Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  True, there were one or two English people whom Susie didn’t please much more than she pleased Mrs Buchan. Virginia Woolf, to whom the Norman Grosvenors had been conspicuously kind when she was a girl, repeated the opinion of her brother-in-law, Jack Hills:* ‘Susie Grosvenor is engaged to John Buchan and the wise – that is Jack – predict tragedy. How is she to live with a clever man all the days of her life? She is pretty and flaxen and brainless (that is Jack’s voice) and must have a man to hold her handkerchief – but her heart is excellent – He has a brain, edits The Spectator and thinks of politics.’53

  Much as JB liked her family, he couldn’t resist teasing Susie about some of her more reprehensible ancestors. In Midwinter, his historical novel set at the time of the ’45 Jacobite rising, he has General Oglethorpe remark about Sir Robert Grosvenor, a Cheshire baronet in the mid-eighteenth century: ‘Now Sir Robert’s mother [Miss Mary Davies] was an heiress and all the faubourgs of London between St. James’ and Kensington village were her fortune. Whence came that fortune, think you, to enrich the honest knights of Cheshire? ’Twas the fortune of an ancient scrivener [notary] who bought up forfeited lands from Cromwell’s Government, bought cheap, and sold most profitably at his leisure…’54 In other words, a direct ancestor of Susie’s had become rich from the downfall of other, better men.

  In January 1907, Mrs Buchan and Anna travelled to London to meet Susie, and to attend the couple’s engagement party. The first meeting took place at Brown’s Hotel in Piccadilly and it was a sticky occasion. They enjoyed more the engagement party in the mansion in Park Lane, belonging to JB’s South African friends, the Hermann Ecksteins, despite it being a ridiculously lavish affair in their eyes, with white heather, menus printed on silver bells, and silver slippers containing sweets. ‘One almost expected the footmen to be got up as cupids,’55 observed Anna drily.

  Having heard an account of this trip, Willie wrote to his mother: ‘What a lot of interesting people you and Nan met in London. Isn’t that one of the pros of John’s engagement? I am sorry you didn’t take to Susie, poor girl: but I hope you will come round. It is certainly your bounden duty to try.’56 And to his sister: ‘I am glad you liked Susie, but astonished that you thought so little of her intelligence and looks … I never claimed for Susie ravishing loveliness, but my recollection of her is certainly one of smartness and cleverness, and I’m certain it wasn’t due to my freshness from the jungle. The prospect of matrimony may not be conducive to light conversation. It certainly would tongue-tie me.’57 Willie, so much more worldly, would have met girls who looked and sounded like Susie at balls given by the Governor of Bengal.

  Once JB decided to join Nelson’s, he knew he must resign from his position at The Spectator. Although he gave nothing like a year’s notice, Strachey wrote very kindly to him, saying that he was glad that JB had not shut the office door for the last time and that he wanted many ‘serious and sober’ reviews from his pen.58 At least initially, these tended to be long round-up reviews of poetry, as well as articles on exploration, mountaineering and fishing.

  In February a second edition of A Lodge in the Wilderness was published, with JB’s name attached, putting an end to all the speculation surrounding the author. At the same time, JB went to work in Edinburgh, having promised Tommy Nelson that he would spend two or three months there at once in order to learn about the publishing and printing trade at the Parkside Works.

  The firm had been founded as a second-hand bookshop in West Bow in Edinburgh in 1798 by Thomas Nelson, a canny entrepreneur who could see that there was a market for cheap editions of out-of-copyright classics. In 1850 his son, also Thomas (who together with William had joined the firm some years before), perfected ‘the rotary press’, which revolutionised mass printing, since it could print on both sides of the paper, and very fast too. The range of books offered by the firm expanded to include ‘moral books’ (which became very popular as Sunday School prizes), educational and travel works, as well as adventure stories. In 1880, after a fire, the works moved to Parkside, near Arthur’s Seat, and the innovations continued, with upgraded presses that could produce standardised sizes of books. In 1900 these included the New Century Library of classic fiction, which were joined, in 1903, by the Sixpenny Classics, reprints of books out of copyright. These were in a standard size of 6 ½ by 4 ½ inches, for ease of production – the right size for knapsack, pocket, ‘and especially suitable for railway reading’.59

