Sunset Song E-Book

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 575

Beschreibung

Faced with the choice between her harsh farming life and the seductive but distant world of books and learning, the spirited Chris Guthrie decides to remain in her rural community. But as the devastation of the First World War leaves her life-and community-in tatters, she must draw strength from what she loves and endure, like the land she loves so intensely. Brutal and beautiful, passionate and powerful, Sunset Song is a moving portrait of a declining way of life and an inspirational celebration of the human spirit. And in Chris Guthrie, Grassic Gibbon has given us one of literature's most unforgettable heroines.

Leseprobe

SUNSET SONG

James Leslie Mitchell (pen-name Lewis Grassic Gibbon) was one of the finest Scottish writers of the twentieth century. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1901, Mitchell’s boyhood in a small rural community shaped his ideas and imagination throughout his life. He was a brilliant school pupil, although less successful as a journalist in Aberdeen and Glasgow. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served abroad. In 1925, he married Rebecca Middleton, a former childhood friend, and four years later he became a full-time writer. The couple lived in Welwyn Garden City until the writer’s premature death in 1935, of peritonitis, at the age of thirty-four.

Mitchell was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflected his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, politics and science. His major published works are: Hanno: or the Future of Exploration (1928); Stained Radiance: A Fictionist’s Prelude (1930); The Thirteenth Disciple (1931); The Calends of Cairo (1931); Three Go Back (1932); The Lost Trumpet (1932); Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights (1932); Image and Superscription (1933); Spartacus (1933); Niger: The Life of Mungo Park (1934); The Conquest of the Maya (1934); Gay Hunter (1934); Scottish Scene, a collaboration with Hugh MacDiarmid (1934); and Nine Against the Unknown (1934). Mitchell adopted his mother’s name for his best known work, A Scots Quair, a trilogy comprising Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). An unfinished novel, The Speak of the Mearns, was published in 1982.

Ian Campbell is Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has worked with the Lewis Grassic Gibbon estate (now in the National Library of Scotland) and the Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott.

LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON

Sunset Song

Edited with an introduction byIan Campbell

This eBook edition published in 2013 byBirlinn LtdWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

This edition first published in 2006 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Introduction and notes copyright © Ian Campbell, 2006Glossary copyright © Norman Harper, 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted inany form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-713-4ISBN: 978-1-90459-866-4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Introduction

A Note

SUNSET SONG

Notes

Glossary

Introduction to Sunset Song

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s place on the shelves is beyond question now, though it has taken a long time for readers to see beyond the attractions of Sunset Song to the entire trilogy, A Scots Quair, undoubtedly one of the most important works of modern Scottish literature. With the re-appearance from Polygon of his other works (Spartacus, The Speak of the Mearns, The Lost Trumpet, Three Go Back, Stained Radiance, Gay Hunter, Nine Against the Unknown and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights) many of them long out of print and all but unobtainable, his stature as an important and prolific writer of his century is becoming clearer. Sunset Song, long taught at school and university, televised and adapted for the stage, came first in a recent popular survey of Scottish books. Time now to look beyond Sunset Song, to see it as the first part of a strategy to face up to the reality of a Scotland which Lewis Grassic Gibbon had known in the 1910s and 1920s, had watched change almost beyond recognition, and in 1932 in Sunset Song sat down to write about coolly, critically. When the Kirriemuir Free Press published the obtuse comment (which Grassic Gibbon gleefully reprinted in Scottish Scene) that ‘the “Kailyard” writers of a generation ago gave us pictures of Scottish life at its best’ it went on to contrast them with ‘the tendency today [which is] to go to the other extreme, and, in dealing with rural life in particular, to gloat foully’. Sunset Song is proof of just how wide of the mark this comment could be.

In his brief but hectically productive career Grassic Gibbon produced a lot of essay writing, much of it autobiographical, and inevitably it touches on his memories of life in the country. Most of all, he was inspired to write about that life when he revisited the Mearns after years spent in the South, or abroad, in the armed forces, or scratching a living as a writer in Welwyn Garden City.

    Going down the rigs this morning, my head full of that unaccustomed smell of the earth, fresh and salty and anciently mouldy, I remembered the psalmist’s voice of the turtle and instinctively listened for its Scots equivalent – that far cooing of pigeons that used to greet the coming of Spring mornings when I was a boy. But the woods have gone, their green encirclement replaced by swathes of bog and muck and rank-growing heath, all is left bare in the North wind’s blow. The pigeons have gone and the rabbits and like vermin multiplied – unhappily and to no profit, for the farmers tell me the rabbits are tuberculous, dangerous meat. Unshielded by the woods, the farm-lands are assailed by enemies my youth never knew.

Here is the mixture of nostalgia and repulsion which made his writing about a remembered Scotland so individual and so enduring. For Sunset Song is a challenge to any reader, above all to the Scot with some knowledge of the place and time in which it is set: returning to it, like the author returning to his native Mearns, the reader is assailed at once by the plangently familiar and the astonishingly unexpected. For Grassic Gibbon’s essays are full of the sights and sounds and smells of his boyhood, as the English fiction is full of Scottish characters who stop and remember that Scotland of their youth in far-off places. Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song is assailed by those tactile impressions from an early age, they bombard her at the crucial moments of her life, they are still there at the last page of the novel when the main characters are dead, the community she knew ripped apart by the war in distant Europe. Small wonder that Scottish readers react with surprise and delight to a novel which assails them with the familiar, while at the same time offering to non-Scots a sensory equivalent of being there, then, in those circumstances.

