THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Good food is a treat and a comfort at any time, and during lockdown sharing tips on eating well has been a highlight across social media. Scotland’s publishers are always on hand to give us books that highlight the joy of cooking and eating, so we thought it the right time to give a you taster menu of some current cookbooks.

Canongate have a beautiful collection of books about food on on their list and one of BooksfromScotland’s recent favourites is the wonderful Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity by Priya Basil. It’s a brilliant gift to anyone who loves to entertain. She writes:

In English ‘to cook something up’ means to prepare food, but also to invent stories or schemes, to concoct something out of fantasy. When I first started writing I also baked a lot, mostly on days when the writing wasn’t going well. It soothed me, alongside the slow and intangible creation of a novel, to cook up something that was quickly ready and edible. A cake can bring simple, instant self-gratification and appreciation from others, whereas writing – for all its rewards – is always accompanied by self-doubt. Moreover, the reactions of others, even when positive, are rarely enough for me. I’m perpetually hungry for some extra validation, which nobody in the world can give. Only in the act of writing is that hunger satisfied, for I become, briefly, bigger than myself, capable of hosting the entire universe and yet treating every single person in it as if they were my only guest. This feat feeds and sates my ravenous self, my need to be and to have everything.

Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You’re invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other.

A recipe is a story that can’t be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks by cuisine and you’ll find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of ingredient quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – ‘Julia’s Apple Tart’ – or in a sub-line – ‘Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’. Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially nowadays, with online food blogs abounding and all kinds of once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket. Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it’s tradition.

No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. Hummus in the Middle East may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dip, a group of Lebanese hummus-aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their ur-hummus credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you’ll need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household. A year after the Lebanese set their hummus record, the title was taken by a group in Israel who filled a satellite dish with four tonnes of the dip. Months later the Lebanese managed to top that and reclaim the Guinness World Record title. The dispute continues, a mild incarnation of the greater, more intractable regional conflict. I should probably refrain from dipping my finger into such loaded contests about the humble chickpea, but I adore hummus, and my favourite version is one made by a Palestinian friend – without a trace of garlic. And, of course, she is certain hummus was invented in her village.

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Our friends at Black & White have been really spoiling us lately with their gorgeous lifestyle books. One of those books, guaranteed to make your mouth water is Ailidh Forlan’s Street Food Scotland: A Journey of Stories and Recipes to Inspire. In the book, she travels round Scotland giving us the best recommendations for food stalls across the country. Here, she tells us about the delightful Melt, providing the best comfort food to the residents of Aberdeen.

Melt will celebrate its fourth birthday on the first of March 2020. It’s a hugely accomplished business now boasting two premises, the Melt Mobile and a street food stall. It bends the rules of my book – does Mechelle’s unconventional timeline of bricks and mortar before an outdoor stall disqualify her from the classification of street food? Perhaps. But are her grilled cheeses of such a high calibre that it would be a crime to walk past without joining the queue for them? Oh, most definitely.

The toasties are thick heavenly doorstops containing your week’s recommended calorie intake in each half. They’re filthy things, loaded with stringy mozzarella and robust cheddar to create the most Instagrammable cheese pull – if you’re of that ilk. The pulled pork, haggis, ham and smoked bacon come from Aberdeenshire Larder in Ellon. It’s all sandwiched between bread from the Breadmaker in Aberdeen, who are, ‘A not-for-profit bakers that employ special needs staff and put profits back into the local community.’

In one shop, Melt gets through a whopping 150 loaves a week, creating toasties like the oh-so-popular Bruiser that has hangover cure written all over it. It’s a marriage of macaroni cheese with a three-cheese blend, haggis and smoked bacon and, as a top secret off-menu perk, if you ask for a ‘Bruiser Bru’, Mel will gift you a pity can of Irn Bru to restore you back to full health. You didn’t hear that from me. Scottish rapeseed oil does a marvellous job of crisping up the outsides of the toasties and Mel chooses to cook with big flat top grills and castiron steak weights to give the customers a bit of a show.

The shop itself transports visitors back to their childhood. ‘The Breville toastie maker came to the UK in 1973, so the design brief was your nan’s living room if it had been designed by Wayne Hemingway,’ Mechelle says. And ‘Mrs Melt’ looks the part. Mechelle’s style has strolled out of the 1950s with her headscarf, pristine eyebrows, winged eyeliner and ‘MELT LIFE’ tattooed on her knuckles, which she paid for in toasties to the artist – now that’s seriously cool.

One February Monday, a newspaper reported that a passer-by kicked one of Melt’s bakers in reaction to them being closed. Heaven forbid anything should get in the way of a hungry woman and her toastie. But the community hasn’t always been so . . . welcoming. Let’s rewind.

‘When we opened the shop, we had dreadful press. It was faddy, it was fickle, it was bread and cheese: “How dare they charge £5 for what we can do at home?”’ Melt was up against it. ‘Aberdonians are so fussy and simple with their taste. You work with it or you fight it. I learned very quickly that if you dare to charge Aberdonians £5 for what they deem to be bread and cheese, it better be the size of a house.’

She ran the shop for a year before venturing into street food, and it soon became pivotal. There were only burger vans in industrial estates, fuelling lunch-break workies when she started up, but it gave her business the road it deserved. ‘Up here the palate’s a little limited. I could go to an event in Glasgow or Edinburgh and use San Francisco-style sourdough bread, that comes out chewy and sticky. In Aberdeen, unless it’s a farmhouse loaf, you’d struggle. They don’t appreciate specialist cheeses either. I tried to do trendy drinks and got met with resistance from people who just want Irn Bru!’

At times Mechelle’s creativity was limited by her audience, but by trading at hundreds of events across Scotland, she could experiment with her produce and then reel customers back in for more. ‘People now come to me because they’ve seen my stall at pop-ups and festivals. There’s no better advertising than getting out there and doing it.’

Aberdonians might have simpler tastes, according to Mechelle. But once she’s converted them, they’re loyal. ‘Almost four years on and my customers are incredibly protective of me; we’ve established a cheese cult!’ There are no regrets here.

 

THE BRUISER
A very Scottish toastie comprised of macaroni cheese, haggis and smoked bacon

INGREDIENTS

2 slices of sourdough bread
50g béchamel sauce
100g mozzarella, grated
50g strong Scottish cheddar
Rapeseed oil
50g Marshalls macaroni, cooked
2 rashers of grilled smoked streaky bacon
100g haggis, cooked

METHOD 1. Lay your bread out and generously spread your béchamel sauce onto both slices of bread. 2. Shower one slice of bread with both types of cheese and sandwich together. 3. Oil a hot pan, a skillet is ideal, and place the sandwich into it at a high heat. 4. If you have a heavy pan press this on top. 5. Lift the underside after a few minutes to check it’s browning, adjust heat accordingly. 6. Once browned flip over and cook the other side. When you’re happy it has browned and the cheese has melted put the macaroni and meat inside and continue to heat through for several minutes. 7. Take off the heat and enjoy

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Birlinn have a wide variety of cookbooks across their backlist, but BooksfromScotland particularly loves the Food Bible series, a selection of pocket guides that celebrate particular ingredients in Scotland’s larder. And, very presciently, two new bibles have just been released, The Scottish Baking Bible, by Liz Ashworth, and the The Scottish Wild Food Bible by Claire Macdonald. Here, we share a recipe from each.

 

 

SCOTTISH STRAWBERRY SPONGE
A light-as-a-feather sponge to complement fresh Scottish strawberries baked for a birthday surprise.The tasting comment?‘Sooooooooooooooooo good!’

Makes a cake 20cm (8in) diameter

Sponge

3 eggs
85g (3oz) caster sugar
115g (4oz) self-raising flour
30g (1oz) melted butter

Filling

150ml (¼ pint) double cream
A little caster sugar to taste
Vanilla essence
115g (4oz) strawberries, hulled and sliced

Heat the oven to 180°C (160°C fan), 350°F, Gas 4. Oil and line two sandwich tins. Whisk the eggs and sugar until thick and holding the trail of the whisk. If you can, do this over a pan of simmering water because this gently cooks the egg as you whisk. (I find with very fresh eggs this is not necessary.)When the egg is increased in volume, light in colour and holding the trail of the whisk, sift the flour over the mix then fold in very carefully until all the flour is combined,making sure none is stuck to the base of the bowl or the inside of the spoon. Pour the melted butter down the side of the bowl and fold in gently. Divide the mixture between the two tins and bake in the oven for 20 minutes until risen, golden and springy to touch. Cool a little in the tins and then complete cooling on a wire tray. To make the filling, whip the cream until thick and flavour with a few drops of vanilla essence and a little sugar. Spread the cream on one of the sponges, top with sliced strawberries, then place the second layer of sponge on top. Dust the top of the cake with caster sugar and decorate with a fresh strawberry and a rosette of whipped cream.

Baker’s note You can use any Scottish soft fruit, such as raspberries or blueberries

 

NETTLE TIMBALES
Serves 6

INGREDIENTS

2 large handfuls of nettles
300ml (½ pint) single cream
3 large eggs and 1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon salt
12–15 grinds of black pepper
a grating of nutmeg

Steam the nettles for 2–3 minutes until wilted. Cool, then squeeze out any excess liquid. Whizz in a food processor until smooth, then add the seasonings. Whisk together the eggs and yolk, adding the single cream. Mix the seasoned nettle puree thoroughly into the egg and cream mixture. Butter six ramekins. Divide the nettle mixture evenly between the ramekins. Put them into a roasting tin and pour boiling water into the roasting tin, to come halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Cook in a moderate oven at 180°C (350°F, Gas 4) for 20–25 minutes, or until the timbales feel firm. Take the roasting tin out of the oven and leave to stand for 15 minutes. Then run a knife around the inside of each ramekin, and shake them out onto warmed plates. Serve either as a starter or as an accompaniment to a main course.

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Kitchen Press’s remit is to give its readers the most interesting and most beautiful cookbooks, and if you have already bought yourself one of their titles, you’ll know what a treat they are. Here on BooksfromScotland, we have a pre-publication exclusive from their much-anticipated and award-winning book from the fantastic Seafood Shack. If you can’t make the journey to Ullapool to find out just how delicious Kirstie Scobie and Fenella Renwick’s food is, then this book will be the next best thing. It will be released in November 2020.

 

SMOKED HADDOCK, PEA AND CHORIZO MACARONI CHEESE
If you feel like jazzing up your mac and cheese, try this. The smoked haddock and chorizo gives it a yummy smoky flavour and the peas freshen it up. A great way to get your kids to eat more fish! Smoked trout also works really well as an alternative to smoked haddock.

Ingredients
Serves 6

100g salted butter
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
½ red chilli, finely chopped
1 vegetable stock cube
3 heaped tbsp plain flour
600ml full fat milk
300g Cheddar cheese, grated
1 tbsp chopped curly parsley
juice of 1/2 a lemon
400g macaroni
100g chorizo, chopped into chunks
3 fillets smoked haddock, chopped into chunks
150g fresh or frozen peas
1 tbsp chopped fresh chives
black pepper

Put a large saucepan on a medium heat and add the butter, onion, garlic and chilli, then let it all sweat off for a good eight to ten minutes until everything is nice and soft and very sweet. Make sure you keep stirring so nothing burns. Crumble in the stock cube and add a good grind of black pepper, and fry off for another minute before adding the flour. Fry for a minute or two to make a roux, then slowly add the milk, whisking all the time as you don’t want it to be lumpy. Cook on a low heat until the sauce has thickened, then take it off the heat and add the grated cheese. Stir until the the cheese has melted into the sauce, and add your parsley and lemon juice.

Boil the macaroni for about seven minutes in salted water – it will keep cooking after you drain it so you want it to be al dente. Cooking times can be different for different brands so look at the packet and take off two minutes from the suggested cooking time to make sure it doesn’t overcook. Once cooked, drain your pasta in a colander.

Heat a small frying pan and add the chopped chorizo – you don’t need to add any oil as the chorizo will release plenty as it heats up. You want to get it nice and crispy so fry it off for a few minutes on a high heat, stirring and reducing the heat if it starts to burn. Keep a few pieces of chorizo aside to garnish your dish at the end. Add the smoked haddock and the peas to the remaining chorizo in the frying pan and cook until the haddock starts to flake. Stir the contents of the pan into the cheese sauce and mix in the pasta. You might need give everything another quick blast of heat. Garnish with the reserved chorizo pieces and a sprinkle of chopped chives and serve.

 

Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity by Priya Basil is published bu Canongate, priced £12.99

Street Food Scotland: A Journey of Stories and Recipes to Inspire by Ailidh Forlan is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £20.00

The Scottish Baking Bible by Liz Ashworth is published by Birlinn Ltd, priced £4.99

The Scottish Wild Food Bible by Claire Macdonald is published by Birlinn Ltd, priced £4.99

The Seafood Shack: Food and Tales from Ullapool by Kirstie Scobie and Fenella Renwick will be published by Kitchen Press in November 2020, priced £20.00

 

 

We may not be able to go wandering too far from home just now, but we can still be armchair travellers, especially with books as evocative as Patrick Baker’s The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland’s Wild Histories. In this extract, he invites us to travel round Scotland’s western isles.

