The scene is Edinburgh, 1939. Lives are about to change. Blackout,
bomb shelters, cinemas, dance halls, all call out to the girls and
young women that life need not be dull. This book, set in one of
the poorer areas, is full of the comedy and extraordinary dialogue
for which Fred Urquhart is well known, and the Hipkiss family and
its neighbours are foregrounded. But central is the imagination of
young Bessie Hipkiss, aged fourteen, only just too old to be
evacuated. Bessie's fantasy life as a princess of an exiled French
Royal Family contrasts with the disappointing ordinariness of
everyday, until she meets Lily McGillivray, only six months older,
but already with peroxide and men on her mind. But when Bessie's
mother dies her father expects her to raise the family. Life
changes. Fred 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. Isobel 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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