The Weather Weaver is a brilliant adventure story where we meet the anxious 11-year-old Stella as she travels to Shetland for the summer holidays to spend time with her grandad who is still grieving the death of his wife and Stella’s gran. In Shetland Stella discovers a magical skill that takes her on wild journey where she will have to summon every ounce of courage she has. In this opening chapter we meet Stella as her ferry approaches Shetland.
Extract taken from The Weather Weaver
By Tamsin Mori
Published by UCLan Publishing
Shetland
STELLA hung over the wooden rail and watched the inky waves, far below.
I know you’re down there . . .
As if in answer, a sudden swell made the ferry tip and her stomach rolled. She’d never liked being out on the open water, but the nightmare had made it worse. She couldn’t remember all of it. Deep, dark water. The feeling of drowning. In the daytime, the details always faded, like mist in sunlight.
Mum always blamed it on Gran – all her tales of sea witches and selkies, blue men and sea monsters. Stella didn’t really believe the stories any more, but deep water still made her uneasy. She couldn’t shake the feeling there was something down there, watching.
‘We’re close now,’ said Dad, his eyes twinkling. ‘The edge of the world!’
It did feel like it. They’d been travelling for ages. Always north. Until the air was clear as crystal and the only sound was seabirds. Dad nudged her. ‘You excited to see Shetland again?’
‘Can’t wait,’ she said.
Ever since they’d moved away, Stella had been longing to come back, but now it was really happening, it felt alarmingly real.
‘It’d be better if you were staying too.’
Dad put an arm round her shoulder. ‘We’ve talked about this.’
‘Just for like, a few days?’
‘You know we can’t,’ said Dad. ‘That’s the whole point of you coming here. Mum and I have got to work.’
Work. Always work.
Other people’s families went on holiday together. That was the point of holidays.
‘It’s important, what we’re doing,’ said Dad.
More important than me. Stella narrowed her eyes at Dad, but he just smiled at her.
‘I could come with you?’ she said. ‘I could help.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Dad. ‘You’d be bored out of your mind. Besides, I don’t think they allow children on research vessels.’
Stella pulled a face to show what she thought of that.
‘Hey, you’re the one who’s been pestering us to come back here!’ said Dad.
It was true, but Stella had always imagined all of them coming back, as a family. Not just her, on her own. She was excited to see Grandpa again. The bit she wasn’t looking forward to was Mum and Dad leaving. Six weeks was a long time.
Dad shook her gently by the shoulder. ‘Happy thoughts, remember?’ he said. ‘I know you’re nervous, but you’re going to have a great time.’
Stella curled her toes inside her shoes. Maybe she would. Maybe it would be amazing.
‘Come on,’ said Dad. ‘Name one thing you’re looking forward to.’
Stella thought about it for a moment. ‘Hot chocolate,’ she said.
In a big mug. With cream instead of milk. And loads of shortbread to go with it.
‘More than I’d be allowed at home,’ she added, daring Dad to disagree.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ he said. ‘With cream? Shortbread to dip?’
Stella nodded. He remembered.
‘So, hot chocolate. What else?’
‘Seeing puffins again,’ she said. ‘Real live puffins.’
‘Tammie norries,’ Dad reminded her. ‘Get Grandpa to take you to the lighthouse. They’re nesting, this time of year. You’ll be able to get right up close.’
It was hard to stay cross with Dad, even when he deserved it. Somehow, he always knew what to say.
Puffins. Right up close!
‘I’m looking forward to staying with Grandpa too,’ she said.
It would be strange seeing him without Gran. They were always a pair. Salt and pepper. Bread and butter. Gran and Grandpa. Now it was only Grandpa. But it would still be brilliant to see him. It had been such a long time! Six whole years. The last time she saw him, she was only five.
“’you think he’ll recognise me?’ she said.
Dad smiled. ‘He’ll recognise you alright. But I daresay he’ll be amazed. His favourite little girl, all grown-up and independent,’ he said.
Stella’s heart glowed with pride. She stood up straighter, turned her face into the wind and let her knees bounce, riding the movement of the boat, like a proper Shetland sailor.
The deck bucked over a wave and she grabbed for the rail again. How did Dad make it look so easy?
