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Frank Wood brings together themes of community, history, war and power in his novel, Where the Bridge Lies, set in and around Clydebank. Here we share an extract that takes place during the Clydebank Blitz.

 

Extract taken from Where the Bridge Lies
By Frank Woods
Published by Ringwood

 

Kilbendrick, March 14^th 1941

 

Joe Connor pushed back his ARP helmet, fished cigarettes and matches from the breast pocket of his blue overalls, lit up, and leaned his elbows on the wall at the top of Church Brae.

This spot, with its bird’s eye view of Kilbendrick nestling in the tight turn of the Clyde, was one of his favourite places. When he was a kid, he and his pals had often dangled their legs over this high wall and argued about which of the toffs’ gardens below them were ripe for raiding. The pears on the minister’s tree were always September favourites. On the other hand, Henderson the shipbuilder’s walled garden spread its treasures over a wide season – early rasps, strawberries, goosers, plums, apples. Then there was Dr Robertson’s. Despite the threat from his spaniel, his cherry tree needed regular, critical sampling before the decision to plunder could be made. To Joe this hadn’t been stealing, but an adventure that was his by right, a sort of balancing of the books. Looking back, he could see how those escapades seeded an attitude in him, a first understanding of social difference, of them and us. And they’d been stepping stones on a journey that had led him to serve his apprenticeship in Henderson’s yard, to become a tradesman, to become a trade union man, too.

And he’d stood here and proposed to Sarah as they walked back from a long kiss and cuddle in the bluebell woods. When she said yes, they’d wrapped themselves around one another and gazed down on the lovely vista of river and village. He’d thought his heart would burst.

Aye, that was a world away. Now he was up here on lookout while down there Sarah cared for his grief-crazed sister and got ready for another night of … of what? He looked eastwards towards Clydebank. Just two miles away, the damaged oil storage tanks at Old Kilpatrick continued to pour out flames and thick black smoke. In and around Clydebank itself, countless fires were still burning. He could just make out the barrage balloons above Brown’s shipyard. To their left, a square mile of desolation flickered and smouldered where Singer’s wood storage yard had been left to burn itself out while overstretched fire crews and rescue teams had focussed on saving human lives and dwellings. A menacing pall of smoke billowed like a warning above the devastated town.

High in the Kilpatrick Hills behind him, smoke still rose from the embers of the flimsy timber decoy towns that had been set alight last night in the vain hope of misleading the raiders. But the unmistakeable ribbon of the moonlit Clyde had beckoned the German bombers and tonight’s fires would make their job easier still. Those blazing oil tanks would draw them further west and more bombs were bound to hit Kilbendrick. At this thought, his eyes sought out the wreckage of Hillcraig Terrace then, nearer at hand, the burntout wing of Henderson’s mansion where the old woman had died. Twenty-four hours could make a hell of a difference. Boss or worker. Victim or rescuer. Life or death. For now, you could hardly slip a tram-ticket between them. Bombs didn’t give a shit about the social class of the people they were blowing to bits.

Day faded into dusk. The river glittered red in the remnants of a sunset that, further to the west, silhouetted the dome of Dumbarton Rock and painted reds, pinks, blues and mauves in the western sky above the distant Cowal hills. For a moment he felt a surge of wonder that such beauty could exist in the midst of so much death and destruction. In the village below him, a light flickered in a top floor window of Erskine View. Sure enough, Maggie Thomson had forgotten to close her blackout blinds again. What was it going to take before she got the message? He looked again at the flaming oil tanks and the burning town in the distance. What the fuck did it matter? Tonight wasn’t going to be about blackout rules, it was going to be about survival. He dropped his cigarette end, crushed it under his boot, and set off downhill.

As he approached the foot of Church Brae he could see beneath the railway bridge the shapes of tonight’s two Home Guard sentries. Although it was now almost dark, he recognised them from their shadowy outlines – Sandy Downer and Jock Wilson, respectively the shortest and the tallest in the shipyard. Sandy insistently described himself as ‘over five feet’, a claim that had once been put to the test in the plating shed where he had lain down and been marked out. Careful measuring put him a sixteenth of an inch over. Disbelievers subsequently claimed either that he’d kept his socks on or needed a haircut, but Big Sandy, as he was affectionately known, stuck to his guns. Despite his size, he was good for a full shift swinging his riveting hammer with the best of them. Wee Jock Wilson was a clear fifteen inches taller and about twice as broad as Sandy. Putting them on guard duty together was the one bit of evidence that old Colonel Somerville had a sense of humour buried somewhere beneath his florid and grumpy exterior.

Big Sandy’s face wrinkled in concern. ‘How’s it looking up there, Joe?’

‘Terrible. The tanks are still blazing and there’s fires all over the place in Dalmuir and Clydebank.’

‘Think they’ll be back the night?’

‘It’s not what I think, Jock. I’m sure of it. The weather’s perfect. They’ll see the fires from miles away. Those bloody incendiaries. Makes it easier to find the target the second night. Look at last year. Birmingham, three nights. London, two nights. Liverpool and Manchester got two each as well. Aye. They’ll be back all right.’

‘After what happened last night,’ said Wee Jock, ‘you wonder what we’re up against here. I mean. Just look at us.’ He held out the makeshift weapon he was carrying, a scaffolding pole with a bayonet lashed onto one end.

‘Stop complaining, you big lassie. We agreed it was night about with the musket.’ Big Sandy held up an old bolt-action rifle. ‘And tonight, I got not just one bullet, I got two. Bring on the Wehrmacht! Anyway,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘that thing you’ve got is too heavy for me. It’s designed for big brainless people.’

‘Sandy, if you kill any Wehrmacht it’ll be because they die laughing. I mean, look at him, Joe. Churchill’s secret weapon, done up to make the Jerries think Scotland’s being defended by wee boys dressed up as soldiers. The shoulders of that battledress are somewhere round about his elbows and the arse of his trousers is at his knees.’

‘Ach, the big eunuch’s just jealous, Joe. He’s bothered because I need a lot of room down there in my pants. Unlike him.’

‘Boys, boys.’ Joe pretended to placate with outstretched hands. ‘Don’t drag me into it. When you two are doing the sniping, my head stays below the firing line. But I’ll say one thing, Sandy. You showed plenty of balls the day. Crawling in under that roof.’

‘No. Don’t say that. I was the obvious one to go. The rest of you buggers are all too big. No. I’ll tell you who the real heroes are. Mrs Brownlee when I handed her wee Shona’s body. And people like your sister Nessa who’s lost her man along with most of her family. How is she?’

‘Still not talking. The doctor came in and checked her. “She’s one of many,” he said. “Time’ll take care of it.” Whatever you say, Sandy, you did a great job.’

‘What I can’t get over is Mrs Dagerelli. I knew I was in their kitchen, at the back of the café. Most of the walls were still standing but it was a hell of a mess. And a strong stink of gas. That really bothered me. I looked everywhere I could. There was no sign of her. When I crawled back out, Ernesto wouldn’t believe me. “I know she’s-a-there. In-athe kitchen. Please. Please. I know she’s-a-there.” So in I crawled again. Checked under the table, under the bed, in the pantry. Not a sign. The kitchen door had swung wide open. Then I noticed the door wasn’t hard up to the wall. I pulled it back. There she was. Bolt upright. And stone dead. It must’ve been something to do with the blast. Or maybe she’d changed her mind and was at the door on her way to the shelter when the bomb exploded.’

The other two had heard Big Sandy’s account before, but they listened respectfully. Joe clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You did well, Sandy.’ He set off to complete his rounds.

 

Where the Bridge Lies by Frank Woods is published by Ringwood, priced £9.99

Kenneth Steven uses the inspiration of Scotland’s landscape to write his many poetry collections. In West, he uses the landscape to pay tribute to his late sister, peace activist Helen Steven.

 

Extracts taken from West
By Kenneth Steven
Published by Wild Goose Publications

 

MY SISTER HELEN

She was Scotland to me:
bedtime stories that woke me
to the history of Wallace and Bruce,
would have had me up in a saddle,
galloping back in time
for the bits of the border we’d lost.

She lived down endless long windings of bumps,
in cottages with attics and owls –
the hope of conkers in the morning.

She drove me one August night
when the skies were orange and bruised,
till the storm was flickering booms
and we came home in silvering rain.

She was drives at high speed
down roads that should have closed long ago,
in cars that were held together
by the hope of a better tomorrow.

She could conjure a whole ceilidh
out of a candle and an old bothy;
she was songs and tin whistles
in the middle of the worst of blizzards.

She was a beach where you could always swim,
and a place you’d not known before;
she was a fire that would set you alight –
an adventure that was yet to be planned.

 

WEST

Leave Craignure and the woods around Duart Castle
and hug the shore before you climb the lion-coloured hills:
Glen Gorm, from which the people once were burned.
Up higher and still higher, until the lochs lie far below
and if you’re lucky, the whole bald head of Ben More
has broken out of cloud and stares west, a weathered sphinx.
A telephone box, a single house, and miles of salt marsh
for the constant hope of otters. Then on, to Pennyghael,
and the thin single road that winds like a piece of thread
over to the cliffs of Carsaig. But keep on heading west,
until Bunessan and the harbour and the clustered houses.
You’re almost there. An inland loch, impossibly blue,
and now the breeze blows every way at once –
the land lies low, left with a few wind-twisted trees,
and see, ahead, there, on the edge of the sky,
the island still at anchor; the abbey nestled by the sea –
guarding, keeping, waiting.

 

THIS LANGUAGE

Even now, so long after the motorway and the wire
have torn tranquillity, it is worth coming here

to listen. But if you really want to understand this language,
you must throw away the rules

forget all you thought you knew –
begin again. Open the book of the moorland

read what is written there in the morning by the mist,
trace with your finger the runes of the birds.

Go and hear the water in the wood as it splays downhill
cold as Greenland. Wait by your window

as the larks on the edge of summer rise and rise,
singing. This land is not for sale –

this language takes a life to learn.

 

West by Kenneth Steven is published by Wild Goose Publications, priced £6.99

Val McDermid is one of Scotland’s brightest literary stars with fans around the world captivated by her brilliant crime thrillers. Her latest book, My Scotland, sees her take a trip down memory lane, travelling around Scotland sharing the places that have meant a lot to her in life, and as inspiration for her books, all accompanied with beautiful photography by Alan McCredie.

 

My Scotland
By Val McDermid, with photographs by Alan McCredie
Published by Sphere

 

BooksfromScotland went to see both Val and Alan at the Bloody Scotland launch event in Stirling, and here, she reads from her chapter on Edinburgh, answers questions from the audience, and tells us more about the My Scotland project.

 

 

 

My Scotland by Val McDermid, with photographs by Alan McCredie, is published by Sphere, priced £20.00

David Robinson welcomes back fan favourite Jackson Brodie and a writer on top of her game.

 

Big Sky
By Kate Atkinson
Published by Doubleday

 

When it comes to crime fiction, I’m with WH Auden.  In his 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage”, he described how, once he started reading a crime novel he was unable to write anything until he had finished it. And yet when he had done so, he forgot the book’s plot immediately and never had the slightest urge to re-read it.  “If, as sometimes happens,” he added, “I start reading and find after a few pages that I have read it before, I cannot go on.”

I never knowingly re-read crime fiction either. Granted, I hardly re-read at all, what with life being so short and everything, but I just can’t see the point of picking up a puzzle whose answer I already know. There is only one crime novelist whose work I can ever imagine myself reading for a second time, and even then she probably doesn’t think of herself as a crime novelist in the first place.

It has been nine years since Kate Atkinson published her last Jackson Brodie novel, and her new one, Big Sky, reminds us what we have been missing. The plot, though intricate, isn’t the point. By the end of the book, when it spins out of its hitherto tight constraints for a big-picture, collapse-all-the-dominos finale, she seems to be positively revelling in its artifice.

But then again, I could say exactly the same thing about the way in which she starts the book too. Jackson is sitting next to his bored 13-year-old son Nathan watching the model ship naval battle staged for tourists on the lake at Scarborough’s Peasholm Park. When he was Nathan’s age, Atkinson points out, Jackson’s mother had already died of cancer, his sister had been murdered and his brother had killed himself. Yet Nathan’s mother Julia, she adds, “could go toe to toe with Jackson in the grief stakes – one sister murdered, one who killed herself, one who died of cancer. (‘Oh, and don’t forget Daddy’s sexual abuse,’ she reminded him. ‘Trumps to me, I think’).”  Another couple of pages further on, and we are re-introduced to Tatiana, the Russian girl Jackson first met “in another lifetime  when she had been a dominatrix and he had been fancy-free and briefly – ludicrously though it seemed now – a millionaire.”

All of this is the barest precis of Atkinson’s first two Jackson Brodie novels, Case Histories and One Good Turn, and you no sooner read it than you wonder whether anything plausible could conceivably come from such an extravagant gallimaufry of grief and good fortune. But Atkinson takes off on her own track. She both uses and then makes you forget the basics of genre fiction. She takes a cliché – the maverick  cop, the sullen teen – out for a spin, and by the time she’s finished with it you’ve forgotten that it was a cliché to start with.

Let’s take another example: Vince Ives, middle-aged telecoms area sales manager living on the Yorkshire coast, and a central character in Big Sky. Here’s how Atkinson introduces him:

“He was grinding towards fifty and for the last three months had been living in a one-bedroom flat behind a fish-and-chip shop, ever since Wendy turned to him one morning over his breakfast muesli – he’d been on a short-lived health kick – and said, ‘Enough’s enough, don’t you think, Vince?’ leaving him slack-mouthed with astonishment over his Tesco Finest Berry and Cherry.”

I can imagine Atkinson mouthing “Yesss!” and clenching her fist as she finished that sentence. It is waspishly witty, but it is also a blatant stereotype of the put-upon mild-mannered middle manager nudging fifty who is also just about to lose his job.  Vince’s friend Tommy’s neat freak trophy wife Crystal is another (“‘Yeah, OCD,’ she said triumphantly, as though she’d worked hard to acquire it”). But though they might start out as stereotypes, Atkinson’s characters are so delightfully described that the reader never thinks of them like that.

