Virago, 2008, 316 p.

This is the third volume of Angelou’s autobiography. For my reviews of the first two see here and here. In this one her story carries on through her ongoing attempts to keep herself and her son solvent. She even marries (when her mother asked her why she had agreed to it she replied simply, “He asked.”) Eventually, though, her husband gets bored of marriage and leaves.

She gets a job dancing in a bar and hustling drinks, but salves her conscience by letting her customers know the ones she is served are not alcoholic. Her life is transformed by seeing a performance of Porgy and Bess – the first time she had seen black performers of a high standard – and she gets to know the cast when they come to the bar. This eventually leads to her joining the cast on a European tour.

I must admit that until I read this I had not known Angelou came to fame as a singer and dancer rather than a poet.

In Italy she feels wonder to be in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, and finds Italians welcoming but adds, “I hadn’t been in Europe long enough to know that Europeans often made as clear a distinction between black and white Americans as did the most confirmed Southern bigot. The difference, I was to discover, was that more often than not, blacks were liked, whereas white Americans were not.”

She has a facility with languages, going so far as to learn Serbo-Croat for the visit to Yugoslavia, picking up some Arabic for the trip to Egypt. On the ship taking the company there an encounter with a Greek doctor lets her know that black females from the US were attractive to European men as they represented a chance to become a US citizen by marriage.

Through it all though she is haunted by the fact that she had to leave her son behind in the US. The book ends with her return to the States and taking up family life again.

Pedant’s corner:- Chris-tian (is that hyphen a hangover from a line change in the manuscript?) “My only applause for the first three performances were the desultory claps from Eddie” (My only applause … was the..,) hiccoughing (hiccupping,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, crafts (it was a gondola – a sailing vessel – so the plural is craft.) “From my third-floor (which the French perversely called second-floor) room” (perversely?) Cheops’ (Cheops’s,) “even their approach to the common musical scales are as different as odds and evens” (their approach … is as different,) Smallens’ (Smallens’s,) “an entire cast of Negro singers were nervously rehearsing” (an entire cast was nervously rehearsing.) A commendation, though, for ‘culs-de-sac’.

Grant Richards Ltd, 1916, 304 p.

The book is a memoir of the Great War experiences of the author, famous for creating the character of Old Bill in his cartoons for the magazine The Bystander and later collected in various Fragments from France booklets, from late 1914 till he is wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.

In this early stage of the war the trenches were rudimentary to say the least, with men waist deep in water, and what dugouts there were also sodden. Not far behind the front line a few farm buildings not yet destroyed by shellfire gave some cover from the Germans provided no movement whatever could be seen in them.

Bairnsfather was in charge of a machine gun company but seems to have had a lot of time to be able to wander about just behind the line exploring the local area. I assume his sergeant looked after things in his absences. His company was also rotated in and out of the line on a regular basis.

He describes these early days of the war as “delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life,” which he says to his mind gave the war what it sadly needed – a touch of romance. Later, though, “much of the romance had left the trenches.” He says he “wouldn’t have missed that time for anything” and claims “our soldiers” even though living “in a vast bog without being able to utilize modern contrivances for making the fight against adverse circumstances anything like an equal contest” wouldn’t have either.

It was during this time he began his artistic career, drawing on the farmhouse walls and making sketches for fellow officers and then deciding to sending off his first cartoon to The Bystander. The book has some of the author’s sketches scattered throughout and also photographic plates of cartoons which appeared in The Bystander bound in and counting towards the pagination.

As an insight into how a British officer felt in that first year of the war this is probably as good as it gets.

Sensitivity warning: contains the word “gollywog.”

Pedant’s corner:- focussed (focused,) “form part of a slack heap” (since these were now ruined farm walls the author may have meant ‘part of a slag heap’, but no matter,) “gulley”, two lines later followed by “gully”.

Virago, 2007, 313 p.

This is the first volume of Angelou’s autobiography and was originally published in 1969. Its span covers a touch more than the decade of the 1930s.