 

Extract taken from The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland’s Wild Histories
By Patrick Baker
Published by Birlinn Ltd

 

Of all of Scotland’s wild places, its wild islands enthral me the most. Perhaps it’s some relic from childhood. The consequence of reading so many children’s books that imbued islands with a sense of mystery and adventure. They were the realms of exploit and exploration, wondrous territories described in a tantalising prose of danger and discovery. Places such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, that could claim ‘latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to safe anchorage’. To a child’s mind they also represented powerful notions of independence and freedom, distanced both physically and imaginatively from the timeframes and rules of the adult world. Most famously, in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Wild Cat Island becomes a private dominion for the children of the novel: their own unexplored island kingdom, to be mapped, named and ruled over by them, as if they are the first to ever land on its shores.

There is, then, something childlike in my fascination with wild islands, but there is also something inherently beguiling about their separateness. Their geographical detachment from the mainland and the difficulty to reach them provokes the same stubborn inquisitiveness in me as remote mountain peaks do. They are also, as I have come discover over the years, places that have been repeatedly weighted with human importance, invested with strategic or spiritual significance through multiple generations.

I have visited dozens of Scotland’s wild islands, but there are countless more I have never set foot on. Many are cast out at sea, but it is the inland varieties that really capture my imagination: wooded islets, freshwater archipelagos or tide-marked outcrops sheltered in sea lochs. None are lived upon (for to be truly wild, an island must be uninhabited) and unlike other wilderness areas, few attract much human traffic. In their containment and isolation they have become vessels of past events, water-locked archives for some of Scotland’s wildest histories.

I had in mind to extend my exploration of wild islands further. For some time, I had heard of a cluster of islands at the north of Scotland’s longest loch, Loch Awe, which were both mysterious and primordially wild. Forest islands, swathed in ancient pines, from whose uppermost branches raptors could be seen lifting off in flight. I planned to make the journey by canoe, sleeping out on the islands’ treefringed shores and paddling between their narrow channels. Later, I would also make a crossing to Eilean Fhianain, a small island in the vast waters of Loch Shiel that had once been home to the Irish missionary, Saint Finnan, and where a ruined chapel and burial ground describe the religious schism that once bitterly divided Scotland.

*

In the middle of the canoe, brightly coloured dry bags had been stuffed beneath the thwart, wedged tightly together so they’d remain in place even if we capsized. Under the bow seat I’d crammed a rucksack full of camping equipment and enough supplies to last us a few days. At the stern was a steal fire pan and a bucket full of firewood, to be used for cooking and for warmth.

I’d been joined by my best mate, Steve, grabbing the chance for a wilderness trip before the birth of his second child. It was good to have him along. Not just for the rare chance to catch up, but also, as an experienced sailor, I knew Steve’s guidance would be useful in some of the exposed stretches of water we were to cover.

We paddled slowly north, the evening light closing in. It was June, and the lochside was dense with foliage. Birch, oak and alder spilled from the banks, their leaves overhanging and touching the water. Where the trees gave way, we saw farmland. There were small white cottages, sheep being herded and the distant sound of quad bikes. After an hour we moved into more open water to ready for the crossing to the northern side of the loch. From shore to shore the distance was just under a kilometre.

It’s an edgy place, being so far out from land. A canoe is a highly susceptible craft, vulnerable to even the slightest changes in weather conditions. Winds can arrive faster than the time it takes to renege on your course, and gusts that would hardly register your attention on land can quickly kick up swells capable of upending a boat. Open-water crossings therefore require caution and commitment.

Almost halfway out, from nowhere, we were hit by a sudden squall. The canoe spun around, the bow flicked clockwise like a weathervane. I powered hard on the leeward side to bring the boat back on course, but I was unable to counter the wind and felt the canoe being forced in the wrong direction. For a few moments I experienced a quiet, concentrated panic, wondering if we’d be pushed into the middle of the loch, then caught up in larger, cresting waves. But the squall died just as quickly as it arrived, the water flattening and the boat responding once more. It was, though – as we were to later find out – a demonstration of the energy the loch could instantly summon.

We reached calmer waters on the northern shore, its surface turning to glassy green. Near a wooded peninsula, a small, scrubby island came into view. It had a swampish look, hardly sitting above the level of the loch and colonised by water-loving trees; willow and alder threw out thin branches, breaking the island’s outline so that it was hard to tell where its shoreline began. It was a crannog, one of dozens of prehistoric settlements built into the body of the loch thousands of years ago. Remarkably little is known about these artificial island refuges, but most are believed to have been homesteads: family dwellings kept safe from animals and intruders by their distance from the land.

We scanned the treeline beyond the crannog for a place to make camp. It had begun to drizzle, and tiny droplets puckered the loch’s surface, turning its texture from mirror to sandpaper. We found a spot, spaced between the canopies of two aged oaks. I rigged a tarp between them to provide some shelter from the rain, and we cooked dinner underneath. We were on the edge of a temperate woodland that stretched deeply inland behind us. The atmosphere was heavy and filled with the onion scent of wild garlic. Mosses grew everywhere, upholstering boulders and tree trunks in lustrous greens and yellows, while tresses of ghost-white lichens hung from every branch.

*

At first light the next day we explored the shoreline on foot. Small boulders covered in black algae lay in between tufts of grass, making it difficult to walk any distance without slipping. Where the grass grew longer, flowers had taken hold: pink campion, forget-me-not, bluebell, and meadow buttercup. Up ahead, Steve signalled from a break in the forestry. There was a ruin, fifty metres from the water’s edge, hidden among the trees.

Only the walls remained, spanning the height of two floors. I stepped across the threshold; inside, but still outdoors. A huge sycamore had grown from the centre of the building, its canopy reaching through the roof’s empty space, dappling sunlight on the walls. The building was a drystone construction – the tallest I’d ever come across and almost a foot deep in parts. The stones were a myriad of shapes and sizes, but so perfectly tessellated that in places they appeared as a single rockface, fissured laterally with cracks. I could sense the builders’ patience and expertise, the contemplation of placement for every piece of the wall, and I struggled to remember seeing anything more beautifully crafted.

Despite its size, the building was slowly disappearing, being swallowed back by the wood. Ivy streamed from the tops of the walls, sending down vines like rappelling ropes. In both rooms, fireweed grew in tall clusters, reaching for patches of sunlight, while spleenwort ferns emerged in splayed starfish forms from the ruin’s stonework course. Outside, birch and alder saplings were establishing themselves. In between them, stands of foxgloves had sprouted, their bugle-shaped flowers turning from white to pink.

Back on the water, we pushed further up the loch, and after a couple of kilometres the islands appeared on the horizon: a small flotilla, fully rigged with dark-leaved sails. We paddled past more crannogs on the way and stopped at the largest, a circle of boulders about twelve feet in circumference. It was a desert island, a granite mound barely above the water and devoid of vegetation. A place to be marooned or abandoned on.

We headed to the furthest island in the archipelago first: a shoreless landmass of tall trees mirroring down into the loch and joined to the mainland by a causeway of wooden groynes. Being the nearest to land, it had signs of being frequently visited. A small stone pier tilted out from beneath the branches, and in the island’s centre an area of flat ground held the remains of a wild camp: charred logs and a circle of smoke-blackened rocks. As we pulled away from the island, a large bird heaved itself into flight, its wings breaking in long, mechanical beats. It appeared black at first, darkened against the brightness of the sky. Then colour. Chocolate-brown wings and the flash of white underside, dark primary feathers and a distinctive highway-man’s mask of feathers banding its face.

 

The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland’s Wild Histories by Patrick Baker is published by Birlinn Ltd, priced £14.99

Jim Crumley’s seasonal quartet is such a treat for nature lovers. His close observation of Scotland’s landscape and wildlife, and his talent for putting those observations into beautiful prose has put Jim firmly in BooksfromScotland’s list of national treasures. We’re delighted to share this extract from his latest book, The Nature of Summer.

 

Extract taken from The Nature of Summer
By Jim Crumley
Published by Saraband Books

 

Simmer’s a pleasant time
Flowers of every colour
Water rins o’er the heugh
And I long for my true lover

Robert Burns

 

Consider the mountain sorrel by your left boot. If you failed to spot it don’t worry, you wouldn’t be the first. At 4,000 feet on the Cairngorms plateau, there is bigger and more handsome stuff to look at. But summer is the Goddess of Small Things. So now that I have drawn your attention to it, why not give the mountain sorrel the time of day? I know, I know, it looks like nothing at all; it’s basically a high-altitude dock leaf. What’s this one…four inches tall? Yet up here, things have a habit of not quite looking like what they really are. That sparse cluster of kidney-shaped leaves at ground level is what botanists call a basal rosette, which is arguably too grandiose for what actually meets your eye. And those things at the other end of a skinny stem that morphs from red at the bottom to green halfway up, those are what pass for flowers, and it is true that they are on the nondescript side of insignificant. But let me show you something. Look closer, look deeper, look inside the flower. See the whole plant. The way to see what’s there is to get down on your knees. Peel the petals apart. Do you see it? This is the fruit of the mountain sorrel, not a berry but a nut. I told you we were dealing with small things. It’s about an eighth of an inch long. Three millimetres, if you don’t do fractions. Turn your binoculars upside down, put the eyepiece almost against the nut and look in the wrong end, for now you have a microscope in your hand. And now that you can see it larger than life, what do you think that is, that green canopy to which the nut clings? Can you see how beautifully formed it is, like an open book; and can you see that it is exquisitely edged in red, the way the finest book pages are edged in gold? It’s a wing. So when plateau winds blow (and the wind has a considerable repertoire up here, from the easiest of breezes like this July morning to an all-Britain all-time record of 176 miles per hour in January 1993), the nut flies until it eventually touches down and – in time, in time – it pushes a root into the tough plateau soil and a new mountain sorrel plant begins to come to terms with high living.

Now consider its neighbour. Notice that unlike the mountain sorrel’s erect stem and spike of flowers and winged nuts, its neighbour is a horizontal, ground-level straggle of shining leaves. Such is the nature of summer in the high Cairngorms that ten days ago this strange growth showed not so much as a leaf bud. Plants of all kinds bloom late and wither early here. The growing season, such as it is, is fast and brief. These leaves are fully open. And if you care to lift up one or two, you may find a yellowish non-leaf growing among them, and if you have the capacity to set aside the evidence of your eyes and think outside the box, it may occur to you that it looks like a tiny catkin – because that is what it is. What you are looking at is a tree, an inch-high tree with its “branches” underground, a dwarf willow. And this is its Scottish homeland, the highest, pared-to-the-bone upthrusts of the Cairngorms, and what passes for summer up here is a short, sharp shock of a season (in the forty-something years I have known these mountains, I have acquired a complete snow calendar: that is, I have been snowed on in every month of the year, so including June, July and August). So short and so sharp that the leaves of some specimens have turned yellow in July, while others just a few hundred yards away are still in bud or have yet to bud at all.

 

****

 

When I chose the title for this chapter, and having written it on a notebook page with a fountain pen (my preferred way of writing), I thought I would begin with a list. This was it:

Goldcrest eggs and nests and chicks, wild strawberries, wild raspberries, blueberries, brambles, cloudberries, cloudberry flowers, small blue butterflies, small coppers, small tortoiseshells, small whites, small pearl-bordered fritillaries, small skippers, dingy skippers, chequered skippers, orangetips, northern-brown argus, Rannoch brindled beauty moth, sea pink, sea spurry, sea holly, newborn lizards, scales on the petals of fragrant orchids, small white orchids, seventeen species of speedwell, wild mountain thyme, mountain avens, mountain sorrel (and nuts), alpine lady’s-mantle, dwarf cornel, eyebright, bedstraw, house martins, sand martins, sandpipers, wrens, merlins, little-ringed plovers, little auk, little tern, azure damselflies, all damselflies and dragonflies apart from those ones that look and sound like Sopwith Camels, spotted flycatchers, headdress of redpolls and reed buntings…

Then I ran out of ink, and I thought better of the idea and that perhaps you might just like to make your own list, now that I’ve shown you how to get the hang of it.

 

The Nature of Summer by Jim Crumley is published by Saraband Books, priced £12.99

If you’re looking for a writer whose skill in taking readers to a different time and place with characters that linger long in the mind, then David Robinson discovers that Lesley Glaister might just be the person you’re looking for, and that her new novel, Blasted Things, deserves to be added onto everyone’s bookshelves.