What is clear, though, from Grassic Gibbon’s comment above and from the whole trilogy, is that the Scotland of memory, of sights and sounds and smells, is disappearing. Seduced by the song of the title, readers find it easy to forget that the sunset is one of the central themes, if not the central theme. Returning to the farm of her childhood in Cloud Howe, Chris finds that even a few months’ absence changes everything, encountering ‘the winter smell of the land and the sheep they pastured now on Blawearie, in the parks that once came rich with corn that Ewan had sown and they both had reaped, where the horses had pastured, their kye and their stock’. To Grassic Gibbon, it is not merely one farm that changes, but a way of life he knew in his childhood and which by the date of the novels’ composition (Sunset Song 1932, Cloud Howe 1933, Grey Granite 1934) had all but vanished: some farms remained, ‘but they are fewer and fewer, the cultivated lands. Half of them are in grass – permanently in grass – and browsed upon by great flocks of sheep, leaving that spider-trail of grey that sheep bring to pastures. We are repeating here what the border men did in Badenoch and the Highlands – eating away the land and the crofter, killing off the peasant as surely as in Russia – and with no Russian compensation.’ Sunset Song is about that process, broad-brushed against the story of the First World War, picked out in more detail in the autobiography and memory of a childhood spent in Arbuthnott watching these changes, half-understood, then better understood from a distance till he felt he could write about them in the great sweep of the trilogy A Scots Quair, the picture of his youth which his mother wryly thought had made the family ‘the speak of the Mearns’, but which today we recognise as the requiem for a vanishing, almost vanished Scotland.

Returning to Grassic Gibbon the essayist, we can see in his accomplished if hasty writing the iconoclast who delighted in making people see the uncomfortable truth, rather than relishing a familiar but misleading half-truth, as many Scottish writers seemed willing to tolerate in the 1920s and 1930s, the kailyard not quite dead, the uncomfortable realities of the Depression and the rise of Fascism far from the popular press and the kind of weakly writing Grassic Gibbon lambasted in Scottish Scene. For, he wrote with tongue only half in cheek,

    I am the complete Philistine. I have always liked the Philistines, a commendable and gracious and cleanly race. They built clean cities with wide, airy streets, they delighted in the singing of good, simple songs and hunting and lovemaking and the worshipping of relevant and comprehensible Gods. They were a light in the Ancient east and led simple happy and carefree lives, with a splendour of trumpets now and again to stir them to amusing orgy … And above, in the hills, in Jerusalem, dwelt the Israelites, unwashed and unashamed, horrified at the clean anarchy which is the essence of life, oppressed by the grisly fears of life and death and time, suborning simple human pleasures in living into an insane debating on justice and right, the Good Life, the Soul of Man, artistic canon, the First Cause, National Ethos, the mainsprings of conduct, aesthetic approach – and all the rest of the dirty little toys with which dirty little men in dirty little caves love to play, turning with a haughty shudder of repulsion from the cry of the wind and the beat of the sun on the hills outside … One of the greatest tragedies of the ancient world was the killing of Goliath by David – a ghoul-haunted little village squirt who sneaked up and murdered the Philistine while the latter (with a good breakfast below his belt) was admiring the sunrise.

Small wonder Grassic Gibbon was the speak of the Mearns, for his impish delight in upsetting people was matched by his impish gathering together of hostile put-downs and reviews which he reprinted in Scottish Scene. There is a serious core to the deliberate offence of writing like this: the wish to assert the life-affirming values of ‘clean anarchy which is the essence of life’ against the deadening and distorting values he saw in contemporary society – poverty, depression, religious inertia, political messiness. Sunset Song, in addition to its obvious pleasures as evocation of village life in Scotland in the early twentieth century and up to the end of the War, is a mirror in which the struggle is reflected between these life-affirming values (in sunset) and the hostile outer world which forces itself on Blawearie and on Kinraddie as a whole, cutting down not only the young men and the ancient trees, but the way of life which the novel celebrates and mourns the passing of.

Sunset Song begins, deliberately, with a historical backward look to the days when Arbuthnott Kirk (in life as ancient and as historic as the author remembered it in his fiction) was the centre of a Christian, unchanging, feudal settlement. The wash of history passes Arbuthnott by as the cycle of seasons and the demands of agriculture fashion the society to which Chris Guthrie comes with her family from Aberdeenshire and (mirroring the author’s own early years) settles in Arbuthnott for childhood and schooldays. Many commentators have noticed the use of the seasons as markers in Sunset Song, the relation between the season and the development of the central characters obvious, perhaps less obvious the tension which exists in the book (and which Chris sees early on in her maturing consciousness) between the seemingly timeless countryside and the human society which tries to shape the land, memorably described in one of his essays as ‘only halfinanimate’ and which passes in its turn as the land endures. Chris in harvest time sits and listens to that land, ‘the Standing Stones up there night after night and day after day by the loch of Blawearie, how around them there gathered things that wept and laughed and lived again in the hours before the dawn’, and when life with her tyrannical father becomes unbearable she runs to those same standing stones, ‘the only place where ever she could come and stand back a little from the clamour of the days’. It is only with maturity – and suffering – that Chris comes to see how little human society endures, ‘nothing endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of them had set the Standing Stones by the Loch of Blawearie’. And even they were marked for destruction, as her own father saw, ‘the day of the crofter was fell near finished, put by, the day of folk like himself and Chae and Cuddiestoun, Pooty and Long Rob of the Mill, the last of the farming folk that wrung their living from the land with their own bare hands’.

