by Sarah Moss
I reached into my bag and pulled out the envelope, gently tipped the letters, the envelopes flapping open, on to the white plastic table in front of me. They looked dirty there, like a display of evidence from a crime scene. Everyone craned forward, not at all like people who had been writing shopping lists and counting nappies. I held up the first of May’s letters. Dearest Allie, I had hoped to find a letter from you at Inversaigh.
‘These letters were written by May Moberley, the younger daughter of the artist Alfred Moberley and Elizabeth Sanderson, an early feminist campaigner who became a friend of the Pankhurst family. It is surprising that Faith Stanley’s biography of Alfred Moberley makes little reference to May’s adult life beyond stating that she trained as a nurse and practised in Manchester for several years, for the final events of May’s life as they appear here are colourful. Most of these letters are addressed to Alethea, May’s sister, who had just decided join the small band of British women training as doctors in Edinburgh, but several are to Aubrey West, a protégé of her father who had spent the summer of 1878 travelling in the Hebrides and whose paintings of Colsay featured in the Royal Academy exhibition the following year. West, who was intimate with the Moberley family, seems to have made the acquaintance of Hugo Cassingham and his sister Emily, and persuaded them to employ May, who was experienced in urban welfare work, to resolve the infant tetanus problem. There is some basis in these letters for the idea that May assented out of loyalty to Aubrey West rather than any sense of calling to Colsay; certainly she did not find out much about her destination before leaving Manchester and made no effort to learn Gaelic while on the island. Evidence given to the Highland Commission ten years later, after the deaths of all the main participants in this episode, suggests that Sir Hugo had prepared the way for May by telling his tenants that they would be evicted if they refused her attendance. And that, I think, is why this particular baby was not given a funeral and buried in the churchyard; as long as there was no official record of her birth and death, Sir Hugo had no reason to implement his threat. Childbirth had become the locus of the tension between modernity and tradition, between metropolitan and peripheral ways of understanding the world. If they had accepted May’s support and attended the lectures she offered them, the women of Colsay would have been accepting an alien and colonial intervention in the most personal and also the most political life event, the birth of a new islander. In refusing, they would expose themselves to the anger of a man who had the power to end their life on the island. By burying the baby in secret, they were able to conceal their non-compliance, and because in the event May died at about the same time as the child she failed to deliver, no one need ever know the full story of May’s failure on Colsay. There was no attempt to replace May, and life on the island continued to become steadily harder relative to life on the mainland until the last permanent resident left in the late 1960s.
‘There seems to have been local gossip to the effect that Sir Hugo showed little interest in the infant death rate until a relationship between his son, Hartley, and one of the local women resulted in a pregnancy. May’s suspicions about the dates of the pregnancy she attempted to oversee, and the DNA of the bones found in the orchard, would seem to confirm that the child in question was the result of such a liaison.’
And then I told them the story of May, Eve and Mrs Barwick, no longer quite sure whose story it was. I could imagine Mrs Barwick out in the garden in the days after May’s death, standing where Raph and I had stood, forcing the spade into the matted roots of turf as I had forced it, a bundle in a badly knitted blanket lying on the ground beside her. Would she have said something, made some ceremony, before shovelling the earth back over the baby’s dark hair, watching it trickle down the folds of pale wool? I told them about the Highland Commission, and about the reports of May’s shipwreck in the Oban Times. And that what was probably May’s body appeared on the beach at Invercarron in the first of the big storms in the new year.
The head of department had stopped writing and was watching me as if I were about to chant Mrs Barwick’s spell for raising storms. Spell for getting a job. Would Virginia Woolf have supported May or Mrs Barwick? Which is really the heroine?
I looked up, gathered my papers. I was finishing exactly within the allotted time. ‘I cannot say why the baby was buried in her father’s garden rather than elsewhere on the island. It is easy to understand that Virginia Grice would want to know where her daughter lay. Perhaps the location was Mrs Barwick’s choice, perhaps it was meant as a private insult or revenge on Hartley. The other question I cannot answer is what would have happened had May survived the passage across the Sound that day, and been able to tell her story to the Cassinghams; despite the loss of their own men, it must have been a shipwreck that was not unwelcome to some on Colsay at that time.’
I bought myself a copy of the Guardian for the train home, and settled down in another window seat of my own with the third cup of hot coffee in three days and the new Booker Prize winner, the first time I had bought a new hardback for myself. In my bag, with my laptop and the padded envelope, I had one of those plastic pots of fruit, air-freighted, peeled and chopped by other people for my convenience. The city, silenced by the thick windows and air-conditioned hum of the train, rushed past. Colsay lay waiting for me at the end of the day: the sound of the sea, the ghost of the anchorite watching over us all, the children with their sticky hands and night wakings. The newspaper showed a woman’s torso emerging from concrete rubble, although the headline I could see was about the arrest of an American singer for attacking his girlfriend with a baseball bat. I do not know if there is a good reason to read the news.
