Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.
You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.
In May, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is THE GREAT OUTDOORS.
Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers. Catch up with the latest profiles.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Scottish Mountaineering Press
Publishing Scotland spotlight Sandstone Press
Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews.
Click here to read an interview with David Howe about his book Extraction to Extinction: Rethinking our Relationship with Earth’s Natural Resources.
To read an interview with Nina Mingya Powles about her award-winning book Small Bodies of Water, click here.
To read an interview with Marchelle Farrell about her forthcoming book, Uprooting, click here.
If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.
Catherine Munro’s book is a beautiful meditation on the relationship between people, places, and animals. We caught up with her to chat about her debut book.
The Ponies at the End of the World
By Catherine Munro
Published by Rider
Congratulations Catherine of the publication of The Ponies at the Edge of the World. You must be thrilled! Can you tell us all of what to expect from your memoir?
Thank you! The ponies at the edge of the world tells three interconnected stories.
The first is the story of people, ponies and landscape and how these relationships are connected to ideas of home and belonging. I describe the history of Shetland ponies and how their story, and the story of Shetland, is one of love and survival against the odds. I describe how when people work with ponies today they seek to preserve historic characteristics in ways that keeps the breed relevant for its current/future roles. Through their daily lives with ponies they connect to Shetland histories, the ponies living out in the hill today and with hopes for sustainable island futures.
I consider this in relation to ideas about domestication and critique traditional narratives of domestication which emphasise human control and domination over animals. Instead I consider how domestication relationships in Shetland are part of an ongoing process of communication where both humans and animals are active participants and are both affected by their shared lives
The third theme is my story about moving to Shetland. Before starting the PhD I had been living in Glasgow, I had been in a cycle of low paid, temporary contracts and the PhD was a way to do something different with my life. I write about how there is no one place that is home to me and my family- such a contrast to the extended networks of roots I found in Shetland, where memories of places, people, flocks and herds stretched back for generation. A landscape of history and connection. I write about how home is a journey, even for people who know their roots and can trace their connections, home is a daily practice of cultivating, creating and maintaining connection.
This is your first book. Can you tell us a little bit about its journey to publication?
While I was finishing my PhD I took part in a the XpoNorth tweet pitch. I tweeted the basic book idea and this led to me signing up with my agent Jenny Brown. She helped me to think about how I could turn the ideas and stories from the PhD into a book that would suit a wider audience. When we sent the idea out to publishers I was lucky to get some offers and chose to publish with Rider Books. It has actually been a lovely and relaxed process and I am lucky to work with a lovely editor and agent.
What was it that drew you to move to Shetland? What was your relationship with animals before the move?
My mum’s family is from Orkney and my dad spent many years in Shetland and so the islands were somewhere I heard a lot about. I visited Shetland when I was very young but it was a visit in 2012 where I fell in love with the place. At the time I was living in Glasgow and was in a cycle of short term temporary contracts which left me feeling anxious and unsettled. When I returned from Shetland, I just kept thinking about the islands and longing to return. I started to think about the possibility of doing a PhD and doing my fieldwork in Shetland. This would allow me to move to Shetland and go back to the work I had done in undergraduate, exploring connections between people and place. I was incredibly lucky to get a place with Aberdeen University’s Arctic Domus project, a five-year project studying human-animal relationships in northern places. This allowed me to follow my dream of going back to Shetland but also meant I could spend my days with horses.
As a child I grew up rurally and was surrounded by animals. For a time we had a goat, donkey, dogs, hens and a pet jackdaw. I was very lucky to live near to a trekking centre and riding school where I would help out at weekends and holidays, joining rides whenever the opportunity arose. I hadn’t realized at the time what a lasting effect my childhood love of horses would have, how these days would become part of me, continuing to shape my body and mind. Every time the wind carries the smell of horse manure baking in the summer sun, I feel a deep sense of happiness, and the sweet smell of grassy breath from soft-whiskered noses brings an instant release of tension. My separation from a life outdoors was not deliberate; it just slowly happened as jobs and money tied me to the city, in a life where I felt perhaps not unhappy, but somehow less me. The visit to Shetland in 2012 was like an awakening where I knew that things had to change.
How has your background in anthropology shaped your experiences and storytelling?
I think my background in anthropology has significantly shaped how I write and tell stories. Ethnographic research teaches you to spend time in a place, to observe what is happening around you and pay attention to the stories. Much of my anthropological work has been on human-animal relationships and multispecies ethnography and this has affected how I think about and write about places. When I write, I want to tell stories about the intertwined lives of people, animals and landscapes, to consider them all to be active participants in place making.
What do you hope readers from across the country, in diverse environments, can take from your book?
One of the stories I really want to tell is about the social bonds we can share with the animals in our lives and how these relationships can affect who we are. We become who we are through sharing our lives with others and this includes non-humans. In the book I look at this in relation to domestication and consider what domestication can mean for our lives with animals. A lot of writing about farming has, quite rightly, focused on the harm caused to animals and environments from large industrial farming.
Domestication has traditionally been understood as a point in history where humans gained control over animals and landscapes. It’s often associated with a separation from, and commodification of, nature. The violence of industrial farming wreaks unthinkable harm on animals and ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and accelerating climate change. Domination and violence don’t have to be part of domestication relationships, but too often they are, and narratives that imply this is an inevitable part of domestication can legitimate, and naturalise, exploitative practices. These processes turn nature into resources and profit rather than something to be understood and respected, something to be loved that may be capable of loving us in return. If we become who we are though our lives with others, then silencing so many potential relationships – those with landscapes and animals – leaves us isolated, feeling separate from the worlds in which we live, rather than part of an ongoing, engaged social life.
This is why I want to tell a different story about domestication and home. That domination is not the founding principle of Shetland domestication relationships. It is domus meaning ‘home’: a home co-created with animals, a home comprising myriad meaningful interspecies relationships, where through their domestication practices Shetland pony breeders actively create possibilities for shared lives. When Shetland summers are spent outdoors with foals that will form the next generation of island ponies, and winter winds simultaneously carry stories of past survival and hopes for unknown futures, then this land truly becomes part of body and mind. These connections are social and reciprocal. Through their love, their ways of noticing nature every day, people affect the land and animals, and feel this love returned through the landscape, their home.
Nature memoirs are hugely popular with readers. Do you have favourite books you return to? Which books have influenced your writing?
I absolutely love books where the landscape plays a role in the story. Neil M Gunn and George Mackay Brown are two of my favourite writers as they have the most amazing ability to make you feel the places and stories. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass are two of my favourite non-fiction books and both were very influential to my writing. I loved Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment, I really enjoyed her amazing descriptions but also the unusual locations that she described. I also loved Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild and have already started to reread it despite only finishing it about six months ago!
You’re also a tour guide in Shetland. Other than Shetland’s ponies, what do you love to share about the islands to visitors?
I love how there are many areas in Shetland that have experienced near constant human habitation since the Neolithic. The history of people and animals is present in the landscape around us. Jarlshof archaeological site is a particularly good example of this as it has well preserved Neolothic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Viking and Scottish Laird’s houses. It is like having a walk through 5000 years of history
What next for your writing?
It is very early stages but I have begin researching what I hope will be my second book. I am hoping to get some sample chapters done this summer.
The Ponies at the End of the World by Catherine Munro is published by Rider, priced £16.99.
Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.
You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.
In April, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is INSPIRING TALES.
Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers. Catch up with the latest profiles.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Cranachan Publishing
Publishing Scotland spotlight Super Power Books
Publishing Scotland spotlight Little Door Books
Publishing Scotland spotlight Pipin’s Book
Publishing Scotland spotlight National Galleries of Scotland Publishing
Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews.
Click here to read an interview with Angela Hughes on her memoir My Heart’s Content.
To read an interview with Bali Rai, author of The Royal Rebel: The Life of Suffragette Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, click here.
If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.
Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.
You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.
In March, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is BOLDNESS.
Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Luna Press Publishing
Publishing Scotland spotlight Polaris Publishing
Publishing Scotland spotlight 404 Ink
Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews.
Click here to read an interview with Bashabi Fraser and artist Vibha Pankaj on their poetry collection Patient Dignity.
To read an interview with Peter Burns and David Barnes, authors of Behind The Thistle, click here.
If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.
Scotland’s Year of Stories sees many books being released that finds more ways to tell the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. Jennifer Morag Henderson’s Daughters of the North looks at Mary’s relationship with Jean Gordon – the Earl of Bothwell’s first wife – as well as exploring the political machinations and bloody events in the Highlands during her reign.
Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots
By Jennifer Morag Henderson
Published by Sandstone Press
The Downfall of the House of Huntly: 1562–1564
The prophecy of Lady Huntly’s tame witches had been fulfilled: Huntly was in Aberdeen without a scratch on him as they had promised – but he was dead. John Knox said that Lady Huntly blamed her chief witch for the defeat, but the witch defended herself by saying that her prophecy had come true to the letter. Huntly’s body had been carried from the battlefield with some difficulty; eventually thrown over two creels, or fish-baskets, and transported that way, and taken, along with Jean’s brothers John and Adam and the other prisoners, to Aberdeen Tolbooth. Huntly’s body lay there overnight, and was an object of curiosity for many, who came to see the extraordinary downfall of the Earl, as he lay dressed only in a canvas doublet, grey hose, and hastily covered by one of the fine wool tapestries more usually found hanging on the walls. One of Huntly’s children may have been able to come to him: Jean’s middle sister, Margaret, wife of the Master of Forbes. There had been Forbes on both sides of the conflict at Corrichie, but Margaret’s husband and parents-in-law were resolutely Protestant and had opposed Huntly. Margaret’s mother-in-law was in Aberdeen, and the morning after Corrichie she joined the groups of people who wished to view Huntly’s body: ‘What stability shall we judge to be in this world?’ Margaret’s mother-in-law asked when she saw him. ‘There lieth he that yesterday in the morning was held the wisest, the richest, and a man of greatest power that was in Scotland.’ ‘In man’s opinion,’ said John Knox, other than the royal family, ‘there was not such a one these three hundred years in this realm produced as Huntly’. He was the very greatest in the land, brought to the very worst end. His sons, Jean’s brothers the dashing John and the young Adam, were in prison. Moray’s triumph was almost complete.
As news of Huntly’s defeat was brought to Mary, Queen of Scots in Aberdeen, there was a scramble to decide what to do next. Moray at least had a plan and a vision. Meanwhile, Mary, Queen of Scots dined, passing her supper ‘in mirth’, and was distracted only by the fact that the English ambassador Randolph had just received a letter from Queen Elizabeth. Mary told Randolph that she hoped to now travel as far south as she had travelled north – since she was now ‘assured of good quietness at home’, but Randolph reported to Elizabeth that no one quite knew what to do with Huntly’s body, with some arguing that he should be buried and the matter thus laid to rest, while others advanced the competing idea of beheading the corpse.
The first thing to do was to try Huntly’s sons. It was decided that Adam should be freed on account of his young age, but John must finally be brought to trial. The original feud with the Ogilvies was forgotten in the new fault of taking arms against the Queen. Compromising letters from the Earl of Sutherland had been discovered in Huntly’s possession, which were shown to Mary, Queen of Scots to prove that not only Huntly but also Sutherland and others had treasonable thoughts. John, once again in a comfortable prison, was as confident and arrogant as ever, and declared that any fault must lie with his father, avowing his love and support for Mary, Queen of Scots.
However, faced with the implacable Moray, John had no chance this time of escaping or persuading Mary, Queen of Scots that he could be redeemed. He was sentenced to death, and the execution was to be carried out immediately.
Huntly Castle had become forfeit, to be handed over to Mary, Queen of Scots’ men, so Jean and her mother had to leave their home and travel to Aberdeen. Jean’s mother tried her best to speak to Mary, Queen of Scots, but once again she was refused an audience.8 Jean and her mother were left to watch events unfold without hope of influencing them.
John’s execution was designed to be a public event to show the crowds in Aberdeen what would happen to those who stood against royal authority, a public declaration that bands of young Gordon men were not in control of the north-east and that the new Earl of Moray was taking charge, under the lead, of course, of his half-sister, Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary herself, and her ladies-in-waiting, all came out to watch the execution as though it was another entertainment laid on for them.
His hands bound by ropes, Jean’s brother John was led to the Castlegate, the main marketplace where public executions often took place, followed by four of his closest friends. They were to be beheaded. John was young and handsome, and the crowd was moved by his strength and resolution in the face of death. When John saw the queen, it was said that he cried out that her presence gave him solace. He needed that solace, because the executioner, ‘a butcherlie fellow’, made a botch job of the killing. It was a truly horrendous scene, as a blunt blade meant several strokes were needed before John was dead. Mary, Queen of Scots was so appalled that she broke down completely, weeping uncontrollably, and had to be carried away by her waiting-women before spending the rest of the day, and much of the following day as well, resting in her chamber. The unseen killing of unknown soldiers at Inverness Castle was one thing but witnessing the horrendous death of a young nobleman who was known to her was another. It was only a few months earlier that John had been knighted at Moray’s wedding. The tourism aspect of Mary’s trip north was emphatically over.
Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots by Jennifer Morag Henderson is published by Sandstone Press, priced £24.99.
Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.
You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.
In February, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is KNOWLEDGE.
Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Knights Errant.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Bright Red Publishing.
Publishing Scotland spotlight White Horse Press.
Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews.
Click here for Alasdair Gray book recommendations.
To read an interview with Aven Wildsmith, author and illustrator of Tamlin, click here.
To read an interview with Vixy Rae, author of The Secret Life of Tartan and The Art of Tweed, click here.
To read an interview with Gordon J Barclay and Ron Morris, authors of The Fortification of Firth of Forth, click here.
If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.
The last two years have been dominated by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Leading epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse has written an important and enlightening book on how we learn from what happened in the UK and across the world in 2020 in order to navigate our lives while the disease is still present. BooksfromScotland spoke to Mark about his book and his experiences.
The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir
By Mark Woolhouse
Published by Sandstone Press
Hello Mark, and congratulations on the publication of your book The Year The World Went Mad. In a strange way, is it a book you really would’ve liked not to have written?
Whichever way the pandemic unfolded there would have been stories to tell and books to write. Happily, there many positive stories about the Covid-19 pandemic, not least the extraordinary efforts to produce effective vaccines in just a few months. You’re right though, I never expected nor wanted to write this particular book. I’d been working on pandemic responses for many years but the possibility that we’d devise interventions that would make a bad situation even worse hadn’t crossed my mind.
Do you recall the moment when you realised it was a book that you had to get out to the public?
Yes, I do. My wife first suggested I write a book in July 2020 after one of our many, many conversations about the deficiencies of the pandemic response (she is a professor of global health and is even more sceptical about lockdowns than I am). It was a great idea and I put pen to paper the very next day. A few weeks later I shared the idea and some text with two science writers I know, Matt Ridley and Dorothy Crawford. Both were encouraging and so I kept going.
How have you enjoyed your publication process?
It’s quite different from publishing scientific papers, which is what I have mostly been doing for the last forty years. Publishing a book is much more of a joint enterprise. Naturally, I want the book to succeed, but so too do many other people: my agents, the publishers, the publicists and the retailers. I have enjoyed that sense of a collective endeavour very much.
The title of your book is called The Year the World Went Mad and you give an excellent overview of how the COVID-19 pandemic played out in 2020. How would you characterise this collective ‘madness’? With so many competing voices, scenarios, political affiliations, theories, economies, how difficult is it to foster sensible consensus on crises such as COVID-19?
The first thing to say is that surely there should be open and vigorous debate about decisions that have an enormous impact on everyone’s lives. I think it was wrong that alternatives to lockdown were summarily dismissed despite it being obvious that lockdown would be highly damaging in a number of ways.
It is true that public health policy has to be built on evidence, consensus and trust, but that need not and should not preclude debate. For example, issues around the pros and cons of vaccination were handled well and the upshot was that the great majority of people chose to get vaccinated. Why did we not have an equally collective and informed discussion about lockdown?
I don’t agree with the argument that we had no choice but to go into lockdown. I think that if we’d had more faith in ourselves, our data, our systems and our science then we’d have made different decisions. We’d have saved more lives and spent less time in lockdown too. Instead, we went down a path that wasn’t consistent with basic public health principles and wasn’t supported by the evidence, which is what I mean when I say that the world went mad.
Your book gives clear ideas on how the UK could’ve reacted to the pandemic differently. Now that we’re in 2022, how confident are you that we will approach major health scares in a less damaging way?
We will only do better next time if we learn the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic. The word ‘lockdown’ (meaning legally enforced restrictions on people leaving their homes) was nowhere to be found in public health text books written before 2020, but it’s part of the public health vocabulary now. We need to change the narrative before it becomes embedded.
I take the view that lockdown is what you do when you’ve failed to implement more proportionate and sustainable interventions effectively. Therefore, lockdown should be regarded not as a public health policy but as a failure of public health policy. If we adopt that attitude then hopefully we can manage the next pandemic in a way that doesn’t make a bad situation worse.
Finally, though your background is in the scientific method, do you have any suggestions on how the public can build up confidence, trust and control in their day-to-day living again?
For me, one of the most depressing features of the pandemic years has been the loss of people’s confidence, trust and control of their day-to-day lives. Some of that may be starting to return, but the damage runs deep and it’s looking to be a slow process. It turns out that it is much easier to frighten people than it is to persuade them that they don’t have to be frightened any more. We got some of our public health messaging – particularly our communication of risk – badly wrong in 2020.
This brings me back to the importance of good decision-making. We cannot make good decisions – as individuals or as policy makers – if we don’t understand the risks we face. I think that too many people did not fully understand the risks we faced in 2020 and the public health policies we ended up with reflected this.
The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir by Mark Woolhouse is published by Sandstone Press, priced £16.99.
Elle McNicoll has gained a huge following since the release of her debut novel A Kind of Spark. As her latest book, Like a Charm, hits the shelves, BooksfromScotland got in touch to ask Elle about her favourite books.
Like a Charm
By Elle McNicoll
Published by Knights Of
The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?
Elmer. I still think it’s one of the best books of all time.
The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book Like a Charm. What did you want to explore in writing it?
I never set out wanting to write about any specific theme or issue, it always begins with a character. Which, in this case, is Ramya: a girl who is 12, loves fashion, has learning difficulties and also happens to have magical gifts. She also loves berets. So, I wrote about her.
The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?
Probably my own, to be honest. I wrote A Kind of Spark because nothing like it existed. An Own Voice book for ND readers young and old. I still can’t believe it survived the pandemic and reached readers.
