Jenny Turner: Hated and Loved in a Breath

Jenny Turner

Teaching Lewis Grassic Gibbon at the University of Aberdeen, Isobel Murray used to ask her women students ‘whether they have a recurrent need to retreat upstairs to a cold, wintry bedroom, there to undress and inspect themselves slowly in front of the mirror’. Chris Guthrie, the heroine of Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair, does this five times, by Murray’s reckoning, in Sunset Song (1932), six times in Cloud Howe, published the next year, and eight times in Grey Granite, which appeared a year after that. None of the students owned up to the habit, ‘although women’s bedrooms are surely warmer now than in Chris’s young day.’ ‘Maybe using a word such as voyeurism is unkind’ – it isn’t – ‘but there is an element of titillation … Chris is regularly seized on by her (male) creator and displayed to the male gaze.’

The first and most famous time Chris takes her clothes off, it’s not winter but harvest time, ‘real blistering weather of heat’, and ‘the great moon’ by the light of which she admires ‘the glimmer of shoulders and breasts’ is presumably the reddish one, low on the horizon, that appears before the autumn equinox. It’s 1912 and Chris is sixteen and living on the family smallholding near Kinraddie, to the south of Aberdeen, a clever girl who has been forced to give up school on the suicide of her mother; she’s just been sexually propositioned by the ‘tink’ – Traveller – her father has hired to help get the corn in, and she’s slightly wondering if she was over-hasty when she turned him down. ‘Below the tilt of her left breast was a dimple, she saw it and bent to look at it and the moonlight ran down her back’: Murray is right that Chris’s self-examination is also a display put on for the reader, a north-east of Scotland odalisque. She’s also right that the frequency of such episodes across the books is odd.

Chris Guthrie was unavoidable at Aberdeen Grammar School in the academic year 1979-80, which is when I was doing my Higher English. The Scottish past was back in fashion, what with the discovery of oil and the revival of the movement for Scottish independence, and one early sign of the so-called Second Scottish Renaissance had been BBC Scotland’s serialisation of Sunset Song in 1971, for which Vivien Heilbron insisted on appearing naked, albeit briefly, from behind: ‘I said it is not a question of me wanting or not wanting, it is a critical moment, isn’t it?’ She was the first nude on BBC Scotland, on BBC Scotland’s first colour series. It was broadcast only once, and long after most of our bedtimes. But it was much admired, I’m told, by the Scotsman-reading classes.

My school was one of the many to bulk-buy a set of the Longman schools edition and, having bought it, was going to haul it out of the books cupboard year on year, through the failure of the March 1979 devolution referendum and the accession of Mrs Thatcher to Downing Street. I was about the same age as Chris when I first read about her ‘harvest madness’, and about how ‘glad’ she was that ‘her legs were long from the knee to the ankle,’ because ‘that made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes slip ‘up and down her dress’ when Chris is harassed by a local ‘daftie’ and ‘peep out’, like those of ‘a caged beast’, when he sees her in her knickers; who sneaks round the door of her room at night, ‘a great cat padding there, a beast that sniffed and planned and smelled’. The madness of Ewan Tavendale, whom Chris will marry, when he gets drunk with his mates and grabs her, unbidden, for a snog: her brother ‘looks at her queerly’ when she tells him about it and says that ‘all ploughmen were like that, aye ready for fun,’ although, as Chris thinks, ‘it hadn’t seemed fun to her.’ The madness of Chris’s mother, raped by her husband into bearing children she cannot manage, who poisons herself and her twin babies, leaving Chris alone to deal with her monstrous, now bedridden father, ‘with the red in his face and his eye on her, whispering and whispering, at her … to come to him, they’d done it in Old Testament times, whispering you’re my flesh and blood, I can do with you what I will.’ She cannot sleep for terror, sometimes, that he may struggle ‘from his bed, like a great frog struggling, squattering across the floor, thump thump on the stairs’. After he dies the memory continues, ‘festering away in a closet of her mind’, and it festered with me too, half-asleep in a smelly classroom, as the (male) teacher ignored all the bits with abuse and perving, and ignored the word ‘incestuous’ when I put it in my essay, having been most interested to learn it from the Longman schools edition, in the notes at the back. That evil frog sat there, just one of those awkward loads you knew you had to hide about your person, and so much the better if you forgot it was even there. I saw it clear, for the first time, when I was working on this piece.

If you are Scottish, on the old side, the sort of person who was in an upper stream at school, it’s probable that Sunset Song already holds a place in your mental closet. If you aren’t, you may never have heard of it. ‘The Land’, as Gibbon called the low, fertile country between ‘the coarse hills the Grampians’ and the North Sea, has neither the geographic nor historical glamour of the mountains to its north and west, but it was, until his own time, the seat of what Gibbon, a communist sympathiser, called ‘a dual power’: good soil, ‘under the sleet, churned and pelted’, and the tenant farmer precariat, who were unprotected, even, by the Crofters Holdings Act of 1886.* ‘Ewan said that the rocks were sometimes hollow and the water ran far below the fields, so that ploughmen ploughed above the sea and in stormy weather they’d sometimes see their furrows quiver from that storm that raged under their feet’: to work this land was to live intimately with the inhuman forces that shaped it, the stones, the seasons, the grain price, the gentry, the coming of war and sheep and the ‘great machines’. Gibbon knew this life from the inside, being of ‘the Land’, ‘of peasant rearing and peasant stock’, himself; it was a life, he thought, of ‘narrowness and bitterness and heart-breaking toil’. But not without love, and joy, and beauty, as he showed in Sunset Song: ‘The land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you … Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!’

For David Craig in the early 1970s, Sunset Song was one of a ‘cluster’ of ‘absolutely outstanding … novels of peasant crisis’ published in the 1930s, with Sholokhov his index, plus Steinbeck, plus Silone: ‘It has a wholeness … based on the rhythm of life … from ploughing to seed-time to harvest, from childhood through adolescence to death or middle age.’ ‘A thoroughgoing attempt at a dialectical novel,’ the sociologist Ian Carter judged it in a brilliant History Workshop paper of 1978 that reads Gibbon’s fiction against the economic history of north-east Scotland and the collapse of its smallholder ‘farm life’ in the early 20th century, through emigration, capitalist engrossment, the loss of a generation’s finest to the First World War. Gibbon’s new and self-created version of the modernist sentence mixes Scots and English to resemble ‘a meandering, live thought-process’, as Ali Smith puts it: ‘poetic and realist and soaring and dark and local and strange all at once’. A new sort of sentence for a new vision of the rural Scottish experience: neither the twee ‘kailyard’ of popular fin-de-siècle genre novelists, such as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar bush in the lee of a house with green shutters’.

