THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

David Robinson enjoys Peter Ross’s latest travelogue in search of the UK and Ireland’s ancient past.

 

Upon A White Horse: Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland
By Peter Ross
Published by Headline

 

If you are writing about the lure of Britain’s deep past, you have to write about Stonehenge. If you write about Stonehenge, you have to write about the winter solstice. And if you have to write about the winter solstice at Stonehenge, you should start off something like this:

 

‘It was half past five in the morning, three days before Christmas, and King Arthur was on the bus …’

 

That’s how Peter Ross handles it anyway in his latest book, Upon A White Horse, taking the No 333 bus from Salisbury to watch the midwinter sunrise at England’s No 1 neolithic site. I can imagine him on it, tape recorder in hand, sitting next to the self-styled ‘king’ Arthur Uther Pendragon, his sword Excalibur slotted between them. Perhaps that intro is already forming in his head. And why not? It works.

King Arthur is a Druid, a biker with ‘Born to be Wild’ as the ringtone on his mobile (a typical Ross killer detail) and in his battle for free access to Stonehenge he was once defended in court by a certain Keir Starmer.  In many ways, he is just too interesting (Arthur, that is, not Keir) – or, if you prefer, eccentric. Too much of him, or Stonehenge’s Archdruid Rollo Maughfling (‘he has an avuncular, plummy charm, but there’s something cosmic about him too’) could overbalance the story. And in any case, the building of Stonehenge had nothing to do with the Druids;  by the time they came on the scene, a few centuries before the Romans arrived, it was already ancient and possibly in ruins.

Ross is too polite to take this up with King Arthur. In his text, though not in conversation, he points out that the Druidic link to Stonehenge was confabulated in the 1660s, and that the Ancient Order of Druids isn’t so ancient at all, as they were founded in 1781 at the King’s Arms pub in Soho. That’s not the point of the book: it’s not about splitting historical hairs so much as finding out why the ancient places of these islands cast such a strong spell. Behind that lie deeper, wider questions: is our interest part of a search for identity, simplicity and authenticity in an increasingly bland yet technologically frightening world? Is it a comfort blanket we need to cling to more strongly as our collective future darkens?

Some of the answers Ross finds are in surprisingly modern places, like Glasgow’s Sighthill Stone Circle (built in 1979  using the astronomical expertise of the father of Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite), Surrey’s Hascombe Stones Circle erected in the mid-1990s by members of a hippy commune, or the all-new neolithic-style barrow tombs like All Cannings in Wiltshire.  Many such places are built out of a wish to memorialise loved ones in the most permanent way we can imagine –  entirely understandable given the anonymous 15-minute farewells of so many crematorium services.

Sometimes the links to the past Ross uncovers are both visible and invisible. The Uffington White Horse, carved into the south Oxfordshire chalk hills a thousand years or before the Romans arrived, is indeed, as points out, an amazing bit of graphic design. More amazing still, though, is the fact that if the locals didn’t weed it and hammer in a new layer of chalk every year, within 25 years the hill on which the chalk horse is etched would be completely grassed over.

Just think, Ross writes, of everything that has happened since the horse was etched onto that hillside – the Roman invasion, the Norman Conquest, the two world wars – while in each generation local people ensured it was never put out to grass. There is a simple poetry in that fact, just as there is in the science of dating chalk layers by when they last saw sunlight, and his writing uncovers it. Again, an archaeologist might come up with a theory about the horse’s origins as a form of sun worship, but I prefer Ross’s pithier summary: ‘A prayer in chalk. Hallowed be thy mane.’

Personally, I have a bit of a blind spot about archaeology. I lack the imagination for it. (History is different: as soon as there’s a written record about how people thought, felt and behaved, I’m on board). I need a helping hand: a writer with a wide cultural frame of reference, who can write descriptively and accessibly, involving himself in a place either directly or through others. Ross fits the bill perfectly: at Uffington, for example, he joins in the parish’s annual weeding of the chalk horse and interviews XTC’s bassist about why the band used an image of the horse on their album English Settlement. On the site itself, he meets both dope-smoking teenagers and a retired brigadier working as a National Trust volunteer who keeps dementia at bay by memorising Anglo-Saxon poetry.

It’s the same weirdly wonderful story at Cerne Abbas, home of the club-wielding and notoriously well-endowed chalk giant (not prehistoric, apparently, but more likely Anglo-Saxon), where singer-songwriter Virginia Astley tells him about Gustav Holst meeting Thomas Hardy in Egdon Heath. On May Day, he’s there to see Wessex Morris Men dance round their monster mascot, as locals tear into donated barrels of local beer.  As if that isn’t surreal enough, the local vicar then asks him if he’d like to meet Chesney Hawkes. ‘What do you make of it all?’ he asks him. ‘I live in LA,’ Hawkes replies. ‘You don’t get this on Ventura Boulevard.’

Yet do not, for a second, get the idea that this book is just a compendium of the strange, the unusual and the downright eccentric. Whether writing about Silbury Hill (the largest prehistoric mount in Europe, it would once have been entirely chalk white: according to novelist Adam Thorpe, ‘nothing as spectacular and lovely has been created since on our islands’), Avebury, Sutton Hoo, the bog-preserved bodies in Ireland’s National Museum, the Ness of Brodgar, or the massive Vindolanda camp on Hadrian’s Wall, or taking his son on a walk across the Antonine Wall, Ross is always lucid, almost reverent, about the whole process of archaeological discovery.

On Page 132 we find out why. One weekend when he was ten, his grandparents took him to a sand and gravel quarry near his Stirling home for his first dig. On the Friday night his grandfather had overheard a quarryman talking in the pub about how he’d accidentally unearthed a skull when his excavator bucket had smashed a stone slab. That slab, his grandparents – both amateur archaeologists – knew, was a Bronze Age burial cist that had been undisturbed for 4,000 years. They got out their trowels and started digging. Uncovering pieces of bone and of a beaker, they put them in a sealed plastic tub, and on the Monday morning reported the find to the council archaeologist. Imaginatively, they then asked their grandson to write it up for the archaeological journal Discovery and Excavation in Scotland.

There is a coda to the story that I won’t spoil by revealing. It is, however, worth pointing out that this anecdote does at least show that Ross has been in the archaeology and writing business for rather a long time. ‘Really,’ he writes, ‘I should have been an archaeologist rather than a writer…. Whenever I think about my childhood adventures in digging, I have a feeling of a path not taken. This book is an attempt to walk it a little.’

 

Upon A White Horse by Peter Ross is published by Headline, priced £22.

Yasmin Hanif has released a beautiful picture book Abdullah’s Bear Needs a Name! that is fabulously illustrated by Sophie Benmouyal. The story was inspired by Yasmin’s work with school children and her observations when they themselves were given a teddy bear to name. We hope you enjoy this reading.

 

Abdullah’s Bear Needs a Name!
By Yasmin Hanif; illustrated by Sophie Benmouval
Published by Floris Books

 

 

Abdullah’s Bear Needs a Name! by Yasmin Hanif and illustrated by Sophie Benmouval is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.

Ghillie Başan is an internationally acclaimed writer, broadcaster and food anthropologist with, and is renowned for her work on Turkish, Middle Eastern and Moroccan food. But her heart is also in the Highlands where she loves to bring her food knowledge to Scotland’s wonderful larder of ingredients. Her latest book, Food, Whisky, Life is more than a recipe book – it’s a celebration of a life well lived and well fed! Here, we publish her recipe for whisky-inspired baklava.

 

Food, Whisky, Life
By Ghillie BaŞan
Published by Tin Shack Press

 

 

 

Whisky-inspired Baklava

Pastries filled with ground nuts, baked fruit or creamy, semolina mixtures, and bathed in honey or syrup are made for a dram.

A legacy of the Ottoman Empire, baklava is perhaps the grandest of all sweet pastries as the paper-thin sheets of dough, the number of layers, the different texture of the nuts, the density of syrup and the shape of the pastries are all crucial to its perfection in its many guises.

During the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent when the banquets were indulgent and lavish, the creative chefs of the Topkapi kitchens produced trays of syrupy pastries and sponges with suggestively descriptive names – ‘young girl’s breasts’, ‘sweetheart’s lips,’ ‘ladies’ navels’, ‘Vezier’s fingers’ – all of which are still popular today but, when I’m pairing with whisky, it is baklava that I turn to.

Many people shy away from making baklava at home as it seems like it would be complicated to do, but if you buy the filo sheets rather than make them yourself, the rest is easy, although I’m not saying that a top pastry chef in Istanbul would approve! In my modest kitchen where the oven is erratic and I use shop-bought filo, I stick to elements of tradition interspersed with a twist of fruit and flavoured syrups tailored to the whisky I am pairing with, such as apricots and raspberries, combined with orange, rose or whisky syrups.

An Ottoman sultan might have thrown me out of his kitchen but I enjoy preparing baklava to pair with whisky as you can be creative and invent your own fillings and toppings. My guests are always delighted– even the ones from Turkey, Lebanon and Greece! It usually leaves with them in a doggy bag. These are some of my creations: Ricotta, vanilla, pine nuts with whisky syrup and fresh raspberries; Ground Pistachios, chopped dried apricots in lemon syrup; Ground Pistachio with blackcurrants in lime syrup; Ground almonds, mashed baked pumpkin, rosemary and preserved lemon syrup; Ground cashews, pulped pineapple with pink peppercorn syrup

How do you make baklava?

First you make the syrup with a ratio of roughly 500g granulated sugar to 300ml water, the juice of one lemon and any other flavourings. Bring the water and sugar to the boil in a heavy-based pot, stirring all the time, then add the lemon juice and other flavourings and simmer for about 10 minutes to thicken. Turn off the heat and leave the syrup to cool. You add cold syrup to hot baklava.

For a large tray of baklava, you need a 250g packet of filo sheets (you can use more than this – it all depends on the size and shape of your tin), roughly 175g butter or ghee, and the fillings you choose for the layers, generally consisting of finely chopped or ground nuts, chopped dried or fresh fruits, and spices like cinnamon, vanilla and cardamom. Preheat the oven to 350F/mark 4/180C.

Melt the butter in a small pan and keep it beside you as you layer up the filo sheets. Brush a little butter over the base of your oven tray, place a filo sheet over the base and brush it lightly with butter, then place a filo sheet on top of that and brush it with butter. Repeat with five to seven layers and work quickly so that the filo sheets don’t dry out. (If your sheets of filo overlap the tray, just fold them over to fit and brush the fold with butter and, if your filo sheet is too short for the tray, you can overlap with another sheet making sure the overlap is brushed with the butter).

Scatter your filling over the fifth or seventh layer, spreading it evenly across the sheet, then continue layering the sheets and brushing with butter. If you are using two fillings, layer two to three sheets between the fillings. There are usually 12 sheets in a packet. When you get to the top sheet, brush it generously with butter and, using the tip of a sharp knife, cut down through the layers in lines from one end of the tray to the other and across the way to form small squares or diamond shapes.

Place the baklava in the oven for 35-40 minutes, until golden brown and crispy on top. If the oven is too hot, it will darken on top but won’t be cooked all the way through, so you can put it on the low shelf of your oven first and then move it up towards the end of the cooking time.

Take the baklava out of the oven, ladle some of the cold syrup over the top, and return it to the oven for five minutes. This helps to absorb the syrup and seal the top layer.

Take the baklava out of the oven again and place it on a heat-resistant surface. Gradually drizzle the rest of the syrup over it, giving the baklava time to absorb it. You can garnish the top with fruit, nuts, roasted seeds, petals, whatever you like, and leave to cool before serving.

 

Food, Whisky, Life by Ghillie BaŞan is published by Tin Shack Press, priced £26.

Twelve-year-old Tally Smuck is destined to become a Sting Winkler — someone who can communicate with jellyfish — just like her mother and grandfather before her. The Smucks‘ special gift means only they can do the vital job of caring for the invaluable jellies that Stormcliff depends on. The isolated, salt-soaked isle of Stormcliff is preparing for the annual Firebloom Festival, a famous gathering of thousands of jellyfish and their incredible light show. But with only a day to go, there’s no jellyfish. Can Tally save the festival?

This illuminating middle-grade mystery adventure from award-winning author Justin Davies is full of jeopardy, joy and jellyfish! Firebloom is a bright and brilliant standalone novel set in the same imagined world as Haarville. 

 

Firebloom
By Justin Davies
Published by Floris Books

 

The First Sting Bites the Deepest 

I have never been stung by a Stormcliff jellyfish. 
No Smuck ever should.  
– from The Sting Winkler’s Handbook by Agnes Smuck 

 

The night before the Firebloom Festival began was almost as exciting as the festival itself. 

At least, that’s what Tally Smuck was thinking as she hung from the final rung of the Cliff-Climb ladder above Bloom Bay. She twisted her neck to look down in an attempt to judge the distance she was about to drop, but her salt goggles were so dirty she couldn’t see a thing. 

Too bad. Tally let go. 

“Thank the krakens,” she whispered, as her feet made contact with the sand and her knees buckled to absorb the impact. 

Staying crouched for a moment, Tally whipped off the goggles. The wind had dropped during her climb down, so the risk of eye-smarting salt spray off the waves had disappeared. She picked up a handful of sand. It was still warm from being heated by the sun all day. As she let the grains run through her fingers, Tally smiled at the tiny particles of quartz sparkling in the moonlight like diamond dust. 

Standing up, she turned to look out across the bay, taking a moment to enjoy the sound of the surf bubbling on the shoreline. Any other time of year, she would have been deafened by massive waves, whipped up to a frenzy by the constant wind crashing on the shore and towering rocks that gave Stormcliff its name. In those conditions, no sensible Stormcliffer would dream of leaving home without their salt goggles firmly clamped to their face. But now, and for the next week, a soft breeze was as much as they needed to worry about.  

It always fascinated Tally how the weather seemed to know to calm down whilst the Firebloom Festival took place. Just thinking about the festivities to come sent an excited shiver up her spine. Tonight, she had the bay to herself. But this time tomorrow the beach would be packed with locals and visitors, all gathered to witness the first firebloom, when thousands of jellyfish would put on their spectacular light show, just as they had at the same time every year since before anyone in Stormcliff could remember.  

Tally kicked off her shoes and rolled up her trouser legs, then made her way across the sand. The excited spine-tingle had fizzled away, replaced by a nagging knot in her stomach, and she suddenly wished she hadn’t piled quite such a large dollop of potted plankton on her kelp crackers for supper. She had never felt this nervous about the Firebloom Festival before. 

