THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

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.

Alistair Braidwood has been a fan of Edwin Morgan and his work since he was a teenager, here he tells us why Edwin Morgan means so much to him and why we should investigate his brilliant work.

 

Feature portrait taken by Jessie Ann Matthew and belongs to the National Galleries of Scotland.

 

James Kelman, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, Janice Galloway, Iain Banks – these are just a few writers who made me realise at a formative age that people like me, mine, and those around me, belonged on the pages of books, and that our culture and language was legitimate. This is hopefully beyond any reasonable argument today, but even in the dying embers of the 20^th century it was much less certain. Those named above did as much as any to challenge and change the situation, but before them all there was Edwin Morgan.

The first poem of his I read was ‘In The Snack-bar’. Not many lessons from my less than comprehensive education have stayed with me, but just thinking about it transports me to that snack-bar with the sights, sounds, and smells that Morgan evoked so powerfully. The desperate plight of the blind man with his ‘dismal hump’ and face hidden, the voyeuristic nature of the onlookers, and the decidedly uncomfortable relationship between young and old, contrasting hope for the future with resignation approaching defeat – Morgan captured the picture perfectly with the keen eye of someone invested in the lives of others however, and wherever, he finds them. It takes something special to grab the attention of a 14-year-old for whom poetry till that point was little more than a song lyric or amusing graffiti on a toilet wall, but here it was and Morgan and his poetry would never leave me.

Charming, challenging, intellectual yet intimate, humorous and humble, his work is all of those things and more, inspiring widespread adoration and devotion for a poet that is rare. I have found him to be revered by people who claim not to read, or even like, poetry, and many who admire his work talk about it in hushed awe as they might a favourite band who they want to keep secret – he belongs to them, he is their poet. When enough of the population claim you as “their own” before long the inescapable conclusion is that you have come to belong to the nation, and there is no doubt that applied to Edwin Morgan. Despite life-long links to his home town of Glasgow he was undoubtedly a poet of national, and international, importance and it was no surprise when, in 2004, he was named Scotland’s first National Makar. Arguably there was no other choice.

Part of the reason for this was not only the quality of his work, but also for a literary longevity that is quite astonishing. Morgan’s peer group consisted of writers at work throughout the 20^th century, and beyond. He is one of the subjects of Sandy Moffat’s famous painting ‘Poet’s Pub’ (1), alongside Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir Smith, and Robert Garioch, a collection of writers often referred to as the forefathers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, and whose influence on Scottish culture endures.

At the age of 82, Morgan worked with Scottish indie darlings Idlewild on their seminal 2002 album The Remote Part (2). Being involved in this sort of collaboration again seems a result of his innate interest in others, and particularly the work of fellow artists. He was constantly seeking out the new, and was only too pleased to support those who were up-and-coming. As a result he remained relevant with subsequent generations discovering him anew, believing that he spoke to and for them. Morgan retained a youthfulness and vitality even in later life that few could hope to match.

As late as 2007 he was involved with the album Ballads of the Book (3) alongside writers such as A.L. Kennedy, Laura Hird, Alan Bissett, Rodge Glass, Louise Welsh, and others who came to prominence in the 90s or later, their work adapted by a variety of musicians. Morgan’s nearest contemporary on the project, at least age-wise, would be Alasdair Gray, (14 years his junior), someone who shared this ability to appeal across the ages.

Over the years I have continued to read and return to Edwin Morgan’s poetry with a mixture of affection and reverence – the scope and breadth of his work never failing to impress, from the early collections such as The Vision of Cathkin Braes and Other Poems, through experimental concrete poetry of the 60s, the sonnets, numerous translations into Scots (Cyrano de Bergerac a personal favourite), and so much more. However, for all his variety, and mastery of form and subject, it is his reflections on the subject of love where he truly excelled, with poems such as ‘One Cigarette’, Strawberries’ or ‘Absence’. Poignant, insightful, and often heart-breaking, few have managed it better. Edwin Morgan’s legacy is one of peace, love, and understanding and it’s one we would do well to heed.

