Happy Birthday, Robert Burns!

 

'Ae Spring' - Illustration for Tam o' Shanter,
by my husband, Alan Lees

Later on today, I'll be toasting the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns at a small, private Burns Supper. This year, I thought it would be nice to say something about Tam O' Shanter. Here it is. 

Once upon a time, a young lad called Robert Burns (probably Rab in Ayrshire, occasionally Rabbie, Robin too, but never Robbie) was fascinated by the folk tales he heard from his mother and other relatives. This would be when he was living in the cottage in Alloway, till he was seven, and then when they moved to Mount Oliphant, not too far away. He would have filed them away in his memory. They would have fired his youthful imagination.

Later, as a teenager, he was sent to Kirkoswald to learn a form of practical mathematics associated with surveying. He stayed just outside the village, either at or close to Ballochneil Cottage where his mother’s brother lived, and walked into the village to study. With his companions, he would also walk to Turnberry Shore and Maidens, where he met Douglas Graham of Shanter farm, and his formidable wife Helen McTaggart who may or may not have been models for Tam and his wife Kate in the poem.

This was also where he heard stories of smugglers and witches, especially witches who could raise storms to wreck sailing ships. Witchcraft was still a serious allegation in 18th century Scotland, although not quite so disastrous as it had been less than a hundred years earlier. He went out in a small fishing 'coble' and was as sick as a dog. (Few of his later poems are about the sea.) Smuggling, the contraband trade, was active all along the Carrick coast of Ayrshire, and young Rab would drink his fair share of French brandy. He also discovered flirtation with Margaret – Peggy – Thomson, who was only 13 to the poet’s 16. 

He may even have thought about a poem concerning witches and drunkenness, but he certainly wasn’t ready to write it yet.

Cue forward some years. Our Rab is all grown up. The family had moved from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea - ruinously for the poet's father. Not long after his premature death, Robert and his brother Gilbert took the tenancy of Mossgiel outside Mauchline (where our delicious milk now comes from) and moved there with the rest of the family. 

In 1786 he publishes the first edition of his poems, plans to go to Jamaica, but goes to Edinburgh instead, where he rapidly becomes a celebrity, especially among the upper echelons of society, the ‘nabbery’ as they are still occasionally called here. Meanwhile, he is in an on-off relationship with Jean Armour, the eldest daughter of a Mauchline building contractor. She has already given birth to his twins of whom only one child now survives, a boy called Robbie. He is living at Mossgiel with his father’s family.

By 1788, Jean is heavily pregnant with a second set of twins and is staying at Tarbolton Mill, with the miller Willie Muir and his wife, sent there by Jean’s exasperated parents in a vain attempt to avoid the town gossip.

The poet arrives from Edinburgh ostensibly to see his family and his son at Mossgiel. But he can’t escape the responsibility of Jean. I always have the feeling that Willie, who had been a friend of the poet’s father, and was a good man, gave him a serious dressing down. He found accommodation for Jean in Mauchline, a room in the house belonging to a doctor friend, and paid for it – before behaving very badly, telling Jean she had no claim on him and heading back to Edinburgh in a hurry.

When the second set of twins were born prematurely, and died soon after, he suddenly reappeared in Mauchline, thoroughly penitent and asking her to marry him. The sooner the better. We don’t really know what made him change his mind so suddenly and so comprehensively. A matter of days previously, he had been swearing undying love to Nancy McLehose - Clarinda - in Edinburgh and calling poor Jean nasty names.

I think the inconvenient truth was that he loved her. He couldn't help himself. Besides, they had never not been married, ever since he had asked her and she had agreed, during her first pregnancy. It was a legal marriage in Scotland at the time, whether paperwork was involved or not. I think he knew that. Besides, Nancy was never going to be a farmer’s wife. Or his wife at all, given that she was already married to somebody else.

Rab had taken on the tenancy of beautiful Ellisland near Dumfries. He was supervising the building of a new farmhouse there, missing Jean very much, and not afraid to tell her so, in a scant handful of enchantingly domestic letters about linen and cheese as well as love, while travelling back and forth on horseback to Mauchline whenever he could. She would walk along the road to meet him. Jean was his real 'muse' - the genuine love of his life. He acknowledges it himself. 'My muse maun be thy bonnie self' he wrote in a wonderful song for Jean called O Were I On Parnassus Hill. He had confessed that he had to be 'in love' to write a love poem or song. But there is all the difference in the world between being fleetingly 'in love' and genuinely loving somebody through thick and thin. 

Later, when the couple were living at Ellisland, he met English antiquary and collector of folk tales, Captain Francis Grose, along the road at Friar’s Carse (now a hotel). The two got on, even though Grose was a good deal older than Burns. Grose was collecting traditional stories and Rab had learned them at his mother’s knee. He sent the folklorist summaries of three ghostly tales about Alloway’s old ruined kirk, stories he knew from his childhood, as well as tales of witchcraft and witches summoning storms, tales that he had heard at Maidens all those years before.

So it was at Ellisland in 1790 that – encouraged by Grose - he wrote Tam o’ Shanter, one of his most famous and well-loved poems. The story goes that he was working on it as he walked beside the Nith at Ellisland. He used to go fishing in the river there, wearing a kind of Davy Crockett hat, a rakish fur hat with a tail. There’s a green path there too, and you can still walk along it. He was reciting bits of the poem to himself and laughing out loud, so that the farm workers overhearing him went to ask Jean if her husband had taken leave of his senses. She reassured them that he hadn’t – he was just in an imaginative world of his own.

It was also round about this time that a female poet called Janet Little arrived at Ellisland to find Bonnie Jean ‘drown’d in tears’ as she put it. Only a little while before Jean went into labour with a son, Ann Park, the barmaid at the Globe Inn in Dumfries had given birth to the poet's daughter, Betty. A bit of a reality check for romantic Janet and a slap on the face for Jean. 

But Jean was quite capable of seizing a ladle and – as her husband described it in one of his many letters - ‘laying about her as lustily as a reaper from the corn ridge’ if domestic chaos involving children and dogs and faithless poets became too much for her. Later, Jean would take Betty into her household when Ann couldn't look after her, bringing the child up as her own and loving her dearly. The two would remain close for the whole of Jean's life which should tell us something about the quality of the woman. 

It’s not hard to imagine that Rab may have had his own formidable, wonderful wife in mind, quite as much as Helen McTaggart, when he was writing about Tam. 

O Tam! had'st thou but been sae wise, As taen thy ain wife Kate's advice!

The poem is a work of genius – wise and witty and real because it is stitched into a familiar landscape and concerns people that the poet knew well, and loved dearly. 

We still love Tam and his creator for it.

Meanwhile, you can read Jean's story - and of course the story of the charming husband she loved her whole life long - in my novel, The Jewel. It's available on Amazon as a paperback or an eBook.   And if you want to know more about the real relationship between the poet and his wife, there's a little book called For Jean, that I put together at the same time as the novel, a collection of poems, songs and letters by Robert Burns, written for and about his wife. 

   

 

 

 

Place Names on my Mind

 

A long time ago, when I had graduated with my first degree and had spent another year in Edinburgh working part time in an art gallery, and attempting to build a writing career, one of my previous professors asked me if I had ever considered researching place names. Although I hadn't, it was an interesting suggestion and there would have been the possibility of studying for a postgraduate Master's degree, which would have postponed the dreadful moment of deciding what on earth I wanted to do next. Other than write, of course. I had never really wanted to do anything but write.

I thought about it. My first degree in Mediaeval Studies had involved Old Norse, Old English and Middle English, so I had some idea of the history of languages, and how that history is fascinatingly embedded in place names. 

I had also learned about mediaeval scholars debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and that should have told me something. Shouldn't it?

As it happened, the decision was made for me, because another of my old heads of department made me an offer I would have been mad to refuse. Professor Stuart Piggott, one of Britain's best known archaeologists back then, (long before Indy glamourised the profession) invited me to a meeting. I'd done a couple of years of archaeology of the most basic kind before specialising in Mediaeval Studies so he knew who I was. He was - to the young me, anyway - scarily distinguished. He also had a stuffed owl, perched on the back of his chair, something that intrigued me so much that I would later include it in a novel. His friend and colleague, Scottish folklorist Stuart Sanderson, was running a postgraduate Master's course in Folk Life Studies at Leeds University. Funding would be available. Would I be interested? I hardly needed to think about it. I was fascinated by folklore, folksong and social history, all of which seemed to dovetail very nicely with my first degree, and I jumped at the chance. 

Good choice.

That course, with the reading and research I did as part of it, has stood me in good stead throughout my whole writing life to date, whether I was working on radio and stage plays, historical fiction or non-fiction, all of which involved going back to what are known as 'primary sources' - as close to original texts, voices and accounts as you possibly can. 

From time to time, however, I've tried to renew my interest in place names and their derivations. I even attended an academic conference about the subject, at which I discovered that it is possible to go mad with boredom. To face the possibility of falling asleep for a hundred years and hoping for a prince or chewing your own arm off in despair. Who knew? All it did was confirm that my choice of Master's all those years ago, had been the right one.

Now, I've been following the odd place name group online, but the madness risk still pertains. Place name scholars (mostly male) could give mediaeval theologians a run for their money, only this time it's in debating the minutiae of linguistics rather than angels on pin-heads. 

Some time ago, I was commissioned by Birlinn to research and write a history of the Isle of Gigha: The Way It Was. Not a project to make you rich, said my editor, and how right he was. It was a labour of love though. Gigha had been a Gaelic speaking island and place names were vitally important in confirming which were the oldest sites, and how their traditional names illuminated their history. I needed help, and I wasn't getting it from the usual suspects. But I had a not-so-secret weapon. Our good friend, islander Willie McSporran, was a native Gaelic speaker who had worked on farms throughout the island during his long life and knew the landscape and its history as intimately as anyone could. During one or two magical afternoons, we sat together with a map and a recorder, and drank tea while he told me the place names of the island and their stories. The whys and wherefores. He gave me intimate and detailed landscape names of all kinds, describing their history. This was a 'primary source' par excellence, a folklorist's dream, and it was only age that prevented him from walking over these places with me, and telling me their names and tales in situ. But the large scale map was a good substitute. 

When I was doing that folklore degree we were told never to discount traditional stories and beliefs, because they may well contain a germ of truth. We were taught about a site with a long local tradition of association with a 'golden man' where archaeologists eventually discovered a 'grave good' in the shape of a golden ceremonial cape. Perhaps even more engagingly, we were told of a folklorist collecting an old story of the 'lane that Mr Chaucer walked along while planning his book' - only to find that in all likelihood there was a six hundred year old association with Geoffrey Chaucer. 

Now, pondering modern place name studies - 'toponymy' - I think it's the human, imaginative element that is sorely neglected. The oral history of these landscapes. Willie had used the names every day of his working life but more than that, he knew the stories associated with them, and the tales had their roots somewhere in the Norse and Celtic history of the island. Perhaps even in the pre-Celtic history of the place. So these weren't just linguistic 'artefacts' to be slotted into some likely grammatical schema. They were part of the ancient traditions associated with this complicated landscape. 

Arguably, pinning names down to linguistic minutiae, but neglecting the tantalising possibility of narrative survivals over millennia of oral history, results in a weird imbalance. Try to be accurate by all means, but take human custom and belief, our love of story, into account as well. Dare to be enchanted. 

And at all costs, avoid situations in which you're tempted to chew off your own arm. 

Willie McSporran

Truths and Lies

When I was eleven years old, about a year before we moved to Scotland in the early 60s, we were living in Bramley, a suburb of Leeds. We rented an upstairs flat, part of a big millstone grit house on Rosemont Road, just off the top of Hough Lane. My best friend, Sandra, lived a short walk away, on Hough Lane itself. This is a very long lane that leads down to busy Stanningley Road on one side, and on the other meanders past a few shops, a cemetery, a school, a couple of churches and a library, before heading down to Bramley Town Street. It always seemed to be greener that way, and still does, if Google maps is to be believed. If you turn left where Hough Lane joins Town Street, you'll come to Bramley Park, where Sandra and I used to play tennis on the public courts and through which I and my dad used to walk, using it as a short cut to Rosemont Road, when he brought me back from my weekly piano lessons. I'm not sure that the Victorian house is still there, and there is certainly no sign of the huge lilac tree in which I used to climb to cut big bunches of blossoms, every spring. The way into the top of the park at the end of Rosemont Road has disappeared amid a tangle of new and not very beautiful buildings. 

Sandra and I, having passed our 11+, were attending a convent grammar school in leafy Headingly, on the other side of Leeds. To get there each day, we would walk down Hough Lane, catch the bus on Stanningley Road, get off in City Square, and race for another bus to take us out to the school. Looking back, we were mostly unaccompanied and nobody ever assumed that we wouldn't be safe. 

Sandra and I had attended the same primary school and were firm friends. Sometimes a third girl joined us on the trip into school. Occasionally she would come to the park with us, and a few times, during that year before we decamped to Scotland, we would go on more exciting expeditions. I remember one adventure to Ilkley, from which we hiked over the moors to Bolton Abbey, and caught the bus back to Leeds. I had been hillwalking for years by then, and knew the way, but the amount of leeway and independence we three little girls were given still - from this perspective in time - surprises me. Mumsnet would be appalled. 

Anyway, our new friend - let's call her Mary - had one quality that puzzled us. She fibbed. More than fibbed. She was capable of telling great big porky pies about herself, her family, what they did, where they went, who they knew. At first, we believed her. We were only eleven, after all. But I remember one conversation with Sandra as we slogged up Hough Lane at the end of our school day. 'Do you think?' I asked, hesitantly, because it seemed disloyal. 'Do you think she can be telling the truth?' Sandra thought about it. 'No!' she said, after a while. 'No. I think she tells fibs. All the time. I wonder why.'

I don't think we ever called Mary out on her fantasies. They were vivid and engaging and we never challenged her. We didn't believe her, but we simply went along with it. We never understood why she lied so much. I don't think she was a neglected child. She was bright, well dressed, seemed to cope well at school. We liked her a lot. But like Billy Liar, in Keith Waterhouse's poignant and hilarious novel, she felt the need to invent and embellish everything she told us, to the point where it was impossible to tell what was true and what was a lie. 

I thought about Mary recently, when I finally got around to watching Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou's excellent and startling documentary about the Salt Path Scandal. I had never read the book, had never become enchanted with it, as so many people seemed to be. I hadn't seen the film, either. I think the media hype, the fawning, those endless breakfast show appearances on all possible channels had been faintly off-putting. But I did occasionally wonder about it. 

Reflecting on the critical documentary that has only served to earn everyone involved even more truckloads of cash, it struck me that the publisher (once a reputable publishing house) was blinded by miracles and money. It also struck me that a good editor would have spotted the problems right away. In a long writing career, I've probably had only a couple of genuinely expert editors. They were astute and meticulous and always questioned something that might not ring true. Where matters of fact were concerned, I had to be prepared to defend my interpretation of events. 

