THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

David Flanagan is back with another amazing adventure with Uncle Pete and TM, this time in the arctic, searching for a lost polar bear. It’s another cracker sure to get young readers flying through its pages! Enjoy the extract below.

 

Uncle Pete and the Polar Bear Rescue
By David C. Flanagan
Published by Little Door Books

 

‘What’s that in the sky up ahead?’ TM suddenly shouted to Uncle Pete, pointing from her seat in the plane. ‘It looks like smoke!’

It was smoke, the thickest, blackest, nastiest looking stuff you can imagine. There was a trail of it snaking up through the cold, clear Arctic air. The smoke hung in the blue sky, like someone had smeared soot across it.

Uncle Pete turned the plane to try and avoid the black smoke, and TM coughed and coughed when they flew through the horrible dark clouds of it.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ spluttered Uncle Pete.

TM peered over the side of the plane, trying to see where the smoke began.

‘Look!’ she yelled to Uncle Pete. ‘A ship! It’s coming from a ship!’

Sure enough, far below the plane, there was an enormous dark ship moving fast through the ocean. Icebergs just bounced off the front of the ship, so it was obviously very strong.

The ship had ten huge funnels, all belching out black smoke into the air. There were big cranes along its deck (which is what the floors on a ship are called), and some other mysterious objects that were all covered up. Uncle Pete felt a bit nervous about going closer, but he had to find out what had happened to Berg’s family. And he wanted to see what was under those covers on the ship’s deck.

‘Let’s take a look!’ he yelled to TM and Berg. ‘Hold tight!’

Trying to avoid the clouds of black smoke billowing from the funnels, Uncle Pete dived the plane towards the ship, roaring around it in a big circle.

The ship had a name, painted on the back in big white letters. It was called THE HUNTER.

‘It looks very suspicious indeed!’ shouted Uncle Pete to TM and Berg. ‘I’m going to fly a bit closer and have another look at what’s on the deck!’

Secretly, he wondered if Berg’s family were being hidden under those covers, but he didn’t want to say anything to his friends just yet.

Uncle Pete turned the plane back towards the ship and flew much nearer to it so he could see if there were any clues about what it was doing.

Berg’s nose twitched as they got closer to the ship.

‘I can smell my family!’ he yelled. ‘I can definitely smell them! They’re on that horrible looking ship!’

Just then, three angry looking men burst out of a big metal door on the ship, shouting and pointing up at Uncle Pete’s plane. They didn’t look very happy, or very friendly. The men ran to the mysterious shapes on the deck and pulled off the covers. Uncle Pete gulped when he saw they’d revealed some big guns.

The men started turning the guns towards Uncle Pete’s plane and then… BANG, BANG, BANG! The guns shot at them!

Now, lots of dangerous things had happened to Uncle Pete on his explorer adventures, but he’d NEVER been shot at before. He was completely shocked! Uncle Pete was always peaceful and kind, and hated when people shot animals, or each other.

‘Uh-oh!’ shouted Uncle Pete, ducking down in his seat. ‘TM! Berg! Get your heads down!’

Uncle Pete gritted his teeth and flicked the plane from side to side, trying to avoid all the bullets being fired at them from the ship.

TM was absolutely furious. “How dare you!” she yelled at the men on the ship, though they couldn’t hear her. Then she had an idea.

‘Berg!’ she yelled. ‘Grab some tins of beans and let them have it!’

Berg opened one of their rucksacks and pulled out six tins of beans. Uncle Pete turned and twisted the little plane towards the men on the ship and, just as they passed over the blazing guns, Berg threw the tins of beans over the side.

The tins flew through the air, clonked two of the men on the head and knocked them out. They fell in a heap on the ship’s deck. But this just made the third man angrier, and he spun his big gun around and began blasting away at Uncle Pete’s plane again.

‘This is too dangerous, even for us!’ Uncle Pete said to TM. ‘I think we’ll need to go and get help!’

Just as he was talking to TM, a bullet from a ship’s gun tore a hole through one of the wings of the plane. Uncle Pete managed to keep it flying, but he now definitely thought it was time to get out of there.

‘HA!’ shouted TM over the side of the plane. ‘It’ll take more than that to stop us!’

But then another bullet hit the engine with a loud THUD. The engine spluttered and stopped – stardust poured out of the hole in the engine making a long sparkly trail across the sky.

‘Uh, oh!’ said the three friends all at once.

The two men who’d been knocked out by Berg’s bean tin bombs were getting up rubbing their heads. They cheered when they saw the stardust trail from the damaged engine, and the little plane beginning to dive towards the ocean.

‘We’re going to have to jump out!’ yelled Uncle Pete, hoping he’d packed his parachute and not his dirty washing, just as he’d done by mistake on his first adventure with TM. He’d made sure he’d put a parachute in the back for Berg and he’d made a tiny little one for TM, too, just in case they got into a bad situation. And this was definitely a bad situation.

 

Uncle Pete and the Polar Bear Rescue by David C. Flanagan is published by Little Door Books, priced £6.99.

Robin Scott-Elliot is an acclaimed writer of children’s books. His latest release, Sweet Skies, is a brilliant tale of a boy in post-war Berlin who dreams of being a pilot but is fighting to survive in a battle-weary city. In the extract below, Otto witnesses the victorious US pilots coming to the city’s rescue.

 

Sweet Skies
By Robin Scott-Elliot
Published by Everything With Words

 

Chocolate was falling from the sky. Otto watched it fall, head back, mouth open, and if he’d been able to tear his gaze away, he would have seen that every child gathered at the end of the Tempelhof runway was a mirror image. Every head with every shade of hair colour, red to blonde to jet black to brown pigtails and yellowy stubble like a cornfield after harvest, was tipped back, mouths open as if in hope the chocolate might float straight in.

It was like watching parachutists leap from doomed planes, except the parachutes started small and stayed that way. They were handkerchiefs after all. Soon they could make out the bounty hanging beneath them and, as if someone had barked a command, eager arms stretched skywards.

They’d arrived early as Ilse instructed and argued about where the best spot would be. In the end they split up. Karl hopped and hauled his way up the rubble mountain, giving him the best view to direct Otto and Ilse in their candy collection mission.

There were more children gathered than the day before. As Ilse predicted, news of the candy drop had spread (it was an impossible secret to keep). Ilse was close to the fence, where most children gathered. They clustered together, moving this way and that like a flock of starlings, trying to estimate where the parachutes would land.

Otto was at the foot of the mountain, but the noise of the plane engines meant he couldn’t hear Karl’s shouts. It was the waving crutch that caught his eye. Karl was pointing to the cemetery. Otto looked up again. Karl was right, several parachutes were drifting that way.

Otto leapt over the ragged wire fence. The cemetery was one of the new ones dotted across the city – this is what happens after wars. The graves were wooden crosses, hammered into the ground in ragged rows and fighting a losing battle against straggly bushes and weeds. There was not a lot of time for looking after the dead when staying alive was such a full-time occupation.

A few others followed Otto, noticing Karl’s direction. They eyed each other, like runners at the start of a race… how quick is she? He looks slow? Why’s he looking over there? Because here comes one. A makeshift red parachute was nearly down, attracting every eye in the cemetery. Which meant Otto wasn’t looking where he was going and tripped over a loose brick. He sprawled forward, head just missing the cross of a tilting grave marker.

He was up again in seconds, but his fall was enough for a girl of about his age, hair pulled into a ponytail and a fierce look on her face, to leap and catch it. She clutched it to her chest and spun round to face the others. The red handkerchief parachute made it look like she’d been wounded.

‘Mine,’ she snarled, a declaration accepted at once by the others, not least because several more parachutes were about to touch down.

Otto saw one hanging from the corner of a cross and ran. A boy tried to trip him but he jumped over the outstretched foot and dived for his target, yanking it off the cross and pressing it to his chest as he rolled into a ball ready for the other boy’s attack.

But like the girl – who was sitting on a grave marker staring at her chocolate bar as if she couldn’t believe what was happening – he was left alone. Finders/keepers was the Kinder Code: the unwritten rules between children trying to make their lives among the ruins of the adult world. Besides, why fight over one chocolate bar when plenty others were falling from the sky?

Otto rolled onto his back to catch his breath. Above him was another parachute, heading right for him. Chocolate falling from the sky. How ridiculous. He was laughing as he scrambled to his feet and reached one hand for it and didn’t stop laughing even as another boy leapt across him and grabbed the precious package.

The laughter spread, a happy infection, and as they darted after the parachutes, beneath the shadows of the Skymasters, child after child began to catch it, even as they pushed and shoved and leapt and dived for the chocolate from the sky. The cemetery was full of laughter.

When it was done, Otto, who’d forgotten a bag, scrambled up to Karl’s vantage point with his booty rolled up in the front of his baggy old jersey. It was his father’s and he had to roll the sleeves up to reveal his hands. He dropped his treasure in front of Karl and pulled himself out of the tangle of jersey. It had been chilly when he left home before the sun was up. He was hot now, sweating, and still laughing, although it was more of a gasp for breath.

A last plane roared overhead and a last mini-parachute dropped. They watched it flutter down into the upstretched hands of a small boy dancing a jig in anticipation. Otto scanned the skies then switched his attention to the ground.

Over the fence in the airfield, lorries were rushing to the parked planes. The unloading began at once; sacks were humped out of the planes, collected by groundcrew and lifted into lorries. Once the planes were emptied, their engines spluttered back to life and the ch-ch-ch-burrrrr of propellers jerked them forward.

Otto waved as the first Skymaster rose towards them from the runway. He could make out the pilots in the cockpit, caps jammed on tight by their headphones, dark glasses in place, setting a course for their home base far away in the safety of the west.

Otto kept waving, Karl joined in and below them the rest of the children did too. A number flashed into view on the plane’s fuselage – 712 – and as it did, the wings waggled. Otto raised both hands to the sky and yelled in delight. He was still yelling and punching the air when the next plane took off and that too waggled its wings as it flew over.

‘Where’s your bag? What did you get?’ Ilse’s face was red from the climb up the rubble and her parachute-chasing.

Otto ignored her first question and pointed at his jersey. On it lay three bars of chocolate.

‘One each,’ he said.

 

Sweet Skies by Robin Scott-Elliot is published by Everything With Words, priced £8.99.

Red Star Over Hebrides is a unique book where Donald Murray looks back at his childhood in Lewis through prose, poetry and song inspired by the deep-rooted social and cultural connections of the island with Russia and the Baltics. He explores aspects of Hebridean life, such as the fishing industry and crofting land raids with the stories of literary giants such as Dostoevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy. Below, Donald remembers a dominant community figure.

 

Red Star Over Hebrides
By Donald S. Murray
Published by Taproot Press

 

From ‘Capone and Dostoyevsky’

Hypocrisy is a dying art in these islands. Every weekend, there’s a queue buying scratchcards and DVDs at the local shop. ‘Give me those lucky dips, Martin,’ they announce to the shopkeeper. Or, ‘I’ll take this film. And that one,’ they say, placing the empty cases on the counter. ‘I need something to pass the time on a Sunday afternoon.’

