Spooks Week: Mary King's Close

The Old Tolbooth

Once upon a time, when I was writing a lot of drama for BBC Radio 4, my late and much missed friend and producer Marilyn Imrie and I decided to book a tour of Mary King's Close in Edinburgh, with a view to a possible production. This was long before it became a visitor attraction. To see it, you had to organise personal tours through a volunteer guide who, as far as I remember, had some connection to the Royal Exchange building that sits above this strange and spooky place. 

Our interest was triggered by research that I'd been doing for my novel The Curiosity Cabinet. Although that book is largely set on a fictional Hebridean island, it was originally inspired by the story of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from her house in Edinburgh's Old Town, at the behest of her husband. He wanted to get rid of her without actually committing murder, so he had her transported to - among other places - St Kilda. I was fascinated by the notion of how a younger woman might cope with a similar challenging situation, and The Curiosity Cabinet was the result, albeit with a happier ending! If you want to read more about the real Lady Grange, I can highly recommend The Prisoner of St Kilda, by the late Margaret Macaulay who was a fine historian. It appears to be available only as a second hand hardback at the moment which is a pity. 

It was in reading accounts of Lady Grange that I became curious about Edinburgh's Old Town. I had lived in Edinburgh for five years, and knew the area well, but what I hadn't known, until I went looking, was that part of Mary King's Close and its warren of linked rooms, had effectively been buried below the newer Royal Exchange building on the Royal Mile. If you walk up Cockburn Street towards the Royal Mile, and look up to your right, you'll spy a door, high up in the building. That door marks the lower end of what survives of the close. 

Edinburgh can probably claim the first skyscrapers in with world, with its impossibly tall 16th and 17th century tenement buildings, with narrow lanes running between them. There are plenty of these 'closes' still in existence. Mary herself, after whom the close was named, was an affluent widow, who lived here c1635. When the tenements were first built, the rich lived high up in the buildings, to avoid the stench of sewage and other refuse clogging up the alleys below. The poor lived down below, and many of the rooms in the labyrinths between closes never saw daylight at all. Contrary to popular belief, plague victims were not 'walled up' here, but this place would certainly have seen its fair share of sickness and horrible death when bubonic plague came to the city in 1645. However, the close survived, with people living there until 1753, when it was adapted to form the foundations of the grand Royal Exchange building on the site. In 1853 the lower end of the close was demolished to make way for Cockburn Street - but a large chunk of the old street and its adjoining warren of rooms survived, buried under the newer building. 

Marilyn and I followed our guide down numerous steps, through rooms that were clearly used as storage for the Royal Exchange above, rooms full of quantities of filing cabinets, old files and documents. At one point, we heard somebody rattling down the stairs, whistling loudly as he came. 

Our guide grinned. 'They don't much like coming down here, even though they have to from time to time!' he told us.

There were lights but only up to a point. As far as I remember, there was some illumination in the original, steeply cobbled close. The shops were still there. We saw open doors and windows, that would never look out on daylight again. But once we left the close and moved inwards, there was only darkness, our guide and his lantern. It was probably the single most disconcertingly spooky experience I have ever had. Rooms led off rooms. There were passageways, stone stairs and more rooms. His lantern showed us ancient wallpaper peeling off the walls. Fireplaces with the ash still in the grates. A few abandoned pieces of furniture. A cupboard in the wall with the door hanging off. Sad, sad little rooms reflecting the impossibly difficult lives of those who had once lived here.  I chiefly remember the smell of it. It smelled of damp plaster, rot, neglect, a miserable past. We went further down, all sense of direction lost, until at one point it seemed as though we were among the very bones of the city. 

'You know something,' Marilyn whispered in my ear. 'If he were to take his lamp and leave us here, we would never find our way out again!' 

Somewhere online, you will find the PDF of an intriguing book, published in 1800, and titled the History of  Witches, Ghosts and Highland Seers, including, among much else to intrigue and entertain, a chapter about an 'Apparition seen in a dwelling house in Mary King's Close in Edinburgh.' 

The account starts enticingly with somebody meeting a maidservant carrying some light items of furniture into the close in the middle of a 'flitting' or house removal. The friend asks if she intends to stay there, and on being told that she has been 'hired for half a year', tells her that she will 'have more company than yourselves'. As is usual in these cases, maid tells mistress, and mistress tells husband but he, 'with natural courage and fortitude of mind' (i.e. stubborn) decides that they should give it a try. Wisely, the servant heads off to the kirk, but 'came no more to the family.' 