We crossed a motorway and suburbia began outside. Rain spattered diagonally against the window, as if thrown in anger, and my coffee slopped under its plastic lid. Raphael tugged at my mind, as if he were thinking of me, willing me home to him. He is not all right, Raphael, not really. He needs help of some kind, from someone. And Moth, riding through the day on my hip, poking his fingers in my ears and resting his satin head under my chin. Moth, I think, barring accident, barring illness and addiction and the treachery of strangers, barring most of the things that can happen in a life, will be all right. We were leaving the city now, me and the man in the suit watching television on his laptop, and the woman fiddling with her iPod and staring out into the rain as if the song were about to make her cry, and the boy texting some urgent thought with the hyper-evolved thumbs of the generation born more than five years later than me.
I will never learn to write with my thumbs. I will never bake cookies and keep baby wipes in the glove compartment. My stomach will never be flat again. I will never do Voluntary Service Overseas, not even if there is an impoverished and oppressed community whose problems could be resolved by the application rather than the undoing of nineteenth-century history. I will never recover the lost innocents, those who in dying as children took the only way of not doing harm, not even my own.
My phone rang. The rain was heavier now, rivulets racing across the window, behind which the heather on the moor was bowing under the wind. I pulled the handset from under the papers in my bag. It was not Giles telling me that something had gone wrong, that the children needed me now, but the head of department in Glasgow, calling to offer me a different kind of servitude, and an institutional room of my own. The train carried me onwards, across the moors, towards the island and the cliff.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Colsay is a fictitious island, but some readers will have recognized similarities between the history of Colsay and that of St Kilda. A lot has been written about St Kilda, and there is a comprehensive bibliography on the island’s website. These are the standard texts:
Mary Harman, An Isle Called Hirte: A Culture and History of St Kilda to 1930 (Waternish, Skye: Maclean Press, 1997)
Charles Maclean, Island on the Edge of the World: The Story of St Kilda (1972; rev. ed. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006)
Martin Martin, A Late Vo
yage to St Kilda (London: 1698)
Tom Steel, The Life and Death of St Kilda (London: Harper Collins, 1988)
I found specialist research on neonatal tetanus in:
Peter Stride, ‘St Kilda, the neonatal tetanus tragedy of the nineteenth century and some twenty-first century answers’, The Journal of the Royal Collage of Physicians of Edinburgh, April 2008; 38(1): 70–77
E. J. Clegg and J. F. Cross, ‘Aspects of the neonatal death in St Kilda, 1830–1930’, Journal of Biosocial Science, Jan 1994; 26(1): 97–106
The history of the Clearances is well known and well served; I found the following useful for an anecdotal approach:
David Craig, On the Crofters’ Trail: In Search of the Clearance Highlanders (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990)
Derek Cooper, The Road to Mingulay: A View of the Western Isles (London: Warner Books, 1992)
Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2002)
My sense of life on Colsay in the late nineteenth century was informed by:
Lynn Abrams’ book Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
Some readers will also have recognized the reports of the ‘Highland Commission’ as inspired by the Napier Commission, the full record of whose proceedings can be found at the website of Lochaber College in Mallaig: http://www.lochaber.uhi.ac.uk/links/napier-commission
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank everyone who gave me permission to quote from their work, and especially Nyree Findlay, who also corrected my archaeology, and Julia Donaldson, who let Moth have The Gruffalo.
I thank my colleagues at the University of Kent and at the University of Iceland for their support and interest as I wrote this book. At Kent, my especial gratitude to Jennie Batchelor and Scarlett Thomas; in Iceland to Peter Knutsson and Messiana Tomasdottir, Maeja Tomasdottir, Maeja Gardarsdottir, Mads Holm and Matthew Whelpton, and all the students in my writing courses. Sinead Mooney’s reading and comments were much valued.
Thank you to my agent, Anna Webber, to everyone at Granta, and especially my editor, Sara Holloway, for her bounteous patience and for the gift of her discernment, and to Amber Dowell for good cheer (and pink drink) when I needed it.
Copyright
Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2011
This ebook edition published by Granta Books 2011
Copyright © Sarah Moss 2011
Sarah Moss has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Lines from The Gruffalo © Julia Donaldson 1999, reprinted by kind permission of Julia Donaldson and Macmillan Children’s Books.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84708 374 6
Table of Contents
Title Page
1: THE REALITY PRINCIPLE
2: NOT FOR THERAPEUTIC USE
3: FEARING TO HANDLE A KNIFE
4: THE CHILD’S CURIOSITY
5: A SNAKE, HARMLESS
6: ANXIOUSLY PREOCCUPIED WITH OTHER MATTERS
7: THE ABILITY TO DEFEND ONESELF
8: THE CAPACITY OF AN ADULT
9: COMMON KNOWLEDGE
10: THE MORE HIGHLY ORGANIZED FORMS OF LOVE
11: WATCHING BUT NOT STARING
12: IRRATIONAL EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS
13: THE CHILD’S NEEDS
14: THIS HAPPY PARTNERSHIP
15: THE NEXT GENERATION
16: WHAT MAY BE FOUND WITHIN
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright