This month we are particularly well served with fantastic new historical fiction releases. Sally Magnusson’s latest novel, The Ninth Child, is one of them. We caught up with her to chat about her favourite books.
The Ninth Child
By Sally Magnusson
Published by Two Roads
The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?
The first encounter I remember with a book was with an Icelandic one of my father’s when I was about three. It had pictures of gnomes in it, to which I felt bound to add my own embellishments in crayon. He was not amused! For actual reading as a child it was Enid Blyton all the way: boarding schools and secret societies and ginger beer galore.
The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book The Ninth Child. Is there something in particular you’re setting out to explore?
The Ninth Child is set around Loch Katrine during the building of the great works to provide Glasgow with pure water in the mid-nineteenth century. It’s about the collision between industrial progress and the ancient folklore of Scotland, exemplified in the spooky figure of Rev Robert Kirke. A major focus is the role of women in Victorian society, and what it was like for those who struggled to become mothers when that was just about all that was expected of them.
The book as . . . object. What is your favourite beautiful book?
When it comes to books, my favourite anything changes from week to week. So many books are beautifully designed these days and it brings me joy to own them. Right now I’d have to be honest and say my current favourite is … the hardback of The Ninth Child, which I saw for the first time just the other day. Honestly it’s gorgeous! A divine shade of purple, with thistles that gleam in the light. The artists and designers behind the wonderful book-covers on our shelves these days deserve enormous respect and thanks.
The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?
That’s a hard one. The book that jumps to mind is Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, which I read as I was embarking on my first novel a few years ago. I remember thinking so keenly that this was the kind of novel I’d love to write – and that maybe, just maybe, I could write: using words beautifully but also with energy and humour, rooted in history without parading its research, loving to entertain, stirring all the senses, getting inside characters …. I could go on. It’s been a big inspiration in the kind of fiction writer I’d like to be.
The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?
My sister and I exchange and recommend books to each other all the time, and every book shared bonds us a bit more. We know each other’s taste so well. The last one she send me was Circe, by Madeline Miller. ‘You’ll love the language,’ she said. ‘You’ll adore the idea of a goddess who wishes she was human.’ She was exactly right. Wonderful book. Wonderful sister.
The book as . . . entertainment. What is your favourite rattling good read?
The one I go back to every few years is Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Every book by this brilliant author is a rattling good read, but this is my favourite. By turns dark, funny, lyrical, angry and of course, being Dickens, a bit sentimental. Trouble is, like all those great Victorian novels it’s HUGE.
The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?
Right now I’m re-reading Robert Harris’s Pompeii, in preparation for a birthday trip with one of my sons. I’ve never been to Pompeii before and Harris is brilliant at taking us back to the human impact of the eruption of Vesuvius all those centuries ago – and keeping us agog with his usual brilliant ability to tell a story. As I said, a different favourite every week!
The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?
Like everyone, I’ve been longing for Hilary Mantel to complete her Wolf Hall trilogy. By the time you read this, I’m hoping to have The Mirror and the Light on my bedside table at long last.
The Ninth Child by Sally Magnusson is published by Two Roads, priced £14.99.
David Robinson reads the much-anticipated new novel from Maggie O’ Farrell, and finds Hamnet an astonishing, moving and hugely impressive read.
Hamnet
By Maggie O’Farrell
Published by Tinder Press
Maggie O’Farrell was 16, going on 17, when she first heard about Hamnet. They were studying Hamlet in Mr Henderson’s English class at North Berwick High School when he mentioned that Shakespeare had named the play after his dead son. She wondered why, and over the next three decades carried on wondering. One day, she thought, there might be a novel in that.
There is. And even for such a phenomenally gifted storyteller, it’s her best yet.
Why? Let me count the ways. Look, for example, at how O’Farrell starts the story. A boy is running through an empty house in an as yet unnamed town, looking for his mother. He goes into every room, even his grandfather’s workshop, where he is normally forbidden to go, then the yard and the washhouses. So subtly that you hardly notice, he is named: Hamnet. We can see his urgency, but it is as if this is a scene with the sound turned down, so at first we don’t know the reasons for it. Instead, we get a spill of his most immediate memories: about how some kittens in the house were spared drowning, about how he and his sister had been teasing one of them with a pinecone, before Judith, his 11-year-old twin, felt ill and went off to bed. She lies there still, with what feels like a pair of quail’s eggs underneath the skin of her neck.
Tonally, this – as with so much of the rest of the novel – is both as beautifully descriptive and subtly detached as a Terrence Mallick film. Yet it’s more than that too. Because we, the readers, know that those bumps in Judith’s neck are the first sign of plague, and that Hamnet is desperately searching for his mother Agnes because she alone has the herbalist knowledge to effect a cure, provided it can be caught early enough. And we know what plague does to 11-year-old children. So even though we haven’t been formally told precisely where and when the story is taking place, we might suspect that we have already been told the whole novel, right there in the opening scene. We already half-know about Hamnet and Hamlet. What more is there to say?
O’Farrell’s task is to make us forget that half-knowledge, and make everything new again, as if death hadn’t yet come to the glover’s house in Henley Street, Statford. That’s why the boy’s father, a playwright, isn’t mentioned, because why should he be: he’s away in London, writing comedies. That other parental absence matters far more. ‘Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns,’ writes O’Farrell. ‘This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, deserted yard, the unheard cry.’ Agnes is, it turns out, a mile away from her children, trying to coax swarming bees back to her hives at her family farm.
Names are the first and most obvious way in which O’Farrell makes her story new again. That family farm is Hewlands, which is what Ann Hathaway’s cottage used to be called, Agnes is what Hathaway’s father used to call her, and according to Shakespeare expert Steven Greenblatt, quoted at the start in the novel, Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably at the time. Shakespeare himself is never named, although his roles are: ‘Judith’s father’, ‘the Latin tutor’, ‘the glove-maker’s son’, ‘the playwright’, and so on. In his short biography of Shakespeare, Bill Bryson once noted that ‘he is the literary equivalent of an electron – forever there but not there’. He is more fleshed out than that here, but there’s still something missing too. There has to be. The novel demands it.
Shakespeare has made so many reappearances in fiction that there’s at least one whole book on the subject. Yet when you examine his recent fictional forms, most divide up neatly between the comic prefiguring of classic lines in his everyday life (Shakespeare in Love, Upstart Crow) and novelists (Anthony Burgess, Robert Nye) reimagining a life to fit their own interpretations of his work. What O’Farrell is attempting here doesn’t fit either paradigm; instead of mining his life for either punchlines or revelations, she has written a family tragedy of devastating – indeed, Shakespearean – depth, not least because she leaves him out of so much of the story.
Instead, the focus is on Agnes and her children – the twins Hamnet and Judith, and their elder sister Susannah – as they grow up in Henley Street. We see their home in Vermeer-like detail, along with its inhabitants: Agnes’s irascible, boozy father-in-law; her husband, yearning to escape the life of a small-town glover; the customers knocking at the street-facing window in search of the kind of folk-medicines and herbs she learnt all about growing up on the edge of the forest at Hewlands. For Agnes is a wise, witchy, free-spirited woman: uneducated maybe, but intuitive, seeing the future in her dreams and on strangers’ palms. She doesn’t care what people think about her, and ‘can cure anything, or cause anything’. No wonder her new mother-in-law thinks she has bewitched her glaikit Latin tutor son (‘All that education and not an ounce of sense’, her husband says). Because in a way she has.
It’s Agnes, not her younger husband, the unnamed playwright, who has agency here. It’s she who flouts her stepmother’s ban on marrying him by deliberately becoming pregnant. She who knows how the living need to be both reassured about and reassuring to the dead, and yet constantly vigilant against death’s approach. She who can see who will find happiness in life and who will not. She who will allow her husband, a bored Latin tutor, a bored glove-maker’s assistant, a potentially great writer, his freedom. She, not he, who will do most to try to save the twins from those quails’ eggs beneath the skin.
At the same time, this story of a child’s death breaks the heart, and O’Farrell’s writing fills it with wonder. How, you marvel, can a story told in the present tense, swoop back into the past and forward again so smoothly that you hardly notice? How can it be at one and the same time the most visual novel you could hope for and yet also reveal intentionality, memories, dreams and worries about the future with the same clarity? How can it have that precision, that level of detail, and yet also have the panache to follow plague-carrying fleas from a market in Alexandria to a box of beads in Stratford or to tiptoe into the afterlife? How – and both O’Farrell’s fiction and non-fiction has asked this question repeatedly – can words on a page help us to cope with loss?
The play’s the thing, Hamlet once said, working out his own particular strategy to do just that. But in the hands of a good writer, the novel can do the trick too. O’Farrell is such a writer, and this is such a book.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Tinder Press, priced £20.
In another anniversary, this year sees the 200th anniversary of the 1820 uprising in Glasgow. In his new book, Radical Scotland, Kenny MacAskill looks at national and international events that led up to those protests. Here, we have an extract covering the trial of Thomas Muir, a radical dissident, in 1793.
Extract taken from Radical Scotland: Uncovering Scotland’s Radical History from the French Revolutionary Era to the 1820 Rising
By Kenny MacAskill
Published by Biteback Publishing
And so, on 30 August Thomas Muir the radical advocate appeared in court as the accused. Choosing to represent himself, he was supported by his friend and solicitor William Moffatt. Five judges were on the bench with Lord Braxfield as senior judge. From the outset it was clear that this was not a trial but a state inquisition. As Peter Hume Brown has described, Muir’s trial was ‘prejudiced by the very atmosphere of the court, for almost to a man the members of the Bar shared the panic of the classes’. The outcome was clear and only the sentence was unknown.
The jury was handpicked by the court, thus ensuring that all were members of the Goldsmiths’ Hall Association. There were three main charges facing Muir. Firstly, exciting disaffection by seditious speeches. Secondly, circulating Rights of Man by Thomas Paine and some of his other subversive works. Finally, reading and defending the Society of United Irishmen’s address at the First National Convention of the Scottish Friends of the People.
The first two charges were particularly weak although this did not trouble the court, nor did it unduly worry the jury. The alleged seditious speeches were references to reports from spies who had attended meetings at which Muir had spoken across the central belt of Scotland. The tone and tenor of his addresses emphasised that he was clearly arguing for parliamentary reform rather than sedition. Evidence that he had been circulating Paine’s work came from a servant at Huntershill who looked suspiciously like an informant and whose evidence was flimsy to say the least. However, the final charge relating to the address from the United Irishmen did have substance, which explained the nervousness and concern of some individuals who attended the convention.
The evidence provided varied from factual reports, through jaundiced remarks to frankly absurd statements that simply attempted to paint a picture of a dangerous revolutionary. Unsubstantiated and prejudicial comments were permitted which stated that he was a ‘French emissary’, a member of an Irish society that was involved in radical activities in Ireland that were similar to those of the London Corresponding Society in England, and that he had a seal inscribed with the words ‘Ça ira’. Most of these comments were not relevant to the specific charges but this did not matter and the court was willing to give the Lord Advocate a free rein. When addressing the jury, Robert Dundas described Muir in a variety of terms, the least offensive being ‘demon of mischief ’ and ‘pest of Scotland’. Both the court and the jury seemed to lap it up.
However, when it came to his own speech to the jury, Muir came into his own. His address has gone down in history and has been admired by lawyers and radicals alike. It was a veritable tour de force that lasted some three hours, despite the hostility of the court and the pressure that he was under. If Muir only returned to publicly defend himself in court, he certainly rose to the occasion and utilised his rhetorical skills to passionately argue the cause that he believed in. Despite being certain that he would be convicted he bravely stood his ground and prepared to accept his fate, before finally concluding:
‘This is now perhaps the last time that I shall address my country … of crimes, most foul and horrible that I have been accused. Of attempting to rear the standard of civil war, and to plunge this land in blood, and to cover this land with desolation. At every step, as the evidence of the Crown advanced, my innocency has brightened … What then has been my crime? Having dared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuous and active advocate for an equal representation of the people – in the House of the People … It is a good cause. It shall prevail. It shall finally triumph.’
Muir went on bravely to add:
‘I am careless and indifferent to my fate. I can look danger and I can look death in the face, for I am shielded in the consciousness of my own rectitude. I may be condemned to ascend the scaffold. Nothing can destroy my inward peace of mind, arising from the remembrance of having discharged my duty.’
When his speech ended there was applause and the stamping of feet, such was its impact on all who were in the courtroom. However, this only seemed to harden the heart of Lord Braxfield. After Muir’s address it was then up to the judge to give the charge to the jury, which are directions on points of law. Lord Henry Cockburn, a leading legal commentator, later described how it was an abuse to say that this was a judicial charge. Instead it was an incitement if not a demand to convict made by the judge, even if the jury was already in agreement. Braxfield stated:
‘I leave it for you to judge, whether it was perfectly innocent or not in Mr Muir, at such a time, to go about among ignorant country people, and among the lower classes of people making them leave off their work, and inducing them to believe that a reform was absolutely necessary to preserve their safety and their liberty, which, had it not been for him, they would never have suspected to have been in danger.’
The judge’s prejudice was obvious, but he also made it clear that he was protecting the position of the establishment and the interests of the landowning elite, by adding:
‘A Government in every country should be just like a corporation: and, in this country, it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye. But landed property cannot be removed.’
The judge went on to accuse Muir of ‘poisoning the minds of the common people and preparing them for rebellion’, before finally concluding, ‘I leave it with you and have no doubt of your returning such a verdict as will do you honour.’ By then it was well into the early hours of 31 August, as the courts in Scotland at that time normally sought to conclude business in one day. However, given the lateness of the hour and the importance of the case, Braxfield adjourned until later that same day. Therefore, it was early afternoon on 31 August that the court reconvened and Muir returned to learn what his fate would be.
With the courtroom packed with Muir’s friends and supporters, the jury and the judges filed in. Muir impassively sat in the dock as the jury was asked for their verdict and the foreman unsurprisingly stated that they had found him guilty. The judge thanked them, and once again demonstrated his complete disdain for judicial impartiality by saying that ‘the court highly approves of the verdict you have given’ after previously whispering to a juror who passed by him and imploring him to convict ‘ane o’ thae damned scoundrels’.
Radical Scotland: Uncovering Scotland’s Radical History from the French Revolutionary Era to the 1820 Rising by Kenny MacAskill is published by Biteback Publishing, priced £20.00.
This year sees the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, a document written and sent to Pope John XXII as part of a campaign, in 1320, to assert Scotland as an independent kingdom. The declaration went on to have wider influence with many believing it to be the inspiration behind America’s declaration of independence. In this anniversary year, three publishers are releasing books on the document’s history.
