I write books. I live with my artist husband, Alan Lees, in a 200 year old cottage in Scotland.
The Textile
Throwing It All Away
There was a time, back in 2012, watching the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, when many of us felt at least a stirring of pride in - or perhaps I mean genuine affection for - the island group that we call home. It was a production full of historical awareness, creativity and good humour. We liked to think it reflected the best of us.
Yet here we are, eight years later, and many of us can't think about that time without a profound sense of regret and horror. Because in eight short years, we've been precipitated into the most divisive political situation of my life - although I know other parts of this now precarious union have been through worse times.
How on earth, we wonder, could a country that is supposedly part of a voluntary union, deliberately throw away all that goodwill, all that affection, in the pursuit of an unattainable, unrealistic and unworthy dream - one, moreover, that has turned into a nightmare for so many of us, based as it is on lies, greed and xenophobia. The sabre rattling we're now seeing at Westminster is terrifying. It takes an Irish writer, wise Fintan O'Toole, to call it out for what it is: England recasting itself as a victim of colonisation, emerging from the imaginary 'empire' of the EU.
Somebody remarked to me today that - living in the EU - he always makes it clear that he is Scottish, not English, because so many of his friends, coming from many different nations, have admitted that they really don't much like the English now. They're very fond of Scotland though.
I'm glad for Scotland, but sad for England. After all, I was born there, albeit with an Irish grandmother and a Polish father. I spent the first eleven or twelve years of my life in England and I loved it deeply. Still do, in so many ways. But the cultural and ideological gap between Scotland and England is now a gaping chasm, one that can't be spanned - and certainly not by one of the PM's imaginary bridges.
As most of my friends know, last year, after thinking about it since 2016, and taking some time to gather together the various papers needed, I reclaimed the dual nationality I had when I was born. It was a fiddly but not particularly difficult or expensive procedure, largely down to helpful advice from the Polish vice consul in Edinburgh and the fact that I still had a number of my father's old documents squirrelled away.
I haven't yet applied for my passport. I had all my 'ducks in a row' but then Covid and lockdown and shielding (for my husband) intervened and I couldn't get to Edinburgh. I'm hoping to do so before the end of the year.
What the process has done, though, is to highlight for me that the citizenship is more important to me than the passport. The passport, when I get it, will be a convenience. The rather beautiful and formal citizenship letter was what I craved. Let's face it, Poland too has its troubles. But I don't think it's ever going to be stupid enough to vote to leave the EU. So the letter symbolises something very important to me - not just Poland, but Poland in the heart of Europe - and the precious retention of my European citizenship that the Cummings government has tried and failed to take away from me.
I loathe the constant stream of tabloid insults to our European friends and relatives. Now the government intends to break international law, threatening the Good Friday Agreement in the process. I resent every lie, every implication that the EU is the enemy, every wretched inconvenience. I resent having to try to stockpile food and medication. I resent every smirking politician who invades my TV screen, disparaging the rest of the continent to which I belong, and which I love.
But you know what I hate most of all? I hate the way the revulsion at what this government is inflicting on the rest of us fills my days and disturbs my nights.
I've always been interested in politics. I can't call myself an activist, but I've done my bit. I campaigned to join the Common Market, back in the 70s. I've been a Labour party member and now I'm a member of the SNP. I've read and debated and I've always voted.
I've also made big mistakes. Huge. Voting no at the last indyref was the biggest mistake of my life, and, hand on heart, I did it because I swallowed the lie that it was the only way of remaining in the EU. I've regretted it every day since. I didn't do my homework. I didn't look at countries like Finland - which I know well - and Denmark and Norway, and wonder why on earth we couldn't be like them. There's nothing I can do about that now except say sorry, and campaign for independence. And to be fair, I've been welcomed into the fold like the lost sheep in the bible.
But it strikes me that although politics should be something we all engage with, it works best when we don't have to think about it every single day; the way so many things that are important to us in our lives go on working just well enough that - even the most proactive of us - don't have to consider them or be afraid of them all the time. I am careful what I buy, shop local as much as possible, read labels. But I don't spend my entire days worrying that the farm shop down the road is up to something nefarious behind my back. I trust them. I love the fact that the water that comes out of our taps here tastes pure and clean and I would be alarmed if it didn't. But I also pretty much trust Scottish Water to keep it that way, without worrying about it every time I drink a glass of water.
