Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Chapter Twenty Two

  The Singing Sands

  The Singing Sands was published after Josephine Tey’s death, and was written while she knew she was seriously, if not terminally, ill. It has a plot that starts in Scotland but ranges far and wide, before tying up all the ends in a satisfying conclusion in London. The character development goes deeper into Alan Grant’s psyche as he suffers from stress and claustrophobia, and finally overcomes this through his application to learning and hard work. As the culmination of Elizabeth MacKintosh’s life’s work, it has roots in her childhood; touches on her doomed romance with Hugh; is a personal response to the Scottish Literary Renaissance and Neil Gunn; and reflects the achievements of her adulthood in the way it is based in Scotland, but ranges much further.

  Grant has been signed off work, something he finds difficult to deal with as his illness is mental rather than physical. He has been working too hard, and decides to go and stay with his cousin Laura, in Scotland, to recover. Grant’s struggles with claustrophobia in the sleeper train north set the scene in detail, and the journey ends with the discovery of a dead man in one of the compartments. Grant absent-mindedly takes the dead man’s newspaper, and, waiting for his cousin in the hotel next to the station, is surprised to find a short and intriguing poem about ‘The Singing Sands’ written on the edges of that newspaper. When he later reads the report of the death in the following day’s newspapers, he cannot square the description of the man with the poem, the handwriting, or the face that he glimpsed in the compartment. The mystery of the location of the Singing Sands takes hold of him, and, as he battles his own personal demons and contemplates his future, he starts to follow the dead man’s trail. The twisting plot takes in a flight to the Western Isles, Grant’s romantic life, an encounter with a Scottish nationalist activist, and academic and personal jealousy amongst archaeologists and explorers.

  Back in 1949, when Josephine Tey had published, in quick succession, Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair and Brat Farrar, Maurice Lindsay, a Scottish poet, editor and broadcaster, wrote to Neil Gunn, discussing some of the writers they knew in common, such as James Bridie and Hugh MacDiarmid (and, of course, their political views). Lindsay also touched on his own work, saying, ‘The novel is nearly finished. I found out that I couldn’t write a detective story. I’m just not interested in crime that flippant way. So it’s now a very human story in which a murder just happens to occur.’1 That was very much the attitude to crime fiction within the Scottish Literary Renaissance. The mystery novels that Josephine Tey was producing were not thought worthy of serious consideration. However, Gunn could not help but be aware of Tey’s work, since it was garnering such good reviews.

  Neil Gunn had published his best-known book, The Silver Darlings, during the war in 1941, but by 1949, although his adulation by the Scottish Literary establishment was well underway, and he sat on committees and received awards and honorary degrees, his most recent novels, The Drinking Well and The Shadow, had not received the reception he had hoped for. Gunn decided to try his hand at a sort of detective fiction. The result, 1949’s The Lost Chart, is generally received by Gunn aficionados with bemusement.2 With a Cold War spy theme, a missing chart and a detective with a shady Second World War past, the novel starts strongly, though soon becomes bogged down in ruminations on a lost Gaelic idyll. To Josephine Tey, it must have seemed as if Gunn was encroaching on her territory. The book even starts with her own preferred hobby of fishing, but, however high her hopes were for it, it’s hard to imagine she would have admired the way Gunn tried to impose his vision of Scottish nationalism onto the story.

  Colin’s lifelong interest in fishing gets considerable time devoted to it in The Singing Sands, where Grant sees fishing not as a hobby, but as ‘Something between a sport and a religion’.3 The Singing Sands is a clear riposte, not only to The Lost Chart in particular, but to Gunn’s political vision of Scotland, and, by extension, to the way that the Scottish Literary establishment had treated Josephine Tey over the years. It is also about fishing, and much, much more. Grant, The Singing Sands tells us, was ‘the best sonnet-writer in the sixth form’.4 This novel, where the plot hinges on the dead man’s unfinished poem, clearly shows us crime writing as Beth herself saw it: ‘a medium as disciplined as any sonnet’, where a framework can be used to create something original.5

