Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps

Childhood and Youth, 1875–1895

The countryside of upper Tweeddale had experienced a fierce storm, so that the snow was piled high in drifts on the morning of the second day of December 1874, but that did not prevent family and neighbours from crowding into the parlour of Broughton Green, a square-fronted, whitewashed farmhouse standing on the main Edinburgh to Carlisle road. They had come to witness the marriage of the Reverend John Buchan to Helen Masterton, one of two daughters of the house. Afterwards, they sat down to a generous farmhouse luncheon of hare soup, roast meats, creams and trifles, and stayed on to drink cups of tea and eat cake and shortbread before braving the snow once more.

The bride was seventeen years old, slight of build and no more than five feet tall, with a strong face, blue eyes and a magnificent mane of golden hair, which she put up for the first time that day. She wore a white satin dress and white kid shoes with rosettes on the toes and blue silk laces, in sharp contrast to her new husband’s sober clerical black. The Reverend John Buchan was ten years her senior, of above average height, strongly built, with blue eyes, a ruddy complexion and mutton-chop whiskers.

The couple had met in church the Christmas before, after Helen came home from boarding school in Peebles, the county town; at the time the young man was deputising for the sick resident minister of the Free Church of Scotland in Broughton. The year 1874 had seen a religious revival in Britain, generated in part by the arrival of the charismatic American missionaries and hymn writers, Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, and Helen had already heard tell of this eloquent, committe d – and handsome – young preacher, who held outdoor prayer meetings in lonely glens. He was a notable topic of conversation in the Masterton circle, not surprisingly, since this family had shown both piety and independence when they provided the land, and helped to build the Free Kirk in Broughton, at the time of the ‘Disruption’ in 1843.^*

The Reverend John Buchan later told his wife that he had fallen in love at once with the back of her head; in her turn, she was stirred by his youth and his religious ardour: ‘As a young man he was like a sword-blade, pure and keen. And yet he was such a boy with it all, or I never would have dared to marry him.’¹

Mr Buchan was the eldest son of John Buchan, a ‘Writer’ (solicitor) in Peebles, and his wife, Violet Henderson, who was of local farming stock.^** The boy had been a good classical scholar in his youth, and was always a voracious reader, in particular loving Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. He also knew by heart a great deal of poetry, old Scottish stories and all the Border ballads, published or not, which he had learned at his mother’s knee. She also taught him the names of the Lowland wild flowers. When young, he had tramped the hills around Peebles, fishing in the ‘waters’ that ran into the River Tweed, and rioting with local boys. His was quite a wild youth, which may explain the comparative latitude he gave his children.

When the wedding party was over, the couple took the train from Broughton via Edinburgh to Perth, to the little stone-built manse in York Place, close to the Knox Free Kirk, to which he had been ‘called’ after his temporary sojourn in Broughton. Mrs Buchan was, not surprisingly, daunted by having to run a household on a tight income, as well as playing her expected part in the life of the kirk. Moreover, almost immediately, she became pregnant, giving birth to a son on 26 August 1875. He was called, simply and unimaginatively, John. She was only just eighteen years old. Later, she told her children that there were many times in that first year when she had been sorely tempted to run away home.

It is possible that the Buchans’ move from Perth to Pathhead on the Fife coast less than two years later was the result of a friendship that Mr Buchan had forged in his theological college days with Miss Helen Chalmers , the elderly daughter of the mighty Dr Thomas Chalmers, one of the leaders of the ‘Disruption’. The two worked together amongst the poor of south Edinburgh and, when the Free Kirk in Pathhead (in which the Chalmers family had an interest) lost its minister, it is likely that Miss Chalmers recommended her young protégé to the Elders.

Whatever the truth of that, in November 1875, the Buchans found themselves ‘flitting’, with their baby son, to a manse in Smeaton Road, a quarter-mile up a steep hill from the harbour at Kirkcaldy and close to Nairn and Co’s linoleum factory. Mrs Buchan’s heart sank at the first sight of the manse and its environs:

November is a poor time to go to a new place and Kirkcaldy certainly looked a most unattractive part of the world when we arrived on a cold wet afternoon. The ‘queer-like smell’ from the linoleum factories, the sea drearily grey and strange to my inland eyes, the drive through the narrow streets and up the steep ‘Path’, past great factories and mean houses, until we reached the road, knee-deep in mud, where the manse stood, combined to press me to the earth.²

In the 1870s, Pathhead was a large village, still more or less distinct from the town of Kirkcaldy to the south-west and the village of Dysart to the north-east. The area had long been a centre of textile-making, salt-panning and coal-mining, the products of which were trundled down to the ports for export abroad or for transport up and down the coast. The coming of the railway in 1847 had accelerated industrialisation and, in particular, the manufacture of linoleum. The square, stone-built manse stood in a big garden but, behind it, nearer the sea, was the coastal railway and Nairn’s colossal factory, while, in front, across a very muddy by-road, there was a coal-pit, a rope-walk and a bleaching-works.

In fact, for all the shortcomings of locality, the manse itself suited the expanding family well. A number of babies were born there: Anna in 1877, William in 1880, (James) Walter in 1883 and Violet in 1888.

