THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

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

 

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

 

The Flicker of North
Duncan McLean & Kenny Taylor

 

Hello Kenny

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

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

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

Duncan

 

Dear Duncan

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

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

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

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

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

Kenny

 

***

 

Dear Kenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duncan

 

Dear Duncan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenny

 

***

 

Dear Kenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duncan

 

Dear Duncan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenny

 

***

 

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

 

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

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

 

Extract from Lazy Susan
By Alan Bissett
Published by Speculative Books

 

Fancy some Led Zeppelin? he says.

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

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

Naw! he scoffs. Nivir heard Zeppelin?

Nup.

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

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

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

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

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

dae I?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep daein whit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ye’re no…ye’re no upset or nuhhin?

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

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

released in him.

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

I dae like ye, he says, smilin.

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

Epic, he says.

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

 

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

Well, whitiver ma life is.

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

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

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

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

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

 

The best feelin x

an I’ll jist reply

Aye mate. It is x

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Xxx

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

Catch the Radio 4 adaptation here.

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

 

Barnhill
By Norman Bissell
Published Luath Press

The Last Man in Europe
By Dennis Glover
Published by Polygon

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 + 2 =

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

We are certainly living through an era of great change, stress and strife,with a news cycle that can often seem overwhelming. In News and How to Use It, former journalist Alan Rusbridger helps readers make sense of our news media landscape. In this extract of his book, he introduces our current dilemma.

 

Extract taken from News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
By Alan Rusbridger
Published by Canongate

 

Who on earth can you believe any more?

I am writing this at the peak – or so I hope – of the most vicious pandemic to have gripped the world in a century or more. The question of what information you can trust is, all of a sudden, a matter of life and death.

As an average citizen you have four choices about where to find information on this new plague.

You can believe the politicians. That might work if you live in, say, New Zealand or Germany – less so if you are in Brazil, Russia, China, Hungary or the United States. And maybe not so much in Britain.

What about the scientists? As politicians have struggled for authority – or even understanding – some leaders thrust scientists and doctors into the limelight. We began to absorb many lessons in epidemiology, immunology, exponential curves, antibody tests, vaccines and the modelling of viral infections. And we learned that scientists disagree with each other. They harbour – and value – doubts. They even change their minds. To some this is reassuring; to others, confusing.

Or we can turn to our peers. As always, there is good and bad on social media; expertise and madness; inspiration and malicious nonsense. New words have been coined – infodemic and infotagion are just two – to describe an environment of viral information chaos which nevertheless has proved massively addictive as people the world over stumble in search of light.

And then there is journalism. There has been much to admire here: some brave reporting from inside hospitals and on the streets; some clear and honest analysis; some tough investigations into governmental advice and inaction; some brilliant visualisation of data and some admirably simple explanations of complex concepts. The best news organisations have performed a real, vital public service.

But – as with social media – there is bad to counter the good. Some were slow to grasp the immensity of what was happening. There will be a special place in journalistic hell for Fox News and its initial torrent of Trump-echoing propaganda. That coverage will have helped contribute to numberless deaths. There was lamentable confusion about how to cover the nightly parade of presidential lies, sulks, boasts and vainglorious irrelevance that flagged itself as public information. There was uncertainty about how to communicate risk.

Some news outlets – initially, at least – seemed unable to imagine the scale of what was happening: it was easier to report on what videos Boris Johnson was watching in his hospital bed than on the hundreds dying every day all around. The newsrooms that had jettisoned their health or science correspondents struggled. The idiots who suggested that 5G phone masts could be spreading the disease encouraged arson and trashed their own brand. So, it was a mixed picture.

Covid-19 could not have announced itself at a worse time in terms of the question about whom to believe. Survey after survey has shown unprecedented confusion over where to place trust. Nearly two-thirds of adults polled by Edelman in 2018 said they could no longer tell a responsible source of news from the opposite.

This was not how it was supposed to be.

The official script for journalism was that once people woke up to the ocean of rubbish and lies all around them they’d come back to the safe harbour of professionally-produced news. You couldn’t leave this stuff to amateurs or give it away for free. Sooner or later people would flood back to the haven of proper journalism.

This official narrative was not completely wrong – but nor was it right in the way the optimists hoped it would be. There was a surge of eyeballs to mainstream media sites, but it was too soon to judge if the increased traffic would remotely compensate for the drastic loss of revenues as copy sales plummeted and advertising disappeared. It normally didn’t.

At the very moment when the UK government recognised journalists as essential workers, the industry itself looked more fragile than ever.

Surveys of trust showed the public (especially the older public) relying on journalists, but not trusting them. Another Edelman special report in early March 2020 found journalists at the bottom of the trust pile, with only 43 per cent of those surveyed holding the view that you could believe them ‘to tell the truth about the virus’. That compared with 63 per cent for ‘a person like yourself’.

As the pandemic wore on, so trust in both UK politicians and news organisations slumped. Between April and May 2020, according to Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), trust in the government plunged a full 19 points – partly, it was thought, as a result of newspaper investigations which appeared to show double standards between what the government was saying and what its top advisers were actually doing. But if reporters expected gratitude for their efforts they were disappointed: the same period saw an 11-point fall in trust in news organisations.

I spent most of my working life in journalism: I would like people to believe the best of it. I like the company of journalists and, as an editor, was frequently lost in admiration for colleagues – on the Guardian and beyond – who were clever, brave, resourceful, quick, honest, perceptive, knowledgeable and humane.

But it was impossible to be blind to so much journalism that was none of those things: editorial content that was stupid, corrupt, ignorant, aggressive, bullying, lazy and malign. But it all sailed under the flag of something we called ‘journalism’. Somehow we expected the public to be able to distinguish the good from the bad and to recognise it’s not all the same, even if we give it the same name.

The official story paints journalists as people who tell ‘truth to power’. But ‘truth’ is a big word, and we seldom like to reflect on our own power.

Now, four years on from being full-time in the newsroom, I want to bring an insider’s perspective to the business of journalism, but also look at it from the outside. How can we explain ‘journalism’ to people who are by and large sceptical – which is broadly what most of us would want our fellow citizens to be? This book aims to touch on some of the things about journalism that might help a reader decide whether it deserves their trust, and offer a glimpse to working journalists of how they are viewed by the world outside.

 

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger is published by Canongate, priced £18.99.

The long-awaited third novel by Jenni Fagan has just been published, and BooksfromScotland know that it’s already going to be one of the literary highlights of the year. We caught up with Jenni to ask her about her favourite books.

 

Luckenbooth
By Jenni Fagan
Published by William Heinemann

 

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

First memory of a book would probably be reading fairy tales and taking it really seriously, I didn’t want to be the girl who had toads fall from her mouth (rather than pearls) because she said horrible things about people, I knew if I didn’t help an old lady at the well then I’d grow a scaly tail (I am elaborating) and much, much later when I discovered Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs that turns in circles and sits to rest and it all made perfect sense to me.

 

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

Luckenbooth is a love letter to Edinburgh. I moved here when I was three years old and it’s a city of extremes, dark and light, wealth and poverty, mercurial, moody, pretty, exasperating, it’s a big village with iconic aspirations and the history is always on show in our architecture and pubs and lots of other things, I wanted to explore the unseen, the strange, occult, brilliant, unnerving, the guttural howl and institutional malaise, all kinds of things. The novel travels through nine decades of different characters lives in an Edinburgh tenement but their stories are all tied together by a curse, placed on Luckenbooth, when the devil’s daughter moved in to the building in 1910. Jessie MacRae reappears all the way through in one way or another and we finally find out the buildings oldest secret right at the end.

 

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

I’m not sure any one book has informed how I see myself, there have been books that gave me a real ‘ah’, moment. The Color Purple by Alice Walker is about a young girl growing into a woman, in the American South in between wars. Celie is a young black girl born into poverty and her book takes the form of letters to God, and later her sister. Her life really called to me, her voicelessness and the journey she took all throughout her life was so inspiring, I read it first when I was a teenager and it meant a lot to me.

 

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

I liked reading Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak to my wee boy years ago, also The Hobbit, The Gruffalo’s Child was pretty good too. I am bonded by a love of certain stories to anyone who also has an affinity with them, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (among others), Breece D’J Pancake’s Trilobites, lots of Scottish female writers I discovered when I was younger, Laura Hird, A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith, Sandie Craigie, this could go on endlessly actually.

 

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

My favourite beautiful book is a very elaborate hardback edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s really pretty. I am a sucker for a good looking book. I read a lot of religious texts and books over the years and sometimes I revisit them, this one looks great on any book shelf though.

 

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

I would struggle to pin down one single book that is a ‘rattling’ good read, I’ll choose Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison for a book that hooks you in on the first line and returns you back to the world a day or so later, a much better person for it. Bone is such an amazing protagonist and I adore Dorothy Allison, I think she is one of America’s greatest living writers.

 

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

This is hard to pin down to one book but I’ll choose The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswaany. I read it when I was staying in a no stars pension in Downtown Cairo for a wee while, it tells the stories that are unseen and it made my time in Egypt so much richer for reading it.

 

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

A book that made me look at the world differently is Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. I return to it often. The story seems perfectly told. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as an ‘ungezeifer,’ we don’t have a translation for the original German word but it means some kind of monstrous vermin. He has tiny wriggly legs and a big shell for a body and he can no longer speak in a way that humans understand, he just screeches. It is the story of how the individual no longer exists if they are not serving the structures that surround them, family, workplace, government, firstly financially but secondly by not being ‘other,’ or a burden in any kind of a way. I love this book.

 

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

I do not read off the page. I have never even held a kindle. However, I love seeing flashes of poetry out in the world like Tracy Emin’s neon signs, or more recently I thought the projection of Kayus Bankole’s A Sugar For Your Tea, projected onto City Chambers in Edinburgh. The piece explored Scotland’s role in the slave trade and was so beautifully written, powerful and humane, it was a piece that greatly impressed me.

 

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

The book as the future, I am looking forward to reading a few things next, Helen McClory has a novel Bitterhall coming out in 2021, also Salena Godden has a novel out in January Mrs Death Misses Death, also Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josie Giles, a science fiction verse novel written in Orcadian, they are all on my list!

 

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan is published by William Heinemann, priced £16.99.

Author Richard Hallewell, known primarily for his walking guides, has used his extensive knowledge of nature to create this wonderful childrens’ story, which tells the tale of Ka, a jackdaw who discovers a special talent for communicating with other birds and animals. When he is banished from his family, he embarks on a journey to seek out the mythical figure of the Old Raven. On his travels he meets many creatures including, in this extract, two crows.

 

Extract taken from Ka, the Ring and the Raven
By Richard Hallewell
Published by Hallewell Publications

 

SO Ka flew north once more, now hugging the coast. At first, he didn’t stop to ask the way, but on the afternoon of the second day he began to spot strange crows, a piebald black and grey, and recognised the hooded crows described by Swartfeather. After that, whenever he needed to feed or rest he would always look for a hoodie, introduce himself, and ask about Riach and the Old Raven. Both were always known, but both were always simply ‘north’. On he flew, past hills and then mountains, crossing deep arms of the sea and offshore islands. The weather was mixed, but never warm: days of sharp winds and rain, and others of grey, bone-chilling gloom.

