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| Magnolia, South Inch, Perth |
Magnolia is one of the most primitive of ancient flowering plants. Sixty million years evolving and here it is, budding, miraculous since early spring, in Britain of all places, in Scotland even.
It is an un-British plant, far too glam. What is it? Half flower, half tree? A gloriously flowering tree. But we can't mention Britishness. Britishness, if it ever existed after the Queen's 1977 silver jubilee, is a dirty, anachronistic phrase, especially in Scotland. It's only England versus Scotland now, like a raucous, aggressive football match. What symbol, which value might be used to talk about Britain? A bacon sandwich? Fish and chips? None of that - the Muslims, the vegans, the climate catastrophe - all very inappropriate.
I discovered last week there is such a thing as a "sensitivity reader" - people employed by publishing houses to remark on whether, for example, a racial portrayal is too crass, banal or misguided. A 'stalinist' concept said a friend. It reminded me of going to a poetry reading and hearing a general warning to the audience of a "triggering" topic - a reminder of the heightened sensitivities of what is sometimes cruelly called the snowflake generation. I don't know about stalinist but it does rather put the kibosh on writing about anything other than your own "lived experience" as they say nowadays. Where does that leave imagination and fiction, I wonder?
Where would that in fact leave something like LLoyd Jones' 'Mr Pip'? The New Zealand author and former journalist wrote a convincing story of the Bougainville war from the perspective of black villagers, and a teenage girl, at that, without apparently ever setting foot on the island. Part of his research seems to have been an account he heard from a man who had experienced the war, with whom he spent a night on board a ship. How did he pull the story off? Or did he? What do people living there, who lived through the war, think of the story? Does it matter? It matters, commercially at least, if, in the brave new world of social media your readers have followers and the lived experience of the subject of your writing but you do not. But what's not to like about onlywriting about your own experience? It'll make everything authentic, right?
Is there some other representation of Britishness? Tolerance and democracy maybe? Perhaps, but how does that distinguish us from anywhere else that has free elections and the supposedly impartial rule of law? Britishness is historically tied to flags and identity which, with immigration, multi-culturalism and racism is going to be a messy, complicated, unsettling thing.
Yet Scottish nationalism flourishes here, wildly, like the thistle. Across the world, nearly everywhere in Europe, nationalism itself is seen as dangerous, populist, vulgar even, something the uneducated and overly emotional engage with. You might think Nazi nationalism would be enough for the word to cause even now, a sickening sense, a rising bile. Here in Scotland the SNP has overtly socialist policies and those two words nationalism and socialism sit badly together. But fear not, the SNP also seems to want to be part of Europe so if you like you can believe the more elevated part of that tribe that says they don't hate the English or other countries (or maybe just the English), they just want to run their own affairs. Still, I can't hep but worry at some of their more totalitarian tendencies. Education is run with a heavy hand here: the tone, the policies, the socialist-inspired levelling down, the distrust of families, the head teachers they put in charge of schools.
But nationalism isn't defined by left or right. In 2017 Austria's nationalist FPO party took 26% of the vote. Only five years ago, in Norbert Hofer Austria nearly had the first far-right European head of state. He was only narrowly defeated by, of all things, a Green.
Like the rhododendrons in Rodney Gardens this magnolia has been damaged a little, maybe by the low night time temperatures but it is still attractive. There is the stunning colour, the creamy petals, the upright structure, the effort of the bloom, despite the frosts, the lift, upon seeing it, of the heart.
The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi has the concept of imperfection through the wear of time. Can it apply also to plants, slightly imperfect? The magnolia hasn't quite flourished as it might. It is a reminder of how this season was this year - bright in the days and cold at night. Sun in the morning, snow in the afternoon. Was it just chance or part of the growing climate catastrophe? Either way, it presages what we may face in seasons to come.
They can't do that to a magnolia though, without cutting down the whole tree. The magnolia is a social tree - low branches, easy to climb, to perch in, wide, to accommodate friends. Who, I wonder, has thought to plant magnolia trees in parks, for no better reason than for children?
When I first moved here, Perth was dazzlingly white. Coming from five years in London, the latter two in Southwark, where I could easily be the only white person on the bus, it was what I noticed most. At the baby groups in the A.K. Bell library, the one Indian woman hung about on the fringes. With my next child, it was the same, one black woman, on her own. No one spoke to her much either. Anyone sounding English, anyone not from Perth even, was also excluded, not least by the ice princess who ran the group and seemed to hate small children. For years afterwards we went to Oxfam, not the A.K. Bell until the temperature there warmed a couple of degrees.
My mum friend at the time, who was from England, couldn't take the cultural chill and not just of the library. Like me, she had had a good job in London prior to parenthood. She tried and tried to make friends and get involved in this town and in Crieff, to the west with more optimism and energy than I ever mustered. She chaired the NCT, ran coffee mornings and went to myriad mum and baby groups. She seemed to have a built-in support network and babysitting from other teaching families at Glenalmond, the eye wateringly expensive private school, to which she had recently moved with her teacher husband. She ran a wonderful, extravagant party for her two-year-old with a bouncy castle and teenage helpers galore. In a documentary about the school, shocked, we saw her sobbing. They moved to another exclusive private school, somewhere mellow and golden-sounding in England, Gloucestershire I think.
My family was here. I had roots and memories in Scotland. Half Scottish I had even been to school briefly, in what we, still in the late seventies called Kincardineshire but I envied her at the time. Another English friend left, for Wales. I felt as stranded and out of place as the erratic rock on top of St Magdalene's Hill. In years to come, someone told me about muttered racist comments from parents in the playground about the eastern Europeans who had not long before arrived.
There was a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings in the park. Black, brown, white, and a guitar. Look and look again. It was the first time in fourteen years I had seen such a mixed group relaxing together in the park. A young Romanian mother, her head covered with a small triangle of cloth, called to her children. My son's school is on this park, which we call the Inch, meaning meadow. His classmates are Czech, Spanish, Romanian, Syrian. His lovely Polish teacher was one of the nicest we ever had.
The school is thoroughly multicultural now, even though religious worship in the Scottish tradition is still, anachronistically forced upon the children six times a year in law. The stricture of a culturally specific religion is in contrast to the diversity of the people. It seems more than irrelevant now, laughable even, though my blood still boils when I remember the zealously religious head in our first school and my carefully brainwashed three year old coming home from nursery singing "Jesus loves me".
The children were in the park again the other day. It was another perfect spring afternoon. Teenagers in seated groups on the grass chatted around shared food. Children ran, shrieking, between the flying fox and the climbing frame. Adults grazed at the picnic benches. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the straight reeds reflected wavily in the water, birds scattered across the pond. In the budding, welcoming magnolia children from all places festooned the branches, chatting.