The household also included a young nursemaid called Helen Robertson (known as Ellie Robbie), who had accompanied the Buchans from Perth, as well as a cook called Marget from the Borders, but Mrs Buchan took pride in being able to keep her own house spotless. In particular, she enjoyed the annual spring cleaning, so necessary in towns where smuts from coal fires and industrial processes dulled the polish of furniture, smeared the windows and darkened the carpets and curtains. The house was surrounded by a flower and kitchen garden, tended by Mr Buchan, and where the children all had their separate garden plots. The back of the house looked across the town below to the Firth of Forth, with a distant prospect of Edinburgh and the Pentlands and a view of the Inchkeith Lighthouse in the Firth.

When ‘JB’ was four or five years old, he was badly injured in an accident. He was travelling in a carriage, when he leant out to look at bluebells and the door gave way. The back wheel passed over the side of his head and broke his skull. In a panic, Mrs Buchan ran into the nearest cottage and started opening drawers to find something to bind the wound.^* Mercifully, their doctor happened to be passing in a dogcart, and escorted them home and stayed all night. He held out little hope that the boy would survive or, if he did, would not be brain damaged. JB was operated on to relieve pressure on the brain and, when finally he regained consciousness, his mother asked him the name of their butcher, a particular favourite of his. When he gave the name at once, she wept with relief.

For much of a year, he lay in bed, not allowed to try to read or exert himself; when finally he was allowed up, he had to learn how to walk again. He went about with an enormous bandage on his head and one neighbour memorably remarked: ‘It seems almost a pity he pulled through. I’m afraid he will never be anything but an object.’³ The only lasting sign of this accident was a prominent bump on the left side of his forehead, which very slightly dragged down his left eyelid.

Both Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson spent time as small children in bed or as invalids. Such an enforced state of idleness encourages the development of both patience and imagination in sensitive children.

Once up and about again, JB’s circumstances fostered those beginnings. The presence of so many different industrial activities within even a small child’s walking distance could not but engender a sense of adventure and wonder. Smeaton Road may now be a post-industrial wasteland but, in 1880, it hummed continuously with life and noise: the clanking of the pithead wheel, the factory sirens and the comings and goings of workers. The children watched women twisting rope in the rope-walk and they were – astonishingly – tolerated by the miners, who would place them in trolleys underground and pull them about. They played in disused quarries and the wooded ‘dens’ or glens of the burns running down to the sea. When a little older, they discovered the beach below the ruined Ravenscraig Castle, famous for Scott’s ballad of Rosabelle, where the oystercatchers poked about in the shallows, their piping mingling with the wash of the tide and the cries of the seagulls. Beyond was the harbour at Dysart, with a harbourmaster’s house slant on, and a ship-building yard, and carts rumbling down the narrow wynds. Here sailors strolled about, and occasionally conducted the children around their ships, and told them colourful tales of foreign lands.

Inland, there were the Dunnikier woods, knotty with the roots of beech and oak, with hidden ponds, where they skated in winter, bluebells flowering in spring, and, just beyond, the rolling landscape of agricultural Fife. These places JB peopled with characters and incidents from the Bible and The Pilgrim ’s Progress. A pond he named the ‘Slough of Despond’ and there was more than one ‘Hill Difficulty’.

The characters of the Buchan children were formed both by devoted, serious-minded parents and their environment, at a time when children were given what seems to us unimaginable freedom but where they had to create their own amusements. They had the time and encouragement to make deep friendships, undistracted and untroubled by what was happening in the outside world. They were taught to learn poetry and prose off by heart and, all his life, JB would depend heavily on the results of this early training – when writing letters, speeches and even his prose works. It’s hard to imagine how he could have done as much as he did without being able to dip confidently into so capacious and reliable a memory. It rarely failed him.

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, outside 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 garden ¹⁰ 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.

Furthermore, Mr Buchan’s theology, on examination, may not have been quite as unswervingly rigid as the stereotype would suggest. While there is much firm orthodoxy, there are also some tantalising suggestions of something softer, in a valedictory sermon he preached when leaving Pathhead in 1888²⁰ and in a privately printed collection of his writings and sermons.²¹ His tireless pastoral concern for his congregation is apparent throughout. In his family life, he was no killjoy, and this is reflected in his writing and preaching of gladness in ‘the glorious excellence of the message’. There is no reference to the application of internal Church discipline (harsh or otherwise). His reverence for Scripture is not unthinking; he is plainly aware of the liberal, especially German, strand of analysis and interpretation and is prepared to engage with it. In his Pathhead valedictory, he sought to explain that it was not due to ‘natural harshness or desire to say unpleasant things’ but because ‘knowing the terrors of the Lord, I have spoken much of hell and the retribution that will overtake the careless’. In saying so, he demonstrated an ambiguity in relation to predestination. It would take considerable theological sophistication, even sophistry, to argue that retributive punishment could be both unavoidably predetermined by God and avoidable by taking care.

Although he could be explicit about the doctrine of election, it seems that he could not let go of the thought that the autonomous exercise of free will might play a part in salvation. He wrote of God rendering ‘unto every man according to his deeds’ (rather than ‘according to God’s predetermined decree’).²² He preached against letting ‘the opportunity slip of saving the soul’.²³ How could that be if the soul was damned from the beginning of time? In a sermon entitled ‘The Teaching of Paul – the Plan of Salvation’, he admitted that he was unable to reconcile predestination and free will, ‘they must be left where scripture leaves them – side by side’. However, intriguingly, he found in St Paul’s teaching ‘bright glimpses of a universality [i.e. that all might be saved] in the plan of salvation’.²⁴ JB much later regretted that his father had not lived to read the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, for he thought their views had much in common. While Barth’s approach to Scripture may have been closer to Mr Buchan’s than that of the German liberals, he had proposed a doctrine of predestination that could be characterised as ‘universalist’. If JB believed that his father would agree, that would cast some light on the latter’s theological openness.