Sadly, editing itself may be a dying art. Even literary agents expect books to arrive as 'oven ready products'. Writers use 'beta readers' aka friends who may be reluctant to question things too closely. Many publishers seem unwilling or unable to spend the necessary money to buy experience, so books are simply proofread by beginners. AI would probably make a better job of it - and often does. 

Good fiction has been described as 'made up truth' where 'truth' may mean the authenticity of events and characters depicted, insights into the human condition, and an overall coherence, even when fantasy is involved. I've written historical fiction and non-fiction myself. All of it uses some form of interpretation of researched facts. But the reader has to be aware of the writer's intentions, and should be free to disagree. 

Fiction masquerading as undeniable fact, make-believe told as completely true, is a different matter. 

Since then, I've discussed the documentary with a few readers. You know what? Nobody seems to to care. Cognitive dissonance plays its part. It can be distressing to admit that you were deceived. Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis reports trying to persuade somebody, face to face, that he had not been recommending crypto currency, and that his image was being used in a scam. Ten minutes later, he felt he was making some headway, but still wondered if he had really succeeded in changing the man's mind. 

In the same way, the documentary itself bravely shows commentary from people who simply don't care about truth or falsehood, because they just like the books. 'Would it have made a difference if it had been written and published as fiction?' somebody asked me, sceptically. Of course it would. The writer can really write. An industry with more integrity might have published and promoted this and subsequent books. But I doubt very much if the invitations to sit on those breakfast show couches with presenters fawning over miracles would have materialised in quite the same way. 

Perhaps our school friend Mary had the right idea all along. Perhaps Billy Liar - ironically enough from the same publisher - was factual, instead of one of the great fictional comic creations of the 20th century. And perhaps we have the media - and the publishing industry -  we deserve. Poor us. 

Shadow of the Stone - A Memory.

A couple of weeks ago, the Radio Times ran a feature celebrating the career of the talented Shirley Henderson. A new series called Summerwater was about to be shown, one which - in spite of enjoying much of Shirley's work to date - we didn't persevere with. This review from the Guardian explains why. I don't know why so many writers persist in setting slightly weird crime dramas in Scotland, but they do. There are many wonderful books set in Scotland, but we seldom see them dramatised. 

If you love Dirty Dancing as much as I do, and have always wanted to stay at Kellerman's you could do worse than book a visit to the wonderful Drimsynie Holiday Park, on the shores of beautiful Loch Goil. Nothing sinister about it at all. It's comfortable and well run with gorgeous views, and somebody, somewhere, is sure to be carrying a watermelon.

I digress.

If you look at the image above - and although it says well-deserved nice things about Shirley, who is a very fine actor - there is a significant omission. That would be me. My name. I wrote Shadow of the Stone. It was a supernatural story, before they became so popular, (I was always ahead of my time) and a very happy production, with the lovely Leonard White producing. My husband, Alan, was skippering a 50 ft catamaran at the time, and it was used as the camera boat. Much of the drama was filmed in and around Gourock and Inverkip. I was about six months pregnant but still able to leap on and off boats. Shirley was just out of college and Leonard was exceptionally good at spotting talent.

Anyway, I find it odd that so many magazines and newspapers think that those who write the dramas they are publicising - unless they are mega famous - don't deserve a mention. It's as if they imagine the scripts arrive by magic.

Finally, a little while ago, I came across this clip from the film Topsy Turvy. Watch this brilliant performance of  the Sun Whose Rays.  I didn't know just how beautifully Shirley could sing until I heard this, but she can. 

A True Tale For Hallowe'en - Re-blogging My Own Ghost Story.

 

 

Michael James Flynn in the middle, with the moustache and waistcoat,
seated next to the man with the tar bucket.

I posted this last year, at about this time - but it has been on my mind and since it's a spooky - but nice - little story, I thought it might be worth while re-blogging it in time for Hallowe'en. I still don't quite know what to make of it even though it happened to me - but it has stayed with me ever since. I leave you to make up your own minds.

Most writers, whether of fiction or non-fiction (and I create both) will tell you that we become so absorbed in our subject matter that we feel as though the people we're writing about are not just real - as they often are - but alive. Sometimes that sense of reality even rubs off onto our nearest and dearest. When I was researching and writing a novel called The Jewel, about poet Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, back in 2015, I had talked about her so much that my husband swore that he saw her one night, walking through the door between our bedroom and my office - a woman in old fashioned dress, with something like a mob cap on her head.

My tale for today is quite different, very personal and not nearly so fleeting.

In 2018, I had been deep into research for a new book, about a murder in my Leeds Irish family. The book, called A Proper Person to be Detained, would be published in 2019 by Contraband. On Christmas Day, in 1881, my nana's uncle John Manley had been stabbed in the street by one John Ross and died where he fell. His younger sister, Elizabeth, watched him die. The two men had been casual friends. John Manley had refused to fight, but Ross was angry and drunk and found a tobacco cutting knife in his pocket. The murderer fled, to be apprehended a few weeks later. He was tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to hard labour, a mercy that I felt was probably justified.

In writing the book, I explored the situation of this poor Irish migrant family, whose parents had fled famine, only - like so many - to be abused and exploited in the industrial cities of England and Scotland. Researching the book also gave me the opportunity to find out more about my great grandfather, Michael James Flynn from Ballinlough, County Roscommon. (He went by both christian names.) He married my great grandmother Mary, another of the murdered man's sisters, already a widow with children, in St Patrick's Church, Leeds, in 1888. The Manley family had come from Ballyhaunis in Mayo, but the two villages are only five miles apart, so there may have been family associations. At that time, he was a paviour's labourer, but later, he would describe himself simply as a paviour. He built roads and pavements.

From the accounts of those who knew him, including my own beloved nana, he was a good, kind, generous man who managed to transform the fortunes of the family. The household into which I was born, more than sixty years later, was by no means wealthy. It was still a crowded working class household, but it was warm, clean and comfortable. Nobody went hungry. There were books to read. A piano. My nana remembered Michael as the most generous of fathers. If he was wearing a winter coat and he saw a beggar on the street, he was quite likely to hand it over to the more needy man, to the occasional frustration of his wife who was always counting the pennies.

So what about my Hallowe'en story?

It happened in a supermarket car-park of all places. Not long after I had finished the book. It was one of those chilly, misty mornings, (much like today) with a low sun shining in my eyes as I walked from my parked car to the door of the building. It was early and the car-park was fairly empty. A man walked out of the mist and the sunlight and headed straight for me. I had just crossed the narrow roadway leading into the parking spaces, but halted as he approached. I remember that he put a gentle hand on my elbow and encouraged me to step up onto the pavement as another car passed by. 'Take care, madam,' he said. He was Irish. Not Northern Irish, as so many visitors to this part of Scotland, but a soft southern Irish voice.

'I was wondering,' he said, 'if you might be able to give me something to get myself a bit of breakfast.' He glanced back towards the supermarket doorway. 'They've all been ignoring me,' he said.

I looked him up and down. He was covered in grey-white dust - it looked like plaster dust - from head to toe. He wasn't dirty or drunk. Just - dusty. He wore boots and they too were dusty. He looked like a working man, a labourer.

I didn't hesitate. I looked in my purse, found a five pound note, and gave it to him. I don't carry much cash these days and it was all I had. He thanked me. 'God bless you,' he said. 'God bless you!' And off he went. I watched him walk into the misty winter sunshine, as he headed towards the steps leading up into the town. But I never saw him go up the steps.

