was still not adequate to the task set before it. The settlement of a Presbyterian minister in every Highland parish did not immediately secure adequate religious provision for Highland communities. The established church took the view that that there remained areas of great need in the Highlands. There are a number of reasons for this which are mostly associated with the nature and size of Highland parishes. In terms of meeting this need an important contribution was made by the efforts of missionaries, catechists and school teachers. These individuals supplemented the work of the parish ministry by also providing religious instruction.
The People Of The Great Faith: The Highland Church 1690-1900 is out now (PB, £7.99) published by Acair. You might also like these other titles from Acair – An Sgoil Dhubh and The Living Past – that reflect this Issue’s Ungrounded theme.
Helen Sedgwick explains the genesis of this unique short story: Several years before I wrote The Comet Seekers, I wrote a short story composed of independent flash fictions in which the characters were linked through a connection to the comets in the sky overhead. The resulting story, called ‘Searching For Comets’, was completed in 2011 (and published in Tramway’s Algebra) but over the years I kept feeling myself pulled back into it. When an idea keeps calling like that, I find I have to listen! So here it is, the short story of flash fictions that became a novel – I hope you enjoy reading it.
Searching for Comets
By Helen Sedgwick
There is a falling star unlike any of the stars that have fallen before. It was predicted, and sometimes predictions can come true. Twelve women scramble up the hillside overlooking Aegospotami, their wild hair streaming out behind them as they run. Their dresses are white linen, tied around their waists with finely twisted rope and their jewellery is amethyst and gold, emerald and polished mother of pearl. In Athens, a philosopher is writing about the comet that lights up the night, but on the hilltop the women let their dresses slip off so that they can dance and sing. They feel mud between their toes and touch skin with their fingertips, they sing to the gods and they sing about the comet of Anaxagoras; they sing to the falling star that is different from all the others, then they dance with spiraling arms and the urgency of freedom and
*
like many Brittany farmers, he is proud and stubborn; a solitary man. Where his fields lie empty he can remember herds of cattle. His farmhouse is crumbling. He rubs the walls with his fingertips and feels his skin soften where the stone flakes away, but he can remember when it meant safety and permanence and everything that should come with a home. He remembers camping out in the fields to watch Comet West pass by with his cousin – cousin by blood, but more like a sister really, more like a best friend. He remembers asking her if the comet was a falling star and how much he liked her reply: that it was more like a dirty great snowball hurtling through time and space. He looks up to the sky in his empty field and focuses his eyes on this year’s comet and presses his shotgun into the roof of his mouth and pulls the trigger. An instant before his brain bursts from his skull with shattering violence, he remembers his cousin and thinks that he should visit; turn up on her doorstep and ring the bell and tell her that she is remembered, that she is
*
alone on the balcony with the music pounding in her heart, in her stomach, and tequila scraping down her throat. But not for long. Soon there’s a hey, soon there’s a need another one of those? and a fumbling in the dark, an awkward meeting of lips becoming a salivary kiss with a man who tastes like Guinness and looks like Simon Pegg. Below them everyone is dancing, jumping to the beat that turns into an alarm but at first they don’t realize; only when the music stops and the alarm keeps ringing do people start pushing their way to the door. She’s caught in the crowd, pulse racing with panic until, outside on the street she stops still and looks. She looks at the flames licking across the rooftops, and past the flames to the comet that she’d forgotten about, that she had been meaning to look for but hadn’t yet made the time to see. And thanks to the arsonist or the smoker or the electrical fault that sparked the fire she sees the spectacular flame-blue colour of the comet’s coma, she sees its luminous tail streaming out behind and she catches her breath, thinks my God, what if I had missed this – this comet flying through the solar system like
*
an arrow; the shock of an arrow piercing his skin as it forces through his chain mail hauberk. His shield hangs uselessly to the ground and his arm buckles, surrendering to the pain that paralyses his right side. It feels as though the battle has lasted forever, and he has forgotten why they were fighting, or whom they were fighting, or what they were hoping to win. He lets his knees give way to the weight of his body and slumps forwards, as if in prayer. Whoever shot him has moved on, or perhaps hasn’t noticed that his arrow found its mark, but the man doesn’t mind – he too has fired many an arrow with no knowledge of its destination. His head rolls back and he is about to close his eyes when he sees something extraordinary above him; he sees a bright star with a trail of glowing light behind it. He doesn’t imagine for a second that others have seen it, that it might be remembered for centuries and recorded in thread and gold. Instead, he thinks it is a personal star, promising a life after the one he knows he’s losing, and he smiles at the glorious sight and he forgives
*
the smell of rotting food and urine. It seeps up from the street, and the women lift their skirts a few inches from the ground. They don’t want to be here in this odious place but they have no choice; the sky is going to fall, and they are afraid. They tiptoe over dirt and stagnant fluid, follow winding alleyways to the marketplace where they know they’ll find him. On his stall, gas masks are spread out like gawping faces. Goggle-eyes bulge and mouthpieces grimace. Beside them, pill bottles and coloured liquids in glass decanters are lined up: for protection, for good health, to purify bile and blood. It seems old fashioned, but then he explains about the toxic cyanogen that will impregnate the atmosphere when the comets come. The pills will keep them healthy for now, he says, but the gas masks will keep them breathing no matter what falls from the sky. They start to believe him. It is the twentieth century, after all, and who knows what’s going to happen? One by one they buy, and the more they buy the better they feel, content in the knowledge that they’ll be prepared. They will survive this
*
portent – that’s what the oracle says. The bright light moving across the sky with a tail of glowing fire is a portent, and at the end of the light’s journey his enemies will have the throne of Rome. Nero thinks of killing the oracle but decides instead to murder every eminent man of state, to take their wives, or kill them if they won’t be taken, and to offer their children death by poison or starvation. It’s not enough. He thinks of new ways to dominate. He keeps boys in his bed and naked women chained to his walls like statues. At night, he lights his garden by setting fire to prisoners and, watching from his rooms above, he enjoys the glow. He develops quite a taste for killing – besides, the portents keep coming; year after year he can see them in the sky – and he forgets how many he has killed but he can taste the blood in his soup, in the embers of the burning buildings of Rome, and in the seconds before his death by his own hand he thinks: the portent foretold my death, and now my death is here, where
*
she positions her telescope to point out of the Velux window. As expected, the clouds spill into her field of view, and she waits for the sky to clear. She hears a fox howl in the street downstairs, feels a chill and thinks that it’s a good sign – clear skies are partnered with the cold. She remembers that visit to the Bayeux tapestry with her cousin when she was young – her cousin by blood but more her brother, really. Almost her best friend. She remembers him asking why he couldn’t see all the stars at once, and her reply that we can only see the bits of sky that lie above our own horizon. From her attic window she sees a sliver of moon revealed between the clouds. They are not daytime-clouds, more like swirls of fog, a silvery mist above her that is clearing. She is awed by the sky; she always has been. She checks the time. There is not long left before sunrise. She feels goose bumps rise up on her arms and she knows that it has to be now, so she holds her breath as the clouds begin to part. Then, through the eye of the telescope, she sees the red gold plumes of light emitted by Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it bursts through the atmosphere of Jupiter with shattering violence, and her ribs feel like they might break and when her doorbell rings
*
the applause begins. In the audience, the old man feels a little embarrassed by his show of emotion; part of him wishes he were sitting quietly with his family in Morningside. He tries to imagine the sub-atomic particle, his sub-atomic particle, because really, even now, that is what he has to do, despite the graphs and equations and years of believing in things that cannot be seen. His thoughts circle down through molecules and atoms and empty space, to colliding streams of protons moving close to the speed of light – they are still clapping – and then up, through planets and stars and empty space, to comet Machholz 1 flying closer and ever closer to the sun. And for a second he feels like he can see all the things that cannot be seen, because he believes that they have found the proof they have all been searching for, until
*
they scramble to the top of Blackford Hill, all finger-nail mud and grass-stain knees and at the top they fall together on the bracken for skin-prickling. Below them city blocks rise high, their rooftop gardens patterned with people, but here they are alone, the only ones to have scaled the padlocked gates tonight. They peel off their coats, kick off their shoes and throw keys and mobiles carelessly to the ground. He’s got slow kisses, but already she can feel his eyes looking past her and she wants to do that, too – she wants to see something more than this. Then, as if he knows what she’s thinking, they roll apart to lie on their backs and look not at the bracken or the bench or the tracks on the dirt or the sprawling merger of the cities of Scotland, but up to the comets as they disintegrate overhead. They fracture and they split and burst, creating more bodies, more parts of themselves and it is beautiful – a shower of light, here, in this quiet corner of the spiral arm of the galaxy.
The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick is out now (HB, £12.99) published by Harvill Secker.
Ian Niall’s nature writing powerfully evokes the sights and sounds of the high wood at night, when ‘half of the world goes to sleep and the other half awakes’. Ian Niall is the pen name of the Scottish author John McNeillie who wrote over 40 published works and many articles, mostly on nature and the outdoors.
Extract from ‘Fresh Wood’ in If The Corncrake Calls
By Ian Niall
Published by Neil Wilson Publishing
Over the brow of the hill. Do you hear the bird singing in the high wood? Down below it is dark, night among the elderberry bushes and the blackthorns. Summer night in the high wood, warm and alive. In the little patch of sky the leaves of the beech look black and flutter gently. Out on the turnip field it is impossible to see the rabbit or the hare but the leaves rustle and tremble, the yellow weeds sway. The night is full of the little sounds that mark the season, the flying beetle’s note as it goes off speeding through the gloom, the cry of lambs on the grass hills, a restless dog barking in the hollow drum of a barn or a cart-shed, the far-away and yet weirdly near sound of two countrymen talking at a road end. The bird sings and some oddness in the air makes its heart happy. The last combing of the day goes from the sky and the bird is silent. The owl calls. The wood sits brooding, sheltering its bird life, its millions of insects. The tawny owl flies, the wild cat hunts. Who has time in his life to discover how far the rabbit ranges at night, the territory covered by the hare? Who can tell what world the owl sees as he perches on the stump like a ghost, or why he does so when he is so lately out of roost, for night for him is day and day night? Does it become a brighter place of monochrome, like moonlight, and does he sit contemplating its beauty and peacefulness? One half of the world goes to sleep and the other half awakes. Here in the crumbling bank the wasps’ nest settles. It is not completely dormant. It is still alive, vibrating, humming gently. Part of the pattern of night and day, scavengers of sticky jam pot shards and midden refuse, food for the badger, distraction for the honey bee, grubs for the hungry fish, a hot noon fury to warn the browsing beast away.
If The Corncrake Calls by Ian Niall is out now (PB, £12.99) published by Neil Wilson Publishing.
Visiting the Glasgow-based family-owned publishing house Brown, Son & Ferguson takes David Robinson back to when Clyde-built ships and Scottish captains ruled the waves. Founded in 1832, the company continues to publish a range of key titles used worldwide including the seminal Brown’s Nautical Almanac, once described as ‘the sailor’s bible’.
If you ever doubt that Glasgow – as opposed to Birmingham, Manchester or even Liverpool – was the second city of Empire, you can find proof in a most unlikely place.
Head south on the M8 towards Glasgow airport, look on your right as it sweeps through Craigton, and you’ll see a small industrial estate. For the last year, it’s been home to the publishing firm of Brown, Son & Ferguson. If you’ve ever been an officer on a merchant ship – and not just a British one either – you’ll already know who they are.
To merchant shipping, the annual Brown’s Nautical Almanac is what Wisden is to cricket, except it’s even older. From charts of tides in 84 ports worldwide to the location of every offshore windfarm, oil rig, lighthouse, beacon and buoy around Britain’s coast, it aims to put all the necessary facts of maritime life at its readers’ fingertips. In more than 1200 dense pages, it does just that – ranging from how to navigate using a sextant to how to use satellite-based rescue systems. Every year just under 14,000 copies are still sold all over the world.
Brown’s Nautical Almanac was already a century old when Nigel Brown took over as editor in 1978 – he’s Managing Editor now – and beefed up its content by a third. By then, the core of the business had already been long established. His great-great-grandfather was a sea captain who opened a stationery business in Bridge Street in the days when ships sailed right into the city centre. Back then, there were few books on maritime affairs, a gap in the market he set about trying to fill. Brown’s Nautical Almanac was first published in 1878, the Nautical Magazine – which dates back to 1832 – was acquired, and every kind of technical book about going down to the sea in cargo ships soon followed.
The first three generations of Browns were nautical men, the last three haven’t been. Though he has worked in the family firm since 1964, Nigel Brown is as much a landlubber as I am. As he shows me around the warehouse, I suggest that all the arcane knowledge on its shelves – “the astrological ephemeris and other phenomena required for the purposes of navigation”, the first Almanac boasted about, for example – is completely wasted on him. “Totally,” he admits, with a sad smile.
So too is all the detail he’s spent decades of his life editing. Take Thomas’s Stowage: another bestseller for what may well be the oldest family firm in British publishing, another book exported throughout the world, because even in an age of container shipping, a directory of how to safely store cargo is still useful. In it, between “dodder” and “dom nuts”, I discover an entry for “dogs’ droppings,” which usefully informs readers that such cargo – often shipped from the Iranian Gulf in 28kg bags for use in the dying industry – “should be protected from rain and spray by tarpaulin”. “Then there’s camels,” says Nigel. “There’s an entry for that too.” So there is, between “calves” and “cyanide”: next to information about how to treat camel bites “because some of these animals are very vicious”, is a reminder to give them 30 litres of water and 2kg of grain before a voyage.
“Isn’t there an entry for heroin?” he asks. “No,” says his son Richard, 34, a Director of the firm. “Maybe there used to be in past editions.” Because that’s the point about the firm’s business – although templates for their books on safety, maritime law, stowage and navigation have come down from the past – they still have to be regularly updated and often completely revised.
Even though we’re in a relatively modern building, that sense of inheritance hangs over the whole business. On the warehouse shelves are books about how to make ships in bottles or those beautiful, large-scale wooden models that are themselves a testament to an almost bygone age of craftsmanship. Oddly, there are also whole shelves of the kind of mainly one-act Scottish plays amateur dramatic groups regularly used to perform.
Brown, Son & Ferguson’s Logo
But as I mentioned at the start, there’s an even deeper sense of the past at Brown, Son and Ferguson, for so much of its stock is a reflection of the kind of country we used to be – not this century, not last, but the one before that. It’s there in the 19th century opium, China and colonial clippers Basil Lubbock wrote about (the firm sells all 15 of his books) from the last great age of sail. And it’s there too in the contents of the very first books and magazines the company published.
