In his latest review, David Robinson savours the passion for woodwork and the outdoors which exudes from Callum Robinson’s debut memoir, and the family stories that are revealed within the wood.
Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman
By Callum Robinson
Published by Doubleday
Some David Robinsons are exceptional. Not me, but there’s a craftsman with the same name who lives in East Lothian and who can handle wood so well that he can produce miracles like these:
https://www.callumrobinson.org/journal/conjuring-wildlife-from-wood
His son Callum is similarly talented, though he brings different skills to the woodwork table: those of a high-end furniture maker, of an entrepreneur, and above all, someone with the skill to write well about both.
Now I know little about entrepreneurship and even less about woodwork, so I am hardly an ideal reader for Callum Robinson’s engrossing debut Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman. I haven’t held a chisel in my hand since I was about 12 and even then my accomplishments didn’t stretch beyond making a basic picture frame. Many of Robinson’s readers may, I suppose, be equally ignorant about how extracting old or cold resin from a knot is like digging toffee from a tooth cavity, or how a last-minute slip of a knife might ruin a tabletop worth thousands. Like me, they won’t have wandered in sawmill yards full of old-growth hardwoods, have a clue how long it takes for a log to dry out (a year per inch and then some), or know that yew sawdust is as toxic as iroko dust. Let’s face it, they probably won’t even know what iroko looks like in the first place.
For all that, Ingrained held my attention throughout. Much of that is down to Robinson’s clear love of his job, his delight at working with “the ghostly, almost luminescent” sycamore, the “vivid orange” yew or “tense, fretful” cherry or the wondrous elm “the tenacious, swaggering, dandy of the forest”. We pick up on the passion, then the challenge, of turning designs into 3-D reality. All good, all interesting enough, and to those of us who have never, say, fashioned anything out of a tree’s burr knots, even enlightening.
But it’s always going to take more than that, isn’t it? Process, design, materials: this is the stuff of the specialist magazine, not something to stir the antennae of the general reader. Beautiful as Callum Robinson’s credenzas, display cabinets and travel trunks undoubtedly are – the kind of luxury goods that formed the basis of the first business he and his designer wife Marisa Giannasi had – we want more. We need what we always need: story.
And this is where Ingrained really scores. Robinson’s first business implodes when an order on which Robinson and his small team had banked on getting – enough for half a year’s work – evaporates. Suddenly, their business – built up over a decade – looks doomed. There’s no chance of an overdraft: if anything, the bank will be wanting to call in its debts. They’ll have to lay off people they care about. Selling off offcuts as kiln-dried firewood is the only thing they can think of, and even that won’t touch the sides of their debt. Bankruptcy is within touching distance.
When Robinson spots an empty shop in Linlithgow, he starts dreaming again. If they’re going to go down, at least they could go down swinging, trying to sell speculatively built furniture. It’s a gamble, and if it works at all, it will have to work quickly. But is West Lothian ready for the kind of prices they need, prices way beyond anything else on the High Street? The lease is signed, and the countdown to opening day begins. He can hardly sleep: “inside my head excitement limbers up for its night-time battle with panic.”
Tense as this is, the general reader needs yet more. The countdown to the big day is the feature of so many television DIY shows, as is the last-minute flurry of problem-solving. Put the two together and it’s still just a business magazine feature running along predictable lines.
What gives Ingrained its heft is something else altogether: its psychological honesty. Both David and Callum Robinson, father and son, seem to be rather thrawn individuals. Both have started businesses after setbacks, and Callum is honest enough to admit that, as a “frankly loathsome” adolescent, he sometimes resented both being roped into his father’s business and being unable to do so many of the tasks expected of him. For five years, he worked alongside his father: it wasn’t a conscious career, just something to do while drifting through his late teens and early twenties.
This being a Scottish family saga, many of his feelings went unexpressed at the time. When things went wrong, Callum got angry; when they went well, he kept it to himself. He has, he admits, a hair-trigger temper, mistrusts most people in authority, is useless at small talk, and almost incapable of talking instruction, even when he realises he is out of his depth. For years, he has suspected that his father, the more studied and steadier craftsman of the two, thought his son too incautious in business. It must have been galling when his dad seemed to have been proved right.
Callum, we should not be surprised to read, is occasionally exasperated at some of the people who drift into his Linlithgow shop: time wasters, sticky-fingered children, or anyone who fails to grasp that these should reflect the long hours spent designing and crafting bespoke pieces of furniture. But if all of this is ingrained in his character, so too is its corollary: a deep appreciation of clients and craftspeople who share his love of wood and woodworking. In this, father and son – who were never really far apart in the first place – find reconciliation and respect. The drifter has found a purpose, and has firmly locked onto it. “Engaging with the natural world through expressive manual labour speaks to something ancient within us,” he concludes. “Furniture-making is as fine a way of making a living as there is.”
Impressively, the craftsmanship on display in this book isn’t all about woodwork. Although there are a couple of pages of sources and acknowledgements at the end, within the text itself, there’s never so much as a hint that Callum Robinson ever had any ambitions to be a writer in the first place. Yet not only can he write well, but his storytelling structure is satisfyingly complex, looping back chronologically in a way that is every bit as balanced and engineered as the rocking chair prototype he makes for his Linlithgow shop.
“From such crooked timber as humanity is made of,” Kant famously observed, “nothing entirely straight can be made.” We general readers are quite happy with that: straight is straightforwardly boring. Things that are knotted and rounded and crafted and complex – like David Robinson’s table otters or his son Callum’s memoir – are infinitely more enjoyable.
Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson is published by Doubleday, priced £22.
Trindadian-Scottish poet and prose writer Anthony Vahni Capildeo has been consistently producing some of the most breathtaking poetry in the country for the last twenty years. Their latest collection, Polkadot Wounds, continues this run of success. With shades of their 2016 Forward-winning Measures of Expatriation, these poems explore ecopoetics, queerness, faith, and finding continuity both despite and through travel and lockdown. Read four poems from this gorgeous new collection below.
Polkadot Wounds
By Anthony Vahni Capildeo
Published by Carcanet Press
A SHORT PRAYER TO COFFEE WHICH CROSSES THE SEA
Prayer lurks in the uncertain air between poetry and philosophy, in the heat at the coppery base of the cezve, in the steam of the human breath meeting the haar of a northern morning where the sun rises orange over a bitter sea.
Witness this endeavour of faith in the poet Helen and the philosopher Aaron’s Leeds coffee-house conversational book project. Additionally witness the accompanying assertions of faith, such as the faith in almonds, and the acts of faith accompanying these additional assertions of faith. Witness the extension of faith to California, a land whose existence remains unproven to me by experience: California also of oranges and salt water, California of wildfires, California of sequoias, California producer of eighty per cent of the world’s almonds, a land of silica mines, fistfuls of protein, and air miles.
Prayer lurks in the agon of poetry and philosophy. Rejoice therefore, as if divinely caffeinated. Rejoice even in the side effects. Rejoice in the used grounds. Hosanna from the straw men of argument, rising like a struggle and reduced to streamers. Hosanna from the organs in subtle states of damage from false yoga, felt and undetected, hot, compressed, suffered, diagnosed. Hosanna from the souls of the insects and minerals crushed to make paint for gaudy Greek and Roman statues, before those icons were whitened for much later museums into the likeness of whitened cemeteries for much later colonizers’ great wars.
Prayer lurks in the exalted origins of coffee on our originator continent; in the upraising of Yemen and the grandeur of Yemen’s port of Mocha, original exporter of the brilliant beans and lender of its rich name to our lower-case blend named mocha; in the upraising of the intoxicating civilization of Ethiopia; the upraising of the sophisticated thirst of Egypt. Raise up these primary hosts of the world’s coffee-houses. Praise to their early enliveners. Praise to the Sufi mystics, frequenters of the coffee-houses. Praise praise praise to the unnumbered branches and unusual grounds of their debates. Praise to the acerbic throat of the great grey wolf, the Ottoman Empire, popularizer of coffee to its tiny kittycat rival, Venice, Venice who played catchup by opening its own café in 1647, the first in the west.
Rest in blessed memory, Jacob, called ‘the Jew’ by an English diarist. Delurk from history how the newness of Jacob’s business was also a return, three hundred and sixty years after the king expelled all Jews from England. Live, readers and coffee-drinkers, and think to praise the good taste of the modern-minded Jacob; hot on the heels of the Venetians, he opened England’s first coffee-house, in 1651, in Oxford, that city where the learned reputedly talk and profess.
INFERNO: ONE SIZE FITS MOST
Mr Alighieri, I’m curious.
Who cleaned your shoes, when you got back from hell?
What brand are they? And how hard are your soles?
You stampeded through the bitter wanwood;
at least a twig, if not a yellow flower
must’ve stuck. You were super unsure
about your footing. That’s why you give us
instructions how to steady our feet.
I wonder. Sometimes, on your way, you fell
asleep. I understand you slept in hell.
I’ve almost done that. With your drastic drop-
and-pass-out, you’re like someone taking cover
from natural catastrophes: drop and hold on.
The good interpreters come pigeoning.
They nod: that sleep’s a trance; that one’s a rapture;
this time, he’s in celestial ecstasy…
No, no! Even in hell, you were being
repaired. Did a bluesilver angel bend
lower than earthward, feathering footwear
smooth and clean for you? Did the temperature
changes help with the dirt? Steam-treatment
in the adulterers’ swirl? An ice rinse later?
Anyway, you stepped up. Saw the stars again.
You’re saved. So you don’t have a ghost. That sigh
at my shopping-mall anxiety
is Vergil’s shade, perhaps, kit list in hand
summed up in one word: FOLLOW. You swapped out
that list for one word: LOVE. I want to know,
Mr Alighieri, who cleaned your shoes?
And which nameless guest forgot his jacket
in my pinewood wardrobe? Many people
stayed while I was away. I’m wearing it.
Scarlet leaves are crawling from my pockets.
“DOON YER TEA, EAT YER BREAD”
A faint resentment paints
the spiral staircase walls
blue all over again,
unheimlich as a school
bazaar, as gilded eggs,
as rebonding plaster.
Footsteps. Stop one floor down.
Is that too soon. Or not.
They aren’t yours? Colour this
now, collect it like likes,
call it no name, no name.
I have seen the best minds
of my generation
turned into deer. About
time, too. Fuck resonance.
Streetside, virus baubles
the heatstroke jetty air.
Lyric! Cannae come in.
Vampiric lyric, you’re
banished. O my threshold,
my threshold, threshing floor
and sea floor, loud as foil.
O my deer, my hamlet,
my flowering wall, O
ladder to breakages,
nightmare’s gown, summoning moonvowels. Exeunt.
I will go out. I will
Breathe. Breath is the spirit.
When’s a door not a door?
Too many empty rooms
NEVER HAVE I EVER
I’ve been bending the ear of God
for years, sure and impermanent
as rust water saddens the dyes
pressed from buddleia leaves and grass
on rags nobody thought to hem
before cutting, and now I do
think of it; won’t do it though
when you tell me to stop praying
for you you’re saying stop something
I can’t help. All neighbourhoods need
a Utility Queer but I
never was a dab hand with a
toolbox. I’ll kick any bucket.
Take away my prayer, make me the
Neighbourhood Futility Queer.
Teach me how to swear to the end
of the breakwater, in Polish,
and all the way back, in Greek. I’ll
tell you the one about the bear
I heard in Ireland. Bonfires
on the beach. Secondary smoke…
Mari Juana, herb of wisdom,
clinging to the clifftop cyclist.
You’ve never done illegal drugs?
Too many killings. Hear my prayer.
Polkadot Wounds by Anthony Vahni Capildeo is published by Carcanet Press, priced £12.99.
Outlander meets Shōgun in this romantic time-travel adventure from Scottish-Japanese author Poppy Kuroki. When Isla MacKenzie travels to Japan to learn more about her ancestry, a vicious typhoon hurls her through a strange white gate and back to 1877, amid the dawn of the Satsuma Rebellion – the conflict that ended the samurai. In this thrilling extract, follow Isla as she seeks shelter from a storm and gets more than she bargained for…
Gate to Kagoshima
By Poppy Kuroki
Published by Magpie
The cold set deep beneath Isla’s skin and shakes racked her body. She had to find her way back to the road or she might suffer symptoms of exposure. While there wouldn’t be any cars out – people’s phones would be beeping with weather warnings of the sudden storm – Isla promised herself that once on the road she could find shelter. She couldn’t even tell where the shrine building was.
