In John Buchan’s book of reminiscences, Memory Hold-the-Door, written in 1939, he wrote about his teenage years, towards the end of the nineteenth century:
My chief passion in those years was for the Border countryside, and my object in all my prentice writings was to reproduce its delicate charm, to catch the aroma of its gracious landscape and turbulent history and the idiom of its people. When I was absent from it, I was homesick, my memory was full of it, my happiest days were associated with it, and some effluence from its ageless hills and waters laid a spell upon me which has never been broken. I found in its people what I most admired in human nature – realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. I asked for nothing better than to spend my life by the Tweed.
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It was not to be; there were not enough openings for a very clever and ambitious son of the manse in the Lowlands, but Tweeddale never lost its deep appeal for him, and it haunts much of his fiction.
Tweeddale was never, in fact, his childhood home, but the Reverend John Buchan and his wife, Helen, née Masterton, had been brought up there, and summer holidays, first from the coast of Fife at Pathhead and then from Glasgow, were spent at Broughton Green, where Helen had been born, and the couple first met. She came from a line of sheep farmers in the district.
Spending summer holidays in Broughton taught Buchan to love the green, rounded hills, and sparkling waters of upper Tweeddale, not only for its quiet beauty and solitude, but for its clashing, stirring past. The countryside was full of the echoes from legend: Merlin, the sixth-century political leader rather than wizard, supposedly had been killed at Drumelzier and buried under a thorn tree where the Powsail Burn flows into Tweed, while the roughly contemporary Arthur may have fought a battle around Cademuir Hill, close to Peebles. In the Middle Ages, the ferocious clans of Tweedie and Veitch had stolen each other’s cattle and fought bloody skirmishes. The Jacobite army had marched past the door of Broughton Green on the way from Edinburgh to Derby in 1745. For centuries, almost down to Buchan’s day, hardy, hard-fighting men had driven cattle along the drove road from Falkirk to the English markets over the bridge in Peebles and across the lonely hills.
Buchan described those summer holidays in Memory Hold-the-Door. He was, by then, Governor-General of Canada, chronically ill with a duodenal ulcer, weighing only eight-and-a-half stone, and having to spend at least one day a week in bed, but his memories of his childhood holidays in Peeblesshire seem to have been particularly bright and pleasant to him: ‘In those [summer] weeks we never gave our home a thought, and with bitter reluctance we returned to it. The Borders were to us a holy land which it would have been sacrilege to try to join on to our common life’ (p. 21). He describes the country round Broughton that he remembered from early childhood:
the links of the burn, the fields of old pasture, certain ancient trees which had been standing when the vale was the demesne of a Jacobite laird, a seductive mill-dam lined with yellow flags, a water-meadow full of corncrakes [alas no more], the confluence of the burn and the ‘water’ and the progress of the said water by fir-clad knolls and young plantations and bracken down to Tweed. (p. 22)
The Buchans had six children in all, and they were a markedly lively and adventurous bunch, regularly getting into mischief, led by their eldest brother, but they were extremely devoted and affectionate, both to each other and to their parents, their dreamy father and their daemonically energetic mother. The children were brought up in the shadow of the pulpit, with religion playing a major part in their lives, but it was not the gloomy Calvinism of stereotype that Mr Buchan preached, but a joyful wonder in the greatness and glory of God and the natural world that He created. Buchan considered that he had had a rigorous, organised, cultured and very happy upbringing.
With the example of his energetic, organised mother before him, Buchan seems to have learned early in life how best to use his time. Although he worked extremely hard on his books in the vacations, he left space for fishing or exploring. He found time to help his Masterton relations on their farm. A devotee of Wordsworth, he felt the romance of their work, and he admired immoderately the shepherds that he met. He particularly enjoyed rising at dawn to ‘look the hill’.