Duncan Macdonald – the church elder that some twenty years ago we all knew better as Capone – would have stood for none of that. A tall powerful figure in his grey overcoat and hat, his eyes had the sharpness of a gannet’s gaze. For all that he was in his seventies, one look would have been enough to terrify the likes of Martin, his hand sweeping over these goods like Jesus chastising the moneychangers in the temple. ‘What do you mean selling stuff like that? It may do a lot for your profits, but it won’t do much for your soul!’ And then his glare would swirl round his fellow-shoppers. ‘Gambling! Breaking the Sabbath! What do you mean by doing such things?’

One time I was on the wrong side of this look was a few short weeks before he died. A young student, I was reading Crime and Punishment near the back of a crowded bus when he came to sit beside me.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

I told him.

‘Now tell me … Do you ever spend time reading the Bible? I bet you never spend much time doing the likes of that.’

I smiled weakly in response. There are some people with whom it is a waste of breath to quarrel.

 

Yet in his youth, Capone never spent much time studying the Bible. If rumours are to be believed, he was never still long enough to lift the Good Book. Instead, he would be scaling rocks on the shoreline; balancing on one leg or combing his hair while standing on a stone outcrop that jutted out a hundred feet over the ocean and daring others to follow his example.

‘I bet you couldn’t do that.’

He would clamber on the roofs of the village blackhouses too, blocking the chimney with a large flat stone or a piece of turf or wood. As the inhabitants ran from their smoke-choked home, he would be hiding behind a nearby wall, trying to choke down his own laughter.

‘I bet they don’t know what’s happened to them.’

‘I bet …’ Even in his years as a church elder, this phrase would be like a nervous tic on his lips. ‘I bet you don’t think often of your salvation … I bet you don’t read the Bible like you should…’ In the years before he found the Church, however, these words were more than habit. They clicked continually on his tongue as he played cards and dice with the men with whom he worked on the Hydro schemes in places like Cannich, Cluanie and Glencarn. Phrases like ‘I bet’, ‘I raise’, ‘Ace of Hearts’, and ‘Jack of Diamonds’ formed part of the only common language of their camps.

People from the battered ends and edges of all over Europe learned to use it. There were Highlanders and islanders; poor Irish from the ragged coastline of Donegal—coming from communities where steady work was rare and intending to return when things had changed. And then there were those known as the ‘Poles’ – the displaced men of not only Poland but also countries the others never knew existed – like Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia. Unlike the West Coasters and Irish, they had been forced to surrender many of their dreams of return. Looking over their shoulders at nations lost either to bloodshed or tyranny, they had little choice but to try and begin new lives on the strange and alien landscape they had chanced upon.

For all their differences, the groups had much in common. In slow and faltering English, they could each tell stories about the frailty and precariousness of life. Poverty and weakness had helped to make them that way; the sound of money in their pockets – crisp notes and coins – a more comforting rhythm than the pulse of their hearts. Only a good wage in their hands could grant them a short spell of security, a time of calm and ease.

The author Capone caught me reading, Fyodor Dostoevsky, would have known much better than me how they felt. Never from a rich family, his father, murdered by serfs, left little for his widow and children. This turned the young Fyodor into a radical—so much so that he was imprisoned for political reasons by Tsar Nicholas I. He made, too, an early, disastrous marriage to a widow who suffered from consumption and had a son from her first husband. He was also involved with a magazine banned by the Russian government. A short time later, his wife and brother died. At one stage, he even had to pawn his clothes for food.

And throughout all this, there was gambling. The gaming tables at Weisbauden in Germany. The spinning roulette wheel. Roll of dice. Cut of cards. Eyes shut and hoping for a glimpse of luck. A change of life. It was the same with the men in the hydro camp. The boredom of isolation. Stench of sweat and grime. The prospect of poverty when this spell of work came to an end. All this made them gather nightly at a table in the centre of their hut; the words ‘I bet…’, ‘flush’, ‘pontoon’, ‘I raise…’ never requiring any translation for this multinational group of men whose blackened fingers stained the cards within their hands. As they coughed up the dust of earth and boulder that had gathered in their lungs, the pile of coins gleamed brightly. To have it in their fingers meant the oblivion of whisky. Or another kind of oblivion—a new life that would help them escape the horrors of the old.

 

Red Star Over Hebrides by Donald S. Murray is published by Taproot Press, priced £14.99.

Sally Magnusson has brought readers another exceptional novel of historical fiction. We caught up with her to find out more about her writing and reading.

 

Music in the Dark
By Sally Magnusson
Published by John Murray

 

Congratulations Sally on the publication of your latest novel, Music in the Dark. Could you tell us a little bit about what readers should expect from it?

I hope what they’ll enjoy in it is a love story in later life, in which two people hurt by life find healing and joy. And also thatthey’ll discover new things about the role of women in resisting the Highland Clearances – and the cost of that resistance.

 

Your novels are all set in the past, in different times, in different locations. What is it that draws you to write historical fiction? How do you choose your times and places?

I love stories. I am endlessly fascinated by history. And I’m always drawn to the atmosphere and feel of place.  So when I have a good story – especially one that excavates the experience of women from the vacuum that is the historical record – and a good place to set it, that’s me on my way.

 

Do you read a lot of historical fiction too? Do you have recommendations of your favourites from this genre?

I do read a lot of historical fiction. I am Hilary Mantel’s number 1 fan. When it comes to The Clearances, Neil Gunn and Iain Crichton Smith are shining beacons from the last generation.

 

Music in the Dark is set at the time of the Highland Clearances, a significant moment in Scottish history. What did you want to bring to readers in exploring this period?

I wanted readers to feel what it was like to grow up in a Highland township as a talented girl who composed songs and had been well educated in the local parish school as well as being mentored by the Free Kirk minister, Rev Gustavus Aird (a real historical figure who championed the people of Strathcarron). I wanted them to understand the kind of community these townships were, and what it meant to lose it. I wanted to introduce them not just to the appalling violence with which the women of Greenyards were treated by the police in March 1854, but to the aftermath in the years and decades that followed What happened to these women afterwards with their head injuries and their bright dreams crushed? I want readers to think, but above all to feel their way into the minds and hearts of these people – men too – who are only a few generations away from us all. Jamesina’s later life in Glasgow and then Rutherglen, where the novel is set over the course of one night 30 years after the events in Strathcarron, is inspired by the life of my own great-grandmother.

 

Your main character, Jamesina Ross, is also a writer. Did you feel a kinship in writing a character who wants to bear witness too?

Yes, her love of words is something I identify with, and the way Latin has stayed with her through the decades, as it has done with me, and did too with my mother, who lost a lot when she succumbed to dementia in her later years, but never her Latin. And yes, I wanted Jamesina Ross to be concerned with bearing witness, because that mattered to people then and it matters now, as much as ever.

 

It is also an intimate story of love found later in life. How do you tackle writing emotional vulnerability?

I feel my way into the character and try to be honest. I’m attracted to ambivalence and nuance – the fact that people can feel one way one day, one hour even, and something different the next. I like characters who can be irritable and grumpy … I identify with them.

 

What are your favourite love stories in fiction?

Goodness, there are lots.  Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End leaps to mind. I also like love stories that don’t involve romance, like the one between Shuggie Bain and his mother.

 

What are you looking forward to reading next?

I’ve just finished Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. May need to give myself a laugh with some Dickens next – Birnam Wood has quite an ending.

 

Music in the Dark by Sally Magnusson is published by John Murray, priced £16.99.

David Robinson finds the beauty of church, art, and community in Peter Ross’s latest travelogue, Steeple Chasing.

 

Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church
By Peter Ross
Published by Headline

 

At the last four funerals I have been to, there hasn’t been a single hymn. I shouldn’t be too surprised: the growing unpopularity of Christian rituals of death is one of the signs of our times. As an example, consider this: direct cremations (no service, no mourners) used to be almost unheard of – even murderers and paupers got some sort of ceremonial send-off into the afterlife. Now they account for one in four of all funerals.

That’s how we are with death these days: increasingly, we’re giving it the cold, secular shoulder. We don’t want religious funerals in churches or chapels (none of my last four were), so the numbers have dropped by 80 per cent in the last decade. Bad news for the clergy and undertakers is good news for supermarkets and off-licences: according to the Co-op – which conducts 100,000 funerals a year – 21 per cent of us feel that the wake is more important than the funeral service.

So where does this leave Britain’s churches, those great traditional portals on the infinite?  If we have lost faith in Christianity so much that we don’t even want to use its rites at the one moment when they might offer consolation, what’s the point in keeping churches open in the first place? As congregations dwindle and roof repair bills rise, can they ever be anything more than a costly irrelevance?

Such questions are at the heart of Peter Ross’s Steeple Chasing, an ecclesiastical echo of his graveyard explorations in A Tomb With A View, which went on to win the 2021 Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year award. The titular pun indicates that this is to be a journalistic journey: with 16,000 Anglican churches in England alone, anything other than an impressionistic survey of British Christianity’s ebbing sea of faith is impossible.  For all that, his book is never less than fascinating, and even though some of its stop-off points are familiar (Lindisfarne, Durham, St Paul’s Cathedral), his chapters on the wooden angels guarding the medieval hammerbeam roofs of so many East Anglian churches, the Great East Window at Gloucester, Stanley Spencer’s painting The Resurrection of the Soldiers at Sandham in Hampshire, and the medieval mural The Ladder of Salvation of the Human Soul  at Chaldon in Surrey have inspired me to add them all to my bucket-list.

Ross isn’t a believer himself, but his journalism has always been marked by the kind of deep empathy that makes this irrelevant. More than that, he knows where the core of a good story lies, and has a nose for the telling quote. So at Pluscarden Abbey, a monk tells him ‘I sometimes think it would be nice to have a wife. Or even a pair of socks’ and that matters every bit as much as the details of the monks’ centuries-old rituals. At Southwark, he tells the story of the cathedral cat’s meeting with the late Queen (‘This is Doorkins Magnificat, Ma’am’) so well that I found myself watching the service of thanksgiving for its life. He tracks down effigies so life-like that they could be horror film extras, talks to steeplejacks about working on buildings that sway in the wind, and tells a story about a Norfolk man who stopped satanists using the local village church and then – in a scene that could come straight from JL Carr’s A Month in the Country – uncovers 11th century paintings of angels on its nave walls.

At London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields (‘Refugees Welcome’) he helps serve meals to the homeless and needy in a chapter that goes on to offer one possible defence of keeping churches open in a post-Christian age – that the role they play in mental health counselling, addiction support groups and so on is, according to Treasury figures, worth a cool £55.7 billion. One does, though, suspect that his heart really isn’t in this purely utilitarian argument. The real value of churches, he maintains, is that they hold the past and present, decay and use, in a rare balance, that their buildings have a poetry and spirituality about them that only intensifies as they come under threat. As the head of a charity dedicated to rescuing such buildings points out, ‘These buildings transcend time. They are the spiritual investment and the artistic legacy of generations and a community’s greatest expression of itself over centuries.’ In France, all church buildings older than 1905 can, in theory, claim state aid for repairs. In Britain, where some 2,000 churches have closed over the last ten years, and where the Heritage Lottery Fund no longer has a special section to deal with churches, they are a lot more vulnerable.