“Look at this,” says Nigel Brown, handing over a copy of the first edition of The Nautical Magazine. It dates from March 1832. The Great Reform Bill hasn’t even happened. Darwin, sailing with Captain Fitzroy, hasn’t even reached South America. And yet here are reports of the ships from this country in all corners of the world, finding easier ways up the St Lawrence into Canada or examining trade opportunities with that still relatively new colony, Australia. There are six full pages listing Royal Navy ships whose main masts have been struck (“shivered”) by lightning in the previous 40 years. A beautifully illustrated account of the raising of the treasure lost when HMS Thetis (on which Captain Fitzroy was a Lieutenant) sank off Brazil in 1830. And a full page of wrecks of British merchant ships from all over the world. I counted 72. For each there was a column about survivors. A surprising number reported “Crew Saved”; a few had the altogether bleaker one-word fate: “Doubtful”. “Aye, and that was just in one month,” murmurs Nigel.
But it’s not just in the stories and features of the Nautical Magazine that give you the sense of the full extent of British mercantile power. We move along 50 years and pluck out another copy of the magazine from Glasgow’s imperial heyday. “Just feel the type, the impression of type on paper,” says Nigel, who can remember when the firm had 120 employees, its own book bindery and printers. “You get that from letterpress, not lithography.” Hot metal. In printing terms, an age as different from ours as a sailing ship is from a liner.
But me, I’m looking at the Nautical Magazine’s adverts. Page after page of them. Marine insurance companies. Officers’ outfitters. Ropework companies. Compass-makers and repairers. Chronometer manufacturers. Ship’s chandlers. Lifebuoy makers. Shops selling ship’s paint, cabin cushions, anchors, cables. Sailmakers. More sailmakers. And every page you read, though this is a magazine sold throughout the world and we’re talking about a time – 1880 – when about a third of the world is painted red on the map – every page has shop after shop, factory after factory, with a Glasgow address.
We forget all this now. We remember that once the Clyde used to mean shipbuilding, but we forget that the shipbuilding also meant hundreds and hundreds of other support industries. They don’t have their Finnieston Crane to remind us of how pervasive they once were. They don’t have the appeal of noisy shipyards swirling with industrial, political and trade union power. Quietly, they shut up shop, and cancelled the adverts. Sales of the magazine, still at 2,500 a month when Nigel started work in 1964, dwindled to a mere 200 in 2011 when he decided to sell it off.
Brown’s Nautical Almanac doesn’t set out to be a reminder of this age, but it can’t help but be one. It was after all, founded in Glasgow by a ship’s captain, and grew to be able to boast that it was “the sailor’s Bible” because so many ship’s captains either were Glaswegians or were at the helm of a Clyde-built ship. And while they may have gone, and the south side of Glasgow emptied of outfitters and ropeworks and compass-maker’s shops, in an industrial estate by the M8, that past still echoes in the present. After all, it’s October, and that means the deadline for 2017’s Brown Nautical Almanac is already upon us, and a small bit of Glasgow is about to sail off into the world once more.
David Robinson is a freelance journalist and editor and from 2000-2015 he was books editor of The Scotsman. This year David is convener of the Saltire Society’s Literary Awards panel. You can find out more about Brown, Son & Ferguson at their website.
Crossing the landscapes of four evocative islands on Scotland’s remote west coast, this excerpt reveals traces of a forgotten past. Stunning photography accompanies Hunter’s exploration of landscapes created by people, and the footprints they left behind.
Extract from The Small Isles
By John Hunter
Published by Historic Environment Scotland
At the turn of the 19th century the parish of the Small Isles, comprising Canna, Eigg, Muck and Rum, were visited by Sarah Murray, one of the few female visitors at that time. She described them as ‘emerging from legend’ – a particularly apposite phrase which, in archaeological terms, encapsulates the end of those centuries of which we know little, and the beginning of those years of which we know more. It was the time when the cultures of island communities were brought into the realities of an economic world which provided massive social change. In researching The Small Isles it soon became clear that the traditions and customs developed over hundreds of years in these four islands had become either depleted or erased in the first part of the 19th century. This was the result of eviction and emigration, enforced or otherwise, which saw the wholesale exodus of family units and social groups. These movements occurred throughout the Highlands, but their effects were most pronounced among the islands where the physical constraints of insularity shaped culture on a local scale. Reduced populations lived under new controls, former communal enterprises were no longer possible with a depleted population, social structures changed, and the way of life was fundamentally altered. Incomers arrived and within a few generations local cultural memories had faded and a new order developed. Place-names had become obsolete or altered, buildings and structures abandoned, and traditions forgotten. In most respects the Small Isles had become islands without memories – islands ungrounded from their pasts. Their traditions and customs over the centuries now lie embedded in a landscape of grass-grown foundations, field systems and obscure earthworks. Landscapes were created by people, and The Small Isles is about the footprints they left behind.
Gallanach farm, Muck © HES
Rum is by far the largest of the four Small Isles, bleak and recognised by its towering mountains; the other three are smaller, greener and look friendlier. Canna and Muck are both relatively low-lying, but Eigg is characterised by the sombre silhouette of the Sgurr, a huge jutting stump of pitchstone eagerly climbed by day-trippers. The whole group lies to the south of Skye, adjacent to the sea routes that run up the west coast of the mainland or across to the Western Isles. The islands each have unique topographies and different stories to tell. The islands are all very different too in their expressions of past human activity as a result of the limitations of individual island landscapes.
Galmisdale on Eigg, photographed by Erskine Beveridge in 1883 © HES
Between them the Small Isles contain a rare collection of monuments of all types and from all periods. There can be few places so geographically concentrated that provide such a vivid illustration of Scotland’s past from prehistory to the 20th century. From earliest times the four islands offer lithic workings, burial mounds, prehistoric hut-circles and field systems, coastal forts indicative of an elite presence, and Early Christian monuments. From later times survive the jumble of successive building foundations of townships, farmsteads and outbuildings, and a landscape peppered with shielings for use in the summer months. Then, finally, there is the inescapable and dominant presence of the modern landed gentry, their sporting estates and the sometimes lavish homes and farms they built. Some of these still stand and are occupied, such as Eigg Lodge, Kinloch Castle on Rum, and the modified farm at Gallanach on Muck. But we can only identify the activities and dwellings of the majority of islanders, the ‘everyday folk’, through what is left, typically lengths of walling, foundations, grass-covered ruins, natural features altered to suit some particular purpose, earthworks and cultivation lines. The monuments possess an anonymity, a type of clinical detachedness, which is hard to ground in the heavily peopled landscape in which they once played a part.
Canna, with the associated smaller island of Sanday © HES
Some of these monuments can be brought to life by the descriptions written by travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries. They spoke to people who lived and worked in buildings that are still recognisable on the ground, but are now ruinous. They allow us to picture a living landscape rather than a dead one. The township ruins seen on all four islands speak only of desertion, but the full social impact of the Clearances that brought about their abandonment is difficult to appreciate without the eyewitness laments, or the listing of names and ages compiled as the émigrés arrived in Nova Scotia. Even a little knowledge about the people who lived there makes the ruins of the old townships less impersonal.
Kinloch Castle, Rum © HES
In the many centuries before the written accounts we can only guess or imagine how the landscape may have looked, and how it was populated. Where did people live? How were they organised? How did they use the land? Unfortunately, the raw material needed for answering these questions usually consists of partially hidden, distorted fragments of what was originally there. Many of the sites discussed here can only be interpreted in the vaguest of terms, or in levels of uncertainty which might perhaps be improved by archaeological intervention.