Declaration of Arbroath
By Tom Turpie
Published by Luath Press
Declarations on Freedom for Writers and Readers
Edited by Scottish PEN
Published by Scotland Street Press
The Illustrated Declaration of Arbroath
By Andrew Redmond Barr
Published by the Saltire Society
First up is Tom Turpie’s pocket guide, Declaration of Arbroath. In the book, Tom seeks to contextualise the document, and to begin, he offers this historical timeline:
Timeline
1189–92 Scottish Church granted ‘Special Daughter Status’ by Papacy
1286 Death of Alexander III
1290 Death of the Maid of Norway, Alexander’s only heir
1291–2 The Great Cause; the legal process to choose a new King of Scots
1292 (November) John Balliol chosen and inaugurated King of Scots
1295 Scots seek alliance with King Philip IV of France
1296 Wars of Independence begin with Scottish attack on Carlisle, English attack on Berwick and battle of Dunbar; King John surrenders to Edward I
1297 Rebellion led by William Wallace and Andrew Murray ends with Scottish victory at the battle of Stirling Bridge
1298 Scottish forces under Wallace defeated at the battle of Falkirk
1301–2 Debate in Rome between Scottish and English procurators, Edward I forced to back down
1303 Philip of France makes separate peace with Edward I following defeat at battle of Courtrai
1303–4 Edward I invades Scotland again captures Stirling Castle and forces surrender of John Comyn and most Scottish nobles
1305 William Wallace captured and executed
1306 (February) Robert Bruce murders John Comyn at Dumfries Greyfriars Kirk for which he is automatically excommunicated, inaugurated at Scone as Robert I on 25 March
1307 (July) Death of Edward I, succeeded by Edward II
1308–10 Robert I personally absolved by Pope for murder of Comyn
1309 Declarations of the Scottish Clergy and Nobility sent to Philip IV, justifying support for Robert I
1314 (June) Scottish victory at the Battle of Bannockburn
1315–22 Great European Famine
1315 Robert I excommunicated for invasion of Ireland
1317 ‘Remonstrance of the Irish Princes’, letter sent to Pope John XXII from Ireland with similar theme to Arbroath
1317 Truce between Scots and English forces declared by Pope John XXII
1318 (October) Death of Edward Bruce at the Battle of Faughert in Ireland
1319 Bovine Pestilence
1319 Robert I excommunicated by Pope John XXII and papal bulls summon the king and four bishops to Avignon for 1 May 1320
1320 (March) Meeting of General Council at Newbattle
(April) Declaration of Arbroath sent to John XXII at his palace in Avignon
(August) John XXII suspends excommunication of Robert I and four Scottish bishops
1327 (January) Edward II deposed and murdered by English opposition and is succeeded by Edward III
1328 (March) Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton ends First War of Independence
1329 (June) Death of Robert I, succeeded by David II
1332 Edward Balliol invades Scotland and starts Second War of Independence, David II forced into exile
1337 Beginning of Hundred Years’ War limits English support for Balliol
1341 David II returns from exile
1346 David II captured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross
1356 Balliol gives up claim to Scottish throne
1357 David II ransomed and Second War ends
1689 First publication of the letter by itself and in translation from Latin to English
1776 United States Declaration of Independence
1904 A local historian, J Brodie, first used the term Declaration of Arbroath
1998 Senate Resolution 155 officially designated 6 April, the date on the Declaration of Arbroath, as Tartan Day in the US
2016 Declaration of Arbroath placed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register
In April Scotland Street Press will publish Declarations on Freedom for Writers and Readers, an anthology of poetry, short stories, essays and letters exploring freedom of expression. With a foreword by Tom Devine, and contributions from writers such as James Roberton, Karen Campbell, Kirsty Logan, Donald S Murray, Carl McDougall and Zoe Wicomb, the collection is full of provocative, beautiful and necessary writing, all using the Declaration of Arbroath as inspiration. Here is a poem from the collection by Finola Scott.
The set o declaration
In ma mooth it’s oer wersh, aumlach,
tackits ma tongue, maks me rame an scrift.
In ma lugs it propales itsel, emphatic,
nae wheetie-whattie, a stuir wurd.
Ah wad as lief ma wurds ruitit in widland
aye green, glentin in the muinlicht.
Doucely they jouk, ettle an tak tent o
the manes o ithers, the sorraes o the warld.
This cannie wurd welcomes, disnae mak mairches
in the saun, but sees efter partins in pools.
It laments injustice, bewails the weak. It langs
fi r scowth, off erin a place o haud tae aw.
The wurd fi ts ma hairt jist richt.
set: the way in which a thing works; wersh: tasteless, sour; aumlach:
ungainly; scrift: declaim, spin (a story); propale: make public,
announce; wheetie-whattie: vague; stuir: unyielding; wad as lief:
would rather; doucely: sweetly, politely, gently; jouk: dodge, swerve,
evade; ettle: aim (at), plan, intend; tak tent o: pay attention to; manes:
moans; canne (cannie/ canny); mak mairches: set boundaries;
scowth: space, freedom to move; place o haud: bield, sanctuary
The properties of declaration
In my mouth, it tastes too sharp, feels clumsy.
It tangles my tongue, makes me rant and rave.
In my ears it proclaims itself, emphatic,
sure of its direction, a no-compromise word.
I prefer my words rooted in woodland,
evergreen, shining in moon-glow.
Gently they plan, bend with the breeze, attend
the griefs of others, to the world’s sorrows.
This wise word welcomes, doesn’t draw lines
in the sand, instead consults crabs in pools.
It laments injustice, bewails the weak. It yearns
for freedom to speak, to be. It offers sanctuary to all.
The word fits my heart.
Lastly, the Saltire Society have published a beautifully illustrated history and reproduction of the declaration by Andrew Redmond Barr. He writes in the book’s prologue:
Ever since I first read about the Declaration of Arbroath it has lived in my imagination as an icon of Scottish independence. Its image is recognised throughout Scotland, and far beyond, because as well as being known for the message it contains it is also visually distinctive; a parchment letter with a thick morass of wax seals on ribbons hanging below, the signatures of Scots magnates and nobles tied one over the other, clustered and tangled as if attached in popular flurry. You can almost imagine the weight of it, and the unexpected delight of its creators in finding so many so eager to sign.
The Declaration of Arbroath was a diplomatic letter sent from the Scots to the Pope in 1320, calling for Scotland to be recognised as an independent kingdom against English claims of overlordship. Though written in the bleakest times of war, this Declaration spoke to the most basic human desires for freedom and peace, and revealed something profound about Scotland’s earliest ideas of people-power, liberty and nationhood. It represented an idea of Scotland so often almost lost and defeated throughout the ages, but always somehow mended and restored.
It is in the spirit of remaking that I approach the Declaration of Arbroath on its 700th anniversary. The Declaration lends itself naturally to illustration because the text itself is rich in images. Its message conjures a picture of a nation somewhat embattled and under siege, but also a nation hopeful for transformation, a nation ripe with stories and traditions and a nation in touch with Europe and its place in the wider world.
There has been a great volume of academic research into the Declaration of Arbroath and the Wars of Scottish Independence, much of which has been invaluable in the making of this book. I am not an academic but a writer and artist with a view that our history needs room to breathe outwith academia, and that artistic interpretation can aid our understanding of the past.
The life of a nation, like the life of a person, is a complex puzzle of episodes and events from which we try to find the threads of a story. What our most ancient texts lack in verifiable accuracy they make up for in another kind of truth, a bardic truth, a sense of how the country once felt, what people believed in, what frightened them and what gave them hope. All of this can be lost when history is reduced to dates, times, numbers and names. The chroniclers of the old Scotland were tale-tellers, and their tale-telling revealed something truthful about the time and place in which they lived.
First, it should be understood that the wars of conquest waged against Scotland in the Middle Ages were not simply designed to defeat the Scots army in battle, but to erase the very idea of Scotland from memory. All Scottish thought, Scottish art and Scottish writing today exists because an idea of Scotland, against all the odds, survived.
The Declaration of Arbroath remains today one of Scotland’s most cherished historical treasures. Its value is not in the parchment artefact itself but in the resonance of the words, the defiance of tyranny, the power of the people, the survival of Scotland – those words, ‘for freedom alone’, which still linger and lurk in the deep memory of the nation. Its image remains a permanent reminder of those Scottish rights so often lost and re-won throughout history, and the rights which in the eyes of many are yet to be won for a final time.
The written word has a long and enduring place in Scottish political life, and the Declaration of Arbroath rings sharply through the ages as perhaps our greatest ever demonstration of word-power. Today there are many people around the world seeking freedoms of different kinds, and my hope is that the Declaration of Arbroath on its 700th anniversary will reaffirm a sense that the written word and the freedom to write are vital to human expression and ought to be defended.
Centuries after it was first written, the Declaration of Arbroath still has something relevant to say about the world. The principle of the sovereignty of the people in particular endures through the ages. The assertion of the people’s demands over and above that of kings, parliaments, governments or political leaders, is today just as powerful an idea, and just as hotly contested.
The Declaration of Arbroath therefore is not only one of the primary foundation stones of Scottish identity, it is also the original document of Scottish democratic thought, a thread of which has found its way through centuries of cultural and political change to this very moment.
To me the Declaration of Arbroath is a manifestation, a solidification, an illustration, of all that is fascinating, curious and uplifting about this country I wasn’t born in, but which I call my home. 700 years since the Declaration of Arbroath was written, Scotland stands yet again in a state of flux, toying once more with new ideas of nationhood and independence.
In creating this book I hope, in my small part, to celebrate Scotland’s historic presence in the world community, and to contribute as best I can to the carrying stream of this ancient but ever-evolving country. Illuminate our history and our history will illuminate us in return; that is the principal at the core of this book.
Declaration of Arbroath by Tom Turpie is published by Luath Press, priced £4.99
Declarations on Freedom for Writers and Readers, edited by Scottish PEN is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £9.99
The Illustrated Declaration of Arbroath by Andrew Redmond Barr is published by the Saltire Society, priced £14.99
We love to welcome fresh, new voices to Scotland’s literary scene here at BooksfromScotland, and we’re excited to read Graeme Armstrong’s debut novel, The Young Team. We hope this little taster will have you rushing to the bookshops!
Extract taken from The Young Team
By Graeme Armstrong
Published by Picador
We wander up the lane, buzzin wae the Friday Feelin, a force wae almost supernatural powers. It’s obvious that last week is on everywan’s mind. This Friday we’re gonnae join the actual troops instead ae our wee mad squad up the Mansion. We wurnae oblivious tae the main gathering’s existence before. On Friday nights before we tended tae just say ‘awright’ tae them n go on our way. It wisnae an official thing, yir just fae that area n know them aw fae school. Then yi come ae age n it’s accepted that yi hang aboot wae them n become a YT wan, oot gittin a smoke durin the week n on-it at the weekend wae the troops n the tidy burds who hang aboot anaw.
They call theirsels the YT Burds or the Team Lassies. They huv their ain enemies, the lassies who jump aboot wae other young teams. They mostly move aboot the town freely. A tidy is a tidy, after aw – regardless ae wit scheme she comes fae. There’s gorgeous scheme queens n then the loyal crazy burds that ir practically troops. They’re mad anaw n would fight wae guys as easily, n wur nae less mental. Every young team hus at least wan burd who’s a juggernaut in a tracky. She wis never a looker but yi would never say it tae her face. If yi tried tae batter in tae her mad-wae-it regardless, she would probably punch yir cunt in . . . if yir lucky.
‘Mon, Addison, ya dick,’ Broonie says. Addison is standin on the phone tae a lassie. He wis always dain this. He’s a goodlookin, trendy kinda guy – a perfume boy drenched in Ultraviolet n always wearin the best ae gear. Popular wae the lassies, hence the constant telecommunications wae them, but that doesnae earn yi the respect ae the streets.
‘A’m coming, fuck sake, Broonie.’
‘Hurry up, mate.’
We reach the top ae the park. There’s nae park really. Crash mats cover the ground round the swings n they’re littered wae black n blue blobs, where wheelie bins hud been burnt n melted. The swings huv been vandalised tae the extent that the council huv removed the chains n seats. Noo aw that’s left is the bare frames, which ir like notice boards, aw penned n tippexed like fuck. The climbin frame is spray-painted like fuck anaw. YT, scrawled aw over it n names ae ghosts fae young teams past. The place is fucked, plain n simple. The council huv long since gave up tryin tae fix it fur the weans. It, like the whole place, is forgotten.
Aw the troops sit on the other side ae a wee metal fence behind a wee shelter belt ae trees. A kin see waterproof jakits n fitbaw trackies n a mix ae Rangers n Celtic taps. There’s a few lassies laughin n we kin hear the din the rest ir makin, shoutin, singin n laughin. The elected edgy hus obviously alerted the team tae our presence. Big Kenzie, Eck n Taz appear at the front n somebody shouts, ‘Chill oot fuck, it’s only the younger wans.’ As this passes aboot the group, more heads appear fae behind the bushes n trees fur a swatch. There’s aboot twenty-five young wans congregated. Roughly fifteen guys, and aboot ten lassies. We walk through the trees the- gither, the six ae us. Our wee clan among these tribal chieftains and the eligible lassies. Wan ae the lassies is hoddin a wee MP3 speaker n switchin between ‘Dancing in the Dark’ n ‘I’ll Get Over You’. That’s the extent ae hur repertoire. ‘Fuck sake, we runnin a crèche noo, troops?’ some dafty says, gittin a laugh fae the crowd.
‘Well yir maw doesnae complain, when we aw turn up at hur door!’ A say wae a cheeky smile.
People ooh n ah, the lassies giggle, n Big Eck walks up tae me. A stand brave, still smiling. ‘YASS! You fuckin tell ’um, wee man,’ as he extends a hand. The guy who made the comment, Peter Dickson, walks forward, tryin tae growl at us. Eck slaps him across the face. ‘Sit doon, Dickson, ya fuckin dick.’ He looks ragin. ‘That’s Kenzie’s wee brur n his pals, ya dafty.’ Big Kenzie swaggers over at the mention ae his name.
‘HAW, YOOZ!’ Big Kenzie shouts, addressin the masses. ‘This is ma wee brur n his pals, nae cunt, n A mean nae cunt, gees them shite, understand?’ The crowd mutters assurances n goes back tae their own chats. Our six split n start mixin wae the troops. Eck winks at us, n him n Tam start talkin aboot an elder lassie who’s pickin them up in hur Seat Ibiza. The ages range fae us at fourteen n fifteen, right tae eighteen n nineteen. Big Kenzie n Eck ir seventeen n eighteen, respectively. They ruled the roost, but they’re aff. They both disappear, back up the red ash path n oot ae the park. Our only real friend left is Taz, but he’s distracted, tellin two lassies the tales fae last week. He waves me n Danny over tae chat.
‘Happnin, ma main wee muckers! YASS, these ir the boays A wis tellin yi aboot, ladies.’ The two lassies turn n smile at us. They’re both a couple ae year elder than us. A recognise the two ae them fae our bit. The first is tall fur a lassie, aboot five eight. She’s a brunette, wae fair highlights runnin through hur straightened hair. Hur long legs ir standin crossed against the cold. She’s git on a red puffer jakit, wae ripped, faded jeans. Hur face is gorgeous, high cheek bones n big green eyes. She’s git on the perfect amount ae make-up. Most lassies caked themselves in the stuff, their necks generally a different colour fae their faces. They huv that plasticky look, like somebody’s moulded them fae plasticine n smoothed oot the edges. Monica Mason is a stunner, nae denyin it. She’s git the kinda face yi turned back tae look at but she doesnae pure know it.
Guys around the other ir like flies around shite. Patricia Lewis always hus a wee entourage ae admirers buzzin around hur, usually the tap men n everyone else fallin in behind. Big blue eyes, natural platinum blonde, big boobs n slim. She’s git big hoop earrings n a cheek piercing. There’s a millimetre gap between hur two front teeth. Underneath an Inter Milan tracksuit top, there’s the green n white hoops ae a Celtic fitbaw tap. She’s wearin white Adidas tracky bottoms n wee pink Lacoste trainers. Hur lip gloss is pink and glittery. The two ae them pass a half bottle ae Glen’s vodka between them straight, then take a swig ae Irn-Bru tae git the taste away. A laugh as Monica screws hur face up. Patricia hands hur a draw ae a Lambert & Butler, which obviously helps. The two ae them look up at us. Patricia glares wae hur usual scowl, but smiles n winks. Monica gees us a wee cheeky smile anaw. Yolt. ‘Wit’s yir name then, wee man?’ Patricia asks us.
‘Azzy Williams,’ A say, aw confidence.
DJ Pulse, ‘Poison’, is playin oot wan ae their phones.
‘Nice tae meet yi, Azzy Williams,’ Monica says.
‘A’m Danny fuckin Stevenson – the wan n only.’ Two ae them laugh. He bounces away steamin tae talk tae another burd.
‘You one of the young wans that punched fuck out ae Big Si?’
‘Aye, fuck. We backed Taz right up n aw that.’
‘So yi mad then?’ Patricia asks us. This time A wink. Monica giggles. Patricia gees us the sexy scowl, like she’s kiddin on she doesnae fancy us a wee bit. A kin hear Danny talkin tae another wee burd behind me, Emma Black, huvin a similar convo aboot last week’s antics. A turn roon tae see him nippin her, two ae them standin under a tree. The lassies follow ma look n both laugh.
‘You hopin fur a kiss the night, son?’ Patricia says.
‘Ah never say never n aw that!’ A say, wae Monica catchin ma eye. She looks doon ever so slightly, n gees us this mad look.
The Young Team by Graeme Armstrong is published by Picador, priced £14.99.
If you haven’t yet made your aquaintance with Olga Wojtas’s wonderful detective, Shona McGonagle, then BooksfromScotland urges you to rectify that immediately! We thoroughly enjoyed Olga’s first novek, Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar, so we caught up with her to find out more about her latest release, Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace
By Olga Wogtas
Published by Saraband
You’ve now just released the second Miss Blaine’s Prefect mystery, Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace following on from the first highly-acclaimed novel Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar. For those who have not yet introduced themselves to your sleuth Shona McMonagle, could you tell us a little bit about her?