The wife sees the first apparition - the head of an old man, which seems to emerge from a small adjacent room, hovering in the air, gazing at her. Predictably, her husband, who has slept through the whole thing, doesn't believe her. 

They make up a large fire for warmth and comfort, and go back to bed. Whereupon the drowsy husband sees the same old man's head, hovering in the same part of the room. His wife isn't at all happy, but they commend themselves to the Lord, like the good Christian souls they are, and go to bed again. An hour later, they see a vision of a young child 'with a coat upon it' suspended in the air near the old man. 

Tom, the husband, leaps out of bed with his wife not far behind. They are both terrified and try to wake the neighbours, who don't respond. Perhaps they are used to disturbed tenants and prefer to ignore them. The couple light more candles and do a whole lot of praying, but to no avail. 

A naked, disembodied arm appears, flexing as though in salute, and approaches so close to the husband that it seems as though it wishes to shake hands with him. Unsurprisingly, he prefers not to return the gesture. The couple retreat into the bed, whereupon - rather horribly - the hand and arm appear through the opening in the bed-curtains. They try prayers and exhortations, but the persistent arm still approaches them 'in a courteous manner, as though wishing to make their acquaintance.' 

Soon a small dog appears from the same adjacent room, jumps up on a chair and 'composes itself as it were with its nose in its tail to sleep.' They have no dog. Nor do they have a cat, although a cat follows the dog, and begins to 'play some little tricks' as cats do. Soon, the place seems to be full of leaping, dancing creatures. When they are at breaking point, they hear a series of 'deep dreadful groans' whereupon all the apparitions vanish. The narrator reports that they went 'hand in hand to the little room where the drink stood and refreshed themselves.' I'll bet they did. Oddly enough, they then assumed that the worst was over, as in fact it seemed to be, because they remained lodging in Mary King's Close thereafter. Perhaps the welcoming party had tired of the game. 

Fortunately, our 20th century guide didn't abandon us.  Nor did we see any disembodied arms. We staggered into daylight, and went in search of another 'place where the drink stood'. We never did make the programme, and now Mary King's Close is a successful visitor attraction. We went back, my husband and I, many years later. It was very good. We enjoyed it. But it wasn't half as spooky as that original strange voyage into the unknown. 

Launching a Novel: Pausing for Breath

Research material.

Last week was a whirl of train travel and book events for me: the Boswell Book Festival, followed by Blackwell's in Edinburgh followed by Waterstones in Argyle Street, on a warm and sunny evening in Glasgow. In between I managed to spend a very happy couple of hours chatting to my son - who had come down to Edinburgh  from Dundee for the occasion - in the gorgeous Cafe Royal in West Register Street, a place I used to visit occasionally with radio producers and other 'media people', back when I was writing radio drama for a living.


'You look very comfortable in here,' he remarked.

I studied at Edinburgh University and I lived in Edinburgh for five years in total, two of them in a big, shabby, cold, but beautiful flat in the New Town, and I still love the place. One of these days, I keep promising myself, I'll move back there.

Truth to tell, I love the book events as well. What's not to like about chatting to nice people about a subject you love? And this time, the questions have been fascinating, perhaps because so many people know about Robert Burns, have wondered about his wife, and are now really interested to hear more about her.

But it's also good to have a breather this week, if only to catch up on the mountain of paperwork that seems to have accumulated on my desk in a short space of time - as well as tackling the garden that was awash with mare's tail and ground elder. Besides, I have letters to write, books to post, people to email. And a husband with an art exhibition coming up next month to add to the confusion.

The book is going very well, I'm pleased to say. It is Scottish Book of the Month for May in Waterstones and Blackwell's Book of the Month too. I feel an extraordinary sense of pride in Jean, my long neglected heroine. You can't live with such a fine character for so long - a couple of years of intensive research and writing - without growing to love them.  I feel as though Jean is a friend. Rab too, although you'd find yourself coping with the warm blast of his charm.

Next week I've an event in Ayr and then what promises to be a really fun evening at the Globe Inn in Dumfries - where the poet bedded Ann Park - on 22nd June. (In conjunction with Waterstones)  I use an academic year planner - August to August - so yesterday I pinned up a new one because I'm beginning to be booked for autumn and winter and even a few dates for next year.

In between, there's a new project or two nipping at my imagination. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about muses. Of which more in the next exciting post!

