Place and landscape

Section 2, Activity 3

Place is very important to me as a writer, and always stimulates my imagination. In writing my poem about the missionary Jane Haining, I considered what it must have been like for her, incarcerated in Auschwitz, the horror of the place – how different from her Scottish childhood in the village of Dunscore, growing up on her family’s small croft.

This led me to recall a moment in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s great novel SUNSET SONG, when Ewan Tavendale, a soldier in France during the First World War, ‘deserted in a blink of fine weather between rains that splashed and gutted the rat-runs of the front.’ The evening before he is shot for desertion, Ewan tells his friend, Chae Strachan:

It was the wind that came with the sun, I minded Blawearie, I seemed to waken up smelling that smell. And I couldn’t believe it was me that stood in the trench, it was just daft to be there. So I turned and got out of it.

This passage gave me a ‘hook’ – a way into my poem: I imagined Jane Haining in Auschwitz, catching for a fleeting moment a scent of wild flowers on a summer breeze, reminding her of home. Here is the poem, written in iambic pentameter, with rhyming couplets. The lines at the end of the second stanza, in italics, are Jane’s own words.

1. Listen to me reading the poem and see the textile artwork by Eileen Campbell: Jane Haining, Work by Eileen Campbell::Poem by Gerda Stevenson, produced for the Quines Poems and textiles in tribute to women of Scotland exhibition by the Edge textile artists Scotland group.

2. Take a note in your Learning Log (opens in new tab) answering these questions:

  1. What is the impact of using the Scots language in this poem on you as a reader/listener of this poem?

  2. Above, I mention the use of iambic pentameter, with rhyming couplets – what is the effect of these stylistic features in connection with this sad and serious subject matter?

  3. Is there a way in which you could use the poem, the recording, the artwork, or my comments in your teaching?



Jane Haining

Born Dunscore, Scotland, 1897, on a small farm; died Auschwitz, 1944;

Church of Scotland missionary; matron in the girls' home of the Jewish Mission Station in Budapest; the only Scot to be officially honoured for giving her life for Jews in the Holocaust.



A wind wi hinnie braith – a welcome guest –

blew in the day tae Auschwitz frae the West;

it mindit me on hame, insteid o war,

brocht me closer tae ma Makker than afore.

The visit was aa ower in a blink,

but lang enough tae smuir the rank stink

o burnin flesh, and gie me gowan braes

in Dunscore wi ma mither, simmer days

o bairnhood when we learned by hert that faith

is only love, and never hate; and daith,

tho seemin fell, a wey o makkin hale

this gift o life we maun tent withoot fail.



Aa ma bairns I ken will go tae heaven,

and I am number 79467

fur lovin them – stampit wi tattoos

fur mitherin Hungary’s orphaned Jews,

forced tae stitch Jude stars ontae their claes,

jaloused o bein a spy by oor faes

when they fund me greetin at the task,

but I wis never ane tae weir a mask –

dissembling wad hae been tae brak the vow

I made at hame, when Europe wis alowe:

tae return tae Budapest and be there

for ma bairns: If they needit me sair

in sunshine, they’ll need me mair in daurk.



Yon hinnie wind is gaen, and aa is mirk;

men scraich orders, gas pipes hauch and hiss,

bairns whimper faur aff fur a guidnicht kiss

I canna gie them - we maun weep oor lane;

Yet ‘We hae kenned love’ is oor sweet refrain,

and like menorah branches bleezin bricht,

we cairry in us oor great Makker’s licht.



You can hear me reading the above poem on my Soundcloud: Jane Haining by Gerda Stevenson


To continue with the theme of ‘place’, here’s a little story which delighted me, and got me thinking about one possible way of reading Quines. I was staying on the Isle of Skye in the summer of 2018, and one evening stopped by a lovely sandy bay in Sleat, where I happened to meet an old friend who was camping there. I hadn’t seen him for many years. In the course of our conversation, I told him about the recent publication of Quines, which he didn’t know about. The next day I had a phone call from him. Shortly after I’d left him the previous evening, a couple of young German women – both working in the fields of science and holidaying on Skye – were walking along the same beach and asked him for directions. They got talking, and my friend said to them that in the space of just a couple of hours he’d enjoyed stimulating conversation with three women – firstly with his old friend Gerda Stevenson and now with them. They replied “Not the writer of Quines?” “Yes!” my friend replied – “She’s just told me about her book.” “We have it here,” one of them said, taking a copy out of her backpack. They had just visited Sgathach’s Castle at Tokavaig and had read the poem about Sgathach while sitting on the rocks there, looking out at the spectacular Cuillin Mountains.

I relate this story partly because of the delicious and unlikely coincidence at its centre, but mainly because it demonstrates a way in which Quines can engage readers with specific environments. Many of the women, and the poems I’ve written to commemorate them, relate to places – in fact, Quines could be seen not only as a journey through the history of Scotland, but also as a journey through Scotland itself.

If you are interested in a Quines-based journey through Scotland, its places and history, here is a list of the places mentioned in those Quines poems in the Scots language connected to the women in the poems.