It wasn’t the arrival of this year’s visitors that was giving her the jitters. Tally was as eager as everyone else to meet the tourists lucky enough to have secured a seat on the once-a-year sailing to Stormcliff from the mainland. Some of them would have waited a long time for the chance to witness the legendary display put on by the Stormcliff jellyfish.   

Nor was it the prospect of helping Grandad Isaac and Mandeep – or Mandad, as Tally had always called Grandad’s husband – with this year’s jellyfish-sting harvest. If you were a Smuck, you had no choice. The jellies had always been their responsibility and Tally had been allowed to help her grandads in the sting shed at harvest time since she was six years old.  

No. The thing making Tally’s stomach twist and tumble like a tangle of dried seaweed was whether this would be the year she would finally become a Sting Winkler. Just like Grandad was. Just like her mum had been. 

Tally smiled. She had a few clear memories of her mum, Ama. But the clearest of all was the last time she stood with her, just like this, in the surf the night before the festival began six years ago. It had turned out to be her mum’s last ever Firebloom Festival – she’d died later that same year. But when she’d been alive, Tally’s mum had liked to greet any jellies that had arrived in Stormcliff’s waters early, to let them know that they were welcome and that they would be taken care of during their stay. That night, she had held Tally’s small hand in hers and told her that one day it would be her job to do the same: to talk to the jellies and gain their trust, to be a Sting Winkler, just like generations of Smucks before her.  

That’s why tonight, Tally had come down to the bay to greet the jellies alone. Just as her mum had done. 

Not that the jellyfish understood her yet, of course. She’d need to be a Sting Winkler for that to happen, and even though she was already twelve, there’d been not so much as an inkling of any winkling. Tally couldn’t help but worry that her abilities should have shown themselves by now. After all, Grandad had become a Sting Winkler when he was eleven, as had Tally’s mum. What if hers didn’t arrive at all? No, that couldn’t happen. Could it…?   

Tally squeezed her eyes shut, twisting some of her copper-tinged curls around a finger, whilst tapping her chest in the spot where a tiny jellyfish hung on a chain. Stormcliff’s very first Sting Winkler, Agnes Smuck – Tally’s who-knew-how-many-times-great-grandmother and famed Victorian jellyfish seeker – was said to have carved the jelly out of a strange amber-coloured gem she’d found washed up on the beach when she first came to the isle of Stormcliff many years ago. Now, as she stepped into the surf, Tally sent her ancestor a silent plea for help.  

Biting her lip, she scanned the surface for signs of jelly life. For a few minutes there was nothing but a ribbon of moonlight dancing on the gentle ripples, then Tally spotted a flickering blue light about an oar’s length away, just under the surface. 

“There you are!” 

 The first flicker was followed by one, then two, then three more. As the jellies washed closer, their markings became more defined, flashing bright circles on their smooth, translucent domed tops. 

With her fingertips just breaking the water’s surface, Tally waited to greet the first jellies of the year. And maybe, just maybe, she would feel a connection – like a true Sting Winkler should.  

Only, these jellies seemed reluctant. They were holding back, pulsing gently against the tide, faintly flashing their blue circles, one after the other. It was almost as if they were whispering amongst themselves. 

“It’s alright,” Tally whispered back. “You know me.” 

She held her breath. Five seconds, then ten. Finally, one of the jellies displayed a sequence of flashes, before bobbing closer until Tally could reach out and ever so gently stroke it. The jelly glowed briefly, then faded to an eerie milky white. Tally waited, her feet sinking into the sand, but she didn’t dare move. 

Then, in a single rapid movement, the jelly turned sideways, sucking itself in, before exploding in a series of rapid flashes radiating from its centre, across its dome and sparking along its tentacles as it billowed away. 

“Hey!” 

Tally reached out, but as she did, a single sparking tentacle lassoed back and whipped across her arm. 

For a moment, she could only stand in disbelief, her skin throbbing.  

She’d been hoping for a sign that she was a true Sting Winkler. Instead, Tally was the first Smuck to ever be stung. 

And it hurt. 

It hurt a lot.  

 

Firebloom by Justin Davies is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.

Every year we look forward to the publication of the New Writing Scotland anthology as it always highlights the best in established names and exciting newcomers in Scotland’s literary scene. The new anthology, A Chaos of Light, is fine reading as expected! Here, we publish a few poems from the collection.

 

A Chaos of Light: New Writing Scotland 43
Edited by Kirsten Innes, Chris Powici & Niall O’Gallagher
Published by Association of Scottish Literature

 

Kevin Cormack

SHORACKS
fur Tony Swain

 

This wis whin TVs hid thir oun national bedtime:

a vicar in a comfortable, high-backed chair

wid shepherd his mild-mannered story

aboot a window cleaner, or a trip tae the seaside,

twaards hids inevitable punchline:

‘And, you know, Jesus was a bit like that.’

At these words the TV wid sink intae a sea o white noise.

We convened in her mither’s attic,

oan an owld couch beneath the cooples,

and stared at yin churnan blizzard fur oors oan end.

Hunkered in front o her mither’s muted Grundig,

a year since wir last meeteen, we drifted oot again

intae a dwam until figures appeared.

The hoose below breathed like bellows

o an accordion; a timorous whistle, me squeaky eyes.

The attic lowed like a crystal haal, last I saa her –

dark-eyed and ready tae furgit me.

I wid lean intae that storm (o some demiurge’s

makeen) the rest o me days.

Sheu leant in different – like bliindie-bockie –

and disappeared intae tambourines and mirrors.

 

Shoracks: shore-dwellers of Kirkwall

bliindie-bockie: blind man’s buff

 

GUTS
i.m. K. H.

 

‘You know more than I know’ sang John Cale,

under the needle in yir student digs, twinned

wae mine. Words afore I worded thum;

clippeens o feteesh and crime scenes

afore the inkleen, the glue, the compositional eye.

Whar ye came fae and whar ye then dwelt:

that fraction o a second afore sense

reaches the brain, raffles up wae emotion,

laughter lippers ower. Whar stimuli bides

in the raa, afore adoption: colourless colour,

touchless touch and ither such blethers.

 

Makan me whit? A cover version – a bad wan

at that – wae virry little say in the metter?

Me intimidatan mate, as mates so often err.

The Mekon in Bowie’s black leather jaiket

fae the cover o Heroes, riflan through

vintage paperback emporiums,

as if elbuck-deep in a buullick’s liver.

Lendan me biographies o resplendent,

reckless lives – hand-me-doon

subversion fur yir second-hand sael –

designed tae mak me less and less sure.

 

Fae somebuddy thit nivver bowt a stick

o furnityir in his life, nivver ouwned

a fridge or washeen machine, hoose or ker,

computer or smertphone.

Zeus (as played bae Niall MacGinnis)

geen foosty in a ruined picture-hoose attic.

 

That’s the trouble wae classicists:

liable tae spang clear o the membrane entirely.

Blessed be the latecomers – the gulf

between stoory needle crackle

and yir bureaucratic bowels.

 

 

Reyzl Grace

BRIGADOON
for E. R. Shaffer

 

A think A knew, somegate,

in that first month we war girlfreinds –

 

We’d passt the nicht thegither,

an it wis sae haurd tae lea’ ye

 

in the morn, cuisten across

yer gowd-strawn bed

 

like a saunt’s cloak on a sunleam

whiles yer ain lay on the fluir.

 

Ye laucht, telt me object

permanence is a real thing

 

an that ye’d still be there eftir

ye walkit me tae the door.

 

As it shut, I cawed

oot, ‘An the door eelit

 

a hunner year . . .’ A wis anely

tryin tae mak ye lauch,

 

but ye reappeart in an instant,

luiken sae sairious,

 

catcht bi ma vyce afore

the joke, and then ye grint

 

in that aaber, elfin wey

ye dae that inveets ma tongue

 

like the clootie wall caws

the cuinyie in a lanely lass’s

 

purse. A wis late tae wark.

That wis afore A’d eaten

 

thae cupcakes on yer birthday –

afore A’d passt a century

 

watchin ye draig a fag

an then kythed tae find A’dna

 

been missin mair ’an a day.

Nou A knaw why

 

ye walk circles aroond

the flat whan things gae missin,

 

why yer een wirth til milk

like some Greek oracle

 

anent the clock, why

ye maist like daena remember

 

the lingelie whit apens the poyum

ye demandit, an why ye demandit

 

a poyum, oot aw things,

whan offert yer auchtin. Ye telt me,

 

aince, that ye war afeart

A wudna date ye acause

 

ye’re a stoner, but the suith

is A cudna lea’ ye kis ye’re a sìth.

 

Zain Rishi

PILLARS

Among the trees, there is a tree, the leaves
of which do not fall and is like a Muslim.
—Sahih al-Bukhari

 

1. Sajjada

It was as if blessing the floor below her knees was

the only way she could ever stand again. Her scarf,

black and billowing, moulded to her like a dark

calcification as she said the words, , and I

couldn’t help saying them too. I didn’t know what

they meant, only that somewhere in the rhythm of

each syllable, the roughness of the middle h, was

a kind of safety: something that resembled a home.

 

1. Taeam

Home was an unfaltering reminder that our lives

were burdened with temporality. Plastic chairs.

Plastic plates. Plastic food containers stacked like

glassy, wordless bookshelves behind the fridge.

We lived as though we were bound to leave, and

yet we could not deny our permanence, how we

pulsed out of the foreign ground like a weed, how

we only grew twofold, only deepened our roots.

 

iii. Hadiiqa

Roots veining below my feet, I climbed higher and

higher towards the canopy. I found my Allah in the

furrows running up the tree, in the bugs that left

them just to live below my nails. I climbed higher

and higher, leaves cleaving to me like a new flesh,

dew mottling my hair as I broke out into the daylight,

forgetting, if only for a moment, the splinters in my

palms, the bark breaching my new, ascended skin.

 

1. Wajah

Skin that was never scarred or spotty, only plain as

bleached canvas, only warm blood bristling under

rosy white cheeks. It meant something in me was

wrong, something I could never reach, a place

I could never inhabit, a beauty I could never keep.

Because to keep a thing was to love it, and to love

a thing was to become it. So I would put on my

own skin, every day, thinking it wasn’t mine

 

1. Rouhi

until I knew it was hers. And there are many things

I know now. That the Devil is the name we gave to

the human condition. That there are a thousand ways

to love another boy. That I never uttered an honest

prayer, not until I knew this skin was ours, that we

grew out of foreign ground, that we fell from the

canopy, our bodies glowing with sin, and prayed

for a faith where we didn’t need words at all.

 

A Chaos of Light: New Writing Scotland 43, edited by Kirsten Innes, Chris Powici & Niall O’Gallagher is published by Association of Scottish Literature, priced £9.95.

2025 sees the centenary of the births of three Scottish writers – Alexander Trocchi, Ian Hamilton Finlay and George MacDonald Fraser. Greg Thomas considers their lives and legacies.

 

The year so far has been awash with centenary celebrations for the feted Scottish poet, artist, and ‘avant-gardener’ Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). From a series of international exhibitions organised by the poet’s estate to shows at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and further afield, to print-media coverage touching on lesser-known aspects of the poet’s legacy, oeuvre, and biography, the roster has been packed. There has even been some old-fashioned broadsheet controversy of the type Finlay courted during his lifetime, with The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones offering a carping review of the recent Finlay show at Victoria Miro Gallery in London, earning a rejoinder from the veteran Scottish journalist Magnus Linklater in The Times.

It’s less well-known that 2025 also marks the centenary of two other Scottish authors, Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) and George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008). In very different ways, both also made striking contributions to twentieth-century Scottish literary culture. Both were also, for very different reasons, figures as liable to attract opprobrium and fierce loyalty as Finlay. Yet, while the latter of these ‘tricky figures’ has seen his star rise posthumously, the counter-cultural impresario Trocchi and waspish writer of the Flashman historical novels Fraser have faded into relative obscurity or cult status—notwithstanding a two-day symposium on Trocchi’s work held at the University of Glasgow in June, and an ongoing trickle of academic interest in his work since the 1990s, not to mention Fraser’s still-sizeable and loyal coterie of readers.

I’ll touch on some possible reasons for this contrast in fortunes further on. But I’m primarily interested in comparing the lives and works of these three writers as a way of teasing out some of the details of the era of literary and public life in which they found fame. The 1960s in Scotland have been the subject of a mini-flurry of critical attention over the last decade, partly involving revisionist analysis of some of its leading literary lights, from the concrete poets Finlay and Edwin Morgan to the folk revivalist Hamish Henderson and radical women writers such as Helen Adam and Fiona Templeton. Much of the discussion has also centred on the new social infrastructure – from radical book shops such as Jim Haynes’s Paperback to iconic small publishing projects including Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press, the rise of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and performance spaces such as the Traverse Theatre – by which the old, ‘Rose Street’ coterie around Hugh MacDiarmid was superseded.

Trocchi, who famously clashed with MacDiarmid at the 1962 Edinburgh Writers Conference, helped to define the spirit of the new at that event in the most pugnacious possible terms, decrying the ‘turgid, petty, provincial … stale porridge Bible-class nonsense’ which he felt defined the post-Scottish-Renaissance literary establishment. (He added, for good measure that ‘of what is interesting in the last, say twenty years in Scottish writing, I have written it all’.) By contrast, Finlay and Fraser – I will argue – partly represent different kinds of conservative reaction against the tide of social and sexual liberation that Trocchi embodied, Finlay with his stern neo-classical moralising and Fraser with his white-male fantasies of imperial and sexual dominion, more of which below.

Alexander Trocchi, of Italian heritage on his father’s side, was born in 1925 in Glasgow, and became a brilliant and wayward student at the University of Glasgow, finishing his studies in English and Moral Philosophy in 1949 after a three-year stint in the Royal Navy (1943-46) had curtailed an earlier university career. Leaving for Paris immediately on completing his final exams, he fell in with the existentialist coterie, becoming the editor of the literary magazine Merlin, publishing authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Neruda, and, most crucially to his own writing, Samuel Beckett. In 1954 he published a novel squarely in the existentialist idiom, Young Adam, about a man who witnesses a woman drowning, writing under the pen-name Frances Lengel because of the gratuitous sex scenes that his editor Maurice Girodias had insisted he insert.