One of the deftest strategies in the book is the author’s balancing act between the passionate attachment to that land which Chris feels (and which obviously, in memory, he felt – one glance at his essay on ‘Autumn’ in The Speak of the Mearns would make that clear) and the slow but inescapable destruction of that way of life which is forced on the book by outside circumstance even as Chris (and through her, the reader) accepts the limitations of life on the land, the hard work and the occasional dislike of the farming people. Chris, in marrying Ewan and keeping on her father’s lease of Blawearie, embraces Kinraddie after decisively rejecting the life of schoolteaching in the cities: the ‘English Chris’ once conquered, she can surrender to the Scottish Chris and the life of the land. Yet this is just the moment of destruction of that life, as the details crowd into the second half of the novel – the cutting of the woods which destroys the arable farming habits of centuries, the removal of the bothie labour force which made the farming techniques of horse and man possible – and the coming of the machines, the call-up and slaughter of the menfolk which cruelly is the climax of the book’s last pages. Sunset song indeed. Behind it, her brother’s callous but accurate summing up of his Blawearie years when he comes back to visit her in his army uniform: Who’d want to come back to this country? It’s dead or it’s dying – and a damned good job! Grassic Gibbon at the same time brings that old Scotland to life with clarity and passion – and writes its death knell in the closing chapters of the book. It is not just Ewan who does not live to see his farm and his son again: Chae and Long Rob, the leading men of the village, repositories of folk music and tradition as well as leaders of opinion, are cut down by the war, while the power passes to those who stay behind and adapt to the new ways – market gardening for the cities’ appetite for vegetables and hens, untilled fields of pasturing sheep, the new-fangled machines which do away with the need for men, and the spread of the motor-car which is to transform society in Cloud Howe and finally to disrupt that claustrophobic world of the opening chapters of Sunset Song.

Why, when Kinraddie is all but destroyed in the last pages of the novel, should Sunset Song be so popular and so widely welcomed for its lyrical, approachable celebration of Scottish country life? There are many answers: the fact that Grassic Gibbon was remembering something he had lived through himself, and while he was glad to get away from the dirt and the mind-numbing labour of the farm, he could not (and did not wish to) forget the beauty of the country, the sharp memory of the smell and colour and above all the sound of the peewit which haunts all his fiction. Kinraddie is realistic because it is real: the map which accompanied the first edition is deliberately distorted to make it difficult to pin down too exactly the real-life originals (some of which would have taken grave exception to the picture he painted of them) but real-life Arbuthnott today (with the Grassic Gibbon Centre to help) makes the geography of the book plain to see, and while the farms and the settlement may have changed, the land itself is as unchanged as the ancient Church by the river, and the Manse and the trees which are so obviously the inspiration for Cloud Howe.

Popularity is something the book has long enjoyed, and with it has come the realisation that the style which the author perfected in this novel is a flexible and successful tool for narrative and dialogue. Scottish literature was changing as fast as the language itself in a world where radio and cinema, cheap newspapers and paperback books were assaulting what remained of the Scots tongue. The author had himself spoken Scots in youth, and done much to rid himself of it when he reinvented himself as a journalist in the cities and then as a professional writer based in the South-East. The ‘Grassic Gibbon Style’ as exemplified here is a many-layered instrument, a narrative basis close to standard English which offers few of the initially offputting mannerisms of the ‘Synthetic Scots’ which MacDiarmid and other Scottish authors of the time were championing, a narrative which can be read and almost completely understood through the medium of orthography which disguises the presence of a Scottish word through the printing of an English word resembling it – leaving the reader in due course to substitute ‘braw’ for ‘brave’, ‘coorse’ for ‘coarse’, and so forth. He defined it himself as an attempt ‘to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires’, and he noted that the experiment was intended specifically for a countryside novel. As we will see in Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, the experiment was modified in interesting ways as Scotland’s speech changed: for Sunset Song in the century’s second decade, the experiment of writing in English-based Scots works, and worked, in the sense that people found the novel accessible whatever their background.

A subsidiary reason for the novel’s popularity is the wide-ranging experiment he made in manipulating point of view, the ubiquitous ‘you’ of the novel (as Graham Trengove has noted) swooping in and out of the consciousness of individual characters, the disembodied ‘speak’ of the neighbourhood, and the readers themselves – so that instead of standing back from Kinraddie and its gossip as well as its warm communal life, the reader is drawn into it as surely as into the emerging adult consciousness of Chris herself, as she comes to know herself as woman, not girl; as independent consciousness, not daughter of John Guthrie; as wife and mother, and finally as individual in a rapidly changing world, the suggestion in the last pages that her isolation would not long survive into the sequel where her second husband is already all too clear from the hints in this first book. The inclusion of so much that is easily identifiable with many readers, the harvest and new year and wedding festivals, the scenes of intense family life, of childbirth, of death – make reader identification a strong part of the author’s intention: as the trilogy progresses and the Scotland of the early pages of Sunset Song retreats, so too does reader identification with a Scotland which increasingly repels and makes Chris retreat into herself.

The unveiling of the war memorial in the novel’s last pages is not only a splendid piece of writing, it is something which encompasses the themes of the book, preparing the reader for the sequel (as yet unwritten when Sunset Song was published), and raising the emotional level to a pitch which today can still strongly appeal to readers with or without experience of Scotland. To include the music of The Flowers o the Forest (played at funerals and war memorial services and great military occasions) is a cue that perhaps appeals more to Scots than to non-Scots: to use the idea of war dead is a completely international marker for the irreversible change which has transformed Kinraddie from the early pages of Cospatric’s exploits through the early life of Chris, to the torn-apart and uncertain collection of broken families who come to witness the unveiling of the inscription on the standing stones above Blawearie’s loch. In itself, the choice of the standing stones is intended to underline that contrast between the permanence of the historic Scotland and the hectic political events of the decade just described. The dead whose names are inscribed on the ancient stone barely understood why they were going abroad, and why their deaths meant anything – if indeed they did. But the minister is making a point far beyond the immediate address to the folk of Kinraddie (many of whom, the author sourly notices, missed the point anyway). The minister is talking about Scotland as a whole, and not just his parish with its newly denuded hill slopes and its missing parishioners. The dead he acclaims as the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk, and their death goes far beyond the individual tragedies the novel has described.