 

1: ‘Poets’ Pub’ is on display now at The Modern Portrait exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

2: Idlewild’s The Remote Part was released on Parlophone.

3: Ballads of the Book was released on Chemical Underground

Scotland was a subject that inspired much Edwin Morgan’s work, and this year Val McDermid and Jo Sharp used Scotland as their muse when putting together Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future, a brilliant collection of essays, published by Canongate Books, from writers from all walks of life pondering on the possibilities of life, work, love, and a whole lot more, in a future Scotland. Here we share an essay on climate change and collaboration, and you can also catch the digital launch of the book starring Val, Jo and other contributors.

 

Extract by Lyndsay Croal, Cameron Mackay and Eilidh Watson taken from Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future
Edited by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp
Published by Canongate Books

 

No one is too small to make a difference. This is the key message from the burgeoning youth-climate movement that first began in 2018 and has since swept across the world. Nobody would have guessed that a teenager from Sweden would be the catalyst for a global political movement that intends to hold the polluting neoliberal system accountable for the damage it has caused for generations. A system left unchecked and unanswered for decades. Whilst Greta Thunberg is just one voice amongst many climate activists from across the world, together these voices are united. We would like to imagine that this is just the beginning. The beginning for Scotland and for the world.

As part of a contingent of young geographers with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, we had the pleasure and privilege to travel to Sweden to present Greta with the Geddes Environmental Medal in the summer of 2019. We travelled across land and sea, brought together with other environmental activists by our shared goal of addressing the climate emergency and our passion for telling stories. Over the course of the journey, we discovered the diversity of our ideologies, faiths, identities, but that together, this diversity made our approach stronger. Similarly, the process of writing this piece collaboratively is exactly the sort of collaboration we imagine and hope a future Scotland would adopt: we want to be part of a country that takes into account every voice and is therefore able to make a greater impact than the sum of its parts.

When we met Greta, Scotland had been hailed as a world leader in climate-change action, even before passing the responsible and ambitious climate legislation it adopted later in 2019. However, the measure of leadership is changing and so Greta’s message to Scotland was clear: every country must act, and every government must do more. Many argue that as a small country, Scotland’s emissions are insignificant in comparison to other nations. But we believe that climate change is everyone’s responsibility and it is irresponsible to accept no blame for a problem to which we, as a nation, have contributed. Currently the impacts of climate change are disproportionately borne by poorer countries and communities. Often the people most vulnerable are those who have contributed least to the human causes of climate change. This injustice is just one of many reasons to make a change.

Today there are glimmers of what a positive future could look like in Scotland. From community energy and a flourishing renewables sector, from shared allotment space for local food production to circular resource- and tool-sharing networks, we have the knowledge we need to move forward. Scotland has the potential to continue on this path, to invest in a better future and to become an example of what sustainability that works for everyone looks like. It is not too much to imagine a future where inclusive, welcoming and sustainable communities lie at the heart of our culture.

So, we imagine a country that has embraced the shared message from Greta Thunberg, global activists and our own home-grown Scottish climate campaigners.

We imagine a future Scotland that prioritises climate justice; a Scotland that is not afraid to stand up for those that are voiceless.

We imagine Scotland leading the world by example: empowered by an inclusive, innovative and sustainable society whilst at the forefront of challenging some of the biggest problems facing the world today.

We imagine Scotland’s land delivering benefits for nature, biodiversity, climate and society. A Scotland with a clean and affordable energy and infrastructure system that is just and provides benefits for all.

In that future, we will have listened for solutions not only from politicians or businesses, but from the younger generations, minority groups and others who have traditionally been separated from decision-making.

The way we structure our economy will be tied to a global green agenda, and Scotland will continue to be at the forefront of forging that path internationally. Just as no one person is too small to make a difference, no single country is too small to make an impact and bring forward change.

 

Lyndsey Croal, Cameron Mackay and Eilidh Watson are the current editors of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Young Geographer magazine. Eilidh is a PhD researcher focusing on climate, energy and gender justice issues, based at the Centre for Climate Justice, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cameron is a documentary filmmaker with a focus on environmental stories and also works in the Scottish sustainability sector, and Lyndsey works for WWF Scotland in Edinburgh on environmental and climate-change policy and writes in her spare time.