Leaving Paris for New York in the late 1950s, Trocchi worked on a barge and descended deeper into the heroin addiction that he had consciously cultivated as a form of counter-culture posturing in Paris. (‘I have a bounden duty to go out and experiment with strange and unknown states of mind,’ he is quoted saying in the 1996 television documentary A Life in Pieces.) His experiences at this time were gathered into the roman-à-clef Cain’s Book (1960), which presents a non-linear picture of its protagonist Joe Necchi’s inner world through flashbacks to his childhood and an abandoned domestic life, combined with various accounts of drug use and underground life.

This fairly squalid and nihilistically endured present is enlivened only by the cool ecstasy of the fix:

At certain moments I find myself looking on my whole life as leading up to the present moment, the present being all I have to affirm. It’s somehow undignified to speak of the past or to think about the future. I don’t seriously occupy myself with the question in the ‘here-and-now’, lying on my bunk and, under the influence of heroin, inviolable.

One of the implications of the book is that the routine and mental life of the junkie is in some sense naturally attuned to new principles of literature defined by Trocchi’s heroes such as Beckett. In the absence of the kind of guiding moral principles which might propel a character’s actions forward, Necchi lounges in an eternal present of hustling, scoring, and fixing, in similar fashion to Didi and Gogo beneath the dead tree waiting for a visitor who will never arrive to push the story along.

Escaping the States while on bail for a charge of supplying heroin, Trocchi was, bizarrely, taken in by Leonard Cohen in Canada, before heading back to Britain. Cain’s Book was famously banned following an obscenity trial in Sheffield during 1964-65. Meanwhile, Trocchi confirmed his status as a counter-cultural impresario as the compere for the iconic International Poetry Incarnation reading at the Albert Hall in June 1965. But his productive years as a writer were already over. He would remain in London until his death from pneumonia in 1984. By this time his wife Lyn had died of hepatitis connected to heroin use and his son Marc of cancer at the age of 19.

No new fiction followed after Cain’s Book, but the author did publish two inter-related manifestos outlining the possible conditions of a revolutionary network of educational and cultural institutions (‘Project Sigma’) during the 1960s. The first of these, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, appeared in the Scottish journal New Saltire in 1963. ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ was circulated privately in 1964 as part of Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio pamphlet series, in which ‘Invisible Insurrection’ had also appeared.

According to his sometime saviour Cohen, Trocchi ‘saw himself as the general secretary of some new subversive worldwide movement’. In an interesting presentation given to the recent Trocchi symposium, later published on the Bella Caledonia website, Calum Barnes points to the strange irony of a writer so fixated on his own, rudderless inner life becoming the evangelist of a revolutionary anarchist politics with implications for all of humanity: ‘[t]he hopelessly involuted self-consciousness of Cain’s Book is refashioned as a potential panacea in his quest to unleash homo ludens’. This perhaps had to do with a kind of figurative mirroring of the non-teleological, ungoverned emotional life of the junkie author with a theoretical global society freed from all institutions and economic systems with similar kinds of top-down order.

To this end, there is an interesting passage in ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ in which the base-superstructure model of Orthodox Marxist analysis is turned on its head. Revolutions in thought and language become the means by which broader, cultural and economic revolutions might be fomented.

We are concerned not with the coup-d’etat of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup-du-monde, a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse….The cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them

Of course, the dystopian reality of Trocchi’s life – not to mention the appalling fortunes of many of those closest to him – give the lie to the idea that the ‘strange and unknown states of mind’ the writer doubtless inhabited were a viable basis for even the most elementary form of workable social grouping.

Ian Hamilton Finlay had no time for the international underground. Indeed, in an interesting counterpoint to Trocchi’s grand youthful adventures with drugs, the Edinburgh-based poet and artist was treated with LSD in a psychiatric hospital in 1959 and succumbed to a series of terrifying hallucinations. According to his son, the poet and critic Alec Finlay, this explains his ‘rejection of psychology and the exposure of anguish, and his distaste for the 1960s counter-culture’.

Born in 1925 in Nassau, Bahamas, to a Scottish father who was running bootleg alcohol into prohibition-era USA, Finlay returned to Scotland for boarding school at a young age and ended up at Glasgow School of Art during the early 1940s (probably 1943-45). After a decade spent as a painter he began writing plays and short stories in the mid-1950s, moving back to Edinburgh after several years living in Comrie, Perthshire. Very much indebted to the classic Russian short story, his prose is naturalistic and melancholy in tone, dealing with the loneliness and flashes of beauty in everyday life for a cast of characters mostly living in small-town or rural Scotland.

Finlay reoriented his work again at the close of the decade, becoming a lyric poet in a style closely connected to the neo-objectivist and Black Mountain aesthetics of North-American poets such as Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker, while also whimsically imbibing a kind of post-Burns doggerel. Here is ‘Glasgow Poem’:

 

Airship poet Guillaume (Angel) Apollinaire

Wrote poetry something rer.

It was back in the Future. What the Scotch call ‘auld Sol’

He called the ‘sun airplane’. It would drive you up the wall.

 

The piece is typical of this phase of Finlay’s work in alluding to the international avant-garde in a way that played off and reframed the homely and faux-parochial connotations of his craft, rather than suggesting a Trocchi-esque commitment to the new and radical.

It was through contact with the concrete poets of Brazil’s Noigandres group in 1962 that Finlay really found his animus. He began creating concrete poems, on the page and in three dimensions, exploring a variety of visual, sculptural, and tactile effects that could enhance the linguistic dimension of his work. At the same time, his concrete poetry inhabited the same realm of rustic and rural imagery that had defined his plays, short stories, and lyric verse. Again, radical figures and movements in art and literature were invoked in a way which simultaneously suggested their relevance to, and distance from, Finlay’s own emotional and creative world.

His 1965 poem ‘3 happenings’, with its titular reference to the uber-fashionable Fluxus art movement and its semi-spontaneous performance events, is quintessential in this regard:

 

the little leaf falls

the little fish leaps

 

the little fish falls

the little leaf leaps

 

the little fish leaps

the little leaf falls

 

the little leaf falls

the little fish leaps

 

Beneath the version of this poem printed in Emmett William’s 1967 Anthology of Concrete Poetry (whose use of italics and bolds is reproduced here), an authorial note reads: ‘[a]re happenings sometimes wearisome? This is a plein air or out-of-door one.’ The sentiment is typical in coolly imbibing contemporary intermedia art aesthetics while transporting them into a realm of rural calm in which, we sense, the urban-anarchist cultural connotations of those aesthetics are stripped away.

Finlay’s interest in aesthetic ‘purity’ – a commonly used term of his – also found expression through concrete poetry, in the reduction of the poem to just a few reiterated words and visual or formal effects. However, by the 1970s, he was defining purity in far more tendentious and politically motivated terms, ones that were largely anathema to what he felt was the prevailing, liberal and secular spirit of the age. By the mid-1960s Finlay had already been complaining in letters to Stephen Bann about the appropriation of concrete poetry by the counter-culture: ‘all those ignorant young ones are getting out of hand – they are like a blight with their “Zen” and all that nonsense’.

The spirit of ‘neoclassical rearmament’ that overtook him during the 1970s, after his 1966 move to Stonypath farmhouse, led to a pointed engagement with classical culture, taken to entail a form of rigid and virtuous social order ordained by the Gods and backed up by the latent presence of military violence. This realignment contextualises his redesignation of an art gallery on his grounds as a ‘garden temple’ in the late 1970s, something which famously set him at odds with Strathclyde Regional Council over the tax rates due on the building.

Finlay’s emergence as a classicist also indicated his complete break with any spirit of counter-cultural ideology to which he might have seemed tangentially attached via his multi-media artistic aesthetics in the 1960s. Then again, the political and cultural worldview that Finlay’s practice ultimately came to embody is almost impossible to place within any modern pigeonholes. When he described himself as a ‘High Tory, like Bakunin’ at the close of the 1980s, he was emphasising the extent to which, as Alec Finlay puts it, ‘his politics were those of a poet, party of one’.

What, finally, of George MacDonald Fraser? An introductory anecdote suggests the nature of his fandom today: you can find a spoof Flashman account on X that promises to ‘taunt … Corbynistas only to run off when it looks like it’s turning nasty’, as well as ‘the usual high-jinx with belly-dancing warrior-queens’. Born in Carlisle in 1925, Fraser was a self-confessed lazy student who entered the army at 18 and was demoted to private three times before becoming an officer in the Border Regiment that fought in Burma in World War Two. On his discharge in 1947 his father found him a job on the Carlisle Journal, and Fraser remained in journalism until he rose to become deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald from 1964 to 69.

The first of his Flashman novels appeared, not coincidentally, the year he left that employment, having promised his wife – according to a posthumously discovered note included with a recent edition of the book – that he would ‘write us out of it’. In a canny meta-fictional conceit, the character of Flashman is lifted directly from Tom Brown’s School Days, an 1857 comic novel by Thomas Hughes recounting its protagonist’s adventures at Rugby. Flashman, a drunken bully expelled halfway through the story, was recognised by Fraser as the unsung ‘hero’ of the book, and incorporated into a dozen historical novels between 1969 and 2005, in which Flashman found himself at the centre of all the major events of Victorian imperialism, from the Retreat from Kabul (the subject of the first novel) to the Boxer Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Throughout his escapades – which, as critics often point out, are the product of meticulous historical research, and richly evocative of their era – Flashman appears as a hard-drinking, sexually abusive, subordinate-flogging cad. In a particularly egregious passage in Flashman which sums up many of these tendencies, the protagonist is offered the sexual services of a topless dancer by his host, the Ghilzai leader Sher Afzul:

He beckoned her to dance close in front … and the sight of the golden, near-naked body writhing and quivering made me forget where I was for the moment. By the time she had finished her dance, with the tom-toms throbbing and the sweat glistening on her painted face, I must have been eating her alive with my eyes….Sher Afzul saw it too…. ‘You like her, Flashman bahadur? Is she the kind of she-cat you delight to scratch with? Here, then, she is yours’

This orientalist titillation takes a dark turn when the dancer angrily refuses his advances and Flashman takes her by force: ‘after a vicious struggle I managed to rape her—the only time in my life I have found it necessary.’ Fantasies of imperial and sexual conquest are entwined throughout the Flashman stories. And, while the anti-hero is undoubtedly presented as a coward, whose chief characteristics include a desire to avoid danger at all costs combined with an uncanny ability to steal credit for others’ military bravery, his seeming nudge-wink lovableness as far as Fraser is concerned is hard not to interpret as coded nostalgia for the golden age of British imperialism, when we all knew who was in charge.

Fraser was happy to accept the insinuation. In that posthumously discovered note, he writes: ‘[w]ith the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad.’ An article by historian Saul David based on a 2006 interview with the author reads:

MacDonald Fraser is an unashamed fan of the British Empire, and was delighted that revisionist historians like Niall Ferguson (and myself, for that matter) had recently felt able to write about it in a more objective, less guilt-ridden way. “With all its faults,” he says, “it’s just about the best thing that’s happened to an undeserving world[“]….It would have been a “good thing”, he adds, if the empire hadn’t ended when it did.

A 2008 obituary in The Washington Post rounds off this picture, noting that ‘Mr. Fraser was proudly conservative and often spoke out against modern social trends, including immigration, coarse language and the metric system of weights and measures’. Needless to say, he was never on the mailing list for Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio.

So much for our three centenarians. What do these three life stories tell us about the era which spawned them? Apart from anything else, we might do well to remember the historian Dominic Sandbrook’s proviso that the sixties, in Scotland as elsewhere, represented more than its gilded memoirs and flower-power mythology. For ‘people who spent the 1960s in Aberdeen or Welshpool or Wolverhampton’, the sixties might ‘conjure up memories not of Lady Chatterley, the Pill and the Rolling Stones, but of Bingo, Blackpool, and Berni Inns’.

Of course, our authors do not fit neatly into this binary model of cosmopolitan radicalism and humdrum provincial conservatism, but they do suggest that the legacy of the Scottish sixties in culture and literature is vexed and complex. If Trocchi rode the crest of a wave of emerging radical thought, crashing into drug-addled oblivion, Finlay and Fraser represent different kinds of oppositional reaction to the perceived spirit of the times, while partaking it some of its advances: Finlay, for example, in his attachment to mixed-media artforms connected with the anarchistic philosophies of Fluxus, and MacDonald with the seedy seventies eroticism of his sex scenes. (It’s not surprising to learn that he went on to co-write the script for a James Bond film, 1983’s Octopussy.)

The relative status of the three seems to have less to do with the extent to which they accepted or rejected the (real or imagined) advances of their time as with the global status and visibility that Finlay achieved in his transition from the world of (small press) literature to fine art, via his reorientation as a concrete poet and, ultimately, a maker of beautiful three-dimensional poem-sculptures and conceptual artworks at his garden Little Sparta and elsewhere. Both the striking visible presence of Finlay’s work around the world, and its entry into civic and commercial gallery circulation from the late 1960s onwards, mean that it continues to be seen—and sold at lucrative prices. In short, the artworld can perhaps provide the kind of lively critical and popular afterlife that the economics and networks of literature might fail to deliver.

It may also be that the murkier thematic subtexts of Finlay’s work – his interrogatory use of the iconography of fascism, for example – have been easier to partition off from his central achievement than those of Trochi and Fraser. The unrepentant misogyny and racism covertly embraced through the figure of Flashman is difficult to reconstruct in age of febrile debate on identity and empire, while Trocchi’s addict-life in retrospect seems far less liberatory than it does brutal, tragic, and dangerous to be around (particularly for the women in his life, such as his wife Lyn, who at one point in New York became a sex worker to fund the couple’s habit). Yet each writer, through both their flair and their flaws, helps to offer a more complex picture of the decade in which they emerged, a decade in whose long shadows our Scottish culture still moves.

David Robinson takes a look at two books published on one of Scotland’s best loved writers.

 

The Letters of Muriel Spark
Edited by Dan Gunn
Published by Virago

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
By Frances Wilson
Published by Bloomsbury Circus

 

It’s January 1955 and Muriel Spark is writing to her erstwhile lover and literary collaborator Derek Stanford (‘Dearest Boy’) from a Kent cottage let out to artists in difficulties. She has been there since July the previous year, following her mental breakdown and conversion to Catholicism when she had seriously considered becoming a nun.

‘My immediate neighbour next door, Mrs Bell,’ she writes, ‘is reputed to be a spiritualist. She is small and fat and surprised. She stands in the middle of the road outside our cottages with her plump parsnip legs astraddle and as you come out of the door her eyes say “Goodness me!” Then, in a fluting trill, she tells you about herself, though you have heard it before.’ Spark then launches into a comic monologue in Mrs Bell’s voice that could have come straight out of one of  Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, in the course of which she mentions that Mr Bell had written a novel called Murder on the High Seas and, seeing that Mrs Stark [sic] is an authoress, could she possibly take a look at it?

