THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

2021 looks to be another year of fantastic releases from the wonderful Charco Press. Their first publication of the year, Havana Year Zero follows Julia and her former lover Euclid as they set out to prove that the telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci in Havana, convinced it is will turn both their lives around and give Cuba a purpose once more. We hope you enjoy this opening extract.

 

Extract taken from Havana Year Zero
By Karla Suárez
Published by Charco Press

 

It all happened in 1993, year zero in Cuba. The year of interminable power cuts, when bicycles filled the streets of Havana and the shops were empty. There was nothing of anything. Zero transport. Zero meat. Zero hope. I was thirty and had thousands of problems. That’s why I got involved, although in the beginning I didn’t even suspect that for the others things had started much earlier, in April 1989, when the newspaper Granma published an article about an Italian man called Antonio Meucci under the headline ‘The Telephone Was Invented in Cuba’. That story had gradually faded from most people’s minds; they, however, had cut out the piece and kept it. I didn’t read it at the time, which is why, in 1993, I knew nothing of the whole affair until I somehow became one of them. It was inevitable. I’m a mathematician; method and logical reasoning are part and parcel of my profession. I know that certain phenomena can only manifest themselves when a given number of factors come into play, and we were so fucked in 1993 that we were converging on a single point. We were variables in the same equation. An equation that wouldn’t be solved for many years, without our help, naturally.

For me, it all began in a friend’s apartment. Let’s call him… Euclid. Yes, if it’s all right with you, I’d prefer not to use the real names of the people involved. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So Euclid is the first variable in that damned equation.

When we reached his place in the afternoon, his mom greeted us with the news that the pump had broken down again and we’d have to fill the storage drums using buckets of water. My friend scowled, I offered to help. So that’s what we were doing when I recalled a conversation that had taken place during a dinner a few days before, and I asked him if he’d ever heard of someone called Meucci. Euclid put down his bucket, looked at me and asked if I meant Antonio Meucci. Yes, of course he knew the name. He grabbed my bucket, poured the water into the drum and informed his mother that he was tired and would finish the task later. She protested, but Euclid turned a deaf ear. He took my arm, led me to his room, switched on the radio – his usual practice when he didn’t want to be overheard – and tuned in to CMBF, the classical music station. Then he asked for the full story. I told him what little I knew, and added that it had all started because the author was writing a book about Meucci. An author? What author? he asked gravely, and that irritated me because I didn’t see the need for so many questions. Euclid got to his feet, went over to the wardrobe and returned with a folder. He sat down next to me on the bed and said: I’ve been interested in this story for years.

And then he began to explain. I learned that Antonio Meucci was an Italian, born in Florence in the nineteenth century, who had sailed to Havana in 1835 to work as the chief engineer in the Teatro Tacón, the largest and most beautiful theatre in the Americas at the time. Meucci was a scientist with a passion for invention who, among other things, had become interested in the study of electrical phenomena – it was known as galvanism in those days – and their application in a variety of fields, particularly medicine. He’d already invented a number of devices and was in the middle of one of his experiments in electrotherapy when he claimed to have heard the voice of another person through an apparatus he’d created. That’s the telephone, right? Transmitting a voice by means of electricity.

Well, he took this thing he called the ‘talking telegraph’ to New York, where he continued to perfect his invention. Some time later he managed to get a kind of provisional patent that had to be renewed annually. But Meucci had no money, he was flat broke, so the years passed and one fine day in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell, who did have cash, turned up to register the full patent for the telephone. In the end it was Bell who went down in the history books as the great inventor, and Meucci died in poverty, his name forgotten everywhere except in his native land, where his work was always recognised.

But they lie, the history books lie, said Euclid, opening the folder to show me its contents. There was a photocopy of an article, published in 1941 by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, which mentioned Meucci and the possibility that the telephone had been invented in Havana. In addition, there were several sheets of paper covered in notes, a few old articles from Bohemia and Juventud Rebelde, plus a copy of Granma from 1989 with that article I just mentioned.

I was fascinated. In spite of the fact that, so long after the events recounted in the documents, I was still unable to enjoy the advantages of a functioning telephone at home, I felt proud just knowing that there was a remote possibility that it had been invented in Cuba. Incredible, right? The telephone, invented in this city where telephones hardly ever work! It’s as if someone had come up with the idea of the electric light, satellite dishes or the Internet here. The ironies of science and circumstance. A dirty trick, like the one played on Meucci, who, over a century after his death, was still a forgotten figure because no one had managed to prove that his invention had preceded Bell’s.

A dreadful historical injustice, or something like that, was what I exclaimed the moment Euclid finished his exposition. That was when I learned the other thing. Euclid rose, stepped back a few paces, looked me in the eyes and said: Yes, an injustice, but one that can be righted. I didn’t understand. He sat down again, clasped my hands and, lowering his voice, added: What can’t be demonstrated doesn’t exist, but the proof of Meucci’s precedence and, ergo, its demonstration, does exist, and I know because I’ve seen it. I can’t even imagine the expression on my face; I only remember that I made no reply. He freed my hands, never taking his eyes from mine. I guess he was expecting a different reaction, waiting for me to jump up, perhaps, cry out in surprise or something, but my only feeling was curiosity, and that’s why, in the end, I simply asked: The proof?

 

Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez is published by Charco Press, priced £9.99.

Each year the Association for Scottish Literary Studies publishes their New Writing Scotland anthology. Here, we share two poems from the anthology, which includes work from  from forty authors – some award-winning and internationally renowned, and some just beginning their careers.

 

Poems taken from The Last Good Year: New Writing Scotland 38
Edited by Rachelle Atalla, Samuel Tongue and Maggie Rabatski
Published by the ASLS

 

GARDENER
Susan Mansfield

 

That’s how I see my father, looking back,
always stooped with a spade in his hand
slicing square sections from the rich, dark earth,
the rhythm of it, the heft of each cut,
leaving it furrowed and fresh, full of promise,
the mica gleam of it, ready for growing,

ready for roots. For the magic of growing
happens deep down where the land gives back
the lifeblood to the seedling, promising
fragile new things which need tended by hand,
and some will wither, such is the cut
and thrust, the mixed blessings of the earth.

My father claimed as his this patch of earth,
set aside plenty of ground for growing,
how he paced it out, how the sod was cut
without ceremony, how he bent his back
to building a home with his own hands,
with enough room in case the promise

in her eyes became more than a promise
and tending his seedlings in the dark earth
was just the beginning. How one small hand
changes all you know about growing,
the unflinching force of it, no looking back,
eyes on the wide horizon ready to cut

and run, but all so soon, the toughest cut
for man or gardener, seeing a promise
fulfilled by leaving you, then going back
to lay down next year’s crop in the mulched earth
and wait for the consolation of growing
while the furrows deepen on your gnarled hands.

I wasn’t even there to take his hand
at the last, which is the strangest cut,
holding the phone in the half-light, the growing
sense that the things we think are promises
are only good intentions, and the earth
receives everything but gives nothing back.

Now, the weeds grow thicker and in my hand
no spade to cut them. I made no promises,
feeling the turn of the earth at my back.

 

 

BLAST ZONE
Lotte Mitchell Reford

 

I want to write about meaningful things
but everything coming out is about fucking
or sometimes about churches. Often about how
I’m worried about drinking myself stupid
or to death. There is a story I’ve been wanting to tell
about the time I broke my leg and the morphine barely
worked,
how a man who loved me held my calf for an hour and felt
the split bones
pressing into his palms, and also a scene stuck bouncing
round my brain,
something I heard in an interview on NPR about nuclear
tests
in the ’50s and how they made young men bear witness to
the devastation
and gave them questionnaires afterwards to gauge its effect
on their mental health. Was it like a psychiatric intake form?
‘In the last week, on a scale of 1–7, how often have you
thought
about death’ – this one is always a 7 – or more like the
pain charts
they give you in an ambulance. Those ones have faces
to represent 0, 1–3, 4–6, 7–10. The only time I have pointed
at one of those little faces I had to ask what I was comparing
my current pain to. I’ve never felt anything worse than this
I said, my left tibia and fibula smashed into several pieces,
But someone must hurt more? Like, where are those men
now,
who after they watched the blast from a trench at a distance,
walked out in a line,
a search party, and combed the desert for what was left.
Those bombs are used now to measure everything
temporally. There is a before and an after; for bones, for
wine.
And in the middle of that hard dark line across time
were animals penned in the blast zone. The furthest out
lost limbs
and survived a while. Most of the animals were pigs
because pigs die like humans, and the guy I heard
on NPR, he said the worst part was how delicious
the whole desert smelled, a giant barbecue,
and that as they are dying like humans, pigs scream like
us too,
and yet, still, he thought of food. While we waited
for the ambulance Thom and I talked about pizza to
distract me,
pretending I’d be home in time for dinner.
In the hospital they pulled on my foot to reset the bones
above.
They told me not to worry because pain
is something we never really remember and anyway
I’d had all the morphine they could give me. I didn’t want
to point out
there are many kinds of pain, and some are hard to forget
some remain etched into you, your body and bones
or become a new kind of glass, Trinitite, superheated sand
which registers as radioactive. I didn’t want to tell them
that I had a hefty tolerance for opioids.
I never want to tell people who fix bodies
about the things I do to mine. Most of those men,
young as they were, must be dead now. Our bones hold
the nuclear tests in New Mexico, and so do wine cellars,
trees
and soil, but how do we hold those boys
with us too, how do we keep bearing witness,
how do we remember to remember?

 

The Last Good Year: New Writing Scotland 38, edited by Rachelle Atalla, Samuel Tongue and Maggie Rabatski is published by the ASLS, priced £9.95.

Thanks to Leela Soma, there’s a new detective in town: Glasgow’s DI Alok Patel. Cauvery Madhaven finds this new detective a welcome addition to Scotland’s fictional crime fighting cohort.

 

Murder at the Mela
By Leela Soma
Published by Ringwood Publishing

 

The word mela originates in Sanskrit means a gathering or assembly of people. Since its conception in 1990, the Glasgow Mela has taken this many steps further, evolving into an outdoor multicultural spectacular, one of the largest in the country. The Mela instantly conjures up images of music, dance, arts and food from Glasgow’s varied communities, celebrating their shared diversity.

Into this heady mix, Leela Soma throws in a murder at the mela. A young Asian woman, Nadia, is found dead on the closing night of the famous event, in Kelvingrove Park. Detective Inspector Alok Patel is not just newly appointed, but is also Glasgow’s first Asian DI. A rising star in the force, he is now under pressure to solve this murder quickly. Was the homicide a crime of passion, or was it racially motivated? There is talk of it being an honour killing. There are multiple suspects and very little to go on.

The investigation begins to uproot the barely buried tensions within Glasgow’s Asian communities and Patel must navigate all of it while coping with the professional jealousy of an overtly racist colleague. Adding to his problems is a deception of his own making – DI Patel is in a relationship with his colleague, Usma, a Muslim policewoman and all evidence must be kept from his disapproving Hindu parents.

Yes, Leela Soma’s third novel is a welcome addition to Tartan Noir. However, this book is far more than a police procedural crime novel. Sitting in the passenger seat of the police car alongside Patel, you get to read the very heart and soul of what divides and unites the Asian community in Scotland: the Hindu-Muslim rift that goes back decades, its roots in the partition of the subcontinent, the anxiety in the Muslim community about their young people getting radicalised, the personal angst of those drawn to strict religious tenets having to square up with what a youthful modern society has to offer. Soma’s characters, including the murder victim, confront the challenge of being Scot Asian today, charting their own destinies while trying to conform – to parental expectations and dreams, to norms laid down by gossiping aunties and interfering uncles. Soma is skillful in her revelations, carefully drawing back the many veils that shroud family life and religious pride and prejudice, so that her characters are utterly believable.

Soma moved from India to Glasgow in 1969. She was a Principal Teacher in Modern Studies and has made a name for herself as an award-winning poet and novelist, appointed Scriever 2021 for the Federation of Writers Scotland.  Soma’s teacher’s touch is evident in her meticulous research of police procedures which keeps the investigative narrative moving briskly. DI Patel’s unit reflects life itself – police officers are no different from the citizens they are meant to keep safe –  bitter, self-pitying DS Alan Brown, DI Joe grieving his young wife Lucy and Usma trying to reorganise  her career  so so she can ‘settle down’.

Soma’s love for Glasgow really shines through, her dual Indo-Scot heritage giving her a unique perspective into the lives of the Asian Scot community, as well as the urgent social issues that face Glaswegians of every colour. Interspersed with this well plotted whodunnit is a very truthful account of poverty in the post-war social housing schemes. Poverty that spawned Big Mo and Gazza in Drumchapel, who have no chance of escaping the ‘living aff the burro, man lifestyle’ and who are portrayed with the same wonderful compassion with which Soma details the life and loves of Hanif, a young medical student teetering on the precipice of being radicalised.

There are several suspects and Soma keeps the reader guessing – and when a second murder takes place DI Patel is give a rollicking by his superior. And with the uncanny bad timing that desi mothers are wont to have, DI Patel’s mother gives him a earful too – Usma, being Muslim, has to go!

Soma’s Murder at the Mela is a breakthrough book – the first Tartan Noir with an  Asian DI, written in a very cinematic style with made-for-TV characters and a cliffhanger of a twist at the end – perfect for a season finale! Watch the listings as DI Patel is here to stay.

 

Murder at the Mela by Leela Soma is published by Ringwood Publishing, priced £8.99.

‘The Scottish Play’, one of Shakespeare’s most famous works. Though the play might have played a little with history, writer Shaun Manning and illustrator Anna Wieszczyk have decided to go back to historical sources for their graphic novel to tell us the real story of the Scottish monarch. Here we share some of the amazing storytelling and artwork to be found in Macbeth: The Red King.

 

Macbeth: The Red King
By Shaun Manning and Anna Wieszczyk
Published by Blue Fox Publishing

 

Macbeth: The Red King by Shaun Manning and Anna Wieszczyk is published by Blue Fox Publishing, priced £12.99.

Duck Feet, Ely Percy’s second novel, follows 12-year-old Kirsty Campbell as she and her friends go through high school together. Taking in teen rites of passage as well as the troubles of bullying, drugs and pregnancy, each chapter is told with poignancy and humour. In this extract, Kirsty contemplates the pitfalls of teenage fashion.

 

Extract taken from Duck Feet
By Ely Percy
Published by Monstrous Regiment

 

Nearly evrubdy in school wears stuff that says Tregijo. Yi can even get school shirts that’ve got it writ on them. This boy in ma class cawd David Donald, his family are pure poor cause thiv got aboot ten million weans, he come in wan day wi a Tregijo shirt an he got the slaggin ae his life. Ah didnae even notice anythin cause ah thought it looked identical tae evrubdy else’s but Charlene said, Naw yi can well tell that’s a fake, she said, Cause the stitchin on the cuffs is different.

Charlene wants tae get a pair ae Tregijo jeans as well as a top noo. Ah said, Ah didnae even know yi could get Tregijo jeans. Charlene said, Where’ve you been planet Uranus, an then she sniggert. Ah tolt her ah didnae get it an she jist said, Never mind, then she said, Ah take it ah’ll need tae gie you lessons oan how tae huv a sense ae humour as well as fashion.

*

Ma ma went an knittet me an Arran jumper tae wear ower ma school shirt. Ah said, Ah cannae wear that. How no, ma ma said, Yiv wore Arran jumpers tae school before. Ah says, Aye when ah wis aboot eight-yir-auld or somethin. Ma ma’s face wis pure trippin her. Actually the last Arran jumper yi had ah knittet a year past in October, she said, If yi remember right aw the wans in yir class wur jealous an ah endet up daein aboot six ae the bliddy things fur other folk.