  In The Lost Chart, Gunn’s hero is ‘Grear’, a name noticeably similar to Tey’s detective Grant. Grear becomes obsessed with the island of Cladday, a Gaelic paradise in the Western Isles, though he never actually goes there. Tey takes her hero Grant on a bumpy flight west to the island of Cladda in The Singing Sands, and shows it very clearly for what it is: not an idyll where people speak Gaelic and have discovered the meaning of life, but a collection of disparate souls living in a small place. As for Ellen, the Gaelic singer and Grear’s romantic interest: what a contrast between Tey’s description of Gaelic singers at a ceilidh, and Gunn’s view. His lead character is barely able to hear Ellen sing a line in Gaelic without fainting from emotion. Grear regularly calls Ellen up on the phone and asks her to sing to him – something that Neil Gunn, in real life, sometimes asked his girlfriends to do – as he finds her voice so soothing and inspiring and evocative.6 The audience in Tey’s novel, faced with interminable, mediocre Gaelic singing, slip out the back of the hall and go home to watch the ballet on TV.

  The Lost Chart is full of ideas about how Gaelic is the ancestral language of Scotland, and how Scots going back to the pure emotion of Gaelic, with people saluting the sun and moon and remaining unsophisticated, would be idyllic and an antidote to the Cold War. Josephine Tey, who had seen the snobbish way her father had been treated in Inverness, could not endorse that world view. By turning his back on Gaelic, Colin had given his daughters the education they needed to get on in the world. When Tey saw Gaelic speakers, she saw her uncles, people who had fought Colin in the back of his shop to try and get money out of him; she saw the poor roads and stifling religion of the Applecross peninsula and Colin’s original home, as described in The Man in the Queue. When she thought of Gaelic women, she didn’t think of dark-haired, long suffering silent types like Christina in The Lost Chart, she thought of Colin’s mother, bringing up her family as best she could through hard work. Transferring a female character from a Neil Gunn novel into a Josephine Tey novel – or into Josephine Tey’s life – would be impossible, and cuts to the root of their differences. Gunn saw the Highlands through a romantic, historical mist, with idealized female, Gaelic speakers. In The Singing Sands Josephine Tey presented an entirely different vision of Scotland: the Scotland that she knew and lived in.

  The SNP was campaigning hard in the last years of Josephine Tey’s life. In 1950, Lena Ramsden and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies had spent Christmas together at Tagley Cottage in Essex, and Lena remembered the two of them laughing at reports on the radio that the Stone of Destiny had been stolen by Scottish students, keen to make a nationalist point.7 Lena thought it was a tremendous joke; her friend Josephine Tey was not so sure. Tey had seen the beginning, in Inverness, of the Scottish National Party, with Gunn and his political friends, ex-provost Alexander MacEwen and lawyer John MacCormick campaigning for election. In the Scottish literary world, the idea of stealing the Stone of Destiny was not new – Hugh MacDiarmid had been corresponding (in secret) about it since the 1930s.8 Beth had been aware of these nationalist ideas for years.

  Lawyer John MacCormick, in 1950 Rector of the University of Glasgow, was heavily involved in the aftermath of the Stone of Destiny theft (which had been taken by Glasgow students), and, by 1951, was also taking the Covenant Committee up to Inverness.9 The Covenant Committee aimed to raise the profile of the idea of Scottish Home Rule, and their meeting in Inverness was very well attended, with an audience of 2,000 congregating outside the Town House. What Lena saw, from Essex, as a fringe movement, had been at the heart of Josephine Tey’s local politics in Inverness for some time, and Tey was remarkably prescient in seei
ng just how important Scottish nationalism would become. For Tey personally, the idea of an independent Scotland was anathema. She had not received full recognition for her achievements in Scotland. Both she and her sisters had left Scotland in order to find work. Scotland, for Tey, was where her father was eternally stigmatized for being a shopkeeper. London, and Britain, were the stage where Tey was successful. Her reasons for not supporting Scottish independence are set out clearly throughout her work, but nowhere more clearly than in The Singing Sands.

