Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  As children, the young Buchans were markedly adventurous and full of pranks. JB belonged to a gang of boys, who fought with the children of local industrialists, including the enormous and fiercesome Robert Key Hutchison, whom he later met in the Great War, by which time he was a Major-General but had somehow become ordinary-sized and very amiable.* The second Buchan boy, Willie, was a particularly ferocious user of his fists, since he had a quick temper, although at home he was gentle and forgiving. But it was JB who led them into the most mischief – for example, setting light to tar barrels and rolling them into a disused quarry. After a particularly egregious misdemeanour, the local policeman, who was an Elder of the Free Church, remarked that ‘I’ll hae to jail thae bairns and leave the kirk’.4

  In such a free environment, there were plenty of opportunities for accidents and hurts, but the Buchan parents seem to have taken the ‘Better to break a child’s head than his spirit’ approach. Considering the anxiety caused by JB’s accident, and his capacity for mischief, this seems little short of heroic.

  The Pathhead Free Kirk had opened just a year after the Disruption, paid for by the congregation of factory workers, miners, retired seafarers, small manufacturers and independent-minded bonnet lairds. It was a large, ugly building, of unforgiving whinstone, standing a quarter-mile away from the manse down the hill towards the sea on the west side of St Clair Street. From the age of five, the children were expected to attend two services on Sunday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, as well as a Sabbath School. Kindly parishioners eased the tedium of these services by slipping them toffees, but it’s plain that, at least for part of the time, the children listened. JB could not have quoted the King James Bible, especially the Old Testament, so extensively in adult life if he had not.

  At least the Sabbath meant bacon and eggs, rather than porridge, for breakfast, and sugar biscuits and cake for tea. Since the children were not allowed to indulge in any secular activities on Sundays, what time they had at home they spent acting out the more rumbustious of the Old Testament stories. They also read pious tracts and bloodthirsty accounts of martyrs. Most especially they read The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  This work, the greatest of all Christian allegories in English, was written when John Bunyan, a Puritan ‘Independent’, was imprisoned for unlicensed preaching, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In the book, he describes the journey of one Christian to the Celestial City, through many difficulties – the Slough of Despond, a sojourn in Doubting Castle and the false delights of Vanity Fair – meeting divers people on the way who help or hinder him, such as Mr Standfast, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, Giant Despair and Mr Worldly Wiseman. The influence of this powerful narrative can be seen most obviously in JB’s novel of 1919, Mr Standfast, when Richard Hannay and his confederates use it as a communication code, but the central idea of a hero setting out on a quest in an unfriendly, sometimes frightening, often desolate landscape, and needing friends to help him defeat the forces of evil, surfaces in all the spy stories, including The Thirty-Nine Steps.

  As in his writing, so in his life. In 1939 he wrote:

  My delight in it [The Pilgrim’s Progress] came partly from the rhythms of its prose … there are passages, such as the death of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, which all my life have made music in my ear. But its spell was largely due to its plain narrative, its picture of life as a pilgrimage over hill and dale, where surprising adventures lurked by the wayside, a hard road with now and then long views to cheer the traveller and a great brightness at the end of it.5

  The children were brought up to have a consciousness of sin, of the attractive wiles of the Devil, and of being always under the eye of the Almighty. But, thanks to the influence of Robert Burns (and unlike Robert Louis Stevenson) they did not grow up terrified of Hell and the Devil. They took seriously the consequences of the religion they were taught, and accepted that there were rather more duties than privileges to being children of the manse. There was the prospect of the Celestial City at the end of life but, in the meantime, there was a burden of obligations to their parents, to each other and to the congregation their parents served. JB’s first published work, ‘By a Scholar’, appeared in a church magazine when he was only eleven years old. It is entitled ‘New Year’s Hymn 1887’ and the first verse runs:

  To Thee, Our God and Friend,

  We raise our hymn today;

  Oh, guard and guide us from above

  Along life’s troubled way.*

  At that age, JB saw the time spent in school in the week as an unwelcome interruption from home and outdoor play. The ‘board school’ that he attended after a short-lived stay at a dame school, where he learned to knit but was expelled for knocking a pot of soup off the fire, was just a few steps away at the end of Smeaton Road. At the age of eleven, he went to the Burgh School, later renamed the Kirkcaldy High School, in the centre of the town, walking the three miles each way every day. Despite his protestations that he wasn’t a good scholar, aged thirteen, he won the top prize in his class.6