Ah wantet tae say tae her that that wis primary school; that naebdy in high school wore an Arran jumper, no even David Donald an he wis the pure reject ae the class. Ma ma said when she wis at high school she’d tae wear hand me doons fae her big sister an she didnae go cribbin aboot it. She said, Ah remember bein no much aulder than you Kirsty, she said, An The Who had jist split up an fur months afterwards ah wis made tae wear yir Auntie Jackie’s auld denim jacket wi their logo on it.

Your ma musta been a pure reject anaw, said Charlene. This wis cause ah tolt her aboot The Who jacket. Ah wish ah hadnae tolt her noo but she kept askin me when ah wis gaun intae Glasgow an whit jumper did ah think ah wis gaunnae get. She kept on an on an on at me an ah had tae tell her somethin; ah never thought she’d hit me wi a comment lik that though.

*

Ma ma used tae be a sewin machinist. She used tae work in a factory that made aw the clothes fur Marks an Sparks. See aw yir Tregijo jumpers an yir shirts, she said, Thir no worth a chew. Widyi mean, ah said. She said, Thir no worth the money hen. She said, Ah’ve looked at some ae the stuff an the hems are aw squint an everythin an thiv jist been papt oot intae the shops an naebdy’s botherin as long’s it’s got a designer label on it thir’s folk that’ll buy it. Dae yi never think aboot gaun back tae it, ah asked her. Back tae whit, she said. Sewin machinin. Ma ma jist sighed. Wid yi no go back tae it then. Ah gave it up tae huv you an Karen, she said. Aye ah know. Don’t get me wrang it wis a great environment ah loved ma job, she said, But that wis thirteen year ago an it’s aw changed. Aye but yi could still go back. Aye Kirsty, she said, Ah can jist see it noo … ma designer Arran cardigans wid be aw the rage.

*

Ma ma gave me the thirty pound fur gaun intae Glasgow wi Charlene. Ah felt dead excitet cause ah’d only ever walked past Trendy Tribe, but then ah also felt bad cause ma ma an da had a big argument cause ma da jist got made redundant fae his work, an he says we cannae afford tae be spendin money willy nilly.

Charlene’s ma’s boyfriend disnae work either but he’s never oot the pub an he’s always wearin the best ae gear. Charlene’s ma works IN the pub an she’s whit ma da calls aw fur coat an nae knickers, an she gies Charlene thirty pound a week jist tae gie her peace. An they wonder how that wee lassie’s the way she is, said ma ma. Aye, ma da said, Ah’d rather dress lik a tramp than live the way that they live.

*

Ah wisnae that keen on Trendy Tribe. Ah thought thir sizes wur dead weird, an the folk that wur servin kept comin up an sayin, Can ah help yi dae yi need a hand can ah get yi anythin else there. Ah couldnae even get peace tae look but they wur up ma back every two minutes.

Charlene must’ve tried on every jumper in the shop in every different colour. She took that long in the changin rooms that ah actually shoutet through tae her, You better no be knockin anythin, an that soon made her move. She spent seventy two pound aw in: she bought a jumper that said

TREGIJO + PARTNER

that had a picture ae a cowboy haudin a smokin gun. She also got her jeans that she wis wantin, an a belt tae haud them up cause the smallest size wis too big fur her.

Ah endet up jist gettin a plain white T-shirt that had a T on the sleeve; it only cost fifteen pound an the lassie in the shop wis gaunnae gie me a twenty percent reduction because it had a black mark on it. Ah said tae her ah’d jist leave it though cause ah wisnae sure if it’d come aff, so she had tae go an get me another new t-shirt the same. Charlene wis pure hummin an hawin cause she said it wis takin ages an she wantet tae go fur somethin tae eat. Then she said, Is that it is that aw yir buyin, an when ah said Aye she said, Kirsty that’s pure miserable.

*

Charlene’s in a bad mood. She managed tae lose her purse wi twenty eight pound in it in the toilets in McDonalds, an by the time we realised an went back sumdy wis away wi it. Her return ticket wis in it anaw so ah had tae pay her bus fare back up the road.

When ah got in the hoose ah opent the carrier bag tae show ma ma whit ah’d bought an ah noticed the lassie had gied me a black Tregijo T-shirt by accident; then ah noticed that the white wan ah’d picked wis in there anaw. Sake, ah said, Ah’ll need tae go aw the way back intae Glasgow tae take it back noo. Don’t be daft, said ma ma, Sumdy’d need tae go wi yi an wur no wastin aw that money on bus fares. But it’s stealin is it no. Naw, said ma da. It’s whit yi caw an error in your favour – Anyway, it’s bad luck tae look a gift horse in the mooth. This is true, said ma ma. Ah wisnae convinced, but ah let it go cause ma ma did huv a point aboot the bus fares cause it widda cost another seven pound fifty an that’s only if we got a child an an adult day ticket.

Ma da had his ain good fortune the day. He’d applied fur a job packin balls a wool in a warehouse ower in Hillington an he got asked tae go fur an interview. Ah’ve got a right good feelin aboot this, he said. Me tae, said ma ma, An if yi get it they might gie yi some freebies.

 

Duck Feet by Ely Percy is published by Monstrous Regiment, priced £8.99.

David Bishop has just released his debut novel, City of Vengeance, introducing us to a new investigator, Cesare Aldo, in the sensational and dangerous underbelly of Renaissance Florence. We spoke to David about his book, and his favourite historical fiction.

 

City of Vengeance
By D. V Bishop
Published by Pan Macmillan

 

Congratulations David on the publication of City of Vengeance! It’s been quite the journey getting your book into print, but an encouraging one too for budding writers. Could you tell us more about your road to publication?

City of Vengeance was inspired by an academic monograph I chanced upon in a bookshop near the British Museum, which argued the criminal justice system in late Renaissance Florence was roughly similar to a modern police force. That set off a big lightbulb in my head, but I spent years researching and not writing the novel. The more I learned about the period, the more I realised how little I knew. I wanted to do the story justice, so I did other things instead – writing episodes of Doctors for BBC 1, audio dramas featuring Doctor Who, graphic novels and award-winning short film scripts that never quite got made.

To force myself into writing the novel, I started a Creative Writing PhD part-time via distance learning at Lancaster University in 2017. That gave me deadlines and a supervisor to offer feedback. The following year I entered the Pitch Perfect competition at the Bloody Scotland international crime fiction festival at Stirling. To my surprise I won, which galvanised me to hurry up and finish my first draft. More drafts followed and in Spring 2019 I started querying agents. Happily the wonderful Jenny Brown offered to represent me, and the book went on submission to publishers. Several made offers, but I chose Pan Macmillan – the home of Colin Dexter, Ann Cleeves, Ian Fleming, Lin Anderson and many others.

 

With historical fiction, a writer has to undertake a lot of research to bring authenticity to the world you’re creating. Did you enjoy this process?

Yes, too much at times. Research is utterly addictive because you discover so many fascinating things you never knew, facts that challenge your perception of history. My biggest problem is knowing when to stop researching and start writing, because it’s such a useful work displacement activity. My book shelves are groaning beneath the weight of books I have read, and those still waiting for my attention.

 

Your book is set in 16^th century Florence. Did you already have a relationship to the city?

I grew up in New Zealand but had always wanted to see Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance. My first visit was in 2001, and I return every few years. Now I’m writing about the city, I have even more reason to go back – once the pandemic is over.

 

Your novel is a thriller as well as historical fiction. When writing, how did you strike the balance between your world-building and your pacy plotting?

My writing naturally tends toward pace, thanks to a background in journalism where lean writing is essential and a career in comics, where concision is crucial. I have to make a conscious effort to describe environments and characters, perhaps because I tend to send the story as a film playing in my head. I have to remember the readers can’t see what a tavern or a convent or a stabbing looks like unless I write it down.

 

You have quite the protagonist in your investigator Cesare Aldo. Can you tell us about his creation?

The fact I spent so long not writing City of Vengeance was to Aldo’s advantage. Instead of writing, I thought about his character. Who he was, how he was able to move between all parts and layers of life in Renaissance Florence. I knew he would be an outsider of sorts, but his sexuality means Aldo’s life is always at risk. Being what we now call a gay man at that time and in that place made you a criminal. So Aldo is both law enforcer and law breaker. When I realised that about him, a lot of his characterisation fell into place. He has a code he follows, things he will and won’t do. He’s a former solider, able to fight for his life when required, and he will kill if he deems that necessary. That makes him dangerous if cornered.

 

Who do you see playing him in a TV or film adaptation?

Twenty years ago the answer would have been Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings films. Now I think Shaun Evans who plays the young Morse in the TV drama Endeavour would make a wonderful Cesare Aldo. He’s a great actor, able to convey so much without saying a word – perfect for the often taciturn Aldo!

 

You’re currently working on a sequel. How far along do you see Aldo’s fortunes unfolding? Do you have a series arc in mind, or are you taking it on a book by book basis?

I have plans for the first four novels, which follow the seasons – winter 1536 in City of Vengeance, spring 1537 for the next book, and on into summer and autumn. There is a clear arc across those individual stories, which I hope readers will want to follow with me and the characters.

 

What historical fiction and thrillers have influenced you in your writing?

Abir Mukherjee’s novels set in early 20^th Century India were a touchstone, the story of a good man working for a bad system of justice. The Leo Stanhope mysteries by Alex Reeve set in Victorian London showed that historical thrillers could have unexpected detectives. Books by Antonia Hodgson and Laura Shepherd-Robinson were also influential, as was the master of historical crime C. J. Sansom – we’re all following in his footsteps, one way or another.

 

What are you looking forward to reading next?

I’ve just finished an advance copy of Robbie Morrison’s Edge of the Grave, a cracking police procedural set in 1930s Glasgow which is coming out next month (March 2021). That really lives up to the ‘no mean city’ adage, and has all the deadpan humour you would expect of a great Glasgow novel. And I’m eager to read the next book by Liam McIlvanney, which is a sequel to his prize-winner The Quaker.

 

City of Vengeance by D. V Bishop is published by Pan Macmillan, priced £14.99.

Salena Godden’s debut novel has been deservedly garnering much praise from critics and early readers. Her lyrical, mesmeric story sees her personifying death as a black woman ready to tell her story and experiences. Here, in this extract, we are introduced to Wolf Willeford, who will go on to tell death’s story.

 

Extract taken from Mrs Death Misses Death
By Salena Godden
Published by Canongate

 

She came ten-pin bowling into my life, smashing over all that was good and all that made sense. I clung to the memories of my life before, as the weather turned bad and dark storm clouds gathered. It was a horror, a swirling ugly mess of feelings of loss and betrayal and abandonment. The room in my head was cold with the shadow of all that was absent and broken. The silence was screaming and I tipped my head back and screamed into it.

I cried. Of course I cried, I was just a kid and I was alone in the world. I lost a tooth one minute and everything the next. I remember I put the tooth under my pillow, but that night it was not the tooth fairy that came to visit, it was Mrs Death herself. This was my first time watching her at work. It is masterful, the way Mrs Death works. So deliberate. So merciless. There is a system: I’m not sure how it works, but I believe she must have a system and know what she is doing. There has to be a method for who lives and who dies, and when and where, but I cannot work it out. How does she choose? How does she know what’s best? What is supper for the spider is hell for the fly, or some-thing? I forget how that saying goes. Mrs Death is always too too too much. Too soon. Too sudden. Too cruel. Too early. Too young. Too final.

Mrs Death took my mother in one greedy gulp of flame and I watched. I still don’t know why I survived. That last night is in fragments. I can remember the last dinner we had together was a chicken curry. My mum made the best coconut chicken curry. Jamaican cooking is the best. I still miss my mum’s cooking so much. If I had known then that that was the last meal my mother would cook for me, I would have kneeled down and kissed it. I would have only eaten half  and saved the rest to eat when I miss her. I would have distilled it, frozen it, locked it in a capsule, kept it in a safe. Or you know, I would have at least said thank you. Instead I just scoffed it down watching telly. I don’t remember what we watched on telly that night, I wish I could. We were being ordinary. We were being normal. Me and Mum on the sofa, we ate chicken curry and rice, we watched some telly and then when we went to bed, she said goodnight.

Goodnight, Wolfie, love you! she said. Night, Mum, love you too. She said the tooth fairy would be coming and remember to put the tooth under my pillow. Stop reading! Switch the light off! she probably said. Mum, what does the tooth fairy look like? Wait and see!

I never found out though. Next thing I knew everyone in the building was shouting and there was panic and smoke and then I was shivering and standing barefoot in my pyjamas in the road. They said there was nothing that could be done. I stood alone, frozen to the spot, cold feet on the wet pavement. Someone wrapped me in an itchy green that smelled sterile. I stared up at our building, the heat, the roaring fire, guffs of black smoke. And all around me was a chaos of blue lights, flashing lights, a scream of sirens, whilst the hungry flames grew higher and higher, scorching tree tops, tongues of flame, licking the heavens. Black pages, black ash, debris drifted, a black ash snow fell around me as our entire building burned. No sprinklers. No alarms. No warning.

I threw my head back and I howled into the charred and blackened sky. My home, my whole world was burning. I let her have it. I tipped my head back and roared and I hoped someone would hear it, perhaps that Death would hear it, hear me crying my heart out. Fat tears rolled down my dirty brown face.

Through the blur I saw a face in the smoke above me, a woman’s face: the face of Mrs Death. A kind black lady’s face was smiling down at me, and her smile, it was gentle, but that made me furious. I screamed at her. I was crying and crying and crying, raining tears to the river to the sea, from salt to salt, from root to root and blood to blood. And the wind swirled and echoed my pains. There was heat, a great heat within my pain, a searing heat in my heart and soul, a pain in my chest and guts and my cries were howls carried in the wind through time and space.

 

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden is published by Canongate, priced £14.99.

The 25th February 2021 will be the first Gray Day, a celebration of the writer and artist Alasdair Gray, on the 40th anniversary of his masterpiece Lanark. Canongate will be publishing a new hardback edition of Gray’s seminal debut, as well as new editions of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, McGrotty and Ludmilla and The Fall of Kelvin Walker. BooksfromScotland pays tribute to one of Scotland’s most iconic works by sharing one of its most iconic passages.

 

Extract taken from Lanark
By Alasdair Gray
Published by Canongate

 

One morning Thaw and McAlpin went into the Cowcaddens, a poor district behind the ridge where the art school stood.They sketched in an asphalt playpark till small persistent boys (‘Whit are ye writing, mister? Are ye writing a photo of that building, mister? Will ye write my photo, mister?’) drove them up a cobbled street to the canal. They crossed the shallow arch of a wooden bridge and climbed past some warehouses to the top of a threadbare green hill. They stood under an electric pylon and looked across the city centre. The wind which stirred the skirts of their coats was shifting mounds of grey cloud eastward along the valley. Travelling patches of sunlight went from ridge to ridge, making a hump of tenements gleam against the dark towers of the city chambers, silhouetting the cupolas of the Royal infirmary against the tombglittering spine of the Necropolis. ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living here,’ said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, ‘If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.’

‘Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a musichall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.’

‘I thought we had exported other things—ships and machinery, for instance.’

‘Oh, yes, we were once the world’s foremost makers of several useful things. When this century began we had the best organized labour force in the United States of Britain. And we had John McLean, the only Scottish schoolteacher to tell his students what was being done to them. He organized the housewives’ rent strike, here, on Clydeside, which made the government stop the landlords getting extra money for the duration of World War One. That’s more than most prime ministers have managed to do. Lenin thought the British revolution would start in Glasgow. It didn’t. During the general strike a red flag flew on the city chambers over there, a crowd derailed a tramcar, the army sent tanks into George Square; but nobody was hurt much. Nobody was killed, except by bad pay, bad housing, bad feeding. McLean was killed by bad housing and feeding, in Barlinnie Jail. So in the thirties, with a quarter of the male workforce unemployed here, the only violent men were Protestant and Catholic gangs who slashed each other with razors. Well, it is easier to fight your neighbours than fight a bad government. And it gave excitement to hopeless lives, before World War Two started. So Glasgow never got into the history books, except as a statistic, and if it vanished tomorrow our output of ships and carpets and lavatory pans would be replaced in months by grateful men working overtime in England, Germany and Japan. Of course our industries still keep nearly half of Scotland living round here. They let us exist. But who, nowadays, is glad just to exist?’

