How Not To Be A Writer - Part Seven: Finland

Teaching in Finland. I'm at the back, in red,
with short dark hair in the fashionable 'Purdie' cut.
Photograph by our fellow tutor, Wladyslaw Cieplinski

There I was, in the mid-seventies, back home in Ayrshire, with two degrees in - let's face it - pretty useless subjects where the job market was concerned and the urgent need to earn a living.  Don't get me wrong. Everything I've ever studied has been invaluable for my writing. I've used all of it, and still do. But was it ever going to help me to earn a living? Well, in a way, it did.

I'd been given a New Writing Award from the old Scottish Arts Council, more approachable and committed to the arts than its subsequent incarnation, Creative Scotland, but it wasn't enough to live on. I was always welcome at home, and I loved it there, but I was used to living independently. I'd published a poetry collection called a Book of Men, had a few radio plays under my belt, published some short stories here and there in literary magazines, and had written the occasional book review or freelance article, but none of these things paid very well, or at all. I needed a job that would bring in some income and allow me to write as well.

I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language, applied for and got a job at a private language school in Tampere in Finland and headed off to Turku, by cargo ship from Hull: much cheaper than flying, back then, and an experience in itself. 

I spent two tremendously happy years in central Finland. I loved it. The work was hard, with long hours and a not particularly high salary in a country where everyday living was expensive - but it was worth it. I taught adults, sometimes one to one lessons and sometimes groups. I travelled by bus to paper mills to teach executives and PAs there. I remember one very senior executive who had already rejected two teachers in quick succession. I was my boss's third and last attempt and I was nervous. As it turned out, his English was already very good. What he needed was recommendations for reading, books and newspapers, and a teacher who could discuss that reading with him. Thanks to my English Lit degree, we got along just fine.

It wasn't easy to begin with. Finnish people turned out to be warm and welcoming, but extremely shy and self contained. They were fine in one to one sessions, but groups were incredibly difficult. I soon discovered that the only way to cope was to make a fool of myself by - essentially - leaping about and making them laugh with daft examples. It worked. They soon relaxed and began to chat. This was an experience that would later prove invaluable when running writing groups where people may be understandably nervous of exposing their writing to other people. I've heard far too many tales of experienced writers humiliating beginners including people who were put off for years, before going on to ultimate success themselves. It's fine to make a fool of yourself - but never, ever of other people. 

Teaching in factories also taught me a lesson about the egalitarian nature of Scandinavian society. One of the CEOs I taught would turn up in his tracksuit, having cycled to work, and we'd have coffee in the staff canteen before starting. He knew everyone by name and there was no 'executive' dining room at all. This was back in the 1970s when the divisions between the workers and management in British companies was marked, and for all I know still is in some industries. 

I was invited out by my unmarried engineering students for meals, to ice hockey games, to try cross country ski-ing, or to watch car racing on frozen lakes. I learned how to walk on icy ground without falling over and admired the amazing skill of bus drivers who knew just when to put on the brakes, so that the bus would slide to a gentle stop at the head of the queue. I acquired lots of warm underwear, boots and hats. In Finland, at parties, a room is generally set aside not just for coats and hats and scarves but for the ladies to take off their obligatory woolly knickers. One or two of my older lady students took me under their wing and treated me to saunas and lake bathing, at their summer cottages. Another of my students flew me over the city in his little Cessna. In short, I had a ball. 

I also wrote. A lot.

In spite of working full time, I managed to finish a novel called Snow Baby, and a whole heap of poems. Most of the poems were published subsequently, and you can find them again in my new retrospective collection, Midnight Sun. The novel languishes in a bottom drawer, where perhaps it should stay, but I do occasionally look at it and think 'Hmm. Not half bad.' 

Midnight Sun - My New Poetry Collection

 

A little while ago, I published a collection of my poetry, written over many years: Midnight Sun. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to some of my friends who didn't realise that I had once focused almost wholly on poetry. I started in my teens, carried on through my university years, and for a long time after - so the collection is arranged chronologically, although those teenage poems remain firmly at home in the 'beginners' folder where they belong. 