 

Blasted Things
By Lesley Glaister
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Daphne du Maurier, Kate Atkinson, Ruth Rendell, Gillian Flynn, Patricia Highsmith: read Lesley Glaister’s reviews and she’s been compared to all of them. The underlying thought is invariably the same – Glaister’s novels are every bit as good at chiselling out hidden secrets from expertly drawn characters, the psychological tension is equally taut, the writing just as  dextrous. So how come she isn’t as well-known as they are?

Her sixteenth novel, Blasted Things, published this month by Sandstone Press, does nothing to make that question go away. There aren’t many novelists who can turn both their characters and plot inside out and still make both believable, but this novel, set in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, manages to do just that.

Unlike all of her other ones, it is rooted entirely in the past. The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction defines it as being anything set more than sixty years in the past. As Blasted Things is set a full century ago, I suggest to Glaister that she has just gone and written her first historical novel. At the other end of the phone, I can hear her demurring, and I know why. Because although the book’s historical setting is well drawn (it opens in a First World War field hospital, before switching back to England in the first years of peace) and the period setting and social attitudes accurately conveyed, that’s not really its point.

‘Maybe that’s the problem with my work,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t really fit into any genre. Is it historical? Is it a romance? Is it a psychological thriller?’ Her own preferred form of words is ‘literary fiction with a nod to the dark side’.  Which is fine, although I’d precede it with ‘character-driven’, because the two main protagonists of Blasted Things are so well drawn that they will hang around for a long while in the reader’s mind.

Clementine, a middle-class English girl, has returned from working as a nurse in a field hospital, where love briefly blossomed amid the horrors of war, to an unhappy marriage with a stolid Suffolk GP. There is, at least, stability to her life, although not in her mind, as nothing and no-one can match the intensity of her love for her wartime sweetheart. To Vincent, a lower-middle class war hero back in Blighty minus half of his face, peace brings the very opposite of stability. Instead, he has to hustle for survival: no-one wants someone so horribly disfigured on their sales team. Yet Dolly, the war-widowed landlady who had taken him on as an odd job man, looks a very promising prospect indeed. So while there’s no stability in his life, there may yet, he hopes, be love.

Vincent, Glaister explains, was a thread back to her 2014 novel Little Egypt, in which a similar character had returned shellshocked from the First World War. ‘I thought I’d like to pick up on that, not because I’m interested in war but I am in its ramifications. My father was a Japanese PoW and I’ve already explored this a little bit already, how bottled up tensions can affect a family even down the generations.

‘In 2014, there was so much about the war, and I began writing Clem’s story, starting it quite a long way back. But as the story moved into the First World War, it became too obvious that she was going to get engaged and he was going to be killed, and it was all becoming predictable.’

At this stage, when she was already losing interest in the original direction of the novel, her daughter-in-law in Fort William fell ill and there were other, more important, priorities. Only when she realised that it was the aftermath of the war that really interested her, and when the character of Vincent sparked to life, his blatant external injuries mirroring Clem’s hidden ones, did the book spring back into life. (Her daughter-in-law, incidentally, recovered too: these days, she’s an online yoga teacher, and Glaister had just had an hour in her class before we talked.)

Clem and Vince are the opposite of cardboard cutouts; they are edgy, awkward, brittle, disappointed, maybe even hard to like. Neither are ordinary, neither are mainstream, and of course neither are contemporary. When Glaister’s London publisher was rootling around for an explanation of why her novels didn’t sell as well as they deserved to, that was the answer he came up with: maybe if her characters were more ‘normal’, mainstream and zeitgeisty, more like people she knew …

Maybe if they were online yoga teachers? I suggest.

‘Or influencers, perhaps. Maybe a blogger or an influencer with a dark secret in her past working her magic on the internet.’ She laughs. Not bitterly, but at the absurdity of the idea.

‘Because what I love about writing is imagining life in another skin altogether, with another set of values. Trying on another psyche for size is completely absorbing, and in some ways the more different a character is from me, the more fulfilling writing about them is. When I’ve written characters like the sort I was asked to do, it’s always been hard to bring them to life.’

In that respect, her 2014 novel Little Egypt – largely set among Egyptologists in the 1920s – was an act of defiance, breaking away from the pressure to write something marketable as a psychological thriller to write exactly the kind of novel she wanted to instead. Blasted Things follows a similarly liberating trajectory.

For the reader, the pay-off is the depth of characterisation. In Clem, Glaister has latched onto the way in which VAD nurses came back from the Front to a world bored by talk of war and manic edge to the wish for normal life to resume, where friends want to cut off their tresses in favour of a flapper’s bob,. With Vince, she shows what lies behind the tin mask held with the same psychological acuity albeit on the other side of the class chasm. I can’t say much about the relationship between the two of them without giving away the plot, which soon twists away in an altogether more unnerving direction than you (or certainly I) could possibly imagine.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I find plotting quite difficult as I believe actions have to be deeply motivated. My writing is all about a very painstaking building up of a sense of character and then putting them in difficult situations.  And while it’s easy to concentrate on the two protagonists, I always like to find a whole world in a novel, so the smaller figures have to be fleshed out too, so that you can, as it were, see the two central characters’ faces not just from the front but from around the sides and the back.’

Her plan now, she says, is to start writing a second novel set just after the Second World War that will have as its main characters the babies born, or about to be born, in Blasted Things. There may even, she says be a third novel set around the time of the Vietnam war. You might not find yourself reading about internet influencers and other modish matters in any of them, but if you want war, peace, dark secrets and edgy characters you can believe in, Lesley Glaister is in it for the long haul.

 

Blasted Things, by Lesley Glaister, is published by Sandstone Press, price £14.99.

Young love is never easy, and Sylvia Hehir captures its ups-and-downs perfectly in her new novel, Deleted. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to find out more.

 

Deleted
By Sylvia Hehir
Published by Garmoran Books

 

Firstly, how are you doing? How are you coping with lockdown?

As I usually work from home, the routine of my day is not that different, especially as we live in such an amazing place and I can walk out of my door to beautiful areas. However, I hate not seeing family or having friends visit. Then there’s the big horrible scary bit forever lurking to swamp you. So, not a big fan really.

 

Are you managing to read? What books have been getting you through?

I was so looking forward to The Mirror and the Light and I have started it but I was finding it difficult to totally escape in to that world, and I don’t want to spoil the experience, so I’ve set it aside for the moment. I’ve got a lot to read for Garmoran and that helps as it is working towards positive outcomes. I’m also currently searching for my Roobarb and Custard Annual to help cheer me up.

 

You are just about to release your second YA novel, Deleted, at the end of the month. What draws you to writing YA books?

It is a time of life that stays with you, isn’t it. Everything turned up to maximum. All those things experienced for the first time. Plus, I’ve been a teacher in secondary schools for over thirty years so I have spent a lot of time with teenagers. I loved reading the Georgia Nicolson stories (as an adult!) and I dream of writing like Louise Rennison.

 

What were your favourite books when you were a teenager?

You have to remember I am very old. I only had comics to read at home and any books I did read were generally from school. My own choices that followed on from those include Laurie Lee’s adventures in Spain, Lady Chatterley, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Make of those what you will. Being in an amateur dramatic club I was also fond of reading play scripts, especially Irish writers such as J.M. Synge.

 

Can you tell us a little bit of what to expect from Deleted?

Deleted is unapologetically a teen romance, delivered with a light-hearted tone. The hint of mystery in the story provides our main character, Dee, with a few uncomfortable moments as she tries to work out what is happening with her new mobile. There are fights and misunderstandings and new relationships (and a happy ending). Themes of prejudice and belonging come through too.

 

Both your novels have their young protagonists in fairly remote settings. How do you think the teenage experience differs in rural settings?

I do think growing up with just a handful of classmates in a rural setting is a very different growing up experience to that of youngsters in an urban environment: Social events, opportunities for friendships, everyone in a small community knowing your business. However, taking steps towards adulthood can still be scary and difficult, whatever our surroundings.

 

Not only are you writing, but you’re embarking on a publishing career too. Can you tell us about Garmaron Publishing?

Starting Garmoran Publishing with a few other local writers is an amazing project and we’re very excited for our titles. Indie publishers have the flexibility to approach and take part in the industry on different terms. It is very difficult for unknown authors to be ‘seen’ by agents and big publishing houses. Here at Garmoran, we are committed to giving our authors the support they need to make real the possibility of bringing their work to readers.

 

Has anything you’ve learned in starting publishing influenced your writing?

I will avoid writing tongue twisting phrases and sentences if I’m going to narrate the audio!

 

What’s next for you?

Delivered, the sequel to Deleted, is due out in November 2020. I’m very lucky to have Hilary James provide another fab cover image and I’m looking forward to sharing Dee’s best friend, Frankie’s story. After that, I’ve got a climate change novel in progress (remember when that was our big concern!)  And I’m desperate to complete a graphic novel I’ve got planned.
Garmoran is also currently producing Stories from Home, an ebook short story collection, with proceeds going to a Covid-19 relief fund. So, lots to do!

 

Deleted by Sylvia Hehir is published by Garmoran Books, priced £8.99

 

BooksfromScotland may be biased as it’s our home city, but Edinburgh really is a beautiful place. We love a meander round its streets, but, at the moment, we can’t venture out too much. Brilliantly, Shawna Law has put together an excellent book, Pockets of Pretty: An Instagrammer’s Edinburgh, that means we can enjoy the city’s gorgeous nooks and crannies from the comfort of the couch. Here, we share some of her beautiful pictures of Leith, and in particular, its collection of murals.

 

Extract taken from Pockets of Pretty: An Instagrammer’s Edinburgh
By Shawna Law
Published by Black and White Publishing

 

It’s only right that one of Edinburgh’s main artistic hubs is home to the largest collection of street art and murals in Edinburgh. It’s by no means as extensive as Glasgow’s or Aberdeen’s street art scene, but still Leith has murals dating back to the 1980s with an influx of newly painted walls from 2013, thanks to LeithLate’s mural project. As well as LeithLate’s mural map, I’ve come across a few unofficial murals dotted around the neighbourhood.

 

MURALS TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR

Wronger Rites by Kirsty Whiten (2015)
Dalmeny Street

Untitled Mural by Elph (2016)
115 Leith Walk

The Leith Aquatic
by Blameless Collective (2013)
Halmyre Street

Leith Dockers Club by Tom Ewing (2013)
17 Academy Street

Untitled Mural by Artists’ Collective (1984)
Tolbooth Wynd

Eduardo Paolozzi
by Russell Dempster (2014)
77 Henderson Street

Leith History
by Tim Chalk & Paul Grime (1985)
Next to Leith Library on Ferry Road

København by Chris Rutterford (2018)
Custom Lane

A survivor of the Gretna rail disaster
by Guido Van Helten (2013)
Out of the Blue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pockets of Pretty: An Instagrammer’s Edinburgh by Shawna Law is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £20.00

If you’re finding that lockdown is having an effect on your concentration, we recommend you turn to poetry. One of BooksfromScotland’s favourite poetry publishers is Stewed Rhubarb, and in C D Boyland’s User Stories, they’ve given us another cracking collection. Here’s a taste of what to expect.

 

Poems taken from User Stories
By C D Boyland
Published by Stewed Rhubarb

 

The Caryatid

change
shift yourself
grow dragon tailsport feathers

change
inherit new ways of
thinking, borrow sharp
new teeth, gaze cautiously
into the shadowy corners of
your own capacity

change
learn to come back from
the dead; it’s a good trick
much easier these days &
will get you follows

change
learn/unlearn/relearn/deny
you once thought some
things would never

change  is           to living what

not to                  change is to dying

change
buy this diy chrysalis kit
off the interwebby, ransack
your gran’s sewing box
& make a pair of wings

steal the colours, if you have to
you’ll find best turquoise
in boys’ eyes, best jade in
haters’ scowls

change
all you like
young whippersnapper
grow armour if you
must, be proud of
scars, get nimble on
your feet but don’t
forget

most of your mother’s songs are still
worth singing

 

The Doll’s House

surround yourself with objects || to keep their ghost
away || a pair of gloves || this leather belt || a coffee
cup they never touched || bought new when you were
‘starting over’ || masks that you put on || close fitting ||
buttoned at the neck || never to be exposed to music ||
only worn at night || taught not to use the unsafe words
|| like ‘I will be faithful’ || or ‘I know what I want’ ||
maps re-drawn || whole territories marked ‘here be
phantoms’ || places where their feet have trod || across
your belly || through the garden of your thoughts || marks
their tongue has left || the taste of certain streets ||
is different now || the air has mouths || whispering things
best unheard || make a doll’s house of yourself || empty it
of furniture & move in || wander all the patient & hungry
rooms || keep a saucer of red milk || beside the door

 

The Notebook

we speak
knowing that      neither of us
will remember   what was said

one of us             talks, the other
writes down       all they say

I wanted to look       over some of the
conversations           that we’d had

I read back          through our
notebook &        discovered that

you’d torn           of the
pages                   out

‘what’s this?’                   I asked holding
out the notebook            showing you the

torn edges          where the
missing               had been

you took the                     notebook from
me & wrote down           ‘what’s this?’