Not all are. As Richard Holloway points out, visits to cathedrals are on the rise. That’s understandable: they are, after all, awe-inspiring in scale even now, as well as being vast repositories of our history – the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral is nothing less, says Ross, than England’s Valhalla. (Did you realise that the cathedral it replaced after the Great Fire of London was once the world’s biggest? Me neither).

In my own experience, the one church where past and present dissolve into each other most completely is Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh, of which Holloway was once rector, about which he wrote so compellingly in his memoir Leaving Alexandria. Ross does it full justice too, helped by excellent interviews with both Alison Watt, whose superlative painting Still hangs above the altar in the church’s Warrior’s Chapel, and Holloway himself.  Personally, it’s art, not faith that imbues the place with such a deep sense of spirituality: the depth of Watt’s art and Holloway’s own writing, or the story I’ve heard him tell of his predecessor as rector, a double Military Cross winner in the First World War who was known for his compassion towards the poor and vulnerable.

Buildings like Old St Paul’s seem to stand outside time in a way that would make perfect sense to quite a number of people Ross interviews. At Durham, the aged guide talks about St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede as though they are both still living; at Lindisfarne, the former curate of the church next to the priory, tells him that as far as she is concerned Saints Aidan and Cuthbert ‘are just as alive as we are, though in a different state’. And although I wouldn’t go quite so far, I do think that knowledge of the past can, by making us aware of the fleetingness of our own lives, can gift us, however briefly, a sense of timelessness. Of all the reasons for taking up the hobby of what John Betjeman called ‘church-crawling’ – which Ross, tongue only slightly in cheek, suggests ought to be as popular as Munro-bagging –  this is, I suspect, the one that chimes the loudest with him: that nowhere else do the past and present slip so easily into each other.

Although not quoted in Steeple Chasing, John Betjeman articulated similar thoughts in the poetry he wrote while serving as the press attache to the British High Commissioner in Dublin in 1941-3, especially those poems written while wandering round increasingly dilapidated graveyards in Church of Ireland country parishes. His poem ‘Emily in Ireland’, for example, ends like this:

 

There in pinnacled protection,

One extinguished family waits

A Church of Ireland resurrection

By the broken, rusty gates.

Sheepswool, straw and droppings cover,

Graves of spinster, rake and lover,

Whose fantastic mausoleum,

Sings its own seablown Te Deum,

In and out the slipping slates.

 

The slates slip, the family is extinguished, yet the poem is written in the present tense. The faith of the mausoleum’s builders – and, presumably the accompanying church – still sings out. Maybe the sea of faith is these days just a tideless, emptying pool, but as long as those buildings are there to remind us what it was, our horizons widen retrospectively across centuries, and we can imagine what faith must have felt like even if we no longer feel it ourselves. Peter Ross, I am certain, would completely understand.

 

Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church by Peter Ross is published by Headline, priced £22.

 

Mother Sea is an evocative fantasy-tinged novel about an island community facing extinction. BooksfromScotland got in touch with author Lorraine Wilson to ask her to tell us how she created her fictional world.

 

Mother Sea
By Lorraine Wilson
Published by Fairlight Books

 

Building An Island 

My new book, Mother Sea, was my first time inventing a country. It is a real world story set on a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean. I’m hardly the first author to create new land for the purposes of storytelling, in fact I am writing this just days after a friend and fellow Scottish author, Nicholas Binge celebrated the publication of Ascension – a book about a mysterious new mountain appearing in the Pacific Ocean. But where in Nick’s book the island is an unknown threat, my island needed to feel like home. Despite a perhaps unfamiliar setting, I wanted it to feel both very real and beloved. Why? Because writers are mean, and I wanted the threats to my island to hit the reader as hard as they do my characters! But also because I wanted, in Mother Sea, to be drawing lines of connection and commonality between me and you, whoever you are. I wanted to speak to the things that we share – the climate fears and the familial ties, the familiarity with grief and the need to belong.  

So how do you go about building an island? There were two strands to my research. The first was rooted in my ecologist background – I simply approached it as an exercise in island biogeography. If an island existed roughly here east of the Seychelles, what might its geology be (I took liberties with tectonic faultlines!), and what species might have colonised it? And of those, which would have become endemic? This involved a lot of looking at field guides and photos from my time in the region, and sighing wistfully!  

This island also had to be able to support a small community before the establishment of trade though, so I tweaked the geography a little to enable a degree of agriculture. I looked at the crops grown on other small islands and the culinary uses of regional plants, until I was happy my ship-wrecked ancestors would not starve. Here then was an island ready and waiting for its people.  

But before I could give the island its people, I wanted first to understand those commonalities I mentioned. To look at all the ways islanders around the world are unique and yet also share similar veins of mythology and culture. I’ve been lucky enough to live, work in, or visit a lot of remote island or coastal areas, from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego. I’ve done bird transects through semi-desert limestone karst and Shetland’s peat bogs, I’ve sat in the dark counting nesting sea turtles on white sand beaches and returning storm petrels on rocky shores. I’ve lived in tents (with additional pythons in one instance), warden’s cottages, bothies and raffia-roofed school huts; speaking to people in my second language, my third and fourth and fifth in rapidly descending degrees of fluency, and still managed to feel thoroughly at sea with Orcadian.  

So how did this help me? Well, it gave me a starting point to an awful lot more research on island mythologies, the history of colonialism in island nations, the gender roles of multi-gendered societies, farming adaptations to coastal ecozones, and more. And through all of this, two common strands began to appear, neither of them very surprising: First, the prominence of the sea in mythology – goddess figures or trickster shapeshifters like Scotland’s own Sea Mither and kelpies – beings that encompass the dual nature of the sea for the communities that depend on it as both their richest resource and greatest danger. And second, communalism over individualism. When your lives are lived at the mercy of the sea, you need one another, and so societies shape themselves around a core of mutualism and of individuals adapting themselves to the roles their communities need. It’s a pattern still evident in Scottish island communities, I think, as well as in many of the other islands I have known.  

These two aspects formed the frame around which I grew my island society. Its initial seed was from the tragic history of a real island called Tromelin where a French trade ship carrying enslaved people was wrecked, and, to cut a long story short, the French crew escaped and the previously-enslaved survivors lived for another fifteen years before rescue. I asked myself what might have happened to a similar ship wrecked on a different island that was not rescued, but instead flourished. With the sea as a goddess and community as the heart of society, with the wider tides of colonialism sweeping the region and the seasonalities of seabird eggs, mangoes, storms … how might this group of people grow into a nation?  

I decided very early on that I wanted my society to be matrilineal, and the normalising of a third gender was never even in question. So they evolved into a people led by Mothers – in the form of the sea and their elders, taught by the Sacere – their history keepers, and watched over by their ancestors entombed in the cliffs above. They are a community who understands that they are only a part of the island, as important as the hermit crabs and the sooty terns, less wise than the endlessly curious geckos. But that they are also a part of the world, feeling the tug-of-war of the benefits the outside can offer even whilst they suffer the climate toll exacted by the outsider’s greed. 

It’s a far cry from North Uist or Papa Westray, but I hope that the worries and dreams of my islanders resonate. We are not as far removed from the issues they face as we might think, and perhaps Mother Sea might bring us that tiny bit closer still.  

 

Mother Sea by Lorraine Wilson is published by Fairlight Books, priced £14.99.

 

Lynsey May’s debut novel, Weak Teeth, is a brilliant, relatable story telling the tale of Ellis and the life she has known crumble around her in one long, hot summer. In this extract, Ellis bluffs her way through a meeting with HR just after her break-up and a bad trip to the dentist.

 

Weak Teeth
By Lynsey May
Published by Polygon

 

A tooth is a sacrifice, a charm. It is a tool for survival. It is a perfectly natural part of the human organism. It is a tusk. A hunk of bone-like substance that protrudes from the flesh. Horrifying, if you think about it too deeply. And right now, Ellis can’t stop thinking. 

A spa packages spreadsheet is up on her screen alongside an article about how dehydration can amplify tooth pain. Hearing footsteps to her left, Ellis hits minimise so the spreadsheet is front and centre. Alison walks by without stopping. 

There are messages from Lana on her phone, asking if she’s found out any more about Trevor. As if there’s anything she can do. It’s just like Lana to try and drag her into a fight when all she wants is to curl up and lick her wounds. 

It’s time for her meeting with Gabrielle. Only HR and a couple of senior managers have rooms of their own. Gabrielle’s is the smallest. It has a window into the main office, but the white blind is always down. Ellis knocks, nervously, and waits to be called in. 

Gabrielle’s office has been prettied up with copious pictures of her children. A desk lamp, either brought in from home or specially requested, casts a buttery light on a handful of thank-you cards. Ellis wonders if she’s written them herself. 

‘Ah, Ellis. How are you feeling?’ 

‘Much better, thanks.’ 

‘Good, good. Grab a seat, and let’s get this tidied up.’ 

Ellis does as she’s told. 

‘Fabian put you down as having a cold. Is that right?’ Gabrielle’s pen is black, matt and weighty. She wields it with pleasure. 

‘Well…’ Ellis told Alison it was nothing infectious. 

‘But I have it that you were at a dentist’s appointment that morning?’ 

‘Yes, I got a filling and then I wasn’t feeling so good.’ Sweat prickles along the edge of her lip. 

‘So it was something to do with that? Should I change the entry?’ 

‘It’s not that. I… it’s just that it’s personal. He’s not my supervisor and—’ 

‘Is there something else you want to share with me?’ Gabrielle says. 

Maybe she should tell the truth. At least they’d know why she looks like death warmed up. Gabrielle is so poised, so perfect, and is looking at her so expectantly. The thought makes her stomach lurch. 

‘Is there anything we can be supporting you with? Is it work-related? I can see we haven’t had your three-month review yet, but if there are any problems at all, please do feel free to share. We want you to be happy here.’ 

‘I’m sorry if I’ve seemed a little distracted.’ 

‘Something going on at home?’ Her voice is treacle, her gaze as warm as a TV mom’s and twice as fake. She is hungry for Ellis’s failures. 

Panic pulls Ellis’s thoughts into a vortex. They’re keeping an eye on her. They’re not sure she fits in. She should tell them about Adrian, but if she does, she’ll start greeting. She knows it. God. Lana would never let herself get in this mess. She’d have been honest right from the off. No, she’d not have been cheated on in the first place. Not Lana. 

‘It’s my sister. Her husband… he slept with someone else. They’ve split up. It’s all a big mess.’ 

‘Oh, how awful.’ 

‘And she has twins. They’re only toddlers. She’s gutted – we all are. We thought she might…’ Ellis’s eyes obediently grow damp, and Gabrielle reaches out a hand to place over one of Ellis’s. She has long, pointed nails. Ellis imagines one sliding into a vein. 

‘How’s she doing now? Will she be okay?’ 

‘We hope so. Sorry, I feel like I shouldn’t have said anything.’ 

‘No, no. Don’t you worry about last week’s absence. I’ll put family emergency down on the form. Any time you need to talk about it, you know where I am.’ 