  When JB arrived at Parkside in early February, the company was well positioned to cater for the mass market in cheap good books, especially as Nelson’s were building an extension to the factory, a printing and binding plant with a production capability of 200,000 books a week. The other partners were the brothers Tommy and Ian Nelson, together with their capable and hard-working Canadian cousin, George Brown, who had imported an up-to-date (‘very complex and scientific’) accounting system from the United States. Nelson’s were notably good employers for the time: there were extensive sports facilities and a cultural institute for the employees, and women were well treated.

  In May, three months after JB arrived, Nelson’s introduced the first titles in the Sevenpenny Library. These differed from the thin-paper Sixpenny Classics in that they were reprints of works still in copyright, so of modern rather than classic fiction, and they were handsomely bound in red and gold cloth bindings. JB sent the very first copy off the presses – The Marriage of William Ashe by Mrs Humphry Ward – to Susie, and four titles appeared in bookshops in May, with new ones added every fortnight. JB began to use his contacts amongst London literary agents to bring in works by Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells (whom JB described as ‘quite the most disgusting person’)60 and his friend Henry James. Nelson’s technological efficiency and vertical integration ensured that the Nelson ‘Sevenpennies’ revolutionised the habits of the book-buying public;61 certainly their competitors were quickly forced to follow suit.

  JB was in the thick of these new developments, even if he didn’t initiate them. As well as literary advice and the minutiae of book production, he found himself dealing with sales personnel, literary agents and general administration, including the sourcing of paper. While working at Parkside in early 1907, he stayed with Tommy Nelson and his wife, Margaret, at a large neo-Gothic house built by Tommy’s father, called ‘St Leonard’s’, very close to the Works. (It is now part of the Pollock Halls of Edinburgh University.) In March, however, he went to lodge in Hanover Street with Sandy Gillon, now practising at the Scottish Bar. At weekends he travelled to Glasgow to see his parents, for his mother was ailing, or to Peebles, so that he could walk the hills with Walter.

  He was extremely busy learning the business. He wrote to Susie: ‘Today I have spent almost entirely in machine shops in the company of old and [indecipherable] Scotch engineers. They know their business uncommonly well and explain details to me with an Olympian superiority. Great engines always fascinate me, and I enjoy the work very much. But there is a great deal of detail besides which has not the interest of novelty.’62

  JB also took over responsibility for The Scottish Review, a weekly penny journal issued by Nelson’s, which he wanted to make into a Scottish version of The Spectator and was his particular concern from the time he first arrived at Parkside until it closed at the very end of 1908. The editor was a Scottish writer called W.[illiam] Forbes Gray, but it was JB who wrote a great deal of the copy, contributing a number of columns, including book reviews, a survey of politics and a ‘London letter’. The Scottish Review had grown out of a rather churchy periodical called The Christian Leader, which Nelson’s acquired in 1905. JB at once set about making it less parochial and more secular, with good-quality serial fiction and book reviews, stories and political articles by distinguished writers, from the Scottish novelist Neil Munro to R. B. Haldane. He also toned down its Radical and ultra-nationalist stance. He gradually introduced columns on art, music and the academic world, as well as one for women.

  Gray increasingly worried
that it went over the heads of the buying public. As he wrote, a little sniffily, in the Introduction to Comments and Characters, an anthology of pieces from The Scottish Review, published after JB’s death: ‘Buchan, I soon realized, was not enamoured of popular journalism, nor was he in entire accord with Scottish sentiment … Residence in England and South Africa, together with an Oxford education, had influenced his point of view, probably unconsciously, and interposed a barrier … between him and his countrymen…’63

  Gray freely admitted that JB was a delightful person to work with, since he appreciated good work and praised it. Interestingly, even by 1907, Buchan had taken on a veneer of Anglicanism that Gray thought was the reason why he did not view the Scottish Church very warmly, believing that, at that time in Scotland, there was ‘a kind of restless interest in church affairs which is no more a spiritual thing than an interest in party politics’.64 (That criticism could certainly be laid at his mother’s door.)