Blinded now with heavier rain, her outstretched fingers found a wall. Exhausted, she stood there with her head bowed, but the stone wall offered no protection from the weather. Isla stepped close to the wall and rested her forehead against it. She didn’t know how long she’d been lost in the rainfall. It could be hours – it felt like hours, certainly – but it might only be minutes. The wet had sunk deep into her trainers, soaking her socks. Her clothes clung to her skin and she could barely feel her freezing fingers.
Perhaps it would be better to hunker down here and wait it out. This typhoon or storm, whatever it was, lashed at her clothes, blowing her off balance, a fierce and sudden maelstrom in the middle of a city.
She had never experienced anything like it.
She wished she had worn more than her leggings and hoodie. She wished she had stayed in the hotel. She wished she was anywhere but here.
Isla pulled out her phone and flipped it open. It was dead, fat droplets splashing on to the screen reflecting her scared face. Her breath ragged, she pulled her hood over her head.
The wind wailed above like she was stuck somewhere in the mountains, not in a city. A beast raged in the clouds, roaring like a battle of gods.
Isla squinted into the grey. The murk was clearing in one particular space. There! A white torii gate. A back entrance to the shrine grounds, maybe?
It didn’t matter, as long as she could get out of here. In twenty minutes, Isla promised herself, she’d be in her hotel about to step into a scalding shower, and tomorrow she’d be back at the café to see the friendly barista, regaling him with her tale of getting lost in the rain.
But as she headed towards the torii gate, things felt more wrong.
Her fingers tingled, pins and needles prickling her digits. Dizziness assaulted her, a wave of what felt like drunkenness, and she stumbled. She fell against a stone wall as rain thrashed her face once more.
What was happening?
Isla clutched the wall, breathing hard. Where was she? She needed to reach, well, somewhere. She had a vague sense of a hotel, the scent of coffee, a smiling young man…
Whispers surrounded her and she cowered, wondering if she were hallucinating. Her head turned as she searched for where the voices came from. But, try as she might, Isla couldn’t make out what they were saying. What she could hear felt like murmurs from beyond the veil, encouraging her, yet also mocking.
‘What?’ she croaked, forcing herself upright. She took several staggering steps forward. The weather was disorientating her, making her doubt herself.
She wanted to see cars, people with umbrellas being whipped away by the wind, the glow of streetlights. But everywhere was greyish white. The mist was strange, an otherworldly fog that had no business here among this heavy deluge. Isla made her way forward, her steps dragging. She had to find civilisation soon. Wasn’t that why she was here? She couldn’t quite remember.
The tingling intensified, spreading across all her limbs. A voice whispered, making her start. She struggled to think. The rain was ice on her skin, or was this because of who was talking to her?
The shape of a tree emerged like a mirage in the fog. Isla huddled beneath it and curled into a ball, confusion and desperation mingling as one in her petrified heart.
The wind chimes jangled, a requiem of dread.
She must have slept.
When she opened her eyes orange streaked the sky, setting the clouds aflame as the sun sank beneath the horizon. Isla was stiff and uncomfortable, chill and damp still deep in her skin. She pulled herself to her feet. Every movement felt sluggish and exhaustion settled in her bones.
Isla shuddered in the winter air. She badly needed to get back to her hotel, peel off her clothes, and take a long, hot shower. That had been no normal storm, but at least it was over.
She looked around her. The lion statues stared back, frozen scowls on their carved faces, as she tried to make up her mind which direction she needed to go. She couldn’t see the buildings from earlier, though that was likely because it was getting dark.
Isla felt confused but wasn’t at first sure why. Then she realised there were no streetlights or lights from buildings in sight, nor the sound of traffic. But why? She was in a built-up area.
Isla picked her way through the rapidly falling darkness, searching for a light, a voice, a car engine. Anything.
Fear pricked her skin. She felt more alone than she ever had done in her life.
Had she passed out? Had she been blown away? Had the typhoon caused so much damage it had knocked out the city’s power? Yes, that was likely.
But she found herself hurrying forward all the same.
The clouds cleared, their retreat so rapid it was almost unnatural. Stars glinted above, lighting her way. And there was the wall of the shrine. For a moment, she was pleased to see something she recognised.
Isla’s fingers grazed the stone, her breathing loud in her ears. Her hair stuck to her neck, her soaked hoodie doing little to ward off the chill. She pulled down her hood and raked fingers through her red locks as a new sensation flooded her.
As long as she lived, she never wanted to see this shrine again. She glanced at the building, to where the rope gently swung. Along the roof were painted symbols, a vertical cross within a circle.
She turned her back on the building and rubbed her hands together.
Ahead, there was nothing. No road, no concrete path. Before her was a cinder track and grass and starlight.
Long grass caressed her shins. None of this made sense. Kagoshima was full of cafés, roads and shops, with a bright, twenty-four-hour convenience store every fifty feet.
All there was now in the starlight was a hill and a bamboo forest ahead, its stalks pale. A half-moon emerged from behind a cloud, bathing her surroundings in silver.
A movement in a nearby group of trees caught her eye. A woman emerged from the shadows, wearing a kimono and obi belt, both grey in the darkness, for the faint moonlight sucked the colour from the world. Isla’s heart lifted. The woman had a youthful face with her hair in a bun at the back of her head. She looked like somebody on her way to a festival, her straw sandals silent in the grass. Her short steps were careful and delicate, as though she was trying not to be seen. Was she lost, too?
The girl jumped violently when she saw Isla, her eyes wide.
‘Excuse me,’ said Isla in her limited Japanese. ‘Do you know how to get to—’
The girl shrieked, almost falling as she backed away. Her tight kimono skirt hindered her as she pushed her way into the trees, screaming a single word.
‘Yōkai!’
Gate to Kagoshima by Poppy Kuroki is published by Magpie, priced £16.99.
Them! is the must-read new collection from Harry Josephine Giles. A quite unforgettable dive into what it means to be trans, how it is lived and politicised, Giles writes with characteristic ingenuity in a series of poems that will stay with you for days to come.
Them!
By Harry Josephine Giles
Published by Picador
Materials
Each day the world was more girls. Each day greener
and deeper and: brickwork, girls; bin lorry, girls;
three loaves, three girls; vitamin supplements, girls
rattling bones in the morning coop. We were girls.
We grieved. We bit. We waded from girls to women
and were girls anew: sticky, sorrowful, spite
tucked intimate like cool calzone. We
ejected from girls to men and were girls anew,
violent smooth. Girls whooped out those ‘Young-Girl’s
way of being is to be nothing’ guys,
those guys! Those guys ratioed by the specific
labour of their girlhoods, pores and butter.
At any rate: more girls, more peace. No?
Why else does girls the triple goddess grant
to the incandescent pavement, whyever else
the warheads girls, cyclopean, under desert?
Fingers are too much girls to tell any further.
Each good day the words more girls, and louder.
I Love to Hear Her Speak
a cling peach slithering out from its tin
a lip gloss ground into paste by the teeth
a burnt clutch scribbling down from the pass
a cowpat drilled by extravagant heels
a hangnail snatching a lark by the throat
a wire thong under a cage crinoline
a crazed screen slicing a covetous thumb
a quotetweet high on the sodium moona plum duff smelting its thruppenny bit
a lightbulb loose in a bucket of knives
a string cheese stubbornly whole in the pipes
a war pig through the dimensional gate
a salt lick slapping a jellyfish sting
a blessed bass warily bowed at the bridge
Why do we not everywhere see innumerable
transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion?
But Charlie, I vary a body:
deforest my face and force
volcanos from my chest.
May I stroke your liberal beard
in survival? May you and the lads
see me pass saying fit, fit, fittest?
Ach, Charlie! My gametes
rest in their holsters, never
to be unslung, be sprung,
be origin, be stringing
descent. (Selection is choice
and coercion.) The proof of me
is a finch, two finches, eighteen
finches (vegetarian,
vampire, large ground, small ground,
grey) known for their marked
profusion of beak form and function.
A charm, a trembling, a trimming.
Oh Charlie, the flock of me settles
the branches of your damned
ineluctable equation,
twittering . . . Please, Charlie!
Forgive the annotation.
Favour the preservation.
May a transsexual hear a bird?
May a transsexual hear a bird?
When I, a transsexual, hear a bird,
I am a transsexual hearing a bird;
when you hear a bird you are
a person hearing a bird. That is,
I am specific, you are general.
When a bird sounds in a poem
it is a symbol of hearing a bird,
a symbol of a person being
in relation to nature. Only
a person may hear this. Only a person
may hear a bird and write a poem
on hearing a bird and in so doing
praise the gentle dissolution
of personhood or elsewise strive
towards the clear and questionless presence
of an unworded bird, being.
Were I to attempt such a poem again,
I would be a transsexual writing
a poem on hearing a bird – I note
that ‘transsexual’ is the legal
adjective for a person with
the protected characteristic of
‘gender reassignment’ in
the Equality Act (2010),
Section 7, which applies
to any person at any stage
of changing any aspect of sex,
and so to make a claim of employment
discrimination I must have
the capital, social and economic,
to bring such a claim and also be
a transsexual – hence incapable
of dissolving without addressing
my transsexuality to the bird.
Even were I to fail to sound
out my transsexuality,
it would remain in the title, unsilent,
a framing device, regardless, and so
once again you would be hearing
a transsexual hearing a bird.
But now I am too preoccupied
with how to source testosterone –
a Class C Controlled Substance
under the Misuse of Drugs Act
(1971) carrying,
for supply, a maximum tariff
of fourteen years’ imprisonment,
and/or a heavy fine – to give
to my friend, and how to publish a zine
detailing how to negotiate
and circumvent the Gender Identity
Clinic system, given waiting
times for first appointments now
range from three to seven years,
without attracting the critical social
media attention that would shut down
any explicit alternative routes,
and whether the fact I have not heard
from my trans sister in over a month
means she is in a severe mental
health crisis or merely working,
and whether I have the strength and love
to call her, to remember to hear
a bird. If I cannot remember
to hear a bird I cannot write
a poem. How can I lack the strength
and love to call? Because I have not
heard enough birds. Because I am scared
of what it will mean if she answers. Because
I am scared of what it will mean if she doesn’t.
Because I have been working in far
too many political meetings scolding
parliamentarians to call
or hear a bird. I tilt the window
on its catch so I, a transsexual,
may hear the birds singing. If I
may hear the birds singing the sound
may lift me from myself and my
working conditions. Then the self,
the conditions, and the listening day.
Them! by Harry Josephine Giles is published by Picador, priced £10.99.
Can joy be found amidst extinction? How can we write of the natural world in an era of widespread climate anxiety? These are the questions asked of Kathleen Jamie’s highly-anticipated new book, Cairn, in David Robinson’s latest review.
Cairn
By Kathleen Jamie
Published by Sort Of Books
I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of Georges Couvier. Same with the word ‘eustatic’. Yet both hover around the edges of Cairn, Kathleen Jamie’s new collection of prose poems, micro-essays and personal notes, twin ghosts at the feast.
Couvier (1769-1832) was the French naturalist and zoologist who first proved that animals could become extinct, that catastrophies such as rising sea levels (‘eustatic’ is the relevant adjective here) had happened. Until then, people had thought that the living examples of fossilised animals were around somewhere, but we just hadn’t found them yet.
You might well pause to reflect on just how short a span of time has elapsed between the ‘discovery’ of past extinctions of life on earth (as Couvier first expounded in 1813) and the anthropogenic threats to the planet right now. But Cairn spells out the message even more starkly. ‘It’s been a while,’ Jamie writes, ‘since we could turn to the natural world for reassurance, since we could map our individual lives against the eternal cycle of the seasons, our griefs against the consolation of birds, the hills.’
