Glitter of Mica

by Jessie Kesson

  Other titles by Jessie Kesson

  White Bird Passes

  Another Time, Another Place

  Where the Apple Ripens

  Somewhere Beyond

  Contents

  Introduction

  Main Text

  First published 1963

  This edition published 2017

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 096 7 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 052 3 in paperback format

  Copyright © Jessie Kesson 1963, Jenni Fagan 2017

  The right of Jessie Kesson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  EBook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  For Elizabeth Adair

  This is the shape of a land which outlasts a strategy

  And is not to be taken by rhetoric or arms.

  G. S. Fraser, Hometown Elegy

  Introduction by Jenni Fagan

  It is a privilege to write an introduction to this new edition of Glitter of Mica by Jessie Kesson. I have a great respect for Kesson – artistically, politically and personally. We share considerable similarities and I wish she were still here. I feel like I know her so well, but that is, of course, the true test of a great writer – they become integral to our own narrative, their works become a part of who we are.

  In Glitter of Mica, the mythopoeic parish of Caldwell is introduced unadorned by poetry, unvisited by tourists. It is practical, working farmland used for rearing cattle, producing milk and barley. It is described as the bleakest landscape in Scotland. On a distant hill you can see a horse carved out in Pictish times and a Free Kirk now used as a granary since the people of Caldwell are ‘less kirk conscious than their forebears’. This nod toward inherited social structures between rural workers and the bourgeoisie underpins a particular muse for Kesson. She dissects the social dynamics of Caldwell without ceremony. When Lady Grizelda Beaton opens a fete claiming ‘these are her ain folk’, we are embarrassed for her, so delusional is the vast gulf between her misguided sense of affinity and the truer reality – ‘Caldwell is first and foremost the land of the farm-worker.’

  Kesson highlights how the social structures of class need to deny individualism to maintain control. The many levels of prejudice that exist in every area of life are shown up. Meanwhile, characters see through these confines and refuse to be defined by social expectation. In Glitter of Mica, the land belongs to those who belong to it, by birth, in their bones, their souls – a generational and unquestionable certainty that is never diminished by landowners’ titles, deeds or assumptions.

  The relationship to landscape in Glitter of Mica is poetic yet clear-sighted. She gazes upon the horizon unflinchingly and draws the lines of her landscapes accordingly. You feel the soil, the weather, skies, turbulence or that fleeting shaft of sunlight. Kesson’s connection to landscape grounds her work both artistically and politically.

  The use of verse and poetry in the book reflects Kesson’s experience hearing the oral tradition from her mother and local community. Even in the poorest areas where she grew up in Scotland, there was a daily connection to storytelling and the spoken word.

  Kesson never takes the narratively weaker route of over-romanticising any one social group. Those who work the land are part of patriarchal, hierarchical structures that make individuals suspicious of nearly everyone they encounter. Nobody is spared her fearless gaze. In Glitter of Mica, we find farm-workers who vote for their farmer’s political party, with the ‘fierce privilege of sons passing judgement on this issue’, not only because of a traditional system passed down by their fathers as a way to keep aristocracy in check. More pertinently, she shows how the farmer was synonymous with the land he represented. A vote for the farmer was a vote for the land itself. It was a vote for the values of the land and the worth of it.

  Kesson cleverly highlights so many things in the most understated ways. In Caldwell we see that hereditary aristocrats required two names such as Hay of Seaton or Gordon of Huntly, while a farmer needed only one: Auchronie; Clova; Drumdelgie; Darklands. The farmer was a representative of an unquestionable land that would be here long after they were gone. They did not have to marry into the position or create alliance with another landowner. They were of the land and would return to it without question.

  Darklands farm is at the centre of Caldwell’s residents’ lives. The only other landmark (after the horse and kirk) is Ambroggan House, on Soutar Hill, an asylum for the ‘wealthy mentally ill of the land.’ A farm-worker called Plunger says that, ‘if you’re poor you are mad but if you are rich they have an easier name for you. A nervous breakdown.’ Plunger goes onto muse on the fact that the wealthy mentally ill are somehow softened by their wealth – they do not create the same fear or genuine distress among locals, as those who are mentally ill and poor. Even madness is shown to be cosseted by a sense of financial security and cultural entitlement that ordinary farm workers will never know.

  For Caldwell’s farm workers, uncertainty is a permanent way of life. They are ‘fee’d’ for a year by the farmer and if he wants to keep them on, he lets them know and if he does not, he just stays silent. Whole generations of families are brought up transient at the mercy of such conditions.

  The novel starts on a Friday night, when Hugh Riddel, head dairyman at Darklands is recalling events from the previous Friday. It is astonishing the way Kesson uses time in Glitter of Mica. We have an entire novel inhabit a week in real-time but it actually encompasses the entire lifetime of three generations. We go through Hugh’s early childhood and find how shocked his father would have been to see the cotters’ cottages with electricity, one day off a week, two days off a month and a pension are all huge social changes. Despite this we feel the hardship of modern cotters’ lives, something Kesson knew and experienced directly. It is her ability to create great art from experience while subjecting her work to a critical, perhaps even scathing, eye and maintaining the highest expectations for what her abilities should achieve that make her such an extraordinary writer.