    It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips.

In a moment’s brilliance, Grassic Gibbon sums up in that speech of the minister’s the achievement of this novel, and the larger movement of the next two which would complete the Scots Quair. For Sunset Songis about the death of that old Scotland, beautiful as the short-term description of it has been in the few years before and during a war which seems for a long time barely to touch the fields of Kinraddie. Remorselessly, the war does come and does destroy: and the use ofthat motif so visibly and so strongly atthe book’s climaxmarks the author’s wish to make a statement unmistakable in its wider context.

Sunset Song, more perhaps than any other single book of its time, tackles the question of the past in Scottish fiction. To be sure, others were writing about that past (Stevenson, Buchan, Jacob, Linklater, Shepherd) and novels such as The House with the Green Shutters and Gillespie had marked an emphatic rejection of the kailyard’s dwelling on a beautiful past as escape or rejection of unlovely present. Grassic Gibbon shared Douglas Brown’s testy impatience with merely reflective and nostalgic writing, and in Scottish Scene he cheerfully and insultingly brushed aside what was flaccid and undemanding in contemporary Scottish writing. In Sunset Song he proved that he could write attractively about Scotland’s past, informed by memory and real affection, and with a style which transported the reader in imagination into that past. Given the appetite for such writing, he could have ensured himself and his family commercial success indefinitely in that mode – and the financial security would have been very welcome at that stage in his life.

A Scots Quair is a bold and wholly successful assault on the temptation to write about the past as escape: it starts, with Sunset Song, by demonstrating its abilities in that mode, and even as it recreates the Kinraddie of hazy 1911 in the early pages it ensures a bittersweet tone to remind the reader that everything was not beautiful in that Scotland of the past, that the life of the land was cold and wearisome as well as occasionally beautiful, that the people could be mean and bitter as well as magnificently friendly. To create the world of Sunset Song, then have the courage to destroy that world for ever – and underline the finality of its destruction in the final pages – shows Grassic Gibbon’s courage in the face of the temptation to recycle his gift for cheap commercial gain. He was to re-work some of the material in The Speak of the Mearns, but had he lived to finish that book he would doubtless have moved it forward into an unlovely present as surely as he moved Kinraddie from its comfortable existence to the hillside where the standing stones carried the names of those who had been killed, along with the way of life they represented.

Did Scotland die with them? Grassic Gibbon’s answer is absolutely plain, that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips. The songs and the benedictions will live on. The challenge will be (and it was the challenge he rose to in Cloud Howe and GreyGranite) to articulate that alien effort, to adjust content, plot, narrative, style to a readership which is no longer looking back to a recent past, but to a very recent near present, changing totally the relationship of the Scotland depicted to reader experience – and indeed author’s experience. The author, like the reader, has to make an effort to relate experience to the fiction: to remember that in Sunset Song the material depicted was some twenty years out of date, in Cloud Howe only ten, in Grey Granite completely of the here and now.

Chris is the strong element in all this, the character whose development gives the time-scheme to the novels, whose physical maturing changes the relationship of the reader to the assumed relationships at the heart of all three, whose view of her own country changes as the trilogy progresses, as we readers are invited to change our view as alien effort intrudes on memory. Inevitably, Sunset Song is the most popular part of the trilogy: the challenge Grassic Gibbon set his contemporaries, and which readers in the present century face, is to pass the limits of the reflective and the nostalgic and grapple with the newer and more difficult material which the near past, and the near present make necessary. For the trilogy to work, the first part had to anchor securely both character and overall strategy. Sunset Song is that anchor, a tour deforce in its own right, and a splendid preparation for A Scots Quair in which Grassic Gibbon was to look at his own lifetime, and bring to it a painful vision which only now is being appreciated for its clarity and its predictive power.

A Note

If the great Dutch language disappeared from literary usage and a Dutchman wrote in German a story of the Lekside peasants, one may hazard he would ask and receive a certain latitude and forbearance in his usage of German. He might import into his pages some score or so untranslatable words and idioms – untranslatable except in their context and setting; he might mould in some fashion his German to the rhythms and cadence of the kindred speech that his peasants speak. Beyond that, in fairness to his hosts, he hardly could go: to seek effect by a spray of apostrophes would be both impertinence and mis-translation.

The courtesy that the hypothetical Dutchman might receive from German a Scot may invoke from the great English tongue.

L.G.G.