JB as an adult was not sectarian, unlike many members of the Free Kirk. As in politics, he was always sympathetic to the validity of other sincerely held views. Nor was he a Bible literalist. In The Kirk in Scotland of 1930 he criticised the view of religion as something static, ‘the forms of which have been established once and for all by a divine decree which admits of no fresh interpretation’.²⁵ He liked to quote the fourth-century Roman statesman, Symmachus, who believed that there was no single road to so great a mystery. He was both an ordained Elder in the Church of Scotland and an Anglican churchwarden. He attacked the cruelty of seventeenth-century Presbyterian church discipline and the dangers of antinomianism (by which those who believe themselves ‘elect’ feel free from any moral law) – most vividly, in Witch Wood – but his target was plainly contemporary as well as historical.

It would be mistaken to conclude that all this amounted to outright rejection of Calvinism. Unfortunately, it is difficult to extract from JB’s many speeches and writings in which he touched on religion a consistent, systematic account of his theology. It is better, and easier, to look at how he lived. As the story unfolds, we shall see that, far from rejecting all of that for which his father stood, in a number of ways he exemplified and developed it in a manner that is distinctively (though far from uniquely) Calvinist. As JB himself said of his time at Oxford, ‘the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed’.²⁶ That word ‘confirmed’ is the key.

Following his father’s example, JB ’s Christian faith was the foundation of his understanding of the cosmos and the motivation for his way of living. In a talk he gave to the Selkirk Public Service Association in December 1915, he described religion as meaning ‘nothing less than the government of life according to spiritual discipline’ – a view with which his father would have wholeheartedly agreed; both men lived their lives accordingly. In the same talk, JB characterised ‘carelessness’ (a favourite theme of his father’s) as irreligion. Both had a lifelong wonder and delight in the natural world, which they understood to disclose God’s glory. Both had a sense of the limitless sovereignty of God, resulting in gratitude, humility and obligation, but also an unmediated relationship with Him (the characteristic of all Protestantism). Both believed that each unforgiving minute must be filled with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, and that happiness is not to be sought, but might be hoped for as the result of achievement, following self-denial (the earthly road, as for Christian in The Pilgrim ’s Progress, being narrow and hard). And both father and son shared the apprehension of a cosmic battle between Good and Evil being played out in the world and the urgency with which that must be recognised and engaged. JB’s life cannot properly be understood without grasping this.

As one Scottish minister of religion succinctly put it: ‘Presbyterian Calvinism set great store on justification by grace through faith, but Old Testament legalism sometimes loomed large in practice – most obviously in Sabbatarianism .’²⁷ Certainly, as he grew to manhood, JB found Sabbath restrictions on his reading more irksome. In Scholar Gipsies he wrote of his grandfather, John Masterton, to whom this collection of essays is dedicated: ‘One man of good character but no pretensions to piety made the writer’s boyhood a burden by forbidding the reading of any secular book on the Saturday, Sabbath, or Monday. “For,” said he, “though there’s naething in the Bible about it, I hold that the Lord’s day shall aye get plenty of room to steer in.”’²⁸

As a result of their ministry, JB’s parents had a large and diverse acquaintanceship and were not above giving sedate soirées, where they could embarrass their children by their catholic taste in people. The children learned how to put a variety of people at their ease, finding common ground and never showing that they were bored. Most importantly, they learned to look for the good in the most unpromising material and, by looking, often found it.

They made their own friends mainly amongst the children of Presbyterian ministers, who understood completely what it was to be born in the shadow of the pulpit. Charles Dick, JB ’s closest boyhood friend, was the son and grandson of Free Kirk ministers. Other friends, David Young Cameron and his sister, Katie, were the children of a Church of Scotland minister. The Camerons were both artists, and David later introduced JB to John Lane, who had founded the publishing company, The Bodley Head, as well as the voguish, short-lived periodical , The Yellow Book, which featured stories by well-known writers such as Edmund Gosse and Henry James, and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, its first editor. Katie Cameron seems not to have cared much for JB as a teenager, finding him too short in stature, too little prepared to fall in with social events, too little impressed by Glasgow, too quick to give offence (which the gentle Willie Buchan had then to smooth over), too obviously ambitious and single-minded, and too little inclined, as was Anna also, to fall in love with anybody.²⁹

He was certainly single-minded. In the school ‘session’, 1891–2, he took the Leaving Certificate Examination and passed with Honours in Higher English, Higher Latin, Higher Mathematics and Lower Greek. In October that year, aged seventeen, he enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study the general MA course, while living at home, as did most Scottish students at the time. The course consisted of seven subjects: Latin (called Humanity), Greek, History, Mathematics, Logic, Natural Philosophy (what we would call Natural Sciences) and Moral Philosophy.

