Present Tense sees Robbie Munroe, the protagonist of the Best Defence series, back home. Living with his dad and his new-found daughter, life as a criminal lawyer isn’t going well, and neither is his love life. Yet everything becomes suddenly more complicated when one of his more dubious clients leaves a mysterious box for him to look after…
Extract from Present Tense
By WHS McIntyre
Published by Sandstone Press
Chapter 1
Clients. They tend to fall into one of three categories: sad, mad or bad. Some people said Billy Paris’s time in the military had left him clinically depressed, others that he had a personality disorder bordering on the psychotic. Personally, I’d always thought him the kind of client who’d stick a blade in you for the price of a pint. Friday afternoon he was in my office, chewing gum and carrying a cardboard box all at the same time. The box said Famous Grouse on the outside. I didn’t hear the clink of whisky bottles as he thudded it onto my desk.
‘Look after this for me, will you, Robbie?’ he said. No ‘how’s it going?’ No small talk. Nothing. Just a request that sounded more like a demand.
A number of questions sprang immediately to mind. First up, ‘What’s in the box?’
With an index finger the size of a premium pork sausage, Billy tapped the side of a nose that was deviated considerably to the left.
‘You either tell me what’s in it or you and the box can leave now,’ I said.
Chomping on an enormous wad of gum, Billy walked to the window and stared out at a dreich December afternoon.
‘Billy…?’
The big man clumped his way back over to my desk, wedged himself into the seat opposite and sighed. ‘Just for a few days, maybe a week, two tops. Definitely no longer than a month.’
The box was well secured with brown tape. I shoved it across the desk at him. He shoved it back.
‘What’s the problem?’ He tried to blow a bubble with his gum, failed and started chewing again.
‘For a start I don’t know what’s in it.’
‘It’s just stuff.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘You know. Stuff. It’s not drugs or nothing.’ Billy seemed to think I wanted to know what wasn’t in the box rather than what was.
‘Stuff? What, like guns?’
‘When did I ever use a gun…?’
‘All those Iraqis shoot themselves did they?’
‘I was in Afghanistan, and I’m a sparky. I was in the REME. I didn’t shoot anybody. I fixed the guns so that other folk could do the shooting.’
The Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was a fine body of men whose recruiting officer must have been having a duvet-day when William Paris took the Queen’s shilling. It had taken seventeen years and a commissioned officer’s fractured nose for Her Majesty to come to her senses and discharge Billy dishonourably from further service.
‘Knives, then?’
Billy rolled his eyes. ‘That was ages ago and I never got done for it. You should know, you were there. Not proven. Same thing as not guilty.’
It was the end of another hard week, and I’d promised my dad I’d be home to make Tina’s tea. ‘Listen, Billy. Stop wasting my time and tell me what’s in it.’
Billy held up a hand, as though swearing an oath. ‘No guns, no blades, no drugs. And nothing stolen,’ he added, reading my mind. ‘It’s just some personal things I can’t keep at my place.’
‘You’ve got a place?’ It turned out he had: a homeless hostel in Dunfermline.
‘It’s temporary. I like to keep on the move and I can’t leave anything lying about up there. The place is full of junkies. They’d steal the steam off your pish.’
I wasn’t buying any of it. Even a light-fingered Fifer rattling for his next fix wasn’t going to take the chance of being caught nicking from Big Billy. Not unless they fancied making the headlines next morning.
He sighed again. Hugely. ‘A hundred. I’ll give you it when I come back for the box.’
I gave one of the cardboard sides a prod with my finger. One hundred pounds to warehouse a box of personal belongings? If he’d offered me twenty I might have believed him. But a hundred? No, there was more to it than that. This was Billy Paris. I’d have to be as mad as he was not to think there was something extremely dodgy going on.
There was a knock on the door and Grace-Mary, my secretary, came in wearing her coat. She stared disapprovingly over the top of her specs at Billy and his box and asked me if she could have a quick word.
‘That’s me away home,’ she said after I’d followed her through to reception. ‘I’m minding my granddaughter tonight and need to leave sharp,’ she added, as though she wasn’t off and running at the stroke of five every night.
‘Then let me be the first to wish you bon voyage and God speed.’
‘You might not want to look quite so happy about everything,’ Grace-Mary said.
Why not? I was one client away from the weekend.
‘I’ve just had SLAB on the phone about last week’s inspection.’ Suddenly that Friday feeling evaporated. ‘They want to go over a few files with you.’
‘Files? Which ones?’
The Scottish Legal Aid Board’s compliance and audit inspectors carried out regular inspections of those lawyers registered to provide Criminal Legal Aid. Fraud was practically non-existent, but the inspectors had to justify their existence someway or other and were famed for their strict adherence to a set of regulations which, unlike the legal aid hourly rate, changed frequently and with little warning.
‘You know how they sent us an advance list of files they wanted to examine?’
I did. I’d spent much of the previous weekend going through those files, turning each one into a SLAB auditor’s dream, stuffed full of attendance notes fully time-recorded and in duplicate.
Grace-Mary winced. ‘When the lady from SLAB turned up on Monday you were out at court, or otherwise making yourself scarce.’
‘And?’
‘She gave me another list.’
Another list? I didn’t understand.
‘A different list,’ Grace-Mary clarified.
I didn’t like the way this was going. ‘But you wouldn’t have given her the files on that different list. Not before I’d had a chance to look them over.’ Which was to say pad them out with all the bits of paper the SLAB boys and girls wanted to see.
She sniffed and fumbled in her raincoat pocket for a scarf.
‘No, Grace-Mary, you would have told the witch-woman from SLAB that those other files she wanted were out of the office, in storage, destroyed by flood or fire, orbiting the moon or something. You wouldn’t have—’
‘I couldn’t stop her.’ Grace-Mary stiffened, buttoned up her coat. ‘I went out of the room for a moment and when I came back she was raking around in the filing cabinets, hauling out files.’
‘You left her alone in my office?’
‘I was making her a cup of tea—’
Tea? For SLAB compliance? That was like Anne Frank’s mum handing round the schnapps before showing the Gestapo up to the attic.
‘Yes, I made her tea. Why not? I make tea for all your thieves, murderers, robbers and goodness knows who else.’ Grace-Mary, my dad and Sheriff Albert Brechin shared similar views when it came to the presumption of innocence.
‘Firstly, Grace-Mary, those thieves, murderers and robbers you refer to are alleged thieves, murderers and robbers. There’s nothing alleged about SLAB compliance. Everyone knows they’re a shower of bastards. And, secondly, those thieves, murderers and robbers are keeping me in not trying to put me out of business.
Grace-Mary said nothing, just looked down at her desk and the small green tin box sitting on it. By the time her eyes were fixed on mine again I already had a one pound coin in my hand.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before now?’ I asked, dropping the money into the swear box. It didn’t have far to fall.
‘I was hoping the files would be okay.’
‘Okay? Why would they be okay? You know I don’t have time to do a double-entry attendance note every time I meet a client for five minutes or make a trip to the bog!’
‘Well, if you’re going to start raising your voice…’ Grace-Mary yanked a woolly scarf from her coat pocket and whipped it around her neck, almost taking my eye out with the corner. ‘I’ve put the appointment in your diary. See you Monday.’ She strode off down the corridor performing an about-turn after only a couple of steps. ‘And I’ve put a bring-back in as well so you’ll remember that Vikki Stark comes back from the States a week on Monday.’
A seven day bring-back to remind me of my own girlfriend’s return from a trip abroad? As if I needed it. Vikki, legal adviser for a private adoption agency, was off on a two-week lecture tour of America. She and I were now officially an item. Our relationship hadn’t exactly been torrid thus far, our times together infrequent, interrupted by work commitments or with Tina there or thereabouts, cramping what little style I had. The last few months had been hectic for me. First discovering that I was a father and then having to try and act like one. Keeping a romance going on top of that wasn’t easy. So we’d been taking it slow.
Once Grace-Mary had bustled off, I returned to my room to find Billy Paris standing on my desk fiddling with the fluorescent light strip. It had been flickering for ages so I’d been making do with an arthritic, angle-poise lamp.
‘Problems?’ Billy asked, when I returned to my office.
‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ I said, wishing I believed that. ‘By the way, what do you think you’re doing?’
He jumped down and went over to the light switch on the wall. After a couple of practice blinks the fluorescent light came on and stayed on. ‘Your starter’s knackered,’ he said. ‘I’ve sorted it with a piece of chewing gum wrapper, but there’s nothing for it – you’re going to have to splash out fifty-pence on a new one.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘and talking of money, I think you were saying something about two hundred pounds.’
The big man winked at me and his features carved out a grin, revealing teeth, most of them molars. At least he’d disposed of his wad of gum. ‘You’re a good man, Robbie,’ he said. ‘You’ll not regret it.’
That’s when I knew to say no thanks. If Big Billy Paris was ready to shell out two hundred quid for me to babysit a cardboard box, whatever was inside had to be extremely valuable. Extremely valuable and/or extremely illegal.
I showed him the flat of my hand. ‘But I’ll need the cash up front.’
Present Tense, by WHS McIntyre, will be published by Sandstone Press on 15th September (PB, £8.99)
This month’s column puts two very different novels under the magnifying glass: Malcolm Mackay’s For Those That Know the Ending and playwright Peter Arnott’s Moon Country. Robinson reveals how each novelist redefines the rules of the highly popular genre and argues that, in doing so, the two novels provide an inventive and fresh perspective on crime writing.
We’ll start off with a body, because there’s nearly always a body, and death has nearly always come violently. We’ll find out precisely how when the coroner gets to work and the reader starts clue-sniffing. Enter the detective, closely followed by the suspects, and before we know it, we’re halfway into the case.
It all sound so simple, doesn’t it? So simple that you or I could easily have a go at writing crime fiction ourselves. And if we did, surely it wouldn’t be too long before we, too, had our names in embossed capitals on the front cover of a mass market paperback, our half-lit faces staring moodily out from the back?
Of course, as every one of the crime writers at Stirling’s Bloody Scotland crime writing festival (9-11 September) would undoubtedly point out, it’s not quite as easy as that. We’d have to add characterisation, credible dialogue, a dynamic and original plot, and so much more to the mix. All the same, the fact that the first rungs on the traditional crime novel’s ladder are so clearly visible and we’ve all read so many books that have successfully used them can’t help but make so many people contemplate writing one themselves.
But are those first, predictable rungs really so inevitable? Are they necessary rules – or just ones that are crying out to be broken? And do the Scottish crime novels that break them gain or lose as a result?
To Glasgow playwright Peter Arnott, the problem with the crime novel is its certainty. Its narrators are usually omniscient; the one in his debut novel, Moon Country (Vagabond Voices, £9.95) most definitely isn’t. We don’t know anything about him, not even his name, or exactly how much he knows about Tommy Hunter, a career criminal who murdered someone in the course of an armed robbery. Hunter has served 14 years for that, and as the book opens, has been released to pick up the pieces of his life and to attempt a reconciliation with his son, daughter and wife, all of whom have hardly heard from him since he went inside.
You might think you have heard this story before. Trust me, you haven’t. You are imagining an opening scene in which a small door in a big prison gate swings open and a hunched figure steps out into a cold dawn. Scrub that. Instead, imagine a story that begins with the opening words of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and loosely follows its structure, each “beat” or an idea or scene sequentially numbered according to its logical links with the preceding one. A new scene, idea or style (sorry: I should have also mentioned that the story is told using practically every narrative form going) gets a new number.
I can’t pretend that it’s always an easy read, but then again, life’s like that. I can’t even pretend that I should be describing it as a crime novel (“Post-crime perhaps?” suggests Arnott when I chat to him about it). What I can say, though, is that it shows – sometimes infuriatingly, often brilliantly – what happens when a playwright’s mind starts toying with just what a crime novel can and can’t do.
It began, Arnott tells me, back in 1991 when he was watching an item on the TV news about a rooftop protest at Barlinnie. “There was this man there, next to a blanket on which there were the words ‘We Are All Hostages’. He was very calm, just lying in the sun. And I wondered what it would be like to meet him. I don’t know to this day who that was or what he did or anything about him.”
Why not a play then? “Because it became too big a question. Plays are small things, which is why plays based on short stories work better than ones based on novels. And I wanted to go on a bigger journey than that.
“The other thing about writing plays is that your characters aren’t allowed to know everything. The audience sit back and make a judgement between the characters. So I was trying to think of the reader as someone who is listening to the narrator’s story about Tommy Hunter and who is wondering why it is being told in this way and whether it is true.”
He’s right. That’s exactly what you’re left wondering. Because even though the story melts the “hard man” stereotype, that is only the narrator’s interpretation. We don’t really, truly know for sure, because Tommy Hunter “lacks the emotional and linguistic wherewithal to make amends even when he is trying to do the right thing”. We don’t know about Tommy no more than Peter Arnott knows what really happened to that prisoner on Barlinnie rooftop a quarter of a century ago. “Of what we cannot know, we had best be silent,” as Wittgenstein ended his book and Arnott ends his own one (if you want to look it up, it’s on the “beat”, or new idea, that follows 13.12.2.3. In other words – or numbers – 13.13).