& then

 

User Stories by C D Boyland is published by Stewed Rhubarb, priced £5.99

Claire Macleary’s intrepid duo of private detectives, Maggie and Wilma, are a firm favourite here at BooksfromScotland. But in the latest novel, Payback, we find their bond might be on shaky ground. Will they still be working together by the end of the novel? You’ll have to pick up a copy to find out.

 

Extract taken from Payback
By Claire Macleary
Published by Saraband Books

 

‘Without Wilma?’ Maggie questioned, her voice rising a full octave.

‘Think about it,’ said her friend Val. The two were on one of what had become their regular FaceTime calls. ‘You’d halve your overheads.’

‘Not halve.’

‘Near enough. Plus, cut down on the stress factor. Didn’t you say the woman has been giving you grief?’

‘Not grief, so much as…’ Maggie hesitated. ‘…she’s full-on, Wilma. But not in a bad way,’ she hastened to add. She recalled the day her new neighbour had first appeared on her doorstep, all fake tan and sprayed-on leggings. How sniffy she, Maggie, had been. And look at them, now, like an old married couple. ‘Wilma means well,’ she argued, somewhat lamely.

‘That’s as may be. But wasn’t it Wilma who talked you into taking on that missing person case?’

‘It was, yes. But with the best of intentions.’

Val ignored this. ‘And isn’t that the root of your current financial crisis: that the client hasn’t paid your bill?’

‘That,’ Maggie conceded, ‘and other things.’ She hadn’t yet reached a final decision on Colin’s sixth year studies.

‘All I’m saying is, now you’re a lone parent, you have to look after number one.’

‘But…’

‘Let me ask you a question: what’s most important to you?’

Maggie deliberated for a moment, then, ‘Two things. My kids, obviously: keeping a roof over their heads.’

‘My point, exactly,’ Val said. ‘And in order to achieve that, you need to maintain a steady income stream. If you off-loaded Wilma, it would be a major cost saving. You’d be able to run the agency without outside influence, and…’

‘That’s all very well in theory,’ Maggie countered, ‘but I couldn’t do it on my own. Wilma gets through a ton of work. She does most of the computer research, runs virtually all the credit checks, and…’

‘You could employ an intern: some bright young thing who would not only be computer-savvy but full of energy. Cost you nothing, or next to nothing.’

‘Mmm.’ Maggie pondered, furrowing her brow. The idea had never crossed her mind. ‘Notwithstanding. Wilma’s way more savvy than me. Knows…’

‘…all sorts of dodgy stuff,’ Val finished the sentence for her. ‘From what you’ve told me, that neighbour of yours may well have been a Godsend when you were starting out. But now the agency is established, ask yourself this: does Wilma Harcus reflect the image I want to present?’

‘No, but…’ Pictures flashed in front of Maggie’s eyes: the countless times she’d been embarrassed by Wilma’s appearance, like when she’d turned up to an important presentation in skin-tight Lycra and white stilettos. Not to mention the questionable investigative tactics Maggie had learned to turn a blind eye to: picking locks, sticking trackers on vehicles. And those were just the ones Wilma had admitted to.

‘You could sell it to her as a temporary lay-off, just until you get back on your feet financially.’

‘I’d find that hard,’ Maggie protested. ‘Wilma worked for no wages when we first started out. She’s put in countless hours since that she hasn’t billed for. She has a lot invested in the business.’

‘She’s got other jobs, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Two things, you said?’

‘Keeping my kids safe and clearing the Laird name. But I’ve hit a brick wall with that one. Inspector Chisolm has tried to persuade 16 his superiors to re-open George’s case, but they don’t want to know. And as time goes on…’ She broke off, voice wavering.

‘I’d forget about it,’ Val counselled, her face filled with concern. ‘Consign it to the past. No point worrying over something you can’t change.’

‘But I’ve come so far,’ Maggie wailed. ‘Getting George’s partner, Jimmy Craigmyle, to give a statement was a big step forward.’

‘That I grant you. Who’d have believed something as minor as turning off a tape recorder could have had such far-reaching consequences?’

‘Tell me about it,’ Maggie concurred. ‘Turned my whole life upside down.’

‘Yes, but what you have to remember is it wasn’t your decision that caused this situation, so stop beating yourself about the head over it.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘The other chap – the drug dealer – didn’t you tell me he’d gone missing.’

‘Bobby Brannigan? That’s right.’

‘Any news on him?’

‘Not at the last count.’

‘The police,’ Val prompted. ‘Are they active?’

‘No.’ ‘Well, then. My advice to you is to drop the whole thing. I’ve watched it eating away at you, and that can’t be good. Life has moved on, Maggie. Time you did, too.’

‘I suppose,’ Maggie conceded, unconvinced.

‘Talking of moving on, isn’t it high time you packed in your Seaton job?’

‘It’s only a few hours out my week, and…’

‘…by your own admission earns peanuts. Seems a lot of effort for not a lot.’

‘That’s as may be. But those kids, Val, they need me. If you could see them: undersized, underweight. They come into school hungry, some of them. Steal food – sachets of sugar, sauce, you name it -just to stay alive. It’s Dickensian.’

‘Sometimes, you have to make hard decisions in order to…’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Maggie debated, her head spinning. It was all very well for Val, sitting in Dubai with a wealthy husband and a houseful of servants. And, besides, Val didn’t have children.

‘Couldn’t you take out a short-term loan? I’d offer, but I’d have to ask…’

‘No way.’

‘Then, it seems to me cutting Wilma’s salary is the quickest route to solving your problems. Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes, but…’ It’s not just about salary, Maggie thought. Wilma looked up to her, looked out for her. They’d become friends. More than friends. Wilma loved her, of that Maggie was sure. And – the realisation hit home – she loved Wilma.

‘Promise me you’ll think about it,’ Val urged.

‘I promise,’ Maggie replied. Though in her heart she knew it wasn’t much of a promise at all.

 

Payback by Claire Macleary is published by Saraband Books, priced £8.99

A new Isla Dewar novel is always welcome news to BooksfromScotland, and with the release of her latest, A Day Like Any Other, we decided to catch up with her to find out about her favourite books.

 

A Day Like Any Other
By Isla Dewar
Published by Polygon

 

The book as memory – what is your first memory of books and reading?

Sitting squeezed between the living room wall and the back of the sofa, just me and Enid Blyton. The room smelled of lavender polish and the soup my mother was cooking and I was enthralled. Here were characters that had a secret island, a rowboat and a dog I lusted after. I also didn’t like Julian and wasn’t keen on Uncle Quentin so the book had everything. People I loved people I didn’t love and an adventure. Oh my. Later I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson and Kidnapped and my reading life was never the same again. I loved that man and everything he wrote. Still do.

 

Your book as your work – tell us about your latest book A Day Like Any Other. Is there something particular you’re setting out to explore?

I’m not sure that I agree that youth is wasted on the young, but I do think it a pity that when you’re young you’re not old enough to enjoy it. I wrote about two women, one always loved and one not. I wrote about doubting the past, loving it and wanting it back to do it all again, only better. I made my characters reminisce and blush. How stupid we all are sometimes. And life always has a surprise or two no matter how old you are.

 

Your book as object – what is your favourite beautiful book?

I have a few. A copy of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit given to me by a beloved friend years ago, how bashed and thumbed it is. I also have an illustrated copy of Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie.  It is a lovely thing. My husband found it in a charity shop years ago. I treasure it.

 

Your book as inspiration – what is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?

For a while I wanted to be Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Of course before that I wanted to be Jo in Little Women. I also wanted to be Sam Spade. I hugely admire Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. But in truth though I love to write funny stories I am a bit of a doomster. I have a dark side. I am gloomy. A born pessimist. I am Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore.

 

Your book as relationship – what is your favourite book that has bonded you with someone else?

I always though writing should be sparse, too the point until I read T.C. Boyle’s Water Music. He just threw words at me and I loved it. I felt he was saying why use one hundred words when fourteen thousand will do? I do love words. I was halfway through reading when I realised how much my beloved would love it too. So I gave it to him. He flies at life talking and talking. Sometimes takes me along. What a ride it can be. Often we don’t even have to leave the house.

 

Your book as entertainment – what is your favourite rattling good read?

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Always that. Can’t say how often I’ve read it.

 

Your book as destination – what is your favourite book set in a place you’ve never been?

I loved The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville. I love all her books. But this one is so sensitive and beautiful and funny I hold it dear. I have bought many copies and given it to many people. It is set in Australia, New South Wales in a small town. And tells us that small towns are small towns wherever they are. Filled with gossip, hate, love, stupidity, friendship and comfort. It is a lovely book about two awkward people. I wept and I cringed.

 

Your book as the future – what are you looking forward to reading next?

Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass is on my living room table and beckoning.

 

A Day Like Any Other by Isla Dewar is published by Polygon, priced £8.99

Juliet Conlin’s new novel, Sisters of Berlin, is a wonderful domestic and political thriller that takes one bereaved sister, investigating her sister’s past, into the heart of Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. Here, we share an extract where we find out a little more about the sisters’ relationship.

 

Extract taken from Sisters of Berlin
By Juliet Conlin
Published by Black and White Publishing

 

‘Well then,’ Franzen says and looks down at the file. ‘Yes, that’s pretty much in line with our assumptions.’

‘Assumptions?’

‘That Marie knew her attacker. As far as we can tell, nothing of value was taken from her flat – there was some cash on the kitchen counter and a laptop and a stereo in the living room. The only thing missing, really, was the TV.’

‘Marie didn’t own a TV,’ Nina tells him. ‘She said it took up too much valuable time.’

What she doesn’t tell him is that Marie was terrified of the ordinary, the mundane, of being sucked into mediocrity and disappearing without a trace. She didn’t watch TV, she didn’t do small talk, she dropped in for dinner, uninvited. She completed a couple of semesters of a Cultural Sciences degree, but left without any qualifications. Her parents were horrified when they realised she’d quit university, and spelled out to her in a long, bitter, emotionally laden letter that if she chose to throw away such opportunities, they had no choice but to cut her off financially. Nina happily stepped in, tore up the letter and encouraged her sister to focus on something she felt a vocation for, something artistic, something creative. And leave her parents to stew in their disapproval.

It shames her now to realise that perhaps she was perpetuating the drama by rescuing her sister again and again. That she could only stand up to her parents in an act of rebellion by proxy. But what was she to do? It was the only kind of rebellion open to her; it was never quite articulated, but the threat was always there, that if she went against her parents on anything, however trivial, she’d cause unimaginable harm to everyone.

Marie, by contrast, took their parents’ disapproval in her stride. She thrived on acts of defiance, on challenge, hurtling headlong towards god-knows-what as long as she could feel herself moving, anything not to stop and stagnate. This is why she loved Berlin, a city that changes itself constantly, at vertiginous, anarchic speed; a place that’s always becoming, and never being. Maybe, Nina thinks now, maybe this city had been toxic for Marie. That what she needed was security, stability and a rootedness. Perhaps she needed to settle and to be.

But this is impossible to explain to Franzen. ‘Marie didn’t watch much television,’ she says vaguely. ‘She always said she could spend her time doing other things. Such as writing. She liked to write, you know.’

Franzen put up his hands in agreement. ‘You don’t need to explain that to me, Dr Bergmann. I don’t have a TV at home, either.’

He smiles. Maslowski sniffs again and mumbles something Nina can’t quite make out.

‘My colleague here on the other hand,’ Franzen waves his hand in Maslowski’s direction, ‘would be stuck without his daily fix. Am I right, Mika?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Maslowski grumbles into his paperwork.

Nina’s dizziness increases, intensifying the stupor she’s feeling, and adding to the surreal quality this conversation has taken on. Her vision is accosted by numerous small black dots and she has to concentrate hard to follow what Franzen is saying. She will have to join Sebastian and the kids for supper tonight; yesterday, she claimed she wasn’t feeling well. Maybe she should make ratatouille, then it won’t be so obvious that she’s just eating vegetables.

‘Are you okay?’ she hears Franzen ask.

‘What? Yes, I’m fine.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘It’s just – I’m still feeling a little shaken.’

‘That’s completely understandable,’ he says softly. ‘Would you like to come back another time?’

Nina shakes her head. ‘Perhaps you already know this,’ he says, ‘but the initial stages of an enquiry are crucial. Anything we miss out on now, well, there’s always the chance that it’ll get lost altogether. So, if you’re up to it, I’d be very grateful for anything you could tell me about your sister.’ He pauses, as though to check she’s okay to continue answering his questions, then asks: ‘Did Marie have any friends?’

She tells him what she knows, the names of a few friends Marie knew from university.