There is never likely to be a strategy for investigating, preserving and presenting the archaeology and landscapes of the Small Isles that will be to everyone’s satisfaction. There are too many differing views and interests as to what might be important, not to mention other management issues such as farming or conservation where the agendas may be in conflict. But the character of all four islands is undeniably moulded by their past and is to be witnessed in its many surviving forms. Most of the sites and monuments lie beyond the roads and trackways; some are hard to find, surviving as nature has left them. Discovering the sites often requires lengthy walks across beautiful and isolated landscapes where it is hard to imagine the density and complexity of the communities that existed there, and which have inspired so many curious visitors and travellers over the centuries. It is a past to be shared and enjoyed, even if not always fully understood.
The Small Isles by John Hunter is out now (HB, £25) published by Historic Environment Scotland.
Simon J. Hall reveals the highs and lows of journeying to Wewak and gives insight into a world now disappeared: despite rich maritime history, Wewak, in the north coast of Papua New Guinea, is now ‘a forgotten place in a forgotten part of the world’.
Last Voyage to Wewak
By Simon J. Hall
Wewak is a forgotten place in a forgotten part of the world: the north coast of Papua New Guinea, west of the Sepik River. It’s an old German trading post, briefly famous as the site of a large Japanese air base in the Second World War, bombed to bits by the Americans and Australians in 1943.
Post war, Wewak regained its position as a minor trading port, exporting coffee and copra brought down from the New Guinea Highlands. The title refers to the author’s final voyage in the early 1980s, before he swallowed the anchor and prepared for a life on solid ground.
Last Voyage to Wewak is the third in the maritime trilogy by Simon Hall, and follows his acclaimed earlier works. His first book, Under a Yellow Sky, was nominated for the Mountbatten Maritime Award for best literary work, followed by Chasing Conrad, which was equally well received.
This third book traces Hall’s last outing from West Africa to the Persian Gulf, from Japan to the South Pacific, looking back to give the reader a glimpse of a world now disappeared.
Our occasional passengers were generally older types, in their fifties and beyond. They had their own bar and dining saloon, although occasionally ate with us. Sometimes, the more adventurous/curious/nosey types would come into our bar: they were tolerated although nobody really wanted them there, because they cluttered up the place, forcing us to de-salt our conversations.
Bells weren’t generally rung during the day, only from six in the evening until breakfast. They were always rung with solemnity, with exactness. A quartermaster who made a hash of it, failing to ring the correct ‘ding-ding’ sound, would be shamed and humiliated. Ringing bells badly was as embarrassing as if your trousers had fallen down in a public place.
In writing the log at the end of the watch, we were more organised in the structure of our sentences than we needed to be. It wasn’t because of an obsession with clarity, it was a case of doing things in the way we thought was right for the posterity we were creating.
Our lives went on, the shipping world was changing around us and the light was dimming on our path, but we gripped on to what we had. We were like the old time sailors with their tattooed boast across the knuckles of their hands, one word on each, a boast that they would never give way: ‘Hold Fast’.
Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate that less than 40 years ago, before containerisation completely changed the carriage of cargo at sea, a lot of the world’s maritime trade was carried out in a manner broadly unchanged from 100 years previously. Hall paints his picture of characters and incidents in a way that would be instantly recognised by a ship’s mate of the 1880s.
The Warri River: thick, sluggish, the colour of workman’s tea, cluttered with debris and detritus being washed towards the Atlantic, branches, vines, clumps of vegetation, whole trees, human refuse. We moored to two buoys, one fore and the other aft, several ropes at either end to hold us in the stream. The pilot who took us up the river was an ancient Brit with an African understudy, the pilot looked mildly drunk, his understudy looked as if he had no earthly idea as to what he was doing. I prayed that we would get the Brit on the way out, drunk or not.
From Penang, it was a day’s run down the strait to Singapore. As we left in the mid-afternoon a massive thunderstorm rolled over the coast, the sky went as black as doom, lightening flashing and slashing across the cloud, the rain came down on us in heavy rods. The navigation in the Malacca Strait was reliable, thankfully, with well-tended lighthouses and buoys to mark the islets and shoals.
There was a constant flow of shipping of all types. An old Hong Kong flag passenger ship limped along, northbound for Saudi Arabia with a full cargo of pilgrims.
Hall’s earlier books illustrated his moral decay and decadence as he travelled the world, although in Last Voyage to Wewak he moves in the opposite direction as he finally encounters personal stability. Hall begins to appreciate more the world in which he lives, although in a bittersweet way as his life at sea moves inexorably towards its close.
The dock workers arrived too late and too drunk to work. The bus they had been travelling on had ran over and killed two people outside the town and they all agreed it was best to go to the nearest bar and have a few drinks in respect and commiseration. We ended with an overnight stay in Honiara and went to the yacht club for the evening where we traded conversation with expats in blazers and ties. Although they were lifted from another era, it all seemed strangely normal.
This would be my last Christmas at sea. Llewelyn the Pakistani radio officer made a cardboard Christmas tree, which was good of him as he wasn’t even a Christian. We tied the tree in an almost upright position next to the chart room table.
Christmas Day arrived as we were steaming down the Vietnamese coast. Presents were diverse. The bosun gave me a bottle of scotch, which I didn’t drink so I re-wrapped it and gave it to the Old Man, who gave me a bottle of gin in return. I wrapped up a paint brush and gave it to the cadet for his Boxing Day job of painting the monkey island, which he took with good grace. For his present, the third mate got the sack from the Old Man, at last, after he had turned up to his evening watch on Christmas Eve barely able to walk.
Last Voyage to Wewak has a haunting style, a fine work of sea-to-shore that will sit in the memory long after the reading.
Last Voyage to Wewak by Simon J. Hall will be published in January 2017 by Whittles Publishing priced £16.99.
It’s September 2014 and Mickey Bell is in crisis. He has HIV, is on the dole, and dwells in the high flats in Drumkirk. Unsure of where his life is heading, will he be able to turn things around and look towards a brighter future?
The Making of Mickey Bell
By Kellan MacInnes
Published by Sandstone Press
He’d been in the huddle of people crowded round the Reduced shelf of the chiller cabinet in the Morrisons on the corner of the Crow Road, trying to see the prices on the yellow stickers on plastic packs of mince, paper bags of mini beef pasties, tubs of cottage cheese and grey-looking lamb chops.
The old guy in the woolly hat was there of course.
He must live in the supermarket.
He’s there every time Mickey goes in, standing chatting to the staff as they fill the shelves with bags of wild rocket and spinach, cartons of cherry tomatoes and cellophane packets of beansprouts. He overheard him asking the woman stacking the shelves in aisle one with red-stickered Two for £5 ready meals, what time she finished at. Then he felt guilty, silently chastised himself, thinking of the old man’s cold, empty flat, his loneliness showing through in the endless, empty days spent pacing the aisles of the supermarket.
When they sat in rows in school on plastic chairs at metal-framed desks with Formica tops and looked at books, the pages were full of pictures of what people did. Pictures of firemen, postmen, dustbin men, nurses, bus drivers, teachers and airline pilots. There was a sense back then the children could be anything they wanted. No pictures in the books of childhood of people jostling round a chiller cabinet in a supermarket aisle scrabbling to buy yellow-stickered, reduced-to-clear food items.