For Those Who Know The Ending (Mantle, £16.99) the new Glasgow standalone novel by Stornoway wunderkind Malcolm Mackay, actually ends far more conventionally, with three chapters headed ‘1.44am’, ‘1.51am’ and ‘1.54am’. Those who know the ending won’t need any reminding how dramatic it is, but don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil it for the rest of you.
I remember reading about Mackay’s spectacular debut with The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter in 2013, and his triumph at Bloody Scotland 2014 when How A Gunman Says Goodbye won Scottish Crime Book of the Year. It’s taken three years and six books before I got around to reading him, but I’m now firmly, if belatedly, on the bandwagon.
Not a single one of his books (I’m now reading his backlist) begins with the corpse-inquest-clues-suspects opening of the traditional crime novel because none of them is concerned with solving crime. Getting away with murder, though, that’s another business. And yes, I do mean that literally. Being a hitman, for Czech gangster Martin Sivok (to be fair, not just a hitman – “beating people, torturing a few and killing some”), who is lying low in Glasgow, is a business – and one that can only work if he can succeed in living a life so spectacularly unspectacular that no-one ever suspects him.
Mackay’s crime fiction has its own rules, then, but they are not so much to do with crime as with everyday life. “Absolutely. You have to build a life for your criminals that hides what they do for a living, or in which they can make it plausible that they suddenly have to go off and do something in the middle of the night. Because one careless conversation or explanation can bring their whole world crashing down on them. So you give them fewer friends outside the criminal world, and that makes their world a smaller one, because their job forces them to hide so much of what they do.”
Remember that rule the next time you meet someone for the first time who seems reluctant to get to know you. Don’t take it personally. It could just be how a gunman says hello.
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.
Malcolm Mackay will be participating in ‘Into The Dark’ on Sunday 11th September at Bloody Scotland; you can browse the Bloody Scotland programme below.
Rabbit Warren Peace
Published by Black & White Publishing
It’s one of the greatest books ever written, but not as you know it. Many intend to read this classic of modern literature but few succeed; at nearly 1,500 pages and well over half a million words, it’s little wonder that so many copies remain unfinished. Now, Tolstoy’s greatest work comes to you in a brand new package, retold with rabbits, in this new accessible version suitable for all ages.
Rabbit Warren Peace is published by Black & White Publishing on 22 September (HB, £7.99)
Archaeologists Angela Gannon and George Geddes spent over 9 months living and working on St Kilda as part of a team researching the island’s unique history for more than a decade. Turning the popular perception of the archipelago on its head, here the authors explain how tourism, from 1758 through to today, has shaped the island’s changing social and physical landscape.
Extract from St Kilda: The Last and Outmost Isle
By Angela Gannon and George Geddes
Published by Historic Environment Scotland
Tourism
In the summer of 1758, just twelve years after three Royal Navy warships had visited St Kilda in search of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay became one of the archipelago’s first tourists during an official visit. He recalled standing petrified as the St Kildans demonstrated their prowess on the crags:
Two noted heroes were drawn out from among the ablest men of the community: One of them fixed himself on a craggy shelf: His companion went down sixty fathoms [110m] below him; and after having darted himself away from the face of a most alarming precipice, hanging over the ocean, he began to play his gambols: he sung merrily, and laughed very heartily. The crew were inexpressibly happy, but for my part, I was all the while in such distress of mind, that I could not for my life run over half the scene with my eyes.
A man standing on a cliff edge on Hirta, St Kilda.
This is the earliest description of a St Kildan deliberately trying to impress a visitor with a display of their climbing skills: it was a performance that would be witnessed by many over the next 180 years. Macaulay and his fellow adventurers portrayed a visit to the islands as an experience of high drama and romance. In the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion, the political temperature of the Highlands and Islands cooled, opening up the opportunity for what Elizabeth Bray has called the ‘Discovery of the Hebrides’. Visits to St Kilda for the most intrepid became more common from about 1800, but notable early travellers, including Thomas Pennant and Samuel Johnson, never reached St Kilda, and we often need to turn instead to accounts produced by lesser known writers.
Men fowling on the cliffs between Connachair and Oiseval on Hirta, St Kilda.
In 1831, George Atkinson set a precedent when he chartered a boat specifically for the trip. Just three years later, the Glenalbyn became the first steamship to reach Village Bay, causing ‘excitement and astonishment’ among the islanders. The reaction of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland that same summer is recorded in his journals and letters, which betray both a recognition of the St Kildans’ abilities – one islander was noted as ‘rather intelligent’ – and a pressing need to judge them. Tourism, even at this early date, was mixed up with morality and philanthropy.
The sharp-witted St Kildans seized the opportunity to capitalise upon the chance to sell souvenirs. At the same time, Acland provided the St Kildans with 20 sovereigns ‘to help them build new houses’. The impact and intervention of tourists could be both dramatic and well-intentioned, in this case providing the catalyst that brought about the wholesale redevelopment of Hirta’s housing and farmland in Village Bay.
The first visit by a scheduled commercial vessel came in 1877. The steamer Dunara Castle arrived from Glasgow, carrying about 40 passengers on a tour of the west coast. At this time the St Kildans themselves, as well as the romantic landscape, were the subject of a pervasive and perverse interest. Their community was cast as an example of an evolutionary backwater – a survival of ‘the past in the present’. For their part, the islanders looked forward to more prosaic advantages, such as ‘regular post and communication’.
A group of St Kildans with visitors and a ship’s crew pictured in the Village on Hirta, St Kilda.
The Dunara Castle and other steamers continued to ply the route to St Kilda until the outbreak of the Great War. As in the years before the war, after 1919 the steamers not only brought an influx of visitors, but also the opportunity to import foodstuffs, as well as export the islanders’ own produce. After the evacuation of 1930, the steamers continued to visit during the summer, although now their only purpose was to bring the tourists, including some St Kildans, to the islands.
A major hiatus occurred after 1939 when, for the first time in over 60 years, there were no regular trips to St Kilda. The era of modern tourism began about 20 years later, with the first visits of the NTS cruise ship SS Meteor. Short trips, although not a new invention, are now far more commonplace, with as many as five boats coming to the island on any one day. Some 5,000 visitors can now reach the islands each summer.
The effect of tourism on the archaeology of the island is important in two respects. Before the re-occupation in 1957, the practice of archaeology on the island was sporadic and piecemeal, being often undertaken by tourists and ‘sightseers’. The second effect of tourism has been on the landscape. While crofts were established over much of north-west Scotland by estates and their factors, the catalyst on St Kilda came from Acland, a tourist. Furthermore, the advent of work parties on St Kilda from 1958 has itself created a continuing link between tourism and the active management of St Kilda’s landscape – the sites within Village Bay now being kept in a state of arrested decay.
Looking back to the beginnings of tourism, the old steamships that once provided such a crucial link for the islands also offered trading opportunities and connections. The very existence of the community became enmeshed with seasonal visitors and, even now, their demands continue to have a great impact on both the modern and historical fabric of the islands. On today’s St Kilda, it is seldom clear where tourism begins and ends, and which of us is a visitor.
St Kilda: The Last and Outmost Isle, by Angela Gannon and George Geddes, is published by Historic Environment Scotland on 15 September (PB, £16.99). All images in this article are taken from the book.
Listen to two dramatic passages from the first installment in the long-awaited Spellchasers series by award-winning author Lari Don. Molly Drummond is cursed: whenever a dog barks, she turns into a hare – which can make life quite dangerous… So she does the sensible thing and attends a curse-lifting workshop, run by a local witch, where she tumbles into a world of magical beings.
Audio extracts from The Beginner’s Guide to Curses
By Lari Don
Published by Kelpies
In the first of two exciting audio extracts Lari Don reads from the first chapter of The Beginner’s Guide to Curses, the first in the brand new Spellchasers trilogy.
In the second audio sample Lari Don reads from The Beginner’s Guide to Curses, where Molly, the heroine, has a close encounter with a kelpie…
Lari Don launched The Beginner’s Guide to Curses on 7th September at an action-packed event at the Augustine United Church in Edinburgh, as these photographs taken by Richard Wainman show!
The Beginner’s Guide to Curses, the first book in award-winning author Lari Don’s highly anticipated Spellchasers trilogy, is out now from Kelpies (PB, £6.99).
If you enjoyed these audio extracts you might like this exclusive interview with Lari Don on Books from Scotland which also features the fun Kelpie Map of Scotland.
Born in England, Eardley’s family relocated to Scotland during wartime in 1939. Eardley enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art shortly afterwards, and although she went on to travel widely, Scotland was integral to her sense of place. In particular Catterline, an almost derelict coastal village in Aberdeenshire, had ‘terrific light’ and there, often on the beach, Eardley painted prolifically.
Extract from Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place
By Patrick Elliott with Anne Galastro
Published by NGS Publishing
Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place
Asked to comment upon the contrasting nature of her main subjects – slum children and wild, coastal landscapes – Eardley preferred to draw attention to their similarities rather than their differences: ‘The children seem to be no more aware that I’m painting them than the sea and the cliffs are aware of me,’ she said.[1] This was at the end of her life, in 1963, but the two interests – city and rural life – had lived side by side in her work right from the start.
A young Joan Eardley, c.1928.
Joan Eardley was born in Sussex in the south of England in 1921 and grew up on a dairy farm. Her father suffered from severe depression and in 1926, when the farm was sold, Eardley, her sister and their mother moved into their grandmother’s house in Blackheath in south-east London. Eardley’s father took his own life in 1929. The threat of bombing in 1939 took the family to Auchterarder where they had relatives. In January 1940 they settled in a house at 170 Drymen Road in Bearsden, an affluent, almost rural suburb on the north-west side of Glasgow; Eardley enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art shortly afterwards. Although she divided her time between Townhead and Catterline, she always gave the Bearsden house as her home address until the last couple of years of her life.
Eardley in Italy, c.1947–48.
Eardley first visited Catterline in 1950 and returned regularly thereafter. She borrowed a friend’s cottage there from 1952 and rented a cottage herself from 1954. Before she had even settled in Catterline, she was conscious that two separate and contrasting places of work suited her. In 1951 she spent several months in the little town of Cologne, west of Toulouse in the south of France. From there, she wrote to her closest friend Margot Sandeman, who had evidently reached an impasse in the work she was doing in Glasgow. Eardley advised her to take a long break and work instead in the little bothy at Corrie on the Isle of Arran, where they often stayed together:
If you were not to stay [in Corrie] you would be denying yourself something which is necessary to every person who creates. … It is the reason that I go dashing off to places like this so often. You don’t need it so often perhaps – But now I think you do. … anybody who paints needs a rest sometimes – but it is not the kind of rest an ordinary person thinks of – a holiday for 3 weeks and then back again. But a rest in the way that you now should go to Corrie and paint what you feel like there – anything so long as you feel satisfied doing it, lots and lots of not so important things – perhaps – but things just the same – that in itself puts up your morale. And go on and on until you don’t want to anymore – until you actually want to come home … These kind of goings away are entirely necessary for me.[2]
Eardley outside No.1, Catterline, c. late 1950s.
The ‘goings away’ implied a coming back, which Eardley always did. She rarely dated her letters, or indeed her paintings, so it is impossible to construct an exact chronology of her movements. But we can say that at first she lived in Glasgow and made trips to Catterline, while by the early 1960s she was living in Catterline and made trips to Glasgow. She clearly needed both places, the one providing respite from the other. Wildly different on the surface, the two places did in fact have much in common. They were small, poor, close-knit communities, where a spirit of social cohesion existed. By the early 1960s Townhead was destined for complete demolition, to make way for a motorway interchange; and Catterline was semi-abandoned, owing to the decline in the fishing industry. Catterline was not a picturesque Highland village, with lochs, cattle and mountain streams, but a working harbour with boats, fishing nets, and fields of wheat, barley and oats. People may be absent from Eardley’s Catterline paintings, but their presence is felt. She explored the point where man meets nature, epitomised in the paintings of hedgerows at the edges of crops, and the views of stormy seas and skies, pounding in upon the tiny, fragile cottages. Catterline and Townhead were the same, only different. As Eardley said:
Catterline has such a terrific clarity and terrific light, whereas Glasgow feels as though it has a sort of lid on the top of it, but at the same time it’s a little community and the place that I chose to paint in Glasgow is also really a little community in a certain district, a little backstreet, where everybody knew everybody else. The same thing seems to be the case obviously in the village where I live in the north east. It’s the sort of intimate thing I like, and I think you’ve got to know something before you paint it. … I suppose I’m essentially a romantic, I believe in the sort of emotion that you get from what your eyes show you and what you feel about certain things. Well I don’t really know what I’m painting, I’m just trying to paint.[3]
Eardley painting by the sea at Catterline c.1950s by Audrey Walker
[1] The Scotsman, 25 May 1963, interview with Conrad Wilson.
[2] Undated letter, later marked ‘1951’, copy in the Joan Eardley Archive, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), Edinburgh (GMA A09/5/51).
[3] BBC interview with Joan Eardley, 14 January 1963, tape recording in the Joan Eardley Archive, SNGMA (GMA A09/7/1/4).
Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, by Patrick Elliott with Anne Galastro, will be published in November 2016 by NGS Publishing priced £19.95. This book will accompany the exhibition Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place which will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 3 December 2016 to 21 May 2017.
Cleghorn was one of the many remarkable Scottish surgeons who worked for the East India Company. Using his official posting as a base for research upon India’s rich flora, his particular interest in useful plants led to the major work in the field of forest conservancy for which he is best remembered.
