The Weatherhouse. Nan Shepherd

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      When nineteen-year-old Lindsay Lorimer is drawn wildly out into the full moon, I knew that The Weatherhouse was not just a portrait of a community but a sensory thing that would speak to anyone who has known the Scottish land, or enjoyed Nan Shepherd’s beloved work of non-fiction The Living Mountain. ‘Running thus before the wind,’ Lindsay ‘had entered into peace that is beyond human understanding: she was at one with the motion of the universe.’ This is one of the glittering moments that scatter this complex exploratory novel. These epiphanies, often coming when a character is alone and outdoors, are key to Shepherd’s work and make it so exhilarating for me as a reader.

      In the fictional Fetter-Rothnie, a small rural community in northeast Scotland, a cast of mainly female characters live their lives in the wake of World War One. The Weatherhouse of the title, with a ‘quaint irregular hexagon’ room, a glass door to the garden and a sundial, is home to ancient matriarch Lang Leeb and her three daughters. It is a microcosm of the country at that time, pursuing a traditional way of life in a changed world. Then there is the wider community, from old tramp Johnnie Rogie to Stella, a young adoptee, and the novel’s other central character, Garry Forbes. When Garry returns to Fetter-Rothnie, scarred by a horrific trauma in the war, he is sceptical about the village: ‘the reconstruction of the universe,’ he thinks, ‘would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.’ But in the path of the novel the place affects him deeply and his attitude changes.

      The Weatherhouse was published in 1930 and was Shepherd’s second book. She lived in the same house on the outskirts of Aberdeen for eighty-seven years and died in February 1981, three months before I was born. I grew up further north, in the islands, in an agricultural community almost one hundred years later, but many of the concerns remain the same. She explores what I recognise as both the pleasure and toughness of rural life. I have been that young woman escaping into the light of the full moon and also, returning after having lived away, I have felt like Garry, frustrated and conspicuous. It took a slowing down and an opening up to see the light and worth in what was around me.

      Many of the characters are ‘looking for the heart of life.’ We are repeatedly taken into the minds of women seeking some kind of self-realisation. Mrs Ellen Falconer longs for purpose, endeavour and imagination: ‘It was life she wanted, strong current and fresh wind, no ignoble desire.’ She encourages her daughter’s connection to Garry to satisfy her own desires. Meanwhile, minister’s daughter Louie Morgan wants to be admired: praying earnestly outdoors, hoping to be seen. Later she connects herself to the dead army engineer David Grey, saying: ‘I wanted to be at the heart of life instead of on its margins.’ Others dispute her version of their engagement, triggering a debate on the nature of truth and reality that is one of the themes of the book.

      Compared to Garry’s experiences in the trenches, Louie’s fantasies seem inconsequential, but take up much more time and exploration. Shepherd shows how important minor scandal, reputation and gossip are in a small community. She uses the turning points and strivings that make a life, the friendships and misunderstandings, to prompt deeper meditations.

      Nan Shepherd makes ingenious use of free indirect speech to create a novel of great empathy. Uneducated widowed Ellen, a ‘nasty old woman,’ is explored with depth and sensitivity, while crude Stella, born into poverty, comes to represent the future, finding employment and confidence by the end of the book. Characters can say things without really speaking: ‘Garry is coming? I thought, I used to imagine – long ago – you were such friendly you two. I wondered sometimes – but then he went away.’

      Shepherd’s sympathy extends to embrace those in the grip of madness, as when Garry thinks, ‘That’s what they said about me: beside himself, cracked. I was in a fever, you see. But I’m convinced I saw clearer than in my right mind.’ All the people in the novel are being exactly themselves and their motivations are presented with truth and kindness. With the Epilogue comes Ellen’s work with the Working Girls’ Guild, giving a sense of new possibilities and complications in the lives of women.

      The novel’s generous, calm attention to the inner lives of sidelined, unremembered women means it remains relevant for the twenty-first century. Shepherd herself lived happily without a man for many years and here we are shown women, often unmarried or widowed, as complex and passionate as they approach their later years. Perhaps my favourite moment in the book is when Garry returns from war and witnesses, before she has seen him, his aunt Barbara, ‘a hard-knit woman of fifty-five,’ alone in the kitchen, dancing.

      Besides speaking generally for its time and country, The Weatherhouse is also of a very specific place – the outskirts of the Grampians – with a culture and language of its own. Characters go ‘stravagin’ and have ‘collieshangie’. The words are specific to this area but have a control and understatement familiar to me from the isles.

      Continually colliding with this controlled society is a wider desire for joy and understanding in Lindsay, Garry and others. There are several passages of quivering beauty and connection, where time and the individual cease to matter. ‘He [Garry] saw everything he looked at not as substance, but as energy. All was life. Life pulsed in the clods of earth that the ploughshare were breaking, in the shares, the men. Substance, no matter what its form, was rare and fine.’

      In these pantheistic sequences of unbridled energy, where the earthly and spiritual realms are linked through nature, The Weatherhouse seems pressingly modern, a response that will be familiar to readers of The Living Mountain. It is no surprise that there is currently such renewed interest in Shepherd’s work. She has even become the latest woman to grace a Scottish bank note, appearing on the new Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note, depicted in front of her beloved Cairngorm hills.

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