For its fans, however, Sunset Song is simply ‘a story of a Scotland that … is no more – and yet … still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us’, as Nicola Sturgeon wrote in her preface for a new edition in 2020. This fandom foregrounds the novel’s minor-Impressionist-on-a-paperback-classics-cover evocation of adolescence, with any troubling details pushed to the side. Sturgeon is interested ‘above all’ in Chris’s struggle, as she sees it, to choose ‘between tradition and modernity, learning and the land, moving away or staying put’ – as an ambitious working-class girl from North Ayrshire might consider ‘a future at Glasgow University’. And it’s easy to see how clever working-class girls through the ages might connect with Chris, who had hoped to leave home and train as a teacher before her father’s needs reclaimed her, making it more fitting than is decent that the first passage up on the board is always the one about ‘the Scottish Chris’ and ‘the English Chris’:

Two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face … You saw their faces in firelight, father’s and mother’s and the neighbours’, before the lamps lit up, tired and kind, faces dear and close to you, you wanted the words they’d known and used, forgotten in the far-off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart, how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. And the next minute that passed from you, you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true – for a while, for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.

Scots is love, English learning, and you can’t do much of the latter before you lose your roots: it still runs deep, this Oedipal confusion of nation and class and agency and power, and without it, there’s no way Sturgeon’s vaguely social-democratic Scottish nationalism would ever have wrung and held the hearts of people the way it did. Much of it, as Sturgeon senses, has to do with ‘Scots words’, as instruments of interpellation really, especially when your heart is getting held and wrung by them at school. Gibbon’s use of Scots is quite confusing, an artefact that looks authentic although it’s not: ‘The technique,’ as he confessed, ‘is 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.’ He was keen for his book to sell, to American audiences in particular, and appended a glossary of around a hundred words to the American edition. The most used ‘Scotticisms’, according to William K. Malcolm’s new biography, are modifiers such as awful, bit, coarse, fair, fell, ‘cosmetic rather than descriptive’, easy enough for diaspora Scots, more than a quarter of a million of whom left for North America in the 1920s alone.

The question of whether written Scots had any place in a serious modern literature was much contested in Gibbon’s time, with Hugh MacDiarmid’s invention of ‘synthetic Scots’, made up from words he found in Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), in the 1920s, and Edwin Muir’s refusal to fall for it, as codified in Scott and Scotland, published in 1936. Gibbon’s position is different from both. His Scots has a source in spoken language, recognisable to me as what emitted from faces I knew by firelight in my childhood, too: tormented, coarse, folk, brave, fine in the first lines of the two Chrisses passage strike me as samplings from what Gibbon called ‘the speech of bed and board and street’ as I knew it in Aberdeen in the 1970s. You might see other Scots use spellings such as coorse and fowk and braw, but Gibbon’s method is easier for non-Scots to follow. It lets them pick up a feel for the language as they go.

And you’ll have noticed Gibbon’s unusually shifty use of the shifter ‘you’: ‘you’ meaning ‘she’, sort of, except that this free indirect ‘she’ is also ‘I’, an effect that a 1975 paper by Graham Trengove called the ‘self-referring “you”’. This ‘you’ joins across the course of the novel with another that means ‘we’, and ‘they’, and people in general, and often refers back to ‘folk’ used, also shiftily: ‘Folk said he was head over heels in debt, and damn it you couldn’t wonder with a slummock of a wife like that to weigh him down.’ This ‘communal “you”’, Smith writes, ‘is Gibbon’s real technical achievement’, especially in ‘The Unfurrowed Field’, the prelude to the entire sequence, where ‘you’ is used like a screw in a three-way corner, ‘the community voice, the folk voice, and also, skilfully, its reader, the “you” holding and reading this book’. Are these folk the people, or the Scottish people, or a particular group among them? Peasants or burghers or intellectuals, the early 20th-century emergent Scottish working class?

Some see the suppression of an I-voice as a distinctly Scottish move: ‘The YOU I hate it when Mum does it,’ I have scribbled on my copy, and I can’t remember when I wrote that, except that my mother has been dead these past ten years. Distinctly Scottish, and also full of rancour: ‘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.’ ‘It just showed you what the world was coming to, you brought bairns into the world and reared them up and expected some comfort from them in your old age and what did you get? Nothing but a lot of damned impudence.’ There may be nothing distinctively Scottish in this thwarted, sour voice, but it’s too thwarted and sour to be exactly communal either.

The rancour becomes symphonic across the novel. ‘Dirt!’ John Guthrie cries, when he catches Chris up on the hillside, reading, ordering her down to help her mother clean ‘the hippens’, the babies’ nappies. ‘Education’s dirt, and you’re better clear of it,’ Chris is told by the wife who comes to lay out her mother’s body. ‘You’ll have little time for dreaming and dirt when you’re keeping the house.’ The dirt can be an actual midden, ‘high and yellow with dung and straw and sharn’; the dirt is anything that encroaches and must be spat out: ‘Don’t let Ewan saddle you with a birn of bairns, Chris, it kills you and eats your heart away, forbye the unease and dirt of it.’ ‘Auntie said Ay, it’ll be long ere I have to kill myself because my man beds me like a breeding sow; and father said, You dirty bitch.’

‘Tinks’ too are objects of abjection, and thus a useful source of hate-speech: ‘What’s this that I hear about you and some orra tink bitch in Drumlithie?’ John Guthrie says to his son when he hears he has been courting. ‘The cowardly tinks,’ Chris thinks when she knees the drunken Ewan in the groin on their first meeting and he runs away. ‘Toffs’ are hated too, especially ‘poverty toffs’, who are usually townies, like the teachers at Duncairn College, who are ‘right condescending … with Chris, daughter of a farmer of no account’, although ‘sons and daughters of poor bit crofters and fishers themselves’. ‘He loved the gentry, did Mr Kinloch’ – so much so that ‘if you wore a fine frock and your hair was well brushed’ he’d come and sit next to you and ‘stroke your arm’.