A week after he had started, the cloud lifted and the sun shone brightly, bringing an unseasonable warmth. Ka was flying through a landscape he could never have imagined a few weeks before: a line of huge, undulating cliffs, falling sheer into the sea, occasionally broken by shallow bays with wide sand beaches backed by low dunes and sandy grassland cropped by sheep. He began to feel a deep tiredness, and remembered one of Swartfeather’s lessons.

‘Fatigue will sneak up on you on a trip like this,’ he had said. ‘Watch out for it. It makes you slow and stupid. If you can’t rest then you can’t, but if you can, do it!’

Ka peered down at the land, looking for somewhere safe to roost. There were no trees and no buildings, but looking closely at the cliff top he spotted something else: two crows – or something like crows – a male and a female, striding across the short grass behind the cliff edge. They looked a little larger than a jackdaw, but smaller than Swartfeather, and, though their feathers were a glossy black, they had bright red legs and narrow, curving red bills. They were choughs. Ka drifted down and landed beside them.

‘Hello,’ he said, in a mewing cat-like voice which turned out to be perfect conversational chough. ‘My name is Ka.’

The choughs stared at him with astonishment for a moment, then glanced at each other, before the male bird said:

‘Hello. I’m Branek, and this is Eseld. I’m sorry . . . I do apologise for staring – it must seem terribly rude – but we have never seen a bird like you before . . .’

‘. . . And we certainly haven’t met any bird which could speak to us,’ said Eseld. ‘Unless it was another chough.’

‘I’m a jackdaw,’ said Ka. ‘From the south. And I haven’t seen any others like me on this coast, so I may be the only one. And I’m fairly sure I’m the only one which would be able to speak to you, anyway.’

‘How extraordinary,’ said Eseld, with enthusiasm. ‘We are new here ourselves, you see . . .’

‘. . . So, for all we knew, it might be absolutely typical of birds here . . .’ said Branek.

‘. . . We just couldn’t be sure,’ concluded Eseld.

Ka found himself whipping his head from side to side as the birds completed each other’s sentences. After the austere discourse of the crows and hoodies, he found the conversation charming, but he was so tired that he was barely able understand what the birds were saying.

‘I have to apologise again,’ said Branek. ‘We are here on our own . . .’

‘No other choughs, that is,’ said Eseld. ‘When we got paired up we decided to head off by ourselves and find somewhere of our own to live . . .’

‘. . . So it’s rather nice to find someone else we can actually talk to,’ said Branek. ‘We are not usually quite so talkative . . . I say, are you quite all right?’

‘Oh . . . just a little faint,’ said Ka, who was shocked to find that he was on the very edge of collapse. ‘I don’t suppose you know of anywhere I could rest up, do you? I seem to have flown a very long way and I need a sleep more than I have ever needed anything.’

The two choughs looked at each other for a moment, then Branek said: ‘Well, if you can fly just a short way further, we have found a terrific cave in the cliffs . . .’

‘. . . The views are wonderful, and it isn’t a bit draughty,’ said Eseld. ‘Except when the wind is in the north west . . .’

‘. . . And there will be plenty of room for you to rest there,’ said Branek.

So the three birds took off, folded their wings to dip over the edge of the cliffs, then swooped in a low arc across the face of the rocks, with the calm water lapping idly against the edge of the cliff below. Ka was struck by the elegance of the choughs’ flight, and slightly embarrassed by the efforts he needed to make just to keep up. Fortunately, if was not a long flight, and in a few moments they landed on a little ledge jutting out from the cliff. At one end was a large rock, behind which was the entrance to a dry, shallow cave. Ka entered and looked around, then turned to the choughs to thank them – he may even have opened his beak to do so – but before he could utter a single word he had fallen into a deep sleep.

 

Ka, the Ring and the Raven by Richard Hallewell is published by Hallewell Publications, priced £10.00.

Heading into the new year, BooksfromScotland asked various Scottish publishers what they were looking forward to publishing and reading this year. Here we share their recommendations.

 

Allan Cameron, Vagabond Voices

For a start I should catch up on Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron (Charco Press) which was shortlisted for the Booker. I like the sound of Tania Skarynkina’s collection of essays from Byelorussia, A Large Czeslaw Milosz with a Dash of Elvis Presley (Scotland Street Press) and the new edition of Douglas Watt’s The Price of Scotland (Luath Press),  which takes another look at the Darien Scheme. Perhaps most compelling for me is Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places (Canongate), this ‘mixture of memoir, history and nature’ examines ‘how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope’. Having grown up in Northern Ireland during the troubles with one parent from one community and one from the other community, Ní Dochartaigh found some solace in natural landscapes.

At Vagabond Voices, in September 2021 will bring Volume II of our Estonian pentalogy by A.H. Tammsaare, Truth and Justice, which has had more success in North America, even though the rural world of late nineteenth-century Estonia has many parallels with the Highlands in the same period. The pentalogy, which is similar in construction to A Scots Quair, shifts to the cities in this volume and then pass through the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in the next volume. Volume IV takes us into the interwar period independence, and finally in the last volume, the protagonist returns to the countryside for a reflective summary of those eventful years.

Before that, we will be bringing out three books in March and April: Siblings is a short novel by Magnus Florin, whose pared-down prose narrates more through what is suggested and through what is written down on the page. Mither Tongue is a collection of poems by Jidi Majia in Chinese and Nuosu (a minority language in China) and translated into English and Scots. How about that for perfect symmetry! Anne Pia’s The Sweetness of Demons is an evocative series of responses to fourteen of Baudelaire’s poems, which emphasises the range and originality of the great French poet who embodied the fin de siècle. An ambitious and thankfully very successful project.

 

Jean Findlay, Scotland Street

I have just read Shuggie Bain (Picador) and loved every minute of it. It is a painful read, but the pain is all redeemed by love. It is also a good Covid read, because it makes you realise that there is always someone worse off than yourself, and no matter how much we suffer with restrictions, there are still children out there who suffer more simply because of poverty. Also that this suffering can be transmuted into wisdom. Yes there is a great deal in that book.

I am looking forward to Scotland Street’s first themed publication year.  ‘International Women 2021’ will publish women from Canada, South Africa, India, the US and Scotland. The Christmas novel 2021 will be my own, The Hat Jewel, started in 2014 and winner of Hawthornden Fellowship 2018, and Lavigny Fellowship 2019. It has certainly been a long time in coming. My former editor, Jenny Uglow, advised me to publish it under SSP. So here goes.

 

The Floris Books Team

Suzanne Kennedy, Sales and Marketing Director

My son will be getting Alex Wheatle’s The Humiliations of Welton Blake (Barrington Stoke) for his forthcoming January birthday — sure to be a great introduction to his teen years!

Home of the Wild by Louise Grieg and Julia Moscardo is a stunner from us for this coming season. A perfect lockdown picture book about a young boy with a real connection to nature and the natural world who finds an orphaned fawn. He nurtures her to independence and then must learn to let go. Culminating with a gentle turn of events this is luminous, gorgeous and heartwarming.

Kirsten Graham, Marketing Campaigns Executive

The Spellbinding Secret of Avery Buckle is exactly the type of book I loved to read as a child – full of wonder and adventure, with characters you want to be best friends with. Featuring a magical library and portals that can transport you around the world,  it’s the perfect world to escape to!

Elaine Reid, Community Marketing Manager

In our gorgeous forthcoming picture book Olwen Finds Her Wings, co-created by mother and daughter team Nora and Pirkko-Liisa Surojegin, Olwen the baby owl longs to roar like a bear or hop like a hare, but finds she can’t. What can little owls do? Set in a beautiful woodland landscape, you’ll find yourself encouraging Olwen on as she continues her search to find out what makes her special.

Ali Begg, Sales and Marketing Assistant 

A new David MacPhail book is the comic relief we all need this Spring, and Velda is the hero that we deserve. Fearsome, swashbuckling and hilarious in equal measure, with cracking zany illustrations from Richard Morgan, I can’t wait to see Velda the Awesomest Viking in print and start recommending it to parents. Particularly ideal for reluctant readers or kids that are making their first forays into chapter books, join the fun as Velda proves she’s the roughest toughest Viking around!

As we plummet into another lockdown, I find myself in search of journeying narratives, and Randa Jarrar’s upcoming Love is an Ex-Country (Sandstone) looks to be an incredible and powerful story. Told as a road trip across the USA, it charts her extremely personal experiences as a Palestinian daughter shamed for who she is, and a teenage mother rebelling against an abusive family. And. Look. At. That. Cover. Beautiful stuff.

 

The Kitchen Press Team

Nasim Mawji

One book by a Scottish publisher that I’m really looking forward to reading is The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell (Canongate). I can’t resist a good crime thriller and this one is all the better for being true. It tells the story of  Stephen Jackley, a British geography student who at the start of the global financial crisis in 2007 reinvented himself as a modern day Robin Hood and began robbing banks to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. He used disguises and fake weapons and robbed several banks before he was eventually apprehended and it was discovered that he also had Asperger’s. It sounds thrilling and promises to be ‘dark’. Perfect.

I’m so excited to be publishing Jeni Iannetta’s Bad Girl Bakery Cookbook in October. Jeni was a passionate home baker before moving to the Highlands and opening the Bad Girl Bakery. Quite soon customers were traveling from miles around to visit her cafe and she was producing tens of thousands of portions of cake a month and supplying high-profile clients like the National Trust for Scotland and the Caledonian Sleeper, to name just two. She takes pride in creating cakes that celebrate flavour and texture and look impressive but don’t take ages to prepare. With no-fuss recipes that utilise home-baking techniques, this book unlocks the secrets to many of her most popular bakes and is sure to inspire joy, not only in the eating but in the process of baking too.

Emily Dewhurst

One thing that got me through the last year was getting out of the house and going out on my bike so I’m thrilled that the first title in our new Food for Sport series is a cycling book. It’s by Kitty Pemberton Platt and Fi Buchanan, and shares how female cyclists fuel their rides. I first saw Kitty’s illustrated food diaries on instagram, and loved how she celebrated the reality of life on the bike: yes, you might start the day with granola and a protein shake, but it turns out a handful of Haribos and an espresso is what is going to get you through the last 25km of a hard days ride. The book brings together diaries from a whole range of cyclists from enthusiastic amateurs to professionals across a range of distances, with tips and hacks for what works for them. Fi Buchanan (of the greatly missed Heart Buchanan deli in Glasgow’s West End) has created corresponding recipes to charge you up pre-ride, keep you going while you’re on the road and share with friends once you’ve hit the finish line. As well as providing inspiration on easy and tasty ways to fuel up, it’s a celebration of the female cycling community. Out in June.

A new Alan Warner book is always a treat, so I’m very much looking forward to reading Kitchenly 434 (White Rabbit) – it sounds like classic Warner territory: male delusion, romantic misadventure and the resentments of the class divide in a rock star’s Sussex Mansion at the tail end of the 70s. I can’t wait.

 

Ailsa Bathgate, Barrington Stoke

Onjali Q. Raúf is one of the most exciting authors at work in children’s publishing today, able to address pressing social issues in a way that makes them accessible to younger readers and encourages discussion, so we’re thrilled to be publishing The Great (Food) Bank Heist with her in July 2021. In this story Onjali gives a heart-rending child’s-eye view of the growing problem of food poverty and as with all her stories, she provides relief through her unique ability to combine empathy with humour in a madcap adventure that sees a group of enterprising friends use their ingenuity to expose a shameful heist targeting the local food bank. We can’t wait to share it!

