The White Bird Passes Read online

  Other titles by Jessie Kesson

  Glitter of Mica

  Another Time, Another Place

  Where the Apple Ripens

  Somewhere Beyond

  First published 1958

  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 099 8 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 054 7 in paperback format

  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

  Bright is the ring of words

  When the right man rings them

  And the maid remembers.

  R.L.S.

  Contents

  Title

  Introduction by Linda Cracknell

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  A Bubbling Immediacy

  Introduction by Linda Cracknell

  I like to imagine the blether that took place between Jessie Kesson and Nan Shepherd on an early spring day in 1941 when they found themselves sitting face-to-face on a train travelling from Inverurie towards Elgin. When she stumbled aboard, Kesson saw that her carriage companion was to be a ‘lady’. Married to a simple ‘cottar’ herself, she would be considered a ‘wifie’. Despite their fundamental differences, she blurted out the morning’s news of the death of a favourite poet – ‘Hamewith’, or Charles Murray, who wrote in Doric. The news found common ground and pitched the two women into an encounter with lasting consequences.

  According to Kesson, they ‘tired the sun with talking’. Their backgrounds could not have been more different, and yet they shared a passion for the woods and hills that passed by the window of their carriage, and a love of words and literature. Kesson, who had made a small but promising start in writing by that time, often attributed her further determination to this chance meeting. Shepherd encouraged her to enter a short story competition, which she subsequently won.

  I picture them leaning towards each other, illuminated by flashes of spring sunlight between Scots pine, noting the wood anemones spilling down the banks next to the tracks, catching at each other’s joys, so that Shepherd later remarked on Kesson’s ‘life gushing out in all sorts of ways’. At the end of the journey, a strawberry-coloured silk headscarf passed from Shepherd to Kesson as a memento of the encounter and a lifelong literary friendship began. It led indirectly to Kesson’s distinctive voice being caught between the pages of a book seventeen years later – The White Bird Passes.

  In their sharing of Doric words, surely they must have lingered over one in particular. Kesson in this, her first novel, as well as in her other works, vividly animates the condition of the ‘ootlin’ – the Aberdeenshire word she uses for ‘queer folk who were “out” and who, perversely enough, never had any desire to be “in”.’ Towards the end of the novel, an authority figure puzzles over Janie, the young narrator, finding her ‘far too knowing for [her] years’ whilst fearing that she will soon ‘find the world a tough place’. This paradox, reiterated by others, characterises a girl who may have witnessed too much of adult confusions, but arrives on the page with an acute but naive sensitivity. Simultaneously old and young, sharply observant and articulate on the agonies of loss and absence, she makes the perfect narrator.

  Janie can be both solitary and gregarious, is at ease in the natural world and yet has an affinity with ‘ne’er do weels’, the disadvantaged and the oppressed. These tensions and paradoxes are perhaps the axis of the novel’s magic, opposing the eight-year-old (and latterly sixteen-year-old) Janie’s playfulness and occasional fearful withdrawal into solitary thought and imagination, with a surprising revelry in the bawdy wit, curses and sensory mayhem of the Elgin lane that is her childhood home.

  The novel reveals the particularity of lives that have conventionally remained untold and is thus a valuable document of social history. However, it is also charged with universal emotion and eloquently filtered through a child’s imagination. The fine line Kesson’s work treads between autobiography and fiction, so sensitively and fully explored in Isobel Murray’s Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life, is inescapable here. The experience of growing up in the 1920s in an Elgin slum, the absent father and the Skene orphanage are undoubtedly drawn from Kesson’s own life, material she re-trod both on the page and in her writing for radio. But what matters in a reading of The White Bird Passes is not identifying what was selected from life, what was omitted or invented, but its powerful sense of authenticity. It is candid and deeply felt yet humorous, and it dances off the page with its sheer love of language.

  The White Bird Passes was published in hardback in 1958 but it wasn’t until Michael Radford’s BBC film in 1980 that it received the acclaim it deserved and appeared in paperback. Along with the many good reviews on initial publication, an accusation was made by The Daily Record and Mail: ‘Daughter Shows No Shame’. This alluded to the portrayal in the novel of the mother’s small-time prostitution and child neglect that attracted the attention of the ‘cruelty man’, thought to be autobiographical.

  Arguably, rather than a slur on a mother, it can be read as a love letter. At home in the claustrophobic lane, Janie’s mother is preoccupied and elusive and the narrative is taut with fear of her death. But when mother and daughter leave the lane and walk five miles through countryside to visit her grandmother, it explodes into a sense of space and green, of joy and liberty. Their poetic naming of the flowers, the vitality of scent, song and story, elevate their intimacy. Such moments with the beloved mother who ‘saw a legend in the canna flowers and a plough amongst the stars’ are luminous almost because of their rarity. As Janie says, such fleeting times ‘more than made up for the other things lacking in their relationship’ and are coupled with the child’s fierce sense of protection and responsibility at moments of her mother’s vulnerability. There is also an adult sense of gratitude: ‘I would myself be blind now, if she had never lent me her eyes’.