Extract from Indian Forester, Scottish Laird: the Botanical Lives of Hugh Cleghorn of Stravithie
By Henry J Noltie
Published by RBGE Publications
Hugh Cleghorn: Indian Forester, Scottish Laird & Collector Extraordinaire
“Henry Noltie wonderfully captures a world in which both plants and improved knowledge about them were, at once, objects of scientific study and political economy and the subject of spiritual reverence and cultural authority” – Professor Charles Withers, Foreword, Indian Forester, Scottish Laird.
Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn (1820–1895) was one of the many remarkable Scottish surgeons who worked for the East India Company. What was perhaps more unusual was that he used his official posting as a base for research upon India’s rich flora including making efforts to record it visually by commissioning drawings by Indian artists.
Hugh Cleghorn was born in Madras on the 9 August 1820, the eldest son of Peter Cleghorn (1783-1863) and Isabella Allan (1796-1824). Brought up on Wakefield (later renamed Stravithie), the family estate in Fife, Hugh and his younger brother Allan were sent to Edinburgh to attend the city’s High School, followed by a spell at the new Madras College in St Andrews. This was followed by undergraduate studies at the University of St Andrews and then, in October 1837, Hugh matriculated in the Medical Faculty at the University of Edinburgh. In the following year, Cleghorn’s formal botanical studies began when he took Professor Robert Graham’s class at the Botanic Garden in Inverleith Row, a standard element of medical studies at that time. Having graduated in 1841, Cleghorn was soon preparing for entry into the East India Company’s medical service and on the 15 August 1842, aged 22, he set sail from Spithead on the Wellington, arriving in Madras on 6 December.
Cleghorn’s particular botanical interest was in useful plants, which led to the major work in the field of forest conservancy for which he is best remembered. In 1851 he read a pioneering report on tropical deforestation to the British Association for the Advancement of Science; in 1856 he was appointed the Madras Presidency’s first Conservator of Forests; and in the 1860s, with Dietrich Brandis, Cleghorn played a major role in setting up a structure for forest management in British India that, while providing timber for burgeoning commercial demand (especially railways), allowed an element of forest preservation for the protection of watersheds and climatic amelioration.
After Cleghorn’s death his outstanding collection of drawings, and books relating to forestry and botany, was divided between the University of Edinburgh and what became National Museums Scotland. The latter share was transferred to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in 1940, whereupon it was reunited with his substantial Indian herbarium that had come to the Garden in 1896. At this point Cleghorn became, if posthumously, one of the most significant benefactors in the Garden’s 300-year history – books dating back to 1582, and around 3,000 exquisite botanical drawings. Neither Cleghorn’s significance for RBGE, nor the breadth of his interests and achievements, has ever been fully appreciated and in order to do this, two books have been necessary.
A biography explores Cleghorn’s life and work, placing it in the latter days of the Scottish Enlightenment (in the first phase of which his eponymous grandfather was a leading figure), both in the field of applied and useful knowledge, and the documentation of natural resources in both words and pictures. In the second volume more than 200 of the drawings from the Cleghorn Collection are reproduced, in colour, for the first time. These include drawings from nature, copies based on European prints, and Nature Prints made from herbarium specimens. They are the work of several South Indian artists and of pupils of the pioneering Madras School of Art.
Indian Forester, Scottish Laird: the Botanical Lives of Hugh Cleghorn of Stravithie (HB, £15) and The Cleghorn Collection: South Indian Botanical Drawings, 1845 to 1860 (HB, £20) are out now published by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Lighthouses meet literature as Paul A Lynn explores how Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott both travelled with the world-famous Stevenson engineers around the coasts of Orkney, Fair Isle, and Shetland. Lynn also highlights how the men left some poetic, if little known, accounts of their experiences.
Scottish Lighthouse Pioneers: Travels with the Stevensons in Orkney and Shetland
By Paul A Lynn
Published by Whittles Publishing
The Stevenson engineers are world-famous for the lighthouses they pioneered around Scotland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among them is a chain of 11 ‘classics’ that illuminate the dangerous eastern coastlines of Orkney, Fair Isle, and Shetland and guide mariners along a vital sea route between the North Sea and North Atlantic.
From south of Orkney to north of Shetland: Pentland Skerries (Paul A. Lynn) and Muckle Flugga (Paul Warrener)
It is hard for us to imagine the Stevensons’ courage and determination as they voyaged among remote islands on dangerous seas, built lighthouses on exposed headlands and vicious reefs, and carried out annual inspections on behalf of the Northern Lighthouse Board. It is perhaps even harder to appreciate the professional and social climate in which they worked and the attitudes of local people, rich and poor, towards their extraordinary and sometimes misunderstood activities.
However it turns out that two of Scotland’s most distinguished literary sons, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, travelled with the Stevenson engineers around the coasts of Orkney, Fair Isle, and Shetland, and left some fascinating, but little known, accounts of their experiences.
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), poet and world-famous author, accompanied Robert Stevenson, founder of the family dynasty, aboard the lighthouse yacht on the 1814 inspection. It took them from Edinburgh to the northern tip of Shetland, thence back to Glasgow via the scattered Orkney Islands, the notorious Pentland Firth, Cape Wrath, and the Hebrides. Scott acknowledged Robert Stevenson as ‘the official chief of the expedition, a most gentlemanlike and modest man, and well known by his scientific skill’. In his memoir Voyage of the Pharos, he left a remarkable account of the conditions in which Robert Stevenson operated, and of life’s ups and downs aboard a small sailing vessel in stormy seas:
… neither captain nor pilot know exactly where we are. The breeze increases – weather may be called rough; worse and worse after we are in our berths, nothing but booming, trampling, and whizzing of waves about our ears, and ever and anon, as we fall asleep, our ribs come in contact with those of the vessel …
Scott was constantly inquisitive about island lifestyles, folklore, and superstitions. Although he was generally sympathetic towards the people, he could not come to terms with some of their domestic arrangements. On one occasion he was overwhelmed by the contrast between his fashionable Edinburgh home and a Fair Isle dwelling:
… a wretched assemblage of the basest huts, dirty without, and still dirtier within; pigs, fowls, cows, men, women, and children, all living promiscuously under the same roof, and in the same room – the brood sow making (among the more opulent) a distinguished inhabitant of the mansion. The compost, a liquid mass of utter abomination, is kept in a square pond of seven feet deep; when I censured it, they allowed it might be dangerous to the bairns; but appeared unconscious of any other objection.
He ended the voyage with a touching tribute to his fellow passengers who, in spite of seasickness, a severe lack of personal space, and very different interests, had got on famously. He had enjoyed as much pleasure as in any six weeks of his life with ‘a succession of wild and uncommon scenery, good-humour on board, and objects of animation and interest when we went ashore’.
The second eye-witness, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), is internationally famous as the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A grandson of Robert and son of Thomas Stevenson, he was chronically sick as a child and far from robust as an adult. Initially forced by family pressure to study engineering at Edinburgh University, he spent summer vacations visiting lighthouses and harbours around the Scottish coast. At the age of nineteen he accompanied his father on the annual inspection of Scottish lights, including several on Orkney, and Muckle Flugga at the wild northern tip of Shetland. He sent touching letters back to his worried mother in Edinburgh about his ‘sore journeying and perilous peregrination’ and the social conditions he encountered. The following year he was sent to Dubh Artach, a vicious wave-assaulted Hebridean rock on which his father had started to build a lighthouse, and found the experience thoroughly dispiriting, ‘an ugly reef is this … an oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous focus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug’. Increasingly disillusioned, he finally plucked up courage and spilled the beans to his father: he could never become an engineer, his destiny was authorship.
The lighthouse yacht Pharos V, in service with the Northern Lighthouse Board between 1854 and 1874
The lighthouse yacht Pharos V, in service with the Northern Lighthouse Board between 1854 and 1874.
The rest of his short life was given to writing and travelling. After a series of adventures he married an American and ended up on Samoa in the South Pacific. His later years were spent so far from his family roots that we might suppose he forgot all about lighthouse engineering. But as middle age approached, perhaps sensing that his life was slipping prematurely away, he pondered his student rebellion and researched his family history. There was often a hint of regret, even guilt, in his reminiscences:
Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child.
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays and memoirs form a touching tribute to the Stevenson engineers, written by a wordsmith whose delicate health made 19th-century Scottish lighthouse engineering an impossible challenge.
Paul A. Lynn’s new book, Scottish Lighthouse Pioneers: Travels With the Stevensons in Orkney and Shetland will be published by Whittles Publishing on 30 November 2016.
We’re delighted to present an exclusive audio extract from Man Booker Prize nominee Graeme Macrae Burnet’s debut novel The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. Taking us to an unassuming bistro in the small French town of Saint-Louis, the extract also introduces the solitary protagonist Manfred Baumann.
The audiobook recording of The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, published by Saraband Books, was facilitated through Publishing Scotland‘s Adaptability Programme in partnership with RNIB Scotland. It is narrated by James Bryce.
If listening to the extract whetted your appetite you can find out more about the author and the novel here. Perpetually ill at ease, Manfred Baumann spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adèle Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. But one day, she simply vanishes into thin air.
When Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl’s disappearance, Manfred’s repressed world is shaken to its core and he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past. The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau is a literary mystery novel that is, at heart, an engrossing psychological portrayal of an outsider pushed to the limit by his own feverish imagination.
You can find out more about Graeme’s Man Booker Prize 2016 shortlisting with His Bloody Project here.
Uilleam Blacker takes us into the murky world of border crossings as the protagonist makes a perilous journey through Europe leading, eventually, to Scotland. ‘Crossing The Line’ was originally published in Talking About Lobsters, the latest edition of New Writing Scotland (34).
Crossing The Line
Whenever I get near a border I feel tense and my stomach churns. It’s like I can smell it, the nauseating smell of the border. It’s like feeling seasick. Because you know that they are waiting for you: the one without the piece of paper, because you were born on the wrong side of a line on a map. And here we are heading for another one, and I feel sick, and it has nothing to do with the car.
I’ve been watching the landscape change through the window as we go north, from flat land and endless town, to leaves and brick houses, then the more dilapidated, more grey places, long flat cities; a lot of motorway; then some hills and stone walls, long all across the hillsides, which it must have taken years to build – quite some effort just to keep in a few sheep, those little white clouds that look as if you could just blow them over the walls with a light puff of your breath; and now these hills with darkening clouds nearer the border. The other two seem fine. I don’t know why, especially O., who is in no better a situation than I am, with no documents; she looks over her shoulder and smiles a big smile and offers me another crisp or biscuit or something that I can’t face eating. And why shouldn’t she smile? We’re going on holiday after all – it’ll be the first time I’ve crossed a border just to go on holiday. But all the same, I still feel sick.
Borders are like those stupid Russian dolls: those gaudy little wooden things they sell in Ukraine even though it’s nothing to do with us. There’s the border between Ukraine and Poland; which is also the border between the EU and the Rest of the World, and it’s also the border of the Schengen zone, the sacred Schengen zone, whose visas carry you across the continent like a magic carpet. And then inside that there are more borders: Poland–Germany–France; or you can go Poland–Czech–Germany–France; or maybe Poland–Germany– Netherlands–Belgium–France. Of course, that’s not really a problem any more, at least not like it would have been before. Because there’s no control. If you pay attention you can see the old border posts, some are even empty and overgrown. So nice – the old bad history buried in the ground, feeding the plants, and no more iron curtains. That’s how it is inside Schengen, that fairy-tale land, with its overgrown castles.
Our border crossings are still in business, of course. Business being the operative word. A licence to rake it in from all the trucks and lorries, the smugglers and the illegals. Just sit there, put your feet up, practice your sceptical face and hold out your hand. You can sit for hours on our border. They take their cut. They haul you out and ask you pointless questions and take turns to squint at your passport until you give in and slip them the cash. I know that, in the end, it’s not the worst border to get across. You see those women in the queue taking alcohol and cigarettes over, and they’ve done it a million times, and they take it in their stride. But I get sick every time. Maybe it’s the uniforms, the tired, cold faces, the dogs, I don’t know. But I get it every time.
There are various ways to get over our border into Poland, of course. You can drive, but that means the worst queues, and they might take your car apart screw by screw just to check you’ve not hidden anything or anybody in there. Or you can go on foot, which I prefer. You take the minibus to the village near the border crossing and then just walk. Last time I went the bus was full of gypsies, singing all the way through their gold teeth, which didn’t help me relax one bit, with their chickens in baskets on their laps. Seriously, this is the difference: not even Poles take chickens on a minibus any more, but we do, and not just the gypsies. And the Poles have a lot fewer gold teeth. That’s the difference between Europe and Noteurope; outside the Schengen border it’s all gold teeth and chickens.
And so you queue, and when the Ukrainians eventually let you through, you walk down this long corridor between two high fences with barbed wire, and combined with the dogs it makes you feel as if you’re being released from some prison camp. And off to each side there’s this big strip of empty land, this nothing, this no-man’s land, like between two trenches. A dead place, bogs and nothing. And then you have to deal with the Poles speaking loudly to you in Polish as if it was the lingua franca of the EU: and you’re meant to understand, aren’t you, learn from big brother . . . But they are just as bad: they know what we are up to, and we know they know, and you see this charade, this pantomime that happens every single day, those women standing there with their fags and spirits strapped to themselves in every nook of their bodies and the Polish border guards lording it, looking at them as if they were naughty children and wondering which one to make an example of in front of the class; except it’s not like that, because they’re taking backhanders from those women. And the women laugh at them when they’re gone.
