Wild Geese Overhead

Wild Geese
Overhead

Neil M. Gunn

www.whittlespublishing.com

Foreword © 2002 Dairmid Gunn

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, recording or otherwise
without prior permission of the publishers.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume.

ISBN 9781849950756

Neil Gunn, one of Scotland's most distinguished novelists of the 20th century, was a prolific writer. His first novel,
The Grey Coast
, appeared in 1926 and his last,
The Other Landscape
, in 1954. This long period of creative writing spanned the Recession, the political crises of the 1930s and the Second World War and its aftermath. Although nearly all his novels are set and enacted in the Highlands of Scotland, he can never be described as a regional writer in the narrowest sense of that description. His novels, reflecting his constant philosophical quests, invariably depict two worlds—the world of here and now and the world in which the meaning of life and the essence of living are explored. In 1943 he wrote his famous anti-utopian novel,
The Green Isle of the Great Deep
, a rural equivalent of George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, which appeared six years later. Some of the themes explored in that profound and optimistic work had been anticipated in this novel,
Wild Geese Overhead
, a book he wrote on the eve of the Second World War. It was topical and well received, and became a ‘Book Society Choice.'

Unlike most of Gunn's novels,
Wild Geese Overhead
is set in a city—the city of Glasgow. The title seems strange and inappropriate for a great commercial city bracing itself for the onset of another war. It suggests, however, another world, above and beyond the hustle and bustle of industrial Glasgow. The sight of a skein of geese flying northwards on a spring day presents itself as a sort of epiphany for the principal character, Will, a journalist, who chooses to live in the country and work in the city. He is given a momentary experience of transcendence, a moment of delight, that he will measure against urban violence and despair and the international threat of war. This clash between a vision and its inherent richness and the grim reality and pessimism of a city experiencing a dark moment in its history provides the essential theme of the book.

As a journalist and a reasonably well connected young man, Will has a wide circle of acquaintances and friends. His interest in socialism brings him into contact with a sincere and active socialist, Joe; his need for pleasant and undemanding company keeps him in touch with a prosperous and likeable young partner in a shipping firm, Philip, and his pleasure-seeking friends. His colleagues at the office provide the good humour and banter that are the prerogative of the young. In addition to all these characters, and always in the background, there is the young woman, Jenny, whose natural beauty and elusiveness captivate Will and help him in the end to find for himself a philosophy of being and doing.

Only one character, an older colleague on the staff of the newspaper, Mac, is constantly in disagreement with the ideas and views expressed by Will. His gloomy outlook is destructive and negative, but strangely stimulating and necessary for the evolution of Will's thought. Because of it, Will has to ponder and refute the accusation of escapism.

In a gentler way, the political activist Joe is also disturbed by Will's attachment to individualism, an individualism that could be construed as escapism in disguise. In Joe's mind, individualism can be a form of avoidance of one's duty to the community. It is through this honest and dedicated man that Will sees the darker and sadder side of life in the city. His visit to the tenement flat of a woman who has just died in child birth and an encounter with a prostitute are experiences that enrich him in a strange way by revealing the innate goodness of people and their ability to adapt. They are of the Dostoyevsky mould in their simplicity and sensitivity. His visits to scenes of deprivation and exploitation, however, are brutally interrupted by his enforced involvement in a brawl, which leaves him seriously injured and with a temporary loss of memory.

His period of treatment in hospital and recuperation at the farmhouse where he has been lodging provides Will with the opportunity to piece together all the aspects of his life in the city and to establish from them a meaning for his existence. His so-called escapism is beginning to be understood by him as a way of self-development that will enable him to be a more useful member of a real community. His recuperation also helps him to see all the people with whom he has mixed in a new way, and particularly, Jenny, whose aunt is Will's landlady (and friend) at the farm. Her aloofness turns out to be a form of shyness and her inner strength is clearly derived from her love of flowers and, in particular, the rock garden at the farm, which she tends so caringly. In his eyes, she can look at a flower as though she is seeing it for the first time. Her fascination with the kingdom of plants strikes a chord within his own understanding of life. “To look at a bunch of grass, a tree, the sky, to feel the wind, the rain, the light, not only outside, in the air, on the body, but inside, behind the mind…to see, to feel, in the final core of oneself, and so to be whole—and therefore, all the more game to break the fell clutch of circumstance, individual or social.”