  Hugh lives with his wife Isa and his daughter Helen. He has a mistress called Sue and an avowed enemy in local politician Charlie Anson. His daughter doubly betrays him by having an affair with Anson that results in her pregnancy. After Hugh attacks Anson, Helen commits suicide.

  When Hugh makes a speech on Burns Night, he not only ‘deprives them of the comfort of myth’, but he also throws ‘all the little statues of Highland Mary off their mantlepiece and left them lying in broken pieces’. This is part of what Kesson does as a novelist. She does not take part in any twee or genteel idea of Scottishness. She refuses to romanticise the working classes. No character is afforded a life without flaws or plurality. Kesson is modernist in this sense and stylistically, her use of third-person with free-indirect discourse, coupled with changing viewpoint through varying social groups, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf yet she executes this completely in her own particular style.

  Kesson always denied any interest in feminism partly because she wanted to be judged as a ‘writer’ outwith the confines of gender. She writes the inner lives of women in a way that shows up pettiness but also exposes their steel and nerve and ability to cut straight through social niceties. When the dairy workers
are discussing the assault Hugh carried out last Friday, it is a woman called Lil who states that the only good thing to come out of it was that the politician Charlie Anson took a good, long-overdue beating and was left without any teeth at all. On the subject of the languishing Helen, who has attempted suicide, Lil says ‘she’ll survive, yon wish washy molloching kind of creature always does.’

  To continue in the observation of gender it is Hugh who observes that men never mention the word ‘love’. He says while he will talk to men of anything else he cannot tell them about his true heart or the disappointment and loneliness of his marriage. He cannot ask other men if it is the same for them.

  It is also the idea of Robert Burns’s longing for a woman who has a ‘foot on the front step of the castle, and the other trailing behind on the dunghill, and never both together, was just about the loneliest thing that could ever befall a man, and the woman wasn’t born who could bridge this gap with Burns.’ Kesson’s insights into relationships and social roles are blistering. She casually shows up that there is no woman yet born who is allowed to have come from the dung heap but who has one foot in the castle and is neither one or the other but both things socially. She casually shows up Burns a man who ached for something that did not yet exist.

  When Hugh is asked to voice his opinions publicly on Burns, one character comments that, ‘It just went to show. You never could trust the uneducated.’ To her, class structures are fixed, biased and uncompromising.

  Hugh’s observations about sex are brilliantly written. Men size up women like they were livestock. They don’t want to sleep with prostitutes because they’re too tight to part with more than a gift of hens’ eggs and, besides, what man wants something given so freely? He remembers how his mother could always cut his father down. As a boy, he listened with glee to all the sexual songs farmers sang after a drink. He recalls all the talk about women, or cows being mounted or a stallion keeper who was eyed suspiciously by even the most unbeddable woman (to his mind). This is countered by the very real disappointment he feels in a sexless marriage, where affection is so limited that he endures a deep and profound dislocation. This takes him to the point where even seeing his wife’s wrinkled stockings makes him feel like murdering her. The anger and permeating reach of his loneliness is breathtakingly astute.

  Kesson is aware of every single word. She is meticulous and unforgiving settling for no less than a world which breathes off the page. Kesson depicts the inner lives of individuals and communities against the very real struggles of systemic structures. Her work is as relevant today as it was when Glitter of Mica was first published in 1963. The works of Jessie Kesson vastly enrich the European literary canon; she must not be forgotten or ignored.

  THE parish of Caldwell lies to the east of our shire. It has moved neither poet to song nor tourist to praise. It has little to give or lend but much to sell; Ayrshire and Friesian cattle pastured out for milk, Aberdeen Angus cattle reared for fattening, for this is cattle and barley country, and both, and second to none, are flaunted in the face of the world.

  On Soutar Hill, to the north of Caldwell, you can, on a fine clear day, see the figure of a horse carved out in stone from Pictish times, and whatever the weather and from any direction you can see the old Free Kirk, one of the first of the kirks to break away from the Old Established Church, in the Disruption of 1843. Although it stands as intact now as it stood then, the Free Kirk has become a granary, for the people of Caldwell are less kirk conscious than were their forbears. The Misses Lennox, retired from Town, bought the Free Kirk Manse and the wood surrounding it, renaming the latter ‘Lob’s Wood’, but to those who were born and bred in Caldwell, it stubbornly remains ‘The Free Kirk Wood’.

  Caldwell is surrounded by old ‘Houses’ occupied by old names: Forbes-Sempill. Seaton. Hamilton. And by castles whose owners are of Norman origin: Farquharson. Gordon. Grant. Duff. So, considering its proximity to ancient aristocracy, the wonder is that Caldwell has neither legends of its own, nor the ballads which arise from them. It is content to borrow these from its neighbours, so it laughs in recollection of the Laird of Udny’s Fool, reminiscing satirically . . .‘I’m the Laird of Udny’s Fool. Whose Fool are you?’ . . .Weeps in its cups over Fyvie’s Bonnie Peggie, or goes singing in its stride with The Irish Dragoon who died for love of her.