Throughout my life there were some governments who seemed to be doing their best, and some that I didn't trust. Some I voted for and some I didn't. I never believed that any of them would keep all those fine election promises. And there were some that I disliked intensely. But there has never been a government like this one.
It was in 2016 that everything changed. At first, we thought it might be OK. Given the closeness of the referendum result, and the way in which Scotland voted to remain in the EU by an overwhelming majority, we actually thought that some sensible compromise might be reached. And you know, we would have gone along with it. Leaving the EU would have been bad and we wouldn't have liked it, but staying in the single market and customs union would have honoured the referendum result while accepting that just under half of the country disagreed. That would have been a way forward: a decent and honourable compromise. And it wouldn't have threatened the Good Friday Agreement in the way that it is under threat now.
There was no compromise. None whatsoever. There were people who predicted the way things would go and we thought they were exaggerating. We underestimated the xenophobia and carelessness and malice at the heart of the state. We underestimated their determination to placate the Brexit Ultras. They threw it all away: forty seven years of co-operation and collaboration. Almost all of my adult life. All that goodwill, all that regard, all that honour and honesty. All those - let's face it - special privileges England demanded and largely got. They threw it all away to placate a minority of delusional haters.
Why?
God alone knows. For money? Because they're disaster capitalists? To save an ageing Tory party? Because it was always the plan? Because some of them never really understood that blackmailers will always ask for more? Because they thought that if they were dishonest in very specific and limited ways, we would all be fooled into agreement?
As I write this, the European press are increasingly bemused - but also amused - by our self destructive posturing. They still have each other and they can do without us. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Hunting around for some - any - words of wisdom, I'm reminded of an F Scott Fitzgerald observation: Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
It doesn't help our despair, but it helps to explain their difference and their indifference.
In last week's Brexit Blog post, The Descent Into Political Insanity, the usually measured and restrained Professor Chris Grey pulls no punches when he points out that the Brexit Ultras are now willing to sacrifice anything and everything to a cause that has long since ceased to bear any resemblance whatsoever to the promises they made. It has now become – and I don’t use this term lightly or carelessly – a form of political insanity, and it is an insanity which has spread to the entire government.
Precisely. Which is why Scotland must save itself. And soon. We must not allow ourselves to be dragged off the cliff with our neighbours. We've tried to talk sense into them, but it hasn't worked. We've been willing to compromise in all kinds of ways, but we've been ignored and our elected representatives insulted. We are rich in things that matter. And we have plenty of friends elsewhere in Europe who would be happy for us to cut the rope. When England comes to its senses, we can forgive, get on, heal our divisions, be better neighbours. But it doesn't look as though that's going to happen any time soon.
Meanwhile, how's your stockpile of imported goods coming along?
Rewilding - A Free Novella
My weird little novella, Rewilding, is free on Kindle today and for a few days more, so if you like folklore, magic, Scottish myths and all kinds of things like that, give it a try.
I wrote it last autumn, when we had been on a trip to the Isle of Skye to visit friends there. (People from the island will no doubt recognise the cover image!) But it isn't about Skye. It's love story of sorts. Possibly. A story about enchantment and the attraction of danger and false perception and all kinds of other things.
When I was writing it, I was also inspired by this extraordinary song, sung by Julie Fowlis. The dangerous monster becomes something else entirely. But then the winners write the history, as a rule.
It's not long - a short novella or a long short story. And there may or may not be a sequel, because I have an idea floating around somewhere, waiting to crystallise into a proper addition to the story.
Anyway - give it a try - and if you like it, please do give me a brief review. Every little helps!
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.
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.
Marilyn Imrie: Another Sad Goodbye
David Rintoul and Paul Young in Kidnapped |
This is the second time in a few months that I've found myself writing in sadness about the death of somebody who was not just a valued work colleague, but an old friend too. Hamish Wilson died earlier this year. Now Marilyn Imrie has left us as well.