‘I am. At the moment,’ said McAlpin, watching the sunlight move among rooftops.

‘So am I,’ said Thaw, wondering what had happened to his argument. After a moment McAlpin said, ‘So you paint to give Glasgow a more imaginative life.’

‘No. That’s my excuse. I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don’t.’

‘I envy your purpose.’

‘I envy your self-confidence.’

‘Why?’

‘It makes you welcome at parties. It lets you kiss the host’s daughter behind the sofa when you’re drunk.’

‘That means nothing, Duncan.’

‘Only if you can do it.’

 

Lanark by Alasdair Gray is published by Canongate, priced £20.00.

To find out more about Gray Day, please visit the Gray Day website.

Craig Russell is an internationally-bestselling writer of gothic, psychological thrillers. Next month, his new novel, Hyde, will be published, and in it, he explores one of Scottish literature’s most famous characters. We caught up with with Craig to chat about his favourite books.

 

Hyde
By Craig Russell
Published by Constable

 

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

Honestly? I can’t remember.  Books, reading, the written word were always there as part of my conscious environment.  My parents always claimed that I could read well before I went to school, and I remember that I always had books around me.  I have the oddest, clearest memory—almost a flashbulb memory—from when I was at primary school: they had the alphabet up on the walls, large black letters against white backgrounds.  I can still see, very clearly, the lowercase letter ‘a’ in a sans-serif typeface.  I know it sounds bizarre, but I knew instinctively that the letter and the word were part of what defined me.  Much in the way I suppose a natural mathematician engages with the number.

When I was very young, I read a story about boy, a Pacific Islander, and his conquest of his fear of the sea.  I think it was at that point that I realized that reading was a magical device that allowed you to travel to any place or any time.  That, I think, is very much what I try to do now that I’m a novelist.  If I can transport myself completely to another time, place and experience, hopefully I can bring along my readers.

 

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

Hyde is set in Victorian Edinburgh and combines all the elements that excite me personally: conflicting senses of identity, psychology, history, myth and legend.  I think every writer explores the complexities, paradoxes and contradictions of their own cultural and historical background.

Hyde isn’t a retelling of Stevenson’s tale.  If anything, it’s more of an origin story.  Just as Robert Louis Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver on his one-legged friend William Henley, I have suggested that the combined character of Jekyll and Hyde were based on a real acquaintance of Stevenson.  My Hyde—Captain Edward Henry Hyde—is superintendent of detective officers of the City of Edinburgh Police.  He keeps secret from all but his physician that he suffers from ‘lost time’—periods during which he cannot account for his actions—and is plagued with dark dreams that emerge him in a fantastical landscape populated with figures and monsters from Celtic mythology.  With no memory of how he got there, Hyde finds himself at the murder scene of an unknown man, found hanging upside-down above the Water of Leith, a victim of the ancient Celtic three-fold death ritual.  He starts to investigate the murder, worried that he himself should be a suspect.

Hyde is heart and soul a dark, gothic thriller, but it is woven through with dualities of all sorts, including Edinburgh’s split-personality (which was the true inspiration of Stevenson’s tale, even if he did set it in London).  Hyde also allowed me to interrogate the Scottish sense of self at the zenith of the British Empire.  It’s a very different book from The Devil Aspect, but it allowed me to delve back into some of the same Jungian concepts of the role of myth in our sense of identity, and the archetypes that haunt both our dreams and our legends.  All of which allowed me to ratchet up the psychological horror.

 

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

God, that’s difficult!  I would find it difficult to single out a single book.  But, if I had to, I think it would be Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

 

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

My first novel, Blood Eagle.  My wife and I already had a successful freelance writing business and I rather timidly suggested I wanted to devote time to writing a novel.  Her enthusiasm and support was total and I honestly don’t know if I would have stuck with it without her encouragement.

 

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

I love beautifully crafted books and I have a collection of Folio Society editions.  My favourite, however, would be an heirloom: my copy of Gulliver’s Travels from 1898.  My grandmother was awarded it as a school prize, and she gave it to me when I was a child.  It’s filled with wonderful illustrations by A.M. Sargent.

 

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

A combination, in totally contradictory ways, of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and The Roads to Freedom trilogy by Jean-Paul Sartre.  I read them both when still young and they helped form my political consciousness.  I think outsider fiction influenced me greatly and all my protagonists tend to be outsiders, to varying degrees.

 

The book as . . . entertainment. What is your favourite rattling good read?

Again, this is a tie.  The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan and Figures in a Landscape by Barry England.  Both pursuit thrillers where the landscape is as much character as setting.

 

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

When I was a teenager, I read all the Russians.  And, of course, at that time, Russia was behind the Iron Curtain, and a land and culture in shadow.  I read Dostoyevsky, some Tolstoy, all the short stories of Anton Chekhov, and graduated to the social realism of Mikhail Sholokhov—but, above them all, was Nikolai Gogol, whose work I loved.  Unable at that time to visit Russia, I built an image of the land and its people.  I think my favourite book would have to be The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories.

 

The book as. . .education. What is your favourite book that made you look at the world differently?

I honestly think that if a book doesn’t challenge one’s view of the world, of oneself, then it isn’t worth reading.  There have been so, so many.  One of my main literary influences and favourite reads is Heinrich Böll.  His style was very simple and direct, yet so powerful.  It would have to be a toss-up between his Collected Short Stories and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.

 

The book as. . .technology. What has been your favourite reading experience off the page?

Oh. I’m very last century.  Or maybe even century-before-last.  Everything I read tends to be physical books.  Although I do love audiobooks …  I recently listened to the late Anthony Valentine’s narration of Dracula … great stuff.

 

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

The Bridge at Andau by (a very young) James Mitchener.  It was recommended to me by Frank Darabont (the writer/director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), whose parents fled the 1956 Soviet crackdown in Hungary.  Frank knows I wrote Dead Men and Broken Hearts against the background of the Hungarian Uprising and highly recommended Mitchener’s nonfiction book.  I’m really looking forward to it.

 

Hyde by Craig Russell is published by Constable, priced £16.99.

 

The future of the union is a subject that will continue to dominate British political discourse throughout the year. David Robinson finds that Gavin Esler’s new book, How Britain Ends, sheds light on how we arrived at our current circumstances and what it may mean in the months and years ahead.

 

How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations
By Gavin Esler
Published by Head of Zeus

 

The best bit of Gavin Esler’s latest book is when he gets to grips with Shakespeare. The thesis of How Britain Ends is that it’s Brexit-fuelled English nationalism, rather than the SNP, that will consign what Gordon Brown last month called ‘the world’s most successful experiment in multinational living’ to the rubbish bin of history. You can’t talk about English nationalism without at some stage coming across that speech from Richard II, Act II – you know, the one about ‘this happy breed of men’, ‘this sceptred isle’, ‘this fortress built by Nature for herself against infection’ (ouch), ‘this blessed plot, this earth,  this realm, this England’ – and Esler’s analysis of it is one of the highlights of his book.

The speech by John of Gaunt is, he says, is ‘one of the most beautifully patriotic found anywhere in literature’, capable of sending shivers up even a Scottish spine. But if you read it right to the end – and I must admit, I never have – its meaning changes. This once-happy land, it concludes, ‘is now leased out … like to a tenement or a pelting farm…’ and ‘This England that was wont to conquer others/Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’

What else, Remainers like Esler argue, was Brexit?  And even if you don’t accept that, look at the speech’s tone. John of Gaunt is emphatically not looking forward to new and exciting developments in the sceptred isle: just the opposite, he is looking back to a time when England was a far more contented place. This ‘nostalgic pessimism’ is, Esler suggests, inherent in almost all writing about Englishness and probably played its part in the 2016 Brexit referendum too. The EU didn’t really matter to most voters – in a survey the previous year only 6 per cent rated it as a touchstone issue – and the complexities of trade tariffs engaged even fewer.  But given the chance to have their say, nostalgic pessimism kicked in, and English nationalists kicked the UK out of Europe. And, argues Esler, unless they are ready to accept root-and-branch constitutional reform, they’ve made the break-up of Britain inevitable too.

It’s the English not the Scots, who are swinging the sledgehammer here – or, in Fintan O’Toole’s phrase, ‘practising a form of silent secession from the UK’. Of course, they wouldn’t see it like that: Prime Minister Johnson furtively headed north last month to ‘save the Union’ not destroy it. But ‘getting Brexit done’, the one clear demand of the English nationalists, made this impossible. Taking away Scots’ European identity against their will in the Brexit referendum has made Scottishness more important, not less. To the true Brexiter, this was a price worth paying. In October 2019, Tory pollster Lord Ashcroft found that 76 per cent of Tory Leave voters wanted to push for Brexit even if it meant Scotland gaining independence. Slightly fewer – 74 per cent – thought that Brexit would be worth the sacrifice of Northern Ireland.

To anyone who thinks of themselves as British, those figures are hideous. If Unionists no longer care about the Union, says Esler, ‘the end of Britain is only a matter of time’.

But let’s drill down a bit deeper into Ashcroft’s polling sample. Surely the whole point about those people who didn’t set much store the Union is that they didn’t think of themselves as British in the first place. Nominally, of course, they were: and they wanted the dark blue passport to prove it. But in their heads they weren’t really Brits at all. They were English.

Esler calls these people English nationalists, and so far in this piece I have too. His thesis is that the Conservative party, which has now remodelled itself in the image of UKIP, has taken the UK to the point where it faces three possible futures. The first option, to reinvent Britishness, is unlikely to succeed because the things that made Britain work in the past now no longer do. The second  is a form of federalism with a written constitution – basically,  a reworking of the ‘Home Rule All Round’ plans from the 1890s that would incorporate much of Salmond’s 2014  independence plan. The final option – doing nothing – may well be the most likely, given the incompetence of the current British government, but would lead to an even more divisive break-up of the UK. Already, he notes, ‘Johnson has done more in a few months to bring about a United Ireland than the IRA managed in three decades of bombings and shootings’. If denied indyref2, Scots will become ‘even more scunnered, thrawn and determined to seek a more extreme form of independence’.  The Great Paradox of Brexit – that a mainly English whim to assert independence from the EU could lead to Scotland and Northern Ireland demanding independence from England itself – could soon be complete.

This is a consistently thought-provoking and well-argued book, and yet the more I read it, the more I wondered about English nationalism. Maybe that’s because though I was born in England myself, I’ve never felt its pull. Britishness, yes; Scottishness too. Like everyone else, I’ve noticed how the cross of St George has gradually replaced the Union Jack south of the Border, but if this is a rising tide of millions, a force strong enough to fragment a country, where is its cultural expression? Where are the films clips from the Noughties onwards that you’d use to illustrate the thesis? Where are the books?

Esler is, however, right about one aspect of English nationalism: it is comparatively unexplored. If it does exist, it’s hidden away in the statistics, in the rising number of people who identify as English rather than British in recent censuses. According to the Institute of Public Policy Research, there’s a discernible sense of resentment among their English – especially in the North, home to all of the UK’s fastest declining towns with populations bigger than 100,000 – that Scots have greater political clout and get comparatively more money from the public purse. But that IPPR report was written in 2012, and if there have been any mass demos in favour of an England-only parliament since then, I must have missed them.

So was Brexit proof of rising English nationalism or just a loopy protest vote? I’ll leave that for you to decide, but first I’ll take you back to Shakespeare. What I love most of all about the John of Gaunt speech, that classic statement of English exceptionalism, is the man making it. For John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, is really Jean de Ghent. Or, as we would say these days, now that his own country has come into being, a Belgian.

 

How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations by Gavin Esler is published by Head of Zeus, priced £14.99.

 

This month sees the welcome republication of Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith. Now including a new introduction, Kay’s book celebrates the life and art of the blues legend through biography, memoir, and fictional exploration. It’s a thrilling read, full of a fan’s love and will make you want to explore Bessie’s music more deeply. BooksfromScotland is on hand to start that ball rolling. We hope you enjoy these clips of an unforgettable talent.

 

Bessie Smith
By Jackie Kay
Published by Faber

 

Bessie Smith performs ‘St. Louis Blues’ in the film St. Louis Blues. The only existing footage of Bessie Smith singing. Jackie Kay writes: ‘I remember the shock of the grainy monochrome image of my heroine appearing in this sad tale of woe. There she was, a tall, beautiful woman, driven to drink by her feckless lover.’

 

One of Bessie’s most iconic songs, ‘Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out’, recorded as her first marriage was breaking down, and just months before the Wall Street Crash in 1929 that saw her career decline.

 

One of Jackie Kay’s favourites, ‘Dirty No-Gooder’s Blues’. Jackie Kay writes of first hearing it: ‘It sounded so bad. The very name made you think things you weren’t supposed to be thinking at that age.’

 

Another one of Jackie Kay’s favourites, ‘Kitchen Man’. Jackie Kay writes: ‘I was a bit nonplussed when I discovered that all those jelly rolls and sugar rolls in those songs had nothing to do with food.’

 

Bessie’s first hit record, ‘Downhearted Blues’, released in 1923. It sold 750, 000 copies in six months, making her a star.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6TiLIeVZA

 

The brilliant and audacious (and a favourite of BfS – the first Bessie Smith song we heard) ‘Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair’. Jackie Kay writes ‘The combination of the extraordinary plea with the graphically violent descriptions of the murder makes the song wildly funny. I can imagine women hearing it in 1927 and splitting their sides laughing.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ6w5IlqhSk

 

Let’s end our Bessie Smith playlist with one of her best party songs, ‘Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer’. Jackie Kay writes ‘The gutsy way she sings that “yeah” is like nobody else. She drags that yeah out of herself. She knew how to let herself go; didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of her.’

 

Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay is published by Faber, priced £9.99.

Ahead of the Valentine weekend, BooksfromScotland wanted to share an extract from Duncan Mackenzie’s memoir, Cappucino and Porridge, which pays warm tribute to the author’s father, from Harris, stepfather, from Skye, and father-in-law, from Tuscany. Here, though, in this extract, we learn of the romance that brought the two families together.

 

Cappucino and Porridge
By Duncan Mackenzie
Published by Acair Books

 

ALE AND I MEET AGAIN.

~.~ My Positive Premonition ~.~

At this juncture, I recall two points from my formative years.  Firstly, at primary school age, I had an appetite for the stories of the Greeks and Trojans and of Scotland’s William Wallace.  What the Greeks did to Hector was bad enough, but what the English did to William Wallace had me, aged not very much at all, making a solemn vow that I would never marry an English girl.  Secondly, I had a distinct and recurring premonition that a tall, blonde girl was going to appear in my life and that would then be that.

Back in the eighties and I cannot explain why, it appears that I was guilty of having in my mind an ignorantly held stereotypical image of Italian girls as being short, dark haired and deeply tanned in appearance.  There is no more validity in this than there is in believing that Scottish men all resemble the bearded, kilted piper of cartoon caricature, keen on whisky and on observing what a lovely, bright, moonlit night he was enjoying.  To my eternal shame, this did not prevent me from picturing a short, dark bob-cut, deeply tanned, apprentice ‘mamma Italiana’ figure, with arms akimbo when, in 1983, I was invited to take a week off work to accompany my mother and John F to Garden Cottage, Balavil with a young Gori daughter in tow.  The idea was sold to me by the offer of the use of my mother’s car (new, reliable, petrol paid by her) to get to a few golf courses and perhaps to Loch Ness and Skye to show them to the imagined ‘short, dark schoolgirl’ Italian guest.  She was not English, obviously, but otherwise she was still most unlikely to fit the premonition description, according to my subconscious.