Thirty years ago, walking out of Stromness in the middle of a storm, and wondering whether she could make a poem about the two leading lights guiding ships safely through the Sound of Hoy, it was all so different. Back then, she could imagine one of the lights flashing out a message that nature was greater than us, that however much we harmed the planet, it would still allow us to live on it. ‘No child born since then’ she writes, ‘can believe that the natural world is so resilient. Now it sounds like out and out denial.’
Jamie has always chafed at narrow definitions of nature writing that divide it off from everyday realities. In her three previous books of essays – Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) – she has broadened it to include such things as cancer cells, archaeological digs, and lunar eclipses. John Berger’s review of Findings (‘A sorceress of the essay form. Never exotic, down to earth, she renders the indefinable to the reader’s ear’) could easily apply to all three.
The tone here is different. Still meditative, still unpretentious, her writing is now broken into fragments, many only a page long, like stones gathered on a walk and laid down as a cairn. Each, though, is linked by one overriding thought – the kind, she writes, that hits people when they have turned sixty, and start to imagine the world without themselves in it: what kind of planet are we handing on? And (a secondary question though we secretly fear we know the answer already) what happens next?
Jamie has said that she likes to think of her essays in the Findings Trilogy as ‘extended poems’. I never understood that: it’s as if she doesn’t accept that the essay form is wide enough to encompass that glorious mix of memoir, travel and nature that she pours into them. With Cairn, however, the comparison works far better. The pieces here are mainly prose, but the effect is that of poetry. A thought is seeded without detailed description in one piece and expanded – again, subtly and without too much elaboration – in the next, so that it blooms retrospectively, unwatered by words. In one piece, for example, Jamie remembers being in Primary 2 and mishearing a book called ‘Days in the Sun’ as ‘Daisies in the Sun’. Outside, it’s a clear summer’s day, ‘a magic high blue sky above the factories, the ICI works, the steelworks’. And that’s pretty much it. In the next piece, she and her siblings are clearing out the attic of the family house in a heatwave and handling a Doulton figurine of Summer’s Day - ‘but wildfires were raging, incinerating birds’ nests, torching toads and snakes’ … It ends with this line ‘dear god even our summer days’. And precisely because Jamie doesn’t need to spell out the (presumably) intervening half century or so of pollution from those factories and steelworks, her point about today’s headlines of ecological devastation blighting memories of a happier past sinks in all the deeper. Miek Zwamborn’s ghostly artwork, fading and delicate, underlines these evocations of loss.
So yes, this is a bleak book, but why shouldn’t it be? The ‘common curlew, as the old books have it,’ writes Jamie, is now a ‘sobbing trill gliding into silence and bone’. ‘Insects … whoever thought we would miss them?’ she muses. Looking for whales, she notices the oil tankers on the Forth (‘how calm they seem, almost innocent’) and discovers that one of them is actually registered in the possibly-soon-to-disappear Marshall Islands. ‘The youngsters are saying they won’t be having children of their own,’ a friend tells her. ‘Not because they don’t want them but because they’re scared. Societal breakdown and chaos and extinctions and everything.’
Extinctions. Ah, let’s get back to Couvier. Or rather, to the whale named after him. In Cairn, Jamie takes us to the Whale Hall in Bergen’s Natural History Museum. It clearly has made an impact on her because she wrote about walking beneath the whales’ gigantic skeletons (‘such bones as I have never seen’) in Sightlines. Since she last visited, though, there’s the skeleton of a new specimen – a Couvier’s whale which wandered thousands of miles from its usual warm-water habitat before it beached on the Norwegian coast. Next to it are the 30-odd plastic bags that it ate in the dark depths of the ocean, probably thinking they were squid, and that slowly killed it. The bags – the kind we use to carry food home from the supermarket, are hardly changed by their time in the belly of the beast. The lettering is still legible: ‘Fresh’, it says on one. And if that’s not an answer to the question Jamie, quoting Heaney, poses a few pages later (‘How do we find images and symbols adequate to our predicament?’) I don’t know what is.
There are, I suppose, stories on the other side of the extinction ledger if you care to search them out: a few species which are thriving as so many more disappear. There is still joy – real joy – to be found in watching a whale surface or dive deep, slapping its fluke against the sea. You can still poeticise the persistence of a lone tree or wonder at a spider repairing its web in the wind, and Jamie does indeed do so. Couvier’s whale itself, I note, seems to be fighting off extinction remarkably successfully.
But Cairn is too honest to leave room for facile optimism. And honesty makes her question both how it is now possible to write a lyric poem and whether doom-scrolling might not be so reprehensible after all, and merely a way of staving off psychic damage. Dense with thought but clear in expression, the book lives up to the definition of its title given on the back cover (‘Cairn: a marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers’) to perfection.
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie is published by Sort Of Books, priced £9.99
May Day is the latest book by former Makar Jackie Kay. A bold and beautiful collection dedicated to Jackie’s late parents, we are delighted to be sharing four poems from this significant new work here at BooksfromScotland.
May Day
By Jackie Kay
Published by Picador
Daughters, Neighbours
for Elaine
Friend, you saved me through the window:
a wave, a glass raised, a kid-on knife at the throat,
all our pantomimes played out like Rear
Window moved to suburban Glasgow.
And then came sorrow,
your mammy’s hearse pushed uphill in the snow.
My mum following ten days later.
The snow still thick in our street.
Now who are we, my dear friend,
what are we without our mothers?
We who loved them through these long-long years.
Here we are, both turning sixty,
walking grief’s long corridor
to the open window, the open door,
knowing we could not have given more.
We could not have given more.
Bonnie Lassie
Bonnie lassie will ye stay
through aw that’s coming tae greet us O.
The loss, the grief, the wildernesses,
the blank faces and the hot flushes,
the blootered days, the blaze, old age,
the dying light, the rage agin it,
Will ye ne’er grow weary, weary O.
Bonnie lassie will ye tak
the squeeze o’ years, their weight, crack.
And across the meadows, we maun donder
hand in hand, still fu’ o’ wonder –
till the trees are bony, and the bonny banks
spill, my girl, across the corn rigs and barley,
the ploughed fields, the green grown rashes O.
Will ye ne’er grow weary, weary O.
Mother’s Day, 2022
Where do we post our cards to the dead?
Would it be the tiny red box at Camuscross
or the one in Eigg – you laughed when I told you of
a sign that read Don’t post here birds nesting.
No, not that one then.
And would you get it wherever you have gone
and take pleasure in it, the immense
pleasure you took in all ‘interesting post’?
I remember you ruffling through your address
book the Christmas before last: He’s dead.
She’s dead. Oh my. She’s dead. They’re dead. Oh Jesus.
And now, though I can barely believe it, you are –
but your last sentence but one was
Jackie, I can see everything so clearly now,
donning your new polka-dot frames,
maroon and cream.
And so I trust, dear Mum, you’ll see this
and relish this love that goes on and on and on
A Banquet for the Boys
(for MK, Andy, Phazey, B-man and Bailout)
When your foot was stood on and you couldn’t stand
and you couldn’t cook for Phazey or B-man,
I ordered you a feast to lend a helping hand:
for your benevolence, some baba ganoush,
and for your fidelity, your empathy – fattoush;
for your brotherly ways, some moujaddara set al beit.
For Black Lives Matter some bamieh bel zeit.
Tabbouleh since you’re all trans-affirming bros.
Halloumi to hail the halo round your afro.
Zucchini since you’re so queer-affirming,
makdous, moutabal for loving diversity and the mandem.
Restorative justice in a Vegan Lovers’ Platter.
For love, for the love of protest – pickles, bread.
For keeping your head, boys, for knowing what matters.
May Day by Jackie Kay is published by Picador, priced £10.99.
Birding is the second novel by Glasgow-based talent Rose Ruane. This dark and dreamy novel follows the lives of two forty-something women living in the same sleepy seaside town set on an unlikely collision course. Enjoy an excerpt here at BooksfromScotland below.
Birding
By Rose Ruane
Published by Corsair
Maybe it started eleven months ago, in the coffee shop, when Henry finally said sorry to Lydia. Maybe it started years previously, in poky flats and rented rooms where Henry did . . . well, whatever Henry did. When he inflicted whatever harms his abstruse, equivocating apology invited Lydia to absolve him of. Lydia still can’t fit a name to them. Maybe it started almost three decades before, on the day Lydia stood surrounded by pigeons in Leicester Square, hugging her best friend and bandmate Pandora, looking up at a reproduction of their album cover – a mugshot-style photo of them under the words The Lollies Are Legal, wearing nothing but knickers and cheesecake expressions and holding identity placards over their bare breasts – displayed on a billboard the size of a double-decker bus. Maybe it started the day that photo was taken, when Lydia and Pandora, all of nineteen, overheard the photographer telling the make-up artist to, ‘Get some slap on those eyebags; they’re meant to be jailbait and they look fucking ancient.’ Or when he sighed, lowered his camera, and told them to, ‘Lez it up a bit, look like you’re enjoying yourselves,’ and they did. Maybe it even started the first time no one said, ‘You don’t have to,’ or ‘It’s not your fault.’ Or maybe, it simply starts the day you’re born and all the becoming begins right then.
Lydia is contemplating this, staring at the statue which always looks to her like a drowning woman trying to catch the attention of a lifeguard, when a restive sparrow lands on the Come On In Girl’s gesturing hand. Lydia lifts her phone, zooms in, frames; catches the shot just as the tiny bird takes flight. She looks at the photo and is pleased. The dun fans of the bird’s wings are spread, scratchy wire feet not yet quite tucked, almost drawn into its body like the wheels of an ascending jet, the distance from bird to bronze in perfect golden ratio, a sliver of sky inside the gap. Look to the beauty: that’s Lydia’s mantra, though it’s becoming harder to heed and sounding hollower and more fragile every day. Increasingly, the world appears to her all shell: a Kinder egg containing no toy. But she knows if only she can force herself to dwell in the minute poetries and pathos of the everyday, then she can better bear the agony she’s been in for almost a year now. She posts the picture on Twitter and Insta, annotated with some trite but appealing observation about escape and freedom. The comments from her substantial number of followers begin to climb right away:
Love this Lydia *heart emoji* *bird emoji*
Great shot *camera emoji*
Gorgeous, needed this today, thank you x
*Trio of heart-eyed smiley emojis*
Pleasure sparks, falters and fades within seconds, like a cheap light-up novelty with spent batteries. Her photo ceases to symbolise hope, becoming content more than communication. And once again, she’s wondering what the fuck she is doing in this town. She’s been here nearly two months; an unplanned weekend break that slouched into a permanent state of temporariness. As if that couldn’t be said to describe her entire life up to the late August day when Pandora called out of the blue. Pandora was the last person Lydia had wanted to talk to, but some animal impulse to survive made her answer the phone. She had recognised it as her only chance. For days, death had been ranging round her head. She’d stopped imagining afterwards, stopped caring who might be sorry, wasn’t envisioning the uneasy collision of her parents and friends around her lily-topped coffin, had ceased compiling the soundtrack of exit songs. Lying by a sealed envelope without a name on it and a litre of vodka, Lydia simply wanted to unhappen and un-be. She imagined only the relief of thinking and feeling nothing after months suffocating in hell’s own Matryoshka of doubt, recursively dismantling and restacking the nested questions Henry had crammed into her head in that coffee shop months ago. But then the phone rang. Lydia knows she accepted the call and made a noise. Maybe she tried to say ‘Hi’ or ‘Pan’, but what came out was as much spasm as sound. She hardly remembers anything else. Just vivid, disjointed flashes: throwing clothes into a bag; the train pulling out of London through the suburbs as a low gold sun unravelled bolts of navy shadow across the pavements; thinking, It’s beginning to be autumn, and maybe I’ll feel the first cold day of it after all. But she does recall watching the city’s outermost edgelands spool by, the train’s fluorescent interior superimposed on the retail parks and playing fields, each abstracting the other, as an imagined cold elided with a remembered one. The brumous January morning, creeping towards a year ago, when Lydia walked into a coffee shop near London Bridge to meet Henry and walked out almost two hours later, feeling like a shell of the person who entered. So much easier to conjure the irrelevant details of the place: the way the seating was unabashedly designed to discourage lingering; the contrived, brittle friendliness of the barista that made Lydia feel more of a nuisance than if he’d been openly rude; the raucous laughter of a stranger – joyous while Lydia was waiting for Henry to arrive, violent as a plate being smashed by the time he’d embarked on his quibbling, self-interested monologue.