When we were doing Sunset Song at school, I knew I’d probably go to university, as my mother was a teacher with a BSc in mathematics from Aberdeen. But what was harder was whether I’d be allowed to leave home to get my education or would get stuck, as my mother had, in family habitus, huddled against the cold in a cosy soss – fug – of coal smoke and cigarette smoke for life. So I can’t say I found reading about the entrapment of Chris Guthrie in the least bit ‘reflective and healing’, as Sturgeon says she did. This may be because Gibbon country is, as she says, ‘a foreign land’ to a southerner such as herself – harsher terrain, different patterns of land tenure, a spoken language, the Doric, quite distinct from Lallans and Glasgow Scots. Unlike Nan Shepherd, whose Aberdeenshire novels were published just before A Scots Quair, Gibbon makes little effort to reproduce Doric speech sounds in his writing – Shepherd’s fat for ‘what’, yer for ‘your’, sic for ‘such’ and so on – but Sturgeon is probably less familiar than I am with words such as chave, schlorich, smore, words I’d heard for ever from those firelit faces, charged with the painful affect that ran through so many of the traditional ‘dirty sad angers’, as Gibbon calls them, between the ‘ragged’ hillsides and the freezing sea.†

Younger readers would do well to consider the absolute state of 1970s popular entertainment – James Bond, Benny Hill, Jimmy Savile – and what that might indicate about everyday life at the time for teenage girls: the very walls had eyes in them that followed you everywhere, making you feel, as Chris’s father made her feel, ‘sickened and queer’. In Sunset Song, when Chris’s brother ‘whispers his hate’ of their father (like so many of his generation, he will shortly leave for the Americas, where ‘a man can be his own master’), she thinks about ‘the magic land … out and away and south’ she can escape to in books. Doing Sunset Song for Higher English, however, the novel too had eyes: the author behind the sinister father, watching the girl who thinks she is in private when she is not.

That hot harvest night when Chris is admiring herself in the mirror, she sees herself as ‘a third and last Chris’ too,

sweet and cool and fit for that lover who would some day come and kiss her and hold her, so … How they’d lie together in a room with moonlight, and she’d be kind to him, kind and kind, giving him all and everything, and he’d sleep with his head here on her breast or they’d lie far into the mornings whispering one to the other, they’d have so much to tell!

I was revolted, I remember, by that ‘kind and kind’, a young woman in dreamy self-containment but with added panting, a panting that, somehow, does not appear to be coming from her. And also, all this admiring of your sweet and cool and lovely body. Wasn’t this to escape the home rule of the hateful father by entering a sexual marketplace instead? And where would I fit into all this, what with the ‘shortness’ that makes my legs look ‘stumbling and stumpy’ to this very day?

AScots Quair – a quair is a quire, or bundle, of paper – was planned as a trilogy from the outset, by a man in his early thirties who was living with his wife and children in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, and looking back on his early life in a Scottish peasant family in the years before the First World War. Sunset Song takes Chris from 1911, when she is fifteen, through her first marriage to the ploughman Ewan, to war widowhood in her early twenties, with a little son. In Cloud Howe she marries Robert, a war veteran and Church of Scotland minister, and moves to Segget, a nearby mill town, where Robert dies as his hopes die, for the General Strike of 1926 and for a child of his own. By the time of Grey Granite, Chris’s son has grown up and moved to Duncairn, the nearest city, to take an apprenticeship in a steelworks, and Chris, ‘old at 38’, buys a share in Ma Cleghorn’s boarding-house business to be near him. The place names are fictional but map easily to real places – the city has bits of Dundee and Edinburgh in it, but, as the granite indicates, is mainly Aberdeen. Segget is largely Inverbervie, between Kinneff and Gourdon on the coast, a site of both flax and jute production that had nine working mills, according to Malcolm, in 1910. Blawearie, on the Reisk road up from Kinraddie, is really Bloomfield, near Arbuthnott. The house is open for holiday rentals.

The writer better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901, the third son of a tenant farmer couple living on a rented smallholding near Auchterless, a little north and inland of Aberdeen. The land was bad and it was impossible to make it pay, so in 1908 the family moved south to Arbuthnott, by the red clay valley known locally as the Howe of the Mearns. Sons, naturally, were expected to work the fields with their fathers, around the requirements of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, but Mitchell had, he later wrote, ‘a bitter detestation for all this life on the land and the folk upon it’ – there are stories of him getting on with his reading with a book propped on a stile, on a bicycle, at either end of the drill of neeps he was, supposedly, weeding with a hoe. You would leave school at fourteen and either get a fee – a job – or accept what Carter has called ‘the near slavery of work on the family farm’ in the expectation that the lease would come to you when ‘the mannie’ dropped dead, exactly as happens with Chris in the novels, and as Mitchell was determined would not happen to him.

He discovered archaeology when he was nine, he said, after finding ‘marks of prehistory’ on the land around him – flints like those collected by Chris’s son, the younger Ewan Tavendale, standing stones like the ones on the hills above Blawearie, where Chris goes to read and think and ‘stand back a little from the clamour of the days’. His schoolwork was exceptional, so the village headmaster persuaded his parents to let him move up to senior school. But things did not go well at Mackie Academy in Stonehaven and in 1917 Mitchell walked out and tried to join up with the Gordon Highlanders, but he was too young and they wouldn’t have him. If they had, as Malcolm says, he would ‘in all probability’ have been killed on the Western Front, as happens to Chae Strachan, Rob Duncan and Ewan Tavendale at the end of Sunset Song. Mitchell’s earliest novels, written in standard English, are haunted by young men seen in flashes in ‘the hell of bright fires’, ‘gasping’ from a tank or ‘hung upon the wire’.

Mitchell’s ‘pleasure’, he would say, was history, but there was no question of his having the money for formal study. He escaped instead by finding a job in Aberdeen as a cub reporter, then another on the Scottish Farmer in Glasgow. He was sent home in disgrace for fiddling his expenses, whereupon he attempted suicide, then enlisted as a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps, which took him to Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem, all of which turn up in the – largely dire – colonial-romantic strand of his James Leslie Mitchell writing. He first tried setting up as an author in 1923, but ‘nearly starved to death’: there was nothing for it but to enlist again, in the RAF this time, with which he would remain, at bases in Wiltshire and the London suburbs, until 1930. He married in 1925 and moved out of barracks a year later, into rented flats in Purley, Harrow, Shepherd’s Bush. A daughter, Rhea, was born just after his final discharge, and a couple of years later the family settled in Welwyn Garden City, where their son, Darryl, was born in 1934. ‘The house is all electric & an “Ideal” boiler heats the water,’ his wife wrote in 1932, calculating that ‘James’ would have to bring in £500 a year to pay for it. ‘A room of one’s own & £500 yearly is the supposed hallmark of contentment,’ she added. Malcolm has done a lot of work on the household financials to show how hard it was to get there. It’s ‘painful reading’, as he says.

