After the Dance
IAIN CRICHTON SMITH was born in Glasgow in 1928 and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of Lewis before going to Aberdeen to attend university. As a sensitive and complex poet in both English and Gaelic, he published more than twenty-five books of verse, from The Long River in 1955 to A Country for Old Men, posthumously published in 2000. In his 1986 collection, A Life, the poet looked back over his time in Lewis and Aberdeen, recalling a spell of National Service in the fifties, and then his years as an English teacher, working first in Clydebank and Dumbarton and then at Oban High School, where he taught until his retirement in 1977. Shortly afterwards he married, and lived contentedly with his wife, Donalda, in Taynuilt until his death in 1998.
As well as a number of plays and stories in Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith published several novels, including Consider the Lilies (1968), In the Middle of the Wood (1987) and An Honourable Death (1992). In total, he produced ten collections of stories, including The Hermit and Other Stories (1977) and Thoughts of Murdo (1993).
Alan Warner grew up in Connel, near Oban. He is the author of seven novels including Morvern Callar (1995), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, which was later adapted as a feature film; These Demented Lands (1997), winner of the Encore Award; The Sopranos (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award; and more recently The Stars in the Bright Sky (2010) which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and The Deadman’s Pedal (2013).
He lives in Scotland, mostly.
After the Dance
Selected Stories of
Iain Crichton Smith
Edited with an introduction by
ALAN WARNER
This edition first published
in paperback in Great Britain in 2017 by
Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh EH9 1QS
www.polygonbooks.co.uk
ISBN: 978 0 85790 323 5
Copyright © the estate of Iain Crichton Smith. Selection and introduction copyright © Alan Warner, 2013, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
Typeset by Antony Gray
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Murdo Leaves the Bank
Mr Heine
The Play
The Telegram
Murdo’s Xmas Letter
Home
The Red Door
The Button
Murdo’s Application for a Bursary
The Mess of Pottage
The Old Woman and the Rat
The Crater
The House
A September Day
The Painter
In Church
The Prophecy
Do You Believe in Ghosts?
A Day in the Life of . . .
Murdo and Calvin
After the Dance
Mother and Son
An American Sky
Murdo & the Mod
Sweets to the Sweet
The Bridge
The Long Happy Life of Murdina the Maid
The Wedding
The Hermit
The Exiles
The Maze
In the Silence
Introduction
In the nineteen-eighties, Iain Crichton Smith and I both lived near Oban. One day I saw him approaching me up the town’s main street. It was a small town where everyone more or less knew everyone else and since we had met before, I hailed him. If memory serves, over his shoulder, Iain was carrying a black binliner of his washing for the laundrette – not the image we would always associate with the figure of ‘famous poet’ yet, familiar from his great alter-ego, Murdo, who you will read about in these stories. Iain and I chatted away about what books we were then reading, but we were soon interrupted by an elegantly arranged lady of senior years who looked askance at his binliner but nevertheless said, ‘Oh, Mr Crichton Smith. Just who I was so hoping I would run into! We were wondering if you are going to say yes to speaking a few words and maybe reading some of your wee poems at the opening of our tea afternoon and sale of work?’
I found my lurking, teenage presence immediately unwelcome to this good lady, so I made my excuses and despite the slight look of desperation on Iain’s face, I abandoned him to the price of fame in Oban.
Some days later I ran into Iain again, ‘down the town’ or, ‘up the street’ – depending where you had started out from. I soon asked, ‘Well. Are you going to say a few words at yon one’s tea evening?’
Iain raised his eyebrows towards his pleasingly bald head, ‘Och, I had to say yes to her. She was ever so insistent a personality. A very insistent personality indeed. The kind of person you end up saying goodbye to through your own letter box.’
I remember laughing out aloud at this comment and I still laugh today – over thirty long years later. It’s the kind of warmly wry human observation you would expect both from the man himself and from the author of these short stories which show such a wise understanding of people, but also an outsider’s amazement, fascination and sometimes horror with us all.
In many ways, I believe Iain was always an outsider – perhaps writers must be? Many of these stories like, ‘A Day in the Life of . . . ‘ and ‘The Exiles’, feature lonely, isolated individuals at odds with the society and the values around them.
Iain was born in 1928 and he grew up in the shieling of a very small village on the Isle of Lewis. Fatherless, he was raised by his mother in some poverty, along with his two brothers. Gaelic, not English was Iain’s first language. Very many of the stories here, like ‘The Telegram’, ‘Mother and Son’, ‘In the Silence’, and ‘The Painter’, evoke this rural background and his fascination with the taut dynamics of close-knit communities. Many stories, like ‘Home’, and ‘An American Sky’, also show an ambiguous attitude towards concepts of hearth and home – or to the illusion of community. ‘The Wedding’ is an interesting weighing up of cultural difference and change. Yet ‘The Long Happy Life of Murdina the Maid’ is a gloriously scandalous satire of Gaelic culture and rural small–mindedness which would still
