Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Read online

  BEYOND THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

  To the happy memory of my mother, Barbara Buchan (1924–1969), who came from similar stock to John Buchan and possessed the qualities he valued the most.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Childhood and Youth, 1875–1895

  2 Oxford, 1895–1899

  3 The Bar, Journalism and South Africa, 1900–1903

  4 London, Courtship and Marriage, 1903–1907

  5 London and Edinburgh, 1907–1914

  6 The Great War, 1914–1918

  7 Elsfield, 1919–1927

  8 Elsfield and London, 1927–1935

  9 Canada, 1935–1937

  10 Canada, 1938–1940

  Afterword

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  Plate Section

  Introduction

  ‘Better than the book’ was John Buchan’s verdict when he first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The 39 Steps, in 1935. This was not simply an example of his famous courtesy and good nature. Rightly, he reckoned his novel of 1915 to be a modest accomplishment in the context of his many other achievements. After all, he was just about to take up his appointment as Governor-General of Canada, earned after a hard slog in the House of Commons, with the title of Lord Tweedsmuir. However, it is that film which, more than anything else, has kept the book and its author in the public eye ever since.

  John Buchan’s career as a writer, one of the best-selling of his day, would have been remarkable, even in someone who had done nothing else. He wrote more than a hundred books, including twenty-seven novels, six substantial biographies, a monumental twenty-four-volume contemporary account of the First World War, three works of political thought and a legal textbook. There were also dozens of poems and short stories, and about a thousand articles for newspapers and periodicals. As well as a writer, he was a scholar and an antiquarian and, at various times, a barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, publisher, director of wartime propaganda, Member of Parliament and imperial proconsul. He had been a skilled and intrepid mountaineer in his youth and was always a dedicated fisherman and a prodigious walker. And he did all this while suffering from debilitating illness for most of his adult life.

  In his private life, John Buchan had a gift for friendship, with a breadth of sympathy and a willingness to see another’s point of view that endeared him to people, while inhibiting his political career. As a result of his upbringing and education, he was at ease all his life with shepherds and ambassadors, coal miners and prime ministers. This ability to transcend boundaries, even in stratified Edwardian England, found expression in his happy marriage to an aristocratic Grosvenor, brought up amongst the grandeur of Moor Park. Thanks to that improbable match, this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story.

  There were shortcomings and failures, of course. For one generally so modest, he never could quite let go of certain vanities. Like most essentially honest men, he could be disingenuous. He was loyal to a fault. His political judgement was sometimes wayward. He closed down on new literary ideas rather early in life. Although he did not worship success, he could be too tolerant of those who succeeded. He did not make it into the Cabinet. Spreading himself so widely, he never wrote the great novel of which he was (probably) capable. Grandfilial loyalty has not prevented me from confronting his flaws and reverses with an historian’s unblinking eye.

  I never knew him, but certain rather random material things have come down to me: a run of nine Morocco-bound books written by his sister, Anna, each with his bookplate, a stylised sunflower flanked by the initials ‘J’ and ‘B’; a gold ‘plaid pin’ brooch, comprising a finely wrought sunflower, encircled by the motto ‘Non inferiora secutus’, which means ‘not following inferior things’; a battered, japanned barrister’s wig box with ‘John Buchan Esqre.’ in faded gold letters on the front; a silver-gilt rose bowl, inscribed to ‘Their Excellencies the Governor General and the Lady Tweedsmuir from W. L. Mackenzie King Christmas 1938’; and a photograph of the Thirty-Second President of the United States, on which Franklin D. Roosevelt has written in his own hand, ‘For Lord Tweedsmuir with the regards of his sincere friend.’ The significance of this serendipitous collection of items can only be properly understood in the context of the story that has been unfolding for me, in fits and starts, all my life.

  At home, his books were on the shelves and we heard family stories about him, although research for this book has inevitably been accompanied by the crump of exploding myths. The first real intimation I had of the extent of his fame occurred when my twin sister and I were about ten years old and went to play Bingo in our village Reading Room. We were fascinated by the way the caller gave an epithet to every number, such as ‘clickety-click, 66’, and astonished when he called out ‘all the steps, 39’. Until that moment, we had thought that a book by our grandfather was something essentially to do with our family. We had no idea that The Thirty-Nine Steps was famous enough to be a Bingo call.

  However, I have long been aware that much of this fame derived from the Hitchcock film. Furthermore, I have lost count of the times that people have said to me that they enjoyed John Buchan’s exhilarating adventure stories when young, but ‘of course’ they had not read him since. My response has been to urge them to try again, and also extend their reading beyond the thrillers, especially to his short stories and biographies, because they might be surprised by the underlying seriousness of purpose and by how intensely his writing resonates with universal, very grown-up concerns.

  Returning to the fiction I had read when young and reading much that I had never broached before (the poetry, some of the biographies, and political thought), I discovered, as many have before me, that John Buchan was far more than a spinner of improbable but appealing yarns. He wrote some of the most lambent prose I have ever read, and he did so with an easy grace and elegance, a wit, an erudition, which resulted from lightly worn scholarship, a deep humanity and a life lived to the full. I discovered that he had much to say to me – not as a descendant, but as someone trying to navigate a responsible and cheerful course through life.