MICKEY: I’m one o’ the lucky ones but. I know I am. I know that fine. ‘Your HIV’s very stable,’ ma doctor at the clinic told me last week. My GP’s the same: CD4 count in the low hundreds – below average but nothing tae worry about, she says. My life’s been saved by twenty-first-century medical science. The meds and the NHS and all that wis there for me when I needed it. But sometimes I get tae thinkin’ like whit’s the fuckin point? WHAT IS THE FUCKIN POINT? It all seems kindae lacking in meaning sometimes.
I mean – whit am I on the fuckin planet for but?
Tae lie in my bed wanking and fartin’ till three o’clock in the fuckin afternoon?
I dinnae think so.
Some mornings jist in case the DSS are watchin’ like, I’ll get up early and open the blinds and then go back tae bed.
Ha ha ha!
That’s a joke – right?
OK, so I’ll get up then. Whit am I gaunny dae like? Trail round the charity shops for tae get some crap tae resell on eBay, get a few quid in ma PayPal account. I’ll be fuckin minted then like, aye right – then stay up all night talkin’ tae folk in America and makin’ non-friends on fuckin shite Facebook. Fuckin pointless but! Whit the fuck am I daein’ with my life that I’m taking fuckin six tablets a day to keep alive? Maybe I should jist have a wank in the bath wi’ a polybag over ma heid and fuckin be done wi’ it. That’s what I think – sometimes – in the long afternoons on the dole as the rain pours down on Drumkirk.
Outside the supermarket, he waited at the bus stop in Great Western Road. It was a hot day in the city and a balding long-haired man in filthy combat trousers and a worn leather jacket pedalled slowly by on a racing bike.
Across the street he watched a bare-chested, young guy with tattoos and white trainers and an inch of stripey boxer shorts visible above the waistband of his jeans, being dragged along the pavement by a huge Alsatian on a chain lead.
MICKEY: Scottish people go fuckin mental when the temperature rises – it’s like the weather triggers something and they go back in time tae when Scotland wis near the equator and there were palm trees in Motherwell and fuckin dinosaurs in Fife.
Aw fuck. The bus pass routine: hold yer national entitlement card in front of Perspex screen protecting driver. It saves a fuckin fortune in bus fares – be stuck in the flat all day without it but never run for the bus mind. You’re supposed tae be disabled but. That’s why I’ve got a bus pass – right? The driver’s looking at me. He’s thinkin’ I’ve seen him oot walking his dug. He’s no disabled. He’s no in a wheelchair. How come he’s got a bus pass? Now walk slowly upstairs and sit down in the front seats where you used tae sit tae drive the bus when you were a kid. Sunlight shining on faded fabric seats. Dust specks floating in the air. Then get up again and open all the windows on the empty top deck of the bus.
The sun was beating off the pavements in Douglas Street in the centre of Milngavie when he stepped down from the bus in a haze of hot diesel exhaust and hissing air brakes. He stood, watching as the bus pulled away and, orange indicators flashing, turned right into Campbell Avenue.
He looked around at the 1930s bungalows, each one white-painted and well maintained, the gardens with lawns cut and hedges trimmed. A blue hydrangea flowered on a striped lawn among lazily swaying clumps of pampas grass.
Only three miles but it was a long, long way from the dandelions and knee-high grass littered with crisp packets, polystyrene fast-food cartons, Coke cans, empty torpedoes of cider and dirty plastic syringes choking the abandoned front gardens of Drumkirk.
He wandered along Craigdhu Road.
A woman walking a golden retriever passed him. ‘Good morning!’
He smiled back at her.
Nae Staffies and Rottweilers and guys wi’ biro tattoos here then.
Craigdhu Road broadened out into a wide semi-pedestrianised street. He walked past RS McColls, the British Heart Foundation shop and Costa Coffee. None of the shop windows were boarded up. And there was a Greggs. Mickey hadn’t eaten that day and he headed straight for the shop with its inviting smell of lentil soup and pastry.
A black Labrador-like dog with strange orange highlights in its thick, curly coat was tied to a park bench outside Greggs. The dog watched him disappear through the glass doors of the baker’s. The dog remained in a sitting position for about sixty seconds then its front legs slid slowly forward and it lay down, head resting flat on the pavement, staring at the door of the shop.
Five minutes later the dog wagged its tail as Mickey reappeared clutching a paper cup of soup and a steak slice and a sausage roll in a white paper bag already turning translucent with yellow grease. He sat down on the bench and tore a corner of pastry off the steak slice and dropped it at the dog’s paws.
A grey-haired man in walking boots and a red North Face T-shirt came across and made a fuss of the dog. It rolled on its back, wriggling and wagging its tail.
‘What kindae dog is he, pal?’ asked Mickey through a mouthful of sausage roll.
‘Labrador crossed with a poodle,’
The man rubbed the dog’s tummy.
‘Great dog,’said Mickey and he watched as the man picked up a large, heavy-looking rucksack and a pair of walking poles and, with the dog following at his heel, walked away, past the bench where Mickey was sitting.
Mickey looked round. Behind him a paved path led into the trees and above his head, spanning the gap between the brick buildings, was a steel archway. He twisted his head round to read the words on it.
When he’d finished licking the last flakes of puff pastry from his fingers, he got up from the bench and stepped through the archway.
And then everything was different.
The Making of Mickey Bell by Kellan MacInnes is out now (PB, £8.99) published by Sandstone Press.
From Little Terry Tiddlemouse And His Countryside Friends
By Joan Porter; Illustrated by Jessica Excell
Published by Ailsapress
Little Terry Tiddlemouse and His Countryside Friends by Joan Porter is out now (PB, £6.99) published by Ailsapress.
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
One of my all-time favourites. As much a coming-of-age story as it is a swashbuckling adventure, Treasure island features unforgettable characters like Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. Whenever I think of this book, and its depiction of the sea, I think of freedom.
Riverkeep
Martin Stewart
A bit of a cheat as it’s not actually set at sea, but the wild River Danek is a fine substitute in this moody, atmospheric tale. Wull doesn’t want to take over as Riverkeep, but when his father is possessed by a demon, he is forced to take up the mantle early, watching the waters and keeping them free of danger.
Peter Pan
J.M. Barrie
Another classic that I still return to from time to time. Peter and the Lost Boys take on Captain Hook and his vile band of pirates. To me it’s simple: Neverland is childhood, while the surrounding sea, and the pirates who live there, represent the choppy waters of adulthood.
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Without doubt one of the most famous novels ever, Robinson Crusoe sees the titular character trapped on the “Island of Despair” after a shipwreck. Throughout the novel Crusoe fights to survive, his challenges ranging from finding a food source to the presence of cannibals. But the greatest threat comes from the sea.
The Life of Pi
Yann Martel
A story filled with magical, dream-like wonders, tall tales and heartbreak, Life of Pi won an army of fans and spawned a successful movie. The book has many themes and everyone seems to take something different from it, which can only be a good thing. To me this is a book about belief, and the ocean seeks to test Pi’s beliefs throughout.
Ross’ latest novel, Shadowsmith, is out now (PB, £6.99) published by Kelpies. It follows the attempts of one ordinary boy and one extraordinary girl to hunt down the dark forces engulfing a peaceful seaside village.
MacKenzie’s previous novel, The Nowhere Emporium (PB, £6.99), won the Blue Peter Best Story Award 2016, the Scottish Children’s Book Award 2016 and the North East Book Award, and appeared on the shortlist for the Brilliant Book Award.
Born in 1900 Roland Penrose pursued a career as an artist before becoming friends with a number of Surrealists. Hartley introduces Penrose’s colourful life and work while highlighting how a number of major works from Penrose’s private collection ended up in British public collections.