 

Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future is edited by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp and published by Canongate Books.

BooksfromScotland are sharing Scottish publishers’ online resources for parents and teachers homeschooling their children. Here, we shine a spotlight on the excellent educational publishers Hodder Gibson and Leckie & Leckie.

 

Leckie & Leckie

Leckie, and parent company Collins publish books and online learning resources for ages 3-18. To help families continue learning at home during school closures, we have made hundreds of free books and resources available on collins.co.uk/learnathome. These include more than 300 ebooks from the Big Cat primary reading programme, activity sheets, a times tables practice tool, a primary music programme, and free resources for National 4 and 5, Higher and Advanced Higher students.

Leckie are known for their resources for the Scottish curriculum, from Early Level to Advanced Higher – student and pupil books; teacher handbooks; and revision and practice for a range of subjects, to be used in class and at home. These include the bestselling Success Guides for National 5 plus new Student Books and Complete Revision & Practice revision resources for Higher.

The Leckie Primary Practice Workbooks for Maths and English are ideal for learning at home – topic-based practice for each year that reinforces your child’s learning and supports the Scottish curriculum.

Have a peek at some of their Primary School Maths and English Practice books.

Visit their website to access FREE learning resources for children ages 3 – 16 years old! There’s reading guides, times table practice, a song bank and much, much more!

www.collins.co.uk/learnathome

 

Hodder Gibson

Hodder Gibson publishes the widest and largest range of textbooks and revision guides in Scotland – including the award-winning How to Pass series – and is the home of TeeJay Maths, Scotland’s No. 1 Maths publisher. They have won the Times Educational Supplement Scotland/Saltire Society Award for Educational Book of the Year eight times! They publish books focussing on the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, providing resources for primary schools, secondary schools and FE colleges as well as continuing professional development for Scottish teachers. We also publish a growing number of electronic support materials for interactive learning.

Here’s a sample of their book BGE S1 – S3 Geography

Want more? Here are sample pages of:

Essential SQA Practice Exams

https://www.hoddergibson.co.uk/media/Gibson-Documents/Sample-Pages/ESEP/Essential-SQA-Exam-Practice-Questions-and-Papers-Higher-Biology-sample-pages.pdf 

Need to Know: Higher Modern Studies Revision Guide

https://www.hoddergibson.co.uk/media/Gibson-Documents/Sample-Pages/Need-to-Know/Need-to-Know-Higher-Modern-Studies-revision-guide-sample-pages.pdf

Visit Hodder Gibson’s website here.

 

For more information on free online resources, follow the #UnitedByBooks hashtag. This marvellous #UnitedByBooks project is coordinated between Scottish Book Trust, BookTrust, Authorfy and Coram Beanstalk.

We highlighted Martin MacInnes’s Gathering Evidence at the start of the year in our Who we’re Watching in 2020 feature. Alistair Braidwood discovers that the novel has never been so timely.

 

Gathering Evidence
By Martin MacInnes
Published by Atlantic Books

 

There is little doubt that the time and times in which you first encounter a book will have no small influence on what you read into it and its effect on you. Re-reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye as an adult was a world away from the impact they made to my teenage self. Similarly, when I read Sunset Song at the same young age I hated it, or more likely didn’t understand it. Reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic again as a 28-year-old first-year university student, it hit me like a hammer. Because of how they made me feel at the most impactful time of reading all three remain among my favourite books.

Reading Martin MacInnes’ Gathering Evidence as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold across Europe was an unsettling experience – one which I doubt will ever leave me. This is a novel that would pack a punch no matter when read, but to say it seems prescient in its timing and content is to seriously undersell it. The world is in a state of high anxiety – the atmosphere foggy, unclear, the earth noxious, potentially virulent, and its inhabitants have to deal with information and mis-information overload, struggling to work out what is real and what is imagined. Paranoia and mistrust are inevitable.