She was born Marguerite Johnson; the contraction Maya came about from the pet name her brother Bailey used for her. At the age of three when her mother and father became estranged, her upbringing, and Bailey’s, was given over to her grandmother, whom she calls Momma, living in a town called Stamps in Arkansas. Momma was a formidable woman, steeped in the Bible but with an unusual position. She owned a shop (or store, as it is here) and was better off than many of the white people there (the memorably dubbed powhitetrash, who nevertheless looked down on her.) In fact during the depression Momma had been able to lend money even to some of the professional whites to help tide them over.

Life as a young black girl in that time and place was as circumscribed as you might expect. This is made especially evident at Angelou’s graduation from her (black) school when the (white) speaker praised only athletic accomplishments. The audience stilled as it realised that while in contrast to the money the white kids’ school was to receive that for hers meant whites “were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren’t even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises.” She thinks, “What school official had the right to decide that those two men must be our only heroes?” Nevertheless Joe Louis’s status as a standard bearer for blacks is well illustrated by their reaction to the radio commentary on his fight with Primo Carnera.

The early part of the book has the feel of a novel. Angelou’s recall is impressive and she had the same wish for a different appearance as the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (in effect to be more white;) in Angelou’s case specifically to be rid of her curly hair. Her memoir also shares with that book instances of sexual abuse. (At the age of eight, while staying for a few months with her mother, Angelou was raped by her mother’s live-in boy-friend.) The emphasis on religious belief, though strong in Momma’s case – Angelou transgresses her code in ways she didn’t understand at the time, sudden tripwires previously unexplained by adults are something of a feature – are not as to the fore as in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain but its importance to black life is plain. It is books that become solace, both for Maya and Bailey, books that tell of a different life and point the way toward it, books that perhaps made the difference in the way her life turned out in comparison to others who found no such support.

In her late childhood Angelou and her brother moved to San Francisco to live with her father where she noticed that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese businesses disappeared from San Francisco to be replaced by Negro ones (Negro is the word Angelou uses) with an influx of Southern Blacks. Her father – also called Bailey – takes her with him on a trip to Mexico where she undergoes a rite of passage of sorts when he gets drunk and she attempts to drive his car back from what she feels is the middle of nowhere, making it fifty miles to her destination with only one mishap.

Her conclusion, speaks for itself. “The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

Pedant’s corner:- Du Bois’ (the ‘s’ in Bois is unpronounced, the sound’s inclusion in the possessive has to be signalled, then; Du Bois’s,) Stamps’ (Stamps’s,) Flowers’ (Flowers’s – used two lines above,) Williams’ (Williams’s.) “Bailey and I lay the coins on top of the cash register” (laid the coins.) “fewer Amen’s were heard” (Amens,) Jenkins’ (Jenkins’s,) Dolores’ (x 2, Dolores’s,) “to staunch the flood of fear” (stanch,) “focalized on” (focused on.)

In The Finlay J Macdonald Omnibus, Warner Books, 1988, 187 p. First published 1984.

This final instalment of the author’s childhood memoirs sees him, having at the second attempt passed the bursary exam, finally off to the “big” school in what he perceives as the metropolis of Tarbert though by wider standards it is little more than a village. In his new school the headmaster “didn’t really expect boys to behave themselves – he had seen too many boys for that – but he did expect them not to get caught.”

Before that, though, the author had time to aid Old Hector, debilitated by malaria contracted in his sole journey away from the village as a seaman, with milking his cow daily – which has the side advantage of providing the opportunity to have a sly smoke without the knowlegde of his parents. Hector wasn’t really old but his infirmity meant he depended on others, a dependency made worse by the death of his sister who had dedicated her life to looking after him. Macdonald, in considering how Hector would have to sell his cow when he leaves for school, conceived of the idea of advertising for a household companion ‘with a view to matrumony’ for Hector, a plan kept secret between the two of them. (Later, however, Macdonald’s father surprises him with his knowledge of Finlay’s part in the scheme. How did he know? “You never could spell matrimony.”) The first replies were unsuitable in various ways but in Macdonald’s absence at school someone did come to fulfil both aspects of the design. These machinations give the opportunity for some light humour as does the visit of the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, that particular incumbent being a Gaelic speaker.