Take a note in your Learning Log (opens in new tab) addressing these points:

  1. Explore the places listed here using the links I provided and/or your own research. You could work with your pupils to create a poster/video/blog/journal… starting with a map of Scotland:

    1. mapping a suggested Quines-journey through the country

    2. and highlighting features of the places to visit.

  2. Think about how you can use the information from the poems, the people and the places in your subject area.

  3. Explore which of these places and people are featured in the Quines Poems and textiles in tribute to women of Scotland and the Soundcloud.



People and Places

  1. Scone Palace and Berwick Castle (Berwick-upon-Tweed) – Isabella MacDuff, Countess of Buchan. She crowned Robert the Bruce at Scone, and was captured by Edward 1st’s forces, and imprisoned for four years in a cage on Berwick Castle wall, open to the elements. Her dramatic story, part of the Wars of Independence, is one of great bravery and tragedy:

  1. Inchmahome, Lake of Menteith – Mary Fleming, cousin of and lady-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots. Mary Fleming accompanied the infant queen (both aged four), with the latter’s mother, Mary of Guise, to the island of Inchmahome, Stirlingshire, where they went into hiding from Henry VIII’s forces:

  1. Lochleven Castle – where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned and gave birth to still-born twins the day before she was forced to abdicate:

  1. Culross Abbey, where Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (poet, c. 1578–c. 1640) worshipped, and Makars’ Court, Edinburgh, where an inscribed flagstone commemorating her as one of Scotland's great writers was unveiled by Germaine Greer on 21st June 2014. Melville was the earliest known Scottish woman writer to be published in her lifetime:

  1. Edinburgh’s Grassmarket and Tolbooth prison, and also The Sheep Heid Inn, Duddingston – Maggie Dickson, an early 18th century salt-seller (sometimes also described as a fish-wife) from Musselburgh, who was hanged in the Grassmarket, and, amazingly, survived, reviving in her coffin outside the Sheep Heid Inn, where her wake was being held!

  1. Gask, Perthshire – Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, 17th-18th century songwriter, from a staunchly Jacobite family. She wrote many famous songs in Scots, which are often incorrectly attributed to Robert Burns:

  1. Saltcoats – Captain Betsy Miller, 18th century, the only woman ever to be listed in the British Registry of Tonnage as captain of a vessel – a great character, who is reported to have told her crew during a storm: Lads, I’ll gang below and put on a clean sark, for I wid like to be flung up on the sands kin’ of decent. Irvine folks are nasty biddies!

  1. Dundee – Mary Slessor, missionary, 19th century. Born in Aberdeen, from a poor family, she worked in Dundee’s Jute mills as a girl; promoter of women’s rights, protector and adopter of children, mostly twins, believed by the Efik people of Nigeria to be possessed by evil spirits and left to die after birth; fluent in their language, she was trusted by the Efik people, who called her Ma; a passionate pragmatist, and challenger of orthodox theology and thinking:

  1. Fochabers, Speyside – Ethel Baxter, entrepreneurial business woman, 19th-20th century, who set up the world-famous Baxters food company:

  1. House of Dun, and Dun Parish Church, Montrose, Angus – Violet Jacob, 20th century, novelist, poet, writer of short stories, and botanical artist. On the following BBC Sounds website you can hear details of Jacob’s life, her poetry, and the singing by Sheena Wellington of Jacob’s Scots poem Hallowe’en, set to music by Jim Reid:

  1. Dunscore Heritage Centre, Dunscore, village Dumfriesshire – Jane Haining, missionary, 20th century, matron of the girls’ home of the Jewish Mission Station in Budapest; the only Scot to be officially honoured for giving her life for Jews in the Holocaust. Died at Aushwitz:

  1. Motherwell, Lanarkshire – Nancy Riach, 20th century, renowned as the finest swimmer in the British Empire. Here you can watch the short Pathé News film that inspired my poem for her, written in the voice of the river:

  1. Townhead, Glasgow – Joan Eardley, artist, 20th century. She painted local children who used to visit her studio in Glasgow. My poem for Eardley is inspired by a photograph of the children in her studio, and a portrait she made of twin sisters, using the medium of chalk on sandpaper:

  1. Rosehearty and Elgin – Anna Buchan, geologist and zoologist, 20th century:

  1. Craigmillar, Edinburgh – Helen Crummy MBE, 20th century, founder of the Craigmillar Festival Society, which became internationally renowned as a model for urban regeneration through the arts. Here you can see the memorial for her, one of the very few statues in Scotland to commemorate women:

  1. Aberdeenshire – Lizzie Higgins, traveller, fish-gutter, singer and tradition-bearer, 20th century, bullied at school because she was a traveller. Below, on the first link, you can hear Lizzie singing the song Blackbird (also known as What a Voice), and on the second you can hear how the ground-breaking Scottish musician Martyn Bennett arranged the same song for orchestra and Gregorian chant choir in a contemporary style on his famous album GRIT:

  1. Hamilton, Lanarkshire – Margo MacDonald, politician, 20th-21st century. Suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, she campaigned for Assisted Dying – the right for an individual to choose how to die. The voice in this poem is of Death, addressing ‘Margo’. She was very popular, and, unusually for politicians, commonly known by her first name:


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