‘There it is,’ he said and pointed at the horizon.
Stella squinted at the distant dot and her stomach flipped like a mackerel. Soon she’d have to say goodbye.
The Shetland mainland looked like a little limpet. A small grey hump hunched low in the sea. As the boat drew gradually closer, the cliffs loomed taller. Seagulls whirled and swooped down the sheer rock face like stunt pilots.
On the skerries, close to the shore, dozens of seals were sunning themselves like fat black sausages. Stella pointed at them in excitement. ‘Sleeping selkies!’
‘I’d forgotten you used to call them that,’ said Mum, joining them at the rail.
‘They’ve made a welcoming party for you,’ said Dad.
‘Remember the selkie story?’
‘Of course I do,’ replied Stella. ‘I’ve got the book with me.’
‘Shetland Myths and Magic? No wonder this rucksack’s so heavy!’ said Mum, hefting it in her hand. ‘How on earth did you fit it in?’
‘I took some stuff out . . .’ said Stella.
‘What?!’ said Mum. ‘What stuff?’
Stella could practically see the packing lists scrolling through Mum’s mind.
‘Nothing important,’ she said. ‘Just spare socks.’
‘There wasn’t spare anything!’ said Mum. ‘And I already packed a stack of books for you. That one’s falling apart!’
Stella felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment. Shetland Myths and Magic was very tatty now. And a bit young for her. But it was still her favourite.
‘Gran always used to read it to me,’ she said. ‘Coming back here, I just felt like . . .’
‘It was a good idea,’ interrupted Dad, firmly. ‘Grandpa will be pleased.’
Mum shook her head and looked doubtfully at Stella’s two bags – probably wondering what else she’d taken out.
Dad put a reassuring arm round Mum’s shoulder.
‘It’s not a problem,’ he murmured into Mum’s hair. ‘Socks can be washed. She’s going to be just fine.’
Stella gave him a grateful smile.
‘Come on, tell us what else you’re looking forward to,’ said Dad.
‘The northern lights?’ she said.
Dad shook his head. ‘Not this time of year. Right now, it’s the Simmer Dim – summer twilight, so it won’t get properly dark.’
Never dark? thought Stella. I’ll be able to stay up all night!
‘That doesn’t mean you get to stay up all night, mind,’ said Mum.
Mum did that sometimes – knew exactly what she was thinking. Usually when Stella was trying to get away with something.
‘It’s the holidays,’ said Dad. ‘A few late nights won’t hurt.’
‘I was thinking more of your father,’ said Mum. ‘I should think he’ll want his sleep, even if Stella doesn’t.’
‘You’ll be fine with Grandpa, won’t you?’ said Dad.
It wasn’t a real question. It was just to make Mum feel better.
She almost told him that, but a glance at Mum’s face changed her mind.
‘I’ll be responsible,’ she said. ‘And super helpful. And I’ll go to bed at bedtime. And I’ll wash my own socks if I haven’t got enough. You don’t have to worry. I’ll be completely fine.’
I will, she thought. I’ll be fine. Her stomach was doing little somersaults. Just think of it as an adventure, she told herself.
Stella breathed in as they slipped through the narrow opening in the harbour walls, as though she could make the boat thinner by sucking her tummy in. The harbour was packed with fishing boats, their lines clinking and clanking.
There was a great whirr and growl of thrusters as the ferry lined up neatly alongside the wall. Two crewmen leapt ashore and looped ropes around the bollards that sprouted on the dockside like massive mushrooms.
Stella peered over the side. Ropes of dark-brown seaweed tangled beneath the surface. She counted five jellyfish.
I do NOT want to fall in there.
A scrap of the nightmare surfaced in her mind: a feeling of being trapped, tangled in seaweed.
Dad picked up her suitcase in one hand and walked down the gangplank, as calmly as if he were taking an afternoon stroll, then headed off along the dock.
Stella glanced back at Mum. Dad had made it look easy, but now it was her turn.
She took a deep breath for courage. Also, in case she fell in.
Don’t think that! It’s not going to happen.
The gangplank bounced as she walked along it. Three short steps – with her arms out wide, like a tightrope walker – then she jumped off, onto the concrete, and let the breath out again.
It felt good to have solid ground under her feet.
