The Unheard Voices
Ahead of her appearance at Fringe By The Sea, Sally Magnusson tells why her new book explores the brutal lost stories of the Clearances
SALLY MAGNUSSON is sitting in her home just north of Glasgow looking back on the Clearances, and particularly the role women played – something which affected her own family in the 19th century.
“Women were at the centre of resisting Clearances and the delivery of eviction notices – there were some appalling injuries. Many of the stories just haven’t been told, frankly because they were women.”
The broadcaster and journalist will be discussing her latest novel Music In The Dark at the Fringe By The Sea festival in North Berwick this summer.
The novel, her third, covers the lives of two people cleared from the Ross-shire townships of Glencalvie and Greenyards, near Tain. It explores the brutal clearance itself as well as how it affected them three decades later when they lived in Rutherglen, outside Glasgow.
The narrative is based on real events and although the characters are fictitious, Sally has based their story on contemporary accounts of how real people’s lives were overturned.
“The dramatic heart of the book is the clearance… a group of women standing by the boundary of the township, trying to delay the delivery of the eviction notices, as women often did. They were set upon by a horde of policemen. Some of them suffered catastrophic injuries and the township was cleared, as so many were.
“This one at Strathcarron was the last of the great confrontations between the people and the authorities. People trying to resist being put out of their homes and lands and the authorities getting more and more fed up at being thwarted.”
Sally’s great-grandmother, Annie Mckechnie, was evicted from land on Mull and ended up living in Glasgow. The way people like Annie had to start again
and find a life away from the Highlands and islands is something explored in the novel.
When the novel moves to the outskirts of Glasgow, the story of Jamesina Ross, one of the main characters, and Annie Mckechnie almost became “fused”, says Sally. They both took in washing for money, and took in lodgers too.
“I never knew her but my mother had all sorts of stories about her grannie who had been a Gaelic speaking Highlander, came down on the boat to Glasgow when she was made homeless and found work as a domestic servant. She married and had children, almost all of whom died of TB.
“It is important that people of that era are remembered. The lives of women at the time are important – the role they had in trying to robustly defend their communities – and I was also interested (in the novel) in what happened to women after these events. As the years passed, what did the blows to their heads that so many of them received do to their lives? Did they ever recover? Did they recover a bit, or not at all?”
Sally will be appearing at Fringe By The Sea in August – an event she’s looking forward to. She adds, “It’s a lovely festival, a little bit different from other book festivals because it is by the sea. There is this great outdoors, seaside feeling about it.”
“These women… did they ever recover?”
Visit www.fringebythesea.com for more information.