Jessie Kesson (1916–1994)

North East Scotland 1944. Tough, remote, isolated. Life revolves round little beyond keeping body and soul together: planting and harvesting potatoes and other crops: livestock. Bits of extra money are spent on essentials like worn-out work shirts, not on frivolities like new curtains. Three Italian POWs are billeted on the community. They're regarded with suspicion, but also with interest ....

Each carefully chosen word in this novella evokes the tough lives lived in this community, in which little out of the ordinary happens, and quiet suspicion can flourish. It's atmospheric too. But in the end, this slight story didn't truly engage me.… (plus d'informations)

A short, elegant rural tragedy, set in the 1950s in a farming community somewhere in the north of Scotland (around Aberdeen?), pivoting on the long-standing rivalry between Hugh Riddel, a steady, reliable agricultural worker, employed as dairyman on a large farm, and his sometime schoolfellow Charlie Anson, who has ambitions to get into local politics and has been seen hanging around Hugh's daughter. When Hugh is invited to give the "Immortal memory" toast at the Burns Supper and the text of his address gets into the local papers, Anson is burning with jealousy, and trouble seems inevitable.

Kesson takes an odd approach to structuring the story, where we start in the aftermath of the trouble and then loop away into the back-stories of characters indirectly involved in it — Hugh's cattleman father; Sue Tatt the shameless village "woman of shame" (based on Kesson's mother?); the Vicar; Hugh's social-worker daughter Helen (Kesson herself?); the gossiping Greek chorus of farmworkers in the dairy — and she tells us a lot about conditions of employment in agriculture, the social structure of villages, the misguided way youth work is organised, the eccentricities of Scottish local buses, and so on. We keep feeling that we are losing our grip on the story just at the point when she swoops back to where she was meant to be and we suddenly see how relevant it all was. In the background throughout is the figure of Robert Burns, as a farmer and as a lover, his experiences contrasting with and sometimes paralleling the lives of the modern farmworkers. But there's also the important symbolic presence of a hill with a Pictish horse on it, and of a modern mental hospital: neither ever quite enters into the story, but they are both clearly essential somehow.

I also loved the way Kesson quite naturally and undemonstratively reaches for a Scots word whenever that expresses what she wants to say better than standard English could. She doesn't write in dialect, but she ends up with English prose that feels unmistakably Scots.

Wonderful stuff, it seems to pack something like the breadth and scope of a Thomas Hardy novel into 150 pages...… (plus d'informations)

[Another Time, Another Place] is definitely an apt title for this novel. Set on a farm in northeast Scotland during WWII, it is definitely a world onto itself. "The woman", never given a name, or even capitalized, is an outsider, a dreamer, set down in a cottage in this place by dint of being married to a dairyman, a protected occupation during the war.

Working piece work at various seasonal jobs around the farm, she was caught between her neighbours Meg and Kristy. Debating the nature of triangles, she felt there should never be threes, but then realized a third is always necessary as a foil or a go-between for the other two. The woman is judged and made fun of by the pair for her solitary nature and dreaminess, yet they have to grudgingly accept her as she has "the knack" for doing the chores that need doing. This is a culture which respects good work.

Enter another threesome - a trio of Italian POWs, conscripted to farm labour. They were housed in the bothy next to the woman and her husband, so she was given the chore of delivering their milk. Speaking neither English nor Scots, the Italians were isolated by language and prejudice, make worse by the fact that one of the villagers' own was missing in Italy after the battle of Monte Cassino.

Little by little, the woman came to know the Italians. Fantasizing about one, pursued by another, she learned enough Italian and they learned enough English to communicate. The village was not so kind however, going so far as to lump the woman and the Italians together as outsiders. They did not have "the knack".

This is a slow paced novel built around the year's agricultural cycle. The war ended and the Italians were to be sent home. However, in a twist of fate, the kind where everyone is too keen to judge, and swiftly at that, a misunderstanding had lasting consequences.

Kesson knew that Scottish judgemental streak all too well. The fatherless daughter of a young prostitute, she was taken into state care at age eight. Denied a full education because of her origins, she was placed in domestic service at sixteen, eventually marrying and turning to hired farm work. There is no bitterness here though, just a feeling of listening to a story about another time and another place.… (plus d'informations)