With St Andrew's Day coming up on Friday this seems like a good week to go to Scotland with some reading and I did, via an adventure to Penzance for the day back in May.
Pootled down on the train for £14 return to meet Barbara (once but no longer writing Milady's Boudoir) and a mutual friend staying with her in the Egyptian House, a Landmark Trust property in the centre of town. It was all very exciting, and of course it is always imperative to buy a book on these days out as a memento of a happy time. I was delighted to find a copy of Into the Mountain - A Life of Nan Shepherd by Charlotte Peacock for half price in the very delectable Barton Books. We squeezed a lot more into the day...the exhibition of Newlyn paintings at the Penlee Gallery, a tour and wine-tasting at the Polgoon Vineyard (well I tasted the elderflower because I don't drink) and a good trawl of Penzance's other fantastic emporium The Edge of the World bookshop.
Once I had waved farewell to friends, Penzance, St Michael's Mount etc, and watched the sunset from the train I settled down with Nan, reading the book for the two hours back up to Plymouth and the forty minutes back out to Gunnislake, and for the days thereafter until I had finished it.
My love for Nan Shepherd's non-fiction book The Living Mountain knows no bounds. I've read it about six times now, each time it welds to me a little bit more and I took a copy (which Robert Macfarlane very kindly inscribed for me) to give to Offspringette on my last trip to New Zealand. Every time I read the book something Nan says will have new relevance, and I think I know Nan Shepherd well enough from those readings, as she contemplates the might and power of the Cairngorms and the impact on body and soul of walking there, but of course I don't, so it has been fascinating to read more about her life.
I find that some biographies keep you at arm's length from the life, others plunge you straight in, as did this one, and with little on the record about her life and much destroyed (presumably to make the task more difficult) I wonder if the notoriously reticent Nan ever imagined that anyone would be remotely interested, let alone that her face would appear on a Scottish bank note.
Yet Nan Shepherd did leave three novels, The Quarry Wood, A Pass in the Grampians and The Weatherhouse, all of which are known to be, in varying degrees, autobiographical. Along with commonplace books and poetry plus some correspondence Charlotte Peacock has scoured available material extensively for her research. Thus, whilst it could be argued that much of the information is supposition and speculation, I sensed I was reading an accurate enough picture of the Nan Shepherd I felt I have come to know from those readings of The Living Mountain.
Born in 1893, Nan's life is clearly constrained by the times and setting aside any notions of a 'famous person' the book also offers a wealth of insight into the social mores of the time. But Nan is also constrained by a mother who for whatever reason 'went off her legs', as we used to say in nursing parlance, becoming an invalid for reasons unknown, in need of care and confined to her own home. Nan's education leads her to employment as a trainer of teachers in Aberdeen, a job she held for her entire working life until retirement.
Everything that lay dormant, all Nan's hopes, dreams and unfulfilled potential... and can you sense her imagining it all in this picture...
...everything seems to unfurl at the point where she takes to the hills seriously in 1928.
Walking in the Cairngorms gives Nan the opportunity to shake off the constraints of her existence and to experience real freedom, both from disappointments in love, and the responsibilities of home and family as the main bread-winner for her ailing mother following the death of her father. I sensed the other light in her life came from a regular literary and critical correspondence with the writer Neil Gunn.
The disappointments in love are heart-rending and fascinating. The man Nan loves marries her best friend, but within the open marriage that John McMurray and his wife create there is some speculation that Nan's affections and desire may not have been entirely thwarted.
Meanwhile her correspondence with Neil Gunn provides the literary and cultural exchange that Nan craves and thrives on, and a mutual respect and openness and honesty between the two is evident in their letters...
'Poetry means too much to me - it seems to hold in intensest being the very heart of all experience: and though I have now and then glimpsed something of that burning heart of life - have intimations and hauntings of its beauty and strangeness and awe - always when I try to put these things into words they elude me. The result is slight and small. And then when I read something like Hugh McDiarmid's
" You cannot sing until your flight
Leaves you no audience but the light."and go away humble, chastened and shut my lips.'
Nan's lack of confidence and self-belief in her own ability would endure throughout her lifetime.
But how sad it always is to read of a life full of such vigour and energy drawing to its close. I walk on Dartmoor and often think of Nan striding purposefully yet mindfully up a mountain while I puff my way up a tor. Who can know how Nan must have felt, eighty-seven years old, packed and ready to leave hospital after a collapse, to move into a cottage next door to Sheila a long-standing family friend, only to be told Sheila had suffered a heart attack and the move cannot happen. A place is found for Nan in a nursing home where she will end her days, but thankfully in sight of the hills.
'You're like a lovely day in the hills', says the last line of Neil Gunn's final letter to Nan, who accepted it as a lovely compliment 'an all sufficient goodbye,' her own farewells to life made on February 27th 1981 just two weeks after her eighty-eighth birthday.
What a surprising legacy this seemingly ordinary life has left us, perhaps proving that this is exactly what ordinary lives can do. It is indeed ' a grand thing to get leave to live' and Into the Mountain a book I can highly recommend if you are a lover of all things Nan Shepherd or reading about women's lives in general.
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