Mitchell’s first book, Hanno, or The Future of Exploration – an account, according to Malcolm, ‘of man’s restless drive through the ages to illuminate the unknown corners of the earth’ – was published in 1928; his second book was his first novel, Stained Radiance, published in 1930, by which time he had left the RAF for good. He spent what time he could in the British Museum, contributing articles on Mesoamerican history to an antiquarian journal; when a scholar snubbed him for his lack of ‘first-hand research’, he pretended he had worked on an archaeological dig in the Yucatan. The Maya led him to Diffusionism, Grafton Elliott Smith’s thesis that early human hunter-gatherers had lived ‘free and happy and undiseased’, as Gibbon would later put it, until the accidental discovery of agriculture on the Nile Delta ‘enslaved’ them: ‘Had she lived at the time of the golden men,’ he has Chris think, ‘you’d not have a care or a coin in the world, only life, swift, sharp, sleepy and still and an arm about you, life like a song, and a death at the end that was swift as well.’ Diffusionism, Douglas F. Young suggested in a 1973 study, was sometimes the only thing that kept Mitchell going, ‘for it gave him his faith in man and kept him from black, hopeless pessimism’. It also positions the ‘farm life’ he so hated as the original sin.

His output was prodigious, and it had to be. That £500 a year had to come from somewhere. Stained Radiance was followed a year later by The Thirteenth Disciple – both are written in Standard English, and both are ‘artistically confused narrative mishmashes’, as Malcolm says, with a Wyndham Lewis-like propensity for unpleasant characterisations of human beings as ‘apes’. Three Go Back – Diffusionist sci-fi – came out a year after that, along with The Lost Trumpet, Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights and Sunset Song, the first Lewis Grassic Gibbon production,which came together after six weeks of typing at least a thousand words a day. Cloud Howe followed in 1933, along with two more novels. Grey Granite appeared in 1934, after Niger: The Life of Mungo Park, The Conquest of the Maya, Gay Hunter – more Diffusionist sci-fi – and Scottish Scene, a polemical anthology produced with Hugh MacDiarmid, and was followed by Nine against the Unknown: A Record of Geographical Exploration. ‘The dual novelist, biographer etc has made of himself a literary sausage machine,’ his wife wrote. A visitor recalls him working on two typewriters at once.

He fell ill in 1932, with ‘a complaint’, he said, ‘which suggested a brood of rattlesnakes had taken up their residence in my tummy’. The trouble flared up again over Christmas 1934, with doctors able only to suggest rest, a plain diet and stopping smoking. He was taken to hospital on 4 February with a perforated ulcer and died four days later. He was 33. His plans had included a trilogy of historical novels about the Covenanters, a Diffusionist version of H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, a history of religion and ‘Memoirs of a Materialist,’ an autobiography written like a film treatment, with scenarios and stills and sections called the ‘Camera Eye’. Notes towards this can be found in Smeddum (2001), Valentina Bold’s collection of non-Scots Quair Gibbon writings, which also contains an unfinished novel, ‘The Speak of the Mearns’.

‘Idisliked him at first sight,’ Rebecca Middleton, the daughter of the ‘twa pair o’ horse fairmer’ in the next croft up the road, said of her first meeting with Mitchell, when they were at primary school. ‘He was a strange unusual boy and looked so very distant … I liked his brothers, George and John, much better.’ Like Mitchell, Middleton did well academically and stayed on at school after most of her contemporaries had been put to work; but unlike the man she would marry, she completed her school leaving certificate and got a job with the civil service, moving to London in 1919 to live in a women’s hostel and work at the Post Office Savings Bank HQ. ‘Scots, she had never ceased to feel foreign in London, and intrigued by it,’ Mitchell wrote of a young woman called Thea Mayven in Stained Radiance. ‘In Scotland, on the little farm where she had been born, she had hated the peasant life. In London she remembered it with gladness and with tears, a thing of sunrises and rains and evening scents and the lowing of lone herds across the wine-red moors.’

Thea Mayven also likes to examine herself naked. ‘Undressed, proceeding from bedroom to bathroom, she never wore her dressing-gown … Naked, she would pose, walk like a bird, placing one foot in front of the other, delighted at the quaintness of herself.’ She would be followed in Three Go Back by the romantic novelist Clair Stranlay, who admires her naked self in ‘pools’ while stalking mammoth with her ‘Cro-Magnard’ lover, and by Gay Hunter, a shapely-breasted American archaeologist stranded in a post-apocalyptic future after a nasty storm.

Middleton and Mitchell married on 15 August 1925 at Fulham Registry Office, the bride forced to leave her job because of the civil service marriage bar, the groom still in RAF accommodation for single men. Middleton, it seems, was pregnant, until the pregnancy ended with near death for the mother and premature birth for the child, who died soon afterwards. This too makes it into Stained Radiance, in which Thea almost dies in childbirth, ‘a thin brown liquid’ oozing from her mouth, along with ‘a scream thin, horrible, animal, mounting chord upon chord’. Chris Guthrie’s mother screamed like that when she was giving birth to her doomed twins, and Chris herself secretes brown stuff when giving birth to the baby she has with her second husband in Cloud Howe. That baby too is soon dead.

‘Thousands of Ritas there must be,’ the hero ruminates in The Thirteenth Disciple (1931), when despite the ‘clumsy fumblements’ of the available contraception, his girlfriend tells him she is pregnant. ‘He had never realised it before. Women for whom motherhood was the equivalent of human sacrifice, marriage a bestial trap.’ Which is pretty much the way he wrote it in Sunset Song for Chris’s mother, her face so ‘blithe and sweet’ and then, in a moment, ‘grey and old’. Chris is seen dealing with her own fertility and advising a young housemaid on how to manage hers, and in any case her first two husbands get killed off quite quickly when they start going bad: Ewan by bullying and whoring, Robert by retreating into an ‘unclean dream’ of the gentle Jesus, ‘soft as a new-libbed sheep’. She does, it’s true, take a third husband in Grey Granite, ‘with little liking’, but ‘like a cow, a cow’s purpose, in order to keep a roof over her head’. But he is a working-class poet who despises Burns – ‘silly Scotch muck about cottars … and love and dove’ – and writes ‘dirt about women having bairns and screaming’ instead and has the wit to see he isn’t wanted and emigrates to Canada at pace.

