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ANNUAL NAOMI MITCHISON MEMORIAL LECTURE.
Mitchison and Kesson: Travelling Light
This was the title of this year's lecture (2006) given by Isobel Murray of Aberdeen University.
An extract from the lecture appears below.
Here Isobel Murray is looking at Kesson’s 1946 essays, ‘A Country Dweller’s Year’:
The subject matter of these essays concerns the writer’s brief moments of respite and solitude, her full-hearted response to solitude and the natural world, especially trees and woods. It is hard for us, perhaps impossible, to imagine how precious solitude could be to one brought up and moved from institution to institution, rarely if ever alone. Kesson always finds a wood nearby.
Time and again in Kesson’s work we find her attachment to the country and to woods and trees in particular. She said to Julie Davidson in 1980, ‘Woods are my territory’. Woods seem most of all for solitude. In the June essay, she described her two ways of walking into the town, the field-track, which she has made herself, flattening the same daisies every day, and fearing to disturb the nesting peewits: ‘How thankful I shall be when the infant families of three peewits grow to maturity!’ - and the wood-road: ‘when time is not an important factor I take the road past the wood’. The two roads have very different qualities: the first has Kesson as Impressionist:
The June field of illusion, where the enchanted sunlight transforms the clover flowers from purple to crimson; buttercups from palest lemon to deep copper; grasses, from white to pale lime, to olive, to the dark, glancing green of old bottles.
‘The wood-road’, on the contrary,
needs infinite leisure in which to be appreciated, and, just as the field is the place of illusion, the wood, I think, is the haunt of heartbreak. The wood sent out on the mist-heavy air the sair smell that the hawthorn aye has; the hawthorn’s gone to make way for the old, heavy, broom-sweet smell, and mingles it with the bitter-sweetness of the wild roses. Hawthorn – whose scent lingers after the blossoms have gone – broom, wild roses, fir trees; smell them condensed together, syne you’ll understand the definition of heartbreak. . . .