What Jessie Kesson thought about Skene
April 2008
John McMurtrie with the young Mary Mitchell, his future wife, and their respective mothers, 1914.
by Jim Fiddes
What was the connection between two remarkable North-East women whose names will be familiar to most readers of Leopard. One came from a relatively privileged background, the other was brought up in poverty and deprivation.
Jessie Kesson went from the slums of Elgin, where her mother was a prostitute, to an orphanage, then on to a hard life in service and on the land before her talent for writing eventually brought her recognition and some reward. Mary McMurtrie (nee Mitchell) was the daughter of the school teacher at Skene, went to Gray’s School of Art in the early 1920s and married Rev. John McMurtrie, the minister at Skene in 1924.
After a life as a minister’s wife, and after John’s death, she went on to write the history of the parish for the Third Statistical Account, restored The House of Balbithan near Kintore, and, as well as becoming a renowned gardener, she published several books of drawings of flowers, her final book being published shortly before her death in 2003, aged 101.
What connected these two women was the village of the Kirktown of Skene where Jessie was sent to Proctor’s Orphanage and where she went to the local school. Skene, the land round about it, its people and the Orphanage, were important in Jessie’s writing. Jessie owed a debt to the encouragement of Skene Dominie, Donald Murray, a debt she acknowledged in dedicating The White Bird Passes to him, even though he did not live to see its publication.
John and Mary McMurtrie also encouraged the young Jessie and in five letters Jessie wrote to Mary, two in the 1940s and three in the 1980s, she talks about her time in the village.
Mary’s daughter, Elspeth Haston, has allowed me to borrow these letters. As far as I know, no-one other than family members has seen these letters, and I am very grateful to Elspeth for allowing me to use them to look back to life in another era in the Kirktown.
Skene Heritage Society collection
She has also allowed the Skene Heritage Society to add around 100 photographs to our collection of material on the parish. Most of these photographs were taken by her father and his family in the years between 1914 and 1922, the latter date just a few years before Jessie arrived at The Orphanage. Through the letters and the photographs we can get a glimpse into the real people who lived in the village at the time.
As Jessie’s biographer, Isobel Murray, says “Jessie’s feelings about her time in the Orphanage varied enormously in the different telling”. This also applies to her feelings about Skene generally. Just as Grassic Gibbon’s Chris Guthrie could one minute view life on the land as harsh and full of drudgery, the speak ‘coarse’, and next minute see the beauty of the land and the expressiveness of the language, so Jessie could write about Skene in different ways.
It was a hard environment for the young girl who arrived there with her head shaven, having been taken from her mother. It was also a place where she did not have to worry about her next meal or having clean clothes to wear. It features in several of her stories – Stormy Weather is set in the Orphanage, part of the autobiographical The White Bird Passes is set in Skene, as is Where the Apple Ripens. In the latter the hymn By Cool Siloam is crucial, Isobel Murrray says. In the story, Jessie writes, “They would sing By Cool Siloam for you when you were born or if you died young”. Of course, the girl in the story has died young, by suicide
In both of the early letters to John and Mary, and in the later ones, Jessie writes about how Mr McMurtrie took the orphanage children on drives in his car, one of only three in the parish in the 1920s. “I remember how you once took the Orphanage children to Potarch in your car – the lupins stretched so vast, and the blue solidly as far as the eye could see, they smelt spicy – like musk, I think it was.”
In a later letter: “The most vividly remembered excursion – to the Brig of Feugh, but I remember the wild lupins along the banks of the river. Taller than men. Hot smelling and spicy. On another occasion up and over the Devils’s Elbow via Moor of Dinnet – the heather there was not purple – but Blood Red.”
“No one, it seemed to me, and indeed, still does, could read finer – nor singer sweeter than Mr McMurtrie. I always felt that Isaiah was his favourite ‘Book’ – his beloved prophet. He did such justice to its wonderful words. His hymns, By Cool Siloam I felt was his favourite. Blake’s Jerusalem another.
“Also – but I think this choice was for old Willie Laing, an Elder, who sang it so fervently – The Sands of Time are Sinking. Old Willie nearly ‘brought the rafters down’ when it came to – “_and glory, glory dwelleth in Immanuel’s Land_”. That old man had…certainty. He was without doubt. His long swallow tailed suit was green with age – betrayed outside in the sunlight. Strange that I, an agnostic, fortunately still hold on to the things that were beautiful then”.
Memories of Willie Laing
Isobel Murray also records Jessie‘s memories of Willie Laing . “When winter proved too severe for younger folk to attend, the old miller was all the choir there was, and all that was needed. He stood alone, a unique figure in his sweeping tailed-coat that years of Sundays had faded from black to dull green. His great white beard swept over his chest, and from somewhere under it, arose filling the Kirk with volume and beauty… We outlived the miller. We saw him carried into the Kirk for the last time”.