The book has a strange relevance to the events of today. The battle against terrorism, the fear of recession and the decline in adherence to established religious beliefs, are symptoms, albeit in different guise, of an uneasiness with regard to world stability and the erosion of traditional values and beliefs. Freedom is always being sought, but not necessarily in the way Will sees it in
Wild Geese Overhead
. Will's vision is also the earliest statement of the author's ultimate theme in his creative work…“For there was a tremendous difference between the abandon of the old drunken revel and this strange exquisite abandon of his ‘vision'. True, there was kinship; up to a point, there was bodily warmth, fusion; but ah how profound, how unbridgeable, the essential difference! For in the Dionysian revel, the self, the ego, whirled unrestricted in its desires into a state of frenzy; but in the ‘vision' the ego was lost in the calm uprising of the second self, the deeper self, into conscious freedom”.

D
AIRMID
G
UNN

A
s he awoke he heard the bird-singing and cunningly tried not to hear it, not to get exasperated by it, so that he could go to sleep again. He did his best; breathed deeply, made his brain dull, let his head fall inert. When his cunning was being defeated, he raised up his will. In the effort of keeping his mind a blank, he became wide awake.

It was very maddening. He needed sleep. Now he would toss and turn and wear himself out before the day started. From the riot of the singing, he knew his watch would show five o'clock. He had been in bed little more than four hours.

How one grew tired and tossed one's legs and turned over—and back, with what increasing torment of anger and bad temper and spasms of violence to coverlet and pillow! So utterly futile the whole affair—particularly the bird-singing. The same things went round and round in the mind; and, behind them, in the most momentary pause—that storm of singing. No good shutting the window with a bang and placing a pillow upon the upper ear. Nothing was any good, for there was nothing he had not tried except tears of vexation, and they had come fairly close to him more than once.

Well, I may as well give in! he thought. Oh, pipe on! he suggested; pipe up your ditties of no tone! Don't mind me. I'll listen. That's precisely, he said, fisting a pillow, what I'm here for.

Then, for the first time, he deliberately listened to the singing that broke out each morning in the grey of the dawn.

And there was truly an astonishing volume of it. The main wood began at the back of the farm steading and the singing receded with it to what seemed an immense distance. It was in fact a sea of multitudinous sound. No individual song emerged. Individual notes—yes, if the ear listened acutely, but in the very act of listening, the individual notes were lost, fell like little jets of water back into the main tumult. It was the whole throbbing vibrant sea that lived, writhing and interwoven. An ecstatic creative sea.…

That beginning of symbolic thought revolted him, and in a sudden calm moment it was not a sea at all but a plain, an immense prairie, where the notes of individual songs, previously like tiny fountains, were now grasses, sticking up here and there, and fronded, in the way one might see them when lying flat to the earth as they bow against a remote horizon. This was a perfectly clear image after that vagueness of a sea. Precise, with a fine morning light over the prairie and above the horizon. And cool, too, so that one could look at it and almost smile, feeling the cool morning breath of it on the sticky sweatiness of the body. Besides——

All at once, it was the real sea, advancing upon him with the sounds of its green waters smashing over rocks and boulders, advancing up the valley from the shore which was miles away. For several moments the illusion was absolute, and he caught the crying of the gulls, with the cavernous echoes acquired from cliff walls. The cries were smothered every now and then in the spume of the advancing waters. Advancing upon him…up the valley…tumbling over, sweeping on, growing louder, near at hand…until he suddenly realized that the crying
was
the crying of gulls.

He remembered having seen a company of them on the field below the house the other day. At last, his smile emerged. For the space of five seconds he had completely forgotten himself in wonder—evoked out of the vision of himself as a small city boy on a stormy shore.

The vision had arisen in a magical transparency superimposed like a film.…

What was that? The short sharp cries of terns, ripping the air with their narrow beaks, right above him, over the house.…

His smile, with its faint irony, faded out and left him listening more acutely than ever.

An iron gate creaked over in the farm steading. Or was it? Again—and again:
Honk! Honk!
And then suddenly happened the miracle that transformed his life and he felt himself lifting on the wings of wild geese.

