The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse was written in 1930, twelve years after the war in which it is set had ended. It is about small, fictitious, farming community in North East Scotland, and more particularly about a small group of women living their circumvented lives – but it is about much more than this. In describing a few, seemingly insignificant, events, Shepherd is able to examine the nature and perception of truth, the meaning of war, and what was for her the essential oneness of the physical, spiritual and natural worlds.

Nan Shepherd was born in 1893, in a house less than a mile from the one in which I am writing this review, at Peterculter on Deeside. The family then moved to Cults, a little closer to Aberdeen, and there she remained for the rest of her long and active life. She worked for many years at Aberdeen College Of Education, and is remembered as a generous and forward-thinking teacher, but her first love was always the Cairngorms, the mountain range in which she spent so much of her time, and about which she wrote her late-discovered classic The Living Mountain. She also wrote three novels, which together with The Living Mountain, form the Grampian Quartet. The Weatherhouse is the second of the three.

Nan Shepherd: image Canongate Books

Aunt Craigmyle (known as Lang Leeb, for this is rural Aberdeenshire, in which nicknames are commonplace) is over 90 and lives at the Weatherhouse with her three daughters, Annie (or Paradise), Theresa and Ellen. Only Ellen has been married, and her marriage ended in dismal failure; she has returned home with her placid adult daughter Kate, who works at a local hospital. Most able-bodied men are away at the war.

Into their lives comes Lindsay, daughter of Lang Leeb’s solicitor cousin Andrew Lorimer. Lindsay has been sent to stay at the Weatherhouse to get over a love affair of which her parents – her mother in particular – disapprove. It is however not long before the object of her affections, Garry Forbes, returns wounded from the war to stay with his aunt, Barbara (Bawbie) Patterson, a near neighbour of the Craigmyles at Knapperley.

One other character of importance features in the story; Louie Morgan, the daughter of a previous minister of the Kirk. Louie has told everyone that she was engaged to David Grey, a close friend of Garry’s who has died of TB. Louie is a fanciful, over dramatic woman; Garry cannot believe that his friend could ever have been involved with her, and decides that he has to show Louie up as a liar. On this central issue the plot turns, and this may at first seem a very flimsy story on which to turn it – but the ripples that eddy out from Louie’s assertions and Garry’s attempts to disprove them soon become treacherous, and Garry, Louie, Lindsay and Ellen in particular are forced to question the motives for their actions;

‘Things are true and right in one relationship, and quite false in another’ (Louie)

‘Was the truth, after all, more important than the pain you inflict on others for its sake?’ (Garry)

The beauty of The Weatherhouse lies not only in the main story, but also in its vivid pictures of country life in early 20th century Scotland and of the idiosyncratic members of the small community. From Bawbie, a fierce, strong, independent woman who drinks whisky with the tramp Johnny Rogie (a war veteran, now seeking his fortune on the road), treats the blackout with total disdain, and dances alone in her farmhouse kitchen, to local odd job man Francie Ferguson, who has waited 20 years to marry his bride in order not to offend his brother (‘Feel Weelum’), Theresa, who has a habit of appropriating other people’s things, and scheming cobbler Jonathan Bannochie, who is busy making money out of the war, every character is brought to life; small details let us see each one as their neighbours see them.

Shepherd was a feminist before her time, and The Weatherhouse shows us the effects of the constraints on women who want more than the domestic round. Both Ellen and Louie suffer for their dreams, and Ellen especially, denied a full life and with the hopes born of imagination eventually destroyed, ends up a tragic, Miss Havisham-like figure.

Nan Shepherd

Written mostly in the Doric, the novel is not easy to follow at first (and I lived for some years in a remote part of Aberdeenshire where this is still in everyday use) – Shepherd provides a glossary, but many of the words are not in it, so we are left wondering if she thought we should work them out for ourselves; this is easier to achieve if you read the more opaque sentences aloud. Once you get into the rhythm of the language, however, it takes on a beauty of its own; without it the story would not be as rooted in the rough, unforgiving landscape of the area. Shepherd’s descriptions are startling in their originality;

‘(Lindsay) crashed like a cataract down the stair’

Landscape and weather were of supreme importance to her; the characters sometimes seem to become part of the natural world (something that Shepherd herself felt when in the Cairngorms, and about which she wrote in The Living Mountain. To Garry, observing his aunt spinning in her solitary dance, Bawbie becomes a star, and Lindsay;

‘Running thus before the wind (she) had entered into a place that is beyond understanding; she was at one with the motion of the universe.’

At the end of this superlative novel some of the characters achieve a version of happiness, some do not. The Weatherhouse has, at times, a dreamlike quality, but it is also real. In the wider world the war is destroying lives; in the microcosm that is Fetter-Rothnie frustration and gossip destroy hope and reputation. But despite all of this, Garry eventually learns to appreciate the value of what he has;

‘It wasn’t the war that was big, it was being alive…..where there were other people, divinely different from oneself; whole kingdoms of Heaven clamouring to be…loved in spite of themselves.’

The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd is published by Canongate Books.