There is a more reflective aspect to the text when the author mentions the melancholy of being present when a language goes into its death throes. (Though nearly ninety years on from the times described here the Gaelic language still manages to survive.) The assumption in the village and more widely on Harris and elsewhere in the Hebrides was that to get on a child had to get out, that not to do so would be a failure, a factor which would inevitably lead to a hollowing out of life on the islands. Macdonald’s going to the big school was a first step on that journey. This quality of Macdonald’s memoir is of a piece with one of the perennial considerations of the Scottish novel; the sense of nostalgia, of things lost, of a strange incompleteness. I suspect that is one of the hangovers of the Union of the Parliaments and the formation of the United Kingdom in 1707. Macdonald also has the Scottish novelist’s eye for landscape description.

Macdonald’s growing to adulthood lay under the shadow of the looming Second World War. There is a grand set piece when the lads who have signed up are piped on to the ferry to the mainland to join their regiment, the ill-fated 51st Highland Division. This was before the actual formal commencement of hostilities when, “Nobody heard Chamberlain’s declaration of war on the Sunday because, in the Hebrides in those days, radio sets were never switched on on a Sunday – not even for the news.” The “wireless” in those days had vagaries of its own which is illustrated by the author with a comparison that is now itself outdated, “the sudden demise of the accumulator tended to have the sort of explosive effect that the telephone bill has nowadays on a house with daughters.” Macdonald’s thoughts on the whole matter are expressed by the sentiment that, “Nobody ever had a ‘good’ war and I can’t imagine how anyody could coin the phrase in cynicism or in jest.” He had a near escape himself when he and his brother unscrewed the spikes from a mine that had floated onto the shore and then hammered them onto their door as a makeshift knocker. His father was appalled when he discovered this.

He himself had been a sniper in the Great War (a conflict to which he never referred) and would not touch a gun since. So it is that on one of Macdonald’s returns home for the holidays he is surprised to find his father kitted out in khaki and with a rifle. He had joined the Home Guard. He allows Macdonald one shot of the rifle (wildly inaccurate of course) but on practice with his platoon merely jerks the rifle instead of firing it.

The drawbacks of progress are illustrated by the demise of the corncrake whose cry is Macdonald’s abiding memory of his childhood and whose habitat was destroyed by the improvement of the soil’s richness by the application of fertiliser reducing their scrub ground cover. Also the local oysters and wolf mussels die out because the run-off from the new internal toilets was being directed straight into the sea. The Lysander in the title refers to an RAF spotter plane which patrolled the waters round the islands in search of U-boats.

It is odd to see words such as ‘carry-out’ and ‘screwtops’ given quotation marks but English was Macdonald’s second language.

Pedant’s corner:- focussed (focused,) a closing inverted comma where there hadn’t been an opening one, Coolins (a curious Anglicisation given Macdonald’s Gaelic childhood, in most texts in English Skye’s mountains are spelled as in Gaelic, Cuillins,) “since the balances of males to females was totally disproportionate” (the balance … was,) some commas missing before or after pieces of direct speech, miniscular (x2, minuscular,) “honoured more in the breech” (breach.)

Ebury Press, 2016, 312 p, plus vip Introduction by Irvine Welsh.

One of the 100 best Scottish Books.

Boyle was at one time dubbed by tabloid newspapers as the most violent man in Scotland. The book is an account of his life and, in part, a description of why he feels that designation was perhaps unwarranted. Not that he was in any way a shrinking violet. I most likely would never have read this had it not been on that 100 Best Scottish Books list. That the book is there is most probably due to the light it shed on the conditions inside Scottish prisons during the author’s various incarcerations, his attempts to stand up against them and the violence to which he was treated in order to control his (and other unco-operative – ie recalcitrant – prisoners’) behaviour, his rebellions against the system and those upholding it at times channelled into what have come to be known as “dirty” protests.

