How good to come across this recommended novel inSlightly Foxed! I was pleased to read it. And it is very readable. There are some cracking bits: vibrant writing, especially about the Scottish landscape and about animals and birds.
Sadly, this is the only novel written by Elspeth Barker, a journalist, published in 1991. She died in 2022, so this is it!
O Caledonia
We meet Janet, murdered in her castle home at 16, on the novel’s first page.
Halfway up the great stone staircase which rises from the dim and vaulting hall of Auchnasaugh, there is a tall stained-glass window. In the height of its gothic arch is sheltered a circular panel, where a white cockatoo, his breast transfixed by an arrow, is swooning in death. Around the circumference, through sharp green leaves and twisted branches, runs the legend: ‘Moriens sed Invictus’, dying but unconquered. […] At night, when the moon is high it beams through the dying cockatoo and casts his blood drops in a chain of rubies on the flagstones of the hall. Here it was that Janet was found, oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death. (1)
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Her tombstone caries an inappropriate epitaph:
Chewing gum, chewing gum sent me to my grave.
My mother told me not to but I disobeyed. (2)
Chewing gum is not mentioned again in this novel, but there is plenty of disobedience, and perhaps that is why her family buried her so quickly and wanted everyone to forget her. Janet had been a ‘difficult’ child for her family and teachers.
The scene is set, but we are not entering a gothic murder novel, will not seek out the murderer (although we will know their identity in the final pages), but instead we are to become familiar with a child growing up in a neglectful, unimaginative family.
Every child, perhaps especially girls, who grew up feeling out-of-place with her own interests and few friends, will identify with Janet. She was the first born to Vera and Hector just after the end of the war. Four other children follow, but Janet does not seem to fit in. Her parents constantly misunderstand her motives or actions and find her difficult. She likes to be left alone. They want her to be a normal girl, which meant being interested in her appearance, in learning housecraft and becoming a biddable girl. But she loves books, the classics especially, and animals too much for this.
Janet escapes frequently from the chaos she causes with the family, often to walk or ride through the Scottish landscape. Here the writing becomes entrancing, and I recalled my own escapes to Chestnut Grove, or along the lanes of Sussex, or up into the hangars of beech trees. Such expeditions seem to provide confidence that life would turn out ok, without any evidence. For Janet this was not the case. Here she is at her favourite place up in the hills.
She would ride up there and set the pony loose to graze the delicate forest grass. In a glade nearby she could change unseen and slip through the trees into the icy waters of the pool. When the shock had gone she swam lazily about, watching the sunlight probe the pebbles on the muddy floor, the trout flicker under the banks, listening to the boys splashing and shouting far on the other side. When she came out she would creep through the bushes to the place where the capercailzies had their nest and watch the astonishing huge green and black male bird stamping about his little clearing while his dim wife crouched in admiration. The cock was less impressive when he tried to fly, veering and tilting from side to side, brushing branches, narrowly missing tree trunks. His wings droned as he went. (82)
She comes across some sympathetic characters. This allows Elspeth Barker to introduce some vivid and quirky characters: Aunt Lila who is fascinated by fungi and has samples in her room, the jackdaw who she rescues and who stays and lives in her dolls house (previously rejected by Janet), and her pony and dog. Most characters in her orbit do not understand her at all and some respond with cruelty: the boys at the castle’s prep school, the son of her parents’ friends, and Nanny and the other house servants. Even her parents, Hector and Vera, are unable to find patience to understand.
Vera decides to launch Janet into society when she leaves her boarding school and battles for Janet to attend a dance. Janet picks a revolting and inappropriate dress:
Vera had also noticed the purple dress; it was uniquely hideous, festooned with massive bows and encumbered by a bizarre scalloped train like a dragon’s tail. It might be worn with panache by a mad old person whose brains had been jumbled by hunting accidents, and who was indulgently regarded as ‘game’, but by a young girl never. ’Never. Never. Never,’ she said aloud, surprising herself. Janet leered at her. ‘Tricolonic anaphora’, she remarked in her most irritating, pedantic voice. (185)
Janet is mortified by the critical reception of the dress. She was undoubtably a difficult child to warm to, but not to a reader who remembers so much of that feeling of not fitting in. But remember the opening paragraph: ‘Moriens sed Invictus’, dying but unconquered. That was Janet.
Elspeth Barker
Born in 1940, married to the poet George Barker (SeeBy Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Weptby Elizabeth Smart, 1945) with whom she had 5 children, and lived in Norfolk as an adult, involved in some teaching, but also gaining a strong reputation in journalism. She clearly drew upon her own life, the oldest of 5 children growing up in a Scottish Castle after the war, but this is not autobiographical in the usual sense. For a start, Elspeth Barker was not murdered at 16. She died in 2022.
O Caledoniaby Elspeth Barker, first published in 1991 and republished by W&N Essentials in 2014, with an introduction by Maggie O’Farrell.206pp