In Stained Radiance, Thea loves a struggling working-class writer, stationed with the RAF: ‘A mere ironical portraiture of contemporary life was worse than useless,’ he frets. ‘An excellent acquaintance with current bestsellers had prompted the remedy. Purple patches. Sex.’ ‘By God! Some day he would write a novel, the world’s first real love story,’ the protagonist thinks in The Thirteenth Disciple. ‘What a book, what a book one could make of it, with the essence of every love story – the sex act – stripped of shame and reticence! With neither the wordy pawings of the pornographer, the scared brutalities of the realist, the romantic’s firelight and curtains.’ Later, he writes disappointedly: ‘I see that … I am the pornographer. I have called in moonlight and bare shoulders … To us of the early half of the 20th century the detailed sex act is still impossible in all literature but the pseudo-scientific. We are, all of us, still too young and nasty-minded.’

At school in Duncairn, before the suicide of her mother, Chris pals up with Marget, the daughter of the Guthries’ globe-trotting neighbour Chae Strachan. Chae, being a ‘socialist creature’, intends his daughter to get an education so she will be ready for ‘the Revolution that was some day coming. And if come it never did … she was off to be trained as a doctor, Chae said that life came out of women through tunnels of pain and if God had planned women for anything else but the bearing of children it was surely the saving of them.’ The girls kiss, ‘tingling and strange and shameful’, then Marget announces she is moving to Aberdeen to live with her auntie: ‘It’s a better place for a scholar, Chae says, and I’ll be trained all the sooner.’ ‘So that was your Marget gone,’ and to begin with, Chris misses her. We never hear of Marget again.

But A Scots Quair also develops another, quite different arc, as Raymond Williams recognised in The Country and the City (1973): it follows ‘the classical historical process’ of his study, from peasant to proletarian, Kinraddie to Duncairn. This process, as Williams observes, happened much later in Mitchell’s part of Scotland than in most of England, which is the reason it’s possible for a British ‘novel of peasant crisis’ to show that crisis coinciding with the First World War. But also, what Williams calls ‘the social integration … of the English capitalist rural order’ never quite took in most of Scotland, leaving pockets of ‘spiritual self-subsistence’, ‘conscious, in old and new ways, of [their] hard but independent life’. Mitchell had no nostalgia for the life of the tenant farmer – ‘a thing for most to be stared at, tourist-wise, endured for a day or a week’ – and no fondness either for what awaited farming folk in the towns and cities. What Williams finds ‘exciting’ in the tale as Gibbon tells it is ‘a spiritual inheritance [that] is seen as surviving’ through the spinners who fight the 1926 General Strike from Segget and the hunger marches of the 1930s, of which the younger Ewan Tavendale becomes an organiser. ‘The radical independence of the small farmers, the craftsmen and the labourers is seen as transitional to the militancy of the industrial workers. The shape of a whole history is … decisively transformed.’

Right at the beginning of Sunset Song, an especially sardonic folk voice relates the way ‘the Kinraddie lands’ came into being. A ‘Norman childe’ killed a gryphon for the king, ‘and William … gave to him all the wide parish as his demesne and grant to … keep down all beasts and coarse and wayward folk, him and the issue of his body for ever after.’ Thus feudalism, or, as Williams calls it, the process by which ‘armed gangs became social and natural orders’, and thus too the beginnings of another, subaltern tradition, oral for most of its existence. Cloud Howe’s voice savours the repulsive Mowat, the absentee mill-owner of Segget, ‘polished as a mart-day pig’, and in Grey Granite the satire widens to take in the church, the local council, a newspaper called the Tory Pictman. ‘The displaced labourers and craftsmen and small farmers did not learn radicalism when they came to the cities. They learned, in altering conditions, new kinds of organisation, new directing ideas, which confirmed and extended a long spirit of bitterness, independence and aspiration.’ And new sorts of hate and hate-speech: the ‘tink spinners’ of Segget are ‘looked on’ by better established bodies ‘as a man would look on a swarm of lice’. ‘What they needed … were folk like the Fascists,’ a burgher thinks in Grey Granite. ‘They knew how to keep tink brutes in trim.’

The title of Malcolm’s biography comes from a letter Mitchell wrote, by way of self-promotion, to Naomi Mitchison in 1933:

I was thrown out of the Communist Party as a Trotskyist – while I was in the ranks of the Army, doing Communist propaganda. So I went Anarchist for a bit but they’re such damn fools … When the last Labour Gov went west, I re-applied to join the Communists, but they refused to have anything to do with me. Brief history of a revoluter.

‘The full story of Leslie Mitchell’s left-wing involvement is extensive and sustained,’ Malcolm continues, with a single caveat: there’s little documentary evidence, making concrete details ‘fiendishly hard to pin down’. There’s ‘no evidence’, for example, that he ‘was ever a card-carrying member of the CPGB’, and the claim of Trotskyism is ‘hard to substantiate within the timeframe he gives’. The Aberdeen essay in Scottish Scene contains apparently eyewitness accounts of a Ramsay MacDonald rally and the 1918 foundation of the Aberdeen Soviet, at which Mitchell got himself elected to the council: the MacDonald episode, Malcolm has discovered, was ‘filched’ from a friend, but the Aberdeen Soviet election probably happened, according to the testimony of a sub-editor on Mitchell’s paper. A colleague, apparently, dropped in on the meeting to see how the cub reporter was doing and found him addressing it, ‘in full flow’.

Many details of Mitchell’s political life, including his reputation as a ‘communist bandit’, have seeped into currency from his early novels. When the hero of The Thirteenth Disciple, for example, is sacked from his reporting job for defrauding his employer, the money, the novel says, was to pay for ‘delegates’ fares, printers bills … financing the Group chairman in a threatened libel action’ and it’s common to follow Ian S. Munro’s 1966 biography in assuming that this episode is rendered ‘exactly as it happened’. All Malcolm will say, however, is that there’s ‘a compelling fit’ between the novel and Mitchell’s biography, and that the ‘assured detailing’ of the outgoings of the Left Communist Group seem especially ‘true to life’. It does at least seem possible that this fictional organisation was based on Guy Aldred’s real-life Glasgow Communist Group, which was founded early in 1919, around the time Mitchell moved to Glasgow, though it’s strange that he doesn’t mention the Battle of George Square, which also happened in early 1919, or anything else about Red Clydeside. He can’t be definitively pinned to any political grouping at all, in fact, until the Revolutionary Writers of the World in London in 1932, which is where he met Hugh MacDiarmid, then in his ‘Hymns to Lenin’ phase.