It nearly didn’t happen at all.  Alessandra’s letter to Margaret, written at the suggestion of Cipriana, looked for help in finding a job as an au pair/babysitter/nanny for the summer holidays with the practice of English in mind.  Ale was at university, majoring in German coupled with English as her secondary subject.

Margaret and her friends were all beyond the stage of needing the kind of help Ale was offering, but she responded with the offer of a two week visit with plenty of English practice available.  Ale very nearly graciously declined, as she doubted that the length of stay would provide her with the volume of practice in conversational English that she thought she needed that summer.  Fortunately, she decided to accept and booked her flight.

By this stage, both my brother and I had left home, had bought our own flats and my brother was engaged.  Dinner was arranged chez Margaret and  John F, with my brother and his fiancée forming the reception party at the airport, in the company of Margaret.  I would arrive in time for the evening meal once I had played for the Court of Session football team against one of the big law firms in Edinburgh.  It was an enjoyable time of the year for me with plenty daylight for evening golf; the rugby season was over, so click into football mode.  Some of the opponents didn’t seem to have a switch to click nor anything other than long, metal studs.  So, for me, it was a case of, ‘Hello.  Welcome to Scotland.  Excuse me while I patch up this gouge out of my leg.’

There was no ice to be broken by the time I reached my mother’s house.  The ‘short, dark schoolgirl’ of my caricature turned out to be twenty years of age, tall, cascading blonde waves, brown eyes often widened in animated conversation, tanned only to the shade of honey and all hand gestures, loads of hand gestures.  She would struggle for an English word, but only for an instant before her hand would be raised as if directing traffic to come to an immediate halt, then, ‘Wait!’ in a distinctly north German accent, followed by the furious turning of pages in a tiny dictionary.  She was quite something, but it was Scottish eyes which met Scottish eyes across the dinner table and almost imperceptibly widened at the sight of Ale reaching confidently out to the wine bottle in the centre of the table and helping herself.  It didn’t register with the MacKenzie boys that the wine was from Nazareno’s vineyard, sent over with his daughter in gift.  Wine at our mother’s table was novel enough for the brothers without the sight of a young guest diving in and helping herself – utterly unthinkable for either son.

The teasing must have started almost immediately, as my brother has been quoted often since as having assured Alessandra that Scots only tease people they like.  No doubt Rev and Mrs Fletcher’s eyes met and perceptibly widened when I was found to be helping to dry the dishes after dinner.  I am sure that within three hours of our meeting my brother nudged me in the ribs and urged me to befriend the young Italian lady or, at least, something along those lines.

In the days that followed, I am told that I suddenly found time to drive from my office to my mother’s house for lunch and then to reappear for dinner in the evening.  Mother, apparently, told family later that Ale would not eat until I arrived, no matter if work, football or golf kept me very late.

On one of my journeys in for dinner, I was nearly delayed on a long-term basis.  I had been cruising along quite happily in my old mini, when a black car came right out in front of me from a side road on my left.  It felt like the wee mini’s nearside wheels left the ground as it got itself round the black car before making it back on to its own side of the road – no anti-lock braking systems in those days, at least not in old minis.  Looking back to see if the other car was ok, I saw it had stopped so I did the same.  The driver came forward to thank me and congratulate me, in colourful terms, for my evasive action.  We parted as new best buddies.  Alessandra’s reaction, on hearing of the incident after dinner, was (wide-eyed of course) to take my hand in both of hers – nice.  I was really getting to like this very foreign girl.

As to the week which followed, there is an unusual source of information. On 14th December 1996 Ale, John, Seumas and I were surprised to find ourselves in colour on the cover of the weekend section of one of Scotland’s national newspapers with the words ‘The Europeans’ emblazoned below.  The four of us, pre-Finlay, were surrounded by cartoon Santas in the traditional styles of half a dozen European countries.  The Glasgow Herald was running a feature on how Europeans had made Scotland their own.  What had the Europeans found in Scotland?  What did they miss?  What part did they see Scotland playing in Europe?

In addition to the group photo on the front, inside there was a close-up of Ale, taken at her desk, the  caption reading, ‘The Gaelic Dolce Vita.

Ale had clearly spoken freely to the writer of the article, Jane Scott.  There are one or two quotes which, on re-reading the piece for the first time in many years, I found touching.  In addition, there was a paragraph on Ale which remains pertinent, namely, ‘Her first foreign language was German.  When she first came here, she had a German accent, but she has a superb ear.  When she speaks now it is pure Edinburgh.  After holidays on Harris, the island of Duncan’s father, her accent is often mistaken for Hebridean.  She is proud of that.’ Ale still comes back from Harris sounding like Auntie Mary Ann in Quidinish.

The article did carry one serious error slap bang in the middle of the headline which read, ‘A first kiss upon the moor.’

No.

On the absolute authority of one of the parties to that first kiss, it is confirmed that it did not occur up on the moor.  It happened a good two or three hundred yards below the edge of the Balavil moor, on the track, in the woods.  Alessandra leaned forward, she still insists, to brush away a beastie which had landed on my collar.  I misinterpreted the approach and there we had ‘the first kiss upon the track, two or three hundred yards down from the moor and thanks, in part at least, to a visiting insect.’

The suggested trip to Loch Ness did not happen, but the two of us did take off for a day trip to the Isle of Skye which is only about two hours away from Balavil.

Scotland, it must be admitted, had a very good summer in 1983, good enough to amount to a clear case of innocent misrepresentation to a visiting Italian.  We stopped off at Invergarry where Ale took a photo from the riverbank.  An enlarged version of that photo has hung above our open fireplace for over thirty years and it shows that the day must have been quite hot.

While we were walking in single file along a narrow path in the glen, I realised that things had gone quiet. There was no sound at all from the enthusiastic conversationalist behind me.  I turned around to find Ale looking like a feeding duck, head in the river, both cooling off and controlling the former cascading waves, which had first become slightly unruly curls and which then became, instead, cascading ringlets; so, cooled and controlled, the operation worked on both counts.  The feeding duck reference is perhaps best consigned to history; she probably didn’t find it funny, even then.

Over on Skye, on Broadford pier to be precise, I heard a burst of Italian (no German accent) which rang a few bells from early Latin classes, Amo, amas, amat and all that.  By the time the week was nearing its end, we had talked about Protestant/Catholic and Scottish/Italian marriage and even the raising of children.  Discounting the 1974 discovery of bivouacked children in my home, I had known Alessandra for all of two weeks.

 

Cappucino and Porridge by Duncan Mackenzie is published by Acair Books, priced £15.95.

 

The annual Burns celebrations are always a welcome moment in the dark January month. This year, Black and White Publishing have released a sumptious celebration of the bard, Burns for Every Day of the Year. Author Pauline Mackay gives us poems and commentary for each day, a perfect way to introduce yourself or rediscover his brilliant work. Here, we share entries for late January to accompany your Burns suppers.

 

Burns for Every Day of the Year
By Pauline Mackay
Published by Black and White Publishing

 

25th January

Robert Burns was born on the 25th of January 1759 in Alloway, Ayrshire. It is commonly believed that the first Burns Supper was held in Alloway in July 1801 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the bard’s death. A gathering of contemporaries and admirers paid tribute to Burns by reading from his works, raising a toast to his memory and dining on haggis, a dish traditionally regarded as peasant food. They agreed to meet again in January of the following year to celebrate the bard’s birth and the tradition developed from there. Burns Night is now a truly global phenomenon: the biggest annual celebration of any author worldwide.

‘To a Haggis’ is the bard’s ode to the dish that has since become the culinary centrepiece of any Burns Supper. Haggis is comprised of those parts of a sheep that would not fetch a good price at sale: heart, lungs and liver combined with oats and seasoning, and boiled in the sheep’s stomach. In a performative piece, abundant with imagery, Burns presents the haggis as nutritious, hamely fare, unpretentious and truly worthy of celebration.

Why not try performing the poem at your own Burns Supper? By the end of this ‘warm-reekin, rich’ address, your company will be ravenous!

 

To a Haggis

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’a grace
As lang’s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see Rustic-labour dight,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn they stretch an’ strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes believe
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
Bethankit hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a’ wither’d rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ legs, an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thrissle.

Ye Pow’rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ pray’r,
Gie her a haggis!

 

26th January

Even in the absence of manuscript evidence, ‘The Selkirk Grace’ has long been attributed to Burns. Another Burns Supper favourite, it represents an important part of the almost ritualistic running order of the festivities.

 

The Selkirk Grace

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it:
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.

 

27th January

If haggis is the culinary centrepiece of the Burns Supper, then whisky is its most popular accompaniment. ‘Scotch Drink’ is Burns’s most explicit celebration of the Scottish national tipple and one of the country’s most successful exports (alongside the bard himself). In the following extract, Burns wittily extols the inspirational and illuminating ‘benefits’ of a dram.

 

Scotch Drink

Let other Poets raise a fracas
’Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,
An’ crabbed names an’ stories wrack us,
An’ grate our lug:
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us,
In glass or jug.

O thou, my MUSE! guid, auld SCOTCH DRINK!
Whether thro’ wimplin worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp an’ wink,
To sing thy name!

Let husky Wheat the haughs adorn,
And Aits set up their awnie horn,
An’ Pease and Beans, at een or morn,
Perfume the plain,
Leeze me on thee, John Barleycorn,
Thou king o’ grain!

On thee aft Scotland chows her cood,
In souple scones, the wale o’ food!
Or tumbling in the boiling flood
Wi’ kail an’ beef;
But when thou pours thy strong heart’s blood,
There thou shines chief.

Food fills the wame, an’ keeps us livin;
Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin,
When heavy-dragg’d wi’ pine an’ grievin;
But oil’d by thee,
The wheels o’ life gae down-hill, scrievin,
Wi’ rattlin glee.

Thou clears the head o’ doited Lear;
Thou chears the heart o’ drooping Care;
Thou strings the nerves o’ Labor-sair,
At’s weary toil;
Though ev’n brightens dark Despair,
Wi’ gloomy smile

 

28th January

We draw towards the close of this month with another of Burns’s Bacchanalian productions. Famous for its representation of conviviality and revelry in male friendship, ‘Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut’ was inspired by a meeting between Burns, William Nicol (1744–1797) and Allan Masterton (c.1750–1799). Burns recalled that, ‘We had such a joyous meeting that Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, to celebrate the business.’ And so, Masterton composed the air to which Burns’s song is set.

 

Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut
(to the tune of Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ MautO Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,)

O Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,
And Rob and Allan cam to see;
Three blyther hearts, that lee-lang night,
Ye wadna found in Christendie.

Chorus: We are na fou, We’re nae that fou,
But just a drappie in our e’e;
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And aye we’ll taste the barley bree.

Here are we met, three merry boys,
Three merry boys I trow are we;
And mony a night we’ve merry been,
And mony mae we hope to be!

Chorus: We are na fou, &c.

It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That’s blinkin’ in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright to wyle us hame,
But by my sooth, she’ll wait a wee!

Chorus: We are na fou, &c.

Wha first shall rise to gang awa,
A cuckold, coward loun is he!
Wha first beside his chair shall fa’,
He is the King amang us three!

Chorus: We are na fou, &c.

 

Every Day of the Year by Pauline Mackay is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £20.00.

 

Looking for more books to celebrate Burns Night? Check out . . .

 

The Canongate Burns, edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg

The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns, edited by Gerard Carruthers

My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane

Tam o’ Shanter, adapted by Richmond Clements and illustrated by Inko

The Life of Robert Burns, by Catherine Carswell

The Jewel, by Catherine Czerkawska

On the Trail of Robert Burns, by John Cairney

A Night Out With Robert Burns, edited by Andrew O’ Hagan

The Wee Book Book o’ Burns, by The Wee Book Company

With the rise and rise of Gaelic learners on Duolingo, there is no shortage of people interested in finding out more about Gaelic language and culture. Luath Press have just released a brilliant anthology of new and classic Gaelic poetry, from writers representing the past, present and future of Gaelic writing. Here, we share a few poems from the anthology – we hope it will spur you to investigate further.

 

100 Favourite Gaelic Poems
Edited by Peter Mackay and Jo Macdonald
Published by Luath Press

 

’s i ghàidhlig
Donnchadh MacGuaire

’S i Ghàidhlig leam cruas na spiorad
’S i Ghàidhlig leam cruas na h-èiginn
’S i Ghàidhlig leam mo thoil inntinn
’S i Ghàidhlig leam mo thoil gàire
’S i Ghàidhlig leam mo theaghlach àlainn
’S i Ghàidhlig leam mo shliabh beatha
’S i Ghàidhlig leam luaidh mo chridhe
’S i Ghàidhlig leam gach nì rim bheò
Mur a b’ e i cha bu mhì

 

gaelic is
Duncan MacQuarrie

Gaelic to me is the hardness of spirit
Gaelic to me is the grit of distress
Gaelic to me is my mind’s satisfaction
Gaelic to me is the pleasure of laughing
Gaelic to me is my beautiful family
Gaelic to me is my life’s mountain
Gaelic to me is the love of my heart
Gaelic to me is everything in my life
If it didn’t exist I wouldn’t be me

 

*

 

faclan, eich mara
Caomhin MacNèill

nam bhruadar bha mi nam ghrunnd na mara
agus thu fhèin nad chuan trom
a’ leigeil do chudruim orm
agus d’ fhaclan gaoil socair nam chluasan
an-dràsta ’s a-rithist
òrach grinn ainneamh
man eich-mhara, man notaichean-maise
sacsafonaichean beaga fleòdradh

 

words, seahorses
Kevin MacNeil

i dreamt i was the seafloor and you were the weight of ocean pressing down on me, your quiet words of love in my ears now and again, golden, elegant and strange, like seahorses, like grace-notes, tiny floating saxophones

Trans. the author

 

*

 

màiri iain mhurch’ chaluim
Anna C. Frater

Mo sheanmhair, a chaill a h-athair air an “Iolaire”,
oidhche na bliadhn’ ùir, 1919
Tha mi nam shuidhe ag èisteachd ribh
agus tha mo chridh’ a’ tuigsinn
barrachd na mo chlaisneachd;
’s mo shùilean a’ toirt a-steach
barrachd na mo chluasan.
Ur guth sèimh, ur cainnt
ag èirigh ’s a’ tuiteam mar thonn
air aghaidh fhuar a’ chuain
’s an dràst’ ’s a-rithist a’ briseadh
air creag bhiorach cuimhne;
’s an sàl a’ tighinn gu bàrr
ann an glas-chuan ur sùilean.
“Bha e air an ròp
an uair a bhris e…”
Agus bhris ur cridhe cuideachd
le call an ròpa chalma
air an robh grèim gràidheil agaibh
fhad ’s a bha sibh a’ sreap suas
nur leanabh.
Agus, aig aois deich bliadhna,cha robh agaibh ach cuimhne air a’ chreig
a bhiodh gur cumail còmhnard;
’s gach dòchas a bha nur sùilean
air a bhàthadh tron oidhch’ ud,
’s tro gach bliadhn’ ùr a lean.

Chàirich iad a’ chreag
agus dh’fhàg sin toll.
Chruadhaich an sàl ur beatha
agus chùm e am pian ùr;
agus dh’fhuirich e nur sùilean
cho goirt ’s a bha e riamh;
agus tha pian na caillich
cho geur ri pian na nighinn agus tha ur cridhe
a’ briseadh às ùr
a’ cuimhneachadh ur h-athar.
“… oir bha athair agam …”

 

màiri iain mhurch’ chaluim
Anne C. Frater

My grandmother who lost her father on the “Iolaire”,
New Year’s Night, 1919
I sit listening to you
and my heart understands
more than my hearing;
and my eyes absorb
more than my ears.
Your soft voice, your speech
rising and falling like waves
on the cold surface of the sea.
and now and again breaking
on the sharp rock of memory;
and the brine rises up
in the grey seas of your eyes.
“He was on the rope
When it broke. . .”
And your heart also broke
with the loss of the sturdy rope
which you had clung to lovingly
while you were growing
as a child.
And, at ten years of age,
you had only a memory of the rock
that used to keep you straight;
and every hope that was in your eyes
was drowned on that night
and through each New Year that followed.

They buried the rock
and that left a hole.
The salt hardened your life
and kept the pain fresh;
and it stayed in your eyes
as stinging as it ever was;
and the old woman’s pain
is as keen as the girl’s,
and your heart breaks anew
remembering your father.
“…because I had a father…”

Trans. the author

 

*

 

bho ‘nuair bha mi òg’
Màiri Mhòr nan Òran

Moch ’s mi ’g èirigh air bheagan èislein,
Air madainn Chèitein ’s mi ann an Òs,
Bha sprèidh a’ geumnaich an ceann a chèile,
’S a’ ghrian ag èirigh air Leac an Stòrr;
Bha gath a’ boillsgeadh air slios nam beanntan,
Cur tuar na h-oidhche na dheann fo sgòd,
Is os mo chionn sheinn an uiseag ghreannmhor,
Toirt na mo chuimhne nuair bha mi òg.
Toirt na mo chuimhne le bròn is aoibhneas,
Nach fhaigh mi cainnt gus a chur air dòigh,
Gach car is tionndadh an corp ’s an inntinn,
Bhon dh’fhàg mi ’n gleann ’n robh sinn gun ghò;
Bha sruth na h-aibhne dol sìos cho tàimhidh,
Is toirm nan allt freagairt cainnt mo bheòil,
’S an smeòrach bhinn suidhe seinn air meanglan,
Toirt na mo chuimhne nuair bha mi òg.
Nuair bha mi gòrach a’ siubhal mòintich,
’S am fraoch a’ sròiceadh mo chòta bàn,
Feadh thoman còinnich gun snàthainn a bhrògan,
’S an eigh na còsan air lochan tàimh;
A’ falbh an aonaich ag iarraidh chaorach,
’S mi cheart cho aotrom ri naosg air lòn –
Gach bot is poll agus talamh toll,
Toirt na mo chuimhne nuair bha mi òg.
Toirt na mo chuimhn’ iomadh nì a rinn mi
Nach faigh mi ’m bann gu ceann thall mo sgeòil –
A’ falbh sa gheamhradh gu luaidh is bainnsean
Gun solas lainnteir ach ceann an fhòid;
Bhiodh òigridh ghreannmhor ri ceòl is dannsa,
Ach dh’fhalbh an t-àm sin ’s tha ’n gleann fo bhròn;
Bha ’n tobht aig Anndra ’s e làn de fheanntaig,
Toirt na mo chuimhne nuair bha mi òg.

 

from ‘when i was young’
Mary MacPherson

Rising early, slightly sorrowful,
on a May morning when I was in Ose,
the cattle were lowing in their herd,
and the sun rising on the rock of Storr;
light beams glittering on the slopes of mountains,
hurrying away the hue of the night,
and above my head the lively skylark singing
make me remember when I was young.
Make me remember with joy and sadness
that I can’t find the words to relate,
each twist and turn of the mind and body,
since I left this glen of faultless heroes;
the river flowing downstream so gently,
the murmuring burn answering my words,
and the sweet-voiced thrush singing on a branch,
make me remember when I was young.
When I was foolish, walking the moorland,
the heather catching my white petticoat,
through mounds of moss, with my feet bare,
and the ice in patches on still lochs;
crossing the uplands, looking for sheep,
and feeling so light as a snipe in a field –
every bog and pool and muddy hole
make me remember when I was young.
Make me remember many things I did
that I can’t close until my story’s told –
going in the winter to waulks and weddings
with no lantern light, just a burning peat;
lively young folk would be singing, dancing,
but those times have gone and the glen is sad;
Andrew’s ruined house, now full of nettles,
makes me remember when I was young.

 

*

 

hallaig
Somhairle MacGill-Eain

‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’

Tha bùird is tàirnean air an uinneig
trom faca mi an Àird an Iar
’s tha mo ghaol aig Allt Hallaig
’na craoibh bheithe, ’s bha i riamh
eadar an t-Inbhir ’s Poll a’ Bhainne,
thall ’s a bhos mu Bhaile Chùirn:
tha i ’na beithe, ’na calltainn,
’na caorann dhìrich sheang ùir.
Ann an Sgreapadal mo chinnidh,
far robh Tarmad ’s Eachann Mòr,
tha ’n nigheanan ’s am mic ’nan coille
a’ gabhail suas ri taobh an lòin.
Uaibhreach a-nochd na coilich ghiuthais
a’ gairm air mullach Cnoc an Rà,
dìreach an druim ris a’ ghealaich –
chan iadsan coille mo ghràidh.
Fuirichidh mi ris a’ bheithe
gus an tig i mach an Càrn,
gus am bi am bearradh uile
o Bheinn na Lice fa sgàil.
Mura tig ’s ann theàrnas mi a Hallaig
a dh’ionnsaigh Sàbaid nam marbh,
far a bheil an sluagh a’ tathaich,
gach aon ghinealach a dh’fhalbh.

 

hallaig
Sorley MacLean

‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’

The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,
a birch tree, and she has always been
between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-chuirn:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.
In Screapadal of my people
where Norman and Big Hector were,
their daughters and their sons are a wood
going up beside the stream.
Proud tonight the pine cocks
crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,
straight their backs in the moonlight –
they are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up by the cairn,
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.
If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,
to the Sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.

 

100 Favourite Gaelic Poems, edited by Peter Mackay and Jo Macdonald is published by Luath Press, priced £12.99

Moving to a new area can often be a lonely, challenging time. In Cat Step, author Alison Irvine explores how a public mistake can make that process even harder. Here is an extract from her honest, clear-sighted novel.

 

Extract taken from Cat Step
By Alison Irvine
Published by Dead Ink Press

 

Emily will ask me one day about Lennoxtown. She may discover that she and I lived there briefly when she was on the cusp of four and five and I’ll need to have answers when she asks me why we didn’t stay. I’ll tell her something of the story. She’ll believe me because I’m her mum. By then I may have made sense of her dad.

The truth is Emily and I danced a demi-detourné. We stepped up to Lennoxtown then turned away from it, a half turn, even changing feet so that a new foot was in front. Yet there was no ballerina’s precision or elegance; it was ugly.

Lennoxtown is hard to turn away from, I’ll give it that. Those hills. You catch them as you come round a bend, half submerged in cloud or crossed with sun and shadow or shining with the gold that comes off the grass you get up there. I imagined us climbing them, the Campsie Fells, picnicking, exploring, lying out in good air. But we came in March and winter wasn’t over and it rained and rained and my plans didn’t work out.

There was one thing I could have done differently. My mum said I should leave Emily with her and go alone – have a break, live a little, earn some money if there was any to be earned – and I nearly accepted, I nearly thought it the most sensible of all the options I had. I paused, – en l’air – extension – and then took her with me.

I use ballet terms but I was never a ballerina. I did the training and I almost had the technique, but not the physique or that extra porcelain quality. I was a dancer, a very good dancer: a tapper, a hoofer, a high-kicker. I wore feathers and sequins and American Tan tights and travelled the world on cruise ships. I will tell Emily that.

This is what I won’t tell her: she had been awake between the hours of two and three the night before, crying and thrashing with a temperature and a sore head. I gave her paracetamol and put a cold flannel on her forehead and thought if we ever got back to sleep it would do us good to lie long into the morning. But she woke at six and although she was calmer she was weak and didn’t want anything other than television. In the end she didn’t even want that. I tried to curl up with her on my bed and help her get back to sleep but she wouldn’t settle.

We had nothing in. The bread was gone, the milk was off. She liked fish fingers, and I knew if we drove to the Co-op I could buy some fish fingers and more milk and bread and she might fall asleep on the way home. I knew it would work for her. It always had.

I told her she could wear her dressing gown over her nightie and I’d buy her a treat. I brushed her hair but I didn’t wash her face or clean her teeth. I found her wellies because they were easy to put on and I tied her dressing gown. See how I’m telling it? I had to tell it in this detail many times to many people.

I’d forgotten about the roadworks and the temporary traffic lights and of course by the time the lights turned green Emily was asleep. I wondered if I should drive straight home but I had a queue of cars behind me so I had to go on and once I was through the roadworks I was two minutes from the Co-op and we did need fish fingers and milk and bread and other things I’d remembered like toilet roll and toothpaste. So I made the decision to go on.

I couldn’t get a space close to the entrance so we parked at the back of the car park under the fir trees where the crows had their nests. When I cut the engine I thought the sudden lack of noise might wake her as it often did, but it didn’t. I turned in my seat and checked her. Her lips were parted. Her cheeks were red. She’d kicked off her wellies and peeled her socks from her feet and I could see black hairs on her shins. I thought about carrying her in, but it would have woken her and, God, to wake a sleeping child – an ill child at that – and then drive for hours afterwards trying to get her back to sleep was not an option. I have driven around with her fighting sleep as if it was death closing down on her.

I opened a window to give her an inch of air. I locked the car. I ran to the Co-op. Perhaps I was longer than the few minutes I thought I’d taken. How long does it take to pick up milk, bread, fish fingers and toilet roll? And a slab of chocolate? And cheese and toothpaste. And a Freddo for her treat. I told the woman at the checkout that I didn’t need a bag – and then I changed my mind, so I watched her pack my bag, gave her my Co-op card, paid for my shopping and ran from the shop.

When I came out of the Co-op I saw there were people standing by my car looking towards a running boy. Cap, jeans, red top, that’s all I saw: the sprinting back of him and the flailing soles of his trainers. Something had happened.

‘There was a thief,’ a woman said. ‘He’s run off. We know who he is. Greg’s talking to the police.’ She pointed to a man who was on his phone, pacing. The man looked at me as he spoke and then turned away towards the traffic on Main Street.

I needed to check Emily.

‘He’s a menace,’ the man said, off his phone and making me listen. He pushed his hair back with both hands, shoved his phone into his pocket, adrenalin, urgency all over him.

‘But the car’s not even fancy,’ I said.

‘You left something on your front seat.’

I’d left my phone. I’d put it on the passenger seat to save me carrying it in. The window was smashed but not shattered. Emily was asleep. Fast asleep. She’d slept through it.

‘You can’t leave anything in your car round here,’ the man said. ‘There’s a ring of them. They’ll steal it and sell it on.’

‘At this time of the morning?’ I said, which struck me as an odd thing to say but it was too early to have my car broken into, surely? The sky was weak, the crows were barely awake and the clock on the sandstone church behind us showed only half past eight.

I looked at the people around me. The man and two women, one with a dog on a lead. I checked on Emily again.

She was unhurt. My phone was still on the seat, the window could be fixed. These people had stepped in to help me.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

There was silence. They looked at Emily and then at me.

‘You left her in the car by herself,’ one of the women said. Her dog pulled on its lead and barked at another dog across the car park. She told it to sit and in the same tone of voice said to me, ‘Anything could have happened.’

‘She was asleep,’ I said.

‘That’s even worse.’

I sensed the fullness of her judgement, in increments, like the gradual lightening of the morning.

The other woman spoke. ‘My niece is a social worker. She tells me this is a problem with some parents. You know it’s against the law?’

I unlocked the car and opened the boot and put my shopping down.

‘Please don’t make me feel guilty. She’s not well. She’s been up all night. I know my daughter.’

‘And look at her legs. Look at what you can see. Does she even have underwear on?’ The woman peered through the window at Emily.

I got angry then and when I turned my head I felt the shooting stars I’d been having for days. I told them to get away from the window and of course she had underwear on but when I checked at home, she didn’t. She wasn’t indecent, she was covered, even though her dressing gown had ridden up to her thighs, but they will have used that against me too, that her legs were exposed.

‘I’m taking my daughter home now,’ I said and went to open my door. ‘She’s ill. I know what’s best.’

‘Don’t touch the door!’ the man shouted. ‘That’s the police here now.’ He raised a hand and beckoned the police car to where we stood. ‘You’ll have to stay. They’ll want statements from us. They might be able to get the little shite if they have enough evidence.’

The woman with the dog nodded and told her dog to stay.

 

Cat Step by Alison Irvine is published by Dead Ink Press, priced £9.99.

Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low have put together a fantastic anthology of creative essays, essays that explore what the form of the essay can be as well as their diverse range of subject matter. In this enjoyable and thought-provoking epistolary essay between Duncan McLean and Kenny Taylor, they explore the idea of ‘The North’

 

Imagined Spaces
Edited by Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low
Published by The Voyage Out Press

 

The Flicker of North
Duncan McLean & Kenny Taylor

 

Hello Kenny

We’ve been invited to discuss the north as a place, both real and imagined. If you don’t mind, I want to call it the North. My notion is that there’s a place formed by ‘northness’, defined by ‘northness’, consisting of ‘northness.’ And you and I are both in it.

It would have been good to have had a blether with you before introducing such an idea, to make sure you don’t think it entirely daft, but so far it’s been impossible to talk. Who’d have thought it would be so hard in this day and age to catch each other on the phone! I will just have to launch our conversation with this brief contribution, and hope the words connect even if our mobile providers can’t.

A conversation of what kind? We won’t know till we talk! I’ll go first, will I? You can’t answer that, because you won’t even see the question till I send it to you, which I won’t do till I get to the end of whatever I’m going to write here. Let’s call it 700 words, two pages—it’s good to have an arbitrary target. Many years ago, I drove right across the USA. Every morning I’d look at the atlas and find a town 3 or 4 or even 500 miles west with an interesting name: Chunky, Mississippi; Uncertain, Texas; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. And I’d drive till I got there and find a motel for the night. I had to have an arbitrary target, you see, otherwise, why stop? In the States, you can just keep driving forever. Not like here in Orkney: twenty minutes in any direction and you get to the sea. That’ll stop you.

Duncan

 

Dear Duncan

At first glance, part of the reason it’s been hard for me to communicate much seems simple: ‘notspots.’ During chunks of this spring and summer I’ve been working in some of the most trackless country I know. One of a team surveying birds, mammals and vegetation in the wilds of north Sutherland, I’ve often been far from both roads and reliable phone signals.

Your schedule and mine have meant that there seem to be only a few days—or hours—when we might have had a chance to chat. My hiking along a mountain slope or venturing into the boglands just adds to the difficulty at a time when we might otherwise have spoken.

Like that day when I was inland from Loch Eriboll, going towards Foinaven on a day of sunshine and wader calls, when the signal evaporated faster than the dew on the deer grass. We’d managed a quick phone rendezvous mid-morning, and I suggested that we could speak later, before you needed to go to the shop. Seemed simple—a good way to converse while I paused for some thermos coffee. But long before the appointed talk time, I’d entered the valleys and crags of no-speak. So I’ll tell you a little of what happened while we failed to converse; what I saw and what I didn’t see.

There were pools among the bog mosses when I reached a high plateau. I could see the Pentland Firth a few miles off, and a blue-green smudge on the horizon that I took to be the hills of Hoy. The Orkney Islands. Laser flashes might have made a connection between us right then. But signalling in Morse would have defeated me, while you, of course, were in Kirkwall, not Hoy. So my attention soon drifted to the closer sight and sound of a greenshank flying a couple of hundred metres away. Then another veered in from the east, diving at the first bird and chasing it, fast and low, over the bog and beyond. Once it had seen off the intruder, this second bird returned. Rising above the sky-mirroring lochans, it began to call. And call. The notes fluted loud and softer and louder with shifts of breeze.