The book as. . .education. What is your favourite book that made you look at the world differently?
The Eyewitness Book of Sharks. An amazing account of my favourite animal and their underwater world.
The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?
Eight Princesses and a Magic Mirror by Natasha Farrant.
The book as . . . entertainment. What is your favourite rattling good read?
Anything by Talia Hibbert or Jennifer Bell.
The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?
Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman. She’s an exceptional writer.
The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
The book as. . .technology. What has been your favourite reading experience off the page?
Plays, usually. Tony Kushner and Tennessee Williams.
The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?
Persuasion by Jane Austen has always made me want to go to Bath.
The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?
I’m in a slump at the moment, so something engaging and dynamic that is impossible to put down. I’m excited to pick up The Wolf Den next, I think.
Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll is published by Knights Of, priced £6.99.
David Robinson finds you can’t keep a good story unwritten when he reviews Sarah Smith’s debut novel, Hear No Evil, by Sarah Smith.
Hear No Evil
By Sarah Smith
Published by Two Roads
Imagine you’re a policeman directing traffic. You want to tell the driver facing you to get a move on. You put your hand out, palm open and facing up, and move it back towards your shoulder. In sign language for the deaf, this gesture means that something happened in the past. Over your shoulder. Behind you. Gone.
Now imagine the past through the eyes of a deaf-mute girl in, say, the early 19th century. Sign language is in its infancy, and certainly not standardised. As a deaf girl, you probably haven’t been to school, so you can’t read and write, and because of that, the people you can’t talk to probably think you are stupid. Stupid and ignorant and, when accused of murdering your baby, probably guilty.
That is precisely the story Sarah Smith tells in her debut novel Hear No Evil, which is partly based on the real-life case of Jean Campbell, a Glaswegian who in 1817 was the first deaf woman tried in a Scottish court, accused of throwing her three-year-old child into the Clyde from the Saltmarket Bridge. Her trial made legal history for another reason: the court employed Edinburgh deaf school owner Robert Kinniburgh to help in her interrogation. In the novel, he does a lot more, repeatedly going to Glasgow to ascertain the facts of the case and see if he can uncover anything that could save Campbell from either the hangman’s noose or the insane asylum.
Already, perhaps, you can see both why Smith was drawn to this story and – because of her insistence that early sign language be a key part of it – the difficulties inherent in telling it. There are, she has written, hardly any deaf users of sign language in fiction, and the few that there are ‘range from the patronising to the absurd; childlike victims who are “rescued” by the hearing protagonist, or one-dimensional characters whose lack of hearing is used simply as a device to move the plot forward’.
Her own fictional Jean Campbell would, she resolved, be a lot more than that. At first, she wanted her to speak on the page using sign language – but, well, how was that even possible? And even if it was, as a hearing person, she was wary of cultural appropriation. No: the way into the story, she resolved, was through Kinniburgh. His empathy towards Campbell, his determination to understand her, his uncovering of the truth behind her plight would drive the story and, in the processs, allow it to be told through his own explanation of sign language. That’s how, for example, I know that the sign for ‘in the past’ looks like (my description, not hers) a traffic cop beckoning cars onwards.
Smith’s novel runs on twin tracks of drama and explanation, often swapping between them. Sometimes the explanations go on for far longer than one would expect – Kinniburgh’s exposition on sign language to a partly deaf congregation lasts for ten full pages – but as the story is set at a time when signing is still new and strange, it is easy to understand why. As a reader, one starts to realise the sheer attentiveness involved in following sign language, and even then it can still seem puzzling. In Kinniburgh’s talk to the congregation, for example, he has to say ‘Rottenrow’ in sign language. You can, he says, either spell it out on your fingers (time-consuming) or try a sign. The sign for Rottenrow he comes up with is one showing whiskers like a cat or a mouse. Why? Because ‘the name is common in towns or villages throughout the country where there once was a row of tumbledown cottages infested with rats’. Would you have got that? Neither would I. In fact, as we are told Rottenrow could also be derived from the Gaelic phrase Rat-an-righ (road of the kings) perhaps some people in the congregation would have more readily understood a sign indicating a crown instead.
Although Campbell is accused of murdering her child (in the novel, a baby) by throwing it into the Clyde, Smith loads the dice in her favour so much that you never really think she is guilty of the crime. Her jailer says she’s no trouble, a local barmaid sings her praises (‘she cares for that wean as good as anybody’), members of her local church put in a good word for her and Robert himself notes her ‘intelligent expression and admirable composure’ on first meeting her at Edinburgh’s Tollbooth Prison. The fact that she has so many modern attitudes – being open about her desire for her labourer boyfriend, not minding that he’s from the other side of the sectarian divide, and the fact that she ‘shows no shame or remorse’ about living in sin seals the deal. She’s like us, so we like her.
Robert Kinniburgh isn’t like us at all. As he goes about trying to establish what really happened to Campbell in Glasgow, Smith seems to be painting him more and more as a person completely rooted in his times. The plot pauses and takes a breath while these details are provided. The jobs of the people in the coach with him back to Edinburgh (an engineer draining Nor’ Loch, a brewer setting up in Fountainbridge); once there, the timetable of the deaf school he runs and the anticipation among the pupils for the following month’s balloon flight over Arthur’s Seat by James Sadler. In Glasgow, we are shown where the city fathers are planning to widen the Clyde and inquire about the new asylum being built on Parliamentary Row. All these facts are threads tying him down to his times, and so do his attitudes: when told of a husband ‘making his wife suffer’ (in our day, we’d call it marital rape) he points out that this may be part of a husband’s duty. ‘The Lord exhorts us to go forth and multiply. He was only doing God’s will.’
Sarah Smith says that she was inspired to write the story because no sooner does Jean Campbell flit into the historical record via court reports in the Glasgow Herald and the Caledonian Mercury than she disappears again. Those brief mentions are, however, also enough to give Campbell a slender afterlife on the internet, and if you want to check out the real story underpinning this novel, University College London’s website is worth a look.* The blog there tells you what happened next, but as that would be too much of a spoiler, I won’t give the game away.
Hear No Evil by Sarah Smith is published by Two Roads, priced £16.99
Scottish historical fiction is having quite the moment just now with many novelists taking on Scotland’s past as a rich subject to explore. Sue Lawrence carries this on with her latest novel, The Green Lady, which uses the diary of Marie Seton to look at the violent clash of personal and political ambition.
Extracts taken from The Green Lady
By Sue Lawrence
Published by Saraband
1615
Marie Seton
As I lie on my bed, not far from death, I have asked Sister Agnes to bring me over my journals and my letters, which I have not looked at for so many years. I feel ready to reflect on my long life before I begin my journey into the next. I had just received news that Alexander Seton, now Lord Chancellor of Scotland, is to begin preparations for the royal visit from London to Scotland next year. The plan is for King James and Queen Anne to tour the country, from Dunbar to Aberdeen, presumably at great expense. The King never travels without hundreds of servants and horses and probably the entire Court and its attendant trappings. But my nephew Alexander has never been one to let the mere matter of money get in the way of his great schemes.
I believe he was generously rewarded for his guardianship of Prince Charles who, in his first few years while his parents were in London, was brought up by Alexander at his properties in Scotland, including Fyvie Castle. As well as receiving an annual income, my nephew was also made Earl of Dunfermline. And now that the young prince’s elder brother Henry is dead, Charles will be the next king of England and Scotland. How Alexander will be rubbing his hands in glee that he brought up the future King Charles I of Great Britain.
But, as I lie here thinking about my life and my relationship with Alexander Seton and also with his first wife, Lilias, I wonder what would happen if his royal patrons knew what he actually was. Then perhaps he would not be lauded as one of the greatest men in Scotland, one of the finest legal minds and among the most gifted patrons of the arts. If only I had the King’s ear, as I had his mother’s ear during all my many years in her service. His mother is now more often spoken of as Mary, Queen of Scots, even though she was not only Queen of Scotland but also Queen of France, and her name, like mine, was Marie, not Mary.
I sigh as I think back to those times, when I was one of her four Maries, at first her childhood companions and friends in France, then later, at Court in Scotland, her ladies-in-waiting. But whereas the other three abandoned her when their men came courting, I was the one to remain loyal and true, though I too had to leave her shortly before her death. That I regret even to this day.
I force my ancient, arthritic bones upwards in the bed so that my head can rest against the cold stone wall. I pick up my diary and flick back through the pages to those happy times when, instead of wearing this simple habit of coarse grey wool, I would dress in fine Court attire, in gowns of silk and velvet, with gold and jewels woven into the fabric and pearls plaited through my hair, and all of this even more sumptuous and lavish at special banquets and assemblies.
I have a notion to read more about life back then and, in doing so, remember the conversations I’d always meticulously recorded. I had wanted my journal to be not just a written account of what happened, but a memory of all the voices. I inserted comments and addenda along the way in later years. And now I shall listen to them all again, whisperings in my ear of old promises and of secrets and lies.
***
October 1584
After what seems like an interminably long sixteen years serving the Queen in captivity and in various levels of damp discomfort and cold confinement, when my bones have ached from morning till night and my heart is tight with sorrow, I know I have to start thinking of myself, of my own well-being. And the only way ahead therefore is for me to retire from her service, something that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, but now is becoming an imperative.