SUNSET SONG

ToJean Baxter

Contents

Map of Kinraddie

PRELUDE

The Unfurrowed Field

THE SONG

Ploughing

Drilling

Seed-time

Harvest

EPILUDE

The Unfurrowed Field

PRELUDE

The Unfurrowed Field

Kinraddie lands had been won by a Norman childe, Cospatric de Gondeshil, in the days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf-beast, come through the hide window, tearing at their throats. In the Den of Kinraddie one such beast had its lair and by day it lay about the woods and the stench of it was awful to smell all over the countryside, and at gloaming a shepherd would see it, with its great wings half-folded across the great belly of it and its head, like the head of a meikle cock, but with the ears of a lion, poked over a fir tree, watching. And it ate up sheep and men and women and was a fair terror, and the King had his heralds cry a reward to whatever knight would ride and end the mischieving of the beast. So the Norman childe, Cospatric, that was young and landless and fell brave and well-armoured, mounted his horse in Edinburgh Town and came North, out of the foreign south parts, up through the Forest of Fife and into the pastures of Forfar and past Aberlemno’s Meikle Stane that was raised when the Picts beat the Danes; and by it he stopped and looked at the figures, bright then and hardly faded even now, of the horses and the charging and the rout of those coarse foreign folk. And maybe he said a bit prayer by that Stone and then he rode into the Mearns, and the story tells no more of his riding but that at last come he did to Kinraddie, a tormented place, and they told him where the gryphon slept, down there in the Den of Kinraddie.

But in the daytime it hid in the woods and only at night, by a path through the hornbeams, might he come at it, squatting in bones, in its lair. And Cospatric waited for the night to come and rode to the edge of Kinraddie Den and commended his soul to God and came off his horse and took his boar-spear in his hand, and went down into the Den and killed the gryphon. And he sent the news to William the Lyon, sitting drinking the wine and fondling his bonny lemans in Edinburgh Town, and William made him the Knight of Kinraddie, and gave to him all the wide parish as his demesne and grant to build him a castle there, and wear the sign of a gryphon’s head for a crest and keep down all beasts and coarse and wayward folk, him and the issue of his body for ever after.

So Cospatric got him the Pict folk to build a strong castle there in the lithe of the hills, with the Grampians bleak and dark behind it, and he had the Den drained and he married a Pict lady and got on her bairns and he lived there till he died. And his son took the name Kinraddie, and looked out one day from the castle wall and saw the Earl Marischal come marching up from the south to join the Highlandmen in the battle that was fought at Mondynes, where now the meal-mill stands; and he took out his men and fought there, but on which side they do not say, but maybe it was the winning one, they were aye gey and canny folk, the Kinraddies. And the great-grandson of Cospatric, he joined the English against the cateran Wallace, and when Wallace next came marching up from the southlands Kinraddie and other noble folk of that time they got them into Dunnottar Castle that stands out in the sea beyond Kinneff, well-builded and strong, and the sea splashes about it in the high tides and there the din of the gulls is a yammer night and day. Much of meal and meat and gear they took with them, and they laid themselves up there right strongly, they and their carles, and wasted all the Mearns that the Cateran who dared rebel against the fine English king might find no provision for his army of coarse and landless men. But Wallace came through the Howe right swiftly and he heard of Dunnottar and laid siege to it and it was a right strong place and he had but small patience with strong places. So, in the dead of one night, when the thunder of the sea drowned the noise of his feint, he climbed the Dunnottar rocks and was over the wall, he and the vagabond Scots, and they took Dunnottar and put to the slaughter the noble folk gathered there, and all the English, and spoiled them of their meat and gear, and marched away.

Kinraddie Castle that year, they tell, had but a young bride new home and she had no issue of her body, and the months went by and she rode to the Abbey of Aberbrothock where the good Abbot, John, was her cousin, and told him of her trouble and how the line of Kinraddie was like to die. So he lay with her, that was September, and next year a boy was born to the young bride, and after that the Kinraddies paid no heed to wars and bickerings but sat them fast in their Castle lithe in the hills, with their gear and bonny leman queans and villeins libbed for service.

And when the First Reformation came and others came after it and some folk cried Whiggam! and some cried Rome! and some cried The King! the Kinraddies sat them quiet and decent and peaceable in their castle, and heeded never a fig the arguings of folk, for wars were unchancy things. But then Dutch William came, fair plain a fixture that none would move, and the Kinraddies were all for the Covenant then, they had aye had God’s Covenant at heart, they said. So they builded a new kirk down where the chapel had stood, and builded a manse by it, there in the hiddle of the yews where the cateran Wallace had hid when the English put him to rout at last. And one Kinraddie, John Kinraddie, went south and became a great man in the London court, and was crony of the creatures Johnson and James Boswell; and once the two of them, John Kinraddie and James Boswell, came up to the Mearns on an idle ploy and sat drinking wine and making coarse talk far into the small hours night after night till the old laird wearied of them and then they would steal away and as James Boswell set in his diary, Did get to the loft where the maids were, and one Πεγγí Δυνδαζ ωαζ φατ ιν τhε βνττοcκζ αυδ I δ1δ λιε wιτh hεp.

But in the early days of the nineteenth century it was an ill time for the Scots gentry, for the poison of the French Revolution came over the seas and crofters and common folk like that stood up and cried Away to hell! when the Auld Kirk preached submission from its pulpits. Up as far as Kinraddie came the poison and the young laird of that time, and he was Kenneth, he called himself a Jacobin and joined the Jacobin Club of Aberdeen and there at Aberdeen was nearly killed in the rioting, for liberty and equality and fraternity, he called it. And they carried him back to Kinraddie a cripple, but he would still have it that all men were free and equal and he set to selling the estate and sending the money to France, for he had a real good heart. And the crofters marched on Kinraddie Castle in a body and bashed in the windows of it, they thought equality should begin at home.