Just a year ago, he had been here in the spring. An afternoon it was, and, standing not far from this house, he had heard that rusty
honk! honk!
and wondered—and then, strung out in an irregular arc, he had seen the geese. At first he had thought they were swinging to the south, and that had vaguely disturbed him, for he had the notion that they should go north to nest. As they continued to swing round, a deep pleasure and reassurance had flooded in upon him, and when they assumed their arrow formation and headed a little west of north, he had watched them enthralled. One barb of the arrow was much longer than the other and, going away from him, it undulated slowly like a ribbon drawn through the still air. Where had they come from? And whither bound? Watching, he was invaded by the feeling that he was seeing something which it was hardly right he should see, something out of occult books, out of magic. He should have been better prepared. It was going from him; and he had not got it all. He had missed something. What he had missed, he wondered over.

This wonder in one form or another had worked in him through the gritty summer days in the city, and during the winter time he had found himself inclined to a greater conviviality than ever. Not that he was exactly drinking too much, but still he was perhaps drinking more than was good for him, enough anyway to make him swear many a time that he was a fool and that it was high time he chucked it. His thirtieth birthday, falling on the first Sunday in March, he left the city by bus, and, from the bus-stop, set out on foot for the place where he had seen the geese.

It was undulating farming country, lowland country, for when he turned to look northward he saw a remote dark-purple rampart circling slowly against a pale-blue sky, like the contour of a strange land seen from a ship. The sunlight glittered in his eyes, so that they grew smaller and, breaking their stare, glanced hither and thither, as if they had emerged from a winter sleep and were not to be taken unawares. His face was pale and thin, his hair mouse-coloured, and his eyes a flecked brown. His body was thin and tall, but walked with an easy light footfall. He looked at everything near and far with pleasure, yet also with the unconscious air of a nimble animal making sure of its environment, a rather graceful animal, if grace rises from supple joints and sensitive responses.

Touched with a knowingness that was something more than irony, his eyes glimmered, good-naturedly amused. Already his body was feeling the weight of his heavy dark-brown overcoat for it was very susceptible to change of temperature. The narrow country road wandered its way up the slow incline.

He took off his gloves and stuffed them in a coat pocket. A farm steading a hundred yards off the road drew his attention. It was an old steading, badly needing some whitewash, and stood surrounded on three sides by churned-up mud and an uncertain scum of grass that was very green compared with the grass in the pasture fields. Broken-down farm implements and the rusting chassis of an abandoned car gave the whole place, with its begrimed outside walls, a forbidding, even a sordid air. Life could not be comfortable there, but always a little raw, and dirty, and in winter cold to the marrow. Yet it fascinated him. For he was haunted by the notion never to forget the fundamentals. And for the animal part of living, every occupation or preoccupation of man could be dispensed with—except this fundamental one of growing food out of the earth.

His mind, from that simple point, adventured into speculation so that for a hundred yards the country was not within his focus of attention, even though his eyes were continuously alive and might not have been surprised. He removed his dark-grey felt hat and wiped his forehead with an open palm. Then he unbuttoned his overcoat but did not take it off, because there was a cold nip in the air, made all the more treacherous by the thin sunshine, and he had been laid up twice during the winter with feverish chills that he had found difficulty in shaking off. The cool air now penetrated his clothes to his hot skin and he began to cough. When the spasm passed, his face was left with the watery pallor of a plant grown in a cellar or under a stone.

As he began to approach the crest, excitement crept into his skin. Soon he would come in sight of the next valley and see the farm-house with the dark plantation stretching away behind—the house had stuck in his mind with a remarkable visual solidity—and stand on the spot where he had watched the geese head north by west towards regions where, if he listened, he could hear icicles tinkle in vast desolate noondays.

Some such element of faery had hung about the valley itself, which was no more than a fold in the rolling land, and when at last he looked down upon it he found that the element of remembered intimacy had, if anything, increased. This was a pleasant surprise, and it made him hold his breath a little, until he realized that the effect was due to the strong sunlight on the bare lands. Under that light the earth and all it contained lay utterly dead. In December and January the sodden earth is a drowned body, but by the beginning of March it is blown dry as a skeleton. Towards the sun, the bark on the old gnarled trees was not the pale gold of winter but white as bleached bone. Far out over a grey-green pasture field, birds heeled and tumbled, swooped up and fell, like tatters and fragments tossed by a storm. But the farm-house itself, on which his gaze lingered, was more still than the land, and, where the land was strong and austere, it was roofed and lonely.