 

Francesca Barbini, Luna Press Publishing

As an Italian, I really cherish the opportunity to access Speculative and SFF fiction in other languages. Translating from other languages and into other languages is a big part of what I set out to do with Luna Press. So this Spring we have two releases which cross that language barrier. The first is an SF collection by Brazilian author Fabio Fernandez, Love: An Archaeology. The second is an anthology of Greek SF, Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece. This particular book will be released in English, Italian and Japanese.

Another important aspect of Luna Press is going beyond fiction, through the projects of Academia Lunare, where papers and essays are explored further through the use of short stories. In June, we’ll be publishing Jane Alexander’s The Flicker Against the Light and ‘Writing the Contemporary Uncanny’. The insightful essay is enriched by clever storytelling to bring us all into the world of the uncanny.

Finally, as a speculative Scottish Press, we are always on the lookout for amazing and entertaining Scottish authors. This is how we met Barbara Stevenson, from Orkney. Barbara’s fabulous sense of humour, paired to her surreal imagination, will be brought to life in The Dalliances of Monsieur D’Haricot. And I am also thrilled that it will be released in Italian as well.

Because of my passion for translated works, I always look at Charco Press’s releases with anticipation. Whether is a new author or an established one, I get a chance to read fabulous South American literature. I’m also interested in Radical Acts of Love, by Janie Brown (Canongate). It’s about an oncology’s nurse conversation with the dying. I actually find these books very comforting, as they remind me of how much good is done every day in the world. I also want to read Love is an ex-country by Randa Jarrar (Sandstone). Randa is from Palestine, a land where I have spent a bit of time. Her personal account sounds intriguing and I’m really looking forward to hear it.

 

Aisling Holling, Saraband Books

We’re bringing out great books in 2021. Three that I want to particularly highlight are In a Veil of Mist by Donald S Murray, How to Survive Everything by Ewan Morrison and Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet.

After the wonderful reception for As the Women Lay Dreaming, both from readers in the Western Isles and an audience far beyond, we are thrilled to publish another deeply poignant novel from Donald based on a little-known piece of Hebridean history. Evocative literary fiction exploring the human cost of war and the Cold War arms race: the perfect follow-up to Murray’s Paul Torday Prize-winning first novel.

How to Survive Everything is a biting satire wrapped in an electrifying thriller confronting the huge global issues of our time – from disease, fake news, consumerism and denial of science all the way to family dysfunction and mental health in crisis. Ewan is one of the most inventive, provocative and acclaimed writers of his generation, and once again he’s created a powerful and unforgettable voice in a young protagonist. On top of this, it’s extremely fast-paced and often funny.

It is a real honour to be publishing Graeme Macrae Burnet’s highly anticipated fourth novel; and dare we say – his best yet! Case Study extends Burnet’s playful ‘metafictional’ approach, and this time presents an enthralling, layered and profound novel exploring 1960s psychiatry and society. Drawing the reader so effortlessly into the mind and world of the protagonist, Burnet has created yet another set of unforgettable characters that feel deceptively real.

 

Ann Crawford, National Galleries of Scotland

The team at NGS Publishing have found that there is one silver lining to the lockdown life – the opportunity to spend even more time reading books. On our combined reading lists, you will find The Wind That Lays Waste (Charco Press), Scabby Queen (HarperCollins), Duck Feet (Monstrous Regiment) and Wheesht (KDD).

We were thrilled to be working in the autumn on Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema by Vanessa Harryhausen, his daughter. The pioneer of stop-motion cinema is famous for films such as Jason & the Argonauts and he counts many Hollywood giants among his fans – but he was also a great Dad, husband and friend. This book, which is filled with personal images as well as many of Harryhausen’s famous and not-so-famous creatures, tells us the uplifting story of the real Ray Harryhausen from the point of view of his daughter and people who worked with him. Perhaps it is the sheer joy in the book that has resulted in the need to order a reprint just days after the first stock arrived.

Looking ahead, we are finalising a publishing programme for 2021 that we know will be an offer of real colour and fascination into the months ahead. Among the titles coming is a new, highly illustrated book about the incredibly popular Scottish artist, Joan Eardley. In exploring how she portrays land and sea, Patrick Elliott uncovers brand new findings and brings new insight into the artist’s work and her love of the coastal village of Catterline.

 

Michele Smith, Jasami Publishing

We have a lot of  exciting books coming out this year. I’m particularly looking forward to publishing Joy Dakers’ and Catherine Grace’s Journeys With Joy: Scotland, a photography book with short stories, as it will not only display the varied beauty of Scotland, but there will be a captivating short story to kindle the imagination of the reader giving a new and diverse perspectives. We are also looking forward to publishing the poetry book, Reflections of a Scotsman by Gordon McGowan. The poems are funny, tragic, intriguing, and absorbing as he encounters all aspects of the world we live in. For children we’ll have Bernie the Bear by written by Catherine Grace and illustrated by Holly Richards about the antics of a bear lost in the city and how those antics relate in his natural home. Bernie really entertains and educates children about what happens when urban life encounters nature. I am also looking forward to reading Precious and Grace (Abacus) by Alexander McCall Smith. I have read most in this series No, 1 Ladies Detective Agency, as they are always heart-warming and absorbing read.

 

Alan Windram, Little Door Books

In looking forward to 2021 it’s hard not to feel the ever present shadow of Covid and Brexit looming over us.  But this is also a year that is very exciting for us at Little Door Books. We have three different types of debuts publishing this year within our list spanning age ranges from zero to nine year-olds. Alongside our picture books we are thrilled to be publishing a board book for 0-3 year olds which is a TV tie in with the popular Cbeebies animated series, Hushabye Lullabye. We follow cuddly little alien Dillie Dally as he flies to planet dream in the a unique lullaby jukebox Hushabye Rocket. Written and created for TV by Sacha Kyle, we’ll be publishing in June.

For the 3 – 6 age range, in July we are publishing a Little Door Debut picture book by brand new illustrating talent Madeline Pinkerton and her book A Dragon Story. Her warm, classical-looking illustrations perfectly combine with a wonderful story about bravery, following your own path, and friendship. A story loving dragon and a feisty young girl who loves to tell stories develop an unlikely friendship.

Also on the debut front, in April, we venture into another age range as we publish our first chapter book for 6 – 9 year-olds, a magical, fantasy adventure written by award-winning writer and journalist David C Flanagan, Uncle Pete and the Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep. This is Dave’s first book for children and is a hilarious adventure of the imagination involving the remarkable journey undertaken by Uncle Pete and his fearless female sidekick, with themes of determination, collaboration, ingenuity, kindness and acceptance. It’s also got fabulously quirky chapter illustrations by Will Hughes.

With all this excitement and more coming up this year I hardly have time to read myself but I must say I am really looking forward to getting into some crime fiction with Chris Brookmyre’s new novel, The Cut, coming out in March and the next book in Elaine Thomson’s Jem Flockhart series, Nightshade (Constable) which is out in April. Spending every day running a children’s publisher I do like to escape with a bit of crime fiction.

Here’s to a 2021 of fabulous books for all ages, and I hope you will join us as we step out into this year with something new and different for our little readers.

David F Ross is a brilliant novelist, growing his fanbase with every release. When he is not writing, he is an architect – director of Keppie Design – and a facilitator of projects for design students at the City of Glasgow College. Last year, he oversaw the the students designing what book festival spaces might look like in the future, and here, we present the students ideas. Exciting food for thought!

 

There’s Only One Danny Garvey
By David F. Ross
Published by Orenda Books

 

The Outliers Book Festival: A Design for the Future

In the latter part of2020, this most unusual of years, I was invited to mentor design students from City of Glasgow College for an interesting project. Through collaborative practice, the BA Design Practice Degree -4th year (hon) students were to explore the possibilities for the creation of a new literary festival for 2021, planned to celebrate literature, and inspired by the ideas of togetherness, connections, relationships, physicality, meetings and rendezvous.

The students were free to decide whether the festival would feature a specific site, several variable locations, or even a digital ‘virtual’ space.  This decision would depend on their findings when researching the target group, the project’s context and the possible interpretations of “meeting place”.

This process culminated in the form of a client presentation to the festival ‘organiser’, Karen Sullivan; the award-winning publisher of Orenda Books.

Designers are encouraged to understand how things have been and to analyse how they are now, to explore how they might be. This is the essence of design process. The global pandemic has turned our traditional analytical approaches upside down. Where the commerce of collaboration and connection once drove the type of spaces we wanted to be in, fear of contamination now controls them.

Book Festivals are facing hugely complex challenges as an unsurprising consequence. Paradoxically, there has been a rise in the sales of books and a dramatic resurgence in the popularity of reading. Taking cognisance of this, the City of Glasgow College design students responded imaginatively.

Fresh Horizons

The Fresh Horizons pavilion is a pop up venue that can be placed in any kind of location, from warehouses, school and university campuses and outdoor parks.

‘Our ‘Fresh Horizons’ pavilion is inspired by the Paisley pattern, which was in turn, inspired by the ‘Boteh’ of Persian origin, first incorporated into fabric designs in India. The Boteh is emblematic of the influence of other cultures and represents the aim of our project: a place to celebrate translated works of fiction from across the world.’
(Lynn and Martin)

MIND

MIND celebrates science-fiction by offering a daring authorless space with immersive, interactive exhibits using apps and AI technology.

Our Modular Interactive Novel Design (M.I.N.D) offers a unique experience in which festival users can immerse themselves in not only the structure but the atmosphere of the ongoing festival. Those with the passion for reading can discuss, share, listen, purchase, and even participate in a multitude of activities and events that encapsulate the genre of Sci-Fi. As a group, we believe that the project we have created offers a realistic direction for the future of book festivals. With the use of modern design techniques and innovative thought processes, we believe we have created an effective, forward thinking design solution to the Outliers Book Festival brief.
(Jade, Lewis, Becca and Beth)

The group behind MIND have even designed their own merchandise too.

 

Nexus Train

Alice and Stephanie’s ‘Nexus Train’ proposal features a moving festival with events taking place on a series of trains. Individual carriages are dedicated to individual authors or specific genres of literature depending on theme. Reading and events can be given from the trains to socially distanced audiences on the platforms. A brilliant graphic design advertising campaign promotes author readings and visual experiences from the outside of the carriages and on the platforms of the towns and cities on six different routes.

 

The Pheonix

Meanwhile, ‘The Phoenix’ – by Calum, Caitlin, Jordan and Nichola – is based at the Barras Art and Design (BAaD); an already established creative hub which is part of Glasgow’s East End transformation. This design centres on sustainability and personal interaction with opportunities for book lovers to design and print new book covers for their favourite titles. Other components include the interactive Exchange Vendor; a curving timber structure which encourages the exchanging of books as way of ‘recycling’ literature.

The Pheonix is a walk-through pop up venue that incorporates interactive exhibits celebrating book design’

The City of Glasgow College design courses are fantastic explorations of real-world projects. They require the students to analyse and understand complex design considerations before developing creatively pragmatic solutions. The ‘Outliers Book Festival’ project is a perfect example of this. The publishing industry is grappling with how to promote writers and books in a post-pandemic world, and the solutions reached by the students are not only impressively creative but hugely practical and deliverable.