Ellis nods gratefully. Gabrielle gives her hand one last squeeze on the way out. Everything Ellis said will be typed up and saved. 

She checks her phone. Another message from Lana. Paranoia floods in. The phone was locked and silent. There’s no way she could have pocket-dialled. Lana can’t have heard her lie. Ellis thumbs the message open. It’s a photo of a muscular grey-blue body and a set of great, chomping teeth. A pacu fish. 

No deep sea creature, no animal, frightens Ellis more than the pacu. From behind it looks just like the sort of innocent fish that might brush a leg as it paddle-dabbles around a loch. With its mouth closed, it’s just a blunt-faced nothing. But when its jaws open, the pacu becomes something else. An unholy chimera, a fish with a set of human teeth. 

The first time Lana sent her a photo of one, Ellis assumed it was Photoshopped. It was too uncanny to be real. But her sister sent another and then another until Ellis was forced to investigate. The trawl through a page of search results revealed more horrors: pacus had a second layer of teeth behind the first. 

Lana hasn’t sent a pacu picture in years. Ellis thought she’d forgotten about them, she should know better. She has to reply. If she doesn’t, Lana will only send more. Ellis has already memorised the picture against her will and is imagining fingers, ankles even, clamped in the jaw of this awful beast. A body pulled under the surface. She shivers. Another message pops up. 

Didn’t know Adrian had taken up swimming. 

Ellis’s cheek twitches. Lana’s on her side: that’s worth the toll of seeing this fish. Guilt swims alongside its blue body; Ellis evades. Lana would swallow Gabrielle and her false concern up in two fierce bites.

 

Weak Teeth by Lynsey May is published by Polygon, priced £12.99.

Nadine Aisha Jassat follows her brilliant poetry collection, Let Me Tell You This, with a book for children, The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them). BooksfromScotland chatted with Nadine about some of her favourite books.

 

The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them)
By Nadine Aisha Jassat
Published by Orion Children’s Books

 

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

Much like Nyla, my protagonist in The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them), when I was a child I loved my local library, and would go almost every day after school. I read nearly the entire children’s section, and from there moved on to the crime section! I can still remember the covers and pages of some of the novels I borrowed again and again so clearly, and even, years later, hunted down a second-hand copy of one of the editions I loved the most. It now sits pride of place on my shelf as a reminder of the child I was, the books I treasured, and what libraries mean to me in my journey as a writer and reader. I wrote in It’s Not About The Burqa that I was a ‘daughter of stories’, and this is true – but I am also a child of libraries, and so its no surprise that they take centre stage in The Stories Grandma Forgot.

 

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your book The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them). What did you want to explore in writing this book?

Writing the novel began with two things: wanting to write about a young, mixed girl who wanted desperately to understand herself and who she was, and wanting to write about a granddaughter and her grandmother with Alzheimer’s. Both of these came from within me: from the child I once was filled with questions I had to figure out on my own, and from the adult poet seeing her own grandmother’s experience with Alzheimer’s. The Stories Grandma Forgot came into being in the longing in both those experiences, and it is a novel about love, family, community, legacy, and how to define ourselves for ourselves, and say ‘this is who I am’.  And, of course, it is a novel about stories.

 

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

Andrea Gibson was a great early influence in my journey as a poet. I have their books on my shelves now, however it was their performances on YouTube that I watched, back when I knew I had stories to tell, but didn’t know how to tell them. Their poetry told stories with so much heart, in such beautiful clever ways, just like how I wanted to, but hadn’t thought I could. It expanded my understanding of what poetry was and could be, and with it expanded the possibilities for my own journey, opening a door to where poetry became something that I could step into and make my own.

 

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

I am very lucky to have some gorgeous books on my shelves, but one in particular that always stands out is Sophie Anderson’s The House With Chicken Legs, whose rose gold foil started my love of metallic foils many years ago!

 

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?

I think I’ve learned secret truths from the books that I’ve written – the process to me feels like a conversation with myself, and ones in which I learn as I go. Let Me Tell You This taught me how much voice was central to my journey. The Stories Grandma Forgot taught me that there were whole worlds and characters hidden within me – and all I had to do was believe in myself, and have fun, to write them. Both books are rebellions in their own way, whether for the stories they tell, or how they tell them – and both exemplify my belief in the power of poetry to tell stories.

 

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

Anyone who follows my Instagram book reviews knows how much I love YA fantasy. One of my absolute favourites of the genre is Sarah J Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury – I feel completely transported in the magic and beauty of the world she’s created. I think we must never forget the fun of reading – the joy of curling up and the hours disappearing away, the ‘just-one-more-chapters’ at midnight. It is sustaining, restorative. Maas’ world gives that to me.

 

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

I am deeply excited for Juno Dawson’s The Shadow Cabinet – and doubly so that she’ll be doing an Edinburgh event chaired by Katalina Watt! I’m also excited to read The Grief Nurse by Angie Spoto – it sounds such a brilliant, intriguing concept (and has that beautiful metallic foil I’m so fond of!). Scotland’s poetic talent is phenomenal – and in particular the writing of Mae Diansangu, Nasim Rebecca Asl and Roshni Gallagher has blown me away. You can find some of Mae’s writing via the National Library of Scotland’s Fresh Ink archive, and Nasim and Roshni’s pamphlets Nemidoonam and Bird Cherry were both recently released with Verve. I’m excited to see what these poets do next, and I can’t wait to read more from them.

 

The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them) by Nadine Aisha Jassat is published by Orion Children’s Books, priced £7.99.

One Button Benny is our favourite fun robot who is garnering fans all across the country with each adventure he embarks upon. His latest escapade sees him come face to face with a grumpy dinosaur after too much energetic dancing! Here, author Alan Windam reads from his latest book, guaranteed to try out your own robot dancing!

 

One Button Benny and the Dinosaur Dilemma
By Alan Windram, illustrated by Chloe Holwill-Hunter
Published by Little Door Books

 

 

One Button Benny and the Dinosaur Dilemma written by Alan Windram, and illustrated by Chloe Holwill-Hunter is published by Little Door Books, priced £7.99.

We all know Victor Frankenstein and how his story turned out, but what of his great-neice, Mary, outspoken, outsider and keen to make her mark? C. E. Mcgill has written a hugely enthralling re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s iconic novel, and here we present an extract where Mary remembers a moment in childhood.

 

Our Hideous Progeny
By C. E. Mcgill
Published by Doubleday

 

But I wallow. I mean only to explain here that I cannot recall a time before I knew I was a disgrace – though it would be many years before I understood precisely why. An ill-gotten child is a faulty cog; living testament to the fact that rules are not always followed, that sons and daughters cannot always be controlled, that men and women do not always couple as we might think they should. Shame breeds fear, and fear breeds goodness, morality, better behaviour. Such is the hope.

Except that sometimes – as I can attest – shame and fear beget only anger instead.

I can recall with perfect clarity the first time I knew that. I was five perhaps, or six. Young enough that I had not yet been sent to school, though old enough to be curious about it. I would peer through the gates as my nursemaid and I walked into the village, watching the children laugh and scream and push each other into puddles. It must have been a Saturday that day, however, for the schoolyard was empty as we passed on our way to the shore. It was early spring, far too chilly to paddle, but I still loved playing treasure-hunter, filling my pockets with stones and shells which my humourless nursemaid would inevitably make me empty out before we left. And it was there, in the shadow of the pearl-white cliffs, that I found it.

It was a small thing, dark and lustrous as mahogany, resting atop a pale boulder as if simply begging to be found. I spotted it from a dozen paces away and picked my way closer, rocks slipping and clattering beneath my feet. When I retrieved it and held it up to the light, I saw that it was shaped almost like a piece from a game of draughts – a squat cylinder marked on both sides with subtle rings like the inside of a tree. The top and bottom were not quite flat, but slightly concave, fitting perfectly between my forefinger and thumb. It was lovely; not as beautiful as some of the other stones I had found on the beach, nor as colourful as sea-glass, but fascinating in its singularity.

‘What’s that?’

I swivelled upon my heel. Somehow, so absorbed was I in my new treasure, I had not heard him approach – a local boy, two years my senior, whose name I could not recall; Tim or Tom or Thomas, perhaps. What I could recall was this: that I had seen him earlier that week in the schoolyard, pushing another boy to the ground. That he had laughed as his schoolmate spat dust, and run away with the boy’s hat and his spinning top. That this was a boy who took things.

My gaze darted up the beach to where my nursemaid stood, joined now by another, the two of them absorbed in conversation. They were too far for me to call to, and even if they had not been, I knew my own nursemaid’s opinion on trinkets I found on the beach. She would not help me.

‘It’s mine,’ I blurted, my heart a drum. I watched his face sour.

‘I only asked what it was.’ He stepped closer, eying my closed fist. ‘Did you find a penny?’

Of course; I should have realized. His clothes were shabbier than mine. The woman with him was likely not his nursemaid, but his mother. He was the son of a shopkeeper probably, a butcher or a baker. He had little, but (I felt at the time) I had so much less – no mother, no proper place in the world, no means of driving him away. All I had wanted was this, this odd little stone, and yet I would not be allowed it.

I gave him one last warning as I shrank back, legs pressed against the boulder behind me – ‘It’s only a stone, go away !’ – but he ignored me and pressed forth, a greedy look in his eyes. He stretched out his hand and that was the final spark that lit the flare.

I bit him.

Hard.

The less said of the hour that followed, the better. I was punished, of course; screamed at by my nursemaid and my grandmother both. The thing I remember most clearly is my nursemaid’s hand around my wrist, her fingers pressing hard enough to bruise, the bared-teeth grimace upon her face as she hissed at me: ‘What the devil is wrong with you?’ And my unspoken reply: I do not know.

 

Our Hideous Progeny by C. E. Mcgill is published by Doubleday, priced £16.99.

Amelia Dalton is following up her action-packed Mistress and Commander with another adventure travel memoir, Pages From My Passport. We caught up with her to hear more about her new book.

 

Pages From My Passport
By Amelia Dalton
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Congratulations Amelia on the publication of your latest book, Pages from my Passport. Could you tell us a little bit about what readers should expect from it?

An entertaining account of exploring remote places with a specific purpose, rather than to have a break or a good time.  Readers will be transported to unknown destinations in distant countries. The book has little about the usual aspects of travel, such as hotels, restaurants, or planes; it is a series of adventures with each chapter a story of a different country, describing exotic seashores and tiny villages discovered when I was employed to replicate exploring the archipelagos and remote islands of Scotland’s intricate west coast. Researching from the Arctic to India, I needed to find unknown and unvisited places to offer our passengers unexpected experiences and unusual destinations with curious wildlife, interesting architecture or idiosyncratic small museums.

 

Most people would be daunted by the kind of travelling you organise. What gives you your fearlessness?

I am not at all fearless, but I am determined and can be politely, I hope, stubborn!  Lee Durrell once said ’It’s difficult to say ”No” to Amelia.’   I regard this as a huge compliment.  Persuading someone they do want to open up their private palace or solving the difficulties of bringing people onto a beach in Madagascar to visit a village is the kind of problem solving I like.