When I look back over my poetry, it didn't dry up completely, although at the time it seemed like it. I was busy writing drama, first for radio and then for the stage, with a small excursion into television. At the same time, I was working on fiction, long and short. I had a couple of novels published, but then there was a hiatus while I focused on drama, and when that dried up, I went back to fiction, publishing nine novels, so far. 

From time to time, though, I would feel that only a poem would do, to express what I wanted to say. I've been told that some of my novels - the Physic Garden and Bird of Passage in particular - as well as some of my plays, are 'poetic' or 'lyrical', so perhaps part of the creative energy that once went into my poems had gone into those novels. 

When I started putting this collection together, I wondered how I would feel about these poems that cover so much of my life. I left out much more than I put in. Many are love poems, but none the worse for that. Many of them have already been published over the years in a variety of small literary magazines. One or two have even won prizes. Some of them reflect the fiction I was working on at the time - poems about Robert Burns, a poem about Clarinda for example. Some of them were inspired by family history research undertaken when I was writing a book called A Proper Person to be Detained, about a murder in my family in 1881. 

I didn't even consider 'submitting' these anywhere. In fact I won't be submitting anything ever again and what a relief that is! But I did engage some expert help. A Polish friend, Michał Piasecki, (he posts as Keen Photographer on Facebook) is a talented landscape photographer and I have been using some of his beautiful images for my book covers. The excellent Duncan Lockerbie of Lumphanan Press has worked on book and cover design for me here and for other books, and he has made a wonderful job of this collection. In fact people keep complimenting me on the design of the book as much as the poems  - which I'm happy about, because one of my reasons for 'going independent' with my work was to try to maintain the quality of the physical product. To be able to work with a professional to make the book as good as it could be within the financial constraints that exist. 

If you read the book and enjoy the poems I'd be grateful for a review. Even a few lines on Amazon would be helpful. But if you can't do that, I still hope the poems speak to you in some way, that you can find something to identify with, something that strikes an emotional spark. 

A friend remarked to me yesterday that we all have secret rooms inside us, areas of our experience, places that even close friends don't know about each other. Poetry often taps into those places and experiences. It can help us to understand that our similarities are more important than our differences and that even our differences are other ways of seeing the world, other ways of experiencing our common humanity.

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Three: University

 

When I was seventeen, I headed off to Edinburgh University to study English Language and Literature, one of only two people from my school to go there, as far as I remember - and given that the other girl was on a completely different course, we never saw each other. 

I loved the university and the city, made some lifelong friends, and started to take my writing a lot more seriously. I was mostly focused on poetry back then, something I had written on and off since my early teens. This was when I began to submit to various magazines, take part in public readings and generally mix with other young poets who were just starting out on the long long road to penury. That's me in the picture, long hair, long skirts and - although you can't see it - a bell around my neck. 

After the first few spells of winter depression and homesickness, it was a happy time for me. I remember my dear mum coming to visit me and watching the students in their army surplus uniforms or smelly afghan coats with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. She was a talented seamstress and made me maxi dresses and a 'Lara' coat, in black wool, with fur around neck and cuffs, clothes I would never otherwise have been able to afford. We were a lucky generation. We didn't realise just how lucky. Took it for granted that our fees would be paid, that we would get grants to live on, frugally for sure, but that was fine - and accommodation would be available. 

In my Honours years, when I was specialising in Mediaeval Studies, three of us shared a big, beautiful, shabby and impossibly chilly flat in Great King Street, the heart of the New Town. Henderson's where we bought our wholemeal loaves or went downstairs to drink coffee and eat a fantastic concoction of fruit salad, Greek yoghurt and ginger, (the old hippyish restaurant and shop in Hanover Street, not the new terribly posh incarnation) was nearby. The Laigh Bakehouse owned by a waspish retired actor called Moultrie Kelsall, where we bought cakes, coming home in the early hours of the morning, was just around the corner. 