  Kesson transformed personal hardship into a story of beauty, enchantment and humour, told with the ‘bubbling immediacy’ that Nan Shepherd remarked on in her 1958 review. When she gives us Janie, ‘just walking along watching the mists steam from the seams of the Cairngorms,’ or she observes the ‘peesie’ (lapwing) ‘weeping its grief across the stubble field’, a vein pulses between the inner life of a vivacious child and a powerful sense of place. Her words skewer the poignancy of joy or heartbreak.

  Kesson braved a barrier of class and education when she initiated that encounter on the train in 1941 and connected by chance with a writer who also found landscape and self inseparable and focused on small, northern communities. In a sense, she never returned to the margins and she remained courageous. Perhaps Janie’s frustrated cry – ‘I want to write poetry. Great poetry’ �
�� was indeed Kesson’s own at that particular crossroads in her life. Thankfully, as we pass the centenary of her birth in 2016, the spirit that is embodied in her words and her marvellous story lives on.

  one

  OUR Lady’s Lane; that was what the Monks had called this thoroughfare eight hundred years ago. The name may have fitted it in their time; perhaps it had been a green and cloistered place in those distant days. But, in this Year of Grace 1926, it was no longer green, although it still remained cloistered.

  Lady’s Lane was a tributary of High Street, one of many such tributaries of long, narrow wynds that slunk backwards from the main street, gathering themselves into themselves, like a group of women assuring each other proudly, ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves’, and, at the same time, usually knowing more than most people of what is going on around.

  If you rushed down High Street in a hurry, you wouldn’t notice Lady’s Lane at all, so narrowly and darkly does it skulk itself away, but Lady’s Lane would most certainly see you. At all hours of the day a voluntary lookout lounges against the entrance to the Lane. It may be Poll Pyke, Battleaxe, or the Duchess. For those ladies of the Lane are in some mysterious way self-appointed guardians of the Lane. The Duchess is the supreme guardian of course. Poll Pyke and Battleaxe are merely her faithful henchwomen, competent enough to take over temporary command on these not infrequent occasions when the Duchess is forcibly removed to Barclamp Jail for ten days without the option, and wary enough to step down from office the moment the Duchess’s ‘time’ is up.

  The less ambitious occupants of the Lane were quite content with this order of things. It meant that they could swipe the bugs from the walls of their sub-lets in peace, in the sure and certain knowledge that, if anything exciting and untoward was taking place in another part of the Lane, they wouldn’t miss it; they would receive a clarion call from the Duchess to come and bear witness to such goings on.

  Only the children of the Lane were irked by such vigilance. To get up through the Lane unnoticed took on the face of an adventure, and became triumph indeed, if they could reach their own doors without the Duchess confronting them with a pillow-slip, threepence, and a threat: ‘Run up to Riley’s back door for a stale loaf, tuppence of broken biscuits. And see you that the loaf isna’ too stale.’ Or Annie Frigg trapping them with her tin plate, her persuasive voice, and a promise: ‘My fine queanie take a runnie down to Lossie Will’s for a tanner of herrings. Your legs are younger nor mine. And I’ve got something for you. A great big ball. All the colours of the rainbow it is. Blue, red, green, and yellow. And there’s something else about this ball that I’ve got. It will never burst. Run on now, for my herrings. That’s a queanie!’

  And though the Lane’s children knew from experience that Annie’s promises never came true, they grew up and they grew old before they finally lost their hope that one day Annie Frigg might really give them a ball of all colours that would never burst.

  Janie was one of the children who never quite lost faith in Annie.

  ‘Annie Frigg’s giving me a doll,’ she shouted to Gertie Latham, as she struggled up the cobbles with a pail of water. ‘If I carry her water for her, she’s going to give me a doll.’

  ‘Some doll,’ Gertie responded. ‘Annie Frigg’s just an old twister. It’s Salac’s night, Janie. Let that old bitch carry her own water, and come on. We’ll play the Salacs up for a laugh.’

  ‘But the doll,’ Janie said reluctantly, ‘it’s a fairy one.’

  ‘What about the toy piano she promised you? And the skipping rope? And all the other things she was going to give you for carrying her water?’ Gertie went on relentlessly. ‘What about all those things?’

  ‘She just couldn’t lay hands on them,’ Janie explained. ‘She’s got them all, Gertie. Somewhere in her room, I’m sure she’s got them all. She can tell you every bit about what they’re like. She couldn’t do that if they weren’t there at all. Could she, now?’

  ‘O.K.’ Gertie became resigned to the inevitable. ‘Be a soft mark if you like. I’m away for my supper. Hurry up out, Janie. It’s Salac’s night.’

  Trauchling up Annie’s stairs with the pail of water, now almost half empty, Janie recalled her Mother’s verdict on Annie: ‘There’s one thing about Annie, she’ll never send you away with a sore heart.’ Nor did she.

