In My Small Corner: Memories of an Orkney Childhood
by Margaret Aitken

In My Small Corner: Memories of an Orkney Childhood is a welcome addition to the growing catalogue of books about Orkney, written by Orcadians.

It is a collection of thoughts and memories of a Kirkwall childhood, lovingly described and followed through by the author, Margaret Aitken (or Donald, as she was then). In places it is pure nostalgia, and touching with it, but it has many snippets of historical and sociological information about the places and people of Orkney.

From the Orkney earls to the influx of the armed forces during the wars, the book is full of detail and reflection from a sensitive and enquiring observer.

There are many personal evocations too - from the beloved figures of the author’s immediate family, to glimpses of other members of the community, including the poet and naturalist Robert Rendall, who was well known to the author. She remembers his liking for silly songs, and his desire to be marooned by the tide on the Brough of Birsay. Two of his poems, ‘The Planticru’ and ‘Birsay’, are reproduced in the book. Recalling the poet reciting ‘The Planticru’, the author speculates that she may have been the very first person to hear it.

The Orkney of Margaret Aitken’s childhood is a lost world in some respects, though still familiar. She remembers day trips taken with a hired car plus driver to exotic places such as Skaill and Maeshowe, when the divide between country and town was much more absolute.

Maggie in Sandwick, where the author spent happy holidays, lives in a proper but and ben - a world of corduroy chairs (which might have hens roosting in them), black stoves and feather-light scones.

Further afield, in Westray, the author remembers being carried up the last steps of the lighthouse at Noup Head after an attack of vertigo, and being taken to greet fellow guest, Stanley Cursiter, in his bedroom in the Pierowall Hotel. (Incidentally, the account of running aground in an early incarnation of the St Ola, is enough to strike fear into the heart of any Orcadian or ferry-louper!)

There are interesting glimpses of Orkney’s religious (and ecumenical) life too. Brought up in the Brethren, the author’s grandparents belonged to the Salvation Army. She remembers being forbidden to go to the cinema with the Brownies. Her grandmother, who thought it ‘despicable to neglect home duties by reading books’ believed that the cinema was ‘the Devil’s house’. A few fearful shadows were cast over the author’s otherwise happy childhood from this strict, though loving, upbringing.

Shadows were cast too from other sources. The fire at Garden’s, where her father was manager of the drapery shop, seems to have sparked a terrible fear. When the author first started school, she was regularly compelled to run back home, so vivid was her ‘day-mare’ that a fire was raging there and her mother and grandmother were caught in it. Ironically enough, the runaway went on to become a teacher herself. At the end of the book, when she sets off to Moray House in Edinburgh, one wonders how this timid, hypersensitive child managed to leave her loved island home. It seems an act of astonishing bravery.

PB