My heroine is a 50-something librarian and proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, who deplores Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for bringing her alma mater into disrepute. Impeccably educated and an accomplished martial artist, linguist and musician, Shona is thrilled when Miss Blaine selects her for time-travelling missions – but she does tend to get the wrong end of the stick about what her mission is.
In Golden Samovar, Shona was whisked off to Tsarist Russia, what can we expect from her new adventure?
In Vampire Menace, she’s in fin-de-siècle France, in an Alpine village called Sans-Soleil which never gets any sun. It’s reeling from a spate of unexplained deaths, and during her investigations, Shona meets an intriguing aristocrat who wears a muffler round the bottom half of his face, and whose eyes glow red. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but is he really, as Shona believes, the Earl of Erroll from Aberdeenshire?
What, other than your love of Muriel Spark, inspired the creation of Miss Blaine’s Prefect?
I’m a journalist, and a news junkie, and the state of the world for the last few years has been unspeakably depressing. I wanted to write something that was pure escapism.
It’s not often that a book makes a reader laugh out loud, but yours really do! How do you approach writing comedy?
That’s so kind of you to say that – thank you! Humour is so subjective that all I can do is write what makes me laugh, and hope it appeals to at least a few readers.
It’s clear you are a massive bibliophile: your books are full of literary references. Can you remember what ignited your love of reading?
My mother said I was a nightmare as a tiny child – whenever she read to me, the second she stopped, I would cry “Read! Read!” Once I learned to read for myself, there was no holding me. I’m an only child, so maybe books were a replacement for siblings.
How much research goes into your books?
For the first, I started off doing a huge amount of research, and then realised I risked shoe-horning in information just to show how much I’d done. That would be totally boring, so I jettisoned the research, and relied on memory. Although I did double-check various facts, such as when the metronome was invented. For the second book, I had to research Bram Stoker’s sources for Dracula, so that I could prove that all his information about vampires was wrong.
With a time-travelling heroine, you have given yourself a freer rein than other crime writers who have set their novels in a specific place and time. It must be endlessly entertaining to think where you might send Shona next. How do you decide your settings? Do you have a million ideas for future books?
I studied Russian, and love Tolstoy, so that was the inspiration for the first. One of the loveliest comments I’ve had is from the writer Linda Cracknell, who described the Golden Samovar as “Anna Karenina written by P.G.Wodehouse.” I lived in France for a while, so that was the inspiration for the second. Who knows where Shona will go next? All I can say is that as a good Edinburgh person, she’s unlikely to go to Glasgow.
What is your favourite part of the publishing process?
Holding the physical book. I still can’t believe I’m a published author.
What upcoming events do you have in your diary that you can tell us about?
I’m delighted to be at Bookmark in Blairgowrie on March 14, and at the York Book Festival on March 28.
What are you reading just now?
I’ve just finished The Amber Seeker, the second book in Mandy Haggith’s Stone Stories trilogy – and there’s definitely no soggy middle here. This is the sequel to The Walrus Mutterer, which was longlisted for the 2018 Highland Book Prize, and it continues following the Iron Age Greek explorer, Pytheas of Massalia. I’d never had any interest in the Iron Age, but Mandy’s writing it so great that, forgive the pun, it’s riveting.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace by Olga Wogtas is published by Saraband, priced £8.99
The Island Child is a spellbinding debut novel set on the island of Inis at a time where life revolves around births, deaths, fishing and wool. It is also a tale of motherhood, love and escape, beautifully-told from Molly Aitken who is a novelist to keep your eye on. Here we share an extract from the novel’s prologue.
Extract taken from The Island Child
By Molly Aitken
Published by Canongate Books
I began with my mam, just like my daughter began with me.
My mam whispered the story of my birth to hook the fear in me, to keep me shut up at home with her, but as a child I loved to hear how I came to the island, because it linked me to him, the other baby born during the storm.
Mam told it like so: she was stood by the wall in front of our cottage, waiting. No one was about on the road or in the fields, but below her the bay was busy with boats. Purple clouds climbed the blue; thin and wispy at first and building to heavy stacks that spread like flames in the gorse. A storm prickled in the air. Mam scanned about for Dad’s currach but didn’t know his from any other. She thanked God my brother Kieran and the baby Enda were too young to be out and were safely playing in front of the neighbour Bridget’s hearth so Mam could arrange the house before I came. Already the fishermen were struggling back towards the pier against the sharp-toothed waves. The fear had lit the men.
On the island, the sea was what separated women from men. Women weren’t taken by the water. Instead, mothers were drained by the dropping tears over the bodies of their dead sons. Grandmothers vanished into old age early, almost as quick as waning moons, and girls were drowned in the tides of birthing blood. Men fought death on the sea, women in the home.
Mam pushed away these thoughts and turned her focus inwards. For weeks I’d been beating against her belly like a bird trapped in a chimney. She couldn’t wait to be rid of me and not a drip of terror had entered her about it. She’d already had my two brothers without a bother. What could go wrong with the third?
Thunder rumbled as far off as the mainland, rolling in across the waves to shake the stones, waking the giant, sleeping whale beneath, the mother of the island. Mam had never heard the tale – and it was the outsider Bridget who told me – but still, Mam felt the whale’s shudder and unease build in her as she watched two currachs skip further out across the swell. She could picture the laughter on Dad as he and the other rowers pushed on into the wild waves. If the sea stole him, Mam would be left to fend for herself with three children and she knew if she was alone the island would kill her. She told me all this on one of our many drawn-out days of sighs and work in the kitchen, but still I must have sensed her weakness. With my new fingernails I scratched at a thread inside her and snapped it. Water splashed her bare feet – I couldn’t say why she wore no shoes on that day but before she had me she must’ve lived in a wilder, happier woman.
Pain ripped through her then and she sank to her knees as if to pray but it was curses that appeared on her tongue – I know because I shouted those words myself when I was having my own daughter – but, unlike me, my mam swallowed them down, leaving them to rot in her chest.
Mam hauled herself through the doorway and forgot to look back to see if Dad’s boat was coming home.
A square of light shifted across the floor and was extinguished with rain slashing through the wide-open door. Mam sat on the floor, lips bleeding from biting back the shouts inside her while the Virgin watched her from the dresser, a string of prayer beads wrapped around her saintly neck and a wilting meadow flower at her porcelain feet. For the first time since Mam had landed on the island, she didn’t pray to the mother of Himself. She never told me why, but it might have been because she felt she couldn’t live up to the Mother of Mercy with whom she shared a name or she believed a mortal woman was no good in a case as bad as me.
With Mary’s painted blue eyes burning her back, Mam braced herself against the wall and pleaded with God – she only ever made the big requests to him – to cut the agonies of me, her child, away, but like most men, he wasn’t one to involve himself with women’s matters.
Somehow Mam got herself into the big room. Lightning flashed in the matchbox window and was swallowed by the dark clutch of the storm. The pains tearing through Mam went on and on and on but I gave her no urge to push. She wouldn’t let herself think this was different from the times before but somewhere at the back of her mind she knew I would be the difficult child.
She prayed again to God and listened for his answer, but all she heard was the tormented roar of the storm. Where was Ardàn? Why didn’t Bridget return the boys to her? Through the open bedroom door the kitchen stared its blank emptiness at her. She laid herself on the bed and gave in to the moans and shouts.
The Island Child by Molly Aitken is published by Canongate Books, priced £14.99
When Brian Wilson first wrote of his adventure journeying around Scotland in a kayak, he hoped that he could galvanise both appreciation and conservation of our coastal wildlife and landscapes. Now, thirty years on, and in a fourth edition, Blazing Paddles: A Scottish Coastal Odyssey still carries that message and it is one that is even more vital. Here is Brian in the introduction to this new edition.
Extract taken from Blazing Paddles: A Scottish Coastal Journey
By Brian Wilson
Published by Birlinn Ltd
This edition of Blazing Paddles marks the passing of three decades since, at the age of 22, I launched a small kayak, hoping to paddle it right around the coast of the country that was, and remains, my home. I didn’t need to be the first, or the fastest; it wasn’t about staking a claim. I simply wanted to travel as a self-contained unit ‒ independent of the land and sea support that often accompanies similar ventures ‒ and to explore and discover the whole Scottish coastline, its people and its wildlife, to make it my own. Travelling alone, by kayak ‒ portable, vulnerable, seaworthy, quiet ‒ seemed to me the best possible way to do this.
The journey itself (1,800 miles in four months) was to become a personal awakening, almost a rite of passage. There were periods of intense physical challenge, moments of sublime peace, emotional highs and lows – fear, loneliness, elation – even days when I thought I might die! And by the end I had become a very different person.
One can’t travel on the sea for four months, living in tents and caves, sleeping on beaches, without developing an acute awareness of the intricate ecology of the sea and shore. And along with that awareness comes a concern about everything which threatens its diversity and health. So it was that submarines, supertankers and sea pollution found their way into the fabric of this story.
I hoped (back in 1985) that wider appreciation of some of the issues involved might encourage more open discussion and help people who love the sea to exert more effective pressure towards its sane and sustainable management. And perhaps, to some extent, it did. Sadly, however, many of the problems that I was beginning to worry about as a young traveller have today become major international environmental concerns. Some, indeed, are approaching catastrophe level.
Scotland is home to more than 40,000 species of marine wildlife. Our coasts and seas host a third of the world’s population of grey seals, a third of all whale and dolphin species, and the highest number of porpoises in Europe. We have the world’s largest colony of northern gannets, the UK’s biggest stronghold of puffins, the most northerly pod of bottlenose dolphins and some of the finest sub-marine habitats in Europe. In addition, Scotland is the best place on the planet to see basking sharks, making us one of Europe’s finest ecotourism destinations. All of which is big business, and a huge stewardship challenge. And all of which is currently facing a range of serious problems.
Fish farms crowd the sheltered bays of the Atlantic seaboard, polluting our tides and sea beds with chemical effluents and infecting wild fish stocks with lice and diseases. Industrial ships dredge the sea bed indiscriminately in pursuit of shellfish, leaving wrecked habitats in their wake. The seabirds which once crowded the great cliffs and skerries are today struggling desperately with pollution, overfishing and the effects of a changing climate. Many of their roosts ‒ once raucous festivals of life ‒ have become lonely, subdued places.
When change and decline are gradual, their impact in the short term is hardly noticeable. A 3 per cent reduction in bird numbers each year may be almost invisible to the casual observer, and many of our seabird sites are remote, and seasonal, seen only by occasional visitors. But the majestic spectacle of a major seabird colony is already gradually becoming a distant memory. All the more tragic, as future generations are unlikely to miss what they never knew.
Globally, seabird populations have dropped by around 70 per cent in the past 60 years. Half of all known seabird species are in decline, with a full third facing possible extinction. There are a billion fewer seabirds now than in 1950, with many species plotted on a population graph trending towards zero by 2060.
In European waters, fulmars are down 40 per cent in the last 30 years, kittiwakes may have lost around double those numbers. Atlantic puffins ‒ those ever-popular sea parrots of the northern seas ‒ are under enormous pressures from climate change. With the disappearance of their feedstocks, their numbers will be down to a fifth of what they once were by the middle of this century, thereby becoming a very rare sight anywhere south of the Orkneys.
These are declines for which we are responsible. Human overfishing has much to answer for. (Research has shown that if fishing boats take any more than two-thirds of the available fish stocks, the seabirds begin to die.) But there are many other factors at work here.
Massive numbers of seabirds are destroyed ‘accidentally’ by fishing gear. Even after it is discarded or lost, it can continue to ‘ghost fish’, catching and killing birds, fish and mammals for many years. Pollution of the seas ‒ oils, metals, plastics, PCBs and other toxins from human activities ‒ takes a constant and devastating toll on seabirds. As do the disturbance and destruction of habitat, the introduction of predators to bird breeding sites, and the ongoing effects of climate change and ocean acidification.
All over the world, measures are being taken in an attempt to avert seabird decline. Projects to eradicate alien ground predators (rats, mink, hedgehogs), especially on islands, have been very effective. There have been schemes and initiatives to reduce accidental by-catch and to limit the shooting of seabirds. But at current levels of intervention seabirds continue to tumble towards the abyss. There is no time left for complacency ‒ for blaming the seabird losses on normal oscillations in the ocean ecosystems. Seabird decline is a visible sign that the entire web of marine life may be in jeopardy. Much more must be done, and urgently. Crucially, we must acknowledge that the rate at which we are changing the atmosphere and the oceans ‒ their temperature, acidity and cleanliness, use and management ‒ needs to be brought under tighter control.
The bountiful mounds of driftwood and wooden fishboxes, which once comfortably fuelled and furnished the camp spots of a coastal nomad, no longer wash up on our western beaches, having been superseded by generations of polystyrene and bright indestructible plastics. From the elemental sea-salts to the bellies of the greatest whales, particles of plastic now pervade the entire marine ecosystem.
Plastic pollution, of course, is neither a recent, nor just a Scottish problem. Plastics have been found in all the oceans – from the poles to the tropics – and even in the deepest oceanic trenches. Phenomena such as the ‘great pacific garbage patch’ have become infamous. With an estimated 12 million tonnes of plastic getting into the world’s oceans every year, the issue is at last creating international headlines and entering human awareness worldwide. Impacts of plastic in our ecosystems range from unsightly littering of our coastlines, through entanglement and physical harm to wildlife, down to insidious, far-reaching, long-term damage to habitats, food chains and human health. It has been estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastics than fish in the world’s oceans.
Recent media coverage (most notably David Attenborough’s excellent Blue Planet 2) has fed into a growing public backlash against wasteful use of plastics. Beach-cleans and plastic removal are enormously important initiatives, both in terms of clean-up and in raising awareness. But, in the absence of a miraculous technological solution, ocean-borne plastics are going to be a fact of life for the foreseeable future and much remains to be done. The flow of plastics into the oceans needs to be stemmed at source.
All can contribute to tackling this crisis ‒ governments, drinks companies, the cosmetics industry ‒ but it is up to us, consumers and voters, to demand it loudly, and then we must actively support the changes.
Of course, not all is gloom and disaster; much of what I enjoyed in 1985 continues unchanged. The Scottish coastline remains one of the most magical, unspoiled places in the world for relaxation and discovery, exploration and adventure. And there exists today a growing awareness of the need to protect the precious natural richness around us. The great swell-waves still pile in upon our shores from the wide Atlantic; strong tides scour and swish through the island narrows; impressive numbers of plucky seabirds still return to their rocky outposts each spring; and the flowers of summer still crowd the Hebridean machair-lands.
Blazing Paddles was a lone foray into less-travelled areas, both geographically and personally. But the very concepts of solitude and wilderness ‒ which lie at the heart of the journey ‒ are themselves changing quickly: a tsunami of miniaturised digital technology has, in the intervening years, transformed adventure travel. True solitude dissolves when we choose to carry a reliable means of contacting (or being contacted by) the outside world. And the idea of wilderness recedes in direct proportion to the quantity of technical bling we choose to bring with us in pursuit of it.
‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there,’ wrote L.P. Hartley. But as Blazing Paddles relaunches, in its fourth edition, I like to think of it reaching out to a new generation of coastal adventurers, and also continuing to touch the hearts of those who care about the salty places where land and sea combine. It’s probably best enjoyed with a generous dram, on a beach, by a driftwood fire, possibly as a narrative record of a time which is rapidly passing, but, above all, it is a portrait of a young man’s first low-tech voyage of discovery, floating boldly alone among the seabirds and fishboxes of a very special country.
Blazing Paddles: A Scottish Coastal Journey by Brian Wilson is published by Birlinn Ltd, priced £9.99
Kapka Kassabova’s travel writing often shines a light on parts of the world that don’t always get much attention. David Robinson finds more illuminating stories in her latest book, To the Lake.
To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
By Kapka Kassabova
Published by Granta Books
With her last book, Border, Kapka Kassabova won the inaugural Highland Book Prize and the 2017 Saltire Book of the Year, and was either shortlisted or won a further half dozen awards. An exploration of the borderlands of the south-east Balkans, it cast new light on a neglected corner of Europe, mixing memoir with a sophisticated study of cultural intermingling.