At this point in The Letters of Muriel Spark Vol 1 1944-63, excellently edited by Dan Gunn, the irony is that while Mr Bell is a novelist, Mrs Stark – sorry, Spark – still isn’t. It will be another few months before she sends the first five chapters of  her first novel to Alan Maclean, a young editor at Macmillan who has expressed interest in her work. In the  course of the year we will track its progress from The Loving of Mrs Hogg, to Characters in a Novel, Types and Shadows and Shadow Play – all oddly unSparklike, anodyne titles – before she finally hits on The Comforters.

Gunn’s book comes just two months after Frances Wilson’s biography Electric Spark and covers some of the same ground. ‘The Muriel Spark who interests me,’ writes Wilson, ‘isn’t the grande dame of her last 40 years but the young divorcee whose arrival in postwar London sent feathers flying and who started all the hares.’ True enough: here’s a young girl from Bruntsfield, born minus silver spoon in mouth to a Scottish-Jewish father and English mother, a double outsider in a city far more stratified and less tolerant than now (think back to the 1935 Protestant Action riots in nearby Morningside); a woman who beats 6,700 other writers to win a short story competition in the Observer with a prize worth the equivalent of £10,000 today with her first stab at fiction when she was so broke she had to borrow the paper to write it on; a barely-known poet who becomes chief administrator of the Poetry Society and takes on its old guard (including such bigwigs as Marie Stopes and Field Marshal Wavell) as editor of its magazine Poetry Review by backing modernists such as TS Eliot. How on earth did all of that happen?

Her letters can’t tell us the whole story. There aren’t any before 1944, so Gunn is unable to shed new light on Spark’s childhood, adolescence, the collapse of her marriage in Africa to the mentally unbalanced Oswald Spark and her wartime work for Sefton Delmer’s anti-Nazi propaganda outfit at Woburn Abbey.  But the letters have one great advantage over Wilson’s apophenic biography. As we read them, we piece the story together ourselves rather than second hand.

Take, for example, her correspondence with Alan Maclean. In 1955, when she sends him those first five chapters The Comforters, she is still comparatively hesitant about her fiction. For the previous seven years, she has devoted her time to poetry, book reviewing, and collaborating with her lover Derek Stanford on a variety of non-fiction projects (books about Emily Brontë and Wordsworth and collections of letters by Cardinal Newman and Mary Shelley).

But now she is inventing her own worlds, and she isn’t sure whether she has gone too far with the auditory hallucinations her central character hears in The Comforters and she wants her editor’s advice – something which within a few years will become almost impossible to imagine.  To another friend, she writes about having ‘an idea going around in my head for a new novel called Memento Mori. Everyone in it is over 70. I have written the opening pages but don’t at all know where it is going to lead….  My main problem is, whether I should make clear to the reader what I am doing or simply let the irrationality be an accepted thing…’

Yet all the time her self-assurance is growing. Edith Sitwell tells her how to deal with people in the book business by looking witheringly at them ‘as if through a pair of lorgnettes’. When a friend, Christine Brooke-Rose, has the temerity to suggest she has made a grammatical mistake, Spark tells her ‘If I write it, it’s grammatical’. ‘I made up my mind at the age of nine not to care less about criticisms of style’, she tells another of her editors. ‘Naturally I’m not going to climb down at my age.’

Although she has had the support of fellow Catholic writers Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene (the latter even sending cheques and wine on condition that she didn’t pray for him), Spark was repeatedly let down by the men closest to her. Derek Stanford – the original of the specious ‘pisseur de copie’ in A Far Cry from Kensington – may not even have been the worst of them. Even though he did betray Spark by selling her love letters and telling her parents about her breakdown, Stanford did at least respect her decision to stop having sex with him after she was baptised into the Church of England in 1952. In 1958, she had to fight off drunken BBC producer Rayner Heppenstall. ‘I had to literally struggle for my honour,’ she wrote to Stanford. ‘A real hard struggle and me terrified all the time Mrs L [her Camberwell landlady] would hear. I was bloody angry – particularly as he said some aggressive things and refused to leave.’  Spark’s 2009 biographer Martin Stannard calls this an attempted seduction. Wilson is more forthright: ‘I say he tried to rape her.’

I started by mentioning how Alan Maclean gave Spark her first break as a novelist, but that was back in 1955 and since then five years have passed. Five years, five books: The Comforters (1957), Robinson (1958), Memento Mori (1958), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), and The Bachelors (1960). Any –  tiny –  lack of confidence has long since disappeared, along with any sense of obligation: this is a woman who knows her own worth, who is dictating what her publisher’s print run should be and is sure of her goals. As she writes to Maclean:

‘Your policy is cramping and stifling my vital development as a writer. I am tired of living in an attic. I do not intend to write attic literature all my life. I have glorious things to be written, unlimited creative potentials, a brimming talent to be expressed.’

Of course, she was right. The next novel was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the first novel by a British writer to be serialised its entirety (though marginally trimmed) in the New Yorker and ‘a definite turning point in my career’.

Dan Gunn’s selection of letters is wide-ranging: there are letters here of friendship, of love, of literary insight and family worries and most of them are written with the kind of wit and clarity you would expect. But I’ll end with one she wrote to her Alan Maclean’s boss at Macmillan, Rache (short for Horatio, apparently) Lovat Dickson. I’ve never read anything like it in my life.

It’s 15 November, 1961. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was serialised in the New Yorker and published in London in October. Spark should, by rights, have been on a high: Lovat Dickson had already assured her that she was Macmillan’s highest paid author but cautioned her to keep quiet about it. Instead, she writes a letter which takes up a full ten pages of Gunn’s book. She is demanding the withdrawal of an option clause in her contract – a legal detail of the kind that wouldn’t normally hold my attention for a microsecond.

Yet this letter, in its controlled anger and eloquence (not to mention length) is completely magnificent. And when you have read, in the preceding 500-plus pages, about Spark’s Grub Street years, of the way she was betrayed both professionally and personally; when you read her telling her friend, the novelist Shirley Hazzard, that her gay American literary agent Ivan von Auw is ‘the only man I’ve ever had to do with who hasn’t tried to push me around’; when you have followed two decades of her life in her own words, you can’t help cheering her on. As she tells Lovat Dickson:

‘I know of no other writer on your list but myself who has had the opportunity to build an intelligent career in the world, or to get married, and who has consciously and deliberately set these safeties aside and endured poverty, and taken the risk of failure, in order to write well. It is not a spare-time hobby I am engaged in, but something for which I have had to sacrifice pleasures, and continually have to give up pleasures to do, and no matter how successful I become I shall always have to make these sacrifices. It is not the type of work that comes from a compromised life.’

 

The Letters of Muriel Spark Volume 1 1944-1963 edited by Dan Gunn is published by Virago, priced £27.95. Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson is published by Bloomsbury Circus, priced £25.00.

 

Damian Barr’s new novel The Two Roberts is a much anticipated release here at BooksfromScotland. Ahead of its release we asked him about his favourite books.

 

The Two Roberts
By Damian Barr
Published by Canongate

 

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?  

My mum taking me to John Menzies in Motherwell every Weds to get a new Mr Men book. Often I would pretend to be the Mr in question and she’d indulge me in being a square or ticklish or anything really. My Mum died last month and that was one of the last memories she shared with me.

 

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest novel The Two Roberts. What did you want to explore in writing it? 

It’s a novel based on two real people: Robert (Bobby) MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. They were working class boys from Ayrshire who met on their first day at Glasgow School of Art in 1933.  They were wildly talented and just wild, nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso.  They became rich and famous then poor and infamous and now largely forgotten. They have become footnotes in the stories of their pals Bacon and Freud and Smart when they were the story! So I wanted to correct this and to imagine what it was like to be gay and Scottish and working class and trying to make your name as an artist in London before, during and just after the war. So much has changed and so little…It is, first and foremost, a love story. I want that for us.

 

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?

The Colour Purple gave me the courage to write in the language I grew up hearing and to think of myself and my own story as having meaning and value.

 

The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?

I have a signed edition of The Colour Purple and it makes me happy to think Alice Walker held it in her hands.

 

The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?

Easy. The memoirs of the late great Diana Athill made me think I had to meet her and then we became friends, a marriage of country house and council house. I miss her still. I encourage everyone to read her memoirs on publishing—Stet, they’re a scandal!

 

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?

A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White, who we miss already. Here was a teenage boy who felt like me about other teenage boys. WILD!

 

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?  

Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris. It is six months of travels in a country facing some sort of war or invasion. There are spies and a casino and it is all very glamorous but dark, if memory serves (and when does it). The only thing is, Hav is not a real country. Read this book and it wlil exist to you.

 

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next? 

Big Scottish Book Club is returning to BBC Scotland for a seventh series – the longest running arts show on the networks. Guests this series include John Niven, Rachel Kushner and Tash Aw—so all of them, really. What a treat!

 

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr is published by Canongate, priced £18.99.

Philip Paris has been gathering lots of fans with his historical fiction novels, with his last, The Last Witch of Scotland, being named as Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year. His latest novel is set in the mid-16th century and looks at the convenanting movement through the love story of Samuel and Violet. In this extract, Samuel gives his love bad news.

 

A Fire in their Hearts 
By Philip Paris
Published by Black & White

 

Samuel
6 November 1666, near Coylton, Ayrshire

Hamish and I glance at each other nervously across the table. We’ve been planning this in secret for weeks but now we’re about to announce it to our families my mouth is almost too dry to speak. Everyone has finished their meal so it’s now or never. I stand up, in my haste knocking over my chair, which clatters loudly on the stone floor. It certainly gets everyone’s attention.

‘Samuel?’ says Father.

‘Hamish and I intend to help the Covenanter cause, to stop the king forcing Presbyterians to worship in ways that go against the Scriptures.’ I had expected comments, but everyone remains silent. Violet’s silence is almost thunderous. She doesn’t know any of this. ‘So we’ve decided to leave in a few days’ time and let God guide our feet to a destination where we can make a difference.’

‘Hamish,’ says his father. ‘Are you set on this course of action?’

Hamish stands, visibly bridling at the implication, which in truth is often made, that he always follows my decisions.

‘Yes, Father. Sam and I are equally determined.’

Everyone turns to my father – everyone except Violet, who continues to stare at me. I pluck up the courage to give her a quick smile. The gesture is not returned.

‘If Samuel and Hamish feel that they will be doing the work of God by making this journey, then it is not for us to hold these boys back,’ he says.

With that simple statement, we are free to leave. But I’m quaking inside at having to face the girl I love.

 

* * *

 

‘You could have discussed this with me!’

Our meeting is not going well. Violet and I have left everyone and come to the barn, where she’s pacing around with increasing agitation.

‘It wouldn’t have been proper to do that before speaking to my parents.’

‘Just what do you think you and my brother can do?’

‘I don’t know! I just know that I can’t stay here and do nothing except . . . listen to stories of violence against innocent people who can’t protect themselves.’

‘And you’ll fight?’

‘If I have to.’

‘What about Hamish? He’s doing this because you are, Samuel. You know that. It’s not in his nature to fight.’

I don’t reply because what she says is true. Violet’s twin would be happier tending to animals and working the land.

‘Please stop pacing around. Hamish has the right to make his own decision. Violet, stop!’

She faces me, panting hard with emotion.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I have to do this, Violet. I have to stand up to the tyranny of the king, the injustice of bishops telling us how to pray, the violence of the Royalist army killing people where they work in the field without any sort of trial. Even a witch could expect a court case.’

She’s crying now. I take her in my arms.

‘What sort of man would I be if I didn’t do something?

What sort of minister could I hope to become in the future? I’m not even sure I want to be a minister in the church that we’ll end up with if we don’t make a stand to prevent these changes.’

‘If you or Hamish are hurt . . .’

‘I promise I’ll watch out for him. And I want you to look at me with pride . . . on our wedding day.’

She pulls back. ‘Our wedding day!’

‘Of course, didn’t I say? Once Hamish and I have returned, we’ll get married. We’re not going to be away for ever.’

‘Samuel, that’s about the most unromantic proposal a girl could get!’

‘But you’ll say yes?’

She doesn’t. Instead, she buries her head in my chest and bursts into tears.

 

* * *

 

13 November 1666, Kirkcudbrightshire

Parting from our families had been a great deal more upsetting than Hamish and I had imagined. We weren’t allowed to leave until we had as much food as we could sensibly carry, spare warm clothing plus some coins in our pockets. The most astonishing gift for me was from my father, who handed into my keeping the Colvil family dirk, made long ago by a skilled ancestor.

With nothing to guide our feet except the belief that God will take us in the right direction, we’ve headed south-east.

Finding shelter has so far been easy with so many sympathetic to our journey and our spirits are high as we approach the outskirts of a village.

‘What’s this place?’ says Hamish, as if I am somehow to know.

I ask the first person we meet, an elderly man carrying an armful of whins and twigs, no doubt for the fire from which smoke drifts reluctantly through the thatched roof of his tiny dwelling.

‘It’s the clachan of Dalry,’ he replies, stopping to study us with an amused expression that instinctively makes me like him.

‘Do you need a hand around your cottage?’ I ask.

‘Ha, I suppose you two want food.’

‘We’ll help for the pleasure of helping, though we wouldn’t want to insult you by refusing your kind offer.’

‘I haven’t offered.’

‘My mother says I’m too optimistic for my own good!’

This sets him off cackling, which turns into a coughing fit.

We have to wait for him to recover.

‘Well, ginger head, you can bring in the rest of those logs, and you,’ he says to Hamish, ‘chop up that wood over there.’

‘Don’t let him eat everything,’ says Hamish, happily going off to complete his given task.

The cottage is similar to what can be found throughout Scotland, with one room to eat, sleep and live in. The small fire in the centre gives out little heat. There’s a flimsy wooden partition that separates this area from a place where animals would live throughout the winter. I can tell straight away by the smell that there has been no livestock for a long while. Despite his age, the occupier is sharp-eyed.

‘I’ve known too many seasons to keep animals, so it’s easier to obtain milk or whatever I need from others who have some to spare. We look out for each other around here.’

‘We don’t want to take any food that you need yourself, sir.’

‘I don’t often get called that. You’re heading east?’

‘Yes, with no particular destination other than where God guides us.’