In Big Sky we are back in the seaside towns and villages of Atkinson’s native Yorkshire.  She touched on this territory in her last Jackson Brodie novel, 2011’s Started Early, Took My Dog, in which crimes from the present also resurface in the present. Big Sky also sees the welcome reappearance of Reggie Chase, the  plucky 16-year-old Scottish orphan last seen in 2010’s When Will There Be Good News? who resurfaces here as a rookie policewoman investigating a murder. A woman’s body has been found sprawled out on her garden lawn, her skull bashed in by a golf club  (as is surreptitiously pointed out, this case is “only the thin end of the wedge”). The rest of the wedge takes us firmly into a Brexit-y Britain swirling with prejudice and sexism, as washed-up comedians like Barclay Jack (“who had done a gig for Britain First”) prove every time they take to the dilapidated seaside stage.

All of this is well handled, but neither that nor the reminders of Jackson Brodie’s other adventures are the real reason I enjoy Atkinson’s forays into crime fiction so much. For that, all you have to do is to go back to the scene I mentioned at the start of the book which (re)introduces the reader to Brodie.  While watching that model ship naval battle with his son, he is also ostensibly working as a private eye shadowing a husband who is having an affair. Plotwise, it’s not a particularly significant scene, yet it is one that contains all the secrets of Atkinson’s craft and is worth looking at in detail.

For one thing, she doesn’t rush. That concatenation of the past tragedies in Brodie’s life I mentioned earlier might make you think that she does, but really it’s the opposite. His mind idles, and there’s a whole stream of inconsequential consciousness the differences between his son Nathan’s teenage years and his own. In the background, the Battle of the River Plate is being refought with 20-foot model boats on the park lake, and some of the Tannoy commentary drifts into the story, a little hint of the more mannered, orderly wartime world that overhung Jackson’s childhood and now looks just as absurd to Nathan as Jackson’s (true) claim that the model boats actually have people inside them, steering and firing the guns. So it passes, this summer afternoon, Jackson thinking of his own schooldays, Nathan slumped and sarcastic and bored next to him, the dialogue between them stitched with irrelevancies and mutual incomprehension. And ever so carefully, and with more confident whimsicality than you can imagine from any other writer, Atkinson launches the plot on that park lake without a single ripple, and you, dear reader, will be hooked before it has even before it has got into gear.

And who knows, one day we might both of us pick up Big Sky and start re-reading Kate Atkinson. Because she’s worth it.

 

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday on 18 June, priced £20.

Naomi Mitchison was a force of nature, and BooksfromScotland is delighted to see a new edition of Jenni Calder’s biography of this amazing writer and woman. Carla Sassi discovers that this is a biography that shall surely herald a new generation of fans.

 

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison
By Jenni Calder
Published by Sandstone Press

 

‘To understand just one life you have to swallow the world’ says Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. If this is true of any life, it applies even more so to that, extraordinarily long and rich, of Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane 1897 –1999) — a life that literally, and not just metaphorically, embraced the whole planet, well beyond her native Scotland and her second, equally loved adoptive home, Botswana. A polymath, an avid traveller, a Scottish nationalist, a socialist, an aristocratic cosmopolitan, a feminist, a most prolific writer, an outspoken advocate for those who were oppressed and silenced (‘the people who have not spoken yet’), Mitchison was a free spirit — generous, brave, relentless and indomitable. She championed the local, but always in the name of a universal vision of social justice. She came from an exceptionally privileged background, both socially and culturally, but she felt in many ways more at home with the Highland fishermen and the Bakgatla tribesmen of Botswana. A writer of historical novels often set in the ancient past, she was also an attentive recorder of her own time and life, leaving behind a wealth of journals, diaries, letters, sketches and three autobiographical volumes. To bridle such complexity one is tempted to borrow Muriel Spark’s concept — the quintessentially Edinburgh ‘nevertheless’ that can ineffably and effectively bridge the most incompatible of opposites. ‘I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea. I act upon it,’ said Spark in her essay ‘What Images Return.’ An Edwardian child, Mitchison lacked Spark’s postmodern irony, but she could have easily identified with her younger colleague’s transcending of conventional binaries through ‘action’ — by ‘performing’ conflicts in her own writing and life she made continuous and compatible stances and experiences that for many were irreconcilable. To engage in the writing of the biography of such a charismatic and kaleidoscopic figure, when she was still alive and vigilant, and very much in control of the narrative of her life, must have been an extraordinarily daunting task even for Jenni Calder — herself an established writer, a distinguished scholar and in a relationship of friendship and familiarity with her subject.

First published by Virago Press in 1997, only two years before Mitchison’s death (at the age of 101), Calder’s biography is a remarkable tour de force — embracing the complexity of its subject and going a long way to doing justice to her multifaceted career. Originally titled The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (a title that, after reading the biography, is bound to sound more an understatement than an exaggeration), this is a most thorough and thoughtful work, comparing and balancing out Calder’s research with Mitchison’s comments and memories as they surfaced in the conversations with her biographer and emerge from a vast corpus of autobiographical writings. Calder’s admiration for her subject is (understandably) strong, but not unconditional, as she goes a long way to pinpoint the grey areas that characterised Mitchison’s endeavours and experiences by discreetly letting them emerge and define by themselves, without pointing her finger at them. From Mitchison’s intellectual and competitive bond with her brother Jack, to her affectionate but controlling and possessive relationship with Linchwe, the Bakgatla chieftain whose friendship introduced her to Africa, the reader is provided with numberless cues as to the many tensions and contradictions that animated Mitchison’s long life.

There other features that make this biography remarkable, and they all have to do with Calder’s approach to her task. Accurate and painstakingly researched, The Burning Glass, aims at memorialising an extraordinary writer and intellectual in the most possible ‘objective’ way, but also at discreetly acknowledging and recording that complex bond that ties any biographer to his/her subject. This is most obvious in the last section of the biography — chapter 9 (‘Personal and political’) — where the process underlying the writing a life subtly takes centre-stage, and where the lives of Calder and Mitchison intersect and reveal more than accidental similarities and parallelisms. A bond made of affinity and mutual understanding unfolds from their first chance encounter on a flight from Nairobi to London in 1970, to the many visits Calder paid to Mitchison at her Carradale ‘ancestral’ home when working on her biography. ‘By this time’, Calder recalls ‘I had become part of the story I was going to tell’. As the notes she took in the course of those visits are woven into the story of Mitchison’s life, Calder becomes aware that ‘the biographer of a living and co-operative subject cannot avoid stepping on to the stage’ — ‘I was a character as well as audience’ she explains (p. 379).

The revised edition published by Sandstones  has a new (more convincing) title, and a new epigraph — ‘For intensity there must be: a focus, a burning glass, a painful shaping’ — both borrowed from Mitchison’s essay ‘Poets and Prophets’ in What the Human Race is Up To (1962).  Very much in line with her approach to biography writing, Calder lets Mitchison ‘speak for herself’ and selects from her writings a single image — conflating intensity with burning passion — to provide a unifying perspective on her tumultuous existence. There are other (minor) adjustments and corrections, and there is a thoughtful foreword by Scottish-based writer Ajay Close, but on the whole The Burning Glass does not represent a radical departure from the first edition. For those of us who enjoyed the 1997 edition, it is certainly worthwhile, after almost 20 years, to go back to it, and re-discover both Mitchison’s legacy and the subtle art of Calder. For those who know little (or nothing) about Mitchison, Calder’s biography represents no doubt the best starting point for a journey of discovery.

 

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder is published by Sandstone Press, priced £9.99

Sarah Jane Douglas brings us a hugely inspiring, touching and funny memoir that teaches us all about the value of perseverance. All through the challenges of life, she finds herself in Scotland’s mountains, finding solace and constancy and some breathtaking landscapes. In this extract, we find Sarah Jane putting her best foot forward with her son, Marcus on the majestic Beinn Eighe.

 

Extract taken from Just Another Mountain: A Memoir
By Sarah Jane Douglas
Published by Elliot & Thompson

 

In the same way I had once used the bottle and blow to bury all the hurt, I now found salvation in the freedom of wide, open spaces. Among mountains I enjoyed a natural high. And I wondered, momentarily, if it was a similar pain that my father had tried to blot out when he chose to drink himself to death. He chose drink and drugs. I had chosen to live, to find a more positive outlet for my turmoil, and to be there for my sons.

As Marcus and I climbed out from the dark confines of the corrie on Beinn Alligin and topped out onto a fairly flat plateau, we were rewarded with sudden and extensive views over sparkling waters to Skye, Harris and the low-lying profile of Lewis. We were standing high on the north-western edge of Scotland, with nothing between us and the islands of Skye and the Outer Hebrides, dark, angular outlines across the Minch. Behind and now way below us, Loch Torridon glinted in still, blue perfection. Rising steeply above its southern shore stood Beinn Damh, smaller than its neighbours but stark and prominent with endless peaks sweeping gracefully away behind it. We couldn’t help but keep stopping to admire the grandeur – while also enjoying some respite from the hot work. With a film of sweat across our foreheads we climbed higher still to reach the first summit, where we had a well-earned rest. We weren’t even bothered by the flies that buzzed around us as we ate some lunch. Liathach dominated our view to the east, that intimidating yet fascinating terraced sandstone monster. And behind us, almost five kilometres in length, was the rest of our ridgewalk. After our break, still feeling the heat, I whipped off my sweat-soaked vest before moving on.

We could admire our surroundings properly now, like a work of art, the sandstone ridge gently curving in a serpentine line all the way towards the second summit, Sgurr Mor, and beyond it the Horns. We carefully descended the steep, narrow ridge and the rock felt warm against the palms of our hands as we lowered ourselves over awkward drops that presented a stretch too long for our legs. Being with Marcus, and given the combination of good weather, incredible scenery and the challenge of the terrain, I felt consumed by an enormous sense of joy, and it seemed no time before we’d reached the col between the two Munro tops – only to have to begin another steep climb upwards. After ascending a smaller top, to our right a fantastically dramatic gash – the Eag Dubh gully – split the ridge. We paused momentarily to peer down and marvel at all the fallen rocks and rubble that had been weathered away and were now lying strewn on the corrie floor. I turned my face from the dark, shadowy confines of the gully and continued the trail, so brightly illumined in sunshine, to the height of Sgurr Mor. It felt good to be up here, to be part of nature’s glorious mountain canvas. We’d done it together, me and my boy, and we couldn’t stop grinning foolishly at each other, flushed with pleasure at our achievement.

From our second summit Liathach appeared even more imposing. My eyes remained transfixed on this isolated bastion with its precipitous walls. I knew one day I’d have to climb it, to satiate my curiosity. Beyond it were even more jagged tops. Land dressed in purple and deep-blue hues swept away into the distance to merge with the heated haze of the day and vastness of the sky, and I surrendered myself to the magic of the silence and beauty. Turning through 180 degrees, I gazed upon the Dundonnell and Fisherfield Hills, yawning off to the north. We sat quietly together, Marcus and I, tired but satisfied by the physical challenge.

We would have been content to stay there on the mountain’s peak, but we still had to tackle the three pinnacles, so off we sauntered towards the Horns, with Beinn Dearg and Beinn Eighe as their backdrop. Scrambling over the airy sandstone towers held an attraction of its own. It was basically easy rock climbing and added an element of real fun to the day. Finding foot and hand holds with natural ease, Marcus scrambled up and down the rocky architecture of the Horns, loving every second of it. The warm wind blew more gustily, but, unfazed, he continued his route-finding with the utmost confidence, and his beaming smile as we arrived on the final pillar said more than the spoken word – almost.

‘Can I call Dad?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, course you can,’ I nodded, handing him my mobile.

‘Dad was up here a few weeks ago, but he told me didn’t manage the Horns because his legs were too tired for it. I can’t wait to tell him I’ve done them,’ he said gleefully.

‘Dad! Guess where I am?’ sang Marcus. ‘I’m on the last Horn on Beinn Alligin.’

‘Well done, Son,’ I heard his father say, ‘I’m going to have to attempt it again then.’

 

*

 

Coming off the final ridge felt rough on my knees, but I watched with pride as Marcus skipped and bounced his way downwards. Stopping in his flight, he turned to look at me, his face all tanned. ‘Mum, I really enjoyed myself today,’ he said. I beamed back, and with that he bounded off again. Marcus and I had always been close, and it was wonderful to be able to share these experiences with him.

Left alone with my thoughts for a moment, my mind wandered back to a conversation I’d had with a random stranger I’d walked this same bit of trail with weeks earlier.

‘I want to climb Kilimanjaro. It’s the highest free-standing mountain in Africa. It borders Tanzania and Kenya . . .’ When he had said that I’d immediately thought of Mum. She had lived in Kenya as a kid. An idea started to take form.

As Marcus and I neared the bridge and the path that would return us to the car, I was convincing myself more and more that it should be me making the trip to Africa. If I felt released from the burden of my grief on the heathers and hills at home, maybe Kilimanjaro would expunge it for ever. I could climb that mountain as a personal tribute to Mum – and raise some money for charity too. It made sense.

‘Hey, Mum,’ Marcus called, breaking my train of thought. ‘I found a stone and it’s got a smiling face!’ He pressed it into my hand; sure enough, iron oxide within the rock had created the illusion of two eyes and smile. Perceiving it as a good omen, I took it home as a reminder of our day. I was now a woman with a plan.

 

Just Another Mountain: A Memoir by Sarah Jane Douglas is published by Elliot & Thompson, priced £14.99

The history and character of Edinburgh infuse every piece in Stewart Conn’s new collection. Conn’s poems, paired with John Knight’s detailed drawings evoke the spirit of the city and its unique aspects. Knight’s pieces are not simply illustrative: the poems and images complement and enhance each other, showing us how the essence of the city infuses every stone.