Birding by Rose Ruane is published by Corsair, priced £20.00.
Abir Mukherjee’s new standalone Hunted treads familiar ground in a novel about the fallout from a terrorist attack in the United States, but David Robinson explores how it stands out by placing itself right in the middle of contemporary culture and transatlantic political debate, subverting expectations along the way.
Hunted
By Abir Mukherjee
Published by Harvill Secker
Stephen King did it in 849 pages with 11/22/63. Don DeLillo took three years to do it with Libra. James Ellroy did it with American Tabloid, which Time magazine reckoned was 1995’s best read. All three of them chose a subject for their fiction so central to the American psyche that it comes with its own Wikipedia category: ‘Novels about the assassination of John F Kennedy’.
Move further away from the historical record, make the subject an assassination attempt on a fictional American president rather than a real one, and there are more titles still. Indeed, this is such a crowded field that a thriller about a terror plot to kill a US President has to be very special to stand out. Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted might well be just that book.
Hunted represents a huge change for Mukherjee, a Bengali Scot now living in Surrey, who is best known for his five Wyndham and Banerjee novels set in 1920s India. As these have had both critical acclaim (‘Not just excellent characterisation and historical credibility but bravura plotting too’ – BooksfromScotland.com) and prizes to match, as well as worldwide sales of 400,000 in 15 languages, the temptation to follow up with the sixth in the series must have been strong. But while that is still down for publication next year, Hunted – his first standalone novel – is so of-the-moment that it just won’t wait.
Here’s the background. We’re in the US, and November’s ‘toxic’ presidential election is just eight days away. Recognise any of the candidates?
‘A man that was quite possibly deranged, that half the populace viewed as a dangerous, egotistical charlatan who’d run over his mother to get into the White House was, at the same time, worshipped as the messiah by the other half, who’d probably view that act of matricide as an act of selfless patriotism….’
A bomb explodes in a Burbank shopping mall, killing 63 people and injuring 114. The woman who planted it, a British Muslim, died in the blast. An organisation calling itself Sons of the Caliphate claims responsibility and demands the release of all remaining prisoners at Guantanamo. It is, says investigating detective Sheyra Mistry’s boss at the FBI, ‘the hard right’s wet dream’.
We’ve met detectives like Mistry before. They’re mavericks, so they run into collapsing buildings in search of clues when all their colleagues are running the other way. They’re intuitive, but because they’re also so outspoken, their bosses always want them off the case. They’re workaholics, and it’s wrecked their family life. True, Mistry is non-white, which is a change from stereotype, so she’ll make a point of holding her photo ID close to her face ‘to help people who have trouble telling one brown woman from another’.
In London, Sajid Khan’s experience of racism is more visceral: his daughter Mia is lying in a vegetative state in hospital after being batoned by police breaking up a demo outside the US embassy. The FBI are on the trail of his other daughter, Aliyah, who arrived in the US with the woman who planted the shopping mall bomb. They don’t know what we already do: that Aliyah is in a remote Oregon compound with a group of political radicals, including a US Army veteran called Greg who was badly injured in Afghanistan. And they certainly don’t know that Greg’s mother Carrie has persuaded Sajid to go to the States and find their children before the police do.
That’s the set-up, and I’m not going to tell you anything else. Not a word of who’s in the Sons of the Caliphate and who isn’t. Nothing about how Sajid and Carrie get into the US. Not a mention of where the next bombs go off (and they do) or how they affect the last week of the presidential race. Who’s that woman running the Oregon camp and why is everyone so afraid of her? Sorry: not going to say.
What I will say is that Hunted would make a great film. Because while the chase is an essential part of a good thriller, most of them give you just the one. Here there are three at the same time: the police are hunting the parents (Greg and Carrie), who are in turn hunting their wayward kids, who are themselves the subject of a nationwide manhunt. And I do mean nationwide: in the best road movie tradition, we’re stringing together quite a few states here, all the way from the Rockies to the Great Plains to a climactic eve-of-election rally in Florida.
Usually, when there’s just one couple on the run, no matter how mismatched they appear to be at the start, there’s a likelihood that by the end there’ll be some sort of romance. Sajid, though, has such a refreshingly strong sense of izzat (honour) that he feels awkward even sharing a seat with Cassie on a London bus, never mind sharing anything else. He is, we come to understand, a devoted father to his two girls, and having lost one is determined to do everything he can to save the other. Mukherjee clearly realises the importance of clearly establishing the depth of Sajid’s love for his children, as without it the implausibility of his mission to rescue his daughter would become apparent. Instead, he is not only the linchpin of the plot but the most interesting character in it.
And as for the plot itself … well, Mick Herron calls it a masterclass and Ruth Ware says it will keep you guessing, and they should know: indeed, right from the start, when we see how frightened the shopping mall bomber is, you half-suspect that it’s not going to be obvious. That suspicion hardens into a certainty by the time you reach what would seem like an obvious denouement – and then realise that there are still another 300 pages to go. It’s a thrilling, twisting ride, so densely plotted as to make Mukherjee’s more gently paced Wyndham and Banerjee novels read like Anita Brookner. But for all our sakes, let’s hope that, come November 2024 it remains wildly imaginative and enjoyable fiction and nowhere near fact.
Hunted by Abir Mukherjee is published by Harvill Secker, priced £14.99.
Over the last forty years Frank Kuppner has established himself as one of Scotland’s most arresting and inventive poets, capable of finding the profundity in absurdity and the poetry in the everyday. His latest collection Not a Moment Too Soon is a tour-de-force consisting of three extended sequences, and we’re delighted to share a selection of it here at BooksfromScotland.
Not a Moment Too Soon
By Frank Kuppner
Published by Carcanet Press
- NOT QUITE A FALSE FRESH START
Clocks were put forward an hour last night. So, on this clear bright morning,
I have the sloping, tree-lined city lane for once all to myself.
More slowly than ever, I walk down it an hour before I walk down it.
- A CURIOUS INCIDENT ON A LATE SUMMER EVENING
I look out. Someone is strolling along the street towards the park.
Over there, someone else is gently walking a dog away from the park.
I had more or less decided to get up from this chair at the window.
Why should anyone want to wait, just to see two people walk past each other?
- ANOTHER OF THESE PICTURESQUE LOCAL VIGNETTES
Okay. High time to get out there again –
for the day’s messages, some fresh rolls, and (no doubt) another newspaper –
whatever was happening on this barely perceptible slope,
say, ninety-nine thousand years ago – although now
a charmingly girlish pair of (presumably) Chinese students
have stopped behind a strange obstruction of chairs left out in the street
to let this quaint old local, lost (it seems) in his own thoughts,
move more easily past them both, with almost no signal of thanks.
- NO INSINUATION OF TENTACLES
Once again, I look up and glance out of the window just beside me.
Once again, there’s only yet another wrong somebody else
walking unconcernedly down the street in this certainly more meaningful
direction.
What’s going on? Are only unknown people now allowed to come round
that nearest corner?
Another sigh. I return to a startling book about the minds of octopuses.
- A PRACTICAL DEMONSTRATION
What? Her key in the lock! (I hadn’t even realised
she was out.) No. No – wait a minute. Of course
I knew she had gone out. Of course I did.
Dear God – can’t any of these so-called great philosophers
ever get anything right? (Hello? No – I’m in here!)
Children are once again pouring out of that school over there.
Dear me … Who can even think of all the schools there must be
on the planet. On all the planets. In this city. Raining still.
Will a few billion more years really be quite enough?
But – enough for what? Yes, that’s the big question, isn’t it?
Across the road, a man unhurriedly opens the school gates.
First, the left-hand section. Good. Then, what we see as the right.
Morning again. Still pleasantly cool. And, yet again, the planet
has breath-takingly avoided splitting into two overnight.
Or even three. Or more. But two would surely have done it.
- STILL WAITING
One more undistinguished planet somewhere among the millions of
billions of stars.
It may not be as serious as we think it is.
No. All those different lengths of years passing on every last one of them!
But – it’s very nearly noon. Yes. Surely the Hospital
would have phoned us by now if it really was something urgent?
- VISITING TIME NOTES
The vast impressive frontage
of what I used to think
was chiefly a Children’s Hospital
has at last been demolished
(surprisingly quickly at that)
and, somehow strangely unlooked-for,
the old public clock-face
the hands of which had stood
static, stationary, motionless, fixed, rigid, unmoving
at five minutes to noon – (or, possibly, midnight) –
(Yes – look! It really isn’t moving!)
that too must have gone
not quite patiently off
into some vague, shadowy, unpursuable
nowhere or other along with it – fit backdrop
for many a priceless local Eurydice.
(Don’t worry about it. It should be all right.)
But – such a highly doubtful adornment
for any public building
never mind a hospital!
(Unless perhaps its unique antique status had itself kept it safe till then?)
And it felt as if a rare resource
of continuing-continuous use and value
had been cruelly removed from us
before we had had even the most last-gasp chance
to seek out a second opinion –
once proverbially dead-right twice
on every single one of those days –
all those vital busy days
those difficult labouring days
all those routine annihilating days
(and what thanks do you ever get for it?)
Strange, to miss so livelily
(“What did you bring those lilies for?”)
what had by then long since become
so hardened, shameless and encrusted
a chronic habitual deceiver –
just because something vaguely internal
perhaps went wrong with a ratchet or lever?
(All these arrivals! Yes. Then, all these leavers!)
(“Did you really have to talk so much about beavers?”)
More than half a century –
and no-one (was it really no-one?)
had ever quite been able
(was it really half a century?)
to find enough time to fix it.
(“I just can’t find the time!”)
(“But – then again – who ever can?”)
And, for that matter, did I ever give it
even a single passing-momentscaring
thought
on any one of the thousand or two occasions
when (fraught? relaxed? utterly ecstatic?)
I must have paced past within sight of it?
Well … perhaps I did.
I simply don’t remember.
Always something else
going on unseen
behind the passing faces.
Like, say, this precarious visit
of what, if it were real,
one might even call hope
(and think how much hope, genuine hope,
must have arrived here … and then left)
that right there, near the very end,
not long before it went forever
some fatal dislocation did
not jolt it back into life again:
nor some perfectly timed knock
during the fraught process
of ephemeral dismemberment
– (a mutilating strike
mutating into
mock resuscitating progress) –
momentarily shocked it back
into a final spasm of action
(“That corpse’s arm moved, did it not?”)
somehow stretching its hands beyond
mere real life and death –
now a parodic portent
of posthumous existence –
a face once more indicating
that all was still going on – still –
all of it – still –
(whatever this is) – going on –
perhaps even showing
a suddenly correct continuation
the minute that it actually was
exactly the right time of day
for whatever patched-up chaos
was continuing far below –
where at present a substantially new artery is being created out of the
local road network.
Not a Moment Too Soon by Frank Kuppner is published by Carcanet Press, priced £12.99.
Lindsay Littleson’s latest book Ice Cream Boy is a coming-of-age story focused on the Scottish-Italian community, which looks at dementia and our relationship to memory, family and identity. Here, Lindsay tells us about the inspiration behind the novel.
Ice Cream Boy
By Lindsay Littleson
Published by Floris Books
I began writing Ice Cream Boy soon after my mum’s death from Alzheimer’s disease and that aspect of Luca’s story feels very personal. It was not an easy subject to write about, particularly for children, as there are no positives to dementia. It’s a dreadful disease which profoundly impacts family relationships, and I didn’t want to write a depressing book! So, my main character, 12-year-old Luca, is a fast-talking joker who is often in trouble at school, but is determined to save his family’s Glasgow ice cream shop by inventing the best ice cream in the world.
While there are lots of humorous moments in the novel, I wanted my book to be an honest account, so Ice Cream Boy doesn’t sugar coat the fact that Alzheimer’s is an awful disease and that caring for a relative with dementia is extremely challenging. Towards the end of the novel, Luca’s Nonna moves into residential care and while Luca finds the change difficult to cope with initially, it’s also a relief, as he and his mum have been struggling to keep Nonna safe. This short scene in the care home illustrates how residential care has become the best option for all of them.
