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A Nation in Want of a Grievance takes its name from a 19th century editorial in the Times newspaper. It consists of a collection of 35 essays written in Scotland around the end of the 20th century and the start of the present 21st century. Some of these are directly concerned with Scotland, some are not. Some are documentary in character, others are fictional. The first essay is a memoir, in a spirit of fictionised reportage, of the last herring-fishery on the west coast of Scotland - a fishery in which the author took part as a trawler deck-hand. A second piece in the collection is a re-jig of Lady Gregory's famous little one-act play, The Rising of the Moon, which has been re-written and located in the post-Jacobite Highlands of 1746. One piece of extended and research-intensive journalism examines in detail the long record of landlord chicanery relating to popular access to the waters of Loch Morar in western Lochaber. Another piece draws extensively on French and Spanish resources to tell the story - so far as it can be told - of Duncan Stewart of Balquidder, private doctor to Le Roi Christophe, the famous monarch of post-revolutionary Haiti. Oysters from Sweetings, meanwhile, is a fictional comment on modern Scotland in the style of John Buchan. The collection ends with two newspaper editorials. One, from a post-war edition of the Scotsman newspaper, is fictional, and relates to the forced merger of the churches of Scotland and England. The other is the Times editorial from the 19th century, in which Scotland is castigated as a nation in want of a grievance.

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Short story

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	17 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849890427
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
A Nation In Want Of A Grievance

Essays from turn-of-the-century Scotland.

by
Iain Fraser Grigor

Publisher Information

Copyright © Iain Fraser Grigor 2011

Published in 2010 by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

The right of Iain Fraser Grigor to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A Very Short Introduction

THE PIECES in this collection were all written in Scotland around the end of the 20 th century and the turn of the new millennium. Some of them have appeared in print, should that constitute any special recommendation: some have not. Some of them have a Scottish theme, to a greater or lesser degree: some do not. They have been written at a time of modest political change in the country of Scotland, and tumultuous change in the world of publishing. What is already clear is that the Caxtonian model of book production and publishing is changing beyond recognition. What is not yet clear is what will follow that ancient model. Electronic publishing may be in but its infancy. Already, however, it has freed the writer from dependency on old structures of format, authority and control, by which the book, magazine or newspaper publisher was gatekeeper to a readership.
None of the pieces in this collection was commissioned: and few if any of them would ever have been commissioned. They represent, then, the glacial drip of one writer’s mind through the echoing caverns of imaginative doubt, unfettered by the traditional obstructions, requirements and blandishments of commercial publishing. Whether such liberty will prove to be a good thing remains to be seen.
But of course writing is a bi-partisan matter, involving both writer and reader. The reader, in short, is under no obligation to concern himself with the words of another. But should he or she have read to this point, then he or she might wish to know why this collection has been put together.
This present writer has spent much of his life in traditional libraries. What has been clear to me for a long time is that these libraries make available books and newspapers as the principle paths to study of the past. But occasional writing, of the sort which does not find its way into books or newspapers, is often overlooked, for it is seldom collected. This collection, then, is of occasional pieces by just one writer in Scotland around the year 2000. Although any writer who tries to second-guess the future does so at his or her peril, the collection may be of some interest to readers now, or in the future, whether on paper, on screen, or both: or by reading technologies yet to be invented. At time of writing, after all, there is no way of knowing what our libraries will look like in ten years, far less a hundred, or how readers will - by either of those times - access the written word. But if this collection finds its way to interested readers, howsoever they access it, then this writer’s time will not have been wasted.

Iain Fraser Grigor
2010

Snow On High Ground

A memoir of the last herring-fishery on the Scottish west coast.