Her new book, To the Lake, does exactly the same thing – except instead of taking her readers around and across the intersecting frontiers of Greece, Turkey and her native Bulgaria, she takes them around and across the equally neglected borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece. It is a story that can almost, but not entirely, be told around the shorelines of two lakes – Prespa and Ohrid.
Let me try to explain where they are. When the Romans wanted a fast overland route to Constantinople, they started half-way down the coast of what is now Albania, and marched west through the mountains to Thessalonika. This, the first half of the Via Egnatia, is by far the toughest part, but a third of the way along it, they would at least have the consolation of seeing Lake Ohrid. This is where Kassabova’s maternal ancestors lived, owning orchards and living by its shores right down to her grandmother Anastassia’s time.
This land has been shuffled around between different rulers so frequently that it would be farcical had not whole lakes of blood also been shed in the process: when Bulgaria lost ownership of it in 1944, for example, it was for the fourth time in only 60 years. Even the locals refer to the fast-changing regimes almost as if they were football scores: Serbia 1 (1913-15), for example, or Bulgaria 2 (1941-4). Even when Macedonia finally won its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it still couldn’t even legally call itself what it wanted to: only a year and a half ago was a compromise finally reached on the name ‘North Macedonia’.
So when Kassabova – born and reared in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital 170 miles to the north-east – goes to Lake Ohrid, it’s a homecoming of sorts. This was where Anastassia was from, where the family went for summer holidays, and where many of them remain. Kassabova left this part of Europe behind a long time ago – first, by emigrating with her family to New Zealand, and then by moving to Scotland, where she settled in 2003 – but even though she never lived and worked there, in a sense this is where her deepest roots lie.
The first time she visited Lake Ohrid by herself was in 1990, four years after her grandmother’s death, when the Kosovo war had just finished. She was by standing by the lake when a retired doctor who had been throwing bread to the swans approached her. ‘Forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but whose are you?’ She told him about Anastassia. He had, it turned out, been in love with her grandmother himself, and so had many others, but he’d heard the story: she’d met a Bulgarian cavalry officer and moved to Sofia.
By the time you’ve finished the book, you realise how much more there is to a simple story like that. First of all, the book lives up to its title. The lake her family’s orchards overlooked is indeed beautiful – check it out on Google Images – but it’s more than that. It is, she points out, one of the oldest in the world. Apparently, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, most of them silt up. But Lake Ohrid, fed by underground streams from the higher, colder and altogether bleaker Lake Prespa, is naturally filtered by porous karst by the time it arrives. This subterranean inter-lake link is, she says, the only one of its kind in Eurasia.
The human contrast to this lacustrine immutability is obvious, and it’s there in the retired doctor’s question: whose are you? Because borders in these parts rise and fall so rapidly and each time they do the consequences can be brutal. Families can be trapped on the wrong side, sometimes never being allowed to meet again. If Anastassia had fallen in love with an Albanian resistance fighter instead, she would have brought up her family under a regime so repressive that even having the temerity to recommend Yugoslav socks over locally-made ones would get you ten years in the slammer.
This is land not only of ever-shifting borders but of complex linguistic and religious interminglings. The graffiti next to the frescos in the church at Zaum, at the south of the lake, are in five languages: Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian and Greek – evidence, Kassabova suggests, of the Balkans ‘baggy natural cosmopolitanism’. Before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in 1912, there was no shortage of travellers expressing amazement at the relatively peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews.
In fairness, she doesn’t press this point too far, because how can she? From the blinding of 14,000 captured Macedonian soldiers by the victorious Byzantines at the battle of Kleidon in 1014 to the litany of atrocities at the end of the Greek civil war just over the border, historical hatreds have gone too deep to ignore. But she does at least show how the weight of history – not just hatred but love of the land, not just religion but folklore, not just political leaders but ordinary people – shapes individuals, not least members of her own family.
This is the real strength of the book. You don’t turn to it for detailed exegesis of the Macedonian Question – or, come to that, as a tour guide: she’s not all that bothered about telling you precisely where she is or how she got there. Places are never as carefully described as are the emotional impact they make on her, and it’s the same with some of her generalisations about people (‘The Lake women … embodied the generative depth where desire and grief ceaselessly churned’). Sometimes the musings seem overblown (‘It may be that the epic journey of the unborn is already written in the ciphers drawn by winds on the lake, as if by cosmic calligraphers’) and you yearn for a simpler narrative.
Yet if you want to understand a place, you need a book like this. Wikipedia will tell you the bare bones of its past, Google Images what it looks like in the present. You might look at both and even contemplate going there. But even if you did, you’d never return with anything like the depth of understanding that Kassabova has drawn from her travels and conversations around her grandmother’s lake.
To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace by Kapka Kassabova is published by Granta Books, priced £14.99.
The port of Leith, although still busy, was once Scotland’s gateway to Europe and home to many shipbuilding companies. Whittles Publishing have released the first book that documents the shipbuilding history of Leith, and here we share part of its introduction.
Extract taken from Leith-Built Ships, Volume 1: They Once Were Shipbuilders
By R. O. Neish
Published by Whittles Publishing
The Leith shipyards, so named for their base in the port of Leith, are the focus of this book, with particular reference to the history and ships originating from what would become the Henry Robb Shipyard. That story begins with the shipwright Thomas Morton, who started building ships at Leith in 1844. Morton was the man who had invented the patent slip, a means of raising ships from the water to the land on an even keel, thus enabling the vessel to be worked on without the expensive need to dry dock it.
Thirty years later, in 1877, the company of Ramage & Ferguson Shipbuilders and Engineers was established; and after that, at the west pier of Leith Docks, was the shipyard of Cran & Somerville, which built ships from around 1880 until taken over by Henry Robb in 1927. The next shipyard on the scene was that of Hawthorns & Co., which started on the banks of the Water of Leith prior to moving down to Shipbuilders’ Row on the foreshore of Leith. Hawthorns took over the Morton shipyard in 1912 and continued until 1924, when it went into voluntary liquidation and was then taken over by Henry Robb. This acquisition gave the fledgling shipbuilders of Henry Robb access to three slipways, and meant that it could now launch ships directly into the sea. All three of the above-mentioned shipyards, including the assimilated Morton’s Yard, were to be incorporated into the firm of Henry Robb, ultimately to become Henry Robb Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd.
Some very fine vessels were built in the 130-plus years that this history covers: from the great days of sail, to the wonderful steam yachts, to the steamships of iron and steel. In the days prior to 1850, Leith was a place that had a lot more in common with Glasgow than it ever had with Edinburgh, with which it was connected by a rough track called Leith Walk. Leith was an independent burgh until the mid-1920s when it was assimilated into the growing city of Edinburgh. Back then, the town of Leith was a rough, dirty place, and times were hard, just as they were in most of Scotland. The majority of Leithers were living in slum conditions and some of the slums were not demolished until the 1960s.
With a population of approximately 30,500, Leith was a growing town in the mid-18th century, but it had none of the infrastructure required to sustain its growth – by 1880 the population had almost doubled, to around 55,000. The huge families were due more to a survival instinct rather than a lack of television or birth control. The infant mortality rate was drastic and to ensure some of them would survive required many children. Life expectancy was short throughout Scotland and 42 was a decent age.
The man of the house had to have gainful employment and a Leither would invariably be connected in some way with ships or shipbuilding. Any decline in the industry would result in him moving or emigrating to find work. For those lucky enough to be indentured as an apprentice, it was a very tough life. After a five-year apprenticeship, he would have joined one of the trade bodies, not the same as today’s trade unions, but more like a benevolent society of men who looked after each other, there being no other form of support for anyone who fell sick or became injured in this dangerous industry. When an apprentice qualified as a journeyman he became a freeman of his incorporation. On paying his dues, he would then be entitled to a small pension should he fall sick or meet with a bad accident.
The chances of falling sick at this time were high and any available hospital care was rudimentary. Being a port, many strange diseases were brought in by visiting ships, and insanitary conditions meant it was a dangerous place to work or live. There was slow improvement at the turn of the century, when Leith Hospital and the Northern Leith Hospital were running. Poor sailors (which was the majority) relied upon the Seaman’s Mission; this is now an upmarket hotel on the shore at Leith.
Schools were also being constructed, and a nautical college was opened in 1903; the first in Scotland for training sailors and officers.
The Water of Leith was a much-polluted river having passed through Edinburgh which was also a smelly, dirty place for the most part. The situation started to change as more and more piped water reached the good citizens of Leith. As ever, the best way to deal with adversity is with humour and a sense of belonging, and this contributed to a community spirit which could not be broken or downtrodden; many Leithers retain a strong sense of community identity to the present day. There is no question that Leith, for all its contemporary gentrification, is a port town that owes its very existence to ships and shipbuilding.
Leith-Built Ships, Volume 1: They Once Were Shipbuilders by R. O. Neish is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £16.99
Next to take our Book According To questionnaire is T F Muir, author of the DCI Andy Gilchrist crime series. His latest, Dead Still is the ninth book in the series, so if you’ve yet to make an aquaintance with the St Andrews detective, you’ve got plenty to catch up on! We asked T F Muir about his favourite novels.
Dead Still
By T F Muir
Published by Constable & Robinson
The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?
At the age of 6, a children’s book about a family of robin redbreasts nesting in a barn. Don’t ask me the title, or who wrote it, because I haven’t a clue. But I loved looking at the pictures of the robins feeding their young, and I somehow managed to read my way through it.
The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book Dead Still. Is there something in particular you’re setting out to explore?
I hadn’t intended to explore anything in my latest novel, but wanted to write a complex murder mystery, and in doing so ended up learning a bit about the whisky distillery business. Dead Still begins with a body being found in a 25-year old whisky cask during a bottling run. My wife and I had a number of enjoyable trips to our ‘local’ distillery, Glengoyne, to enquire about the practicalities of hiding a body in a cask. At first the distillery staff eyed me with suspicion, and told me emphatically that it couldn’t be done. But I persisted, and together we managed to find a believable way to hide a body in a whisky cask, which required the skills of a cooper, which in turn led me to introducing a new character in the back-story, and further complicating and enhancing the plot. All in all, I’m delighted with the end product, with my publishing editor telling me – much to my relief – that it is one of my best novels so far.
The book as . . . object. What is your favourite beautiful book?
I love browsing through books of photographs, not books about photography, but books that contain photographs taken by professional photographers. A photographer friend has this massive coffee table book entitled Before They Pass Away by the English photographer, Jimmy Nelson. The photographs are stunning, and I could spend hours just easing my way through the pages and revelling in the beauty of Nelson’s work.
The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?
The book that inspires me as a novelist is Rose by Martin Cruz Smith. Set in Wigan, in Victorian England, of all places, it tells the story of a disgraced mining engineer, desperate to return to Africa, being persuaded against his will to investigate the disappearance of a curate in the mining town of Wigan, and in so doing, earning his ticket on the next ship back to Africa. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read it, but every time I do I am humbled by the power of Cruz Smith’s writing, and his enviable ability to create evocative and atmospheric settings.
The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?
I came across the timeless bestseller, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, by John Gray, around about the time I rekindled a relationship with the woman I should have married the first time round. Turned out we were both struggling with the demise of our first marriages, and I’m delighted to say that we’re now happily married to each other.
The book as . . . entertainment. What is your favourite rattling good read?
Oh, this is a difficult one, as I have a number of books that I just love, and which I reread from time to time. Picking one from the pile, I would offer The Fear Index by Robert Harris, another author I admire. The protagonist is a mathematics genius who heads up an investment management firm that administers a hedge fund, but with the decisions to buy or sell stocks for the fund being made by the protagonist’s purpose-designed software, also programmed to learn. This is a gripping thriller in which Harris mixes fact with fiction to create a truly terrifying scenario of Artificial Intelligence taking over control of a company, and culminating in a life or death struggle between the computer system and its creator.
The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?
Again, this is a blast from the past when, at the age of 12, one of my Christmas presents was a semi-pictorial, semi-travelogue, book of countries around the world. To this day, I still have in my mind’s eye an image of a young man, naked except for a loin cloth, swimming deep in the bluest of seas, surrounded by fish of every colour imaginable. The place was in the Far East, which to me at the time was as far away from Scotland as the moon was to Earth. That book fired my imagination and left me with a keen desire to see more of the world than the rain-sodden slopes of the Campsie Fells.
The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?
I have a number of books on my ‘to be read soon’ list, one of them being Martin Cruz Smith’s latest The Siberian Dilemma, which is number 9 on his Arkady Renko series. Coincidentally, Dead Still is number 9 in my DCI Andy Gilchrist series. Another book I’d love to read, if the author will ever get around to finishing it, is The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes. I read his I am Pilgrim and was blown away by the story-telling and the protagonist’s characterisation, not to mention the most terrifying of plots, which seemed to me to be history just waiting to happen. Closer to home, and perhaps a nice way to end this article for Books from Scotland, is a novel by another Scottish novelist, Peter May. I love his writing, and his latest novel A Silent Death is on my must-read list.
Dead Still by T F Muir is published by Constable & Robinson, priced £19.99
Wild swimming is becoming an increasingly popular pastime, and authors Anna Deacon and Vicky Allan extol the many reasons why this should be so in their gorgeous book, Taking the Plunge: The Healing Power of Wild Swimming for Mind, Body and Soul. Here they talk to fellow wild swimmers about the joy of being in nature.
Extract taken from Taking the Plunge: The Healing Power of Wild Swimming for Mind, Body and Soul
By Anna Deacon and Vicky Allan
Published by Black & White Publishing
THE INTIMACY OF NATURE
There’s something about being in water – the sea, a river, a lake, a pond – that takes being in nature to a whole different level. You are literally immersed in that wildness and it can feel as if you are more connected to the life that bobs, swims and plunges around you than to any other. That same water that runs over your skin runs over theirs too. The sea in which you float connects to waters on other sides of the planet. In it, you feel small, yet also in touch with a vastness beyond yourself. Swimming in the same water as other creatures feels more intimate than breathing the same air. In water, our relationship to nature changes. Away from our own built environments, we are more on a level with other wild creatures, in touch with some other aspect of ourselves.
We know that being in – and within – nature is good for us. The Japanese have been practising ‘forest bathing’ for decades. There’s even a word for the connection human beings seek out with other living things – ‘biophilia’, coined by the American biologist Edward Wilson in 1984.
Worcestershire-based NHS psychiatrist Charlotte Marriott has long been interested in how evidence-based lifestyle changes can make a difference to mental health. She notes that the evidence in favour of spending time outdoors, and in particular exercising outdoors, for physical and mental well-being, is ‘becoming hard to ignore’.
She says, ‘I started to become interested in the power of spending time in nature after noticing the beneficial effects on me and my family. How a long walk in the countryside can defuse an argument, a swim can invigorate and energise, and a stroll through the woods can calm and relax.’
Charlotte cites studies that show the physiological and psychological benefits of time spent in nature. ‘Spending time in a forest once a month,’ she says, ‘can increase scores for vigour, reduce scores for anger, depression and anxiety and reduce the risk of psychosocial stress-related diseases.’ Trees even release chemicals, phytoncides that make us feel better. ‘They have a direct effect on human immune function and stress hormones.’
The list of ways in which time outdoors in nature can help us is long. Charlotte says it has also been shown ‘to reduce the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, stress, anxiety and depression, and increase sleep duration, perhaps because exposure to green spaces reduces the level of stress hormones: cortisol in saliva and adrenaline and noradrenaline in urine’. And, here, in the UK, GPs in Shetland have piloted the social prescribing of rambling and birdwatching.
That sense of biophilia is there in our feelings about open waters. The sea, and other big bodies of water, are wild places. We can’t see beneath the surface and we can’t breathe, and so we feel like interlopers. Blinded, but for goggles, suffocated but for the gulps we take when we come up for air, we don’t know what’s down there, what monsters – or other more benign creatures – might lurk. More used to the sea, we might feel panicked by the darkness that greets us when we put our faces into a lake’s dense waters, more used to the clear waters of the sea. Yet, curiously, once in these wild waters, many swimmers feel like they belong. They find their wild selves, and they find themselves at home.
A DISSOLVING OF BOUNDARIES
People have always swum in the waters of this planet. Their watery adventures have been recorded in our art; in the paintings, for instance, in the 10,000-year-old ‘Cave of the Swimmers’, with their delightful procession of doggy paddlers. Swimmers are there in mosaics at Pompeii and Ancient Egyptian ceramics. For non-swimming reasons, we have settled next to our seas and waterways, travelled on them, fed ourselves from them. Some suggest we are evolved from aquatic mammals, and there is even talk of us having a ‘blue mind’.
