The Scots Kitchen

F. Marian McNeill

(b. Orkney 1885, d. Edinburgh 1973)

'I can still recall vividly, the moorland path leading to a certain snug little croft, the clumps of foxgloves and purple thistles, the scent of heather and bog myrtle . . . the warm greeting at the door, the pungent odour of peats burning on the wide open hearth, the delectable nutty smell of oatcakes . . . toasting on the girdle, the singing of the kettle, the straw-backed Orkney chairs . . . the table spread with homely cottage fare. All this had a charm for me that was lacking in the Kirkwall drawing rooms with their Victorian furniture, in spite of their superior tea-table delicacies.

-from 'An Orkney Childhood' by F. Marian McNeill.1

This croft scene from Florence (Floss) Marian McNeill's childhood took place in the district of Holm, a part of Orkney inhabited by crofters, farmers and fishermen: sensible, kindly, hard-working folk whose way of life was cooperative, not competitive. Human values were rated above commercial ones as they toiled under the great arch of sky, in the clean-cutting wind, among the austere beauty of those treeless islands and the ceaseless sounding of the sea.2 It was in this distinctive island culture-by a happy turn of fortune-that her roots were formed.

Her father, Daniel, was a Gaelic-speaking Highlander from Argyll, a medical doctor as well as Holm's Free Church minister. He had been en route for missionary service when he met her mother, Jessie Jane Dewar, on Orkney. She had come from Fochabers to keep house for her brother, a doctor at St Margaret's Hope, and was from a Lowland line of bonnet lairds, lawyers and ministers. Her parents were another happy turn of fortune.

The large manse looked out on a stunning panorama of islands and sea: wild gales in winter contrasting with opalescent summer nights when sunset merged into dawn. To feed their large family-they had six daughters and six sons, Floss was their eighth child-they farmed twenty acres of fertile croft-land. They grew oats for the porridge-pot and girdle and vegetables for the kail-pot; kept cows and goats for milk, cheese and butter; and hens for eggs. They had a boat for fishing and a pony and gig for trips into Kirkwall.

Their lifestyle, like the rest of the people in Holm, depended on daily frugality, diverted by seasonal and festive good things. Her mother did the scrimping and saving. She had a special concern for the emancipation of women in education and politics. Floss describes her as 'a woman of unusual strength and sweetness of character, with intellectual and social skills which caused some of her friends to say she was "lost" in an obscure Orkney parish-an opinion she did not share.'1 Her father also had an exceptional intellect and 'imbued his children with Gaelic lore and song as well as liberal theology'.2 She describes him as 'a typical West Highlander-warm-hearted, impulsive, hospitable, full of vitality, [and] many-sided in his interests.'3 The manse was well stocked with books of all kinds. Economies were made on everything but the children's education and the manse's hospitality.

On social evenings, when her father's fine fiddle playing, singing, and storytelling were the highlight of the night, drinking and eating went hand in hand with hospitality. Along with others, who had inherited an oral Celtic tradition, he was concerned that it would fall into oblivion in this century of industrial revolution, as country people flocked to the towns for work and lost touch with their roots. He believed that there was a cohesive force in folk culture, and heritage, which should be used to define the identity of small countries like Scotland.

Also part of the manse family life was the children's nurse, Beenie (Bella Bremner), whose own family were steeped in generations of Orkney folklore and fairytales. On wild winter nights when the wind howled in the chimney pots, the children would gather, transfixed by Beenie's stories as she sat in her high-backed, straw-woven Orkney chair by the kitchen's glowing peat fire. There might be drama and intrigue in a Norse saga, or a trip into the mysterious Otherworld inhabited by trolls, fairies, witches and mermaids. 'We lived,' says Floss, 'in an eerie borderland between the seen and the unseen worlds, and, Manse bairns and all as we were, duly trained in the Shorter Catechism . . . we had (like most Scots, I fancy) more than a dash of the pagan beneath our Presbyterian veneer.'1