The engagement of ‘live clients’ in the education process is vital for all practice-based learning development but none more so than in the creative industries where successful solutions are often subjective. Understanding the brief from the perspective of the client, and then communicating responsive ideas clearly and confidently is the basis of our profession and these students have demonstrated how much they understand this already. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of these ideas feature in the book events of the future.

‘The presentations were engaging, enlightening and thought-provoking, and really do represent viable options for book festivals of the future. I loved the creativity … the potential for pop-up venues, vending machines for books and merchandise (essential in a post-Covid world?), moving a festival around the country via train to engage readers everywhere, themes of literacy and regeneration (sustainable literacy!) that have been placed at the heart of so much of what we, as publishers, hope to do. There were new forms of delivery, from 3D printing onsite and apps to enhance the festival experience through to AI technology and QR codes for ebooks, celebrations of international literature with the emphasis on oneness rather than being ‘foreign’, and original, artistic interpretations of familiar backdrops and even seating.

 Our lives have changed dramatically in the last ten months or so, and we need to rethink the way we present books and authors, the way we engage readers, the way we embrace the newest technologies. With online events taking precedence, readers will undoubtedly demand to see more of this in the future, and creative ways to provide access will become integral to any festival planning. The students offered explosive food for thought … and the freshness, vibrancy, immediacy of their visions and ideas are really worth contemplating – and incorporating.’
(Karen Sullivan, Publisher, Orenda Books)

Perhaps more than other professions, designers crave contact with others; to be creative, to be stimulated, to be inspired and, yes, sometimes to disagree. All are essential and necessary means of the trial and error design process. An educational environment in which these things can return as before is a universally shared ambition, even if currently difficult to imagine. As a profession we evaluate problems in the wide context where we find them and explore solutions that overcome not only those known problems, but anticipated ones that may emerge out of new phenomena. This experience of this project will stand these students in very good stead for their own future careers as designers.

“The ‘Outliers Literary Festival’ Project brought together individuals in a multi-disciplinary student project. Each team demonstrated innovation and sophisticated interpretations to the brief. Their research demonstrated insights into key issues such as sustainability, community engagement, user experience and above all the needs of the client. There was a significant amount of research underpinning each proposal. I was most impressed with the final presentations which demonstrated a confident and articulate delivery to the panel. The students were all able to present a compelling narrative with supporting visuals clearly addressing the key points in the brief and taking cognisance of earlier client feedback discussed at the interim review.”
(John Baird. Curriculum Head, Faculty of Creative Industries, City of Glasgow College)

The students:

Jade Frame, Lewis McKechnie, Becca Collins, Beth Cowan, Alice Brown, Stephanie Boyd, Lynn Crew, Martin Poli, Calum Lockerbie, Caitlin Smith, Jordan Russell and Nichola McArthur.

 

Now, let’s concentrate on David’s talents as a novelist. He has just released his latest, There’s Only One Danny Garvey, set against the backdrop of lower league football. Here he is giving a wee taster reading.

 

There’s Only One Danny Garvey by David F. Ross is published by Orenda Books, priced £8.99.

The beautiful book: the perfect Christmas present. David Robinson finds, in Lachlan Goudie’s The Story of Scottish Art, that not only is the book beautiful, but an inspiration for travel.

 

The Story of Scottish Art
By Lachlan Goudie
Published by Thames & Hudson

 

IV36 3WX. DD2 5SG. PA1 1DG. I’ve never reviewed a book through the medium of postcodes, but there’s a first time for everything, and in the case of Lachlan Goudie’s The Story of Scottish Art, it seems appropriate. A book like this, packed as it is with fine reproductions of paintings and sculptures, usually inspires its readers to go back to the galleries where they can see the originals, but with me, that wasn’t the case: none of those postcodes contain galleries. Yet in 2021, after I’ve had my jags and when the world is back to normal, Goudie’s book made me want to travel to all three of them.

What works of art will I be looking for? I’ll give you three clues. Before I read Goudie’s book I hadn’t heard of any of them, so while they may be well known to some, they’re not mega-famous or established stop-offs on the tourist trail. They’re also to do with Death and Christianity, yet none of them are graves. Any help?

IV36 is Forres and 3WX narrows that down to a solidly suburban street that used to be the old road to Findhorn. A hundred yards to the north is a huge white-painted  tubular bridge  for pedestrians over the main Inverness-Aberdeen road which runs beneath it. Why the bridge is there I have no idea because according to Google Maps, there’s nothing much on the other side apart from flat, featureless fields. Trust me, I won’t be going there for the view.

No: the reason to visit my first postcode is to check out the contents of what looks like an enormous glass box on the east side of Findhorn Road.The carvings on the red sandstone pillar are probably too weather-worn to make out as clearly as I’d like. Even without going there, I suspect that I’ll feel a bit let down when I finally do.

And yet I really will go there in 2021. Why? Because Lachlan Goudie had sold me on it. He’d already taken me, without a hint of artspeak, on an  east coast trail of Pictish carved stones, ending up in front of what you have probably already correctly worked out is Sueno’s Stone. On one side of it there’s an enormous cross, but it’s the other side that is really interesting. Carved into this 21-foot pillar are incredibly detailed battle scenes, like a Pictish graphic novel. Goudie describes them from top to bottom: first, the cavalrymen marshalling before battle, then the bloody fight itself and, at what looks like knee height, the triumphant victory parade afterwards. Like a latter-day Rosemary Sutcliff, he gives us the sounds of battle and highlights some of its more gruesome sights, all in a particularly vivid present tense.

Goudie’s book isn’t like any art history book I’ve read. For one thing, he’s neither an academic or an art historian, but a painter trying to uncover what’s particularly Scottish about Scottish art. So he’ll commit all kinds of sins against academia, like calling artists by their first names once he’s introduced them, stringing together superlatives to emphasise why we should be interested in them, and making a series of often unsubstantiated subjective judgments. His is a very broad-brush approach, and given that he has five millennia to work through, and that he’s throwing architecture and sculpture into the mix too, perhaps it has to be.  His book won’t dethrone Duncan Macmillan’s magisterial Scottish Art 1460-2000 as the essential book on (most of) his subject but then again, it isn’t trying to.

Essentially, the book is everything you’d expect from the 2015 four-part TV series on which it was based – well structured, informal and informative. His page on Sueno’s Stone is a case in point. This is one of those artworks when we don’t need the footnoted caution of academia, not least because academia hasn’t got a clue about it. We don’t know who they were, these people who hacked each other to death on the edge of what is now suburban Forres. We don’t even know where the battle was, when it was, what the war was about, who commissioned the stone, or who worked on it. “A final creative yell left to echo down the ages,” Goudie calls it. Me, I’d call it a massive sandstone question mark. Think you know your ninth-century ancestors? Think again.

What about our 15th century ones? For that, I’ll be heading to DD2 5SG – in other words to St Marnock’s church, Fowlis Easter, about half a dozen miles outside Dundee. Again, it doesn’t look much from the outside, but this is one of Scotland’s finest surviving medieval parish churches (built in 1180). Inside, it has one of only two painted rood screens to have survived the Reformation.

If you’re thinking ‘So what?’, let me put it another way. About a century before Knox kickstarted the Reformation up the road in Perth, here is rare primitive religious painting from old Catholic Scotland. Again, we don’t know the artist, but as Goudie points out, the people painted around 1480 at the foot of the Cross in this 5ft x12ft wooden panel certainly look like locals. They’re there, along with an unidealised Christ and even a jester, in a painting of charming naivety which itself was almost crucified during the Reformation, with angels’ faces scratched out and the rest of it damaged by hammered nails. It only survived, Goudie points out, because the green paint with which it was painted over in 1612 gradually flaked away.

The final stop on this vaguely mystical tour – PA1 1DG – is, as you have probably guessed, right in the heart of Paisley. Having just finished reading Pat Barker’s Life Class trilogy, I knew a small bit about the artists of the First World War, but I’d never heard of Alice Meredith Williams, who sculpted what looks like a spectacularly imposing memorial to the conflict. In our multicultural age, no-one would dream of commissioning a statue of the enormous Crusader knight who stands atop Sir Robert Lorimer’s equally gigantic (too high?)  plinth. But it’s the four flanking stone infantrymen that intrigue me more because even though they are idealised to some extent, they still look as though they were drawn from life. And so they should, because Alice’s husband Morris – though not an official war artist – provided her with whole albums full of unflinchingly realistic sketches of life and death in the Flanders trenches. Over a century on, there’s still something incredibly moving about those four soldiers, their greatcoat collars up, striding purposefully forward alongside a mounted warrior from a different, but still faith-soaked, era.

This is already, I must admit, already a death-obsessed journey into Scottish art, so I’m almost afraid to mention Allan Ramsay’s 1741 portrait of his dead son, though I must because it is one of the most moving images I have seen: click on https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5348/infant-son-artist and tell me I’m wrong. Like all the other three, it is something I had never seen before I read Goudie’s book. I’m not convinced by his conclusion that there is “a character to Scottish art, a strand of creative DNA that originates in this place” – apart from Sueno’s Stone, all the artworks I’ve mentioned could easily have originated in other places too. But if there’s still anyone out there who thinks that Scottish art is provincial, obscure and unimportant, there is a verve, beauty and breadth of imagination about the artworks in this book that will make them change their minds. And if you’re still looking for good ideas for Christmas presents, it’s definitely worth adding to the list.

 

The Story of Scottish Art by Lachlan Goudie is published by Thames & Hudson, priced £25.

 

As the latest volume in Alexander McCall Smith’s serial novel comes to an end in The Scotsman newspaper, David Robinson looks back at working on the series on the release of A Promise of Ankles.

 

A Promise of Ankles
By Alexander McCall Smith
Published by Polygon

 

For many years, there has been one editing job that I have looked forward to more than all others. Ever since 2004, when the first volume of Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street ‘daily novel’ first appeared in The Scotsman, I’ve been in charge of making sure that it did so without any mis-spellings or grammatical howlers before it went on to be published by Polygon. As Sandy has somehow acquired the knack of writing at speed (1000 words an hour), to length, and with minimal mistakes, this is one of the easier jobs in journalism. Because those words are also loaded with a fair dollop of wit and wisdom, it is also one of the more enjoyable.

Last week the 14th volume – a world record for a serialised novel, no less – ended its run in The Scotsman, ahead of publication this week by Polygon as The Promise of Ankles.  Time perhaps for an insider’s guide to the crafting of a serial novel.

Though ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, these days the serial novel is a rarity. One of the few recent examples is American writer Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City series. When Sandy met him in California in 2003, he made that very point. Why weren’t more writers following his example, he asked him. When Sandy mentioned this in an article in the Herald, I wondered the same thing. Would he himself be interested in writing a series novel? I asked.  Yes, he replied.

Over lunch at The Witchery in Edinburgh, the Editor of The Scotsman expressed delight at the news. ‘But would you be able to write it daily?’ he asked as we rose from the table. Sandy hadn’t been expecting that. After all, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola, Hardy and all the other star serial novelists of the 19th century usually had at least a month between instalments. Even readers of Maupin’s serial fiction in the San Francisco Chronicle had to wait for a week for the next episode. A successful daily novel would be a world first.