FIRST DAY of the week, last week of the fishing year; and so they cleared the harbour and put to sea, without hope, for the last few weeks had been blank, as if the herring for ever had gone from the ocean. On first watch, the Old Timer loafed in the wheelhouse; abaft it, the boy-Cook in his galley (mince, Gold Leaf and a new war comic) was making the tea; down aft, the Big Fella and the Skipper were in their curtained bunks, studying the newspapers of the previous week.
That night they got nothing, and they saw no marks till dusk the following day, close-in to an island, with a slash of wind screaming over its cliffs and shrouds of spindrift blasting into the growing night. They had a tow, tore the net, and left it in tatters aft. Later, in a sheltered bay, and just as it began to snow, they hauled the net forward and mended it. By the time they had finished the snow had stopped, though it was colder than ever. When they went to sea again, it was blowing harder than ever too.
The Cook produced a meal, which he described as venison chops, and which was even more of a disaster than usual. But the Skipper, poker-faced, said, ‘You’re fair coming on at the cooking, Cook”; for he too had once been a boy-cook at the fishing. And he knew that for pure nastiness the job would be hard to surpass, and was rendered possible only by the fierce intimidation offered by the crew to the slightest sign of independence on the part of the boy.
In the wheelhouse, the Old Timer turned the boat through the wind and she lurched violently. A basin of beans, a bag of sugar and the tomato sauce hurled themselves off the cabin table. Someone caught the sugar, but the beans exploded on the seat-locker, and the sauce lay smashed and bleeding at the foot of the heavy steel heating stove. No one said anything: speech was an effort, against the roar of the engine. The boy could clear it all up later, as usual.
The Big Fella suddenly roared at him across the table: “What’s for pudding, Cook?”
The boy threw himself waist-deep in an appropriate locker, reappeared, turned and shrieked, “Peaches”.
“What kind?”, screamed the Big Fella, incandescent with mock fury.
The Cook jumped visibly, gaped for a moment, and then, with split-second inspiration and perfect seriousness, bawled back, “Sliced”.
Later, at anchor somewhere, the men slept while the boy was left in the wheelhouse to get the forecast at the back of midnight.
“What was it?, asked the Skipper when he came up.
“Em - just snow on high ground”, said the Cook with confident precision.
There was a terrible silence on the Skipper for a moment, a terrible stillness, in the winking gloom of his wheelhouse.
But all he said was, “That will be handy, Cook. You better give the boys a shout now”.
And so they went to work again. Each knew that the weather promised gales and worse on the way, but the night was still clear and the tops of the hills on the mainland coast were indeed white with new snow. In the far north the northern lights were dancing weirdly, very high in the sky. The Old Timer was standing in the door of the casing watching them, with the Cook at his back, taking a break from brewing serious tea in the galley kettle.
“Do you know what that means, Cook?”, he demanded, taking a cigarette uninvited from the boy’s mouth, to smoke it himself. “Ice. When you see them like that, it means bad ice up north”.
The boy, jaunty with pleasure at the recognition of his presence, lit another Gold Leaf and peered aft, over the boat’s wake, into the north - towards which, in due course, he spat with stylish expertise.
“The hardest man I ever saw was up there”, the Old Timer said. “In Spitzy. A German. Just after the war. We were in four days sheltering from weather when this rust-bucket side-winder came in. Rust and ice from stem to stern. God knows how she had survived it. Her skipper came out on the bridge wing to have a look at the place. I was never nearer to him than fifty yards. But there was something queer about him. About the way he cocked his eye at the weather. He wasn’t afraid of it, somehow. Anyway, he was at sea up there right through the war. All that time, up there on a U-boat”.
“What kind’s a you-boat?”, the Cook wondered.
The Old Timer flicked his cigarette over the transom and into the boiling wake. “He had a lot of friends in those waters, the poor bastard”, he said; and went down the trap at once, into his bunk, closed the curtains, and retrieved from its hiding-place a half-empty, half-bottle of sweet, black rum.
There was no herring found that night either, and after lying in the lee of the land for the following day, they put to sea again late in the afternoon - a clear and crisp day, with the shadows already on the hills in the east, and to the west the tops of the islands scattered like antique bonnets along the horizon.
The Big Fella, in good form, pointed to one of these far grey-blue tops, and told the Cook about a girl he once had known from its western side. The boy looked doubtful, as if fearful of complicity in something not entirely understood.
That night too there was nothing to be had, nor nothing throughout the following day and evening - by which time, down aft in the cabin, the gloom was tangible. Speculation began as to when they would turn for home and be done with if for the week, the year - with just the prospect of the Christmas break ashore to blunt the pointed injustice of it all.
“What was her name anyway?”, the Cook suddenly bawled at the Big Fella, over the roar of the engine.
The Big Fella leaned out from his bunk in his grimy vest and grinned, but shrugged that he just didn’t remember: and at that the Skipper was hammering on the cabin skylight and shouting them on deck to shot, in a blatter of rain and the best part of a gale.
“But she had beautiful eyes”, the Big Fella suddenly volunteered to no-one in particular: “Aye, like an army with banners”.
They manned the winch and shot away, the wires lashing the length of her and singing with wild hope in the turning blocks, and towed away into the night, with the odd sea clim