Extract from ‘Roland Penrose: Private Passions for the Public Good’
Published in Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous
By Keith Hartley
Published by National Galleries of Scotland
Roland Penrose (1900–84) began pursuing a career as an artist, before meeting and becoming friends with a number of Surrealists. When he inherited money from his parents in the early 1930s, he began to help the artists he knew, buying works and financing their projects, which was the start of a broad and extraordinarily high-quality collection of surrealist art – one of the four collections that are brought together in this book.
Penrose’s talents lay in bringing people together (not an easy thing to do), holding them together (an even more difficult thing to do, especially with people as disputatious as the Surrealists) and making sure that they brought things to a conclusion. Penrose was a born diplomat and conciliator, always seeking common ground and avoiding unnecessary quarrels. But beneath the affable, old-world manners and charm was a resolve to achieve well-defined goals. Breton famously said that Penrose was ‘surréaliste dans l’amitié’, surrealist in friendship.[1] This was no empty phrase, no attempt to provide Penrose with an easy epithet, to go with the supposedly more meaningful epithets that he applied to the other Surrealists. Breton, and almost everyone else who came into contact with Penrose, recognised that his gift for friendship was quite remarkable and produced extraordinarily positive results. In a movement such as Surrealism which tried to bridge the gap between individual creativity and group solidarity and all too frequently failed, anyone such as Penrose who united people was very welcome indeed.
Up until 1935 when he was ‘by chance’ introduced to the young English poet, David Gascoyne, in Paris, Penrose was, by and large, living the life of a well-to-do expatriate English painter in France. He had acquired a post-cubist style in the usual Bloomsbury way via André Lhote’s Académie in Paris and an extended period in the south of France. But in 1926 he had come under the spell of Max Ernst and he then made a large number of highly accomplished frottages in the manner of Ernst’s Histoire Naturelle published the same year. He used similar techniques in some of his paintings, but he had not yet found a style or mode of expression that was fully his own.
[…] In Scrap Book Penrose says that he was not by temperament a collector in the classical mould: ‘It was probably a reaction against the stately well-ordered collections at Wisbech [his maternal grandfather’s house] that gave me a dislike from an early age for the classical idea of collecting. A collection shared too many characteristics with the cemetery.’[2] However, he did admit that when he had lived in Paris he collected strange objects that attracted his attention, and that he had helped out his friends such as Max Ernst who were hard hit by the Depression. He seems to suggest that this was one of the reasons behind his first major purchase of a work of art: Ernst’s La Joie de vivre, 1936. He bought this work in 1935 even before Ernst had finished it.[3] However, there is no doubt that Penrose also felt it hard to resist buying works that really appealed to him. An important case in point was his acquisition in March 1936 of Picasso’s Femme nue couchée au soleil sur la plage, 1932. Penrose had seen this illustrated in a publication and was immediately smitten. He writes about it in Scrap Book: ‘At that time, I had seen reproduced in the Cahiers d’Art a recent painting by Picasso dated 1932 which seemed to contain magic of a kind I had never known before and to fill me with a longing to see and if possible own the original.’[4] Picasso took Penrose down to his house in the country at Le Boisgeloup and, even though Penrose was surprised to see how small the painting was – from the reproduction he had expected to see something much more monumental – he purchased it, the first Picasso he acquired.
It is wrong to see Penrose’s collection as being primarily the product of bulk purchases, as some have suggested.[5] Since coming into his inheritance, Penrose bought consistently, from his friends mainly (both artists and otherwise) but also from shows of contemporary art. In Scrap Book he is reluctant to see himself as a collector, calling his collection, self-deprecatingly, ‘a collection which collected itself’.[6]
[…] Penrose’s friendship with Picasso, although at times severely tested when Picasso kept him waiting before he would see him, led to other successes.[7] In January 1965 Picasso finally agreed to sell his masterpiece The Three Dancers, 1925, to the Tate. This came at the end of a long process, begun in 1960, of tentative probing, tactful questioning, persistence, cajoling, diplomatic silences, and well-aimed praises (not to say flattery) on Penrose’s part. To persuade Picasso to part with this painting was a triumph. Picasso regarded it very highly and commented on the fact that ‘some people had told him they preferred it to Les Demoiselles [d’Avignon, 1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York] – in fact it is more complete in composition and conception.’[8] Picasso said that it was really unlike anything else in his oeuvre. He certainly preferred it to Guernica (‘de beaucoup’) and had repeatedly refused to sell it.[9] It was, Picasso said, because of Penrose that he finally agreed to sell it to the Tate.[10]
[…] To all these exhibitions and to hundreds of others at home and abroad Penrose lent very generously from his collection.[11] As long as the shows were serious and well-organised, he believed that the works he owned should be seen as widely as possible. Although he enjoyed being surrounded by works of art that he loved, he was in no way selfish about them. Indeed, when it came to selling them (in order to buy a house and farm in the country or to help the ICICA) it was a deliberate, if reluctant, choice.
A fair number of major works from Penrose’s collection have ended up in British public collections. Between the two national collections in London and Edinburgh, Britain now possesses one of the finest groups of surrealist masterpieces in the world. This is due to a great extent to Penrose and to his enthusiastic championing of that movement in the 1930s and beyond. Today Surrealism is enjoying unprecedented critical attention and popular success. In part, this can be attributed to pioneering shows such as Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, which was shown at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978.[12] Penrose was one of the advisers for this exhibition and was closely involved in the hanging. But, perhaps, more important is the way that the surrealist technique of collaging together objects that our rational mind separates but which our imagination finds an intoxicating synthesis, has now become an accepted part of contemporary artistic practice.
[1] Roland Penrose, Scrap Book: 1900–1981, London, 1981, p.60.
[2] Ibid., p.162.
[3] Penrose had helped Ernst, a close friend since 1927, in many ways. He had backed the publication in 1934 of Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de bonté, had allowed Ernst and his wife Marie-Berthe to stay at his château, Le Pouy, in Gascony in 1935 when they were in dire financial straits, and in 1937 he had funded the publication of a special edition of Cahiers d’Art devoted to Ernst’s work. Ernst had acknowledged this debt to Penrose with a dedication to him in the 1937 book: ‘Je dédie ce livre à Roland Penrose à la nymphe écho et aux antipodes du paysage.’ Penrose had bought several other works by Ernst in the period 1936–7. The special edition of Cahiers d’Art lists a version of Jardin gobe-avions, 1935, and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1935–6 (private collection).
[4] Penrose is probably referring to the Cahiers d’Art triple issue devoted to Picasso which appeared in early 1936. Roland Penrose, Scrap Book: 1900–1981, London, 1981, p.68.
[5] Most notably the collector and art historian, Douglas Cooper, one of the few people Penrose actively disliked. John Richardson in his book The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, writes: ‘The two Englishmen were very competitive about each other’s collections. Douglas dismissed Roland’s as “ready-made”. “I don’t call it collecting,” he used to say, “if you combine Picasso’s handouts to his surrealist friends with a collection bought lock, stock and barrel from a Belgian.”’ John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, 1999, p.26.
[6] Roland Penrose, Scrap Book: 1900–1981, London, 1981, p.168.
[7] Picasso liked to play his friends and admirers off against each other. In the case of Penrose, he usually did so against Douglas Cooper, his arch-rival. John Richardson describes what frequently happened: ‘A past master at dividing and ruling, Picasso enjoyed playing these two admirers off against each other and putting their devotion to the test. He would keep Roland, who had come specially from England, waiting for days at a time in Cannes, saying that he was busy with Douglas. Next time, Douglas would be reduced to begging Jacqueline to arrange an audience with the master.’ John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, 1999, p.234.