The session ran from October to April,^* and every morning I had to walk four miles to the eight o’clock class through every variety of the winter weather with which Glasgow fortifies her children. My road lay through the south side of the city, across the Clyde, and so to the slopes of Gilmorehill. Most of that road is as ugly as anything you can find in Scotland, but to me in the retrospect it was all a changing panorama of romance. There was the weat her – fog like soup, drenching rains, winds that swirled down the cavernous streets, mornings that dawned bright and clear over snow. There was the sight of humanity going to work and the signs of awakening industry. There was the bridge with the river starred with strange lights, the lit shipping at the Broomielaw, and odours which even at their worst spoke of the sea … And at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the glow of a West Highland sunrise.³⁰

Those gaunt walls had been designed by George Gilbert Scott in the mature Gothic Revival style, and enfolded a double quadrangle, between which were cloisters, entered through the base of an enormously tall tower, topped off with pinnacles. The university had moved there from the kindlier, sootier and more confining Old College in the High Street in 1870. JB thought the buildings like ‘the battlements of a celestial city’, which might have pleased Scott had he known. Gilmorehill was close to Kelvin grove Park, designed by Joseph Paxton in the 1850s, which led down to the River Kelvin. The students were thus away from the crowded, dirty streets of central Glasgow and breathing fresh air.

When JB arrived, the reputation of the university was flying high, since Lord Kelvin (the great scientist of thermodynamics, after whom the Kelvin measure of temperature is named) was still, after many years, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, while other luminaries included Edward Caird, Professor of Moral Philosophy, who was succeeded by the even more eminent, and very lovable, Henry Jones in 1894. A. C. Bradley, the Shakespearean critic, was Regius Professor of English. From JB’s point of view, the most important Chair turned out to be that of Greek, which was held by Gilbert Murray, the outstanding Oxford-educated classicist who had been elevated to the post in 1889 when only twenty-three, and who was to make such an impression on the young man – and he on Murray.

At the end of a lecture to his Middle Greek class, JB went up to ask what Murray considered a most unexpected question. The lad explained that he was editing Sir Francis Bacon’s essays for a London publisher and wanted to know why Bacon quoted a phrase from the Greek philosopher Democritus in Latin and where would he have found the translation? Murray thought the quotation was from Cicero, ‘but such a pupil in the Middle Class was obviously a treasure, and we formed a friendship which lasted through life’.³¹

JB seems not to have been a ‘figure’ at Glasgow, indeed was practically anonymous in the first year. Although his friends from Hutchesons’ who had gone on to university with him – Joe Menzies, Charlie Dick and John Edgar, in particular – thought him a ‘genius’ and told anyone who would listen, he kept his talents pretty well wrapped up, working in solitude on his studies, as well as writing essays, poetry, short stories and even a novel in his spare time.

A shadow fell over the family while JB was still in his first year at the University. His much-loved five-year-old youngest sister, Violet, was ill; indeed at the end of the ‘session’, in April 1893, he had to postpone a promised visit from Charlie Dick because of her sickness. ‘She is much weaker since we came here [Peebles] and if we cannot get her strength up soon she will not recover.’³²

Violet was a most singular little girl, who seems to have had a highly precocious moral sense. Her father wrote of her: ‘To tell her that she was grieving Jesus was sure ere long to bring a penitent confession from her lips. There was in her character a deep substratum of serious thought.’³³ She also shared with her father a great interest in flowers, both wild and garden, forming thereby a close bond with him. Five years younger than Walter, she was very much the pet of the family, and a welcome companion in such a masculine environment for her older sister Anna.

When she was about three, Violet began to suffer from periodic and sometimes painful gastric troubles, which caused her to lose weight. A family photograph taken, probably, in the summer of 1892 shows Violet sitting on her mother’s knee, looking like a wraith in comparison to her heartily healthy brothers and sister. But the family were not seriously alarmed until early the following year, when she began to decline quite fast. They took her to Broughton in April in the hope that the country air would do her good. ‘In the furnace of affliction she was chosen. Her self-will was gone and a beautiful patience took its place,’ wrote her father.³⁴ It is hard not to recoil at the idea of a little girl discussing her imminent demise with her family, but infant death was an ever-present fact of late Victorian life and the Buchan family were, of course, firm believers in the Hereafter.

She died on 16 June, apparently of tuberculosis of the mesenteric glands in the stomach. Who knows whether even the expensive Edinburgh doctor who was summoned to her bedside diagnosed her illness correctly? Whatever it was, he had no answer for it. She was buried in Broughton churchyard, next to her grandfather, John Masterton. Mr Buchan put together a privately published memorial volume, A Violet Wreath, which included poems that he had written about her, in both English and Scots. It is one long howl of pain for the family’s loss – impossible to read without emotion – but at the same time there is a resigned submission to the will of God. ‘The Lord has a right to the best, and we do not grudge her to Him and happiness,’³⁵ celestial happiness being of a completely different order from the earthly variety. JB was shaken out of his profound teenage self-absorption and wrote to Charlie Dick three weeks later: ‘I must apologise for not writing to you sooner. My only excuse is that I hadn’t the heart, I was so troubled at my sister’s death. I had no idea a death in a family was such a painful thing …’³⁶

He wrote a lot to Dick that summer, sometimes in the arch and mannered style common amongst well-read, precocious teenagers in every age. In September, for example, he was (reluctantly) on holiday with his family on the Isle of Arran and Dick received this:

I am coming up, perchance next week for more books, when, if the gods be propitious, I may see thy face once more. Yet, (as is likely) if I come not back any more at all, but leave my bones (os, ossis, a bone) on this desolate island, the following is my will (testamentum, saith Cicero)…³⁷