There was indeed a William Laing in the Skene area at that time, a farm servant in the 1920s, possibly the husband of the Mrs Laing who we see beside the village pump. He then lived in a house at Milton of Garlogie in 1933, so he may have been a miller. However, I am fairly certain that Jessie is confusing two different people here. James Laing, farmer at Drumstone, was an elder of the Kirk for nearly 30 years and he died, aged 87, in July 1932, just about at the end of Jessie’s time in Skene.
His obituary describes his long service as an elder and records, “of a deep and simple piety, he loved the House of God and its services”. He was for the greater part of his life a member of the choir, and on many occasions acted as precentor. He possessed real musical gifts and had a wide knowledge of the old psalms . “When over eighty years of age he was still to be seen in the church choir, an example of faithfulness.”
Elspeth Haston, born in 1932, remembers Willie Laing and that he also had a great singing voice, but no beard. She says that her father liked to sing with him. However, James is buried in Skene Kirkyard, William is not, and James’s obituary also shows him with a beard! Surely James was the almost ‘Dickensian’ figure who Jessie saw carried in his coffin into Skene church, but she may have merged elements of Willie into the figure she remembered.
In one of the 1947 letters Jessie also writes about how Mr McMurtrie once sang Blake’s Jerusalem. “The kirk hadn’t been renovated then, it was dark, dank and foosty – but because it was the first time I’d come in contact with the vivid imagery – Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire – I remember not the dark, dank atmosphere, but the fact that the congregation still had the same, stolid, set look on their faces during Jerusalem – it just didn’t seem to do anything to them – and myself was burning inside with sheer ecstasy. I was amazed that they could sit so still and untouched – but then, even now I am intolerant of human beings’ unawareness. They’re not only dead, they seem to be buried as well”.
Presumably Mr Laing, whichever one, was not present on that occasion!
The present Skene Parish Church building dates from 1801. In 1932 its interior was substantially renovated under the direction of Aberdeen architect, George Bennett Mitchell. Much of the carpentry was done by local carpenter Willie Durno who will appear later in our story. During the gutting of the interior the semi-circular layout, whereby every seat faced directly to the pulpit, was lost. The pews were high-backed with doors on the end and the names of the farm, estate or family who occupied them painted on the back.
Lost Skene House family pews
Also lost were the three completely enclosed family pews belonging to the lairds of Skene House, Easter Skene and Kirkville. A full house of 400 parishioners attended the first service in the renovated church and it ended with the baptism of Mr and Mrs McMurtrie’s daughter, Elspeth Anne.
Finally on the subject of the Kirk, Jessie writes from 1982: “I suppose I remember these things so vividly because ‘The Kirk’ was literally a refuge, a place of affinity for me in those days”.
Jessie’s first letter to Mary McMurtrie in 1947 came, in her own words, “out of the blue”. It was to let Mary know that BBC Scotland was broadcasting some of her work, beginning with Bless this house – a dramatised portrait of the orphanage. Jessie writes that she wasn’t meant for a life in service.
“I’m not proud of the fact that I wasn’t a good servant – but I’m not ashamed either. My teens were stormy. I was never ‘bad’ in the criminal sense of the word – but I was difficult. Rightly or wrongly I stopped attempting to be – and to do – what others wanted me to do. In some dim way I sensed that there were many thousands who could turn out a room well – and enjoy doing so – but there wasn’t so many who could write a poem.”
The second set of letters, after a gap of almost 35 years, Jessie sent after receiving a copy of North East Folk by Elizabeth Adair, which contained a short section on Mary McMurtrie and her restoration of the medieval garden at the House of Balbithan.
Jessie writes “I always knew you loved a garden. I remember the Manse garden. Never lush, the actual land of Skene always seemed bleak to me. A kind of ‘utility” earth. But the Manse garden… What I remember vividly about it was the Himalayan Cowslips – a flower I had never seen before. Nor, alas, since. Shakespeare wrote of wallflowers :
_That smell so heavenly sweet
The senses ache at thee_
That applies equally to the Himalayan Cowslips I saw in the Manse Garden. So much so that I made them one of the turning points in my short novel – Where the Apple Ripens.
In a subsequent letter the same year she wrote of her own love of gardens. “For myself, my love for gardens came with my first awareness of the external world itself. The garden of the wood – in long early walks with my mother. Real woods. Not commercial afforestations. And then, of course, my Grandmother’s garden and all the cottage gardens on the road to her house. Skene – the Kirktown I mean – never seemed to have cottage gardens like the ones I left behind in Morayshire. I wonder why. Shall we delve for reasons – half seriously, half in fun!
The first Kirktown garden
“The first Kirktown garden – passed for years on the way to school – belonged to the Joiner’s wife. A lady hard to avoid, she always seemed to be folded over the gate of her cottage, awaiting the unwary. A lady of intense curiosity. Highly skilled in the art of interrogation. One longed for Mercury’s feet- to evade her. That being so she didn’t have time for the wordless occupation of gardening. No interest whatever in conversing with living things like flowers.
