She knew that she was behaving horribly, she knew she was indeed horrible, a despicable compound of arrogance, covetousness and self-centred rage. She was like one of those seething, stinking mud spouts which boil up in Iceland and lob burning rocks at passers-by. She felt guilt for blighting Vera’s pleasure and excitement; she felt shame. Her shame and guilt only made her angrier.
I’ve long wanted to read this portrayal of a gothic Scottish childhood, and the dark days before Christmas was as good a moment as any to settle down with it. Elspeth Barker published it, her only novel, in 1991. In it, she reworks elements of her own life (she was born during the Second World War, hand-reared a jackdaw, and grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a boys’ boarding school) for her story of Janet; indeed, Janet may not be too different to her (unorthodox, a devout animal-lover and an enthusiast for poetry and the Classics). While occasionally this gives a flavour of the writer’s own resentments being channelled unmediated through Janet, this novel’s magic lies in the beauty of its prose, its effortless conjuration of atmosphere and its depiction of someone who cannot and will not fit in.
The first thing we learn about Janet is that she is already dead, aged only sixteen; pushed down the staircase in her family’s castle home ‘oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress’, her body dappled by the colours of the stained-glass window above her. Her family is ambivalent about her death; Janet was too different to them, she ‘had blighted their lives’. ‘[T]he speywives, the fishwives, the midwives, the ill-wishers’ blame Janet for her own murder, and her jackdaw is her only mourner. This beginning flavours everything that follows with poignancy.
After establishing Janet’s unhappy demise, the narrative skips back to her birth and her early life in her grandparents’ Glaswegian manse; her father’s return at the end of World War II and the family’s removal to the castle of Auchnasaugh, where Janet’s parents set up their school. Janet, now the eldest of five siblings, at first doesn’t understand and later refuses to understand conventional behaviour. She withdraws into literature and the ‘stern and wild’ landscape around her which strikes a chord with her nature, in contrast to the narrow-minded stupidity she sees in people.
But then it was summer and a rare, exquisite summer. [...] Janet forgot her earthly doom and rose before daylight to ride bareback up the grassy tracks through the woods to the moors. She watched the sun rise over the far hills, the mist float in steamy filaments off the glen and the silent golden day bring glory to the sombre pines. She was the first person in the world; only she disturbed the dew.
Any possible human allies she has are ineffective and easily disposed of, by fate or her parents – her grandparents are elderly, her beloved grandmother Ningning dies, alcoholic Cousin Lila is too self-absorbed and frail to offer much in the way of companionship. So Janet finds some comfort with birds and animals, ‘whom she loved without qualification’ and of whom there are many: a parrot, the jackdaw, ponies, the dogs and cats who roam the castle and ‘lick the butter’ to the disgust of a hearty visiting family.
The novel’s title comes from its epigraph, by Sir Walter Scott:
O Caledonia, stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Friends and family reveal to Janet her shortcomings as a social being. She acts according to what her own common sense or desires dictate: these are not society’s codes. It becomes hard to know what to do in any given situation. Once, when they’re driving to the dentist’s, Janet’s little sister Lulu opens the car door and falls out, and Janet says nothing. Instead, she waits, knowing that she will somehow be blamed as soon as the adults notice.
What Caledonia, the ‘meet nurse’, reveals to Janet is the beauty and the brutality of existence, the ever-presence of death. The universal truths that lie beneath the thin film of modern society. Janet’s rural castle life is far from glamorous (although it is Romantic). Weasels kill rabbits; lobsters are boiled alive; a headless deer hangs by the sawmill. In Arcadia ego, as Janet would appreciate.
And as we already know, the ‘poetic child’ will never have to test the nurse’s lessons against an independent existence in the world. She will never grow up.
The child’s-eye view is faultlessly depicted: elaborate ways to dispose of nasty lunches, the wince of tight pigtails, the problem of siblings (‘A nasty rat has buried your baby. She’s gone now,’ the infant Janet announces to her mother, after she’s filled her baby sister’s pram with dead leaves), the bizarre terrors (such as Janet’s conviction that a witch lives in a ruin near her school). In her instinct for the grotesque and the absurd, and her sympathy for children, Barker has a spiritual sister in Barbara Comyns.
(Photograph of Elspeth Barker by Jane Bown, 1991; found here)
Barker offsets her novel’s rich gothic tones with a dark humour; there is ridiculousness even in horrible moments. When Rab the dog slaughters the escaped hens, he has to wear a dead chicken around his neck (a blackly comic ‘primitive aversion therapy’). Everything is vividly, even unnervingly evoked: each word perfectly chosen, the prose full of wonderful rhythms. Barker weaves a dark, glittering spell that draws you into Janet’s world, her restless imagination and her savage refusal to compromise herself. I kept hoping that magically she would not die after all...
What fun she would have as a ghost. She could hardly wait.