The Weather Weaver by Tamsin Mori is published by UCLan Publishing, priced £7.99.
This month sees the release of Linda Cracknell’s novella The Other Side of Stone, a historical fiction story that centres around a cotton mill in Perthshire. In the novella, we follow the lives of a 19th century stonemason, a rural suffragette and a modern day architect to explore the themes of the industrialisation of rural Scotland and the struggles for women’s rights. Here, author Linda Cracknell writes of the inspiration behind her story.
The Other Side of Stone
By Linda Cracknell
Published by Taproot Press
It was the year 2000 and I was thrilled that my first collection of short stories Life Drawing had been published. But it wasn’t long before people were asking what was next. ‘Of course you’ll have to write a novel,’ they all advised, ‘to be taken seriously by publishers.’ So supported by a Scottish Arts Council bursary, I skulked off to think up a novel.
It began with a young ambitious architect. A fit, outdoor man, previously a climber, he was fixated on converting a disused industrial building into superior apartments and making a bit of a killing, despite his wife’s reservations. Somewhere in Highland Perthshire, where I’ve lived since 1995, I imagined them settling in to one of these apartments not long after completion. But he was ailing with some weighty weariness, a mysterious illness, and not everything seemed well with the building either. I always suspected it harboured a secret or some kind of harm. But I hadn’t entirely decided on the nature of the building.
When I lived in Devon in the 1980s my first job was in a defunct Victorian woollen mill. Abandoned as a commercial anachronism, it was frozen in time, economically unviable with its gloomy halls of stilled spinning machines and historic steam engine. I remember the darkness and quiet in this vast, fourth floor building with its stench of lanolin. Decades of neglect could be heard in the dripping from the roof, seen through glassless windows. Absences were evidenced by a half-eaten sandwich and a bookmarked, unfinished paperback abandoned on a windowsill when the final round of redundancies were announced.
We were to convert the place into a working museum. I began as a general labourer, then worked on the interpretation of the site to visitors and finally became education officer. As a result I learned quite a lot about the industry – its processes, organisation and the near demise of the woollen industry in the 20th century when artificial fibres became popular. The experience gave me a great respect for the historic significance of wool textiles and the universality of weaving as a fundamental structure. It didn’t take much of an imaginative leap to transplant such a building into a small, fictitious Highland Perthshire village. Although not as centralised as the woollen industry in either Yorkshire or the Borders, there had been clusters of wool manufacture here.
I’m always interested by hidden histories and knew that this building still looming over the village with buddleia ranging from its roof might act as an archive in stone and glass, even if converted for housing. But what exactly was it that had happened there?
My fiction nearly always begins with two or three preoccupations tangling with each other and refusing to be un-knotted. I can trace the journey of The Other Side of Stone back through drafts and re-drafts, photographs, press cuttings and scribbles in notebooks; files and files of research notes.
It was serendipity that brought me Catharine. Whilst scouring the Perthshire Advertiser microfiche in the AK Bell Library for historic evidence of the woollen industry and related industrial action, I was distracted by a headline from March 1913:
WENT TO CANADA
LIFE WITH A SUFFRAGETTE
I couldn’t help reading on. It was a long account about a man in Kinloch Rannoch suing his wife for divorce in her absence in Canada. Following his refusal to sign necessary documents to allow her to train as a nurse, she’d stopped cooking his food, begun reading books including Tolstoy, and become a suffragette. I tried to tear myself away from this ‘irrelevant’ story, but not long afterwards was diverted from my intended search by a second headline:
THREE PERTHSHIRE MANSIONS BURNED
HAVE THE SUFFRAGETTES BEEN AT WORK?
I was amazed to read that arson attacks had brought three grand houses not far from my home to the ground, and it was thought to be the work of ‘the militant voteless women’. Now I was hooked. Should I begin again – a different novel, a historical one? What might it be like to be a suffragette in a small rural community?
Catharine erupted out of the collision of these ideas, fiery and passionate about unionisation and suffrage, a cotton spinner from Paisley in love with a woollen weaver with origins in a Perthshire village. It was a marriage built on shared political and egalitarian values, or so she thought, until he took up a position in the village woollen mill in 1913 and she fought on alone for her own meaningful work and women’s suffrage. And so the idea of linked narratives a bit less than a century apart was born, and all those drafts followed.