 

Extract from Aspects of Edinburgh: Poems and Drawings
By Stewart Conn and John Knight
Published by Scotland Street Press

 

From 2002 to 2005 Stewart Conn was Edinburgh’s inaugural makar, or poet laureate. Publications include An Ear to the Ground (Poetry Book Society Choice); Stolen Light (shortlisted for the Saltire Prize), The Breakfast Room (2011 Scottish Poetry Book of the Year) and most recently a new and selected volume The Touch of Time (Bloodaxe), plus The Loving-Cup, Estuary and Against the Light (Mariscat Press). Distances, a personal evocation of people and places, was published by the Scottish Cultural Press. He also edited 100 Favourite Scottish Poems and 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems for Luath Press.  Of his plays The Burning, The Aquarium, Play Donkey and Clay Bull were premiered by the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Company; while Herman and Hugh Miller won Fringe First Awards.  A fellow of the RSAMD and an honorary fellow of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies, he can be heard reading from his own work on The Poetry Archive.

Closely allied to his work as an architect with Historic Scotland (now Historic Environment Scotland), John Knight’s drawing skills were honed through observation of the many historic buildings the length and breadth of Scotland he worked on for 25 years. In 1974 he was commissioned by East Lothian District Council to draw thirteen East Lothian villages for heritage display boards – published subsequently as a book – requiring some 90 sketches.  More recently he was asked, by the local history society, to prepare a set for East Linton.  Also in the 1970s he was commissioned to provide illustrations of the houses associated with Robert Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh for James Pope-Hennessy’s biography of the author.  His work has been included in mixed exhibitions at galleries including the Talbot Rice and the Fine Art Society, and a collection of his drawings taken into the Historic Environment Scotland archive will shortly be accessible online. On retirement as a Principal Architect in 2002 he was awarded the OBE.

 

From Arthur’s Seat

North-east the Firth, a bracelet

merging with mist; south-west

the Pentlands, sharply defined.

Directly opposite, the Castle.

A sudden gust makes me lose

my footing. Gulls slip past,

eyeing us disdainfully.

 

Strange to contemplate this spot,

gouged cleanly out, as going back

millions of years; its saucer

fire and ice, volcanic rock

shaped by glaciers,

where now cameras click,

and lovers stroll in pairs;

 

while those golfers

on the fairways below

keep their heads down

and eyes on the ball –

oblivious of the shadows

furtively closing in,

the imminence of rain.

 

Tempting, watching us

here, to deduce

the same; whereas

often when happiest,

we are most conscious

of darkness. See, it sweeps

towards us, the rim of an eclipse.

 

Aspects of Edinburgh: Poems and Drawings by Stewart Conn and John Knight is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £9.99

BooksfromScotland would love to congratulate Theresa Breslin on being awarded the OBE for services to childrens’ literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Well deserved! We absolutely love her illustrated treasury books of folk tales, published by our good friends at Floris Books, and featuring the amazing artwork of Kate Lieper.  An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Castle Legends, the new book by this dream team, features stories from iconic castles including Edinburgh, Caerlaverock and Eilean Donan. In this extract, find out how Dunvegan Castle was saved by a magical ‘faery flag’.

 

Extract taken from An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Castle Legends
By Theresa Breslin, illustrated by Kate Lieper
Published by Floris Books

 

The Faery Flag of Dunvegan Castle

For eight centuries, Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye has been the home of the MacLeod Clan. The MacLeods have held on to their ancestral seat longer than any other family in Scotland.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that they own a magical flag, Am Bratach Sith, which can summon the Folk of Faery/and to help them in times of need. It is spun from faery silk and gossamer, and stitched with tiny stars. Before the land bridge was built, Dunvegan Castle was surrounded by water. Visitors came by boat through the iron-barred sea gate. It was said that a sleeping Dragon, dark and dangerous, had its lair in a deep cave below the castle walls …

Eight centuries ago, when Price Leod married the daughter of the Seneschal of Skye, the newlywed couple came to live in the castle at Dunvegan. Thus began the great Clan of MacLeod, who guided and guarded their kith and kin from this fortress on a craggy isle facing out to the North Atlantic Ocean. The only way into the castle was through the iron-barred sea gate, which opened to allow boats to enter along a narrow canal. With the mountains to shield them and the waters of Loch Dunvegan all around them, the MacLeods believed their castle to be safe from invaders. No one paid much attention to the old tales of a dark and dangerous Dragon living in a cave below the castle walls.

Now, it is known that the men of Clan MacLeod are invariably handsome, and one young chieftain, a descendant of Leod, was no exception. Every lass on Skye fell in love with him, but he never met anyone whom he might love in return. That is, until the day he was walking by the shore of Loch Dunvegan and saw a girl sitting singing upon a rock. The song she sang had no words, but the melody was so sweet and haunting that Chieftain MacLeod paused to listen. He approached the girl, who turned her head and smiled. And at that moment love filled his heart. She too was enchanted with him. But, when he said that he wanted to ask her father for her hand in marriage, she looked troubled.

The young chieftain soon found out why. The girl was a princess of Faeryland and her father, the king, did not look kindly upon any mortal man who wished to take her away from her home.

“Humans age and die more quickly than us,” the king told his daughter. “This union would bring you heartache and sorrow.” “If heartache and sorrow is the price that I must pay for love, then so be it,” the princess replied.

The king was impressed by her spirit and courage, and he agreed that the young couple could marry… on one condition. “After a year and a day my daughter must return to Faeryland, bringing nothing with her from the human world.”

This was a harsh condition, but the chieftain and the princess decided that they would enjoy the time they were allowed. They spent spring wandering happily on the hills among the yellow whins. They spent summer sitting cosily together on the sands by the shoreline. They spent autumn brambling for wild berries. They spent winter singing and dancing and feasting by the fire. Their days were filled with happiness, none so much as the morning that their son was born.

All too soon a year and a day was completed, and, at midnight, they knew that they must obey the condition placed upon them by the king. The princess bade a sad farewell to her husband. Before she left she made him promise that he would not let their son cry for long without being comforted.

“Supposing our son is in danger?” he asked her. “Would you never be allowed to return to help him?”

At this she replied, “You, the MacLeod of MacLeod, have treated me, a royal faery princess, with honour and love. And so, should Clan MacLeod be in danger, the whole Faery Host will come to their aid.” She regarded him solemnly and then said words he did not understand:

 

Fear not the Dark Dragon of Dunvegan.

If it should ever awake from sleep, then,

though I am gone from your side, you must summon me.

Send me a signal, and the Faery Host

will fly to your aid.

 

With a heavy heart the chieftain watched his faery wife leave him.

As the days passed, his sorrow did not lessen but increased in measure. Another year went by, with sadness hanging over the castle like grey mist.

On the eve of the anniversary of his wife’s departure, the chieftain sat silent in the castle hall, his head sunk in his hands. To cheer him, his friends and relations decided to organise a clan ceilidh for the next day. They opened the iron-barred sea gate so that members of Clan MacLeod arriving from the Islands and the Highlands could row their boats through the canal into Dunvegan Castle.

In the tower room that was his son’s bedroom, the chieftain spoke to the child’s nursemaid. “Be watchful over my babe this night of all nights,” he told her. “I am charged with not letting my son cry without being comforted.” And the chieftain heaved a huge sigh, for, since his wife had left, many a long and lonely night he himself had cried without being comforted.

The nursemaid sat by the baby’s cradle and she rocked him gently to sleep.

As the sun set on the Isle of Skye, the noise of feasting sounded throughout Dunvegan Castle. As the food was served, the clatter of crockery and clash of cutlery reached the tower room where the young babe slept.

The child snuffled in his sleep.

The nursemaid rocked the cradle and the child fell silent.

As the moon rose on the Isle of Skye, the noise of storytelling sounded throughout Dunvegan Castle. As the tales were told, the lilt of laughter reached the tower room where the young babe slept.

The child turned over in his sleep.

The nursemaid rocked the cradle and the child was still.

As the hour of midnight approached on the Isle of Skye, the noise of the ceilidh sounded throughout Dunvegan Castle. As the dancing began, the merry music of fiddle and frolicking reached the tower room where the young babe slept.

The child opened his eyes.

But no nursemaid was there to rock the cradle. She had tiptoed from the room to lean over the staircase and watch the people whirling in reels and jigs.

The child did not slip back to sleep.

No nursemaid was at the cradle…

…and no guard was at the sea gate.

When the sun had set on the Isle of Skye, and the noise of the feast sounded throughout Dunvegan Castle, the clatter of crockery and clash of cutlery reached the cave where the Dark Dragon slept deep below the castle walls.

The Dragon snuffled in its sleep.

When the moon had risen on the Isle of Skye, and the noise of storytelling sounded throughout Dunvegan Castle, the lilt of laughter reached the cave where the Dark Dragon slept deep below the castle walls.

The Dragon turned over in its sleep.

When the hour of midnight had approached on the Isle of Skye, and the noise of the ceilidh sounded throughout Dunvegan Castle, the merry music of fiddle and frolicking reached the cave where the Dark Dragon slept deep below the castle walls.

The Dragon opened its eyes.

With no one to rock the cradle or comfort him, the child began to cry.

The Dark Dragon began to growl.

No one heard the sobbing of the child.

No one heard the scrabbling of the Dragon’s claws, the beating of its enormous wings, the screeching of its hideous voice.

Midnight struck the hour. The chieftain thought again of his lovely wife – the faery princess from whom he’d parted one year and one day ago. He remembered the promise he’d made to her: that their son would never cry without being comforted. He raised his head. Through the noise of the feast and the chatter of the stories and the music of the ceilidh, he heard the sobbing of his son.

With the clock bell chiming, he hurried from the hall and raced up the stairs of the tower. Faster and faster he ran, the crying becoming louder and louder as he neared the nursery room. But, just as he put his hand on the door, the cries became a gurgle of delight. The child crowed in happy contentment.

The chieftain stopped in surprise.

Slowly he opened the door.

The shadowy figure of a woman was leaning over the cradle. He heard his son murmur: “Mama!”

The last bell of midnight chimed. A gleam of light flashed at the window. And by the time the chieftain entered the room, he was alone with his son.

In wonderment he lifted his smiling child from the cradle and hugged him. There was no doubt in his mind that the figure he had seen was his wife. And although it saddened him that she could not stay, it was also a comfort that she was close by and watching over them.

When the chieftain laid the child back to rest he noticed a silken shawl draped over the cradle. Had his faery princess left it deliberately? As he bent to tuck it round his son, the window glass shattered. A clawed foot scraped at the frame, and a fierce yellow eye peered into the room!

The Dark Dragon of Dunvegan Castle had awoken, crashed through the open sea gate and was now inside the castle grounds!

The beast spotted the baby in the cradle. It thrust forward its mouth and opened up its jaws…

There was a shout from below and a rainstorm of arrows struck the Dragon’s scaly body. With a roar of anger it turned and flew down into the courtyard.

The chieftain ran to the window. His clansmen surrounded the thrashing beast. But the Dragon lashed its tail in a circle and hurtled them into the loch. Beating enormous wings, the beast took off, heading once again towards the tower and its prey.

The chieftain drew his claymore.

The Dragon’s mighty face was at the broken window and murder was in its mind.

It was not within the reach of his sword, but the chieftain held fast in the face of danger, for he would not leave his son to run and save himself.

The child cried out.

The chieftain glanced towards the cradle. His son had wriggled free from his shawl of faery gossamer.
The Dragon’s eyes shone with rage.
The child cried out a second time.
The chieftain glanced again towards the cradle.
His son had kicked the shawl towards him.
The Dragon drew in a long breath, preparing to belch out a firestorm of red-hot flames.
A third time the child cried out.
And for a third time the chieftain glanced at the cradle.
The shawl was floating free in the air.
And suddenly the chieftain remembered the words of his faery bride and he understood.

 

Fear not the Dark Dragon of Dunvegan.

If it should ever awake from sleep, then,

though I am gone from your side, you must summon me.

Send me a signal, and the Faery Host

will fly to your aid.

 

 

Swiftly the chieftain grasped the shawl. He spun around to stand alone before the Dark Dragon of Dunvegan Castle. Raising his hand, he waved the shawl like a flag in battle and called upon his one true love to come to his aid.

And instantly, there was rushing wind and the Faery Host were on either side of the chieftain, in the air and on the earth. Above, around and below the tower, the magical horde battled the Dragon. And with a thousand spears they brought down the Dark Dragon of Dunvegan Castle.

When the chieftain’s son grew to manhood he declared that he remembered his mother rocking him to sleep that fateful night when she left him wrapped in the Faery Flag. And he also clearly recalled her promising that the Faery Flag of Dunvegan Castle would rescue the MacLeods from death three times more.

Twice more, indeed, the Faery Flag has saved Clan MacLeod. The first time, Clan MacDonald set fire to Dunvegan Castle. As the MacLeods were escaping, their chieftain snatched up the Faery Flag and, immediately, the Faery Host appeared. Armed with claymores, they drove the MacDonalds into the sea. Centuries later a pestilence came upon the Isle of Skye, destroying crops and cattle. The MacLeod chieftain, who knew the old stories, carried the Faery Flag through the fields, and, as he went, the Faery Host went with him, and the crops and cattle were healed. So Clan MacLeod may use the flag only one more time to call upon help from Faeryland.

The Faery Flag remains in Dunvegan Castle, lying there until it may be needed. It is treasured by Clan MacLeod, for within it rests the powerful love of a beautiful faery princess for a mortal man and the baby she bore him.

 

An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Castle Legends by Theresa Breslin and illustrated by Kate Lieper is published by Floris Books, priced £14.99

A joint venture by Robin Howie and John McGregor, Walking Scotland’s Lost Railways covers the Borders, Fife, Clackmannan and Kinross, and the South-Central Highlands. It offers a fascinating and varied selection of walks, totalling over 375 miles, which could fill an afternoon, a day or a long weekend.

 

Walking Scotland’s Lost Railways: Track Beds Rediscovered
By Robin Howie and John McGregor
Published by Whittles Publishing

 

 

Scotland still has hundreds of miles of ‘dismantled railways’ (so termed by the Ordnance Survey). Some track beds have been saved as Tarmacadam walkways or cycleways while others have become well-trodden local footpaths. The remainder range in walking quality from accessible, to overgrown, to well-nigh impassable… However, their railway origins ensure that they are all gently graded making the walks easy to explore. As well as being carrying-size and walker-handy, it will appeal equally to the more sedentary railway enthusiast. The book is complemented with integral hand-crafted maps that identity the old railway lines and former stations which are, by now, mostly unrecognisable. Every walk is described in detail and accompanied by a selection of photographs, recalling the railways’ grand past and illustrating today’s conditions.