Divided into three parts, it opens with ‘NEST’ a short chapter that concentrates on a mobile computer app that monitors patterns in individual behaviour in a manner not dissimilar to those found on many modern smartphones, and just as addictive. However, what we see is a future when such technology is taken to its extreme conclusion. It’s a short story in its own right but also works as an overarching and contextual prelude as to what is to unfold.

In a conservation area known as ‘Westenra Park’, primatologist Shel Murray and a team of analysts and observers arrive to investigate two mysterious deaths in the last known troop of Bonobo chimpanzees. From the beginning the project appears cursed as they lose a key member before even entering the unnamed country, are given strict rules and regulations by shady corporation WEBG, struggle with the realities of life in dense jungle, and are made to feel less than welcome by both people and place. As the survey begins in earnest you begin to ask who is studying who, and why.

Meanwhile, Shel’s partner John, a computer programmer and coder, is left at home and looking forward to getting their new house ready for her return. After a brutal attack he is left disorientated and damaged in ways he can’t quite comprehend. His memory is badly impaired, his wounds refuse to heal, and his only contact is a doctor who doubles as his warder as he is kept under house arrest. His confusion during this time is keenly felt, and, as with Shel, it appears that he is being observed and examined, part of an experiment the reasons for which are never clear.

The two stories are linked beyond the relationship of the main protagonists. Despite being a considerable distance apart they both find they are being changed and challenged physically and mentally. Shel takes ill, clearly affected by the extreme environment, particularly the surrounding plant life that seems to have infected her, but also the stress of being stalked by an unseen predator. At the same time she is trying to understand and explain the patterns of behaviour of her simian subjects, something which in turn reflects back on her. John is also forced to cope with nature gone wild as a strange fungus spreads throughout their house creating an environment that can only hinder his recovery. In both cases you are asked to comprehend not only what is happening, but also who or what could be behind it. The evidence builds but to what end?

Reunited in part three ‘Place Beyond The Forest’ (‘stay away from the trees’, might be sage advice for the couple) Shel and John try to deal with the fallout from their recent experiences, as well as coming to terms with a brand new one. It is pointed that their stories remain mostly separate despite there being good reason for them to unite, and it feels like trust and faith, in each other and possibly themselves, has been lost. There are mysteries at all levels, from the global to the individual, with no easy answers and only further questions.

Gathering Evidence is impossible to truly pin down – part sci-fi, part paranoid thriller, part body horror, where Michael Faber’s Under The Skin meets Alan Trotter’s Muscle with a dash of David Cronenberg. More than any other novel I can bring to mind it is as much about sensation as it is story, and its success is all down to Martin MacInnes’ writing which is nothing less than breathtaking. Describing an alien environment in all but name, at times the imagery is so rich, even fetid, that you can almost taste it. As if viewed through a high-powered microscope, insects, fungus, disease, and decay, are rendered beautifully, and that results in an appreciation of MacInnes’ writing that encourages empathy where there could have been revulsion or nausea. It would be fascinating to re-read the book in future, but right here and now it’ll shake you, and your world, to the core.

 

Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes is published by Atlantic Books, priced £12.99

As we spend our days indoors during the COVID-19 measures, BooksfromScotland will be sharing online resources from our brilliant educational and childrens’ publishers. Here, we shine a spotlight on the brilliant Bright Red and Barrington Stoke.

 

Bright Red Publishing

Bright Red publish the brightest, freshest study guides and course books for Scottish Qualifications Authority exams. Easy-to-use and with plenty of exam hints and tips, their books offer the best study and revision support for BGE, National 4 & 5, CfE Higher & Advanced Higher courses.

They’ve just released a BGE Level 3 Mathematics Course Book, and you can see below for a colourful sample.

There are more samples of all of their guides on their website. As well as samples, BrightRed host the Bright Red Digital Zone, a fully interactive online resource for teachers and pupils. All Digital Zone material is completely free to use and works well on its own or in conjunction with their study guides. With over 100, 000 active users and 1.5 million tests taken, it uses the very latest technology to help students learn in the most rewarding way possible.

Visit Bright Red’s website here.