None except wealthy students would be able to afford this area now, but it was inexpensive, albeit spartan. The elderly landlord and his scary wife, all red nails and lipstick, would visit occasionally to check that we weren't ruining the place. We had to put shillings in the meter for heating and lighting and the payphone on the landing was extortionate. Mobiles weren't a thing. We had no television and didn't miss it. Nobody ever had a car.

I read my poems at a couple of big, well attended poetry festivals at the university, festivals that I had helped to organise, as well as at the Traverse, before it too became serious and posh. I had poems published in various literary magazines, in a little collection called Seven New Voices and in a joint collection with Andy Greig, called White Boats. I did a bit of reviewing for a few magazines. I earned almost nothing. 

Then, I had a story called Catch Two published in glossy She Magazine. It was a strange little tale about two people trapped in a lift and it earned me an unheard of sum of money. I had been in the habit of drawing out £5 a week for general expenses so it seemed like a fortune. 

After graduation, I stayed on for a year with my flatmates, working part time in a small art gallery in Rose Street to pay the rent and to buy time to write. And at some point, I wrote to and managed to arrange a meeting with a Scottish Radio Drama producer called Gordon Emslie. I had been writing radio drama speculatively for years. All those periods of illness with books and radio drama for company had borne a certain amount of fruit. Gordon seemed to think so too.

He was kind, encouraging and above all a talented radio producer. Back then, if a producer was prepared to mentor a writer, give them the benefit of his or her experience, and if the aspiring writer was prepared to put in the work, a small production was more or less guaranteed. Radio Scotland had an actual drama department that produced and broadcast actual Scottish plays to actual Scottish audiences. Later, London would introduce something called 'producer choice.' In true BBC doublespeak, this meant that the producer would have no choice at all, unless London agreed. But that's for another, sadder chapter. 

Meanwhile, I was happy. I was earning just about enough to live on in a city of great beauty, I had an entertaining social life, I had good friends, and I was learning about the joys of a medium like no other. 

.

A Memory of Burns (from someone who knew him.)

 

Old Mossgiel

When he was farming at Mossgiel, where our milk comes from, Burns employed a herd-boy called Willie Patrick. Many years later, in 1859, another William, a Burns enthusiast called William Jolly, went on a pilgrimage to Burns Country, visiting Mauchline and Mossgiel. While he was wandering about Mauchline, he met Willie Patrick and asked him about his memories of the Burns family. This formed the basis for a little book called Robert Burns at Mossgiel, with Reminiscences of the Poet by his Herd-Boy. You can still find reprints online if you hunt for them. Asked to do a brief Immortal Memory speech and toast at a small local Burns Supper, I dug out my copy and reread it, for inspiration.

Willie Patrick had been born in 1776, so was in his 84th year when Mr Jolly met him. He was short, and very bent, after a life of hard labour. Jolly describes him as being in good health, clear in his mind, shrewd and full of humour. He had a staff, which he leant on, although he could walk without it.
He wrote "When making any statement, he would turn quickly round and earnestly answer me that ‘it was as sure as death’ or ‘as sure as I knock the heid aff that thistle.’"

Willie spent four years at Mossgiel, working for Robert and his brother Gilbert, between March 1784 and April 1788. This meant that he started work as a little lad of eight, and worked there till he was twelve - afterwards becoming a shoemaker, before serving in the army and eventually working for the poet’s friend, Gavin Hamilton.

At Mossgiel, he was herd callant, watching over the herd, or occasionally gaudsman, accompanying Burns when he was ploughing, to help drive the four horses. However, in view of his age, he mostly did odd jobs about the farm. Willie remembered that the Burns family lived chiefly in the kitchen, as most farming households did and probably still do. Robert’s father had died at Lochlea, a rather unhappy place for the family. The two elder boys had actually taken on the Mossgiel tenancy before their father died, without telling him, reluctant to add to his worries. Their mother, Agnes – ‘a wee booed body’ as Willie called her - spent a lot of time sitting close beside the fire. Willie said that the house was largely kept by Isabel, known as Bell, the youngest daughter, although that may have been because she was closer in age, and very much his favourite sister. There were two older sisters, Agnes and Annabella, who were probably involved with dairying, and two younger brothers, William and the youngest son, John, who died aged 16, while Willie Patrick was working at the farm.