I attended every clipping, where shepherds came from ten miles round to lend a hand. I helped to drive sheep to the local market and sat, heavily responsible, in a corner of the auction-ring. I became learned in the talk of the trade, and no bad judge of sheep stock. Those Border shepherds, the men of the long stride and the clear eye, were a great race – I have never known a greater. The narrower kinds of fanaticism, which have run riot elsewhere in Scotland [he meant particularly in the seventeenth century] rarely affected the Borders. Their people were ‘grave livers’, in Wordsworth’s phrase, God-fearing, decent in all the relations of life, and supreme masters of their craft. They were a fighting stock because of their ancestry, and of a noble independence. As the source of the greatest ballads in any literature they had fire and imagination, and some aptitude for the graces of life. They lacked the dourness of the conventional Scot, having a quick eye for comedy, and, being in themselves wholly secure, they were aristocrats with the fine manners of an aristocracy. By them I was admitted into the secrets of a whole lost world of pastoral. I acquired a reverence and affection for the ‘plain people’ who to Walter Scott and Abraham Lincoln were what mattered most in the world. I learned the soft, kindly, idiomatic Border speech … I have never had better friends, and I have striven to acquire some tincture of their philosophy of life, a creed at once mirthful and grave, stalwart and merciful. (pp. 23–24)
Shepherds are to be found everywhere in his early writings, fiction and non-fiction. His skill as a fisherman of hill burns, his prodigious capacity for walking, as well as his family connections with the well-respected Mastertons, gave him an almost unique access (for a Glasgow boy) to this breed of highly independent and often very thoughtful men. Much later, in the House of Commons in 1931, he told the, no doubt bemused, company that he would rather take the view of a Border shepherd on most questions than of all the professors in Europe. He meant it.
His grandfather and uncles would inevitably have been expert in divining changes in the weather. The success of their sheep-farming, even the security of their lives and those of their charges, might depend on them knowing when the heavy snows or the ‘Lammas rains’ were coming. One of the enduring fascinations of Buchan’s novels and short stories is the way he used not only landscape but weather as a protagonist, sometimes benign, more often malign, but always an influence on the action. At the same time, he must have learnt from his uncles how the moon behaves, what happens at sunrise and sunset and even probably how to guide his way by the stars, all of which knowledge informed his fiction, especially the adventure stories.
As a teenager, he would borrow a bicycle so that he could go further afield for his fishing expeditions and explore the hills surrounding the valleys of the Clyde and Annan. And, since he always had a fascination with waterfalls, he cycled up the side of Moffat Water to see the Grey Mare’s Tail, and into the hills above Tweedsmuir to Talla Linns, at a time just before the Talla reservoir was dug. The roads were grass-grown and empty, the motor-car unknown. He was quite alone, and the sound of the ‘whaups’ (curlews) and ‘peesweeps’ (lapwings) and the sight of grass of Parnassus in the bent, remained a vivid memory to him.
When not out on the hill, at the riverside, or studying classics, he wrote essays, short stories and poetry. His first published and paid-for work was entitled Angling in Still Waters, and came out in The Gentleman’s Magazine in August 1893, just before his eighteenth birthday. He described getting up before dawn to fish Tweed, noting the weather and landscape, the sounds and sights of peaceful Tweeddale, and the excitement of being young and fit and with the prospect of a long day’s fishing ahead of him.
He would also cycle or take the train from Broughton to Peebles, to stay with his two maiden aunts, Jane and Kate, and his uncle Willie – town clerk, procurator fiscal and bank agent – at Bank House, on the corner of the High Street in Peebles. Buchan and his uncle Willie became fast friends, since the latter, a cultured middle-aged bachelor, was plainly a delightful man, and an unusual one, even for a town that very much respected learning and bred the occasional scholar with a national reputation like John Veitch, Professor of Logic at Glasgow.
In May 1907, not long before the couple were married, Susan Grosvenor visited the Buchans in Peebles for the first time and stayed at Bank House, where by now Buchan’s siblings, Walter and Anna, lived. It was quite a culture shock for her since, although Buchan had tried to teach her some Scots dialect during their courtship, she had the greatest difficulty in understanding his farming uncles. But she took most warmly to the Buchans, and in correspondence and later her memoirs she left a vivid picture of her first visit to Bank House.