Almost immediately. I had one of those sudden intimations of something odd. Not in a bad way. Not frightening at all, you understand, but uncanny. And strangely uplifting. I headed for the supermarket, but had to find a seat and sit down for a moment or two. I felt quite shaky. It struck me that I have seldom, if ever, seen or heard an Irish labourer travelling alone in this part of the world. Ulster yes, but Irish? Tattie howkers used to come, but they seldom do now, and besides, it wasn't that time of year.

I can see him now, feel his gentle hand on my elbow, his warm 'God bless you!'

All through my shopping, and all the way home, I thought about my kind, generous, much loved great grandfather, a man I had never known, but who was very much on my mind. Of course the sceptics will easily explain it away. And in a strict sense, it is perfectly explicable. Isn't it?

But I know what I saw. And I know what I felt. And it's an encounter that I still treasure.

What do you think?

PS: If you would like to read a made-up supernatural tale, you'll find my strange little novella Rewilding free on Kindle, from Friday 27th until 31st October.

PPS: I've started to write a novel, or perhaps a novella - I don't know which, but it will be as long as it needs to be - about John Manley's sister, Elizabeth. She has been on my mind ever since I wrote A Proper Person to be Detained, and from time to time, I've done more research about her and the tragedy that befell her and drawn some sad conclusions. She needs a voice, and perhaps I need to give it to her.   

The McLehose Bible and the Clarinda Connection

                                    

I've finally decided to sell this fascinating Old Testament, with its connection to Robert Burns and his 'Clarinda'. It will be in Thomson, Roddick and Callan's next Fine Art and Antiques sale on 20th November. Here is its story: 

I bought this beautiful little book, with its traditional Scottish ‘herringbone’ binding, some twenty years ago. At the time, I was in the process of researching the life of Robert Burns, initially for a commissioned BBC radio play, but then for my novel about his wife, Jean Armour, the Jewel, which was eventually published by Saraband in 2016, along with a companion volume of Burns’s poems and songs written for Jean herself.

Who was Elizabeth?

With the bible, came an accompanying letter: 
25th December 1925
The enclosed Vol 1 of Bible belonged to my great grandmother Mrs Elizabeth McLehose or Graham and contains the names and dates of birth of her children except Lilias the youngest. It was given to me by my cousin Mrs Jane Hamilton or Patterson, Acton Hill, Stafford, who states she found it among Aunt Kate’s effects after her death. It probably got into Aunt Kate’s hands through her mother Elizabeth Graham or Hamilton, a daughter of Elizabeth McLehose.
James Graham.

For the genealogists among you, the inscriptions in the bible, front and back, are as follows (just as she wrote them herself.) 
Elizebath (sic) McLehose her bible June 30th 1779
John Graham and Elizebath McLehose was married the 26th of Aprill 1779 by Mr Furlong Minister in the Chapel of Ease Glasgow.
Helen was born the 18th day of April at 5 oClock Afternoon 1780
John Graham was born 27th of August at one oClock Afternoon 1781
James was born 5th May at nine oClock Afternoon 1783
William was born the 26th of Febry at one oClock Morning 1785
Patrick was born 26th August at two oClock Forenoon 1786
Kathrine was born the 5th of May at two oClock Forenoon 1788
Elizebath was born Nov 25 at one oClock Forenoon 1789
Marrion was born June 27th at two oClock Forenoon 1793
Adam was born the 28th of January at six oClock Forenoon 1795
Lilias born 1801 - (in a different hand.)

Elizabeth, (or Elizebath as she spelled her name) may have had two of these books – an Old and a New Testament, but it’s possible that she took the New Testament – which hasn’t survived - to the kirk, more often, whereas this Old Testament might have stayed at home, and would have been where she kept a record of her growing family. All the same, it still has its own soft leather case.

Elizabeth McLehose, born in 1753, married John Graham of Kittochside, East Kilbride, in 1779. Wester Kittochside is where the Scottish National Museum of Rural Life is now based, although I think this would have been an adjacent farm. John was a wealthy farmer, as testified by this book (possibly a gift on the occasion of the marriage) – a rare and expensive item, then as now.

 A Burns Connection?

I instantly wondered if there was any connection between Elizabeth McLehose and James McLehose, husband of Agnes Craig, Robert Burns’s Nancy, or ‘Clarinda’ as he called her in his many letters. 

A certain amount of research, with some help from a descendent, Judy Philip, in Australia, revealed that this was indeed the case. They were first cousins, of similar age, and would almost certainly have known each other, especially given the somewhat scandalous tale of Nancy, her unsatisfactory husband, and the celebrity poet.

Nancy

Agnes ‘Nancy’ Craig was born in Glasgow in 1758, the daughter of a prominent surgeon, Andrew Craig. Her mother was Christian McLaurin who died in childbirth in 1767, leaving a young family in the care of their father. Nancy was a sickly child, but grew into an exceptionally pretty and accomplished young woman.

Nancy’s husband, James McLehose, was a lawyer. As a suitor, he was not at all welcomed by Nancy’s father, but he persisted in his courtship, and the couple seem to have met in secret. One of his expedients was to buy all the seats on a coach between Glasgow and Edinburgh, when Nancy was travelling, and then to woo her throughout the long journey. It’s hard to believe that Nancy herself didn’t know about and acquiesce in this ruse.

They married on 1st July 1776 when Nancy was eighteen and she gave birth to four children in four years, the first of whom died in infancy. The marriage was not a happy one, and there are stories of drunkenness and cruelty. Shortly before the birth of her fourth child, late in 1780, Nancy left her husband and returned to her family home in Glasgow’s Saltmarket, citing his cruelty. James spent some time in a debtor’s prison, then managed to take custody of their surviving children, but soon returned them to her. In 1782, he tried to persuade her to emigrate to Jamaica with him, where his Uncle John was a plantation owner. Nancy refused.

Her father, meanwhile, had died in that same year, having lost most of his money, and Nancy moved to Edinburgh, to a flat off Potterrow. She was supported by small charitable contributions from wealthy relatives and was very much reliant on their good will.

'Sylvander and Clarinda'

Nancy was intelligent and well educated. She wrote poetry and instigated the first meeting with Burns, at a tea party in a friend’s house, in December 1787. He was good looking and charming, and she was instantly attracted to him and he to her. She invited him to visit her at home, but he had injured his knee in a fall from a coach and was confined to his lodgings, so the relationship developed by means of an increasingly intense and flirtatious correspondence, in the course of which, romantic Nancy suggested that they call each other Sylvander and Clarinda, to maintain a certain anonymity. This was a reference to the fashionable fantasy of the classical 'pastoral' life of the shepherd and shepherdess, living in Arcadia, although the poet would have been well aware of the grim realities. Nevertheless, he was happy to indulge Nancy, and had occasionally drawn on this myth himself, in order to be taken seriously by the Edinburgh 'literati'. What else was a farmer poet to do? 

By the end of January, they had met six times. She would certainly have been vulnerable to the advances of this devastatingly attractive man, a celebrity in the city, lionised as an eighteenth century superstar, but she was also a married woman, and afraid of scandal.

She was twenty nine when they met and had been separated from her husband for seven years. It’s doubtful if the ‘affair’ ever amounted to more than a kiss and a cuddle alongside a very overheated  correspondence. Bear in mind that letters could be sent and received on the same day in the city. Nancy resisted any real physical intimacy (as poor Jean Armour clearly could not!) while the poet indulged in his usual self dramatisation and a number of lavish attempts to persuade her into bed, both poetic and actual. 

‘I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh Widow, who has wit and beauty more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian banditti,’ he wrote to a friend. Of course Nancy was not a widow, as she persisted in reminding him. The relationship resulted in one of the most beautiful songs of lost love ever written, in Ae Fond Kiss, although we should remember that he wrote Red Red Rose for Jean Armour, an equally beautiful celebration of lifelong married love. 