Charlie Dick seems to have been JB’s closest friend at Glasgow, their interests coinciding and their personalities complementary. (Katie Cameron called Charlie Dick ‘vague’.) In the vacations, they bicycled to see each other in Tweeddale, since Dick’s grandfather was a minister in Coldstream, and they walked long distances in Galloway. When in South Africa in 1902, JB wrote to Dick saying how ‘deplorably sentimental’ he was about ‘those old madcap days of ours’.³⁸ Other friends at Glasgow included H. N. Brailsford, to whom Professor Murray gave a revolver when Brailsford said he wanted to fight for the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, and who became a well-known left-wing journalist. There was also Robert (Bertie) Horne, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, as well as Alexander MacCallum Scott MP, who has left us a pen-portrait of JB at this time:

He seemed to step into an inheritance. Everything he put his hand to prospered and people accepted him on every hand. He had an air of simple and convincing assurance. He believed in himself, not offensively, but with a quiet reserve. His whole manner inspired trust and confidence and respect. He could depend on himself and others felt that they could depend on him too. His judgment was sane and was therefore listened to. The fact was that he made himself indispensable to people. They knew him for a man who could order and systematise.³⁹

Two days before Violet died, JB had finished editing Sir Francis Bacon’s essays and apothegms that he had mentioned to Gilbert Murray in the first session. Almost certainly, he was introduced to Walter Scott (a publisher with both Newcastle and London offices) by D. Y. Cameron, who had illustrated several books for him, since there is no reason otherwise why the former should have picked out an unknown University of Glasgow student to edit one of the volumes of his popular series of classics, The Scott Library. But it shows a great deal of perspicacity on Scott’s part.

The first paragraph of the Introduction, which contained biographical and critical notes, shows both JB’s sure historical sense and his ability to tell a story:

The two decades between 1550 and 1570 are marked, perhaps, more than any other in the history of our literature by the birth of famous men. In the Devonshire farmhouse Raleigh saw the light; Shakespeare in the home of the wool merchant of Stratford; Sidney in the manor-house of Penshurst; Spenser under the shadow of the Tower of London. Mary was dead, and her sister Elizabeth had mounted the throne; and by her wise and generous policy had given great hopes to her people of a peaceful and prosperous reign. The times seemed fit for the birth of a man who should be great alike in the worlds of politics and letters.⁴⁰

For his own amusement, JB wrote poetry. There are, extant, a number of unpublished early poems dating from his late teens: they are, as can be expected, derivative, consciously archaic, conveying conventional sentiments. They are pale versions of his father’s ‘musings’. They are concerned with nature, the seasons, landscape, death, and some are classically inspired.

One example will suffice:

When the fairy-footed Spring,

Rising like a maiden,

Cometh swift on airy wing,

With her bounties laden;

When the dainty lips have kissed

Darkness from the hollow –

Clothed in mist of amethyst –

Rise and let us follow.⁴¹

His most successful poems were experiments with different verse forms, such as the kyrielle and triolet. In one poem, in trochaic tetrameter (like Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha), he manages very cleverly to rhyme ‘boat is’ and ‘note is’ with ‘myosotis’, the botanical name for forget-me-not:

Let us twain go where the boat is

Rocking by the riverside,

By the beds of myosotis

And the lilies open-eyed,

Where the little sedgebird’s note is

Heard by men at eventide.⁴²

Although JB worked extremely hard on his books in the vacations, he found time for fishing, as well as helping his Masterton relations on the farm. He felt the romance of their work and admired immoderately the shepherds that he met. He particularly enjoyed rising at dawn to ‘look the hill’:

delighting in the task, especially if the weather were wild. I attended every clipping, where shepherds came from ten miles round to lend a hand. I helped to drive sheep to the local market and sat, heavily responsible, in a corner of the auction-ring. I became learned in the talk of the trade, and no bad judge of sheep stock. Those Border shepherds, the men of the long stride and the clear eye, were a great race – I have never known a greater … My old friends, by whose side I used to quarter the hills, are long ago at rest in moorland kirkyards, and my salutation goes to them beyond the hills of death. I have never had better friends, and I have striven to acquire some tincture of their philosophy of life, a creed at once mirthful and grave, stalwart and merciful.⁴³

Shepherds get the best press of any working people in the Bible, and a pretty good one in The Pilgrim’s Progress as well, so it is hardly surprising that JB was so influenced by them. They are to be found everywhere in his early writings, fiction and non-fiction. His skill as a fisherman of hill burns, as well as his family connections with the well-respected Masterton brothers, gave him an almost unique access (for a Glasgow boy) to this breed of highly independent, observant, often devout and always hardy race. Much later, in the House of Commons in 1931, he told the no doubt bemused company that he would rather take the view of a Border shepherd on most questions than that of all the professors in Europe. He meant it.

His uncles would inevitably have been expert in divining changes in the weather. The success of their sheep-farming, even the security of shepherds’ lives and those of their charges, might depend on them knowing when the heavy snows or the ‘Lammas rains’ were coming. One of the enduring fascinations of JB’s novels is the way he uses weather as a protagonist, sometimes benign, more often malign, but always an influence on the action. At the same time, he learnt how the moon behaves, what happens at sunrise and sunset, and even probably how to guide his way by the stars, all of which knowledge informed his fiction, especially the adventure stories and historical novels.

The summer of 1893, after Violet’s death, JB borrowed an old bicycle so that he could go further afield for his fishing expeditions and explore the hills surrounding the valleys of the rivers Clyde and Annan. There is a charming, joky triolet in the Commonplace Book he kept for a few years from 1890 about his brakes failing and him being laid up with a cut head.⁴⁴ At one point, he cycled all the way from Broughton to Moffat, past the deeply creepy Devil’s Beef Tub, where he saw a dead man on the roadside, which frightened him considerably and from which he fled. And, since he always had a fascination for waterfalls, he cycled up the side of Moffat Water to see the Grey Mare’s Tail, and into the hills above the lonely clachan of Tweedsmuir to Talla Linns.^* The roads were grass-grown and empty, the motorcar unknown. The sound of the ‘whaups’ (curlews) and ‘peesweeps’ (lapwings) and the sight of wild flowers in the bent stayed with him all his life.

