Extract from 'Scottishness' - Bill Duncan

SEPTEMBER, late afternoon. The thirtieth day. The window frames judder and rattle, shaken by the first of the autumn storms. A tattoo of rain lashes the glass, then silence. The first leaves fell weeks ago. I can hear them now, scuffling in their thousands around the darkening street in a sudden mad flurry. Soon they will lie in mounds, dry and skeletal, touched by the frost, each leaf the ghost of a leaf. The trees will be black and bare.

The clock ticks, its face a pale circle inscrutable in the dying light. I sit with the dark gleam of a whisky-glass at my side, a pen in my hand: only the white rectangle of a folded notebook resists the slow gloom. 'Happy' would be the wrong word, but I am aware of the intimate comfort of a quiet pulse, the unpredicted yet familiar inner glow that I recall from as far back as I can remember at this time of the year – maybe the same week, day or hour – a timeless concordance of landscape and seasonal conditions with memory, instinct and emotion. The sway and tremble of shadow and light across leaves disturbed by a sudden wind. The way sound carries when a child calls to her friends, their voices ringing back in answer across the emptiness of early dusk. The quietly rising shiver, verging on the erotic, that awakens in my body a trembling thrill as temperature drops and darkness falls. Like an animal that senses through the delicate processing of a complex nexus of organic computation involving heartbeat, scent and nerve endings, I feel in my deepest core the perfection of a strange harmony stimulated by the subtle but unmistakeable drift of another year into winter. And at the end of next month, all these signs – at first indistinct and random – will intensify, triggering in me once more a quiet sentient answering. By then, the hands of the clock will have been moved back an hour by human hands, coaxing the Northern world into the onset of still earlier night.

Here, our reactions to spring are guarded and equivocal, influenced perhaps by the unstated but profoundly sensed conviction that the rightful season of these latitudes is the cold grey weather of the year's turn as it announces itself in the barely perceptible sensation of the quiet thrum within cell, blood and bone. Spring, with its airy tracery of branch, bud and sudden blossom, its morning of unpredicted sprays of birdsong, somehow involves an inevitable disappointment, a dissonance between subject and weather; perhaps a subtle betrayal of identity and essence.

I belong to that dark lineage of Northeast men who are unaccountably at one, physically and emotionally, with the turning of the year. Neither my father nor my grandfather cared to articulate this sensibility, but from an early age I witnessed in mute admiration their unease in light and warmth; their instinctive affinity with darkness, growing with the passing years to share an unstated but absolute temperamental alignment with winter. I can recall the unaccustomed ardour, verging on loquaciousness, with which my father and his brother, and his own father and uncles before him, could explain the mysterious intricacies whereby the necessary adjustments to the clock at autumn would result in a slow but inexorable accretion of lost seconds, minutes, hour on hour, day on day, hastening the early advance of night, to the point where for a couple of weeks either side of the winter equinox, the Northeast was a zone of near-constant darkness. These same men would unfailingly impress with the detail of their knowledge and the understated pride with which they could express a quiet enthusiasm for the imminent season of night, often breaking the late afternoon silence with their terse discourse in the growing dimness of the living room, a while the women inevitably gathered in the bustle and light of the kitchen.

Even in this exalted company my uncle was acknowledged as a virtuoso of diminishing light; a mental ready-reckoner of darkness, a human calculus of gloom. I recall his performances, computing the initially modest impact of accumulating seconds, minutes and eventual hours of light deprivation, culminating in the dark triumph of Midwinter Day. Every year without fail he would find himself answering the same innocent enquiry (always from a female member of the family) regarding the effect of changing the clocks back by an hour in autumn: "Now does that mean it'll be darker or lighter in the morning or at night at this time the moarn?"

Shrugging, he would exhale, slowly shaking his head in the annual dumb- show of weariness that always preceded his reply. A slight grimace and inclination of the head and his gaze would shift beyond his interrogator, fixed somewhere in the greying distance. Rubbing his hands together, as if in quiet anticipation of darkening skies and falling temperatures, he would respond with a rare enthusiasm reserved for such occasions: "Eh tell ye this every year wummin. It'll be lichter for a wee while in the moarnins at first. Jist for a couple o weeks, mind. An then yell ken aa aboot it. Believe you me. Afore ye ken whaar ye are it'll be a damned sight darker than it ever wiz tae start wi afore the clock went back. An yell ken a hell o a difference at nicht straight awaa. Startin wi the moarn's night. It'll be pitch black beh this time an in a couple o weeks it'll be as dark as that in the efternain when the wee bairnies come oot the skail. Nicht will close in on day tae the point whaar yell no ken the difference atween evenin and moarnin. It'll be late afore it gets light an early when it grows dark wi no hellish much in atween the twa."

Pausing, apparently lulled by the familiarity of the rhythm and repetitiveness of his annual discourse, and oblivious of his now silent questioner, he contemplated the fading light, observing, to no-one in particular: "Can ye no feel winter in the air aaready?"

The last sentence delivered with an understated finality, a quiet satisfaction at the promise of gloom, as if the respondent wasinhisnaturalelement,perhapshimself an appointed medium of the slow darkness now falling outside. Conversely, a blithe and anticipatory enquiry six months later concerning the lengthening hours of daylight in the spring would fail to elicit correspondingly positive reply, encountering instead a consistently unenthusiastic response, if indeed any. There was no glib, transatlantic 'fall forward; spring back' in their world. Only the year's pledge of encroaching night, falling temperatures and the onset of winter, expressed in a timeless lexicon of darkness.

My best friend, an otherwise impressively dour specimen of A Man of Few Words, becomes uncharacteristically effusive at this time of year in response to the prospects of the clocks going back by an hour: "Oh aye." Vigorous rubbing of hands, as if simultaneously cold and thrilled. "This is the best time o year comin up. It only last a few weeks, mind, but there's nothing tae beat it. The time between the change o the clocks an Midwinter. Caald an dark, wi an atmosphere aa its ain – there's nae ither time o the year comes near it."

And I think I know what he anticipates. Dark mornings. Dark afternoons. The rising clamour of geese, invisible, ringing across falling night. The sudden recognition of a winter constellation, absent for a year, wheeling in an arc of cold brilliance over the horizon. Ice that stays all day. The Death of the Year. All this strange Northern beauty.

WRITER
Bill Duncan is an author, whose books include The Wee Book of Calvin and The Smiling School for Calvinists. He was born in the East Neuk of Fife, where he spent his childhood, before moving to Dundee, where he works as a Head of English in an Angus secondary school. He divides his time between Dundee, St Madoes and Orkney.