| Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton
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14. St Abbs; Dorothy; Elizabeth Mason
In 1928-29 Aitken taught a new course in advanced statistics that became a primer for PhD students. He was also supervising Norah Calderwood, a PhD student in algebra. In the summer of 1929 the Aitkens took the first of their holidays at St Abbs, a fishing village 65km from Edinburgh, travelling by train and bus.
We topped the ridge at Heughhead and saw the blue sea below and all about us the riot of summer growth, the briar roses, the honeysuckle, the sun-splashed sleepy village of Coldingham, the ancient Priory, the shore, the village of St Abbs, the harbour, the cliff called the White Heugh, with its crags shaped like giant cactus, and the incessant clamour, though subdued by distance, of the migrant guillemots on the ledges – all this was new and old, forgotten and remembered at the same time; this was my Otago Peninsula, but fused with ancient Northumbria and drenched with history.115
John Mott said of Aitken that he was happiest in the countryside or with his children, and here were both. A Wordsworthian quality attaches to Aitken’s identification with the natural world. His sense of place can be associated with music:
Around East Cairn and Lammerlaw began another of the musical hauntings, destined to persist for years in association with these spots, and especially with East Cairn Hill in early November, 1929116
or with names, as in the passage that follows, almost a spell to conjure up the places it names.
(From the top of the middle Eildon, August, 1954)
The “coloured counties”! Can those that Housman saw compare with this? Thomas the Rhymer below; the Cheviot in the south-east; the Romans at Trimontium. Flodden Field; Bemersyde; Black Hill of Ercildoune; a reticulation of farms and trees stretching to the English border and beyond. Norham Castle; Berwick just visible; Lammerlaw. Turn gradually round. Lee Pen, Windlestraw Law, Minchmuir, Pykestone and the Scrape; then White Coomb, Broad Law, Cramalt Craig and Dollar Law; Ettrick Pen in the west. The winding river, Yarrow, Ettrick, Tweed and Teviot, all shown on the copper-faced indicator; Ellwyn Water and the Fairy Dean of The Abbot; Roman roads and Roman camps, the towers, Colmslie, Langskaw and Glendearg. Then south, and Penchrise and Skelfhill point to England again. Then to the east once more; Smailholm Tower, and Sandyknowes guessed at below it, and the winding Tweed.
(‘I have only to mention this list, knowing that memory will clothe every name with the colour and association of the time,’ he wrote of another catalogue of places.117) His children occupied a magical place in this memory-soaked landscape, as if not only the Otago Peninsula but his own childhood appeared before him.
George Aitken took me to St Abbs in 1996, on our drive from Edinburgh to his house at Coldstream in his rattling Suzuki minivan. St Abbs is a ragged collection of stone and brick houses overlooking a tiny protected harbour. Grassy, chocolate-brown cliffs slope down to small beaches. St Abbs, like other villages on the east coast of Scotland, requires an act of imagination to discern from its unpeopled streets its former identity as a teeming fishing village. Its vitality was waning in the thirties when the Aitkens holidayed there; the very presence of holidaymakers in fishermen’s houses was symptomatic of its decline. Victoria Villa where the Aitkens stayed is a two-storied stone house standing square to the street, the attic windows facing the sea. George was not moved to nostalgia. Despite the prompts of sun and sea, a note of bitterness towards his parents intruded into his recollections.
Margaret’s memories of St Abbs mirrored Aitken’s own. Her relations with her mother could be turbulent but she was immovably close to her father. She noticed what he noticed and their responses coincided in the way she recalled that her parents’ had done in the early days of their marriage.
When I was a child at St Abbs – we stopped going to St Abbs when I was 11 I think – we used to go to the beach. There was a sandy beach, Coldingham Sands, and there was also a rocky, secluded beach where hardly anyone went. It had very nice grassy slopes down to it, with blue cranesbill flowering. You walked along a track with a dyke on one side and a fence on the other, and along there there was a chaffinch’s nest. There were baby chaffinches on the fence, and we watched them. Father said afterwards, ‘Now wasn’t that a lovely experience.’ We all loved seeing this. He had a pure delight in things like that.118
Margaret thought Winifred consciously encouraged the closeness between them as a way of keeping Alec’s emotional centre within the family; there would be no more Dorothy McBurnies. But even St Abbs threw differences into relief.