He goes quiet for a while and when he speaks again there is no humour in his voice. ‘You carry a Bible?’

‘No.’

‘Good. You don’t want to be caught around here with one. The king’s—’

His sentence is interrupted by shouting. When we go to investigate we’re faced with four soldiers and a corporal. Two of the soldiers step forward, roughly taking hold of the old man and tying his hands behind his back with rope they have ready for the task. Hamish and I are so stunned at this sudden aggression that we’ve no idea what to do.

‘Keep out of this, lads,’ the old man instructs us. ‘Don’t get into trouble because of me.’

In silence, we follow the group as it heads further into the centre of the village. People join us and there’s soon a noisy crowd clamouring for the old man’s release. As we near the alehouse, four men emerge on to the street. Although they appear extremely unkempt, as if they’ve been sleeping rough for a considerable time, the way they stand so erect and look about them with an air of confidence conveys a sense of privilege that immediately sets them apart from the ordinary villagers.

‘Why have you bound this man?’ asks one, stepping into the path of the corporal.

The two soldiers holding their victim continue to head towards the nearby blacksmith’s forge. Hamish and I go with them, though we can clearly hear the angry exchange behind us.

‘Don’t you dare challenge my authority here,’ replies the corporal. ‘That filthy traitor has been fined for not attending the kirk and he’s refusing to pay. He’s about to find out that you can’t defy the king.’

 

A Fire in their Hearts by Philip Paris is published by Black & White, priced £16.99.

These Mortal Bodies is poet Elspeth Wilson’s debut novel. We caught up with her to ask her about her publishing journey.

 

These Mortal Bodies
By Elspeth Wilson
Published by Simon & Schuster

 

Congratulations Elspeth on the publication of your debut novel, These Mortal Bodies. Can you tell our readers a little bit on what to expect when cracking open its pages?

 Thank you so much and absolutely! These Mortal Bodies follows Ivy Graveson as she heads North of the border to attend an all-girls college at a prestigious ancient university. Once there, she quickly becomes drawn into an elite world of secret societies, privilege and riches. But as the parallels between the university’s twisted past and its presence become more striking, Ivy will have to decide how far she’ll go to belong and what exactly she’s willing to do for sisterhood. Think The Secret History meets The Crucible with a dash of Mean Girls. It’s really a novel with friendship in all its complexity at its heart with a whole lot of yearning and girls behaving badly thrown in for good measure.

 

As a debutant, what has your publishing experience been like for you so far?

It’s been a real learning curve. I’ve been so grateful to have the support of my wonderful agent and my team at Simon and Schuster who have been very reassuring, reliable, transparent and honest. I also have to give a massive shout out to the debut writers group that I’m part of! I’ve made so many friends through it and we like to joke that we act as a kind of unofficial union. It’s a fantastic place to turn for advice, consolation and cheerleading. I think community is always really important in the writing world as it can be a confusing, isolating industry with a lot of rejection – some of my favourite parts of the debut experience have been connecting with other writers. Lastly, I’m seeing this as just as the start of my writing career which helps put things in perspective and makes me excited for what might happen next.

 

Dark academia is having a bit of a moment in the literary landscape just now (as are witches and witchcraft!) What drew you to the genre? What did you want to explore in your writing?

I really wanted to explore the headiness of being at university and the formative years where we are spat out of our home environments with so many possibilities – and pitfalls – ahead of us. I’m interested in girlhood, femininity and gender relations and wanted to write in that area in a complex, nuanced way. Something I love about dark academia is a genre is that the characters are so flawed, and yet (nearly) all of them have redeeming qualities too. My novel definitely sits more on the campus novel side of the genre but there’s a lot of gothic qualities to it too. I love writing about soaring spires, ancient campuses, rich people behaving badly and outsider perspectives – all things which are very much central to the genre.

 

Do you have favourite stories on intense friendships that influenced your novel?

I actually read both these books after I wrote the novel but I really like The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer and The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue for their explorations of intense friendships. The book that really influenced my writing was The Secret History by Donna Tartt which is an absolute classic of the dark academia genre and has one of the most beautifully written, complicated friendship groups going. As a teenager, I also absolutely loved Brideshead Revisited and the yearning underpinning that definitely influenced These Mortal Bodies.

 

These Mortal Bodies is not your first book; you’re also a poet. Could you give us an insight in your approach to poetry and prose and how they interact with each other in your writing practice?

 I find this question quite hard to answer because their interaction is more something that I do than that I think about. Writing poetry certainly changes my editing style for my prose – I read out loud a lot when I’m editing and think about how each word is earning its space on the page. I tend to focus more of my time on my prose work and then see delight and freedom in the brevity of poetry. I also often handwrite my poems as opposed to typing them which feels like a nice change. That said, I’ve been working this year on a YA novel in verse so I am interested in exploring longer form poetry!

 

The next few months will see you promoting the novel. Do you like the non-writing aspects of a writer’s life? Do you enjoy events? What advice about the non-writing part of a writing career would you give to budding writers?

 I do really enjoy doing events! I love meeting readers and connecting with people and I think events are a great way of doing that, for me at least. I also enjoy chairing and I think being on different sides of literary events gives different skills and insights. There are other non-writing aspects which are more challenging and/or mundane such as lots of admin things! I have to be very protective of my writing time as I work on my second novel – I carve out specific time for that and try to use the times where I have the most energy to write rather than prioritising the non-writing aspects of writing like replying to emails. I tend to come to those when I’m more tired! That would be my main piece of career advice to budding writers – do what you need to protect your writing time and creativity. And in terms of promotion try to focus on what you enjoy – for your own sanity and also because it will show if you’re not enjoying it.

 

We hope you’ve had time to read this year too. What have been your favourite books you’ve read this year so far?

There’s so many! For anyone who wants a book to keep them awake at night (in the best way possible), I’d recommend Cuckoo by Callie Kazumi, This Immaculate Body by Emma van Straaten or Baby Teeth by Celia Silvani. On the lighter side of things, I loved The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang which has an amazing autistic MC and I also enjoyed the drama and paciness of The Favourites by Layne Fargo. I’m looking forward to reading an ARC of The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier next, and on the non-fiction side Love in Exile by Shon Faye.

 

These Mortal Bodies by Elspeth Wilson is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £16.99.

Drystone is a memoir of love and chaos, resilience and finding yourself and your space. In this extract we see author Kristie’s first appreciations of the solidity and connection in stone.

 

Drystone: A Life Rebuilt
By Kristie De Garis
Published by Polygon

 

Caithness had no cinema, barely any public transport, and no shopping centre – just a Woolworths with a CD section and a pic ’n’ mix that Mum assured us was extortionate. The internet was a faraway fantasy, and Mum wouldn’t let us have a TV, often expressing her concern that shows like Home and Away or Neighbours would rot our brains. But I suspected it was because we couldn’t afford a TV licence. And for a lot of my childhood, I didn’t have firm friends. Even for the nicer kids, it made sense to distance themselves from a person who attracted regular hassle.So I spent a lot of time with my brother, playing outdoors. 

The moorlands that surrounded our home required skill to navigate. My brother and I learned this the hard way, often traipsing home wet to the knee, one sock stained bronze by peaty water when we had foolishly taken the solid look of mossy ground at its word. In the summer we discovered tiny life hidden in the grass, the drama of a slow worm sighting, the smell of sphagnum. In winter our playtime was scored by the music of ice in farm-road potholes stretching and creaking beneath our feet. Braving a white-out in pyjamas, our hats, scarves and coats thrown hastily on top. Returning home to the smell of burning peat, our bodies raw with cold. 

Our play was dictated by the seasons. In winter, quickly fading light set a strict curfew, but in summer we could take our sweet time. Around solstice the light lingered right above the horizon all the way through to dawn, and with such a gentle transition between day and night, an appropriate home time was much harder to determine. It took just a few bike rides through moorland in light that showed you too much (but not enough) to convince us of the benefits of better timekeeping. 

Summer was a whole season of carefree miscalculations. No jumper or jacket for the cycle home, shorts and T-shirt feeling brutally inadequate as the sea air, pulling in the evening mist, covered our arms and legs in waves of goosebumps. In the morning, an eight-mile cycle had seemed easy, so we had given no thought to saving energy over the course of the day for our return trip. One eye on the shifting shadows of the land, we would pedal hard and fast, until we closed the gate between the moor and the track to the farm cottages. From there, we would push our bikes so we could lean on the handlebars for support, arriving at our front door, exhausted and close to tears. 

As soon as we were inside, our mum would empty our stuffed pockets. The animal bones were immediately confiscated, the flowers we picked for her were unbent, fluffed and put in a vase, and our collections of stones were piled onto windowsills all over the house. Any parent knows that a walk with kids means hauling five kilos of stones back to base. Children know what we pretend to forget: stones are treasures. Even as adults, we will privately pocket a pretty pebble on a beach, and don’t we all secretly hope to turn one over and discover the imprint of million-year-old life? Within their small, solid forms, stones encapsulate the very essence of memories. 

Frank, another of my mum’s boyfriends, looked hastily sketched. No solid edges, each part of him an impression of the real thing. His long, pony-tailed hair and pointed beard reminded me of a Buffalo Bill I had once seen in a performance of Annie Get Your Gun at the Playhouse in Edinburgh. As if in homage, Frank wore a suede jacket and tall leather boots. 

He took us on a walk in the field next to his house, asking us if we knew what had made this track or left that dropping. We did not, and we looked on horrified as he picked up a small pellet of shit from the ground and tasted it. Not popping the whole thing in his mouth but just kind of licking it. ‘Aye, that’ll be a deer,’ he said before walking on ahead. 

But I loved the floors in his house. 

Standing lonely somewhere outside Halkirk, Frank’s house was a tiny, loaf-like structure that sat so low in the moorland it looked like it might be sinking. Huddled within the metre-thick, solid stone walls were a few deep-set windows that were visible only at night, when interior light illuminated their positions in the dark. I don’t remember doors; instead, heavy, faded curtains hung on sagging rails. Wires snaked the walls, secured occasionally with white tape curling and blackened at its edges. 

Laid in huge squares, flagstone floors ran throughout the building. Ripples, the influence of water frozen in time, disrupted their surface, making them look like a nighttime riverbed. Ice-cold in winter, the slabs warmed as the ground did, and in summer you could walk on it without socks, feeling every lithic detail beneath your feet. The stone was always warmest around the hearth where peat, cut in blocks from the land, fuelled a fire, the sole source of heat in Frank’s home. A permanent draught from the front door excited ash in the grate and sent dancing particles through the air to settle all over the house. 

Frank, although not particularly houseproud, seemed to think the flagstone warranted special treatment. First, he’d sweep, paying particular attention to the indentations between the stones. Then, fetching a bottle of milk from the fridge, he’d fill a small bowl with the cold liquid and carefully set it down beside him. Soaking the corner of an old red rag, he’d gently wave this cloth across the floor – and the flags, at first dusty and dull, would reappear from beneath the cloth, an oil slick of dark, shining stone. 

Like Caithness itself, Caithness flagstone is very flat and very tough. An obstinate, sedimentary rock that splits along its bedding plane to create sheets, it reflects colour the way the sea does. Reacting to the moods of the sky with intense clarity, or murkiness, over the course of a few hours it will shift from uncorrupted black to leaden grey to warm-toned, to blue. 

I saw natural deposits of flagstone in coastal areas or in long-abandoned inland quarries. On the moorland itself, I would find it in the form of an existing structure – or a structure that once existed. Scattered across Caithness is thousands of years’ worth of drystone: brochs, cairns, blackhouses, stells, fanks and, the very bones of the land, endless miles of drystone walls. 

Drystone is a traditional craft. Building with stone without mortar, you can create something as simple as a wall or as tricky as a chapel. Drystone is about using what you have to do what you need. What Caithness has is flagstone. 

Rising like a spine from the ground, drystone is often the only visible feature in the recumbent Caithnessian landscapes. A constant roadside companion, tightly packed stone walls line ditches amid the white froth of meadowsweet and the always surprising burgundy and apricot of water avens. Running the length of fields, flagstone fences – those single, square sheets of flagstone placed edge to edge – stand like domino-ed gravestones. A memorial to the land and all that has been lost to time. 

From an early age, my hands knew the weight of stone. Firmly pulling a weathered grey sheet from a line of copes was like unsheathing a heavy blade. Misjudging the integrity of a wall, it would shed into a slithering clatter. On a sunny day the smell was of dry moss-musk, but when I lifted a well-settled stone to reveal a damp nook, it would be stirring with quiet life and metallic earthiness. 

One afternoon at school, we stood in line to peer at a slide containing the inner epidermis of an onion bulb that had been slotted into a microscope and placed at the front of the class. I waited, bored, to take a look at what would most certainly be a bunch of boring onion shapes. When my turn finally came, I pressed my eye against the warmed black rubber of the eyepiece and saw, unmistakably, the interlocking shapes of a drystone wall. 

I began to pull stones from the ground like root vegetables, brushing off the dirt and stacking them in an attempt to replicate that neat cellular structure. As I built these simple altars, I’d collect fronds and flowers from the banks of the burn and place them on the stones. A wee pagan, arranging pink mops of ragged robin among green fern fingers, I hoped the universe would be pleased with my small offerings. 

 

Drystone: A Life Rebuilt by Kristie De Garis is published by Polygon, priced £14.99.

The Dangerous Women Project was an initiative of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. Editors Ben Fletcher-Watson and Jo Shaw have explored this archive to put together this fantastic book that tells the stories of brave, bold and brilliant women across time and around the world who have dared to make changes that helped us all. BooksfromScotland chose five Scottish women from the book to highlight here. You will find their fuller stories and much, much more in this great collection.

 

Women Who Dared: From the Infamous to the Forgotten
Edited by Ben Fletcher-Watson & Jo Shaw
Published by Edinburgh University Press

 

 

DISSIDENTS AND DISRUPTORS

Chrystal Macmillan: Challenging Authority, Championing Equality

Why is she a Dangerous Women?

 

Throughout her life she challenged the established order, campaigning for women’s rights to full citizenship under the law at home and abroad.

She said in a speech in while campaigning for the vote:

‘Men have made a more comfortable world for boys and men than for girls and women; and the women now want the power to make the world more comfortable for the girls and women without doing any harm to the boys and men. It is not good for men that they should be in the position of tyrants.’

Other campaigns included relief for refugees during the First World War, the International Congress of Women’s call for heads of state to focus on mediation over warfare, and change in both national and international law for women who had married outwith their home nationalities.

