The White Bird Passes: Jessie Kesson 1

‘It was spring along the road to Grandmother’s country. Not the dusty, daffodilled, yellow spring that Janie glimpsed on the barrows in High Street, but a spring that was sharp and white. Star of Bethlehem flowers clustered together in groups, like milestones flashing along the way. Hawthorn wound itself in thorny whiteness, smelling like heartbreak, if heartbreak could smell. The great fir wood of Laveroch shadowed the road…’

‘This is Grandfather’s wood, isn’t it, Mam?’ Janie knew the answer…

A mother and young daughter walk together. It was these walks away from the slums of Elgin that were to cement a powerful bond between them. They drank in the land and all it held and Liza reeled off poetry that the young Janie absorbed like the sounds and smells of the land. Rare enough were these moments but they marked out Janie for an impossible future.

Even in the surroundings of The Lane in Elgin, Jessie Kesson’s autobiographical novel exudes a warmth and passion for life that belies the squalor and a lifestyle that would soon separate mother and daughter when Janie is sent to an orphanage 100 miles away in Aberdeenshire.

‘Sometimes, with a sudden impulse to please the women grouped round the entrance to the Lane, Mysie Walsh would dance to the music coming from the chip shop’s gramophone, her petticoats whirling, her garters showing, real and silk, her voice rising above the gramophone; and, like her smile, her voice gathered you right into it, so that her song seemed to come from you too …

…In moments like those the Lane became so alive and full of colour to Janie that she felt suddenly and intensely glad for just being alive in a world of song, and colour, and whirling petticoats and warm dark women like Mysie Walsh.’

But Janie is tormented that she might lose the only parent she had
‘Mam’ … ’just say this one time that you won’t die soon.’

For Jessie Kesson: failed ferm deem and shop assistant; voluntary mental patient; cottar’s wifie; periodical writer; cinema cleaner; talented social worker; artist’s model; BBC radio producer and one of Scotland’s outstanding writers of the 20th century, The White Bird Passes is a prolonged act of catharsis and self healing.

But this is to run ahead. This classic and moving autobiographical novel covering a period parallel to Jessie’s early years, is more darkened window than mirror.

Liza is Liz and Janie is Jessie.  Jessie Kesson (1916-1994) was born Jessie Grant Macdonald in Inverness in a big hoose with a big garden, as reported to her by a matron at the Skene orphanage. Her mother Liz came from a rural farming and forestry family in Moray. It was a time when moving up or down the social scales or just clinging to where you were was fraught with chance and little in the way of the safety nets of a later welfare state. Jessie was Liz’s second illegitimate child and that was a chance too far for Liz’s father.

The ‘big hoose’ was Inverness Workhouse as Jessie was to discover when she went to Inverness to marry John Kesson. It was years before she spoke of this uncovering of her inauspicious beginning.

Liz found herself an outcast, condemned to poverty and getting by on Poor Relief and small time prostitution.

On the 19th of April 1927 Liz McDonald was charged with neglect under the Children Act 1908, pled guilty and was admonished.
The Inspector reports:
‘…yesterday, in Elgin Sheriff Court, her mother appeared on a charge of neglect, when she agreed to allow the girl to be removed to a home until she attains the age of 16 years’

Janie of the novel sees their future together as tinkers because ‘nobody worries about tinker children.’  Running away is short lived and they return to the inevitable separation and Janie is sent to the orphanage in the barely disguised ‘Skeyne’.  Janie’s love of poetry and the woods and landscape, so influenced by the time with her mother, prove her to be a bright and articulate pupil.

‘Skeyne never had the colour of its sound. It lay on the threshold of Deeside. A doormat against which hurrying tourists wiped their feet, their eyes ever forward to the greater glories of the Moor of Dinnet and Lochnagar.’

Janie, aka Jessie, is given to wandering when occasion and opportunity permits and the strictness of orphanage life can sometimes be tempered with affectionate understanding.

Kesson used her early life experiences as material for stories and magazine pieces over and over again before wrestling with producing The White Bird Passes, her first novel. (1958)

In Makar in Miniature which appeared in the North-East Review in September 1946 and quoted by Isobel Murray in the biography:

‘The library could be swept another hour; explanations to the Matron could wait; but the Makar must go now to Ducks’ Wud, for hyacinth time is so brief that, if you dinna catch it, it’s gone…

…Another bairn would be sent in search of the missing Makar.’
‘Mrs Elrick sent me tae look for ye, she said ye’d either be in the Wud or speaking til yersel in the lavvy.’

Kesson brilliantly evokes the child’s sense of urgency and wonder. Her memory for detail and of a child’s perspective is one of the delights of her writing and of the novel.

Encouraged by her dominie, a case for a place at University in Aberdeen is energetically argued for. But, just as it was to be for Jessie, the funding of a University place was beyond the remit of the orphanage trustees.  The Scarlet Goon would be long in the coming.

In an interview with her biographer Isobel Murray in 1985, Jessie Kesson spoke about the influence of her mother:

‘It was my mother, great credit to her, she was the one that had the poet in her – she really had – it wis her gave me my great love for all o’ it, my mother…’

Jessie dedicated the The White Bird to her Dominie, Donald Murray, headmaster of Skene School. She owed much to Murray who recognised and nourished a rare writing talent. But there was always the nagging doubt that perhaps it should have been dedicated to Liz. For all the apparent frankness in the novel the unburnished truth is folded carefully in sheets veiling anguish that was for another day, another year.

Liz held Jessie in the North East until her death in 1949, her body twisted and her senses destroyed by syphilis. The song in her soul was Jessie’s inheritance.

But the dedication is there on the pages of The White Bird Passes through Janie’s recollections:

‘All the things I know, she taught me, God. The good things, I mean. She could make the cherry trees bloom above Dean’s Ford, even when it was winter. Hidden birds betrayed their names the instant she heard their song. She gave the nameless little rivers high hill sources and deep sea endings. She put a singing seal in Loch Na Boune and a lament on the long, lonely winds. She saw a legend in the canna flowers and a plough amongst the stars.’

And in the less sentimental; ‘And I would be blind now, if she had never lent me her eyes.’

Russell Bruce, Books Editor, February 2010

Footnotes:

The White Bird Passes p 57
ibid p 6
ibid p. 89 (for Janie a recurring anxiety see also p 122)
Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life, Canongate 2000 p 5
ibid p 7
The White Bird Passes p 103
Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life p 67
ibid p 26
9  The White Bird Passes p 123
10  ibid p 124

The White Bird Passes by Jessie Kesson is available in paperback. B&W Publishing Ltd, Edinburgh 153pp  £5.99

Jessie Kesson 1 is the first of a series looking at the work of one of Scotland’s most important writers and her place in Scotland’s literary history. This reviewer is indebted to the tireless work and research of Kesson’s biographer, Isobel Murray, Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.

Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life, published by Canongate in 2000
at £12.99 has recently gone out of print. Copies are still available from online booksellers and libraries. We hope to provide an update on the availability of this indispensable work to any student of Kesson’s art in a later part of this series.