George has written to say he is to travel to France next spring on a mission for the Queen and has suggested I travel with him to ensure my health, which has been failing, does not suffer any longer. In the Seton family, it is a tradition that the unmarried middle-aged women retire to a convent for their last years. I know I will never marry, so surely now is the time to devote myself to God rather than to my Queen? After many discussions with the Queen, she has eventually agreed it would be better for my health that I leave her, and I have accepted the invitation that I received so many years ago, when I was still a young woman. At last, I will join the Abbey of Saint Pierre in Reims, whose Abbess is the Queen’s aunt, Renee de Guise.
During those years of indecision when she came to rely more and more on me, her only Marie, I often could not sleep for worrying. But then early one morning as I lay in the dark before the hope of light that the dawn brings, I asked myself a question: if she were me, would she continue in service, to the detriment of her health? Or would she grasp this opportunity and for once think of herself? I knew immediately the answer. Once my decision had been taken, I felt neither fear nor trepidation, and of course she acquiesced, with tears and sighs, but also with fortitude; this is, after all, her battle with her cousin, Elizabeth, not mine.
But first, before I exchange one form of incarceration for another, I need to live, for just a short period, in freedom. Since George is not leaving for France till the month of March in 1585, I agreed that I would first recuperate with my family. It’s been decided that I would travel, after a short stay at Seton Palace with George, to Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire, which his son Alexander has just bought from Andrew Meldrum of Drumoak. My nephew wants to show it to me before I leave for France, and I too am excited to see what is soon to become another Seton family home.
I shut my eyes tight as I remember writing these words and the excitement I felt in my new venture, including a visit to my nephew’s new property. I believed it could be the last time I would set foot in Scotland. As it turned out, of course, it was not, and I had to return another sixteen years later to attempt to put right the wrongs my brother’s son had visited upon his own dear wife.
It was during those few months of freedom residing up at Fyvie that I first met Lilias Drummond. She was not even fifteen, yet already betrothed to my shrewd, ambitious nephew, Alexander Seton. There was such an immediate connection between Lilias and me, even with the age difference; I was already forty-three years old. And by the end of my stay there in the wilds of Aberdeenshire, I had decided without any doubt that it was she who would be the recipient of my beautiful parure once I had gone. Those sparkling rubies, emeralds and pearls would be so beautiful around her fair neck.
Such spontaneity was not in my nature, but I felt somehow that God had guided me to this decision. Alexander may have been the Queen’s godson, but to me, Lilias was more than a goddaughter could ever have been; she was the daughter I never had.
The Green Lady by Sue Lawrence is published by Saraband, priced £9.99.
The call for change in the Metropolitan Police is increasing as its practices and culture come under scrutiny. Donna Mclean’s memoir Small Town Girl can only strengthen the case for reform. BooksfromScotland talked to her about her extraordinary book.
Small Town Girl
By Donna Mclean
Published by Hodder
Congratulations on the publication on your memoir Small Town Girl. It’s an extraordinary story. For those who are unaware, could you tell us a little bit of the story behind the writing of the book.
Thank you! In 2015 I discovered that my ex fiancee, who disappeared from my life in 2004, was actually an undercover police officer. Carlo worked for a secretive political policing unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, within the Metropolitan Police. Over 40 years the SDS and its successor, the NPOIU, spied on left wing and grassroots groups. Women activists were deceived into long term intimate relationships in order to gain greater access to the groups. I was one of those women.
It clearly took a lot of courage to take your story to the public. What prompted the decision to write?
I started writing in early 2017, having been encouraged by a close friend to write an article for a trade union journal. I was anxious that it wouldn’t be accepted or would be sent back with heavy edits! This wasn’t the case and it spurred me on to sign up to a six week creative writing course, Write Like A Grrrl. I started writing snippets of my story, showed the tutor and she said you have to write a book about this! Little did I know!
Before this happened did you consider that you would ever write? How was the experience in putting your story to paper?
I hadn’t written since I was at school. As a child I loved writing, and wrote pretty much every day. Someone gave me an old fashioned typewriter and I would bash out stories at night. I had brilliant English teachers at Prestwick Academy and they were extremely encouraging. Unfortunately it all fell away when I left school. Getting my story down on paper was one of the most therapeutic things I’ve done, plus I have absolutely found my writing voice again. I’ve written for several national newspapers, I’ve published two short stories and I will soon be writing a regular newspaper column.
Other than writing what else has helped you come to terms with what has happened to you?
The support of other people affected by abusive policing methods, the opportunity to speak about it in public, walking by the sea, re-examining my life and priorities. It has been a tumultuous few years but I am very much back on track, on a better track than before. Coming through this experience, I’ve been able to make big changes to my life. I don’t view myself as a victim, I think I’m a survivor.
What would you like to see happen for the public to be able to trust the authorities again? Do you think that even possible?
We saw the forced resignation of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick yesterday. That’s a tiny step. What we need is utter transparency, a willingness from the top to admit, accept and deal with the corruption, racism, sexism and homophobia within the Met and other forces. It’s not a few bad apples. It’s the whole orchard. Policing needs a radical overhaul, not just a new face at the top and some superficial changes.
Do you see yourself writing another book? Do you have other stories you wish to share?
Yes, absolutely! I have a story in my head that has been there for 35 years. I first came across this tragedy at Ayr Library when I went to do some research with my English teacher. It has never left me and it now is shouting to be told. I also have a folder of extra words (30k) that were edited out of the book. This is going to keep me occupied for a while!
Small Town Girl by Donna Mclean is published by Hodder, priced £16.99.
As part of the Year of Scotland’s Stories, we will be running a series of Responses on BooksfromScotland, commissioning writers to respond to books from the Publishing Scotland membership, engaging with work in different ways. To mark LGBT History Month, Kevin Guyan, Edinburgh-based writer and researcher, and author of Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action, writes about The Bi-ble: New Testimonials, Volume 2, edited by Ellen Desmond and Lauren Nickodemus, published by Monstrous Regiment, sitting at the intersection of data and lived experience.
The Bi-ble
Edited by Ellen Desmond and Lauren Nickodemus
Published by Monstrous Regiment
Beyond the binary: queer data and bisexual lives
What happens at the intersection where data meets identity? More generally, what tensions emerge between the representation of lives – in data, education, media, art and culture – and the reality of the lives they claim to represent? These questions were on my mind as I read The Bi-ble: New Testimonials (Volume 2), a collection of 19 essays about the experience of being bisexual.
My own writing focuses on data about LGBTQ communities in the UK, and the decisions made by people in power about how and who to count. For those with the ability to craft the narrative, what stories are brought into view and what stories are pushed further into the shadows? The Bi-ble speaks to the dual sides of visibility by documenting the diversity of bisexual lives and the interplay between identity and institutional bedrocks such as culture, religion, family, education and history. The Bi-ble therefore offers insights that go beyond the grasp of data and its rigid rules: the messiness, nuances, half-steps and grey areas that are formative in making sense of who we are in this world.
In the Foreword, Kemah Bob asks, ‘Where do definitions and labels stop serving to empower us and begin to box us in? When do they begin to limit the ways we think we’re entitled to feel about ourselves and other people?’ In my book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action, I argue that we need to pay attention to the dark side of quantitative data practices. The completion of a diversity monitoring form in your workplace or answering questions about how you identify in a national census are not apolitical or value neutral activities, they produce benefits and harms for particular identity groups. As Bob rightly describes, definitions and labels are liberatory as well as limiting. Numerical data gives the impression that what is counted is static, fixed and unchanging across time and geographies. Those tasked with the collection of data are wrongly understood as archaeologists uncovering artefacts from the belly of the earth, rather than entomologists trying to capture butterflies with broken nets. When we imagine identity characteristics as ‘moving targets’ and value what people say about themselves, rather than trying to fit lives and experiences into predetermined categories, traditional understandings of identity and data are reconfigured.
The challenge of definitions and labels is particularly evident in essays that examine who counts as bisexual. Rebecca Wojturska, in the essay Bidentity, writes, ‘I am a bisexual who has never slept with a woman’, While Vaneet Mehta notes in The Hardest Things I’ve Ever Had to Do, ‘who you have had sex with, or relationships with, does not define your sexuality – it is your thoughts and desires that do’. These reflections highlight the opaqueness of ‘sexual orientation’, which include sexual identity (how a person thinks of their sexuality and the identity terms with which they identify); sexual attraction (the object of a person’s sexual and/or romantic feelings); and sexual behaviour (the sex/gender of a person’s sexual partner(s), if they engage in sexual behaviour).
Of course, the many moving parts of an individual’s ‘sexual orientation’ are not unique to bisexual lives but are equally part of the experiences of those who identify as gay, lesbian and straight/heterosexual. As Alizée Pichot notes in ‘Bisexual Woman Has Sex with Gay Man’: Not Such an Unusual Story, and the title of their essay suggests, ‘Heterosexuality (read: male/female sexual relationships) is not as limited as it appears. In fact (disclaimer, major announcement coming!), heterosexual activity can be très gay, too!’ I welcomed the collection’s exploration of the fuzzy borders between bisexuality and heterosexuality, a topic that some might perceive as taboo but contributed to The Bi-ble’s rounded exploration of the topic.