She kept picking at specks of loose wool on the blanket, and glancing warily at Mum, who was sitting in the other chair with a fixed smile on her face.
Nonna’s hands started fluttering. “Who’s that lassie?” she hissed, her voice a frightened croak. “What’s she doin in my house? Get her out of here! Get her out!”
Her hands flapped, like panicking birds. Then, as if exhausted by the effort, her eyes closed and she started snoring, mouth wide open. Mum put a hand on my shoulder.
“Why don’t we leave her to sleep?” she suggested. “I’ll pick you up from school on Wednesday and we can pop in and visit again.”
I swallowed hard, trying not to cry, and then nodded. “Yeah, sure. Good plan.”
My hope is that reading Ice Cream Boy might develop children’s empathy and understanding of dementia. In the course of the novel, Luca feels confusion when his beloved Nonna begins to act out of character and fear when she becomes aggressive, as well as frustration, guilt and embarrassment. The emotions Luca experiences are all perfectly normal, but they are difficult feelings for children to deal with if they have insufficient information about what’s happening to their relative. Reading Ice Cream Boy will hopefully help young people who are coping with a similar situation and experiencing similar feelings know they are not alone.
While the dementia aspect of the story is sad, Luca’s close relationship with his grandmother has been vitally important throughout his childhood and glimpses of that enduring love and warmth shine through, right to the end.
Crossing the room, I planted a kiss on her forehead. Her skin felt cold, though the room was stifling, and when I hugged her, her clothes felt loose on her stick-thin body. But I’m right, I know I am. My gran might not remember my name, she might get confused about who I am, but she remembers she loves me. And I’m positive she knows I love her too.
These websites provide useful information on helping children understand dementia, how it affects people and how this could impact their lives:
https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/kids/juniors/
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-support/daily-living/supporting-children-young-people-resources
Ice Cream Boy by Lindsay Littleson is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.
With the republication of Dorothy K. Haynes’ memoir Haste Ye Back, we asked the editor of the new edition to tell us why we should be reading Haynes now, and why she fell out of the canon.
Haste Ye Back
By Dorothy K. Haynes (edited by Craig Lamont)
Published by ASL
If you have heard of Dorothy K. Haynes, it is most likely that you have read one of her short stories, probably a supernatural tale. Or maybe you heard one of these stories broadcast on the radio. But it is more likely that you have not heard of her at all. Haynes represents a bit of a blind spot in Scottish literary history. She was born in 1918, and, following the death of her mother, she attended Aberlour Orphanage with her twin brother Leonard.
During her time at Aberlour she discovered her talents in writing and found the encouragement to pursue it further. She recounts all of this, and more, in her 1973 memoir Haste Ye Back. She published two novels: Winter’s Traces (1947) and Robin Ritchie (1949), but it is her debut collection of short stories – Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch (1949) – which launched her career. During the 50s, 60s, and 70s, she wrote new stories, mostly for broadcast, and a new collection titled Peacocks and Pagodas was printed in 1981. She died in 1987. In the later years of her life, and after her death, she has been widely anthologised in horror and supernatural annuals, periodicals, and in plenty of Scottish Short Story volumes. It is this fine reputation as a short story writer that has kept her legacy alive, though the flame of memory has been flickering and threatening to go out for some time. Indeed it might have been extinguished altogether if not for the 1996 edition of Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch edited by Angela Cran and James Robertson, which introduced three previously uncollected stories to Haynes readers.
In the ensuing period there have been some radio transmissions of stories, but only very sporadically. Timothy C. Baker (University of Aberdeen) wrote on Haynes in 2022 for the journal Gothic Studies, reaffirming her place in the supernatural canon. In 2023 Gerard Carruthers (University of Glasgow) included Haynes’s title story (‘Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch’) in his new Scottish Stories collection. And this year was published the new edition of Haste Ye Back, edited by myself, with the permission of Dorothy’s son, Leonard Gray. Working with Leonard on his mother’s archive has been a real pleasure, and the origin story of the new edition can be found in a news piece by Aberlour Children’s Charity here.
As I state in the Introduction to this new edition, Haste Ye Back is often misleadingly described as an autobiography, but in reality the book only encompasses a few crucial years in her youth, albeit in great detail. Those years spent at the orphanage are bookended with a Prologue and Epilogue on her journey back to the site of Aberlour during its deconstruction with her husband – who she met there – and makes for very effective life-writing. It is an account of the imagination in bloom, of sharpening awareness with a sense of loss draped over it.
In this new edition I have sought to retain the 1973 text intact, adding some explanatory footnotes along the way. I have also introduced some new texts, in the hope of giving a more rounded account of Haynes and Aberlour. There are four archival items: one letter to the former superintendent of the orphanage, two early reminiscences sent to the orphanage magazine, and one undated manuscript reflecting on the importance of the place to her personal growth.
I also decided to include the text of her first ‘successful’ short story ‘The Head’. The tale is about a man shackled to a church wall as punishment for stealing, who, in his discomfort and delirium, is affected by the head on a spike set beside him. It is a masterful tale, dealing with perspective literally in terms of the shifting view of the scene and in a moral sense. It was first printed in Writing Today (1945), was republished the following year and won the Tom Gallon Award for 1947. In this story we find one of the many macabre themes which would go on to characterise Haynes for decades to come.
Now that Haste Ye Back has been reprinted, Haynes might be discovered anew. The next step is to reconsider her novels, never reprinted, and to do something meaningful with the short stories, including the dozens of unpublished typescripts which are lying in wait. What matters now is the momentum in studying Haynes and her unique voice in Scottish literature, and making the best use of it going forward.
Haste Ye Back by Dorothy K. Haynes and edited by Craig Lamont is published by ASL, priced £14.95.
Hugo Rifkind’s debut novel Rabbits follows Thommo, a product of the middle-class, as he moves to a prestigious boarding school and is thrust into the decadent, decaying world of an elite struggling for relevance. What better, then, to hear from the author himself on some of the school-set novels that have influenced him?
Rabbits
By Hugo Rifkind
Published by Polygon
The Liar – Stephen Fry
Adrian Healey is at an English public school in the 1970s. Here, his two major hobbies seem to be saying incredibly witty things, and also having lurid, glutinous sex with his fellow pupils. Boys fumble in dorms, behind trees, and on school trips, and are fairly open about their lusts and loves.
Really, though, all of this is part of a depiction of public schools as alien, parallel worlds. Fry is particularly good their archaic traditions, such as the rituals of meeting for toast, and the embedded system of “fagging” by which younger boys serve older ones. It’s brilliantly evocative, particularly in its message that none of them ever quite get over it. ““Little girls grow up to be women,” writes Fry, whereas “little boys grow up to be little boys.”
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Only part of Evelyn Waugh’s novel about the social collapse of Paul Pennyfeather is set in a school, but it’s the best part. The whole place is crumbling and mad.
Newly employed as a teacher, in one scene Pennyfeather is attempting to take a rollcall. Various boys all claim to be called “Tangent” while others, who actually might be, insist they are not. The teacher, writes Waugh, “felt desperate.” Then, “in a few seconds, the room had become divided into two parties: those who were Tangent and those who were not. Blows were already being exchanged.” That’s school, right?
Pyramids – Terry Pratchett
Before Terry Pratchett’s fantasy reaches Djelibeybi, a magical, Egyptian-style kingdom, our hero Teppic attends the Assassin’s Guild in Ankh-Morpork, essentially a parody of the most brutal boys’ boarding school imaginable.
Literally it is life and death, but against a background of spots, friendships and hormones. There’s a fantastic scene where Arthur, a tiny new boy from an obscure religious cult, doggedly attempts to sacrifice a goat on his first night in his dormitory. “Pious little bastard!” says somebody, throwing a pillow at him. And I wouldn’t say it was exactly like that being the only Jewish kid at a quite churchy Scottish boarding school in the 1990s. But it wasn’t far off.
New Boy – William Sutcliffe
Mark, Sutcliffe’s protagonist, is a sex-obsessed boy at a London private school, clearly based on Sutcliffe’s own Habedasher’s Aske’s. Generally hilarious, New Boy is particularly brilliant on the mad social codes of school, and the hierarchies.
Mark is a low-status kid at school itself, but has higher status on the school bus, which is just one of many tremendous observations about how these things work. Another kid, all floppy-haired and aristocratic, is regarded as an inexplicable oddity at this school dominated by the children of urban professionals. One rumour behind him being there is that “it was a punishment for his parents for trying to steal an estate in Kent.”
There’s also a tremendous tone of blithe school sociopathy, as seen in the terrible way Mark gets his nickname “Bruno” (which I won’t spoil), and in the smirking pleasure he and his peers take in the terrible misfortunes of others. It’s just so damn honest. Too honest, maybe, but I loved it.
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Sad and haunting, this a novel about a parallel 1990s in which lab-grown children are harvested for their organs. It begins in Hailsham, a boarding school where many of them are raised. At first, none of these lonely, abandoned kids quite grasp what they are being raised for, but there’s a muted awareness that it’s definitely for something.
The most beautiful bits of this book actually come later, when the characters are in their teens and given a little more freedom. In a series of rural cottages, they role play as adults, experimenting sexually and wondering who to be, faintly in denial about the inescapable destiny which means it isn’t really up to them. You can read it as a pure dystopia, but it is also a story of social conditioning, and in a way, of class. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it.
Rabbits by Hugo Rifkind is published by Polygon in June, priced £14.99.
Ahead of the publication of Victor and Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium, we sat down with Alan Cumming to find out about some of the books that have played a significant part in his life so far.
Victor and Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium
By Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson
Published by 404 Ink
The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?
Books were always about escape for me in my childhood. I remember devouring Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series as a child. They seemed like an alternative reality I could connect to, a rural idyll where adventures happened all around you. There was even a trans person among them! For a little boy growing up in Angus countryside they were both relatable and unimaginable.
The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book Victor and Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium. What did you want to explore in putting together this book?
This book all came about because we realised it had been 40 years since we had made up Victor and Barry! We still cannot compute that number! And when it is released it will be the 40th anniversary of Victor and Barry’s first ever appearance at the Edinburgh fringe, where they found their feet and eventually their fame. So the book is a celebration of the characters and also Forbes and I’s friendship and artistic collaboration. It’s also us as older men looking back at ourselves in our early twenties dealing with this cultural explosion we were at the centre of and recollecting how insane and overwhelming it all was. But mostly it is a laugh. We uncovered old scripts and sketches and shows and photos, and we also managed to snag an exclusive interview with Victor and Barry themselves!!
The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?
I know it might sound egocentric and navel-gazing, but honestly my own books about my life have been incredibly illuminating. The act of standing back and analysing my own actions and choices and patterns through the process of writing has been revelatory and therapeutic to an incredible degree, and I think I have such a higher level of self-knowledge both for having committed to writing them but also for hearing the feedback from those who have read them. I think I might need to do another!
The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?
I just love photography books that you can pick up and browse. Some of my favourites are Waiting for the Magic by Oscar Mazzaroli, a Taschen book on the architect Zaha Hadid, and I also love the colour and queerness of David Lachappelle’s books.
The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?
It’s not so much about books bonding me with other people who have read them, but more reading a book then getting the chance to meet and even become friends with the author. So I have relationships with writers that have come directly because of their writing. Like Douglas Stuart, Danny Ramadan (whose Foghorn Echoes blew my mind), Amy Bloom. It’s really one of my favourite things about being me that I have access to artists I admire. I can geek out with impunity!
The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?
When I was quite young I read Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and I recognised a queer desire that I shared with the narrator. At the time I think it was even a secret to me, but it allowed me to embrace and feel comfortable with it.
The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys is set in Paris and London. I don’t really know Paris very well, and I lived in London for ten years and still don’t know it very well. But this is set in a time between the wars and an epoch that is both fascinating and terrifying to me. It’s also about someone having a breakdown and I seem to be drawn to books that make you feel you are inside someone’s mind. Shuggie Bain, Catcher In the Rye, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, they are all immersive experiences, and so is this one.