There is something very keen and strenuous about the atmosphere here; to begin with one feels very fit. They all talk awfully well – so intelligently and keenly and the amount of poetry quoted is amazing. One feels very alive and invigorated.
I was charmed by Bank House, with its polished brass door-handle and its little hall, and the sitting-room with a glowing fire and books everywhere. I felt strange and a little alien to my new family, but we soon found that the same things made us laugh, and no bond is stronger…
Anna had gone to housekeep for Walter at Bank House, after Uncle Willie died in 1906, and Walter had moved smoothly into his uncle’s shoes. I have no idea whether a rigorous selection process preceded the passing of the jobs of town clerk, procurator fiscal and bank agent from uncle to nephew, but I doubt it. Nevertheless, Walter was to prove a very canny, discreet, genial professional, much loved in the district, and a very important figure in the town, especially during the Second World War.
In 1911, Buchan was selected as Conservative and Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk, and the Buchans spent as much time as possible touring Tweeddale, where he visited cottagers and gave speeches in village halls, where anything could happen. He became adept at giving as good as he got to hecklers and drunks, and comedic political meetings based on his own vivid experiences appear in The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Macnab and in some of the short stories.
The Reverend John Buchan died at Bank House in 1911, aged only sixty-four, broken down by his years of unremitting toil and care in Glasgow. The following year, 1912, Buchan’s brother, Willie, came home from India, where he was a gifted and energetic civil servant, for a long leave, but he’d picked up a streptococcal infection and, in November that year, he died in a Glasgow nursing home.
Anna, under the pseudonym O. Douglas, began to write highly autobiographical novels of Scottish provincial life. Her first was called Olivia in India and was really a thinly fictionalised account of a visit she paid to Willie in India in 1907. Later ones included The Setons, Eliza for Commons and Pink Sugar, which features my father as a very naughty small boy, called Bad Bill. Anna became a considerable figure in the district and beyond, both because her novels enjoyed substantial success, but also because she was a very good amateur actress and public speaker. She never married, and nor did Walter. They lived at Bank House with their widowed mother for the rest of their lives. Mrs Buchan died in 1937, aged eighty, Anna died in 1948 and Walter in 1954.
On the Governor-General’s frequent travels across Canada, his aides were briefed to be in on the look-out for people originally from the Borders. When he was visiting a remote community in southern Saskatchewan, to look at a new dam, he was told that there was an elderly Tweeddale couple, who had emigrated decades before, and who had driven a hundred miles in an old car to ‘take a look at John Buchan’. He talked to them in Lowland Scots, while the tears rolled down their cheeks.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Tweeddale to John Buchan and thus his writings. Not only is it the countryside where Richard Hannay finds succour after his desperate flight from Galloway in The Thirty-Nine Steps but it’s the place where a number of short stories as well as three historical novels are set. The novels are John Burnet of Barns (the wanderings of the eponymous hero show how much the young Buchan was influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson), The Lost Lady of Old Years, (the lost lady is the wife of the man, Mr Secretary Murray of Broughton, who turned King’s evidence and betrayed Bonnie Prince Charlie) and Witch Wood, which is set around Broughton in the time of the Covenanters in the seventeenth century. Buchan considered Witch Wood his best novel, and many people agree. Nor should we forget his very fine biography of Sir Walter Scott, published in the centenary of Scott’s death in 1932, which showed how well he knew the country that had nurtured the great Scottish novelist.
Buchan wrote a dozen or so war poems in the summer of 1917, while grieving for his brother Alastair, who had died at the Battle of Arras, and they are all written in Borders dialect, which indicates to me that, when expressing heartfelt emotion, he found it easier to write in the language he had learned on his youthful holidays.