It never did make it as a novel but neither would the characters and location desert my imagination. I was lured on by the idea of the building as a focus of anger and expectation, a repository of history and a sense that its trajectory might stand as a microcosm of the state of a country. Minor characters and their periods stepped from the shadows and demanded their own platforms. Locked in or locked out, struggling to save the place, find meaningful work or escape from its demands, Catharine was somehow central to all of them.
That’s how this novella came to take in stories of the mill between its building in 1831, and a sort of finale in 2019. And across the years all those intertwined lives have been watched over by the same steep hillsides of bracken, birch and heather, seasonally changing their colourways to match the different weave of tweeds.
The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell is published by Taproot Press, priced £14.99.
Writer and critic James Campbell knew the James Baldwin for the last years of Baldwin’s life, and their friendship fed into Campbell’s biography of the great writer, originally published 30 years ago. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin is being republished this month with a new introduction, and is still vital reading for anyone interested in the life and work of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.
Extract taken from Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin
By James Campbell
Published by Polygon
The boom years of the 1920s—the era of the consumer revolution, of mass production and the assembly line, of great building in New York and fortunes on the stock market—scarcely touched America’s 16 million black citizens. Moreover, a population the size of Canada’s could look in vain to find itself represented in national literature, art, drama, or the cinema, unless to serve as nannies, doormen, or grinning entertainers (“Black girl, stretch / Your mouth so wide”). Out of this determined anonymity in the 1920s emerged an abstraction called the New Negro, who embodied the aspirations of the rising generation. Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, the cultural phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance came into being. Among its leading lights were James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. Encouraged in some cases by white editors and patrons, such as Carl van Vechten and Joel and Amy Spingarn, they and others produced a stream of novels, poems, plays, and essays reflecting the experience of the modern American black.
The main activity of the Harlem Renaissance took place in the years immediately before and after James Baldwin’s birth. In 1924 Alain Locke was preparing an anthology to be published under the title The New Negro. Yet the mass of blacks in Harlem were as little affected by the so-called renaissance in their midst as they were by the “boom” they might hear in the downtown distance. “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Harlem Renaissance,” Langston Hughes remarked in his autobiography The Big Sea (1945). “And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”
The Baldwin family certainly had at once more basic and more lofty concerns—food and worship—and even when he came to artistic conscious-ness in the early 1940s James Baldwin showed scant interest in the cultural movement that had flourished in the neighborhood during his childhood.
The puritanical regime which his father exercised under his roof was one reason for Baldwin’s lack of interest in the black renaissance; but what is more important is that from the moment he first knew he was going to be a writer—a writer or nothing at all—Baldwin set his course for the mainstream. The conditions were, to say the least, unfavorable. When he began to write in earnest in the mid-1940s, only one black writer in the history of America, Richard Wright, had been treated to national acclaim. But for Baldwin the important thing was to become an artist; to make oneself into a “Negro writer” was to accept the patronage of the literary world, and one’s place in the second rank.
While his subject matter, even in his juvenilia, was more often than not black, like Wright and a majority of American writers of the time he looked to Europe for formal models. The evidence contained in “Black Girl Shouting”* apart, he left behind scarcely a hint that he even held an opinion about the prime movers of the Harlem Renaissance: Toomer, Johnson, and McKay he never mentioned in print; Hughes was to be the subject of a scathing review in the New York Times in 1959. As for Cullen, who had been a teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, Baldwin passed no opinion on his poems and was later unable to recall which subjects he had taught.
The first artist to exert a strong personal influence on him was not a writer at all, but a painter. By the time Baldwin met him, Beauford Delaney was already a respected and admired figure among the artistic community of Greenwich Village. Henry Miller wrote a long essay extol-ling the painter, “The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney” (1945), which speaks—like all accounts by those who knew him—of Delaney’s gentleness, kindness, and ready friendship: “Beauford retains the green vision of a world whose order and beauty, though divine, are within the conception of man. The more men murder one another, bugger one another, corrupt one another, the greater his vision becomes.”