Or you can always take the train over the border. It takes several hours on our lumbering, cumbersome train to trundle to the border from L’viv along our wide, sleepy, slow rails, even though it’s only eighty kilometres. Our trains are like us – not built for life in Europe. They can go over the border – but only just. Because the wheels aren’t right for Europe’s slim, polished rails. Only for our fat, iron ones, like peasants’ fingers. Our trains would fall over like a drunk on the dainty European railway lines. So they let us in a bit, just enough to get to Przemyśl and sell whatever it is we’ve stuffed up our jumpers and then go back again.
The smugglers like the train: first they get out their lunch, all wrapped in greasy towels and newspaper, their tomatoes and boiled eggs and sausages and they laugh and plot. And then when they’ve got some fuel inside them it starts: those big checked plastic bags, blue and red ones, made in China – when they bury Ukraine they’ll wrap it in one of those and throw it in the ground – the manic rustling of bags and plastic and paper, blocks of fags, unwrapping the foil, breaking them up. And Sellotape! Sellotape screeching and stretching and strapping it all to themselves, to their big sweaty, warm bodies; middle-aged women hike up their blouses and t-shirts and strap the fag packets in; and the vodka too – spirits into bags and into the bra. It’s quite an operation, and needs space, so they kick you out if you’re sitting in their way, but not before asking you to take a block of cigarettes in your bag for them.
And the customs officers walk through, first ours, and then theirs: ours look a bit old-fashioned compared to theirs, a bit Soviet, the men look meaner and shiftier and the women more dyed blonde and with higher heels; their guys look a bit more dull, bureaucratic, and the women too; and they all know, and the women know they know, and it goes on, again and again, a ritual dance to mark the territory where the land of freedom begins and the land of drudgery ends, back and forth, every day, they do their dance, keeping the gods of the borders happy with their meagre offerings, the glum priests in their uniforms and hats officiating.
And then it’s Schengen. But inside Schengen it’s not quite true to say that there are no borders. The borders do exist, for some of us. Like on the way here, when we were driving through Germany, some place not far from Berlin, some little town, they stopped us. Why? Ukrainian plates of course. Got a little EU flag on your number plate? No problem: drive back and forth for the rest of your life from Gdańsk to Gibraltar, knock yourself out. But a poor little Ukrainian flag and our funny little dirty number plates: sorry, we just remembered we have a German border that needs protecting. Because Ukrainian number plates don’t just drive through Germany just like that. Ukrainian number plates don’t just go on holiday along the autobahns, not just like that.
This German stops us, a little guy, not like a German, and you could see that he knew something was up, just by looking at us. They took us off for questioning, and checked our documents, and the guy who was driving us disappeared somehow. The others had Belgian visas, and only my papers weren’t good for Germany apparently, only for Poland. Then questioning, with an interpreter, then into a cell, then questioning again, then into a different cell. Who are you, where are you from, where are you going, why? And this lasted the whole day, and overnight, and the next day: and then they tell me I’m being deported.
But then the interpreter, God bless him, a neat little guy from western Ukraine somewhere, you could see he was trying to help, I think he felt sorry for me, maybe he saw his little sister in me or something, he tells me that I have a choice of how to get kicked out of Germany: either they deport you, and you get a big DEPORTED stamped in your passport, or, if you have the cash, you buy yourself a ticket, and your Polish visa gets ANNULLED stamped on it. He said go for the latter option. Well, who wouldn’t rather be annulled than deported?
They took me into town, bought me plane tickets with my money, and they say off you go, your flight’s tomorrow, here’s a piece of paper, give it to them when you get on the plane to prove you’ve left the country. Want to stay another night in our cells before you go? No, thanks.
That’s how the border catches you. Because the border isn’t just a place: the border is inside you. You have the border stamped on your face, in your passport, on your number plates, it’s encoded into your obscure language, always there when you speak, like a wrong harmony in a song, and a little German will always be there to hear it, to read it, and to stamp it on you again to make sure it doesn’t fade. And even when you cross the real border, there’s a part of you that’s still on the other side, part of you that just can’t step across. And once you’ve made the decision to cross, you’re split for ever in two, and there’s always a bit of you that never left, that is stuck there, afraid to join the rest of you on the right side of the line, because it feels like a traitor, because it feels like a criminal, taking something that doesn’t belong to it.
No, thanks, I said, and went off into Berlin. Berlin is all blocks and roads and rails and infrastructure and grey, it felt like it was just pretending to be Western Europe, pretending to be something it wasn’t, just like I was. Maybe that little feeling of being at home in Berlin was what made me decide not to take the plane. Maybe the fact that I’d come this far already and they’d just let me out, just like that, after those cells and all the questioning: it felt like a reprieve, like they were almost saying, okay, we did our bit, we ticked our box and filled in our form, now it’s up to you. And it felt stupid to go home. Schengen, of course, has another end, another border. And if you thought it was hard getting in the Polish end, try getting out the French end into Britain. Britain does borders well. It comes naturally, I guess.
It’s not by accident that there’s a big chunk of sea in the way, a moat around the castle. There isn’t even a drawbridge, though I suppose there is an underground tunnel you can try to crawl through. And those ferries: like crossing the Styx. I had to pay my boatman too. My boatman was a Lithuanian who got me a very expensive Lithuanian ID card. It wasn’t what I had been expecting. They had taken my money and told me they’d sort out my documents. What that meant, I didn’t know, and they wouldn’t have told me if I’d asked. And I didn’t want to ask.
I got to Dover on the boat, with my new document, which did look quite like me: my document, which wasn’t mine. In Dover I told them: it’s me, it’s me. And they said it’s not you, it’s not you. I almost believed myself. Okay, the details on the card are not exactly mine, but the main thing is that I am here in front of you and I am me, and I have this card, which is real: I’m no worse than whoever that is. She’s at home in Lithuania and not here, so you can let me in in her place, right, what’s the difference?
But no. Not you, not you. They had a good rummage through my stuff looking for another ID, the real one for the real me, right through all my clothes, they even had a good laugh at a pair of stupid highheeled pink sandals that I’d packed, passed them around, marvelled at our exotic Ukrainian fashions. And then straight back on the ferry, with some guy to hand me over to the police in France. The sea was calm: it was the border that made me sick. The guards, the explaining, the searching, trying to believe for a second that it’s really me on that card because if I really believe, they might let me in, if only I can be someone else convincingly enough.
The French cells were definitely not as nice as the German ones: small with this horrible toilet in the corner. And more questions, and more police, and this time the interpreter also wanted to help me. He offered to get me out of this mess if I slept with him. He said it right there in front of the police, knowing they couldn’t understand. At least you can always rely on your countrymen to step in and help you in your hour of need, those knights in shining armour, real Cossack heroes. I wasn’t having it, of course. And after a couple of days of questioning, I was off to a detention centre. Now I was really, properly locked up. In Europe’s bin, with all the other rubbish.
And then, like some kind of bad joke, after a week they did the same thing, they let me go. They kept my Lithuanian ID, gave me a piece of paper and told me to get out of France. This was now my only document. At that moment, that’s who I was: Get Out Of France. One of the people there, a woman, offered me a lift into the next town. I said no, no thanks. I just wanted to get out of there and away from them and just be on my own and free to move, to walk that way or this, run around, lie down in a field or whatever, I couldn’t even bear to sit in a car with them for ten minutes. And so I walked like an idiot along this busy road not even knowing where the town was and eventually met some people with bikes who couldn’t speak English and I five words of French, but they pointed me in the right direction.
I managed to contact my Lithuanian, and he came up with a new plan and a new document. He said go on this other, long ferry by some islands, British islands near France, where they don’t check too carefully, and then you get to a place called Poole and then you go to London. Why didn’t you tell me this the first time? Obviously the stupid amount of money he took for his ID card the first time didn’t stretch to this new information about this Poole. So I went on that ferry, by those islands, and they came on and the guy sits down next to me and asks me where I’m going, and why, and why I’m on my own, and so on, and he doesn’t like the new ID too much. I’ll come back to you, he says.
And here some miracle happened. He didn’t come back. The boat was only in that port for a little while and they had a lot of people to go round, and there was a lot of commotion, and whatever happened, I don’t know, but he didn’t get back to me, and there I stayed, and I
got to Poole.
I got to Poole with twenty euros, and I knew that wouldn’t get me to London. But I walked to the bus station anyway. And here was the second miracle. I asked the bus driver how much the ticket to London cost, and said I only had twenty euros. He laughed, and said he’d take me for nothing: it was the middle of the night and he was driving an almost empty bus. I was so grateful to that driver, I don’t think he realised.
And in London I got in touch with a family friend who helped me find a room in a place with the beautiful English name Manor House. It was not the kind of place the name suggested. The room
was in a cramped flat being sublet by a family of Bulgarians, who for some reason spoke bad Polish to me. And then I was immediately chewed by bedbugs. I’d never encountered a bedbug until England. Then the family friend got me my first job, and that was it: I started cleaning London. And London was very dirty. It wasn’t quite what I had been expecting, after negotiating all the Polish and German and French and English border guards and the creepy interpreter, after two jails and a detention centre. Where was London? Where was the Manor House?
So we’ve been driving north and north for hours now, and the sky is getting colder and bigger and darker, and I say to O., so when are we getting to this border? I can’t take the tension already, when will they check us? And she just looks at me as though I’ve asked her if she is sure the world isn’t flat, and says under her raised eyebrow, my dear, we crossed the border ages ago, you’re in Scotland already and no one is going to check anything.
This really is something new, I think: a border with no guards, no dogs, no bribes, no detention centre, no jail, where nobody goes through your underwear, nobody wants to sleep with you, nobody locks you up, nobody says its not you, not you. This really is something new, I think. And somehow I don’t feel so sick any more.
© Uilleam Blacker 2016
Uilleam Blacker is from Barra, but now lives in London. He is a lecturer at UCL. His stories have appeared in Edinburgh Review and Stand. He has also co-written plays for the Molodyi Teatr London theatre group, and has translated the work of several contemporary Ukrainian writers.
‘Crossing The Line’ is published in Talking About Lobsters: New Writing Scotland 34, out now from ASLS (PB, £9.95). New Writing Scotland is the principal forum for poetry and short fiction in Scotland today. Every year it publishes the very best from both emerging and established writers, and lists many of the leading literary lights of Scotland among its past (and present) contributors. New Writing Scotland is supported by Creative Scotland
Uilleam Blacker’s short story ‘Crossing the Line’ has been adapted and incorporated into the Edinburgh Fringe show ‘Penetrating Europe, or Migrants Have Talent’, part verbatim theatre based on interviews with Ukrainian migrants in the UK, and part parody talent show, performed by Molodyi Teatr London. Molodyi Teatr London is a Ukrainian–British theatre group. ‘Penetrating Europe…’ is written by Uilleam Blacker and directed and co-written by Olesya Khromeychuk. Details are here.
Looking for a new read to adventure with this summer? In this article, to coincide with our travel-themed Issue, Scottish publishers pick two of their top books: one from their own publishing house and one from elsewhere.
Emily Dewhurst, Kitchen Press
The Savoy Kitchen: A Family History of Cajun Food – Sarah Savoy (Kitchen Press)
I’d choose The Savoy Kitchen: A Family History of Cajun Food by Sarah Savoy for the one we published. It’s so evocative of family feasts eaten outside, of hunting, cooking and playing music – Sarah is incapable of writing about a dish without celebrating her Cajun culture and it’s a fascinating read. It also introduced me to the pleasures of eating gumbo around an open fire on a summer evening.
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (Picador)
Novelist Zoe Venditozzi recommended the collected stories of Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women, to me and now I’m pressing it onto anyone who’ll listen. Her prose is both beautiful and relentless and has the power to stop you in your tracks while you’re reading – it is writing to wallow in.
Seonaid Francis, ThunderPoint
Seonaid Francis, ThunderPoint
Changed Times – Ethyl Smith (ThunderPoint)
Based on real events and people, ‘Changed Times’ by Ethyl Smith is set over the summer of 1679, during Scotland’s Killing Times, and deals with some of the most important episodes of that year. It is historical fiction written mostly from the perspective of ordinary people, such as John Steele and his wife Marion, farmers caught up by the Covenanting cause. It’s also a good summer read as the great Scottish summer plays an important part in the novel, sweeping the reader from the glorious blue skies of an Ayrshire May morning to the pounding rain and dangerous mists of the Lanarkshire moors.
Hegemony or Survival – Noam Chomsky (Penguin)
I am also reading ‘Hegemony or Survival’ by Noam Chomsky which discusses America’s pursuit of global power through an analyses of conflicts in Nicaragua and Iraq, amongst others. In this summer of the Chilcot report, it seemed appropriate, and is a fascinating read.
Laura Waddell, Freight Books
Laura Waddell, Freight Books
Gutter issue 14 – edited by Colin Begg and Henry Bell (Freight Books)
In summertime, the fresh air headspace of a break from the desk and sensual jolt of travelling often provokes me to write. As an extra encouragement, seeing the variety of new writing within the latest issue of Gutter makes for an inspiring summer read, and it’s great for spotting emerging talents too.
