Journeys in Scotland

I owe my readers an apology – in no way have the two previous posts offered any real insights into the Scottish soul. Pointing you in the direction of five books is all very well but my readers deserve better. When I googled “Scotland’s soul” I was directed mainly to musical groups but did unearth an interesting title The Soul of Scotland (2016) by Harry Reid, the erstwhile editor of “The Glasgow Herald” which, like most newspapers these days, has fallen on very sad times. The only decent contemporary writing nowadays comes from the weekly online “The Scottish Review” to which I directed you all in the last post.

But Scottish writers are alive - and very much kicking. My theory is that English writers (Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Iris Murdoch) were so caught up in the class system that they couldn’t kick out. The “thrawn” Scots have a different sensibility – it’s not so much that alienation (although some like Irvine Welsh are) but that the difference they feel from the English gives them the additional, more peripheral, vision this blog tries to celebrate

Maurice Lindsay was, for half a century, a pillar of the Scottish literary establishment and left us this great guide A Century of creative Scottish writing 1900-2000. But one very curious omission from his survey was the name of poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959) who may have been too modernist and cosmopolitan for Lindsay – given his later strong European connections. Originally from Orkney, his family had to move to Glasgow and one of his early books was Scottish Journey (1935) which was nicely reviewed recently here 

Muir, torn as a young boy from his pastoral Orkney and landing in the Glasgow slums, likened this shift to travelling forward in time by a hundred years, or witnessing the fall of mankind before one’s very eyes. Such was the enormous difference between these two places. Industrial life brought to Muir and his family the gravest misfortunes one might predict to befall those living amongst such miserable decay and deprivation. These same circumstances led Muir to socialism, an awakening he readily compared to his religious conversion aged fourteen.

It is Muir the socialist and poet whose observations we read as he navigates Scotland in a borrowed motorcar, one that dances ‘like a high-spirited colt’ when pushed anywhere beyond thirty-five miles-per-hour. Muir convinces us from the outset that he is not looking, as a tourist might, for a Scotland historical or romantic, but rather the Scotland which presents itself ‘to one who is not looking for anything in particular, and is willing to believe what his eyes and ears tell him’.

What then, does Muir see? He sees much about Scotland that he admires, dislikes, and much that can only be of hindrance to anything like progress. He understands and effectively articulates the various contradictions and hypocrisies often found strung together in the identity of a place. 

He is, of course, driving – something which would immediately have marked him off as a “toff”. My father and his own father were at that precise time camping – university graduates both – I have their holiday diaries from 1933/34 still here in my mountain house. 

In Edinburgh, this is poignantly characterised by the ugly divide between rich and poor, and the obsessive keeping-up of appearances, despite glaring sanctimony, by the middle-classes. In the Borders, he visits Abbotsford House in Galashiels, once the home of Sir Walter Scott. Scott, along with Burns, whose house is also visited, was a literary figure seen as the embodiment of the kitsch, sentimental ‘Scottishness’ to which Muir and his generation of Scottish writer were so vehemently opposed. For those baptised as the Scottish Renaissance, Scott and Burns represented the idealised Scotland of the tourist; unblemished, quaint, bonnie, and not the Scotland experienced by the majority of its inhabitants. This rather fictitious Scotland contains little remedy for the large-scale unemployment that Muir sees in Glasgow, a city that once housed such misery for him.

 

Nor does the fine imagery of mist-wrapped hills and mirror-like lochs have anything to say about that stage of industrialism, also seen in Glasgow, that stays jammed at human exploitation on its path towards affordable luxury. In the Highlands, a region that really does accommodate the majestic, natural beauty that many mistake for the whole picture, Muir is no less sympathetic towards the ordinary people living there. They are as much thwarted by a crass romanticism belying genuine struggle as the rest of Scotland is.

At his time of visiting, Muir believed the Scottish Highlands to be in a third stage of its decline, something that had begun with the punishment afflicted upon the Highlanders following Culloden. The second phase of decline would, of course, be the Clearances; the forced eviction of thousands and the installation of landlordism where the clan system had previously existed.

The third stage, Muir argues, is symbolised by ‘the pictures of slaughtered animals that disfigure the walls of Highland hotels.’ This is the Highlands as a sporting playground, for its wealthy estate owners, many with little connection to Scotland other than the land they have inherited, and for those who come from elsewhere to enjoy this version of wild Scotland. The majority of locals, growing smaller in number, serve one of two purposes; to cook and clean for these visitors, or to slaughter animals for them; their own form of non-Industrial subjugation.

