From Scenes Like These

You will perhaps know Paisley-born writer Gordon Williams as the author of The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, the basis for Sam Peckinpah’s controversial (and hated by Williams) film Straw Dogs. Or maybe as the co-author (with Terry Venables) of the Hazell detective series, briefly adapted for television in the late 1970s. However, he also has a more literary claim to fame as one of the six authors shortlisted for the original Booker Prize in 1969 (the only time two Scottish writers have been nominated, the other being Muriel Spark):

“My editor, who was a judge, told me I’d won. In fact my wife and I had already spent the 5,000 quid on a new bathroom. When my name wasn’t read out I was bloody pissed off.”

The novel in question was From Scenes Like These, recently reissued for the first time since 1996. The title comes from Burns’ The Cottar’s Saturday Night (“From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs”) and is meant entirely ironically as the rural life depicted in the novel is mean and brutal, as is the urban landscape it exists alongside, an estate called the Darroch scheme based on Ferguslie Park where Williams was brought up. The novel’s central character is the fifteen-year-old Dunky Logan, recently left school and employed at Craig’s farm. Though intelligent, Dunky is keen to leave education and childhood behind and become a man:

“It made him feel tough and hard being a farm worker who had to be yoked by the time other men were only crawling out of their beds.”

There’s something of Chris Guthrie of Sunset Song in the two sides to Dunky’s character, which, in a sign he is more educated than his fellow farm workers, he compares to “young Jim Hawkins, able to talk to both Long John Silver and Squire Trelawney.” He also has an awareness they lack, a sense of his life from the outside:

“There was another daft notion which made him wonder if he was normal, the idea he had that all sorts of people, some he knew and some he didn’t, were watching him wherever he was.”

Yet at the same time he calculates that he will have to fight McCann, a young man in his twenties, who sets out to bully him, even though he knows he will lose:

“In a way he was beginning to look forward to getting it over with, hammering or not. It had to come sometime.”

This need to prove yourself through violence is one aspect of the novel’s examination of what we would now call toxic masculinity; a dismissive, misogynistic attitude towards women is the other. This is highlighted throughout the dialogue of the farm workers – one in particular, Telfer, has a reputation for seduction and abandonment, whereas another, McPhail, is known as a ‘knee-padder’ – that is, someone who spies on courting couples. The appearance of the farm’s new housekeeper gives license to their comments, especially as she has disability that means she walks with a metal support on one leg: “She’s a bloody limpy dan!” announces McCann. When she falls over, scared by Craig’s dog, Telfer picks her up:

“She’s a bloody smasher…I felt the tits on her when I picked her up!”

Interestingly, Williams introduces the housekeeper, Mary O’Donnell, by leaving Dunky and focusing the narrative on her journey to the farm. If the reader hopes for a more sympathetic character, however, we soon discover that Mary has her own plans and as much intent to use men as they might have to use her: “they were making a mistake if they thought she wasn’t just as hard as they were.”

From Scenes Like These is a determinedly unredemptive novel. Any glimmer of hope soon fades, whether it is Dunky’s love for a scheme girl, Elsa, or his chances of a professional football career. In both cases there is an element of self-sabotage in Dunky’s actions, but dreams in general, like Telfer’s talk of emigrating to Canada, are seen as unrealistic in the novel. The only character with anything resembling integrity is a recluse widely believed to be a tinker but in fact a minister who has given up on civilisation after experiencing the trenches of the First World War:

“I’ll maybe believe in their civilisation the day I hear of God and the king of England sharing a two-apartment Corporation house.”

That Willie Craig, son of the farm owner, goes every so often to talk to the tinker, just as Dunky finds some peace with the rabbits he keeps, suggests that Williams can see another side to his characters, yet both Willie and Dunky see these outlets as unmanly and something to be ashamed of.

From Scenes Like These brings the Scotland of the 1950s vividly to life in all its brutality and horror. Williams describes both the farm and the scheme with visceral detail and dark humour, an unvarnished view of reality that must have been just as shocking in its time as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Tellingly, its story of Dunky’s desperate determination to prove himself a man is one that still resonates today.