 

What draws you to the lesser-known places? What does travel mean to you?

I love introducing people to places and experiences they would not have come across on their own.  For myself, I am interested in wildlife, plants and geology – and I simply love a new experience. It’s a privilege to experience different cultures, foods and beliefs and find out what influences and shapes peoples’ lives.

 

You write about your misadventures with humour and a light touch. Do you think this is a key ingredient for an adventurer?

A sense of humour eases many a long day. A vital aspect of travelling is an ability to see the ridiculous, combined with a sense of curiosity. Misadventures, rather than actual disasters, are usually more interesting than successes and become entertaining stories.

 

What advice would you give to more cautious travellers about getting more adventurous?

Do your research really well before you arrive somewhere remote. It will make the unknown seem less daunting if you have an idea of the history, the local culture and how and why people live there and what makes the place tick. Small manageable steps which you can expand as you feel more comfortable, rather than leaps into the unknown.

 

Do you read a lot of other travel memoirs? Who would you say influences your writing?

I like to read about a country or place whilst I am there.  In June I will be in the Western Isles again so will re-read Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons. Recently I was in Sulawesi and the Moluccas and enjoyed reading Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Scott as well as the rather daunting scientific account The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace.  I will re-read Jan Morris’s Sultan in Oman a wonderful, highly entertaining book, before my next tour there in early 2024.

 

Where are you planning to travel this year?

2023 will take me back to St Kilda (weather permitting!) to Oman, Italy, France and, if I am lucky, again to Madagascar and the outer Seychelles. The St Kilda archipelago is truly extraordinary,  powerful and dramatic.  It is an edgy place, so remote, with a fascinating history, scenery and unique wildlife

 

Pages From My Passport by Amelia Dalton is published by Sandstone Press, priced £14.99

Lesley Harrison’s latest collection, Kitchen Music, turns north to the sea for inspiration. BooksfromScotland are delighted to share some of those poems with you.

 

Kitchen Music
By Lesley Harrison
Published by Carcanet

 

 

Weather Reports You
Vatnasafn / Library of Water, by Roni Horn, with interviews by Oddný Eir
Ævarsdóttir. Stykkishómlur, Iceland

 

i.

My favourite weather is a north-easterly blizzard. This feeling is
comfortable. I enjoy being in a breeze, or a drizzle out at sea.
The weather is the sea.

 

ii.

A north-easterly is usually our best weather. It is bright and
clear. The air is deep blue and fresh, like the good weather that
follows a good catch, or a good wedding. Every moment is a
new thing.

 

iii.

In summer, I get fed up with light. I feel full, over-satiated, like
being in a closed room. The sky is empty. You have to move
around. You have to be with other people.

 

iv.

The weather is part of my body. I shift my position in my chair
according to the weather. I feel fine in calm, foggy weather.
Then I can smell the sun. Talking about the weather is talking
about oneself

 

v.

There is no weather in dreams. In dreams we move like fish in
water, without resistance. When we wake up, we are sluggish.

 

vi.

It is a wonderful time of year when the darkness is coming. It is
when the sea starts moving. In August, when it gets dark at night,
it is as if I am growing up further back in time. You feel that
summer was a long time ago.

 

vii.

When it snows, the sky drops down to the village. This frightens
me a little. After a storm, or a death at sea, the wind might drop
and immediately it seems as if nothing had happened. Then
grief is uncomfortable.

 

viii.

After a very cold Spring followed by a few good days, you fill up
with a kind of joy. The world feels settled and empty.

 

ix.

The currents affect your dreams, as does the tide, and the moon.

 

x.

Weather is reflection and measure. Stories about the weather
create false memories, conditioned by time, by a certain blindness.
Our weather is always in the present. It is word-of-mouth.

 

 

 

Kitchen Music
New York, 2017

 

collage = REALITY
—Joseph Cornell

 

i.

the morning after
with its “back to life” feeling.
manhattan breakfast:

a restaurant of
silver grey driftwood –
a feeling of water.

 

ii.

outside the coffee shop
a young bird alighted –
treethrushsong

 

iii.

a gulf of rain,
and the city sinks an inch.

at Penn Station, the lush tyres of yellow taxis –
umbrellas of Cherbourg
in the subway crush.

 

iv.

chance encounters:
old back yards,
reflections of the sun through curtains

from the sidewalk, gleaming
the city market,
“Hey Jude” among

bees and melons
a steel bridge, the Hudson
blank between the walls.

a corner bar.
a girl in a window.

 

v.

Thursday at the arboretum:
cool green
the café kitchen window open

and sounds tunnel in
– song sparrows,
butterflies that churr

 

 

vi.

downtown evening:
the sky towers of Manhattan
dark green against a stark aqua sky

then home, the sea
a new north blue.

the chill early March breezes
a wild piano music.
nostalgia wiped clear

 

vii.

this morning
among the tidewrack:
azimuth, whale bone

shoes and twine, a tedium of
cartons, floats
varia, et cetera.

a day owl, almost blue.

 

viii.

couch dream evening
entre chien et loup,
a high angelic sunset

“the earth with yellow pears
and wild with roses”

 

ix.

ephemera:
what minute (infinitesimal)
living can be

 

 

Iceland Poppy
Victoria Street, Kirkwall

 

it is snowing.

in the silence
of this bright space

a tight bud
creaking

prehistoric
as delicate as birch

dark white,
rooting.

 

Kitchen Music by Lesley Harrison is published by Carcanet, priced £12.99.

Tik Tok sensation and author Alex Howard has turned his attention from The Library Cat to The Ghost Cat in his latest novel. Over the course of a century in his nine lives in one Edinburgh tenement the ghost cat oversees two world wars, a coronation and one giant step for mankind. In the extract below, we are introduced to Grimalkin at the end of his first life.

 

The Ghost Cat
By Alex Howard
Published by Black and White Publishing

 

Back then, during the reign of Queen Victoria, Eilidh had found Grimalkin as a stray kitten on nearby Thirlestane Lane. Mewling for milk and nearing death in the corner of a stable, a mist, or ‘haar’ as it is known locally, had swept across Edinburgh, causing Grimalkin’s mother to abandon the site with the rest of her kittens. As he shivered in the urine-soaked straw, the haar sank its teeth into his minuscule bones, hour by hour. Another thirty minutes and the little cat would have been no more. The master of 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, Mr Calvert, a cartographer by profession, who was forever dressed in brown stockings and accompanied by a forbidding oak cane, had reluctantly agreed to keep the cat. In the early days of kittenhood, Grimalkin would often chase his tail on one of Mr Calvert’s great maps that had been unfurled onto the study floor. Lost in the ecstasy of papery rustles, he would suddenly detect Mr Calvert’s narrow head (bald apart from a few white wisps of hair on the side) looming over him. A moment of stillness would ensue, as Mr Calvert slowly placed his quizzing glasses over his eyes before releasing a sudden ‘humph!’, which would send Grimalkin charging off down the hall.

But Eilidh’s face told a different story: big rosy cheeks flushed vivid red like a clutch of Scottish loganberries on her otherwise perfectly white skin. Her eyes permanently sparkled, as if she was always on the point of telling a joke, and their turquoise irises were so deep and kind one could tell, just by looking at them, that their bearer could be trusted with your secrets. She wore her black hair rolled up in a handsome pompadour, but despite her best eff orts, it would often explode out of its frilly headdress in little corkscrew curls, making her look comic, and yet somehow charming. She was one of those people that always looked youthful, and to Grimalkin she looked no different to the day in 1887 when she cupped him in her warm hand from the icy sodden straw of the nearby stable.

As Grimalkin padded over to the fire grate, which was just starting to lick with flame, he caught sight of his own reflection in Eilidh’s brass firebox. A hunched tabby cat stared back at him, crooked of tail and jagged of whisker. His eyes, once lizard-green and flashing with alertness were now, at fifteen years old, cloudy and drawn ever so slightly down at the corners, so that his pupils looked unnaturally large. To the unassuming passer-by, this might have given them a melancholy air, but, to the more perceptive among cats and humans, it in fact spoke of a profound and restless wisdom. His fur, at one time the envy of the neighbourhood for its dazzling mix of browns, marmalades and creams, was now flecked with white and constantly matted with bits of grit that he could never completely lick off . His forelegs were stout, with big paws, the likes of which would not seem out of place on one of his wildcat cousins excepting his neatly rounded toes; and his ginger hind leg, once his proudest attribute when prowling the communal gardens, had now turned a deep fox-red and was bent in a half-curve that he couldn’t straighten out. There was a majesty about him, as there is with all handsome cats grown old, and a robustness to his form that suggested a prodigious Victorian diet of lark pie, pork suet and dripping. He was a thinking cat and, as such, enjoyed a life of quiet intellectual contemplation.

But on this morning in September 1902, his whole frame, from the ends of his ear peaks right down to his tail, was lashing with pain. His leg joints throbbed, taking his mind plain off any thoughts of stalking for mice; and even now, as Eilidh placed his morning bowl of fish-ends down on the pantry tiles with a familiar clatter, Grimalkin’s ear did not twitch. Instead, he sat staring into the grate deeper and deeper, as the orange flames licked in between the knuckles of coal, his senses dulling and his mind becoming ever more silent. No, this will not do! he thought, in a sudden rallying of mental strength. A dreary soul doth guddle nay mice. I must still wash myself. A good ablute always puts me to rights.

You see, even at fifteen, Grimalkin believed, as did many Victorian cats, that a clean pelt led to a pure soul. Rising, he padded closer to the fi re, coming to rest on a little rug beside Mr Calvert’s gramophone, which stretched up its huge brass trumpet like an oversized daffodil. But no sooner had he dampened his paw with his tongue and hooked it up towards his left ear than his muscles seized, and his tummy cramped with a pain so strong that it almost made him cry out loud.

No, I cannot. I simply cannot.

It is an alarming day when a cat can no longer wash himself. It signals the last of dignity and the end of choice. Feeling quite alone, Grimalkin squatted on the rug and decided to watch the skirl and twist of the flames again. As they flexed and grew, he thought back across his life. Being born in 1887, he had seen a lot . . . The opening of the Great Forth Rail Bridge, the first motion picture camera, the proliferation of works of literature by Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr Dickens . . . The continual irrevocable rise of the steam train. I have had much fortune . . . he thought as various memories panned up in his mind. I have been well-kept, well-fed and well-groomed. Why if a cat has nine lives, reserved for misadventure and poor luck, I dare say I am still on my first . . .

 

*

In the silence, Grimalkin’s eyes closed. And under the strengthening morning light coming in through the part-opened shutters, the crackle of the fire and the warming smell of coaldust, his head fell silent, and the worries and travails that inflict all cats during their short time on this earth receded as if carried downwards on a tumbling vortex of sand. The ache of his back eased; the arduous pull and heave of his lungs subsided, and as the rising flames beat their warmth upon his fur, the twist of his thoughts fell silent for the last time ever in this life.

 

The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £12.99.

Christopher Rush has used the life and work of William Shakespeare in his previous works both fiction and non-fiction and returns to this subject matter in his latest novel, Letters of Elsinore, which delves deeper into the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet. We hope you enjoy the extract below.