How I Got Where I Am Now (Part 2 - Edinburgh Days )

Edinburgh was a revelation to me. As far as I remember, only one other girl from my school went there and we were in different faculties. I never saw her. I was reading English Language and Literature and - for my first year anyway - staying in the East Suffolk Road halls of residence. It had the air of a rather superior but chilly girls' boarding school. It was an all female establishment and the formidable warden would periodically issue a summons to the top table at dinner. Boys were frowned on in general and definitely had to be 'out' by a certain time, although we didn't always obey the rules. In fact we didn't often obey the rules. We were reading about feminism and the world was at our feet. I made real, enduring friendships in Edinburgh, people I still see and write to, people I like very much indeed. The kind of friendships where you can just pick up where you left off, even if you don't see each other for a long time. You can tell who they are, because they all call me Cathy even though just about everyone else uses Catherine, now. But I still answer to Cathy!

Top Withens in the 1920s

I'd been writing plenty of poetry before I went to Edinburgh: lots of deeply romantic adolescent stuff. I'd also tried my hand at writing for radio, which I still loved,  though I hadn't done anything with the fairly dire results, just filed the scripts away in a drawer, most of them typed on an elderly Remington which my dad had bought for me while I was still at school, and on which I slowly but surely taught myself to type, faster and faster.  I still have the machine and it's practically an antique. Nobody has typed anything on it for years. It looks like a prop from a movie and I love it to bits.

I even had a go at dramatising Wuthering Heights, just for the fun of it. I had a special relationship with Wuthering Heights, and it's one that has never really gone away, even though in all my years of writing radio plays and dramatising classics, the BBC has never, ever let me get my hands on this one. It was my mother's favourite novel. When I was just a little girl, she and my father had taken the bus to Haworth and trundled me over the moors in my push-chair, as far as Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse which was said to be the place, although not the building, which Emily had in mind for the Heights.

It was while I was at Edinburgh University that I wrote poetry. Lots of it. And stories and reviews and parodies. Between lectures we would sit in the basement cafe of the David Hume Tower in George Square, setting the world to rights and making plans for the future. We girls wore long skirts and maxi coats, bells around our necks, flowers in our hair - the guys were in old army greatcoats or shaggy, smelly, Afghan jackets and bell bottom trousers. We listened  to Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell on the Juke Box and smoked Gauloises, a little self consciously. One of the bookstores in the town was such a hotbed of another kind of smoking altogether that you couldn't browse there for more than half an hour without feeling light-headed. Outside the Fine Art department, beautiful Ian Charleson held court, admired as much by men as by women. There was a sit-in in the old Quad. I was there, but can't for the life of me remember what we were protesting about.

One of our lecturers, the late and much lamented Paul Edwards, who had translated many of the Icelandic sagas with the equally lamented and ever kindly Hermann Palsson, encouraged me to carry on writing. Paul used to hold court most afternoons in his big, untidy room at the top of a stair in Buccleuch Place. By the time I was in my third and fourth years, specialising in Mediaeval Studies, a friend and I would be invited up to what was essentially his literary 'salon'. There was home brewed beer and home made wine, and it was a place where visiting writers and lecturers hung out and talked about books and politics and new writing. He was clever, charming, iconoclastic, a little dangerous, but very protective of us younger visitors. Even then, these meetings were  frowned on by the authorities. I can't imagine that anyone would ever get away with sessions like this now in our deeply sanitised academic worlds, but I remember them as some of the most exciting and inspirational times of my life.

With John Schofield, Brian McCabe and Andy Greig among others!

Poetry was flourishing in 1970s Edinburgh. A friend called John Schofield organised a series of big poetry festivals and I participated in them, reading my own work, helping to organise sessions and publicity, herding poets from one venue to another, occasionally attempting to mediate between literary giants who clearly loathed one another. They were incredibly well attended, with poets coming from all over the UK and beyond. Robert Garioch and Norman MacCaig were writers in residence during that time, neither of whom, alarmingly enough, would now be sufficiently 'well qualified' for the post in an academic sense. After graduation, I stayed on in Edinburgh for another year, working part time in a small art gallery on Rose Street and writing obsessively. I had several collections of poetry published: one an anthology called Seven New Voices (Liz Lochhead was one of the other new voices!) one with Andy Greig, called White Boats, and a third solo collection, called A Book of Men, which won a Scottish Arts Council New Writing Award.

Much later, I would use some of these experiences to describe Kirsty's time in Edinburgh in Bird of Passage. She wasn't me, but I can tell you that I saw her one day, sitting with a friend, in a cafe, not far from the university, saw her in her long Indian cotton skirts, which I sometimes wore too, with her long red hair (mine was much darker) remembered her for thirty years afterwards, and eventually put her in a novel which also, oddly enough, turned out to be a homage to Wuthering Heights.

