Another Time, Another Place Read online

  Other titles by Jessie Kesson

  White Bird Passes

  Glitter of Mica

  Where the Apple Ripens

  Somewhere Beyond

  First published 1983

  This edition published 2017

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2017

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 098 1 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 055 4 in paperback format

  Copyright © Jessie Kesson 1983, Candia McWilliam 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 by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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

  Ebook Compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  To Avril and Ken

  Contents

  Title

  Introduction by Candia McWilliam

  Main Text

  Introduction by Candia McWilliam

  Jessie Kesson was born Jessie Grant McDonald in October 1916 in the Inverness Workhouse – a bastard girl-child come into life in the middle of a catastrophic war to a mother who was intermittently drunk and intermittently offering herself for money (what you might call making ends meet in a hard time when the devil drove). She was a writer of great responsive natural talent and lifelong close-exercised artistic discipline. It was her gift to pursue what she refers to in Another Time, Another Place as the ‘serious search of laughter’s source’. As always with this writer, when dealing with what is serious, her approach is glancing not insistent.

  That innate talent, it seems clear, derived in no small part from her mother, who was full with remembered poetry and song, who knew the names of what she saw in nature all around her and her daughter, and from whom Jessie was taken away at the age of ten, on grounds of neglect, to be placed in Proctor’s Orphan Training Home at Skene in Aberdeenshire, the first and not the worst of such institutions in which she was to be held. It is not surprising that the theme that sings loudest throughout her work is imprisonment – of various circumstantial and psychological kinds. Like a run of closed doors in a corridor in a bad dream, her work evokes various forms of this: the feeling of being trapped; exclusion from insular human communities; being met with a closed mind; facing psychological manipulation and control. Glimpsed beyond this claustrophobic world, however, her work also shows the converse – a world of warmth, love and of art itself. This world is aquiver with life, desire and hope, like the light on the back of a gull in a lowering black sky, the starry pale bramble flowers in a dark hedge or indeed ‘the glitter of mica’ in stern north-east Scots stone (the phrase used for the title of another Jessie Kesson novel in 1963).

  Jessie was denied higher education on account of her perceived station in life. Such an orphan, female at that, would be presumed to be destined for work as either a domestic servant or a farm worker. Such is the barely examined, soppy-stern notion of ‘to be cruel to be kind’, which is, in our own time, mealy-mouthedly designated as ‘management of expectation’.

  This exclusion from the education that her mind and her spirit deserved was yet another insult to her consciousness as well as her intelligence, in a life already roughly shaken by constant upheavals and slammed by loss upon loss. She had a breakdown and was institutionalised again, this time in the mental hospital in Aberdeen. She married John Kesson in 1937 and worked with him as a farm worker, a cottar-wife, in north-east Scotland. Their labour was subject to the need or whim of the presiding farmer or landowner and they were susceptible to being sold to the lowest bidder. There was no domestic security and the houses needed not be more than barely habitable by profitable beast rather than transient man.

  Throughout, Kesson’s work retrieves lightness and air from within the weightiest, most soul-extinguishing of repetitive experience. The effect of her understanding as to how to space the notes of her observations, and of recalled and summoned emotion, paced along the stave of feeling, is that the reader may take seriously the scoring she offers when it comes to an understanding of time itself; time – that is perhaps the most difficult of all the many kinds of fiction, although it may be the only certain truth we know at the level of the cell. It is with her art as with the scone-making in Another Time, Another Place:

  She would miss Elspeth’s friendship. Elspeth who had tried to initiate her into the strange ways of this new life. Who had taught her to bake. Conjuring up a living entity out of a raw ingredient. ‘Lightly now – lightly. That scones [sic] will never rise. Thumping away at the dough like that. Leave it now. Let it alone. For the love of goodness. Give the dough a chance to breathe . . . ’

  It is not surprising that in her work she consistently makes time for ‘ootlins’ – an Aberdeenshire word that describes those who are outside the pack, overlooked or forgotten in some way different or ‘other’ – since who, in fact, is not an ootlin, or at least has may be considered to be one, merely by being translated to another time, another place?

  This short novel casts a spell reminiscent in technique of two other female writers of different nationality and extraction, but of similarly intense and original art: Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson. They also tested the connective and quickening limits of punctuation, and the creative possibilities of omission. All ask the reader to trust their very particular rhythm and to consider what they imply when they leave details out. Kesson’s high discipline and clean technique allow and ‘train’ the capacity of her reader to feel her protagonists’ pain, fear or heartbreak freshly, as in life, and not to become dulled by iteration or insistence. It is risky but is successful because the novel is wholly devoid of cheap intent or vulgar effect. She mobilises innocence while swerving naivety.