In February 1788, Burns wrote to Nancy from Mossgiel near Mauchline, in very disparaging terms about Jean, followed by a reference on 2nd March 1788 to his proposed farm at Ellisland being only a day and a half ride from Edinburgh, clearly planning future meetings – although it’s hard not to see this as more fantasy.

The following day, on 3rd March, Jean gave birth prematurely to his second set of twins, one of whom died on 10th and the other on 23rd March. By 12th March, Burns had returned to Edinburgh on publishing business, and there were a few more love letters to Nancy, albeit less passionate than previously. He seems to have been feeling guilty. 

The Aftermath

Some six weeks later, the poet and Jean were officially married, possibly in Gavin Hamilton’s house, in Mauchline. There is some evidence that they had never not been married, since they had agreed to marry a couple of years earlier, a binding contract under Scots law, but Jean's parents had objected, strenuously. In a letter to his friend James Smith, dated 28th April 1788, Burns is writing happily about his marriage to Jean and his intention of buying her a printed shawl. The marriage wasn’t officially acknowledged in the Mauchline kirk until August of 1788, probably on the insistence of the minister, the Reverend Mr Auld.

Burns left it to his friend Ainslie to give Nancy the bad news.

Her subsequent response to him has not survived, but in his reply, dated a whole year after his letter disparaging Jean, he points out that he has behaved pretty well in the circumstances and refers to Nancy’s accusation of ‘perfidious treachery’! Nevertheless, the correspondence with Nancy continued, intermittently, although by December 1791 Burns is pointing out that he has sent Nancy six letters to which she has not responded – although perhaps she had set off for Jamaica by that time.

In 1791, Nancy sailed for Jamaica in a misguided attempt to reunite with her husband. She arrived to find that Elizabeth’s cousin, James McLehose, was living with a local woman, Ann Challon Rivere, who had given birth to his daughter. With admirable strength of character, she turned around and sailed back to Edinburgh on the same ship.

It’s clear that Jean was aware of her husband’s correspondence and tolerated it, although the ‘disappearance’ of some letters that the poet mentions, sent via Nancy’s friend Mary Peacock, and one about Nancy’s health, sent to the poet from Mary herself, may be connected with Jean’s loss of patience as she coped with a difficult domestic situation. The two women even met, after the death of the poet, a scene which I imagined in The Jewel. I think Nancy's affection was genuine.

What the owner of this little bible thought of her errant cousin, his wife and her association with the greatest poet Scotland has ever known, is a matter for speculation. It’s hard not to imagine that it must have been hotly debated at Kittochside, although perhaps not within earshot of the children. One wonders if – when James briefly took custody of his and Nancy’s young children – he might even have left them with his cousin Elizabeth and her husband for a time. 

A tenuous connection, for sure, but a fascinating one, this beautiful book and its inscriptions are a  gateway to a more widely known tale of love and loss and the creation of one of the finest love songs the world has ever known. 

'I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy, 

Naething could resist my Nancy. 

But to see her was to love her, 

Love but her and love forever.' 

To Beta or not to Beta

A wearisome heap of old
literary magazines in which I had 'stuff'. 

It seems to have become compulsory for all writers, but especially those starting out, to enlist a 'beta reader' or two to vet early drafts and offer helpful suggestions. Theoretically, this should be OK, but is it? 

The term comes from the world of video games, where beta testers are asked to play a game in the later stages of its development, to see where there may be glitches and bugs that have somehow managed to slip through the long, expensive and complicated process of building a game. They are usually enthusiastic and experienced gamers so their opinions matter - but it's a later stage process, whether in games or software development, and I often think it's akin to the work of a good copy editor. 

Copy editing is also a late stage process and involves someone checking your manuscript, not just for grammatical glitches, but for repetitions or general imperfections. For example, something might make complete sense to you, the writer, but it may puzzle the reader. He or she will also pick up inconsistencies, and do a certain amount of fact checking. Or at least will point out to you that you need to do some fact checking yourself. A good copy editor will never tell you what to do, but may ask difficult questions. It's often done on the finished manuscript, using Track Changes (in Word) or similar, so that you can have an online conversation. All this is incredibly useful but it's a professional job, and it's not what beta readers do in the world of writing. 

I used to run a writers' group in Ayrshire. It started out as a Workers Educational Association group, but over the years, funding failed. The council took over, and when the council stopped funding it we just carried on, because by that stage, the group members had become friends. We were a disparate bunch of writers, working on everything from plays to novels, with short stories, poems and articles in between.

 As time went by, the group became a safe space - to use current jargon - where people could comfortably read out some of what they had written and gain feedback. It's the job of the group leader to impose a certain amount of control over all this, making sure that suggestions are just that - not instructions. It's nice, as a writer, to be taken seriously, and it's interesting to be asked questions about your work, because in coming up with the answers, you often make the work better. But nobody should ever feel bullied into making changes that don't feel right. 

The wrong word at the wrong time can damage tender shoots of talent, especially since people in groups sometimes feel that they have to give feedback. One of my colleagues, who later became a celebrated and well published poet, was put off writing for several years by inexplicably damning feedback from an already successful poet tutoring a writing course. 

None of which is to say that work doesn't benefit from good feedback, good editorial input. All the same, looking back on a long switchback of a career, I'm surprised to note that I've had far more bad editorial advice than good. I remember one theatre director musing that I had been much too open to his suggestions. (The question of why, perceiving that, he didn't stop giving them, is something that has puzzled me ever since.) Another editor, this time of an early novel, wrote to me to apologise about the mess she had made of my book. I've been told to delete a third of a novel by two different, allegedly competent, people. The problem was that one wanted the first third gone, while the other had problems with the last third. Both were wrong, although the book in question certainly needed work.

Time is often your friend here. If you've finished the precious first draft of your novel, can I suggest that before you hand it over to anyone else, you let it lie fallow for a while. Write something else. Resist the urge to begin editing immediately or - worse - hand your baby over to a reader or editor of any kind.

 All writers know the horror of someone asking 'what are you working on now?' We tend to fudge the answer by coming up with the most generic, least specific description possible. This is because most of us will have had the experience of pinning a project down, only for it to dissolve before our very eyes. Wait a few weeks or even months* and you'll find that when you go back to your work with a fresh eye, problems - and their solutions - will often leap out at you. Another technique is to print out at this stage, read the words on the page and even physically shuffle things about. 

In my opinion, one of the best books about the craft of writing is still a slim volume called On Writing, by Stephen King. Part memoir, part manual, it should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career as a writer, even though the industry itself has changed since he first wrote it. He advises the aspiring writer to do plenty of reading and writing. It's my belief that many writers who are starting out don't do nearly enough writing. Most of us used to have drawers full of the stuff. Now we have files on old computers or Dropbox stuffed with failed experiments. His advice to go with the story and see where it takes you is both liberating and inspirational for anyone who has ever become bogged down in the need to plot. 

To beta or not to beta - that is the question. Well, if it works for you, go with it. But don't ever forget the observation about the camel being a 'horse designed by a committee'. Not to cast aspersions on camels of course. Collaborations between creative people can work magnificently. But not always. And not without someone keeping the vision of the whole project in mind. 

That someone should be you. 

* I am currently working on a manuscript of a novel I wrote some fifty years ago. Yes, I've been writing that long and even longer. I was very young. I filed it away and forgot about it. But I kept it. It's something of an adventure. It's raw and needs a lot of work, but it's also surprising me with the freshness, the insight, the emotion it contains, before the publishing industry got its claws into me! 