The early parts dealing with Boyle’s childhood and early adolecscence had echoes of No Mean City – back courts, middens, rooms-and-kitchens, single ends, initiation into crime and violence – not least in the self-imposed pressure to act up to the stereotype of the hard man. Boyle’s slide into a life of crime was compounded by poor schooling combined with lack of expectations, and an apparent relative ease of committing petty crimes without detection. Despite his revulsion at young offenders’ institutions and Borstal, on coming out he quickly fell back into his old ways and progressed into more serious crimes.

He was twice tried for murder but acquitted the first time – and he claims he was unaware of and therefore not responsible for acts of intimidation against witnesses which occurred while he was on remand. By his account he was innocent of the murder for which he was found guilty and suggests that evidence against him was planted by the police who also put pressure on witnesses to testify against him. But after that earlier acquittal (and no doubt because of his reputation) they were out to get him. (In the afterword to this edition he provides the identity of the real culprit; something he had not done when the book was first published in 1977. Honour amongst thieves, and all that.) For that reason and the harsh conditions inside, he saw police and prison officers both, as enemies and acted accordingly. The same is obviously true in reverse. He was seen, justifiably, as a danger.

His life was turned round when he was taken in by the Barlinnie Special Unit, set up to provide a more ameliorative means of coping with prisoners and to rehabilitate them. An art tutor left behind some modelling clay one day, Boyle worked with it and so found he had a talent for sculpture. Almost as an aside he reflects on the mutual incomprehension of the guards and prisoners; while the former still saw them as ravening wolves, he says it would never have entered the heads of the latter to harm any woman entering the unit as a visitor.

The Special Unit did not succeed with all its inmates and was the subject of suspicion by some in authority who thought it was ‘soft’ on prisoners. It closed in 1994. Irvine Welsh’s introduction to this edition laments its passing and the deterioration of social conditions in Scotland in the years since, the increase in drug use etc, the loss of an escape hatch via education, not to mention the overcrowding in prisons leaving them nothing more than containment facilities “with rehabilitation pretty much an afterthought.”

It has to be said, poor schooling and Boyle’s lack of interest in it or not, the book is well-written, even though it occasionally feels the need to define terms such as “steamie” and “altar boy” which are surely widely known, certainly in Scotland.

Pedant’s corner:- Lots of instances of singular nouns (such as “a group” or “each of us”) having a plural verb form. Otherwise; St Francis’ (St Francis’s,) scarey (scary,) near-alchoholics (near-alcoholics.) “Started cutting my on the back of the neck” (started cutting me,) “vocal chords” (cords,) “and took Ben away, leaving, me alone” (took Ben away, leaving me alone,) “Dostoevsky ,” (should have no gap between Dostoevsky and the comma,) “too much But” (either the full stop is missing, or, ‘too much but’,) discoloration (discolouration is surely to be preferred,) grill (grille,) Alex Stephen (elsewhere ‘Stephens’,) Parkhufst (Parkhurst.)

First published 1983.

Warner Books. In The Finlay J Macdonald Omnibus, 1988, 174 p.

This is the second part of MacDonald’s memoirs of growing up in the southern part of the isle of Harris between the two World Wars, his recounting of a way of life that was on the way to extinction. There is no running water, no electricity – though here battery powered radios make their appearance – and no indoor plumbing; but the island’s first aeroplane sighting occurs. The Great Recession has brought poverty – sales of Harris Tweed have declined to zero – and the author’s father is reduced to killing the family’s pet sheep for food, despite his reluctance at killing anything due to his experiences in the Great War, principally as a sniper. MacDonald contrasts poverty with being broke as broke is a temporary situation, but poverty grinds unremittingly on.

The end of the author’s preliminary schooling is in sight as he sits the exam for the bursary which will allow him to carry on with education beyond the village; an education which Government and parents desired for the children but which will ensure that those children would leave the island in pursuit of the opportunities which it brought. In the meantime he wins a competition organised by Gibbs’s Dentifrice to promote their wares. Sadly the prize was not the bicycle he hoped for. Life in the family is loving but not indulgent and in amongst the nostalgia are some light moments – one involving a piss-pot laced with Andrew’s Effervescent Liver Salts, another where we are told, “There is something irrevocable about a botched haircut” – words and deeds may be forgotten or forgiven, the haircut “lingers on for an eternity, reproachfully.” As a result of his, MacDonald suffered the nickname “convick” – a Gaelic approximation to the English word – for months. We are also treated to the author’s first (and unsatisfactory for the girl concerned) sexual experience at the hands of a teenager MacDonald describes as one of a band of tinkers. The author also has that Scottish gift of an eye for landscape.