Wallace Nicholls, who wrote a book with that title, in a popular a TEDx talk observed, ‘When we’re with the water, it washes our troubles away. When we’re standing at the sea, taking it in quietly it takes away our stress. It’s one of the reasons we love the ocean so much. It reduces our anxiety. It connects us to ourselves.’
Victoria Whitworth, in her wonderful memoir, Swimming With Seals, writes that in the water, ‘I know I am part of something much bigger than myself. I feel myself dissolving.’ She relates that feeling to that loss of boundaries described sometimes as oceanic feeling, an idea discussed in the 19th century in letters between Sigmund Freud and the French writer Romain Rolland.
Even looking at images of water relaxes us. Project Soothe, a study at Edinburgh University, has been finding that many of the images we find most relaxing and soothing are those involving water.
For many wild swimmers that sense of connection with nature is one of the biggest reasons they are there. ‘I was brought up on a farm in the country,’ says regular Edinburgh swimmer Jane, ‘and living in a city has always been a bit strange for me, so I’ve looked for ways of connecting myself to nature and the seasons. I grow veg here. Swimming in the sea feels similar because it’s another way of connecting.’
ELEMENTAL RHYTHMS
With its tides and swells, its changing currents, the sea is also a reminder that not everything conforms to the kind of timetable we have constructed our lives around. Being in a body of wild water also demands our attention in ways that so much of our contemporary lives don’t – it might sound glib, but you can’t check your phone out in a loch or worry overly about how Insta-friendly your look is. Wild swimming becomes something of a radical act, a deliberate rejection of digital distractions in favour of more elemental activity. Although online information and specific apps can help you stay safe, there is no doubt about the sea as a vast force beyond human control once you are in it. Appreciating that – on a visceral level – truly is a life-changer.
When we’re in water, no longer standing on two legs, wildlife seems to notice how different we are too. They regard us humans afresh, eye us in a different manner. Birds study us curiously, as if wondering what exactly we are. Wildlife guide, James McGurk, describes occasions when he has bobbed up close to creatures. ‘I’ve swum with a few animals that would otherwise be startled if you approached them on land, but just aren’t really bothered about you swimming in the sea.’
People, too, seem to have a different take on each other in the water – as if we’re all just part of the wildlife. Mary-Jayne is a London-based therapist and eco-psychology pioneer, who swims regularly in the women’s pond on Hampstead Heath, which she describes as ‘a diverse community of women, birds, water and more’.
‘I’m swimming,’ she says, ‘with moorhens, Canada geese, swans and other women. The Women’s Pond is the first in a line of ponds fed by a spring. There’s a pond for men too, as well as a mixed pond; the other ponds are reserved for wildlife. I don’t know anywhere else in the country where you can go and immerse yourself in a wild pond with a group of women; it’s a particularly unusual place. Women often come to be quiet, to immerse themselves in nature, so from a spiritual point of view it feels very special.’
When we submerge ourselves with marine life, we are reminded of our place in the community that is the ecosphere, and even in history. ‘Once,’ says Lil, an East Lothian artist who swims all over Scotland, ‘when I was getting out of the sea, I saw an otter emerging. I realised I’d been swimming in the same body of water as this beautiful creature. That was really special. We are human, but we humanise our world so much that we claim these environments and forget that they are all part of our planet, and long have been. To be a part of that alongside other creatures who are living there is intensely humbling.’
The water humbles us. That is a common refrain. It puts us in our place, and reminds us of who we are. And we are grateful for that.
Taking the Plunge: The Healing Power of Wild Swimming for Mind, Body and Soul by Anna Deacon and Vicky Allan is published by Black & White Publishing, priced £20.00
Leonie Charlton inherited a love of wildlife, landscape and the Hebrides from her parents. After the death of her mother she planned a journey across the islands on Highland ponies with her friend, Shuna, and as a tribute to her mother, a jeweller and collector of beads, Leonie would leave behind a trail of beads on her travels. In her memoir of this trip, Marram: Memories of Sea and Spider-silk, Leonie reflects on both her surroundings and her memories.
Extract taken from Marram: Memories of Sea and Spider-silk
By Leonie Charlton
Published by Sandstone Press
The three Terns from last night skittered by, all pointed wings and forked tails and chattering noisily, so close I could make out the flash of orange on their beaks, the tiny stab of black at the tip. I stood up and headed to the shore, crossing the sand to the huddle of rocks covered in seaweed. When I put my hand down to steady myself Bladderwrack slipped under my palm. Looking closer at the fronds of seaweed, on each one a mid-rib was visible and decorated with air sacks like small green olives. Oystercatchers pipped at me while I watched a canary-yellow Sea Snail take close-in suckery steps, stretch by shiny stretch. The magic of being down on this level, how much we miss as our heads go about our days all the way up there in the air, so far away from our feet.
I stepped onto the body of dry rock, where clumps of Sea Pinks seasoned the stone, and walked carefully to the end where it met a milky sea. It was a clouded-over day and St Kilda was nowhere to be seen. The rock I was standing on was black, marked with splashes of dove-grey and old-gold Lichen. I would leave the pottery fish bead here on the rocks, and the next spring tide would draw it away. A friend of Mum’s in Galloway had made these pottery fishes for her thirty years previously. Mum tended to stay clear of ‘craft’, seeing what she did as ‘art’, but this little pottery fish, with its blobby gold spots and clumsy yellow outline, was surely craft, and had somehow slipped through the net. I squatted down, laying it on the rock, and yes, it belonged. Its spots were the same colour as the Lichen, its body the very same green-brown as the Bladderwrack below.
Mum hadn’t been a great one for exercise, and was scornful of ‘sporty’ people, but she liked going for walks and riding. She also liked to swim. Some of my earliest memories are of her swimming in the public pool in Holyhead. I can still feel the surges of her strong breaststroke, how dizzily dangerous it had felt clinging on to her shoulders. Dad has a cine film of us in Ghana. Mum, young and slim, flared trousers, midriff showing and her hair swinging impossibly thick and red. A barrage of hair, surely too much for one person. And that colour, bright bay if she’d been a horse. The film, silent and speeded up, of her under a tree smoking a cigarette, walking and joking with the Ghanaian grooms at a polo yard, us being given pony rides. The African bush and the old Cortina on red dirt roads. Dad, young and handsome, his beard dark, eyes smiling. Will’s face already full of mischief, Tom and I white-blonde from the sun. The three of us splashing in an outdoor swimming pool, playing and performing for the camera. Mum at the side of the pool, laughing, diving in. I touched the pottery fish bead one last time. If I had another, I would have left it here, nose to tail with this one, like her star sign, Pisces.
Mum’s favourite bird, the Raven, croaked as we approached Vallay House which sat eerily in the muted morning light. I couldn’t see the bird, but the ponies were on the skyline by the house, heads up, looking straight at us. Ross’s mane was lifting out in all directions. He was getting saltier and wilder-looking by the day. They were standing against the disarray of an old iron fence, each upright post leaning waywardly, each cross-piece unsprung, a far cry from the neat line it must once have been. The rufous red of its rust stood out against the wet pigeon colour of the house walls. Gold Lichen swept the house’s graceful lines and curves. Large square windows, and small porthole-shaped ones, looked out at us, lacklustre without glass. The crow-stepped gable ends bit into a dull sky.
Parked outside the house was a tractor, rusted away to finger-touch crumble. The sea air had been hard on it. We looked through windows and saw tiled fireplaces, moulded ceilings fallen to the floor, a fire grate in mid-air where the first floor had collapsed. A sister Starling to the one we’d seen yesterday landed on the grate, hissing, her mouth full of Grubs, before hopping up into the chimney cavity.
‘Do you know anything about this place?’ I asked Shuna. ‘Did someone say it belonged to a photographer?’
‘Yes, a historian and photographer, his name was Erskine Beveridge.’
‘What a great name.’
‘It’s a sad story. His son inherited the house and lived here alone. He was forbidden from marrying the love of his life, became an alcoholic and died crossing the sands to Vallay, caught by the tide.’
The Raven croaked again. So close now it must have been somewhere in the building. Maybe it had a nest here, or was just on the prowl. We looked in on a circular room as a Pigeon flew low over the fallen debris following the curve of the wall, soft feather-flap of air as it passed before disappearing through an archway. The place was derelict but pulsing with life.
Ross and Chief followed us back down to the steading. ‘We’ll be back for you soon,’ I said to them, climbing over a wall. We wanted to explore the east end of the island and Angus had asked us not to go with the ponies as there were cows calving. As Shuna climbed over the wall beside me a buff bird whirred by before disappearing into the long grass.
‘A Corncrake!’
‘That’s the first one I’ve ever seen,’ said Shuna. ‘Oh, this place…’ I couldn’t agree more.
The tide was going out and we followed a trail of neat cattle hoof-prints and tiny pink cockle shells across the bay towards the promontory of Àird Mhic Caoilt. Past a gate with a hand-painted sign warning Cows Calving, Please Keep Out were the dun and the standing stones that Anne had told us about. The dun was easy to spot, a circular stone-built wall straddling the pre-existing bedrock. The sea was encroaching now, and I wondered how it had looked when it was first built 3,000 years or so ago. Had there been trees, and where had the high tide mark been way back then? Now the tides were breathing on the dun and sometime in the not-too-distant future the sea would take it. We sat on the grassy top of the wall but weren’t the only ones to ever rest there. Little tubes of goose shit were dotted all about. There was a fence running through the middle of the dun with seaweed hanging from each square of rylock. I loved that this fence was there, that there were no paths to this ancient site, no signage, and wham-bam, a stock fence put up right through its centre. It was a living, breathing monument with tides and cattle and geese smoothing its edges.
There was an entrance way to the right, a beautifully crafted stonework channel that I imagined had originally been a doorway but was now a conduit for the sea. A tiny bird watched us from a grass tump beyond the dun. Bright glare from the sun came through the cloud and the air was warm. To my left a thick hessian rope dropped from beneath the turf, hanging over the inner wall of the dun and disappearing into a tangle of seaweed and silverweed below. I found my bead, a gemstone I didn’t know the name of. Roughly shaped, its purple hues picked up the blush of an empty crab’s shell and the pink in the quartz running through the gneiss. I threaded the bead and tied it onto the thick rope, drawing the knot extra tightly.
‘Shall we leave the standing stones for another day?’ Shuna said. ‘It’s so nice just sitting here, listening to the Oystercatchers.’ I nodded, feeling a jolt of pleasure at the thought of coming back here sometime.
Marram: Memories of Sea and Spider-silk by Leonie Charlton is published by Sandstone Press, priced £8.99
Witherby’s publishing journey is one of Scotland’s biggest success stories and yet you will rarely find them mentioned in the mainstream book press. They have found their niche in books on shipping, which are read and referred to across the world. Well done Witherby Publishing Group – long may your books set sail!
On the Panama Canal, just before boarding LNG carrier ‘Golar Snow’. L to R: Witherbys CEO Iain Macneil; Witherbys Commercial Director, Kat Heathcote; Witherbys Technical Advisor – Navigation, Scott Campbell; Senior Panama Canal Pilot, Douglas Rodriguez.
Crude Oil Tanker ‘Hercules Voyager’.
It’s a little known fact that the oldest independent publisher in the English speaking world is based in Scotland and that its entire business is focussed around shipping. So, as a company, we are very excited about 2020 having been declared the year of Coasts and Waters!
In 1998, Iain Macneil, a 3rd generation merchant seafarer from the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, set up Seamanship International (previously Todday Publications), a company dedicated to the provision of digital and printed training and reference materials for seafarers. After building a global profile from small offices in Govan, in 2008 he initially merged with and then took over Witherbys, a specialist provider of regulatory and guidance publications to the shipping industry.
Now based in Livingston, Witherbys is one of Scotland’s largest and most successful publishing houses, with a portfolio of over 400 specialist titles that are exported to over 110 countries.
Established in a London coffee house in 1740, Witherbys has long been involved in the maritime industry, initially drawing up and publishing marine insurance clauses for use by merchants, ship owners and their sponsors. In 2008, when Seamanship International bought the company from the 7th generation of the Witherby family, the name was changed to the Witherby Publishing Group and the company was brought, in its entirety, to Scotland.
At that point the hard work really began for husband and wife team, Iain Macneil and Kat Heathcote, as they set about the task of bringing the existing publications up to date, identifying opportunities for new publications and strengthening relationships within the industry.
12 years later, having grown the company tenfold, Witherbys is now one of the largest providers of regulatory and guidance materials to the marine industry.
Witherbys is the publisher for many international maritime bodies, taking on the responsibility for getting important information to a global industry that, while operating in English, is staffed by a diverse range of nationalities. The company’s success and expansion in this area has been due to its skill in ensuring complex rules and procedures are described in a uniquely unambiguous and straightforward style. This style was developed through continuous round table discussions with mariners, both from within the company and from outside, and for any new subject matter it is still the approach that is taken.
We keep up to date with regulations by observing proceedings at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and through regular meetings with partner clients that include the Society of International Terminal and Tanker Operators (SIGTTO), the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF), the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and The Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO).
Witherbys also has its own successful portfolio of publications, primarily concerned with navigation, safety and operations for larger tonnage ships, particularly tankers and gas carriers.
Unusually, Witherbys has been creating and protecting digital content for nearly 20 years. It is estimated that there are more than a million protected Witherby eBooks in use today, on over 40,000 ships and in marine offices, including digitised mandated publications on behalf of the IMO (International Maritime Organization), the United Nations agency for shipping.
A privately owned company, Witherbys has a strong sense of community and social responsibility. Proud to be part of both the Living Wage Scheme and the Scottish Business Pledge, Witherbys also channels a significant percentage of its profits to its Charitable Trust, which supports individuals and groups in sport, the arts and education.
In 2019 the company’s 54 employees, including a modern apprentice and 4 interns, moved into a state of the art office and warehousing facility, ‘Navigation House’ in central Livingston.
To get a real insight into the company, however, we need to explain the pictures at the top of this article!
One of the most successful series of publications in the ‘Passage Planning Guides’, which are reissued at 2+ yr intervals and cover shipping ‘hotspots’ such as The Straits of Malacca, The English Channel and The Great Barrier Reef. They are always written and reviewed in partnership with local authorities and industry associations (such as UK, French, Dutch and German Deep Sea Pilots, Australia Reef Pilots, Port of Singapore Pilots and the Panama Canal Authority).
After a discussion of need for a detailed passage planning guide to the Panama Canal, particularly its new locks built for large LNG carriers and the like, CEO Iain Macneil, Commercial Director Kat Heathcote and Technical Advisor for Navigation Scott Campbell headed to Panama to work with the Pilots for 10 days, discussing every aspect of the publication. During that time they travelled with the pilots as they went about their duties guiding tankers through the canal, climbing up and down ladders attached to the sides of moving ships to do so!
It is this level of attention to detail and immersion in the subjects we publish on that makes us a unique and trusted source in our industry. The Future? More of the same.
In Catriona Child’s second novel, now out in paperback from Luath Press, we are introduced to Hannah Wright, a dedicated swimmer with a promising future in the pool. Then she meets Mariele, an elderly lady with a secret past, and an unlikely friendship is formed.When she is forced to give up her swimming dreams, it is Mariele’s own story that gives Hannah the strength to negotiate her new expectations. Here, we meet Hannah, unsure yet committed.
Extract taken from Swim Until You Can’t See Land
By Catriona Child
Published by Luath Press
It’s a dumb rule anyway, no diving. Diving is the only way to enter a pool.
None of this descending down a flimsy, metal staircase while it rattles off the tiled walls.
None of this lowering yourself feet first from the edge, the cold water chilling you from the toes up.
No, that just gives the water the advantage, gives it the power. If you don’t dive in, then you struggle to get your shoulders under. You have to bounce, bounce, bounce, try to plunge yourself deeper, deeeper, deeeeper, until you finally build up the courage to submerge completely.
You’re beaten before you’ve even managed to dunk your head under. Game over. Back to the showers with you.
Diving gives you the upper hand, puts you in control.
The woman doesn’t speak, although her lips keep moving. Vibrating, quivering. Dark, like she’s wearing purple lipstick.
‘Are you okay?’
Her fingers spread and the purse falls from her hand. Change spills, rolling and clattering off the counter and onto the floor.