  Circulation and advertising both diminished under this regime so the plug was reluctantly pulled at the end of 1908. JB wrote to Gray, ‘It has been a gallant and worthy little paper, of which none of us have any cause to be ashamed.’65 Its end was regretted by intellectuals, academics and literary novelists, but probably not that much by ordinary church-minded Scots.

  Despite his extreme busyness, he found time to write to Susie (using her mystifying nickname Moufflée) every morning after breakfast. Since they were mostly apart, they had to express their love and suppressed longing for each other almost entirely through their letters. (‘O Mouffs, I am so sick of not seeing you. You have poisoned my life, for you are so much nicer than anything else that all my modest pleasures have paled in comparison.’)66 JB missed her much more acutely than he had expected but could take the anodyne of hard work, while Susie found it almost impossible to distract herself, even by dealing with the torrent of presents that poured into 30 Upper Grosvenor Street. These included several silver inkstands from Asprey’s, a fleet of silver sauce boats, and an enviable set of lustre plates from William de Morgan himself. In those six months the couple only managed a few days together towards the end of March at Highcliffe in Hampshire, as well as a short trip to Peebles.

  Willie in India had no doubt that Mrs Buchan’s hostile attitude to the forthcoming marriage was affecting her health, which deteriorated materially in February and March. ‘You are needlessly fretting yourself unwell,’67 he wrote that April. In Ann and her Mother, Anna’s extremely thinly veiled biography of her mother, published some years later, ‘Mrs Douglas’ says: ‘Mark’s [JB’s] engagement gave me a great shock. It came as a complete surprise, and we knew nothing about Charlotte [Susie], and it seemed to me that it must break up everything, and that I must lose my boy.’68

  Anna herself, though she tried to make the best of things, was not entirely happy either, privately dreading the loosening of ties and caught in a tangle of illogicality. ‘To him I owed so much the pleasure and interest in my life that I very earnestly wished him well.’69

  It was little surprise that Susie suffered an acute crisis of nerves when finally she travelled up to Peebles to stay with the Buchans in late May, JB having had to go from Edinburgh to London to collect her, since there was no room in Bank House for her lady’s maid. As she wrote to her mother when she arrived at Bank House: ‘I had a horrid moment of homesickness before I got to Peebles. John told me his brother [Walter] was going to be there and my heart went into my boots – and I even went so far just before we arrived at Peebles station as to ask John to let me go home to my woolly one [one of her mother’s nicknames]. I really really meant it – I would have given all I possessed not to go on. However I pulled myself together and saw Walter on the platform. He is very short and has a much longer, narrower face than John. Then a small boy [Alastair] in a kilt and a cap with streamers was lifted into the carriage murmuring “Very glad to see you.” ’70

  A few days later she wrote: ‘Yesterday we had a tea party of the rank and fashion of Peebles. They all arrived punctually at 4 o’clock – I was an object of great interest as they had all read John’s books and regard him as a celebrity. We made conversation steadily for about an hour and a quarter. Peter [a terrier] was a great help as whenever topics flagged we patted him and stuffed him with cakes, with the result that he was very sick that evening!!!’71

  Nothing in her life ever became Susie better than the way she approached the Buchan family. It was much more than simply a matter of good manners, but a serious attempt to please JB’s ‘people’. She studied beforehand to make sure she had topics of conversation for them all: flowers for the Reverend John Buchan, ‘the poor’ for his wife, poetry for Walter, novels for Anna, and she brought butterscotch for Alastair. She seems to have seen their worth at once, even if she had never come across anyone quite like them in her twenty-five years:

  I was charmed by Bank House with its polished brass door-handle and its little hall, and the sitting-room with a glowing fire and books everywhere. I felt strange and a little alien to my new family, but we soon found that the same things made us laugh, and no bond is stronger. I was fascinated by my mother-in-law’s ability, and by the rapidity with which she worked. I can see her now writing long letters with her pince-nez perched on the end of her nose, or putting a lightning patch on her husband’s or sons’ underclothes, or making spills out of newspapers.

