About the Author
A.D. Scott
A. D. Scott was born in the Highlands of Scotland.
After various adventures too numerous to mention, the author currently lives in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. But other mountains may beckon.
How I started writing
Over a haggis pakora, Maggie McKay, director of Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, mentioned the possibility of writing about my childhood in the 1950s in the Highlands of Scotland.
I agonised; does she want to know the about the dialect, the superstitions and legends? Or is it the faerie stories? Does she want to hear about your granny waking you before sunrise on Mayday morning to wash your face in the dew? Or of jumping in and out of stone circles, dancing around the standing stones? Or is it the second sight, the evil eye, or the bogies lurking under bridges, in wells in the woods is that what interest these academics? And can I do this? That was the real question.
Problem; you have to tell the facts, the truth, for these cataloguers of the past.
So where could I fit in Laura my friend, daughter of the Italian chip shop and ice-cream parlour, complete with cappuccino machine? How could I describe the men, ten years after the war had ended, damaged, drinking in the British Legion solitary in the company of fellow ex-servicemen? And where could I find a place for Sheila McKay and me, down the harbour, in our gymslips, flirting with the Polish seamen from the Baltic timber ships?
Our music; the hee-drum, ho-drum folk songs, Jimmy Shand and his band with a Strathspey and Reel, the music-hall stars with “Donald where’s yer troosers”, the piping and pibroch competitions broadcast on the radio from the annual Mod in Skye bringing forth ghosts of slaughtered clansmen; and the singing, most of all the singing. At the church hall ceilidhs everyone took their turn; the songs of Rabbie Burns, the war-time songs sing-alongs (Run rabbit, run rabbit…) the invasion songs from Perry Como, Doris Day, Frankie Lyman; and then - Bill Haley and the Comets. Where was there a place for those in an academic study?
Wicked of the wicked, the memories of us thirteen year olds, sneaking off to dances at the Two Red Shoes in Elgin with American airmen from the local airbase- pretending we were sixteen. Then television appeared, forever changing our view of ourselves. So how could I fit in all those disparate fragments of childhood, all just as valid as visiting the Clootie Well and the faerie rings and remembering the last of the local customs, the history, the dialect? How could I tell those true stories in an academic document? But fiction? Fiction based on vivid memories? That was a possibility.
So, that summer, back home in Ha Noi, Viet Nam, temperature 36C and rising, humidity 85%, I put my motorbike on the train, packed my laptop, a teapot and Ceylon tea and left for Sa Pa, an old French colonial hill station at the foothills of the Himalayas on the Chinese Yunnan border. At 1500 metres and a perfect 26c it is the home of many of Viet Nam’s minorities. Trust the French to find the perfect spot to escape the heat of Hanoi.
I settled in for the summer. And all the while, the words of dear friend, Robert Alan Jamieson the Shetland poet, author and teacher of Creative Writing at Edinburgh University, kept ringing in my ears, ‘You could write – you’re good at telling stories.’
Nine weeks and 100,000 words later, A Small Death in the Great Glen, the first in the series of ‘Tales from the Highland Gazette’ was written. I drove up to the high pass and at two and a half thousand metres, stopped my old Russian motorbike, got off, stood on the edge of a precipice and shouted into China ‘I did it’. I had started at the beginning and had got to the end. I amazed myself.
The first three books in the series ‘Tales from the Highland Gazette’ were conceived up there in very different mountains indeed.
Back down in the heat of Hanoi, on a street in the Old Quarter, I met Neil my granddaughter’s sports teacher. He is from Strathpeffer where I had just been – in my mind, in my writing.
‘Hi Deb. This is my Mum and Dad, over on a visit. Dad was editor of the Ross-shire Journal for twenty years.’ This was one of the newspapers I had used as inspiration for The Highland Gazette!
Total stranger, the Dad, Jock Watt, was on his way up to Sa Pa for his holiday, and he left with a 300 page manuscript adding to his luggage. Poor man. A week later, we met in a bar. He loved A Small Death in the Great Glen.