Born into a poor black family in Tennessee in 1901, Delaney had come north in the 1920s. To Baldwin, who met him in 1940, five years before Miller paid homage, he was to prove a teacher; in the young would-be writer, more than twenty years his junior, Delaney found a willing pupil and a friend for life. Addressing a group of women prisoners at Riker’s Island, New York, over three and a half decades later, Baldwin said: “The most important person in my life was and is . . . Beauford Delaney.”
Recalling the day when he first knocked on Delaney’s door in Greenwich Village, Baldwin wrote:
He had the most extraordinary eyes I’ve ever seen. When he had completed his instant X-ray of my brains, lungs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal column (while I said usefully, “Emile sent me”) he smiled and said, “Come in,” and opened the door.
He opened the door all right.
Cullen apart, Delaney was the first genuine artist Baldwin had met. His attitude toward the Harlem Renaissance poet was one of schoolboy to schoolmaster, whereas he found Delaney warm and friendly, with a gift for instruction by example. In his studio at 181 Greene Street, Baldwin heard recordings of Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith—all forbidden at home—and listened to the older man talk about painting. “I learned about light . . . he is seeing all the time; and the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.”
Delaney was important not only for his aesthetic teaching, but for the precedent Baldwin found in his way of living. Delaney was neither famous nor rich; yet he was incontrovertibly an artist. And although he was a black artist, his work was not complicated—or simplified—by matters of protest. He tried above all to do his duty as a painter: to see clearly and to put down what he saw, to bear witness.
In the same year that Baldwin met Delaney, an important event took place in American letters: the publication of Native Son by Richard Wright, perhaps the first novel by a black American to be regarded in the literary world as a work of major significance. These two encounters—with Delaney in person, with Wright through his novel—together form the most profound influence on Baldwin in his teens. His career at the Magpie had already helped him chart a route to his proper subject: his people, seen through the lens of his own self. Now Beauford Delaney opened the door on a way of seeing. And Richard Wright showed that a black writer need have no fear of competing with whites on equal terms.
These meetings also had their effect on Baldwin the preacher. The sacred, it turned out, was not the only domain to scrutinize in search of the “everlasting life”; looked at another way, perhaps the Holy Ghost might be identified here on earth, among human beings, in works of art. (Baldwin had yet not reached the stage where salvation would be pursued via the profane.) Beauford Delaney taught him that art was a way of celebrating the material world, of transcending it and returning to it some-thing of itself in coherent, meaningful form.
* Black Girl Shouting
(first published in James Baldwin’s school magazine, The Magpie)
Stomp my feet
An’ clap my han’s
Angels comin’
To dese far Ian’s.
Cut my lover
Off dat tree!
Angels comin’
To set me free.
Glory, glory,
To de Lamb
Blessed Jesus
Where’s my man?
Black girl, whirl
Your torn, red dress
Black girl, hide
Your bitterness.
Black girl, stretch
Your mouth so wide.
None will guess
The way he died
Turned your heart
To quivering mud
While your lover’s
Soft, red blood
Stained the scowling
Outraged tree.
Angels come
To cut him free!
Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by James Campbell is published by Polygon, priced £14.99.
Satan, Dracula, Sauron, Lord Foul, Darth Vader. The motif of the Satanic Dark Lord is ever-present in science fiction and fantasy, a malign intelligence seeking to thwart the Chosen One. In this study, prize-winning author A J Dalton considers how our understanding and characterisation of Satan has developed over time. In this extract, Dalton lays out one of the earliest uses of Satan as a literary character.
Extract taken from The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy
By A. J. Dalton
Published by Luna Press Publishing
A close study of the history of Satan as a literary character thus allows us to understand the changing values and relationships of society. It also helps us understand how science fiction and fantasy are a reflection of, and direct comment upon, the moral, spiritual and philosophical condition and realities of their society. Without such an understanding and appreciation of Satan and SFF, I would argue, we are far lesser readers and far lesser individuals.