  The Singing Sands is not a polemic against Scottish nationalism. Many of the ideas in the novel had already been explored in Patria, the unperformed play written around the same time.10 As with Dickon and The Daughter of Time, Patria is less successful as a piece of work, while The Singing Sands is the finished item – more polished, and much deeper. In Patria Tey’s attitude is clear from the name of the first (nationalist) character mentioned: he is just called WASTREL. There is some attempt, from the author of Kif, to discuss the role of economics and unemployment in nationalist movements, but in Patria the whole reason for the nationalist movement is that these people don’t want to work: they want glory; they’re drunk on words. The nationalist movement is even led by a poet (BERGEN), an American who has written a dramatic and lengthy poem entitled ‘Flame among the Lilies’. Bergen leads his cronies in impassioned speeches at political meetings – but is brought up short by ‘Margot’, who appears to be his ex-girlfriend: ‘dark and pale, earnest but not fanatical, obviously nervous and unhappy in her position, but driven by a conviction stronger than her fears’.11 Margot, so similar in looks to Beth MacKintosh, certainly expresses much of what Beth says about nationalism throughout Patria and The Singing Sands. Over a long speech which spills onto two pages of the published play, Margot spells out Beth’s eloquent thoughts about her country and its place in Britain, and her distrust of nationalists:

  What you are doing is a sin, a crime. A crime against humanity and civilisation. You are rousing hatreds that were sleeping, that would have died in their sleep. [...] you rake up old injustices [...] you invent new ones [...]. You distort history as you please [...]. I love my country as much as any of you. But I’m not blinded by flag-waving or doped by cheap sentiment. I don’t cheer when some fool tells me that we are the salt of the earth.

  Poetry, in particular that of Hugh MacDiarmid, was at the forefront of the literary scene in Scotland, and fuelled the debate on writing in Scots or Lallans.12 Beth, with her Gaelic heritage, makes ‘Margot’ (still in that same lengthy speech) say this about writing, the subject dearest to her heart:

  You talk of our glorious traditions; you would revive the language and literature of the Creelanders. There isn’t any literature, and you know it. All the literature the Creelanders ever produced were folk-tales, handed down by word of mouth because they couldn’t write. As for the language, there isn’t a single person in this hall tonight who knows a word of it. It is so dead that it has no words for anything that came into being later than two hundred years ago. It has no connection with modern life. And yet you demand that it should be learned and talked again. And when you speak a tag of it your poor dupes cheer like maniacs.

  The Gaelic revival in Scotland has seen the number of speakers rise and the language maintain an important part in Highland life. In Beth’s time, her former schoolmate Mairi MacDonald was typical of the Gaelic revival in that she devoted time and energy to the Mod, the showcase of Gaelic song and culture, but did not want to associate with poor Gaels such as Beth’s grandparents, or even Beth’s father. Gaelic speakers such as Beth’s grandparents experienced real prejudice against their language, an attitude that persisted for many years, but the Gaelic revival did not simply reverse this prejudice and allow descendants of Gaelic speakers, like Beth, to accept their heritage: instead it set up new norms and new societal groupings. The Scottish Literary Renaissance honoured Gaelic writers such as Sorley MacLean, but Beth’s distance from the men of Scottish literature such as Gunn and MacDiarmid meant these new Gaelic writers never came into her circle.

  Gordon Daviot’s play Patria simplifies the argument about Scottish nationalism, but also tries to include too much. It is not a successful play, because it has too much going on and too much ranting – but it is a successful exposition of complicated views about Scotland and its place in Britain, and as clear an expression as anywhere in her work (with perhaps the exception of The Singing Sands, which is more subtle) of Beth’s complicated attitude to Scotland. She didn’t hate her country and love England, as is sometimes presented. Beth liked her home and liked England as well: she was British. What annoyed Beth was that ‘Scotland’ was being presented as a particular entity in the nationalist debate, a romantic, pseudo-historical national entity that had room for the songs of Colin’s rejected Gaelic heritage, but had no room for Colin the self-made man, or Beth the successful writer.

  Beth put so much of herself into her final novel The Singing Sands that it is easy to trace echoes of her childhood, her young womanhood and her adult life. The novel begins with one of her descriptions of the train journey north, a journey she had done so many times before. In the annotated draft manuscript of the novel, held now in the National Library of Scotland, some of the very few alterations made to the typed text make sure that details of the train and railway are correct – while the list of passengers that have previously met ‘Old Yoghurt’ include an Admiral (Beth’s brother-in-law Humphrey Hugh Smith) and an officer of the Cameron Highlanders (either Hugh McIntosh or her lost First World War soldier) – while ‘Yoghurt’s’ real name of Murdo is the name of Beth’s uncle, on her father’s side, who had worked (as a cab driver) at the station. The book is nominally set in Perthshire, which of course Beth had links to through her maternal grandmother, Jane Ellis, but it may as well be set in Inverness. The length of the train journey, the airport, and a few other details all point to Grant travelling from London to Inverness and then out into the country to his cousin’s. From the moment Grant gets off the train and walks into the Station Hotel, every part of the scenery seems familiar to an Invernessian.