 

Barrington Stoke

The multi-award-winning Barrington Stoke is a small, independent and award-winning children’s publisher. For over 20 years we’ve been pioneering super-readable, dyslexia-friendly fiction to help every child become a reader. Their books are written by some of our biggest bestselling, award-winning authors, including Michael Murpurgo, Malorie Blackman, Andy Staton, Julia Donaldson and many more. One of their latest books is Tanya Landmann’s brilliant retelling of Jane Eyre. The author tells BooksfromScotland about this project here.

And here’s an extract.

I was not loved.

I was not wanted.

I did not belong.

I lived with my aunt and cousins, but I was not welcome in their house. My parents had died when I was a baby, and my uncle took me in. He didn’t live much longer than they had. I don’t remember any of them.

My strange story starts on a wet winter’s day.

There was no chance of taking a walk, and I was glad of it. I never liked being out with my cousins. They had rosy cheeks, golden hair, and brimmed with the kind of confidence only money can buy. They would stride ahead as we walked, and I’d be stomping along in their shadows. I was small, shabby, and the nursemaid nagged me at every step. The chilly air bit deep into my bones, but what bit even deeper was knowing I was disliked.
That clamped its teeth right down into my soul.

The wind blew so hard that wet winter’s day the rain fell sideways. No one dared set foot outdoors. My cousins were in the drawing room, clustered around their dear mama. She lay on the sofa, basking in the fire’s warmth like a well‑fed pig.

I’d been told to go away. I was banished from their company for some sin or other, I don’t know what. I asked my aunt what I’d done wrong, but that just made things worse. Children were not meant to question their elders, my aunt said. It was unnatural. Odd. Children were meant to be cheerful and charming. And if they could not be cheerful and charming, they should at least be silent.

Very well, I thought. I walked into the next room and shut the door behind me. I took a book from the shelf, climbed on to the window seat and pulled the curtains across so I was hidden from sight.

I was all right until my cousin John came looking for me.

John was fourteen years old. He’d been kept home from school these last few weeks because his mother feared he’d been exhausting himself. My aunt adored her son John: he was an angel fallen to earth in her eyes. A genius with the soul of a poet and the heart of a saint. Never has a mother been so mistaken.

John was a selfish bully who cared little for his mother and less for his sisters. I was his one passion. He hated me. John attacked me not two or three times a week, or once or twice a day, but continually. I was four years younger and half his size. Every nerve in my body feared him. Every inch of my flesh shrank whenever he came near.

I heard the door open and I froze. John was not intelligent or observant. He wouldn’t have seen me at all if one of his sisters hadn’t pointed out my hiding place. He came in, ordered me from the window seat and demanded, ‘What were you doing?’

‘Reading,’ I replied.

‘Show me the book.’

I placed it in his hands.

‘You’ve no right to take our books!’ John said. ‘You’re an orphan, a beggar! You’ve no money. You should be on the streets, not living here at Gateshead, eating our food, wearing clothes my mother has paid for. I’ll teach you your place. Go and stand over there, by the door.

Barrington Stoke have a learning resource to match Tanya Landmann’s Jane Eyre here.

The Barrington Stoke website is also chockful of free online resources for teachers, parents and pupils. Find out more here.

Visit Barrington Stoke’s website here.

 

For more information on free online resources, follow the #UnitedByBooks hashtag. This marvellous #UnitedByBooks project is coordinated between Scottish Book Trust, BookTrust, Authorfy and Coram Beanstalk.

Britain’s nuclear deterrent has always been a hot topic, and in W. J. Nuttal’s thought-provoking history, Britain and the Bomb, he gives a great overview on the government’s strategy during the Cold War. Here he tells us what to expect from his book.

 

Britain and the Bomb: Technology, Culture and The Cold War
By WJ Nuttal
Published by Whittles Publishing

 

This book tells a historical story centred on the mid-1960s, a point in history when the UK made its important decisions about the Bomb. The UK has made crucial decisions about nuclear weapons at four points in its history. There was the late 1940s decision to develop plutonium-based atom bombs similar to the Fat Man weapon  dropped by the Americans on Nagasaki, Japan, which helped bring the Second World War to a close a bit sooner than might otherwise have been the case. The next decision came in the 1960s. It was to transition the British nuclear deterrent from primarily a Royal Air Force-delivered capability to a Royal Navy submarine-based approach, deploying US Polaris missile technology. The third decision concerned the upgrading of that system through the 1970s with the Chevaline upgrade – a uniquely British idea.