When I first began writing radio drama, not long after I finished university, I worked with a BBC Producer called Gordon Emslie. After he died, tragically young, Marilyn and I worked together for many years and on many hours of radio, including original plays and mammoth dramatisations such as Stevenson's Kidnapped and Catriona.
When Marilyn moved south, I began to work with Hamish, but we maintained contact and still managed to work together from time to time. Like all such long distance friendships, we kept in touch, told each other news of our offspring, always meant to meet up 'soon' - but years passed and even when Marilyn and James moved back to Edinburgh, my visits to that city were few and far between.
I had stopped writing for radio by that time, although until a few years ago, Marilyn would still suggest putting my name to a proposal. None of them ever 'took' and besides, I had other creative fish to fry by then: novels and non fiction books. My radio days were over, but not our friendship.
When I think about Marilyn now - beautiful, kind, enthusiastic and inspirational - it's very hard to imagine that she isn't here. I have a kind of patchwork in my head, composed of vivid fragments of our shared history, but mostly of the hours, days and weeks spent in small, airless studios deep inside the warren of the Edinburgh drama department. I remember the script meetings, the editing 'on the hoof' that all radio writers must learn how to do, the frequent cups of strong coffee, the freshly baked BBC scones that helped to keep us all going.
When we were working on Kidnapped and Catriona, we spent a couple of days reading my scripts aloud in advance, all ten of them, so that we could spot the places where the cast might find themselves dissolving into giggles. Not that she ever minded laughter. We were a happy bunch. But this production involved ten hours of radio, some 600 pages of script, studio time was limited and we needed to be ahead of the game in every way.
We came into the little control cubicle one day, in the middle of this big, stressful production, to find that she had pinned up a quote from Kidnapped - 'Day and night were alike in that ill-smelling cavern of the ship's bowels.'
To appreciate something of her talent and patience, you need to know that radio productions like this, with large casts and complex scripts, aren't necessarily recorded in the order in which they are written. Actors often have other commitments, so will be booked for specific days. It is one vast juggling act. And it is the director/producer, with the help of a production assistant, who makes this impossibly difficult task look easy. The reality was that Marilyn could manage a complicated production like this one with grace, unfailing good humour and the most amazing skill.
By the time we were doing Kidnapped, we had already worked on my first big dramatisation: Scott's Bride of Lammermoor. I have a postcard beside my desk that she sent to me in 1982, purporting to be from the great man himself, congratulating me on the 'remarkably fine retelling of my own favourite tale'. Details. She always took care of the details.
She produced my play O Flower of Scotland that won an award for best original radio play of 1980 - entailing a day trip to London, big celebrations and rather a lot of gin, as far as I remember. She produced another play called Bonnie Blue Hen that won a Scottish Radio Industries Club award. And later, we fulfilled a long held mutual ambition to work together on Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. We both loved the book, but it took us some 20 years to get the BBC to agree to it. So much of the radio success I enjoyed then was down to the talents of both Marilyn and Hamish. So many plays, so much joyful work.
I remember her flair and her positivity. I remember her visiting us in Ayrshire when her elder daughter was little, and inadvertently melting a pair of wellie boots while drying them next to our wood burning stove. I remember staying with her in Edinburgh when I was in the middle of another kind of melt down, some years previously, and her kindness and encouragement on that occasion.
Recently, I found a cassette that my dad recorded for me before he died. He's reading fragments of a play called Noon Ghosts. It was inspired in part by my father's childhood in eastern Poland. Marilyn wanted the cast to hear an authentic Polish voice. Coincidentally, I'm about to start work on a new book about my father's family, and about the grandfather I never knew. I'm listening to Noon Ghosts as I write this, and thinking about that production, and the chocolate covered plums I bought in a Polish deli in Broughton Street, and how we ate them in the studio with more of the tarry BBC coffee that left you jangly for hours afterwards.
A few months ago, when I heard that Marilyn was very unwell, I wrote to her. We were all in lockdown by then. She sent me a short letter of such loving kindness that it made me cry a little, because it seemed, as indeed it turned out to be, a valedictory letter.
I'll treasure it, as I treasure the memory of her. But perhaps Stevenson's words are enough for now.