The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?
As I write this I am looking at Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, waiting on my desk for me to pick up and begin. I love Andrew both as a person and a writer, and everything I have read of his has been both magical and earthy, and always compelling. I can’t wait.
Victor and Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium by Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson is published by 404 Ink in July, priced £12.99.
Pink Camouflage is a hard-hitting, eye-opening account of one woman’s experience of the abuse and misogyny she suffered while serving in the British Army. In this introduction, author Gemma Morgan details the trauma she dealt with following her exit and how she came to accept help.
Pink Camouflage
By Gemma Morgan
Published by Luath Press
He found me by the roadside, delirious and choking. I was 33, happily married with two beautiful young children, a poster girl for female achievement with a stellar Army service record and a glittering international sports career.
But behind this golden public image, I was a wreck. The British Army had taught me to achieve more than I ever thought I could – but it was a lesson that came at a price. The reality of the Army’s quest for gender equality meant moulding – forcing – female recruits to fit masculine ideals. Desperate to be part of the team, I tried to camouflage my femininity, to crush and slowly dismantle my identity.
The Army’s toxic culture – the sexual abuse and misogyny – prepared the ground for the nightmares long before I saw the man lying dead in the snow in pools of bright red, frozen blood. The sexism of life in barracks undermined me long before I saw the shreds of flesh hanging off shattered limbs and the soulless dark brown eyes. I was a soldier, but contrary to everything I had been led to believe, I found myself powerless to alleviate the suffering all around me.
When I was deployed on a highly unusual operation as a soldier out of uniform with no military back-up, not even a satellite phone, the Army neither offered me guidance, nor asked how I was faring. When I came back to Britain, they never asked what it was like to be an unarmed soldier in civilian clothing deployed in the middle of the blood and mayhem.
I left the Army on my own accord. I ran away, hoping the nightmares would stop. There was no medical discharge. One minute you were in. The next you were gone. My new identity ripped from me. The nightmares replayed again and again in my head. I could not unsee what I had seen.
Then a grenade was thrown into the mix. I gave birth to a baby girl. Motherhood left me lost and alienated. I was a soldier who had no idea how to be a mother. The Army had stolen my femininity. Behind closed doors, vodka, Valium and sleeping pills numbed the pain. Panic distorted the world. It left me isolated and alone. I was constantly on my guard, checking behind me, scanning every window, every corner. I stopped answering the phone and hid when the doorbell rang. I walked with a look designed to make someone think twice. I was more like a bodyguard than a mother.
I found myself drowning, gasping for any pocket of air. In the room, but not really present, not part of the world. Parts of me began to shut down. There was no-one to turn to. The ties with my military family had been cut. Back in the day, there was no help from charities like Help for Heroes – they didn’t yet exist. The NHS doctors I saw seemed baffled and confused. Then after seven years of hiding, I hit a rock bottom that led me to that desolate roadside.
In 2006, I was diagnosed with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. At first, it brought a feeling of intense relief. It was vindication after years of being ignored. Years of thinking that I was at fault. Identifying behind four letters – PTSD – made living easier. It stopped the questions and offered an explanation. I used it to articulate who I was, what I was not and why my suffering and illness were somehow valid.
But as the years passed, I began to wonder how such a short period of time had left such a lasting impact on me. I was in the Army for less than seven years. It was a drop in the ocean, but the ripples of trauma have travelled with me and seeped into each and every part of my life. It has infected those I love and it has destroyed those that I have loved. But I have also been blessed. With the support of my family and the professional help of doctors and therapists I have been able to rebuild my life.
In Narrative Therapy in 2007 we were told to write down our life story. It helped me, but I hated sharing what I had written. Pink Camouflage grew out of that first session. Fear gripped me as I began to write. Each word challenged my urge to remain invisible, to hide. I stopped and put the manuscript away in a drawer time and time again, but it kept calling me back, pushing me to confront who I really am, to make sense of things for myself, on my own. I had to tell this story for the thousands of other women who have been harmed by the toxic culture that pervades the British Army. It is not the trauma that steals so many lives. It is the shame and guilt. Pink Camouflage has been an exorcism: I refuse to entertain this devil into my 50s.
Pink Camouflage by Gemma Morgan is published by Luath Press, priced £12.99.
In this review of All Before Me, David Robinson explores the ways in which Esther Rutter weaves the history of the Wordsworths and the landscape around Dove Cottage into her own personal battles with depression and need for belonging.
All Before Me
By Esther Rutter
Published by Granta
If you’re ever looking for a good walk across the north of England, try the one William Wordsworth did with his sister Dorothy in 1799. Start about eight miles south-west of Richmond in North Yorkshire and walk across the Pennines to Kendal. The Wordsworths took just three overnight stops – inns at Askrigg, Hardraw and Sedburgh – to do it, even though the winter roads were frozen, because Dorothy walked fast: 16 miles in four and three-quarter hours, even allowing for rests. Once in Kendal, they stopped to buy furniture for their new, rented house. The next day – December 20, 1799 – they moved in. Perhaps you’ve been there: Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
Esther Rutter certainly has, and after reading her book All Before Me, you’d be hard-pressed to say whether the place meant more to her or the Wordsworths. To William and Dorothy, Dove Cottage represented an end to their orphaned homeless wandering, a place where they would be among their kith (people like them) if not their kin, all the more appreciated after their miserable stay in the German town of Goslar the previous winter.
To Rutter, working for a year as a paid intern at Dove Cottage, and living just across the road, meant an end to a cycle of mental illness that had culminated in her being sectioned in a Japanese psychiatric institution the previous year while teaching English in her first post-university job. At the interview in Grasmere, she had broken down in tears. Mercifully, the man who interviewed her wasn’t put off. Good job too: he is now (spoiler alert: happy ending in sight) her father-in-law.
This then is a book about recovery, about regaining self-confidence and rediscovering joy. In rural Japan, like William and Dorothy in Goslar, Rutter was ‘unmoored from her mother tongue’ and homesick. More than that, though, her depression had hardened into such a strong conviction that she was incapable of happiness as to allow the possibility of suicidal thoughts. Back in her native Suffolk, she was jobless, alienated, her sense of self almost non-existent.
So how and why does the turnaround happen? How does Rutter gain from the society of dead poets and living guides to the Wordsworths’ home? How does the loud internal voice of self-recrimination learn to hush and a young woman who was still having panic attacks become at ease with herself?
Dove Cottage has a lot to do with it. This was, Wordsworth once wrote, a place of such happiness that even on his deathbed it would still be foremost in his thoughts. It was where he fell in love with his wife Mary Hutchinson (Dorothy’s friend: they’d been visiting the Hutchinsons in lower Teesdale before they started that long walk back to their new home in December 1799). Once there – and isn’t this the absolute marker of a love of place? – they started naming their surroundings after themselves. The wood a quarter of a mile away was John’s Wood (after William’s brother). A spit of land at the lake’s foot was Mary’s Point, while Mary’s sister Sara (whom Coleridge clearly fancied despite the fact that he had a wife and child up the road in Keswick) was commemorated by Sara’s Gate, the place where she first stopped to admire the view of Grasmere.
Now suppose you or I paid our £14 to shuffle round Dove Cottage and the extra £11 to wander round its garden, orchard and museum, would we, too, get anything even remotely like what Rutter describes here from the experience? (Incidentally, I absolutely share that curious impulse to get closer to great minds, to stand at the spot where, as here, you could argue that the Enlightenment ended and Romanticism began – even though, I agree, it’s completely irrational.)
Well, although I don’t doubt that we would leave Grasmere with a greater sense of what made Wordsworth such a great poet of memory, and of the massive role played by his sister and Coleridge, Rutter’s own debt to Dove Cottage goes way deeper. This was, after all, where Wordsworth developed a new way of looking at the world, and it played that role for her too: his desire to ‘see into the life of things’ was also hers as she learnt more about the poets’ lives and the mountains and lakes they now had in common.
More than that, there was kith here for her too - visiting poets, writers, academics, the curators, guides, interns, and everyone else at the Wordsworth Trust, or Wordsworth Grasmere as it has now rebranded itself. This would certainly include Tom, the son of the trust’s director, with whom she started a relationship while they were both working for a conservation charity putting in land drains. (I know: the romance!)
All Before Me is a contrast to Rutter’s 2019 debut book, This Golden Fleece, which ranged all over Britain to tell the history of wool and knitting. But although the new book has a tighter geographical focus, it also weaves a whole variety of subjects together. A less confident writer might have separated them out more obviously: personally, I love the naturalness of the links, as we zoom back into Rutter’s childhood, get an overview of why Wordsworth’s poetry was such a radical break with the past, slip into musings on the roots of depression, picture the creative burst when, as Dorothy wrote, Wordsworth and Coleridge ‘wantoned in wild poesy’, or set about learning to climb some of the Lake District peaks.
At its heart, though, is Dove Cottage, which she, along with Dorothy’s first biographer, who bought it in 1860, says has ‘a sense of benevolent possession’. Maybe it always has. In 1800, just after William and his sister had moved into Dove Cottage, he started writing a poem about it. He never finished ‘Home in Grasmere’, and because it was only printed in full in 1977, perhaps you’ve never heard of it either. In its expression of what the place meant to him, though, you get a sense of what it means to Rutter too:
’tis the sense
Of majesty and beauty and repose
A blended holiness of earth and sky
Something that makes this individual Spot
This small abiding-place of many men,
A termination and a last retreat,
A Centre, come from wheresoe’er you will
A whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself
Perfect Contentment, Unity entire.
Or, to put it another way, Paradise. Don’t all rush at once.
All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District by Esther Rutter is published by Granta, priced £16.99.
Ever since her Saltire-winning debut Hand Over Mouth Music was published in 2019, we’ve been eagerly looking forward to another full-length collection from Janette Ayachi. Well, now the wait is over, and QuickFire, Slow Burning is more than worth the wait. We’re delighted to share three poems from this vital new collection here at BooksfromScotland.
Extract taken from QuickFire, Slow Burning
By Janette Ayachi
Published by Pavilion Poetry
Quantum Leap
New Year 2021
still reeling from the last full moon
damp fire pits reignite & champagne pops
Mars-like drones sail a light show
across the landscape
& ship horns bellow from the Leith harbour
neighbours & fireworks & blasting foghorns
belly laughs spluttering like a war has ended
then where to sit in the silence
they ask each other with their eyes
& break it with a giggle
as they all slip in the snow
turn to retreat back indoors
on a slow cuckoo-spring
as if something could still fall from the sky
all stick & none stay & the curtains close
households returning a unified gaze
back to box sets as the gunpowder blew itself
to an inevitable
death.
Lobster
This was the first scene of our Stockbridge reel,
where the sun tempered against our backs
eyes flicked for shop window displays, smiles
of strangers; our vagrant shadows taller than trees.
The street was smudged
with expired parking meters
our circle became the shape of a drain puddle
absorbing through the grid, brimming clumsy
steps as I clutched the tiny hands of my daughters.
We spot something living behind glass,
a trapped lobster tentatively piano playing its
tentacles feeling for the promise of rock pools
& sand ‘it’s drowning in there’
a homeless woman shouts up from the curb
marking her presence with exclamation marks.
The young fisherman in a white plastic bodysuit
sees our interest as the girls’ caw with excitement
prod the glass with their clammy fingers
& he scoops up the meaty weight, its claws
bound shut with rubber bands, lifts it outside.
People are pulled in like kites on a string
reared away from the endless sea,
the homeless hands & the lobsters’ knuckles
both twitch out begging under the new crowd.
Translating The Transcendental Mountain
Things are shed when people listen to poetry.
Things are shed when people
peregrinate the mountains.
I will be that woman;
a quiet pioneer equipped
with a middle parting;
side satchel, walking stick,
in tweed, not Gore-Tex,
nor climbing gear or gadgets,
who saves her smelt of tears not for pillows
but to embellish the earth that bellows
to swamp nests of idle birds
alongside the flood.
I have been that woman;
walking circles from the cliff’s girth,
palm against a precipice of granite
given as a new gift from God.
Shrines in the summer rain, fertile
& full each season
with mountaineers who claimed
to own the mountain by mounting it.
