LITMIR.BIZ

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and The Pilgrim’s Progress, I read very badly, and with a strong Scotch accent; so, besides a chapter of the Bible, he made me read a paper of the Spectator aloud every morning, after breakfast; the consequence of which discipline is that I have never since opened that book. Hume’s° History of England was also a real penance to me. I gladly accompanied my father when he cultivated his flowers, which even now I can say were of the best quality. The tulips and other bulbous plants, ranunculi, anemones, carnations, as well as the annuals then known, were all beautiful. He used to root up and throw away many plants I thought very beautiful; he said he did so because the colours of their petals were not sharply defined, and that they would spoil the seed of the others. Thus I learnt to know the good and the bad – how to lay carnations, and how to distinguish between the leaf and fruit buds in pruning fruit trees; this kind of knowledge was of no practical use, for, as my after-life was spent in towns, I never had a garden, to my great regret.

      George the Third° was so popular, that even in Burntisland nosegays were placed in every window on the 4th of June, his birthday; and it occasionally happened that our garden was robbed the preceding night of its gayest flowers.

      My father at last said to my mother, – ‘This kind of life will never do, Mary must at least know how to write and keep accounts.’ So at ten years old I was sent to a boarding-school, kept by a Miss Primrose, at Musselburgh, where I was utterly wretched. The change from perfect liberty to perpetual restraint was in itself a great trial; besides, being naturally shy and timid, I was afraid of strangers, and although Miss Primrose was not unkind she had an habitual frown, which even the elder girls dreaded. My future companions, who were all older than I, came round me like a swarm of bees, and asked if my father had a title, what was the name of our estate, if we kept a carriage, and other such questions, which made me first feel the difference of station. However, the girls were very kind, and often bathed my eyes to prevent our stern mistress from seeing that I was perpetually in tears. A few days after my arrival, although perfectly straight and well-made, I was enclosed in stiff stays with a steel busk in front, while, above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the shoulder-blades met. Then a steel rod, with a semi-circle which went under the chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays. In this constrained state I, and most of the younger girls, had to prepare our lessons. The chief thing I had to do was to learn by heart a page of Johnson’s dictionary, not only to spell the words, give their parts of speech and meaning, but as an exercise of memory to remember their order of succession. Besides I had to learn the first principles of writing, and the rudiments of French and English grammar. The method of teaching was extremely tedious and inefficient. Our religious duties were attended to in a remarkable way. Some of the girls were Pres by terians, others belonged to the Church of England, so Miss Primrose cut the matter short by taking us all to the kirk in the morning and to church in the afternoon.

In our play-hours we amused ourselves with playing at ball, marbles, and especially at ‘Scotch and English,’8 a game which represented a raid on the debatable land, or Border between Scotland and England, in which each party tried to rob the other of their playthings. The little ones were always compelled to be English, for the bigger girls thought it too degrading.

      Lady Hope, a relative of my mother, frequently invited me to spend Saturday at Pinkie. She was a very ladylike person, in delicate health, and with cold manners. Sir Archibald was stout, loud, passionate, and devoted to hunting. I amused myself in the grounds, a good deal afraid of a turkeycock, who was pugnacious and defiant.

1 The Test and Corporation Acts stipulated that public-office holders must take Holy Communion in the Church of England, 1673, and excluded all Roman Catholics from Parliament, 1678. In Scotland the Act, 1681, required all public-office holders to declare their belief in Protestantism.

2 ‘Scons’, more commonly ‘scones’, are little breads with bicarbonate of soda as a raising agent rather than yeast. They may be sweetened or unsweetened, or flavoured with treacle.

3 Penny-weddings: the painter David Allan (1744–96), sometimes regarded as the founder of Scottish genre painting, has a pen-and-watercolour sketch, ‘The Penny Wedding’, 1795. My father remembered going in the early 1930s to what he called a ‘pay-wedding’ in Maybole in Ayrshire.

4 Tolbooth: a Tolbooth is a town prison, originally the cells under the Town Hall. The Tolbooth in Edinburgh is now marked by a heart-shaped design in the causeway of the High Street. Formerly the Parliament and law courts and finally a prison, it was built about 1466 and pulled down in 1817: its doorway and keys are now at Scott’s house at Abbotsford.

5 Edie Ochiltree is a licensed travelling beggar in Scott’s The Antiquary (1816).

6 The first draft has ‘horridly’ for ‘strongly’. Mary Somerville also remarks that the battles between ‘Gowns and Plebs’, which her son described when he was at Cambridge, reminded her of these Scottish fights.

7 The ‘cutty stool’ was the stool of repentance in the church for fornication. Sitting there, the guilty party could be arraigned from the pulpit. Mary Somerville’s mother’s problem was presumably in explaining the nature of the offence. Usually the evidence of fornication was pregnancy.

8 ‘Scotch and English’: in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark invokes this passage from Mary Somerville to illustrate what remained the concerns of her childhood in Edinburgh.

       TWO

       Freedom – Religious Education – Jedburgh

      [My mother remained at school at Musselburgh for a twelve-month, till she was eleven years old. After this prolonged and elaborate education, she was recalled to Burntisland, and the results of the process she had undergone are detailed in her Recollections with much drollery.]

      SOON after my return home I received a note from a lady in the neighbourhood, inquiring for my mother, who had been ill. This note greatly distressed me, for my half-text writing was as bad as possible, and I could neither compose an answer nor spell the words. My eldest cousin, Miss Somerville, a grown-up young lady, then with us, got me out of this scrape, but I soon got myself into another, by writing to my brother in Edinburgh that I had sent him a bank-knot (note) to buy something for me. The school at Musselburgh was expensive, and I was reproached with having cost so much money in vain. My mother said she would have been contented if I had only learnt to write well and keep accounts, which was all that a woman was expected to know.

This passed over, and I was like a wild animal escaped out of a cage. I was no longer amused in the gardens, but wandered about the country. When the tide was out I spent hours on the sands, looking at the star-fish and sea-urchins, or watching the children digging for sand-eels, cockles, and the spouting razor-fish. I made a collection of shells, such as were cast ashore, some so small that they appeared like white specks in patches of black sand. There was a small pier on the sands for shipping limestone brought from the coal mines inland. I was astonished to see the surface of these blocks of stone covered with beautiful impressions of what seemed to be leaves; how they got there I could not imagine, but I picked up the broken bits, and even large pieces, and brought them to my repository. I knew the eggs of many birds, and made a collection of them. I never robbed a nest, but bought strings

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