I kept it in view as it ascended, cricking my neck back to watch, then arching further to catch its shape in binoculars and hold the silhouette in focus. After more than a minute, it stalled its high rise and plummeted, steep and fast, to reach the ground in seconds. In the times when I’ve thought of it since, I know that my interpretation of what it was doing in that airspace could be wrong. That the greenshank’s communication and signalling is not my language, though I think I understand some of it, that its place is not my home, much though I relish going there. And though my image of your home isles is more—much more—than that smudge on the northeast horizon, and though I’ve visited many times over many decades, still I wonder how much I actually know of Orkney and the wider North. How much I’m projecting my own preconceptions on the screen of the cool blue horizon. But I’ll leave that for later as we see what place or idea takes us further along the turns of this conversation.

Kenny

 

***

 

Dear Kenny

You have the ability to describe your work and make your readers envy you, wishing they were up on those trackless moors watching the duel of the greenshanks. Are you sure that really is work? Ach well, I suppose there was a painfully early start, the bog was claggy on your boots, and a million midgies showed up to keep you company. Oh, any number of downsides. It all comes round to what we choose to focus on, which parts of the working life we select to present in our prose. I could, for instance, suggest something of my working day by describing me throwing open the shop door first thing to see St Magnus Cathedral across the street, sandstone glowing red in the morning light. I could go on to recount a conversation with an excited Italian restaurateur, visiting Orkney on holiday and tasting Westray Wife cheese for the first time. And I could describe a late-afternoon delivery run in my van, out past the standing stones and Maes Howe, to deliver a case of good red wine to a restaurant in Stromness, named The Hamnavoe after George Mackay Brown’s classic fictional version of the town.

On the other hand, I could also show me in a sweat and pretty much wabbit by 9am, after the arrival of two pallets of wine from our importers, a couple of tons in weight, all of which has to be carried in by hand through our inconvenient back store, checked and stacked.

A few months ago a friend asked me a question that I couldn’t answer at the time, and has been gnawing away at me ever since. The question was, what do you like about Orkney? I couldn’t think of anything to say. I know what tourists and other visitors like: the landscape, the dozens of archaeological sites, the birdlife. I know what they like because they tell me. Sometimes they tell me because they’re bursting with excitement and want to spill it out. Other times they tell me because I ask them.

A typical conversation in my shop over the four or five tourist months runs like this:

Duncan: So, are you here for long?
Visitor: We’re here two weeks, we love it.
Duncan: You’re in Orkney for two weeks? Great!
Visitor: No, we’re in Scotland for two weeks: Glasgow, Skye, Lallybroch, and now Orkney for two days. Then we go to—what’s it called?— Edinburgh, and then home.
Duncan: And where’s home?
Visitor: The United States of America.
Duncan: Aye, I got that, but where exactly?
Visitor: Roanoke, Virginia.
Duncan: I’ve been there!
Visitor: You have? No one’s ever been to Roanoke! It’s dull as all heck! What were you doing there?
Duncan: I was staying with a friend in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we were starting to get cabin fever, so we drove to Roanoke to see that terrible Mel Gibson film, Braveheart. That wasn’t a pretty sight. Tell you what though, those mountains were spectacular, and the landscape around there was just beautiful. As we drove along you could see eagles circling up in the sky… amazing.

So this is how I know what the tourists like about Orkney, conversations carried out all summer long, across the cheese counter.

But what about someone who lives here, or lives anywhere? Can they really ‘like’ their place? It’s not a Facebook post of a friend’s new pushbike or relationship status or political opinion. You can’t just get up in the morning, look out the window, and click a ‘like’ button to express mild and barely-considered approval of what you see. Those kinds of ‘likes’ are about reminding a far-flung friend you exist and are aware of them, maybe that you’re supportive of whatever they’re doing or buying or thinking. But that’s not what goes on in your own mind when you look out your window or walk down the road. That’s more likely to be a complex of plusses and negatives:

—Blue sky and sun, that’s a good start. But bushes leaning north-eastwards and cloud out beyond Hoy, so maybe a bit of rain coming in later.

—Small cruise ship anchored off Stromness. Busy day for the town, good for the shops and cafes and pubs.

—Still can’t believe that guy got planning permission to build that house down by the shore: does not fit in at all. Still, have to admit it’s quite modern and interesting, and anyway it’ll all be gone in a few years with the sea rising!

—Oh, there goes Billy down the road in his John Deere 6125. As usual, fifty miles an hour, on his phone, and his wee boy bouncing about the cab. Is it true what they say that tractors don’t have to obey the Highway Code? That they’re agricultural vehicles so can do what they like? Certainly seems to be here … Like taxi drivers in Kirkwall: no seat belts and wrong way round the roundabout: they can, because they’re taxis, it’s the law! (So they say.)

—Jesus, and now that bloody hen harrier’s back, cruising along and back the length of the garden, peering down into the bushes. I know what you’re after, you bastard, it’s the baby blackbirds, but you’re not getting them, I like blackies singing in the garden.

Here, hold my laptop: I’m off to throw some stones at a bird of prey. What is that? Is that liking Orkney? It doesn’t feel like it to me. It just feels like living Orkney.

Duncan

 

Dear Duncan

I feel the weight of your plusses and minuses, including the sweat of heaving heavy boxes—however tantalising their contents—at times when many of us might be doing nothing more strenuous than lifting a morning cup of coffee; the tractors careening down streets; the anti clockwise taxi drivers. And the hen harrier threatening to silence the garden blackbird. Much though I mourn the persecution of harriers on the killing fields of the grouse-moored uplands, that’s worrying. But to be honest, (sorry to be an anorak, though I do have the relevant jacket) that sounds much more like normal behaviour for a sparrowhawk than a harrier. A few years ago, a sparrowhawk slew the blackbird that liked to whistle the ‘da-da-da-DA’ phrase from Beethoven’s Ninth at the gable ends of my roof. I’ve not heard that whistler’s like again. Household birds apart, your comments also make me think about the balance sheet of emotions in how I relate to my own home place, on the Black Isle. I could say that I’m writing this at my kitchen table, where I often work, looking across a few miles, beyond the surrounding farmland, to the corries of Ben Wyvis, wondering when the first snows will come. But I’m travelling backwards at the moment, returning north to Inverness on an overcrowded train (as is normal on this line) and both ‘liking’ (there’s that word again) and loathing the increasing popularity of the Highlands to visitors. There’s a guy squashed-in beside me who’s dressed as superman, though his face is painted in zombie tones of fungal green and congealed-blood red. He and the Aussies across the passage are swapping tales of their trails and travels. Think he’s on his way to a stag party, while the girl in the wizard’s (not witch’s) hat down the carriage—who knows?

All a contrast to the Black Isle, highlighting how part of what I’ve always relished about life there is the relative quietness, and the sense of un-crowded space. Space to notice small things, such as subtle sounds in the woods behind my house … the way the click of a pine-cone on a track could mean there’s a crossbill feeding in the tree overhead. How else can I notice, not only the day, but also the very hour of autumn when the first skeins of pink-footed geese arrow-in from Iceland to glean the stubbles after harvest? The way my children might explore the woods, and later, dig full-on, adrenalin-boosting downhill mountain bike trails among the conifers, without anyone really noticing that they, or the bike tracks, were there.

Those are some of the plusses, as are the overlapping communities of interest here, such as among those of us who help to promote live performances of music, drama, poetry and more in small local venues. I know that’s no different to how things work in countless other places across Scotland—across many other parts of the world, perhaps.

But it’s part of what I value about ‘living the Black Isle’, as you do living Orkney.

It can also be one of the minuses; the way, for example. that communities of interest can rapidly circle wagons when faced with perceived threat and then fire at supposed adversaries in the parish. That happened some years ago, when there was a chance of community ownership of old woodland nearby. The woodland was part of what was classed as a farm, but had barely been worked as such in recent times. But that categorisation was enough for the community of farming interest (both practitioners and relatives) to react as if the sky would fall if anyone other than one of their own were to have a say in how the woodland was used and managed.

The bitterness and division engendered by what should have been a straightforward and positive process was almost frightening. In some ways, it taught me a great deal about how quickly group behaviour can turn from friendly interactions to something much more sinister. It also showed how there’s no straightforward way of defining what a particular place means to people living there, let alone to visitors. Where I thrill to the sounds of the wild geese overhead, as Neil Gunn did when he lived not far from here a few decades ago, a farmer might see a threat to winter-sown crops. Where I see an average stretch of Black Isle coast, my nearest neighbour down the track (not long deceased, and sorely missed) would think of possibilities for outwitting water bailiffs and catching salmon. Come to think of it, that chimes with some of Neil Gunn’s writing. Hugh Miller—a son of Cromarty, just a few miles away, both wrote of the local scene in the early 19th century in ways that I relish, especially in his close observations of wildlife—a relative rarity in his work—and people he knew on the peninsula. Those meld in his description in ‘My Schools and Schoolmasters’ of when a party of ‘herd-boys’ had stormed a humble-bee’s nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging inwards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base—the foramen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers more scrupulous than Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very great consternation their honey all to themselves.

Elsewhere (and I don’t have the book to hand) Hugh Miller also talked of his dislike of the long miles of heath and pines and bogland on the Black Isle, now shrunk to fragments since his day, which I’d love to see restored. If perceptions of place could be GPS overlays, I suspect there would be as many as there are individual inhabitants. So I know that my perceptions of Orkney, though shaped by many visits to many different islands and influenced by George Mackay Brown, Viking sagas and things such as the tunes and songs of the Drevers and the Wrigley sisters, are simply the mix I’ve been able to make mine. Billy in the John Deere might well think me daft.

But I’m minded to take a different track now. That’s part of the pleasure of essays as a writer or reader, of course (if, as you say, this staccato communication is indeed such a thing): the way you’re never sure—maybe don’t want to be sure—where the next few sentences might lead. Casting back, it’s like moving through the kind of blanket bog I was describing earlier. You think you see the direction of travel, but it’s impossible, assuming you don’t want to risk getting up to the oxters—or worse—in sodden moss or bog pools—to go in a straight line. Some of that, I assure you, is hard work, since making a mistake when you’re out there alone in cloud so low you can barely see your feet (as happened to me a few weeks after that greenshank encounter), could be life threatening. At least essays, whatever the barbs literary critics might throw, might be safer.

Another thing I can tell you that I often see from this part of the peninsula is liners. Cruise ships by the score, docking across the Firth at Invergordon to disgorge tourists in thousands to be taken in coaches across the Highland mainland. It’s hard to imagine how such numbers could descend on somewhere of such modest size and narrow streets as Kirkwall. Here, the similarly small town where the cruise passengers land won’t be high on their wish lists for selfies against a northern backdrop. But the hulk of the defunct aluminium smelter and the oil rigs parked inshore could say more about that place and the people who live and work there than the photo opportunities they’ll seek elsewhere. I’m sure that many of those travellers, between the diversions of shopping, are more minded to share images taken with an old castle behind, or Loch Ness, or maybe the place where both castle and loch could be caught in one frame (plenty of potential for ‘likes’ there). They’ll have journeyed in hopes of glimpsing ‘Nessie’, that prime economic asset of the Highlands and as improbable—and potent—as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.

Santa, reindeer, north: now that last word is one that has excited me since childhood. Still does, even though the ways I think of it could be as much to do with my imagination—and the words and images of writers and northern artists whose work I relish—as with the realities of life and land beyond where I now live.

North: unless you’re standing precisely at the pole, there’s always a north. And from where I’m sitting, Orkney is part of that ‘north’.

Superman has left the train, by the way, but the wizard is still aboard.

Kenny

 

***

 

Dear Kenny

The idea of the North appeals to me too. I have gazed reverentially at William Heinesen’s old house in Torshavn, and watched Mairi Boine sing at mild blue midnight, the jagged peaks of Lofoten behind her. (By the way, I never made it over to Lofoten; if I had, I’d’ve had to have made one of my randomly generated trips to Å at the southern end of the archipelago. Of course, I would then have been obliged to find the legendary lost city of Z in the Brazilian jungle …)

So tourists are attracted to places by fictional animals like Nessie, and fictionalised versions of real people like Mary Queen of Scots, and fictional locations from Outlander. But what attracts and excites you and me is just as fictional: the notion that ‘North’ is something more than a relative geographical description; the idea that George Mackay Brown’s fantasies describe an Orkney that ever really existed; the wish-fulfilment that Sigrid Undset’s politics represent the values of far-northerners better than Knut Hamsun’s.

It’s all projection, isn’t it? ‘Imagined Spaces’ is exactly the right phrase: we invent a space or place in our minds that we want to believe in, and then set out to find it. We travel solo on foot to some wilderness free of human contamination (other than ourselves, who are not contaminants, of course, but neutral observers.) Or we go as a family to campsites in Normandy for that authentic French countryside experience, the back of the car full of iPads and Rice Crispies to keep the kids happy. Or maybe we hole up to work on a draft of a novel in North Ronaldsay or Graemsay because the Mainland of Orkney is just not Orcadian enough—a more concentrated essence of Orkney is required to steep in than the complex, diluted reality of the Mainland.

Which brings me to a surprising place where I find myself in sympathy with the liner passengers. Most of them, in my experience, don’t come on a cruise in order to visit a particular imagined place. It’s the travelling that’s the important thing. They’re not travelling TO anywhere; rather they are voyaging THROUGH a series of places. It could be half a dozen coastal towns from Portsmouth to Oban to Kirkwall to Invergordon. Or it could be northern seas from the North Sea to the Baltic to the North Atlantic.

Cynical and weary tourist industry workers claim that the cruise liner passengers often have no idea where they are. To which I reply, So what? Travelling, hopefully, is better than arriving. These liner folk travel day and night, on they go, always moving, pausing only briefly to draw breath in a town, yet another town, at the end of a pier, at a mooring out in the bay. Some come on land by footbridge or tender and spend a few hours—‘Where are we?’—wherever they are. Others choose to stay on the boat, sleeping or eating or gazing out at the shore: ‘There’s a town there, but I’m not going to it. Mustn’t get hooked in, must keep moving. I hate the stops, love the journey.’

When the shore visitors walk or bus back to the harbour, there’s a whole row of those ‘How was your experience?’ signs. You know, the ones you pass once you get through airport security, with the sad face, the neutral face and the happy face. There they are, a dozen or so signs lined up, all with, HOW WAS YOUR ORKNEY? in big bold letters. And as they go through, the visitors have to punch one or other face to register the extent to which they’ve liked their hours here. Every cruise port has such a set-up, apparently. And the good news for us is, Orkney gets more smiley faces punched than any other place in the UK.

The tourist board are actually planning to install a whole series of those punchy faces across the key sites of Orkney: HOW WAS YOUR SKARA BRAE? HOW WAS YOUR OLD MAN? HOW WAS YOUR BETTY CORRIGAL’S GRAVE? Only then will they be able to accurately assess the extent to which these various attractions are realising their potential in the tourist economy. Any which are found to be pulling less than their weight risk demolition or at least demotion from the tourist brochures to the history books.

All of which fantastical nonsense leads me to conclude that it is time for me to draw my part of this conversation to a close. By rights at this point I should assess the success of my contribution and punch myself in the face, which I may well do after rereading what I’ve written.

But before that I will finish by quoting lines from another Orcadian writer, Edwin Muir, which pop into my mind unbidden and seem relevant. In life he went south, but in his work he often came back north. Whatever the direction, there was always restless movement. Rather than spaces, imagined or real, there was the journey, ‘The Way’:

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.

