A Hard Act to Follow

They say if you want to understand a man, look at his mother. Nowhere is this as true as in the story of Eric Linklater, the fatally prolific Orcadian writer. He was a difficult man. His son Andro described the anxiety generated whenever his father was around.

He disliked his physical appearance and emotional inhibitions . . . anything which reminded him of them provoked fury . . . there was a manner in which people should behave and a way in which things should be done and it was crucial that people should measure up.

When visitors were present ‘he made a splendid companion . . . from a mingled sense of drama and terror the butcher produced his best mutton’. Upon their departure, however, ‘meals took place in an atmosphere so charged the squeal of a knife or the slurrup of soup on lip could trigger an explosion’. Andro concludes that his father suffered from ‘not an absence, but an excess of feeling . . . his spirit met a stumbling block in the weighty Victorian values instilled by his parents’. It is a generous assessment. An ‘excess of feeling’ often goes hand in hand with intense self-scrutiny. Linklater was his own severest critic. Who was he trying to impress? His mother, that’s who. Rationalizing a decision he made to leave his pregnant wife in a half-built house in an Orkney winter (‘Marjorie was often in tears’) in order to travel to India, he wrote,

I shall not blame my mother for all that is unstable in my character, but I think she was partly responsible for my reluctance to settle down . . . I had an idea for a novel . . . perhaps it was my duty to see India.

This is not the kind of duty Elizabeth Linklater would have recognized. She was certainly indomitable. Her father was a Swede who ran away to sea. Eric remembers his grandfather with awe, rather than affection.

He had large bony hands, cool to hold and seeming to a child strong as iron . . . he made boats for us. My grandmother had to fashion the sails, and my grandfather would not be satisfied with anything but a perfect copy of the brown-paper patterns he cut.

In those days it was common for the master to take his wife and family on board. So it was that, by the time she was 6, Eric’s mother had been round the Horn three times. ‘I came home from my final voyage in 1890,’ Elizabeth told the Glasgow Herald, ‘and felt I must do something to throw off the effects of being shut up in so small a place for so long a time.’ To her parents’ alarm, she took a shorthand and typing course with a friend – not an appropriate career choice for a lady. They found lodgings in Glasgow, lunching at the Athenaeum, an iconic radical hub where suffragettes spoke and women took carpentry classes. ‘I recall with amusement the amount of curiosity our venture aroused,’ she said. In 1898 she married the second mate on her father’s ship and moved with him to spend the rest of her life in Orkney. In her fifties, she typed a memoir of her time at sea. Eric published it in 1938. A Child under Sail tells a remarkable story and is, as Arthur Ransome wrote, ‘a lovely book’. ‘The child who spent her childhood under sail was taught to use her eyes,’ Eric says in his introduction. ‘I cannot judge it quite dispassionately, because in fragments it gave such pleasure to my childhood, when Rio de Janeiro, the coast of Java and the village down the road were all equidistant.’ A ‘business-like farewell’ is the first thing the 4-year-old remembers. There is no sentiment in her tale, and it’s all the stronger for that. They sail from Essex on the Parajevo. Her mother is seasick, barely able to comb her daughter’s unruly hair into ringlets.

I remember shrieking with delight when the waves dashed over the porthole; Mother used to say if in the first few days it had been decided she should be thrown overboard, she would not have asked for the decision to be reconsidered.

The frontispiece is a picture of Elizabeth – ringlets well curled – in frills, with a basket of flowers, looking every inch a solemn little Victorian. I wonder if it’s the same dress she’s wearing when she describes meeting a ship’s agent on arrival in Boston.

I was in the ’tween decks, helping sweep up after the cargo of chalk had been discharged. I was dressed in a black silk dress made out of one of my mother’s. It may have been very useful in ordinary times, as not showing the dirt, but it hardly fulfilled its purpose when the dirt was chalk.