Refugees and Me

 

 

Here's my dad, not long after he married my Leeds Irish mum, in the very late 1940s. I wrote about his wartime experiences and those of his family, in a book called The Last Lancer, currently out of print, with a revised edition due to be reprinted later this year. 

Britain has gone crazy over immigration.  All our media have gone crazy over immigration.  It's impossible to turn on the TV or radio, or pick up a newspaper, without getting the impression that the whole country has been flooded with threatening young aliens.

Every time I hear an interview with an angry man or woman advocating drowning or burning the incomers I think of my dear dad. It's not everyone, or even the majority, but as with all senseless and crass hatred, those are the ones that stick. 

Dad had been part of the Polish Home Army, the resistance, initially as a young courier in the Polish east, then in the Warsaw Uprising, followed by a spell in a German Labour camp, where he worked in the infirmary. This was followed, after liberation, by some time in Italy, in 'General Anders Army' - essentially part of the British army. 

There is no reference to his time in the Home Army in his official papers. This is hardly surprising, because people who had been in the resistance, returning to Poland in the post-war years, were often sent to Gulags, as enemies of communism. Stalin was no friend to Poland. My grandfather was dead at the age of 38, probably of amoebic dysentery, having been imprisoned by the Russians in some hellhole and then released to trek east. He is buried on the Silk Road. My grandmother  was believed to be lost, although many years later, the Red Cross facilitated a reunion. She had survived. I often think of her and so many other family members when I watch Doctor Zhivago  - each becoming 'a nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid.' Dad's much loved Aunt Ludka died in Bergen Belsen just before liberation. 

Under 'next of kin' on his army papers, Dad had written a Polish phrase that translates as 'closest family to nobody'. 

Julian Czerkawski came to England in 1946 to a Polish resettlement camp near Helmsley in Yorkshire, and was later demobbed to a job in a textile mill in Leeds. The choice initially was mills or mines, and dad chose a mill. He was an 'alien'. Years later, I wrote a poem about that term. You can read it at the end of this post. In my naivety I thought we might be past all that, during those years when we were members of the EU, but it seems that Britain will never ever be past all that. 

 The camps worked, largely because they were properly organised, that word 'resettlement' being the key, with language classes, gardens, healthcare, education and even visits to nearby halls for dancing. By the 1950s, there were some 250,000 Polish refugees here. Of course this wasn't handled by big private companies, milking the taxpayer for every last pound, which is perhaps why it seemed to work pretty well.  

Not long after that, dad met my mum, Kathleen, and was soon absorbed into her large Irish immigrant family. My nana at least knew all about prejudice. These days, people will tell me how much they liked the Poles. How they fitted in. Except that mum told of somebody saying 'Don't you think they should send all those Poles home?' to which my forthright mum replied 'Not really. Seeing as how I've just married one.' 

Neal Ascherson writes of a 'packed out rally in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh where a church minister was cheered as he abused Poles as scroungers and Papists.' 

Even after I was born, when we were living in a tiny, shabby, two room apartment in central Leeds, whenever a crime was reputedly committed by a 'foreigner', the police would come knocking. Often in the middle of the night. Or they did until one night my mum - with a new baby and a short fuse - went down and told them exactly what she thought of them. They never came back. 

Dad went to night school after work, studied, and eventually had a long and distinguished career as a research scientist, contributing to his community, especially once we moved to Scotland, in a great many ways. Today, people still make a point of telling me how much they liked him. 

But as I wrote in The Last Lancer, 'we became complacent. Brexit seems, in part at least, to have been facilitated by the same jingoistic resentments of incoming foreigners that caused people to scrawl "Go Home Poles" on walls in the post war period. The skewed perception that it is the poor who take jobs and houses from the poor.' 

We are not alone. There are problems with the rise of the far right all over Europe, and - to an even more alarming degree - in the USA. 

As brilliant historian Timothy Snyder wrote, 'Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.' 

I wish those intending to vote Reform in our next election would bear that in mind, but I'm not holding my breath. There will almost certainly be trouble ahead. 

ALIENS

I am small in springtime

on my father’s shoulders.

I can see everything even the

bald patches on the

heads of passing men,

a precarious and thrilling position.



My father’s hair is coal black and curly,

Polish hair as foreign as he is.

The word refugee is as familiar

to me as my own name.

I hold his ears for balance,

while he trots with me aloft.



My father’s papers proclaim him alien

which makes me half alien too.

Poland might as well be Pluto but

the iron curtain is real.

I see it sweeping across Europe

made of polished metal,

dividing kin from kin,

as unfathomable as space.



Small and safe on his shoulders

his hands steadying me,

I grip his ears and laugh.

We are what we will always be

to one another:

complicit and loving

alien invaders of

a mystifying new world.

From Midnight Sun, Collected Poems by Catherine Czerkawska

Dad on the right, looking into the camera.

Just Reprinted - For Jean: A Love Story in Letters and Verse

What if there was a quiet, steadfast heroine behind the poet’s genius?

I’m in the process of reprinting my collection: For Jean: Poems and Songs by Robert Burns for his Wife, Jean Armour. I never quite understood why my publisher let this volume in particular fall out of print after it had so comprehensively sold out. It was well reviewed and should have had a long life as a gift for any Burns enthusiast - of which there are plenty.

‘Jean Armour, the lass with the “voice of a nightingale,” has often been reduced to the margins of Burns scholarship. Yet it was her enduring presence—her strength, grace, and quiet resilience—that supported Burns through a life of brilliant highs and shadowy lows. This beautiful collection gives Jean her long-overdue spotlight.’

Whether you're a Burns enthusiast or a lover of literary history, the book offers a fresh perspective on the poet’s work. With poems written for Jean and others inspired by her, alongside candid, moving letters to and about the woman he loved, For Jean reveals a poet who was not just the rakish bard of popular imagination, but a man who returned, again and again, to the one woman he undoubtedly loved.

Collected and annotated with sensitivity and care, this edition includes:

• A selected glossary to guide readers through 18th-century Scots dialect
• Rich historical context that brings each poem and letter to life
• An intimate view into the couple’s complex yet enduring relationship

The book was intended as a companion volume to my novel  The Jewel, which fictionalizes Jean’s life. Together, these works give voice to a woman who has, until now, lived too quietly in the shadow of her husband’s legend. The link above is to the Kindle edition of The Jewel, but I'll be reprinting the paperback in the next few weeks.

Fortunately, For Jean is now available again, in paperback, under my own Dyrock Publishing imprint.

What's In A Name?

I switched on BBC Scotland's Television News on Sunday morning to be met with the deep voice of a male Scottish newsreader mangling Iga Świątek's name. It's perfectly reasonable to ask 'where does the 'n' come from?' because unless you know about Polish diacritical marks - the technical term for the various squiggles that change the sound of a letter in many languages - the name looks as though it should be pronounced swiatek or similar.  Most of us know how to say Señora, even if it's written with an ordinary 'n' but in an unfamiliar language, we tend to ignore these marks if we're not set up with the right keyboard. I'm guilty of it too, although when I was writing The Last Lancer, I went through the final draft and reinstated them all. 

I'm usually very understanding about the difficulties of Polish pronunciation for English monoglots. But in this case, I was irritated enough to shout at the television. He didn't mispronounce it. He mangled it. And - given that she had just won the Wimbledon Women's Singles Final - her name had been on the news since the night before. He should have known. He could have asked his phone. I've just done it, and up popped a clear audio file. Given the ease of finding out the pronunciation of foreign words, it has become ill mannered not to try, given a little advance notice. But he simply couldn't be arsed. 