On the ground, the pattern of railway lines and branches remains, but what of the efforts which brought them into being and the challenges in construction? A general background history is provided, while each chapter begins with an outline regional history.

In more recent times Scotland has experienced a railway revival, not least in the partial reconstruction of the Waverley Route to create the 30-mile Borders Railway from Edinburgh to Tweedbank. An extension to Hawick is at least a possibility and meanwhile the 46 miles from Tweedbank to Kershopefoot, where once the line crossed into England, offer an expedition of many contrasts that might be tackled in its entirety over several days. So get out there and get walking with this ideal companion!

 

For over 15 years Robin Howie had a popular hill-walking column in The Scotsman and is the author of the acclaimed 100 Scotsman Walks. Dr John McGregor is a railway historian, a trustee of Glenfinnan Station Museum, and author of The West Highland Railway: Plans, Politics and People. He was for many years an Open University tutor.

 

Walking Scotland’s Lost Railways: Track Beds Rediscovered by Robin Howie and John McGregor is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99

This fabulously titled book is an excellent guide to geology, particularly for a beginner. Reading through it encourages you to get outdoors and get up close to Scotland’s amazing landscapes. Here’s an extract detailing Hugh Miller’s influence in looking at fossil fish in the Caithness countryside.

 

Extract taken from Hutton’s Arse: 3 Billion Years of Extraordinary Geology in Scotland’s Northern Highlands
By Malcolm Rider and Peter Harrison
Published by Dunedin Academic Press

 

Hugh Miller (1802–1856) was born in the Black Isle fishing village of Cromarty, sheltering under the Sutors at the entrance to the Cromarty Firth, 60km north of Inverness. He became a quarryman at 15 and then, by sheer intelligence and force of character, some 20 years later had become the authority on the geology of the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland, especially the Highlands. He became fully embraced by the ‘socially superior’ geological community in London, a remarkable achievement in Victorian times. He was a very religious man, an excellent writer, and became a renowned Edinburgh newspaper editor. His geological classic is The Old Red Sandstone mentioned above, but he also produced a number of other geological works such as Footprints of the Creator (1849) and The Testimony of the Rocks (1857), all being an inextricable mixture of rocks and religion, of nature living out God’s will. But this is not to underestimate his science: he was an observant, gifted and enthusiastic scientist. Miller was not only unusual in his background, he was physically so as well; tall, rugged, with a full head of shaggy sandy hair, and was usually dressed roughly in a plain shepherd’s plaid, preserving the image of his origins. ‘He never looked grander than a working man in his Sunday best,’ said a friend. He was a distinctive personality and a great speaker with a broad Ross-shire accent, keeping audiences of thousands rapt with descriptions of rocks and fossils, especially ladies, it seems. He was a thoroughly likeable character and when he died in Edinburgh, the centre of the city was closed for his funeral.

The place where we are going to start this chapter has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), and to visit needs a permit from Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). It is an inconspicuous quarry near Spittal, 24km south of Thurso, at the end of a long farm track on top of a low hill in the searchingly flat Caithness countryside. The quarry itself is entirely unremarkable at first sight: water-logged, no remaining worked face, a ruined building and a lot of broken rock spoil clambered over by cows. Yet over the years this quarry has provided thousands of beautifully complete fossil fish, it having been excavated unintentionally into the Achanarras fish bed. This is why permission is needed from SNH to visit, hit the rock and to collect the fossils. A few years ago a Dutch team brought power drills and heavy equipment to improve their collecting efficiency! Not allowed; the rules are one hammer and a few fossils.

There is a mystery here, though. The rock is perfectly layered to resemble pages in a book and you can sit in the quarry for hours splitting layer after layer and find absolutely nothing. The excitement that each split may reveal beautiful shiny black scales and the first look at a curious ancient fish is rapidly lost. But with experience and some knowledge of collected specimens, the fossil hunter learns to look for black or rusty red weathering colours in the grey-green rock. The truth is that the magnificent fossils really are abundant, but only in a very precise layer two metres thick, hence the name ‘fish bed’; the fossils are not scattered throughout the rock. Fish beds are now a known feature of the Old Red Sandstone of Caithness, Cromarty and the southern shore of the Moray Firth, but it originally took Hugh Miller years to find some of them even though he was on the rocks every one of his working days.

Why are the fossils so distributed? Why are they concentrated only in the thin fish beds?  Do the thin layers of abundance represent a time when a huge number of fish lived? Or do they represent the catastrophic death of a whole fish population? Perhaps there is something special about their fossilization?

 

The different degrees of entireness in which the geologist finds

his organic remains depend much less on their age than on the

nature of the rock in which they occur

 

was Hugh Miller’s surprising (and accurate) observation. What was special for him, evidently, was the fossilization. But we should try to find out for ourselves, because it affects our understanding not just of these fish fossils but of the entire fossil record, what we say about evolution and what we give as the age of a rock. Fossils cannot be considered in isolation, they are inextricably linked to the sediments in which they are found, ‘the nature of the rock’. The sediments represent both the environment of the living animals and the medium in which they are preserved.

 

*

 

Miller would not have known the Achanarras quarry; it was opened in 1870, twelve years after his death. This is a shame. He would certainly have revelled in the abundance of the fossil fish although, at the same time, have been surprised and fascinated by the way in which the sediments and the fossils themselves have now been analysed.

What is immediately remarkable about the rocks of the quarry and indeed all the rocks of the Caithness area, is their extreme, regular layering. These are the Caithness Flags, famous for covering floors around Europe, all the way from many Scottish kitchens, to the Royal Mile, to many streets in Edinburgh and now the infamous new Scottish Parliament building. The flags are so readily available in the north that lines of them are used to separate fields instead of dykes (stone walls) as in Sutherland or hedges in lusher counties. The amazingly flat beds were caused by the exceedingly regular accumulation of sediments in the huge freshwater Orcadian lake that stretched from Cromarty to Caithness to the Orkney Islands and to the west coast of Norway during the Middle Devonian, 374–387Ma. With a size of about 700 by 300 kilometres, it was larger than the individual North American Great Lakes and comparable with the size of the present Black Sea. But undoubtedly, during its 13 million years or so of existence, lake outlines shifted and water stands were often temporary, similar to the lakes of the present day African Rift. Over 5000m of stratified flags accumulated during this time, in the general area of the slowly sinking but usually isolated Orcadian Basin. The powerful, vertical cliffs of Caithness and Orkney are the remains of this remarkable sequence, the Old Man of Hoy their famous statue. Incredibly, throughout this whole Orcadian lake sequence the flaggy layering persists. Each flag is usually about the thickness of a paperback book and exceedingly flat, which gives it its economic worth. Although persistent, the layering shows subtle changes related loosely to the silt, sand and shale content. All the fish in the Achanarras Quarry come from a thickness, as I have said, of only two metres, and through this interval the individual layers are extremely thin. The fish beds are in fact laminites, that is, sediments with paper-thin layering. It is only in the laminites that the fish are found: or is it preserved; or is it lived; or is it died?

Although not visible without draining, researchers have found that the sedimentary layers of the Achanarras quarry form a sequence of gradually increasing particle size and lamina thickness from the bottom upwards. Ten metres are found at the quarry, but when complete, it is about 60m thick. The finest particle size and thinnest layers at the bottom of this sequence are the two metres of laminites where the fish are found. They occur nearly at the base of the quarry. The laminites were deposited in still water, deep for a lake, perhaps 80m. The thicker layers at the top of the sequence show fossilized ripples and mud cracks and clearly come from very shallow water, which even occasionally dried out. The rocks in the quarry are the remaining evidence of an episode when the lake became progressively shallower as time went by. It slowly filled with sediment and the lakeshore eventually passed over the quarry site, whereas before it had been a long way off. When the lakeshore environments were present, the water was well oxygenated and any organic remains in them would have been consumed by bacteria or predators or dispersed by water currents. On the contrary, when the deep water was present, the lake floor would have been anoxic, that is without oxygen. There would have been no bacteria or predators and no water movement, which would have been ideal for the preservation of organic matter. This, of course, is where the fish remains are. But did the fish only live when and where the water was deepest?

 

Hutton’s Arse: 3 Billion Years of Extraordinary Geology in Scotland’s Northern Highlands by Malcolm Rider and Peter Harrison is published by Dunedin Academic Press, priced £19.99

The good folks at Tippermuir Books specialise in books that celebrate the history, culture and places of Perthshire, and Trish Colton’s Perth & Kinross: A Pocket Miscellany is packed with the finest titbits for visitors and locals. And after all the sightseeing, you’ll want a nice to sit down with refreshing drink, so here we share the best pubs in the area as recommended in the miscellany. Bottoms up!

 

Extract taken from Perth & Kinross: A Pocket Miscellany
By Trish Colton
Published by Tippermuir Books

 

Balgedie Toll Tavern, Kinross

In the sixteenth century, travellers would have had to stop at the Balgedie Toll Tavern to pay the toll that was due. It is a much bigger building now than it was in 1534, the actual toll house having been incorporated into the present building.

 

Birchwood Hotel, Pitlochry

A former Victorian family home built in 1875, Birchwood is today a lovely country house hotel.

 

Crieff Hydro, Crieff

In 1868, Dr Thomas Meikle founded the Strathearn Hydropathic Establishment at a cost of £30,000, specifically to practise the ‘science’ of hydropathy. This is a system of treating illness using water both internally and externally. It was invented in the 1820s by Vincent Priessnitz who had treated Dr Meikle in Austria.

Meikle was contemptuous of some of the treatments Priessnitz promoted, due to his own training as a proper medical doctor (which Priessnitz certainly wasn’t). This was an era when spa towns such as Cheltenham, Bath and Harrogate were flourishing in England; maybe the temptation to cash in on the craze was also a tempting factor.

Meikle’s establishment was built with the intention of attracting a well-heeled clientele and was an immediate success.

During the Second World War, Crieff Hydro was used to house Free Polish forces. These days, it operates as a popular spa hotel.

 

Cromlix House, Kinbuck

This 5-star hotel is a Victorian mansion 4 miles north of Dunblane. It used to be in Perthshire before boundary changes gave it to Stirlingshire. Originally built in 1874 as a family residence, the house burnt down four years later. The building which stands there now was constructed in 1880 and later operated as an hotel. It is now owned by the tennis player Andy Murray.

The hotel itself may not be that old, but records show that in the 1500s the Bishop of Dunblane sold the lands which constitute Cromlix to his brother.

 

Dalmunzie Castle, Glenshee

Located in the heart of Glenshee, the original Dalmunzie Castle dated back to 1510 and stood on the south bank of the burn. By the eighteenth century, it had fallen into disrepair and in the nineteenth, Dr Charles Hills Macintosh, the 10th Laird of Dalmunzie, built a hunting lodge on the opposite bank, but retained the castle’s name. This is the building that became the present-day hotel.

 

Kenmore Hotel, Kenmore

Scotland’s oldest inn, the Kenmore Hotel, was built in 1572 and is located at the eastern end of Loch Tay, 6 miles west of Aberfeldy on the A827. The tiny modern village of Kenmore in which it is located is thought to stand on the site of an earlier medieval village, so it may be that the hotel is a surviving remnant of that era. The Earl of Breadalbane is responsible for building the lovely village you see today, constructed at some time after 1755. It might be surmised that his motivation was to provide homes for the villagers whose houses may well have been knocked down so that Taymouth Castle could be built. Moving whole villages to a more convenient location was not at all unusual on either side of the border at that time. In fact, it is what happened when Scone Palace was built too.

 

King James Pub and Kitchen, Perth

Although the King James Pub (formerly Christie’s Bar) is modern, there is a possibility that the remains of the medieval Blackfriars Monastery lie beneath it. If so, keep a weather eye open for a royal ghost, because that is where James I was assassinated in 1437.

 

Meikleour Arms, Meikleour

The conservation village of Meikleour is home to this small country hotel and pub built in 1820. It is owned and run by Meikleour Estate, which remains a family business many centuries after it was founded by French settlers. The estate has been held by the same family for centuries, through various turbulent times on both sides of the Channel. Even today, the estate’s management has dual nationality.

 

Mercure Perth Hotel, Perth

This former fifteenth-century watermill maintains its connection to its origins in a lovely old stone building. There are glass portholes in the Mercure Hotel’s lounge bar, enabling you to watch the water which still trickles along the lade that powered the original water wheel.

 

Moulin Inn, Pitlochry

Fifty years before the Jacobite Rising of 1745, the Moulin Inn was already up and running. There were two rooms on the ground floor, with two rooms above that and two further rooms on the floor above those. One of the upper rooms was used as a meeting place by the local elders, who dealt with neighbourhood squabbles and minor crimes.

 

Old Ship Inn, Perth

The Old Ship is the oldest pub in Perth; its name has remained unchanged throughout its history, according to records which date back to 1665. It is, however, thought that its existence goes back even further and that it provided a welcome haven for sailors as far back as medieval times.

The name was significant because at one time the harbour was just at the bottom of the road. So, sailors did not have far to stagger back to their ship after a drunken night in the pub.

 

Royal Dunkeld Hotel, Dunkeld

Located on Atholl Street, in the ‘Gateway to the Highlands’ town, the Royal Dunkeld Hotel, a former coaching inn, was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

 

Struan Inn, Calvine, Pitlochry

Built in 1863, this inn was intended to be patronised by travellers arriving at the nearby Struan Railway Station, which closed to both passengers and goods traffic on the 3rd of May 1965.

 

Perth & Kinross: A Pocket Miscellany by Trish Colton is published by Tippermuir Books, priced £9.99

When Ann Scott-Moncrieff submitted Auntie Robbo to her regular London publishers in 1941 they rejected it as being ‘too Scottish’. As a result, the book was sent to Viking Press in New York who published it that year.  After successful sales it was taken on by Constable in 1959 and was later published in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and Germany.