When not out on the hill or at the riverside, or concentrating on his books, he wrote essays, his first published and paid-for work being Angling in Still Waters, which came out in The Gentleman’s Magazine in August 1893, just before his eighteenth birthday. In the essay he describes getting up before dawn to fish the River Tweed, noting the weather and landscape, the sounds and sights of peaceful Tweeddale, and the excitement of it all. He wrote to Charlie Dick: ‘Sir James Naesmyth [of Drumelzier] has read my article in the Gentleman’s and told my uncle that he is going to prosecute me for poaching on his heronry and produce my essay for evidence. “The wicked have digged a pit etc.” ’⁴⁵ It is unsurprising that this essay should have been, ostensibly at least, about fishing, a sport that retained its fascination all his life. He had begun at the age of nine in the burns around Broughton; initially catching trout with worms, he was soon expert with the fly. Later he took to salmon fishing as well. He was undoubtedly encouraged, even perhaps taught, by his Uncle Willie, whose salmon rod he inherited in 1906. His technique was exemplary, as his eldest son recalled: ‘My father, for all his slight figure, could throw a salmon fly thirty yards, and use a heavy greenheart rod all day. He was one of the finest salmon fishers that I have ever watched. The rod appeared to do his work for him. The perfect curve of his back cast seemed to follow forward with the fly drawing out the long, straight line ahead, independent of his agency. It is the hallmark of all experts that the instrument appears to do its own work.’⁴⁶

More fishing articles followed: ‘Rivuli Montani’ in October 1894 described the mountain streams of the Borders, while ‘The Muse of the Angle’ in January 1895 explored those writers with a particular facility for writing about fishing. (He had a lifelong admiration for Izaak Walton and The Compleat Angler.) He was paid 30 shillings per article: the money was very useful.

In the vacations, he would sometimes cycle or take the train from Broughton to Peebles , to stay with his uncle and two spinster aunts. The aunts were hospitable and notably God-fearing, but their piety may have trumped their familial feeling in the case of their bachelor brother Alexander, a lawyer who seems rarely, if ever, to have been mentioned in the family after he went to England as a young man. There was another unmarried brother, Tom, known as ‘the black sheep of the family’, who became a sailor and went to Australia, but they never lost touch with him.

JB and his uncle Willie became fast friends, since the latter, a cultured middle-aged bachelor, with a pale face, dark eyes, hooked nose and a neat black beard that made him look like a sparer version of Edward VII, was plainly a delightful man, and an unusual one, even for a Scottish provincial town that respected learning and bred the occasional scholar with a national reputation such as John Veitch, Professor of Logic at Glasgow. Willie was competent, organised and cheerful, with broad interests. He was a keen fisherman, a collector of antiquarian books, a great reader of poetry and French novels, and an inveterate European traveller. He encouraged JB to learn French, which was to prove very useful in later life, and introduced him to Flaubert, Maupassant, Dumas, Gautier and Daudet. He also gave him valuable books, including an Elsevier’s version of the works of Tacitus from 1621, in very good condition, which his nephew had bound in leather.⁴⁷

JB’s letters to Charlie Dick are full of his reading. In April 1893, for example, he was deep into the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert’s brother, a prominent English Deist. This, with the work on Bacon, shows the beginnings of a profound and lasting interest in the seventeenth century. Another book that he read but probably never finished, since he found it ‘very smart but very tiresome after a little’,⁴⁸ was Robert Hichens’ roman à clef about Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, called The Green Carnation, which was published in 1894 but so scandalised the reading public that it was withdrawn the following year.

At this age, his principal inspirations in fiction were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Meredith. He read Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae for ‘the 4th or 5th time’ that summer. His sailor uncle Tom, who was visiting Peebles, told him ‘that he had lived for six months in Samoa and had often seen Robert Louis. He said that he is a sort of King there, but that he goes about with nothing on him except a blanket, worn toga-wise, and pinned at the shoulder with a Cairngorm brooch. Fancy! Sic a sicht for sair een! A decent, honest Scotsman come to that!’⁴⁹

It is hardly surprising that Stevenson should be such an important early influence on JB and his generation, since he was at the height of his fame at this time (dying in 1894) and, most importantly, he was Scottish:

He had the same antecedents that we had, and he thrilled as we did to those antecedents – the lights and glooms of Scottish history; the mixed heritage we drew from Covenanter and Cavalier; that strange compost of contradictions, the Scottish character; the bleakness and the beauty of the Scottish landscape … He was at once Scottish and cosmopolitan, artist and adventurer, scholar and gipsy. Above all he was a true companion.⁵⁰

Looking back to his youth in the late 1930s, JB had to admit that Stevenson’s influence on him did not last and that he tired of his phrase-making, since ‘I wanted robuster standards and more vital impulses’.⁵¹ He thought his prose too fastidious, too self-conscious, with too much artifice about it. But in the late 1890s, Stevenson was almost the ideal mentor for a young Scot who already sensed that his future lay in the world of letters. As for George Meredith, JB was attracted to him as an optimist, ‘who believes that the universe is on the side of man’s moral strivings. He believes in the regeneration of the world by man, and in the high destiny of humanity.’⁵²

Much of September that year he spent with his family on the Isle of Arran, and one senses he was beginning to feel confined by the family circle, and was happy to escape back to the Borders to stay with his grandmother and ‘Antaggie’ at Broughton Green, where in early October he was to be found working on an historical novel about seventeenth-century Tweeddale, which he called John Burnet of Barns.