 

Letters from Elsinore
By Christopher Rush
Published by Sparsile Books

 

Ophelia’s Muddy Melodious Death

There was a woodland stream on the landward side of Elsinore, just beyond old King Hamlet’s orchard. It flowed very quietly among the trees, still waters, not deep. But deep enough. That’s where she was found, half-floating but drowned, close to a willow-tree, the whitish undersides of its leaves mirrored in the glassy stillness of the water. There was a sad symbolism there, the willow being considered an emblem of regret and wretchedness, particularly pertaining to the sorrows of forsaken love, and from that sad tree those who have lost their loves sometimes make mourning garlands, which they wear, or hang up like mournful trophies.

She’d gathered garlands of flowers for herself before coming there: crow-flowers, daisies, and even nettles, noxious generators of pain and poison, to the delicate, slender and tender-handed, as she was. And those long phallic purples–orchids with the roots resembling testicles, which lent them a coarser name on the rough tongues of peasants. In their vulgar parlance they were known as pricks, crimson cocks, knobs with balls, and so on, whereas our chaste maids and unplumbed virgins, untouched by country grossness, chose not to go there, referring to them instead as dead men’s fingers–macabre but modest, sexuality succumbing to death. That’s where Ophelia chose to end it all, if choose she did. Could it have been a cry for help? Or did a branch giveway? Or maybe she tumbled, hung with her trophies, her armfuls of wild-flowers, and fell in the weeping water. But it was her failure to struggle against her fate which later led to the verdict of ‘doubtful’, determining her death.

A shepherd’s boy, it seems, was the only eyewitness, so they said, too terrified to intervene, or afterwards to say too much about the lewd lyrics she sang concerning cock-robins and cock-a-doodle-doos, and how she stroked the long purples and moaned of country matters and sweet nothings–the details had to be coaxed out of him –before the waters gathered round to cover her and put her to her bed. She was now the property of the gravedigger.

‘It’s to be a Christian burial, so let’s get her plot dug straightaway, and let’s dig it straight, not one of them skew-whiff pits.’

‘Hang on, not so fast there! If she drowned herself in her own defence -’

‘She did. It’s been decided on. But now you’re the one’s got it wrong. How in God’s name could she kill herself in self-defence? You mean self-offence. She committed an offence.’

‘What offence was that?

‘Heaven help us, se offendendo–don’t you know any Latin? After all them funerals? It was an offence against her own body. And the body’s a temple. And that’s a crime, don’t you know that neither?’

‘I know this much, if she hadn’t been a nob, she’d have been slung into the ground outside these here walls–unconstituted ground.’

‘Unconsecrated. You’ve got no more brains than that spade.’

 

It was never a love affair, it was a conspiracy of sorts, a well-woven lie. He was never going to rescue me, to sweep me up with him onto his white charger and carry me off and out of Denmark and change my life. And so my life stayed as it was, and what it was, a needlework of mediocrities that he wasn’t going to unpick. It was a stich-up of shortcomings: the motherless child, the dutiful daughter, the innocent little sister, the wrong choice, the forbidden choice, the decoy, the bribe, the bait, the cow loosed to the bull, the whore in the convent, the nun in the brothel. Let’s face it, I was a mistake, the courtly love that was all court and no love, the prince’s intellectual indiscretion, to be corrected, cancelled, regretted –oh yes, greatly regretted, all too late. But all the same he whored me in his mind, he took me without penetration, and in the end he was unkind, he was cold, he was a bloodless butcher. And he killed my heart, he killed my soul. He was Elsinore’sexecutioner. He was just like his uncle. He was a murderer. And he had enough anger for all of Elsinore.

Anything else? Left undone perchance? Oh yes. Last stage of all: get buried –easiest of exits, not my problem, not my job, to be laid in earth, the only bed I was ever laid in, cold clay, and put me back, back on my back, where you could have had me, any night you cared, had you cared enough. Too late now, death’s my lover now, the Grim Rapist, and worms will welcome the woman, and try that long-preserved virginity. See, here they come now, quietly up the thighs, to the portals of the hymen, and there you have me –ravished at last. I’m undone. And nothing’s left to do –unless to do it all again, eternally, and haunt them from my grave?

Too late for that, my friends. They’re in their graves already, all of them, even you, Horatio, even you. And you, with a headful of ghosts, were the only one among them that least deserved a haunting. But I’ll say it again –I could have loved you. Love was all I wanted. And love denied where it was so desperately needed, it was a kind of haunting too, and more than mere pathos. I think you said it once –it was tragedy. The rest were just deaths. Death’s all right. Nothing better. Nothing tragic about death, not if you deserve it, or if you want it, if it’s what you live for, if life’s lost its meaning for you and the urge to exist has gone. But who am I in the end? The nonentity of Elsinore –what does she know? Not much. I never pretended to know much. I wasn’t given the chance. I do know one thing, though, and I know it now for sure, surer than before. That gravedigger –he got it right in his own muddy way. At least he wasn’t far from the truth when he said it: she killed herself in self-defence.

 

Letters from Elsinore by Christopher Rush is published by Sparsile Books, priced £20.99.

As the seasons turn and the sun starts to shine, let Kellan Macinnes, author of The Wild Swimmer of Kintail, inspire your next summer adventure in the Highlands.

 

The Wild Swimmer of Kintail
By Kellan MacInnes
Published by Rymour Books

 

Can you tell us a little bit about The Wild Swimmer of Kintail?

The Wild Swimmer of Kintail tells the story of how following the end of a twenty year relationship, flat broke and with a house full of Airbnb guests driving me crazy, I set out to follow in the footsteps of the little known poet, mountaineer, travel writer and pioneer of wild swimming Brenda G Macrow.

Macrow quit London for the Scottish Highlands in the summer of 1946 and spent six months in Kintail, a remote and mountainous area in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. While she was there, Macrow took on the challenge of wild swimming the 28 hill lochs (all located above a thousand feet) that lie within the boundaries of the Parish of Kintail. Seventy years later, accompanied only by a cantankerous and flatulent Labradoodle and hoping to find my ‘single self’ again on the way, I too set off in search of the hill lochs of Kintail.

The book is multi-faceted and there are many different layers to the story: as I tackle the challenge of wild swimming – or at least wild paddling – the hill lochs of Kintail, I recall scenes from the disintegration of my civil partnership. Some of the memories are funny, some poignant, some shocking. Meanwhile a parallel narrative about the summer Macrow spent in Scotland in 1946 is told in flashbacks from Kintail Scrapbook, the book Macrow wrote about her time in the north-west Highlands.

Last but by no means least, The Wild Swimmer of Kintail also contains practical information (routes, grid references and directions) for those wishing to take on the challenge of wild swimming the 28 high-altitude hill lochs of Kintail.

Far more than a mere travelogue, much more than simply nature writing, The Wild Swimmer of Kintail tells the story of the end of a gay relationship as well as being a deeply perceptive account of what it is like being a writer. Laugh-out-loud in some places, painfully honest in others, The Wild Swimmer of Kintail is a life-affirming tale about the healing power of wild swimming.

 

The Wild Swimmer of Kintail was a long time in the writing. Can you tell us a little about the process, the sources and the people you consulted?

I first began work on The Wild Swimmer of Kintail not long after my first book, Caleb’s List, Climbing the Scottish Mountains Visible from Arthur’s Seat, came out. I had just been awarded a grant by Creative Scotland to research and write another book and fulfil my ambition to become a writer. I was inspired to write The Wild Swimmer of Kintail when I was browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh and came across a volume called Kintail Scrapbook by a writer I’d never heard of. The book had been published in 1948 and the writer’s name was Brenda G Macrow.

I was captivated by Macrow’s tale of escaping war torn London, taking the night train north and spending the summer of 1946 living in a cottage in Kintail with only her Skye terrier Jeannie for company. I loved Macrow’s descriptions of her wanderings through the Highlands just after the end of the Second World War. Throughout The Wild Swimmer of Kintail there are flashbacks to the summer of 1946 told in quotes from Macrow’s own writing.

For this I am indebted to Brenda Macrow’s daughter Lesley Hampshire for giving Rymour Books permission to use the extracts from her mother’s book in The Wild Swimmer of Kintail. I knew from my research that Macrow had a daughter but I had to do a bit of detective work to track her down. Using Google I found an obituary for Brenda G Macrow who had died in 2011 at the age of 94 at the Abbas Combe nursing home in Chichester.

I phoned the nursing home and explained I was researching a book. They gave me Lesley’s address and I wrote to her explaining all about my project. Lesley was a great help with the book, sending me photos, diaries and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about her mum’s writing. A few weeks ago I was really pleased to get an email from Lesley which read: ‘I am now 75 pages into your brilliantly written book, I feel like I am walking both back in time with my mum, also with you now!’

 

Your writing demonstrates a deep love of the Scottish mountains. Can you tell us a bit more about how that came about and about how you got into wild swimming?

I was born and brought up in Edinburgh and spent many childhood holidays in Argyllshire and it was here that I was first introduced to hillwalking. Aged about seven I climbed 308m high Beinn Lora that rises above Ardmucknish Bay. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember the bracken towered way over my head.

Moving forward a few years to the mid-1970s: back home in Edinburgh my primary school class was taken to meet the famous mountaineer Chris Bonington at the Lothian Outdoor Education Centre in MacDonald Road. I  remember the bearded man sitting behind a  school-type table, but what formed a lasting impression on my ten-year-old mind were the brown blotches on the skin of  his hands, the scars of frostbite sustained climbing the south-west face of Everest.

I was lucky to be a pupil at James Gillespie’s High in the early 1980s during the golden age of outdoor education. I went rock climbing and canoeing and spent two weeks climbing in the Austrian Alps with a group of fellow Edinburgh school pupils, (opportunities that are sadly only open to state school pupils with comfortably off parents today). Back home in Scotland with a school friend I climbed the Five Sisters of Kintail, Buchaille Etive Mor and Ben Nevis.

Re wild swimming, I’d always been up for a wee dip in the burn on a hot summer’s day on the way back down the mountain. But it wasn’t until I read Kintail Scrapbook by Brenda G Macrow, in which she describes visiting and swimming in the hill lochs of Kintail and decided to repeat this challenge for myself, that I realised it could be fun to jump in the water on cold days too.

 

Which books about Scotland and the great outdoors influenced you?

Many and various is the short answer: At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig, Hamish’s Mountain Walk by Hamish Brown, The First Fifty, Munro Bagging Without a Beard by Muriel Gray, The Key Above the Door by Maurice Walsh, Kidnapped by R L Stevenson, The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane, Waterlog by Roger Deakin, The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, Under the Skin by Michel Faber and so many, many more.

 

The Wild Swimmer of Kintail is an unusual book in many ways, how easy was it to find a publisher for it?

Following the advice of a Literature Officer at Creative Scotland, I submitted The Wild Swimmer of Kintail to every literary agent in London whose website expressed an interest in narrative non-fiction and nature writing. A handful got back to me with feedback about my book. Typically, their emails began with positive comments. Something like: ‘The introduction had my hair standing on end’ but ended with: ‘it just didn’t quite add up to something that I thought would win over the publishers.’ The process took months and months (at least it helped pass the time during lockdown) but I really wouldn’t recommend it to other aspiring Scottish writers. I’m not sure they’re very keen on books about Scotland down there to be honest.