The true serial novel isn’t just one that has already been written and chopped up into equal-length chapters. Instead, it is created on the hoof: once made, mistakes can’t be corrected, characters changed, or dialogue rewritten. If all novels are tightrope walks, this is one without a safety net. Typically, McCall Smith starts off with about 20 episodes of each Scotland Street novel already written, but with 50 or so still to write. In pre-pandemic days, he filed these from all over the world, and although he never missed a deadline, there were times – like when his email link went down on a cruise round Cape Horn – when I wondered whether I would have to step into the breach and write an episode of my own. Fortunately for his readers, it never came to that.

Sandy hadn’t arrived at that Witchery meeting with a firm idea of what characters he wanted to write about, but he knew exactly where they lived. He himself had once stayed near Scotland Street, so he knew the New Town well, loved its charm, variety, and realised he could have fun with its occasional pretensions.

Let’s pause here and imagine that you or I had to choose the characters for a series novel set in Edinburgh’s New Town. My guess is that we’d aim for a rough sociological mirroring for our fiction. And why not?

Yet look again at the dramatic personae in The Promise of Ankles. For a start it’s called that because a small part of it takes place inside the mind of a dog tempted to nip the ankles of his master’s friend. The main character? Bertie, a seven-year-old boy breaking away from his hothousing mother. His gran? A Glasgow pie shop owner. His  neighbour? A socialite Italian nun who speaks almost entirely in aphorisms. Hardly New Town stereotypes, any of them.

Yet at the same time, the Scotland Street novels aren’t just untethered comic whirligigs either. McCall Smith might write about absurd situations – infighting within the Moray Place-based Association of Scottish Nudists, for example – but there is never anything cruel about his comedy. Instead, he is a celebrant of the good things in life – friendship, art, wit, kindness, comedy and above all a profound love of both Edinburgh and Scotland, an emotion which also finds expression in his just-published debut poetry collection, In a Time of Distance (Polygon, £12.99).

What kind of story would we tell in our own putative Edinburgh serial novel? Again, I fear we’d get that wrong and, seduced by tartan noir, contemplate a thriller or a crime novel, failing to realise that the serial novel can’t really handle anything with a particularly complicated or convoluted plot. McCall Smith, whose own tastes run to the shrewd, slow-building comedies of Barbara Pym, intuitively realised that something similar could easily be adopted to serial fiction. Just as Armistead Maupin centred his tales on 28 Barbary Lane, on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, so he himself could base an enjoyable Edinburgh comedy of manners around a New Town stairwell, and that if the characters were sufficiently interesting  or different, we would happily follow their interactions in subsequent volumes.

So now we’re onto book 14 in a series that that has already won the hearts of readers throughout the world.  In McCall Smith’s new novel, they’ll discover that seven-year-old Bertie finally gets to live in the Promised Land (Glasgow), just as his father’s budding romance is stymied by the narcissistic Bruce Anderson (not a real villain but the nearest we get to one here). But though we read on to find out what happens to the characters, the real charm of 44 Scotland Street lies in the sometimes surreal  unpredictability of the other stories McCall Smith will add to the mix. The chapter headings hint at their range. ‘Rhododendrons and Missionaries’. ‘Bruchan Lom’. ‘Akratic Action’. ‘A Speluncean Entrance.’  I’ll explain one of them and you’ll see what I mean.

Speluncean means ‘like a cave’, and when two characters go exploring by the Water of Leith near Stockbridge with Cyril (the titular ankle-tempted dog), the latter roots around in a shallow cave and comes up with what looks suspiciously like a human skull. Except it’s shaped differently, like a Neanderthal one. This discovery could rewrite archaeology, because Neanderthals hadn’t hitherto been known to venture this far north. Could Cyril have inadvertently proved that the New Town was Neanderthal before it was either new or a town?

I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself. But here’s the odd thing. A couple of weeks after I edited that chapter, I read a story in a newspaper about the discovery of 120,000-year-old stones thought to be Neanderthal tools on an island off Denmark. Because the earliest human remains in Denmark – as in Scotland – only go back 14,000 years and there was no evidence of Neanderthals so far north, this is thought to be a potentially  significant find. So if, in the future, anyone ever does find proof that Neanderthals did make it as far as Edinburgh’s New Town – a couple of hundred miles further north than their remains have ever been recorded, but on the same line of latitude as that Danish island  – it will be only fair to point out that McCall Smith got there first.  And if Homo McCall Smithiensis turns out to have had an exceptionally large brain and well-developed smile muscles, I won’t be at all surprised.

 

A Promise of Ankles, by Alexander McCall Smith is published by Polygon, priced £17.99.

The Common Breath are an exciting new publisher releasing excellent books and creating a wonderful literary community. Their latest publication is The Middle of a Sentence, short stories from a wide-ranging collection of up-and-coming and established writers. Here we share two stories from Ruskin Smith and Jenni Fagan.

 

Stories taken from The Middle of a Sentence
Edited and published by The Common Breath

 

‘Outside’
By Ruskin Smith

She came towards me all in white—white jeans, a thin-looking white top—hugging herself as if the air was cold although it wasn’t, it was warm, it had been warm all day and even now the birds were chirping in the trees around the wasteground as she walked beneath them veering side-to-side a bit. Her shoes were deep white platform soles but big for her—one foot kept slipping off and she was crying now, or sort of crying, words I couldn’t understand, or whether they were words or groans and as she went to turn—the wall curves round, a slope towards a path behind the baths—she doubled over, stumbled to one side and whacked her temple on the wall. She went down slowly to her knees and made a noise and curled up with her forehead on the pavement. I had no phone on me, and no-one else was in the street. I looked around at all the flats, the windows, hundreds of them—glass, reflected glass, reflected sky. Nothing. She made a noise as if something had struck her in the gut. If anyone turned up they might think I was here involved, my bag of beer and ice-cream dangling, when I was only walking back from Co-op. If I left her she might not be safe—the things you heard about from time to time that happened on the wasteground, in the news. I squatted down beside her—Do you need a taxi home or anything?

She crawled sideways into the wall and all the broken bottles there, scraping her face. I stepped away to breathe and turn my back. She turned her face to yell at me—Jamie’s gone, I think it was. Her rows of teeth were very straight and white and too wide for her mouth, and as she shouted it her face had seemed to shrink around them. Then she curled up in a ball again, her hands in front of her now like a yoga pose. Her handbag, plastic and transparent, like a child’s toy, was on the concrete there in front of her, a fiver and some coins and lipstick I could see.

Jamie’s gone, she yelled into the ground, as if realising it for the first time. A woman walked by on the other side but in a rush, and talking on her phone, not noticing.

The ice-cream would be going soft. My beer was probably getting warm. She had gone quiet again. If I turned my back and stood for a few seconds I could almost think she wasn’t there at all—it was so still, the evening, a perfect night for walking outside in your tshirt, all the birdsong going on and on.

 

‘Ida Keeps Falling’
By Jenni Fagan

She is to be awake throughout the entire procedure. They’ll slice the top of her head open, saw through the bone (make it like an attic hatch — so they can peer in) and she was told to bring a friend.

– It’s important you chat to someone through the procedure, so we can see which areas of the brain light up.

– This will help you diagnose why I’m falling over all the time?

– Yes, we hope so.

All they know so far is that it is not a cancer, nor a tumour, she’s had a CAT scan, been to oncology, it is not Meniere’s disease, nor is it benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, no acoustic neroma, no vestibular neuritis, no herpes zoster oticus. Inner ear fine.

– This will be worth it, Ida, if it means you stop falling over.

It’s not possible to nod in agreement so Ida blinks. Her friend blinks back and they are smiling then. It will be. It’s so awkward, falling over in front of everyone, in the office, the water cooler shaking, bruises, arnica, staying home more and more. There is a tugging above her, then the surgeons fall momentarily silent.

– Well, Ida, we appear to have found the problem — the reason, for your balance issues.

– What is it?

– It’s a little man, bout as big as your pinky nail.

– What?

– Yup, tiny little thing he is, and he’s drunk, on a bicycle, cycling round and around.

– Okay — so, what do we do with him?

-Well, with your permission, Ida, we’d like to cut him out.

Signing a form then, a disclaimer, a dizziness and the surgeons working quickly so the anaesthesia does not wear off and wondering what he’ll look like, if they’ll let her take him home in a jar.

 

The Middle of a Sentence, edited and published by The Common Breath, priced £8.00

London, the third in the Adventures of Captain Bobo children’s picture book series is published early next year. Set on a famous paddle steamer the series has also recently been made into a Fun Kids radio series, narrated by the late, great, John Sessions. Author, Richard Dikstra tells BooksfromScotland more about the magical world of paddler steamers, missing elephants, crafty seagulls, mysterious tigers, shipwrecks and a quirky comic crew always ready to help save the day.

 

The Adventures of Captain Bobo
By R. D. Dikstra & Kay Hutchison
Illustrated by Matt Rowe
Published by Belle Kids

 

Somewhat unbelievably the series is inspired by real-life. A few years ago, we helped one of the Clyde’s best-known captains, Capt Robin L Hutchison, publish a memoir of his many years at sea. Hurricane Hutch’s Top 10 Ships of the Clyde was as much a social history, as it was about his story and the ships he sailed. Forget tonnages, timetables and cylinder capacities, his book was full of stories about the characters he worked with and the passengers that travelled on board – animals, as well as people! Funny stories, unusual incidents and many references to the ways things were done in an analogue age.

Kate and I always thought that some of the stories might also make the basis for a great children’s series – Ivor the Engine meets Para Handy, with perhaps a wee touch of Katie Morag thrown in. It’s no coincidence that Red Gauntlet, the paddle steamer in the series, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Waverley – the world’s last ‘ocean-going’ paddle steamer. It was a ship that Captain ‘Hurricane Hutch’ knew well.

Bananas! – the first book in the series opens with Captain Bobo and the crew facing an uncertain future. The big car ferries have taken over and no one seems to want a wonderful old paddle steamer anymore! But fate, and a lost elephant, prove otherwise. The books are beautifully illustrated by Matt Rowe, whose style brings a real charm and warmth to the series. The stories are about inter-generational friendship, teamwork and a celebration of our unique coastal communities. In London, Captain Bobo and the crew find their annual ‘Round Britain’ trip disrupted when Tower Bridge fails to open. It’s left to Emma, the Apprentice Engineer to come up with an idea to ‘save the day’.

 

This autumn the series was adapted for radio. A 10-part series, narrated by John Sessions, initially premiered on Fun Kids Radio – the UK’s only national children’s radio station. It’s also available in Gaelic, narrated by Gillebride MacMillan, thanks to support from the Gaelic Books Council, and the English and Gaelic versions are being carried on numerous local and community stations across Scotland. It’s also being broadcast in Nova Scotia in both English and Gaelic.

The series is set in the modern world, but its slower pace reflects a brighter, more optimistic time. It’s a world of brass bands, lost teddy bears, shy puffins, fluffy sheep, missing dinosaurs, cream buns, mountain railways and Welsh teas.