The Lesser Bohemians – Eimear McBride (Faber&Faber)
I utterly adored A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, so when my hustling for a proof of The Lesser Bohemians paid off it felt like gold-dust in my hands. Set in 90s London, following a young actress as she moves to the city and explores art, sexuality, and love, this dusky peach book perfectly captures both a sense of nostalgia and the complex emotional arc of tumultuous formative years. McBride’s second novel confirms her place as one of the greatest novelists of our age.
Andrew Mackinnon, Acair
Andrew MacKinnon, Acair
Three Dark Days – Kenneth MacDonald (Acair)
From Acair, I would like to choose Three Dark Days by Kenneth MacDonald. I recently read this book whilst travelling, and loved every minute. The non-fiction book is a real page turner, primarily focussing on Kenneth’s own story to save refugees found drifting along a river while fleeing Singapore. His three days with the refugees had a profound effect on him, and it took him thirty years to finally write about the experience.
Look Who’s Back – Timur Vermes and Jamie Bulloch (Eichborn Verlag)
From the publisher Eichborn Verlag, I would like to choose a book I’m currently reading, Look Who’s Back. This comedy fiction book focuses on Adolf Hitler, who has suddenly woken up in modern day Berlin. His confusion, and the public’s belief that he’s simply a brilliant performer, makes laugh out loud moments! He soon becomes a viral sensation, and even manages to get his own TV show. I would highly recommend this book, and look forward to reading more of it!
Liz Small, Waverley Books
Liz Small, Waverley Books
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Cam Kennedy and Alan Grant (Waverley)
Re-reading Waverley’s Cam Kennedy and Alan Grant graphic novel of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with its gloriously dramatic colour art and accurate script. Love it.
Squirrel Pie (and Other Stories) – Elisabeth Luard (Bloomsbury)
New for me is Elisabeth Luard’s Squirrel Pie – she has reviewed many of our books, is a tremendous writer on food, and her new book is fun, colourful and decisive – written about food around the world. And she always makes me hungry!
Suzanne Kennedy, Floris Books
Scotland Stars F.C. Books – Danny Scott (Floris)
In my suitcase I’ll be packing the next three not-published-yet Danny Scott Scotland Stars F.C. books for my 8 year old. They’ll be a surprise… but he’ll only get them if he’s very, very good (there’s a lot of mileage in these books). Move over Messi there’s a new hero in town and he’s Scottish and his name is Calum Ferguson and, as from 18 August, there will be 6 books to collect about him. He starts off in Calum’s New Team as the new boy in a new town at a new school with the wrong boots (‘Mum,’ all seriousness, threat of tears, on the last page, ‘I really, really hope Calum gets some new boots in the next book . . .’) and it ends with Calum’s Cup Final. Boy works hard, practises hard, overcomes hurdles, boy does good, all 6-8 year old football fans happy. Parents happy child is reading. And, it’s crucial you understand, reading makes you a better footballer!
The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt (Abacus)
I’ll also be packing my Mum’s copy of The Goldfinch, it’s sticky with her sun cream, there are grains of sand through the pages and it’s the furthest from a summery, carefree read you can get, but I’m halfway through and nothing else will get read until I’ve finished it! Donna Tartt, genius.
Sara Hunt, Saraband Books
Sara Hunt, Saraband Books
The Jewel – Catherine Czerkawska (Saraband Books)
An exquisite slice of historical fiction, The Jewel beautifully conjures up 18th-century Scotland and is a fascinating and convincing portrait of Jean Armour and her marriage to Robert Burns. Jean has been overlooked by Burns scholars, but Catherine rightly brings this indomitable woman centre-stage in the Burns story. A wonderful book.
Open Wounds – Douglas Skelton (Luath Press)
This crime thriller has been nominated for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year, and it’s easy to see why. Genuinely compelling characters with so many shades of grey, and a plot that races along, with some heart-stopping moments… it’s unputdownable and a must for fans of the Davie McCall books. A shame it’s the last one, but Douglas will be back with a new series very soon.
K. A. Farrell, Sandstone Press
K. A. Farrell, Sandstone Press
A Private Haunting – Tom McCulloch (Sandstone Press)
I’m a fan of thrillers and Gothic novels and this is a perfect blend of the two. Characters haunted by their past decisions and trying to make their way in the world is endlessly fascinating, and Tom McCulloch’s elegant prose elevates the story to something beautiful.
The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern (Vintage)
At heart a story of love, the supernatural elements and Victorian setting make this an irresistible world. I’ve returned to this novel every year since it was published, and always find myself sinking back into its elegiac grace with joy.
Megan Hammersley, Ringwood Publishing
Megan Hammersley, Ringwood Publishing
The Activist – Alec Connon (Ringwood)
Perhaps a novel focussed upon the decimation of earth’s marine life is a bit heavy for a beach read, right? But, Alec Connon’s The Activist is written with such deft wit and humanity that it’s hard not to become invested in the environmental concerns of its semi-autobiographical protagonist, Tam. Through following his journey towards personal fulfillment as a member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, one of the most controversially effective animal activist groups in history, you’ll likely discover a passion for the life in our oceans, too.
Hyberbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened – Allie Brosh (Square Peg)
For an engagingly witty summer read that’s a bit different, check out Allie Brosh’s Hyberbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, a web comic-slash-memoir-turned-graphic novel. With her deceptively simple art style and her brilliant sense of humour, Brosh brings comedic relatability to everything from fish murder, bears that break into houses, and simple dogs that are terrified of horse statues, to the way in which shrivelled up pieces of corn can give you hope in the depths of depression.
Jennifer McIlreavy, NGS Publishing
Modern Scottish Women: Painters & Sculptors 1885-1965 – Alice Strang (NGS Publishing)
Summer days often make me feel dreamy and unfocussed; for days like that, I need a book I can dip in and out of without making a big commitment, and this lovely volume, with its multitude of stand-alone entries, is perfect. The book focusses on the lives and works of 45 Scottish women artists, many of whom are largely unknown – until now. It is beautifully illustrated with full-page colour images, and is packed with fascinating stories of strong, talented, adventurous women navigating a profession dominated by men. Draw inspiration from Cecil Walton’s beautiful painting Eric Robertson and Mary Newbery and take the book to a grassy spot surrounded by flowers on a lovely, warm day. Ideal.
Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran – Shirin Ebadi (Rider)
One of the highlights of an Edinburgh summer is the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and this year the event I’m most excited about is Shirin Ebadi’s talk. Ebadi is an absolute force of nature; brave, intelligent, committed to her cause and entirely inspiring. She was the first Iranian, and the first Muslim woman, to win a Nobel Peace Prize for her work as a lawyer promoting human rights, particularly for women and children, in the face of death threats, imprisonment and a corrupt regime. Until We Are Free is her latest title, detailing her continued fight to bring justice and human rights to the country she loves, and an ever-intensifying campaign of persecution against her by the Iranian government.
You can view the travel-themed Issue of Books from Scotland here.
Danny Scott, children’s author and goalkeeper for the Scotland Writers F.C., reveals what it’s really like to play football matches overseas. He finds that it’s not the results that matter but the shared team experience.
Travels with the Scottish Writers F.C.
Danny Scott
Danny Scott
It’s not the winning and losing that counts, it’s the stories.
Football isn’t a matter of life and death. Don’t be ridiculous. It is beautiful, however. Forget Ronaldo’s spray on tan, Rooney’s wages and players’ writhing about on the ground like salted slugs to get their fellow professionals sent off. Remember, instead, Zidane’s volleyed goal at Hampden in the 2002 Champion’s League final – a goal so beautiful that former chief sports writer at the Guardian Richard Williams refuses to watch television replays of it to preserve his memories of seeing it live. Remember, instead, Archie Gemmil’s impudent dribble and goal against Holland at World Cup ’78 – an act of such fluidity and grace that it has been adapted for modern dance.
Beauty is everywhere in football. Sometimes you just need a lifetime to attune your eyes to it.
Many of us who are obsessed the game had a guide when we were young. Someone who sat us down on a couch or stadium seat and equipped us with the tales we needed to know of our club and country’s greatest moments. This matters. One’s enjoyment of any sport increases proportionally with your knowledge of the stories surrounding each player or team.
All that said, football’s position as the world’s most popular sport still perplexes some. On average there are over 50 scores a game in basketball, and six in rugby union and league. In football the average is 1.5. Perhaps, as Chris Anderson and David Sally argue in The Numbers Game, this is part of its appeal. Goals become rare moments of beauty or transcendence where a pub or living room can erupt in a focussed moment of pure joy. Arguably, it’s the patient melancholy a football fan must develop that attracts so many writers to the sport. They know how long it takes to create magic. It could be why baseball has traditionally been the writers’ sport of choice in the US.
In fact, there are enough writers-cum-football-lovers across Europe to form several international football teams of writers. I play in goal for one of them: Scottish Writers FC. We play in Scotland’s World Cup 1986 strip because a large proportion of writers’ football is an unashamed act of childhood wish fulfillment.
I first heard of the team in 2012 when working on the inaugural Book Week Scotland. To mark the week, Scottish writers invited their English counterparts, who already had an established team, to play on a frozen November pitch in Glasgow. Scotland won 4-2. Radio 4 made a documentary about the match. Our country’s national writers’ team was off to a great start.
Since those auspicious beginnings, the squad has grown, and travelled Europe. I made my own debut in autumn 2013 for an international double-header against Sweden in Gothenburg, and Austria in Vienna the following weekend.
The match in Gothenburg was the first overseas adventure for Scottish Writers and anticipation levels were high. So high, in fact, that a giddy set of players indulged in a couple of ‘looseners’ the night before the game with the Swedish captain egging us on, assuring us that his team would be doing the same at the Gothenburg Book Fair. They probably weren’t.
Match day arrived and the tall Swedish team made up for their unexpectedly fresh and fit appearance by presenting us with a piper in full military regalia to play the national anthems. Inspired by the bizarre experience of belting out ‘Flower of Scotland’ to bagpipes as Swedish dog walkers and teenagers stared at us, we raced to a 1-0 lead. Yass. International writers’ football suited us. Had the match ended there we would be bucking the trend of our county’s overseas footballing misadventures. Only it didn’t end there and we were walloped 9-2 by a fitter, more organised, and better team.
And yet, that first away weekend contained so much that is good about writer football. After attending to our astroturf burns back at the hotel, we came together upstairs at a wood-panelled Irish bar to share stories. High on victory, the Swedes were particularly beguiled by our midfielder-cum-Gaelic-poet Pàdraig MacAoidh’s reading, hearing their own history in the old language.
Others shared their work before we mixed the teams to sit down and eat a buffet including delicious lobster – not usually on the menus of Irish bars in Scotland. And despite the emotional and very real physical pain of loss, we had a great night.
Scottish Writers F.C.
A handful of days later, the team dusted itself down, welcomed some new players to the matchday squad, and waltzed to a 3-1 victory in Vienna at an actual football stadium, before clearing the pitch so an U14 girls’ game could start. We had our first overseas victory and no-one could take that away from us.
A 2014 trip to Rome has followed since then and the team will travel to Barga in Tuscany, a town with strong Scottish links, for our third match versus the Italians, this September. The Azzurri are desperate for revenge following our famous 2-1 victory in Edinburgh last year – a result that sent shockwaves around the world of writers’ football.
But in many ways, it’s not the winning or losing that counts in writers’ football – even if it does make the weekend that wee bit more enjoyable. Writing is a solitary pursuit and football is anything but. And so it follows that the best part of any international weekend is always the coming together in the evening to share stories and poetry about football and life. The magic lies in making connections with writers in other countries around the love of a game we played in different streets as children, sharing the same dream that we’d one day score a goal for our country.
Danny Scott is the author of Scotland Stars F.C., a series of six football-filled chapter books for readers aged 6-8 from Discover Kelpies (PB, £5.99 each). The final hat-trick of books in the series –Calum’s Hard Knock, Calum’s Tough Match and Calum’s Cup Final – are published on 18 August 2016. He is also a goalkeeper for Scottish Writers F.C.. Follow him on Twitter @ASimpleDan.
In these two delightful poems we invite you to travel with us to Crianlarich to see swallows on the station platform and to cross the Machair in the Outer Hebrides.
Swallows at Crianlarich
The sleeper shuffles into Crianlarich
on a grey morning, eyes not quite open yet.
Stepping onto the platform, I feel air from the hills
splash like fresh water in my face
and am startled by a world full of wings:
swallows swooping round the station,
small bodies that jink and dart,
over the down platform, past tearoom signs
and tubs of late-summer flowers,
across lines stretching south to Glasgow,
rails running north across Rannoch Moor –
dancing as though delighted,
maybe with the morning midge-rise,
or simply with all that air
sending out urgent messages on twitter,
low-flying, then looping over and up
to gather on wires with fast-beating hearts:
a new brood testing their wings
in training for the long haul
where lines converge on the horizon,
connecting with another hemisphere
and this in-between place where I’ve alighted,
paused for breath, is where the tired year
breathes out and blows them far away –
where the young swallows’ journey starts.
