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.