All of which is to say that Mitchell’s contribution to the great events of his day comes more from his writing than any other activity. He never had much to add to the revolutionary discourse when he came at it head on – ‘never succeeded in penetrating behind words to thought’, as he wrote in ‘The Wrecker’, a bombastic attack on Ramsay MacDonald. The Scots Quair novels, however, have history in their very bones, as land, skies, seasons, peewits drop away in the modern city with its modern ways of doing things, from fields to factories, ‘near-slavery’ to wage slavery, the old songs replaced by ‘fine new ones … from America … all about the queer blue babies that were born there’; broth and brose and loaf and oatcakes by ‘dirt out of tins’.

Rereading A Scots Quair now, my ancient resentments fade as Chris fades and other agents take over: afterlife-of-Marget young women such as Maggie Jean Gordon, for example (‘I won’t have time for babies for years yet, mother, I’m to help ORGANISING THE FARM SERVANTS!’ ); Ellen Johns, the socialist schoolteacher in Grey Granite, ‘slim like a boy’, ‘short black hair and blue deep eyes’. The old folk ‘you’ of Kinraddie, meanwhile, spreads and modernises in the Segget of Cloud Howe, with its pub to ‘claik’ in, its town square in which ‘the dirt of spinners’ end their Armistice Day march, Red Flag at the vanguard, distinguished service medals on their chests. In Grey Granite the ‘you’ individualises sometimes to Bob, who works with Ewan in the foundry – ‘not that you thought much, you wanted a job when apprenticeship was over and a decent bit time and maybe now and then a spare bob or so to take your quean to the talkies’ – and collectivises, to ‘Will! Or Peter! Or Tam!’ when the ‘Communionists’ organise a march against the Public Assistance Committees and the men march as they haven’t marched since Ypres:

You minded your time in the army, the rain and stink and that first queer time your feet slipped in a soss of blood and guts, going up to the front at Ypres … Singing, you’d never sung so before, all your mates about you, marching as one, you forgot all the chave and trauchle of things, the sting of your feet, nothing could stop you.

Beginning in Cloud Howe and pretty much taking over in Grey Granite is Chris’s son, Ewan, whose own self-referring ‘you’ starts out as the voice of ‘a queer lad’, but develops, as his mother sees it, ‘into something darker and coarser’ through reading and thinking and working in the steelworks, from witnessing a boy being beaten by a policeman’s baton on the unemployed workers’ march. ‘He would never be himself again, he’d never be aught but a bit of them,’ Ewan thinks at one point, as we watch him gradually relinquish what chance he ever had for social advancement, a nice girlfriend, a stable identity as a bourgeois subject, to become a comrade, self-disciplined and self-flattened. ‘A revolutionary: unidealised; the difficulties and the weaknesses faced,’ Williams writes of this characterisation, seeing Grey Granite as ‘a narrative that more clearly than in any other novel embodies the active labour movement of the 1930s’.

‘Your head had softened like a swede in the rain’: Gibbon’s rendition of Ewan’s radicalising you-voice starts out with an awful boiled-piss Standard English mishmash of the sort that appears in the early Mitchell novels, ‘hell, how they stank, the unscrubbed lot’, ‘idiotic ape-maunderings’, and more. A little later, Ewan wanders into the sculpture court of the Duncairn Museum Galleries and wonders why the statues never show the barbarity on which their civilisations were built: slavery, torture, Spartacists on crosses, ‘little kids wailing and crying … scorched in jars’. ‘The same everywhere,’ he thinks,

picture on picture limned in dried blood, never painted or hung in any gallery – pictures of the poor folk since history began, bedevilled and murdered, trodden underfoot, trodden down in the bree, a human slime.

It is soon ‘he, Ewan Tavendale’ who is arrested, incarcerated, raped, ‘lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies … in the torture-dens of the Nazis in Germany, in the torment-pits of the Polish Ukraine, a livid, twisted thing in the prisons where they tortured the Nanking Communists, a Negro boy in an Alabama cell while they thrust the razors into his flesh’. It’s awful, chymous stuff, but Gibbon has at least registered atrocities that went unnoticed in most British novels in 1934.

‘A hell of a thing to be History, Ewan!’ Big Jim Trease, the Communist full-timer, says when the international solidarity strike is over and the comrades have ambled back to work. The change won’t come, Gibbon knows, in the lifetime of any of his characters, in the lifetime of any likely readers of his book: ‘capitalism had a hundred dodges yet to dodge its own end, Fascism, New Deals, Douglasism, War.’ ‘Neither friends nor scruples nor honour nor hope for the folk who took the workers’ road; just life that sent tiredness leaping from the brain.’

‘This adds a new meaning to the Mirror Stage,’ Isobel Murray joked in an early version of her essay, removing the observation when the essay was reprinted in a book. But it’s an interesting thought, and all the more so for coming at the reader backwards. It’s not so much what Chris brings to the Lacan as the way the Lacan opens up the ‘dark, queer play’ – the phrase is in Grey Granite – between author and protagonist in A Scots Quair. The image in the mirror is whole, perfect, all-powerful sometimes: Mitchell derived his pen-name from the names of his mother, Lily Gibbon, and her mother, Lilias Grassick, and the idea of Chris Guthrie may have started, Ian Campbell has suggested, in a connection fantasised by the bored schoolboy Mitchell between the ‘fairish red’ hair of his mother and that of the personification of Hope who stands, in both Sunset Song and in the real-life Arbuthnott, as one of the ‘three bit creatures … not very decent-like’ on the stained-glass window of the kirk. Gibbon’s portrait of Chris Guthrie is as lovely, and as generic: a nude pretending to preen herself for the painter, ‘the same everywhere … picture on picture’ across the history of Western art.