... and then we stood a space, and looked over at Edinburgh in silence. 'Well, goodbye,' said Alan, and held out his left hand. 'Goodbye,' said I, and gave the hand a little grasp and went off down the hill.
Neither one of us looked the other in the face, nor so long as he was in my view did I take one back glance at the friend I was leaving. But as I went on my way to the city, I felt so lost and lonesome, that I could have found it in my heart to sit down by the dyke and cry and weep like any baby.
World Beating?
Throughout his life, he encountered a certain amount of prejudice, including in his career as a research scientist. He was the best qualified biochemist never to be promoted to head of department in the government institute where he worked, better qualified than most of his colleagues, holding a DSc, which is awarded only on career merit, as well as his PhD. Fortunately, his expertise was recognised before he retired when he spent a couple of years based in UNO City in Vienna, travelling the world as visiting expert in his field. My mother was Leeds Irish so she knew a bit about prejudice too. Somebody once asked her if she thought they should 'send all those Poles back where they belong now' - to which she responded that no, she didn't think so, because she had just married one.
My mum was a forthright, occasionally fiery person. Dad was more measured, wise and kindly. Dad had plenty of bitter experience of fascism and totalitarianism. But he would always say that it could happen anywhere and at any time, because nobody and no nation is ever immune.
How right he was.
Yesterday, a respected political commentator said that there was no point in getting angry over those Brits who were jeering and cheering over the death of a 16 year old Sudanese refugee - such people had already lost more than they would ever realise. He had a point. My dad might even have agreed with him. But all the same, if we do nothing, remain silent, aren't we complicit? My mum - never one to hold her tongue - might have favoured anger. She might well have been right too.
As Karl Popper says: 'unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.'
Fascism doesn't arrive proclaiming itself in song, like the people in that chillingly beautiful scene from Cabaret. It creeps in slowly and insidiously, with the willing connivance of the media. It labels other human beings as 'not like us'. Once they are 'not like us', once we have othered them, we can attribute all kinds of vices to them. We can see them as potential threats to our safety. We can easily slide from thinking of them as the 'enemy' to thinking of them as 'not really human at all'.
The Daily Mail's moderated comments on the death of a sixteen year old included such gems as 'that's our kids safe from one of them' and 'one less we have to keep and pay for' and 'good enough for him' and 'cry me a river'. There were more, many more like that. Since first writing this, I've discovered that there are similar comments on Sky News, on the Metro site and elsewhere. If even half of them are bots or fake accounts, that still leaves plenty who aren't: people who actually typed the words 'cry me a river' about the untimely death of a young man whose entire life had probably been marked by hardship and horror. It's tempting to call these people inhuman but they are all too human. They walk among us. And our so called 'leaders' conspire in fostering the hatred - or at least do nothing to mediate it.
I don't know what the answer to any of this is. I'm not a politician. But it's on my mind right now, because I'm writing a book about the Polish grandfather I never knew, and his extraordinarily tragic story.
The truth is that history never repeats itself or at least nothing happens in the same way twice. All the same, if you have ever wondered what you might have done in pre-war Germany, in the years when Hitler was coming to power, you're probably doing it or something very much like it right now. Pretending that all is well. Hoping for the best. You might even have voted for him because you didn't much like the alternative, and he promised to restore prosperity, create civil order and make the country a world power once again.
Of Blaeberries, Midgies and a Scottish Love Story
Bajka who loved blueberries. |
The Deserving and the Undeserving Arts
I Love My Kindle
Gorgeous herring bone bound tooled leather Old Testament belonging to Elizabeth McLehose. |
Of Water Horses and Other Worlds
The Kelpies: photo copyright C. Czerkawska |
Many people have heard of kelpies, mostly because of these spectacularly beautiful statues near Falkirk. What most people don't know though is that kelpies could be reasonably - albeit certainly not always - benign, or at least able to be controlled.
Back when I was very young, I briefly attended Brownies and among the sixers that pranced around the big plastic toadstool in the church hall were kelpies. I was a pixie. 'Here we are the jolly pixies, helping people when in fixes.' we sang. I think the kelpies were 'ready helpers'. A demonic and notoriously male water creature was perhaps not the best role model for little girls. Maybe that was why I ran away, hopped on the bus home and never went back. However, that's a story for another day.