Franzen is scribbling away furiously. When Nina pauses, he looks up. ‘Good, go on, anyone else?’

She opens her mouth and closes it again. Behind her, Maslowski slams a file drawer shut. She jumps. She’s finding it impossible to concentrate. Finally, she says, ‘She was part of a writing circle with five or six other writers. They met up regularly.’

‘Would you happen to have their names?’

‘No, sorry. Marie was . . . guarded about her writing. It was very personal for her, so she didn’t talk about it much. I just know that she and these other writers met up. But they had a name for the group. Wortspiel.’

‘Wortspiel,’ he repeats. ‘Wordplay.’ He writes it down.

‘Not very original, for a group of writers,’ Nina says. ‘Marie hates it. I mean, hated it.’ Her hands are trembling in her lap. She interlocks her fingers and squeezes them tight. She will never get used to referring to her sister in the past tense.

Franzen puts down his pen. ‘We found several writing journals in your sister’s flat. Did she ever show them to you, Dr Bergmann?’

‘No. I mean, I’ve read some her stories, but –’

‘No matter. I read the journals. It appears she liked to familiarise herself with the topics she was writing about. Her research was really quite in-depth.’

‘Yes, that sounds right.’

‘There were a few stories, and copious notes, about political extremists. The far left as well as the far right.’ He pauses, then adds in a pensive tone: ‘She was a talented writer.’

Nina almost thanks him, but stops herself in time.

‘Well, you’ve been very helpful, Dr Bergmann. I guess that’s all from me right now. Unless you have any questions you’d like to ask us?’

‘Did she fight back?’ Her voice is hardly more than a whisper.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Marie. Did she – her attacker . . .’

‘Oh. I see. Yes. There was most definitely a struggle.’ He clears his throat. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure how much detail I should go into. We’ve no DNA evidence. Apart from the baby.’

The baby. The thought of the baby – the sudden image of a perfect shell-like curl of a foetus – shocks Nina so much she forgets how to breathe for a moment.

‘Dr Bergmann,’ Franzen says, concerned. ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’

She shakes her head, although her mouth is dry and sticky. She gets to her feet slowly. Then another question occurs to her. ‘Have you spoken to Robert Kran yet?’

‘I’m driving to Leipzig tomorrow,’ Franzen says. ‘Our initial focus is on people who knew Marie. And –’ he gets to his feet, ‘we will be speaking with your husband, as well.’

Nina stands up straight, the black dots fizzing and then settling behind her eyes. ‘My husband was with a client on the morning Marie was attacked,’ she says calmly, her cheeks burning. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult to confirm that. He’s a lawyer.’

‘Don’t worry, Dr Bergmann,’ says Franzen. ‘We will. As you said, it won’t be difficult to confirm.’

Her stomach growls audibly as she opens the door to leave.

‘You obviously didn’t get around to having lunch, either.’ He smiles.

Nina swallows and bites her lip. ‘There’s a Bratwurst stand on the corner,’ he says. ‘They’ve got by far the best Currywurst in town. Homemade tomato sauce. Secret recipe, I’m told.’ He smiles. ‘You should try it.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that,’ she says.

Stepping outside into the grey Berlin air, she turns and looks up at the imposing police building, tips her head back at the fourth floor and tries to locate Franzen’s office. The building, with its grand sandstone columns and barred windows, seems to tilt towards her and for a split second, she has the terrifying sensation it might fall and crush her. She steps backwards, into the path of a man shoving a Currywurst into his mouth, and she apologises hastily, nearly heaving at the smell of the spicy ketchupy sauce.

 

Sisters of Berlin by Juliet Conlin is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £8.99

We may not be able to visit our favourite football team’s stadiums at the moment, but there are plenty books to read if you’re still looking for your football fix while the game is put on hold. Archie Macpherson has been broadcasting on football for decades now, and his latest book takes a look at what the Old Firm means to him and to Scottish football. Here we share reminiscing on the notorious 1980 cup final between Rangers and Celtic that ended in a riot. But first, the winning goal . . .

 

Extract taken from More Than a Game: Living with the Old Firm
By Archie MacPherson
Published by Luath Press

 

Trying to recall much of the game itself is difficult for most of us. It is shrouded in the downpouring of images of the riot, smothering many of the game’s details, like Vesuvius’ ash did for Pompeii. Even for the victors. Roy Aitken admitted to a block in his memory:

I honestly can’t remember much about it. I can recall the 1985 final against Dundee United much better than that. I don’t know why that is.

Gordon Smith also treated it like a challenge to memory:

It’s difficult to look back on the game itself. Some games stick out in your mind. But with this one it was like just some few key moments I recall.

David Provan’s primary remembrance was of relief when the final whistle went:

I remember, above all, running down towards the Celtic end with the Cup. That stands out. The rest is blurred.

Derek Johnstone’s comment reflected what most people thought of the quality overall:

I thought it was one of the poorest Old Firm games I ever played in. Only one or two moments stick out like the great chance I had near the end when Davie Cooper crossed to Tam [Tommy] McLean who volleyed it to me. But I mistimed the flight of the ball at the far post, even though I was only a more than a game: living with the old firm staircase 13 67 couple of yards out and it just sailed past. That’s about all.

But, of course, after some prompting, they all recall the goal. Who wouldn’t in a Cup Final? The unlikely source was Danny McGrain. Unlikely in the sense that one of the best right-backs I have ever seen, harboured no desire to be the nation’s primary goalscorer. His wonderful ventures down the right side of the field were characterised by speed, control and vision. But, around the opponents’ penalty area, his whole instinct was to be a provider. In 17 years with Celtic he managed only four goals which for a man who invaded penalty areas with unceasing regularity, looks a meagre return. But that bare statistic tells you nothing of the rich harvest his side reaped off his play. That day, deep into extra time, he was sweating. And although everyone on the field at the time remembers the goal, they certainly didn’t know what exactly was going through the mind of the Celtic captain, who at that stage in his life was triumphantly dealing with Type 1 diabetes. ‘It was hot’, he told me:

I thought it was getting to me and I was worried about getting cramp. That’s what was going through my mind. We had won a corner-kick and I was well up the field for it. There must have been 20 players in that area. Remember it was extra time and just one goal would do it. Everybody knew that. I was just outside the penalty area myself and I was concerned about what would happen if Rangers counter attacked. There was nobody behind me except Peter Latchford in our goal. Somebody cleared it high out of the penalty area. So, the ball dropped out of the skies towards me. As I say, I was worried about my legs and getting cramp. So, my first thought was, ‘How are my legs going to last if Rangers get hold of the ball’. My first instinct was to kick the ball out of the park, get it away from there to safety, anywhere so they wouldn’t get hold of the ball. Now, it had been a tiring game, so like everybody else I was suffering. So, when it eventually reached me, I totally mistimed it. Rather than putting it out the park, out of play, anywhere, the ball struck the bottom of my leg and it went towards the 18-yard line. It was threatening nobody. However, George McCluskey was rushing out, just after the corner had been cleared. I saw him sticking out a leg diverting it more than a game: living with the old firm staircase 13 68 away from Peter McCloy who was moving in the other direction. He had no chance. I tell you, when I saw the ball landing in the net after just trying to belt it anywhere for safety, I felt I had won the lottery.

Viewers who travel back in time on the magic carpet of YouTube might have looked at that goal and consider McGrain’s interpretation of that moment, as modesty taken to extremes because. Even as I recorded it at the time, it looked a direct attempt at goal. ‘Danny McGrain’s shot’, I clearly said instinctively. Indeed, the commentator on our rival channel credited him solely with the goal itself almost immediately. Overall, it does provide a moment of insight into how YouTube can play tricks with history. And, in any case, in all the years of knowing McGrain he has always spoken with absolute candour about anything he did on the field. Like admitting to me a mistake he had made in the Scotland–Yugoslavia World Cup game in 1974, which he believed had cost his team dearly.

 

Have a look for yourselves – did McGrain mean to score? 18.10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cveJKKJyJlg

 

More Than a Game: Living with the Old Firm by Archie MacPherson is published by Luath Press, priced £14.99

Lesley Kelly has just released the fourth book in her Health of Strangers series, Murder at the Music Factory. If you’ve not come across the series yet, it has never been a more prescient time to do so: Lesley’s books are set in an alternative Edinburgh where a global pandemic has taken hold of the population. She introduces us to the North Edinburgh Enforcement Team, charged with finding people who miss their health checks, and who find themselves embroiled in investigations that are more far-reaching consequences than missing a doctor’s appointment. Here she gives a flavour of the team dynamic in Murder at the Music Factory, and finds time to praise Scotland’s fabulous crime writing commuity.

 

Murder at the Music Factory
By Lesley Kelly
Published by Sandstone Press

 

 

Murder at the Music Factory by Lesley Kelly is published by Sandstone Press, priced £7.99

Mary Paulson-Ellis has made herself a fan favourite with the release of her two novels The Other Mrs Walker and The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing. To mark the release of the paperback edition of Solomon Farthing we asked her to give us a reading and to tackle some of those probing questions from the Proust Questionnaire.

 

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing
By Mary Paulson-Ellis
Published by Picador

 

 

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing by Mary Paulson-Ellis is published by Picador, priced £8.99

We have been waiting with much excitement for Kirstin Innes’s new novel Scabby Queen, and though publication has been postponed until July due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we thought it would be a treat to have this advance reading. Kirstin also answers some questions from the Proust Questionnaire where she talks about her favourite writers and her idea of perfect happiness.

 

Scabby Queen
By Kirstin Innes
Published by Fourth Estate

 

 

Scabby Queen is by Kirstin Innes, published by Fourth Estate, priced £12.99

One of the key projects of the Edwin Morgan Centenary Celebrations is the publication of the Edwin Morgan Twenties, published by Polygon, each taking on a major theme of Edwin Morgan’s work and introduced by literary luminaries Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Michael Rosen, Ken MacLeod and Ali Smith. We are delighted to offer a taster of each Twenty, and they are also available altogether in a gorgeous box set.

 

The Edwin Morgan Twenties Box Set (Love, Menagerie, Take Heart, Scotland, Space and Spaces)
By Edwin Morgan
Published by Polygon

 

Love
Introduced by Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay writes: ‘Morgan’s love poems give you a real sense of this shy, passionate, interesting and interested man, a man who is in awe of the elements and of the natural world, as well as the cultural one, a man who appreciates the intensities of absences, and who knows what a power they have on the imagination.’

 

Love

Love rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love is the wolf
that guards the gate.
Love is the food of music, art, poetry. It fills us and fuels us
and fires us to create.
Love is terror. Love is sweat. Love is bashed pillow,
crumpled sheet, unenviable fate.
Love is the honour that kills and saves and nothing will ever
let that high ambiguity abate.
Love is the crushed ice that tingles and shivers and clinks
fidgin-fain for the sugar-drenched absinth to fall on it
and alter its state.
With love you send a probe
So far from the globe
No one can name the shoals the voids the belts the zones
the drags the flares it signals all to leave all and to
navigate.

Love and a Life
(Mariscat Press, 2003)

 

Strawberries

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you
let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills
let the storm wash the plates

The Second Life
(Edinburgh University Press, 1968)

 

Menagerie
Introduced by Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen writes: ‘When we came across Edwin’s poems we knew we had found something that was just right for the job. We performed them to each other, savouring the words, the subtle changes in rhythm and mood.’

 

A Defence

I am told I should not love him, the magpie,
that he’s a bully, but then I watch them bouncing
along the grass, chattering, black and white and
he and she, twigs in beak, the tree-top swaying
with half a nest in a hail-shower, the magpies
seeing off crows and gulls – a feint of mobbing
but who knows – eyeing a lost swan waddling
down the pavement, off course from Bingham’s waters,
the smart bright bold bad pairing caring magpies
whose nest was blown down last December, back now
to build again, to breed again, to bring us
a batch of tumbling clockwork liquorice allsorts,
spruce, spliced, diced, learning to prance and hurtle
through evening and morning sycamores with what must be
something like happiness, the magpies, cocky,
hungry, handsome, an eye-catching flash for that
black and white collie to bark at, and the black and
white cat lurking under the car-bonnet
to lash a bushy tail at, and this page, seeing
these things, first white, now white and black, to pay its
tribute to, and lay out, thus, its pleasure.

Hold Hands among the Atoms
(Mariscat Press, 1991)

 

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl –
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok-doplodovok-plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl –
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp.

Twelve Songs
(The Castlelaw Press, 1970)

 

Take Heart
Introduced by Ali Smith

Ali Smith writes: ‘Perseverance, ‘that one persisting patience of the undefeated’, as Morgan puts it, unites us, and even if the odds are as ridiculous, as flagrantly hilarious as, say, the task the jigsaw-maker faces in ‘From the Video Box 25’, the payoff is the kick of real/miraculous transformation that comes with concentrated creativity.’