When my mother came with us to the beach she didn’t come rock-clambering with us but would sit in the shade & sew – she never did like the heat. … Indeed beach holidays as such would not be her first choice, though she loved St Abbs; she loved best woods & fields, trees & flowers. She was a good walker, but not a climber or clamberer, being rather heavily built.119
As it turned out, the remission of anxiety that Aitken felt at St Abbs was short-lived. On Boxing Day 1929, he wrote to Pearl:
Three or four months ago I had a second rather bad turn of nerves and insomnia, which lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of November. It was not as bad as the very severe business of 1927, in every way similar to Harry’s of 1926, and I had the curious feeling that it was somehow reversing and neutralising the effect of that earlier breakdown and bringing me back to normal. That seems to have been the case, for I am better now than I have been since 1924. A curious feature this time, to which Winnie can certify, is that several times, in the sleeping-waking dreams characteristic of insomnia, I foresaw and foretold odd irrelevant things which appeared, surprisingly, in the papers the following day. … Once I would have scouted this; but it is quite possible that our division of time into the past of memory, the present of experience, and the future, the last quite [?] conjectural, is an arbitrary division peculiar to the matter-of-fact waking mind only, and that a different ordering of the world-material of space, time and matter is perceptible to the subtler and, as I well know from experience, enormously more rapid and powerful faculties of the dreaming or sub-conscious mind.120
His intuitions about his recovery were largely correct. The decade to come was happy and fruitful, the most productive of his working life. It was punctuated by illness and psychosomatic disturbances but, setting aside a breakdown in 1934 in the wake of his brother’s death, his troubles were, by the standards of 1927, small ones. Perhaps the effect he noticed, of the second breakdown ‘reversing and neutralising’ the first (as though breakdowns could be a tonic), reveals a wish for security with Winifred. Though Aitken was – austerely, intellectually and artistically – attractive and doubtless considered himself so, it may be that he gave up a fancy to be loved in favour of a dependable domestic life.121 The cost may have been little more than self-knowledge. Aitken is remarkable on the level of being, not action. Not the vagaries of sexual passion but routine and a geographical purview medieval in its enclosedness emancipated him. His Romantic impulses could be played out in the cavernous theatre of Aitken himself, in which he alone was everything, actor, director and audience.
And yet Dorothy McBurnie was in Aitken’s thoughts as late as 1930. Idling in a public library during the Easter vacation, he came across one of her poems (‘Unto the Hills’) in Chambers’s Journal. He was seized by a sense that she was nearby. Instead of walking in the countryside as he had intended, he went to the University, worked a while then walked out to pay a bill in Princes Street. Dorothy was standing in a doorway with her father. Aitken left unseen, abandoning his work and office.
Elizabeth Mason told me that Aitken would visit her alone at her house in Ramsay Garden. He ‘exhibited’ himself, she said. On more than one occasion he read her his sonnet ‘The sky’s a sea tonight’122, and once confided: ‘You understood my little brother and you understand me’, a remarkable confession given that her understanding of Harry had amounted to passionate love. Was it always thus with Aitken – an aching infatuation taken to the brink but finally withheld? Among his papers at the University of Edinburgh is a typed copy of A.R.D. Fairburn’s poem ‘The Impetuous Lover’ from The Rakehelly Man (1946).
This is the time, the appointed place,
love’s paratroops have hit the ground,
surprise is scrawled across your face –
soft, not a sound!
The floor sways up to meet the wall,
my blood is up, my cab can’t wait.
Tell me, before the pictures fall,
tell me my fate!
Tell me with passion’s flaming tongue
as here before your throne I kneel,
tell me, before the trap is sprung—
how do you feel?
Speak to me now, for love’s sweet sake,
send me a wire, my gay entrancer.
I warn you I shall never take
"NO!" for an answer.
See – in my buttonhole I wear
the tiger lily of desire!
Its fumes are more than flesh can bear —
SPEAK, OR I FIRE!
At the bottom is written by hand ‘from A.C.A.’ To whom was it sent and by whom returned?
| 115 | Memoir, 96. |
| 116 | Memoir, 97. |
| 117 | Memoir, 96. |
| 118 | MM speaking to me, 17 June 1996. |
| 119 | MM to me, 21 Aug. 1995. |
| 120 | ACA to Pearl, 26 Dec. 1929. |
| 121 | Though not without a struggle. Miscellaneous Recollections II, 14-16, indicates that Dorothy McBurnie was still preoccupying him in 1930, and Margaret Robertson, another student, appears to have aroused his interest in 1932 (Memoir, 100). |
| 122 | The Recovery - July 1951 The sky’s a sea tonight, the moon’s white prow Plunges amid the cloudy waves and shakes A silver spray afar. Now clear she breaks From close pursuing surge, draws free, and now Sails into wide translucencies, where deep Beyond all sounding fish ethereal sleep; Now threads a mottled archipelago Of wandering isles, that merge and melt and flow. Late in the silent dark, from sleepless bed I watch, and am aware of inward seas Now halcyon-calm, that once were overspread With storm and terror; there in tranquil ease White Argo forward glides, safe to have fled Whirlpool, and reef, and Symplegades. |
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