  This book is not a work of literary criticism; if it were, it would be double the length. In any event, if you are like me, you will prefer the satisfaction of working out what you feel about his craft for yourself. In truth, I am the ‘ordinary’ reader of John Buchan; once there were millions of us and there are still a great many, despite expert critics bending down from a great height to warn us against him. So, rather than reveal too much of the plots, or dissect his style and hunt down his references, I have thought it most useful simply to set the books, especially those such as Greenmantle that have a complex political genesis, in the context of his life and times, making clear what may have become cloudy in the decades since they were written. The writing of this book has involved painful decisions over selection, as well as the expression of judgements that may be idiosyncratic and are certainly personal. This much I can promise you: if you stay the course, you will have gone far beyond The 39 Steps.

  In referring to John Buchan and his wife, I have exercised one of the few privileges that belong to consanguinity and called them respectively ‘JB’ and ‘Susie’: JB is what John Buchan was called by his family and friends, and is the nickname his descendants use, while ‘Susie’ is what he called her.

  1

  Childhood and Youth, 1875–1895

  The countryside of upper Tweeddale had experienced a fierce storm, so that the snow was piled high in drifts on the morning of the second day of December 1874, but that did not prevent family and neighb
ours from crowding into the parlour of Broughton Green, a square-fronted, whitewashed farmhouse standing on the main Edinburgh to Carlisle road. They had come to witness the marriage of the Reverend John Buchan to Helen Masterton, one of two daughters of the house. Afterwards, they sat down to a generous farmhouse luncheon of hare soup, roast meats, creams and trifles, and stayed on to drink cups of tea and eat cake and shortbread before braving the snow once more.

  The bride was seventeen years old, slight of build and no more than five feet tall, with a strong face, blue eyes and a magnificent mane of golden hair, which she put up for the first time that day. She wore a white satin dress and white kid shoes with rosettes on the toes and blue silk laces, in sharp contrast to her new husband’s sober clerical black. The Reverend John Buchan was ten years her senior, of above average height, strongly built, with blue eyes, a ruddy complexion and mutton-chop whiskers.

  The couple had met in church the Christmas before, after Helen came home from boarding school in Peebles, the county town; at the time the young man was deputising for the sick resident minister of the Free Church of Scotland in Broughton. The year 1874 had seen a religious revival in Britain, generated in part by the arrival of the charismatic American missionaries and hymn writers, Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, and Helen had already heard tell of this eloquent, committed – and handsome – young preacher, who held outdoor prayer meetings in lonely glens. He was a notable topic of conversation in the Masterton circle, not surprisingly, since this family had shown both piety and independence when they provided the land, and helped to build the Free Kirk in Broughton, at the time of the ‘Disruption’ in 1843.*

  The Reverend John Buchan later told his wife that he had fallen in love at once with the back of her head; in her turn, she was stirred by his youth and his religious ardour: ‘As a young man he was like a sword-blade, pure and keen. And yet he was such a boy with it all, or I never would have dared to marry him.’1

  Mr Buchan was the eldest son of John Buchan, a ‘Writer’ (solicitor) in Peebles, and his wife, Violet Henderson, who was of local farming stock.** The boy had been a good classical scholar in his youth, and was always a voracious reader, in particular loving Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. He also knew by heart a great deal of poetry, old Scottish stories and all the Border ballads, published or not, which he had learned at his mother’s knee. She also taught him the names of the Lowland wild flowers. When young, he had tramped the hills around Peebles, fishing in the ‘waters’ that ran into the River Tweed, and rioting with local boys. His was quite a wild youth, which may explain the comparative latitude he gave his children.

  When the wedding party was over, the couple took the train from Broughton via Edinburgh to Perth, to the little stone-built manse in York Place, close to the Knox Free Kirk, to which he had been ‘called’ after his temporary sojourn in Broughton. Mrs Buchan was, not surprisingly, daunted by having to run a household on a tight income, as well as playing her expected part in the life of the kirk. Moreover, almost immediately, she became pregnant, giving birth to a son on 26 August 1875. He was called, simply and unimaginatively, John. She was only just eighteen years old. Later, she told her children that there were many times in that first year when she had been sorely tempted to run away home.

  It is possible that the Buchans’ move from Perth to Pathhead on the Fife coast less than two years later was the result of a friendship that Mr Buchan had forged in his theological college days with Miss Helen Chalmers, the elderly daughter of the mighty Dr Thomas Chalmers, one of the leaders of the ‘Disruption’. The two worked together amongst the poor of south Edinburgh and, when the Free Kirk in Pathhead (in which the Chalmers family had an interest) lost its minister, it is likely that Miss Chalmers recommended her young protégé to the Elders.

