Typescript 2: Origins and publication of The Flight of the Heron

Madam President, Ladies—I must begin by begging for indulgence if I have more or less to read what I am going to say. This is the first time I have ever tried to make a speech, having always refused with shudders, to uplift my voice in public. But, as I daresay you know, there is a Gaelic proverb which says ‘The spot of a man’s birth and of his death he is necessarily impelled to,’ and I seem to have arrived at such a place, brought there by your great kindness in asking me to be the guest of honour at this luncheon, and by the feeling that if you really wish to know how I came to write my Jacobite stories I must tell you.

I have tried very hard to learn off my remarks, but I find I can’t remember them in the proper order, so I think it will be pleasanter for you as well as for me if I cast myself on your mercy and do not try to conceal the fact that I have got them here on paper.

Your President has spoken of the way in which a place gets hold of one’s imagination. This was never truer, I suppose, than in my own case. “The Flight of the Heron” owes its existence entirely to a visit to the Highlands—the first I had ever paid to Scotland. For I must tell you that nine years ago I had never been over the Border in my life, that I had no particular interest in that over-written period of the ‘Forty-Five’, and very little knowledge of it. But I had long wanted to see the Highlands, and in the summer of 1923 Destiny pointed out to me some rooms at Roy Bridge in the Spean valley in Inverness-shire; and my friend and I took them, little knowing what was to come of this action.

I had been advised to go in June, as the least wet of the summer months. Alas, it rained practically the whole of the five weeks that we were there; I think we had only four completely fine days in that time. But, despite the rain, the Highlands got hold of me and have never relaxed their grip! Although I have not to my knowledge a drop of Scottish blood I invariably feel when I return as though I were going back to places I had always known and loved. And though at first it meant little to me that I was that summer in Lochaber—the land of Lochiel—it meant a good deal before I left. As you know, Inverness-shire holds both the beginning and the ending of that tragic and romantic venture of the Forty-five—that is, as far as the Prince himself was concerned. It was in Inverness-shire that he landed, that the standard was raised, and the first skirmish fought; he was four times in the Great Glen, and left from the very spot where he had landed. I first learnt of that skirmish at High Bridge, when two companies of the Royal Scots were routed by eleven men and a piper, from a little book on Lochaber by the then Abbot of Fort Augustus, now the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh,[1] and I still remember how wet I got, on my second visit to the Spean, plunging through the long grass to find the overgrown approach to the broken bridge. Nineteen miles too did I walk to get a sight of Lochiel’s house of Achnacarry—not, of course, the old one, which was burnt soon after Culloden. Since then the present Lochiel has taken me there and shown it to me.

It was my ever kind friend the Abbot’s sister, who had lent me his book, who said to me one day, “Why don’t you write a story of the Forty-five?” I remember replying something to the effect that I felt not the slightest inclination to do so—it had been done too often—and did not suppose that I should ever want to. But how little we know what we shall perpetrate! The wet must have been helping something to germinate in my mind all the time; yet how could I guess, as I sat looking out from the cottage window through the downpour at the ben opposite, and learning from my Highland hostess the Gaelic for rain, which sounds almost exactly like the German word for a curse, Fluch,[2] that I should not only write a Jacobite novel, but commit the crime of following it up by two sequels! But it was so. I came down one morning to Mrs Macleay’s scones with an idea which rather thrilled me, and before I left Roy Bridge ‘The Flight of the Heron’ was planned out; it remained to go home and work hard for a couple of years at the history, and the writing of it.

Those of you who are writers yourselves will know how very often the central incident, or at least an incident of a story, will shoot of itself, generally as a picture, into the mind, sometimes even coming by way of a dream, and will prove the seed from which all the rest will spring in its proper place. I saw first the scene—which as it happens comes exactly in the middle of the book—where my English hero Keith Windham rescues my Scottish one, Ewen Cameron, from being shot by the English redcoats after Culloden in front of a mountain sheiling. You will know also how tiresome it is when a character insists on having a name which is difficult to account for; I had great trouble with Captain Windham, who refused to be called anything but ‘Keith’, though he was not a Scot and in fact disliked them. So I had to give way, and invent an explanation for his name as well as for his being in the Royal Scots.