A Track Across the Machair
Photo Credit: David Coleman
This track is a bit like my journey, Jesus –
winding and gravelly,
rather rough at the edges.
But it’s well-used too,
cut deep into the earth –
a firm track, going somewhere.
It gives me the confidence I need
to keep going,
always travelling, like you.
‘Swallows from Crianlarich’ is from A Pocket Full of Crumbs, by Jan Sutch Pickard, to be published by Wild Goose Publications. ‘A Track Across the Machair’, from Iona: Images and Reflections by Neil Paynter and David Coleman, is out now published by Wild Goose Publications (PB, £13.99).
In this Q&A award-winning author Janis Mackay talks about her time-travelling trilogy for children and tells us why Scotland’s past and future provides endless inspiration for her exciting writing which spans centuries.
The Unlikely Time Traveller is the third book in your time-traveller series. For anyone who hasn’t had the chance to read them, can you tell us a bit about the trilogy?
This exciting adventure travelling through time all began with my discovery of the diary of an eight-year-old girl from 1811. It inspired the character of Agatha Black, who landed up in Scotland in our time having time travelled 200 years into the future. Agatha was a gift for a writer: one of those characters that just arrives fully formed and ready for adventure.
There have been a lot of adventures, friendships and time-travel troubles in the series. In the second book Saul – who is the main character – travels back 100 years to the outbreak of the First World War, then in the third and final book he zooms 100 years into the future. While writing these books I became more interested in history and fascinated by the idea of forming friendships across time zones.
Your view of Scotland in 100 years is quite unusual. Where does this come from?
My future Scotland is, of course, fantasy, but I did a fair amount of research, including asking scientists what they predict might happen.
In this future no one uses petrol and they blend traditional ways of growing food and getting around with innovative ways. So, old and new, side by side.
I was once involved in a workshop where we were asked to look at the labels on our clothes and see where they were made. Everyone’s clothes came from places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, China, Vietnam… which got me thinking about how we don’t do the basic things that we (when I say ‘we’ I mean our grandparents and great grandparents) used to do – like grow our own food, make our own clothes. So it seems like in the future it would be a sensible thing to live locally and to learn to survive on a simpler and possibly more honest level.
I am also a member of the Green Party, and while writing this book I thought a lot about climate change and how we can make a world worth living in for those who come after us.
What inspired you to write about time travel?
I wanted to open doors to other worlds without writing pure fantasy. I think my genre is probably magic realism – where I write about ordinary children leading ordinary lives and then something extraordinary happens and their lives enter the adventure zone. Reading the diary of Marjorie Fleming was a big inspiration for me and gave me real insight into what life was like for a child in Scotland in 1811.
Janis Mackay
What did you find most challenging about this theme?
I think I found imagining the future the most challenging. With The Accidental Time Traveller and The Reluctant Time Traveller, because they are both in part dealing with the past, I could research them easily. With The Unlikely Time Traveller I had to make it up. In fact, my first attempt at it was too gloomy – the book that is being published now was my second attempt. I had to realise it isn’t my job to instruct but actually to tell a good story, so I lightened up my approach and decided the future was going to be FUN.
What was the most fun?
With The Unlikely Time Traveller the most fun thing was imagining exotic and amazing theme parks and swimming pools. I also enjoyed writing the scene where Robbie and Saul pretend they are tour guides – taking people down the Royal Mile and spinning them random stories about what life in the past was like. I found the banter between Robbie and Saul great fun to write. In fact, lots of the book was fun. I hope it is fun for people reading it too.
Do you have a favourite character in the trilogy? If so, why are they your favourite?
Saul would have to be the favourite because he holds the whole thing together. He allows adventures to happen because he gives things a go. I also love Agatha Black, and Elsie, and Frank, and Ness, and Robbie…
You’ve written books set all over Scotland. How have your own travel experiences inspired your writing?
I lived for five years in Caithness – right at the top of Scotland and next to the sea. The Magnus Fin books (also published by Floris Books) kind of wrote themselves while I was there. I just had to walk along the beach, see the seals, see the rubbish, watch the tides – and the underwater adventures of Magnus Fin appeared before me.
You’re also a storyteller, do you find that this has an impact on your writing and if so, how?
Yes – hugely I think. I am also an actress and I used to direct plays. I love Shakespeare and see themes from some of his plays come into my books – like twins for example. Shakespeare liked twins. So do I! Traditional storytelling is a wonderful source for writing new stories.
I always loved telling the Selkie story, so writing Magnus Fin was a case of re-working a story. Storytelling also trains you in what stories are – their form, the characters, and the importance of images over ideas. All important skills for an author.
Do you have a favourite place where you like to write?
I am sitting in the garden while I write this – in the sun. I like that. I also have a caravan on the west coast where I write a bit. I am fairly flexible with writing – but I do like to have a bit of a view!
If you could travel anywhere in the world, to any point in history, where would you go?
At the moment I am enjoying The Arabian Nights and Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor – so perhaps to that part of the world. I’d travel the Silk Road and listen to Sheherazade tells stories for her life!
The Unlikely Time Traveller by Janis Mackay is out now published by Kelpies (PB, £6.99)
For David Robinson’s first column for Books from Scotland he writes about two very different pilgrimages in the recently published Poacher’s Pilgrimage by Alastair McIntosh and White Sands by Geoff Dyer.
The thing about pilgrimages, as Chaucer never quite got round to saying, is that where you are going isn’t often as important as the people you are going there with.
For me, it works like that with travel books too. I want more than just a journey. I want even more than finding out what it’s like to live in a place, what the people there are like and what they think about life. On a good day, I can get that from a newspaper travel feature. From a book, I expect more: I want it to be written so well that, when I finish it, I will feel as though I have been on the journey myself. And the very best – the ones in which the writer’s mind matters as much as the view from the window – leave me thinking that it would be hard to imagine making a particular journey with anyone else.
Alastair McIntosh’s Poacher’s Pilgrimage: An Island Journey (Birlinn, £20) is such a book. A meditative and discursive account of a 12-day hike across Harris and Lewis from Rodel to Butt of Lewis, he planned it to take in many as possible of his native island’s “sacred sites” – the beehive shieling huts (some of which have been standing for 2000 years) and their often neglected pre-Reformation chapels and holy wells.
Now perhaps you or I could, given a compass and all the right gear, go splashing across the boggy wastes of mid-Lewis, and with enough luck we might stagger through to the end of the trek. What we wouldn’t be able to do is to write a book like McIntosh’s at the end of it, tracing as it does, not just the journey across his native Lewis but the contours of his own singular and eclectic mind.
He is certainly much nicer than some of the other writers I like to armchair-travel with – less garrulous than Paul Theroux, and certainly less laconically solipsistic than Geoff Dyer, whose White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World has also just been published (Canongate, £16.99). In it, there’s a chapter entitled “Pilgrimage” about a visit he made to Theodor Adorno’s house in Brentwood, where Adorno lived in exile from the Nazis on what he called “this remote western coast” and the rest of us call LA. There, Adorno wrote Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, a book which marks him out as what Dyer calls a “badge writer”, in other words somebody to be seen reading. Sure enough, asked by the Guardian to pick a book that defined a summer for him, this was what he picked “to distinguish myself from novelists who I guessed would choose The Go-Between or Tender is the Night or whatever.”
The two pilgrimages – Dyer’s and McIntosh’s – could hardly be more different. Dyer knows his way through Adorno’s thickets of theory, and conjures up that strange time when so many European exiles [Mann, Schoenberg, Stravinsky] found themselves way out west, blinking in the California sun. But what he really wants to write about is the inconsequentiality of dropping round to Adorno’s old house and talking to the woman who lived there and didn’t know much about who he was, or cycling there from Muscle Beach and musing whether old Theo “ever stood there with the other intellectual expats transfixed by what a beautiful thing he was seeing through the muscular lenses of his spectacles, fleeting instants in which we catch a glimpse of a unified field…”.
Yet while Dyer riffs, lightly but entertainingly, on Adorno’s incongruous and easily forgotten West Coast sojourn, McIntosh’s Western Isles pilgrimage is altogether deeper and more purposeful. Essentially, it’s about nothing less how we can best live in the world, the nature of God and the nature of Hebridean spirituality. In all three cases, his answers are thought-out but unpredictable.
And here we come to what I mean about a good travel writer needing to have a mind worth following as well as an itinerary – a mind that challenges the reader or pulls their thoughts in unexpected directions. McIntosh is good at this: a committed pacifist, for the last 19 years he’s been a Quaker devil’s advocate at the British Army’s officer training college at Shrivenham, invited down to make the case for a strategy of non-violence over the Army’s more usual bombs and bullets approach. Although under Chatham House rules, we aren’t given the names of the top brass he is talking to, he is allowed to write about their discussions and does so in his book. They’re fascinating.
McIntosh is one of those people with a solidly consistent worldview, and an engaging lack of ego to match. A leading radical ecologist, he has played a prominent role in the campaign against the Harris superquarry and the Eigg buy-out, and helped to set the GalGael Trust, one of the most important community projects in the Gorbals.
But what’s impressive about his pilgrimage is that its true dimensions only emerge gradually, like the shape of the moorland hills he is walking across. Instead, it is crafted, layered. He’ll mention his Shrivenham talks, not to grandstand, but to shoot down the “just war” theory that Christianity has aligned itself to since Augustine. Christ’s teachings about non-violence were altogether more radical, he argues, and need to be underpinned by a theology free of violence too. Naturally, he comes up with one.
Normally, it’s true, any book I pick up which mentions theories of penal substitutionary atonement don’t stay picked up for very long. But Poacher’s Pilgrimage is different. By the time I hit the theology, I’ve been striding out alongside McIntosh since Rodel, and he’s kept me engaged, so I cut him some slack. Already I’ve started to get the hang of how he thinks – that coherent yet diffuse cast of mind – as I’ve been mentally accompanying him through a landscape he’s loved since childhood, and he has spent pages filling it with memory, history, literature, language and (gulp!) metaphysics and theology too.
This island, he’s saying, isn’t what we think is. It’s a corrective against anomie, materialism, and spiritual disconnection. If you walk into its pre-Calvinist past, unblock (physically as well as metaphorically) its old Celtic springs, visit its old Catholic holy sites, you can at least catch an echo of a different kind of spirituality. I can’t quite follow him off to the edge of mysticism, but I can at least understand how he gets there. The thinking is part of the journey.
With Dyer, so dissimilar from McIntosh as to be almost another species, it’s the sardonicism. In White Sands, he and his wife pick up a hitcher near a prison on the way to El Paso, a dangerous-looking guy who doesn’t want to leave the car. He’s just been ditched by his girlfriend, he says, and he starts talking about his life. Dyer almost falls asleep listening to him. “A few minutes earlier,” he writes, “I was worried that he might be a murderer; now I was worried that he might be a bore, but it was possible he was a murderer and a bore.” I won’t tell you how it ends, though it’s fair to say that mysticism isn’t involved. But whether you like your pilgrimages sacred (McIntosh) or profane (Dyer), at least this month you get a choice.
Geoff Dyer is at the Edinburgh international book festival on 13 August with ‘The World: Intimate Portraits’; details are here. Alastair McIntosh is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with ‘The Mystery of the Outer Hebrides’ on 18 August; details are here.
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.
In this photo diary author Sue Reid Sexton takes us behind-the-scenes on a fascinating trip to the Midi-Pyrenees in the south of France as she combines a family holiday with using her trusty campervan, Vanessa Hotplate, as a mobile office and creative space.
Meet Vanessa Hotplate, a small but perfectly formed Romahome campervan. Vanessa has living quarters for two, but for me the van functions best as a mobile office and creative space. I favour laybys in isolated locations for this purpose and this summer, I voyaged all the way from Glasgow to a tiny village in the Midi-Pyrenees in the south of France.
This was a distance of 1277 miles or 2043.2 kilometres to be exact and frankly more impressive. Such a journey is all the more remarkable with an engine of only 1,300 horsepower (though that does seem like a lot of horses) and dinky body a mere 3.95 metres long.
The purpose of the journey was to prove I could do it. And to visit family too, of course. Ahem. And also to give myself some uninterrupted time to get on with the latest writing project. My habit is to find a layby, preferably one with limited phone connection, so I can climb in the back, open the laptop and have no alternative but to write. It’s amazing how difficult it sometimes is to get down to writing, even though it is thoroughly enjoyable once I do.
It took several weeks to summon the courage to make this epic solo flight into the sun but I used the time to have the van serviced and checked so it would be in tip-top shape when the moment arrived.
I arrived in France late in the evening and drove through the dark until I could drive no more. Luckily a ‘rest area’ appeared and I snuck between a larger campervan and a lorry and slept like a log. The next day, with only the nice American lady on the sat-nav for company, I drove until dusk. The navigator was set to non- péage so it threw me off the motorway just as a red sunset reached across the whole sky. At first I was frustrated by the twists and turns of the smaller road, then I found the perfect spot for the night, which is where you see Vanessa in the picture. Birds and insects serenaded me as I dug out the sleeping bag and settled down for the night.
This would have been the perfect writing layby. It had a section which was completely flat, trees between me and the road upon which there was limited traffic, birdsong a-plenty, a field of maize and a hill covered in more trees on which to rest my eyes. Within the van I had supplies of tea, breakfast materials and other nibbles, a fully charged laptop, a battery to replenish it when necessary, a table to sit it on and a project which was difficult but enticing for its author.