[8] Roland Penrose, Picasso notebook, November 1964 (RPA).
[9] Roland Penrose, Picasso notebook, 29–31 January 1965. He wrote: ‘On m’a demandé cent fois le vendre – des Americains, Kahnweiler et bien d’autres mais j’ai toujours refusé.’ [I have been asked hundreds of times to sell it – Americans, Kahnweiler and lots of others but I have always refused.] (RPA).
[10] Penrose quotes Picasso in one of his Picasso notebooks (31 January 1965) as saying: ‘Enfin si je le [The Three Dancers] vends aux anglais c’est à cause de toi – et s’ils désirent l’avoir, c’est toi qui l’a fait.’ [In the end if I’m selling it to the English, it’s because of you – and if they want to have it, it’s you that did it.] Modest and tactful to the last, Penrose added: ‘Non, ça c’est impossible, c’est toi qui l’a fait.’ [No, that’s impossible, it was you who made it.] (RPA).
[11] In Scrap Book Penrose wrote: ‘I always had the feeling that works that had collected around me still belonged in some degree to their authors and whenever asked to lend to serious exhibitions I do so … ’ Roland Penrose, Scrap Book: 1900–1981, London, 1981, p.173.
[12] Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, Arts Council of Great Britain (Hayward Gallery, London), 11 January – 27 March 1978.
We’re delighted to show you some spreads from Surreal Encounters below:
Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous, containing this extracted piece on Penrose, is out now (PB, £19.95) published by the National Galleries of Scotland.
To mark Scottish Food and Drink Fortnight in September 2016, we highlight some lovely local recipes. Here’s a delicious recipe for baking Dundee Cake with none other than Maw Broon, courtesy of Black & White Publishing!
If you enjoyed this you might also enjoy these recipes on the theme of ‘homegrown’ which Books from Scotland put together for Book Week Scotland in 2015. Bake With Maw Broon is available now from Black & White Publishing (HB, £14.99).
To mark Scottish Food and Drink Fortnight in September 2016, we highlight some lovely local recipes. First up is Dundee-based Kitchen Press with this from The Parlour Café Cookbook.
Introduction from The Parlour Café Cookbook
By Gillian Veal
Published by Kitchen Press
I started The Parlour Café in December 2005, fresh back from London and in need of a job. The Parlour was just a combination of everything I’d done to that point, all the odd jobs, all the little bars I’d worked in, the random restaurants and the chefs I learned from, the places I’d eaten and the markets I’d walked through. There was a huge gap in Dundee for fresh, seasonal food and from the word go the café was incredibly popular. We’re very proud that we’ve still got the same customers now as we did when we first opened (as well as quite a few more…).
The food we cook is mostly vegetarian, with meat and fish just used as an accent, thrown in to some sandwiches and tarts, but rarely the key ingredient. We buy everything we can locally, but our inspiration comes from further afield: the way people eat in the Middle East and southern Europe, mezze and tapas, a whole social, relaxed approach to food, with
a strong vegetarian focus.
We run a pretty relaxed shop – Dundee is a very creative city and I think the café reflects that. With Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and the University of Dundee just around the corner, we have more than our share of artists and musicians and academics working in and eating at the café. I trained as an artist before cooking took over and the way our food looks has always been a big part of our ethos: it all looks really beautiful – jewel-like salads, golden pies, great slabs of cake. The café – those of you who are regulars will know – is tiny, but that hasn’t stopped us
doubling up as a gallery and a performance space to showcase the other creative lives of our staff. And the same sense of experimentation is on our menu; we’ve all really learned what we’re doing on the job, and every day we try and take it a little bit further.
All these recipes are really easy, but they are aimed at people who love their food, and who aren’t scared of hunting out slightly unusual ingredients. Increasingly you can get pretty much all of them at supermarkets, but I love the whole process of buying them in some of the small shops scattered about Dundee (and pretty much every other town in the UK): the Asian and Chinese supermarkets, Iranian corner shops, farmers markets and Polish grocers. It’s always worth a poke about for an ingredient you’re not entirely sure what to do with but you like the sound of.
The other thing about most of the recipes is that they’ll show you a technique that you can then run with and add whatever flavours you like. That’s how I learn, and how we cook in the café – I’ll learn to make a specific thing in a specific way and then once I know how to do that I’ll put my own twist on it. I hope that’s something people can take from this book.
Enjoy.
Gillian Veal
If you enjoyed this you might also enjoy these recipes on the theme of ‘homegrown’ which Books from Scotland put together for Book Week Scotland in 2015. The Parlour Café Cookbook is available now from Kitchen Press (PB, £15.99); it was shortlisted for the World Cookbook Awards in 2012.
Rupert Wolfe Murray hitched into the roof of the world in 1986, where he hustled to find work, stayed in slums, overcame his fear of travelling alone, and spent a month on a horse. Rupert’s article reveals three key Scottish connections between his Tibet adventures and his new book, 9 Months in Tibet, which he is currently promoting by cycling around the Highlands and Islands.
By Rupert Wolfe Murray
Published by Scotland Street Press
From Scotland to Tibet
Last month I launched my memoir about living in Tibet. It’s called 9 Months in Tibet and is about my search for a job on the roof of the world as well as a series of treks, adventures, horse rides and disastrous love affairs. People say it’s funny, I got a foreword from Alexander McCall Smith, and the best news is that teenagers like it.
What’s all this got to do with Scotland? You might be wondering.
There are three Scottish connections to this book: the first chapter is about getting away from Scotland; the book was published by one of Scotland’s newest publishing companies (Scotland Street Press) and I’m promoting it by cycling around the Highlands and Islands.
Mountains near Lhasa, Tibet, by Ulrike Zimmermann
Getting Away from Scotland
Most travel books I have come across say little about the difficulty of getting away. They tend to start in some exotic location and the assumption is that the author had no problem in overcoming his fear or getting the money together. This creates the impression that travel writers are somehow superior to the rest of us who struggle with fear of travelling independently, not to mention a lack of cash.
I vividly remember my fears, as well as my complacency, and consider myself lucky for getting away at all. I discuss this issue in the book and here is an extract from the first page of 9 Months in Tibet:
“We lived in a white house on the Firth of Forth, the estuary just north of Edinburgh…
One day I was standing on the sea wall when my elder brother Kim turned up. He had left school under a cloud of bad behaviour a year earlier and had gone to France and Switzerland. We hadn’t heard from him in ages but we knew from occasional letters that he had learned French and got some work.
There he was, standing in front of me with a big grin on his face. The thing that impressed me most was his jacket: elegant, dark grey and beautifully designed. It had thin red piping along the seams and a large unusual collar which looked like it could be wrapped round your neck in a blizzard. There was no sign of luggage, just a small leather bag.
– Where d’you get the jacket? I asked.
– Switzerland. It’s a postman’s jacket. I was thrown out of Switzerland for working illegally. I’m home.
To me this was the definition of cool. This was someone with courage. How could I be like him? How could I get out of this place? The idea of travelling abroad on my own was scary. I just didn’t have the courage to do it. I had never jumped into the unknown to such an extent and – worst of all – I didn’t know how to overcome this fear of travelling alone.”
I’m keen to talk to people about these issues, help them discover the joys of independent travel and even conquer fear. When I give talks or readings I share my experiences of Tibet and always ask people what their independent travel plans are.