More than half the estate had gone in this driblet and that while the cripple sat and read his coarse French books; but nobody guessed that till he died and then his widow, poor woman, found herself own no more than the land that lay between the coarse hills, the Grampians, and the farms that stood out by the Bridge End above the Denburn, straddling the outward road. Maybe there were some twenty to thirty holdings in all, the crofters dour folk of the old Pict stock, they had no history, common folk, and ill-reared their biggings clustered and chaved amid the long, sloping fields. The leases were one-year, two-year, you worked from the blink of the day you were breeked to the flicker of the night they shrouded you, and the dirt of gentry sat and ate up your rents but you were as good as they were. So that was Kenneth’s leaving to his lady body, she wept right sore over the pass that things had come to, but they kittled up before her own jaw was tied in a clout and they put her down in Kinraddie vault to lie by the side of her man. Three of her bairns were drowned at sea, fishing off the Bervie braes they had been, but the fourth, the boy Cospatric, him that died the same day as the Old Queen, he was douce and saving and sensible, and set putting the estate to rights. He threw out half the little tenants, they flitted off to Canada and Dundee and parts like those, the others he couldn’t move but slowly. But on the cleared land he had bigger steadings built and he let them at bigger rents and longer leases, he said the day of the fine big farm had come. And he had woods of fir and larch and pine planted to shield the long, bleak slopes, and might well have retrieved the Kinraddie fortunes but that he married a Morton quean with black blood in her, she smitted him and drove him to drink and death, that was the best way out. For his son was clean daft, they locked him up at last in an asylum, and that was the end of Kinraddie family, the Meikle House that stood where the Picts had builded Cospatric’s castle crumbled to bits like a cheese, all but two-three rooms the trustees held as their offices, the estate was mortgaged to the hilt by then.

So by the winter of nineteen eleven there were no more than nine bit places left the Kinraddie estate, the Mains the biggest of them, it had been the Castle home farm in the long past times. An Irish creature, Erbert Ellison was the name, ran the place for the trustees, he said, but if you might believe all the stories you heard he ran a hantle more silver into his own pouch than he ran into theirs. Well might you expect it, for once he’d been no more than a Dublin waiter, they said. That had been in the time before Lord Kinraddie, the daft one, had gone clean skite. He had been in Dublin, Lord Kinraddie, on some drunken ploy, and Ellison had brought his whisky for him and some said he had halved his bed with him. But folk would say anything. So the daftie took Ellison back with him to Kinraddie and made him his servant, and sometimes, when he was real drunk and the fairlies came sniftering out of the whisky bottles at him, he would throw a bottle at Ellison and shout Get out, you bloody dish-clout! so loud it was heard across at the Manse and fair affronted the minister’s wife. And old Greig, him that had been the last minister there, he would glower across at Kinraddie House like John Knox at Holyrood, and say that God’s hour would come. And sure as death it did, off to the asylum they hurled the daftie, he went with a nurse’s mutch on his head and he put his head out of the back of the waggon and said Cockadoodledoo! to some school bairns the waggon passed on the road and they all ran home and were fell frightened.

But Ellison had made himself well acquaint with farming and selling stock and most with buying horses, so the trustees they made him manager of the Mains, and he moved into the Mains farmhouse and looked him round for a wife. Some would have nothing to do with him, a poor creature of an Irishman who couldn’t speak right and didn’t belong to the Kirk, but Ella White she was not so particular and was fell long in the tooth herself. So when Ellison came to her at the harvest ball in Auchinblae and cried Can I see you home to-night, me dear? she said Och, Ay. And on the road home they lay among the stooks and maybe Ellison did this and that to make sure of getting her, he was fair desperate for any woman by then. They were married next New Year’s Day, and Ellison had begun to think himself a gey man in Kinraddie, and maybe one of the gentry. But the bothy billies, the ploughmen and the orra men of the Mains, they’d never a care for gentry except to mock at them and on the eve of Ellison’s wedding they took him as he was going into his house and took off his breeks and tarred his dowp and the soles of his feet and stuck feathers on them and then they threw him into the water-trough, as was the custom. And he called them Bloody Scotch savages, and was in an awful rage and at the term-time he had them sacked, the whole jing-bang of them, so sore affronted he had been.

But after that he got on well enough, him and his mistress, Ella White, and they had a daughter, a scrawny bit quean they thought over good to go to the Auchinblae School, so off she went to Stonehaven Academy and was taught to be right brave and swing about in the gymnasium there with wee black breeks on under her skirt. Ellison himself began to get well-stomached, and he had a red face, big and sappy, and eyes like a cat, green eyes, and his mouser hung down each side of a fair bit mouth that was chokeful up of false teeth, awful expensive and bonny, lined with bits of gold. And he aye wore leggings and riding breeks, for he was fair gentry by then; and when he would meet a crony at a mart he would cry Sure, bot it’s you, thin, ould chep! and the billy would redden up, real ashamed, but wouldn’t dare say anything, for he wasn’t a man you’d offend. In politics he said he was a Conservative but everybody in Kinraddie knew that meant he was a Tory and the bairns of Strachan, him that farmed the Peesie’s Knapp, they would scraich out

Inky poo, your nose is blue,

You’re awful like the Turra Coo!

whenever they saw Ellison go by. For he’d sent a subscription to the creature up Turriff way whose cow had been sold to pay his Insurance, and folk said it was no more than a show off, the Cow creature and Ellison both; and they laughed at him behind his back.

