Growing Up In The West - John Muir Canongate Classics

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after a shower of rain, or the glorious liveries of the brightly coloured trams. What is most impressive here is how Hendry avoids relaxing his vision into a nostalgic soft-focus. Incidents that another writer might have exploited as cheery set-pieces of tender reminiscence – penny soirées in the church hall, visits to the cinema for the children’s matinée – are always refracted through David’s own distinctive consciousness and so retain an edge of strangeness. Crucially, too, Hendry’s fragmented and elliptical style reproduces the often mystified perspective of childhood. Events occur with no apparent cause. The motivation – and even the identity – of certain characters is frequently obscure. In this way, Hendry avoids triteness and sentimentality to fashion a fresh and often disturbing work of fiction.

      Perhaps the bleakest of the four books collected here is Gordon Williams’s cold-eyed Bildungsroman, From Scenes Like These (1968), which was runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1968. A darkness that is more than merely physical is apparent from the opening words:

      It was still dark, that Monday in January, when the boy, Dunky Logan, and the man, Blackie McCann, came to feed and water the horses, quarter after seven on a cold Monday morning in January, damn near as chill as an Englishman’s heart, said McCann, stamping his hobnail boots on the stable cobbles.

      There is a lot going on in this opening paragraph. First, we encounter two characters who are defined above all by their level of maturity. Dunky Logan is ‘the boy’, and the novel will follow his progress towards what passes for manhood in his society. Among his models here is Blackie McCann, whose nickname reinforces the darkness motif and whose sonorous boots carry a promise of violence. Hard physical labour will be important in this novel, and so too will the atmosphere of casual bigotry, though the bigotry – in a rather deft irony – rebounds onto its perpetrators: there are plenty of chilly hearts in this novel, but none of them belongs to an Englishman.

      The novel charts a year in Dunky’s life. Fifteen and fresh from school, he has newly started work at Craig’s farm. As one might expect, given the title’s sardonic nod to Robert Burns, this is no bucolic idyll. Hemmed in by a factory and a lawless council estate, the farm is a ‘sharny old relic hanging on against the creep of the town’. The green Ayrshire of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ seems a world away. There is no rural piety here, and no reverence for nature. There is no organic relationship between man and animal. When old Charlie, the Craigs’ faithful carthorse, has worn himself to the bone after eleven years in harness, he is not put out to pasture; instead – like Boxer in Animal Farm – he is despatched to the knacker’s. The flensing of Charlie – recalling similar passages in Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place and Edwin Muir’s Autobiography – is one of the most harrowing episodes in the novel.

      Not that the human workers are treated with much more charity than Charlie. When Daftie Coll proves surplus to requirements he is paid off with a scant week’s notice – and this after eight years’ service to the Craigs. ‘Farmers can’t afford all this sentimental blether’ is Dunky’s verdict, and neither, it seems, can anyone else. There is a brutal, Hobbesian tenor to life in Dunky’s Kilcaddie. Bickering, back-biting, mutually jealous, the labourers on the farm are like ferrets in a sack. Family life is a bitter joke (‘Family! Don’t make me laugh’ says Dunky’s father), but no one is smiling at the round of flyting and fighting and even incest rendered here. Not even in sex do these characters find communion – the act is either an animal function or a weapon in the class war. Only once – in the maudlin crush of boozers in the bar on Hogmanay – does anything like a community emerge, and even here violence is never more than a jogged elbow away. This is a moral landscape almost devoid of natural human sympathy, and it’s small wonder that the casually ubiquitous rhetoric of damnation (‘MCCANN DAMN YE!’, ‘hellish keen’, ‘Damn and hell, it’s cold’) gradually acquires a more sinister resonance.

      What Dunky needs – and what Kilcaddie fails to give him – is a socially respectable outlet for his abilities. School is no help here. Nicol, the well-meaning dominie who wants to make Dunky his protégé, is a non-starter as a rôle-model. Desiccated, nit-picking, effete, he merely confirms Dunky’s perception that ‘Education was something you went in for if you weren’t good at anything else’. Moreover, for all his Nationalist radicalism, Nicol remains – like the teachers in Hendry, Kelman and Gray – an instrument of the state, ‘stage one in the disciplinary process’. Nicol aside, there is no-one in Kilcaddie who might foster Dunky’s ambitions. From his friends and relatives he meets nothing but levelling scepticism and brutal derision. A key incident comes when his uncle Charlie discovers Dunky’s secret diary – ‘the chronicle of the life of Duncan Aitchison Logan, plus some information appertaining to his interests’ – and proceeds to read aloud from its ingénu pages. The torment of this incident leads Dunky to a spiteful, self-abnegating pledge: ‘They wanted you to be as thick and dim as they were, so he’d show them he could win the Scottish Cup for ignorance. He’d grow up into a real moronic working-man and balls to them.’

      Dunky is true to his word. In the troubling final chapter he turns himself into a caricature, a lumbering parody of lumpen masculinity. The mordant irony here is that, having spent the novel striving to become a ‘real’ man, Dunky winds up as a simulacrum. ‘Like’ is the final chapter’s pivotal word: ‘It was like a man to have mates like them’; ‘It was like a man to stand at the bar’; ‘It was like a man, to have a good laugh about other people’s hard luck’. For all his earnest pondering of the subject,

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