Penguin, 1945, 123 p.

The back cover says this book was mostly edited by Theodora Hendry but she was killed in the London Blitz. The criteria for selection in the volume was Scottish stories with a Scottish setting or else it “would almost certainly have assumed an international aspect.”
The first, The Coasts of Normandy by George Blake, is the story of a tragedy which befell the narrator’s childhood friend and its effect on the child’s mother as reflected through the prism of a chance encounter with a stranger many years later on the coast of Normandy. It takes a slightly circuitous route to its revelation (which the reader intuits well before the narrative gets there) but this allows for such thoughts as, “The simple feel as warmly as the clever and the learned.” Another of its observations is a reminder that, for some soldiers at least, the Great War was not only a horrific trial and ordeal but also an opportunity to remake their lives in its aftermath.
In A Sunday Visit by Colm Brogan two boys are dragged along by their mother to the Mortons’ house, where the family has just suffered a bereavement. Amid all the whispering, the boys are left to their own devices.
A Hike to Balerno by Ronald McDonald Douglas sees two boys on the titular hike, the escapades they get up to, the banter between them, “daft, just plain daft.”
Clay by Lewis Grassic Gibbon is the story of Robert Galt, a man from a chancy background who takes a farm and devotes all his time to it, to the neglect of his wife and his daughter’s prospects.
Beattock for Moffat by R B Cunninghame Graham tells of the last journey of a dying Scot on the train up from London with his cockney wife and his brother come to take him home to die. The author observes of the accomodations married couples make with each other that “usually … good points, seen through prejudice of race, religion, and surroundings, appear … defects,” and refers to the Cockney wife’s reticence being explained by, “the English theory, that unpleasant things should not be mentioned, and that, by this means, they can be kept at bay.” The prose evidences that Scottish authors’ eye for landscape.
In The Sea by Neil M Gunn a twelve-year-old overcomes his fears, staggering through the night down to the harbour to witness the perilous return of his father’s and brother’s boats during a great storm. Here it is seascape (or land-meets-sea-scape) which the descriptive powers bring to life.
J F Hendry’s Chrysalis is a fragment of the childhood of a boy who wants to be good but fears he is bad because he sometimes is too enthusiastic in his activities.
Clock-a-Doodle-Doo by Willa Muir is set in a room full of clocks (all wag-at-the-wa’) which can speak to each other, having theological discussions over whether the Son or Moon is the primum mobile and aspiring to Pure Horological Thought.
Neil Munro’s The Lost Pibroch could be characterised as a Scottish version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Two pipers come to Half-Town. After a night of musical vying with the blind piper there he finally plays them the titular pibroch he “got from a man in Moideart.” It has “something of the heart’s longing and the curious chances of life” and sets up a wanderlust in those who hear it.
In The Matinee by Fred Urquhart a fifteen-year-old newly graduated into long trousers reverts to shorts to get into the cinema more cheaply, dragging his younger brother along for corroboration. Engrossed in a film where a factory owner exploiting the workers is presented as virtuous he fails to acknowledge his brother’s increasing personal discomfiture.
Eric Linklater’s Kind Kitty is an old woman who likes a drink, then dies through lack of it a few days after throwing a party for Hogmanay. She inveigles her way into heaven but finds the company there uncongenial, and the beer far too poor.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing full stop, “brigh” (is missing a final ‘t’,) missing commas before pieces of direct speech.

B&W Publishing, 1993, 267 p. First Published 1935. One of the 100 best Scottish Books.

The sentence, “Not a single order was on the books,” tolls through the first chapter of this novel, reflecting the thoughts of Leslie Pagan, son of the owner of Pagan’s shipyard. It is the day the last ship on the blocks, the Estramadura, is launched. His father is reluctant to acknowledge it but Leslie sees the necessity of laying off all but the fitting-out crew and foresees the end of the yard as a whole. Events are also seen through the eyes of Danny Shields, a riveter in the yard and Pagan’s batman from the Great War. These perspectives allow Blake to explore two Glasgows, the milieux of both the more than comfortably well-off and the working class. In that latter aspect, The Shipbuilders has echoes of No Mean City, set around the same time, but it is much better written.

Both men have domestic problems, Leslie’s English wife Blanche hates Glasgow and wants to move back south, not least as their son, John, is in delicate health. As the novel progresses Danny becomes increasingly estranged from his wife Agnes who gravitates to the world of her sister Lizzie and her upwardly mobile husband Jim. Danny’s life is lightened by his relationship with his other son Billy and very young daughter, who is always referred to, strangely, as Wee Mirren but his oldest son Peter, jobless, falls into bad company.

The importance of football as a means of temporary escape is given due emphasis – especially in the descriptions of a Rangers-Celtic game and of the deliberations gone into over the filling of the weekly pools coupon – as is that of alcohol, whose allure and drawbacks are given equal weight. At a regimental reunion Pagan wonders, “did the drink produce false illusions of grandeur, or did it merely stir the things, fine and foolish, that lay dormant in every man?”

In the end though, this is an elegy to a lost way of life (a theme I was to mine myself in my short story SHIFT, published in Spectrum SF 3, 2000.) On the Estramadura’s trip downriver to its sea trials Pagan witnessed, “the high tragic pageant of the Clyde.” Through his eyes, Blake details the litany of empty shipyards lining the banks of the river, “all the acquired and inherited loveliness of artistry rotting along the banks of the stream .…. The fall of Rome was a trifle in comparison …. How in God’s name could such a great thing, such a splendid thing, be destroyed?” Describing the town at the base of Dumbarton Rock where lay Denny’s yard, bringer of the turbine to Clyde shipbuilding, as “mean” is perhaps a little harsh, though – but only a little.

Leslie’s intense appreciation of his Scottish roots is exemplified when on travelling back to Glasgow on the train from a trip south he notes that it is, “Queer … how definitely the fact of nationality asserts itself even in the matters of landscape and domestic architecture.” It still cannot alter the ineluctable arc of history. “Now one man and a boy, working a machine, could do in the way of making hatches, what it used to take fourteen craftsmen to do.”

The use of the word dago, and descriptions of other characters as Jews show the unexamined attitudes and thoughtlessness of the time when The Shipbuilders was written.

This is a fine book, thoughtful and sympathetic to its characters.

Pedant’s corner:- sauvity (suavity), the Dumbarton Road (multiple instances of Glasgow streets’ names prefixed by “the” are in the text. I have never experienced this usage, it’s always just been “Dumbarton Road” or “Great Western Road”, no “the”,) coupoon (coupon,) “it has done with” (context suggests “it was done with”,) “a CPR Iiner” (liner,) filagree (filigree,) strategem (stratagem,) the ref and linesmen have khaki jackets (the officials possibly wore blazers rather than uniforms back in those days,) “knawed at his subconscience” (gnawed, and subconscious, I would think,) workshies (earlier written as workshys,) once-more (once more,) portentiously (portentously?) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “There was need to begin again” (there was a need.) “The fact at the drinks were served to him” (the fact that the drinks,) “children guzzled and champed” (chomped?)