The artist-son-observer is messy, needy, all over the place: ‘He could never write about Scotland while there,’ according to Middleton. ‘It’s no use,’ he would say. ‘I would be too close.’ Writing in Scots was not straightforward either. ‘Dialect poetry always, for some reason or another, makes me feel vaguely ashamed of myself,’ Mitchell wrote, in a 1929 letter quoted by Malcolm, who reports, further, that Mitchell mostly spoke in standard English, ‘simply to make himself understood’. The language of his childhood was ‘a real and haunting thing’, but he also knew that ‘to the bourgeois’ it was ‘coarse and low and common and loutish, a matter for laughter … to be quoted in vocal inverted commas’. He worried that the technique of the trilogy might become ‘mannered or degenerate’ when expected ‘to compass and express the life of an industrialised Scots town’.

And yet, the vision came together quickly in Welwyn Garden City, with Mitchell supported by his ‘proud wife-cum-editor’, as Malcolm puts it, particularly during ‘the review of the typescript’s progress by husband and wife after young Rhea was safely asleep’. Women, sex, war, his Scottish childhood, the things that Mitchell could turn only into ‘mere ironical portraiture’ in his standard English fiction, emerge with classical depth and roundness once projected on the idealised daughter-lover-mother figure ‘a statue like that of the folk of olden time’ made by Chris just looking in a mirror, ‘as though she looked at someone other than herself’.

‘Πάντα ῥεῖ,’ Chris thinks, walking the soaking fields after the funeral of her father, roughly halfway through Sunset Song. ‘Nothing endures. 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 up the Standing Stones.’ With the death of her father and the inheritance of his savings she is free at last to go to university, but now she has it, she doesn’t want it: ‘The land was forever … And she had thought to leave it all!’ And from that moment to the very end of Grey Granite, we never see or hear of Chris reading again. War comes, and she doesn’t want to know about it – ‘there were aye daft devils fighting about something or other’ – and she doesn’t gossip either: ‘She just didn’t care, not a button she cared about this place or that.’ She’s sceptical when her second husband puts his faith in the striking miners – ‘Chris didn’t much care for she didn’t much hope’ – and indifferent, too, when her son has his political conversion: ‘They had just gone Socialist as young folk would.’ She switches on Ma Cleghorn’s wireless with its ‘talks on ethics and cocktails and how to go hiking on the Côte d’Azur’ and turns it off: ‘That was better, worth paying a licence to keep the thing quiet.’ And she’s dazed, ‘wearied’, at the cinema, ‘the daft tales they told and the dafter news’, ‘the cantrips a creature was playing, a mouse dressed up in breeks like a man’.

‘Getting up and working and going to bed – it had never been anything else in a way,’ she thinks in Grey Granite, as her life increasingly reveals itself to be only a figment of the seasons, clouds and crystals that name the chapters of her story, reflections and repetitions, looking in mirrors and climbing to high places – the standing stones, a ruined castle, the flight of steps from Gallowgate to Windmill Place in the Duncairn of Grey Granite, on a bend of which Gibbon has hung a mirror, allowing Chris, with industrial-age inventiveness, both to climb to a high place and examine her reflection at the same time. She takes to gardening a little, as she ages and urbanises, and bus trips out to ‘the country’, and falls into dreams every twenty or thirty pages, of snipe and peewits, ‘the earth that was red, the cling of the clay’, ‘that sea-shore only women had known, dark with its sailing red lights of storms’. ‘Not looking for happiness, madness, delight … only looking to work and to living her life, eating and sleeping and rising each dawn, not thinking …’ Until, by the end of Grey Granite, she is barely doing even that.

‘It will profit Glasgow’s hundred and fifty thousand slum-dwellers so much to know that they are being starved and brutalised by Labour Exchanges and Public Assistance Committees staffed exclusively by Gaelic-speaking, haggis-eating Scots in saffron kilts and tongued brogues,’ Gibbon wrote of the Scottish nationalism of his time. ‘Archaic ape-spite’ was another epithet, and ‘brosy barbarisation’, and ‘mangy little curs a-yap above their minute hoardings of shrivelled bones’. He hated the idea of belonging to ‘a homogeneous literary cultus’ and in any case, didn’t feel the need of it – he had in Diffusionism a different ‘dream of redemption’, in a Tom Nairn phrase, with which to heal the ‘maimed past’. ‘Scotland’s salvation, the world’s salvation’, lay for Gibbon ‘in ultimate cosmopolitanism’. ‘Braid Scots,’ he thought, ‘may yet give lovely lights and shadows not only to English but to the perfected speech of Cosmopolitan Man.’

In 1970, three years after the SNP’s surprise win in the Hamilton by-election, BP struck oil off the north-east coast of Scotland and began work on the Forties pipeline from Cruden Bay to the refinery at Grangemouth, passing right under those fields where Gibbon’s ploughman watched their furrows shake. The oil boom had transformed the area by the early 1980s, when Vivien Heilbron reprised the role of Chris Guthrie in adaptations of Cloud Howe and Grey Granite for the BBC. But production had peaked by 1999, and BP sold Grangemouth to Ineos in 2005, then the pipeline in 2017, and then last year Ineos closed the refinery, with the loss of four hundred jobs. The BBC Scots Quair is available on iPlayer in its entirety, a perfect exemplar of what Mark Fisher called the ‘popular modernism’ of 1970s and 1980s television: megaliths, pentatonic theme tune, nudity as edification in its proper period place. I streamed them all end to end – and they are wonderful – in a private replay of what Fisher called ‘the loss of loss itself’.

A second devolution referendum was held by the New Labour government in 1997, and in 1999 the Scottish Parliament sat for the first time since 1707. A motion in 2012 from Nigel Don, then the MSP for the Angus North and Mearns constituency, noted ‘the production of the film Sunset Song’ and expressed his disappointment that most of the production was set to go ‘elsewhere’ – interiors to Luxembourg, because the Luxembourg Film Fund had put up the money, exterior scenes to New Zealand. The film, directed by Terence Davies and starring the former supermodel Agyness Deyn, came out at the end of 2015, by which time North Sea oil was slumping and the 2014 independence referendum had failed. The film was mainly sold as marking the centenary of the First World War, making much of the ‘sunset song’ of the novel’s title, ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, a pipe lament composed to commemorate the disastrous Battle of Flodden of 1513. Deyn herself sings it the first time, at Chris and Ewan’s wedding. Ronnie Browne, of the Corries and ‘Flower of Scotland’ fame, reprises it later, over coils of wire and rain and bits of bodies in the mud.