  ‘Here’s your water, Missis Frigg,’ Janie shouted, bracing herself against the smell of cats that was going to rush out and catch her breath the instant Annie opened the door. ‘It was awful heavy that water. I thought I’d never get up here with it.’ Like Jack in the Box, Annie’s head popped round the door, a grey, curly head, like a golliwog grown old, and a mouth that looked as if it had a black moustache above it, but Janie knew it wasn’t a moustache, it was just the snuff that Annie took to clear her head.

  ‘My fine queanie. There’s no’ a better queanie in the Lane.’

  Annie’s eyes twinkled, and Janie, a willing prisoner, stood caught again in the spell of Annie’s promises. ‘About that doll you’re to get, I’ve got an idea it might be lying under some bits of things that’s come from America. Some bits belonging to my cousin’s bairn; just your size she is. And my word there’s some bonnie bits that will fit you. There’s a blue velvet frock for one thing. And a ribbon to go with it. I’m having a sort out just now. And when I’ve sorted out, you’re the queanie that’s going to get the fine surprise, or my name’s not Annie Frigg!’

  Janie emerged as always, empty handed but full-visioned after an encounter with Annie, and with but one small doubt, how to share the delight of this new promise with Gertie, who could never see that something to look forward to, and something to dream about, were such glad things, even when you knew within yourself that they might never come true.

  It was Janie’s day to be ‘caught’.

  ‘That you, Janie?’ Mysie Walsh’s voice called to her from across the landing. ‘Run a message for me, luv?’

  Janie needed no second bidding. Doing something for Mysie Walsh brought its own reward, and it wasn’t the threepenny bit she always gave you either. She was big and bright and safe. And next to Janie’s own Mother, Janie thought her the loveliest woman in the Lane, with a smile that sucked you right into the core of its warmness, and plump arms that caught you and squeezed you when she was excited, and left your small body trembling with something of her own sudden excite­ment. Sometimes, with a sudden impulse to please the women grouped round the entrance to the Lane, Mysie Walsh would dance to the music coming from the chip shop’s gramophone, her petticoats whirling, her garters showing, real and silk, her voice rising above the gramophone; and, like her smile, her voice gathered you right into it, so that her song seemed to come from you, too:

  Yes, I’m goin’,

  Yes, I’m goin’,

  And soon I’ll be hullo-in

  That coal black Mammy of Mine!

  In moments like those the Lane became so alive and full of colour to Janie that she felt suddenly and intensely glad for just being alive in a world of song, and colour, and whirling petticoats and warm, dark women like Mysie Walsh.

  ‘What message do you want me to get?’ Janie sniffed the room. It smelt, as always, different from all the other rooms in the Lane, of powder and cream and scent, all mixed up together and coming out in one great sweet smell, which Janie thought of as the smell of a woman that’s lovely.

  ‘Cheese. A quarter will do, luv.’

  The request, as much as the tone in which it was requested, aroused Janie from her contemplation of the room. Mysie Walsh lay on the top of her bed, her face hidden in the pillow. Janie had never seen Mysie Walsh without her face, dark and laughing. She sensed there was something wrong.

  ‘Have you been taken ill?’ she asked the head on the pillow.

  ‘No. Not ill. You’ll find money for the cheese on the mantelpiece, or on the table somewhere.’

  ‘You’re awfully sad, then?’

  ‘Real sad. Hurry, Janie, or you won’t catch McKe
nzie’s open.’

  ‘Just cheese? Nothing else?’

  ‘Just cheese. Just a quarter. Shut the door behind you.’

  Cheese. Not like Mysie Walsh’s usual messages, Janie thought to herself, as she ran up High Street. Mysie Walsh’s messages were usually as delightful as herself. Phulnana from the chemist’s, a smell of it, a little on your own cheeks, rubbed well in by Mysie Walsh herself, and the promise of the jar to yourself forever and ever when the cream was done. Or a comb from Woolworth’s, the brightest one you could find, with gold stars on it, that shone through Mysie Walsh’s hair, even when it was tucked away, and her old comb with only some of the teeth out for yourself. Or cream buns, not stale ones either. ‘And we’ll have one with a cup of tea together when you come back, luvie.’ All the other people in the Lane bought a quarter of cheese, or polony, or a tin of condensed milk. ‘And tell McKenzie to mark it on the book.’ But not Mysie Walsh. You never had to get it marked on the book for her, because amongst all her other enchantments, Mysie Walsh also always had money.

  Twenty minutes later Janie stood in the Lane debating what to do with the money in her hand. Two shillings. The biggest amount she had ever had. More than Mysie Walsh had ever given her before. ‘Keep the change, Janie,’ Mysie Walsh had said, when she delivered the cheese.

  ‘But there’s two shillings change,’ Janie pointed out. ‘The cheese only cost sixpence, and I took half a crown.’

  ‘Keep it,’ Mysie Walsh had insisted. ‘Run off now, Janie, and bang the door behind you.’