In his second session at Glasgow, he moved up to Gilbert Murray’s top class and the two men got to know each other better. Murray was much more than a simple scholar, he was an innovative and inspiring teacher, and his influence on JB can scarcely be overstated:

He was then a young man in his middle twenties and was known only by his Oxford reputation. To me his lectures were, in Wordsworth’s phrase, like ‘kindlings of the morning’. Men are by nature Greeks or Romans, Hellenists or Latinists. Murray was essentially a Greek; my own predilection has always been for Rome; but I owe it to him that I was able to understand something of the Greek spirit and still more to come under the spell of the classic discipline in letters and life. I laboured hard to make myself a good ‘pure’ scholar; but I was not intended by Providence for a philologist; my slender attainments lay rather in classical literature, in history, and presently in philosophy. Always to direct me I had Murray’s delicate critical sense, his imaginative insight into high matters, and his gentle and scrupulous humanism.⁵³

Murray was a convinced Liberal, a social reformer and a champion of women’s university education, as was his wife, Lady Mary (née Howard), an aristocratic Englishwoman of beauty, style, intelligence and high principles, but not much sense of humour. She had inherited Castle Howard, a great house in Yorkshire, but had given it to her brother. Her parents were interested in art and social reform, and numbered amongst their friends George Eliot, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John Morley. Lady Mary was much admired – being both exotic and open-hearted – by the Glasgow students who came across her. Murray had brought with him from Oxford the tradition of pastoral care that the collegiate system fostered, and the Murrays were unusual in entertaining some of their students at their home, both in term time and in the vacations. In 1895, JB spent several days with them at Sheringham, on the Norfolk coast, where he and the Murrays read Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray aloud to each other in the evenings.

JB’s Essays and Apothegms of Francis, Lord Bacon was published in the spring of 1894, and he rode over to Peebles to see the piles of copies of his book in Redpath’s bookshop. In June, when he was nearly nineteen, he acquired another brother, Alastair Ebenezer, the healthy child of his parents’ middle age, and some consolat ion for the loss of Violet the year before.

The year 1894 was also when Henry Jones arrived at Glasgow, to take up the Chair of Moral Philosophy. Professor Veitch of Peebles had earlier introduced JB to Descartes, before ever he went to Glasgow and, although not especially attracted by Jones’ ‘semi-religious Hegelianism’, he wrote in his reminiscences that ‘a braver, wiser, kinder human being never lived’.⁵⁴ He was of the age to hero-worship his elders, especially those who saw the spark in him.

He was much influenced that year by Walter Pater, whose Plato and Platonism was published in 1893. JB was already keen on Plato as a poet, but Pater showed him the value of the influence of the Greek philosopher on seventeenth-century Calvinist divines, such as Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, the so-called Cambridge Platonists:

… I was born with the same temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century, who had what Walter Pater has called ‘a sensuous love of the unseen’, or, to put it more exactly, who combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal with a delight in the seen and temporal.⁵⁵

To JB, their Calvinism had been mellowed and warmed by the love of humanity and of all things true and beautiful.

For style, however, he was far less inclined to copy the over-ripe and prolix romanticism of Walter Pater, however good the matter of what he wrote, than that exhibited by John Henry Newman, the Catholic theologian, and T. H. Huxley, the scientist, ‘whose one aim was to say clearly what they had to say and have done with it – a creed which would be regarded, I fear, as a sort of blacklegging by most men of letters’.⁵⁶ For JB clarity was of paramount importance.

In his third year at Glasgow, he contributed a few pieces to the university magazine, and gave papers to the Alexandrian and Philosophical societies. However, apart from some canvassing in the Rectorial election when he supported H. H. Asquith, which led to fisticuffs with Robert Horne,^* he was not really visible. But he was working with such dedication and success that, in the autumn, he decided to try for a scholarship to Oxford University. Gilbert Murray almost certainly suggested this to him, but would have been pushing against an open door. JB ’s studies and the university life had inevitably widened his horizons, and Murray probably told him that study at Oxford would be the best route to an academic post in Scotland. He decided to apply to Brasenose College, rather than the more usual (for Scotsmen) Balliol College. Although Walter Pater had died several months before he applied, he wanted to go to a college that still felt his influence, and was full of his friends, such as the Principal, Dr Heberden, and the chaplain, Dr Bussell.

Life at home in Queen Mary Avenue was becoming increasingly stifling. His closeness to his mother was lifelong, but he was now also someone in whom she placed great hopes. In his book of reminiscences, late in life, he hinted at the difficulties, but was too guarded to explain them in a really illuminating way to his readers – a necessary obfuscation because his brother and sister, equally devoted to her, were still alive:

… in my adolescence we sometimes arrived at that point of complete comprehension known as a misunderstanding. We had no quarrels, for to each of us that would have been like quarrelling with oneself, but we had many arguments. Instinctively we seemed to grasp the undisclosed and hardly realised things which were at the back of the other’s mind.⁵⁷

His teenage rebellion was not generated by resentfulness at his relatively confined circumstances, nor exasperation that the family were not smarter or richer, but rather frustration that there was an exciting world to be explored, which he could only travel in his imagination. This frustration was fuelled by a strong intuition that his mother wanted him to stay nearby. She was as ambitious as he was and, for a minister’s wife, surprisingly worldly, but that world was Glasgow or, at the widest, Scotland. She had discovered early in life that her husband was wedded to good, selfless work amongst his shabby congregation and, despite any endeavour of hers, would remain in relative obscurity. So her focus had switched to her bright and talented eldest boy; for her, or rather for him on her behalf, nothing short of Moderator of the Free Church would do.