2.1 The Dark Lord and the white knight
It may surprise some to learn that Satan does not appear as a personification of evil in the Old Testament (OT) of the Bible (c.400BC). The serpent in the Garden of Eden is never named as Satan or described as any sort of supernatural entity. Indeed, rather than being a character’s name, the original Hebrew term ‘satan’ is a generic noun meaning ‘adversary’ (Kelly, 2006). Of the 27 uses of this noun in the OT, 17 of them are entirely generic/non-specific references to ‘the satan’ (it is unclear whether the agency is angelic, human or otherwise), seven more refer specifically to human beings, and two (including 2 Samuel 24) refer to an Angel of Yaweh acting on God’s behalf. The remaining reference in 1 Chron 21 simply references ‘a satan’ in a repeat of the story (told in Samuel) of David being punished by the Angel of Yaweh.
If we get any sense at all of Satan as a single, named character from the OT, it is as an angel of God’s celestial court carrying out the sacred tasks of God’s will. Far from being banished to some burning hell, Satan is one of heaven’s glorious representatives, honoured with the role of testing the worthiness of humans and punishing transgressors. Satan, therefore, acts as a divine prosecutor, only ‘adversarial’ in that he is an advocate of divine-will-as-the-law.
It is not until the New Testament (NT), approximately five hundred years later, that we have Satan as the distinct and named ‘devil’ with which modern audiences will be more familiar. This later version of Satan is diametrically opposed to the will of God, is as monstrous as it is seductive, represents sin in all its guises and only has a malign intent towards humankind.
With the increased characterisation of Satan’s nature in the NT, we also have an increased amount of description of his physical manifestation(s). It is the NT that claims the serpent in the OT’s Garden of Eden to be one of Satan’s avatars, and he is also described variously as ‘an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns’, ‘a dragon that can spew water like a river’, ‘the beast’, a demon who can possess humans, one who can mark the heads and hands of his followers and ‘a thorn in the flesh’ (Biblica, 1978).
Therefore, the move from OT to NT sees Satan go from holy agent to a being who is entirely demonic in both behaviour and appearance. We must wonder what has happened in the five hundred years between the writing of the OT and NT to cause this ideological shift in representation. A closer examination reveals that the NT makes certain telling references and gives us some clues. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus instructs John of Patmos:
‘To the angel of the church in Pergamon write:
These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. I know where you live – where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city – where Satan lives.
(Biblica, Revelation 2: 12-13)
It appears that particular problems had occurred for the Christian faith in the city of Pergamon, and that these problems were due to an evil intent or ethos personified in Satan. By understanding what happened to the Christian priest Antipas, and the politics surrounding his death, we will see that the character of Satan was actually used to ‘demonise’ all those who were not Christian. This construction of Satan, then, was the product of the Christian faith engaging in a form of caricature-based political propaganda.
Pergamon was an ancient Greek city in what is now eastern Turkey. During the time of Antipas, who was executed in 92AD, the city was governed by Rome and was a regional and political capital. It was the site of one of Christianity’s seven major churches in Asia Minor, but also had major temples dedicated to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis (Osiris twinned with Apis), to Athena twinned with Zeus, as well as to several other Greco-Roman gods and even to the Roman emperor himself. The city was also home to a famous school of medicine (where the renowned Greek doctor Galen himself practised) dedicated to the god of healing Asclepius, whose symbol was the snake. Purportedly, Antipas, whose name translates as ‘against all’, was killed by pagan priests and the followers of Serapis for refusing, when tested, to declare the Roman emperor as ‘lord and god’ above all (Renner, 2010). The manner of Antipas’s death is well documented: he was placed inside a life-size metal statue of a bull (the Brazen Bull had been previously gifted to the city by King Attalus, 241-197BC) and a fire was set beneath it; the screams of his death would have echoed inside the statue and sounded as if the bull was bellowing; the god was thereby brought to ‘life’ by the human sacrifice. Scholars such as Renner (2010) believe that the Brazen Bull would have been located upon the Great Altar of Zeus (the throne of Satan mentioned in Revelation) – an altar which took the form of a magnificent set of marble stairs and colonnades surrounded by a frieze (the battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods for supremacy of the cosmos) – atop the acropolis of Pergamon. From there, the public execution could be better seen and heard by all those in the city.