Hector is an eleven-year-old boy living near Edinburgh with his great auntie Robbo who is in her eighties. A woman calling herself his stepmother arrives from England and Hector and Auntie Robbo realise that they have to run away.  The chase leads all over the north of Scotland, narrowly escaping police and the authorities, adopting three homeless children on the way.

This is an exerpt from the part that was deemed ‘too Scottish’ in 1941. Hector is meeting Melissa Benck for the first time, and takes her on a walk up a hill.

 

Extract taken from Auntie Robbo
By Ann Scott-Moncrieff
Published by Scotland Street Press

 

Merlissa Benck’s expression had become hard and eager; she was like a hound picking up an interesting scent; she panted for breath on the steep, windy hillside…

Hector led the way up the path.

‘But what about … Hector, wait for me … What about other subjects?’

‘Oh, Auntie Robbo knows all about them. Sometimes we do sums. We keep account books, and history – lots of history; then afterwards we ride over the battlefields and go and look at the castles where the murders were done.’

Seeing Merlissa Benck’s shocked expression, Hector explained seriously. ‘Scottish history has a great many murders, you know.’

‘I dare say,’ said Merlissa Benck shortly. ‘But I should have thought British history would have been more suitable for a boy of your age, indispensable in my opinion. England’s story is a very great and noble one.’

‘Yes,’ said Hector. ‘But then we couldn’t ride to the battlefields, could we? I mean they were mostly fighting in places that didn’t belong to them, weren’t they?’

‘Certainly not – at least unless it was for a very good cause.’

‘Auntie Robbo says the causes won’t bear looking into.’

‘What other lessons have you?’ asked Merlissa Benck in exasperation.

‘Oh, Gaelic poetry. Auntie Robbo …had a Gaelic nurse when she was young who had the second sight. Her name was Morag, and Morag’s brother was a bard. Then let’s see; we’ve done an awful lot of geography. Auntie Robbo has been three times to New Zealand and twice to South America and once to Italy, passing through France, and once to Norway. So we’ve done all these places very thoroughly. Oh, and French; we read French. This summer we’re going to make a grand tour.’

‘Whatever for?’ cried Merlissa Benck.

‘To finish my education,’ replied Hector confidently.

‘Nonsense!’ but the wind flung the word back in her teeth. Merlissa Benck snapped her mouth tight on it.

Hector bounded ahead out of the gully through which the burn ran and onto a tableland of moor.

‘Come on,’ he shouted, and Merlissa Benck struggled after him.

A neat little lochan lay on the tableland and it was its brown, peaty waters that fed the burn…

Hector pulled a scone out of his pocket and began crumbling it, casting it on the water.

Merlissa Benck had regained her breath. ‘Then I suppose you’ll be going to school in the autumn when you and your aunt come back from this … this so-called grand tour.’

‘S-s-sh,’ said Hector. ‘You’re a stranger, so you’d better keep low down behind me.’ He began to whistle.

From the far side of the lochan a pair of wild ducks began to scutter across the water towards them.

‘Hold your breath,’ whispered Hector, strung up with excitement.

The wild ducks came closer, swimming carefully. Then the brown female dived right close in to gobble the bread, but the male one circled far out, cautious and aloof.

‘Isn’t he a beauty?’ breathed Hector. ‘They’re not so tame this time of the year. Let’s go now so as he can get some food as well. What would you like to see next?’

‘I’d like to get out of this bog before I sink to my knees,’ said Merlissa Benck with some asperity.

Hector stared at her.

‘Oh,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘There’s a road over there.’

They plodded over to it in silence. It was a cart-track, a deep cutting between banks of heather. Water ran down the middle of it but there were comparatively dry patches on either side.

‘This is better,’ said Merlissa Benck, putting good humour back into her voice. ‘Now do tell me about this school you’re going to. You’ve no idea how interested I am.’

‘I’m not going to school,’ he said.

 

Auntie Robbo by Ann Scott-Moncrieff is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £9.99

This week saw a 30th anniversary commemoration candlelight vigil in Hong Kong, where more than 100,000 people gathered to remember the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is an event that still carries huge resonance across China and Hong Kong’s growing pro-democracy protest movement. Saraband have just released a new novel by Christopher New that explores the reality of dissent and democracy in modern China, and BooksfromScotland shares two extracts here.

 

Extracts from Chinese Spring
By Christopher New
Published by Saraband

 

They nearly always went out together now, as though, Lai-king thought, that was somehow safer. At least she wouldn’t come home to find him gone. But now that he’d been back several weeks and the police were no longer there downstairs, she began to feel that wouldn’t happen. The more certain they were they weren’t being watched, the more they felt able to go out. Not just briefly to shop, but also to stroll about the streets in the evenings when the heat had faded, although it still lay heavy over the city, a sullen polluted haze. Usually they only walked along the Bund, where the air was cooler and a little cleaner, and they could look out over the river at the new glittering city of Pudong. But sometimes they would walk all the way down to People’s Square as far as Da Shi Jie, which Guodong’s father often used to talk about. The Great World, where in the old days you could get everything you wanted, from sex and drugs to food, acrobatics, opera and plays. Most of it had been closed for years now, a lifeless relic, and there were only a few fashionable shops left, selling tea and whatnot on the ground floor.

Sometimes they thought they were being followed, sometimes they weren’t sure.

Life was almost normal, and yet they both still felt a hand might be laid on Guodong’s shoulder at any moment. Was that why he’d lost interest in reading? He sat about all the time, gazing at nothing, or occasionally going to the window to see if that unmarked police car was there again. Sometimes he did pick up a book, but then he laid it down after a page or two. It was as if he couldn’t settle to anything because he was waiting for that sudden knock on the door. Even his nearly finished anthology of world poetry, which he’d been working on forever – even that didn’t interest him now. It lay there untouched in his rarely opened computer like a toy he’d outgrown. What had happened to him during those weeks in detention, what had they done to him? He wouldn’t tell her, he could only repeat, ‘Nothing really. It wasn’t too bad.’ Was it like that when soldiers came home from war, she wondered, bearing scars they could not show, tales they dared not tell?

But in the deep of the night, while she lay asleep beside him, he would often start awake, a trembling of anxiety in his stomach, as if he was still there in that cell, the light glaring in his eyes, a guard banging on the metal door with his baton. Yes, he heard that harsh clanging in his head. Or as if he was back in that bleak room again, being questioned once more. Sometimes he wondered what it was, why those memories disturbed him so deeply. He hadn’t been beaten after all; he wasn’t locked up with murderers or drug-runners. The worst was that he didn’t always get his heart pills.

No, it was nothing physical, it was the helplessness, the knowledge they could do what they liked with you, that abiding anxiety, those leaps of fear whenever they called your name. And in the end he had broken, something in him had snapped. He’d tamely agreed at last, agreed not to go back to the village, not to put another ‘subversive’ petition online. Yes, that was what had broken him. But he’d thought it was either agree or be sent to a labour camp, and he didn’t think he’d survive that. Not at his age. But that had crushed something in him. He was ashamed; humiliated and ashamed.

 

——–

 

‘What’s going on over there?’

‘Where?’

They were driving through the crowded streets of Sai Wan on their way to Central. Mila pointed. ‘China Liaison Office. A protest of some sort. Look at the police.’

‘On China’s national day as well.’ Dimitri slowed down. ‘Let’s take a look.’

Mila glanced at her watch.

‘Just for a moment,’ he said.

She shrugged.

He found a space on a side street between a moneychanger’s, where a pale young man with small rimless glasses surveyed him indifferently through a barred window, and a massage parlour’s narrow entrance, brightly illuminated footprints flashing on its gaudy sign. Did people really go for a massage, or whatever, in the middle of the morning?

‘It’s not a parking space,’ Mila warned him.

‘It’s a public holiday. The police’ll be looking for demonstrators, not peaceful parking offenders.’

They started walking back towards the massive building. ‘Are you all right to walk this far?’ Mila asked.

‘I’m supposed to be better, aren’t I?’

She smiled, a wince of a smile, and looked away. She thought Dimitri was breathing harder already, and slowed her steps.

A ragged group of some fifty people – old, young, smart, untidy, long-haired, short-haired – were shouting slogans outside the sternly locked and barred entrance to the Beijing Government’s headquarters in Hong Kong. Some of them, he noticed, were waving the old colonial flag with the Union Jack on it. TV cameramen, reporters, a small crowd of onlookers and a posse of police officers looked on with what seemed impassive, even bored, faces. ‘I am a Hongkonger!’ some of the demonstrators were chanting, and ‘Give me back Hong Kong!’ Dimitri saw a big-character poster held high and crooked for a moment. We have the right to vote for our future! Some demonstrators were kneeling by the gates, offering mock funeral gifts for the ‘dead’ Hong Kong government. The onlookers watched with only casual interest, as though it was a street show they’d lingered a moment for and would soon forget. And there was a self-consciousness about the demonstrators, as though they felt they might look foolish, might even be so. One young man waving the old colonial flag seemed almost embarrassed. And yet all they were asking for was what people elsewhere took for granted – an independent government they’d elected themselves. But why wasn’t everyone on the streets? Why did people walk past – he saw them now – as the wealthy walked past beggars, as if they hadn’t seen them, yet with a faint uneasy sense of guilt or shame?

 

Chinese Spring by Christopher New is published by Saraband, priced £8.99

Ewan Morrison is one of Scotland’s most exciting and thought-provoking writers. Alistair Braidwood finds his new novel, Nina X, is another ambitious, challenging and necessary read.

 

Nina X
By Ewan Morrison
Published by Fleet

 

With all the turmoil, storm and stress of recent times one literary voice has notably, and unexpectedly, been missing from much of the public and artistic debate – that of Ewan Morrison. While that’s not entirely fair as he has been working widely in film and TV, it is with his fiction that he has previously made the most telling and memorable contributions to the cultural conversation. His most recent novel, Close Your Eyes, was published in 2013, which, considering the seismic shifts socially and politically (globally and locally) since, makes it seem a lifetime ago. This makes his return to publication most welcome as there are few writers who deal as intelligently, courageously, and often confrontationally, with the modern world as Morrison does.

All of which applies to his latest novel, Nina X. It’s a fictionalised account of what became known as the ‘Lambeth Slavery Case’, where, in 2015, self-styled Maoist cult leader Comrade Bala (real name Aravindan Balakrishnan) was sent to prison for abuse and false imprisonment. Morrison’s collective consists of Comrade Chen, four women followers whom he has a powerful and dangerous hold over, and a child who they view as ‘The Project’ – the person into whom they pour their hopes and dreams of a better future.

We first meet that child years later, now known by others, if not yet herself, as Nina, trying to come to terms with her first days of ‘Freedom’ after years kept prisoner. The novel is constructed from entries in Nina’s journals – numbered jotters that often have addendums from her ‘Comrades’ where they offer ideas and suggestions as to how her behaviour, and each other’s, should be modified. Certain words and sections are faint on the page, difficult to read and understand. It is as if they are being whispered, or fading from Nina’s mind, and the story has to be pieced together as scraps are discarded, lost, and found, and Nina’s fractured mind and memory offer varied, and often conflicting, explanations of people and events.

In particular, there is a terrible incident which Nina witnesses and which the Comrades try to make her forget, or at least re-remember – with self-preservation trumping nurturance. Morrison has always had a keen eye for portraying human weakness, and piercing pomposity, and the Comrades descent from high-and-mighty pontificating to petty squabbling, and increasingly desperate, and violent, measures to try and regain some control over the situation, is as believable as it is dispiriting. However, things are little improved when Nina becomes caught up in the world of social services, hospitals, and the law where different rules and regulations are enforced. Morrison is interested in constructs, philosophies and faiths of all kinds, but more so with how the human element is always destined to undermine, compromise and ultimately sabotage them.

Nina X is not simply an examination of nature versus nurture, but rather how a vulnerable mind can be pulled apart by conflict and confusion, and that human frailties (a term which seems horribly inadequate) such as envy, lust, jealously, hubris, anger and pride guarantee failure. The portrayal of Nina/The Project is as complex as it is heart breaking, with a long-suppressed individual voice trying to break through, to be heard and understood. In that sense Nina reminds me of Ron Butlin’s Morris Magellan in The Sound Of My Voice trying to get to a personal truth that has been suppressed for years in an attempt to survive.

It is also a novel about the importance of language and the written word, how they are used to understand, but also to obfuscate – deliberately or otherwise. The nomenclature of people and things takes on greater significance in a world as limited and suffocating as Nina’s. The naming of pets as Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg, or the forbidden contraband of Dairy Milk, Coca Cola, and glossy magazines, all carry multiple meanings. Nina has been told her whole life that some words are acceptable while others come at a cost. With her newfound freedom she finds that it’s not just the rules that have changed, the language has too, and even how she refers to herself becomes a battle.

With Nina X Ewan Morrison challenges readers to think about what writing is for, believing that an engaged writer has a responsibility to address difficult issues. Some may regard him as a professional contrarian, using his mastery of the written word and ability to understand all sides of an argument to push people’s buttons for his own pleasure, but that would be to underestimate him as a writer, and a thinker. Rather he challenges prevailing cultural trends and beliefs, no matter who holds them. If you have a sacred cow to hand you might want to secure it as Morrison takes great delight in running them through, which makes him one of the exhilarating and exacting writers around.

As artistic as he is antagonistic, he believes in intellectual discourse and the rigorous thinking that accompanies it. Nina X is a reminder that the best writing should challenge and confront, and that there are few who do this as well as Ewan Morrison. He asks the questions that others avoid, or would never even think of asking, and offers no easy answers in return. This doesn’t always make his novels easy reads, but it does make them important ones and I know which I prefer every time.