The men take to it like athletic swimmers
doing laps across
the blunt pyramidal landscape
up the boulder staircases
& never getting lost in the squall beyond the chase
by making it somehow measured;
its nebulous paths, pink feldspar,
a spell of proper pinnacles.
I have been the woman who listened
to the stream in surround sound,
stereoscopically dumbfounded,
until she no longer heard her own heart pulse
where squirrels traced the scaffold of trees
like circus acrobats,
like the practised mountaineer.
What can we resuscitate, in love, in nature;
sprig of heather, needlepoint stars, crystals of ice,
facing that inaudible glare of life
sleeping on the hill & waking to find a blackbird
trapeze-walk your leg,
the mountain opening its curtains
to a stage of bodies
found on their hands & knees in the drift.
Its dangers must excite us,
to greet a mountain that knew
how to get away with murder –
& what a comfort, to see the world upside down,
like the time I was swimming once
in the waterfall at Glen Nevis,
sometimes I wanted to jump in
from the highest surface
above all the pedalboard structures
regulars hounded beneath
& once I wanted to push my lover in
hoping they would see the fun in it.
What if they might not surface back,
battle the deeper waters instead…
I would make sure no one saw
& tell everyone he jumped
in a terrain with only the stars as witnesses.
I remember expeditions; gunmetal haar,
those same verdigris waters
that tingle the throat if you sip them,
how the mountains are sometimes monsters
from a distance
metamorphosed by the dark,
a frantic jutting dramatic head,
grotesque in a helmet of hot weather.
What was beyond the living mountain then;
a funnel into the body’s marrow,
a tunnel into tomorrow & back & back & back
a perfect mating ground for soul & soil,
practised for when we return
our borrowed bones to it.
A mountain that mopped the cerebral
soaking up any residue of reality
into something utopian,
a slide into the fantasy of a world
surrendered to self
where your book lies holy now in bothies
passed around hillwalkers in communion.
Wallpaper of Aurora Borealis,
mugwort branches, wartime blackouts
why didn’t you get bored out there –
because it was exhilarating
to dump the dishes, docile domestic cities
& all domesticities
face mother nature in her true divine unravel
each starling-stamped sunrise
when boys made racecourses
competed with climbs & flags over it
we, women, open the mouth of it
& inspect the roots & molars
we peer inside its valleys, its belly
like an ultra-scan, sit up straight
with a stethoscope in hand
to hear its countless heartbeats.
Nan Shepherd lifted its life like a surgeon,
traced great cataracts created by old age & erosion
looking in as it looked back
with a summoning iris,
lenticular against sleet & blueberry mist.
I also need to be alone more than with the tribe,
a talking companion
does quite disgust the mountain,
any overheard gossip & it did not speak.
What a view of the world
from the inside of a cloud
where men disappear except for their whistles
the mountain grows trap doors
& swallows them whole
where sunshine vanishes
like a light-fitted switch that turns off in a room.
I have toppled at the supposed standing
waited to undress to bare my breasts as Atlantis
serenading the Sargasso seaweed,
lifted them out for it to suckle in the din,
in the muck & ichor & mountain dew meeting
in the calciferous cauldron of a cloud
as the ridge gorged its mouth on nipples
we felt full as it fed.
It’s not that she was not afraid out there alone
the roar of stags & splash of forests are fearsome
not long after the quiver of midnight,
images & noises leap out of alternate worlds
like lit tulips with mouths agape
for the tale-telling moon.
A song for all the senses, the elementals,
each one tagged with terror;
monstrous rocks, ghostly fog,
the flavours of the berries
for which the tongue cannot repay.
Something about the Scots, they enjoy
the toil & graft of a gruelling lunar landscape,
& welcome the annihilation
caused by wild swimming
for that second after when life floods back
up the violent viaduct into the bone-cup body
from the bottle of infinity
hereunder a hark of bonsai pines
& duck-egg blue whaleback grooves
that breach the sky like an x-ray of my teeth today
roots & rhizomes running like ravines,
snow-capped molars & caves from canines.
Each tooth has three roots, these recesses;
talismanic, limbic
often a sexy nervous simulacrum arises
from the spectacular panorama & chasms.
Nan, arm in arm with the mountain,
not interested in the summit
but in the effect it has on her,
trysting with the beast,
helping her dig deeper into the mystery,
this pilgrimage of life’s peaks & plateaus;
joys & woes,
Nan’s transcendental mountain
is where all wild women
when in nature must look to feel & flow.
Juano Diaz has made a name for himself as a photographer and visual artist, and his debut Slum Boy is an unforgettable memoir about the struggle for self-love and self-acceptance in late-20th century Scotland – guaranteed to break your heart and piece it back together again. In this extract, we meet young John – the name Juano’s mother used for him – as a brief encounter awakens his artistic spirit.
Extract taken from Slum Boy
By Juano Diaz
Published by Brazen
Barefoot and in tears I stand in the back garden, gripping the chain-link fence and peering through at the street ahead. My heart is broken because today is Sister Pauline’s day off and I know that Scary Man will be arriving to do the night shift later. Morag, who has been playing close by, walks over.
What’s wrong? she asks, placing her tiny, freckled hand on my arm.
I want Sister Pauline, I wail.
She’s not here today. Do you want me to get Maria?
I shake my head and wipe my snot and tears along the sleeve of my sweater.
I can get under there! I say, composing myself as I crouch down and point to a tiny gap under the fence. Morag crouches down beside me and we investigate the space.
With our bare hands, we begin to claw and scrape at the dirt until the gap is big enough, then like a soldier I wriggle through on my stomach.
Wait for me, Morag squeals. I stand up straight on the other side, dusting myself down. The little girl crawls under the fence after me, her dress riding up as she wriggles in the dirt. We giggle with delight, filthy from the soil.
Hand in hand, we run out of the front grounds and down the street in the direction of Sister Pauline’s villa. We make it halfway when an old man in a flat cap stops us, grabbing at my arm with his wrinkly hand.
Hey! Where are you two going? the old man wheezes.
I point back to the children’s home.
We live there, but we are going to see our mummy, I lie.
The old man laughs and hands me ten pence from his pocket. My mouth gapes open at the sight of the coin.
I never got any money, Morag sulks, letting go of my hand.
I’m telling, she sings, sticking out her tongue, and she takes off, running back up the street to the children’s home. I continue and run around the corner.
Sister Pauline lives in a villa owned by the Daughters of Charity and run by the Archdiocese of Glasgow. She has taken me here a few times before for a quick visit: a game of Mousetrap or to listen to her records while we draw pictures together, angels from her stories and flowers. The villa is like a fairy-tale castle. Its huge stone pillars stand strong to welcome me into the doorway.
I clamber up to her door and knock. The door opens and Sister Pauline smiles.
Hello, John, she says, sticking her head out to look around. Her smile drops when she realises I am alone.
Where are your shoes? she asks, looking down at my dirty feet.
Maria said I could come and live with you! I smile.
Is that so? she replies, nodding her head. Well, you better come in then.
I run past her and stand in the entrance hall. The floors are polished hardwood, and it’s full of antiques. To my right is a big room clad with mahogany wall panels. In the hallway stands a wonderful grandfather clock. Ahead is the big staircase that has a carved wooden cherub adorning the top of the banister.
But best of all it is dead silent: no sound of greetin’ weans, no shouting staff, no screaming- drunk Mummy. The only sounds in here are the ticking of the grandfather clock, guitar music and the occasional sound of a record, ‘Fleur de Cactus’ by the Singing Nun.
Sister Pauline takes my hand and leads me to my favourite room.
You wait in here.
The huge music room has a big high ceiling. Light floods in from a tall bay window, and musical instruments stand like regal figures all around me – a cello, guitars and an electric organ.
A huge artist’s easel stands close to the window, holding a small unfinished pastel drawing of a single yellow flower. I push my finger into the loose pastel dust that has collected in a small pile on the wooden easel frame. Behind me is a brown upright piano. I walk over and lift the lid. My fingers press the keys, leaving yellow pastel dust on the white ivory. I delight in the crisp, sharp sound that vibrates around me in the room.
Standing on the piano stool, I look at the brown wooden metronome that sits on top. With a flick of my finger, I start the hand going, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK. Lifting it down, I lie on my belly with my chin resting in my muddy hands. I listen to the ticking and watch the hypnotic hand bounce back and forth. The sun streams into the room, bathing me in light, and dust particles settle in the rays around the metronome, like a tiny snowstorm. I breathe deep and slow. At this moment I feel an intense calm, a feeling of blissful love, as if an angel from one of Sister Pauline’s stories has danced from the pages of her Bible. I can see Sister Pauline through the doorway talking on the telephone; she looks at me with a warm smile as she talks to the staff from the children’s home. I tune my ears into the conversation.
Yes, Maria, he’s here. He is safe. Oh, ten minutes ago. That is no problem. We will see you tomorrow morning then. OK. Bye.
Sister Pauline hangs up the phone and shakes her head at me, and I smile.
I never did get to live with Sister Pauline, and after spending the night, cuddled up in bed under heavy knitted blankets, I was returned to the chaos of the children’s home.
Slum Boy by Juano Diaz is published by Brazen, priced £20.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein continues to fascinate, not only the novel itself, but the story around its creation. Lesley MacDowell’s latest book Clairmont fictionalises this moment and the life of Mary’s friend, Claire Clairmont, in literary history. She spoke to us about her novel and it’s inspiration.
Clairmont
By Lesley McDowell
Published by Wildfire
Hi Lesley, congratulations on the upcoming publication of Clairmont. Can you tell readers a little bit about what they can expect from the novel?
I hope they can expect something thrilling, Gothic, and feminist! Thrilling because there are a lot of secrets and lies, which you might expect from a group of people as incestuous as the Shelley-Byron circle; Gothic because there’s a great house and violent storms at the centre of that summer in Geneva in 1816, when Claire, Mary, Shelley, Polidori and Byron all gather at the Villa Diodati, and Mary’s novel, Frankenstein, is born; and feminist because we’ve never properly heard from Claire about her experiences that summer when she was pregnant with Byron’s child, and her life after Shelley and Byron died young has largely been ignored.
You choose to tell the story of Claire Clairmont across three distinct timelines. What were your reasons for using this kind of structure?
I really wanted to put Claire’s afterlife on an equal footing with that summer in Geneva. It’s the summer that will change her life – she wrote that she had had ‘ten minutes of happy passion’ but that that those ten minutes had discombobulated ‘the rest of my life’. So it’s an enormous catalyst, but her life afterwards – going to Russia to work as a governess, living independently in Paris – while being deeply affected by what happened to her that year, is also testament to her independent spirit, her determination to support herself and earn her own money and never to marry. She’s a real counter to the narrative that women of this era had to get married in order to survive, a narrative we tend to privilege because of Jane Austen, I think.
This is your second novel based on a friend of Mary Shelley’s, following Unfashioned Creatures in 2013. What is it about Shelley and that circle of Romantic intellectuals that appeals to you as a writer?
There are so many things! They do embody that ‘small r’ romantic notion of what it means to be a poet or writer – flouting social norms, not having a ‘proper job’, living for the moment and in so many different places, and so on. They were also doing extraordinary things in literature – Shelley, for me, is probably one of the greatest poets who ever lived, if not the greatest; Mary Shelley effectively started a whole new genre of fiction with a single novel; and Claire is an exemplary letter writer (a genre that has been much underestimated). But from a novelist’s point of view, they are also extraordinary characters, who keep secrets about parentage, and tell lies about affairs, and so their personal lives are as fascinating as their literary output. They leave many questions unanswered about the choices they made, and that’s great for novelists, who can speculate and examine them dramatically, in a way that biographers can’t.
You’re a writer of historical fiction and non-fiction, but your concerns – specifically in regards to gender – are timely and modern. What can the study of history teach us about contemporary issues, and how does fiction allow you to explore these ideas?