In a writing career of almost fifty years, this childhood would influence much of her work. Firstly a history of Iona and a novel, then The Scots Kitchen, which was followed by a book on Scottish drinking customs and hospitality,2 and later by four volumes on Scottish folklore, and national and local festivals.3 Her heart and imagination often turned to Orkney for inspiration and renewal. When she was seventy-four, on a trip back to Holm, she went to the lonely, surf-washed graveyard by the sea where her parents were buried: 'Dusk was gathering as I lingered there, and I reflected that as a child I should have been terrified to be alone at that hour in such a place. But now I felt no fear at all, not even grief, but only gratitude for all I owed my parents and my home.'4

Her mother died, aged forty-eight, in 1897, when Floss was twelve. Her elder sister, Charlotte (Hattie) was twenty-two and had been prepared, by her dying mother, to manage the family when she was gone.

Most of the children were educated in Orkney, and then finished their education, as Floss did, in Glasgow, France and Germany. She went to Glasgow University to study for an arts degree in 1904. Then there was a period of travel which she describes as a 'sort of gaberlunzie'5 lifestyle: a hint that making money was not one of her top priorities. She taught English in France and Germany; lived for a while in Greece; was an organiser in the suffragette movement; became a social worker in London; and organised a Peacemakers' Pilgrimage from Wales to London.

Some of the people she met during this period express something of her character: 'I do like to get your letters with that spirit of 'go' in them.6 'You have upon you that subtle thing which I call "fineness". It is an atmosphere, a rareness, something indefinable which I value and which is touched with the quality of poetry and romance.'1

Despite the loss of her mother at such an early age, she had become a highly motivated, socially aware, independent and attractive young woman with a special quality, but still in search of a purpose in life. She was one of the first women to take an equal place with men in politics and education. Her older sister, Mary, became a missionary doctor in Uganda, and her younger sister, Leila, a professor of English in America. Sadly, many of these young women would soon be caught up in the 1914-18 War. For Floss, two much-loved brothers, Pat and Willie, were lost, as well as a close male friend, all of which resulted in her emotional breakdown at the end of the war.

By this time, however, she had met and become close friends with some established Scottish writers living, like her, in London. She was especially close to Catherine Carswell and Willa Muir (wife of Orkney poet Edwin Muir) who were very supportive during this difficult time.2 It was a turning point in her life, for she no longer, it seems, had the stamina to organise peace marches and the like. Instead, she began writing a novel, loosely based on her childhood and her years in Glasgow and London. The story has an unhappy romantic ending followed by an epilogue, a poignant and healing return to her father's West Highland roots. She called it The Road Home.3

Candid criticism in letters from writer friends was not encouraging. They thought the book was too concerned with ideas and lacking creative imagination.4 It was 1928, she was forty-three, unmarried, and had moved from trendy London to live with her sisters in Edinburgh where she would stay for the rest of her life, though she continued to travel a lot. Not abroad but in Scotland, visiting friends, and friends of friends; always collecting, from local museums and libraries, as well as from old people with long memories, the original material which would make her books unique.

Iona: History of an Island was published in 1925;1 her novel in 1932. She never wrote fiction again. She was, in any case, moving in a different direction as a freelance journalist. Her spirit of 'go' had returned. She set about founding the Clan McNeill Society and was involved with the early Scottish Nationalist movement, becoming Vice President in the 1930s. In her next book she would investigate 'the pageant of Scottish history . . . shadowed in the kitchen'.2

Among the six McNeill sisters there were better cooks and bakers than Floss. But she had that spirit of 'go' to take up her father's concern for the preservation of Scotland's culture and heritage. She also had an instinctive curiosity about food, even as a young child starting school.

'We used to take pieces to school,' she recalls in a conversation with folk historian, Ernest Marwick, on a visit to Orkney in 1962, 'and I would have a carvie biscuit, which the other children used to think rather exotic. I remember one...