Rupert Wolfe Murray in Gyantse Tibet
The Highlands and Islands
I didn’t want to launch my new memoir in Edinburgh, Glasgow or any of the big cities down south and my publisher, Jean Findlay, agreed. Instead of trying to get noticed at the Edinburgh Book Festival I decided to launch 9 Months in Tibet at the Belladrum Rock Festival near Inverness and promote it in the Highlands and Islands.
Scotland Street Press is small and new and not laden with cash reserves for promotional tours and the only way to do this was by bike. For the last few weeks I’ve been cycling around Inverness, Ross-shire, Sutherland, Caithness and the Orkneys – sleeping in a tent, cooking over a small gas stove and carrying up to 12 books on my bike-trailer.
The reception has been encouraging. Bookshops in Dingwall, Kirkwall, Dornoch and Inverness bought copies; I sold two in the pottery in Cromarty, 21 at the Belladrum Rock Festival, about 10 in Sutherland and scores more to all sorts of people I met on the road (including a bike mechanic, a cleaner, an art dealer, a writer, an MP and a merchant banker). I told BBC Radio Orkney that I was probably the only author who had delivered books to The Orcadian Book shop by bike.
The most unexpected thing that has happened to me on this bike tour was a realisation that Sutherland looks a bit like Tibet. Before getting to Tibet I assumed it was just high mountains and steep gorges, as that’s what’s shown in the photo books. But Tibet is actually a huge plateau with mountains visible round the edges, on the horizon. The actual Himalayan mountain range is in the narrow strip of land on Tibet’s southern border with India and Nepal. The main feature of Tibet is its height – the plateau is over 4,000 metres high.
When I cycled up through Sutherland, from Lairg to Altnahara, I rose up from the glens and forest that make up most of the highlands and found myself on a vast open moor that stretched out to the distant horizon. The wide open spaces and the lack of people reminded me of Tibet, as did the atmosphere. I delight in the wilderness, become aware of all the hidden life there, and never feel lonely in it. To be able to ride through this environment in the name of writing feels like a great privilege.
Rupert Wolfe Murray will be cycling around Scotland until November 2016. If you would like to invite him to give a talk please send him an email (wolfemurray@gmail.com) or call him on 0747 138 1973.
9 Months In Tibet, by Rupert Wolfe Murray, is out now published by Scotland Street Press (PB, £12.99)
Extract from Rhenigidale: A Community’s Fight For Survival
By Kenneth MacKay
Published by Acair
Chapter 2 – My Story
Kenny MacKay by Katie Laing
In my schooldays at Rhenigidale we never found it boring. There was no television at the time but there was so much work to be done after school when we were growing up: we became part of the community working on the croft which was so essential for each household. We enjoyed everything we did – especially helping with the sheep. At lambing time my brother and I used to get up early in the morning and before we went to school we went through the various crofts to see if any new lambs had appeared during the night. If we found a neighbour’s sheep had just lambed and we were the first to tell them about it, we were able to claim two eggs and a scone for a female lamb and, if it was a male, one egg and one scone. We would be so proud if we managed to get a few in the same morning and we made every effort to be out before anyone else. I suppose it was a useful service for the rest of the crofters that we were keeping a keen eye on what was happening round the crofts that were not fenced off at that time – all of them were open except for one at each end of the village.
When we were getting into our teens, we were given the chore of going to meet whichever parent was walking home from Tarbert with the groceries. They were always very grateful when we met up with them to take part of the load. If there was no boat available that day and groceries were needed, either one of our parents would have to walk to Tarbert and back for the essentials. We enjoyed the walk too.
We had to take turns going fishing in the evenings and, if there was room for us in one of the boats that used to go sea-angling for haddock over in Loch Trollamarig or just going out to the reefs from the village, we would be happy to go. Quite often we became the proud owner of a bamboo rod to use as a fishing rod and this was a passport for going fishing. We always found something to pass the time and in the summer we used to just run round the village in our bare feet. We were never very happy with our mother rubbing our feet down and washing them at night. We wandered all over and from April to October we never bothered wearing shoes. We could walk along the shore with bare feet without any problem. The first time our father took us up Toddun Angus and I managed to get to the summit in bare feet.
During the war years we had two cousins from Glasgow staying with us – a brother and sister, Marion and Roddy MacKay. They both came home here when Glasgow was being bombed during the Second World War. There was also two brothers – John Norman and Iain MacDonald – staying with their aunt and uncle, so the classes at Rhenigidale School then were boosted by four extra pupils.
Chapter 5 – The Road
The struggles to convince the powers-that-be in Inverness started away back in the 1930s, when so many of the people that were offered land, and a better way of life too, left for Skye. I remember my father telling me that Mr MacDonald, who was the headmaster at Tarbert at the time, had supported the community at that time by composing a letter on their behalf to push Inverness County Council to come to a decision on the road to this community.
In recent years I met up with and was introduced to two of Mr MacDonald’s nieces, who had come to Sir E Scott School for the celebration to mark when we finally managed to get it upgraded to a Six Year Secondary. They were telling me that day how they remembered meeting the late Angus Campbell (Glen House) at their uncle’s house at Tarbert after a service in the church. Angus Campbell quite often walked all the way from Rhenigidale to the church at Tarbert for the morning service and obviously had become friends with the headmaster and been invited to his house for a meal.
From that time on there was a constant flow of correspondence with Inverness CC and the local District Council and every time the reply was the same: they couldn’t afford to give us a road. My understanding of that was that the will wasn’t there to consider a road to such a remote community and obviously they were quite happy to wait until we were forced to leave eventually and give up the struggle for our rights.
Rhenigidale: A Community’s Fight For Survival by Kenneth MacKay is out now published by Acair (PB, £12)
In the Scottish village of Ballantrae, tales about the haunted cliffs just up the coast where mythical mass murderer and cannibal Sawney Beane is said to have dwelt in the seventeenth century, still linger. When a group of local boys celebrate finishing high school with a camping trip at the Bennane Head cliffs, they face horror beyond what they ever imagined…
Extract from In The Devil’s Name
By DA Watson
Published by Ringwood Press
He glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head in the direction of the open patio door leading to the shadowy back garden. A large but indistinct shape was materialising out of the gloom, revealing itself slowly as it moved across the back lawn in the direction of the house. Jim froze still, his fist gripping the butcher knife’s handle and the pain in his legs forgotten as a sense of horrible expectancy clutched him.
It crept out of the darkness slowly, savouring Jim’s grey faced terror and the look of dismayed recognition, then it crossed the threshold into the house, fully revealed in the bright kitchen, it towered over him, grinning.
Jim couldn’t scream for a second. His throat seized up, and he just sat there, saucer eyed and drooling. He couldn’t even breathe as sheer fright froze his lungs, and his already tenuous hold on sanity finally snapped before the terrible alien spectacle standing over him.
With his last conscious thought, he raised the butcher knife in front of him and turned the blade not in the direction of the unearthly thing facing him, but towards his own throat, intending to spare himself the awful fate the thing before him heralded. But he was denied even this small mercy.
There was a blur of movement as the thing lashed out with a sinewy clawed appendage, and the butcher knife, still clutched in Jim’s severed hands, dropped between his legs.
And because his broken mind now realised what was about to happen, he finally screamed with such force his vocal cords tore in his throat.
The thing before James Densmore started ripping into him.
In The Devil’s Name, by DA Watson, is out now published by Ringwood Publishing (PB, £8.99)
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