  The novel is in command of itself in terms of art, completely, while it deals with the consequences of an apparent lack of command over the self. The plot is about forbidden desire across time and place and it is set in time of war. The unities and verities are eternal, straight and remorseless. Very few writers indeed can capture the drive to outlawed or forbidden desire as Kesson can. Her technique is a matter of breath, anticipation, suspension of the reader’s conscript imagination and the increasingly – or so we understand the lovers to feel – relentless drive to consummation. This drive is shared, we come to feel, by all created nature, from the rolling seasons of the year to the last dusk-fuming bluebell and tender-horned snail. The whole, almost formally choreographic sense of suspension, teases us – nearly, almost, just-not and barely at all, and then, actually, something happens – or does it?

  In this novel, Jessie Kesson adds to the classical device of pathetic fallacy the forces of the farming year (rich in metaphors of fertility that must at all costs avoid the tumescent silliness of Cold Comfort Farm) in order to achieve her artistic goal. She evokes the trembling short beauty of those seasons when north-east Scotland responds to the brief attentions of the sun and comes forth in flower and scent, as opposed to the fabled grape-hung south whence come the alluring, dangerous, despised prisoners of war from Italy who glow in Another Time, Another Place with longing for
home, for sun, for heat and, all but impersonally, for contact with a woman.

  That there is something impersonal in the sense of circling and parried desire adds to the crisis of the novel. The act that proves so ruinous, that confirms and worsens the trap in which the young woman at the novel’s heart finds herself, isn’t that important. It’s as real in contemplation as in enactment, it’s plural and it is, crucially, shadowed by a version of itself.

  The situational trap becomes a moral trap, moved along with the virtuosic sleight of hand by which a ship might be introduced into a bottle – an image that is offered to us with breathtaking delicacy at the book’s close (which is nothing so limiting as a conclusion). Kesson reproduces the morbidities of a closed society, the septic nature of prejudice and of self-feeding rumour, and the fearful judgmental conclusions and failures of mercy by whose habitual use people prop themselves up in order to be seen to manage to stand upright in relation to one another, forgetting that, just a few degrees around their back, the workings show and we are seen as we are – but stooks of straw.

  A stark drollness lies behind the punitive tasks of the farm, the rotten tatties and back-breaking neeps, the befriended hens it seems unkind to eat after developing acquaintance, the duties and rare tense occasions of mirth, the vegetable show or the harvest home. In the words of one of Kesson’s tragically suffering yet richly individuated protagonists, you’re better off ‘dead than missing. You know where you are when you’re dead’.

  Another Time, Another Place works like a ballad and, like a ballad, it stays in the blood as well as in the mind, as the poems and songs of the mother of this rare writer abided in her own blood and mind to become her vivid coloured art.

  * * *

  THERE would be no gathering in of the corn today. The rain that had swept across Inveraig blotted out the firth itself. The corn that had stood just yesterday, high and ripe and ready to fall to the binder, bent earthwards now, beneath the driving lash of the wind.

  She could, the young woman thought, be standing high in some inland country, not in a sea-girt place at all. But then, she had not yet become accustomed to this alien place in which she now had her being.

  ‘You’ll not be needing the bag apron the day, mistress. I’m saying, Mistress Ainslie.’ She turned to find the shepherd at her shoulder. ‘I was saying, mistress’: it still took her unaware to be addressed by her recently acquired married title, still took her time to respond to it, as if those who uttered it spoke to another person, a different person from the one she knew herself to be.

  If no-one ever marries me

  And I don’t see why they should

  They say that I’m not pretty

  And I’m very seldom good

  But someone had married her, though she hadn’t got used to that either. ‘If this wind keeps on rising,’ the shepherd prophesied, scanning the sky for a break in the hill-locked clouds, ‘it might just manage to dry up the corn.’

  ‘Little chance of that.’ Finlay, the farm foreman, ambled towards them, his scythe sheltering under the sacking that should have protected his shoulders. ‘If my scythe cannot get at the inroads then it’s God help the binder. You’ll be a wee thing short in your pay poke,’ he warned the young woman, ‘if the rain keeps dinging like this. And you, Kirsty,’ he shouted across the dyke to her neighbour. ‘Still. That’ll give you both time to catch up with your washing.’

  ‘In weather like this,’ Kirsty snapped, rising as always to Finlay’s bait, ‘there’s no drying in it, man.’

  ‘Maybe no then, Kirsty,’ Finlay conceded, grinning, ‘maybe no. By the by,’ he turned again to the young woman, ‘you’re going to have neighbours next door. That’ll suit you, that’ll keep you from getting lonesome.’

  ‘Neighbours,’ Kirsty protested, ‘that bothy next door’s not fit for neighbours. There’s been nobody inside it since we stopped breeding pigs, and the boss sent the pigman packing.’

  ‘It’s not the pigman this time,’ Finlay assured her. ‘It’s Italians. Three of them. Prisoners-of-war.’

  ‘Italians!’ Kirsty gasped. ‘Foreigners. Prisoners-of-war.’