I move out from behind the till but before I can get to her she crumples. There’s a thud as she hits her chin on the glass-fronted counter.
Shit, that was loud.
A crack runs out along the glass, slicing the reflection of Panini stickers, Rizla papers and mix-up sweets beneath it.
My heart’s pounding as I move towards her. She’s lying on her side, blood dripping from her chin. Her false teeth have fallen out. I accidentally kick them in my haste and they spin away across the floor.
I kneel beside her, knock a display of chewing gum off the edge of the counter. It falls, showering us with packets of Extra.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I say.
She doesn’t look well, not well at all. She gasps for breath, fumbles with the buttons on the collar of her blouse, blood pours down onto her hands but I don’t think she’s noticed she’s bleeding.
‘I’ll get that,’ I say and undo her top button. Her hands grab at mine, clammy and damp.
She’s wearing a silk scarf tied around her neck so I lift it, press it against the cut. The blood, warm and sticky, seeps into it, turns the pale silk dark.
Shit, what do I do? What the hell do I do?
Shirley’s the first aider, not me. Where is she?
The chlorine, the wet, the chill, it hits you all at once but it doesn’t matter. Because you’re straight into your stroke and the cold’s gone before you’re halfway down your first length.
I know how to work the water with my hands, with my feet. I know the shapes to make with my arms, my legs. Keyhole, figure of eight, breakout, pull through. My hands are paddles, the roll of my shoulders, the froth at my toes.
Push me on, propel me forward. Push me on, propel me forward.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe.
My hands shake as I squeeze the scarf. Blood oozes, dribbles between my knuckles.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll be alright,’ I say, but my voice is different from how it normally sounds.
Her eyes roll backwards, eyelids fluttering. She looks worse now, if that’s even possible. There’s no colour in her face, drained away with the blood through her chin.
Shit, I think she’s dying. She’s dying and I’m just sitting here letting it happen. I need to do something.
Come on, Hannah.
I let go of the scarf. My hands are covered in blood and I wipe them on the woman’s jacket before digging my mobile out of my jeans pocket.
999
‘Hello, you’re through to emergency services, what service do you require?’
My brain has stopped working. Service? What service do I require?
Ambulance, ambulance, ambulance, ambulance.
‘Sorry, ambulance, please.’
‘That’s alright. Can you tell me what’s happened and the address?’
‘It’s Shop Better, on the High Street in Kinross. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the exact number, next to the Post Office. An old woman’s collapsed, she’s bleeding.’
‘Is she breathing?’
. . .
Cap tight against my skull, costume a size too small, slick against shaved skin. Bubbles rise to the surface from my nose, my mouth.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe.
The water slides off me, gathers like pearls on my nails, my bare skin. I’m impervious. Silky and varnished.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe.
. . .
Her face is red, hair stuck to her sweaty forehead.
‘I need help can you breathe for me?’
I know it’s a horrible thing to think but I don’t want to go near that old woman. I don’t want to touch her. Her chin’s stained with blood, seeped into the wrinkles, paint filling in the cracks.
‘I don’t know how.’
‘I’ll show you.’
I shuffle forward so I’m on the other side of the woman.
‘Pinch her nose, form a seal.’
I lean forward. She smells. It’s so strong, meaty.
I put my lips over her mouth, slowly, willing the ambulance to show.
I try not to think about what I’m doing. Think about anything else, even Shirley doing Dad is preferable to this. Shirley’s tits, Shirley’s tits, Shirley’s tits.
The woman’s face is cold, clammy. I can taste salt. I close my eyes, blow, but I’m barely touching her, not forming the seal that Shirley’s so keen on. My hair’s covering her face, it makes it easier. I press down harder, blow again. Pretend I’m kissing a mermaid.
‘Well done, one and two and t h r e e and four and five and six…’
Shirley’s counting’s getting slower, her chest heaving.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe.
‘…twenty-six and twenty-seven and twent y – e i ght and twenty-nine and thirty.’
Mermaid kiss, mermaid kiss.
‘One and two and three and four…’
Dark tiles, T-shaped on the bottom of the pool tell me the wall’s coming. I don’t need the reminder though, I know exactly where I am.
I know the number of strokes, the number of breaths. I close my eyes and I still know where the wall is. I can’t gauge distance on dry land, but in the pool I have an inbuilt GPS system.
I stretch with my arm, a flash of red fingernails. Then my hand pulls me down, flips me over into a tumble turn. My feet plant on the wall, firm, no sliding on wet tiles. Knees bend, I thrust myself forward, arms out in front, head down. Streamline. A short breakout, hips undulating, dolphin kick, then I’m back into my stroke.
. . .
My knees buckle and I sit down on the pavement. People walk past, stare at the ambulance, at me, try to peer in the shop window. Nosy bastards. I can see the kids from the High School, getting closer, closer.
Girls and boys in blazers and ties and black shoes, pounding along the pavement towards me. Laughing and joking and bumping into each other. After their crisps and their Irn-Bru and their donuts and their ten pee mix-ups.
I spit the gum out into the gutter. Everything’s spinning and there’s black spots in front of my eyes. I think I might pass out. Shirley would never survive another cycle of CPR.
I close my eyes, lean forward and put my head between my knees. I don’t care that the kids are getting closer, that they can see me sitting on the pavement. If I keep my head down and my eyes shut, they’ll go straight past and it won’t matter.
I won’t see them, they won’t see me.
Like being underwater, everything muffled.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe.
With each length, I loosen off. Shoulders, hips, wrists, ankles, neck. Heart pumps. Lungs swell.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe.
I’ve got the lane to myself. Not many people can be bothered getting up this early to swim.
(late compared to when I used to get up)
The Daybreak Dip.
One of the reasons why I like this time so much. I’m free to power up and down the pool, nobody in my way as I count the metres before work.
400m.
800m.
1200m.
Swim Until You Can’t See Land by Catriona Child is published by Luath Press, priced £8.99
In reviewing Deborah Orr’s much-anticipated memoir, Motherwell, Lee Randall is reminded that we have lost an incredible talent and formidable woman.
Motherwell: A Girlhood
By Deborah Orr
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Two years ago, ahead of an event I was chairing, I invited Deborah Orr into the authors’ yurt at Edinburgh International Book Festival as my guest.
‘So this is what it’s like,’ she said.
‘But you’ve been before, right? With. . .’ I trailed off, reluctant to name the Famous Author she was divorcing, knowing things were complicated and painful.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘He never brought me.’
‘Never mind, you’ll be here soon in your own right, talking about your memoir. I’ll ask to interview you.’ We smiled, relishing the idea.
But Orr died last October, shortly after her 57th birthday, months ahead of Motherwell’s publication. She is missed as much for her journalism—trenchant, funny, bold, poignant—as for her compelling personality, which was all that and then some. Reading Motherwell proved emotional. Deborah’s vividly alive on these wise, beautifully observed pages. I put off finishing it, for that would consign her to the past tense.
Orr grew up in the shadow of Ravenscraig, ‘a steelworks the size of Monaco,’ whose ‘stunning, dystopian panorama’ filled the eye and psyche, moulding a community’s aspirations. When the steelworks shut down the population lost its group identity.
The most dangerous aspect of group identity, she asserts, is group narcissism. Orr believed in the centrality of narcissism. Her question wasn’t are you a narcissist, but what kind of narcissist are you? ‘Once you know how to spot it, narcissism is everywhere. Narcissism explains many aspects of human society. It is, I believe, the psychological motor behind patriarchy, behind racism and behind most, if not all, prejudice. The need to feel better than others, or that others are no better than you.’
Here in Scotland, it feeds a confusing duality: ‘The Scots, it sometimes seemed, hated everything that wasn’t Scotland. This was very true in my hometown. . . . Conformity was absolutely everything. . . . It was bewildering, this . . . constant keeping of two flames, one of Scottish victimhood, the other of Scottish superiority. So much past, so little present. . . . The heritage industry moves in when people don’t know who they are any more and had to focus on who they were instead.’
Echos of this reverberated inside their home. ‘We’re a funny old family, heightened self-love in a constant battle with exaggerated self-loathing.’ Her mother, Win, was funny, talented, and often warm and loving. She could also be cruelly shaming. Win needed constant praise—a trait Orr says she inherited. She adhered to strict beliefs about her place in the world. For Win, agency over a man was the ‘Great Prize.’ ‘My mum slagged off . . . women she didn’t feel superior to, who were different to her in a way that made her doubt herself, because she was so invested in the perfection of her womanhood, and so proud of it.’
It wasn’t until Win died, says Orr, ‘that I was able even to begin to work out how my own life had really been about just two irreconcilable things: defying my mother, and gaining her approval.’ Frequent belittlement left Orr feeling like a perpetual disappointment, but complaining exacerbated the problem. Whatever happened to you was worse for Win—even your cancer.
Imbued with shame, Orr learned to keep secrets, such as bullying by her peers, which included being pelted with bricks. Bricks. She staggered home bleeding, and lied about falling over. She was seven.
Superficially, her adored father was easier to get along with, but she eventually realised his views were often harsher than Win’s. John masked his fears with bravado and intolerance. Handsome, innately intelligent but barely able to write due to an interrupted education, he had a strong work ethic and was inordinately proud of never missing at the factory. He was also a bully who fell out with neighbours, and nurtured a hatred of Catholics that flared when he was most disappointed and dissatisfied with himself.
Throughout Motherwell, as in the column she wrote after her mother’s death, Orr expresses deep love for her mother, but Win’s inability to accept Deborah’s individuality created a rift. She expected Deborah to validate her life by recreating it. ‘Every time I did something that Win wouldn’t have done, it was as if she’d lost control of a part of herself.’
Unlike her younger brother, Orr never had a key to the house. Her parents monitored her whereabouts and would have censored her thoughts, if they’d had a mechanism to do so. They flagrantly violated her privacy. Neither accepted Deborah having, much less enjoying, sex. Win said sex was awful but an obligation. John said, ‘I know what men are like. Because I am a man.’ Though they denounced and belittled her, though they warped her ideas about love, Orr’s reckoning is compassionate: ‘The self-loathing of it. The sadness. What an unfortunate, unlucky pair, so eager to support each other in self-abnegation. So keen to shore up the other in their mutual horror, their culturally fostered mutual horror, of something as simple as sex.’
‘Collective narcissism’ keeps everyone in line. It trapped her parents, who were baffled and threatened by her urge to achieve and need for individuation. Those urges carried Orr away to university although they forbade it, and bore her onwards to London. There, the daughter of a man who couldn’t write, became a renowned journalist. There, the daughter of a woman who controlled the family’s words found her voice.
Motherwell is full of telling details, startling stories, humour, horror, and warmth. It’s full of anger and empathy. It reminds us that in addition to losing an extraordinary woman, we’ve lost all the books she never had a chance to write. It’s all the more reason to cherish this memoir and her memory.
Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £16.99
BooksfromScotland’s New Year’s Resolution is to read more short stories. And we’ve loved delving into Dan Brotzel’s collection, Hotel Du Jack, released later on this month. His stories are playful, funny and can really tug at the heart strings. We’re sharing two brilliant pieces of flash fiction, and we hope you enjoy them enough to spur you on to investigate the full collection.
Stories taken from Hotel Du Jack
By Dan Brotzel
Published by Sandstone Press
Listing to Port
SATURDAY
Alka Seltzer
Vit B tabs (ones that fizz)
Coffee
Red Bull
Doritos
Eggs
Sausages (thick ones)
Mail/Mirror/FourFourTwo
TUESDAY
Smints
Mouthwash
Nice boxers
Bananas
Condoms
Guardian/Economist/Vanity Fair/TLS
Get cash out (loads)
Condoms
FRIDAY
Condoms
3 bottles red wine (min £12 each)
Big pack spaghetti
2 medium onions
Olive oil
3 garlic cloves (how many bulbs = 1 clove?)
500g lean minced beef
90g chestnut mushrooms
400g can chopped tomatoes
Hot beef stock (or cold and reheat?)
Worcestershire sauce
Ground black pepper
Sea salt
Tomato puree
Freshly grated parmesan (to serve)
1tsp oregano
Teaspoons!
Decent plates
Knives
Forks
Daffodils
Vase for flowers
Wine glasses
CDs? (timeless but not cheesy – Motown?)
CD player
Speakers
Subscribe to Spotify (no ads)
Get laptop fixed
1 kg potty puree (dried herbal incense thing)
Bin bags
Dishcloths, wipes, tissues
Shake n vac stuff
Kitchen roll
Nice duvet cover/Pillow cases/Sheets
Toilet bleach x 4
Handgel
Antibacterial cleaners, all kinds
Dry-clean rugs? Curtains?
Gin (NOT Tescos own)
Fever Tree
Posh ice cream
Baileys
Croissants
Coffee
Strawberry jam
Blueberries, raspberries etc
Milk
Condoms
Furry handcuffs??
Polyfilla
WEDNESDAY
Nice card or nice writing paper
Perfume (expensive)
Fancy hand conditioner stuff? (posh)
Earrings or nice bracelet? (both?)
Box and bubble-wrap
Post Office – send Express? Get her to sign?
Send flowers
THURSDAY
Call EE – check phone working
FRIDAY
Call EE
Get Cosmopolitan/Marie Claire etc
Library – get that Mars & Venus book
SATURDAY
Call EE
Call mum
SUNDAY
Lager x 12
Wine box (red) (or white)
Tissues
Wotsits (big pack)
Chocolate milk
Large bar Dairy Milk
Pepperami
Potato waffles
Chocolate milk stuff
Pot noodles
Coffee!!
Band-Aids
Savlon
Doughnuts
Bottle of port (Tesco’s own)
Foods of Love
We met at a farmer’s market, standing by a stall offering South African beef jerky and biodynamic Stilton. I laughed as you hoovered up all the samples, feigning gourmet appreciation to cover your greed.
On our first date, we saw Super Size Me at your beloved arthouse cinema, followed by Belgian waffles and ice cream.
The next few months were a blur of weekends in bed, fortified by home-made cafés au lait and Cumberland sausage sarnies.
The day you proposed, we sat against a windbreak on the beach, one cold February morning. Remember? We shared a tray of vinegary chips to wash down the little bottle of warm Cava you’d bought along. (I’ve still got the wooden fork somewhere.)
The allotment. Years it took to get it, and then we found chard and squash were about the only things we could grow that didn’t get eaten away. But all those wonderful picnics we had there, drinking stewed tea from your grandad’s old Thermos. Rummagings in the shed. And all those excruciatingly ingenious marrow recipes . . .
After I gave birth to the twins, you surprised me with a feast of things I’d had to give up while pregnant: bubbly, Brie and prawns. Mealtimes took on their happy routine: slowcooker casseroles on a Saturday, Sunday roast, hot chocolate after the kids’ school concerts, your eccentric ‘power salads’ in summer.
For your fiftieth, I got you that French Country Cooking course you were always going on about. It was always easier to get you to cook when it was for some birthday or special event – I lacked the ‘big match temperament’, you’d say. (You lacked the ‘washing-up-as-you-go gene’, I’d reply.)
And so we entered a double-cream era of cassoulets and tartiflettes, ragoûts and terrines de veau, soufflés and coq au vin. You were happy to drive miles for an obscure ingredient or kitchen implement, something you’d only ever use once that was then tucked away in the back of the cupboard with all the other oddities.
After your scare came the keep-fit years – the bikes, the lycra, the couscous, the pine nuts, your obsession with fresh carrot juice. Our Katie marrying Alexios and the big fat Greek wedding feast his family put on – we didn’t eat for a week afterwards. Our retirement trip to Japan, and our first (and only) taste of fish sperm and curry doughnuts.
But of all the meals that make up a marriage, I never saw this one on the menu: vending-machine Hula Hoops for me, and nil-by-mouth for you.
Hotel Du Jack by Dan Brotzel is published by Sandstone Press, priced £8.99
There’s a new fictional detective in town! Happily-married DI Strachan is called to the sleepy town of Burrowhead after the mysterious death of psychotherapist, Alexis Cosse. She’s the creation of Helen Sedgwick, author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season, who has turned to crime for her latest novel. We caught up with Helen to chat about DI Strachan and When the Dead Come Calling.
When the Dead Come Calling
By Helen Sedgwick
Published by Point Blank
After writing two stand-alone novels, what made you decide to embark on a crime series?