 

Was the independence effort of the time, the National Party of Scotland, the answer to any of the problems discussed? From Muir, a resounding no. This movement was to the poet an absurd coalition of political beliefs gathered optimistically beneath the banner of self-government. In Muir’s own words, ‘The National Party has nothing behind it but a desire and nothing before it but an ideal.’ Scottish independence, for Muir, would have to mean socialism – one could not be achieved without the other.

Some things have changed, no doubt, since 1935. Nevertheless, Muir teaches us the importance of going and finding out for ourselves, of taking the responsibility as Scots to understand Scotland and all her people. Also, the poet’s remarks about benign, optimistic nationalism not being enough remain entirely pertinent. Belief in Scottish independence must always extend to something other than simple agreement with the basic argument of the party line. For Muir, this means socialism, for others perhaps not. 

Several decades later a similar journey was undertaken to explore how Scotland had changed but called this time “A Scottish Journey” (2018) and made, this time, by motorbike which made the rider a wee bit more accessible. Although the trip was squeezed into a fortnight’s break between teaching.

But the journey I really appreciated was Journeys around Unfamiliar Britain (2016) made on a good old bike by JD Taylor who included Scotland in the tour and took 4 months to achieve. His model was the famous William Cobbett’s Rural Rides made (by horse) in the 1820s. This section from an interview the author did gives a good sense of the guy's style - 

Just as I was interested in the vast majority of people left out of London-focused narratives, so I was interested in the places between or behind official narratives of ‘England’, ‘The North’, ‘Scotland’, etc. On a bike call you can pull over at any point on the road to eat some grub, grab the ear of a passer-by.

 

Q: Where there any points in the journey where you thought ‘enough is enough. I’m going home’? What convinced you to continue?

I never felt like giving up, strange as it seems, given the difficulties I encountered. I was compelled by a feeling of necessity and fate. I was going to complete this regardless of what happened, and that perhaps I had even already completed it, and was now reliving it again and documenting it. Even where I was injured by careless drivers, or became exhausted by long nights. Of course it was very unlikely I was going to succeed, and that also energised me.

 

Q: You briefly mention meeting a young British actor,working as a bartender in a northern pub. That was quite shocking moment in the book, to see a talented and well-known young man in such circumstances. What were your own impressions of this?

Tom Turgoose is known for playing Shaun in the film This is England, a troubled young guy who finds friendship and community among a group of disaffected young skinheads in an ex-industrial Northern town, partly based on Nottingham. It was apt to find him pulling cheap pints of bland beer in a rough-and-tumble Grimsby boozer. His situation mirrored that of his character, enduring and not unhappy in a place and position familiar to many born in the late 1980s-early 1990s in Britain. He was sceptical, sharp-humoured and open-minded, and we talked for a bit. He deserves more work and accolades but, in a heartbreaking way, so do so many talented young people whose interests have been abandoned by a reactionary political establishment. I am thinking here of the many musicians, artists, writers, actors, educators and community workers I have had the fortune to call friends. They struggle on, flinty-humoured and hard-bitten, ambivalent about it all, highly educated and prematurely aged. They deserve much more than this.

 

Q: The Raleigh bike you purchased for seventy pounds at times becomes its own, quite sadistic, character within the book. It sometimes feels like the thing is holding you back with its many imperfections. Why didn’t you go with a more expensive, or at the least, more reliable bike?

No, the old Raleigh bike is the hero of the book! It just about held it together over those thousand or so miles. I consciously wanted to distance myself from the lycra-clad, middle-class professionalisation of cycling, just as I sought a similar distance from the professionalisation of politics and political theory. Using a cheap everyday road bike mirrored that of taking and using the stories and language of real individuals, as they are. And of course I was skint, and couldn’t afford much better! But I wanted to show what could be done, and focus on the journey rather than the tedious data of mileage or performance that distract so many cyclists. So I didn’t have a milometer, I wore jeans and a shirt, a cape when it rained (until that fell off the bike too), and just got on with it. And I regret nothing at all. 

Background

The most famous trip in Scotland was undertaken in 1773 by the great Dr Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, resulting in two books – the first written (from memory) a couple of years later by Samuel Johnson and entitled A Journey to the Western Isles (1775)

Boswell was a Scot who memorialised the life of Samuel Johnson so brilliantly that he effectively created the genre of the biography. It took Boswell a decade, however, before he published, from detailed notes he had taken during the journey, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)  

After that, it became fashionable for others to undertake the same journey eg Our Journey to the Hebrides (Pennell 1889) and Footsteps of Dr Johnson (Scotland) GBN Hill (1890)

And this is a nice recent tribute to Boswell which also mentions some of the more recent books which have repeated the journey Out of Johnson’s Shadow – James Boswell as a Travel Writer; Julian M Griffin (2017)