 

Nina X by Ewan Morrison is published by Fleet, priced £14.99

Barrington Stoke have a wonderful habit of publishing rattling good reads for reluctant readers, and their summer blockbuster, coming out in July 2019 is The Starlight Watchmaker by Lauren James. At an elite academy where the wealthiest students from across the galaxy come to be educated, Hugo works as a watchmaker in a dusty attic room. But he is one of the lucky ones. Many androids like him are jobless and homeless. A privileged student like Dorian could never understand their struggle – or so Hugo thinks when the pompous duke comes knocking at his door. But when Hugo and Dorian uncover a potential terrorist threat, android and student must overcome their differences and work together to track down the culprit before the whole academy is placed in danger. We hope you enjoy this pre-publication taster.

 

Extract from The Starlight Watchmaker
By Lauren James
Published by Barrington Stoke

 

Hugo picked up a tiny golden cog with his tweezers just as someone rapped hard at his door. A voice yelled, ‘Hey, watchmaker? Open up, will you?!’

Hugo jumped with surprise and dropped the cog onto the desk. It rolled away and tumbled to the floor, falling into the crack between two floorboards.

Hugo sighed. The cog was the size of a grain of sand. He would never find it again.

‘Come in,’ Hugo called out. He twisted his magnifying lens back into his eye socket, folding it out of sight so that only his smooth outer casing was on display. He did this because sometimes people were distracted when they could see Hugo’s moving parts. It was easier for them to talk to him when he looked like a biological person too. He’d been told that the metal cogs and valves inside his robotic body were disturbing.

The door of Hugo’s attic room was pushed open. It banged against the wall, and a cloud of plaster dust fell from the ceiling. A student barged in, wearing the crisp red uniform of the upper fifth year.

‘Are you the watchmaker?’ the student asked with gritted teeth.

‘That’s me,’ Hugo said, and folded his hands together on the desk. He tried to look calm. He hardly ever spoke to the students of the academy, despite working on the campus.

‘You’re an android,’ the student said, surprised. ‘I was expecting … Oh, never mind.’ The student pulled the jacket of his uniform straight. The red was very bright against his green skin.

Hugo wondered which planet he came from. The academy taught children from the richest families across the galaxy – those who could afford to send their sons and daughters to another planet for school. The students were the future leaders of their planets. At the academy, they had the chance to mix with people from other places in the galaxy and learn about their cultures. It was supposed to encourage peace and understanding between the different planets.

‘How can I help you?’ Hugo said.

‘My watch is broken, you idiot,’ the student said. ‘And my Time Travel for Beginners exam is tomorrow! You have to fix it.’

That explained why the student was so angry. But a broken watch was something that Hugo could fix. Especially a time‑travel one, which was a lot simpler than some of his other devices. Once the watch was working, this student would leave, and Hugo could be alone again. He was much happier when he was on his own.

Hugo dipped his head and said, ‘I’m so sorry about that. Do you have the watch with you now, Mr …?’

The student dropped a plain gold watch on the table. ‘I’m Duke Dorian Luther of the star system Hydrox.’

Hugo tried not to react. He hadn’t been around any nobility since his last owner, the Earl of Astea, had left him behind on this planet.

‘I’m Hugo,’ he replied, taking a closer look at the watch.

There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it on the outside. Tiny time‑travel watches such as this one looked very plain and boring, but inside they were a complicated mix of layers of cogs and gears. They were very delicate and easy to break.

Most of the students who bought these watches probably didn’t even know what was inside. They just knew that if they twisted the dial, the watch would send them back in time for a few seconds. It was apparently handy when they embarrassed themselves at a dinner party or said the wrong thing during an important political meeting.

‘I’m going to have to open the watch up,’ Hugo told the Duke. ‘Would you like to come back in an hour?’

‘I’ll wait,’ the Duke said as his antennae trembled. He was clearly annoyed. ‘I only bought it last semester. Are all your watches this poorly made?’

Hugo sighed and replied, ‘I really am very sorry. Would you like a cup of tea?’

The Duke nodded stiffly and watched as Hugo filled a battered copper kettle with water and put it on the hob to heat up.

‘Please, sit,’ Hugo said, and gestured to an armchair. It was buried under a stack of half‑finished projects. Most of Hugo’s attic workshop was filled with boxes of gears, stacked up in tottering piles along the walls.

The Duke began to clear everything off the armchair, holding up each object and looking at it carefully. A broken cleaning spider wriggled its legs as the Duke gripped it. Hugo had been meaning to fix the spider, but he had been swamped with work lately. It would soon be the end‑of‑term exams, and every student who had been putting off buying a watch for class had rushed to place orders.

The kettle sang out as it boiled. Hugo poured hot water over dried flowers in a teacup. The flowers unfolded and bloomed in the heat, turning the water a gentle pink, then green, before settling on purple.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo said to the Duke. ‘I don’t have any sugar. I rarely have guests.’

‘Without is fine,’ the Duke replied. He was looking at the pull‑down mattress on the wall and the piles of spare parts. The bridge of his nose wrinkled just a bit, as if he was disgusted. Hugo felt a bit embarrassed about the state of his room.

Hugo sat back down to work. He could tell that the Duke was already getting impatient by the way he was fidgeting in his seat.

But the Duke stopped fidgeting when Hugo extended a screwdriver from the end of his thumb. Hugo guessed he had never seen an android use their tool attachments before. Hugo knew that biological people didn’t have anything like that, and he thought it must be strange to have to get up and find whatever you needed to use. It was so much more handy to have the tools stored inside your body, like androids did.

Hugo focused on opening up the back of the watch, trying very hard to ignore the Duke. He loosened the screws holding the watch together. As he worked, clockwork moths hovered around Hugo’s head, glowing with light. He’d designed them to help him see inside the dark centres of the watches.

As soon as Hugo opened up the back of the watch, he saw the problem. The glowing heart of the watch was gone. There was no yellow ball – the quantum energy that powered the time travel was missing.

Hugo darted a look at the Duke. He was drinking his tea and swatting at a clockwork moth sitting on the tassels of his uniform.

There was nothing but a black space below the watch’s golden gears and cogs. Hugo removed the largest cogs, trying to pretend that everything was normal. His mind raced with questions as he tried to understand what had happened.

Maybe the quantum energy had slipped down inside the watch? It couldn’t just have vanished into thin air. Hugo had never seen anything like this before.

The Duke shifted, crossing and re‑crossing his legs. ‘Any sign of the damage?’ he asked.

‘Not yet,’ Hugo said.

Hugo unscrewed another gear. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to the Duke, who was already furious that his watch had broken. He wouldn’t be happy if Hugo said he couldn’t fix it.

Hugo dropped a cog onto the desk and then stopped. There was something on the back of the golden cog. He pulled out his magnifying lens from his eye and bent down to look at it. It was a small curl of green metal, stuck in the teeth of a cog.

Hugo lifted the metal free with a pair of tweezers and held it up to the light. It was the shiny green wing of a clockwork beetle.

‘Ah, this is your problem,’ Hugo told the Duke. ‘It’s not broken. Someone has damaged it on purpose.’

The Duke sat bolt upright. ‘What?!’ he shouted. ‘You mean – it’s sabotage?’

Hugo beckoned the Duke closer and held out the wing. ‘Whoever did this used a bug to take out the quantum energy that powers your watch. Perhaps it was another student with a grudge against you?’

The Duke stared at Hugo, folding his arms and creasing his perfectly ironed uniform. ‘Fix it,’ the Duke said. ‘I need it for my exam.’

Hugo had known the Duke would demand this. ‘I can’t,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have the parts.’

The quantum energy that made the watches work was very dangerous. Hugo wasn’t allowed to store it in his attic. He had to order the energy in for each watch he made.

‘I say, this isn’t on,’ the Duke said. ‘You have a room full of parts. How can you not have the one I need?’

Hugo folded his magnifying glass back into his eye. ‘The energy is rather explosive,’ he explained. ‘I can’t keep it here in case it gets hot. It could blow up the building. I can’t fix your watch. I really am sorry. I can give you back the money you paid for it instead?’

‘Money?!’ yelled the Duke. ‘I don’t want my money. I want to be able to take my exam!’

Hugo rubbed his brow. He hated it when people shouted. They seemed to do it so often. He liked it much better when he was left on his own to work on his watches in peace. Sometimes whole weeks could pass by where Hugo didn’t speak to anyone else, biological or android.

‘Maybe you could find the person who broke your watch and ask for the part back?’ Hugo suggested. ‘It’s a small glowing ball of yellow energy.’

The Duke’s eyes narrowed. ‘I know exactly who did this. Lady Ada de Winters. She’s been angry with me ever since I took the credit for our joint coursework project in our Hyperspace Mathematics class. Ada would love it if I failed my exam.’

Hugo nodded politely. ‘I hope she gives you back the energy,’ he replied. ‘I’d be happy to refit it if you find it – free of charge.’

‘You’re coming with me,’ the Duke said to Hugo. ‘I’ll need you to fix the watch as soon as we find the ball of energy. I don’t have time to come back out here. Why do you work on the furthest edge of campus anyway? It’s almost the wilderness.’

The attic room was all that Hugo could afford to rent, but he didn’t say that to the Duke. ‘Very well. I can come with you, if you insist, Duke.’

‘Oh, do call me Dorian,’ the Duke said.

Hugo clicked his fingers to call his clockwork moths, and put them in his pocket along with the pieces of the Duke’s watch. He stood up. ‘Lead the way then, Dorian,’ Hugo said.

 

The Starlight Watchmaker by Lauren James is published by Barrington Stoke, priced £7.99

In this latest article in our A Year of Conversation – Translation as Conversation series, Jennie Erdal shares her thoughts on translation as someone who has practised its art.

 

In discussing translation, you find yourself looking for metaphors, as if translation can’t quite be itself and nothing else. Which is odd perhaps, since it does not need to serve any purpose but its own. In fact translation and metaphor mean exactly the same thing. One derived from Latin, the other from Greek, they both signify a carrying over. And this carrying over is what we do when we talk to one another, when we try to understand one another; we carry over into words our take on the world so that others may know it too.

Translation is therefore a basic human need: conveying in words our experience of life. Whether it’s the birth of a baby, the death of a parent, the silence of a snowfield, the getting or losing of love – we search for ways of expressing these happenings in a language that can be understood by others. In that sense we are all translators.

Those who translate literature for a living, however, are involved in an act of creation that can seem like a miracle. If the miracle happens we are gifted a new-born life in another language, as natural and as pleasing as the life that has gone before, and all recreated out of that most common currency: words. Yet literary translation is so much more than mere words. To be able to translate, it isn’t enough to have learned another language, however well it has been learned. Words are just the starting blocks. Such a lot is bound up in any language – the way sentences are arranged, the cultural nuances, the grammar, the rhythms, cadences and textures. And each language has its own appearance, its own countenance, its own skin. To say nothing of the bits beneath the skin: the veins, the blood vessels, the heartbeat, the animating spirit.  Those engaged in the complex act of translation have to understand a great deal about many things, not least their own language, whose possibilities and limitations they must know inside out. In the end, of course, it does come down to words, and the best translators have an abiding love affair with them.

In a previous life I used to be a not-good-enough translator, mainly of Russian novels. During this time I became aware of some of the challenges and limitations involved. I came to know that some things will necessarily be lost in translation – in any translation. Quite often there is no exact equivalence between languages, and sometimes English simply cannot tolerate certain aspects of the original, at least not without irony or some other modifying factor. Words have different magnetic fields. For example, humour is a notoriously difficult area – sometimes what is funny in one language can look simply inept or embarrassing in another. Puns, double-entendres, malapropisms, indeed any kind of wordplay – these are all hard to transport safely, to carry over.

In the Russian language, there are other difficulties. It is such a dense, inflected, elliptical language that sometimes what is only implied in a tightly packed phrase has to be made more explicit in a longer English sentence. A single verb in Russian can actually be a complete sentence, telling us not only who is doing it, and whether the doer is male or female, but also whether the activity has been completed or is still going on.  The architecture of a language goes much deeper than its inflections or other distinctive features. In some mysterious sense a grammar expresses the culture of its people, their way of thinking, their soul – whatever we mean by that. (And the Russian soul – dusha – has no direct equivalent in English.) All of this is at stake in the translation process. I also came to understand there is no such thing as ‘the perfect translation’. It is always work in progress, never quite completed.

Reading a novel in a foreign language is like travelling abroad: everything is different, the landscape interesting, even the smallest details. You don’t feel completely at home but you sit back and give yourself to the experience. When you are the translator, however, you have to engage in a very intense form of reading, which involves much more than simply understanding the words on the page. It is painstaking, concentrated work, the closest attention that can possibly be given any book. Once the text is absorbed, you need to let it hum in the head for a while. Only then can you work the clay of the language, turning it into something new – a palimpsest of the first creation.

One of my university teachers, in order to discover who had read War and Peace in the original (and, more importantly, who had not), used to ask us what was striking about the language at the beginning of the novel. It was a question designed to trip us up. The answer he was looking for was that the opening words are not in fact written in Russian. The book begins: ‘Eh bien, mon prince’ followed by long passages in French spoken by Russians as if it were their normal everyday language. The characters in question are aristocrats who converse with one another in French for reasons of fashion and ostentation – something the linking text (in Russian) makes clear. Ironically the discussion is about the possible invasion of Russia by Napoleon and ‘les atrocités de cet Antichrist’. Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation should keep those sentences in French; otherwise, Tolstoy’s device, which is key to setting out the characters and the relationships between them, is lost. And yet out of all the translations of War and Peace, only the most recent [Pevear & Volokhonsky, 2007] stays true to the original. The others all begin in rather stilted English with the words, ‘Well, Prince, ….’ as if this were a natural way of speaking to an aristo.

Even as a student I understood that Tolstoy in translation seemed a very different writer. The early translations of his novels were done mainly by genteel educated women who rendered his writing ‘refined’, complete with all the I says! and You beastly things! Tolstoy himself rather scorned fine writers, dismissing them as ‘hairdressers’. He is able to describe human emotions as almost no other writer can, concisely and precisely, but he is not elegant in a classical way. There is a lack of ornamentation, the style is simple and lucid, the syntax sometimes goes awry, and there are bumpy bits. These bumpy bits tend to get smoothed out in translation.