Duncan

 

Dear Duncan

Little did I reckon, when we began this correspondence, that a cruise passenger could lead me, through your words and reflections, into the heart of Nordic literature. Nor that this would make me reconsider ways in which some of its most famous writers raise questions about the relationship between art and artist, or how much of ourselves we project in concepts of place, including ‘north’ and the notion that this is anything more, as you say, than a relative geographical description.

The passenger disembarking at Kirkwall, in the company of perhaps thousands of other fellow travellers, morphs in my mind to a solitary figure and a much smaller ferry. The place is an island in north Norway, where a wooden jetty juts into dark waters. No one is there to meet the traveller, who walks towards a wooden house near the shore. The boat leaves. In a while—maybe days, maybe months from now—the traveller will go back aboard the ferry and depart, never to return. The wanderer’s name could be Knud Pedersen, could be Hamsun. But that’s my projection, my personal imagining. Because I think my name is in there too. Yes, North can simply be a cardinal point. But for me (and for you, I think, through both your home place and your knowledge of writers such as Heinesen, which suggests an interest not typical of many Scottish writers, editors or publishers) it’s also a concept that can stir imagination and creativity. There’s something more than the simple law of averages that means that some great writers, past and present, have come from northern countries.

In that context, I’ll admit that I wrestle with my enduring admiration for the power of Knut Hamsun’s prose. I was introduced to his work long ago, by a lover in Norway who gave me a copy of Pan. Its opening sentence, about the Nordland summer’s eternal day, can still haunt me. So do passages where the words seem to sing, especially in Norwegian, such as: ‘Sommernetter og stille vann og uendelig stille skoger’ (Summer nights and quiet water and endless quiet woods). Then he adds: ‘No calls, no footfalls on the roads; it seemed my heart was full of dark wine.’

As Thomas McGuane, writing about ways people relate to nature has said, Scandinavians differentiate between loneliness and solitude as a matter of course. I recognise that distinction, both in my own life and in Hamsun—the way he can raise a glass of that dark wine, but also, with his twists of voice and disdain for convention, throw it down to swig an entirely different liquor. Not least in Pan and Mysteries as well as the better-known Hunger, some of his work from the close of the 19th century still seems surprisingly modern. That includes, as Isaac Bashevis Singer said, his subjectivity, fragmentariness, use of flashbacks and his lyricism. Those comments are all the more remarkable because Singer wrote principally in Yiddish, while fellow Nobel laureate Hamsun spent his final years as a prominent Nazi sympathiser in occupied Norway.

Nina Frang Høyum of the Norwegian National Museum describes Hamsun as ‘a national cultural trauma’, but adds that his relevance is not only in his greatness as an artist, but also in how he can lead to debate about the relationship between fiction and society and the role of art and the artist. I know also that Sigrid Undset’s life and art was very different to Hamsun’s. Vocal in condemnation of the Nazis though the 1930s, she had to flee to Sweden, then the US, when Norway was invaded in 1940. Her eldest son died at Gausdal in the spring of that year, fighting for the resistance. When she returned to Lillehammer after the war, Sigrid published nothing more. She had earlier sent her Nobel medal to raise funds for Finland in the Winter War. Hamsun had sent his to Goebbels.

So, as you say, ‘it’s all projection, isn’t it?’ in perception of a space and place—and perhaps the art—we want to believe in. But what you say to conclude that observation seems crucial: that we then set out to find that imagined space. I know that describes what has always motivated me to think about, then seek, northern places. What—in addition to the skill of their writing—still draws me to Hamsun and Undset, Per Petterson, Lars Saabye Christensen and poets such as Olav Hauge. Which, prompted by your recent words, will lead me to seek more of the work of William Heinesen, who seems adept at moving from the particular of small-town Torshavn to the universal and back again. So—thanks for sharing ideas through a chunk of this year, where the subjectivity, fragmentariness and flashbacks have been part of the fun.

I’ve been to Å, by the way—on Vesterålen, so a bit to the north of the one you mention on Lofoten. It seems that Norway has seven of them, which could certainly be the start of a journey, either through the wider country, the whole alphabet, or only to places named without consonants.

I wish you well with the travellers who visit and for ventures in writing and publishing.

For me, North still flickers on the screen, still lures. I appreciate how you—and I hope both of us—have added some new frames to the projected story.

Kenny

 

***

 

Postscript: in further correspondence beyond this essay, the writers discovered that Sigrid Undset had called at Kirkwall on her return voyage from wartime exile in the US to Norway in 1945. She seems to have disembarked, since a copy of one of her books, The Longest Years, signed by her with a dedication and thanks to Winifred Clouston, widow of Orkney-based novelist and antiquarian J S Clouston—who had died the previous year—had recently been offered for sale by a local bookseller. Kenny is now the keeper of that book. The coincidence of Sigrid Undset coming ashore in Kirkwall and the track of some of the ideas in the essay is still a source of some amazement for the writers, and may even suggest future paths of inquiry.

 

Imagined Spaces, edited by Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low is published by The Voyage Out Press, priced £14.99.

It’s been nearly ten years since Alan Bissett published his last novel, Pack Men, so BooksfromScotland were delighted to hear that he has just released a novella with independent publishers, Speculative Books. Susan is far from lazy, packing in a weekend full of high jinx in Bissett’s story and told in a brilliantly unique way – we won’t give away the surprise, you’ll have to buy the book to know what we mean! Here, though, we share an extract, which sees Susan spending the night in a swanky hotel.

 

Extract from Lazy Susan
By Alan Bissett
Published by Speculative Books

 

Fancy some Led Zeppelin? he says.

Wee bedside light’s oan. Much better vibe noo.

Is that rhymin slang again? I says, hinkin through the possibilities an comin up blank.

Naw! he scoffs. Nivir heard Zeppelin?

Nup.

Aww man, Susie, he says, they were lit wannay the biggest rock bands ivir.

Noo, I dinnay really like rock music, but if sumdy’s passionate aboot sumhin ye should gie it a shout, try an feel whit they feel.

They invented aw that rockstar behaviour, he says. Groupies an mountains ay coke an trashin hotel rooms an worshippin the Devil. You’d have fitted right in wi them!

Hmm, I says, I dinnay want tay trash nae hotel room. Hotel rooms are for chillin in. An the Devil’s welcome tay lit hang wi us an that, but I’ll no be worshippin the cunt. Disnay work lit that pal!

Haha, he goes, ye ken whit I mean though.

dae I?

Stick them oan then, I says. Lit’s hear whit they’ve goat.

William presses play an straightaway this big sound bursts oot the speaker. Ooft, I goes.

Fuckin Kashmir, he says, as starts drummin in time tay the massive beat.

We listens tay it for a while, an I shuts ma eyes an lets it happen tay me. Eftir a while I opens them an goes: that is relentless.

Zeppelin, man, William says. Hammer ay the fuckin Gods.

I nods deeply, feelin the song’s vibe, but then William takes a deep breath an ootay naewhaur goes Susie? I… I dunno how much longer I can keep daein this.

Keep daein whit?

This, he says, openin his haun up as if that says iviryhin. I’ve been burnin the candle at baith ends an I feel lit…lit I’m gonnay crash against the shore or sumhin eventually. Dis that make sense?

Naw, I says. How can a candle crash against a shore?

He nods lit a wee dug in the back ay sumbdy’s motor, an looks lit a forlorn wee boy for a second. Whit I’m tryin tay say, Susie, is… this is ma final fling wi ye…

An his face hings there jist sortay tryin tay gauge ma reaction tay this.

See folks, I reflect the cunts I meet. You go low, I go low. You go high, I go high. You git high, I git high. Ye’ve just got tay gauge folks’ energies. Whit’s their deal? Match it. Dinnay come in disruptin them wi yer ain hing. Meet them whaur they are an ivirycunt becomes a soundcunt. Ye reflect back at folk whit they want ye tay be, an that wey ye’ve goat them oanside forever.

Charles Manson said that. He took it too far eh? But he had a loat ay gid ideas.

William, I says aw saftlike, it’s fine. I’m jist glad for the time I goat wi ye.

Ye’re no…ye’re no upset or nuhhin?

I dis the face. The face they aw need tay see. Well sure, I’ll miss ye. I like talkin tay ye, I like oor banter, but I unnerstaun. Ye need tay take care ay yer relationship. I respect that.

Kent you’d git it, Susie, he says, an it’s like sumhin’s been

released in him.

Course I git it, I says. That’s why ye like me. Cos mair than ony cunt: I. Git. It.

I dae like ye, he says, smilin.

Nods ma heid in time tay that bulldozer ay a beat. Whit a tune, man, I jist says.

Epic, he says.

Points at him an raises ma eyebrows. Jist lets a wee smile hing there in frontay him for a bit. Hunner percent mate, I says.

 

Next mornin we’re haulin oor bags oot the taxi ontay the train station platform, comedoons an hangovers collidin gently. We got nay fuckin sleep cos we were up bletherin till aboot hauf five eftir that, toppin up oan lines, movin fay Zeppelin ontay The Orb. William’s choice. Kinday chilled-oot but dancey at the same time. Loved it. Noo we’re gittin separate trains back tay oor separate lives.

Well, whitiver ma life is.

I’m no sayin ye’ll never hear fay me again, he says, as his train appears – the wan takin him tay Glesga for the Rangers gemme – an he starts inchin forward wi his bag.

Jist shrugs. Ye ken whaur I am, I says.

Gie nuhhin awa. Nivir ivir come acroass as weak, needy or entitled.

He nods a bit sheepishly, then there’s a wee glint in his eye jist as the train pulls tay a big noisy stoap in front ay us. That wis a gid night though eh? he says.

Oh aye, I grins, a classic. An he gets oan the train, takes his seat, waves at me, winkin, as the train pulls awa, an I wave back at him, an I ken fine that in aboot five months ma phone’ll ping an it’ll be William textin that he is in a club, high as fuuuuuck

 

The best feelin x

an I’ll jist reply

Aye mate. It is x

 

His train disappears roon the bend an I looks up an doon the empty platform, lit it’s a dusty stoap in the auld Wild West. Still an oor til ma train doon the East Coast tay the Edinburgh Festival. Whit a fuckin MADCAP weekend this is gonnay be, an oaff tay a great start hooooo

Takes a selfie ay me staunin unnerneath the sign that says STONEHAVEN, posts it tay Instagram wi the comment

Current stoap aff on the magical mystery tour through life that is me!

 

adds an emoji that’s wearin glam-rock type glesses, then finds a bench an sits doon, knackered.

Ma phone pings wi a text, an I looks at it. It’s fay William.

 

Xxx

 

Smiles then deletes it. Nivir be the last wan tay reply. Keep yer power.

An oor tay wait for ma train. Comedoon startin tae settle ower me gghhegh. Whit tay dae noo?

 

Lazy Susan by Alan Bissett is published by Speculative Books, priced £9.00.

The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line is the perfect novel to read while see through the dark, January days. And we’re not the only ones who think so – the novel is the current Radio 4 Book of the Week! We caught up with author, Ruth Thomas to chat more about the book.

 

The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line
By Ruth Thomas
Published by Sandstone Books

 

Happy New Year, Ruth, and congratulations on your new book The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line. Could you tell us how you came to write this novel? What did you want to explore in writing it?

My novels usually begin with a particular location or atmosphere in mind. In this case, I kept picturing a slightly fading old academic establishment set in fields somewhere, and this eventually crystallized into the shape of the Royal Institute of Prehistorical Studies, in Greenwich Park. The institute is imaginary, of course, as are various aspects of Greenwich Park (as it appears in the book, anyway). Some bits, like the view across the Thames and the path leading past the Altazimuth Pavilion, are real, but atmosphere is more important for me than sticking religiously to facts. I probably had most fun with this novel describing the outdated working practices at R.I.P.S (as the Institute’s known) and its somewhat eccentric staff. Hand in hand with the place (when I first envisaged the novel) came the main character, Sybil. I worked out a lot of her story as I went along, but I knew from the start that she should be a young woman feeling solitary and adrift in this peculiar setting, and with a lot of personal baggage to sort out. I think once you have a setting and a person to put in it (whose dilemmas you really care about), you’ve got the starting point of a plot.

 

The book has lots of memorable characters with their own eccentricities, flaws and vulnerabilities. Would you consider yourself a people watcher? Do you take note of things you observe in everyday life?

I wouldn’t describe myself as an active people watcher, which sounds a bit worrying! I also never take notes. I envy writers who remember to carry a notebook or laptop around so they can jot things down. I never seem to have the relevant things with me at the right moment; I just sit at my desk and try to recall scenes later. Most of my writing is about reflecting and ‘getting into the zone’ (if that doesn’t sound too hippy!) Like a lot of writers I’m also probably a bit of an introvert – more of a listener than a talker – so I do find social interactions interesting to observe, and I find ‘larger-than-life’ characters fascinating. So I probably file mannerisms and conversational tics away without even being particularly conscious of it. There seems to be so much scope for some conversations to go down odd, tangential pathways, particularly if the speakers don’t know each other all that well. I think that’s what draws me to the potential for comedy in dialogue. I suppose the characters in The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line are basically amalgams of people I’ve met over the years, and the kinds of conversations I’ve had with them. One of the most useful things anyone’s said to me as a writer was ‘Remember that everyone, even a pretty terrible person, has elements of light in them as well as shade.’ That’s what makes them believable. I always try to remember that.

 

The novel is set in the world of archaeology. Has this always been an interest of yours? Or was there another reason you decided to choose this setting?

When I was an undergraduate I studied Archaeology for a year alongside my main degree, English Literature. Ever since I was a child I’d liked the idea of becoming an archaeologist – partly because, pootling around my family’s back garden, I used to come across little bits of broken blue and white china and imagine that they might have come from some amazing piece of ancient pottery. Once, aged eight or so, I came across some abandoned old ceramic insulators from an old phone pylon, and fantasized that they were Roman goblets! My sister and I even wrote to Blue Peter about them (though, oddly, we never got a reply…) Tangible objects say such a lot about human lives, whether it’s a recyclable cup made in 2021 or a bracelet from the Bronze Age. Actually, for this reason, I think writing and archaeology are quite comparable. Some of the best writing, I think, centres around physical objects rather than abstract ideas: it’s the small ‘throwaway’ things that make up the bigger picture. So basing the novel around an archaeological institute of some sort seemed quite a natural way for me to proceed. I also just wanted to write about a museum. I love museums – particularly small, old-fashioned ones. Some of my favourites are the Grant Museum in London, the Bell-Pettigrew in St Andrews and the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparitive Anatomy in Paris. That one in particular is quite a gothic marvel, and it’s actually where I drew most of my inspiration for the gallery at R.I.P.S.

Having said all this, I was not a particularly impressive Archaeology student! Like Sybil, I had problems finding The Beaker People all that interesting. It really did seem to me, in lectures, that we were just looking at a series of slightly dull earthenware pots (a very Philistine thing to say, I know…) I think I’d pay a lot more attention these days and hopefully make more intelligent connections, but at the time I often found myself day-dreaming, and wondering when the end-of-lecture bell would ring. For the novel I wanted to revisit that youthful sense of impatient lethargy, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I also wanted Sybil to realise, at some point, that she could be missing out by not taking new and interesting things seriously.

 

You pepper the novel with Sybil’s poetry, a project she has taken on to get over heartbreak. What does poetry mean to you as a writer and a reader?