History and problems
Most historical data about LGBTQ people in the UK (or those perceived as different in terms of their gender, sex and/or sexuality) relates to the lives of individuals we might now understand as white, cis, gay men. Data was collected as proof of a ‘problem’, where people in power felt something was wrong and needed fixing. As an evidence base to demonstrate criminality, pathological maladjustment or to mark some individuals as different from the ‘normal’ majority, the historical relationship between LGBTQ communities and data practices is harmful. When used primarily to inflict harm upon the people about whom the data related, the relative absence of bisexual people in datasets is an omission that had no easy solution – in other words, nobody would want data collected about them when it is used to paint their community as deviant.
These histories inform our present-day relationship to data. Policymakers and researchers still collect data to demonstrate the existence of a problem, whether it’s evidence of under-achievement in education, poorer health outcomes or experiences of hate crime. Yet, as data makes the journey from collection to presentation, the analysis continues to erase the experiences of bisexual people. For example, when bisexual respondents are aggregated into a wider LGB+ group and data is reported as representative of lesbian and gay respondents only, they are made invisible. This analytical manoeuvre is particularly problematic as bisexual respondents often constitute the largest proportion of those who identify as LGB+. For example, 3.7 per cent of students identified as bisexual in the 2019/20 academic year in UK higher education institutions that returned data to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, whereas just 1.3 per cent of students identified as a gay man and 0.8 per cent identified as a gay woman/lesbian. The erasure of unique insights from bisexual respondents means that even when we have more data about LGB+ lives, when data is published, bisexual people appear to be missing.
The erasure of bisexual lives, as described in The Bi-ble, is not only something done to LGBTQ communities but is also something that occurs among LGBTQ people. Jayna Tavarez, in their essay exploring the realities of being LGBTQ+ on campus, reminds us that when it comes to racism, cissexism, classism and other -isms, ‘The LGBTQ+ community at large has proven time and time again that we are capable (and guilty!) of reproducing the same harmful systems that we claim to combat’. As a response, the editors of The Bi-ble describe how their vision for the two volumes was to produce something that ‘would wedge themselves in on bookshelves and claim some much-deserved visible space for the often erased B in LGBTQ+’.
More stories
The removal of bisexual people and identities from narratives across the board makes collections like this all the more significant. Although the balance is improving, the historical canon of LGBTQ writing continues to foreground a narrow depiction of LGBTQ lives. Writing on Black queer femme representation in Erotic Computer, which considers Janelle Monáe’s Black queer femme representation through the lens of Audre Lorde’s writing, Jessica Brough argues ‘it’s hard to be what you can’t see, and it can be hard to be proud of something so rarely celebrated in the mainstream’. In its overarching call for more (and more diverse) bisexual stories and content, The Bi-ble is a necessary tonic.
The Bi-ble edited by Ellen Desmond and Lauren Nickodemus is published by Monstrous Regiment, priced £9.99.
Kevin Guyan is an Edinburgh-based writer and researcher. He is the author of Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action, which explores LGBTQ data in the UK. Queer Data is published by Bloomsbury Academic and is available from most booksellers.
The Year of Stories x Books from Scotland response strand was inspired by Fringe of Colour’s series, which you can read more of at fringeofcolour.co.uk.
Gill Lewis is a children’s author who writes about animals and our human relationship with the wild world. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages and have won the Little Rebels Prize, the German Prize for Environmental Youth Literature and the US Green Earth Book Award. Here, she tells BooksfromScotland the inspiration behind her latest book, Song of the River.
Song of the River
By Gill Lewis
Published by Barrington Stoke
‘Why do you write stories?’
This is one of the most common questions I get asked at schools. A seemingly simple question, yet one that has been hard to answer. Yet, over the last ten years, since first being published, I have begun to understand why I write. Of course, writing is about wanting to share thoughts and ideas and hopefully through an engaging story. But writing is a form of protest too. It is a way of joining other voices to call for change to happen. We know we are in a climate emergency and a biodiversity crisis. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, with the RSPB State of Nature Report showing severely declining native species populations. With increasing urbanisation, children are becoming more removed from nature, losing contact with the wild world. But stories can help bridge that gap. Stories have the potential to be powerful because they can take the reader by the hand and lead them through another person’s world and help them empathise with the protagonist’s journey and make them deeply care.
Song of the River is a song of protest. I have written about the need for restoring wild landscapes in two of my books; Sky Dancer and Eagle Warrior. Both are about the need to rewild intensively managed grouse moors. Song of the River is a story about using one particular animal, the beaver, to re-engineer our landscapes. Beavers, a once native species, are keystone species. They can change landscapes, create new habitats and increase biodiversity. They cut down trees and dam rivers, creating wetlands that in turn have the potential to thrive with variety of flora and fauna. In doing so, they slow water, reduce soil erosion and reduce the risk of flooding downstream too.
We often think in visual terms about restoring landscapes, but when I was writing Song of the River I thought about the changing soundscapes. With restored wetland habitats comes a cacophony of animal song: birds, amphibians and insects. The song of the river will change too, from a rushing river in full spate to one burbling and tinkling as water flows through the ponds and pools. It’s a song we would have heard five hundred years ago, before humans exterminated the beaver from Britain. Now, with the return of the beaver into many parts of Britain, we are already seeing the huge benefits they bring. But there is still reluctance to let these creatures back.
In Song of the River, ten-year-old Cari must fight against local resistance and persuade her community why the beavers are so badly needed in their valley. But when we first meet Cari, she has unwillingly moved from the city to a new life in the countryside where her mother has opened a riverside cafe. Cari is angry and in turmoil. She feels just like the river that rages through the garden of her new home.
‘Sometimes I feel like the river. Sometimes I feel I’m drowning in its sound. The river rages deep inside of me and I can’t make it stop. How can you stop a river? How can you change its song?’
But when a flood devastates their new home and café, Cari begins to wonder if the plans to reintroduce beavers to the valley can save their livelihood. First, she must try to convince the community to give the beavers a chance, but even if she does, will it be enough to stop her home from being destroyed for a second time? Ultimately, I wanted to draw parallels between Cari and the river, and that if the river can change its song, then maybe Cari can change her own life too.
*
Another question I’m often asked by schools is, ‘what do you hope readers take away from your stories?’
And my answer is that I hope they enjoy the story and know that, like Cari, their voices count and deserve to be heard. Because we need many voices. The United Nations has declared the next decade as one of nature restoration. We can all be agents of change. Words are powerful things. They can rewild hearts and minds, and if we use them well, we can rewild this world.
Song of the River by Gill Lewis is published by Barrington Stoke, priced £6.99.
Greg Buchanan’s debut novel, Sixteen Horses, is a thriller with a hint of gothic. In this extract, a farmer has made a terrible discovery.
Extract taken from Sixteen Horses
By Greg Buchanan
Published by Pan
Fifty feet away, the field gave way to freshly tilled brown soil, forming mounds everywhere on the uneven earth. Chalky rocks littered the plot in every direction. Each step in this place was as muddy and wet as the last.
Further still, a thin metal fence marked the edge of the land, clots of wool decorating the wire like fairy lights where the sheep had once tried to break through.
But there were no animals in sight now. There was nothing but detritus.
‘I don’t see what—’
‘There,’ the farmer interrupted. ‘In the ground.’
Alec looked down. For a moment, he saw nothing but dirt.
‘I don’t—’
Alec stopped talking, a breeze moving past them both. Something shook along the soil.
He removed his torch and stepped forward, pointing its light at the source. Just three feet away, almost the same colour as the mud itself, there lay a great mound of black hair, coiled in thick and silken spirals.
He moved closer and knelt down. He wiped his hands on his trouser legs, reached into his pockets, and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. He tried to pull them on in one smooth motion, but his fingers – clammy, damp from the walk – clung to the latex before he could get them fully in. He had to inch each one into place before he could touch those cold dark circles. He stared at them all the while.
He lifted some of the hair up, surprised by the weight of it, its coarseness. He held it higher and ran his fingers along the strands, gripping at intervals. Towards the base of the spiral, where the rest of the hair still lay upon the ground, he felt flesh and bone.
Alec put it back carefully. The sun continued to rise. There was something else.
It was black, almost like plastic in its sheen, a thin half-moon of dulled white at its rim. It looked past him.
There was an eye, a large sad eye in the earth.
Alec stepped back.
‘My daughter found them,’ the farmer said. ‘Shouldn’t even have been out . . .’
Alec shone his torch across the area. There were others – some close together, some alone. He walked until he was sure he had found the whole set. He paced back and forth, a hundred feet all around.
He counted sixteen submerged heads, all apart, all with only the barest strand of skin on display, all with a single eye left exposed to the sun. One of the heads had been dug up a little more than the others, revealing the neck, at least. It was unclear how much of the corpse remained beneath the surface.
There were footprints everywhere: his, the farmer’s, the daughter’s, no doubt. He hadn’t been told any of this . . . He hadn’t known . . .
‘Who could do this?’ the farmer croaked, blinking. ‘Who could make themselves—’Alec looked up suddenly, acid rising in his throat. The sky was growing brighter, its red spreading like fire, the clouds shifting blue. Still the flies and crickets screamed across the reeds, though nothing crawled along those dead eyes. Nothing seemed to touch them.
There was a stone house half a mile away along the horizon.
‘Who lives over there?’ Alec asked.
‘No one.’
Alec stared at it a moment longer. It was a lonely-looking place.
‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ he asked. ‘It’s—’
Grotesque.
Beautiful.
‘No. Have you?’
Alec shook his head, stepping back, staring once more at the hair. It was all tails, he could see that now.
‘That’s murder,’ the farmer said, his voice soft. ‘Just look at them. Look.’