Meanwhile, I had also gone back to writing radio drama. But that will have to wait for next week's episode.

The Curiosity Cabinet on Kindle - Sources of Inspiration

With the blessing of my agent, Edwin Hawkes at Makepeace Towle, and with the encouragement and very practical help of a number of friends who have gone before (Linda Gillard, Chris Longmuir and Bill Kirton, especially) I’ve now uploaded the Curiosity Cabinet to Kindle. It’s for sale at the bargain price of £1.94 and – right after the steep learning curve that is Kindle - I’m embarking on another exciting venture: publicising it. People keep asking me questions about all this, just as I kept asking other people for advice, and I want to blog about the experience as much to pass on some of the generous help that I received, as anything else.

But first things first. The book. Let me tell you a bit about it. Because it’s no coincidence that TCC is my first Kindle novel. When you write a novel, you have to fall in love with it. Not just with the characters, but with the idea of the book in your head. It’s hard to describe this process to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. It isn’t anything like the white heat of inspiration that new writers seem to think has to strike before they can write. So much of writing is perspiration rather than inspiration. But I’ve blogged about this feeling before. It probably applies to all creative ventures. The idea of it must excite you as much at the end of the work as it does at the beginning. Most writers have far more ideas than time to write them and we all keep ideas folders or notebooks, or similar . But the ideas we pick up and run with are those which excite us most, ideas which carry on exciting us from start to finish, no matter how many edits we have to do. Twenty or more drafts is not out of the ordinary. It can be exhausting, it can be irritating, it can even be superficially boring. It is always hard work, but all the same, you never quite lose the feeling in the pit of your stomach that here is a world you love to be in, with people you need to know more about. And that means that you are able to live with an idea for a very long time, even while you are working on all kinds of other creative projects. Which is what I did with this novel.

So - I first had the idea for The Curiosity Cabinet more years ago than I care to remember. I had read a little piece – I forget where now, but suspect it was in an Edinburgh museum – about Lady Grange who was kidnapped to St Kilda on the instigation of her husband. Incidentally, there is an excellent new book about Lady Grange,  The Prisoner of St Kilda by Margaret Macauley, whom I met recently on Gigha. I can recommend this wry, beautifully written and immensely readable slice of history. The Curiosity Cabinet is, of course, nothing like this story, or only insofar as it involves a woman, in early 18th Century Edinburgh, being kidnapped to a remote Scottish Island, for reasons which are not revealed till the end of the novel. At the same time, I had been working on a truly mammoth dramatisation of Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona, for BBC R4, in ten episodes. Gradually, these things fermented away in my imagination and eventually resulted in a radio trilogy produced and directed by Hamish Wilson.

But still the story gnawed away at me, as though there was more to be told. I hadn’t got it quite right. And that was when I embarked on the novel which is markedly different from the plays. It seemed to me that I was trying to tell a passionate love story, but one in which, in some strange, almost supernatural sense – (and without being in any way an overt ghost story) - the tragedies of the past stood a chance of being resolved in the present. I spent a great deal of time on the Isle of Gigha while I was writing the novel, and eventually wrote a factual history of that island and its people called God’s Islanders (Birlinn 2006). But the island inspired the story of The Curiosity Cabinet, as much as anything else – the sense of a small world, with many layers. The sense, as Scottish singer-songwriter Dougie Maclean calls it, of a ‘thin place’ where the boundaries between this world and whatever lies beyond can be very slight indeed.

The novel was eventually submitted for The Dundee Book Prize, was one of three shortlisted, and was published in 2005 by Polygon. That edition sold out. People liked it. My hero, John Burnside, liked it. Lorraine Kelly liked it. Although for some it was seen as a ‘guilty pleasure’. Why? Because it’s unashamedly a love story of course. Well, I make no apologies for that. It is indeed a love story spanning three centuries. Of which more, later, in future posts.

For this new edition, there’s a brand new cover, beautifully made by my friend, textile artist Alison Bell, who interpreted her response to the book as follows: ‘The narrative works on many layers of memory and time, some hazy, some forgotten, but the island’s presence is constant, as a refuge and a place to grow and start afresh. I wanted the colours to be soft, subtle, muted, with hints of turquoise, like the sea up there. It is a gentle book which drifts into the mind’s eye as each chapter unfolds.’

And of course, she’s right. As an ‘island person’ herself, she can see all too well that the island’s presence is central to the book. So if you like love stories, but also if you love Scotland, and Scottish history – and small Hebridean islands too – this may well be the book for you.