It was at this precise moment, however, that her hopes were permanently dashed. In early January 1895, JB travelled to Oxford for the entrance examination, a visit that was little short of a revelation to him:

It was, I remember, bitter winter weather. The Oxford streets, when I arrived late at night from the North, were deep in snow. My lodgings were in Exeter College, and I recall the blazing fires, a particularly succulent kind of sausage, and coffee such as I had never known in Scotland. I wrote my examination papers in Christ Church hall, that noblest of Tudor creations. I felt as if I had slipped through some chink in the veil of the past and become a mediaeval student. Most vividly I recollect walking in the late afternoon in Merton Street and Holywell and looking at snow-laden gables which had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages. In that hour Oxford claimed me, and her bonds have never been loosed.⁵⁸

He achieved a Junior Hulme scholarship to Brasenose College, his tutor, Dr Fox, later recalling that his essay in the scholarship exam was just like a piece of Stevenson. He abandoned the University of Glasgow after three years, leaving without taking a degree.

At the same time he was working on a couple of short stories, ‘The Herd of Standlan’ (first published in Black and White magazine in 1896) and ‘A Journey of Little Profit’ (first published in The Yellow Book the same year), in which a drover comes up against the Devil. He was very anxious to get these projects finished before he went up to Oxford.

That year, 1895, his uncle Willie was granted, along with all his father’s descendants, the right to bear heraldic arms. The crest on the escutcheon was a sunflower with the motto ‘Non inferiora secutus’. The Buchans were entitled now to call themselves gentlefolk. JB was proud of this as doodles in a ‘commonplace book’ of the time show. He might be a hard-up Scottish provincial, but he was, in his own eyes at least, on a par with the men he would meet at Oxford, and not just intellectually.

Just before he left Glasgow, he wrote to Gilbert Murray, enclosing an advance copy of his first novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors: Being Some Account of an Episode in the Life of the Sieur de Rohaine. The dedication read: ‘To Gilbert Murray. Whatsoever in this book is not worthless is dedicated by his friend.’ He wrote to him:

Now that I read it in print I don’t feel at all satisfied with it. Some of it I like, but in a good deal of it I think I have been quite unsuccessful. Of course you will understand that it is all written in character, and that this accounts for the frequently exaggerated sentiment and style. I only hope that you will not repent now of having given me permission to dedicate it to you. The binding of the book, I think the most awful conceivable – a livid nightmare.⁵⁹

The lack of confidence, both in the dedication and the letter, is painfully obvious, as if he were already regretting it all.

He received a long reply a few days later from Murray, in which the latter had obviously mixed kindly praise with judicious criticism. JB wrote back to thank him: ‘One of the worst faults of the book, I think, is the tendency to mere sentence-making. I think this is due partly to the excessive admiration which I have felt for some years for Stevenson, partly in the way the book was written.’⁶⁰ It had been written in small pieces at snatched moments towards the end of his time at Glasgow, and that showed. No doubt he felt he was a more mature writer now. But at least he was a published novelist, at the age of twenty.

The novel is set in the ‘Killing Time’, when ‘Covenanters’ – those Scottish Presbyterians who had signed the National Covenant of 1638 – were persecuted by Graham of Claverhouse, known popularly as ‘Bonny Dundee’, in the 1680s. Sir Quixote of the Moors tells of a French soldier of fortune who finds himself in the position of having to protect a ‘fair maiden’ while her father and lover are hiding from Claverhouse on the Galloway moors. The book was, JB wrote, ‘an effort to show what would be the course of a certain type of character in certain difficult circumstances, and in the second an attempt … to trace the influence of scene and weather on the action and nature of man’.⁶¹ These were Stevensonian preoccupations that would surface again and again in his early fiction. Young as he was, he had already learned the importance of writing an arresting first sentence:

Before me stretched a black heath, over which the mist blew in gusts, and through whose midst the road crept like an adder.⁶²

What was obvious , even this early, and despite some offputting archaisms, was not only his acute interest in, and observation of, the natural world, in all its kindness and malice, but that he knew from experience what it was like to be cold, wet, stormstayed and frightened, and could translate that with immediacy to the page.

Moreover, it is obvious that this twenty-year-old already knew what sexual longing was. The soldier rides away from the girl, because he cannot trust himself to behave honourably if he stays, and thinks his honour more important than her protection. We do not know, but can easily imagine, what he thought when the American publisher, Henry Holt and Company, insisted on an additional paragraph to give the story a happy ending, thereby entirely undermining the point of the book.

This unhappy compromise appeared in the United States in October 1895, just as JB, his character forged and his literary career already under way, set his face southwards, like many an ambitious Scot before and since. Although he would never live permanently in Scotland again, his upbringing there had taught him how to be happy, and despite tragedies, misfortunes, failures, ill-health, successes and fame, that capacity for happiness never left him.