‘Needs editing,’ he told me, ‘and the beginning is slow but the newspaper scenes, the characters, the time and place are delightful… and authentic.’
I drove my motorbike round and round Hoan Kiem lake in celebration. Then I talked to Steve Christensen, graphic designer and post-punk guitarist from Seattle. He designed and typeset A Small Death in the Great Glen. Found a man who hand binds books and we ran off 50 copies with a fabulous dust jacket. They sold out and toute Hanoi thought the book great. It wasn’t but it was a start.
Insprations
Map of my Childhood.
(For Don Macintyre)
‘Distant cousins, there’s a limited supply’ (Captain Beefheart, 1974)
I ordered a map of my childhood on the Internet. It is Bartholomew’s half-inch map of the Moray Firth, 1954. I spread it out on the floor and step into the map that was my life until I left to go to college in the south of Scotland.
The topographical shading is in soft greens, depicting low-lying farmland along the coastal strips. There is not much of that – it is mostly a map in shades of rust darkening to snow white for the mountaintops. And everywhere, in every deep glen, every faultline, are lochs; long, narrow, deep lochs, circular mountain tarns. Then there are the burns flowing into the rivers that flow into the firth, all marked on the map in aqua blue like varicose veins across the landscape.
The stone circles, the standing stones, the cairns, the faery wells, the battlefields, the castles and one vitreous stone fort circa some date BC lurk on this map, ready to invoke memories of games of hide and seek with my cousins. Ruined castles, battlefields, faery glens and devil’s dens are great places to picnic. Mum or Dad or Grandad would fill us with bloodthirsty tales of hauntings as we sat on the tartan rug, eating ham sandwiches and scones and jam, washed down with Kia Ora orange squash in plastic cups
Learning the invisible map starts early. Faery rings are pointed out, usually in birch and rowan woodland. Devils lurk beside bridges but cannot cross running water. Witches haunt caves and ghosts haunt ruined castles and crofts, of which there are many. Battlefields have legions of ghosts, ghost regiments, ghosts fleeing endlessly to the west never to reach their homelands. At Culloden Fields the temperature is always lower than the surrounding woodlands, the grassy covering of the communal graves marked clan by clan never need mowing.
General Wade’s military roads and bridges that dissect the Highlands, are clearly on the map. The conquest of the Highlanders documented in the, wherever possible, straight lines. We could never drive past Cawdor Castle (of Macbeth fame) without a frisson of fear. In town, alleyways and lanes have liberal sprinklings of ghosts murdered in some long ago but not forgotten stabbing or garrotting. The Castle, the prison, the Mental Asylum all prominent in the townscape, all places of menace.
Antiquity is not necessary for ghosts. A drowned village where now lies a hydro-electric dam has ghostly church bells of a Sunday. Tinker encampments were also pointed out as places where children would be left if you didn’t obey your Granny. Sacred wells were favourites places to visit, the water cold and delicious. Grandad would bring an empty lemonade bottle to fill as he swore the sacred spring water was best in his whisky. The Clootie well was the best; hang a piece of an old frock or kilt and wish a wish – it always works.
The Loch Ness monster is unique in Scotland, being one of the few that excites curiosity rather than terror. My uncle Mac – a Minister of the Church of Scotland - once saw it, so it must be real.
Then there are the songs, the rhymes, the tunes. A favourite song tells of a mother who mislaid her baby as she went to gather blaeberries. Grandad used to bounce us on his knee singing of the ‘back o’ Benachie’ where a mother had one son killed at Huntly Fair and the other one drowned in the river Dee. Then there are the endless laments played on pipes, pibroch style.
Cemeteries are just cemeteries, places to go for the Sunday walk. Hauntings are rare. Most people died and were buried with due ceremony and have no need to haunt us. The numerous graves of children are sad but useful as a reminder to children that they too can die.
I study my map, I see the glens, the names, it all comes back, the visible and invisible map of my Highland childhood. Then I write.
A D Scott July 2010.