Oban Girl

A girl in a window eating a melon
eating a melon and painting a picture
painting a picture and humming Hey Jude
humming Hey Jude as the light was fading

In the autumn she’ll be married

Twelve Songs
(The Castlelaw Press, 1970)

 

Pilate at Fortingall

A Latin harsh with Aramaicisms
poured from his lips incessantly; it made
no sense, for surely he was mad. The glade
of birches shamed his rags, in paroxysms
he stumbled, toga’d, furred, blear, brittle, grey.
They told us he sat here beneath the yew
even in downpours; ate dog-scraps. Crows flew
from prehistoric stone to stone all day.
‘See him now.’ He crawled to the cattle-trough
at dusk, jumbled the water till it sloshed
and spilled into the hoof-mush in blue strands,
slapped with useless despair each sodden cuff,
and washed his hands, and watched his hands, and washed
his hands, and watched his hands, and washed his hands.

Sonnets from Scotland
(Mariscat Press, 1984)

 

Scotland
Introduced by Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead writes: ‘Edwin Morgan was indeed Glasgow’s own. He doesn’t belong to Glasgow though, but to all of Scotland in all times, to Europe, to the whole world, to poetry itself and, above all, to the transcendent, transforming power of imagination.’

Canedolia
an off-concrete Scotch fantasia

oa! hoy! awe! ba! mey!

who saw?
rhu saw rum. garve saw smoo. nigg saw tain. lairg saw lagg.
rig saw eigg. largs saw haggs. tongue saw luss. mull saw
yell. stoer saw strone. drem saw muck. gask saw noss. unst
saw cults. echt saw banff. weem saw wick. trool saw twatt.

how far?
from largo to lunga from joppa to skibo from ratho to
shona from ulva to minto from tinto to tolsta from soutra
to marsco from braco to barra from alva to stobo from
fogo to fada from gigha to gogo from kelso to stroma from
hirta to spango.

what is it like there?
och, it’s freuchie, it’s faifley, it’s wamphray, it’s frandy, it’s
sliddery.

what do you do?
we foindle and fungle, we bonkle and meigle and
maxpoffle. we scotstarvit, armit, wormit, and even
whifflet. we play at crossstobs, leuchars, gorbals, and
finfan. we scavaig, and there’s aye a bit of tilquhilly. if it’s
wet, treshnish and mishnish.

what is the best of the country?
blinkbonny! airgold! thundergay!

and the worst?
scrishven, shiskine, scrabster, and snizort.

listen! what’s that?
catacol and wauchope, never heed them.

tell us about last night
well, we had a wee ferintosh and we lay on the quiraing. it
was pure strontian!

but who was there?
petermoidart and craigenkenneth and cambusputtock and
ecclemuchty and corriehulish and balladolly and
altnacanny and clauchanvrechan and stronachlochan and
auchenlachar and tighnacrankie and tilliebruaich and
killieharra

and invervannach and achnatudlem and machrishellach
and inchtamurchan and auchterfechan and kinlochculter
and ardnawhallie and invershuggle.

and what was the toast?
schiehallion! schiehallion! schiehallion!

The Second Life
(Edinburgh University Press, 1968)

 

Glasgow Sonnet v

‘Let them eat cake’ made no bones about it.
But we say let them eat the hope deferred
and that will sicken them. We have preferred
silent slipways to the riveters’ wit.
And don’t deny it – that’s the ugly bit.
Ministers’ tears might well have launched a herd
of bucking tankers if they’d been transferred
from Whitehall to the Clyde. And smiles don’t fit
either. ‘There’ll be no bevvying’ said Reid
at the work-in. But all the dignity you muster
can only give you back a mouth to feed
and rent to pay if what you lose in bluster
is no more than win patience with ‘I need’
while distant blackboards use you as their duster.

Glasgow Sonnets
(The Castlelaw Press, 1972)

 

Space and Spaces
Introduced by Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod writes: ‘Poetry was respectable. Science fiction was not. Encountering them in one place was a shock: of recognition, of delight, of vindication. ‘Archives’ and ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ hinted at a science-fictional sensibility.

A Home in Space

Laid-back in orbit, they found their minds.
They found their minds were very clean and clear.
Clear crystals in swarms outside were their fireflies and larks.
Larks they were in lift-off, swallows in soaring.
Soaring metal is flight and nest together.
Together they must hatch.
Hatches let the welders out.
Out went the whitesuit riggers with frames as light as air.
Air was millions under lock and key.
Key-ins had computers wild on Saturday nights.
Nights, days, months, years they lived in space.
Space shone black in their eyes.
Eyes, hands, food-tubes, screens, lenses, keys were one.
One night – or day – or month – or year – they all –
all gathered at the panel and agreed –
agreed to cut communication with –
with the earth base – and it must be said they were –
were cool and clear as they dismantled the station and –
and gave their capsule such power that –
that they launched themselves outwards –
outwards in an impeccable trajectory, that band –
that band of tranquil defiers, not to plant any –
any home with roots but to keep a –
a voyaging generation voyaging, and as far –
as far as there would ever be a home in space –
space that needs time and time that needs life.

Star Gate: Science Fiction Poems
(Third Eye Centre, 1979)

 

Opening the Cage:
14 Variations on 14 Words

I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.
John Cage

I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it
I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it
I am nothing and I have poetry to say and that is saying it
I that am saying poetry have nothing and it is I and to say
And I say that I am to have poetry and saying it is nothing
I am poetry and nothing and saying it is to say that I have
To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it
Poetry is saying I have nothing and I am to say that and it
Saying nothing I am poetry and I have to say that and it is
It is and I am and I have poetry saying say that to nothing
It is saying poetry to nothing and I say I have and am that
Poetry is saying I have it and I am nothing and to say that
And that nothing is poetry I am saying and I have to say it
Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it

The Second Life
(Edinburgh University Press, 1968)

 

The Edwin Morgan Twenties Box Set is published by Polygon, priced £20.00. Each individual volume is also available, priced £5.00.

Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language is an excellent new publication from ASLS collecting together a selection of Edwin Morgan’s best prose pieces. We’re thrilled to share the essay ‘Signs and Wonders’, celebrating his great city of Glasgow.

 

‘Signs and Wonders’ is taken from Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language
Edited by John Coyle and James McGonigal
Published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies

 

‘Signs and Wonders’

Arts and Entertainment / Out of London / Glasgow

 

Anyone who has lived for a while in Glasgow knows that it isn’t all rivets and razors, and that as far as entertainment and culture are concerned – on a year-round basis, and discounting such bonus events as the Edinburgh Festival – it’s possibly better off than any city outside London. Yet the image persists of a grim place and an uncouth folk: a fearsome porridge stirred up from vague recollections of No Mean City, Miracle in the Gorbals, and the tartan tammies, ricketies, and raucous cries of our periodical descent on Wembley. I wouldn’t want to deny that there’s some truth in the image. A certain forthrightness in Glasgow behaviour is not to be got over, and can cause trouble. A young man taken to court recently for assaulting a bus conductor in Argyle Street admitted the charge but is reported as having said:

I was sitting beside my wife and not bothering anyone. My feet were in the passageway and he asked me to get them in. When I wouldn’t he kicked them in. I waited till my wife was off the bus then I hit him. I thought he deserved it.

And certainly it wouldn’t be Glasgow without the highly animated scene in George Square at half past midnight on Saturday or Sunday morning, when a gay but wild mob hot from the dancing fights its way into the all-night buses bound for the huge Drumchapel housing estate. On one such occasion I heard a struggling matron, swept along in the torrent, cry in the anguished tones of Kelvinside, ‘It’s just disgraceful! Where are the police?’ This got a big laugh. Someone cried, ‘Are you kiddin’?’ I could see two policemen grinning in the background as they watched over this commonplace operation. It’s fun, life in Glasgow, so long as you don’t weaken!

But the bad days of the gangs of the 1920s and 30s, which cling like burrs to the image of Glasgow, are over, and Gorbals itself, though many slums still remain in it, is being steadily transformed, demolition by demolition, into the impressively spaced bastions and towers of Sir Basil Spence and Sir Robert Matthew – already a showpiece for visitors, and a first taste of the city’s renewal. Clusters of white ‘scrapers’ (as Glaswegians familiarly call them) are pushing up everywhere out of the grey (or more often black) Victorian sprawl. The redevelopment plan, involving twenty-nine areas of the city and the eventual construction of over two hundred tower blocks, with the highest flats in Europe among them (the thirty-one-storey Red Road massif, now taking shape), is bold, imaginative, and staggeringly ambitious. A Glasgow Hilton has been discussed; it would certainly not be out of place. Redevelopment has concentrated on housing, since slums were and are Glasgow’s major social problem. But we are to have an arts centre too, on the site of Buchanan Street goods station: a complex which will probably include a large concert hall (to replace the Scottish National Orchestra’s former home in the St Andrew’s Halls, gutted by fire), a civic theatre (for general and amateur use), a smaller theatre (for the Citizens’ Theatre company, whose Gorbals premises are scheduled for demolition), an exhibition gallery, and a restaurant.

These are plans, and plans are signs and wonders. But what sort of reality have we got to meet the plan? There seems no doubt that things are beginning to stir again culturally in Glasgow. New art galleries are springing up, and the active Glasgow Group of painters recently started a Glasgow Group Society (members get a 20% discount on works purchased) which testifies to growing public interest. This year has also seen a renewed awareness of Glasgow’s architecture. As more and more buildings are cleaned and ‘treated for starlings’, and as the smokeless zones begin to spread, the forgotten splendours of the Victorian city emerge again from the grime, and the New Glasgow Society was inaugurated in April (behind the specially floodlit columns of ‘Greek’ Thomson’s extraordinary church in St Vincent Street) to keep an eye on our Victoriana and at the same time to ‘encourage high standards of architecture and town planning in the Glasgow region.’ These two aims aren’t always compatible, and there have been battles between preservationists and developers, but at least buildings are being discussed and looked at again.

In music, there’s the growing success of the Scottish Opera company, marked this year by an ambitious and powerful performance of Boris Godunov, to add to the regular concerts and proms of the Scottish National Orchestra. And at two extremes musicwise, things seem to be swinging. Who would have thought of a Glyndebourne for Glasgow? Yet some people did, and if you join the Pollok House Arts Society you can have your piano recital and buffet suppers with Gainsborough and Goya for background, and stroll through the grounds of a handsome Adam mansion on the south side of the city. But if you prefer the Beatstalkers to John Ogdon, the open-air lunch-time concerts in George Square are ready to welcome you with scenes of mad enthusiasm. At one of these pop concerts in June, the fans forced the performers to flee and take refuge in the City Chambers, losing bits of their clothing on the way. Climbing statues and screaming may be more in the expected Glasgow image of hearty gregariousness than an andante at Pollok – yet both are there.

As for the theatre, one must always rejoice cautiously, but it does seem that the worst days of recession and closing down are over. There’s a new leaven at work here too. We have lost the Empire to the property developers, and the Royal is now headquarters of Scottish Television. The surviving theatres rely on a standard diet of revue, musical, pantomime, and light play, with occasional visits from Sadler’s Wells or the Royal Ballet. A pungent native humour, reductive and extravagant, is kept going by comedians like Rikki Fulton and Jack Milroy, Lex McLean, Clark and Murray, and a show will be advertised as ‘the biggest laugh since granny’s ceiling fell in’. In straight drama, there have been two interesting developments this year. One is the decision of the Citizens’ Theatre (which celebrated its twenty-first birthday in 1964) to start an experimental offshoot called the Close Theatre Club, in premises seating about one hundred and fifty, ‘up a close’ beside the parent company; this is expected to begin production in September. The other is the emergence of Glasgow University’s Arts Theatre Group, playing in the university theatre, as a spearhead of intelligently produced drama. This year they’ve done plays by O’Neill, Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Genet, and Eliot, and they’ll be putting on a play by a Glasgow dramatist (Tom Wright’s Pygmies in the Coliseum) during the Commonwealth Arts Festival next month. The group have also run successful poetry readings and discussions. Glasgow, with two universities, a School of Art, and a College of Dramatic Art, has a large student population, and this is one of the areas in which amateur drama is thriving at the moment. I hope the new audience will not rest content with Pinter and Arden but produce its own native playwrights as well as actors and directors.