With Pergamon described as the home of Satan, its temples described as Satan’s throne, and the murderous attack on the priest of Christianity representing the action by which the devil ‘lives’, Satan becomes the personification of all pagan or non-Christian religions and all physical and political attacks upon Christianity. He is synonymous with bloody sacrifice, scheming, false idols, lies, cunning tests, death and brutality, fire and screaming, the animalistic, and a struggle for dominance and dominion. In terms of physical representation, he takes on the horns of a bull and the forked tongue of a snake. References to the bull might come from Apis the bull god, Zeus as a bull, or the golden calf of Exodus. The forked tongue of the snake, on the other hand, might relate to Asclepius (whose healers interfered with God’s will by way of their arcane arts), or the snake upon the god statue at the temple of Serapis as the Egyptian symbol of rulership and power, or yet again the snake in the Garden of Eden, or the ancient serpent that is the dragon. Finally, we see that the place over which he presides is a place of horror, torture, unholy spectacle and the public witnessing, endorsement or celebration of both sinful and sacrilegious acts. It is the exact opposite of the Kingdom of Heaven; it is literally hell-on-earth. It is not a place of ‘light’ (for Jesus is ‘the light of the world’, in John 8); rather, it is a place of darkness and the fires of punishment.
The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy by A. J. Dalton is published by Luna Press Publishing, priced £12.99.
Will Purdom was a plant explorer and pioneer in reforestation and ecological management. The Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh have just published a biography, written by Francois Gordon, and here he tells us why is an important figure in botanical history.
Will Purdom: Agitator, Plant-hunter, Forester
By Francois Gordon
Published by RBGE
Until recently, the sum of wisdom amongst those few enthusiasts of horticultural history who knew anything at all about Will Purdom was that he was the ‘old China hand’ who between 1909 and 1912 collected moderately successfully in north-west China and Tibet for the British nursery of Veitch & Co, and who in 1914/15 accompanied Reginald Farrer to the same region, an expedition described by Farrer in two books – On the Eaves of the World and The Rainbow Bridge – which are amongst the finest travel books of their period. When Farrer returned to Britain in 1916, Purdom stayed on. He died in Peking in 1921.
None of the above is false, but it begs a great many questions about how and why a working-class Edwardian botanist and gardener found himself collecting plants in China and was, a few years later, appointed as a senior adviser on forestry to the Chinese government and playing a key role in the adoption of scientific forestry management to restore and preserve China’s forests. The answers to those questions can only be understood against the background of the political turbulence and massive social changes in both Britain and China during Will’s too-short lifetime, as well as early efforts to reduce the damage done to the environment and climate as a result of human activities and the troubled and deeply problematical history of relations between China and the West in the century preceding the Communist Revolution.
Will Purdom was the son of a head gardener from Westmorland who trained at Kew, joined the Labour Movement (it was not yet a political party) and became Secretary of the Kew Employee’s Union. He was promptly dismissed, but even in 1905 this was illegal and he successfully appealed to the Board of Agriculture to be reinstated, a decision which so outraged the Kew Director that he resigned. Will then organised the only strike to date at Kew, and it’s perhaps not surprising that in 1908 Kew enthusiastically recommended him to the great British horticulturalist Harry Veitch as the very man for a three-year plant-hunting expedition to China on behalf of the Veitch nursery and the Arnold Arboretum in Boston!
Unfortunately, the Director of the Arnold Arboretum, Charles Sprague Sargent, insisted that Will should collect in the region of north-west China, largely unexplored by Western botanists, and the Tibetan border, where Sargent was convinced many new and exciting plants were waiting to be discovered. This was not the case, but Sargent and, to a point, Harry Veitch chose to believe that Will’s failure to send back a flood of ‘novelties’ was due to lack of effort on his part. Worse, for different reasons they both failed to give Will credit for those new plants he did send back. Will had a good eye for a plant and several of his collections – for example that staple of winter gardens Viburnum fragrans, the yellow-flowered Trollius chinensis, Clematis aesuthifolia (also yellow) and a fine Moutan peony – are very popular with British and American gardeners to this day. He also sent some fine trees, his real botanical love, including red-barked birch, several lovely flowering cherries and the Chinese horse-chestnut, an elegant tree which is increasingly planted in Britain as a medium-to-large ornamental.
