on misty dawns when she used to walk through the trees to fetch milk from a nearby farm, before travelling to town and university classes each day. Yet The Quarry Wood is not a naive nor a ‘student life’ production, for it displays a striking maturity of style and insight.
Shepherd has an acute and unsentimental grasp of character and motivation—witness her account of Stoddart Semple, for example, in chapter four, or her very sharp eye for the intolerable social and sexual complacencies of young men—yet she never loses compassion. When such insight is matched to the reserve and dry humour of her prose, Nan Shepherd’s writing has all the grace of Chekhov, not least in its delight at how revealing the casual juxtapositions of everyday speech and action can be made to be. The most ordinary domestic events come alive under this subtle touch, made even more dynamic by a splendid ear for the vigour of common North East speech. In this respect the novelist honours the community she depicts—notwithstanding the often hilarious direness which she finds there—as for example in the plight of the Leggatt sisters, led by the dreadful Jeannie who learned from an early age to use religion and respectability like a two-handed engine for subduing her timorous mother and the rest of her dust-free household.
The limitations of Martha’s point of view are dealt with equally fairly. Matty is an intellectual being who has yet to find that one ‘does not learn from books alone’, and indeed for a time in the novel she remains unaware of her own emotions and her own passionate and jealous nature. She resists and resents the coarseness of home life around her—and it’s coarse enough—yet Shepherd’s skill lets us see that there’s more there than her protagonist has yet realized despite the scandals that are told against her. Then, too, Martha has to learn that the claims of the ideal can turn into a burden or a kind of exploitation, if they are divorced from physical expression and common life. Her own infatuation with Luke and the unfairness of his spiritualization of her, teaches Matty this.
Such wisdom is not to be found in lectures, and its spokesperson is Great Aunt Josephine, whose formidable and friendly influence opens and closes the tale. Josephine possesses ‘the same sure capable grasp of life’ that Matty finds in one of her most gifted professors, and that she herself will eventually inherit. Thus it is Josephine who will restore to Matty what is best in her roots, without denying the possibilities of a wider intellectual life beyond them. Paradoxically, perhaps, she does this by the manner of her death, which is where the novel ends.
In re-reading The Quarry Wood it becomes clear that an apparently episodic unfolding has been rather carefully controlled from the start, for its delightful opening paragraph has given us what amounts to a summary of the book’s central theme and evolution. When Josephine Leggatt dies, ‘aged seventy-nine and reluctant’, it is after an agonizing and extended struggle against cancer, a grim vigil which Matty (and the reader with her) has assumed responsibility for and has had to undergo. It is a harrowing sequence, and yet Josephine’s end comes as a triumph of affirmation, linked as it is to the turning of the seasons, and to the evocation of the dour and delicate moods of the weather at which Nan Shepherd particularly excels. There is no melodramatic heightening here, such as the Gothic crescendo which makes a ‘clean sweep o the Gourlays’ at the end of George Douglas Brown’s novel; nor does the narrative conclude with the sweet fatalism of Chris’s ebbing away at the end of Grey Granite. Nan Shepherd’s vision is not without its own wry ironies, but she speaks positively and wholly on behalf of life. Like Josephine Legatt, she has an eye that sees everything, ‘a serene unclouded eye’, but ‘an eye, moreover, that never saw too much’.
In the last chapter, Matty’s father helps her to wring a hen’s neck for the family meal:
Geordie stood with an admirer’s eye upon the fat breast of the fowl, holding her out from him until her spasms of involuntary twitching were over. Martha watched, breathing the clean sweet air of a July morning. When she raised her head she saw the wet fields and the soft gleam of the river. ‘How fresh it is,’ she said.
‘Ay, ay,’ answered her father, still holding the hen. ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.’
Roderick Watson
Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her grand-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it was she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving − she reflected − that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.
Mrs. Ironside would have grumbled on for long enough and Aunt Josephine knew it.
‘Ye’ll just tak the craitur awa fae the school Emmeline,’ the old lady said. ‘Ye’ll never haud book-larnin’ in a wizened cask. Stap it in, it’ll aye rin oot the faister. The bairn’s fair wizened.’
‘Oh, I ken she’s nae bonny, Aunt Josephine—’
‘O ay, ye were aye the beauty yersel, Emmeline, I’se nae deny it. But ye’ve nane to blame but yersel that the bairn’s as she is. “There’s Emmeline, noo,” I says to Leebie, “throwin’ hersel awa on yon Geordie Ironside, and the bairn’s as ugly a little sinner as you’d clap e’en on in a month o’ Sabbaths.” “Dinna mention the wean,” says Leebie, “nor Emmeline neither. If she hadna the wit to pit a plooman by the door, nor the grace to mind on fat was due to her fowk and their position, she can just bide the consequences. Dinna speak o’ Emmeline to me,” says Leebie. “She’s never lookit richt upon her man if she’s gotten a surprise that the bairn’s nae a beauty.”’
‘Geordie’s nae that ill-looking, Aunt Josephine.’
‘Na, mebbe no. But look at his sister Sally − as grim’s an auld horse wi’ a pain in its belly. Matty’s an Ironside, ma dear, and ye’ve gotten fat ye hae gotten by mairryin’ aneath ye.’
Aunt Josephine said it calmly, without passion or malice, as one delivers an impersonal truth. She alone of the Leggatt family had recognised Emmeline since her marriage; but she would never have dreamed of denying that the marriage was a folly. She had even, in the early years, attempted on her sisters the thankless task of persuasion in Emmeline’s behalf. After all, she was the only bairn of their own brother − ‘blood’s thicker nor water,’ Aunt Josephine had the audacity to remind Aunt Jean, even after that lady had delivered her ultimatum with regard to Emmeline.
‘But it’s nae sae easy to get aff yer hands,’ said Jean.
That made the matter conclusive. To have Emmeline on their hands would have been an impossible disaster for the respectable Leggatts.
Emmeline tossed her head at their opinion. With base effrontery she married the man she loved, and after twelve pinched and muddled years, with her trim beauty slack, two dead bairns and a living one mostly nerves and temper, she stood in her disordered kitchen and fretted that she could not offer her aunt a decent cup of tea.
‘Beautiful, my dear, just beautiful,’ said Aunt Josephine, sipping the tea; and she returned to the question of Martha’s schooling. Emmeline, to be sure, had a dozen reasons against taking the child away. Reasoning to Miss Leggatt was so much moonshine. Fretful little girls are solid realities (if not so solid as their grand-aunts might wish): reasons, merely breath. It was not to be expected that a vapour would impede Aunt Josephine.