Traditionally, you think of Glasgow as being dancing mad, fitba’ daft, and fond of its pint. But the pattern is changing. There’s no doubt as much dancing as ever, and the sharply-dressed queues still shuffle into the brilliant portals of the Locarno and the other big ballrooms. They are lured by day as well as by night, with lunch-time disc sessions. But the many beat, jazz, and folk clubs offer the strong competition of a more intimate, informal, distinctive atmosphere. And then there’s the Maid of the Loch to take you on a ‘showboat cruise’ up Loch Lomond, with two bars if the jazz makes you dry: five hours for 8/6, not bad? Glasgow is still very much a football city, but ‘the gemme’ isn’t the all-absorbing obsession it once was when there were fewer alternatives. Geodesic domes over Hampden and Ibrox might help to re-people the terraces, but there’s still television and ten-pin bowling to pull in another direction. Neither standing shivering nor standing drinking seems quite so much in the inescapable order of things as it once did. New pubs, new restaurants, new hotels have multiplied in the last few years, and Glasgow has found itself liking Chinese, Indian, Italian, and Scandinavian food as a sudden extension of its naturally embracing and now very cosmopolitan soul. Another extension: it has lately been described as the ‘gamblingest city’ in Britain, and to a wandering onlooker this might well seem to be true: from the ubiquitous profusion of betting shops and bingo palaces to the very plush Casino Chevalier in Buchanan Street and the forthcoming Establishment cabaret-casino in Sauchiehall Street which is to be ‘the ritziest spot in Europe’ (ah those warm Glasgow superlatives!) with Danny Kaye and Diana Dors hot on the heels of Sammy Davis Jr and Shirley Bassey to help loosen our sporran clasps – not that we seem to need much encouragement. Maybe those exiled Post Office Savings Bank employees will require a Glasgow weighting to enable them to keep up with the highlife?

We’ve a lot yet to do in Glasgow: acres of sour crumbling tenements to raze; buildings above some of the finest shop fronts in the city centre which in their filth and neglect ought to shame any property owner; some fire-damaged shells which remain uncleared year after year; we need a good paperback bookshop, and an H.M.S.O. bookshop; we ought to be thinking seriously about extending the Underground; we want route-cards at our bus stops which don’t look as if they were painted by the office boy in an odd moment; we want, eventually, something pretty spectacular in the core area from the Central Station to the Clyde to balance all the peripheral skyscraping. But however Glasgow changes, it seems likely to remain a place of strong character. I’ve seen a lot of cities, from Paris and Moscow to Cairo and Beirut, and as a city-lover I find something to attract me in them all, but there’s a peculiar quality about Glasgow (it certainly isn’t charm) that fascinates and leaves its indelible mark. It’s partly the lingering violent mythology of the slums and the gangs and the sagas of the shipyards, partly what survives in things like the Orange Walk which with its banners and sashes and songs and trot has become folk art, a social ritual deprived of much of its religious bitterness. It has something to do with the paradox that a city which is in some ways very sophisticated (much more sophisticated than Edinburgh, for example – Edinburgh is a city which has never eaten the apple, but Glasgow has, and although it is deeper in sin it is readier for grace) is at heart rough, careless, vulnerable, and sentimental, its people using and expending freely everything a modern city has to offer, not out of civic-mindedness but for purposes of sheer human enjoyment. The Christmas lights are a case in point. Glasgow boasts that its Christmas decorations are ‘the best in the country’, and having seen the London ones last year I’m inclined to agree with the claim. Sauchiehall Street, Renfield Street, Buchanan Street, and Argyle Street – the main shopping routes – are canopied with a fantastic glitter which culminates in a riotous kinetic centrepiece in George Square. There are special buses in the evenings to ‘see the lights’; the shops do a roaring trade; people come in from far and near and the streets are blocked with cars. This image of the great dark industrial city blazing with a source of simple widespread pleasure – something childlike in the enjoyment, yet something fitting in the extravagance of the display – is one that appeals to me very much, and it’s perhaps the one that most nearly shows the soul of the place.

New Statesman, 13 August 1965.

 

‘Signs and Wonders’ is taken from Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language is edited by John Coyle and James McGonigal and published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, priced £24.95

The Edwin Morgan prize is a bi-annual prize awarded to young poets. Roseanne Watt won the prize in 2018, and David Robinson caught up with her to chat about Edwin Morgan’s influence on her work and what winning the prize has meant for her career.

 

Moder Dy
By Roseanne Watt
Published by Polygon

 

In the old, sprawling Arthur Anderson High School in Lerwick, overlooking the Sound of Bressay, the S5 English class was getting grips with Edwin Morgan’s Glasgow Sonnets. They’d already studied what Shakespeare had done with the form, so they could see how Morgan had updated it, how he’d used a flurry of images in the first one

A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash

to drag out the decorous octet template to cover the indecorous – in this case a dilapidated tenement block

Four storeys have no windows left to smash,
but in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
mother and daughter the last mistresses
of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.

That was the main point of the lesson: how Morgan had made a form invariably associated with love and romance describe a spreading indifference and decay

Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl.
The kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall

before finally zeroing in on the human cost of such neglect

The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.

More than a decade after that Lerwick lesson, Roseanne Watt can still recite Morgan’s poem off by heart. Studying it, along with Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’ was, she says, when something ‘clicked’ and she first understood what poetry could do. Something else clicked when Kevin MacNeil, who was then Shetland’s writer in residence, gave a talk in her final year at school. ‘He was the first writer I’d seen, and because he’d come from an island [Lewis] too, he was  a role model. He said “Well, if I can be a writer, you can be too.” That was such a pivotal moment.’

Three years later, when she had left Shetland to study film and English at Stirling University, MacNeil included her work in These Islands We Sing, his anthology of island poetry. By this time, she was already reading Shetland writers such as Robert Alan Jamieson and Christine de Luca. ‘That again was exciting, because at the time I still thought that I was not allowed to write in the dialect I had locked away inside myself.’

In the introduction to her acclaimed debut collection Moder Dy, which is shortlisted for next month’s Highland Prize, she explains when that locking away first happened. Growing up in Sandwick, on the south-east of Mainland Shetland, she only realised she was speaking Shaetlan after she started school. On the phone to her grandmother in Scalloway, she suddenly noticed that that her grandmother  said ‘du’ instead of ‘you’, and ‘de’ instead of ‘the’. ‘From that point forward,’ Watt writes, ‘it was as though both English and dialect had bifurcated in my mind. And with this a choice seemed to present itself: which one?’

The question haunts her poetry, from ‘Salt I de blöd’, the earliest  poem in the collection, onwards. In the poem, she reproaches herself for neglecting Shaetlan, for being blind to the allure of  its vocabulary: shoormal, for example, or mareel, or bonhoga. Look them up in the glossary, and her case is made instantly: ‘the shoreline mark on a beach’, ‘phosphorescence on the water, especially in autumn’, ‘a spiritual or childhood place’. There’s a beauty in those words that absence from Shetland surely intensifies, and indeed Watt admits that’s exactly what happened when she left the island. ‘When I was writing poems in Stirling,’ she says, ‘I was feeling that pull and able to express it in poetry like a kind of very profound homesickness.’

But there is, she explains, a sense of loss within Shaetlan itself. ‘The old language of Norn that used to be spoken on the islands died out at the end of the 18th century. Fragments have survived, but nothing you could take to get an overall idea of what the syntax was like. So there is a starting point of absence. And in Shaetlan there’s a substratum of that Norn language that still exists in words that have been incorporated into the dialect. It’s like there’s a dead language that haunts the modern language, and that’s an interesting dynamic – you’re working in a language that has a memory of this older language within it.’

Her book’s cover expresses this perfectly: shaded just behind its title Moder Dy is its English translation ‘Mother Wave’. The Norn term was used by the haafmen, the island’s deep sea fishermen, to an undercurrent believed to run east from Foula, taking them back to their home. No islander today would know how to ‘read’ the sea surface in oder to latch onto it, and despite the testimony of past generations of fisherfolk, there is no conclusive  scientific proof that it exists.

Yet there is no better metaphor than this – a half-remembered undercurrent pulling one back home – for the impulse behind Watt’s poetry.  To make her work clearer to the linguistically lazy (which, let’s face is, is most of us), she provides what she calls ‘uneasy translations’ to most of the poems written in Shaetlan. Though well crafted, they are not always literal versions – deliberately so, as Watt wants her readers to use the glossary at the back of the book and engage with the Shaetlan words themselves. When they do, they’ll marvel at the precision of ‘goonieman’s candles’, for example (‘small scrolls of birch bark washed ashore’) or ‘lomm’ ( an old Norn word meaning ‘when the surface of the sea would grow light in colour as fish swam beneath it’). The Norn words, she points out, often survived in Shaetlan, because fishermen needed alternatives to words they might normally use on land but which they believed brought bad luck when out at sea.

In ‘Salt I de blöd’, the speaker tells her ‘Dese wirds/ir my hansel tae dee.’ A gift, in other words. Not an oddity, not something to ashamed of, not something to be quietly dropped. And that’s what this book is too: a gift that opens up another language so that by its end, when you read the title poem, the two languages are side by side. ‘Moder Dy’ is actually two poems that can be read as one, consisting of a series of two short lines in English down one side of the page running onto another two in Shaetlan down the other, neither of them a translation, and both given the same weight. A hauntingly beautiful, moving and imaginative poem about the first day of the  afterlife, it comes after the glossary because by then readers should already have learnt enough to navigate their way across this new, old, and sometimes half-remembered language.

And if most of Moder Dy’s poetry is drawn from Shetland itself, there’s an input from further south too, not least from Kathleen Jamie, who taught Watt at Stirling, encouraged her superlative film-poetry (check it out on https://vimeo.com/roseannewatt) and who supervised her PhD. Another poet should be mentioned too. They never met, but poetry unlocked a door in her mind when she first read ‘Glasgow Sonnet’ in S5.

Winning the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize in 2018 changed Roseanne Watt’s life. ‘It was overwhelming,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether it really happened or whether I dreamed it.’ Not only did it provide me a financial safety net but it solidified the publishing deal, and took her to book festivals all over the world, from Indonesia to Brussels, Latvia to Berlin – as well as Ullapool last year, which is where the book was launched (and where I first met her).

Before the Ullapool book festival was cancelled last month, she’d been invited back there this year as one of the four authors shortlisted (along with Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie and David Gange) for the Highland Book Prize.  And even on a list of that quality, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if  she wins.

 

Moder Dy by Roseanne Watt is published by Polygon, priced £8.99

A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s most thought-provoking contemporary writers, and with her new short story collection, We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time, Lee Randall finds a writer wholly engaged with how we navigate our turbulent times.

 

We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time
By A.L. Kennedy
Published by Jonathan Cape

 

And the prize for most presciently titled anthology of the year goes to. . . A.L. Kennedy, for We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time, thirteen stories encompassing a range of historical and emotional landscapes, finely wrought, and full of Kennedy’s trademark wisdom and wry humour.

In a 2006 talk at Edge Hill University (transcribed by Ailsa Cox and Andrew Oldham), Kennedy said, ‘The thing about the short story is that yes, it is small, but it is small in a way that a bullet is small.’

Getting it right means forging immediate emotional connections and capturing moments of penetrating intensity that are—as in life—fleeting yet life-altering. Kennedy said a story should ‘[chime] with the reader because you’ve made it perfect enough that it resonates before and after itself. The people arrive and it’s as if they were alive forever beforehand and the people leave and it’s as if they’re going off to the rest of their lives.’ It demands ‘a really, really deep understanding of character point of view,’ and is a perfect description of her work.

The opening story, ‘Panic Attack‘, alerts us to pay attention. It’s about a wee man called Ronnie, whose every movement is designed to make you notice he’s there, taking up space. He exudes menace to onlookers as well as readers, and seems to be fighting to keep himself in check. Those gathered at Kings Cross, waiting for their trains to be announced, give him a wide berth, but we are trapped with him and inside him, and the edginess intensifies.

Compassion is Kennedy’s strong suit. Throughout this collection she traces psychological cracks to their sources, engaging our empathy. While the narrator’s description of Ronnie’s performance of masculinity feels derisory, as his internal monologue unfurls, a different reading emerges. Kennedy reels us tighter still, then upends expectations. The anticipated darkness swoops in—but from an unexpected direction, forcing a rethink of who Ronnie is and how he got that way.

Standout stories for this reader include ‘Everybody’s Pleased to See You‘, which evokes warm fuzzy feelings about an atmospheric restaurant called The Salazar—until all of a sudden it doesn’t.

Kennedy’s technical dexterity is admirable. Her satire ripens like one of the expensive cheeses served by Mireille, Paul, Augustine, Frank, ‘who love you as good servants should.’ When the twist comes you’ll scurry back to the story’s beginning. It’s a playful yet pointed exposé of artifice that takes a wounding swipe at gentrification and at the Brexit mentality nostalgic for an idyllic Britain that only existed for an elite minority—at the expense of its minions.

There are stories set in our social-media-obsessed present, offering observations such as: ‘Everything now is itself and also a code that suggests a lifestyle,’  and this, about paint colours: ‘[they] would have been called Calf’s Tongue, or Tewksbury Moss, or similar things which suggested values and aristocracy.’ Other stories are set in and around World War II, connecting specifically with the pain of surviving—a theme that should resonate with fans of her novel Day.

