By 1937, many people, both employed and unemployed, were
anticipating war, but from 1939 they were all thrust into it. Fred
Urquhart's second collection of short stories reflects this. The
young men are often reluctant to sign up for the Forces: the world
seems on the move. Tenement dwellers react to the mysteries of
Blackout, sirens, air-raids, air-raid shelters. Urquhart's stories
reflect all this in robust and often comic fashion. The longest,
'The Laundry Girl and the Pole', concerns one of his favourite
subjects, the transformation that foreign soldiers could bring to
local girls, relatively starved of freedom, in the exciting new
Blackout. Wild nights in the chip shop! Language ceases to be the
major problem. Sudden brief romances become the risky order of the
day. red Urquhart (1912-1995) was born in Edinburgh and spent much
of his childhood there, where his grandparents lived, and later he
worked in an Edinburgh book shop for some years ('my university').
He is best known as a superb short story writer. When he began to
write it was the heyday of short story magazines, and this was the
only obvious way to earn a living as an author. He spent the war in
the north-east of Scotland, a conscientious objector relegated to
farm work: his stories of this are agreed to rival Grassic Gibbon
and Jessie Kesson. But later he went to London, finding the louche
world of Soho more to his taste than Edinburgh correctness. Later
he lived in the country in a 'happy homosexual marriage' and he did
not return to Scotland until 1991, after his partner's death. The
Ferret Was Abraham's Daughter (1949) and Jezebel's Dust (1951) are
his two great novels of Edinburgh's poorer citizens in wartime.
sobel Murray is Emeritus Professor in Modern Scottish Literature at
the University of Aberdeen. Recent publications include new
editions of Naomi Mitchison and Jessie Kesson, and Scottish Novels
of the Second World War, which has chapters on them, on Urquhart,
and Linklater, Jenkins, Spark, Hood and Mackay Brown, as well as a
new edition of her biography, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life.
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