It was never my dream to become a writer. I wrote from an early age but to my mind, never well enough. It was finding Agnes that set me off.
As a kid from a country town, I seemed to drift through school missing many of the basics of English. I was brought up on a diet of broad Glaswegian accents and a dialect that none of my friends understood. Perhaps this was the reason spelling completely escaped me. Despite the despair of my teachers, I managed to make it to tertiary level. I do remember writing a story set in my hometown of Albany and a lecturer urging me to submit it to a magazine. I dismissed that idea as barking mad. I now wonder at the lack of confidence in that girl that made her reject the lecturer’s encouragement.
Later, as a visual artist, I wrote—probably very bad—poetry. Not that I cared if it was good or bad. I aimed to identify and condense my thoughts and feelings and hopefully find metaphors that would feed into my artwork.
Eventually, I undertook post-graduate studies, which involved mounting a solo exhibition and writing a thesis. What to choose as a subject? My supervisor wisely steered me, over several sessions, away from wanting to tackle the whole gamut of the female condition to an investigation of the topic at a more personal level. I came back to her, in trepidation, with The Mother/Daughter Relationship.
‘That’s the one,’ she said, pointing her pen at me while gazing over the top of glasses that always sat halfway down her nose.
I went home in a state of benumbed dismay. My relationship with my strong, clever mother had been complicated. How to even start? When I picked myself up, I sensed I needed to go back through the matrilineal line. I needed to trace the source of attitudes and anxieties that were passed on through generations of women in my family. These women had lived through the industrial revolution and the clearances: the forced eviction of thousands of small tenant sheep farmers, which brought upheaval and misery to much of Scotland. Thousands of families were forced off the crofts they had occupied for as far back as anyone could remember. The land was enclosed and stocked with sheep to supply wool for the mills and factories that sprang up in the cities.
During my research, I discovered a fact that shook me. My genteel, Victorian grandmother, Christina, had been born in a poorhouse. How the hell did that happen? It was then that Agnes popped her head up and said: What about me? And I realised that I knew nothing about my matrilineal great-grandmother. She had only been spoken of in one story that portrayed her, towards the end of her life, as something of a hero. We knew the stories about the great-grandmother on the paternal side of the family, how she came from Glen Coe in the romantic Highlands of Western Scotland and spoke only Gaelic. How she was over six feet tall and was thought to have descended from the Vikings.
Agnes led me to see that what had happened in Scotland during the latter half of the nineteen century was anything but romantic. The overcrowded cities saw as many as fifteen people living in a one-roomed house. Disease and the capitalists were the only things that thrived. What I uncovered in Agnes’ life’s story started to help me to understand the hang-ups and anxieties that were apparent in our mostly female family. It was a time when I finished the artwork and the thesis, but Agnes refused to let me go. She demanded that her story be told, that I investigate further.
I travelled back to Scotland and spent two months following Agnes around. I am not usually given to fancies (as my mother would call them), but I could almost swear that several times, when I came to a dead end, Agnes tapped me on the shoulder and pointed the way. I found the estate outside Edinburgh where she was born in one of the farm-cottages. Hers would have been a life of hard work but one full of security and peace as the ploughman’s daughter. It was after she married that her life descended into indescribable poverty, including being reduced to the poorhouse.
Shortly after their marriage, Agnes’ soldier-husband was pensioned from the army with an eye disease contracted in India. From being a proud Gordon Highlander stationed at Edinburgh Castle, he returned to his father’s profession as a cobbler and the evidence seems to say he sank into depression and the dram shops. It was a time when alcoholism was endemic in the clotted slums of Scotland. It was a time when any sense of community was hard to maintain but the class system was strengthening. There was an opinion, promoted by church and state that the suffering of the slum dwellers was due to their moral failings. To be poor became a deeply shameful condition and I believe the tears of this shame washed down through the generations.
Over the years seven children were born, and four died. Agnes and her family moved from the squalor of Edinburgh to the degradation of the tenements in Glasgow. Resilience must have been tested in an age deemed the slaughter of the innocents, due to the number of young children who died of typhoid, tuberculosis and a myriad of other illnesses relating to appalling working and living conditions. When her eldest daughter died of what was thought to be consumption, Agnes took in young women banished from homes because of the disease. Her home became a refuge for these girls whose fate would have been prostitution or starvation.
By the time I pieced together Agnes’s story as a creative non-fiction I had a tome of 150,000 words. I received some encouraging feedback, but to be published it needed to be shorter. Wanting to keep the integrity of the story for future generations, I decided rather than chop events, names and dates, at this stage, I would self-publish for my family. After taking a break to work on another novel, I set about condensing and converting the story into a more fictionalized account.
At a time in my life when I frequently travel to visit my scattered family, I am grateful to Agnes for leading me to the writing process. Besides being enormously satisfying it is wonderfully portable.