The crotal of the title is the name of a lichen that was scraped off the local rocks to be processed to provide a brown dye for Harris Tweed.

Towards the conclusion of this instalment things are beginning to look up economically but the threat of another war has begun to loom large.

Pedant’s corner:- crochets (crotchets,) “before by mother” (my mother,) “which we were lead to believe” (led to believe,) “a rift in the family lute” (??) “coom ceilings” (I have never sen this spelling before, it’s usually comb or coomb,) “the rest of the community were attending” (the rest … was attending,) “ o tell me” (to tell me,) “Callernish stones” (usually Callanish,) Niklaus (Nicklaus.)

Warner Books. First published 1982. In The Finlay J Macdonald Omnibus, 1988, 174 p.

This is MacDonald’s memoir of growing up in Harris, (which is known as the Isle of Harris even though it’s only the southern half of an island: ditto the Isle of Lewis, the northern half.)

Between the Twentieth Century’s two great wars the south of Harris was being repopulated with the aid of a Government intiative but this was still a harsh time when there were few amenities in the temporary turf-roofed dwellings the families occupied while they built their own stone ones – and not many in those – though the remains of the houses whose occupants had been cleared several generations earlier were a stark reminder of worse. There were no inside toilets – the great outdoors sufficed. Water for drinking and cooking was drawn from a nearby burn. In the times Macdonald is remembering the more convenient Tilly lamp superseded paraffin lighting and its whiter light was a source of regret. Electricity and gas were not even a dream.

The book embeds a history of Harris as the author explains his family’s circumstances and delves into the customs of the islanders while the delights of Toffee Cow (McCowans Highland Toffee, now sadly no more) become one of the author’s pleasures as he grows.

A lot of the narrative describes MacDonald’s schoolroom reminiscences, especially the initial tribulations of being solely a Gaelic speaker till he attended school (whose medium was of course exclusively English -inevitably the tawse features at times) and despite this not being published till the author was in his fifties he still manages to retain (or simulate) a child’s perspective. “Gillespie and I had long since learned to distrust adults when they were trying to sound reasonable.” He also comments on the curious circumstance by which the education all the parents desired for their children would most likely ensure that those children would leave the island in pursuit of the opportunities which that education had brought.

The coming of the Great Depression brings further hardship as the Harris Tweed trade declines. (Its use of human waste to fix the dyes require for colouring the tweed obliging everyone – visitors included – to avail themselves of the pee-pot when nature called is matter-of-factly described.)

There are several moments of humour, the new schoolteacher’s Word Game foundering on the definition of an organ, the kilted Dr MacBeth misunderstanding the question asked of him by a new father – this last had me giggling for about half a minute; not the usual response to reading tales of bygone Scottish life.

Like many a Scottish novel this autobiography is another of those laments for a past time, of the loss of a way of life, a documentation of things past. MacDonald certainly has an eye for it, and a way with words – even if they are in his second language.

Pedant’s corner:- Port Sunlight in Lancashire (it’s in the Wirral peninsula, not traditionally considered Lancashire,) “ ‘grace and favour ” (this opened quote was never closed,) while pages later we had “ away down in the south’ ” (a closing quote mark for an unopened quote,) bye-blow (by-blow,) “having failed to illicit information” (elicit,) another end quote that had not been opened, another opened quote remaining unclosed, “until we were hustled off the bed” (off to bed,) liguistic (linguistic,) “to smoothe them” (smooth them,) “even the Prince of Wales wears it” – the kilt – “whenever he ventures north of the Caledonian Canal” (I don’t think Balmoral – or Braemar – are north of there,) goloshes (my dictionary gives this as an alternative spelling but it was always galoshes in my day.)