  He read avidly, including most of the works of Sir Walter Scott, so he later said, between the ages of eight and ten. It’s unlikely he was quite as young as that, but he certainly grew up knowing them extremely well. They helped him develop stamina and patience, as well as teaching him how to read both fast and retentively, while embedding in his memory the rhythms of Lowland speech. He and his sister Anna, in particular, had a strong sense of what it meant to be Scots, with a ferocious pride in their country’s bloody history, and an intense pity for anyone with the misfortune to be English. Reading Scott did little to diminish that.

  The Buchans’ orderly and disciplined life was tempered and enriched each summer when they took the train to the ‘sunny Borders’, the land of their forefathers, going first to Peebles to visit Mr Buchan’s bachelor brother, William, and his unmarried sisters, Jane (Jean) and Kate, at the house with the red door on the corner of the High Street, known as Bank House. Their father, who had been born near Stirling, the son of an innkeeper and grocer,* had striven hard to escape his background, accepting a job in Peebles as a lawyer’s clerk in 1835, and working his way up to become a respected ‘Writer’ and bank agent for the Commercial Bank from 1867, as well as Honorary Sheriff Substitute for Peebleshire, and the owner of a small estate in Midlothian.** William Buchan joined him in the firm in 1876, and in 1880 was appointed town clerk and procurator fiscal. They moved to Bank House, which had both office and residential accommodation, in 1881. Old John Buchan died two years later, much borne down by having to fight, unsuccessfully, a lawsuit, after the spectacular crash of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878, and sell his property.*

  From Peebles, it was a short train ride to Broughton, situated at the point where the River Tweed turns east, to stay with Mrs Buchan’s parents and her sister, Agnes, at Broughton Green. Mrs Masterton, who was always said to be a cousin of William Ewart Gladstone and had apparently the same hooked nose and bright, commanding eyes, was fierce and stately; a woman who rarely praised, she was nevertheless both hospitable and tolerant of children, a favoured saying of hers being ‘Never daunton youth’. The children’s grandfather, who was rather frail and asthmatic in later life, was a man of consequence and means, much respected in the countryside around. The Mastertons had been sheep farmers in the district for at least two generations and Helen’s father, as well as her brothers, John, James and the much younger Eben, were as hefted to the hills as their sheep.

  If Pathhead was formative in binding JB to woods and sea, Broughton taught him to love even more the green, rounded hills and the sparkling waters of upper Tweeddale, not only for its quiet beauty and solitude, but for its clashing, stirring past. The countryside was full of the echoes from legend: Merlin, the sixth-century political leader (rather than the wizard), supposedly had been killed at Drumelzier near Broughton, and buried under a thorn tree at the mouth of the Powsail Burn, while the roughly contemporary Arthur may have fought a battle around Cademuir Hill, out
side Peebles. In the late Middle Ages, the quarrelsome reiver clans of Tweedie and Veitch had fought and plundered. The Jacobite army had marched past the door of Broughton Green on the way from Edinburgh to Derby in 1745. For centuries, almost down to JB’s day, hardy, hard-fighting men had driven cattle along the drove road from Falkirk to the English markets over the bridge at Peebles and across the lonely hills.

  When very young, the children messed around in the farmyard, rode ponies, and learned to fish for small trout in the burns that run into the River Tweed. A favourite moorland playground, Broughton Hope (‘hope’ means a side valley), was reached by walking past the site of the House of Broughton (which had belonged to Sir John Murray, the most famous turncoat of the Jacobite rebellion) where a burn trickles down and the ground rises up to above 1,000 feet, with Trahenna Hill to the right and Hammer Head beyond it. Now, as then, the turf (or ‘bent’) is green and sheep-cropped, there is a patchwork of squares of burned heather, called ‘moorburn’, and distant prospects of rolling, rounded hills.