There was an uncomfortable year at school after that first voyage. ‘I had become, I suppose, a most objectionable little girl. After having been treated with deference at sea, it was little wonder I thought bitterly of my new lot.’ A year later she took her first long voyage – to Calcutta with a cargo of salt. She was old enough now to make judgements. ‘The carpenter was my greatest friend . . . I worked with him driving nails into whatever ship’s work he was doing, and puttying up the holes.’ The sailmaker made her a tiny palm thimble, out of leather, so she could push the sail needle through tough canvas. She learned to weave hemp. All of these activities she much preferred to learning lessons. ‘It was impossible to sit quietly at these peaceful tasks,’ she says. We can see how a cramped cabin must have irked such a practical spirit. It may well be she was shielded from much of what went on below decks, but she was well aware of tensions. ‘Greeks, Spaniards and Italians were not as a rule popular with shipmasters, being too ready to emphasize any difference of opinion with a knife or an iron belaying pin.’ She is utterly familiar with the rhythms of the ship. We learn what the men receive on arrival – the list includes a donkey’s breakfast (a straw-filled mattress) and a dozen boxes of matches. While sympathetic to and admiring of their resilience in the face of poverty, she doesn’t question the hierarchy which allows her to dine in the saloon with silver lamps. It was a common saying, she tells us, ‘that when a sailor married he bought his wife a washing tub, and a looking glass; and if she was too lazy to take in washing, she could look in the glass and starve’. Her father’s work ethic is stern, and it wins her approval. It does her credit, then, that she sees the crew as individuals, with foibles and vanities. ‘When in hot weather the men went about with bared chests, some wonderful tattooing was revealed . . . my father saw a man with an anchor pricked on his nose, the stock down the bridge bone and the flukes on each side of the nostril.’ She understands the importance of music, particularly the singing of chanteys (sea shanties). When sailors hauled in unison, it helped to have a leading voice throwing out lyrics, which the men echoed back. The most gifted of the chanteymen extemporized, a bit like rap artists do nowadays. ‘It was as well for the captain and officers to be out of hearing . . . the solo part might be used to express adverse criticism, sometimes very pungently.’ We get a glimpse, too, of the no-nonsense woman who was feared by an anxious son, when she describes

the bronzed weather-beaten faces of the men who sang these songs: of their huge tarry hands, into which they always spat. I think of the high nasal voice of the chanteyman and the roar of the chorus, regardless of tune. There has of course been a revival of interest in them – but all I hear, when I turn on my wireless, is refinement and nicely balanced parts, and with relief I turn to something modern where there is no make-believe.

Perhaps we all want to show our parents how much we have achieved. But Eric Linklater’s love of excess would never have impressed his mother, while her diet would have a modern nutritionist gibbering.

Flour grew wonderful fat maggots which I have watched a steward rub through a sieve. Maggot races enlivened many a meal. It was most exciting to speculate whose entry would cross the table first . . . Pickles did much to conceal the nauseating flavour of salt fat meat. But on one occasion the vinegar barrel was washed out, and on to the deck came heads, tails and the limbs of many rats. No one suffered really, but the second mate was promptly sick.

In port, she is clearly bored by the social round, keener to tell us that as she was dressing to go ashore she couldn’t get her boot on because a rat had gone to sleep inside it. But her sharp eye prevails. In Stockholm the servants go about on skates, pulling tiny sleighs to carry their purchases. She notes enthusiastically the equality between mistress and servant. Calcutta boasts jugglers, snake-charmers, and ‘a man who swallowed a long hook and brought it back through his nostril’. Ernest Marwick, the gentle but waspish chronicler of Orcadian life in the twentieth century, was fond of Elizabeth, much fonder of her than he was of her son, whose penchant for hobnobbing with gentry puzzled him. ‘The robust common sense of his mother was at odds with Eric’s desire for his child to hunt with the Queen,’ he wrote. For Elizabeth, however, he had only praise, tempered with cautious respect. In a ninetieth-birthday tribute to her, he says, ‘She brings the clearest of minds to her judgement of people and things but has such a capacity for kindness that her frankness is a joy, and her approval something to treasure.’ Elizabeth replies, ‘It has given me a new line of thought that I am a “nice lady”. Very nice to think, but not too good for my soul, I fear. I am too old for such flattery.’ The letter is shakily typed, the signature wavery; but the sentiment is firm. No fripperies, no blandishments. We can sympathize a little, then, with a telling anecdote in Eric’s foreword. A sailing ship anchors in an Orkney harbour, rare and beautiful to behold in 1937. ‘She seemed to me a fine sight, and I thought my mother would find her beautiful. But she looked for a moment and said coldly, “What a very ugly bow!”’ He uses the story to make a point about the seasoned sailor’s ‘exactitude of vision’, claiming his mother saw, like an artist, which shape worked and which did not. I see it differently; no matter how he tried, he felt judged and found wanting. Although he thought he was offering her a treat, she couldn’t sugar-coat her response. It was Eric’s misfortune to want to square his Rabelaisian instincts with the no-nonsense rigour his mother learned from her time under sail.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Morag MacInnes