Although I’ve written mostly about people who lived pre-Darwin and pre-Freud, so that it’s hard to really know exactly how they thought and felt, even when there’s a large body of diaries and letters that give us so much of their inner lives. But for me, what’s important about history is how surprising it often is, how it disrupts our notions of the past, and makes us re-think the present. For example, we tend to think that middle-class women of the Regency era had to be married or their lives would be in ruins, because most of our understanding comes from Jane Austen, whose novels stress that fact for women. And yet, when we study the lives of Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley, not only do we find they were both, at different points, unmarried mothers, but we also find that their mothers were unmarried mothers, too. And yet, none of them had their lives destroyed by this. Were they an anomaly, or were they typical, of women of their class and era? That’s a question we need to ask, because it impacts on how we think about the status of women and marriage even today.
I think fiction allows you to open up the inner life of someone who lived at a certain point in the past, so that they’re not just a figure in a history book, or the subject of a biography. Fiction lets me, specifically, to cross that pre-Darwin, pre-Freud divide, and, hopefully without mapping my own 21st century sensibilities too much on to them, understand their motives, their desires, their needs, much better.
You wrote your Ph.D on the “Feminine Fictions” of James Joyce, and that interest in the ways in which women are written in and out of literature clearly continues today with Clairmont. Does the study of women (or absence of) in literary history change the way you read the work of celebrated male authors, and if so, how?
I think what that kind of study has done for me is emphasise that the male point of view is simply one point of view, and that there are others that are equally valid. And further to that – that those ‘others’ don’t just offer up a different point of view, they can offer up a point of view that disrupts, challenges, even denies that male point of view, one that has been accepted for so long as the only view worth seeing from and speaking from. One of my favourite writers is Henry James, who liked to write very often from a woman’s point of view. That he’s also famous for ambiguity in his writing reflects, I think, that notion that a female viewpoint is less trustworthy – the male viewpoint in his novels is also ambiguous, but those male characters are often not aware of that aspect. He immortalized Claire Clairmont in his novella, The Aspern Papers, which is based on the real-life American collector Edward Silsbee, who visits Claire in old age for her memories of the great poets Byron and Shelley, and hopes to buy her letters from them. The novella is told from the point of view of the Silsbee character, though. Claire Clairmont, as ‘Miss Bordereau’, tellingly wears a veil throughout, until the moment she discovers the Silsbee character rifling through her papers, and the shock of it kills her. I find it fascinating that a male writer had to have a male character effectively kill off Claire in fiction, when the truth is that no man managed to do that, and she actually outlived Byron and Shelley by over fifty years!
Lastly, if you could go on holiday to Geneva with one member of the Byron/Shelley circle, who would it be and why?
It would have to be Claire, of course, although, I’d prefer to be about eighteen, too, so that I could keep up with her! In my head, I imagine being her friend, the one she confides in about how she really feels about Byron, and about Shelley, and about Mary. I don’t think I could have changed her mind about the decisions she made that summer – I think she was too headstrong to listen, as we all tend to be at 18. But I’d like to have tried.
Clairmont by Lesley McDowell is published by Wildfire, priced £18.99.
404 Ink’s Inklings series of books goes from strength to strength, introducing readers to exciting new topics. This month they publish Jean Menzies’ exploration of queer identity in Greek myths in the 21st century. We hope you enjoy this extract.
All The Violent Tiaras: Queering the Greek Myths
By Jean Menzies
Published by 404 Ink
Ancient Greek myth and culture has infiltrated the way in which we talk about queer literature in the twenty- first century, particularly online. Sapphic has become one of, if not the, go to term to refer to art which features women who love women, whether they be lesbians, bi- sexual, pansexual, or some whether else on the m- spectrum. The term long predates the invention of social media but it’s particularly interesting to me that when looking for a way to signpost books featuring queer women, we have landed on an ancient name. Something similar is happening with the term Achillean, which is being used more and more to describe books featuring men who love men (for reference, #SapphicBooks and #AchilleanBooks have over 310 million and 3.6 million results on TikTok respectively, at the time of writing in 2023).
Even when speaking to authors and book reviewers this came up, with Bea Fitzgerald (author of Girl, Goddess, Queen and book reviewer @chaosonlympus) noting Sapphic Greek mythology books recommendations are among the most common requests she received. But where do these terms come from? Achilles is a mythological figure probably most famous (in terms of queer relevancy) for his romantic relationship with another man named Patroclus, who we’ll discuss in more depth shortly, so let’s focus on Sappho for a moment. Sappho is not a figure of mythology, but a writer herself. In the foreword to Mary Barnard’s translation of Sappho’s work, Dudley Fitts succinctly summarises what we know about Sappho: she is a ‘lyricist’ and she is ‘greek’, ‘the rest is speculation’. She is one of very, very few ancient women writers we have any surviving texts from and included in those texts are love poems to both men and women. We don’t actually know Sappho’s sexuality but, given her unique role in history, over the centuries her name has become synonymous with women who love women. Note, when I say we don’t know Sappho’s sexuality, I’m not trying to be a killjoy and nor do I think that lack of knowledge invalidates the impact her legacy has had on the queer community and for queer women in particular. Personally, I think of her as a bi-con, but then I’m biased.
This is a particularly interesting topic given the lack of explicitly ‘Sapphic’ women in classical mythology itself. In contrast with the expectation that sexual relationships would be formed between two men in ancient Greece (with the caveat that only heterosexual marriage was legal), relationships between two women were not condoned. Women’s sexuality was tightly controlled according to how it benefitted men, in what was an aggressively patriarchal society. Despite this, we know through a combination of common sense and the surviving poetry of Sappho herself, that queer women did exist. And, though they were pushed into the shadows, or completely ignored in their time, many queer relationships are now not only having a light shone on them by authors, those that did exist or that could have been, but are sitting at the forefront of literary culture.
*
Madeline Miller’s bestselling novel The Song Achilles (2012) recounts the love story of the Greek heroes Achilles and Patroclus. According to ancient Greek mythology Achilles and Patroclus were both warriors who knew each other from childhood and fought on the side of the Achaeans (Greeks) during the Trojan War. When Achilles perceives his general Agamemnon of dishonouring him, he refuses to continue fighting. Patroclus then dons Achilles’ armour and wears it into battle, which results in his death at the hands of the Trojan prince Hector. Upon learning of Patroclus’ fate Achilles is overwhelmed by grief and anger, returning to the fight to avenge him. Miller’s novel generally follows the ancient myth’s series of events; she begins the story during Achilles and Patro-clus childhood, charting the development of their rela-tionship, and subsequently the romantic aspect, over the years, before their infamous ending.
At the time of writing, #TheSongOfAchilles, #TSOA and #SongOfAchilles have racked up more than 650 million views collectively on TikTok, with a plethora of related and misspelled hashtags receiving numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The same hashtags have been used no less than 194,000 times on Instagram, with thousands of written works under The Song of Achilles umbrella on Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction site. In 2021, nearly ten years after its original publication, The Song of Achilles was back on the New York Times bestseller list, thanks almost entirely to TikTok hype. As someone who has spent more than ten years of their life making bookish content online, first on YouTube and then pretty much everywhere else, I’ve always understood the power of online fandoms. TikTok has been something else. It has had an international influence on book sales that we’ve never seen before and whether you think ‘their’ taste is highbrow enough for you or not, that impact is kind of incredible – to this author and reader, at least. The fact that so many of the books reaching new heights feature positive queer representation therefore is even more exhilarating.
But the question on everyone’s lips: were the ancient Achilles and Patroclus romantically involved? It depends who you ask. The nature of their relationship is a controversial one both in fandom and academic spaces. The earliest surviving version of their story comes to us via Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, set over the course of Achilles’ final days during the Trojan War. Here, there is nothing to explicitly indicate they are lovers. Achilles loves Patroclus as is clearly indicated by his grief over his death, and you could certainly read that as romantic love, many have. But, as others have pointed out, the text is far from conclusive and what might sound like a romantic expression of emotion to modern readers can’t be definitively read as such for a historical civilisation where social mores were not our own. A few hundred years later, by the classical period, there are writers who explicitly reference the romantic relationship between the two. Plato, for example, specifically refers to Patroclus as Achilles’ lover on a number of occasions in his Symposium, as well as specifying that Achilles chose death in part to be reunited with Patroclus in the underworld (179e-180b). So, who’s right? Well, I’ve never been convinced that one text is a more accurate version of a myth by virtue of its age – haven’t I been going on about the malleability of myth? There were clearly ancient Greek versions of Achilles and Patroclus relationship that were romantic, and there were ancient people who read their dynamic as lovers. Just as Miller has.
All The Violent Tiaras: Queering the Greek Myths by Jean Menzies is published by 404 Ink, priced £7.50.
Ali Millar is one of Scotland’s most exciting new voices, and her unsettling debut novel, Ava Anna Ada, looks set to be a literary highlight of 2024.
Ava Anna Ada
By Ali Millar
Published by White Rabbit
ANNA
In the car, I decided to try her out for size. I needed to know how much like Ada she could be.
I told her I couldn’t face the vet on my own. She smiled at me as she hopped into the car and sat where Ada had. Ada always sat straight-backed; she did too. I tried to stop glancing across at her as I drove. I fixed my eyes on the road.
It is unfortunate that not everyone breathes the same. Ada had this soft, low way of doing it. So low that sometimes I would worry she’d stopped, even when she was awake next to me. I spent years making my hearing sharper, telling it to work harder, the way you have to when they’re babies; I tuned into her breath and then, at the end, it changed. It became a ragged, animal thing, a thing she could not properly take. I would hear her struggle for it, and her voice, her beautiful voice, started to come out wrong. Then she was no longer my Ada, not really, just as this Ava was also not my Ada. Ava’s breath was another thing. It was loud. It filled the car up until it became a presence of its own, condemning my stupidity. Possibly she had a cold, or hay fever, or her adenoids needed attention. Whatever it was that was wrong with her, it meant her breathing didn’t match Ada’s the way I needed it to.
I put the radio on, flicked it to a classical station, hoping to block it out.
For a while I couldn’t hear her breathe over the music. When she asked me a question and I took my eyes from the road to glance back at her; she was still all wrong. Something about the arrangement of her was off. Her legs were too long. She was too high up in the seat. I thought about stopping the car. Was it possible that I could pull over and tell her to get out? There was nothing plausible I could think of to say. She needed to be shorter – only an inch or two. I like things to be right. It was vital to be precise about this recreation.
Make yourself comfortable, I said to her, hoping she would slide down in the seat. But she didn’t. Instead, she leant forwards to the footwell, untied her laces and took her shoes off.
I tried not to look at her then. The car began to smell like pondwater.
She came back up with the brown paper bag in her hands. This keeps rattling, she said. Are you sure it’s OK down there? I kept my eyes on the road. It’s fine, yes, I said. She dropped the bag. Not taking care to place it down gently, she just let it fall from her hands.
I didn’t look at her, but I could still see the blur of her movements. I could smell the damp of her socks mingling with the wet-dog smell coming from the back. She smelt of grass, mud and fresh sweat. Almost sweet; certainly alien. She was a thing that belonged outside, not in here.
At the end, Ada hardly smelt. She stopped sweating in the last year as her body receded back into childhood. As her face hollowed around the skull below, I had the strangest sensation she was becoming simultaneously younger and older. For days, she’d smell of pear drops, the faint acetone on her breath. The first time I smelt it I asked if she’d been eating sweeties, not thinking, and she fixed me with her rounding eyes, knowing the fool her mother was. It was the doctor who told me this was the smell of ketones; with nothing else to feed on, her body was eating itself.
I thought: I will need to get some of those sweets for Ava. She might like them. So many things I’d made myself block out; so many things Ava was making me remember.
Ava lifted her legs, put them and her damp socks on the cream leather seat, flopped them to the side and crossed them at the ankle. She stared out of the window to where The Watchers were. She asked about The Wave. I told her no, I didn’t think it would come. She stared out of the window again. I took something from my right pocket. Slid it out, felt the soft rounded edges of it with my thumb before putting it in my mouth. Ava reached under her coat and began to scratch at the top of her shoulder. I could see her hand there, moving around, but I was done with her then. I swallowed, soon forgot about her breathing as the soft blanketing waves of nothingness I’d craved all morning engulfed me.
I turned the radio off and just drove.
Ava Anna Ada by Ali Millar is published by White Rabbit, priced £18.99.
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