A fourth decision came in the early 1980s with the shift to the Trident submarine-launched nuclear weapons system. A fifth major decision is at the time of writing being implemented – via the construction of a successor system to the original Trident capability.   We consider stories from the 1950s and 1960s in order to understand the present better. One observation from those years is how for Britain the threat-space moved from a global set of confrontation points, particularly including the Middle East and the Far East, to become a more narrowly European, North Atlantic and Arctic story.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, Britain’s areas of defence emphasis have broadened once again, particularly to the Middle East and central Asia, but also to include West Africa.  The global reach of British power is an area where ambition and obligation collide with the realities of tight budgets.

This book describes Britain during a period of perceived international decline, retreating from Empire and losing independence of action in defence and security. It was also a time of renewed prosperity at home, social change and post-war optimism. It provides an insight into a Britain of the past, one that is many ways so very different from the Britain of today, but one which can give us insights into, and perspectives on, contemporary choices.  The issues surrounding Trident replacement are often presented in the British press as a choice concerning Britain’s ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ – and indeed it is. Arguably, however, that is not its raison d’etre. It is also a contribution to NATO strategic security and, perhaps most importantly of all, a British investment sustaining and strengthening security guarantees from the United States. Would the United States really risk its very existence to defend interests on the other side of the Atlantic? The existence of British nuclear weapons arguably affects that calculus, to the benefit of Britain. Such connections and linkages emerged during the Cold War, and in particular the years described in the pages that follow.

This book is a story from the past, one that has resonances for the present and focuses on a different, earlier, period. Yes, it was a dangerous time – but it was also a fun, exciting time for many people. It is the story of a generation emerging from the dismal rigours of the Second World War into a new and optimistic high-technology future. But while this book concerns itself with nuclear weapons, their ethics and destructive potential are not our focus. Rather the intention is to evoke a lost Britain and to reflect on what we might learn from it.  Much of my story pivots on a single military project: the TSR2 aircraft. The label ‘TSR2’ stood for ‘Tactical Strike and Reconnaissance 2’, and this was the most ambitious military aviation project ever conceived by the British. It was wonderfully, and recklessly, ambitious.  It represented national aspiration verging on hubris, and in early 1965 it was cancelled. Only one aircraft ever flew – and that aircraft, XR219, went supersonic only once.

My analytical opinion is that the TSR2 cancellation was a wise and carefully handled step. It was a sensible decision in Cold War defence policy. It was a correct and timely move in the Cold War game. This book will help explain the choices made, and perhaps reassure those that see error and even conspiracy. The defence decision makers, however, did not fully realise that the choices they were making would start a redefinition of Britain in the spring of 1965, and in those terms it was a very sad decision indeed. The emotion of the story is important.  The TSR2 cancellation was a decision that becomes sadder as time passes. It appears to affirm national weakness and a retreat from ambition. It suggests that Great Britain has become Britain. Looking at the story in such terms, it appears to represent a mistake of long-term significance made for narrow, short-term motives.

On such matters, however, the author leaves the reader to judge.

 

Britain and the Bomb: Technology, Culture and The Cold War by W. J. Nuttal is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99.

Cathy Golke uses history and world events to write novels that seek to offer inspirational lessons, and her latest, The Medallion, is no different. Set against the backdrop of the Polish ghettos during the Second World War, it’s a novel that looks at the heartbreaking decision of a family to send their daughter into hiding to keep her safe.

 

Extract taken from The Medallion
By Cathy Golke
Published by Muddy Pearl

 

Summer waned and the first crisp days of autumn bit the air, but still Itzhak had not returned. Rosa had risked going to the house of the man arranged to pose in Itzhak’s stead, to beg for news. But there was none. Pani Leja sent slim packages of food that the man brought back to Rosa through the ghetto gate, tied to his leg beneath his trousers, but nothing had been heard or seen of Itzhak since he’d left.