  It is small wonder that the Buchan children little relished their return to Pathhead each September. When JB arrived at Oxford University in the autumn of 1895 he bought for Anna a specially bound Commonplace Book, in which he wrote a poem for her about their holidays:

  We were two children, you and I,

  Unkempt, unwatched, far-wandering, shy,

  Trudging from morn with easy load,

  While Faery lay adown the road.7

  Their mother objected to the use of the word ‘unkempt’, saying she was surprised that the next word was not ‘unwashed.’

  As a result of these summer holidays, JB felt keenly all his life that, like his hero, Sir Walter Scott, ‘he had that kindest bequest of the good fairies at his cradle, a tradition, bone of his bone, of ancient pastoral, of a free life lived among clear waters and green hills as in the innocency of the world’.8

  In November 1888, Mr Buchan was ‘called’ to the John Knox Free Church in the Gorbals, on the south bank of the River Clyde, in Glasgow. His wife was now very sad to leave Pathhead, for the Kirk had flourished there, and they had seen ‘a season of rich spiritual harvest’.9

  The John Knox Kirk in Glasgow presented an altogether different challenge. It was a cavernous city church, dating from the Disruption, set in an urban slum, where recent waves of immigration, especially of Jews and Irish Catholics, had depleted the potential congregation, many of whom were now living in other parts of the city. The move for the family from Fife meant more than twice as much income – a stipend of £410 – but there was no manse, so the Buchans had to rent a house in Queen Mary Avenue in Crosshill, a rather more genteel location near the Queen’s Park, about two miles away from the church. Since they set great store by visiting members of the congregation, this often meant long walks or bus rides for the minister or his wife and daughter.

  Florence Villa was a double-fronted, comfortable stone house, about the same size as the manse in Pathhead. It had certain obvious attractions for the Buchan children, with their highly developed interest in their country’s past, since it was built close to the site of the Battle of Langside, where Mary, Queen of Scots, lost both her liberty and any hope of winning the Crown of Scotland. They dug up a small cannonball in the garden, which they not unnaturally believed had been fired during that battle.

  The garden10 behind the house, flanked by high brick walls, was large enough to contain two tall elms, a ‘thin grove’ of scrubby ash and lime trees, and an untrimmed privet hedge, as well as flower borders filled with old-fashioned flowers – pinks, lilies, honeysuckle and roses (including the white ‘Prince Charlie’ rose, which plays a part in an early novel, A Lost Lady of Old Years). The charm of this garden lay in its dappled shade and well-kept lawn – since the flowers were soon flecked with soot – as well as its birdlife, which brought something of the country into the town. Flycatchers nested in the ivy, there were linnets, thrushes and starlings ‘as thick as flies’ on the grass and cuckoos called nearby.

  JB was sent to Hutchesons’ Grammar School, a half-hour walk away, Willie joining him there from Queen’s Park Academy in due time, while Anna attended Hutchesons’ Girls’ Grammar School close by. Hutchesons’ Grammar School was founded in 1641 for indigent boys and, although not as famous as Glasgow Academy or Glasgow High School, was well-regarded and, crucially, socially quite diverse. The buildings were in Crown Street in the Gorbals, two miles from Queen Mary Avenue. A prospectus dating from JB’s day declared that Hutchesons’ was ‘essentially a Public School, intended to reproduce in its best form, the old Grammar School, where in former days a superior education was to be had at a moderate fee, where the children of country gentlemen, professional men, tradesmen and artisans, were educated side by side, and prepared either for University or commercial life’.11 The curriculum consisted of English grammar and composition, History, Geography, Religious Knowledge, various forms of Mathematics, Drawing, Latin, French, Singing, Drill and Fencing. Greek and Rifle Drill were added for second-year students. In JB’s first year the fees were one guinea a quarter.

  The lack of a conventional public-school boarding education, such as the majority of his contemporaries at Oxford University enjoyed, may well have been an advantage to JB. Because he stayed at home, he had the edge over his richer confrères in three respects: deep knowledge of his city environment and the boys it produced; close and continuing proximity to his lively, intelligent and warmly affectionate family; and no vitiating, unhelpful sense of entitlement. Because of all that, he does not seem to have lacked the qualities that team games – such as were almost a cult in late Victorian boarding schools – were supposed to engender, namely loyalty, subordination of self to a greater cause, self-control, determination, courage and fortitude.