  Prisoners-of-war, heroic men from far-flung places: the young woman felt a small surge of anticipation rising up within her at the prospect of the widening of her narrow insular world as a farm-worker’s wife, almost untouched by the world war that raged around her. She always felt she was missing out on some tremendous event, never more so than when she caught a glimpse of girls of her own age, resplendent in uniform, setting out for places she would never set eyes on. Or when she caught their laughter-filled whispers of a whirling social life, the like of which she had never known.

  ‘Does that mean, does that mean, Finlay, that you’ll not be needing us for stooking the sheaves?’ She could interpret the anxiety in Kirsty’s voice. True enough the women would have preferred minding their homes to the darg in the fields. But, as Finlay was always pointing out, ‘Tenpence an hour is not to be sneezed at.’

  ‘Devil the bit of it, Kirsty. From what I hear tell of the Italians, they’re none too keen when it comes to bending their backs, and you’d better get the scrubbing brush going,’ Finlay advised the young woman, ‘and get that bothy cleaned up for the Italians. It will help to make up for the loss of your wages. Kirsty there can give you a hand if she likes,’ he suggested, as he turned to go.

  ‘Not me,’ Kirsty shouted after his disappearing back. ‘I’ve got better things to do than wait hand and foot on a bunch of foreigners.’

  Slamming her door behind her, Kirsty took her resentment inside the house, and immediately thrust it out again with her bairns. Bundling them threateningly through the door, ‘Late for school again,’ she warned them, ‘another morning.’

  * * *

  Scarfed, hooded, and belted, the bairns stood on the doorstep, momentarily unsure of their bearings, until Alick, spying the snail, shot forward to pounce on it.

  ‘Snail Snail

  Put out your horn’

  he chanted to the small captive, imprisoned in his hand. Mornings like this the young woman re­membered from her own not-so-distant child­hood, always lured the snails from the safety of their hiding places, to creep along the highways of danger.

  ‘And I will give you

  A barley corn’

  she sang across to the bairns, concluding their chant for them. Too grown-up now, though, to intrude on the small miracle that she knew was happening before their eyes, the tremulous appearance of the snail’s tiny horns, at the first touch of a human hand.

  ‘Are you lot still there?’ Kirsty demanded from her doorstep, dissolving the spell, and sending the bairns plunging up through the bracken.

  * * *

  ‘God knows what she’ll think of the Italians.’ Taking her attention off the bairns, Kirsty directed it now to Elspeth, making her way down the hill from her croft at Achullen.

  Of all their small community, Elspeth was the only one involved in and affected by the war. Engaged to Callum, a Scots-Canadian, to be married when the war was over, to go to Canada, to live forever. A fine place for Scots to settle in, Elspeth had always maintained. For, as she had often pointed out to the young woman, ‘You could work your fingers to the bone, on a small croft like Achullen, and not earn enough to buy the six foot of earth to bury yourself in, when it was all over and done with. But in Canada now . . .’

  It was after Callum was reported missing at Monte Cassino in Italy that Elspeth had stopped speaking about Canada; and the young woman had never since mentioned Canada to Elspeth. It was as if a whole continent had suddenly disappeared out of their ken.

  She missed the ‘speaks’ though. The fine long ‘speaks’ herself and Elspeth had shared, when Canada existed. Not that the young woman her­self had been able to add much to Elspeth’s knowledge of it. Remembering only how one of the boys in the orphanage where she had been brought up went to Canada to work on a farm . . . ‘He had a new tin trunk, Elspeth, we all envied him. Going way on
a ship, I mean. He was so excited. We envied that too. Then, on the morning he left, he started to cry. I couldn’t understand the reason for such tears. Not until the day I left the orphanage myself. Not even then. For I cried too, and I didn’t know what I was crying for . . .’

  Elspeth’s excitement had also affected the young woman. ‘O, Elspeth. You are lucky . . .’ Her envy had been heartfelt.

  ‘You’ll come and see me,’ Elspeth had suggested. Half-teasing, half-serious. ‘When your boat comes in . . .’

  But she herself knew that she would never see Canada. ‘Nor anywhere else, Elspeth. Just Scotland . . .’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Elspeth had reproved her. ‘Stuff and nonsense. You’re but young yet, lassie. You’ve got the whole world in front of you yet . . .’

  She had thought that too. Before she was married. She had thought she could go anywhere. Go everywhere, do anything. Do everything . . . ‘Not now though Elspeth,’ she had confided. ‘It’s all different now. Being married, I mean . . .’

  * * *

  ‘You’ve got to laugh,’ Kirsty said, as they watched Elspeth, her old waterproof coat flapping wide in the wind, striding down the hill towards them. The staff she always carried for the steep climb back lashing out at the bracken, clearing the way for the imperious passage of a queen. Boadicea, from remembered history lessons, taking on flesh at last.