Gilbert was a year younger than Robert, but Willie observed that he took more charge of the farm, given that Robert was so taken up with his poetry. The family, especially the women, made Dunlop cheese, a sweet milk cheese, from the rich milk of the Ayrshire cows, no doubt learning from their mother, who already had the skill of cheesemaking .

Besides the sisters, there was a female friend who helped in the kitchen, and Rab’s ‘dear bought Bess’, his little daughter by Elizabeth Paton whom he had welcomed into his house. Latterly, this large household was joined by one of Jean Armour’s first set of twins, Robert, then only a toddler. There were no female servants at all – just friends and family. After a few turbulent years, after the marriage was formalised, Jean would walk up to the farm from her rooms in Castle Street, to learn dairying and cheese making from the Burns sisters. When Jean and Rab moved to Ellisland, Burns was supposedly the first to introduce the handsome brown and white Ayrshire cow to the county. All the household slept in the house, while the male servants, including young Willie Patrick, slept in the stable loft.

Willie did little jobs about the kitchen, as well as feeding and herding cattle, mucking the byre, and running into town on various errands, but most of all carrying letters – more of them than was at all common at that time for a farming family. The poet was a great correspondent and was always sending away for books.



Gavin Hamilton's House, Mauchline

In winter, mindful of Willie’s age, they would sit him down beside the fire, opposite Mistress Burns, peeling potatoes or doing other small domestic jobs, while the women worked and chatted or sang around him. There were far worse jobs for a boy at that time.

The whole household took their meals in the kitchen, and Wille remembered that Rab was ‘aye reading,’ even at mealtimes. Gilbert was a ‘douce and sensible man’ but Willie was more impressed with Rab. He described him as smart, manly and good looking, liked by everyone except a few of the ‘stricter sort’ (including Jean Armour’s father who hated him at that time, although he came round in the end!) – and those who feared his wild reputation. He says he never once saw him the worse for liquor. He over-indulged at times, but was never a drunkard.

Most important of all, he was a ‘good master' good natured and kindly towards all those who worked on the farm, even if he seemed distracted by things that other people never noticed. 'He was aye pickin up things and thinkin ower them for a lang time’ says Willie, adding that he was a special favourite with the lasses ‘He could aye speak up to them’ – a gift, and a charm that never left him throughout his too short life.

Lovely to read the words of somebody who had known the poet and worked with him on a day-to-day basis. Especially since he was remembered so fondly as a good man and a kindly master.

 

Mauchline many years ago

Here we go again ...

 

Can we knock on the head once and for all the belief that Burns was a drunkard and a 'crap father'? This was a view expressed yesterday in a Facebook group devoted - I kid you not - to 'Scottish Literature'! 

The poet was neither, and to label him so is to ignore both the context and the recorded truth of his life. 

He was no saint. He occasionally over-indulged (as which of us has not)  but the drunkard myth was a figment of the imagination of some 18th century idiot writing an obituary in a local rag, and in the process misrepresenting as alcoholism the illness that killed him - most likely chronic endocarditis or inflammation of the heart muscle, which, when it turned acute, was a death sentence.

His wife Jean never forgot or forgave the misrepresentation. 

The glib judgments of his character I read last night seem to have one thing in common - a complete ignorance of historical context. Not surprising, really, since our own history is so neglected by our education system. 

For a man of his time, Rab was a good, loving and patient father, in verse and in action too. By all accounts he was content to work away with the children playing around him. There is evidence of his devastation at the death of his little daughter Elizabeth Riddell Burns at the age of three, as he and Jean desperately sought a cure for the unknown illness that caused her to waste away. Compared to the more aristocratic writers of the time who preferred to pretend that their children weren't there at all, he was a model parent.

He was a serially unfaithful husband, it's true. His wife, as one later biographer observed, was 'better than he deserved' but then she has been largely ignored by his other biographers. She was likened to an 'unfeeling heifer' by one female commentator, as though only a heifer would put up with him. 