My own name is almost invariably mangled. I've spent my whole life reassuring apologetic people, and I honestly don't mind. I'm happy to answer to Catherine. And I know exactly what it feels like to be confronted with a spelling and potential pronunciation  I've never met before. After all, I worked in Finland for two years. But then I'm not a BBC announcer. 

My Scottish doctor pronounces my surname perfectly, without being prompted. And when the late great Ray Bradbury introduced my radio dramatisations of some of his Tales of the Bizarre many years ago (I did them along with the wonderful Brian Sibley) he pronounced my name properly as well.

But from my first day at school until - well - now, it has been challenging. I could have changed it, but I was damned if I was going to. One of my first publishers persuaded me to change the spelling, so that it looked a bit English, but it also looked ridiculous to anyone with even a little knowledge of Slavic languages and I changed it back as soon as possible. 

Now, it's increasingly a badge of being 'foreign' and although we seem to have passed through an all too brief period of that not mattering, once again, it does. My late biochemist dad was a refugee alien who, by the time he retired, had a 'double doctorate'. He had a PhD but he was also a Doctor of Science -  a higher doctorate, only awarded for significant and original contributions to a scientific field, usually at the peak of a fine career. In Germany, where they like to acknowledge such things, he was once called 'Doctor Doctor' which amused him. 

What he was never awarded, in spite of his popularity, the distinction of his work, the way in which he wore his learning lightly, his ability to engage with and to manage people, was the headship of his department in the Scottish government research institute where he worked for many years. That went to the man developing 'spreadable butter'. 

At the end of his career, he spent two wonderful years based at the IAEA in Vienna, touring the world as visiting expert in agricultural projects for developing countries. It was a kind of reward, I think, and he enjoyed it very much. It was also a small slap on the face to the authorities here who had baulked at promoting a foreigner. 

There is a weird kind of low key xenophobia in the British psyche. People like to pretend it isn't there, but it is. All my life, I've been aware of it, popping up when least expected, even in my own career as a writer. I once wrote a short story about it, called Mind the Gap. You can find it in my anthology A Bad Year for Trees. Almost all of the stories in that anthology have been published in various magazines or collections, and two of them have had another life as radio plays. Mind the Gap was turned down immediately and brusquely, given that I was an experienced and very well published writer and might at least have expected the courtesy of an explanation. I think it made the editor feel deeply uncomfortable. I certainly hope so. 

What's in a name? Quite a lot as it turns out. 

Precious Literary Letters

My cohort of teachers in our Finnish language school.
I'm the very dark girl with the 'Purdey'' haircut and the red sweater, at the back.
Photo courtesy of fellow teacher, Wladek Cieplinski.

Next week, Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh are holding a Rare Books and Manuscript Sale.  Among much else of a vastly rarer nature, (letters signed by Mary Queen of Scots herself, no less!)  they are selling two little bundles of letters written to me in the 1970s. 

Lot 64 is a correspondence from Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Lot 65 is a collection of autograph (i.e. hand-written) letters from George Mackay Brown. Back then, I was a young writer, just starting out on my career, and they were both friends and mentors. The letters were precious to me, and I have kept them for fifty years, but now the time has come to let them go. I began to be afraid that when I'm gone, they would finish up in a skip. Since they are such a reflection of their time and place, an insight into two great poets, I wanted to see them preserved and archived.

The letters from Ian, ten in all, are closely typewritten, often on both sides of his headed paper, and annotated by hand in his own frank, energetic and inimitable style. They talk about various topics, and include observations about his building work at his amazing garden at Little Sparta.  'We have raised the level of our loch and I am building, with great labour, a little island,' he wrote. I had been a fan of his work as soon as I learned about it, and visited the garden. He calls me one of the 'last letter writers' in the world, and perhaps I was. 

I first met George when I spent a summer in Orkney, cycling about, visiting innumerable neolithic passage graves, writing poetry, and spending time with Strathclyde Theatre Group, who were performing there. His correspondence is 'warm, personal and detailed' as Lyon and Turnbull describe it, and has a great deal to say about Orkney life and events there, his friendships and his BBC work - kindly and encouraging for me, gold dust for any scholar.

In 1975, I moved to Finland to teach English as a Foreign Language. You can read about that time in a previous post, here. But it was then that my correspondence with these two Scottish greats dwindled, although George and I exchanged Christmas cards for many years. I simply had too many letters to write. I was sending fat, newsy letters to my parents just about every week (no Facebook Messenger back then) and I was keeping in touch with various university friends who were also travelling, or starting on new and exciting careers. Besides that, I was teaching for long hours, and enjoying it very much, doing my own writing whenever I could, and accepting a great many invitations from my students. I loved Finland and only left because I wasn't really making enough money to carry on living there, and saw no career pathway that I could follow. 

After that, I spent a year in Poland, teaching English at Wroclaw University. By the time I came back to Scotland, my own creative career, writing commissioned drama for BBC Radio, some television and the theatre - as well as writing fiction and working as a community writer for the Arts in Fife - was taking off and absorbing all my time. 

These two bundles of letters are, therefore, two little jewels or precious fossils: a slice of time that will never come again. I even kept the envelopes. I loved my work and I loved my writing back then. Not the struggle to make a decent living (vain hope!) but the sheer pleasure of exploring and communicating, of shaping words and ideas. In these days of creative writing degrees, the constraints imposed by the internet and academic judgments, I sometimes wonder if young writers can ever feel that same intense pleasure in exploration, the freedom of it. I hope so, but I have my doubts. 

I was lucky enough to be mentored by real, practising writers whose work I admired. Whatever else she was doing, the hopeful girl you can see in the picture above, with her 'Purdey haircut'  always wrote unselfconsciously and took immense pleasure in the work. Now, much older, but not a lot wiser, I hope to find a way of rediscovering that joy.

You'll find full details of the forthcoming (18th June) sale at Lyon and Turnbull.

Small Isn't Always Beautiful

Catherine, way back when.

When I was a student, I had a summer job working in a small hotel in Wales. I almost wrote 'spent a summer in Wales' but I didn't spend the whole summer there. I worked there for a few weeks and then chucked it in and came home. 

I don't remember why I chose Wales, but I think it may have had something to do with liking Alan Garner's book The Owl Service so much, even though when I had written Garner a fan letter some years earlier, and innocently? naively? - I was about 12 - mentioned J R R Tolkien, I got a very dusty response. Still, it taught me a lesson about being nice to people who contact me about my own work, and I hope I still am. 

Anyway, it didn't put me off the Owl Service, which I still reread from time to time. But an indirect result was that I spent a miserable few weeks working in Wales. Not that it had anything to do with Wales as a country, which I'm sure is a fine place. 

It was the job.

If you are going to work in hospitality, do not, if you can possibly help it, work in a small hotel. You will work long split shifts, but worse, you will do everything, all the time. There were three or four of us girls, packed into a small, dark, stuffy bedroom, and we were worked into the ground. Worse, the owner shouted at us and sometimes threw a massive tantrum which involved screaming, while tossing pots and pans into the sink, filling it with a hellish mixture of caustic fluids and ordering us to clean them. We changed beds, we cleaned rooms, we cooked, we waited at table, we washed up, we mopped floors, we cleaned toilets, did laundry, we washed windows, we hoovered carpets, we poured drinks, we ran from pillar to post and we had very little free time. Besides that, the dust had triggered my asthma and I was wheezing a lot. 