  He had plenty of time for books. His reading at this age ranged from the classic novelists, in particular Scott, Thackeray and Dickens, to playwrights, especially Shakespeare, and essayists such as Bacon and Hazlitt, Lamb and Addison. He read plenty of poetry, especially Milton and Wordsworth. He particularly enjoyed Matthew Arnold and learnt most of the oeuvre by heart. He even began to wrestle with Robert Browning. He maintained later that he did not have any desire to excel and ‘sat far down’ in his classes, and that his reading was ‘only half-conscious and quite uncritical’.12 It is hard to know how seriously to take this, especially since he won an open scholarship a year after he arrived, and the fees were waived. In his final year, he was taught by a remarkable teacher, James Caddell, who fired his enthusiasm for Latin and Greek, especially the former, and prepared him for the University of Glasgow – so well that he won a John Clark bursary of £30 a year.* In 1920, JB recalled Caddell as one of the shaping influences of his life:

  … he had a large and generous understanding of classical literature, and there was something Roman in him which made the Latin culture a special favourite. The classics were to him the ‘humanities’ in the broadest sense, and he managed to indoctrinate his pupils with their intrinsic greatness and their profound significance for the modern world.13

  The boy’s walks to school took him into the heart of the Gorbals. In the 1880s and 1890s it was busy, noisy, grimy and, in places, absolutely poverty-stricken. As a result of the Irish Potato Famine of the late 1840s, people had fled Ireland for the west of Scotland, which had the virtue to them of already sustaining a substantial Catholic population. They settled in Glasgow districts such as the Gorbals, which were already overcrowded; the population was ever at risk of epidemics and sometimes even starvation. The extreme tenderness with which JB describes his band of six ragged children, who form themselves into the ‘Gorbals Diehards’ in Huntingtower (published in 1922), stems from the knowledge he had acquired of the plight of orphaned or just abandoned street children, who he encountered daily on his way to school in the 1890s. Some of the street children joined the Sunday School class that JB took when a teenager, although possibly less for religious sustenance than for warmth in winter and the
annual summer outing.

  Even in a church denomination that valued teaching very highly, Mr Buchan was an exceptional preacher. One of his flock remarked: ‘We cannot readily forget the eloquence, the fervour, the poetic fancy with which he presented his choice themes, expounded and enforced by all his fertility of genius and warmth of heart. But there was a deeper satisfaction in the very earnestness of his preaching. One can recollect an eager appeal, as if he would fain bear us all in his arms to the feet of Jesus.’14 He had ‘a voice of uncommon melody and a poetic style’15 and ‘looked you straight in the face’16 rather than at his few notes.

  To gain a clear picture of what Mr Buchan was like, and the influence he had on his children, especially his eldest son, it is important to look beyond the stereotype of a nineteenth-century Free Church minister and not to be misled by JB’s references in his reminiscences, Memory Hold-the-Door, to the household being ‘ruled by the old Calvinistic discipline’17 and his father’s theological conservatism. The account given by both JB and his sister Anna is of a notably happy childhood, with loving parents who allowed them an almost anarchic freedom. If JB was conscious of the omnipotent God’s interest in him, he was unworried by the ‘Calvinistic Devil’ who he regarded ‘as a rather humorous and jovial figure’.18 As Anna put it, ‘Calvinism sat lightly on our shoulders. I think Father had too keen a sense of humour to be the stern Victorian parent.’19

  The word ‘Calvinistic’ has come to be equated with joylessness, dreary Sabbath observance, harsh internal Church discipline, blind belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, intolerance and belief in ‘double predestination’ – that from the beginning of time, God has decreed that certain people (the ‘elect’) would be saved and all the rest would be damned. However, it seems that Mr Buchan, in the way he lived, conveyed a powerful sense of God’s love and mercy. He was cheerful, devoted to simple pleasures, happy, and drove himself relentlessly in the care of his congregation. No children can have grown up with a clearer sense of duty to each other, their parents and to other people, nor a better understanding of the importance of making something of their lives.