  Whatever the truth of that, in November 1875, the Buchans found themselves ‘flitting’, with their baby son, to a manse in Smeaton Road, a quarter-mile up a steep hill from the harbour at Kirkcaldy and close to Nairn and Co’s linoleum factory. Mrs Buchan’s heart sank at the first sight of the manse and its environs:

  November is a poor time to go to a new place and Kirkcaldy certainly looked a most unattractive part of the world when we arrived on a cold wet afternoon. The ‘queer-like smell’ from the linoleum factories, the sea drearily grey and strange to my inland eyes, the drive through the narrow streets and up the steep ‘Path’, past great factories and mean houses, until we reached the road, knee-deep in mud, where the manse stood, combined to press me to the earth.2

  In the 1870s, Pathhead was a large village, still more or less distinct from the town of Kirkcaldy to the south-west and the village of Dysart to the north-east. The area had long been a centre of textile-making, salt-panning and coal-mining, the products of which were trundled down to the ports for export abroad or for transport up and down the coast. The coming of the railway in 1847 had accelerated industrialisation and, in particular, the manufacture of linoleum. The square, stone-built manse stood in a big garden but, behind it, nearer the sea, was the coastal railway and Nairn’s colossal factory, while, in front, across a very muddy by-road, there was a coal-pit, a rope-walk and a bleaching-works.

  In fact, for all the shortcomings of locality, the manse itself suited the expanding family well. A number of babies were born there: Anna in 1877, William in 1880, (James) Walter in 1883 and Violet in 1888.

  The household also included a young nursemaid called Helen Robertson (known as Ellie Robbie), who had accompanied the Buchans from Perth, as well as a cook called Marget from the Borders, but Mrs Buchan took pride in being able to keep her own house spotless. In particular, she enjoyed the annual spring cleaning, so necessary in towns where smuts from coal fires and industrial processes dulled the polish of furniture, smeared the windows and darkened the carpets and curtains. The house was surrounded by a flower and kitchen garden, tended by Mr Buchan, and where the children all had their separate garden plots. The back of the house looked across the town below to the Firth of Forth, with a distant prospect of Edinburgh and the Pentlands and a view of the Inchkeith Lighthouse in the Firth.

  When ‘JB’ was four or five years old, he was badly injured in an accident. He was travelling in a carriage, when he leant out to look at bluebells and the door gave way. The back wheel passed over the side of his head and broke his skull. In a panic, Mrs Buchan ran into the nearest cottage and started opening drawers to find something to bind the wound.* Mercifully, their doctor happened to be passing in a dogcart, and escorted them home and stayed all night. He held out little hope that the boy would survive or, if he did, would not be brain damaged. JB was operated on to relieve pressure on the brain and, when finally he regained consciousness, his mother asked him the name of their butcher, a particular favourite of his. When he gave the name at once, she wept with relief.

  For much of a year, he lay in bed, not allowed to try to read or exert himself; when finally he was allowed up, he had to learn how to walk again. He went about with an enormous bandage on his head and one neighbour memorably remarked: ‘It seems almost a pity he pulled through. I’m afraid he will never be anything but an object.’3 The only lasting sign of this accident was a prominent bump on the left side of his forehead, which very slightly dragged down his left eyelid.

  Both Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson spent time as small children in bed or as invalids. Such an enforced state of idleness encourages the development of both patience and imagination in sensitive children.

  Once up and about again, JB’s circumstances fostered those beginnings. The presence of so many different industrial activities within even a small child’s walking distance could not but engender a sense of adventure and wonder. Smeaton Road may now be a post-industrial wasteland but, in 1880, it hummed continuously with life and noise: the clanking of the pithead wheel, the factory sirens and the comings and goings of workers. The children watched women twisting rope in the rope-walk and they were – astonishingly – tolerated by the miners, who
would place them in trolleys underground and pull them about. They played in disused quarries and the wooded ‘dens’ or glens of the burns running down to the sea. When a little older, they discovered the beach below the ruined Ravenscraig Castle, famous for Scott’s ballad of Rosabelle, where the oystercatchers poked about in the shallows, their piping mingling with the wash of the tide and the cries of the seagulls. Beyond was the harbour at Dysart, with a harbourmaster’s house slant on, and a ship-building yard, and carts rumbling down the narrow wynds. Here sailors strolled about, and occasionally conducted the children around their ships, and told them colourful tales of foreign lands.

  Inland, there were the Dunnikier woods, knotty with the roots of beech and oak, with hidden ponds, where they skated in winter, bluebells flowering in spring, and, just beyond, the rolling landscape of agricultural Fife. These places JB peopled with characters and incidents from the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress. A pond he named the ‘Slough of Despond’ and there was more than one ‘Hill Difficulty’.

  The characters of the Buchan children were formed both by devoted, serious-minded parents and their environment, at a time when children were given what seems to us unimaginable freedom but where they had to create their own amusements. They had the time and encouragement to make deep friendships, undistracted and untroubled by what was happening in the outside world. They were taught to learn poetry and prose off by heart and, all his life, JB would depend heavily on the results of this early training – when writing letters, speeches and even his prose works. It’s hard to imagine how he could have done as much as he did without being able to dip confidently into so capacious and reliable a memory. It rarely failed him.