The book came out in October 1925 and I must confess that I launched it in fear and trembling as to its reception by the Scottish public, who know the history of their own country and are exact and critical. Yet it was not strictly my historical background that I was nervous about, because my historical training at Oxford has made me rather over particular, if anything, about accuracy even in small details. But no one could know better than I how fatally easy it is to make slips of quite other kinds when writing about a country which is not one’s own; there are hundreds of pitfalls. I could only do my best, get a friend to look over the Scottish vernacular, and hope for luck.

Well, between good fortune and the kindly tolerance of my Northern readers I escaped being scarified. Indeed I now find myself, quite wrongly, regarded as an authority on the history of Clan Cameron, and get letters asking for genealogical information which I generally can’t supply. In fact I was asked some years ago by the Clan Cameron Association in Glasgow to go up and lecture to them. And quite soon after the book came out it received a testimonial too flattering for me to read it to you in its entirety, from that very wellknown scholar and man of letters, the late Dr Horatio Brown, the historian of Venice and—this is the point which I think will interest you—the grandson of the last Chief of Glengarry, Sir Walter Scott’s Glengarry.[3] Dr Horatio Brown wrote to my publishers, who had sent him the book, not telling him that I was a woman, and said that it had moved him more profoundly than anything he had read for years; and then, amid a great deal of praise, in which he was kind enough to say that it was far and away the finest Highland Jacobite novel he knew, he burst out “How the devil (damn him!) did the author get this inside knowledge of the Highland character?” I had several very charming letters from him subsequently, but alas, he died not long afterwards.

I said just now that Scots know the history of their own country. They also have a pious care, very commendable, for the memory of their forebears. Not long after the book came out I had a correspondence—of a very amicable nature, let me say—with the lady whose grandfather was head of the Loudoun family,[4] who did not think that I had been quite fair in my picture of the fourth Earl. My own conscience not being entirely clear in the matter, I inserted a note in the next edition to the effect that liberties had been taken with his character for the purposes of the story. I was also reproached by a correspondent from Edinburgh for making use in the epilogue of a trade token of the town of Inverness in 1746, whereas the first known one dates from nearly forty years later. This anachronism, which I defended by saying that there might have [been] an earlier one, was such a shock to the poor man, who was apparently just finishing the book with satisfaction, that, as he said, ‘my model was smashed by one full blow of sledge-hammer violence!’ I once met a Highlander who said to me in disappointed and even reproachful tones, “You did not write the Flight of the Heron!” I replied meekly that I was sorry, but that I had. Like a good many people—including Dr Horatio Brown, he had thought that I was a man—so did the lady of whom I heard the other day, who said “She! I always thought it was an old man with a beard!”[5] It is difficult indeed to satisfy everybody, for a ten year old schoolboy friend of mine said to me a few weeks ago, ‘There is a boy at my school—he is rather a bloodthirsty boy—who was disappointed that you didn’t explain more about Doctor Cameron’s execution in The Gleam in the North.” The epithet was evidently deserved.

Indeed my young unknown correspondents of whom I have many, are a perpetual joy, from the child who with a friend was making a bookmarker for ‘The Flight of the Heron’ with more on it than you would think could possibly be got into such a confined space—“The White Rose as a centre-piece and round it the wild Highlands covered with heather sloping away to the white sands of Morar and the sea with the ship at anchor not far from the shore, and above all in the sky is a lovely blueish grey heron”—to the girl—a Scottish girl—who wrote ‘I have read the Heron thousands of times and each time I love it more”, “another glorious bit is that awful time when Ewen is in prison at Fort Augustus.”[6]

Now I must sincerely apologise for what must look like blowing my own trumpet, a musical exercise which really appeals to me very little; but you must put the blame on your President who forced the instrument into my trembling hand. Yet before I sit down I should like to say that there are two reasons why I am glad to be standing up; one is the opportunity it gives me of thanking the group for the honour which it has done me in electing me as an honorary member, the other that I am able to say to a Scottish gathering how much I have appreciated the unvarying kindness shown to me, a Southron intruder, by all whom I have met ‘benorth Tweed’—where, I am delighted to say, I am betaking myself again next Wednesday.