The Land of the Leal

Canongate Classics #18

by James Barke, John Burns (Introduction)

This huge novel, closer in scope to a Russian epic than to any English counterpart, opens at the turn of the century in the extreme poverty of the Rhinns of Galloway in southern Scotland.

A thinly disguised autobiographical tale, The Land of the Leal narrates the journey of Jean Ramsay, an aggressively practical woman from a peasant background, and her weak-willed, poetic husband, David. It spans three-quarters of a century of Scottish life, tracing the couple's wanderings from the idyll of their childhood in Galloway, through work for the landed gentry in the Borders and Fife, to their fall from grace in the depression years in industrial Glasgow. Inevitably, as their children are born and grow up and as the years slip away, their rural background becomes another Eden, yet Barke keeps sentimentality in check with his reflective description of the changing face of Scottish society, in which Jean and David are pawns in the development of economic cause and political effect.

Genres: Classics, Scotland

636 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

James William Barke was born in Selkirkshire in 1905 to Galloway parents. He worked on the Clyde shipyards and was involved in local and nationalist politics before starting his writing career. His first novel, The World His Pillow, was published in 1933, but he is best remembered for his five-volume novelization of the life of Robert Burns, which was published in 1946 beginning with The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

The first two books in the Robert Burns quintet (Immortal Memory) were re-published in honor of the 250th anniversary of Burns' birth in 2009 by Edinburgh's Black & White Publishing. Barke also wrote The Land of the Leal (1939), a number of plays including Gregarach, and contributed to anthologies of Burns' poetry.

Reviews

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the end of the 19th century, and Tom Gibson is grieve to the owner of Craigdaroch, a large farm in the Rhinns of Galloway, a peninsula in the south-west corner of Scotland. Old Testament Presbyterian, Gibson is moralistic, humourless, and a strict, often cruel father to his many children. His wife Agnes, at twenty-seven, is already worn out from childbirth and hard work. Andrew Ramsay is a drystone dyker who hires himself out to the farmers of the area to earn a subsistence living for his wife and twelve children. The Ramsay children are sent out to labour on the farms as soon as they are strong enough – as young as six or seven. The book tells the tale of two of the children of these families, Jean Gibson and David Ramsay, who will marry when they grow up and will take the reader around Scotland as they move for work, showing the social changes in both the rural and urban spheres during the first few decades of the 20th century.

David and Jean are ordinary people struggling against the ever-present fear of hardship in a society where ill-health or bad luck can lead to unemployment and penury. We follow their lives in detail, as children first, then as a married couple, becoming parents, meeting with small commonplace joys and tragedies and striving to make a better life for their children. It is beautifully written with a wholly unromanticised vision of the lives of the working poor, and with a sure grasp of the economic and political changes that had driven rural workers into generational poverty and were forcing many of them to make for the cities, with their promise of jobs in the rising industries that were fuelling the empire.

In short, David and Jean start out on married life as trained cheesemakers – considered a good step up from farm labouring. This involves responsibility for the dairy herd as well as running the dairy, so is an ideal career for a married couple. In time, Jean becomes a highly skilled dairywoman while David can turn his hand to any job on a farm, so they are usually able to find work. Jobs tend to be rather impermanent, however, so over time they move from the Rhinns, first to the Borders where David has romantic ideas about the land gleaned from the works of Scott, and later to Fife, where they work on the large estate of a Highland landlord. This job lasts, Jean is well paid and highly prized for her skills, and they settle, watching their children grow up and working hard to ensure that they get an education and opportunities to make something of their lives. But when the landlord dies the estate is broken up, and Jean and David find themselves on the move again, older now and with less to offer in this post-WW1 age of increasing mechanisation of the countryside. So they decide to go to Glasgow, and that’s where they’ll live out the rest of their lives.

When he had seen the last cow from the byre he stood at the door for a moment and looked out over the dung-midden and over the swelling fields flushed with the green growth of early summer to the low-lying clouds that seemed to rest on the Bay of Luce. He thought, as he had often thought, how peaceful and gracious the earth was and how man alone did not seem to be in harmony with nature. Always man seemed to be at strife or at war with nature, ever struggling to wrest a bare living from her. This inharmonious, incongruous note had struck him before but never so forcibly as it did now. It seemed to him now that man was not a part of nature but rather an enemy of nature, fighting not with her but against her. Everything in nature seemed at one—in unison, even the stoat leaping at the rabbit and the hawk swooping on the linnet were in harmony: they were organic to the scene. Only with man was there strife and discord.

Most of the book takes place in rural settings, and Barke paints an authentic picture of the hard physical labour and small rewards of working as a farm labourer. He shows the natural beauty of the land but also the squalid living conditions of the poor. Education for children is compulsory in theory, but many families need their young children to work so that they can eat. Even when they do attend school, they are too tired and too hungry to benefit. And so they grow up to become their parents, uneducated, skilled only in labouring and with no opportunities for betterment. And, like their parents, they have a child each year until eventually the women are broken and prematurely aged and often die before they reach the blessed relief of menopause.

David and Jean are both rather luckier than most. As grieve to a large farm, Tom Gibson could afford to let his children go to school, and although Jean is sent out to work at the age of nine, she is sent to a dairy to learn the trade rather than out to the fields as a labourer. David’s luck is darker – it is the death of his father and the resulting break-up of his family that leads to him being taken in by a farmer who was his father’s friend. This man allows David to be educated and gets him an apprenticeship at the dairy, setting him on a career. Both are determined they will not have a child each year – they will have a small family by dint of abstinence. In the end, they have four living children, two boys and two girls, and we follow the boys especially into adulthood in the 1930s.

I enjoyed the rural sections but for me the book came to life when the family reached Glasgow. This is, of course, because Glasgow is my home, not because I think this section is intrinsically better. David works in the shipyards, while one of his sons trains to be a minister and the other is apprenticed as an engineer. All looks well for the family – coming up in the world – but across Europe the rise of the two great warring philosophies, socialism and fascism, is already gathering pace. Young Andy, the apprentice engineer, is caught up in the socialist movement, while Tom, the newly fledged minister, has moved up a class and married a snobbish middle-class wife. It all comes to its climax at the time of the Spanish Civil War and we leave them with the storm of fascism gathering darkly on their horizon.

I loved the book. It has its dips when I felt it could have moved a bit faster, but it covers a whole lot of ground, both geographically and socially, and does so without romanticisation or excessive dramatisation. Barke shows that, despite all their hardships, life for the poor was gradually improving and opportunities for social mobility were beginning to develop, thanks largely to compulsory education, for all its weaknesses. He is brilliant on the rise of socialism in Glasgow in the ’20s and ’30s, and gives cameos of some of the real socialist leaders of the time. He shows the place of the Church, at this time with both a reactionary and a revolutionary wing, and how that impacted society, especially in Glasgow. Barke also nods frequently to the works of Burns as an influence on the Scottish psyche. His use of language is excellent – he gives a flavour of the different dialects around Scotland but without making it at all hard to read.

Frankly I could write another thousand words on the book and still only give a superficial impression of it, but I won’t. Instead I’ll just recommend you read it for yourself.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

[Simon Ritchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Underrated" is a word bandied about a lot in relation to literature, but this is surely the most underrated Scottish novel of all. Why don't more people know of it? Why isn't it studied widely in schools? I only wish I'd found it sooner.

The fictional village of Caddomlea, where the Ramsays live out the Borders chapter of their lives, appears to be based on Stow. The description of young Barbara's walk to school at Bowland seems to confirm as much, among other clues. Barke himself was born at Torwoodlee, just down the road.