 

John Sessions

 John loved Captain Bobo. We were so lucky he wanted to do the series. We were recording the audiobook of Hurricane Hutch with Bill Paterson, when he suggested John as ‘storyteller’ for Captain Bobo. He knew John would be just right – with a lightness of touch and a talent for character voices like no other. John was also a real enthusiast for the Clyde. He was born in Largs and, although he moved to England at an earlier age, was a frequent visitor to the Clyde and was often a passenger on the ‘steamers’. His favourite ship was the Duchess of Hamilton, but he’d also been on the Waverley many times.

Most well-known for his impressions, and his work on ground-breaking shows such as Whose Line is it Anyway, Spitting Image and Stellar Street, John also appeared in a great number of films and television dramas, playing a range of roles, including two Prime Ministers, Harold Wilson (Made in Dagenham) and Edward Heath (The Iron Lady).

John was great to work with and very keen to help us promote the radio series, telling Radio Scotland’s The Afternoon Show recently they were ‘Lovely, lovely, sweet wee stories.’

With illustrations from the book, here is the first episode of the series Bananas! with John storytelling.

 

We have just completed the final episode. Captain Bobo was the last project John worked on and he died the day before he was due in the studio with Kay to record a podcast about his career and his love of the Clyde. When they were setting up the date he said to Kay, “If only life could be more like Captain Bobo.”

He will be sorely missed.

 

The Adventures of Captain Bobo: London by R. D. Dikstra & Kay Hutchison, and illustrated by Matt Rowe is published by Belle Kids, priced £7.99

When the Independent says ‘call off the search – we’ve found the new Terry Pratchett’, then we’re talking about a comic writer worth your attention. And in a year where humour has been much needed then – if you haven’t already – we suggest you should make your acquaintance with Barry Hutchison and his Space Team series. Luckily, we have an extract from the first in the series right here, right now . . .

 

Extract taken from Space Team
By Barry Hutchison
Published by Zertex Media

 

Cal Carver’s last day on Earth started badly, improved momentarily, then rapidly went downhill. It began with him being sentenced to two years in prison, and ended with the annihilation of two thirds of the human race. Somewhere in between, there was a somewhat enjoyable moment when he ate a lemon drop, but otherwise it was a pretty grim twenty-four hours all round.

The sentencing was harsh, but not particularly surprising. It wasn’t Cal’s first offense and, if he were honest, almost certainly wouldn’t be his last.

It was far from his first prison sentence, either, although usually they were dished out in terms of days, rather than years. Still, two years – half, once his impeccable behavior was accounted for – in a cozy open prison would be an opportunity to recharge. A holiday, almost. In some ways, Cal was even looking forward to it. There was just one problem.

‘What do you mean, “the wrong prison”?’

Cal flashed the warden one of his most winning smiles.

He had a number of them at his disposal, and this one was up there with the best, while still holding enough back in reserve to step it up to the next level, if required.

‘I literally do not know another way of saying it,’ Cal said. ‘This is the wrong prison. I’m supposed to be in Highvue – you know, upstate? With the gardens? They’ve got this training kitchen. The chefs there, they do these amazing little sort of pastry whirl things that—’

‘I know of it,’ the warden said, drumming his fingers on one of the few uncluttered patches of desk he had available.

‘Good. Right. Of course you do,’ said Cal. He waited, cranking his smile up a notch to be on the safe side. It was a smile so dazzling, you could practically hear the ding as the light reflected off his teeth. The warden, however, appeared unmoved.

He shrugged. ‘And? What’s your point?’

‘Well, Warden… Grant, was it?’

The warden didn’t do anything to confirm or deny his name, so Cal continued. ‘I’m supposed to be at Highvue. That’s what the judge said. Someone even wrote it down on that document this guard here was kind enough to look out for me.’

He gave the female guard an appreciative nod and a flash of that smile. A blush flushed upwards from the neck of the woman’s shirt, but she managed, to her immense relief, not to giggle.

‘He’s right, sir. Must’ve been a mix-up during transit.’

‘She’s really very good,’ said Cal, gesturing to the guard.

‘I don’t know how it works here, if you take recommendations for promotion or whatever, but if you do I’d be happy – no, I’d be more than happy to—’

‘We don’t,’ said the warden.

‘Oh. Well maybe you should,’ Cal suggested. The warden held his gaze for several excruciating seconds. Cal cleared his throat. ‘I’m going to just let you read that.’

The warden’s stare lingered for a while longer, then he lowered his eyes to the document in front of him. A single crooked finger tapped the desktop as he read, the nicotine-stained nail tic-tic-ticking against the wood.

‘As you can see, my crime – while obviously wrong – wasn’t really all that serious.’

The warden didn’t look up. ‘Identity theft is very serious, Mr Carver.’

‘I didn’t steal it, not really. I borrowed it. Just for a while.’

The warden raised his eyes just long enough to make Cal shut up, then went back to reading.

Cal rocked on his heels and studied the office. It must once have been pretty grand, with its wood-paneled walls, high ceiling and lush carpet, but time and a distinct lack of storage space had taken their toll.

The walls were almost completely concealed by mismatched metal shelving. The shelves themselves groaned under the weight of ramshackle ring binders and bulging box files that looked fit to explode and shower the room with their contents at any moment.

Around half of the carpet was as good as new, but a number of paths had been worn into it. The thinnest, most threadbare of them all terminated right on the spot where Cal now stood. He met the guard’s eye and smiled at her. Despite herself, she smiled back, then fought to straighten her face before the warden looked up again.

‘Hmm,’ the warden grunted. Cal turned, assuming he’d finished reading, but the old man’s eyes were still fixed on the page, his finger still tapping its steady, solemn beat.

Cal whistled softly beneath his breath and went back to looking around the room.

In the corner of the ceiling, where it met a really quite elaborate bit of cornicing, there was a murky brown stain – three roundish blobs and a swooping curve at the bottom.

‘It looks like a face,’ Cal announced. The warden lifted his eyes from the page. His gray-flecked eyebrows knotted in the middle. ‘The damp patch. It looks like a face,’ Cal said, gesturing towards the corner of the ceiling. ‘At least, I hope it’s damp, and not, you know, some kind of dirty protest. I’ve heard what this place can get like.’

He turned and lowered himself until he was half-sitting, half-standing against the edge of the desk. ‘It must be hard. All that responsibility. You know what? I bet they don’t appreciate you enough, John. Can I call you John?’

The warden’s face remained stoically unchanged.

‘Saw it on your stack of mail there,’ Cal explained. ‘You should probably open those, by the way.’

‘No,’ the warden said.

‘No, you’re not going to open the mail, or no they don’t appreciate you enough?’

‘No, you may not call me John.’

Cal held his hands up. ‘I fully understand. I was out of line. That was unprofessional of me.’

He spotted a small round tin on the desk, with a stack of sugar-dusted yellow candy inside. Taking one, he popped it in his mouth. Across the room, the guard stifled a gasp.

‘Mm. Lemon. Is that lemon?’ Cal asked. ‘Tastes like lemon. Nice, though. Not too sour.’

A vein pulsed on the warden’s right temple. He closed the folder, very deliberately replaced the lid on his tin of candy, then stared equally deliberately at the point where Cal’s buttocks met his desktop.

It took a few seconds before Cal got the message.

‘Right. Yes. Sorry, been on my feet most of the day, just taking the weight off,’ he said, standing up. He flashed another beaming smile, and indicated the closed folder. ‘So, we good?’

The warden crossed his hands over the folder and tapped out another slow drum beat on it. ‘It appears there has been an administrative error,’ he admitted, making no effort to hide the fact that doing so caused him very real pain.

‘Hey, these things happen,’ said Cal. ‘You shouldn’t feel bad about it.’

‘I don’t,’ the warden said.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Cal said. ‘So, I guess I’ll just gather up my things…’ He patted down his orange jumpsuit. ‘Yep, looks like I’ve already got everything, so I guess I am ready to go!’

Cal leaned over and shook the guard’s hand. She stared down at it in surprise. ‘Audrey, thank you for your help, it’s been a pleasure. I hope we can do it again sometime.’

‘Uh, no problem.’

Cal winked at her, then turned to the warden and extended a hand across the desk. ‘John, I really appreciate you sorting everything out,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I’d get that damp patch looked at. It’s structurally unsafe, and from this angle looks like the trapped soul of a dead clown, and neither of those – in my opinion, anyway – are things a man in your position should have to put up with.’

His eyes flicked from John to his outstretched hand and back again. He nodded encouragingly.

The warden’s chair creaked as he leaned back in it. ‘Unfortunately, Mr Carver, there are currently no prisoner transport options available to me.’

Cal’s smile wavered, just for a moment. ‘”No prisoner transport options”? What does that mean?’

‘I literally do not know another way of saying it,’ the warden said, the corners of his mouth tugging into a slight smirk. ‘I currently have no means at my disposal with which to transport you to Highvue.’

‘That’s fine. Know what? That’s totally fine. You could call me a cab,’ Cal suggested. ‘Audrey could come with me, if you’re worried about me running away. You’d be OK with that, right Audrey?’

‘Uh, yeah. Yeah, I could…’

‘No. Don’t worry. Prison transport will be arranged,’ the warden said.

Cal’s shoulders heaved with relief. ‘Really? That’s awesome! Thanks, John.’ He laughed. ‘You almost had me going there for a minute. I mean, the thought of spending another minute in this hellhole—’

‘Tomorrow.’

Cal blinked several times in rapid succession. The warden leaned forwards in his chair again, steepling his hands in front of his face. Somewhere beyond the door behind Cal, a high-pitched alarm began to chime.

 

Space Team by Barry Hutchison is published by Zertex Media, priced £8.99.

If you’re still on the hunt for the perfect gift for children aged between 9 and 12, then we recommend the final instalment in Ross Mackenzie’s thrilling – and award-winning – Nowhere Emporium series. With pirates, nightmares, treasure monsters and a whole lot of magic, readers will surely delight in the twists and turns on offer. But you don’t need to take our word for it – here is Ross Mackenzie to tell us more . . .

 

The Otherwhere Emporium
By Ross Mackenzie
Published by Floris Books

 

 

The Otherwhere Emporium by Ross Mackenzie is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.

In A Friendship in Letters, Michael Shaw brings together correspondence between two of Scotland’s most famous writers – Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie – for the first time. BooksfromScotland chatted to him about his book and what the letters revealed about each of them.

 

A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson & J. M. Barrie
Edited by Michael Shaw
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Congratulations on the publication of your book, A Friendship in Letters. When did you first discover the friendship between Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie?

I wouldn’t say I ‘discovered’ it. It’s been known that the two corresponded since the 1890s and Stevenson’s letters (which have all been published before) made it clear that they had a sustained correspondence. But I only realised that they developed a friendship when I was doing my PhD thesis, when I was reading through Stevenson’s letters.

 

Barrie’s side of the correspondence with Stevenson was thought to be lost. How did you come to find his letters?

Some of Barrie’s key biographers have speculated that the letters were lost, but other scholars have known about them. When I first saw them, I didn’t realise some people had characterised them as ‘lost’. I was on a research trip at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, doing some research for my first book, The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival (2020). I was investigating some manuscripts by Stevenson, Barrie and Andrew Lang, but I got through the material I had ordered quite quickly, so I had some time on my hands. I looked through the library’s catalogues and ordered material (mainly correspondence) that sounded interesting. This was when I first saw the Barrie letters to Stevenson. I simply assumed they had been published before, but I thought I would read through them while I was there. I was struck by how affectionate and fun they were (and the various things they included – such as a short playlet, in which Barrie imagines his visit to Samoa), so I resolved that I had to get a printed copy of the letters for my bookshelf. It was only when I got hold of a copy of Viola Meynell’s Letters of J. M. Barrie, which describes the letters to Stevenson as ‘lost or destroyed’, and did some more work that I realised that Barrie’s run of letters to Stevenson hadn’t been published before.