  Early in the morn they set out for Aberdeen.

  Early in the morning O!

  And when they marched across the bonnie brig o’ Gight

  The band it played ‘The Lawlands o’ Fyvie’, O!

  Long long before they reached Old Meldrum Town

  They had their Captain to carry O!

  Long long before they reached bonnie Aberdeen

  They had their Captain to bury O!

  And drunk or sober it becomes bawdy over The White Cow of Turriff.

  Caldwell also borrows the neighbouring gentry to declare open its Summer Fêtes and Shows. A token gesture this, to those who feel that they ‘have come down in the World’, and an incentive to those who still hope to ‘get on in the World’, though, to most of its inhabitants, Caldwell is ‘The World’.

  Last summer it was Lady Grizelda Beaton who was ‘honoured and privileged’—or so she herself maintained at the time—to declare open Caldwell’s Summer Show. Indeed, Lady Grizelda got so carried away on the platform, that a few close observers, with no sense of occasion, gravely doubted whether Charlie Anson’s carpentry, makeshift at the best of times, would hold its own anent all the prancing and gesticulating that was over her Ladyship. And when she stretched out her arms as if to embrace the whole wide world, vowing to Caldwell’s inhabitants, gooking below, that they were ‘indeed her ain folk’, whose who lived on their avowal of ‘Better Days’ were deeply moved, although the same declaration had been examined closely and suspected strongly by God Knows and his fellow farm-workers; for Caldwell is first and foremost the land of the farm-worker.

  ‘It’s our vote yon one’s smarming after,’ had been God Knows’ considered opinion, but then, he belonged to a race which not only suspected everybody outwith the farm he worked on, but most of those within it too. ‘For yon second son of hers is just down from Oxford,’ he had recollected, ‘and going in for politics. Or so they say.’

  ‘But it’s No Ball. And Up the Liberals!’ Dod Feary had shouted in his cups, which slogan had visibly cooled down the remainder of Lady Grizelda’s speech, for had her claim that they ‘were indeed her ain folk’ been true, she would have known this much about them at least, that the odds were always on the farm-worker’s vote going to his farmer’s Party, just as in older times when his forbears with native sagacity had attended the Kirk of their farmer’s religious persuasion.

  This was a conditioning which had come down through the centuries and was automatic and, in its way, a kind of comfort. For the farmer was their ‘Fatherhood’, good or bad, and the farm-workers took the fierce privilege of sons in passing judgment on this issue, either way he was their own, so rooted that he became identified with the land itself, his name absorbed into the very title of the acres he farmed. Even the old hereditary aristocrats of the countryside needed a double identification; Forbes of Rothiemay, one said. Hay of Seaton. Gordon of Huntly. Grant of Monymusk. Cowdray of Dunecht. But the farmers had need of no such prefixes to become landmarks, for though they died at last, their earth abideth and their identification with it was simplified and perpetuated by the syllabic titles of their farms: Auchronie. Ardgye. Balblair. Balben. Calcots. Clova. Drumdelgie. Delgaty and . . .Darklands.

  * * *

  Darklands is one of Caldwell’s largest farms, its productivity high, its soil fertile, its landscape bleak. The kind of place will cause a Townsman in passing to thank God for the fury of his factory or the fuss of his fishmarket, but to the men who work on Darklands farm, even the two or three isolated landmarks on its landscape become unnecessary at last. Occasionally, they will lift their eyes towards Soutar Hill to verify that the Pictish horse still
stands in stone—always aware that it could rear nowhere else. Whiles, too, they will straighten their backs and gaze on their other landmark, Ambroggan House, for it isn’t every parish that provides asylum for the wealthy mentally ill of the land. It was the Plunger who long ago had puzzled it all out for his fellow farm-workers:

  ‘Just you take Chae Finnie. Him that was Handyman over there at Balwhine. And yon night that he up and chased the Vet in his shirt tail with a scythe in his hand. Clean mad Chae had gone, we all said. And until the Authorities came and carted him off to the Asylum, not a man, woman, chick or child of us opened our mouths to Chae for fear of the madness that had come over him, for all that we had known him all our days with him as sane as ourselves. But yet, mark you! We pass the time of day with the patients from Ambroggan House, and them with us. As happy as if we were all in our right minds. You see, it’s all just a question of money again. If you’re poor you’re plain mad. If you’re rich they’ve got an easier name for you. A Nervous breakdown. And yet, the odd thing about it is we were all far more scared of poor Chae Finnie than ever we are when we run into the Daft Dominie from Ambroggan House, just speaking away to himself by the side of the road. It would near look as though money mellows the degree of madness itself. Or maybe it’s just that our respect for money makes a rich madman less fearful than a poor madman!’

  Hugh Riddel, Head Dairyman at Darklands, stood remembering that now. Minding, too, how he had thought at the time that there maybe was something in what the Plunger had said, though he had laughed it off, and had ordered the Plunger to stop speaking stuff and nonsense, and to keep on plunging the milk bottles in the tank.