  Her powers of work were amazing. She would get up at five in the morning and tackle the day’s tasks from then onwards with a pace and … concentration which would have exhausted most strong men. She radiated an incessant activity and had apparently solved the problem of perpetual motion. Her.husband and children adored her.72

  Considering how much Mrs Buchan sighed over the engagement, this seems remarkably gracious.

  Of Mr Buchan, Susie wrote to her mother:

  John’s father is such a gog [delight]. He has the most heavenly good-tempered way with him – and laughs and is laughed at by his family all the time. He plays the penny whistle delightfully – and Peter [the terrier] simply howls at it!!!

  There is something very keen and strenuous about the atmosphere here; to begin with one feels very fit. They all talk awfully well – so intelligently and keenly and the amount of poetry quoted is amazing. One feels very alive and invigorated.73

  What impressed Susie particularly was the way the family practised economy as far as their own wants were concerned, while exhibiting open-hearted generosity to others:

  I had known extravagant people who spent money on their own pleasures and had nothing left to give to others. I had also met many kind and generous people, but I had never before come in contact with any one family who economised so much on themselves and gave away money so unsparingly.74

  Thanks to Anna’s generosity of spirit, as well as their mutual weakness for collapsing into giggles at the same absurdities, she and Susie struck up a close and lasting friendship. One of the reasons they got on so well together was that they were bred to the same predicament: as bright as educated men but knowing that most avenues of worldly endeavour would never be open to them.

  Susie had particular reason to be grateful to the twelve-year-old Alastair during this time, since he was unaffectedly delighted to make her acquaintance and was prepared to bake her cakes as tokens of his esteem. Being so much younger than his brothers and sisters, he had been a good deal petted in childhood by them, especially by Anna, who took charge to a great extent in bringing him up, since Mrs Buchan was deeply involved in kirk matters. Even disregarding the exaggerations prompted by family affection, he was plainly a delightful boy: funny, cheerful, idiosyncratic, a great dreamer, and much attached to his family. He was a voracious reader of poetry and prose and, when inspired by something he read, would march up and down the room, declaiming. He was particularly keen on Cyrano de Bergerac and would stand on the sofa, waving a home-made sword, and leap off, shouting ‘Cadets of Gascony are we’, as if he were ‘behind the walls of Arras’.

>   During her stay, Susie was taken to the farm at Bamflat, near Biggar and listened respectfully to the Masterton uncles, John and James, even though she could scarcely understand a word they said. They visited Helen’s sister, ‘Antaggie’, and her blind husband, Willie Robb, at Gala Lodge in Broughton: ‘Mrs Robb is very fat and cheerful and was dressed in a shiny thick silk dress and Mr Robb told us Scotch stories and played the pianola. We sat consuming scones in the little drawing room and listening to talk about the various ministers.’75 Fortunately, at times JB managed to contrive to get his fiancée alone to breathe some fresh air walking in the hills round Peebles, or by the River Tweed as far as Neidpath Castle or Manor Water. By the end of the fortnight, Susie had won over most of the family; it was only Mrs Buchan who refused to unbend.

  After the Whitsun holiday, JB settled down to working daily at Paternoster Row in London. He acquired immediately as his secretary an eighteen-year-old girl straight out of secretarial college, called Lilian Alcock (after 1916, Lilian Killick), with whom he was to have a close working relationship for the rest of his life. She was efficient, reliable, literate, intensely loyal and dependably discreet, and she became a dear and respected friend of the Buchans, despite never dreaming of calling them by their first names. Decades later she remembered her first day working for JB at Nelson’s in London, when he dictated forty letters at high speed, in a high-pitched voice that could blur the vowels, so that she once wrote down ‘Countess of Ayr’ when he was writing a letter to the County Surveyor.76 He could dictate at 160 words a minute, never hesitating when dealing with letters or speeches. ‘I would not say that he was a business man in the ordinary sense of the word,’ she wrote much later, ‘but he was business-like and methodical to a degree.’77