Bracing and poignant and a little frightening! Though where this thin harmony of emotion came from, heaven alone knew. From more than a few thousand years back in time, he reckoned. That at least was certain! No childhood memory could evoke this adult shudder of white light and bleached bone. His mind's eye saw the face of a primeval hunter on the edge of a wood, and at once he moved on to the place where he had watched the geese.

But the sky was empty, and the blue, irradiated by light, of a remarkable tenderness. Remote, certainly, and cold if one let oneself be influenced by the moving air—but summer tender in fact and full surely of divine promise. He stood in a chilly trance, till the sound of a footstep fell on his heart and made him start like an animal.

When he saw that it was only a young woman he experienced the spirt of anger that nearly always follows a foolish fright. He stared at her for no more than a second, before turning back again, his heart thudding from the anger.

Yet in that second he had seen her coming walking down upon him with the calm of Primavera, the Lady Spring! Her incurious blue eyes had looked at him as if he were a tree! A calmness remarkable enough to increase his irritation and then to relieve it with swift derision.

He studied her back and knew the type of city girl she was quite well. Her blue-shot-with-grey tweed coat, with its simple sportswoman's collar, was the sort of thing one saw advertised “for country wear” at seven guineas. She exactly suited the fashionable illustration! And her shoes were really sensible—a quiet brown brogue with a single strap; and her hat, a blue felt that covered her head, had a brim outline of cunning simplicity; style, without obtrusive fashion, for the country!

Tall, without being too tall, and slim without being too slim! he thought, as he watched her moving easily down the road and disappearing beyond a belt of trees. Then a cold crepitation went over his skin and he sneezed violently three times and blew his nose. “Blast!” he said, and wiped his eyes. For it was not so much that he was frightened of getting a cold as unutterably weary of the very thought of it. He had got heated coming up the hill and then had stood too long. He must keep moving. It was too soon to go back, so he went on—with reluctance, because it was the way the girl had gone.

When he came to the belt of trees, he saw the private road going into the farm. It sloped gently down through the narrow belt, mostly thorn on the right, but on the left quite a tongue of deciduous trees, and a few Scots firs. Not a wood so much as a shelter; yet it seemed to withdraw the farm from the main valley road into a measure of privacy. Usually a farm-house, it seemed, was little more than an extension of the steading, one with the mud and the manure and the cold gape, unless, of course, it was big enough to have given the farmer in the old days a tall Sunday hat and a high-stepping horse, to have made of him a little laird; then the farm-house might be separated from the steading by a bank of thorn or privet hedge, and might even come within measurable distance of being as comfortable as a manse, though never with the manse garden.

Would he go and ask for a drink? He was shy of intruding on the privacy of any house even to ask for a glass of water, but still.… His feet, however, had begun taking him along the farm road, which was quite dry, if badly rutted by cartwheels. He could see an uprising grazing field through the bank of scrubby blackthorn. On his left, the trees, not very large, were huddling together. Birds flitted across the road, very active little birds, shedding quick notes. Finches or linnets, possibly, for some of them were beautifully coloured. He knew next to nothing about birds, and certainly could not have told a chaffinch from a greenfinch or either from a tit. But he liked their swift ways and bright notes. Notes of coloured sunlight, he thought. Quick-darting little shuttles, weaving their bright invisible threads—about the grey bone! It was warmer in here. He looked about him. Nothing was watching him. He was still alone, could still go back. On his right, the hedge made a small bay, with a wooden gate in the middle giving on the upland pasture. His feet took him a few yards farther before they were suddenly held.

Crocuses, yellow and purple, in hundreds, and clumps of snowdrops with drooping heads. He glanced up swiftly from this unexpected sight to the farm-house. Grey stone, plain front door shut, window each side, two windows above, eaved, out of a blue slate roof. Back to those crocuses, hundreds of yellow and purple lights, all about the grass, running out of sight over the shallow bank, circling round the cherry-tree, moving in single file up the hollows between the grass-covered roots to the very base of the great elm. No garden; just plain grass. And below the bank, a pasture field, with sheep and broken turnips. Straight across, through an iron gate, he saw one side of the steading with its red doors. He could not see the rest of it because up from the gate, separating the house from the steading, ran a stone wall, banked with earth on the near side out of which grew a line of low heavy-foliaged evergreen trees. He went up the gravel path to the door, looked at the black iron knocker, raised it on its stiff hinge, and knocked twice.