‘Inappropriate Staring‘, set outside the gorilla enclosure at the Durrell zoo in the Channel Islands, finds a middle-aged woman eavesdropping on a mother-son conversation, alert to its racist overtones: ‘The man has a voice invented not so long ago, apparently with the sole intention of more perfectly expressing angry whiteness.’ She hears them ‘skirting around a definite longing to hate someone out loud.’ She takes in the push-pull of a parent and child, and the ticking bomb of a second rate man: ‘If he gets drunk enough, stoned enough, outraged enough—then he will be a trouble. He will be the kind of self-harm that hurts other people first.’

Kennedy doesn’t leave it there, but keeps twisting the kaleidoscope. We learn that our narrator is on the island to clear out her uncle’s house, about his positive influence on her early life, and his abrupt, upsetting departure. Coming to the island has re-opened wounds and unlocked secrets, forcing her to consider what’s in front of us but unseen, either deliberately or through innocent ignorance. Here, as in ‘Panic Attack‘, Kennedy shows that toxic behaviour always stems from hurt, fear, and sadness. She excels at balancing disdain with empathy, and even her racist has his humanity.

The title story, ‘We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time‘, comes last, concluding the book on a cautiously hopeful note. We arrive atop a steep church tower in a foreign country, in the middle of a screaming argument between a holidaying British couple. Kennedy conjures a potent cringe. We’re in the woman’s perspective, she’s both having the fight and outside of it, analysing every word and her reactions, painfully aware of the discomfited tourists bearing witnesses. (Anxiety is the spine of this collection, and Kennedy excels at making our hearts beat a little faster.)

There are some beautiful observations. The narrator wonders, ‘Are we breaking up?’ Then she zooms from the enormous to the specific, as you do: ‘And I don’t know how we’d manage another night here being in the same hotel room, the same bed. The flight home has our seats booked, seats together. His other shoes are in my bag and will not fit in his bag, because he won’t ever travel with an adequate size of bag.’

The story’s redemptive message—the whole collection’s—is that present hurt is fuelled by historic hurt. There is context for everything. How can we keep the past from poisoning our present? Perhaps by daring to hope for the best, striving to be good, and endeavouring to look out for one another. As the story’s refrain suggests, progress is achieved in baby steps: ‘Tiny, tiny. Gentle, gentle. Lucky, lucky.’

 

We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time by A.L. Kennedy is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £16.99.

Edwin Morgan, though hugely influenced by the city and country of his birth was very much an internationalist and translated many poets from across the world. It’s probably apposite that Morgan, who grew up in the industrial city of Glasgow would feel kinship with the futurist-inspired poetry of Vladmir Mayakovsky,  and we present here, from his Collected Translations, two of his Scots translations from Wi the Haill Voice.

 

Extracts taken from Collected Translations
By Edwin Morgan
Published by Carcanet Press

 

From his introduction to Wi the Haill Voice, Morgan writes of Mayakovsky:

‘When Mayakovsky read ‘With the Full Voice’ in the House of the Komsomols in Moscow in March, 1930, the poem was well received, and he obviously felt encouraged at that moment that such a complexly-textured poem should have broken  through the audience barrier. He commented: ‘The fact that it got across to you is very very interesting. It shows that we must, without impoverishing our technique, work devotedly for the working­ class reader.’ In the more-proletarian-than-thou word-battles of the later 1920s, Mayakovsky was often under attack for his diffi­culty, or for what was regarded as the lingering bad legacy of futurist extravagance in his work, or for what seemed to some an insufficient identification with workers’ problems and aspira­tions. Many of the attacks were unjust, and distressed him greatly; the philistines, gaining confidence and power, certainly contributed to his eventual suicide, whatever more personal causes were at work. Resilient, if not resilient enough in the end.’

 

To the Bourgeoisie

Stick in, douce folk. – Pineaipple, feesant’s breast:
stuff till ye boke, for thon is your last feast.

[‘Yesh’ ananasy. . .]

 

A Richt Respeck for Cuddies

Horse-cluifs clantert
giein their patter:
crippity
crappity
croupity
crunt.

Bleezed in the blafferts,
wi ice-shoggly bauchles,
the street birled and stachert.
The cuddy cam clunk,
cloitit doon doup-scud,
and wheech
but the muckle-mou’d moochers werna lang
in makin theirsels thrang,
gawpus eftir gawpus, aa gaw-hawin
alang the Kuznetsky in their bell-bottom breeks.
‘Aw, see the cuddy’s doon!’
‘Aw, it’s doon, see the cuddy!’ And aa Kuznetsky gaffit.
Aa but me.
I didna jyne the collieshangie.
I cam and kest a gliff in til
the cuddy’s ee…

The street’s owrewhammelt
in its ain breenges …

I cam and I saw
the muckle draps that scrammelt
doon the cratur’s niz-bit
to coorie in its haffits …

And oh but the haill
clamjamfry o craturly
cares cam spillin and splairgein
fae ma hert wi a reeshle!
‘Ned, Ned, dinna greet!
Listen to me, Ned –
ye think thae buggers are the saut o thr erd?
My chiel,
neds are we aa, to be honest wi ye;
nae man’s unnedlike, in his ain wey.’
Aweel, it micht be
the beast was an auld yin
and had nae need for a fyke like me,
or was my thochts a wheen coorse for a cuddy?

Onywey
Ned
gied a loup whaur he liggit,
stoitert to his feet,
gied a nicher
and the flisk
o his tail doon the street.
My chestnut chiel!
Back hame to his stable
lauchin like a pownie
staunin by the stable-waa
feelin in his banes able
to dree the darg and the downie
for the life that’s worth it aa.

[Khoroshee otnoshenie k loshadyam]

 

Collected Translations by Edwin Morgan is published by Carcanet Press, priced £14.95

James McGonigal’s brilliant biography of Edwin Morgan gives great insight into the poet’s life and work. Here we extract a section on Edwin Morgan’s childhood that shows how some of his artistic preoccupations were formed early on.

 

Extract taken from Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan
By James McGonigal
Published by Sandstone Books

 

GROWING UP IN GLASGOW

EM’s parents were united in matrimony and the family business from 1915 onwards. There was a gap of five years before their only son was born. This may have been because of the turmoil of war and the loss of family members. Madge Arnott’s older brother, George Arnott, was killed on 1 July 1916, fighting as a private with the Highland Light Infantry at Serre, one of the fortified villages held by the Germans at the start of the Battle of the Somme. He was 28 years of age, and EM kept his service medal with his own. On the Morgan side, the second son, Albert John Morgan, who had been working as a silk warehouseman in Leytonstone, London, volunteered for the Territorial Force at Fulham in March 1915, but was invalided out with ‘sickness’ a year later.

There is a mystery about the sixth sibling, Edwin James Morgan, born in 1884, who ‘disappears’ from public record after the 1891 census, when he was living at Clunie Bank Cottage. Was he a military man? There was an Edwin James Morgan who was killed in May of 1916, and recorded on the Plymouth Naval Memorial with the rank of Stoker First Class, but whose name is then said to be a pseudonym for the true family name of Harris. Or he might have been the James Morgan recorded in the 1901 census in England in the Army Service Corps at the Aldershot Military Barracks in Hampshire, and said to have been born in Scotland. His age, given as 19 years, is approximately correct for the birth of EM’s uncle and namesake. There may have been a family quarrel. Edwin James Morgan may have changed his name.

Almost as mysterious as his disappearance is EM’s claim that his parents never discussed the uncle after whom he was named. He had been Stanley Morgan’s immediate elder brother, and so there would have been a closeness there. EM’s father often talked about his next younger brother, Wilfrid Lothian Morgan, who had emigrated to Saskatchewan and worked in a bank. Wilfrid signed an attestation paper for the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force there in 1916, but survived the war, dying in Vancouver in 1957. His relatives were in touch with EM into his old age.

But EM had no memory of his namesake ever being discussed. Was there some scandal – was he gay perhaps? EM thought that possible. Peculiar also is the fact that he himself, with a mind always full of questions, never seems to have raised this one to consciousness. Discussing the mystery, I teased him that this silence was all part of his own desire to be sui generis, selffashioning, the one and only Edwin – and he wryly admitted the possibility.

His father did not enlist, presumably because of his severe deafness. It is possible that the years that passed between his marriage and the birth of his son were also when some surgical attempts were made to improve his disability. EM recalled with a shudder his father’s description of the excruciating pain of these operations. Communication was clearly difficult in the home. Stanley Morgan often thought that people were laughing at him. One can wonder at the gap between the linguistic dexterity of the son and the misunderstandings and frustration of the father.

Broken communication is, of course, another theme in EM’s poetry, and some of his best known poems exploit it, humorously in ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’, ‘Canedolia’, ‘O Pioneers!’, ‘First Men on Mercury’ or ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, and more seriously in the Emergent poems (CP: 133–6, 159, 176) and the ‘Interferences’ sequence (CP: 253–7). He renders creative, playful and exploratory what must in reality have been difficult and, in a sense, shaming.

EM was born on 27 April 1920. Two years later the family moved to a substantial red sandstone semi-villa at 245 Nithsdale Road, Pollokshields, near where his parents had separately lived before they married. This was the place of EM’s first memories, not only of delight in the trees above his pram, but of terror when the dog belonging to the Hunters next door ‘flew at me once’. He had some happy memories of poetry there. Marshall Walker, writing in Unknown is Best to celebrate EM’s 80th birthday, recounted how ‘Your mother laughed when you danced round the house as a boy, chanting your rhymes’. Family photographs show him usually as the centre of attention among adults, happy to perform for the camera when very young, but seeming to isolate himself through self-composure or an aware gaze as he gets older. It is probably these earliest times which EM recalled in the 1990s in the poem ‘Days’. Typically we find him playing with a boat on dry land that his imagination transforms into sea:

I said the grass was waves, my toy boat bobbing.
To get the swishing sound I thought was sea was
steady tugs on the string.

(Sweeping Out the Dark: 53)

A childish pleasure in forbidden working-class male company is also evoked, exotic to a middle-class boy:

We’d hours with the roadmenders, their hut forbidden
and so a place of great resort, a dusty
sweaty sweary tarry magic caravan,
they quizzed us, shared their cans of tea, felt our
no muscles and laughed, surrounding us like a story
of familiar giants we’d never be afraid of.

The poem ends in a parental call to order, with:

[. . .] angry shouts from doorways, this minute,
come in, until we too could sense the shadows
advancing with what must be the end.

From 1925 he attended a private school run by Miss Mary Ross in a modest terraced house, ‘Roskene’, at 21 Larch Road in Dumbreck. He remembered plasticine and the taste of glitter wax; the medal on a blue ribbon awarded ‘if you were good’; and a girl called Violet. She was always vying for this medal of goodness, and at about the age of 6 the prize was divided between them: ‘Violet got the prize as well: she must have been very clever,’ he said, and this became a family joke. He stayed happily there until the age of 8 or 9, when they moved to Rutherglen, which was cheaper than Pollokshields, leaving such glittering prizes behind. This was the time of the Wall Street Crash.

They were also leaving his maternal grandparents, who lived at 11 Maxwell Drive in Pollokshields: EM remembered their ‘scented garden’ and wrote about it in old age in ‘Love and a Life’, remembering ‘the heady scents of other days – / Sweet pea mignotte wallflower phlox – recollection sees them shining in endless summer rays’. He writes about ‘their erotic haze’ and of himself in the midst of this: ‘When I dreamed of lands / Untouched by hands.’ Memories of roses came later, and possibly from another garden in Rutherglen, for the aging grandparents soon followed their daughter and her family there. EM’s grandfather died at 38 Stirling Street, Rutherglen in January 1936, at the age of 79. There is perhaps a contrast here, and later in EM’s life, between the ‘centrifugal’ Morgan and the ‘centripetal’ Arnott sides of his experience of family life, the former open to travel and trading, and the latter bonded within the industrial life of the West of Scotland. This may help us understand how basic to his life experience was the blending in his poetry of free-wheeling internationalism with constantly re-focused local engagement.

The Morgan family’s move to Rutherglen was dictated by the Depression, which had a disastrous impact on a Scottish economy that was still largely based on the pre-war industrial structures of coal, steel and heavy engineering, particularly ship building. Richard Finlay’s Modern Scotland 1914–2000 (2004) provides the clearest perspective I know on the cultural and political changes that have shaped Scotland in the course of the last century. Reading it while reflecting on EM’s life, I realised how literary study of the aesthetic or formal properties in his work has often ignored those elements of shared experience of national life that made his poetry accessible and relevant to readers. He reacted, as they did, to local and international events that affected Scottish lives, but found words or voices that could articulate a range of feelings and concerns – a sort of imaginary yet intense conversation with a history that twentieth-century Scots were living and sometimes making.

 

Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan by James McGonigal is published by Sandstone Press, priced £11.99.