In fact he loved women not wisely but too well and was just as likely to enjoy the company of older women as young women, something that is a rarity even today, when older women become largely invisible. He was a fantasist, like many writers, but had the sense to distinguish between the romance that inspired his poetry, and the real, abiding love he felt for his wife, a love that is present in so many of his poems and songs, if only we look for it.

Finally, when his first illegitimate daughter was born in 1785 he wrote a defiant poem in her honour. This, at a time when the Minister and the Kirk Session in every parish in Scotland would spend much of their time trying to get men to own up to the children they had fathered!

Welcome, my bonie, sweet, wee dochter!

Tho' ye come here a wee unsought for,
And tho' your comin I hae fought for
Baith kirk and queir;
Yet, by my faith, ye're no unwrought for --
That I shall swear!

If you want to know more, look for my novel The Jewel, all about Jean and her husband, their life and times.

A Sad Goodbye to a Very Fine Poet

 I was very sad this week to learn of the death of Sheila Templeton. Ours had been one of those friendships where you stay in touch online and meet up only very occasionally - but it was nice to know that she was there.  I've lost a couple of other friends and colleagues this year, and sometimes have to stop and remind myself that they're no longer in this world - but it's still hard to believe. Sheila was such a fine poet, such a wonderful talent. It was always a privilege to hear her read her own brilliant work. And she was an inspirational older woman who simply could not be ignored! 

But since whenever I think about her she's smiling, I have a couple of stories about her that I want to tell here. 

The first was when we found ourselves at the same gig, in a quirky Glasgow tea house (alas no longer with us either) organised by a mutual friend, both reading our work, along with various other writers, most of them Very Young Men. We were allocated ten minutes each, and Sheila and I stuck scrupulously to that, although to be honest, I could have listened to Sheila for hours. All the young men, without exception, mounted the stage with sheaves of paper, and proceeded to read for at least twenty minutes, sometimes even longer. Some way through the evening, Sheila leaned over and whispered in my ear, 'Do you think any of them can count?'

The other tale is even more characteristic of Sheila. Some years ago, we were asked to judge a competition for a writing organisation - she was judging the poetry and I was judging the short stories. There were many entries and it was a big task, but one that Sheila undertook with her usual enthusiasm. We decided that, although we had the final say about our respective tasks, we should each look at the other's entries, and compare notes, just to make sure that we weren't overlooking anything. We spent a long afternoon in a quiet corner of a cafe, going through the entries together, giving each its due. There was some excellent work, but what was both fascinating and reassuring was that - independently - we had reached the same conclusions about the various winners and 'highly commendeds'. 

Cue forward some weeks to the award ceremony. The organisation had kindly given us accommodation in a lovely little inn, not too far away from the venue. Arriving after the event, we had a drink in the bar but soon retired to our respective adjoining rooms. This was a small inn, with a single row of  bedrooms above the main bar and restaurant, with a door to the carpark at the bottom of the stairs.

At about 2am, on a chilly night, somewhere outside Edinburgh, the fire alarm went off.

 Deafeningly. 

I threw on shoes and a warm coat, grabbed my handbag, and met Sheila heading for the stairs. We were soon joined by a middle aged man in a dressing gown. We three were the only occupants. The bar and restaurant area were deserted, and the door into the body of the hotel was firmly locked. We stood outside for a while, shivering. The wind whistled around the car park. That was deserted too. There was no smell of smoke, which was probably just as well. 

'Where are we?' yelled the man, above the deafening racket. He explained that he had been attending a business meeting and had been dropped off at the hotel quite late in the evening. Nobody had told him where he was. 

My phone had no signal. Sheila's phone had no signal. Nobody came. The man, wandering about the car park with his dressing gown blowing in the wind, did finally manage to pick up a signal, and dialled 999. All the while, the fire alarm rang on. 

Sheila and I agreed that we were very glad we were together. 

Some minutes later Lothian's Finest appeared. They couldn't get into the body of the hotel either but suggested that we at least take shelter in the little lobby at the foot of the stairs, since it seemed that nothing was actually burning and we were freezing. A little while after that, somebody from the hotel turned up with the key. The brigade checked everything out. There was no fire. Something had tripped off in the kitchen.