All this was achieved in conditions of great discomfort and sometimes danger, especially when Will found himself caught up in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution which caused the abdication of the last Ch’in Emperor and replaced the centuries-old Imperial system of government with a Republic which struggled to assert its authority against a plethora of regional warlords. Will was collecting in the most troubled part of China and his survival is largely attributable to his unhesitating rejection of the deeply racist attitudes which were almost universal amongst foreigners in China, his determination to learn to speak Mandarin (which he mastered to a good standard with remarkable rapidity), and his matter-of-fact engagement on a basis of social equality with local officials, priests and farmers. Will was one of the tiny minority of Westerners who formed genuine and lasting friendships with Chinese people, who were able to offer help and advice without which he might well have fallen victim to the violence which swept China in 1911.
One of Will’s closest friends was the junior Ministry of Agriculture official Han An, a trained forestry expert who was determined to create a Chinese Forest Service to restore China’s lost forests, devastated by decades of disastrous logging. (Han is today revered in China as one of the founding fathers of Chinese scientific forestry). Will’s training in the Kew Arboretum made him a perfect fit for a key role in such endeavours, and Will himself was personally strongly committed to restoring and stabilising the eco-systems of northern China. But Han and his colleagues struggled to get their proposals through the labyrinthine Chinese bureaucracy and Will couldn’t afford to sit out what proved to be a three-year wait in Peking. Faute de mieux, he went home, where his past as a trade-union ‘agitator’ made it almost impossible for him to find employment and he retreated to his parents’ home in Westmorland.
Fortunately for Will, the Curator of the Royal Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, then as now the premier centre of excellence in Britain for the study of Chinese plants, recommended him to the flamboyant plant-collector and writer Reginald Farrer as the manager of the expedition Farrer was planning to north-west China. Farrer couldn’t afford to pay Will a salary, but offered him the chance to return to China with all his expenses paid. Will agreed, on the express understanding that he would quit the expedition if and when a Chinese Forest Service came into being. He and Farrer botanised quite successfully in 1914 and 1915, collecting inter alios some fine poppies, alpines, primulas and an elegant Buddleai (B. alternifolia), but Farrer’s plan to finance the expedition by selling plant material to connoisseurs at home did not survive the devastating effect on British gardening and horticulture of the First World War.
In the Spring of 1916, the Chinese government at last formally created a Chinese Forest Service and Will was appointed Forestry Adviser to the Chinese government. Will must have been deeply happy at last to have achieved a senior management position in which he could make his mark, and he and Han An began the back-breaking work of training Chinese foresters, develop tree nurseries and plant trees where they would do most good. By 1919, there were estimated to be over 1,000 tree nurseries in China, containing 100 million young trees and in the same year 20 to 30 million trees were planted on over 100,000 acres of otherwise unproductive land. Many of these were timber trees new to China, mostly from north America, which Will knew would do well in different Chinese regions and climatic zones. He organised the importation of many millions of seeds and cuttings, making him the only Western plant-hunter to have imported into China vastly more plant material than he ever collected there.
Will died suddenly in Peking in November 1921 at the age of 41, of an infection contracted following minor surgery. His Chinese friends and colleagues clubbed together to commission a large and elegant memorial stele in the Forest Service plantation at Xinyang, which was re-named the Purdom Forest Park. Remarkably, the stele and the park were both left alone during the violently anti-foreigner Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and they are both carefully preserved to this day. The epitaph is too long to quote in full, but a hundred years later the sorrow felt by those 54 of Will’s friends who subscribed to the stele is still very clear. Perhaps what would have most pleased Will is their description of him as “ a true and loyal friend of the Chinese people who won the admiration and respect of his colleagues, worked tirelessly for the reforestation of China and who, had he lived, would certainly have trained the next generation of Chinese foresters”.
Will Purdom was a fine and honourable man, who rose from a position of very limited personal agency and overcame formidable obstacles to leave the world a better place for his passage. Not only does he deserve to be remembered in his own right, but his life has a good deal to teach us about our place in this interconnected world, as well as reminding us that what we often think of as very recent concerns about protecting local eco-systems were current well over a hundred years ago. Finally, we should in justice remember him when we plant in our gardens or even when when we see, for example, “his” viburnum, buddleia or prunus.
Will Purdom: Agitator, Plant-hunter, Forester by Francois Gordon is published by RBGE, priced by £18.99.
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 16th 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 20th 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.
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