 

In reading Barrie’s side of the correspondence did you come to think differently of both writers?

I was struck by just how fun, playful and jesting Barrie was. And while I knew they developed a friendship, I didn’t realise just how much the friendship with Stevenson meant to Barrie. It’s an incredibly affectionate correspondence in places.

 

When they first started writing to each other Barrie had yet to write the work that would make him legendary. How did their correspondence inspire his work?

The correspondence inspired various Barrie works, in differing ways. Barrie wrote a poem to mark Stevenson’s death, titled ‘Scotland’s Lament’, shortly after Stevenson died, where we find some subtle references back to the correspondence. He included a chapter on Stevenson in his memoir of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, and a character in one of Barrie’s lesser-known novels, Sentimental Tommy, is based on Stevenson. Barrie told Stevenson that he was modeling the character Captain Stroke on him, and Stevenson’s response inspired the ending of the sequel, Tommy and Grizel (I won’t give the ending away here…). Stevenson and their friendship inspired some later writings too: there are references to Treasure Island characters in the Peter Pan texts, and, in the 1920s, Barrie wrote a lovely short story imagining how he might have met Stevenson in Edinburgh. Several of these pieces are included in the book as appendices.

 

Though Stevenson was the more established writer, he was the one who initiated their correspondence. What do you think Stevenson appreciated from their friendship?

Stevenson had been reading some work by Barrie, which he was taken by, which prompted him to reach out.  As Stevenson’s second letter shows, he was particularly fond of Barrie’s early novel, The Little Minister. I think Stevenson wanted to congratulate Barrie, but he also wanted to support him. He sometimes acts like a literary mentor at the beginning of the correspondence, giving him advice on writing to Barrie, but their relationship becomes much more equal as the correspondence progresses.

 

Stevenson was living his final years in Samoa when they started their correspondence. Do you think establishing a connection back to Scotland, and particularly Edinburgh, was important to him in writing to Barrie?

It absolutely was. I think Stevenson appreciated the fact that he could freely make cultural references to Scottish places and history with Barrie. He suspected that Barrie was, like him, a ‘Scotty Scot’. They don’t talk a great deal about Edinburgh, but it clearly played a role in stimulating the correspondence. Stevenson mentions their shared experiences of the ‘grey metropolis’ in the very first letter and quips: ‘no place so brands a man’.

As well as talking about literary matters, their letters cover family, love, politics, gossip; a whole range of subjects. Do you feel these letters give an insight into both writers that hasn’t been appreciated before?

I think the letters help us understand Barrie’s networks better, what he thought of other writers and writings, and his writing processes. I think we get a stronger idea of Barrie’s sense of himself too, and how deep his affection for Stevenson was.

 

Were you surprised to find the humour in their letters?

It would be surprising if the humour wasn’t there. I knew how funny Stevenson’s other correspondences could be, and Barrie is a great ironist and parodist in his novels and plays.  They were well matched and a humourous correspondence was likely to emerge. Stevenson describes the pair of them as ‘fools’, and they enjoy poking fun at each other (and many other subjects).

 

Finally, what works from Stevenson and Barrie would you recommend as your favourites?

With Barrie, I’d recommend The Little Minister, Margaret Ogilvy, The Admirable Crichton and What Every Woman Knows. Farewell Miss Julie Logan (a late novella) is extraordinary. There’s so much more to Barrie than Peter Pan. With Stevenson, where to begin? There are very few I wouldn’t recommend.  Treasure Island and Kidnapped are well worth returning to, and Weir of Hermiston and The Master of Ballantrae are wonderful. The Beach of Falesá, set in the Pacific Islands, is among my favourites.

 

A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson & J. M. Barrie edited by Michael Shaw is published by Sandstone Press, priced £11.99.

Stanley Baxter is an entertainment legend and his newly released autobiography gives a surprising insight into the man who has made us all laugh for decades. In this extract we follow Stanley trying to make his first steps in the world of entertainment as working down the mines and national service get in his way.

 

Extract taken from The Real Stanley Baxter
By Brian Beacom and Stanley Baxter
Published by Luath Press

 

The pit work involved a conveyor belt delivering a constant line of coal mixed up with stones and Stanley and Co. had to remove the stones, break them up with an 18-pound hammer into smaller pieces and then push them through a grille on the ground. However, as the bars on the grille were fixed close together, it made for far more stone breaking. Naturally, Stanley found this situation to be intolerable.

‘By the time I got the bloody stones broken up other stones had gone into the truck with the coal’

Infuriated, Stanley left his post and went back to the canteen to find the foreman.

‘[With Kelvinside silver spoon in mouth.] I simply must speak with you!’

‘[With pipe in mouth.] Oh, aye. Whit dae ye want, son?’

‘Do you realise what’s going on down there?’

‘No, what?’

‘No? Well, I’ll tell you…’ He does, and concludes: ‘And if there’s any more of this nonsense well, we’re going to WALK OUT.’

Stanley’s interpretation of Marx and Engels was unleashed. However, he could have been quoting Groucho Marx for all the foreman cared.

‘Walk out? Walk out? You’re working for His Majesty’s Service here, son. Do you realise you could be shot for what you’re saying to me?’

‘Shot? Shot? Well, em. Shot, you say? Em, well, regardless, something ought to be done. [Softened, conciliatory tone appears.] It’s really not good enough.’

‘Aye, well. We’ll see what can be done about taking away a couple of the bars.’

Threat of dawn execution passed and the young revolutionary at the vanguard of coal mining improvement schemes had his way. (In a few years’ time Stanley’s union work with Equity would see him described in a Glasgow Evening Times headline as ‘RED BAXTER’.)

But before Red could really make his name as a political activist, fate kicked in. When a very bad cold and his old earache flared up, so did Bessie. Her little Bevin Boy, she felt, had to come out of the mines. Bessie insisted Sonny Boy be given a new National Service medical, but it was only after protracted discussion the board reluctantly agreed to free Master Baxter from the chains of coal mining oppression.

‘They looked at me rather aggressively and said, “We’re dropping you down to b1 status. But don’t think you won’t be called up for one of the services!” And I said, “Look, I’m not asking not to be called up at all.”

‘All they said in dismissing me was, “Well, be on your way.” But I didn’t know where my “way” was at all.’

 

*

 

Released in the spring of 1945 from the pit of misery, Stanley had some unexpected time on his scratched and torn hands. And for a while he managed to delude himself that Her Majesty’s Forces may well have forgotten he ever existed. After all, what use could he be to the war effort now that it looked to be over? Dresden had been bombed flat, the Red Army was about to enter Berlin and the British and Canadians were set to liberate Belsen.

But just in case he were called up, Stanley determined to make at least a little hay while Freedom’s sun shone. Time was again spent at the movies, catching a tram out to the Boulevard in Knightswood to see the likes of Judy Garland’s Meet Me in St. Louis.

Stanley smiles as he agrees this particular days’ delights offered a clue to his sexuality. Yet, his sexual predilection wasn’t entirely clear. Lena Horne made him feel light on his feet, but the mere thought of Bill Henry caused the teenager to defy gravity.

Stanley, now almost 19, certainly didn’t think to explore the Glasgow world of teen heterosexuality. He didn’t like bars and the city’s vast array of glittering dancehalls/pick-up palaces such as the Locarno and the Dennistoun Palais – Glasgow now had more than 150 – held no real appeal.

‘I did go dancing with cousin Alma a few times to Green’s Playhouse in the city centre because she didn’t have a boyfriend, and I was there to be dragged around.’

But if Stanley was gay and in love with Bill what could he do about it? Bill wasn’t gay. He much preferred tea but would have the occasional coffee – when it was presented on a tray.

When Stanley wasn’t thinking of Bill Henry he was dreaming of a life in acting. In May 1945, just before his birthday, Betty Low (a keen actor as well as an artist) suggested Stanley audition for the radical Unity Theatre Group, based at Glasgow’s Athenaeum Theatre. To his utter relief he was successful. Here was a chance to prove to his dad he could make a career as a performer.

‘The only problem was this was I found myself in a workers’ theatre milieu, so I thought I’d better play up the mines and play down Hillhead – both school and district. But I didn’t fool anyone with my baggy brown corduroys and turtle-necked navy blue jersey and wise nods to Marx and Engels.

‘I was uncomfortably aware that the real thing, a young actor called Roddy McMillan, (who would become an iconic tv and film star) was controlling his mirth with difficulty.’

Stanley appeared in one play at Unity (he can’t recall the title – ‘I think it was a George Munro play.’) playing an old man and he loved it, but regrets he had to learn to smoke for the role and was hooked for life.

‘But the next part coming up, I figured, would be truly immense for me. The play was called Remembered For Ever and it was the story of a young soldier who was blinded. A real womb trembler. I thought, “There won’t be a dry eye in the house.”’

The female lead went to Josephine Crombie, his school siren.

However, Stanley didn’t get to play alongside his Paper Doll. Days before the opening, a manila envelope plopped onto the landing with the letters ohms on the back. It was the worst of news. Stanley had been called up.

He could of course have followed in the footsteps of Alfie Hill, later to change his name to Benny, who had decided to become a moving target and worked (hid) in the theatres of England for six months (Benny was caught and punished before being sent to a unit).

Then again, he could have become a conscientious objector and refused to enlist, as playwright Harold Pinter did – and was fined £30. But Stanley had never skipped school, far less a civil ruling you could be jailed for. And that would certainly have created scandal amongst Bessie’s mahjong ladies.

In June 1945, a month after VE day, Stanley set off for Pinefields camp in Elgin to join the Seaforth and Camerons. He was sad to leave behind his dad, Alice and erstwhile lover Bill, whom he’d said a brief goodbye to over the phone. Leaving his mother behind however was far less of an ordeal.

‘It was too close,’ he says of the relationship. ‘I badly wanted to get out of the house. I didn’t want to join the army, but one consolation was Bessie wasn’t coming with me.’

Stanley was sad however to leave the BBC behind and a developing career in acting on radio in series such as Kidnapped. But his saddened heart sank even lower than his battered seat covering when he looked out of the train window.

‘As the train made to move off, I saw this shambolic figure of Mrs Connolly rushing along holding the hand of Norman. And I nearly died at this realisation he was coming to Pinefields with me.’

Norman was all too much of a reminder of the outsider Stanley had been before he found his own set. And Stanley had more than enough adjustments to make on his own, what with moving into a wooden hut in the camp with ‘11 other hairy-arsed soldiers’.

‘When I walked in I thought a rat had died. The place stank of sweaty feet.’

There was another personal issue to contend with.

‘I was terrified to find that you had terrible trouble having a wank, down to the bromide they put in the tea. The army said they didn’t ever do such a thing but believe you me I am living proof that they carried out pharmaceutical de-bollocking. The number of nights I sat in that loo working up to a sweat that would pour down my face – with nothing to show for it but a wee feeling – convinced me we had all been tampered with.