I love poetry but have discovered, after much trial and error, that I’m not a poet. My poems always seem to extend themselves into sentences, then paragraphs, then start forming themselves around a character and a setting! I love imagery and brief allusions to things, but find that I can write it all better in prose. A few years ago I spent some time lecturing in creative writing, and my students and I would talk about poetry as well as novels and short stories, and the qualities they share. We’d discuss the way poetry often draws on story-telling ideas, and prose can work brilliantly when it uses poetic devices to conjure up certain moods and atmospheres. Although I’m not a poet I’m really conscious of the value of metaphor and rhythm and pace, at a sentence level, in novels and short stories. Prose has to have as much impact on the ear as poetry does. I think someone like Grace Paley is a great example of a short story writer who worked like a poet. She’d make these brilliant imaginative leaps and introduce all kinds of strange imagery into her stories. It made her collections seem like wonderful, sparkling jewels, so full of light and colour, and so memorable because of that. These days I run a reading group and have been thinking a lot more about poetry alongside the prose we read. For me the greatest poetry seems almost to transcend time. We were reading John Clare’s ‘November’ recently, which is all about a day in the countryside where the fog is so thick that the poet can only hear some cows very nearby in a field, rather than see them. It feels so existential and other-worldly. He wrote it in the 18^th century but it could have been written yesterday.

 

Other than poetry and fantasising on possible revenge, do you have any advice on getting over heartbreak?

That’s an interesting question! I think I was trying to work that out myself, on Sybil’s behalf, over the course of the book. I suspect – although it sounds like a cliché – that forgiveness is vital if you’re going to move on from having your heart broken. Also, you have to engage with new things and try to make new connections. During the novel, Sybil comes across the poem ‘A poison tree’ by William Blake, where the first lines are: I was angry with my friend/I told my wrath my wrath did end; I was angry with my foe/I told it not, my wrath did grow. I wanted to write about the way Sybil was keeping her feelings of betrayal and loss very closely guarded when it might have been better if she’d confided in someone. Not speaking was probably not the healthiest thing she could have done. There were bound to be repercussions.

 

What books have you read recently that you’ve enjoyed?

Like a lot of people, 2020 was a pretty good reading year for me, and it looks as if 2021’s shaping up to be the same… One book I really enjoyed was Wilful Disregard by the Swedish writer Lena Andersson. It tells the tale of Ester, an academic and poet, obsessively in love with a famous artist (who is, it’s clear to the reader if not to Ester, a pretty unpleasant and self-regarding man.) As well as being quite tragic in some ways, it’s also extremely funny. Lena Andersson is so good at describing the humiliating and rather awkward lengths her heroine will go to, to be with the object of her desire. Another book I loved was Kevin Barry’s short story collection, Dark Lies the Island. He’s a brilliantly funny writer, often working with very dark themes. ‘Across the Rooftops’, one of my favourites, manages to be both wistfully beautiful about a potential (most likely doomed) romance, and also very down-to-earth. I love writers who combine the ethereal with something very ordinary. Winter in Sokcho by the French-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin is also very good. Set in a border town between North and South Korea, it’s brilliant at describing the melancholy of a small, backwater town where most people seem to spend all day gutting fish, while the young protagonist so keenly wants to get away and begin a new existence. I’ve been reading a lot more literary essays recently, too. They are such a wonderful form of prose. Last year I read a lot by the Irish essayist Chris Arthur, who’s written some incredibly moving and wonderfully observed pieces in his collection Words of the Grey Wind.

 

Other than reaching readers with your new novel, do you have any other wishes for 2021?

Of course it’s a massive cliché to say ‘world peace’ but, writing this a day after the storming of Capitol Hill, it seems even more relevant this year. I wish that, after the pandemic is finally in retreat, decent principles and sane, fair policies begin to emerge. There’s such a divide at the moment in so many areas – health, education  and work opportunities being three of the most obvious. On a quieter, more personal front, I also wish that we can start going back into bookshops and cinemas and museums again before too much longer. And theatres and cafes. They feel like such a huge absence in our lives at the moment. I wish, and hope, that 2021 will end a lot more calmly than it started – in like a lion, out like a lamb.

 

The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line by Ruth Thomas is published by Sandstone Books, priced £8.99.

Catch the Radio 4 adaptation here.

The works of George Orwell have now gone into the public domain and this month sees a flurry of activity surrounding his most famous books. David Robinson looks at a selection and finds a brilliant exploration of Orwell’s life and work.

 

Barnhill
By Norman Bissell
Published Luath Press

The Last Man in Europe
By Dennis Glover
Published by Polygon

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Jura edition)
By George Orwell with introduction by Alex Massie
Published by Polygon

 

Next time you are in Hong Kong, check out the bookshops. These days, most of them are run by Beijing’s Liaison Office, which is another way of saying the Chinese Communist Party. But if you go to Kowloon, get off the Metro at Diamond Hill and walk south, you’ll find yourself in Pat Tat Street.  At the Well Tech Centre, take the lift to the 27th floor, and – provided the pandemic restrictions have been lifted and he is still in business – you might come across a New York-born former civil rights lawyer called Albert Wan.

Wan is the owner of Bleak House Books (bleakhousebooks.com.hk), which might lead one to expect a haven of Dickensiana. It’s not – the name is just a nod to his past career – though if you’re looking for a good selection of both new and second-hand English language books, it looks well worth the trek out from the city centre. Those who make the journey, though, often don’t buy what he expects. ‘We want to be selling more literature, more kids’ books,’ he told the Financial Times last month, ‘but everyone wants to buy Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.’  Books by George Orwell, he says, ‘fly off the shelves’.

Hong Kong’s limits on freedom of thought and expression were becoming apparent even before the introduction of the national security law last July. As far back as 2015, when five employees of Causeway Bay Books were abducted from Hong Kong to China, booksellers realised that  stocking politically sensitive books was an increasingly risky business. ‘So far, we haven’t been kidnapped,’ says the bravely cheeky Twitter bio of @bleakhousebooks.

To Hong Kongers, the dystopian vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four must seem increasingly plausible. But there’s another reason for Orwell’s appeal: it’s not just his work but his life too. As Wan says in another online interview, ‘I admire Orwell very much, for the way he lived his life as much as for the way he wrote.  He belongs to the rare breed of writer who never sold his soul to make money or become famous.’

As Orwell’s books come out of copyright this month, a flurry of books are putting both his life and work in clearer focus. Polygon is the first out of the traps with a special ‘Jura edition’ of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which comes with an introduction by Times columnist Alex Massie, who lives on the island where Orwell wrote it. Massie is honest enough to point out that there’s actually not much to connect the two: although Nineteen Eighty-Four is sometimes claimed as a Scottish novel, its topography is firmly Londoncentric, and the central London of the BBC and the wartime Ministry of Information at that. Jura’s importance, Massie suggests, was that life there gave Orwell the necessary distance from Grub Street – both in miles and mind – that allowed him to concentrate on what was to be his final novel.

But if the presses have been rolling with new editions of Orwell’s work, there have also been two new books about his life, both debut novels. Norman Bissell’s Barnhill (Luath, £8.99), named after the Jura farm where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, focuses on the writer’s last six years, with the third-person narration occasionally interrupted by first-person accounts from Orwell and Sonja Brownell, whom he married in hospital three months before his death from TB in January 1950. Though well researched and more detailed on Orwell’s life on Jura, it suffers by comparison with Australian writer and political commentator Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe – Orwell’s original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four – which Polygon is also publishing this month.

It’s a question of focus. Even though Glover’s novel goes a lot further back into Orwell’s life, it is more tightly written and hardly mentions his relationships with women after his wife’s death in 1944. This isn’t too surprising, as Glover is really more concerned with understanding Orwell’s mind than his life – a tall, if not impossible order, but a bit more feasible with a writer whose Complete Works stretches to 20 volumes. It helps that he echoes his subject’s style, with sentences like ‘It was a bright warm evening in August and the barrage balloons were drifting in the sky’.  In case we didn’t catch the reference, the prologue has already reminded us of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s famous opening (‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen’). But this isn’t just an exercise in literary mimicry: Glover is enough of an Orwell expert to also weave in the kind of facts that most of us probably don’t know – like, for example, the fact that at least two of his novels had also started with the ringing of clocks and that when Orwell actually wrote that sentence, at Barnhill, in April 1947, it was midday on the first day of Double British Summer Time, when he really did have to move the hour hand of his watch forward by an hour. More impressive still, he tells you all of that so subtly that it doesn’t look like showing off.

When those barrage balloons were drifting overhead, it was 1940.  In Orwell’s diary entry for 25 July, he noted that while walking to work in London he’d started wondering where would be the best places to site machine gun nests against the German invaders. He is imagining revolution, cadres of radicalised soldiers, defeated and demoralised at Dunkirk, moving in on the Ritz, setting up a very British soviet in the Savoy. And then the clocks move round and round and war turns away from the  immediate danger zone, and he realises that he was wrong to expect revolution, or even to wish it, and that the possibilities of socialism can only be realised by men freed from the kind of hate he’d seen first-hand in Spain, which revolutions seem  to engender and which can only be guarded against by political mindfulness.

And that’s why Glover’s Orwell is so credible. He was wrong about the Savoy soviets, just as he’d been wrong so many other times in his life, just as we all are. Wrong to give Keep The Aspidestra Flying a happy ending in the hope of making it a commercial success. Wrong perhaps to start his new books with the sound of church clocks: too lazy – at least until he revises the sentence and comes up with clocks sticking thirteen. Wrong to try his hand at reportage in the north of England when all the committed lefties had already left for Spain. Wrong, in Spain, to be fighting in the dullest part of the war, on the Aragon front, instead of filing copy from the beating heart of the republic in Madrid. And then, in 1937, still recovering from being shot through the neck and meeting up again with his wife Eileen in Barcelona, so completely and hopelessly wrong about politics that his worldview turned inside out.

In The Last Man in Europe, Glover vividly shows how Orwell was shaken by the betrayal in Barcelona, when he arrived in the city only to find that Soviet-supporting Republicans had taken power and were hunting him down, having already arrested and killed a number of his colleagues. According to the latest historiography* Orwell was a poor interpreter of events there. Be that as it may, we wouldn’t have had Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four without it.

This is surely the moment – though only a two-sentence memory in Bissell’s novel – when Orwell starts to become the kind of unfooled, focused writer who could have produced either of his last two novels, and Glover describes it with cinematic flair. Of course, film could indeed do justice to moments like Orwell’s terror in Barcelona, but – provided it’s written skilfully enough to mask all the research – a fictionalised biography is far better way of showing the steady accretion of other influences and images.

That’s exactly what happens here. I’ll give you an example. When Orwell is working at the wartime Ministry of Information (Telex address MININFORM, run by Brendan Bracken, aka BB) one of his colleagues is literary critic William Empson, then an enthusiastic supporter of a programme of Basic English, which involve severely limiting vocabulary in order to assist its spread as a world language. How would Basic English define, say, Hamlet’s insanity, Orwell asks. ‘Wrong-thinker,’ he is told. ‘A first step to criminalising thought altogether,’ Orwell muses. At no stage is Newspeak mentioned. It doesn’t need to be.

Fictionalised literary biography is a hard art to master. It demands almost the same amount of research as a biography, but also the ability to show how characters change through time (like Orwell’s wife Eileen, from sparky young socialist to hollowed out by grief after her brother’s death at Dunkirk) and to reanimate key moments in their life. Glover’s is highly readable, massively informative, even to the extent of coming up with a plausible hypothesis that changes the meaning of the final sentence in Orwell’s final book.

If you’ve remembered the clock’s striking thirteen at the start of Nineteen Eighty-Four, you’ll also remember how, at the end, brainwashed by Big Brother, Winston Smith concurs that 2 + 2 = 5. But this was too defeatist, Glover’s Orwell realises: it didn’t allow for hope. If 2 + 2 = 5, there’s no possibility of truth and Big Brother’s victory is comprehensive and final. It’s like that poster he saw in Spain, the Communist one of the boot ‘stamping down on all who resist, forever’.

That is the way the US edition ends, but Glover suggests that he changed it for the British edition, which was altogether more open:

2 + 2 =

I don’t know which hypothesis is correct, but I know someone who cares even more than I do about the right answer. Albert Wan is, he tells me, such a great Orwell fan himself that he has himself made the pilgrimage to Barnhill. He hasn’t read either Bissell’s or Glover’s book, so I’ve sent him both, and I know that he will enjoy them.

 

Barnhill by Norman Bissell is published Luath Press, priced £8.99. The Last Man in Europe by Dennis Glover is published by Polygon, priced £8.99. Nineteen Eighty-Four (Jura edition), with introduction by Alex Massie, is also published by Polygon, priced £7.99.

* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/06/george-orwell-homage-to-catalonia-account-spanish-civil-war-wrong

When Gavin Francis isn’t writing his fantastic books, his day job sees him work as GP in a surgery in Edinburgh. His latest book, Intensive Care, shares his experience of the COVID year of 2020, and though often tough reading is a hopeful and necessary read. Here, we share an extract where Gavin talks to Rankin Barr, and his work with the homeless during the pandemic.

 

Extract taken from Intensive Care: A GP, a Community and COVID-19
By Gavin Francis
Published by Profile Books

 

Listening to the story of Barr’s weeks in the hotel it was clear that GPs, district nurses and carers didn’t have a monopoly on intensive care in the community – that the work he and his colleagues were putting in had been transformative in the good it had done, and was continuing to do. But at the same time I wondered how sustainable the model was – if after only two days the hotels had filled up. But of the eighty people taken in over those first two days, Barr told me, forty-five had already been moved on to more permanent accommodation, and new homeless residents had come in to fill the vacated places. ‘Lots of those presenting now are not your traditional rough sleepers. They’re coming from broken relationships, and with lockdown they can’t go to family, they can’t go to B&Bs.’

Around half the rough sleepers in the city are originally from other EU countries, and at imminent risk of losing their right to be in the UK due to Brexit. ‘Half of all our residents are classified as “no recourse to public funds” – they can’t get benefits and aren’t eligible for housing. They’re not registered as UK citizens.’ The Streetwork team had been working with an immigration expert to clarify each resident’s legal status, and help those stranded without papers and who wanted to go home to do so. Fourteen of the eighty current residents were waiting for a decision by the Home Office. We talked about some economists’ dark predictions for the autumn, of the economy going into free fall and of the wave of destitution that would result. Barr had access to a discretionary government fund for ‘innovative and creative’ solutions to rough sleeping, part of which could be used to repatriate people who needed to get home. ‘I’ve got nine people from Romania who are just waiting for the airlines to open again,’ he said.*

Meanwhile, a vaccination programme had just commenced at the hotel. I said I had heard how difficult it was to implement effective immunisation in such a fluid population. Barr nodded. ‘Public health have been trying for years.’ It was amazing to see how quickly the challenges of caring for rough sleepers had been overcome in the city, when the political will and funding was there. Impressive, but at the same time sad, given how simple the solution turned out to be. Covid was transforming, reorientating society in ways both good and bad, as if all the old hierarchies were being pushed aside and new possibilities were emerging.

I asked Barr how long he thought he could keep going. ‘We’ve funding for six weeks more at least, and I’ve had assurances that they’ll give me at least a month’s notice – a month to find other solutions if the money is going to dry up.’ But he was optimistic about the future. ‘I sit on a committee of all the housing and homeless charities in Scotland, and Kevin Stewart [Scotland’s Minister for Local Government, Housing and Planning] sits in on it. All the years I’ve been working in housing, we’ve never had that before, a cabinet minister sitting in on our meetings.’

We were back at the main door. I had a clinic to get back to, and Barr had work to do. ‘It’s the wee things that have made these weeks so extraordinary,’ he said. ‘The other day we had a birthday party for someone who has been on the streets since the age of nine. Nine! Rough sleeping or in squats since she was a wee girl.’ His face shone. ‘You should have seen her face. She’d never had a birthday party before.’

* By late August Barr had arranged the repatriation of thirty-six of the hotel’s residents.

 

Intensive Care: A GP, a Community and COVID-19 by Gavin Francis is published by Profile Books, priced £16.99