Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw Library' paperback edition - 1937
Of course, I am reading the author's famous Scots Quair in quite the wrong order. Last Summer, I read the final book in the trilogy, Grey Granite (see my Blog of 23 June 2023) and had mixed feelings about it. I recall that I was slightly unsettled by the unfamiliar (was it 'poetic'?) syntax used, as well as the strange - to me - Scottish words that kept popping up. 'Grey granite' was a term applied to Ewan Tavendale, the son of the main character of all three books, Chris Guthrie/Tavendale/Colquohoun, The focus swerved towards him rather than his mother and I had no sympathy with his humourless, left-wing activism. Now I have read the second novel in the trilogy, Cloud Howe, I can see his character germinating from his very early teens.
The story focuses on Chris Colquohoun's 'middle years'. She has left the farming background of the fictional estate of Kinraddie in The Mearns and after a brief widowhood - her husband Ewan Tavendale Snr. died in the Great War - has married the Revd. Robert Colquohoun. They have moved, with young Ewan, to the small borough of Segget, which stood under the Mounth, on the southern side. Above lies the ruins of Kaimes, that was builded when Segget was no more than a place where the folk of old time had raised up a camp with earthen walls and with freestone dykes, and had died and had left their camp to wither under the spread of the grass and the whinns. It is an eerie place, often covered in mist or smothered in rain, with a history, part fiction part fact. Chris' second husband is not an easy man to live with: sometimes a black, queer mood came on Robert, he would lock himself up long hours in his room, hate God and Chris and himself and all men, know his Faith a fantastic dream; and see the fleshless grin of the skull and the eyeless sockets at the back of life.
The author's often powerful prose is suffused with poetry, with deeply-felt descriptions of the countryside and its seasons and, most compellingly, with a variety of three-dimensional characters. Every so often, I felt a breath of George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901) and John Galt's The Provost (1822) - the former for its coruscating attack on Kailyard 'life', the latter for his mischievous humour. The Colquohouns have taken over from an old minister, who had died of drink, fair sozzled he was, folk said, at the end; and his last words were, so the story went, 'And what might the feare's prices be today?'...Ah well, he was a dead and a two-three came to try for his pulpit, more likely his stipend...Unfortunately for Segget, the Revd. Colquohoun was to preach meaty and strong and preached with some fire... Not surprisingly, his popularity waned quickly.
Half of the Segget folk worked at the mills - the spinners, as the rest of Segget called them; the others kept shops or were joiners or smiths, folk who worked on the railway, the land, the roads and the gardens of Segget House. There was wee Peter Peat, the tailor, who was the biggest Tory in the town, the head of the Segget Conservative branch, and an awful patriot, keen for blood...ready to kill you and eat you forbye, and running his tape up and down your bit stomach as though he were gutting you and enjoying it. Will Melvin kept the only hotel, the Segget Arms, he'd a face like a cat, broad at the eyes, and he'd spit like a cat whenever he spoke; he aye wore a dickey and a high, stiff collar and a leather waistcoat, and leggings and breeks...he had married late in life, an Aberdeen woman, right thin and right north, she kept a quick eye on the bar and the till. Rob Moultrie had once been the saddler of Segget...and as coarse an old brute as you'd meet...though a seventy years old and nearing his grave....he couldn't abide the sight of the gentry, or the smell of the creatures either, he said, and that was why he was Radical still. Old Leslie was maybe a fair good smith: he was sure the biggest old claik in Segget. He'd blether from the moment you entered his smiddy. One of the best defined characters was his son, Sim Leslie, the policeman. Folk called him Feet, he'd feet so big he could hardly coup...his feet had fair a sure grip on Scotland. There was also MacDougall Brown, the postmaster, who preached every Sabbath in the open air at the town's Square - he wasn't Old Kirk and he wasn't of the Frees, he wasn't even an Episcopalian, but Salvation Army, or as near as damn it. There he'd be, with his flat, bald head, and beside him his mistress, a meikle great sumph, she came from the south and she mouthed her words broad as an elephant's behind...
These were just some of the characters the Colquohouns had to deal with. And then there were the spinners. The worst of the lot were the Cronins, fair tribe of the wretches. The worst of the breed was young Jack Cronin - he worked as a porter down at the station...him and his socialism and the coarse way he had of making jokes on the Virgin Birth; and the sneering at Jonah in the belly of the whale; and saying that the best way to deal with a Tory was to kick him in the dowp and you'd brain him there; so, when the upheavals that led up to the General Strike descended on Segget, he was at the forefront of any disruption. The other side of the coin was represented by Stephen Mowatt, resident at the big house and owner of the Segget mills. He'd a face that minded Chris of a frog's, with horn-rimmed spectacles astride a broad nose, and eyes that twinkled. His English accent made him say Oh, thenks! and I say! and How Jahly! He will be the butt of the author's political slant for the rest of the novel - castigated for his role in ensuring the General Strike failed and forever playing the capitalist swine. When Jack Cronin decides to call it a day and move to Glasgow to join the middle classes, he, too, is caustically appraised.
The author's humour, rarely downright malicious, and then only aimed at the gentry, saved the novel for me. The story of the dead pig in a wife's bed and the drunk husband only realising the fact when a lantern is brought and then saying: Well, then, I'm damned. Man, but it fair looked her image to me, was well told. I have yet to read Sunset Song, the first of the trilogy, regarded as a classic and voted Scotland's favourite book in a 2005 poll supported by the Scottish Book Trust. That will have to wait until I can track down the Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperback edition. I realise that if I was a Scot and a socialist, I would be even more whole-hearted in my praise of the two I have read. But I am neither.
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