 

WRITERS AND WORDSMITHS

Marjorie Fleming: Dangerous Diarising of Nineteenth-Century Girls

Why is she a Dangerous Women?

 

It’s probably more accurate to describe Marjorie Fleming as a dangerous girl. In a time when young girls were not encouraged to explore education in particular subjects too deeply, to eschew curiosity, and to communicate and conduct themselves in prescribed ways, Marjorie began writing a diary at six-years-old where she shows a restless mind and one that didn’t self-censor. Though her Victorian editors edited out parts of her diaries when they were published, readers can now enjoy the fullness and joy of her writing.

 

MONARCHS AND MYSTICS

St Margaret of Scotland: A Dangerous Saint

Why is she a Dangerous Women?

 

Margaret, the first Queen of Scots, is more commonly known for her piety and as a dutiful wife to Malcolm III, and yet behind this obedience to Scripture lay her real power and threat to the newly-established Anglo-Norman royal line of William the Conquerer, where she and her children had a strong claim. Her influence in changing Scotland’s religious orthodoxy to follow Rome also established Scotland’s place within Europe.

 

TRAVELLERS AND TRAILBLAZERS

Lady Florence Dixie: Honeyballers and the Dangerous Women of Scottish Women’s Football

Why is she a Dangerous Women?

 

As a child, Florence joined her brothers in physical activity such as swimming, riding and hunting, riding her horse astride just like them. After marriage, she and her husband joined them in an expedition to Patagonia, which she wrote about in her book Across Patagonia. She also wrote of her time in South Africa covering the Boer War in In the Land of Misfortune. She also supported the campaign for women’s suffrage and wrote the feminist fantasy novel Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 where women win the right to vote and take an active role in politics.

But she is featured in Women Who Dared due to her pioneering work in football. In 1894 she began to put together a women’s football team. She was joined in her endeavours by Mary Hutson, who named herself Nettie Honeyball, and Helen Matthews. After Florence’s death, women were banned from playing football, but her influence remains with the pioneers who fought for the women’s game after her.

 

POLITICIANS AND PEACEMAKERS

Mary Barbour: Beware!

Why is she a Dangerous Women?

 

Mary Barbour became active in her community when she moved to Govan, joining the Kinning Park Co-operative Guild, the Socialist Sunday School, the Independent Labour Party and the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association. She was instrumental in the leadership and organisation of the Rent Strikes during the First World War, the tenants named ‘Mrs Barbour’s Army’, and in the demonstrations against the prosecutions. She also campaigned on food shortages and the anti-war movement. After the war, she was elected to the Glasgow council and fought for better council houses, free school milk and children’s playgrounds. When she became a Bailie for the City of Glasgow, she supported the establishment of its first birth control clinic, despite opposition from her Socialist MP colleagues.

 

Women Who Dared: From the Infamous to the Forgotten edited by Ben Fletcher-Watson & Jo Shaw is published by Edinburgh University Press, priced £12.99.

The Man on the Endless Stair is a literary thriller with puzzles upon puzzles as a young, fledgling writer, Euan, tries to solve the murder of his mentor, the celebrated novelist Malcolm Furnivall. Here is an extract that gives a flavour of the nightmareish quality of Malcolm’s secluded house.

 

The Man on the Endless Stair
By Chris Barkley
Published by Polygon

 

As the door swung shut behind Malcolm, I stared down at my arm, to the sign of the omphalos. It was black and swollen. I didn’t feel any different. I believed magical thinking to be the domain of the child and the old man – a desire for significance in an unfeeling world, a way to control the overwhelming tide of being. This was the reason I supposed Malcolm had built this estate. It was a spell, wrought of plaster and stone, to hold him long after his death; it was furnished with scenes from his books, curiosities, strange paintings and puzzles. You could walk through the mansion with a Gravitation book in your hand and see references to every chapter. During my visits, Malcolm had proved to be a man obsessed with making his mark. And now, he’d made it on me. 

Trying to distract myself from the pain, I moved away from the desk to the record collection, flicking through till I came across one of Anwen’s first performances: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. She’d performed it at Carnegie Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra. I took out the vinyl, set it on the record player and waited, closing my eyes as the first notes of Anwen’s violin sang over the low thrum of the orchestra. Her violin was a cold mist encircling the orchestra’s dark and looming island. I let the record play as I moved through the study. On the walls were more images which, when looked at briefly, seemed unremarkable, but when examined, revealed a discordance. There were tessellations in which simple shapes interlocked and wove until they created a greater creature, nebulous and strange. There were images of endless waterfalls, and prisons of perspective which trapped those inside in an impossible maze. 

As Anwen’s singing mist whipped into a flurry, and the dark island of the orchestra rose, I found myself drawn to one image. It was of two faces, turned to each other. They were unravelling together, and under their skin was not muscle and bone, but rather a swirling system of planets and stars. 

Again, unwanted memories rose in me. I recalled my sister’s voice, gentle but strong. And then I felt her, resting her head on my shoulder. I recalled what Malcolm had said about me lacking something. 

Bringing my hand to my shoulder, the feeling went, and so I turned my attention back to the room, walking over to the glass cabinet of little figures. I looked inside and was struck by their beauty; some of ivory, some of wood, intricate and polished to perfection. There was a sleeping cat, and, in its ears, I could see each of the individual hairs. Beside it was a stag, with antlers that branched like forked lightning. There was a man, bending over a well, staring down into the depths as if he had lost something and forgotten what it was. As I turned my gaze to another figure, I wondered who in Malcolm’s family collected the little sculptures. Malcolm had never told me. 

Anwen’s playing conjured a sense of motion, as if every particle in the air were livid and sparking. I saw, in the jade eyes of a sculpted mouse, a fire which flickered over the patinaed hides of the other figures. Then, those eyes seemed to turn to the window. I followed their gaze.  

There, watching me from outside, was a girl. 

I stepped back, tripping on the carpet, steadying myself on the adjacent wall. 

She blinked, making no move to run away. The long grass was up to her waist and the gentle misting rain had caused her dark hair to cling to her forehead in lank strands. Her face was heart-shaped, familiar . . . 

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re gone.’ 

The girl wore a white gown, torn and muddy at the sleeves and hem. She looked serene. The wind mussed the grass about her, but seemed to leave her be, as if she, herself, were an element to be feared. 

Moving over to the window and placing my hand against the glass, I watched her and waited, the same way you might wait for a beautiful dream to fade. She seemed to look through me, but when I waved for her to come inside, she met my eye. And there was recognition, I could sense it. But it couldn’t be my Julia . . . She would be older now. 

The girl in the white gown shook her head. I saw her clenching and unclenching her fists. Her eyes flicked behind me, to the cabinet of sculptures. She seemed to be more interested in them than me. 

‘Do you want one?’ I said, pointing to the sculptures. I went to the cabinet and ran my finger along the shelves, stopped when I saw her eyes light up. She gazed at where my finger was poised: a pair of otters, forming a circle with their sinuous bodies. ‘This one?’ I said. 

She looked back at me. Fear marked her face. 

A sound. I turned in its direction; it had come from the other side of the house. Time seemed to slow as dread sank through me. It was a shot. A single one, followed by silence. 

I looked back through the window to where the girl had been standing, but she was gone. In her place, only the afternoon gloom and long grass, stippled with white wildflowers. Had they been there before? 

I left the study with the record player still turning, rushed out into the hallway, across a wide foyer, weaving between staircases. I still found it difficult to orient myself in the house Malcolm had designed; like his books, it was near impossible to hold its entirety in your mind; rather, you had to let it pull you where it willed. 

As I ran, I felt my blood coursing to the wound on my arm, pounding at the symbol, as if trying to beat it from my skin. I was the first person who came to the tall oak door of the sitting room, where Malcolm had gone to get the ice. 

Facing the door, I froze. My gaze ran across the woodgrain as my thoughts drifted to the last time I’d heard gunshots. They had been all around, setting the wind alight. But now, this single shot had its own kind of horror. The silence about it had put the terrible sound in sharp relief. It held a meaning. A gunshot in silence is a scar on the face of a child. 

I reached out with my good arm and held it inches from the doorknob. What would I find on the other side? I stepped back from the door, began to breathe deep and ragged breaths. No one else was coming. Had the wind and rain obscured the sound? Or perhaps I’d misheard, panicked over nothing? 

‘Malcolm?’ I said. 

Silence. 

Wind against a distant window made me flinch. I resumed my breathing, called out for Malcolm again. 

This time, when he didn’t reply, I gripped the doorknob, turned and pushed. 

The door jolted in its frame. 

‘Malcolm!’ 

Someone had locked the door. I pushed again but it didn’t move. 

‘Malcolm, open the door, for God’s sake.’ 

Stepping away, I cast about for help of any kind, but found only the vaulted ceiling, dark plum carpets, stained-glass windows. The house swallowed my voice, regurgitated it throughout its many rooms. 

 

The Man on the Endless Stair by Chris Barkley is published by Polygon, priced £14.99.

Catherine Simpson’s new book is another memoir, this time on her relationship with her daughter. BooksfromScotland got in touch with her to discuss five works on motherhood that have influenced her.

 

Hold Fast: Motherwood, My Autistic Daughter and Me 
By Catherine Simpson
Published by Saraband

 

I have chosen examples of memoir, fiction and poetry that explore themes of parenthood (or lack of it) from the point of view of both the parent and the child.

 

All My Wild Mothers: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss and an Apothecary Garden
By Victoria Bennett

This is a stunning meditationon the joy of nurturing a child with special needs, while creating a garden from scratch. It is a love letter to mothering and nature which bursts with wisdom, humility and hope. The writing is lyrical and beautiful and being in Victoria’s company feels like a haven in a cynical world.

 

Slug and Other Things I’ve been Told to Hate
By Hollie McNish

A mix of poetry and prose that includes a section on parenthood which is raw, honest, warm and gets right to the heart of a motherhood I recognise. Her take on parenthood is full of humour and humility and is beautifully summed up in the first poem in the parenthood section:

bartering with a seven-year-old

‘i shared my body with you
for months before birth
the least you can do
is offer me one of your crisps’

 

Letter to Louis
By Alison White

A gripping account of mothering her son, Louis, who suffered severe brain damage at birth. I could feel my heart racing as I read this book and I recognised so much: the endless knocking-head-against-a-brick -wall with medics and schools, the exhaustion, the despair, the fear for the future, the guilt when you enjoy a minute’s peace, the importance of small acts of kindness from strangers and the fierce unconditional love you feel for your child.

 

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?
By Jeanette Winterson

These are the novel inspired by Jeanette’s upbringing and the memoir covering the same ground – all revolving around the relationship with her adoptive mother, who actually asked her: ‘Why be happy when you could be normal.’ The depiction of Mrs Winterson and her iron-clad evangelising, and the effect this had on Jeanette’s childhood is terrifying and summed up in the opening sentence of the memoir: ‘When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’

 

A Conversation About Happiness: The Story of a Lost Childhood
By Mikey Cuddihy

Mikey was orphaned aged nine in New York and was sent to an experimental boarding school in Suffolk and abandoned there – a place with inadequate adult supervision (to say the least) where pupils made the rules and lessons were optional. This is a fascinating memoir of growing up without parents and in an environment where children rule the roost. It is a bittersweet story of survival and an eventual flourishing.

 

Hold Fast: Motherwood, My Autistic Daughter and Me by Catherine Simpson is published by Saraband, priced £12.99.

Who Will Be Remembered Here is a fantastic collection of writings from authors in Scotland on the places in Scotland which define their queer history. Below is the piece from writer and academic, Ashley Douglas.

 

Who Will Be Remembered Here: Queer Spaces in Scotland
Edited by Lewis Hetherington & CJ Mahony
Published by Historic Environment Scotland

 

My Sapphic City
By Ashley Douglas

At the time of our wedding, we had never even heard of Marie Maitland – the historical lesbian poet whose significance to not just Scottish, but global, queer history can scarcely be overstated, and whose biography, nearly a decade on, I find myself writing. 

Marie lived from c1546 to 1596. A contemporary of Mary, Queen of Scots and John Knox, she was born into the influential Maitland of Lethington family – her brothers, in particular, dominated Scottish politics during this era.(1) In 1561, in the twist of fate that changed everything, Marie’s father, the judge and poet Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, went entirely blind. The youngest daughter, and the only one still unmarried and at home, thus it was that a teenage Marie first became her father’s literary and legal secretary – a role in which she would serve for the next 25 years. In a life path very different to that of her three sisters, who had all been promptly married off, Marie remained abnormally unwed for most of her adult life. This gave her the relative freedom to pursue her own learning and writing – and to fall in love with another woman, which we know about because she immortalised that love in poetry, recorded surreptitiously, but still dangerously, still bravely, in a manuscript ostensibly of her father’s poetry. 

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 heralded an era in which Scotland was suffocated by a particularly extreme, virulently misogynist brand of Calvinism, where women were deemed inferior to men in every way, and where ‘sodomy’ (whether between two men or two women) was one of the worst transgressions imaginable.(2) And yet it was in that unthinkably hostile climate of immediately post-Reformation Scotland that Marie declared to her female love, with unmissable eroticism, ‘Ye wield me holie [wholly] at your will and raviss [ravish] my affectioun’– and that, later in the same poem, she stated her unequivocal desire to marry the woman that she loved. Marie invoked Ruth’s pledge of ever-lasting devotion to Naomi in the Old Testament and wrote that, if only she and her lover could ‘with joyfull hairt’ be married, they would not be the two ‘unhappie wemen’ that they were. Of course, in the 1500s, there could be no realistic hope or prospect of them ever actually being able to marry. But in their hearts, Marie stated, ‘nocht but deid [nothing but death]’ could ever divorce them: their love, she vowed, would prove that ‘thair is mair constancie in our sex, than ever amang men has been’. 

This poem appears in a manuscript that Marie completed in 1586, along with a series of other technically anonymous, but female-authored, poems, slipped in among the many pages of authoritative male-authored verse. Marie’s name is emblazoned on the manuscript’s title page, twice. Various poems within its pages confirm her authorship, and her reputation as a poet. In one poem, Marie is even named as a poetic heir to Sappho of Lesbos – the ancient Greek poet who wrote explicit poetry about her love for women, and gave us the very words ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’. Indeed, Marie is one of the earliest known authors of explicitly lesbian poetry in Europe since Sappho herself, making her a key figure in the history of women who love women. 

 

1 Marie’s father, Sir Richard, was a judge, privy counsellor and Keeper of the Great Seal under Mary, Queen of Scots; her brother William was Secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots (Secretary Lethington); her brother John was later Chancellor to her son, King James VI (Chancellor Maitland). 

2 In 1570, for example, two men were convicted of ‘sodomy’ and executed in Edinburgh. In 1625, in Glasgow, two women were found guilty of ‘sodomy’, publicly condemned, and sentenced to separate from each other on pain of excommunication. Numerous other individuals in this period, male and female, were tried for sodomy and witchcraft; the two charges were viewed as inextricable and were often conflated. 

 

Who Will Be Remembered Here: Queer Spaces in Scotland is published by Historic Environment Scotland, priced £16.99.

Mandy Haggith has turned her writing pen to a gorgeous appreciation of Elm trees and their place in our culture and natural history. BooksfromScotland wanted to know more about this particular natural love affair.

 

The Lost Elms – A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them
By Mandy Haggith
Published by Wildfire Books

 

Hello Mandy, congratulations on the publication of your latest book, The Lost Elms. What can you tell our readers about it?

Well, the subtitle, ‘A love letter to our vanished trees – and the fight to save them’ sums it up. It’s a book born out of my life-long passion for trees, which began in the woods close to where I grew up in Northumberland. The book threads together the personal meaning elms have had in my life together with their wider, cultural connections around the planet, while telling the story of how the Dutch elm disease pandemic has affected them. It’s a mix of memoir, arts and science.

 

You’re a great lover and activist for the natural world. What drew you to explore Elm trees in particular? And why do you think they’ve had such a large space in cultural history?

When I was a young child all the elm trees in the woods I played in died of Dutch elm disease, which made a big impression on me. The disease has been spreading north slowly, as the climate warms enough for the beetles that spread it to shift north. Now I live in Assynt, in the northwest Highlands, where we still have healthy elms, but maybe not for much longer, so I feel like my life journey has run parallel to this threat to the elms. The book came about because in 2022, the oldest elm in Europe, at the gateway to the Beauly Priory, succumbed to the disease and I was asked to write an elegy for it. That poem caught the interest of Wildfire Books, who had seen that elms have a huge significance culturally. Elms have many practical uses and they are also valued in many cultures as symbols of mourning but also of marriage, of loss but also of comfort. In this time of environmental grief, elms offer us hope.

 

Are you hopeful that we can bring back what has been lost in our natural world?

Yes, although this book tells a story of loss of hundreds of millions of trees across the world, it is also a tale of hope. There are elms that are resistant to the disease and scientists are working hard to propagate those resilient trees, plus elms have suffered catastrophic declines in the past and bounced back. They can teach us a lot about resilience. 

 

You’ve written fiction and poetry too. Can you tell us about working across genres in your writing practice?

Poetry is at the heart of my creative practice, but sometimes I want to write something that won’t fit into the confines of a poem. A key difference between poetry and prose for me is how much research is involved – poetry generally emerges spontaneously from my lived experience, while both fiction and non-fiction come from disciplined daily practice embedded in lots of research. I love research and writing information-rich non-fiction essays and articles, and if I get stuck into a topic and the obsession builds sufficiently, depending on how speculative I am being, it can become either a novel or a non-fiction book. I find that it’s best to let the subject matter be in charge of the genre.

 

Not only have you had a varied writing career, but your non-writing career has been characterised by change and pivoting. You previously worked in Artificial Intelligence. What are your thoughts on where AI is heading today?

I did my PhD in AI back when it was a new-fangled thing in the 1990s. I used to joke that my research question was ‘Can AI help save the planet?’ and I quit the field in the early noughties when I realised the answer was ‘No’! I was really worried then about the ethics of AI and, in particular, who owned and controlled the technology, and I think my concerns have largely been vindicated. Governments have failed to get a grip on regulating this industry effectively, there is little effort to rein-in the corporations responsible for AI and the results include outrageous copyright thefts for training large language models and a runaway train of potential misuse. I’m no luddite, and I believe we could harness the power of computation for socially benign purposes, but I don’t think we’re achieving a good balance between the risks and benefits of this technology.

 

You love travelling and sailing too. How do you fit in these activities around your writing and teaching?

I used to travel a lot when I worked as a forest activist but for the past decade I’ve become seriously addicted to sailing. Since I got a job teaching I get long summer holidays, which is a boon!

 

What advice would you give to young people and city dwellers in appreciating nature if they’ve not had the opportunity before?

Breathe in – wherever you are, you’re absorbing the out-breaths of plants. Breathe out – you’re sharing your breath with the rest of the natural world. Stand under a tree and exchange breath with it. We are part of nature and the rest of nature is all around us. It is within us and we are within it, it doesn’t judge us and it’s free!

 

The Lost Elms – A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them by Mandy Haggith published by Wildfire Books, priced £22.

Blitzers is pacy, thrilling adventure story perfect for young readers who also love gaming. Here author Alistair Chisholm gives a reading.

 

Blitzers
By Alistair Chisholm
Published by Barrington Stoke

 

 

Blitzers by Alistair Chisholm is published by Barrington Stoke, priced £7.99.

Cat Wumman, is Stevenson’s second short story collection – nine different stories of contemporary Scottish life, inspired by folk tales, poetry and Scots ballads. We hope you enjoy revelling in the wonderful Scots language in this extract.

 

Cat Wumman: Tales o’ Nine Lives
By Gerda Stevenson
Published by Luath Press

 

Warlds Apairt
Efter a Japanese tale,
The Auld Wumman an her Dumplin 

‘DENNER TIME!’ 

The door bursts appen. Dinnae ken whit day it is, but I’m no in bed. I’m back in ma wheelchair. Mibbe the doctor’s been, or mibbe no. 

In comes the trolley. ‘STEW WI DUMPLINS THE DAY!’ 

I yaised tae mak guid dumplins, wi suet frae the butcher’s up the street. Tasty in a stew. But no in yon care hame. Like champin on sponge, thae dumplins. I gie a face like a soor ploom tae lat them ken whit I think o their trash. 

‘NAE NEED TO GIE ME YER GIRNIN GIZZ,’ bawls the astronaut. ‘WE’RE DAEIN OOR BEST FOR YE!’ 

‘Weel,’ says I, ‘Ye could stert wi findin ma hearin aids. Then there’d be nae need tae yowt at me.’ 

I’m feelin hungert, somehoo – mibbe aa the stramash wi ma eejit dochter. I tak a laith wee nibble at a dumplin. Bingo! It tastes no bad! Must be a new cook in this hellhole o a locus! I’m that hungert, ma fingers are fumbling wi the fork, an the dumplins cowp ontae the flair. The astronaut’s left the door appen, an the dumplins roll oot the room! Dinnae ken whit cam ower me, but I grup the wheels o ma chair, an I’m like yin o thae wheelchair tennis pleyers ye see on the telly, hurtlin masel frae the room, an on doon the corridor, chasin efter the dumplins like ma life dependit on it! 

I’m spinnin at tap speed noo, past a cleaner wi her mop – she looks at me, her een like plunkers ower her mask, fair dumfoonert! I’m juist aboot tae hit the double doors when a muckle sinkhole appens in the flair – an the dumplins, me an ma wheelchair gae fleein throu it, doon, doon intae a kinna unnerwarld. Bi some guid luck, I laund the richt wey up, aa in yin piece! I wheel masel alang a stane passage, the ceilin no faur frae ma heid, a single dumplin rollin aheid o me. There’s a thin sliver o licht at the tither end. I follae it intae a chaumer whaur fowk are sittin roon a fire. The smell o roastit meat maks ma mooth watter. Yin o them picks up a dumplin that’s cam tae a staunstill afore me, an gies it a sniff. They’re aa gowpin at me an ma wheelchair, like I’m an alien frae ooter space. I can see their pint – aathing in their hoose is made o stane – stane sidebuird, stane beds an seats (I’m shair I’ve seen this place on the telly afore), animal skins an furs; nae wid tae be seen, nae china plates nor mugs, nae cutlery – they’re eatin the meat wi their fingers. 

A wumman, her hair in lang braids, haunds me a bit. It’s wairm an tender when I bite intae it, wi a crispy cracklin on the ootside, the maist deleecious piece o meat I’ve iver tastit. The fat’s dreepin doon ma chin. I fumble for a hanky in ma dressin goon pooch, but a wee lassie gets up, an dichts me clean wi a bit o wuiven cloot. I’m mair auld nor ony o them, but they’re treatin me like I’m ryalty, or some god that’s drapped in frae heiven! Cannae unnerstaund a wurd they’re sayin – some furrin leid they spik – but it’s plain as parritch they mean weel. A man’s cutting ma dumplin in hauf wi a sherp, flat stane, an haein a guid look at it. I nod, an pit ma fingers tae ma mooth tae say: ‘It’s sauf tae eat – it’ll no kill ye!’ He gies me a bit tae try first. I pit it in ma mooth, an cast him a smile. Syne he cuts it up intae mair wee pieces, an shares it oot amang his fowk. Aabody nods – they like the taste o it. 

There’s a smaa windae in the stane waa, nae gless pane – it’s appen tae the air. I can see a beach throu it, an saund dunes, gress blawin in the wund. I wheel masel ower the stane flair an pit ma face tae the caller air – the smell o the saut sea maks me greet. I’ve bin locked up ower lang in yon care hame, wi naethin but the stale reek o bed pans an bleach. 

They’re aa watchin ma ivry move. A young wumman wi a bairn at her breist gies me a saft look, like she kens hoo I’m feelin. The bairn nods aff. She gets up an haunds the wee dossock tae me, wairm in ma airms, its hert beat agin mine. Ma dochter niver wantit bairns, an ma son’s the same. Truith tae tell, ye couldnae cry us a faimily. But these fowk I’ve fell intae, comin an gangin atween a hantle o hooses, they’re like yin muckle faimily. 

I get tae ken them, ilk ane o them. We dinnae spik the same leid, but we pick up a wurd or twa frae yin anither, an mak sense maistly wi signs, yaisin oor haunds. They seem tae ken whit I need – nae bawlin at me, nae shoving me aboot wi rubber gloves. They help me tae the lavvy when I need it – a chaumer, whaur they haud me ower a stane pit wi a drain ablow, the sea rinnin throu it tae wash awa the waste. They’re aye makkin douce wee sighs an souchs while they tak tent o me – I think it’s their wey o showin me they care. Syne they wash me wi watter they hae wairmed on the fire, dichtin doon ma maist private pairts wi saft, weet oo, awmaist like it’s a haly ritual. 

An they hae learned hoo tae push ma wheelchair, an tak me tae the shore. I like tae watch them gaitherin shellfish. The bairns rin aboot, pickin up cowries, clams an razor shells, bringin them tae me, drappin them on ma knee in a heap. I bade bi the sea when I wis a bairn, an it’s like bein back hame. A wumman gies me threid wi a fine bane needle, an I mak necklaces an bangles for the bairns, sittin there in the gowstie blaw o the saut sea wund. Ma arthritis disnae seem tae bather me – I can dae fine wark wi ma auld bowlt fingers. 

Whiles I wunner if I’m here, or if it’s juist a dwam… I huvnae got ma hearin aids, sae hoo come I can hear the seabirds cryin, the deer bellaein, an aa the soonds o the faimilies bletherin, lauchin, an singin? It’s aa sae clear! An the smell o life fair kittles up ma saul frae the meenit I wauken – breid bakkin on a stane slab ower the fire, herb drauchts bubblin awa – nane o yon disinfectant skooshed aboot aawhaur, killin yer senses. 

Mind you, I miss the tree ootside ma windae. I miss its wrunkelt bark – like me, aa the lines o lang life scored intae oor skin. There’s nae trees here. Nane ava. They burn dried seaweed on the fire, heather tae, an ony bits o drift wid they gaither frae the shore. I dinnae think they’ve iver seen a tree. I tak a stick o brunt heather frae the fire. Syne, at nicht, lyin in ma bed on saft strae an sheepskin, shaidaes pleyin wi the deein embers frae the middle o the chaumer, I draw ma tree on the stane waa. Its brainches are raxin oot tae me, an I’m raxin back wi ma airms. 

 

Cat Wumman: Tales o’ Nine Lives by Gerda Stevenson is published by Luath Press, priced £8.99.

The Needfire tells the story of Norah Mackenzie, fleeing from a past in Glasgow she wants to forget straight into a marriage of convenience to a Highland aristocrat. In this extract her regrets appear soon after the marriage ceremony.

 

The Needfire
By M. K. Hardy
Published by Solaris

 

The kirk was nowhere and then suddenly right before them, the mist parting to admit them into its waiting open doors. They had only walked back down the driveway and partway along a side path, though with the thick mist and the light fading fast it felt as though they had left the house far behind nonetheless. The building was broad and squat and harled just like the house, and it occurred to Norah that they had probably been built at the same time. It was built for practicality rather than beauty, a far cry from the delicate spire and stained glass of St John’s back home. Still, the unadorned windows glowed from the light within, and at the sight of it some warmth returned to Norah’s belly. She had chosen this. As strange as it was, this was her will.

They stepped from the falling blanket of night into the church, lit with candles and sturdy lamps along its nave. The interior was dressed sandstone, muting the glow of the flames and capturing what little warmth they radiated. Standing at the altar was a man so like the housekeeper that had greeted her that she had to glance between them just to believe her eyes. He had the same dark eyes set in a face of sharp angles and planes, the same broad shoulders and straight-backed bearing. And he looked at her in the same peculiar way, as if suspicious of her sudden arrival despite the fact that it was he himself who had asked her here—he who had arranged for them to meet like this, in a church, first setting eyes on one another minutes before exchanging eternal vows.

The minister was a slight and unassuming sort of character with steely hair and a narrow, pinched face, fully a head shorter than her fiancé. He was drowning in his vestments, which were a spartan affair and clearly made for a much larger frame. He was the first to break the silence by clearing his throat. The sound echoed around the chamber, impossibly loud.

‘Gunn.’ Norah fancied the minister did not like the taste of that word in his mouth and her mind began to spin stories as to why. ‘And you must be Miss Mackenzie. It’s good to meet you at last.’ He did not speak like Gunn or the man with the cart. His speech was clipped and monotone, though still a little unfamiliar to Norah’s ear. An east coast lowlander.

‘Good evening, Reverend. I must thank you for coming all the way out here to perform the service—I hope to be able to visit your church one day soon, and meet the families who attend.’ She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being hidden away; why else have the service here instead of in the village? Was he ashamed of her?