‘I hoped that this wouldn’t go on for my entire army career, and fortunately it didn’t.’

But despite the stinking socks and sexual emasculation, being cut from Bessie’s umbilical cord was just what he needed. Stanley began to breathe on his own.

‘I got on awfully well with the corporal in charge of our hut because I started doing impressions of the Regimental Sergeant Major. In fact, he said to a personnel officer, “Take a look at Private Baxter, sir. He has his Higher Leaving Certificate. Could he be officer material?”

‘And this chinless wonder of an officer looked me up and down and with a derisory sneer, produced an Oxford accent and declared, “I don’t think so.”

‘I laughed at the time, thinking, “You are so fucking right!” I never did make officer.’ (Technically, he did – much, much later Stanley would be awarded the awesomely grand title of Brigadier.)

Meantime, he settled in nicely. Learning to march at Pinefields came easy, thanks to Alma’s dancing lessons. Yet poor Norman may have been brilliant academically but couldn’t march, or even fold a blanket.

‘He went AWOL. He ran back to mummy and the House of Usher. And after a few days she brought him back to the camp, by the hand. The commanding officer looked at Norman’s baffies, still held together by string, and his mum holding his hand and clearly felt sorry for the pair of them. He was sent to the Pioneer Corps to do some manual labour and I never heard of him again.’

 

The Real Stanley Baxter by Brian Beacom and Stanley Baxter is published by Luath Press, priced £20.00.

The Changing Outer Hebrides is a voyage of discovery, a fascinating book that focuses on one small village in the Hebridean islands to explore the connection between nature, community and place and how they nurture a ‘sense of place’. In this extract we look at the wonderful plant life of Galson and the cultural history of naming them.

 

Extract taken from The Changing Outer Hebrides
By Frank Rennie
Published by Acair

 

Carnivorous plants, and other delights

As we were walking on the moor one early-Spring morning, following a narrow stream-side sheep-path, winding beside the Allt Grunndal, my eye was captured by a small splash of vivid green among the uniform grey-brown clumps of Heather. The Heather had not yet begun to develop its new-season growth, so the contrast with the lime-green moss was quite startling, and when we drew closer, the reason for its presence became obvious. Wedged among the Heather tussocks was the dried and decomposing remains of a gull which had perished over the winter, probably snuggling inside the maze of tussocks for a last, fruitless attempt to gain shelter and warmth. The green moss was growing on the white carcass. In this nutrient-poor soil, the carcass of the gull would have been a bonanza for the moss, adapted to take advantage of any passing opportunity to suck up sustenance whenever a chance presents. Nor is this uncommon, for several species of plants on the moor of Gabhsann are wonderfully suited to this challenging environment. Among my favourite plants, although they are fairly common here with their red-and-green starburst outlines, are those that are exotically, and intriguingly, carnivorous.

When we hear mention of ‘carnivorous plants’ most people probably imagine strange Amazonian man-eaters, or perhaps something in a dreadful B-list movie Hollywood horror film, but there are half-a-dozen delightful species dotted across this northern landscape. Delightful, that is, unless you happen to be a Midge, or a small fly, because a couple of species of Butterwort, and three or four species of Sunflower specialise in trapping and digesting small insects to secure their scarce supply of nutrients. It was Charles Darwin who first demonstrated that some carnivorous plants capture insects as a source of nitrogen and phosphorous, but if you get your nose right down near ground-level and search among the moss, it is easy to observe the process for yourself. Over the short northern summer, the little green buds of the Sundew burst into a new phase of life and develop a rosette of sticky green leaves covered with tiny hair-like, red fibres. Apart from the clue in their English names, the Round-leaved Sundew and the Oblong-leaved Sundew are perhaps difficult for the botanically inexperienced observer to differentiate, but the leaves of the former are roundish and lie mostly flat on the peat and grow on the higher, drier parts of the bog surface, while the latter have leaves which are gently inclined or even erect, and prefer the lower and damper parts, even on open and water-covered areas of mud. Small insects are attracted to the colourful leaves, but get covered in their sticky coating, and are eventually dissolved by the enzymes which are released by the plant to secure its nitrogen intake. Once trapped on the sticky leaf, the struggles of the insect only serve to encourage the production of more digestive enzymes, and hasten the consumption of the insect.

There is also another species locally, the Great Sundew, but while the three species share the same geographical coverage across the Gabhsann landscape, they each prey on a slightly different range of insects and prefer to occupy subtly different microhabitats on the moor. Botanists have shown that the rate of insect capture increases with the area of the leaves, and that the growth of new leaves is directly related to insect capture.

Surprisingly, the Sundews are not the only carnivorous plants on the Gabhsann moor. Despite being regarded as botanical oddities, it has been discovered that several plant species have adapted to survive in sunny but wet and nutrient-poor habitats such as peat-bogs, where the nutritional benefit gained from capturing insects can give them an edge on survival. Although unrelated, two species of Butterwort are also found on the moor of Gabhsann and they too obtain their nutrient intake by capturing and digesting insect prey. The Common Butterwort and the Pale Butterwort can be harder to find among the ground vegetation, because they do not have the self-advertising red rosette of the Sundew, and they can be difficult to find among the Sphagnum mosses until the flowers bloom. Called ‘pinguicula’ after their fat, glistening leaves, and ‘butterwort’ because of their application by early peoples to curdle milk and produce a yoghurt-like fermentation, the Butterworts have a distinctive delicately blue flower, held on a long stem just high enough above the sticky leaves to ensure against trapping potential pollinators instead of a potential meal.

The Gaels, who have inhabited this landscape longer than anyone can remember, have named every part of it that was familiar to them (which is in fact everything) as did the Norse settlers, who came, stayed a while, then left or intermarried. Some people say that, as a general rule, the names of places which can be seen as landmarks from the sea, have names derived from the Norse, while the inland names were given by the Gaels. Superficially this has some truth, but as always there are many exceptions and oddities. There are names of places which betray a Norse derivation, but which are rendered now in the Gaelic mode of spelling. There are place-names whose meaning and origin are now lost beyond time. What is clear from the topographical nomenclature is that the Gaelic-speaking inhabitants were intimately familiar with every part of their landscape. The naming of the configurations of the land is intimately connected with the Gaelic language, and the Gaelic language is intimately reflected in the nature of that indigenous landscape. Land which might be simply called ‘moor’ in English has a wide diversity of descriptive names, based perhaps on the geomorphology, the colours, the predominant covering of vegetation, and/or the perceived usefulness of that land. This land is not the deep, fertile farmland common further south, but it is neither a wilderness, nor is it bleak. Neil Gunn, in one of his Highland novels The Other Landscape, explores the concept of a hidden landscape beyond the visible one. He describes it to be like to having two similar conversations with different men and liking the first man but distrusting the second because some ‘other conversation’ in the subconscious background led him to detect features and characteristics which gave different interpretations of what he could actually see. Some people read landscapes like this, and these are the impressions that I have as I walk, and work, and live in Gabhsann.

 

The Changing Outer Hebrides by Frank Rennie is published by Acair, priced £16.95,

Time for poetry, and a wonderful new collection from the award-winning and much-translated Magi Gibson. The poems in I Like Your Hat beautifully capture moments of noticing that speak to our wider connections, to family, community and love. We’re delighted to share a sample of them here.

 

I Like Your Hat
By Magi Gibson
Published by Luath Press

 

I Like Your Hat

At the bus stop where the wind’s trying
to kill us, slicing in like a scimitar from Siberia,
a tiny woman is wearing a colourful velvet beret.

She’s so small, I see each segment of its circle
sitting on her head like the wheel
of a stained glass window: emerald, sapphire,

saffron, indigo, amber, red. She beams
when I say it’s beautiful, tells me its story;
a gift from her daughter years ago,

she deemed it too bright, too loud,
stuffed it in a drawer, out of sight.
And now, her daughter’s dead.

Years later, the bus stop on St Vincent Street,
maybe it’s the same wind, slicing in
from Siberia, snow and ice spitting

through its sharpened teeth,
a young woman says, ‘I love your hat!’
It’s a beret of sorts. Mulberry wool.

‘Well cool,’ she says. ‘Unusual.’
‘It’s from a charity shop,’ I reply.
Then she admires my scarf. Hand-woven
in India. Fairtrade. And while the bus

doesn’t come, we talk recycling, pollution,
climate change, and I see she’s carrying
an art portfolio under one arm, while

on her shoulders she bears the future
of the world. And I swear her smile’s
so beautiful, this student girl

I’ve never met before, she’s lighting up
the shelter like an angel in a holy grotto
as all around the drear November dusk

descends black as the wings of ravens.
And the glow from her face warms me
more than my woollen kind-of-beret

or my hand-woven Fairtrade scarf or best
thermal underwear from Marks & Spencer,
or my specially lined duvet coat as worn

by explorers to far Antarctica
guaranteed to keep me warm at minus fifty
in a hurricane. And as we chat I recall

the tiny lady’s velvet beret, its jewelled
wheel of colours, and her sadness as she said
she wore it now to please her daughter,

who is dead. And all the while the darkness
deepens as if the sky is leaking sin
and the east wind with its icy breath

from Siberia does its best to kill us
and cut like a scimitar
through the warmth

of our common humanity.

 

Glasgow Epiphany

Underneath the No Waiting
At Any Time sign
where a homeless man’s been dossing

in a doorway, someone
has scrawled in white chalk
I CAN SEE INTO YOUR SOUL.

A thought that stalks me
dogged as my own shadow
onto Great Western Road,

past the kebab shop, and the
graffiti-scratched bus stop,
where a drunk is singing

obscenities into the cold ear
of the east wind. I can see
into your soul… seven syllables

that susurrate softly at the fringes
of my consciousness, fluttering
like the soft white wings

of the guardian angel I stopped
believing in when I was eight,
haunting me with whispers

of afterlife and sin and lost souls
with no place to sleep at night. So
when three Jehovah’s Witnesses

in the fading winter light offer me
Watchtowers with a sprinkling
of eschatological warnings

at the side door of Òran Mór,
I think maybe it will free me
of the strangeness of it all if I pass

the Good News on that up around
the corner in a dead end street
where No Waiting is Permitted

for All Eternity, there’s a down-and-out
dossing on cardboard in a doorway
who can see into their Immortal Souls –

when from the frozen branches
of a black-boughed tree
at the red-amber-green lights

where four roads meet and
the traffic roar stops starts stops,
and you can hardly hear the pound

of your own heartbeat, the song
of a blackbird rises into the city dusk
scattering sparks of stardust

like a tiny resurrection.

 

Three Days Till Christmas

in the packed department store,
shoppers laden like Sherpas

trek through forests
of synthetic trees,

wade through drifts
of special offers.

in the midst of this throng
under twinkling tinfoil stars

she wanders alone
on sandalled feet

donkey-brown coat
buttoned up all wrong

perched upon her unbrushed hair
a crown of tinsel thorn.

crowds part before her
like a red sea miracle.

she floats by on a cloud
of cheap whisky.

while her voice soars above
the festive ringing of cash registers.

a fallen angel singing
in the bleak midwinter.

 

I Like Your Hat by Magi Gibson is published by Luath Press, priced £8.99.