Later on, I did a masters degree in Folk Life Studies and learned a bit more.
Essentially, the kelpie is a shape shifting 'water horse' inhabiting Scottish rivers and burns. They may seek human companionship, assuming the shape of an attractive black horse when out of the water, but you have to be wary of them, because they can also carry you to your death, if you're not careful!
The kelpie might be caught and harnessed, using a halter with the sign of the cross on it. As a last resort, 'cold iron' could kill it - as it could be the downfall of many other problematic supernatural creatures.
Occasionally, the kelpie might appear in the shape of a human being, but this is where the beliefs in these otherworldly creatures become confused and confusing, because while the kelpie can have a certain impish quality, the creature that you should never under any circumstances mess with, is the true water horse - the each uisge.
He is perilous indeed, this fiercest and most dangerous of the water horses. He lives in lochs or in the sea. He too may appear as a horse, on land, but will carry you off to the deepest part of the loch if once you so much as touch his mane. Even more dangerously, he can and all too often does appear in the shape of a handsome young man but when he rests his head in your lap, you'll find that he has sand in his hair. All in all, the each uisge does not get a good press.
But then, you come across old, old songs like this extraordinarily beautiful piece sung by Julie Fowlis: Dh’èirich mi moch, b' fheà rr nach do dh’èirich in which the water horse turns out to be not so much the villain of the piece as the ... well, what is he? The abandoned lover? The heartbroken father? By any standards it's a deeply mysterious song, and I like things like that - things that challenge my view of the world.
It made me think.
Late last October I did an event in Tarbert with my new book, A Proper Person to be Detained and while we were there, I also listened to an excellent talk about overland cycling, and remote bothies. It struck me that for a woman alone, staying in such places might involve at least a frisson of nerves. It would for me, anyway, even though I have friends who would be absolutely fine with it. After that, we headed for the Isle of Skye to visit friends there, and one day, I clambered up by myself to a well preserved Broch. It was a wild, lonely, evocative place, and that too made me think.
Sometimes people ask me 'where do you get your ideas from?' This is where I get my ideas from. All kinds of places, all kinds of experiences that somehow slot together into a piece of fiction. I don't know how it works, but some stories just have to be written.
When we got home, in the dreich space between the onset of winter and Christmas, all these threads somehow wove themselves together in my head, and I wrote a long story - so long that it almost became a novella - called Rewilding
At 17000 words, it was a bit too long for a a short story, but too short for a novel. It presented itself to me in diary form, in the voice of a young woman, who has a perilous encounter in a wild place.
Or does she?
Well, you can decide for yourself. It's free on Kindle for five days, from 25th July till 29th July. If you're too late for the bargain, it still isn't expensive. So give it a go. One of these days, I might write the sequel that's lurking in my head, like the water horse, only just out of sight.
But it might have to wait till winter.
On 21st July 1796, Robert Burns Died in Dumfries.
Very early on the morning of 21st July, she had been dozing in a chair, so far advanced in her pregnancy that she could not comfortably fall asleep. The child was kicking and tumbling inside her, as it did whenever she rested. Jessie had come in with his medicine and tried to hold the cup to his chapped lips, tried to rouse him a little, but he pushed it away. His face was so thin now that he looked all unlike himself. Even his nose seemed to have become finer, sharper.
Jean got up, steadying herself on the arm of the chair, and took the cup from Jessie. 'Rab, my dear, you need to take your medicine. It'll do you some good, ease the pain, if you can only try to swallow it.'
She sat on the edge of the bed, stroked his forehead gently, stroked the dark hair shot through with grey. Suddenly she had the strangest feeling, as though this was all unreal, as though there might be some magical place where she could turn back time, make it all different, if only she could get to it, if only she could reach it. There, he would be as she had known him at first: her strong, young lover, her husband, her man.
He woke at the sound of her voice, or perhaps her familiar touch, gazed at her, raised his head and drank a mouthful of the cordial, coughing at the bitter taste of it. He tried to say her name, recognition in his eyes for an instant, reached out his arms to her and then fell back on the bed.