But my task at that point was to GET THERE, so after a quick glance at my project I hit the road, opted for the péage and was instantly stuck in a traffic jam. Drat! Wandering back roads is so much more fun.
And also more productive. Over the course of this trip and in various ad hoc locations I re-drafted the first six chapters of a novel and added another. Almost none of this was done with friends or family anywhere near. Many of these writing sessions were brief but others lengthy. All brought a sense of submersion and focus, which makes it sound like swimming under water with a pair of goggles and seeing the wonders of that environment. That is exactly what it is, a diving deep into the inner world of the imagination and seeing what’s going on in there, then bringing the treasure up to the surface, otherwise known as the page.
These writing sessions were possibly further enhanced by the fact that I was entirely with my own thoughts when I was driving the great distance to my destination. As you see from this picture, Vanessa has a snub nose which means the engine is under the seats, which in turn means it’s very noisy in there at 70mph. The audiobooks I had brought along for entertainment were inaudible. The only thoughts I could hear were my own. The only music worth bothering with was stuff I knew well enough to sing along to karaoke style, like Dvorak’s Cello Concerto and Martyn Bennett’s Grit. This provided exercise for the lungs which, having no companion other than the sat-nav, was quite important. But mostly I travelled in silence with my own thoughts. I was therefore more than ready, when chances arose, to get on with the writing.
The first writing session was in a layby on a busy road outside Newhaven, the ferry terminal on the south coast. It was so close to the road the whole van shook every time a car passed, and the traffic was constant…
Next was in the ferry. France was playing Iceland in the European Cup on screens dotted about the ship. Among the French supporters was a brass band whose trumpeter played triumphantly when their team scored and the ‘death march’ when it was Iceland’s turn. Cosily ensconced at a side table near this spectacle, I somehow managed to write. This is a measure of the depth of immersion the project had already garnered.
This is my daughter playing to a valley full of vineyards while her cousin edited a story for my sister, who lives in France and is a storyteller, and I sat alongside and wrote. It was a blazingly hot day and we were under trees with big fleshy leaves and tiny delicious raspberry-like fruit whose name I don’t know. It was one of those rare occasions I managed to write in company.
The rest of the first week was with family, so there was no writing done at all. My attention was required at swimming pools, mountain lakes, picnics, family dinners, late-night discussions and walks. It was a lovely holiday, but the story I was writing was clamouring to get out.
This is an uncomfortable sensation, as any writer or artist will tell you. There were conversations and dramatic goings-on all playing out in my head which occasionally obscured the real life dramas and discussions going on around me. I can only imagine how annoying this must have been for other people, but I did manage to take occasional notes for the novel. There was an awful sensation of being split between several worlds. It was something akin to the ‘dissociation’ that often accompanies trauma. Obviously there was no actual trauma here, only the disconcerting feeling of having travelled a great distance to see loved ones then being unable to be wholly ‘present’.
These two words, dissociation and present, are stolen from my life as a counsellor. Perhaps it is the habit of following an inner monologue, albeit someone else’s, that enables me to foster, cosset and feed my own inner muse in this way and to the extent which seems necessary to write a full-length novel. Obviously there’s a price. It’s like multi-tasking but with bells on. Not everything I did was to the best of my ability.
Imagine my delight then when two friends gave me an open invitation to park my van in front of their house whenever I wanted and for as long as I liked. At last I was equipped with metaphorical goggles and diving equipment. I stayed below the surface until the end of my six chapters, surfacing occasionally for dinner and/or midnight discussions, then back down until I reached the end.
Then, at last, it was time to retrace those 2000+ kilometres, but it wasn’t the end of writing. My first overnight stop heading north was in a picnic area south of Brive. It was typical of the kind found all over France. There were several picnic tables and benches, trees to provide shade from the baking sun, plenty of parking spots and an area which was flat and suitable for overnight campervans, and it was on the side of a hill with a fabulous view. Many of these rest areas also have special waste-dumping facilities for campervans, and toilets, though French toilets, I’m sorry to say, are always worth avoiding. I spent the next morning at the laptop, then drove a while and stopped again in a much larger rest area.
This rest area had a perfect example of hideous French toilets as its centrepiece but was otherwise very well organised. Each car or campervan had its own little space surrounded by hedges and with trees for shade. They also had concrete picnic tables and views across green fields and farms, and no shops screaming at you to spend money like UK service stations. It was the perfect antidote to the motorway and ideal as a writing venue, good enough for me to spend the entire afternoon writing and to leave with a clear plan for the next section.
The rest of the journey through France was so stunningly beautiful I continued driving long after it was sensible and didn’t do what I had planned, which was to wander and pause to write for the next day and a half until it was time for my ferry. Instead I continued through yellow cornfields (with their distinctive smell) under a fading blue sky, then a sunset and into darkness until I was almost at Chartres. In a tiny village called Bonville I turned up a side street and parked, exhausted, crawled into the back, put a tee-shirt over my eyes (because I’d accidentally parked directly under a streetlight and was too tired to move again) and slept until morning.
It wasn’t a suitable writing spot. The shutters beside my window squeaked open early the next day revealing crisp Guipure lace curtains, and exposing my tatty van to their owner. I quickly packed up and left without even having tea (shock … horror) and determined to stop and gather myself at the earliest opportunity.
But the muse had stayed in bed. In fact the muse said she was exhausted and would see me back in Scotland where she knew there were laybys whose locations she knew and liked, preferred even. This inner discussion happened as I hung out in a parking bay near the ferry, seen here.
I felt sure I could coax her back to play at a table on-board the ferry with a sea view. Sadly the boat was full of people with loud voices and all the best views were taken. I tinkered a little in the restaurant then joined the muse in a comfy seat for a doze. The moment had passed.
I stopped several times on the way north through the UK but most of the service stations were about as relaxing as a teenage heavy metal concert outside your window with no police in attendance.
Vanessa had at least played her part throughout the excursion. On the outward journey I was 10km short of my destination when the windscreen wipers stopped working. On the way home, and at roughly the same distance from the finishing line, my skylight came undone. A man in a passing car kindly indicated there was a problem and that the skylight was flapping up and down. You can imagine the hand signals. It was a bit like ‘you’re crazy’ followed by ‘you have a hairstyle like Donald Trump’.
It was great to have travelled and to have overcome my fear about journeying alone, but it was even better to be home. And there’s still plenty of summer left to hit the highways and laybys of Scotland.
Sue Reid Sexton is author of Writing on the Road: Campervan Love and the Joy of Solitude, published by Waverley Books (£8.99, PB) and available now. She is also author of Mavis’s Shoe and Rue End Street; Mavis’s Shoe will be published in Dutch in October.
Danny Scott, children’s author and goal keeper for the Scotland Writers F.C., reveals what it’s really like to play football matches overseas when it’s not the winning or losing that counts but the shared team experience.
Travels with the Scottish Writers F.C.
Danny Scott
Danny Scott
It’s not the winning and losing that counts, it’s the stories.
Football isn’t a matter of life and death. Don’t be ridiculous. It is beautiful, however. Forget Ronaldo’s spray on tan, Rooney’s wages and players’ writhing about on the ground like salted slugs to get their fellow professionals sent off. Remember, instead, Zidane’s volleyed goal at Hampden in the 2002 Champion’s League final – a goal so beautiful that former chief sports writer at the Guardian Richard Williams refuses to watch television replays of it to preserve his memories of seeing it live. Remember, instead, Archie Gemmil’s impudent dribble and goal against Holland at World Cup ’78 – an act of such fluidity and grace that it has been adapted for modern dance.
Beauty is everywhere in football. Sometimes you just need a lifetime to attune your eyes to it.
Many of us who are obsessed the game, had a guide when we were young. Someone who sat us down on a couch or stadium seat and equipped us with the tales we needed to know of our club and country’s greatest moments. This matters. One’s enjoyment of any sport increases proportionally with your knowledge of the stories surrounding each player or team.
All that said, and football’s position as the world’s most popular sport still perplexes some. On average there are over 50 scores a game in basketball, and six in rugby union and league. In football the average is 1.5. Perhaps, as Chris Anderson and David Sally argue in The Numbers Game, this is part of its appeal. Goals become rare moments of beauty or transcendence where a pub or living room can erupt in a focussed moment of pure joy. Arguably, it’s the patient melancholy a football fan must develop that attracts so many writers to the sport. They know how long it takes to create magic. It could be why baseball has traditionally been the writers’ sport of choice in the US.
In fact, there are enough writers-cum-football-lovers across Europe to form several international football teams of writers. I play in goal for one of them: Scottish Writers FC. We play in Scotland’s World Cup 1986 strip because a large proportion of writers’ football is an unashamed act of childhood wish fulfilment.
I first heard of the team in 2012 when working on the inaugural Book Week Scotland. To mark the week, Scottish writers invited their English counterparts, who already had an established team, to play on a frozen November pitch in Glasgow. Scotland won 4-2. Radio 4 made a documentary about the match. Our country’s national writers’ team was off to a great start.
Since those auspicious beginnings, the squad has grown, and travelled Europe. I made my own debut in autumn 2013 for an international double-header against Sweden in Gothenburg, and Austria in Vienna the following weekend.
The match in Gothenburg was the first overseas adventure for Scottish Writers and anticipation levels were high. So high, in fact, that a giddy set of players indulged in a couple of ‘looseners’ the night before the game with the Swedish captain egging us on, assuring us that his team would be doing the same at the Gothenburg Book Fair. They probably weren’t.
Match day arrived and the tall Swedish team made up for their unexpectedly fresh and fit appearance by presenting us with a piper in full military regalia to play the national anthems. Inspired by the bizarre experience of belting out Flower of Scotland to bagpipes as Swedish dog walkers and teenagers stared at us, we raced to a 1-0 lead. Yass. International writers’ football suited us. Had the match ended there we would be bucking the trend of our county’s overseas footballing misadventures. Only it didn’t end there and we were walloped 9-2 by a fitter, more organised, and better team.
And yet, that first away weekend contained so much that is good about writer football. After attending to our astroturf burns back at the hotel, we came together upstairs at a wood-panelled Irish bar to share stories. High on victory, the Swedes were particularly beguiled by our midfielder-cum-Gaelic-poet Pàdraig MacAoidh’s reading, hearing their own history in the old language.
Others shared their work before we mixed the teams to sit down and eat a buffet including delicious lobster – not usually on the menus of Irish bars in Scotland. And despite the emotional and very real physical pain of loss, we had a great night.
Scottish Writers F.C.
A handful of days later, the team dusted itself down, welcomed some new players to the matchday squad and waltzed to a 3-1 victory in Vienna at an actual football stadium, before clearing the pitch so an U14 girls’ game could start. We had our first overseas victory and no-one could take that away from us.
A 2014 trip to Rome has followed since then and the team will travel to Barga in Tuscany, a town with strong Scottish links, for our third match versus the Italians, this September. The Azzurri are desperate for revenge following our famous 2-1 victory in Edinburgh last year – a result that sent shockwaves around the world of writers’ football.
But in many ways, it’s not the winning or losing that counts in writers’ football – even if it does make the weekend that wee bit more enjoyable. Writing is a solitary pursuit and football is anything but. And so it follows that the best part of any international weekend is always the coming together in the evening to share stories and poetry about football and life. The magic lies in making connections with writers in other countries around the love of a game we played in different streets as children, sharing the same dream that we’d one day score a goal for our country.
Danny Scott is the author of Scotland Stars F.C., a series of six football-filled chapter books for readers aged 6-8 from Discover Kelpies (PB, £5.99 each). The final hat-trick of books in the series – Calum’s Hard Knock, Calum’s Tough Match and Calum’s Cup Final – are published on 18 August 2016. He is also a goalkeeper for Scottish Writers F.C.. Follow him on Twitter @ASimpleDan.
In this article Bruce Gilkison, great-great-grandson of the Ettrick Shepherd, explains why he was driven to trace James Hogg’s walks in Scotland and reveals how he was ‘smitten’ by the same landscapes walked by Hogg hundreds of years earlier.
Walking with James Hogg
Bruce Gilkison
In 1802, James Hogg set out on the first of a series of remarkable journeys through Scotland. The most remarkable of all, though, would start long after his death.
He was born in the Scottish Borders in 1770. He grew up in poverty, and was sent out to work on farms and as a shepherd from the age of six. In his late teens he heard a poem by Robert Burns and decided that he, too, should become a great poet. Then he cried, because he remembered he couldn’t read or write. But he never let little things deter him.
James Hogg, portrait by William Nicholson, c. 1815
His journeys through the Highlands and Hebrides were a turning point. They inspired and frightened and educated him. He would return to the Borders and Edinburgh, to a life of chaos and writing and failures and fun. And in time, he would write highly-acclaimed poetry and prose, including a novel which some now believe is one of the greatest books ever written.
In his lifetime he was never fully forgiven by other writers for his lack of education (just six months at school) and the subjects he wrote about – real things like poverty and prostitution, which were uncomfortable for many and were discouraged. His writing lacked ‘gentility’. Wordsworth said he was a man of genius, but had ‘coarse manners’ and ‘offensive opinions’.
Was he a genius? Maybe. Some of his works were ground-breaking. But sometimes his work came to him from heaven – shepherds had a direct link – and he wasn’t always sure which bits to change or reject.