Friends who have worked in big hotels tell me that although the work is equally hard, the hours equally long, the rooms even more filthy (I gather that the rich are filthiest of all) - you at least do your own job and that's that. In good hotels, there's a lot more organisation, and usually enough staff for the job in hand. Also management tends not to scream at the staff in public, because it upsets the punters. 

Anyway, I came home a bit early. The only thing I got from those weeks was a knowledge of how to make sherry trifle on a grand scale and a compliment from an elderly guest in a wheelchair who, I gather, was a photographer of some distinction, and who stopped me before I left to say that he would have liked to photograph me. I still thought of myself very much as an ugly duckling at that stage, so it stayed with me. 

What I should have learned, and didn't, was that small isn't always as beautiful as you think it might be - and - later -  that the lesson applies as much to publishing as it does to working in hotels. Big publishers have their drawbacks too as I would find to my cost a few years later when I signed with an excellent, reputable, nurturing, medium sized publisher, only for the company to be taken over in mid project by a mega corporation who were after beach bonkbusters and not much else.

Small publishers, like small hotels, can be well meaning, full of ideas and ideals, praised and admired, and they often produce lovely books. At their best, they are hands on and caring. That's the good side. The media will love them. The reading public who, on the whole, don't care who publishes anything, will see elegant swans, gliding along, but not the many wee feet paddling like blazes below the surface, i.e. the writers. And sometimes they'll be drowning.

Small publishers, like small hotels, simply don't have enough time or money or staff, don't have the bandwidth, to make things run smoothly for their writers. Much of the time, you're on your own. They certainly don't have time to do publicity. Or even, sometimes, to send out review copies. Mind you, big publishers don't have the inclination to do publicity for any except the starry, celebrity few - who don't really need it. So there's that. 

The only thing to do is decide what works best for you, but - if it isn't working - don't stick with it. Whatever doesn't kill you, doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes it breaks you. These days, there are always other options.

Like jacking in a job where the boss is a bully, and hopping on the first train home. 

Thinking about Finland

A huge folder full of my letters from Finland

Many years ago, after my parents died, we cleared their house. Fortunately, we could take our time over the task. We kept what we wanted, gave things away to their and our friends, and sold what we didn't need. Among the things we treasured were several boxes of 'keepsakes'. Some of them had been stored in their loft since I came home from university. 

I didn't settle anywhere for very long, till 1980, when I moved in with Alan, who would become my husband. First I went to Leeds University to do a Postgraduate Masters in Folk Life Studies, but then, instead of looking for museum work (the obvious choice) I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language and in 1975, I set off for Tampere in Finland, to teach English to adults. This sometimes involved business English, often conversation with groups, occasionally complete beginners (challenging when I didn't speak Finnish!) and quite a lot of one to one sessions. 

A few weeks ago, when I was searching these keepsake boxes for something else altogether, I found a great bundle of letters I had written to my parents, starting with my arrival in Finland in the autumn of 1975. I worked there for two years, but for some reason, my parents had only kept the letters from my first year in Tampere and a few from my return to Finland in autumn 76. 

I spent hours sorting them into date order and reading through them. I was an enthusiastic correspondent back then, and it was clear that mum and dad wrote back, although sadly, all their letters are missing. Sometimes, I would write two or three letters a week, but post them all at once, so some of the envelopes were very fat. I would add little drawings to some of them, to illustrate what I was writing about. 

It makes me a little sad that this kind of correspondence no longer exists for most of us, although I suppose blogs like this one fulfil the same purpose - but without the spontaneity, the immediacy and intimacy. 

It astonished me how many things I didn't remember till reminded by these letters. Memory is very strange and very fluid. I had certain events fixed in my mind, the 'stories' I told myself. But as I read through this long and detailed correspondence, it struck me that over time, I had edited my own memories. Well, some of the correspondence was edited as well, given that I was writing to my parents, but not in quite the same way. Most of it was written in longhand, spontaneously, late at night, and I seldom crossed anything out. 

I was working long hours, having the time of my life (most of us teachers were young, footloose and fancy free) and just loving the country, the people and the landscape. I was writing about it because of course I was also writing my own work: poems, stories, plays and the first draft of a novel. I'm not sure where I found the time, but I did. 

Among the keepsakes was the typescript of a novel which I seem to remember one of my students typing up for me. I had filed it away as 'not very good' but now, I think that judgment came from UK publishing's reluctance at that time to publish anything with a remotely 'foreign' setting. Rereading the first couple of chapters, I reckon it's worth revisiting - a curious little story set in Finland, that I'll probably retype, rework and publish for my own satisfaction. As for the letters - well, I'll type those up as well, immersing myself in that time and place. I may even publish an edited version of them. 

Meanwhile, there's a certain symmetry in the notion that our video game designer son is currently so much at home in Scandinavia. 

Ice Dancing - The Story Behind the Story.

 

Cover image by Michal Piasecki

Of all the books and stories and plays I've ever written, I find myself going back to Ice Dancing again and again. It's a love story, but it also tackles a serious and troubling issue that never seems to go away. When I was describing it for publication, I called it a 'very grown-up love story' and that's certainly what it is. 

When he was young, my son learned to skate, here in Scotland, and then played ice hockey for a number of years. He only stopped because playing hockey 'just for fun' is difficult in this country, and the demands of school work and his other passion at the time - karate - meant that something had to go, and that something was hockey. He enjoyed it very much, but he knew that it was never going to be a career. Later, living and working in Sweden, he went back to it for a while, as the hobby sport he had enjoyed. 

As an adolescent, he had a fine Canadian coach, one who cared about all the kids, whether they were good or not, a coach who commanded the kind of respect that made the parents on the sidelines behave themselves - in short, a model teacher. 

At the same time, we were hearing about other kinds of coaches, in this and in other sports. Coaches who were not at all trustworthy. Coaches who would come to give the sport a bad name. 

The other day, a nice, kind, trusting person of my acquaintance remarked on social media that she would always trust people when they told her who or what they were. Having grown up in a loving and protective family, I used to feel the same. Unfortunately, life taught me, as sooner or later it teaches all of us, that there are people in the world who tell you only what they want you to hear. And then, when they behave badly, manipulate you for their own ends, you find it incredibly difficult to accept the betrayal. It's not nice to feel that you've been deceived. Not at all nice to surrender at least some of your trust in the innate goodness of people. 

I've written about betrayal rather often: sometimes a betrayal of friendship or love, sometimes the terrible betrayal of trust between adults and children. 

Many years ago, having had two successful and well reviewed full length productions at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, I submitted a new play which attempted to tackle this kind of betrayal, only to have it turned down. They were quite within their rights, and it may not even have been a very good play - but I was hurt at the abruptness of the rejection when I had worked so hard for them in the past. 'I hope they nurture this new talent' one distinguished theatre critic had written. Some hopes. 

I felt that I was surely owed a discussion of some kind. Perhaps questions about why I had wanted to tackle this possibly contentious and uncomfortable subject. None of that happened. What happened was that I got a short, abrupt, almost embarrassed note, saying 'not for us.' After which, I was 'ghosted' by someone I had thought of as a friend before ghosting was really a thing. When I look back on it now, I still find something disturbing about the finality of it. It was as though I had committed a terrible faux pas in writing about something unmentionable. 

Year passed, I began to write far more fiction than plays, and eventually I wrote Ice Dancing, set in a small lowland Scottish village - a grown-up love story that was about much more than the central relationship. It was a story that went back to that original play, and its themes, about male athletes in particular and what happened to some of them. 

Even then, no traditional publisher was remotely interested, even though they were publishing some of my other novels. So here it is, under my own imprint, and doing rather well. 

If you're curious, you can get it on Kindle for a bargain price of 99p for a couple of days!