And he set a number of short stories in Peeblesshire. When Buchan was only twenty-three, his first collection of short stories, Grey Weather: Moorland Tales of My Own People, was published by The Bodley Head. The fifteen stories are hymns of love and praise to the loneliest parts of Tweeddale and the people who inhabited it. He drew directly on the speech patterns, phrases and dialect words of the shepherds and drovers he met at market and on the hill, and on tales they told him. The plots are sometimes thin or incredible, but the writing is robust, and, best of all, they are fragrant with the scent of heather and gale in hot summer days, when they are not chilling from the nightmarish terror experienced by a traveller benighted in the hills.
These stories show how much he had absorbed in his youth of his environment. Even when so young, he was already exhibiting the marked ‘nympholepsy’, that is love for water, that he confessed to in his last, unfinished work on fishing, Pilgrim’s Rest.2 He had learned to describe everything from a deep salmon pool to a raging torrent to a dripping mossy stone.
I began with Memory Hold-the-Door, since the book most obviously holds the key to how Buchan felt about Tweeddale.
Most of us have certain childish memories which we can never repeat, since they represent moments when life was in utter harmony and sense and spirit perfectly attuned. Such memories for me are all of Tweedside, and I have welcomed with delight any maturer experience which had a hint of their magic. (p. 28)
He writes about moorland wandering on a hot July morning, of a long tramp on a drove-road in the teeth of the wind and rain, and of Sabbath evening prayers in his grandparents’ house. He goes on,
All my life I have been haunted – and cheered – by these recollections: the green summit against the unclouded blue above a populous friendly world, the buffets of rain on the moorland road, the drone of my grandfather’s voice in the Sabbath twilight. Each was a summons to action. But there was a fourth which spoke only of peace. This was the coming down from the hills, very hungry and foot-sore, to a whitewashed farm on the brink of the heather, where, in a parlour looking out on a garden of gooseberries and phloxes, with a glimpse beyond of running water, I was stayed with tea and new-baked scones and apple-and-rowanberry jelly. Then I demanded nothing more of life except to be allowed to go on living in that quiet world of pastoral. The dying shepherd asked not for the conventional Heaven, but for ‘Bourhope at a reasonable rent’ and, if Paradise be a renewal of what was happy and innocent in our earthly days, mine will be some such golden afternoon within sight and sound of Tweed. (p. 29)
When his brother Willie died in 1912, Buchan wrote what is probably his most famous, certainly his most anthologised, poem, ‘Fratri Delectissimo’ or ‘most delightful brother’. He used the poem as the dedication to both his biographies of Montrose, in 1913 and 1928. And whenever I read it, I think of a particular spot, on Broughton Heights, which is part of the John Buchan Way. It is a wonderful walking route of thirteen miles from Broughton to Peebles via Stobo across the hills and valleys of Peeblesshire.
‘Fratri dilectissimo’ seems to me to contain so much of how Buchan felt about his youth in Tweeddale, and his early-learned historical sensibility, which is so evident to anyone who reads him.
When we were little, wandering boys,
And every hill was blue and high,
On ballad ways and martial joys
We fed our fancies, you and I.
With Bruce we crouched in bracken shade,
With Douglas charged the Paynim foes;
And oft in moorland noons I played
Colkitto to your grave Montrose.
The obliterating seasons flow–
They cannot kill our boyish game.
Though creeds may change and kings may go,
Yet burns undimmed the ancient flame.
While young men in their pride make haste
The wrong to right, the bond to free,
And plant a garden in the waste,
Still rides our Scottish chivalry.
One boon the fates relenting gave,
Not where the scented hill-wind blows
From cedar thickets lies your grave,
Nor ‘mid the steep Himalayan snows.
Night calls the stragglers to the nest,
And at long last ’tis home indeed
For your far-wandering feet to rest
For ever by the crooks of Tweed.
Dear heart, in that serener air,
If blessed souls may backward gaze,
Some slender nook of memory spare
For our old happy moorland days.
I sit alone, and musing fills
My breast with pain that shall not die
till once again o’er greener hills
We ride together, you and I.