Just before we were allowed to go back to our rooms and our sadly disturbed sleep, Sheila nudged me. There we were, two middle aged/elderly females in our nighties and coats. She nodded at the fire chief. 'Would you look at him!' she said. 'I wouldn't mind being rescued by him, Catherine. Would you?'

She was, of course, right. He was as tall and handsome as a firefighter in a movie. At breakfast, we agreed that it had definitely been worth the sleepless night. 

I could say rest in peace, dear Sheila - but after you've had that wee rest, do keep an eye on us. And send us some of your inspiration and your brilliant creativity and your remarkable positivity.

On the Beach at Culzean

This piece of writing is, if I had to define it, a prose poem. It was published under the title On the Beach at Culzean, in 2009, in the first edition of the Brownsbank Broadsheet. I don't know if there were any more editions, and soon after that, I stopped submitting small pieces of work unless I was directly asked for something, and concentrated on longer fiction and non-fiction instead. However, I came across this today while looking for something else, reread it and found that I liked it. More than that, it made me feel a little weepy. So I thought it would be nice to share it again on here. 

WINTER

The black dog rushes ahead. She is more than ten years dead, but here she is, sniffing along the shoreline, her curly cockade of a tail held high. My son, in red wellies and padded jacket, is walking along the beach, squatting to examine a handful of minute golden shells, prising them up with his starfish fingers, toddler’s treasure.

The shore is a string of pebbly and sandy curves. Arran comes and goes: a grey space, a smudge, a real place, etched against the skyline, Goat Fell cloaked in snow. The sea is audible on all but the stillest of days but in winter it is a muted roar. Closer, you can distinguish the inward rush and outward tug of pebbles beneath the waves. Agates have tumbled in, eggs that shatter against the rocks to reveal a smooth world within a world, a blue and white landscape, sea and sky preserved in stone.

The effect of the cliffs, the woods, is to shield the beaches from change, cutting them off from the land. Up there are narrow paths, leading mysteriously out of sight. Some of them thread through frosted plants and naked trees to the sea. Some of them end in nothing, nowhere, oblivion. Take care.

One winter, a canon blew down from the castle and landed on the beach. On Boxing Day, we took coffee and Christmas cake and climbed down to the empty bay, to sit on the elephantine rocks and gaze at the sea. Grey on grey. We found it half submerged in a pool of water, an intruder in this wholly wild world.


SPRING

My son has shed his wellies and hooded coat, casting his clouts before may is out. He slides and slithers, exclaiming over each find: fishing net, feathers, sea glass, his voice bouncing off rocks. What creature made these holes? What’s gribble worm? What? Why? How?

In the woods, snowdrops have given place to windflowers, then daffodils, ramsons, bluebells. On the fringes of the park, there are swathes of whin that smell of coconut and dazzle the eyes. During hard times farmers pulped this spiny crop and fed it to their cattle. The whin mill was an upended grindstone, trundled along a channel, hauled by a carthorse. You can see ghostly rings in the grass, to this day. And whin is still hard to handle. Stumble, put out a hand to save yourself and there will be tears.

Down here, the shore is edged by volcanic rocks, stretched and folded back on themselves, wrinkled, with seams of white quartz. There are caves too with ancient fortifications built across, as though the earlier castle had grown upwards, a living thing, rooted in the rocks beneath. Archaeologists have found human bones here. People were born in these caves, spent their lives, died and were buried among the giant spiders that also call this labyrinth home.

On the beach, the storms have left a litter of driftwood behind, sculptures on smooth sand. Out there the air is a mixture of salt and sweet. Ailsa Craig is a sugared cake.


SUMMER

Picnic time. From above, you can see reefs at low tide, with cormorants and shags perched on the teeth of them. They teem with life, these pavements of rock, and the pools between: anemones, barnacles, little fishes, translucent shrimps, sea slugs. Children are exploring the reefs, teasing the anemones, briefly imprisoning creatures in jars and boxes. Look and let go, look and let go, calls the teacher.