Other aspects of his life were just as ambiguous. It was full of quirkiness and love and sport and music. Of wonderful friendships and spectacular fallings-out. He was frequently penniless, always generous. He had a unique ability, whenever things seemed to be going well, to somehow make sure that they didn’t. Biographer Karl Miller called him ‘the unlikely man who helped give the word “personality” its modern meaning’.
I set out walking through Scotland to find out what was special about his journeys. They’d been life-changing for him, and would be for me. But there’s a later journey too, which began with a strange rediscovery. After he died, his works had been revised and republished: sanitised, over some decades, and made ‘genteel’ for a Victorian audience. They lost their edge as a result, and their readership too, and were nearly forgotten. Then, a hundred years after his death, French Nobel Prize winner André Gide read Confessions of a Justified Sinner in its original form and was ‘voluptuously tormented’ by it. It was the start of a resurrection that would have stunned even Hogg.
In the 21st century, readers, writers and researchers are finding new value in his works. His kind of bluntness has become acceptable. His vivacious female protagonists, created in times when women in literature were inclined to be passive, are still fresh and attractive to modern readers – probably a legacy from his anything-but-passive mother.
Crime-writer Ian Rankin said Hogg’s views on religious extremism are relevant and urgent today. Sir Sean Connery said Justified Sinner is a masterpiece. Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh called it one of the most brilliant books ever written. It ranked third in a recent survey to find the Greatest Scottish Novel.
Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro is a direct descendant of Hogg’s eccentric grandfather (the last person in the Borders to talk with fairies). Modern researchers have found intriguing parallels between Hogg’s writing and hers. Their stories raise difficult questions and refuse to give easy answers.
For me, these journeys were a time of strange new connections. Hogg was known as the Ettrick Shepherd, reflecting his rural roots, and he had a love for the hills. He said he got a headache if the land around him was too flat. Mountains are in my blood too, but I had no idea where this came from. And I love to write too, but until now I didn’t know why. I’d assumed the life of a struggling writer and shepherd in the early 19th century would be an endless grind; he showed how much fun they had. I became fascinated by ancestors, not just my own. And my bond with Scotland, which I’d visited only briefly before, turned out to be more profound than I’d ever imagined.
Hogg’s travel journals spoke of magic and mystery; of fairies, witches, ghosts and monsters. These were oddly familiar to me – similar beings are alive and well in other places I’ve lived, in Africa, the Pacific and even, quite recently, in New Zealand.
I met with descendants of people he knew – of dukes and writers, and of a famous girlfriend (we had to work out what really went on, or didn’t, between them). I searched for descendants of his illegitimate daughters. I visited houses and castles and pubs he’d stayed in. I slept in a house his grandparents lived in – a century older than the oldest surviving building in New Zealand. In a day of walking in the Highlands I found three inns he’d visited, all still open for business.
I was smitten by the same landscapes. The journeys were not always comfortable, but this was usually self-inflicted. I raced with him through the mountains one day – could I match the pace of a shepherd a couple of centuries earlier? And I went through areas of wilderness just as wild now as then, though the masses of eternal snow and ice he saw have gone.
I competed in a sports event, founded by Hogg in 1827 to promote ‘cheerfulness’ in times of social change; it’s still doing that today. I went to Canada for a ‘James Hogg and his World’ conference, an event he could never have imagined. And I found that it’s likely the game of rugby was first played not by William Webb Ellis in 1823 but by Hogg, Walter Scott and a few hundred others, in the Borders in 1815. (The game was replayed recently as a 200 year celebration.)
Bruce Gilkison, not winning a sports event founded by his great-great-grandfather
Novelist James Robertson said he thought Hogg and I would have been great walking companions ‘but not without a falling out or two along the way’. It’s true – our flaws would clash. I came to know him and love him but never to understand him completely. If I tried to predict what he would do next I usually got it wrong.
For me, every day of walking was a discovery and a delight, even in the rain. Maps in the book show Hogg’s main routes, and an appendix covers some of mine. (Another appendix shows what he carried – almost nothing – and my own 21st century baggage.)
If time and opportunity allow, please try some of these journeys on foot. Frédéric Gros said walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method. To really know Scotland, there’s no better way.
Bruce Gilkison is a New Zealander, and a great-great-grandson of Scottish writer James Hogg. He is a keen climber and traveller who has lived and worked in the Pacific, Africa, North America and Europe. He has a passion for social and environmental issues, and a love for the wild and wonderful. He walked through Scotland to find out what was remarkable about Hogg and his journeys. He learned about his eccentric ancestor’s bumpy road through life, and his lively posthumous journey in the 21st century.
Walking With James Hogg: The Ettrick Shepherd’s Journeys Through Scotland by Bruce Gilkison is out now published by Edinburgh University Press (PB, £14.99). Gilkison will be speaking about Walking with James Hogg at the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival on 22nd August: details of this event,’In the footsteps of James Hogg’, are here.
Ronald Turnbull uncovers the varied geology of the Scottish seashore, and explains why Scotland’s coast is uniquely fascinating from the shell beaches of the Hebrides to the twisted grey cliffs of Galloway and the red seastacks of Dunbar, from the mudflats and saltmarsh of the Solway to the basalt caves of Mull.
Most of us love the seaside and Scotland’s wildly indented coast abounds in possibilities. A Handbook of Scotland’s Coasts is intended to feed your natural delight in getting to the coast. It is a sharing of enthusiasm for places to explore and things you might do once you leave your car or bike and get right down to the shore. So there are suggestions for great days out and discovering the many activities on offer around Scotland’s coasts.
Each chapter in the book is written by someone who really knows and loves his or her subject. Leading Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley considers coastal wildlife whilst historian Michael Kerrigan takes us on a marvellously eclectic tour of our coastal culture. Hebridean sailor and poet Ian Stephen takes us around Scotland’s many islands, and Fi Martynoga explores coastal flora and fauna and foraging possibilities. Ronald Turnbull uncovers the geology of our seashore, and here he explains why Scotland’s coast is uniquely fascinating:
“Scotland small?” asks Hugh MacDiarmid – the words are carved in beach granite from Caithness in the wall of the Scottish Parliament. And his poem of 1974 describes the variety of life in one small patch of heather. How much less small, then, when you take the whole of Scotland’s coastline: 6,718km, according to the Ordnance Survey, for the mainland alone, and three times that if you add in all the islands.
From the shell beaches of the Hebrides to the twisted grey cliffs of Galloway and the red seastacks of Dunbar, from the mudflats and saltmarsh of the Solway to the basalt caves of Mull, Scotland has almost every kind of coastal formation there is; from almost every age of the earth, halfway back to when the planet cooled enough to congeal into continents. And with the wandering of those continents, Scotland’s cliffs and boulders come from the southern oceans, and unknown places even earlier.
Understanding of it starts at a scrap of sea cliff called Siccar Point, just south of Cove Harbour on the Berwickshire coast. In 1788, at the full flowering of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, James Hutton and John Playfair came ashore here from a small boat. And what they saw, embedded in the coastline of today, was a scrap of coastline from 360 million years ago.
The rock here is the harsh, layered greywacke – a dark, grainy type of sandstone – of the Southern Uplands, tilted up on edge by some cataclysm (by, we now know, the collision of Scotland and England in the Ordovician period). A few yards out to sea, the seaworn slabs form small upright walls, ready to tear out the bottom of their boat if they’d been careless with the oars. A few yards up from the tideline, just the same small walls, but half-buried in red sandstone.
Those small walls were carved by some much earlier sea: a sea that had risen, and dropped its sand around them, layer upon layer all up the cliffs above. In the bottom layer of that red sand are sea-smoothed pebbles, the beach shingle of that long-ago shoreline.
But what of the tilted greywacke layers underneath? Before whatever force had raised them on edge, they too had fallen, grain by grain, layer on layer, upon the floor of some even earlier ocean. And the grains of sand that formed the greywacke: from what even earlier content had they been washed out by rain and wind of what even more distant age? John Playfair’s mind “seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.
Scotland? No, not small at all. The rock platform at Siccar Point – just big enough for a BBC crew filming ‘Men of Rock’ last time I stood on it – is a three-minute trailer for an epic movie two billion years long. The tilted greywacke is the ocean floor that once lay between Scotland and England. When the two countries collided, about 450 million years ago, this sea-bed sludge was raised into the open air, tilted over, and crumpled like a used paper hanky. Those grey rocks lie within what we now call the Southern Uplands, emerging as sea cliffs at Mull of Galloway and Fast Castle. The Old Red Sandstone on top – by Scottish standards quite a young sandstone – is desert dunes and flash flood gravel, rubble eroded out from the great Caledonian mountain chain. Those mountains, Himalaya-high, rose as the two bits of continent crunched together. Their worn-away roots now make the Scottish Highlands.
A Handbook of Scotland’s Coasts: The Essential Guide for Beachcombers, Walkers, Wildlife Lovers, Rockpoolers, Birdwatchers, Foragers, Fossil-hunters and History Buffs, edited by Fi Martynoga, is out now published by Saraband Books (PB, £12.99)
Kenneth McConkey introduces the ‘eccentric, impudent, pretentious and wild’ work of Scottish artist and adventurer Arthur Melville, the pioneering guru of the ‘Glasgow Boys’. McConkey discusses his career trajectory and highlights Melville’s international outlook and style.
Eccentric, Impudent, Pretentious and Wild: the Art of Arthur Melville
Kenneth McConkey
There was more than one Arthur Melville. Within his remarkable body of work the Orientalist artist-adventurer becomes guru of the ‘Glasgow Boys’; the glamorous hispagnoliste acts as reinterpreter of homeland hills; and the cool recorder of Venice and Tangier provides stimulating forays into portraiture and still-life painting. This bubbling creative stream presents enormous challenges. Melville the proto-abstractionist stands in apparent contradiction to Melville the would-be storyteller. Clean progression is denied; dates are to be distrusted; and at any point he reserves the right to revisit, reinvent and rework past experience. In all, he could lay a faultless wash of colour, place the cutting edges of architecture with acuity, and his observation of crowds, the moving masses of humanity, was unmatched.
During his early career critics were compelled to find new words to describe his work. He painted in ‘blobs’ and ‘spots’, and the neologism ‘blottesque’ was frequently deployed. To some, adopting a catch-all term to refer to almost anything radical, he was simply an Impressionist ‘à l’Écossais’, ‘eccentric’, ‘impudent’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘wild’. Yet the most interesting work of any generation is made by those who cast themselves adrift from the friendships, tensions, movements and mainstreams of youth, and go on to develop new inner enthusiasms. This was the case with Melville in mid-career, after his engagement to Ethel Croall, when he went to live in Surrey, painted the wondrous Chalk Cutting and spent what were, as it happened, the last years of his life attempting grand New Testament scenes, the visionary character of which would carry him beyond quotidian Naturalism. These were, to some extent, an attempt to rediscover that unprecedented freedom in the handling of oil paint, found in Audrey and her Goats his earlier foray into Shakespeare. However, having contracted typhoid on a trip to Spain, he died prematurely, at the age of forty-nine, in August 1904.
Nothing in Melville’s background predisposed him to the exalted sense of visual drama that emerges in his work, save perhaps an accurate eye and steady hand. He was born at Loanhead-of-Guthrie, in Forfarshire (now Angus), the fourth son of a coachman in a family of nine. At the age of thirteen he started commuting from East Linton, where the family had moved, to Edinburgh for drawing lessons. His mother, Margaret J. Wann, a ‘pious and hard-working’ woman, disapproved, we are told, of his interest in drawing, but to no avail. In 1875, his picture A Scotch Lassie (unlocated) was accepted at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and was purchased by his father’s employer, James Annandale, who apparently persuaded the Melvilles that their son had a future as an artist. By this stage he was a pupil of the genre painter, James Campbell Noble, attending drawing classes at the RSA Schools, and within three years was sending pictures such as A Cabbage Garden to the Royal Academy (RA) in London.
However, Paris, not London, was where the most respected masters taught. Thus, in 1878, the young Melville set off for the summer months on the French coast and to register at the atelier Julian in the autumn. His arrival in Paris coincided with the closing weeks of the Exposition Universelle, and for a youth the experience of its unveiling of the European schools of painting must have been overwhelming. If, however, there was one work in the exhibition destined to have a lasting impact it was surely Mariano Fortuny’s Tribunal de la Alhambra.
For the next two years Melville remained for the most part in France, working at Granville and Cancale, and in 1879, at Grez-sur-Loing, the burgeoning artists’ colony five miles south of Fontainebleau, while in 1880 he called at Honfleur, probably on his return to Scotland. Throughout these wanderings, he was looking for peasant models who would pose en plein air. The inspiration for such studies was undoubtedly the work of the rural Naturalists of the école de Millet, now enjoying state patronage in France. If the soft ‘kailyard genre’ of Campbell Noble and other Lothian painters was supplanted by a stern seriousness of purpose in A Normandy Shepherd, the need for diverting human interest led him back in Old Enemies to a scene in which a peasant mother protects her child from a frightening flock of turkeys. There may be more to this innocent encounter than meets the eye.
We are delighted to show some spreads from the book below.
Arthur Melville: Adventures In Colour is out now published by NGS Publishing (PB, £18.95)
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