Constance Garnett, who introduced many in the English-speaking world to Tolstoy, removed several of the characteristics of his prose and missed out certain tricky passages – this in the interests of ‘good writing’, which meant fluent, elegant sentences. She thought that Tolstoy’s writing was easy to translate – ‘it goes straight into English without any trouble,’ she said. Well, yes and no. It went into Constance Garnett’s English without trouble. She produced stylish late Victorian prose, easy on the eye, reflecting the time in which she was living and appealing to the sensibilities of English readers. And because it appealed, her translations have endured. The poet Joseph Brodsky said: ‘The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either. They are reading Constance Garnett.’ The point was well made.

Happily other translations and re-translations have followed. Not just of Tolstoy, but of Homer and Dante, Goethe and Proust. New translations are new conversations. They return to the original text and uncover new meanings and new truths. They are a good and necessary thing, showing that the original endures, is still vital.

In the 80s I went to work for a London publishing house that wasn’t afraid to commission translations. While I was there I had the idea for a new imprint – a series of ‘literary encounters’: translations introduced by living writers whose own output had been influenced by the foreign writer. This was ‘translation as conversation’ made flesh. The editorial meeting to float the project took place on May 19^th 1983, and my notes (I have them still) seem now to come from a lost Eden, gloriously eclectic and high-minded.

My lofty proposal began with a quotation from Melville: ‘For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round’. Ideas for translated works ranged from the Czech writer Skvorecky (with an introduction by Tom Stoppard) to Zbigniew Herbert (prefaced by Ted Hughes). I even suggested George Mackay Brown might introduce Strindberg’s The People of Hemsö. In fact, none of these came to pass, but the imprint went ahead and in 1985 brought out its first six titles, which included translations from Hebrew (Aharon Appelfeld), Polish (Witkiewicz), Italian (Grazia Deledda), and German (Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka). Hardly anyone will remember them now. They didn’t sell.

The following year, 1986, we published another six books, amongst them Ismail Kadaré’s The General of the Dead Army, the story of an Italian general who is sent to Albania twenty years after the end of World War II to search for the remains of those who lost their lives in the campaign. The enormity of the general’s task slowly overwhelms him and eventually despair gives way to madness. It is a solemn, sobering book, whose haunting message is the futility of war. No one in those days had heard of Kadaré, but some twenty years later he would go on to win the inaugural Man Booker International Prize. For me this completed a personal conversation that had started much earlier, when I was a post-grad student in the 70s on a visit to Paris. A young man at my table in a café was reading a book called Le Général de l’Armée Morte. I asked him what it was about. ‘De la futilité de la guerre,’ he said. The next day I bought the book and discovered that it was a translation. Kadaré was not French, but Albanian.

If literary translation is a kind of miracle, it is one we have been slow to recognise.  Until the King James version, translators of the Bible were routinely strangled or burned at the stake. William Tyndale, who coined such phrases as ‘let there be light’ and ‘the salt of the earth’ suffered both fates. We have come a long way since then, but the translator’s work is still too often marginalised and taken for granted. Things are certainly improving, but until recently the name of the translator was often hidden amongst the prelim pages, a tiny intimation tucked away alongside the printer and binder.

This may have been a deliberate attempt on the part of the publishers to maintain the illusion that whatever we are reading comes to us fresh and first-hand – the word unmediated, as it were. Readers prefer authors, and may not want to be reminded that anyone else is involved. Despite the fact that much of our own culture and literary canon has been shaped by translated texts, from the Bible to Homer, from Freud to Dostoevsky, the supremacy of English as a world language has led to a certain complacency in Britain and a chariness of anything ‘foreign’. Our relative monoglotism has led to a strange suspicion of translation.

People used not to know how to think about translation, or what to say about it. It was regarded as slightly mystical, and those who practised it a little bit suspect – the linguistic equivalent of train spotters: sad, dishevelled, middle-aged men in fingerless gloves, still living with their mothers – or so legend had it.  Translators, as if sensing this, learned to do a kind of disappearing act. David Bellos, Director of the translation programme at Princeton and an award-winning translator in his own right, has described his trade as ‘a second-rate kind of thing.’  Michael Hoffmann, another foremost practitioner, puts it this way: ‘Translators are very much alone with their secret pride and public humiliation.’

In reality translators are quite normal people, if typically precise and conscientious, aware of the huge responsibilities and obligations upon them. They are often naturally diffident, used to being in the background. In many cases they have colluded in their own invisibility. I certainly did at one time, sometimes not even being credited anywhere on the book. Many years later when I mentioned to a translator friend that I was writing a novel featuring a translator, he said: ‘Ah, a minor character then?’ – as if someone of his own profession couldn’t possibly be centre stage. Translation has traditionally been a low-profile, as well as a low-status career, a private affair conducted by rather private people working mostly alone, and accustomed to doing a sort of disappearing act. In other countries, however, translators are highly esteemed. In Japan, for example, they enjoy much the same status as novelists. But all translators know instinctively not to overwhelm or compete with the author, understanding that the author’s whole identity is bound up with the way he or she places words on the page. Literary translation, when it is done well, is therefore a supreme act of empathy.

Alas, when it is not done well, it can cause grievous pain to the author, the kind of pain not helped by opiates. I experienced this once – as author not translator – and to read carefully written passages that had been mangled and rendered senseless in another language (one that I was familiar with) was truly distressing. In his essay A Publisher’s Vision, Christopher MacLehose, who has perhaps done more than anyone else to advance the cause of literary translation in this country, wrote: ‘It seems to me certainly desirable that a translator open a line to the author, and keep it always open. I don’t remember a single case in which the time taken to establish communication with an author was time wasted. On the other hand I remember many cases where a failure to do so has led to grief.’

My own translations, from long ago now, were mostly of Russian dissident writers, often imprisoned or in Siberian labour camps. How I longed to be able to contact them, to check on meanings that no dictionary could provide. With the advent of email, collaboration between translator and author has become easy. Keeping a line always open, as MacLehose puts it, is to everyone’s advantage, not least the reader’s. When a book of mine went into Dutch, my translator emailed me around one hundred questions, not because she was a bad translator; rather because she was a very good one. But if a translator refuses to engage with an author, there is nothing the author can do, and the results can be a pig’s ear. Or the ear of a pig, as my terrible arms-length translator might have written.

Nowadays the business of translation is changing, and a good thing too. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which opened the floodgates to Scandi Noir, did much to soften the profile of ‘foreign’ fiction. The perception of novels in translation is now different, no longer off-putting. We are gradually coming to see ‘foreign-ness’ as pleasing and attractive, to accept that we don’t always have to feel at home in foreign fiction. Dancing with strangers can be fun. Talking about it afterwards too.

In Britain we have tended to be an insular lot with literary tastes to match – this despite the fact that our whole literary canon has been shaped by translation: from Homer to the Bible, from Dostoevsky to Freud. But tastes are changing. Translated fiction plays an increasingly important part in literary festivals. Translation is a conversation piece. Prize money is being equally divided between author and translator. Relative to how it once was translation is being shouted from the rooftops.

When John Keats, aged just twenty, first looked into Chapman’s Homer, he was in effect paying tribute to the wonder of translation. He likened his experience to that of an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer laying eyes on an unknown land. Keats’ poem is an extended metaphor, the ‘realms of gold’ the poet has ‘travelled’ signifying both the lands of ancient Greece and books themselves embossed in gold lettering. Like most of us, Keats could not read Greek. It was Chapman who opened a new and magical world to the young poet, and it is Keats’ thrill of encountering this new world that is in turn conveyed to us – the readers of his poem.

As a reader, there is a feeling of trust and hope when you abandon yourself to translation. You are exposing yourself to other minds, other manners, other cultures, other possibilities. Literature in translation doesn’t always repay your trust and your hope, but when it does it is truly rewarding and enriching and mind-expanding. It allows you to see other ways of life – other possibilities, other matters, other manners –  and can help increase the understanding between nations far better than politicians, who often do the reverse.

 

Jennie Erdal is the author of the memoir Ghosting: A Double Life and the novel, The Missing Shade of Blue. Both books have been widely praised, Ghosting already having reached classic status. She is completing her second novel with the same care, intelligence and imagination she brought to the first.

Find out more about A Year of Conversation at www.ayearofconversation.com (#AYOC2019)

Douglas Watt uses his knowledge and passion for 17th century Scottish history in writing his MacKenzie crime thrillers. He has now released the 4th book in the series and speaks to BooksfromScotland about his creation.

 

The Unnatural Death of a Jacobite
By Douglas Watt
Published by Luath Press

 

You’ve just released your latest novel The Unnatural Death of a Jacobite. Could you tell us a little about it?

Crime and history meet in a rollercoaster journey through 17^th century Scotland. The Unnatural Death of a Jacobite is a crime novel set in Edinburgh in 1689 during the first Jacobite Rebellion, featuring investigative advocate John Mackenzie and his side-kick Davie Scougall.

A body is discovered near Craigleith Quarry on the outskirts of Edinburgh after a summer storm. It’s identified as that of Aeneas MacLeod, a young lawyer who works in Edinburgh. MacLeod’s family believe the Lord Advocate is sitting on the case and ask John MacKenzie to investigate.

 

This is the 4^th novel is a series. How do you approach writing a single narrative within a bigger overarching time frame? Have you planned how far your series will run?

The books are all standalone crime novels but they feature the same main characters and are set in consecutive years from 1686. The characters respond to the major historical events of the period and interact with a mix of fictional and real historical figures. In my mind’s eye I can see the general course of the next few books in the series, while focusing on the book I’m writing. I originally planned to take the series all the way to 1707 (Union of the Parliaments) and beyond, with one book set every year, but I may need to increase my pace a bit if I want to get there!

My immediate target is to reach 1692 (7^th in the series) and the Massacre of Glencoe. I’m beginning to think about a plot which will place MacKenzie and Scougall in Glencoe at some point in 1692 – the theme of the book is, of course, politically-inspired slaughter. There’s lots of interesting events during the rest of the 1690s for further books: famine, Jacobite plots and the Darien Disaster, which I know very well from researching and writing a non-fiction book about it (The Price of Scotland). I’d love to write a crime story about Darien as a lived experience through the eyes of MacKenzie and Scougall.

 

You combine two genres in the Mackenzie thrillers: crime and historical fiction. How do you balance both genre expectations? Are you interested in subverting them too?

I think the expectations are similar for both genres: character, pace, plot, denouement. Historical crime needs historical authenticity without overloading historical description. I want to let the reader experience history with the characters in a vivid setting. I’m not aiming to subvert the genres, rather I want to use crime fiction to explore themes in Scottish History during the late 17^th century.

Each book, as well as a crime fiction, is about a particular historical issue: the decline of Highland chiefs (Death of a Chief), the Scottish Witch Hunt (Testament of a Witch), mob violence in Edinburgh during the Glorious Revolution (Pilgrim of Slaughter) and political division (The Unnatural Death of a Jacobite).

The underlying theme of the series is the fragmentation of religious orthodoxy and the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment.

 

Which writers do you turn to for inspiration?

For history I’d turn to Samuel Pepys’ Diary. There’s not much Scottish History in it, but as a window on the world of the 17^th century it’s unsurpassed.

I would also dip into John Prebble’s Glencoe which brilliantly evokes late 17^th century Scotland. It was the book that got me hooked on Scottish History.

In terms of crime I’d go for Georges Simenon’s Maigret books, anything by James Ellroy and Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho novels.

 

Your books are set in the late 17^th Why does that period of Scottish history appeal to you for a fictional setting?

I’ve always been fascinated by this period of Scottish History. The late 17th century was a paradoxical time of witch hunts, blasphemy trials and religious fanaticism, which also saw the green shoots of the Scottish Enlightenment. New ideas about science and trade sat side-by-side with older, darker notions – witch hunting, belief in magic, Satan as a real presence in people’s lives. Sometimes the old and new are found in the same individual – a joint stock investor who hunts witches, a political liberal who hates Catholics, a scientist obsessed with the occult. This clash of old and new makes the period particularly interesting from a fictional perspective.

 

What do you think your novels tell us about contemporary Scotland?

The novels reflect contemporary Scotland’s obsession with identity and history. They also reflect concerns about division, in terms of politics, religion and culture. Just like 1689, we live in fractured times – nationalist/unionist, Brexiteer/ Remainer. In the novels, this is highlighted by the contrast between the two major characters. John MacKenzie, who is based loosely on a real historical figure, is a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, sceptical about religion and a reluctant Jacobite. Davie Scougall is a Presbyterian Lowlander of a puritanical bent who supports the new regime of William and Mary and regards the Revolution of 1688 as a glorious one. MacKenzie and Scougall are good friends but they tend to disagree about the main issues of the day!

 

What are you reading just now?

Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon. I’m always impressed by Simenon’s economy of style, creation of atmosphere and acutely observed characters.

 

The Unnatural Death of a Jacobite by Douglas Watt is published by Luath Press, priced £8.99

They say the past was a simpler time, but Elizabeth Macneal’s debut novel, The Doll Factory, brings us a Victorian London that thrills in psychological twists and turns. We have an extract here with an intriguing first encounter.

 

Extract taken from The Doll Factory
By Elizabeth Macneal
Published by Picador

 

The Factory

 

The house is both shabbier and finer than Iris imagined; tall, narrow and brick, with the look of a rake gone to seed. Its windows stare. One is broken. Ferns and palms froth out of every orifice; over window boxes, out of terracotta pots and planters, around the sides of hanging baskets. The straw-strewn lane is barely passable when a horse and cart trots by, and Iris almost has to crouch in a plant pot, a fern tickling her face.

Once the cart has rounded the corner, she clears her throat and looks down at her dress. She wears a small silk rosette on her chest, a Christmas gift from Albie, and she smooths its ragged edges. She picks at a soup stain on the sleeve of her gown. It is her finest outfit, greyed cotton that was once blue. She used to like the way it pulled in her waist, the pert sleeves that made her arms look slender. But now, she thinks she looks like a poor maiden aunt, not the sort of person likely to indulge in perfect triangles of cucumber sandwiches or cream so rich it gave her a stomach-ache.

She hovers her hand over the doorbell, and then reads the plaque beneath it.