'Oh Jeany,' said Jessie Lewars. 'Oh dear Jeany, I think he's gone.'
She was right.
On this day, 21st July, in 1796, Robert Burns died, probably from acute endocarditis, of which he had all the symptoms.
You can read more about Rab and his dear Jean in my novel The Jewel of which the above is an extract.
At Brow Well on the Solway
At all times of the year, the wind blows unhindered across these mudflats. There is nothing to stop it, down here, on the Solway. The sky is dazzling: high and bright with the glitter of a sun half hidden behind clouds. It is a place of endings, of dizzying infinities. A place where long horizontals constantly carry the eye outwards and beyond.
In June, when the thrift is still in bloom, it is as restful as it will ever be. There are wild roses in the hedgerows, white, pale and dark pink. There is a froth of bramble flowers with the promise of fruit to come. Oystercatchers and peewits patrol the mud. There are whaups bubbling in the peaty wastes. And you can hear the laverock, climbing higher and higher, to the very edges of sound and tumbling through the skies in an ecstasy of movement. Down there, in front of you, a burn meanders through the mud, fresh water meeting salt, while beyond that again is more mud and silver water, cloud shadows and the misty hills of another country. But it is still the loneliest sight you will ever see.
On the third of July in the year 1796, Robert Burns left his home in Dumfries and travelled to Brow Well on the Solway. It was, essentially, a poor man’s spa. There was a chalybeate or mineral spring with a stone tank built to house it and not much else. One Doctor Maxwell had diagnosed a wholly fictional malady called Flying Gout, and advised him to drink the waters in an effort to alleviate his symptoms. He was thin, he was weak, he could barely eat and he was in constant pain. He stayed in a cottage close by. He ate a little thin porridge, and drank some porter with milk in it. When the porter bottle was empty, he told his landlady that the ‘muckle black deil’ had got into his wallet, and asked her if she would accept his personal seal as payment but she refused it and brought him the porter anyway.
He was, no doubt, in that state of desperation where you will try anything. He would have gone struggling and staggering and wading into the sea, half a mile every day, far enough for the water to reach up to his waist, because that’s what the doctors had advised. Did they know how shallow these waters were? How far he would have to walk? How bitter the struggle for desperate mind over failing flesh? His landlady would have gone flounder trampling when she was a lassie, kilting her skirts up and wading out into the firth, feeling for the fishes with her toes. Did he feel the Solway flounders slithering away beneath his unsteady feet? It was his last chance of a cure and he was full of fear. Fear for his wife who was heavily pregnant. Fear of debt. Fear of death.
Nearby is the village of Ruthwell. In the church, there is an Anglo Saxon Cross. It is so tall that the floor has been dug out to make room for it. Because it was judged an idolatrous monument with its intricate carving, its runic inscriptions, which must have seemed suspiciously pagan, it was smashed into pieces on the orders of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. That was in 1664, but it lay where it fell for many years and the good folk of Ruthwell used the stone blocks as benches to sit upon, while they yawned their way through interminable sermons. They had to destroy it where it stood, because the cross was there long before the kirk, which was built around it, an irony which seems to have been lost on these stone killers, as they were sometimes called. They would light fires beneath the stone and pour cold water on the cracks until they split apart.
Later the pieces were removed into the churchyard, which was where the poet may have seen them. In 1818, one Henry Duncan gathered the fragments together and restored the whole. The runes are a quotation from a powerful Anglo Saxon poem called The Dream of the Rood. It is a poem in two voices – the dreamer who relates his dream and the voice of the cross itself, telling how he – or perhaps she, for there is a certain sexual element in the poem - was cut down in the forest, how the young hero was sacrificed, struggling in blood and pain upon the body of the tree, both of them victims of a savage betrayal. Rod wæs ic aræred. Ahof ic ricne cyning. A cross I was raised. I lifted the mighty king on high. The poet’s voice calls to us down the years but only if we are willing to listen.
The seawater would have done some good only in that it numbed the pain. In July at Brow Well on the Solway, you can still hear how the laverocks climb to the very edges of sound while at his feet there would be the silvery meander of a burn finally finally
It would have been his last chance.