It was in fact criminal damage, a mere property crime. If you decide something isn’t human, you can do almost anything.
Alec looked at the house again, dark and cold in the distance.
‘Do you know anyone who might have a grudge against you? Anyone who might try and cause you harm?’
The farmer tried to smile. ‘Apart from my wife? No, no . . . I get along with folk. Always have.’ He paused. ‘What do I do?’
‘We need to get a vet in.’ Alec stood up. ‘We need to get post-mortems performed, if we can. I wouldn’t touch them until we know more—’
‘Can’t afford any of that,’ the farmer said.
‘You wouldn’t have to—’
‘And besides,’ the farmer interrupted. ‘Someone buried them, didn’t they? Horses don’t just get that way themselves.’
‘What about the mud? If this used to be wetland, maybe they . . . I don’t know, maybe they—’
‘No,’ the farmer said, firmly, without elaboration.
Alec paused, looking back down at the eyes. But for the lack of motion, they might have been alive.
He got his phone out to take some photographs of the scene.
They would have to do until help came. ‘Try and keep your other animals away,’ Alec said. ‘If you can keep your other animals inside or—’
‘What about the owner?’ asked the farmer.
‘Of what?’
‘Them – these—’ The farmer gesticulated, wincing.
‘What?’ Alec glanced down at the heads and up again at this man. ‘Were you stabling them?’ He paused. ‘We’d need to contact the—’
‘NO,’ the farmer spat. ‘No – no – no—’
‘Hey, it’s OK,’ Alec said, stepping closer as the farmer turned away. ‘I’m sure it’s covered by your insurance.’
‘You don’t understand. I don’t keep horses – I’ve never kept horses. That’s what I tried to tell the girl on the phone—’
A fly landed on the rim of an eye.
‘I’ve never seen these horses before in my life.’
Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan is published by Pan, priced £8.99.
Kirsti Wishart gathered a fair few fans with her debut novel, the comic-speculative mystery The Knitting Station. She is offering the same surreal delight in her latest novel, The Projectionist set in the strange seaside town of Seacrest. In this extract we are introduced to the dead-not dead film critic Cameron Fletcher.
Extract taken from The Projectionist
By Kirsti Wishart
Published by Rymour Books
We’d left the streets of Seacrest, travelled hundreds of miles south to its polar opposite in style. The bedroom of a drab maisonette in a non-descript cul-de-sac in a suburban Yorkshire town. Even in such uninspiring surroundings, however, the Seacrest spirit was at play. Here an unremarkable man called Arthur Dott was getting into character.
Admittedly, it didn’t look much. Instead of the alchemical process of an actor’s transformation – for Arthur was a trained actor, a promising career having dwindled to the likes of ‘Decrepit Gent in the Woolpack’– it looked like an old man having an afternoon nap, passing the time until Countdown. But in the twitching of Arthur’s facial muscles, his hands, we could tell a change was coming. He was getting into character, creating the man he would play in a few weeks. He was thinking that since he received his invitation to Seacrest, Cameron Fletcher had rediscovered an enthusiasm for life missing for years.
Being dead had suited him, freed him from the constant attention of his fans. He’d filled filing cabinets with their letters asking when his next piece of writing would appear, if any of his scripts were being filmed, if he’d be willing to let them direct one, asking for an autograph, a small piece of a great man. The announcement of his death stemmed the flow yet not as much as might be expected. It seemed his fans believed him capable of evading Death himself, charming the Grim Reaper into a drink before hammering him at chess. When photographs of his funeral were released there were still those who wrote to congratulate him on such an elaborate practical joke but really, enough was enough. When was he going to start writing again?
At first the coffin was comfortable. The afterlife afforded him the perfect opportunity for change. He sloughed off the identity of Fletcher, sold off his books and papers. He’d always envied actors their opportunities for trying out new personalities. He still wrote, had things published under pseudonyms, changing his style whenever doubts were raised over the true identity of Taylor Stannard or Eliot Green. As the years passed though, he began to feel there was something missing. He had cast himself adrift. Being dead was becoming a bore and he began to realise how much he’d enjoyed being Fletcher. Seeing his name out there, being listened to, inspiring others to be as creatively reckless and surprising as his writings.
And then Luke Howard appeared.
At this point Arthur sat up. Although he appeared awake his eyes were as unfocused as a sleepwalker’s. He looked different somehow from the man we met a few minutes ago. The way his shoulders were held, how he got up and walked from the bed to the small desk and chair with an ease we wouldn’t have expected. In front of him were a box of cigars and a neat stack of notes, clippings and photos. From the top he lifted a scrapbook labelled ‘Seacrest’. He started to leaf through it, wearing a smile that was not his own.
With three weeks to go before his first visit to that remarkable town, Fletcher flicked through his scrapbook until he reached an article from the Seacrest Gazette from seven years ago. The year a strange and enigmatic young man arrived from nowhere and gave the town hope. He read:
Although, regrettably, Cameron wasn’t able to visit Seacrest during his life-time, he often wrote about how a number of postcards sent by an uncle there on holiday inspired his early interest in films. He described it in one of his earliest articles as ‘the perfect place for moviegoers – here they take worship of the flickering lights thrown out by the projector as seriously as it deserves to be, building wonderful temples to celebrate this love. It is the place for all those who love to watch and if you count yourself in that number you should make your pilgrimage there.’ I think you’ll agree that it is fitting Seacrest is the new home of the archive of the great man, a living memorial to his work. I am proud to act as its curator.
In the accompanying photograph, there was Luke standing with arms folded in front of the open doors of the van he had driven into the town, a van full of books and photographs, one of those filing cabinets, reels of film and scribbled over scripts. Dressed in black, looking like a young, skinnier Anthony Perkins. An inset photo showed some of the proof, a number of books laid out on a table that caused Fletcher’s heart to twinge: Red Harvest, Nightmare Alley, Kiss Me Deadly opened at the fly-leaf to show the stamp of Fletcher’s personal library, the drawing of a cinema screen framed by curtains and ‘A C.F. Entertainment’ in curled script across it. Next to those, Cameron Fletcher’s death certificate. Every time he saw it, Cameron shivered. Haunted by his own ghost.
The final paragraph was a quote from Dr Jo Ashe, a lecturer in Film Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, proponent of the theory that Cameron Fletcher was a fake, a forgery: ‘If the artefacts Mr Howard has brought to Seacrest are authentic this has to be counted as one of the most important discoveries in recent film history. Please bear in mind, however, there is still plenty of evidence to suggest ‘Cameron Fletcher’ was the creation of a group of highly creative individuals, a very convincing prank. I’m sure Mr Howard is genuine in his belief these were once Fletcher’s belongings but I think it best for all to keep an open mind.’
Arthur’s shoulders had broadened. He appeared to have gained more weight, more presence. Although he gave up smoking twenty years ago, he stretched for the cigar box, pulled out one of Cuba’s finest. He lit it with a battered Zippo lighter that had arrived with the rest of his new past, Cameron’s past, three months ago.
After he’d taken a few puffs, relishing the rich, dark taste, he tapped the unlit end on the picture of Luke. Instead of his own Leeds accent he spoke in an American drawl, like a man possessed. ‘I’m very much looking forward to meeting you Mr Howard,’ and he laughed wheezily ‘but even more excited about being introduced to you, Dr Ashe. Proving my existence to you will be most entertaining.’
The Projectionist by Kirsti Wishart is published by Rymour Books, priced £10.99.
If you cannot get enough of royal court intrigue in your historical fiction, then may we recommend Jean Findlay’s The Queen’s Lender, which explores the life of George Heriot after the Union of the Crowns in 1603. BooksfromScotland asked Jean to tell us what inspired her story.
The Queen’s Lender
By Jean Findlay
Published by Scotland Street Press
In 2014 I returned to live in Edinburgh having spent twenty-one years in London and beyond. Central London is mainly Victorian but central Edinburgh throws you further back in history; the stones you touch on a daily walk go back 500 years.
The city had changed after twenty-one years – for the better; it was busier, more prosperous, cosmopolitan – devolution had made its mark. Restaurants were busy and spilled out on the street. The Poetry Library was full of poets, books, events.
This buoyancy was infectious. Here was a living, breathing city of ancient stones with the ghosts of the past still wandering through. One of the ghosts, the poet Robert Ferguson, had taken metal form and was striding past the Canongate Kirk. Fergusson wrote ‘The Ghaists, a Kirkyard Ecologue’ a political poem in dialogue form with George Heriot as one of the speakers.
HERRIOT
I find, my friend, that ye but little ken,
There’s eenow on the earth a set o’ men,
Wha, if they get their private pouches lin’d,
Gie na a winnelstrae for a’ mankind;
They’ll sell their country, flae their conscience bare,
To gar the weigh-bauk turn a single hair.
The government need only bait the line
Wi the prevailing flee, the gowden coin,
Then our executors, and wise trustees,
Will sell them fishes in forbidden seas,
Upo’ their dwyning country girn in sport,
Laugh in their sleeve, and get a place at court.
It is an insight into a clever man with satirical views on governments of any time. Then his building is impressive, in such good nick it looks almost modern, though built in 1628.The dainty stone carved figure of its founder sits inside the quadrangle of the school and every year in June on Founder’s Day he’s decorated with fresh flowers by the pupils.
Sometimes an author doesn’t impose their will on a book, it’s the other way round; it’s the book that finds the author and determines the course of its narrative.
