BORN IN THE BORDERS
Author and historian Alistair Moffat is always happiest in his Borders home
We have a little farm south of Selkirk where we live with a bad-tempered West Highland Terrier. We breed horses, which is a very quick way to lose a lot of money, but we’ve had a bit of success with it. My wife is the breeder really. I just write and run the Borders Book Festival.
My family were agricultural labourers for 100 years in Berwickshire, so that’s my heritage – wandering about in wellies and shaking my fists at the weather. My family is from
Fogo, they’re all buried in the kirkyard there. I feel very at home in Berwickshire. There are only 19,000 people living there. It’s tiny and people don’t realise that there are only really two towns – Duns and Eyemouth. I love that red, copper-coloured earth.
My dad knew Berwickshire very well as he was an electrician, so he would take me out in his van and we’d go around these big houses on a Saturday morning and put a plug on a kettle. It was amazing the things that people got electricians to do back then. So, I got to know Berwickshire really well too. To me it’s the most beautiful part of Scotland, so it’s a bit of a mystery that Berwickshire is so often ignored by tourists. I’m so pleased that the refurbished Jim Clark Room in Duns has been such a success, because I think it will bring a lot more people to the area in the future.
My biggest achievement has been living longer than my dad, but only just. Or perhaps it’s doing what I like. Most people do jobs they don’t like, or at least just tolerate. I was director of programmes at Scottish Television until 1999 and so I spent a long time in telly and before that I ran the Festival Fringe in Edinburgh. It all sounds very grand but I couldn’t wait to get out of it because I wanted to write. So, that’s what I’ve
spent the last 20 years doing. You spend half the time thinking ‘how am I going to pay these bills’ and the other half thinking ‘that’s not bad.’ That’s the biggest compliment my father ever gave anything, ‘that’s not bad.’ That’s Borders for ‘excellent’.
I wasn’t a good pupil at school. I played rugby because Kelso is a rugby town and was really lucky to get into St Andrews University with pretty lousy Highers. St Andrews had split from Dundee the year before and were desperate for students, so they would let anybody in.
When I was at school I was playing rugby for the 1st XV at Kelso because I was a big lad. So that got me into St Andrews in about two seconds flat. I had a C in Higher Latin and a B in History and it didn’t make any difference. School was really just what you did. What was most important to me was that we lived next door to the rugby stadium. Poynder Park had floodlights and everything then – I loved it.
People say ‘I can’t write fiction’, but anybody can do it. When we locked down last year I had only ever written non-fiction – I’d written 30 or 40 history books. I’m one of those people who has to be writing something, or my wife will tell you that I’m unliveable with. So, I thought what on earth can I do? I decided to write my debut novel, but I couldn’t do any research for it so I set it in places that I knew very well already. That’s why it takes place in Berwick-upon-Tweed, the Borders, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Arisaig and the Morar peninsula over on the west coast.
Someone once asked me what my biggest literary influence was and it was the Roxy cinema in Kelso, where I grew up. I loved to go and see the Saturday serials at the Roxy. They always left you on a cliffhanger so that you came back
That’s my heritage – wandering about in wellies and shaking my fists at the weather
the following week. I wrote a couple of chapters and it just took on a life of its own. It started off at a sprint and got faster. I could barely keep up with these people that I was writing about. I finished it in six weeks. I realised that what I wanted during lockdown was escapism and that’s what everyone else wanted too. So that’s what I set out to do.
The Night Before Morning is set in 1944/95 and Hitler has won the war. Britain is under German occupation and America is terrified and cowed into making a truce because Hitler has detonated an atomic bomb. And that’s not too far removed from real history, because the Germans were working hard on that. It begins in the dead of night, a figure flits through the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey and he’s looking for a document that he knows will change the course of history and he finds it.
The story is this document, a journal written by a young soldier called David Erskine. I had a fantastic time doing it. My own stricture was that there would be no sex in it. Because you just couldn’t write anything that would embarrass your children. There are a few cuddles and kisses and that’s it.
Sir Walter Scott is my hero, he was an extraordinary individual. Not only could he write – and boy did he write, he wrote a huge biography of Napoleon at the same time as writing the Waverley novels and poetry – but he has a pretty good claim to having invented Scotland. He was the Jo Rowling of his time, the most famous Scotsman in the world, because of the Waverley novels and his poetry.
It’s perhaps not surprising, but it is sad that he’s not read as much as he once was. I think his problem is that he was Sir
“Sir Walter Scott played a part in me becoming a historian and writer
Walter Scott and people think ‘Oh God, not another toff!’ But he’s a towering figure in my view. He played a part in me becoming a historian and writer. There was no sighing and clutching his head, no staring out the window. He just got on with it. And he was writing with a quill pen. It’s much easier with a Biro and an Apple Mac.
When he lost everything – not through any fault of his, but due to a bubble in the stock market – he could have declared himself bankrupt. King George the fifth offered to pay off his debts but he declined that offer and his response in paying back this humongous amount of money that he owed was to say ‘mine own right hand will do it.’ And he wrote himself out of bankruptcy.
I just think that’s so admirable.
My other hero is a Berwickshire man. In the 18th century James Small was a blacksmith at Blackadder Mount. He invented the modern plough. In Scotland and elsewhere people ploughed with a wooden mould board as it was called and it kept breaking. He essentially redesigned it into the shape that we recognise today and had the whole thing cast in iron at the Carron Iron works. That changed the world. It meant you could turn over the furrow slice completely, plough deeper, improve drainage, plough more land and plant more. But he never patented it. He wrote a book called A Treatise on Ploughs and Wheel Carriages, which was an instruction manual on how to build a plough and everyone copied it.
The American prairies were ploughed and made fertile because of James Small and his invention, yet he died in poverty at Pathhead. I think he was a genius and a selfless man. When I see the red earth and the fields of Berwickshire it always makes me think of Small.
We’re currently busy trying to revive the Borders Book Festival, so we’re doing it in November at Abbotsford because it’s the 250th anniversary of Walter Scott’s birth. We hope to return to Harmony Garden in Melrose in 2022.
I’m hoping to resume my non-fiction writing too, but this is all Covid-willing. I’ve written another novel. I did it in the second lockdown. In fact, I’m almost finished a third novel. You can just completely lose yourself in these things. That’s not the case with writing history books, you’re just trying to get everything right and in the right order.
The current novel I’m writing is about Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. He invaded Caledonia with the largest army ever seen in this country – nearly 50,000 soldiers – and he’s turned out to be a mix of an old rugby coach that I had and Rab C Nesbitt. He keeps doing stuff that makes me think, ‘what a daft old man!’ Writing can take you places that you don’t expect.