He had been a week at the salt water and had secret fears that this business would be dangerous if not fatal. No flesh or fish could he swallow. Porridge and milk and porter were the only things he could taste. And how could he attempt horseriding, which the doctors had also ordered, when he could not so much as drag himself up into the saddle?
‘God help my wife and children if I am taken from their head with Jean eight months gone’ he wrote. He sent letters to his father-in-law, James Armour, begging him to ask Jean’s mother come to Dumfries, but Mary Armour was visiting relatives in Fife and there was only silence from Mauchline. His correspondence reeks of desperation.
From the middle of the month, the tides were unsuitable for bathing, so he went home, borrowing a gig from a farmer named John Clark, in Locharwoods. When he got back to Dumfries, he was too weak to walk up the Mill Vennel, let alone climb the stairs to his bed.
It is not hard to see these things, here at Brow Well, on the Solway. He walks to the sea, and comes to the edge of the land and almost falls into a great mass of thrift, clumps of pink, fringing the shore like some wild garden. But it is already dying. You can picture him. You can see him in your mind's eye, as he goes struggling and staggering and wading through the water. It is July. The wind blows unhindered across the mudflats.
You come to the edge of the land. The thrift fringes the shore like some wild garden. But it is already fading to brown. When the wind blows through the flowers , they tremble, with a dry, feathery sound. You walk to the sea and there are laverocks singing. Who knows where sky ends and sea begins or where sea dissolves into sand? This is a place of endings, a place of infinities. He, who always sang of rivers and streams, is coming, at last, to the sea.
The Jewel - Some Discussion Questions about Jean Armour and Robert Burns
With the anniversary of the poet's death coming up on 21st July, I've been thinking about some discussion prompts and questions for book or reading groups. I know that many of my friends have been taking part in online discussion groups during lockdown, and I think it's possible that people in particular may decide to carry on with at least some of these get-togethers in the 'new normal' - even though nothing quite beats personal interaction and debate.
1 In her 1930 biographical novel about Burns, Catherine Carswell described Jean as a ‘homely and hearty' and 'a heifer’. Do you think she was right? How did your view of Jean (if you had one) change as you read the novel?
2 Why do you think that a pregnant Jean felt that she must go to Paisley when her parents forced her? What was it like for women at the time? What kind of resources would she have had?
3 Why do you think Burns got so very angry with Jean for her supposed ‘betrayal’ of him. What does that tell us about his feelings for her and his mental state at the time?
4 The so called ‘horse litter scene’ is very controversial now, especially given that Burns wrote about it quite graphically to a male friend afterwards. It was very hard to tackle in the book. What did you feel about it, and were you able to imagine yourself back to that time? Did you believe his subsequent bragging, or do you think he was feeling guilty about it and trying to justify himself?
5 The poet was, by all accounts, a ‘hands on’ and loving father. It is clear that a great many babies in rural Scotland were born out of wedlock at that time, and that the Kirk’s main aim was to get fathers to acknowledge and support their babies – a kind of social control that was actually quite good for mothers and children. Why do you think all this changed during the Industrial Revolution, so that for working women, pregnancy outside marriage was seen as disastrous?
6 When the Mauchline minister ‘Daddie Auld’ wrote that it is ‘aye the poor who maintain the poor in this parish’ what do you think he meant? What does it tell us about him? What do you think the author felt about him?
7 Highland Mary was much lauded by the Victorians. Why? Some of this still spills over into the present day, yet the evidence is that she wasn’t quite as saintly as later commentators and the poet himself made her out to be. What was it that was so appealing about her?
8 How do you think Jean contributed to Burns’s work, and do you feel this comes over in the book?
9 Did you get angry with Burns while reading the novel, or did you manage to maintain a soft spot for him? Did you understand why Jean fell for him? Do you think that if you were an 18th century woman, you would have felt the same? Were you aware of his charm across all these years?
10 Jean continued to lead a very full and contented life for many years after the poet’s death. She even had tea with Clarinda. She had several offers of marriage. Why do you think she turned them all down?
Willie's Mill, at Tarbolton, where Jean spent part of her second pregnancy. |