So that was the Mains, below the Meikle House, and Ellison farmed it in his Irish way and right opposite, hidden away among their yews, were kirk and manse, the kirk an old, draughty place and in the winter-time, right in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, maybe, you’d hear an outbreak of hoasts fit to lift off the roof, and Miss Sarah Sinclair, her that came from Netherhill and played the organ, she’d sneeze into her hymn-book and miss her bit notes and the minister, him that was the old one, he’d glower down at her more like John Knox than ever. Next door the kirk was an olden tower, built in the time of the Roman Catholics, the coarse creatures, and it was fell old and wasn’t used any more except by the cushat-doves and they flew in and out the narrow slits in the upper storey and nested there all the year round and the place was fair white with their dung. In the lower half of the tower was an effigy-thing of Cospatric de Gondeshil, him that killed the gryphon, lying on his back with his arms crossed and a daft-like simper on his face; and the spear he killed the gryphon with was locked in a kist there, or so some said, but others said it was no more than an old bit heuch from the times of Bonny Prince Charlie. So that was the tower, but it wasn’t fairly a part of the kirk, the real kirk was split in two bits, the main hall and the wee hall, and some called them the byre and the turnip-shed, and the pulpit stood midway. Once the wee hall had been for the folk from the Meikle House and their guests and such-like gentry but nearly anybody that had the face went ben and sat there now, and the elders sat with the collection bags, and young Murray, him that blew the organ for Sarah Sinclair. It had fine glass windows, awful old, the wee hall, with three bit creatures of queans, not very decent-like in a kirk, as window-pictures. One of the queans was Faith, and faith she looked a daft-like keek for she was lifting up her hands and her eyes like a heifer choked on a turnip and the bit blanket round her shoulders was falling off her but she didn’t seem to heed, and there was a swither of scrolls and fiddley-faddles all about her. And the second quean was Hope and she was near as unco as Faith, but had right bonny hair, red hair, though maybe you’d call it auburn, and in the winter-time the light in the morning service would come splashing through the yews in the kirkyard and into the wee hall through the red hair of Hope. And the third quean was Charity, with a lot of naked bairns at her feet and she looked a fine and decent-like woman, for all that she was tied about with such daft-like clouts.

But the windows of the main hall, though they were coloured, they had never a picture in them and there were no pictures in there at all, who wanted them? Only coarse creatures like Catholics wanted a kirk to look like a grocer’s calendar. So it was decent and bare-like, with its carved old seats, some were cushioned and some were not, if you weren’t padded by nature and had the silver to spend you might put in cushions to suit your fancy. Right up in the lithe of the pulpit, at angles-like to the rest of the kirk, were the three seats where the choir sat and led the hymn-singing; and some called it the calfies’ stall.

The back door, that behind the pulpit, led out across the kirkyard to the Manse and its biggings, set up in the time of the Old Queen, and fair bonny to look at, but awful damp said all the ministers’ wives. But ministers’ wives were aye folk to complain and don’t know when they’re well off, them and the silver they get for their bit creatures of men preaching once or twice a Sunday and so proud they hardly know you when they meet you on the road. The minister’s study was high up in the house, it looked out over all Kinraddie, at night he’d see from there the lights of the farmhouses like a sprinkling of bright sands below his window and the flagstaff light high among the stars on the roof of the Meikle House. But that nineteen eleven December the Manse was empty and had been empty for many a month, the old minister was dead and the new one not yet voted on; and the ministers from Drumlithie and Arbuthnott and Laurencekirk they came time about in the Sunday forenoons and took the service there at Kinraddie; and God knows for all they had to say they might well have bidden at home.

But if you went out of the kirk by the main door and took the road east a bit, and that was the road that served kirk and Manse and Mains, you were on to the turnpike then. It ran north and south but opposite to the road you’d just come down was another, that went through Kinraddie by the Bridge End farm. So there was a cross-roads there and if you held to the left along the turnpike you came to Peesie’s Knapp, one of the olden places, no more than a croft of thirty-forty acres with some rough ground for pasture, but God knows there was little pasture on it, it was just a fair schlorich of whins and broom and dirt, full up of rabbits and hares it was, they came out at night and ate up your crops and sent a body fair mad. But it wasn’t bad land the most of the Knapp, there was the sweat of two thousand years in it, and the meikle park behind the biggings was black loam, not the red clay that sub-soiled half Kinraddie.

Now Peesie’s Knapp’s biggings were not more than twenty years old, but gey ill-favoured for all that, for though the house faced on the road – and that was fair handy if it didn’t scunner you that you couldn’t so much as change your sark without some ill-fashioned brute gowking in at you – right between the byre and the stable and the barn on one side and the house on the other was the cattle-court and right in the middle of that the midden, high and yellow with dung and straw and sharn, and Mistress Strachan could never forgive Peesie’s Knapp because of that awful smell it had. But Chae Strachan, him that farmed the place, he just said Hoots, what’s a bit guff? and would start to tell of the terrible smells he’d smelt when he was abroad. For he’d been a fell wandering billy, Chae, in the days before he came back to Scotland and was fee’d his last fee at Netherhill. He’d been in Alaska, looking for gold there, but damn the bit of gold he’d seen, so he’d farmed in California till he was so scunnered of fruit he’d never look an orange or a pear in the face again, not even in a tin. And then he’d gone on to South Africa and had had great times there, growing real chief-like with the head one of a tribe of blacks, but an awful decent man for all that. Him and Chae had fought against Boers and British both, and beaten them, or so Chae said, but folk that didn’t like Chae said all the fighting he’d ever done had been with his mouth and that as for beaten, he’d be sore made to beat the skin off a bowl of sour milk.