  The journey to Clune is a journey from Inverness to Daviot, the scene of Beth’s childhood holidays (there is even a Clune near to Daviot). Laura’s house is a return to childhood for both Grant and Tey. And, as Grant remembers an adolescent romance with Laura, Josephine Tey remembers her own romance with Hugh McIntosh, through Laura’s son, Pat. Patrick of course was Hugh’s middle name, and Pat had first appeared in one of Beth’s early published short stories, written just after his death. ‘Haivers’, where the character of Pat first appears in Beth’s fiction, was published in the Glasgow Herald newspaper on 18th February 1928, and essentially the story is the same as an incident in The Singing Sands: Pat has to present a bouquet of flowers, and doesn’t want to. Details are changed – the VIP in The Singing Sands becomes Zoe, and has an integral part to play in the story; Cresta is forgotten; and the sympathetic uncle becomes Grant. The first person narrative of the short story is gone, and The Singing Sands is far more assured: it loses the pawkiness, sentimentality and quick humour of the short story in favour of the more deliberate pacing and character exploration of the novel. Although there are some similarities between the two, the novel shows clearly how Tey had developed as a writer. Pat was always a strong character but now, as Tey herself was older, she also had sympathy with Grant and Laura, and so can present a more rounded picture not only of Pat himself, but how he fits into his family. There is no question that The Singing Sands is the work of a mature writer who is reworking an old idea – looking again at incidents in her real life and in her writing life that have all contributed to who she is and what she can create now. Although knowledge of Tey’s life shows that she was remembering her earlier romance with Hugh, Grant, as a cipher for Josephine Tey (herself a cipher), makes his views about marriage clear: he rejects marriage, almost by accident, because of his absorption in his work. He is a clear celebration of single, independent
life, maintaining his links with friends and family, not isolated, but living his life as he chooses. This is a very clear statement from Beth that she had ultimately found contentment in her life choices.

  Hugh Patrick Fraser McIntosh’s family’s attachment to Scotland was so great that he, his father and two of his sisters all insisted on being buried in Inverness, despite living and dying elsewhere.13 When Hugh and Beth had started writing together they had submitted their work to British or English journals, but Hugh’s poems had also been republished in a popular anthology of Scottish writing. As a man, Hugh would have found it easier to fit into the world of Neil Gunn and James Bridie. Beth had seen, through Hugh, the attraction of Scotland, but her life had taken a different turn. Her ambiguous presentation of poet characters in her fiction shows that she had continued to engage with Hugh’s work and ideas. She didn’t dismiss the idea of Scottish independence out of hand, but had explored it thoroughly, and saw more possibilities in other things. Grant begins his search for ‘singing sands’ in Scotland, but soon discovers that they are actually much, much further away, in Arabia. There is so much more to the world than Scotland that the Scottish Nationalist Wee Archie and his concerns become merely a subplot in The Singing Sands.

  This is where Josephine Tey’s skill as a writer, and her own original thought, raises The Singing Sands from polemic like Patria, and turns it into an extraordinarily complex novel. Given the basic framework – a body and a mystery discovered in the first chapter, and a solution found logically by the end chapter – Tey was able to work in a fantastic plot, which takes wild tangents that are always reined in by the needs of the mystery novels – but which allow her to explore not only nationalism, but also develop several characters, put in an extended storyline about pilots, explore Grant’s mental state of exhaustion, visit the Western Isles and Arabia, and put in numerous other quirky details (such as the fact that Grant’s housekeeper used to be a theatrical dresser, and we hear her opinion of Marta Hallard’s acting in a ‘modern’ play) that make the book a joy to re-read. We know that Grant will solve the mystery, so, as readers, we follow him no matter where he and his author take us. The book certainly does not rely on a traditional building of tension, where the hero overcomes a series of hurdles to reach his goal, but operates in a far more subtle way, balancing several plotlines at once. The trip to the Western Isles, for example, doesn’t help the main plot of discovering the murderer in any way, but it does help to resolve Grant’s nervous exhaustion – whilst also giving Josephine Tey a chance to make several pertinent comments on Scottish nationalism and set up the resolution of the subplot involving Archie’s criminality.