A combination of living history and the mirror of the times: the Union of 1603 which laid the path for the Union of 1707 was being voted on in 2014, and whatever the outcome then, this Union was evidently coming undone. This turning point in history could hear the echo of another.
I was struck by Heriot’s statue and the saying beneath ‘This statue shows my body, this building my soul’ Here is a man who is not afraid to acknowledge his belief in the soul, and his deathbed vision still exists in the form he composed it.
Heriot witnessed the Union of the Crowns of 1603. He was Jeweller at the court of James VI and I and a favourite of his wife Anna.
The novel takes place in Denmark, in Edinburgh and in London. George Heriot and his wife Christian follow King James and Queen Anna to London. The journeys are very different, and part of Heriot’s is tragic for his children.
In London the court is a Crucible, a melting place, where the foundations of what later becomes the dominant cultural force in the world, the English language, are forged; and it all takes place by historical chance, under the eyes of Heriot the jeweller.
James I gave Shakespeare his first proper tenure, a job for life. This was inspired by Anna who had come from Denmark which had an Empire and could afford an in-house playwright attached to every palace. Anna spoke Danish and middle Scots and communicated in the early days with her king in German. James was a scholar of Hebrew, Latin and Greek; he spoke French and Italian and some Spanish and of course the whole court moved to London speaking Middle Scots. This vibrant linguistic influence not only had its affect upon Shakespeare but also James wanted to leave his mark by translating the Bible into English, commissioning fifty-four translators for the task. Since he was a child he had been attempting translations of the Psalms.
The playwright Ben Johnson is another character who makes an appearance along with the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden and Inigo Jones the architect.
It is a slim volume but it took seven years and was awarded two Fellowships. I’m grateful to the Hawthorndon Fellowship 2017 and the Lavigny International Fellowship 2019.
The Queen’s Lender by Jean Findlay is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £12.99.
To Dundee now, and if you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of the city’s fictional detective DI Dania Gorska, then may we recommend that you rectify that as soon as possible. You can start here, with this extract from her latest case, The Murder Stones, written by Hania Allen.
Extract taken from The Murder Stones
By Hania Allen
Published by Constable
She turned her attention to the car.The driver’s door was open, giving her a clear view of the heavy figure slumped face down over the wheel, his arms dangling.There was no air bag. What she could see of his dark hair was flecked with grey, and blood had seeped through it and trickled into his ear. His sheepskin jacket was worn and patched in places, although the matching gloves looked new. His head was almost touching the windscreen, which had shattered so completely that the mere touch of a finger would dislodge the webbed glass. She brought her face close to the man’s skull, then straightened and gazed at Milo. From the expression on his face, he’d seen it too – the array of wounds to the back of the head.
‘I’m about to move him,’ he said. He glanced at the photographer.‘ Ready, Lisa?’ He leant into the car and gripped the man’s shoulders. Using no more force than was necessary, he eased him back and rested him against the seat. It was then that Dania noticed he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Milo stepped back, inviting her to look.
The man’s craggy, lined face put him in his sixties, although he might have been older. His eyes were open and their expression of terror made it clear he’d been fully aware of what had been about to happen. The purplish-blue bruise on his forehead and the smashed nose suggested that it was the force of the blow on hitting the windscreen that had killed him.
The photographer took several photos, then picked her way round to the other side, leant in at the open passenger door and took several more.
‘That’s me done, Prof,’ she said, fiddling with the camera.
Trying not to disturb the clothing too much, Dania fished around in the man’s pockets. She found only a crumpled white handkerchief, and a small colour photograph of a young woman with fluffy blonde hair. She was laughing as though she’d been caught out by whoever was taking the picture. Dania turned it over, but there was nothing scribbled on the back.
‘His daughter, perhaps?’ Milo said, peering over her shoulder.
‘Or his wife when she was young.’
Dania beckoned to one of the SOCOs, who put the photo into an evidence bag.
She made her way to the passenger side and checked the glove compartment. It contained a single item: a Morris Traveller handbook.
‘Is that what this car is?’ she said to Milo. ‘A Morris Traveller?’
‘Indeed.You don’t see many of them around these days.’
‘There’s no indication of who he is.We’ll have to get an ID from the DVLA.’ She glanced at Milo. ‘Do you know much about these cars?’
‘I used to drive one, would you believe. I bought it when I was a student. Lovely maroon colour. There was a girl in my class I wanted to impress, you see, and I thought having a car would do it.’
Dania looked at him with curiosity. She knew nothing about his private life. She didn’t even know if he was married. ‘And did you?’ she said. ‘Impress her, I mean?’
‘Alas, no. She fell for a boy with a motorbike.The two of them dropped out of medical school and went touring round the world.’
Dania smiled. ‘I see. And do you happen to know if Morris Travellers come with air bags?’
‘Not as far as I’m aware; at least mine didn’t when I bought it. Although it may be possible to have them fitted. But don’t quote me on that.’
‘Kimmie should be able to tell me. What she doesn’t know about cars isn’t worth knowing.’
‘And what’s your current thinking? That there’s an air bag installed, and it failed?’
‘It’s possible. But what puzzles me more is that he wasn’t wearing his seat belt.’
Milo frowned. ‘It never fails to amaze me that even now there are people stupid enough not to buckle up. Right, I’d better get him to the mortuary.’
She watched him leave with one of the SOCOs, then called Hamish over. ‘This man that Tam Adie claimed to have seen leaning into the car. Did he give you an indication of where he was headed? You mentioned woodland.’
‘Aye, into those trees behind you.’
She stared into the wood. The day-old snow covered the ground as far as she could see. ‘What about footprints?’
‘We thought of that. Johnty is already in there, following the tracks. He’s using his scanner.’
‘That must be a thankless task.’
‘You know what Johnty’s like. When it comes to footprints, he never lets up. He said he’ll keep going until he gets to the other side. According to Google Maps, the woodland comes out on to a road. My guess is this unknown man left his car there.’
‘I won’t even ask if there are traffic cams.’
‘Nothing for miles. The nearest are on the A90.’
‘I wonder what made the car crash into the tree. Is there ice on the road?’
‘If you come this way, ma’am, I’ll show you.’
Hamish picked his way through the cluster of SOCOs, Dania following.
She gazed in astonishment at the shape in the road. ‘Good Lord, I’ve never seen a deer that big.’
‘He’s fair bonnie, and no mistake. A red deer, according to SOCO.’
‘Why hasn’t it got antlers?’
‘Aye, well, they shed them in winter, then regrow them.’
‘Seems a waste of time and energy.’ She glanced back towards the Morris. ‘Okay, so he was driving along the road, saw the deer—’
‘Hit it and crashed into the tree. Or swerved to avoid it and crashed into the tree.’
‘Seems straightforward enough. But there’s one thing that bothers me.’
‘Aye?’
‘He had wounds to the back of the head. Hitting the windscreen wouldn’t have caused that.’
‘You think it was this man Tam Adie reported?’
‘Possibly.’ She examined the deer. ‘This animal’s been hit, which must have been the Morris Traveller. But the damage isn’t enough to have killed it.’
‘You think it was already dead?’
‘And here’s the evidence. See these tracks here?’
Hamish squatted on his haunches and peered at the ground.
‘Aye, I ken what you mean.’
‘They suggest the carcass was deliberately dragged.’
‘Which means—’
‘That whoever did it, intended to cause an accident.’
The Murder Stones by Hania Allen is published by Constable, priced £8.99.
We are fans of the novella here at BooksfromScotland, and we will happily recommend the novella series published by our favourite speculative, fantasy and sci-fi publisher Luna Press Publishing. This month, they are releasing their latest batch, including work from authors across the globe, and here, we have an extract from The Queen of the High Fields by Rhiannon A. Grist.
Extract taken from The Queen of the High Fields
By Rhiannon A. Grist
Published by Luna Press Publishing
Grey water slapped the side of the boat. We bounced as we cut across the waves, sending a salty spray up and into our hair.
‘We should go round. Cut across the waves,’ Corin shouted over the sound of the motor, squinting into the wind.
I shook my head and gripped the tiller handle tighter.
Trust me, I mouthed back at him.
I could alter the course, go with the waves, go round, but this is the only way. There’s no going round with the High Fields. There’s only through. Through the waves. Through the mist. No shortcuts. You have to fight the current to get there. The motor would handle it as long as I did.
The sky was grey.
Corin and his friend, I couldn’t remember his name, sat looking out the front of the dinghy. They shared talk I couldn’t hear over the wind and the motor. Corin’s hair fluttered like a moth’s wings. He turned a smile my way and I waved back, kicking myself for letting a pretty face turn my head like this. To think that was all it took to send me back.
I’d met Corin last night at the Severn’s End Inn, one of the last old man pubs left since the pilgrims and the tourists settled in, and the only place a local like me could be left alone with her pint. At night, the coastline glittered with new bars, clubs and tourists shops up and down the newly constructed boardwalk, decorated with fairy lights, flags and flowers. New hotels were in the process of being built further inland, past the wide expanse of the dunes, so most visitors had to make do with the traditional fishermen’s cottages and converted community buildings. Some of the older folks of Severn’s End had managed to hold onto their small stone houses, doggedly attempting to go about their days as normal, dodging the out-of-towners. But more and more of the crouching, shrugging buildings were being made over for holiday rentals, turning the community of the town quite transient. Every day the small fishing town was taken over by tourists from all over, walking up and down the boardwalk, following tour guides, taking the haphazard and wholly inaccurate ‘History of the High Fields’ ride built from the remains of the old ghost train in the now revived and reimagined Abergafren Fair, wandering through shops selling t-shirts, fridge magnets and phone covers saying ‘Chase the Light’. Then, when the sun went down, hundreds of revellers took over the black beach each night, wearing flower crowns and submersing themselves in vats of cheap wine and fucking furiously on the cold pebbles, hoping to recreate the moonlit bacchanalia they imagined on the other side of the water.