I have two completely different answers for this question, both of which are true!
The first one is that I didn’t really decide to do it at all, it just happened. I was visiting St Ninian’s cave (a wonderfully atmospheric place) and a ghostly crime story started growing up around me, with the setting and voice and characters all there, so I started writing. There’s an element of trusting my subconscious and writing the story that wants to be written, for me. And then as I wrote, it became clear that it was more than just one novel – the place and the people in it needed more time than they could have in one book and so it became a trilogy.
The second, more practical answer is that I started writing When The Dead Come Calling while I was pregnant and I needed to know how much money I was going to have coming in, and when. I remember sending the first draft to my agent and saying that I thought it wanted to be a trilogy but that, if I was going to keep writing with a young baby, I needed the financial security of a three book deal. Thankfully, and amazingly, she got me one.
In starting a series, what impact does that have on the writing process of the individual book? Do you have a sense of how the series will continue?
I’m approaching the three books together as a single complete story – so in a way it’s the same as writing one book, just bigger. I know the overall arc of the whole trilogy, I know how the circumstances will change, I know the key events, and I know the ending of the third book. But other than that, I tend to allow myself a lot of freedom, and the details of the plot and the development of the characters tends to happen quite organically for me. But the overall shape of it is a trilogy – the three books are needed to create the whole.
Since Book 1 is now published, Book 2 is at the second draft stage and I’ve not yet started writing Book 3, that does mean I occasionally have panic attacks about whether I’m actually going to be able to tie everything up!
You’re slaying quite the sacred cow in When the Dead Come Calling, that of the lone, damaged maverick detective. How did DI Strachan come to you, and how are you getting on with your new creation? You’ll be spending a lot of time with her!
I was at a great event at Wigtown Book Festival with three crime authors a few years ago, and I can remember them talking about how a detective needs to be damaged in some way to be engrossing – and, being me, I immediately wanted to try and write the exact opposite of that. I wanted to know, is it possible to write a novel in which your detective is a really decent, kind person who loves her husband and spends her spare time gardening?
The answer is that I’m not actually sure yet because truthfully, as the book goes on, Georgie gets her fair share of problems to deal with. She does have a history that increasingly haunts her. But she is a different sort of detective, I think, and I do often feel she’s out in the garden with me, tending to the vegetables.
Rural crime mysteries are becoming increasingly popular. Why did you decide to set your series in a small village?
I live in a small village – in fact, not even that, I live in a strip of houses with woodland behind and fields in front, a few miles from the nearest village. I think the setting and landscape rose up from where I am, and also from the atmosphere I wanted to create and the sense of isolation that I wanted the story to have. Setting it in a village on the northwest coast of England tied in with the politics that seeps into the story as well. I’m very interested in the urban / rural divide, what that can mean for people, the different social problems and also strong communities that can arise. Although I must stress that I love the area where I live – and the fictional village of Burrowhead became a haunted place unlike any other!
When the Dead Come Calling tackles the subject of ‘false memory syndrome’. Can you explain what that is and why you decided to feature it in your novel.
False memory syndrome is a condition in which people have or develop very strong memories that are incorrect. I’ve always been fascinated by memory and how nebulous it can be – the brain rewrites our memories continuously, emphasising aspects that we think about more than others, and potentially recreating older memories after other more recent experiences we have had. I started researching it years ago for a novel that I wrote some time before by debut came out, and although that novel itself was never published (and never will be) some of the ideas and research stayed with me and found their way into my crime series. When The Dead Come Calling is about the past and how the crimes of our past, even when long buried, can colour our present – those layers of buried history seemed to fit with the idea of layered memories as well, and so the themes naturally came together.
Which writers, crime or otherwise, have you turned to for inspiration for When the Dead Come Calling?
It’s a rather unusual crime series and I’m trying not to be influenced by any writers in particular… I’d say my influences have ranged from The Wicker Man to Kate Atkinson! The nightmarish feel of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream was a big inspiration I think, and the ghostly haunting of Sarah Waters.
What are you looking forward to reading in 2020?
My to-be-read pile is overflowing from my double-stacked bookcases, so there’s rather a lot! In terms of new releases, I’m really looking forward to the new Carys Bray, When the Lights Go Out, and to Chris Whitaker’s We Begin At The End. BRIT(ish) by Afua Hirsch and Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan have been calling out to me for some time. I’m currently reading Claire Askew’s What You Pay For (Claire and I have an event together in Edinburgh on 29th January that I’m really looking forward to). And I also want to read / re-read everything by Naomi Mitchison and Ursula Le Guin!
When the Dead Come Calling by Helen Sedgwick is published by Point Blank, priced £14.99
A much-loved classic stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page, and often you return to them again and again. Jane Eyre is one of those much-loved classics and the fabulous Barrington Stoke will be publishing their retelling of the tale this month. We asked author Tanya Landman how daunting it was to tackle such an iconic novel.
Jane Eyre: A Retelling
By Tanya Landman
Published by Barrington Stoke
Retelling Jane Eyre for Barrington Stoke was quite possibly the most enjoyable piece of writing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have to agonise about creating a plausible plot or believable characters because everything was all already there for me – a fully fleshed out world and its inhabitants – to dive into. My task was simply to distil the essence of a 185,000 word masterpiece into a novella a tenth the size.
Gulp!
Could it be done? Was it possible? I had no idea. But I felt compelled to try.
How did I do it?
The answer is, I don’t really know.
In my experience acting and writing are very similar things. To create a believable human being you have to climb inside someone else’s heart and mind and look at the world through their eyes. The process is instinctive and therefore difficult to explain. Very little of it is logically planned.
The reason I can’t write on trains or in cafes – and in fact try to avoid public spaces altogether when I’m in the throes of creating – is because I talk out loud to get the voice and the rhythms of speech right. From the very outset my Jane had a very strong Yorkshire accent. There are sometimes moments of magic when a character becomes three dimensional. They seem to fully inhabit you and start speaking all by themselves and the writing part of you has simply has to type it up. Jane’s voice flowed straight from her/my mouth and on to the page.
Looking back at the process now I suppose I found it easy because I’ve always loved Jane Eyre. In my teens I returned to the book over and over again as a comfort read. I adored Jane’s righteous fury, her wild passion, her sense of injustice: I absolutely identified with her.
Returning to Jane Eyre as an adult I noticed things that I hadn’t as a teenage reader. The portrayal of Bertha Mason – the mad woman in the attic – was particularly problematic. How was I to address Rochester’s vile belief that his wife’s madness and her racial heritage are inextricably linked? My answer was to keep the madness, keep the debauchery and drunkenness, keep the deceit on the part of her father and brother, but break any connection between that and her skin colour. As for the rest of the book – I kept the plot and cut the padding. I kept the passion and cut the piety. St John Rivers – who I found deadly boring as a teen – didn’t even get a name check.
As an adult and a writer it was a rare and delightful privilege to actually become Jane for a while and tell her story as if she was sitting by the fire, confiding it to a close friend. If people enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it I’ll be very happy indeed.
Jane Eyre: A Retelling by Tanya Landman is published by Barrington Stoke, priced £7.99
At last year’s Wigtown Book Festival, BooksfromScotland were presented with this marvellous anthology of Gaelic literature by Clive Boutle of Francis Boutle Publishers. They specialise in documenting the literary histories of minority languages in Europe, and if The Highest Apple is indicative of their list, then we highly recommend you check them out. To give you a sampler of the goodies inside The Highest Apple, we share here pieces from each era in the anthology.
Extracts taken from The Highest Apple: An Anthology of Scottish Gaelic Literature
Edited by Wilson McLeod and Michael Newton
Published by Francis Boutle Publishing
Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh
M’anam do sgar riomsa a-raoir
M’anam do sgar riomsa a-raoir,
calann ghlan dob ionnsa i n-uaigh;
rugadh bruinne maordha mín
is aonbhla lín uime uainn.
Do tógbhadh sgath aobhdha fhionn
a-mach ar an bhfaongha bhfann:
laogh mo chridhise do chrom,
craobh throm an tighise thall.
M’aonar a-nocht damhsa, a Dhé,
olc an saoghal camsa ad-chí;
dob álainn trom an taoibh naoi
do bhaoi sonn a-raoir, a Rí.
Truagh leam an leabasa thiar,
mo pheall seadasa dhá snámh;
tárramair corp seada saor
is folt claon, a leaba, id lár.
Do bhí duine go ndreich moill
ina luighe ar leith mo phill;
gan bharamhail acht bláth cuill
don sgáth duinn bhanamhail bhinn.
Maol Mheadha na malach ndonn
mo dhabhach mheadha a-raon rom;
mo chridhe an sgáth do sgar riom,
bláth mhionn arna car do chrom.
Táinig an chlí as ar gcuing,
agus dí ráinig mar roinn:
corp idir dá aisil inn
ar dtocht don fhinn mhaisigh mhoill.
Leath mo throigheadh, leath mo thaobh,
a dreach mar an droighean bán,
níor dhílse neach dhí ná dhún,
leath mo shúl í, leath mo lámh.
Leath mo chuirp an choinneal naoi;
’s guirt riom do roinneadh, a Rí;
agá labhra is meirtneach mé –
dob é ceirtleath m’anma í.
Mo chéadghrádh a dearc mhall mhór,
déadbhan agus cam a cliabh:
nochar bhean a colann caomh
ná a taobh ré fear romham riamh.
Fiche bliadhna inne ar-aon,
fá binne gach bliadhna ar nglór,
go rug éinleanabh déag dhún,
an ghéag úr mhéirleabhar mhór.
Gé tú, nocha n-oilim ann,
ó do thoirinn ar gcnú chorr;
ar sgaradh dár roghrádh rom,
falamh lom an domhnán donn.
Ón ló do sáidheadh cleath corr
im theach nochar ráidheadh rum –
ní thug aoighe d’ortha ann
dá barr naoidhe dhorcha dhunn.
A dhaoine, ná coisgidh damh;
faoidhe ré cloistin ní col;
táinig luinnchreach lom ’nar dteagh –
an bhruithneach gheal donn ar ndol.
Is é rug uan í ’na ghrúg,
Rí na sluagh is Rí na ród;
beag an cion do chúl na ngéag
a héag ó a fior go húr óg.
Ionmhain lámh bhog do bhí sonn,
a Rí na gclog is na gceall:
ach! an lámh nachar logh mionn,
crádh liom gan a cor fám cheann.
My Soul Parted From Me Last Night
My soul parted from me last night,
a pure body, dearly-loved, is in the grave,
a stately soft bosom taken from me
wound in a single linen sheet.
A beautiful white bloom plucked
from the tender, bending stem:
my heart’s darling has drooped,
the laden branch of yonder house.
I am alone tonight, O God,
treacherous the crooked world you see;
lovely the weight of the fresh form
that was here last night, O King.
Pitiful to me yonder bed
covered by my long rug;
Ah, bed, on you I have seen
a long noble body with tumbling hair.
A person with a gentle face
was lying on one half of my bed;
the only comparison, the hazel bloom
to the dark womanly shadow of sweet voice.
Maol Mheadha of the dark brows,
my mead vessel at my side;
the shadow that has parted was my heart,
a jewelled flower planted here has dropped.
My body escaped the yoke
and made off as her share;
I have become a body in two parts
since the bright lovely gentle one left.
She was one of my feet, one of my sides,
her complexion like the whitethorn,
no one was more loyal to her than to me,
she was one of my eyes, one of my hands.
The new candle was half of my flesh,
harshly have I been treated, Lord;
telling of it I grow faint –
she was the very half of my soul.
My first love, her big calm eye,
her bosom, ivory-white and curved;
neither her soft breast nor her flank
ever touched a man before me.
We were together twenty years,
sweeter our words with every year,
eleven children she bore to me,
the new, lithe-fingered, long branch.
Though I am, I am not,
since my smooth nut fell,
since parting with my dearest dear
the drear world is empty and bare.
Since the day the smooth support
was set up in my house
it was never said a guest had beguiled
the one of the fresh dark brown hair.
O people, do not make me stop,
it is no sin that weeping be heard;
my house has been stripped bare
by the parting of the bright brown glow.
The one who snatched her away in a rush
was the King of hosts and King of roads;
small the fault of the one with branching hair
her leaving her husband while young and fresh.
Beloved the soft hand that lay here,
O King of churches and bells;
Alas, the hand that never blasphemed,
it is torment it is not under my head.
Seumas Mac a t-Saoir (James Macintyre)
Òran don Ollamh MacIain
An t-ollamh thàinig à Sasann
’N coinneamh ri masl’ thoirt do dh’Alba,
Ged fhuair e suairceas da chleachdadh
Na astar air feadh nan Garbh-chrioch,
Cho luaithe ràinig e dhachaigh
Gu garaidh altram an t-seana-bhruic
Na rug an trùileach an asaid
De bhreugan ascaoin ’s de shalachar.
Ach ’s e ’n Donas fhèin a spor thu
Thug an toil dhuit gun a chàileachd:
Bu chomhartaich dhuit ris a’ ghealaich
Bhith tabhann ri clannaibh nan Gàidheal –
Is olc, a thrù, nach tug thu ’n aire
Mun robh thu cho labharra dhàna
Nach e ’n cù as cruaidhe dealann
As doimhne a ghearras a nàmhaid.
’S dearbha nach fiach leam it’ iolair
A spùilleadh, no tharraing à balg, dhuit:
’S math a dh’fhòghnas leam a’ ghèadhach
Shlìom, ghlas, laghach gad mharbhadh –
Ceapag bhog challtainn gun chorran,
Gun ghuin, gun oirean, gun chalg oirr’,
A lotas do theanga ’s do cholann
As comh-buige re torran mhealgan.
Chan eil mi creidsinn ga-rìreadh
Gur Iaineach friamh na bèiste,
’S ann a fhuaradh e le mhàthair
Ri coigreach le nàdar Bhènuis:
Balach gun mhodh, lomlàn miosgainn,
Tràill neo-mhiosail air fhèin e –
Is tusa an fheòil a chaidh a dholaidh,
A dhùbail boladh, air brèinid.
Ach chan eil coille gun a crìonach
’S bidh clamhan lìonmhor sna seòcaibh,
’S ainneamh ri fhaotainn magh cruithneachd
Gun bhuilgear ann, gun fhòtas;
Tha coimeasg ri fhaighinn gu minig
Anns na gineachainn as bòidhche,
’S chan iongnadh thusa bhith ad thrustair,
Ad thàir, ’s ad ghusgall de d’ sheòrsa.
Gur tu an losgann sleamhainn tàrrbhuidh,
’S tu màigein tàirrngeach nan dìgean,
Gur tu dearc-luachrach a’ chàthair
Ri snàg ’s ri màgaran miltich;
’S tu bratag sgreataidh an fhàsaich,
’S tu ’n t-seilcheag ghrànda, bhog, lìtheach,
’S tu ’n cartan nach fhurasta thàrsainn
Uait na thàrras tu nad ingnean.
Gur tu ’n sgonnachù gollach, sgallach,
’S tu tramasgal salach gach fàs-phoir,
’S tu soplach is moll na fasgnaig
An àm sìol reachdmhor a chàthadh;
’S tu tom odhar an tombaca,
Gur tu stad feachda o bhlàraibh,
Gur tu croman-luch’ na h-ealtainn –
’S tu nis mìr-cagnaidh nam bardan.
Gur tu fuidheagan an aodaich,
Gur tu cnò-chaoch na fìor fhàsaig,
’S tu am madadh-allaidh air chonfhadh,
Gur tu meas toirmisgt’ a’ gharaidh,
’S mòr tha de bheusan, a bhalaich,
A’ bhruid air carradh ad nàdar –
Chan iongnadh ged tha thu sgreamhail
San fhail anns an deachaidh t’ àrach.
Cha bu tu ’n droigheann no ’n cuileann
No ’n t-iubhar fulannach làidir,
Chan eil mìr annad den darach
No de sheileach dearg nam blàran;
Tha chuid as mo dhìot de chritheann,
Ìngnean sgithich ’s làmhan feàrna –
Tha do cheann gu lèir de leamhan,
Gu h-àraidh do theanga ’s do chàirein.
Ceann puinnsein a chinnich na fhàsach
Den fhailbhe ’s den àileadh lomlàn
Gann uiread maighdeige-tràghad
De dh’eanchainn nàdarr’ ad throm-cheann,
Chan iongnadh ged thigeadh toth gràineil
O dheudach beàrnach do ronnachraois
’S do chom gun chridhe gu d’ àinean
Ach uiread màileid de dhomblas.