Sunset Song fell off the Scottish set texts list for Highers last year, because so few schools were still teaching it – fewer than sixty ‘learners’ chose to do it, the Scottish Qualifications Authority told me, out of a possible 36,300 in 2024. But you can write on it in the critical essay section, and in April I walked the cliff path from Stonehaven to Dunnottar with Lyn Foreman, head of English at Banchory Academy, whose class was preparing to do just that. Lyn studied Sunset Song herself for her Highers in Aberdeen in the 1980s, but unlike me, she says, she always loved it: ‘my Chris’, she kept saying, as if speaking about an actual person, a woman of courage with fairish-red hair like her own. And ‘my Chris’, for Lyn, is also Heilbron – she saw the BBC series on video at Bridge of Don Academy, on a television wheeled into the classroom on a trolley. She’s never been able to show it to her class, though, because it’s not on the streaming platform schools use, and so loss is lost again.

In Sunset Song, it’s on a walk along this cliff path that Chris realises she no longer ‘mislikes’ Ewan Tavendale. She has come into town to see the lawyer and sort out her father’s will. ‘I know a nook,’ Ewan says, helping her to scramble ‘between sea and sky’ to a tiny ledge of sand, where he peels and eats an orange; Lyn showed me what she thinks is the scrap of sand, and pointed out that Chris, just like her mother, is basically running off with the first dashing ploughman who shows an interest, walking straight into marrying her own dad. The sea was to our left as we walked and on the right were fields of what I think was spring barley, from looking at pictures on the online Scottish Farmer. Farmers, I read, face ‘continued uncertainty’ because of what the Strait of Hormuz situation does to fertiliser prices. This spring, the barley looked fantastic. Next year it may not be there at all.

Lyn and I first met last November at the Grassic Gibbon Centre, next to the village hall in Arbuthnott, with neeps in the dark, low field abutting and the sea just visible down the road. She’d come on a coach with her Higher class, and I’d been talking to some of the girls by the wobbly fake menhir who said they thought Sunset Song was great. Lyn told me that her students are so openly and vocally ‘revolted’ by John Guthrie that her task is to get them to step back a little, reflect, understand that marital rape wasn’t even illegal in Scotland until the 1980s. She says she doesn’t mind her Chris having been written by a man, ‘being a lover of Thomas Hardy’, and that she has no problem with getting her class to look at ‘how successful Gibbon is in depicting her sexual awakening … as well as the way she instigates much of the early sex with Ewan (and slaps him when he aggressively steals that first kiss)’. She also takes her class through ‘the beauty and connection’ of Chris’s ‘one-night stand’ with Long Rob, the Kinraddie miller, observing that her students are appalled by the age-gap in a way that has always completely passed me by. But most of all, she says, she is ‘admiring of the way Gibbon presents a strong, forward-thinking young woman of the time’. Her main aim, she says, in her teaching is ‘to instil a sense of respect for her character with the girls’.

It was late June when I got to Banchory Academy to talk to the girls themselves, fresh from sitting their Higher English. ‘The word you used was actually “repulsive”,’ Ella told me: she remembered our encounter in November at the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre. She was joined by Isla and Eilidh and Olivia, the last of whom spoke about the presentation she did about John Guthrie yelling at Chris when she strips down to help her mother wash the blankets: ‘Get out of that at once, you shameful limmer, and get on your clothes!’ (‘Limmer’, Olivia found when she researched it, is an old Scots word for ‘prostitute’. The incident leaves Chris ‘ashamed, shamed more for father than herself’.) The boys, the girls said, were silent, ears up, just listening. The girls, they remembered, talked and talked.

Was it possible, I asked, for a man to write about a woman’s looks without being voyeuristic? The girls and I discussed the probable difference between a (male) writer’s ‘intentions’ – their word – in Gibbon’s time and now. It wouldn’t be possible, they felt, for writerly intentions to be ‘pure’ then, because of the socially prevalent views on women and women’s sexuality. And it wouldn’t be possible now, either, what with ‘exploitation and monetisation.’ And yet, when they read the first harvest-madness scene, they were not disturbed, as I was, by the gaze of the (male) author, but saw a point being made about privacy and boundaries, about how helpful it was to a person’s developing self-relation to have a room of one’s own.

Unlike Isobel Murray, I wasn’t going to ask anyone about their private mirror-gazing habits, though theorising Chris Guthrie’s did make me think about my own. There was no mirror in my teenage bedroom, but there was one on the door of the bathroom cabinet, and I’d look at my face first, pore by pore. The heroines in the books I read were sometimes ‘handsome’, often not, but always had eager, curious eyes and expressive, mobile mouths, as though it were just known to all the authors that a girl’s physical characteristics perfectly matched the intelligence and wonder of her inner being. I could see none of this in my mirror, which I found perplexing. All that purity of intention, where was it, if not around my eyes and mouth?

In her harvest-madness self-evaluation, Chris sees herself as ‘limber and sweet, not bonny perhaps’, her cheekbones being ‘over-high’ and her nose ‘over-short’, but her hair is ‘wild, wonderful’ and her eyes are ‘deep and clear as the Denburn flow’. I was pleased to observe how uninterested Lyn’s girls were in this aspect of Chris and her reflections. Perhaps the trope no longer holds. ‘Chris should be lovely but not prettified – high cheek-bones and so on,’ Mitchell wrote on a postcard to an illustrator, the year before he died, and the brief has been followed by most of the Scots Quair cover art since. Though not the version I found online, which has a picture of an actual gibbon, hair brushed and dressed in a rose-pink suit.

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Footnotes

The Crofters Holdings Act of 1886 established security of tenure for crofters only in certain ‘crofting parishes’ in the seven ‘crofting counties’ of Argyll, Caithness, Inverness, Orkney, Ross and Cromarty, Shetland, Sutherland. Most of Lowland and north-east Scotland were deliberately missed out. Writers, including Gibbon, used the words croft, crofter, crofting to refer to the north-east ‘farm life’ of the time, but north-east smallholders had not been granted any legal protection by the Act.

Chave, schlorich, smore: ‘struggle’, ‘slop’, ‘smother’. One other word important to the works of Gibbon but which I never heard from faces in firelight is libb, ‘to castrate’, mostly but not always used in an animal-husbandry context. You’ll also see a lot of the words Bulgar and mucker. These are not in any Scots dictionary I’ve ever seen but their meaning in context will be obvious. Stite, some say, means ‘nonsense’, and is not at all a politer workaround for shite, which can also mean ‘nonsense’. I don’t read it that way, but who knows.