We trek down to the beach, staggering beneath our trappings. We make a boat out of sand. My son motors to Arran and back within the hour and the sand holds up pretty well. He and his father and his grandfather commence engineering operations. They dam the burn that trickles down from the hill, dig a new channel, build a castle, divert the channel so that it forms a moat. The whole edifice is decorated with shells and white quartz pebbles.

There are swallows diving above, oystercatchers patrolling the shoreline, wagtails darting here and there. I tuck my skirt into my knickers and wade through soft salt water feeling shells between my toes, then look back and see the men in my life, grown small against the rocks, utterly absorbed in the moment and each other.

The dog follows me, splashing and cavorting. She has found a length of mooring rope, thick and prickly, but it is pinned into the shallows by a stone, and she is pulling and tugging, snuffling and sneezing as the salt water goes up her nose. Up there, behind the theatrical arc of the beach, people are walking among the scenery, wearing unsuitable shoes. You can see the odd flash of colour from a jacket or dress. There are precarious girls in high heeled sandals, tight skirts pinning their knees together.

The air smells of roses.


AUTUMN

My son is growing fast. He wears a burgundy waterproof against the rain and a daft tweed hat that suits him, although he will only wear it here, where his friends won’t see. He has given up holding hands. But he still has apples in his cheeks, and a face like a flower, open and trusting. My heart aches for him, for all those leaps of faith which he must soon make. For the tripping and falling. For the spiny shrubs. For the picking himself up and walking on. For the narrowing of possibilities. For the disappointments and the friendships and the loves that are not me. How could it be otherwise?

Geese skein across the sky. The swallows have already gone.We stumble down the path to the sea past the boathouse with its tarry roof. The old dog with her white muzzle trots ahead of us. She comes and goes, a memory in both our heads.

Down here on Culzean beach, the familiarity of these stones, these shells, these grains of sand is comforting, our apprehensions soothed by the relentless thrust and pull of the sea. There is only now.

Behind the cliffs behind the woods there has been a change of scene. The heather is in bloom. The hill is a paisley shawl.

  

Please note that although you are very welcome to share this blog post, the piece itself should not be copied and shared online without my permission. 

Happy Birthday, Robert Burns!

There was a lad was born in Kyle, 

But whatna day o' whatna style, 

I doubt it's hardly worth the while 

To be sae nice wi Robin. 

Robin was a rovin' boy, 

Rantin', rovin', rantin', rovin', 

Robin was a rovin' boy, 

Rantin', rovin', Robin! 

Our monarch's hindmost year but ane

Was five-and-twenty days begun, 

'Twas then a blast o' Janwar' win' 

Blew hansel in on Robin. 

Robin was, &c. 

The gossip keekit in his loof, 

Quo' scho, "Wha lives will see the proof, 

This waly boy will be nae coof: 

I think we'll ca' him Robin." 

Robin was, &c. 

"He'll hae misfortunes great an' sma', 

But aye a heart aboon them a', 

He'll be a credit till us a'- 

We'll a' be proud o' Robin." 

Robin was, &c. 

If you want to read a bit more of Burns's poetry,  you could do worse than get a copy of For Jean - poems and songs written for and about Jean Armour, the poet's wife - and also entertaining extracts from letters that the poet wrote about their relationship, especially when it was at its most dramatic. If you want to know the whole story, you'll find it in my novel, The Jewel. (Both volumes published by Saraband.) People keep asking me which bits of my novel are true, and it's always a pleasure to be able to tell them that most of it really happened, even the part about the poet's race with the highlander. It was on the shores of Loch Lomond and both wild men finished up in a hedge, bruised and battered, but none the worse for the experience.  

Last night, I gave the Immortal Memory speech and toast, not of Robin, but of Jean herself. It was at a Jean Armour Event at the gorgeous Lochgreen House Hotel near Troon and it was organised by the Rotary Club of Troon. It was an exclusively female affair, apart from the waiters. No wild men at all,  and (if I dare say it) all the better for it: a wonderful, warm, generous talented bunch of women of all ages including young Becca Harris whose own 'wood note wild' was as beautiful as Jean's, and whose address to the haggis was the best I have ever heard. 