I then submitted the book directly to Scottish publishers, which is what I should have done in the first place. But they seemed to struggle with the unusual format of the book. I had a sense of deja vu as, just like with my first book, the bestselling Caleb’s List,  publishers rejected the manuscript saying things like: ‘It’s not about Brenda Macrow, or yourself or swimming, but a mixture of all three.’

But the mixture was the whole point, I thought to myself! That’s why I wrote it that way and that’s what made Caleb’s List a success! Luckily for me two independent Scottish publishers did express an interest in The Wild Swimmer of Kintail and Ian Spring at Rymour Books was brave enough to take the book on.

 

If you could choose one thing you hope readers take from The Wild Swimmer of Kintail, what would it be?

I’d really like it if some outdoorsy folk took on the challenge of wild swimming the hill lochs of Kintail. There are 28 of them and they’re all situated at a height of one thousand feet or more in a beautiful, remote area of Scotland. My dream is that one day ticking off the hill lochs on Macrow’s list will become as popular as doing the Munros is today!

 

One last question, can you sum up The Wild Swimmer of Kintail in ten words?

A life-affirming tale about the healing power of wild swimming.

 

The Wild Swimmer of Kintail by Kellan MacInnes is published by Rymour Books, price £15.75

Redeeming Our Cracks is a book about seeing beauty in brokenness and strength in vulnerability. Author Neil Paynter gathers together prayers, poems and reflections to explore issues of mental health and wellness that offer solace and connection. We hope you enjoy the extract below.

 

Redeeming Our Cracks
By Neil Paynter
Published by Wild Goose Publications

 

 

You come,
walking among
the brittle fragments
of our broken lives,
gathering up every sharp shard,
to fashion
a new and beautiful
mosaic.

Sandra Sears, from Redeeming Our Cracks

 

My purple monster

‘Sometimes I wrestle with my monsters; sometimes we just snuggle.’
Anon

Monsters are only monstrous when they are hiding under the bed. Trust me, I know, I have one. My monster is a purple monster. It is sneaky. It is a small, coiled creature, nestled deep down in my subconscious. It is often hidden, but certain noises and tastes and overwhelming situations tickle my monster, irritating it until it erupts, until meltdown. My monster expands to fill all of the unoccupied space in my brain, its fur standing on end. It is a frightened cat, ready to pounce; a bird startled out of its nest; a dog growling and barking and snapping at an unexpected intrusion.

Let me explain. I don’t really have a purple monster living in my head. But I am autistic1, and I live with CPTSD2, generalised anxiety3 and situational depression.4 Autism is a neurotype – a way of thinking and being. It is a diagnosis, but not necessarily a problem. Similarly, a counsellor recently helped me to understand my mental health labels not as disorders, but as rational responses to really painful and complicated situations. God made me autistic, and God celebrates my neurodiversity. The problem, for me, is that many people do not see mental health – or neurodiversity – that way.

That purple monster that I mentioned could be described as ‘meltdowns’. For me, meltdowns are a part of autism. They will not be cured; I will not grow out of them. Autism can include differences in executive functioning, sensory experience, psychological processing and social interaction. For me, this includes finding it very tricky to organise my time; having no visual memory or sense of direction; needing to/being able to do multiple things at once; being able to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts (useful when you are doing a PhD!); hearing repetitive noises as louder than they actually are; relying on lip-reading and visual languages; being unable to stomach certain tastes and textures; having extreme empathy; and experiencing variable levels of social anxiety.

All of these things are part of who I am, and I don’t dislike these parts of me at all. Many of these parts of me are gifts, or at least include a silver lining! But when society is structured around people who think and experience and live in a neurotypical way, those of us who are neurodiverse struggle. This world can be incredibly overwhelming. And, for me, that leads to the purple monster, to meltdowns, to a complete inability to cope, for a little while. Let me tell you about a few situations where my purple monster came out to play.

When I was nine, I called my teacher ‘Mrs Thingamabob’. She was furious. I was sent out. I wasn’t upset about being sent out. I was upset that I had upset her! She had written her name on the blackboard a few days earlier, so I was meant to remember it. I didn’t. To me, this was the end of the world. If only Mrs Thingamabob had known that I have no visual memory, and that I cared deeply about how she felt, the purple monster would not have made me cry.

When I was twelve, my teacher told my mum that I never paid attention. Why? Because I refused to look at the board when he was teaching. Duh – I was listening! If I looked at the board, I got super confused, and had no idea what he was talking about. If I just closed my eyes and concentrated, though, my brain lit up with facts and connections that were light years beyond primary-seven grammar. If only Mr B had known that I loved learning and was perhaps focusing more than anyone else in that room, the purple monster would not have had a tantrum at my mum.

When I was eighteen, at music college, I had an argument with one of my teachers. She told me that I had to memorise the pieces that I was going to perform. I tried to explain that I couldn’t. She said that that was nonsense, that everyone can memorise. I can’t. If only I had known, back then, that I was autistic, and that reasonable adjustments were possible, the purple monster would not have made me storm out of my lesson.

When I was twenty-four, the educational psychologist who diagnosed my neurodiversity said that I should apply for Personal Independence Payment (PIP). I did. In the face-to-face interview, I performed ‘well’, talking with confidence and flair about my studies, my work and my hobbies. I also told the assessor that I couldn’t drive without my wife in the car and that I needed adjustments around the house for my sensory and cognitive difficulties, amongst other things. Did I get PIP? Of course I didn’t. If only the U.K. benefits system understood autism. If only the assessor knew that people with autism who were raised as female – which I was, though I now identify as transmasculine – mask our symptoms (we learn to hide our differences in order to fit into a patriarchal, normative world), the purple monster would be a little more manageable today.

The point is, I hide my purple monster because I have learnt to. I have been taught, throughout my life, that this world cannot cope with my differences, that I need to mask my monster if I want to succeed. Many people who are neurodiverse and/or experience mental health difficulties hide the ways in which we struggle to fit into, or to cope with, the inflexible ways of the places where we study, work and live. I will always be autistic, and experience the effects of CPTSD, anxiety and depression. But perhaps if I could hold hands with my purple monster as I went about my day, life would be very different. Perhaps if Mrs Thingamabob had taken the time to get to know me before assuming my ignorance, I wouldn’t have had to worry so much about upsetting her. Perhaps if Mr B had been taught to attend to different learning styles, I would have been a better student. Perhaps if the classical music world actually talked about the vast amount of gifted musicians who are neurodiverse, the oppressive norms that it perpetuates could be dismantled. Perhaps if the systems that are supposed to support people with autism allowed me to afford assistive technology and reasonable adjustments, everyday stuff would be just that little bit easier and my wife might not have to be my carer, on top of working more than full time. Perhaps if autism were just that little bit more visible in this world, I could snuggle with my monster, instead of wrestling it.

As a minister, I often hear Christians say that they include everyone because ‘We are all human’. They have a point. We are all human. But we are also all different. Perhaps if those differences were brought into the light, more people would feel genuinely included, actually welcome, fully represented, really alive. When Jesus healed lepers, he sent them to the temple to present themselves, to be seen. It’s time for neurodiverse people to be presented to society, to be seen, to be accepted, to be included, to be loved, just as we are. We don’t need to be healed. We need society to reconcile itself to our presence. Are you ready to be part of that change?

 

Redeeming Our Cracks by Neil Paynter published by Wild Goose Publications, priced £10.99.

Stewed Rhubarb have kicked their year off in style with three beautiful pamphlets of poetry. We hope you enjoy these sample poems from each collection.

 

Touching Air
By Gill Shaw
Published by Stewed Rhubarb

Play My Game
By Alec Finlay
Published by Stewed Rhubarb

Another Word For Home is Blackbird
By Catherine Wilson Garry
Published by Stewed Rhubarb

 

 

Touching Air by Gill Shaw

 

UISGE BEAGTHA (OAK-AGED)

You drink whisky. So, I want to learn

about whisky. Do you know the middle part

of the second distillation is called the heart?

Do you know the heart is the sweetest part?

 

Ethanol-filled, highly desirable, perfect

for whisky? If I were a gambling girl, I’d bet

this is the only love poem in the world

where the poet offers up the sweetest part

 

of the second distillation.

But I’m no gambler. Except

when I’m betting

on a sure thing.

 

And you are my sure thing.

Jigger me malted.

Jigger me nosed.

Jigger me rare.

 

Bring me the sweetness

of your second distillation.

Show me the acorn

of your ethanol

 

love.

 

PAUSING REALITY

Bring me your heels stinging,

nicked by marram swords.

Bring me the shingle that clings

between your toes.

Bring me the sand that dulls

the Go-Wild-erness on your toenails.

Bring me your salted shins.

Bring me your thighs

and the rise of their goosebumps.

Bring me your bathing suit, damp.

Bring me the sun,

curled in the waves

of your hair.

Bring me the heat

in the skin of your neck.

Bring me the gasp

that escaped from your lips.

Bring me the pearl

of your teeth.

Bring me the upturned

corners of your mouth.

Bring me shine of your coconut

shoulders and let my fingertips

stick.

 

Play My Game by Alec Finlay

 

questions & answers

‘What is forgetting?

An unripe apple stabbed by a spear

What is drunkenness?

A white page among coloured ones’

– Paul Celan

 

 

what’s a garden?

culture & labour producing

an annual surplus of colour

 

what’s a river?

a flower with its roots in the hills

 

what’s a beach?

an abacus which counts in lines

powered by the moon

 

what’s the sea?

if the sea knew what it was

it wouldn’t keep coming back

 

what is illness?

strangeness felt inside us

 

what’s a pigeon?

not what, but …

who, whoo

 

what’s nectar?

a different colour & scent

where you enter

 

what’s an apple?

a dark star within the earth

 

what’s the moon?

a coin in the high-rise slot machine

 

what’s a friend?

bare love

 

what’s love?

day is, day’s us, day was

 

what’s sex?

fishes in space–fishes

in space–fishesinspace

 

what’s a lake?

a glass rinsed by cloud

 

what’s the sky?

jug of blue

 

what’s tea?

an old pond to fish in

 

 

Inspired by Celan’s Romanian poems composed in the manner of

Surrealist questions, translated by Julian Semilian and San Agalidi.

 

Agnes Martin

Agnes lays on her bed

waiting to be dead

Agnes is bored

so death is delayed

 

Monsieur Le Songe

Milou will sleep now

his bicycle rested

at the end of the bed

while the cherries

ripen in his head

 

Another Word For Home is Blackbird by Catherine Wilson Garry

 

Dulcet

On hearing you read aloud, a fortunate

snark in the audience stated you were stuck

 

with a mouthful of marbles. As if your tongue was bumping

against the received way to speak. The hand-me-downs

 

from your mother’s West coast lullabies

were diagnosed as impediment.

 

I wanted to kiss the stones from your mouth,

swallow their dark vowels, until their deep coolness

 

pooled in my stomach, grounded me

to the wet earth and salt. Instead, I held

 

your silence. Held the weight of it.