This morning, the tourist crowds and the remnants of last night’s shivering revellers had been beaten back by the unrelenting drizzle that came down in curtains of white noise, snaking in waves across the tossing surface of the sea. A small group gathered at the pier despite the rain, hoping to grab a photo of that famous glow on the horizon, to catch an air of that divine peace, inspiration, resurrection, destruction, whatever it was they were seeking, coming across on the wind. Sometimes you could smell incense, though that could have easily come from the multiple put-together shrines, with their tea lights and postcards and side plates of milk and bells and electronic musical boxes and fluttering petals, that dotted the volcanic rocks along the shore. When the rain cleared, many still would take a tour boat out onto the waves to get a closer look.
A few travellers each year would come here with a rowboat, dinghy or some other raft of their own creation and attempt to cross the sea to the promised shore, hoping their faith and determination would win them passage onto the High Fields themselves. I’d found where they shared their tips and advice online: The Queens Court Forum. I’d often considered shutting the site down, but the fascination was cute when it wasn’t entirely based on falsehoods. Some of them claimed you had to build your boat yourself to pass, but Hazard and I hadn’t done that. We’d rented ours. And who would know better than us? I even knew a few who had swum it. I remembered at least one from my time on the island. But that was… ten years ago? Had it really been ten years since I’d left the High Fields? How could a decade creep up on me like that? I supposed I’d become too used to the slow crawl of time in that unnatural place. Still, I’d had ten years to escape. I’d promised myself I’d head inland, start a new life in a landlocked city or on the top of a mountain, but I hadn’t gone far since coming back ashore. I was still here, stuck in Severn’s End, despite the tourists and the pilgrims, despite everything, clinging to this grey rock dotted with Christmas lights and hangovers.
‘Have you ever met her?’ Corin had asked me.
He had good hair, warm blond with a slight wave, and blue eyes with a ring of amber at the centre, like the penumbra of an eclipse. His voice lilted as he spoke, like his words were going up and down stairs and round corners, like his mouth was a house. His arms had a thickness and softness to them. The kind that said he’d never held an axe, but if he ever had to he’d have no problem splitting logs. He was younger than me, yes, but not annoyingly so, and he looked at me as if I was the only person in the room. That’s probably why I let him take the empty bench in my booth. I even dropped my usual tactic of denial, of avoiding any connection between me and the High Fields. God help me, I wanted to impress him, like I was a teenager again. I wanted to make him stay and talk to me a little longer, until he saw whatever it was people saw in the people they want to keep around forever.
I smiled, coquettishly I hoped, and said, ‘Met her? I know her.’
That’s how we ended up out in the strait, bouncing along in my dinghy in the grey of the early morning before the tour boats started their daily orbit, salt on my lips, head a-tangle with too much drink, hope and regret. I was always learning new things about myself. That day I learned that I could sell out a friend for a chance at a pretty, young man.
Or perhaps that—even after ten years of promising myself I’d leave—I’d take any excuse to go back.
A flock of terns screeched high above us, battling against the wind as I urged the dinghy on against the tide, their calls rattling my aching head.
I would make it a quick visit. There was no harm in that. And I was only bringing two ashore with me, so the increased level of ‘witness’ would be manageable. The trip might even be pleasant. Check in on the new batch of the Faithful, catch up with Hazard, impress my young admirer, then back to shore. Yes. Everything would be fine.
‘How long before we get there?’ Corin’s friend—what was his name? —shouted over the noise of the boat and the sea.
‘Peter, that’s not how it works,’ said Corin.
Peter, OK.
Corin explained that I was working to attract the High Fields to us through the use of higher vibrations, created through a strict paleo diet and a positive mindset. All hilariously wrong, of course, but his youthful confidence was so adorable I couldn’t bring myself to correct him. Where did they get these ideas, I wondered. It was like listening to children explain Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy or where babies came from. Sometimes it was better to let such innocent fancies be.
Peter frowned, looking between me and Corin, trying to figure out if he was pulling his leg no doubt. I was surprised to see him when I met Corin down at the harbour that morning. I didn’t remember Corin mentioning a friend, but was too hungover to push the issue. Peter seemed Corin’s exact opposite. He had a permanent frown line between his brows, and a head of dark curls with a sprinkling of greys peeking out from his temples. Thirties, I’d guessed, so more my age. Or perhaps a hard-lived twenties. He was wiry, quiet and observant; so different from Corin. If I hadn’t met them together, I would never have placed them as friends. But then again, I suppose anyone might have said the same of me and Hazard back in the day. She was the centre of any room she was ever in, even before she became the Queen. Whereas I…
The waves turned sluggish and slow.
‘We’re getting close.’
The Queen of the High Fields by Rhiannon A. Grist is published by Luna Press Publishing, priced £7.99.
Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.
You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.
Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Canongate Books.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Floris Books.
Publishing Scotland spotlight Saraband.
Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews. In January, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is AFRESH.
Click here for Burns book recommendations.
Click here for 2022 poetry recommendations.
Click here for recent Scottish debuts.
To read an interview with Leela Soma, author of Murder at the Mela, click here.
To read an interview with R. M. Murray, author of the Saltire-winning Bleak, click here.
To read an interview with Andrés N. Ordorica, author of At Least This I Know, click here.
If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.
It’s been a tough two years since the pandemic took hold, but that doesn’t mean we need to go into 2022 too downheartened that COVID-19 is still ever-present in our lives. In his new book, Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, Gavin Francis explores how time, rest and recuperation is vital in rejuvenating ourselves.
Extract taken from Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence
By Gavin Francis
Published by Wellcome
The word rehabilitation comes from the Latin habilis, ‘to make fit’, and carries the sense of restoration: ‘to stand, make, or be firm again’. The aim of rehabilitation, then, was to make someone as fit as they can be, to be able to stand firmly on their own two feet. And though recovery was the clinicians’ ultimate aim, it’s curious that the words ‘recovery’ and ‘convalescence’ are generally absent from the index of medical textbooks. As long ago as the 1920s, in her essay ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf wrote that we lack a mode of writing about illness, that it is ‘strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. A century on, her assertion no longer holds true: we do have a literature of illness. But I’d argue that we still lack a literature of recovery.
The medicine I was trained in often assumes that once a crisis has passed, the body and mind find ways to heal themselves – there’s almost nothing more to be said on the matter. But after nearly twenty years as a GP I’ve often found that the reverse is true: guidance and encouragement through the process of recovery can be indispensable. Odd as it seems, my patients often need to be granted permission to take the time to recover that they need. Illness is not simply a matter of biology, but one of psychology and sociology. We fall ill in ways that are profoundly influenced by our past experiences and expectations, and the same can be said of our paths to recovery. I have learned much from those other clinicians – the nurses, physiotherapists and occupational therapists – who have most helped my patients, and am always being reminded of how much there is still to learn.
The therapists in the brain injury unit knew that convalescence is anything but a passive process. Though its rhythms and its tempo are often slow and gentle, it’s an act, and actions need us to be present, to engage, to give of ourselves. Whether it’s our knees or skulls that need to heal from an injury, or lungs from a viral infection, or brains from a concussion or minds from a crisis of depression or anxiety, I often remind my patients that it’s worth giving adequate time, energy and respect to the process of healing. We need to take care over the environment in which we’re attempting to heal, celebrating the importance of nature and the natural world and recognising
the part it can play in hastening recovery. Many patients I’ve known over the years have found a way to make sense of even a very difficult illness journey. When an illness or disability is incurable it can still be possible to ‘recover’ in the sense of building towards a life of greater dignity and autonomy.
There is no hierarchy to suffering, and it’s not possible to say of one group of conditions that they deserve sympathy while another group deserves to be dismissed. I’ve known patients whose lives have been dominated, for years, by the grief of a failed love affair, and others who have taken the most disabling injuries, pain, indignity and loss of independence in their stride. Though it can be tempting to resent someone whose illness appears to be less serious than our own, or to judge ourselves harshly when others seem to be coping with more challenging circumstances than we are, comparisons are rarely helpful. Neither should we be anxious to set out a timetable of recovery: it’s more important to set achievable goals.
As a doctor, sometimes all I can do is reassure my patients that I believe improvement of some kind is possible. The recovery I’m reassuring them of might not be biological in nature, in terms of a resolution of their condition, but rather an improvement in their circumstances. What follows is a series of reflections on recovery and convalescence gleaned from my own experience of illness, and of thirty years in training and in practising medicine. It contains much that I wish I’d known when I set out on my career, while acknowledging that there is always more to know. Every illness is unique, which means that all recoveries must also be in some sense unique, but I have tried to set out some principles and waypoints that have proven helpful over the years to guide me, and my patients, through the many landscapes of illness. It’s a place that all of us must visit, sooner or later; from time to time we all need to learn the art of convalescence.
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Gavin Francis is published by Wellcome, priced £4.99.
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