By the end of September, Rosa was frantic. The money Itzhak had saved was gone, despite her careful rationing of every penny. Her ration book was allowed only because of the hand sewing she took in – the repair of German uniforms.

Late one afternoon, Rosa pulled the latest cheese packet from beneath her coat and unfolded its edges. The note, written inside the paper, came as a death sentence.

 

1. looking for I.

 

That was all, but Rosa knew what it meant. The Sturmbannführer had come looking or sent someone looking for Itzhak. It was a wonder it hadn’t happened before now. What it meant for her, for her mother, for her daughter, didn’t bear imagining. A pounding could come at their door any moment. There was no way to know.

Matka’s shadow crossed the table. She still had the strength to carry Ania in her arms – Ania, who weighed almost nothing. ‘What is it?’

‘They’ve gone to the Lejas, looking for Itzhak.’

‘What will they do?’

‘What do you think? They will come here next. One day.’

Rosa wanted to tear out her hair. She couldn’t think that, couldn’t imagine Ania being torn from her arms, her head smashed in the street. ‘Give me my daughter.’ She pulled the little girl from her mother’s arms and cradled her, roughly, beneath her chin. Ania whimpered.

‘That woman, Jolanta, came again today.’

‘Did she bring medicine? Ania’s cough is better, but with winter coming –’

‘She’s taking children out of the ghetto. She wants to take Ania.’

Rosa closed her eyes. She’d heard that the nurse – the Polish social worker – smuggled children from the ghetto and found them homes, safe houses, on the Aryan side. She’d met her once or twice when she brought food. That seemed a lifetime ago.

I would never have considered it before … but now, what if they come for me? What will happen to Ania, to Matka? Rosa swallowed, doing her best to keep her voice steady. ‘This is the last food Pani Leja will send. Even now she may be in Pawiak, or dead, because she helped Jews …’

‘We will manage. We have always managed.’

‘We won’t manage if the Gestapo comes. They will take me away at the very least. You and Ania would be left alone – with nothing. I can’t let that happen to my daughter.’

‘We can only wait and see. Perhaps they won’t come. If they do, we’ll make them understand – say that Itzhak deserted us. We don’t know where he is.’

‘We are playing Russian roulette, Matka! They will come for us. In their eyes we are useless mouths, feeders off their society.’

‘Rosa, Rosa.’ Her mother sat heavily at the table beside her. ‘What can I say to you? What can I do?’

‘Nothing. That is it, there is nothing you can do … but I beg you, do not try to stop me from doing what I must.’

Her mother grimaced but turned away, saying nothing. Rosa didn’t have the strength to try to convince her. She would need every ounce to give up her child.

 

*

 

In the morning, Rosa slipped the medallion Itzhak had given her on their wedding day from her neck. Using a chisel and hammer left in Itzhak’s toolbox, she carefully cut the medallion in half. Filing the cut filigreed edges smooth, she wound a short length of gold chain from her mother’s necklace through the split branches of the Tree of Life. The medallion and gold chains were the only things of value the women had not sold – gifts meant for the generations to come. Rosa crimped the chain closed and placed the half medallion over Ania’s head, around her small neck. Let this remind you you are not alone, my love. One day, we will be together again, mother and daughter, whole.

When Jolanta appeared at Rosa’s door, Rosa was there and ready.

‘I keep a list,’ Jolanta began, ‘of all the children’s Jewish names and the Aryan names they’re given. I keep a list of all the addresses, so after the war we will be able to reunite families.’

Jolanta was speaking, saying words that Rosa would only dissect later. She knew the young woman meant well, that she and her friends risked their lives to save the children of the ghetto, but Rosa had no idea if the woman believed her own speech. Reunited after the war. As much as she wanted to believe that, Rosa could not. Still, to save her daughter’s life was all that mattered now…

 

The Medallion by Cathy Golke is published by Muddy Pearl, priced £14.99.