“In the next house, small, quiet, fragile, Mrs Greig. Three little girls – doorsteps – two big lads – all clever children – but like Martha, she was naturally careful and troubled about many things. So… no garden.
“Then, almost a cottage garden. Mrs Valentine. She was the aunt of one of your maids. A small trim woman. Neatly, soberly dressed. Her garden – neat, trim and like herself, sober in colour.
“Past the gates leading to the manse and bang into the Blacksmith’s ‘abode’. No “mighty man was he with large and sinewy hands” as Longfellow’s Blacksmith had! But a small, timid, dark man who also was the grave-digger. It was his wife who was the Amazon. And a joy to behold in her mob-cap – beating the daylight out of her ‘basks’ – rough mats, as she stood on her doorstep, hailing all who passed by. There was a rough, kindly caringness in her interrogations – one’s life – public and private. So no offence ever taken. Since it was never intended. No garden there.
“Then the Soutars’ small dark shop. How we loved our ‘official’ visits there. With heel-rings or toe caps needed for our boots – shoes were strictly for Sundays. An old man ‘The Soutar’ – with a young apprentice ‘Dod Yule’. We loved it – because it was always warm in there. And the welcome always friendly. The smell homely leather and paraffin stove. I was always greatly fascinated by the new shoes for sale. In long, polished, white boxes. The brand name of these shoes – Gipsy Queen. The boxes had a vividly illustrated head of a dark be-ringed Gipsy Girl. I vowed then that one day – grown-up – I’d have a pair of Gipsy Queen shoes. Alas! Like many things, the Gipsy Queen brand of shoes had disappeared from the trade by the time I grew up.
“Then, last of all The Beadle’s house. Dick Smith, who, apart from ringing the Kirk bell, and preceding Mr McMurtrie up to the pulpit with the big Bible, also did a tidy trade mending watches. In appearance he looked like one of Dickens’s amiable characters from Pickwick Papers. But that was only a veneer – beneath which a sharp, thin man ‘snapped’ to get out”.
Jessie may have used elements of real people in her writing, we will never really know now to what extent. In these letters she is writing about some of the inhabitants of Skene in the 1920s and 30s, albeit her memory of them at some years distant.
The photographs (in the magazine article) illustrate the village of Kirktown of Skene and some of the people who lived there a few years before Jessie arrived at The Orphanage.
Willie Durno, the carpenter (and undertaker – common practice in country areas). Willie’s house was the first you came to when arriving from the orphanage direction (also from the Westhill direction). It included a sawmill and, for a while, the ‘killing hoose’. It can be seen in a photograph taken in 2001 just before it was demolished to make way for four ‘affordable’ houses agreed as part of the nearby development to which it gave its name – Carpenter’s Croft.
‘Soutar’ Beaton
Willie’s son, Leslie, followed him in both occupations and he still lives in the village. He remembers Jessie taking milk to his mother just as Janie does in The White Bird Passes. Willie lived to the age of 97.
In another photograph Mrs Jane Valentine, mentioned by Jessie. You can also see her cottage as it looks now. George Stuart was the blacksmith, having succeeded his father, Alexander. We can see his ‘Amazon’ wife with her mob-cap. Leslie says she was a very hardy woman and, as children they were feart of her. When making horse shoes her husband used to shout in through the door of their house, “Gies a chap, wife,” and she would come out and wield the hammer while her husband held the shoe.
‘Soutar’ Beaton lived to his 90s and is still remembered by some; his young apprentice died of tuberculosis in his forties. Leslie also remembers Dick Smith, the beadle and registrar, as well as watch-mender. In fact, Leslie lives in Dick’s house, the last in the village on the way to Skene School.
The centre of the village itself has not changed that much from those days but, as Jessie goes on to say, “Few gardens but folk, before, as Lewis Grassic Gibbon might describe it –‘the years that faded and fell’ to – widen that world – leading out via the car to bingo, discos, supermarkets. Time was when the only cars to be seen there belonged to the doctor, the minister and the wealthier farmers.
“I’m glad I lived in that other era –when the horse ploughed, and you could see the steam from its nostrils spread out and across the frosty mornings. When the hens clucked around your feet. When those who could sing, sang and those who could dance, danced. And Main’s Wooing performed in the Milne Hall was the communal high spot of winter. We are in danger, I think of becoming plastic people. No one in the Kirktown was that.”
I feel I should end with Jessie’s description of a very young Elspeth. “I remember how we used to love to peer into your pram – I never saw such large dark eyes as those belonging to the occupants of your pram! Elspeth Anne and Isobel Jean.”
Mary McMurtrie records a rather poignant comment beside these letters: “We would have had so much in common if only we could have kept in touch.” And I’m sure they would, but Mary and her husband should have been very proud of the kindness and encouragement they showed to the young girl from the orphanage.
Jim Fiddes was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, then studied History at Aberdeen University. Librarian for Gray’s School of Art and Scott Sutherland School of Architecture; chairman of Skene Heritage Society; secretary of Aberdeen Town & County History Society.*
This is an article from the April 2008 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.