 

Slice of Life

 When I was a kid, my mother cut my hair outside

scattered it for birds’ nests

in the hope something could make

 

a better home out of my split ends.

I feel most at home in other people’s.

I like the days that quickly become nights

 

where we leave conversations feeling

sea-changed, trying to spot the birds

in the park at night. We all exist in

 

different portions. To some, I might just be cups

left in the sink, a dropped pen, the uncomfortable

warmth on a loo seat. Yet. On the last train home,

 

my head against a rainy window, I dream

geologists find me. Uncover more than one

wet pavement footprint. Some people only

 

ever see Van Gogh on a postcard but it

still sits pride of place on a well-worn mantelpiece.

 

Birdwatching, Part II

When it is too much

I take myself birdwatching.

 

This practice is not about collection;

or identification; or, even, knowledge.

 

It is about movement. It is about the

thrum beneath a tiny chest. It is about

 

the dead beetles in the dirt. The dried

up patches of dirt. It is about the

 

humble species like blackbirds and

house sparrows and wrens and

 

(when it is too much) perhaps even seagulls.

It is about the way our lives are so small

 

so painfully small. It is their ignorance held

like a handful of walnuts. I borrow it for now.

 

Touching Air by Gill Shaw, Play My Game, by Alec Finlay and Another Word For Home is Blackbird by Catherine Wilson Garry, are published by Stewed Rhubarb, priced £6.00. (Play My Game is £10.00.)

David Robinson finds Alan Warner’s novella a brilliant addition to the Darklands series.

 

Nothing Left to Fear From Hell
By Alan Warner
Published by Polygon

 

If you have read any of Alan Warner’s novels, you’ll already know that he doesn’t do predictable, whether in plot, style or character. Take Uncle, the one-eyed hoarder of pilchards and builder of domestic papier-mâché tunnels in The Man Who Walks. Who else would invent such a man – or, come to that, his crazed journey, pursued by his drifter nephew, to Culloden?

So what would you, dear reader, expect from a Warner novel which, chronologically at least, starts at the site of Scotland’s last battle? One which features not less a personage than Charles Edward Stuart, and whose title Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is emblazoned over a picture of a crowned skull on a blood-red cover?

Well, I’ll tell you what I thought I was in for. I didn’t think it would be anything as straightforward as the old, old story about the prince on the run from the redcoats, helped into his disguise as an Irish maid by Flora MacDonald and rowed over the sea to Skye. Not with that author, title and cover. Instead, Nothing Left to Fear from Hell would surely be about the not-so-bonnie prince of Roderick Graham’s 2014 biography, the boozy (six bottles of wine a day before he even moved onto the brandy) bloated, mistress-beating boor he became in later years. The Hell – the word dwarfs all others on the embossed title – would be the inescapable hell of regret: all those lives the Young Pretender wasted, all that loyalty and promise he betrayed, all those hopes twisted into tragedy.  Nothing left to fear from hell because Charles Edward Stuart, the crowned skull on that goth-gladdening cover, is already in it.

And yet when Warner’s book opens, we are not in exile but still in Scotland. Twelve men on board a boat land on a Hebridean island shrouded in mist and midges. A tall pale man climbs out and promptly retches. He lowers his trousers. Diarrhoea too. If this is indeed the Bonnie Prince, it’s a version yet to appear on any shortbread tin.

But that’s the point. We already have an image of Bonnie Prince Charlie in our heads. We know the story too. How can Warner, in the latest book in Polygon’s excellent Darkland Tales series of stories from Scotland’s past, subvert that image without losing the Jacobite plot?

The trick, at first, is to gently mask expectations, to withhold chronological or geographical coordinates or explanations of relationships within the prince’s accompanying coterie, carefully smuggling them all past what EP Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ – the assumption that everything was always bound to work out the way it did and that people who ended up on the losing side of history really ought to have known better.

The story unfolding before us hardly belongs to the Ladybird school of history. In the land the fleeing Jacobites move across, the new British state is flexing its muscles. Haystacks have been pulled down and burnt, farms and blockhouses sacked, animals bayoneted. The Jacobites themselves are guided by older impulses of loyalty that make little sense to us secular moderns. ‘It’s God’s work about us here and we know it,’ Clanranald tells the Stuart Che Guevara.

And what of the Bonnie Prince himself? This is where Warner’s novella excels. Because if there’s one thing we know from history it is that Bonnie Prince Charlie must have had at least some charisma: he wouldn’t have gathered followers otherwise. And portraying charisma in cold print is, to say the least, tricky.  How do you do it – particularly when, as here, on the prince’s five-month chase around the Highlands and Islands – there are no cheering crowds to make the point? What was it about him that made Highlanders refuse to clype even for a £30,000 reward (£8.5 million today)?

Warner’s Bonnie Prince Charlie is no saint. He doesn’t worry in the slightest about his moral responsibility for all those burnt-out farms and destitute Highlanders. He is impatient, suffers badly from ‘the terror Mitches’ and insomnia, and is quite capable of giving ridiculous orders, as when he shoots at a passing whale and asks his servant to dive into the sea and bring it back to the shore. (This actually happened.)  He is arrogant, even to the point of walking alongside and chatting to the factor Alexander Kingsburgh on Skye while dressed as an Irish maid, when anyone encountering them would have considered this the very height of social impudence and therefore a complete giveaway. (Kingsburgh’s joke – ‘Sire, surely you are the worst pretender I have ever seen’ – also makes its way into Warner’s novel.)

But look again at that one scene – as far as I can tell, true to the historical record for 28 June 1746. It is absolutely irresistible, fusing daredevilry, humour and panache like a cross between Robin Hood and Some Like It Hot. No wonder Warner stuck with it.

Already, and so subtly that you hardly notice it, Warner has been quietly making Jacobites of his readers. Neil MacEachain – who spent most of May and June with the prince – is quoted pointing out how Bonnie Prince Charlie ‘whether meeting any person of high or low station … held a necessity to impose a high and always striking impression of his easy humour’.  Not a snob, in other words. We have already glimpsed this in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s mildly sexist banter about the fair maids of Mull with the sailors rowing him to Lewis, when he also jokes about plans to disguise him as Captain O’Sullivan’s son.

The hardest thing about historical fiction is getting the dialogue right: too right and it is hard to follow, too modern and it becomes risible. Switching or nudging prepositions (‘he was with me at our army’, ‘both men were in the dram’ etc) is as effective in speech as Warner customary verbal freshness is in description (‘smoke rioted out of the blockhouse,’  ‘the shot jingled up the water’ etc). This may be Warner’s first attempt at historical fiction, but the language rings true.

So too does this portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Charles Edward Stuart is down but not out. He’ll come back soon with the French, he tells anyone who will listen, and when that happens, victory will be all the sweeter for this brief taste of defeat. How much better to have that moment captured, when even a darkened future still had a sense of possibility, than the book I thought Warner was going to write – about the cursed, hellish days of the prince’s long, drunken exile in Paris, when the future had none?

 

Nothing Left to Fear from Hell by Alan Warner is published by Polygon, priced £10.

The Grief Nurse is a fantasy gothic thriller, and debut novel, by Angie Spoto. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to find out more about the book.

 

The Grief Nurse
By Angie Spoto
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Can you tell us about The Grief Nurse?

The Grief Nurse is set in a world where the wealthy elite don’t have to feel grief. Grief nurses, people who can sense and take grief, are indentured to only the wealthiest, most influential families. The story follows Lynx, who is a grief nurse for the Aster family. The story begins when the eldest Aster son dies and the Asters host a death party on their isolated island estate. Shortly after guests flock to the island and the party begins, the first mysterious death occurs, and the bodies quickly start to pile up. Lynx becomes entangled in solving the mystery of what is causing the deaths. The story is an exploration of Lynx’s own stigma against grief and grieving and follows her as she comes to understand the true power of grief.

 

What inspired you to write The Grief Nurse?

Victorian women were required to wear black for years after the deaths of their husbands. I heard once (though I can’t remember where!) that some wealthy women would hire women to wear black for them, effectively paying someone to mourn in their stead. I thought – what if we took that one step further? What if you could hire someone to take your grief entirely?

 

Your writing style is so lyrical – can you tell us about your methods?

I think my style must come from the stories and authors that have inspired me. You wouldn’t necessarily know it when reading The Grief Nurse, but I’m very much inspired by women surrealists, authors like Leonora Carrington and painters like Dorothea Tanning. These women were doing something very special with Surrealism – you look at their work and can see how influenced they were by fairy tales and the Gothic. Carrington’s style, for example, is filled with absolutely stunning (and grotesque!) imagery. I think my style must have been influenced by her and others!

 

The setting of a story can add so much texture (and both the house and the island really do!). Why did you choose this setting?

I love the Gothic so it’s no surprise that I love big, old houses. I knew right away when I started writing The Grief Nurse that I wanted it to be set in an estate home, but I wanted it to be very different than traditional Edwardian manor houses or even conventional spooky Gothic mansions. Because I chose to associate the colour white with grief in the world of The Grief Nurse, I wanted to create a house that was trying its very best to be the opposite – so a house filled with colour inside and out. I didn’t completely settle on a vision until I visited the Isle of Bute and the Mount Stewart estate. Mount Stewart is really unlike any estate home I’ve ever seen; it has this gorgeous great hall on the ceiling of which are painted constellations. The house is filled with unusual details like coloured skylights and bright colours. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted Mount Sorcha, the estate home in The Grief Nurse, to feel like Mount Stewart. Mount Stewart is on the Isle of Bute, which is a small western Scottish island. It was at that point that I decided to place Mount Sorcha on an island too – it helps that it really increases the sense of claustrophobia and isolation!

 

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

The grief! Aside from the fact that the book made me face up and really closely examine my own grief, actually writing about grief in a kind of ‘magical’ way was difficult. Grief is complicated! No two people experience grief in the same way, and how we experience grief changes throughout our lives. Grief can feel one way one day and completely different the next. I think I could have gone a very simplistic route and said, ‘grief is a rose’ and ‘grief is a fire’ but once you start to really examine grief, you realise that an authentic depiction of grief is never going to be simple. That’s why I settled on depicting characters experiencing grief in different ways and exploring their varied relationships with grief.

 

While The Grief Nurse is fantasy, it reads like a book that required research. What was the most interesting or strange thing you found out while researching that didn’t make it into the book?

I actually read a couple books on Scottish deer stalking. I was determined to have a deer stalking scene in the book – this just felt so indicative of the wealthy, aristocratic family I created, and it was a great excuse to show off the Scottish-inspired landscape. Also, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy was a useful read – for obvious reasons!

 

The Grief Nurse by Angie Spoto is published by Sandstone Press, priced £16.99.

Little Door Books were delighted when historical fiction bestseller Conn Iggulden agreed to write a children’s picture book for them that looks at tackling climate change. Here is a small sampler of their collaboration.

 

Scotty Plants a Seed
By Conn Iggulden
Published by Little Door Books

 

 

Scotty Plants a Seed by Conn Iggulden is published by Little Door Books, priced £7.99.