For he wasn’t well liked by them that set themselves up for gentry, Chae, being a socialist creature and believing we should all have the same amount of silver and that there shouldn’t be rich and poor and that one man was as good as another. And the silver bit of that was clean daft, of course, for if you’d all the same money one day what would it be the next? – Rich and Poor again! But Chae said the four ministers of Kinraddie and Auchinblae and Laurencekirk and Drumlithie were all paid much the same money last year and what had they this year? – Much the same money still! You’ll have to get out of bed slippy in the morning before you find a socialist tripping and if you give me any of your lip I’ll clout you in the lug, my mannie. So Chae was fell good in argy-bargying and he wasn’t the quarrelsome kind except when roused, so he was well-liked, though folk laughed at him. But God knows, who is it they don’t laugh at? He was a pretty man, well upstanding, with great shoulders on him and his hair was fair and fine and he had a broad brow and a gey bit coulter of a nose and he twisted his mouser ends up with wax like that creature the German Kaiser, and he could stop a running stirk by the horns, so strong he was in the wrist-bones. And he was one of the handiest billies in Kinraddie, he would libb a calf or break in a horse or kill a pig, all in a jiffy, or tile your dairy or cut the bairns’ hair or dig a well, and all the time he’d be telling you that socialism was coming or if it wasn’t then an awful crash would come and we’d all go back to savagery, Damn’t ay, man!

But folk said he’d more need to start socialising Mistress Strachan, her that had been Kirsty Sinclair of Netherhill, before he began on anybody else. She had a fell tongue, they said, that would clip clouts and yammer a tink from a door, and if Chae wasn’t fair sick now and then for his hut and a fine black quean in South Africa damn the hut or the quean had he ever had. He’d fee’d at Netherhill when he came back from foreign parts, had Chae, and there had been but two daughters there, Kirsty and Sarah, her that played the kirk organ. Both were wearing on a bit, sore in the need of a man, and Kirsty with a fair let-down as it was, for it had seemed that a doctor billy from Aberdeen was out to take up with her. So he had done and left her in a gey way and her mother, old Mistress Sinclair, near went out of her mind with the shame of it when Kirsty began to cry and tell her the news. Now that was about the term-time and home to Netherhill from the feeing market who should old Sinclair of Netherhill bring but Chae Strachan, with his blood warmed up from living in those foreign parts and an eye for less than a wink of invitation? But even so he was gey slow to get on with the courting and just hung around Kirsty like a futret round a trap with a bit meat in it, not sure if the meat was worth the risk; and the time was getting on and faith! something drastic would have to be done. So one night after they had all had supper in the kitchen and old Sinclair had gone pleitering out to the byres, old Mistress Sinclair had up and nodded to Kirsty and said Ah well, I’ll away to my bed. You’ll not be long in making for yours, Kirsty? And Kirsty said No, and gave her mother a sly bit look, and off the old mistress went up to her room and then Kirsty began fleering and flirting with Chae and he was a man warm enough and they were alone together and maybe in a minute he’d have had her couched down right well there in the kitchen but she whispered it wasn’t safe. So he off with his boots and she with hers and up the stairs they crept together into Kirsty’s room and were having their bit pleasure together when ouf! went the door and in burst old Mistress Sinclair with the candle held up in one hand and the other held up in horror. No, no, she’d said, this won’t do at all, Chakie, my man, you’ll have to marry her. And there had been no escape for Chae, poor man, with Kirsty and her mother both glowering at him. So married they were and old Sinclair had saved up some silver and he rented Peesie’s Knapp for Chae and Kirsty, and stocked the place for them, and down they sat there, and Kirsty’s bairn, a bit quean, was born before seven months were past, well-grown and finished-like it seemed, the creature, in spite of its mother swearing it had come fair premature.

They’d had two more bairns since then, both laddies, and both the living spit of Chae, these were the bairns that would sing about the Turra Coo whenever they met the brave gig of Ellison bowling along the Kinraddie Road, and faith, they made you laugh.

Right opposite Peesie’s Knapp, across the turnpike, the land climbed red and clay and a rough stone road went wandering up to the biggings of Blawearie. Out of the World and into Blawearie they said in Kinraddie, and faith! it was coarse land and lonely up there on the brae, fifty-sixty acres of it, forbye the moor that went on with the brae high above Blawearie, up to a great flat hill-top where lay a bit loch that nested snipe by the hundred; and some said there was no bottom to it, the loch, and Long Rob of the Mill said that made it like the depths of a parson’s depravity. That was an ill thing to say about any minister, though Rob said it was an ill thing to say about any loch, but there the spleiter of water was, a woesome dark stretch fringed rank with rushes and knife-grass; and the screeching of the snipe fair deafened you if you stood there of an evening. And few enough did that for nearby the bit loch was a circle of stones from olden times, some were upright and some were flat and some leaned this way and that, and right in the middle three big ones clambered up out of the earth and stood askew with flat, sonsy faces, they seemed to listen and wait. They were Druid stones and folk told that the Druids had been coarse devils of men in the times long syne, they’d climb up there and sing their foul heathen songs around the stones; and if they met a bit Christian missionary they’d gut him as soon as look at him. And Long Rob of the Mill would say what Scotland wanted was a return of the Druids, but that was just a speak of his, for they must have been awful ignorant folk, not canny.

Blawearie hadn’t had a tenant for nearly a year, but now there was one on the way, they said, a creature John Guthrie from up in the North. The biggings of it stood fine and compact one side of the close, the midden was back of them, and across the close was the house, a fell brave house for a little place, it had three storeys and a good kitchen and a fair stretch of garden between it and Blawearie road. There were beech trees there, three of them, one was close over against the house, and the garden hedges grew as bonny with honeysuckle of a summer as ever you saw; and if you could have lived on the smell of honeysuckle you might have farmed the bit place with profit.

Well Peesie’s Knapp and Blawearie were the steadings that lay Stonehaven way. But if you turned east that winter along the Auchinblae road first on your right was Cuddiestoun, a small bit holding the size of Peesie’s Knapp, and old as it, a croft from the