‘The Factory. PRB. (Please Ring Bell.)’

She smiles at it, a sly drawing of a line separating those who know the initials’ true meaning, and the uninitiated who do not. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She feels a brief pride over her inclusion in that inner circle. She knows because Clarissa told her. Her sister does not. Only those who season their speech with phrases like ‘critics’, ‘Royal Academy’ and ‘exhibition’ would know it. But then, she has no claim to any of that. The paper painting in her hand, tucked into a sleeve of fabric pinched from Mrs Salter, crumples in the wind.

‘Are you going to ring the bell, or would you prefer to have your lesson on the street?’

Iris leaps back, trips over a pot, and stubs her toe. The pain is searing. She looks about her.

‘Up here, Miss Whittle,’ he calls. Louis salutes her from the first-floor window.

‘I – I was just about to ring the bell—’

‘And have been for the last five minutes? I must admit I nearly gave myself away when that cart burst past. It looked like you were grazing on the potted plant.’

‘You’ve been watching me?’ She reddens.

‘I would say observing. It’s an important skill for an artist. I’ll attend you now.’

She has her words prepared. I am not your model yet – somebody you can stare at unannounced for five minutes! But when the door opens, Louis smiles at her and her outrage falls away. She breathes in the scent of turpentine and wax and linseed oil. The carpets are threadbare, the chandelier missing most of its shards, but the walls are thick with paintings – some finished, some barely begun. The hallway is painted a startling swampy blue, and peacock feathers are arranged in a neat row between the dado rail and the ceiling. There is gilding everywhere – the skirting boards, the door frames, the banisters and newel posts.

 She wants to take her time, but Louis hurries her along.

‘Is your sister here, Mr Frost?’

‘Clarissa? Oh, no. She has her fallen women causes. The Marylebone Society. Some mite needed tending to. And please, call me by my Christian name. I can’t stand all this mannerly nonsense.’

‘But—’

‘I know, I know. I did ask her to chaperone. But I can promise that you will leave here entirely unsacrificed to Venus.’

Her chest constricts. She would like to find a way to tell him, delicately, that he should desist from such flirtation – she is here to learn to paint, and for nothing else. Other models may comport themselves like prostitutes, but she is different; she will grip tight the jewel of her respectability. And then she realizes she is already thinking as if she has agreed to model. She has not. She will not. Or may not.

‘Are your servants present?’

‘Servants?’ Louis wafts his hand. ‘I couldn’t bear to have anyone fussing like that. A weekly charwoman is all a gentleman should need in these modern times.’ He gestures at the narrow staircase. ‘Come, I’ll give you a grand tour of the studio.’

She has never met anybody like him. It is either very liberating or very intimidating, and she is not sure which. She can see that he is the kind of person used to getting his own way, who makes a virtue of shocking with his views, and it gives her a perverse sense of delight: she won’t humour him by being outraged. She will take pleasure in thwarting him, and feign complete composure at his remarks.

‘I note, at least, that you’re no longer at death’s door,’ she says.

‘I must assign the credit for my hasty recovery to the nursing skills of Guinevere.’

‘She sounds very generous,’ Iris says, and she finds herself pleased that he is married. It removes any complexity.

‘She is. But she ate all of my Christmas pudding so she is far from being a model woman. In fact, you will meet her shortly.’

‘Oh?’

Louis leads her up the stairs and through a door. ‘The studio, ma’am. I tidied especially.’

‘Tidied?’ Iris steps on a mussel shell and flinches. It is as if the room has been spun like a globe until the contents of every drawer, every bookshelf, have been hurled up. A stuffed bear cub lies in the corner, blanketed by newspapers. There are a pair of convex mirrors on the wall. The studio is brimful with clutter.

‘Of course, Mother and I could never agree on a definition for the word, either. Ti-dy. What a dull sound it makes! But there is such mediocrity, when everything is arranged as it should be. Don’t you find that? I’ve never believed in cataloguing things – of putting books here, and cutlery there, and whatnot. It shows such a want of taste and imagination.’

As he speaks, she tries to take it all in. She looks at his easel, streaked with colour.

‘Such a dismal mechanical mind which tidies. A factory mind.’

A movement in the corner, and she screams. ‘What is – the bear is alive! Good God!’

Louis starts to laugh. He laughs until he is holding on to the edge of the door, his mouth open in a silent howl, eyes pinched closed. ‘A – a – a bear—’

‘It really isn’t funny,’ Iris begins, trying not to flinch as the creature ambles towards them. She does not want to provoke his mockery further, but she worries it will attack. He looks just the sort of person who would buy a dangerous animal for a jape, and then find himself killed by it. She moves back. ‘Have you had its teeth and claws pulled?’

It is enough for Louis to straighten, wiping away the tears from his eyes. ‘No! How could I? That would be cruel. This is Guinevere, a wombat, and she is in mourning.’

‘Oh. Ah – I see,’ Iris says. ‘And she is not your –’ She almost says wife, but stops herself. She tests the unfamiliar word. ‘A wombat. In mourning.’ Iris notes the small black handkerchief fastened around the beast’s neck, and tries to hide her amusement behind her hand.

‘I see nothing humorous in it,’ Louis says. ‘She lost Lancelot over Christmas, although admittedly they were not friends. He roamed upstairs and she lived down here. I was quite bereft.’

‘Was he very old?’

‘If only.’ Louis looks down. ‘Rossetti thought it would be entertaining to have him smoke a cigar, but Lancelot gobbled the whole box, a slab of chocolate beside, and snuffed it the next day. Rossetti and I are no longer on speaking terms.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She extends a half-hearted pat in the direction of the wombat, which fails to make contact with its fur. Guinevere is built with the heft of a brown, hairy cannonball.

‘Is she friendly?’

In response, Louis bundles the creature into his arms, groans at her weight, and tickles her under the chin.

 

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal is published by Picador, priced £12.99

It’s hard to really comprehend what goes on day in and day out on the frontline of the NHS, but, thankfully, a collection of recent books have shone a light on the amazing work that goes on in our hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. Leah Hazard has written a memoir based on her career as a midwife, and BooksfromScotland caught up with her to hear more about her experiences.

 

Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story
By Leah Hazard
Published by Hutchinson

 

You have been a midwife in the NHS for a number of years. What made you decide to write a book about your experiences?

I realised from the earliest days of my training that the goings-on of a maternity hospital are stranger, more wonderful, more entertaining and more moving than fiction. I always fancied writing something midwifery-related after my retirement, but my decision to write Hard Pushed was motivated by a growing love for my profession and an equally strong sense of frustration at the constraints of an under-resourced health service.

 

You probably had too many amazing stories to fit in one book! How did you decide what stories you wanted to tell?

Every midwife can remember the events that really moved her, no matter how long or short her career may have been. I made a list of the women whose stories had really stayed with me, and chose the ones that I thought would move the reader and also illustrate the breadth and complexity of my role.

 

There’s been a few books recently about working within the NHS. Why do you think readers are so fascinated about the day to day experiences in the health service?

The human body is a site of endless mystery, and the practitioners who understand and treat the body have assumed almost mythical, magical status. At the same time, people are aware that those very same practitioners are human, and I think it’s that humanity that readers find captivating. We are so lucky in this country to have the NHS, and I feel very privileged to be part of an institution that continues to capture the public imagination in this way.

 

What did your fellow midwives feel when you told them you were writing this book?

I have to admit that I was a bit scared to tell my colleagues about this project; midwives are an opinionated, passionate bunch! I needn’t have worried, though. On the whole, my colleagues have been delighted that I’m trying to show the world how hard we’re all working, and under such difficult conditions. There will always be midwives who don’t feel that my experience represents their own, and that’s fine, too – our diversity is part of what makes us special.

 

Hard Pushed doesn’t shy away from revealing some hard truths about the NHS. Are you optimistic about the future of healthcare? What would you like to see changed?

I have to be optimistic – the alternative is too depressing. We need to recognise and respect the pivotal role that midwives can play in public health. Our profession goes beyond cuddling babies and holding women’s hands, and once the complexity and value of our role is understood, then perhaps we’ll get the funding and institutional support we need to provide a better service.

 

Now that your book has been published, will you carry on writing?

Absolutely. Book Two is outlined and ready to go on my laptop…watch this space!

 

Hard Pushed: A Midwive’s Story by Leah Hazard is published by Hutchinson, priced £16.99

Jenny Lindsay is one of Scotland’s best performance poets, and the publication of her new poetry collection This Script has been BooksfromScotland’s most highly anticipated releases of the year. We’re delighted to share some of her poetry with you, and highly recommend you go to the This Script show when it tours around the UK later on in the year.

 

Extracts taken from This Script
By Jenny Lindsay
Published by Stewed Rhubarb Press

 

This Script

 

a part-univocal poem in and about ‘I’

 

Since six, it imprints in skin –

this girl script, this birthright which kills spirit

whilst timid lips twitch Shhhhh, girls

Swirl mildly within this

is itch in this skin, in this script

 

Misfits spit:

KILL THIS!

Whip nit-wits stingingly with livid riffs!

This script stinks!

It is shirt lifts. It is skirt shims with impish grins

It is slits pink, bikini tits. It is

pricks infringing with victim scripts

It is in birth til infirm

this script, this girlish mimicry…

 

Grim risk if girls wish trim bits within knicks!

If thigh-ripping thick skins in big biffs shirts

bits binding within rigid distinct ticks ID-ing with

script-ish wish-lists is inspiring? PFT!

It binds ‘I’ within slim-picking piddling limits!

 

Misfits flick digits. Fists twitch. Indignity fizzing.

Sighs rising.

 

I

GIRL

Is it implicit? Is it ID?

This insipid script – is it simply right?

Writ in birth? Identity? Cis?

(is this msprnt??)

 

Kick it. Stick it in bins brimming with skin flicks!

High-five other ‘I’s!

Let a collective ‘I’ light up within winning shin-kickings!

Bitches, reclaim this script!

Be singing: one is not born, one becomes WOMAN!

 

oops… off script…

 

It’s illicit thinking, skirting kinship with siblings whilst

hissing indignity within isms splits ID from ‘I’s –

Schisms rip Twit’ring vigils

Timid girls flit, sighing:

Skirmish! Irk! Pitching in is visibility! Crisis-rid!

 

Shhhhh

Shhhhh

 

Kick it. This script?

It’s ‘I’ ridden

‘I’ is limiting

‘I’ is ‘I’ first

Tight-knit wiring gives wind chill

 

We are not this script

Though we act it well – and with vim

‘I’ stands still, individual,

while a collective head wricks necks tae listen.

 

 

 The Imagined We

 

We are never permitted to be human

poets, writers, journalists, whatevers

We are female poets. Women

writers. We are murdered women

We are statistics

We are problems to be solved

We are problems to be represented

 

Each of the imagined we who rises up

becomes us, whether we like it or not

 

Do not tear them down, sisters!

Do not tear us down, women folk!

 

It is not womanly of us, to us

to be at each other’s throats

 

not when they are our throats

 

not when sirens are the soundtrack tae our newsfeeds

 

or, we are slashed at the throat

We are severed heads weighed down with rocks

in bin bags chucked far from our bodies

our humanity shucked off

by default humans’ hands

 

We stand in the shower

The blood trickles down our thighs on

One of those days

One of those days

One of those days

Where we’re encouraged

Me time!

Me time!

ME TIME!

 

Alone with chocolate!

Alone with scrummy bubble-baths in delicious flavours!

 

Misogyny Mud-pie and Mint?

Creamy Dreamy Cum-dumpster Froth?

Raspberry Coulis and Kool-Aid? Mmm!

Paedo Pear with Jojoba and Argan Oil

Lollipop?

 

We plug it in all holes, don’t we?

We lean our heads on the tiles and

watch our blood plop and pool

because the plug-hole is blocked.

 

We imagine that an epic car-chase

followed by fist fights led us here to

this bleeding from a hidden wound –

and that we are renegades! We are superheroes!

(or perhaps functioning drunk anti-heroes)

We have trauma in our pasts and we are

Setting Things Right!

 

The Imagined THEM! The bad guys

have been left in pools of writhing regret!

Some of them have stakes sticking out of where

their hearts once were – some of them

turned tae dust in front of our eyes.

 

And we are bruised

We are injured

But we are alive

 

We are just temporarily crunched over

tenderised, bleeding from the fight

This script writes itself

Plop

plop

plops

In our silence…

 

PICTURE THE SCENE:

 

Strings rise up

are soon accompanied by brass

as the camera angle switches

from our point of view

It starts at polished toe-nails that

sparkle through our bloodied feet

pans up smoothly – at the same speed

as that constant little trickle

The lens ensures a glimpse

of our shaved mound

There’s a sloooo

ooowing at un-suckled nipple

 

And then, our face

our face in tight-lipped defiance

close-eyed anger

and then a sudden SNAPPING OPEN!

Clearly, fierce pain inside

 

The scene ends with our fists

punching and then

pummelling the tiles

our strangled throats expleting

our knuckles bloodied too now

all this fucking PAIN!

 

At which an audience will cry:

BRAVO!

 

What fighting spirit!

Triumph over adversity!

 

All those banished demons!

and the removal of awards.

 

Rewards limited tae a fist

smashing another fist

and being told it’s the fights against us

that make us who we are?

 

And that we must love the pain of this at all costs.

 

We must love the pain of this at all costs.

 

 

An Invite to your baby shower or your child’s birthday party

They don’t make them like they used to.

Don’t make women like yer Gran did.

Nor daughter’s like yer Ma did.

Or girls like this absence

in the shape of a child.

 

I’ll send best wishes. Maybe

I might come sip

awkward prosecco at the barbie,

get accidentally pished like

my ‘aunties’ did.

 

But never ask me of ideal worlds,

or if this choice is choice,

or look at me knowingly when

you hear I’m in love now –

there is no path but the one that’s walked.

 

This Hello, welcome to the world! I wish you wonder!

Joy! Nae Larkin!

is all I have to give at present.

This cradled hope, though

no gifts were asked for,

no gifts demanded.

 

 

This Script by Jenny Lindsay is published by Stewed Rhubarb Press, priced £10.99