Am measg nan iasg ’s tu ’n dallag mhùrlaich
A’ bhiast mhùgach sin ’m mac-làmhaich,
’S tu ’n t-isean à meadhan na brèine,
Am broc ’s a shròn na chèir tri ràithean,
A’ mhial chaorach dhan ainm an t-seulain,
Salach an sprèidh tha dhuit càirdeach –
’S mur bitheadh nach toil leam ainm eisge,
Gun dùraiginn fhèin do sgràilleadh.
Ach nì mi nis a bhrìgh do sgòrnail
Glomhar ad bheul mòr a sparradh
Nach dealaich riut fhad ’s as beò thu,
Gach aon deireadh lò ga theannadh;
Bharrachd air na gheibh thu de riasladh
Air ballan-stiallach gad spannadh –
B’ fheàrr dhuit nach beirte bho thòs thu
Ach ad mharbh-laogh bò gun anam.
A Song to Dr Johnson
The doctor that came from England
For the aim of slandering Scotland,
Though he found civility practised
In his trip round the Highlands,
No sooner was he home again
In the old badger’s nursing-sett
Than the rogue bore a foetus
Full of coarse lies and rubbish.
But it’s the Devil who inspired you
That gave you love without his genius:
It was howling at the moon for you
To be baying at the Gael –
Too bad, you wretch, you didn’t notice
Before being so rude and insulting
That the dog which barks the loudest
Does not bite his foe the deepest.
For you I’ll certainly not trouble to plunder
An eagle’s feather, or draw one from a quiver:
The goose quill, slim, grey and pretty,
Is quite enough for me to slay you with
A soft stave of hazel with no cutting edge,
With no bite, no edges, no point on it,
For wounding your tongue and your body
Which is as soft as a heap of fish-milts.
In truth I do not really believe
That this creature’s a true son of John,
It’s to some stranger his mother bore him
Through the natural laws of Venus:
A discourteous churl, full of malice,
He’s a slave with no self-respect –
You’re a heap of flesh that’s gone off,
Always smelly, now with twice the stench.
But there is no wood that won’t wither
And kites are plentiful midst falcons.
It is rare to find a field of wheat
With no thistles there, no weeds.
An admixture is frequently found
In the most perfect of conceptions.
So it’s no surprise you’re a rascal,
A reproach, and a reject of your race.
You’re the slimy yellow-bellied toad,
You’re the sluggish crawler of ditches,
You’re the lizard of the swamp
Which creeps and slithers through sweet-grass;
You’re the ugly wasteland caterpillar,
You’re the foul, soft, slimy snail,
You’re the botfly hard to relieve
Of what you’ve seized in your claws.
You’re the mean, vile, greedy cur,
You’re the foul trash of each growing-crop.
You’re the dirt and refuse of the corn-fan
When good strong seed’s being winnowed;
You’re the pale stools of tobacco.
You’re what stops armies going to battles,
You’re the kestrel of the birdflock –
You’re now the chewing-gum of the poets.
You’re the thrum-end of the cloth,
You’re the shell with no nut in it,
You’re the hydrophobic wolf,
You’re the banned fruit of the garden,
Many brutish habits, you churl,
Have formed a scab in your nature –
It’s no surprise you’d be disgusting
In the pigsty you were reared in.
You’d not be the thorn or the holly
Or the tough enduring yew,
There’s not a bit in you of oak
Or the red willow of the plains;
Most of you is of aspen,
With whitethorn nails and alder hands –
Your whole head is made of elm,
Especially your tongue and your gums.
A head of poison that became a vacuum
Full of emptiness and air
With scarce as much as a little shore-whelk
Of natural brain in your bloated head,
It’s no surprise if a foul smell wafts
From your huge spittlemouth’s gapped teeth
Since your trunk has no heart for your liver
But just a satchelful of gall instead.
Amongst sea creatures you’re the purblind dogfish,
That snuffling monstrosity the catfish,
You are the chicken from amidst the stench,
The brock with his nose three seasons in his arse,
You are the sheep-louse that they call the tick.
Vile are the creatures that are kin to you –
And if it weren’t that I hate the name of satirist,
I myself would wish to make fun of you.
But now on account of your throaty gargling
I’ll stick a gag in your massive mouth
That won’t part from you as long as you live.
Being tightened at the end of each day;
On top of all you suffer I’ll have you
Being flayed alive at a lashing-post –
You would wish you were still-born from the start
As the soulless foetus of a calving cow.
Niall MacLeóid (Neil MacLeod)
Am Faigh a’ Ghàidhlig Bàs?
Tha mòran sluaigh am beachd an-diugh
Nach eil ar cànain slàn,
Nach fhad’ a chluinnear fuaim a guth,
Nach tèid i chaoidh nas fheàrr;
Gu bheil an aonta bh’ aic’ air ruith,
Nach tog i ceann gu bràth;
’S a dh’aindeoin buaidh MhicIlleDhuibh
Gum faigh a’ Ghàidhlig bàs.
Tha sìol nan sonn gan cur air chùl
’S am fearann ga chur fàs;
Tha fèidh is caoraich air gach stùc
Mun robh na laoich a’ tàmh;
Tha cinneach eil’ air teachd don ùir,
’S ag èirigh suas nan àit’,
Tha toirt am bòidean air gach dùil
Gum faigh a’ Ghàidhlig bàs.
An leig sinn eachdraidh chaomh ar tìr
A sgrìobadh de gach clàr,
’S a Ghàidhlig chòir a chur a dhìth
Le linn nach tuig a gnàths?
A’ chànain aosda, ghlòrmhor, bhinn,
A dhùisgeadh fuinn nam Bàrd,
Am fan sinn dìomhanach gun suim
Is daoi ga cur gu bàs?
Dùisg suas, a Ghàidhlig, ’s tog do ghuth,
Na biodh ort geilt no sgàig;
Tha ceudan mìle dìleas dhut
Nach dìobair thu sa bhlàr;
Cho fad’ ’s a shiùbhlas uillt le sruth,
’S a bhuaileas tuinn air tràigh,
Chan aontaich iad an cainnt no ’n cruth
Gun tèid do chur gu bàs.
A’ chainnt a dh’fhoillsich cliù nam Fiann,
’S an gaisge dian ’s gach càs;
Tha ’n euchdan iomraiteach bho chian
Ag àrach miann nan àl;
Na leòmhainn threun nach tug le fiamh
An cùlaibh riamh do nàmh,
Tha iomadh gleann, is cnoc, is sliabh,
A’ luaidh air gnìomh an làmh.
Chan eòl dhuinn ceàrn an ear no ’n iar,
No fonn mun iath an sàl,
Nach faighear cuid an sin dhen sìol
A’ leudachadh ’s a’ fàs,
Tha ’g altram suas, le dùrachd dhian,
Gach sgeulachd agus dàn,
A bhiodh an sinnsearan a’ snìomh
An tìr nan sliabh ’s nam bàgh.
Ach ’s geàrr a bhios an ùin’ a’ triall
Gum faic sinn, mar is àill,
A’ Ghàidhlig mhùirneach, mar ar miann,
An cathair inbhich, àird;
A’ sgaoileadh eòlais, tuigse, ’s ciall
Bho h-ionmhasan nach tràigh;
’S a’ taisbeanadh le neart a rian
Nach teid i ’n cian seo bàs.
’N sin togaidh i le buaidh a ceann,
Le aoibhneas nì i gàir;
A teudan gleusaidh i gu teann
Le cridhe taingeil, làn;
Gun cluinn Mac-talla feadh nan gleann
Gach doire ’s allt cur fàilt’,
’S an osag chiùin air bàrr nam beann
A’ giùlan fonn a dàin.
Ach buaidh is piseach air na laoich
Tha seasmhach air a sgàth,
Chaidh àrach ann an tìr an fhraoich,
Ge sgaoilt’ an-diugh an àl;
Ged chaidh an sgapadh air gach taobh,
Cha chaochail iad an gnàths;
Chan fhàs an eachdraidh lag le aois,
’S chan fhaigh a’ Ghàidhlig bàs.
Shall Gaelic Die?
Many people opine today
That our language isn’t well,
That not long will her voice be heard,
That there’s no recovery in sight;
That her lease is all but run,
That she’ll never raise her head;
And in spite of Blackie’s influence
That Gaelic is going to die.
The descendants of warriors are despised
And their land is being cleared;
There are sheep and deer on every peak
Round which the heroes dwelt;
Another race has entered the land,
Rising up in their place,
Swearing to every living soul
That Gaelic is going to die.
Will we let the sweet story of our land
Be scraped from every page,
And noble Gaelic ruined
By an age that doesn’t understand her ways?
The ancient glorious melodious tongue
Will we stand helpless, idly by,
While a churl puts her to death?
Wake up, Gaelic, raise your voice,
Have neither misgiving nor fear
There are hundreds of thousands loyal to you
Who won’t desert you on the field;
As long as burns cascading flow,
And waves pound on shore,
They’ll never consent in words or form
That you’ll be put to death.
The language that spread the Fianna’s fame
And their intense bravery in every case –
Long have their renowned deeds
Inspired each generation’s zeal;
The fierce lions that never turned
Their backs fearfully to the foe,
There’s many a glen and hill and peak
That speaks of their dextrous deeds.
We know no place in east or west,
Or land lapped by sea,
Where their descendants are not found
Burgeoning with new growth,
Who carry forward, with purpose keen,
All those stories and songs
That our ancestors used to weave
In the land of hills and bays.
But it will only be a short time now
Till we see, as is our wish,
Delightful Gaelic, as we desired,
On a high distinguished chair;
Disseminating knowledge, understanding, sense,
From her unebbing wealth,
Proclaiming in the strength of her ways
That she won’t die this long time.
Triumphantly she will raise her head
And with joy she will cry;
Eagerly she will tune her strings
With thankful brimming heart;
And Echo will hear throughout the glens
The greetings of grove and burn,
And the gentle breeze on the tops of the hills
Carrying the tune of her song.
But success and good luck to the men
Who stand up for her rights
In the land of heather they were raised,
Though scattered their generation today;
Though they wander in every land,
They will never change their ways;
Their history will not grow faint with age
And Gaelic will not die.
Calum MacLeóid (Calum MacLeod)
A’ Togail an t-Srùbain
Shuidh e aig bòrd taobh a-muigh taigh-seinnse ann an ceàrnag bhòidheach, shàmhach nach robh e air fhaicinn an latha roimhe. Nuair a thàinig an gille a-mach dh’iarr Daibhidh leann. Thàinig e a-mach an ceann mionaid le botal mòr le àrcan ann, ceangailte le uèir tro amhaich a’ bhotail. Rinn an t-àrcan pop beag fo làmh a’ ghille agus ghluais an uèir air ais gus an tàinig an t-àrcan gu tàmh ri taobh bil a’ bhotail.
Bha e airson sgrìobhadh. Lorg e na bhaga am bòrd-ceadachaidh a chleachd e ann an Glaschu agus air an taobh bhàn thòisich e a’ sgrìobhadh.
Chan eil fhios agam ciamar a thachair seo. Rinn mi mo dhìcheall gun a bhith a’ dèanamh cron air duine sam bith. Dìreach aon mhearachd bheag agus sin e. Chan fhaigh mi cuidhteas ciont.
Chan e sin buileach an fhìrinn shlàn ge-tà. Dh’fheuch mi cron a dhèanamh. Agus is mi bha soirbheachail. Cuideachd, cha bhi mi an-còmhnaidh a’smaointinn air. Uaireannan a-nis thèid agam air uairean a thìde a chaitheamh gun chuimhneachadh air. Tha seo air fàs bho mhionaidean agus tha mi an dòchas, an ceann greis, gun tèid agam air làithean air fad a chur seachad gun a bhith a’ cuimhneachadh air na thachair.
A’ leughadh thar na tha mi air a sgrìobhadh tha e soilleir nach eil mi deònach fhathast fiù ’s a bhith ga sgrìobhadh sìos. Nach neònach sin?
Corp.
Lorg mi corp. An uair sin …
An uair sin dh’fhannaich mi mar chealgair, oir ’s e sin a th’ unnam. Uairean, cha thric idir, ach uairean nar beatha thèid ceist no deuchainn no dùbhlan air choreigin a chur romhainn agus fàilligidh sinn.
Ach, fhathast, lorg mise an corp.
Sin e. Sin na lorg mi agus sin a thrèig mi. Sin a dh’fhàg mi fo bhròn, a sgoilt mi as an t-suidheachadh chofhurtail a bh’ agam, cofhurtail gu leòr, agus a thug orm tighinn an seo.
Lath-eigin, tha mi an dòchas, cuimhnichidh mi air na thachair. Bidh na beàrnan eadar smaointean mun chùis air a dhol am meud gus bliadhnaichean a lìonadh. Latha buidhe Bealtainn air choreigin.
Chan urrainn dhomh soirbheachadh a-nis, oir tha fios agam agus tha mi a’ creidsinn cuideachd, nach fhaigh mi lorg cho fad ’s is beò mi air a’ chorp a-rithist. Uill, cha lorgainn ann am Bratislabha e gu cinnteach!
Bha uair teans agam. Sin an latha, a’ mhadainn Dihaoine a lorg mi an corp. Nam bithinn an-diugh air ais anns an t-suidheachadh sin …
Chan eil mi air ionnsachadh bhon ùpraid is bhon sgudal a thàinig thugam as dèidh dhomh an corp a lorg agus a chall ach nach eil àite dhomh anns an t-saoghal sin. Cha tèid agam leigeil leis na feachdan ceart an rannsachadh aca a dhèanamh agus cha tèid agam air feitheamh airson fios fhaighinn bho na h-aithisgean is aithrisean agus a h-uile mac-mathar a’ leantail nan dleastanasan
proifeiseanta aca agus sin agad e.
Lorg mise an corp agus lorg mise na seangain agus lorg mise fìor aodann na coimhearsnachd agam agus an cultar agam mar a tha e san latha an-diugh. Agus chan eil mi gus gabhail ris.
Thill e am peann chun a’ bhùird agus thog e am botal a bha e air fhalamhachadh.
Gathering the Cockles
He sat at a table outside a bar in a beautiful, quiet area he hadn’t seen the day before. When the waiter came out David ordered a beer. He came back in a minute with a big bottle with a cork, connected by a wire through the neck of the bottle. The waiter’s hand made the cork give a little pop and the wire moved back until the cork stopped against the lip of the bottle.
He wanted to write. In his bag he found the boarding pass he had used in Glasgow and on the blank side he began to write.
I don’t know how this happened. I did my best not to harm anybody. Just one mistake and that was it. I can’t get rid of the guilt.
That’s not really the complete truth though. I tried to do harm. And I certainly succeeded. Also, I don’t think about it all the time. Sometimes now I can spend hours without thinking about it. That’s increased from minutes and I hope that, in a while, I’ll be able to spend entire days without reflecting on what happened.
Reading over what I’ve written it’s clear that I’m still not willing to write it down. Isn’t that strange?
A body.
I found a body. And then …
Then I fainted like a coward, because that’s what I am. Sometimes, not often at all, but sometimes in our lives we are presented with a question or a test or a challenge and we fail.
But still, I found the body.
That’s it. That’s what I found and that’s what I abandoned. That’s what made me depressed, that’s what tore me away from the comfortable situation I had, well, comfortable enough, and made me come here.
Someday, I hope, I will remember what happened. The gaps between thoughts about the incident will have grown to fill years. Some fine day or other.
I can’t succeed now, because I know and I believe that I won’t find the body again as long as I live. Well, I certainly won’t find it in Bratislava!
Once I had a chance. That was on the day I found the body, that Friday morning. If I was back in that situation today …
I haven’t learned anything from the uproar and the crap that I experienced after I found and lost the body except that there is no place for me in that world. I can’t let the authorities do their
investigation and I can’t just wait to get information from the reports and accounts with everybody simply carrying out their professional responsibilities and that’s it.
I found the body and I found the ants and I found the true face of my community and my culture as it is today.
And I’m not going to accept it.
He put the pen back down on the table and he picked up the bottle he had emptied.
The Highest Apple: An Anthology of Scottish Gaelic Literature, edited by Wilson McLeod and Michael Newton is published by Francis Boutle Publishing, priced £30
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