But really, it was all good. I can't remember when I last enjoyed anything so much. I think Jean would have loved it too! 

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.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Amazon (Part 1 - Early Years)

Catherine in Blue Organdie

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to do a talk loosely themed on 'how I got to where I am now'. Quite apart from the fact that I'm not quite sure where I am now, the actual exercise of looking back over all these years of writing, producing and publishing was a salutary experience. The wonder of it is that I'm still here, still writing. Clearly, it's an obsession. I can hardly remember a time when I wasn't writing, and I definitely can't remember a time when I wasn't happier making up stories than living in the real world.

 I was severely asthmatic as a child. Books, radio and the power of my own imagination were my salvation back then. I've looked at my old school reports and it's clear that I spent far less time at my primary school than I ever did at home. Those were the days when you were kept at home with asthma. The available medication was ineffective and had unpleasant side effects. We lived next door to my grandparents and my mother helped out in their tiny sweet and tobacconist's shop in smoky Holbeck, not far from the centre of Leeds, so there was always somebody to look after me: my mum, my aunt, my nana or my beloved grandad.

Aunt Vera, Dad, Mum and Me

As well as the asthma, I had a string of other illnesses, one after another it seemed: whooping cough, mumps, serious measles, influenza. (I'd like to give them all to the milkman's horse, instead of you, my grandad used to say, only half in jest.) The world of make believe was so vivid, so enticing, that it became a place of retreat for me from the miseries of sickness. Actually, if I'm honest, I hardly remember being ill at all, although I have vague memories of the sense of 'unease' which was always the preliminary to some nasty affliction or other. I do remember struggling to breathe, the hideous, concentrated panic of it. And being delirious, and seeing, quite literally seeing, dark horsemen galloping across the foot of my bed. But I also remember the pleasure of being at home, of beginning to feel better, of being free to listen to the radio and read my books and play complicated and inventive games with my toys. I remember the time my Polish father spent with me, lots of time, even though he was working by day and studying by night. But he always seemed to have time to tell me stories, and draw with me and read to me and make things for me.

Then, when I was twelve, we moved to Scotland where dad had secured a new job in a scientific research institute, and everything changed - except my need for make believe. Nothing in my life till then had prepared me for the cruelty inflicted on an awkward, ugly duckling of an English thirteen year old by her Scottish schoolmates. One with glasses and a Yorkshire accent at that. I didn't help myself much, it's true. I was naive, shy and desperately homesick for Leeds. I suffered two years of misery, leavened only by the bright beacons of vacation in a sea of educational despond. None of it was physical. They just froze me out.They mocked my accent, they mocked the way I looked, they sniggered and passed clever, insulting remarks just loud enough for me to hear them, while I stood like a rabbit, caught in the headlights of their self satisfaction, and all the time, as bullied children will, I blamed myself and told nobody. Afterwards, as an adult, I thought what hell it must be to be a bullied child in a boarding school. At least I got to go home at nights. Sanctuary. Not that I told anyone at home what was happening at school. I used to pray for the illness I had suffered when I was younger, but on the whole, I could breathe more easily in Scotland.

I did very well academically. The classroom was another, lesser refuge. I can remember wishing that we had no break times at all. I spent even more time living inside my head, and I began to write poetry. Things improved during my third year in Scotland and when we all changed schools for our final two years and travelled out of town by train each day. I was beginning to find my place, lose weight, make a few friends, although I was always aware that I didn't quite fit in and possibly never would.

I was still writing. And starting to be known and acknowledged within the school community as the girl who wrote stuff. Then, in spite of a longish spell in hospital with another severe bout of asthma when I was sixteen,  (during which I had a couple of only-half-joking proposals of marriage from two kindly young male nurses from Mauritius!) I managed to get a place at university and set off for Edinburgh where, once again, everything changed. For the better this time.

Next week: Poets and Parties and Protests: Edinburgh in the Seventies.