‘Indeed,’ replied the minister with a smile, though it was close-lipped and didn’t reach his pale eyes. ‘I was sorry to hear that his lordship’s health would prevent him from attending, as indeed it has these past few years.’ The tone was significant, and Norah turned to scrutinise the man by her side all the closer, but then Gunn spoke up.

‘Ah, there you are, Jamie.’ Nobody else had noticed the light-haired man letting himself in. He was wearing a flatcap now, and a threadbare jacket instead of his earlier coat. ‘Miss Mackenzie, I believe you met earlier: Jamie MacCulloch is our groundskeeper.’ The man tipped his head in greeting again, but didn’t move from his post by the door. Gunn turned her gaze back to the minister and lifted her dark eyebrows. ‘Are we ready, then?’

‘Please.’ It was the first word her fiancé had spoken, and it nearly made her jump out of her skin. His voice was deep and yet thin, scratchy, as though he used it little. ‘Begin.’

What followed was a perfunctory ceremony made all the stranger by the dead silence around them.

There were few bodies in the church to muffle the sound, and so the minister’s voice reached every corner where it hung, expectant and ringing with judgement. Norah fixed her gaze on his face, suddenly unable to look at the man beside her as their fates were woven together by fiat of God and His representative here on earth.

What had she expected? That she might set eyes on her fiancé and find the pit in her stomach miraculously vanished? That he might be a guiding light in these damp and dreary environs? She had never thought as much consciously, but it seemed she must have hoped it, for as the minister pressed onward and she mechanically followed his instructions to turn and face her groom, she was gripped with a sudden and all-consuming terror. She had made a dreadful mistake.

It was not sentimentality that made her quail; she had never dreamed of her wedding as some little girls did, so a perfunctory ceremony in her travelling clothes was as favourable as a cathedral filled with well-wishers—perhaps more so, given the expectations that would place upon her. No, her dread stemmed from a far more mundane source: the dawning realisation that she was surrounded by strangers, for despite the dozens of letters they had exchanged, Lord Alexander Barland regarded her with nothing but mild chagrin as they recited their vows. No one had challenged the banns because she knew no one here, was nothing here. She was completely and wholly alone.

The staff were their witnesses (Norah chided herself inwardly for her mild surprise that McCulloch signed his name and not an ‘X’). The minister presided over the whole affair with that same pinched-face expression, clearly under sufferance, though whether due to the obviously unromantic technicalities of this union or being dragged away from his manse on a Saturday evening was hard to say. Comfort, when it came, was from an unexpected source: as Norah looked up from signing her own name, her eyes met those of the housekeeper, standing in front of the pews, still in her coat. Gunn favoured her with a grim, tight-lipped smile, and for just a flicker of a second, Norah perceived something real behind her unmoving gaze. Not sympathy, exactly, but not its sanctimonious cousin pity either. She glanced from Gunn to her new husband, two straight-backed peas in a pod, and her heart sank again. There was no such secret warmth in his eyes.

It was properly dark when they emerged from the church into frigid air. The clouds were too heavy for stars and even the waxing full moon was a hazy smudge. The land sloped steeply off to the north and Norah knew the sea was spread out forever beyond, but it was gone now, nothing but the path before them visible in the fog.

‘Stay close.’ It was Gunn and not the baron who’d fallen into step at her elbow, and she was perversely relieved. She had to keep from moving closer still, her body hewing to Gunn’s out of cold and not a little apprehension.

‘Is this normal? That the fog should be so low and dense?’

‘Sometimes.’ A pause. ‘Often, in the mornings and at night. In the summer it usually burns off during the day.’

‘I’m beginning to think arriving in the summer would have been a far wiser choice,’ Norah said with a rueful shake of her head. ‘The dark is…’

‘You don’t have the dark in Glasgow?’ The tone was even, flat, and yet Norah thought she could hear the tease in it.

She ducked her head, holding back a smile of gratitude at this small gesture. ‘Not like this. At ho—in Glasgow the dark is always softened by the streetlights, the lamps shining out of people’s windows. It never feels truly dark, even in the dead of winter.’

‘Well, it will never feel truly dark by the middle of summer here, so you have that to look forward to.’

Norah hadn’t thought about this; hadn’t thought about many things to do with her new life, it seemed. She considered it now, the fact that they found themselves so far north that in winter, the sun barely deigned to come near at all, its absence casting the world into perpetual dimness. How did the plants and animals grow in these conditions? How did the people?

At length, Gunn cleared her throat. ‘You did not bring a lady’s maid,’ she said. ‘Are you accustomed… will you be requiring my services?’

‘Oh.’ She hadn’t seen any other servants in the house, it was true, but then, she’d barely spent ten minutes inside before being whisked off to the church. She’d assumed—hoped—that there’d be a lady’s maid already in position, since her mother had steadfastly refused to let her away with the one they had ‘shared’ for the past year or so. In truth her mother had kept the poor girl so busy that Norah had taken to seeing to her own needs rather than require the girl to work twice as much for paltry pay. She’d gotten proficient enough at most tasks that she wouldn’t feel the lack of a maid now, even if it was unexpected. ‘I’ll manage just fine, thank you. I’m sure you have enough to be getting on with, anyhow.’

‘There’s plenty to do, right enough. Careful—’ The last utterance was accompanied by a firm hand on Norah’s elbow as her footing betrayed her on the steep root-laced path. For a moment everything seemed to tilt, and vaguely Norah pondered that if the light could forsake them this far north, why not gravity as well? But then her boot settled more firmly on the ground and Gunn pulled back her hand, and the world righted itself once more. The housekeeper’s next breath came out with a whoosh.

‘There’s a steep drop to your right,’ she said. ‘Mind yourself.’

Somehow Norah knew better than to look down. Sometimes one didn’t have to see the fall to know it was real. They arrived back at the house a few minutes later, the stillness broken only by Gunn’s key scraping in the lock. Norah heard a crunch of gravel behind her and had to fight the urge to spin round, her nerves taut as an overtuned fiddle. A moment later her husband moved past her through the doorway, a dark figure swallowed by the dark house. A hand on her arm again.

‘I’ll show you to your rooms. You can rest before dinner.’

 

The Needfire by M. K. Hardy is published by Solaris, priced £18.99.

The Foreshore is set on a remote Scottish island in the 19th century; Flora has just buried her son and a new reverend is sent over to look after the souls of all the islanders. The unlikely pair team up to solve a murder and to make sure superstition does not lead to more bloodshed. In this extract, they meet for the first time.

 

The Foreshore
By Samantha York
Published by Salt Publishing

 

It was not the first child she had lost, but it was the first that she had buried. Looking upon the lifeless form of her youngest child being lowered into his grave, cradled tenderly in the arms of his father and two surviving brothers, Flora wished that she could summon a genuine tear. Instead, she trembled in the bitter cold, disguising her shivers as sobs as her neighbours mourned on her behalf. Inside she was crippled with a dull pain, but since the day her son’s storm-damaged, mutilated body had been brought back to her, she had not been able to cry. She had lain awake for the past five nights, her boy’s corpse lying just beyond the partition separating her living space from the byre and waited desperately for the grief to hit her. Yet now she stood, watching as other mothers wailed and tore at their flesh for her child, while she remained silent.

With an aching awareness, Flora listened to the soft thud of Donnchadh’s body hit the earth and felt a sudden twinge of longing as her boy’s form was obscured from view. It had been barely seventeen years since she had first held him against her breast.

As she scanned the crowd she observed Mary, the wife of her second son, Fergus, nursing her infant granddaughter beneath her shawl. Flora stared longingly at the child. She thought of her lost daughter, and how there had been no opportunity to grieve then, no grave to weep over, no memorial cairn to sit and remember her by. No mourners had gathered to lay her little girl to rest, but that was the last time Flora had allowed herself to shed tears so freely, and even as her son’s body was vanishing beneath her feet, it was still the memory of her daughter’s soul which plagued Flora’s thoughts.

Despite the relentless battering of the elements, Donnchadh’s grave was soon filled, and Flora allowed herself to shuffle forward to the front of the congregation. The earth lay clumped in freshly dug sods which stood out from the springy turf surrounding the grave. Just yards away stood the burial cairn of Flora’s parents and siblings, now so old that thick moss and lichen had crawled between the pebbles, binding them together.

John placed an arm around his wife’s shoulder and pulled four round stones from beneath his belted plaid, giving one each to Flora, Fergus and his eldest son, Michael. Flora felt the stone sit snugly in her palm, warming to her touch, before she planted it firmly in the ground at the head of the grave. In procession, each member of the family deposited their stone on the growing cairn, while the remainder of the congregation scrabbled around in the turf for their own. Michael’s wife, Ann, hesitated before she placed her own tribute on the cairn, hastily moving back when the deed was done to distance herself from the gravesite. Flora looked to Ann but could not catch her eye. She noticed that some of her other kinsfolk seemed unsettled as they crowded the cemetery; some hovered by the edges as if afraid of getting too close. Flora understood the unease all too well: a death such as this forecast ill luck was on its way, swept in on a high tide. Flora did not fear this, for to her Donnchadh’s death was already a penance bestowed upon her by the sea, but if anyone else suspected this, they wisely chose to keep their fears unspoken.

“This is idolatry.”

Summoned by a stranger’s voice, Flora rose stiffly and looked across her son’s grave. She beheld the owner of those words hovering at the edge of the crowd: a tall, slender man whose thin lips were set firmly on a beardless face which betrayed no warmth of feeling.

Flora observed that he could not have been a great deal older than her eldest, and that the windswept hair escaping from the confines of a thin ribbon binding it at the nape of his neck was the same burnished brown as her own sons’.

Flora quickly surmised from the unfamiliar words and outlandish dialect that the strange man must be Reverend Buchan’s successor. The elderly cleric had left the island with the first buds of spring, taking nothing with him but a terrible fever and leaving nothing but an incomplete structure which he claimed was a place to house God. Unlike her neighbours, Flora had paid little heed to the man’s lectures and preaching.

Perhaps it could be attributed to his relative youth and sickly pallor, but Flora felt a sudden wave of sympathy for the new Reverend, who stood out sharply from the islanders in his closely fitted black clothes and odd, three-cornered hat.

“This is idolatry,” the stranger repeated, his face flushing red.

Most of the mourners ignored him, but Flora could see that John and her sons were eying the clergyman anxiously. Desperate to break the dreadful silence, she took a bold step forward.

“I am very grateful to you for coming, sir.” Flora looked up to meet his eyes.

The young man narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth, but unprepared, took several moments to respond.

“I am sorry for your loss, madam.” He paused and straightened himself. “But I’m afraid I cannot allow this kind of superstitious, pagan ritual to continue while I am tasked with caring for the spiritual wellbeing of this island’s inhabitants.”

“I don’t quite understand your words, Father . . .” Flora could recognise that the man was offering some form of condolence, but there was a coldness to his voice, as well as a trace of unease which she found both unsettling and pitiable.

In this moment, Flora felt a sturdy arm wrap around her waist and a firm hand rest once more against her shoulder as her husband came to stand beside her.

“As you can see, Father, my wife has just buried a child,” John growled. “We’d be thankful if you could leave her to mourn. She’s in no fit state to make introductions today.”

As John spoke these words, Flora set her jaw and gently bit the inside of her lip.

“I meant no offence to your wife, sir. I was just explaining that . . .” The Reverend caught himself mid-sentence, before resuming in a quieter tone. “I only meant to say that it is important that you and your wife honour your son in a way which is respectful to God.”

“Who said anything about disrespect?” John’s voice set as hard as granite.

The Reverend’s head twitched to one side. “I did not mean . . .”

“Are you alright, Ma?”

Another voice joined the fray. Michael and Fergus positioned themselves on either side of Flora and fixed their gaze upon the Reverend. Flora took Fergus’ hand in hers and gazed up at Michael, who now towered above both her and his father.

“I’m fine, boys.” Flora patted Fergus’s hand. “Get yourselves back home. Those bairns of yours will want feeding.”

Michael shifted, but after taking one last icy glance at the Reverend, departed with his own growing family.

“Are you sure you’ll be alright, Ma?” Fergus hovered at her side. Flora gave a shaky smile and nodded, gesturing for him to join his wife and babe. With a final squeeze of his mother’s hand, Fergus left to follow Michael. Flora turned back to the Reverend, who licked his lips slightly before once again speaking.

“The fact is, madam, that your son is in God’s hands now, and hopefully, he’ll be welcomed warmly into the house of the Lord. But no amount of scratching at the dirt will help him into Christ’s embrace.” The Reverend’s voice rose as he drew his body upright to reveal an imposing height which dwarfed Flora’s brethren. “Those stones are empty gestures; they merely serve to venerate death. We cannot permit false idols.”

Silence hung ominously at the end of the Reverend’s words.

Flora felt the air thicken as the remaining mourners all turned to observe them.

“My wife can mourn our son how she sees fit.” The lines on John’s face deepened.

“Aye. And we don’t need guidance from the likes of you!”

Donald Gillies, the Mackinnons’ closest neighbour, stormed his way across the tiny graveyard, positioning himself close to Flora.

“The last one of you lot was a good enough man but did little in the end to actually help us. We don’t want any more of your kind here. Why can’t that fancy laird or bishop of yours send strong, working bodies that can pull their weight around here?”

The Reverend tried to stammer a reply, but was cut off by Donald’s wife, Margaret.

“Aye! Or why doesn’t he send us more sheep or grain? It’s feeding, not praying that we need.”

There was a grumble of assent from the congregation, and several other voices shouted across their own grievances.

“As you can see, priest,” spat Donald, “you’re not wanted here.” A rising tide of fury could be heard gathering over the graveyard. Flora could see in his eyes that the Reverend was growing increasingly anxious, but his doggedness to his cause refused to be cowed.

“I have been sent to this island for your benefit, not my own.” The stranger trembled as he spoke. “Yet thus far, I have received no welcome, not one hint of gratitude from any of you.”

“Here’s your gratitude, priest!”

A stone bounced off the Reverend’s chest, leaving a clod of mud on his fine woollen coat. Despite the cleric’s ghostly pallor, his cheeks once more reddened with rage as he opened his mouth to speak. But another stone soon followed, whistling over the Reverend’s shoulder, narrowly missing the side of his face, and knocking the hat from his head. Despite the strong arms of her husband and Donald holding her back, Flora could contain herself no longer.

“Stop it! For shame!” Flora shouted. “My son is lying in his grave, and you all behave like a pack of squabbling gulls.”

 

The Foreshore by Samantha York is published by Salt Publishing, priced £10.99.