MARGARET ELPHINSTONE

 

On the last walk Mary and I did together she took me to a small loch near Castle Douglas, where Mary of the Moss once lived. I’d never heard of Mary of the Moss, but through Mary’s story I was able to imagine her in her snug cottage looking out on the water. Later I found a painting of Mary of the Moss in Galleries in Kirkcudbright which I sent to Mary. Mary of the Moss is sitting by her fire, kettle on the swee, with a cat, flowers on the windowsill; and assorted hens, just as I’d imagined. Mary of the Moss feels like a final gift from her namesake Mary, one of so many.

 

Mary’s writing was grounded in the landscape, life and language of Galloway, from childhood travels with her father, who was the A.I. man (artificial inseminator for cattle) round the farms. She attended school in Castle Douglas and Kirkcudbright. Her Galloway poetry literally goes back to bedrock; unimaginable time and space is encapsulated in a small landscape: Stars in a richly textured sky/reflected in dark pools. She writes in Scots and English, and, tentatively, in Gaelic. She always said she needed more time for her Gaelic.

 

She seemed hefted to Galloway, but she was born, and lived her first six years, on Islay; she retained an islander’s eye for detail along with awareness of wide horizons. She knew her own country so well, all the better for having been long years away from it. She left to work for Oxfam for ten years in Blackburn. All her life she passionately upheld, and campaigned for, justice, freedom and equality. Blackburn Oxfam supported a leprosy hospital in Karachi, and Mary used her holiday to go out there and see for herself what it was like. She started working there at once, and there she met and married her husband Jon. Their son David was born in Pakistan. This was the beginning of many years working first in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan.

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                             Photo credit: Dumfries and Galloway Council

 

 

Afghanistan became Mary’s other country. Her book Before the Taliban* is a portrait of a land, and the women, children and men who belong there. Mary knew how to write down the quality of friendship, and make readers feel it too, towards people they’d never met and who would never know them. I still know these people - Mary’s friends - by name; I lie awake wondering what has happened to them. The book is much more than a travelogue: the publisher’s first request was that Mary put herself into the book too. In the first draft the pronoun ‘I’ wasn’t used once. Mary was never one to talk about herself. Her astonishing career would emerge elliptically, over the years, usually in parenthesis. She was far too concerned with bearing witness to what she saw, to talk about herself.

 

During those years, after the Marie Adelaide leprosy clinic, Mary established a project setting up clinics and training local Afghan women as primary health workers among the villages. Conditions were often difficult and dangerous. Mary observes it all with compassion and a keen eye for the sheer beauty of the place: the sky at night, the delicious taste of mulberries, the desolate war-torn villages, dangerous roads, border crossings and high passes. Mary made many breathtakingly intrepid journeys. She never saw it like that.

 

When Mary, Jon and David came back to Castle Douglas, Mary studied and took a first class degree in Liberal Arts. She became a journalist, working for both ‘The Galloway News’ and ‘Dumfries and Galloway Life’. Her novel ‘No More Mulberries’ revisits Afghanistan and explores a more intimate cross-cultural relationship. Mary went on to do a Creative Writing masters at Glasgow University. Tom Pow, the convenor, told her that poetry was a compulsory component. Stand-off… Mary “didn’t write poetry”. But Mary succumbed. Her very first poem encapsulates the creative tension between two countries that often informs her poetry:

….

Litany of names, Iqbal, Shahnaz, Chaman….

Smell of cow-dung, goats and dust,

Mingling with vetch and clover.

And the scent of a little white rose

That would break MacDiarmid’s heart

 

Mary’s writing is lyrical, passionate and political. She never stopped teaching either, or encouraging others in groups such as Dumfries Writers, which she convened for many years.  During our lockdown group writing project Writedown there was a terrorist attack on a maternity hospital in Kabul. Mary knew one of the midwives; in fact she had trained her mother. Mary wrote her immediate response to our Writedown group, ending: ‘I’m sorry. I’m not good at keeping bad news to myself, bottling it up. I need to tell someone, talk to people – and tonight you are these people.’ For Mary, writing, like life, was about co-operation, compassion, and sharing what must be said, however desperate.

 

I was privileged to work with her for six years, teaching residential writing workshops at Durham Hill in Galloway. Mary always remembered everyone - we had many regulars - and took endless trouble with their work. We were known as the M&Ms. Some funny things happened, we had some interesting punters. For me it was an unfailingly delightful partnership. And that was only a small part of the teaching, mentoring and support that Mary gave to others almost till the end.

 

Mary’s last long journey is recounted in her blog: https://marysmithsplace.wordpress.com/ Passages about the cancer journey are interspersed with memoirs of Afghanistan. Mary undertook that last journey with the same courage, humour and pragmatism as every other journey she undertook. Her last entry is entitled ‘Finishing line in sight.’

 

Over four hundred people all over the world tuned into the celebration of Mary’s life. Very different people and places have in common a fine writer who spoke for them, expressed what their lives are like, and what it means to belong where they do. Many of us will miss Mary very much. But her writing will endure, and will enhance many lives yet.

 

*Republished as Drunk Chickens and Burnt Macaroni, 2012

​

Margaret Elphinstone is a Scottish author of novels, short stories and poetry. She is known especially for The Sea Road, a re-telling of the Viking exploration of the North Atlantic and is Professor Emerita of Writing in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde.