Singalong with the Sterkarms by Susan Price

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

Tryst: (Old French) an appointed station in hunting. An appointed meeting place, often of lovers. To engage to meet a person or persons. A cattle market, e.g. 'The Falkirk Tryst.'

 

A Sterkarm Tryst: an appointed meeting place of which only one side is aware: an ambush. 

 

The third Sterkarm book, A Sterkarm Tryst, was finally published at the end of last month, and Penny Dolan (who wrote the wonderful A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E) has kindly allowed me to post about it here, on what would usually be her HG day.

'Tryst' is the third in the series. The first two, after being out of print for some years, have been republished by Open Road. They are The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price

The books were inspired by the reivers of the Scottish Borders though Handshake only came to life for me when I thought of sending workers for a 21st Century company through a time machine to the 16th Century Border 'Marches' where they hope to mine the coal, oil and gas. The 16th Century 'natives,' the Sterkarms, suppose them to be Elves. After all, the strange clothes of the 21st Century people give them an eldritch appearance and their carts which move without horses demonstrate their supernatural powers.

The Sterkarms, the local Riding or Raiding* Family, welcome the Elves at first, for their magical wee white pills which take away pain (aspirin). The welcome doesn't last. The Border men were notoriously 'ill to tame,' as a contemporary put it, and the Sterkarms don't relish being told what they can and cannot do, even by Elves.

*The word 'raid' is from the Scandinavian or Scottish form of the Old English 'rade', which meant 'road.' Our word 'road' is from the same Old English word, which also gave us 'ridan' or 'ride'. A road was where  you rode. A track over a moor or through a wood is still called 'a ride.'

     Raiding was often what you were doing when you rode down a road or ride. So a 'Riding Family' and a 'Raiding Family' were the same thing. Ride, road and raid all stem from the same word.

     And 'reivers', as in Scottish Border reivers, comes from the same root as 'bereave,' which survives to the present almost exclusively in the sense of bereavement by death. 'To reave' originally meant to rob, to take, to forcibly deprive.
     I just thought you might like to know that.

Looking back over the books, I realise that the words and music of old ballads run through all of them. (I hear the music, anyway.) The 21st-Century heroine, Andrea, is 'embedded' (in more ways than one) with the 16th-Century Sterkarms and learns many songs from them. She finds that the songs often give her the words to understand the Sterkarms and her own situation.

The higher on the wing it climbs

The sweeter sings the lark,

And the sweeter that a young man speaks

The falser is his heart.

He'll kiss thee and embrace thee

Until he has thee won,

Then he'll turn him round and leave thee

All for some other one.

Then there's the ballad which gives the Sterkarms their rallying cry and boast:

The 'Sterkarm Handshake': their badge

My hob is swift-footed and sure,

My sword hangs down at my knee, 

I never held back from a fight:

Come who dares and meddle with me! 

A 'hob' was the breed of small, strong, intelligent horse which the reivers rode (down roads on raids). This ballad was historically associated with the Elliot family rather than the Armstrongs on whom the Sterkarms are very, very loosely based. ('Sterkarm' means 'strong arm.) 

Child's Ballads

These old songs fitted themselves naturally into the story as I wrote. I'd known many of them by heart for decades before I had any idea of writing the Sterkarm books. I never had to hunt for a quote. The scene I was working on would set a particular song playing in my head.

I knew the songs because, while still a young teenager, my love of folklore led me to Child's Ballads. I was already familiar with the lyrics before I discovered recordings of them by various folk-groups and singers.

I was a deep-dyed folkie, me. I was having none of your long-haired sensitive types strumming acoustic guitars while they intoned modern protest songs. If it wasn't at least 200 years old, I didn't want to hear it. I wanted elbow-pipes, Shetland fiddles and bodhrans. I wanted people with closed eyes singing unaccompanied with one hand over an ear. "As I walked out one midsummer morning..."

It was the stories, of course, that attracted me. I wanted to hear about the Billy Blind starting up at the bed's foot  and the loathly worm toddling about the tree. And the Broomfield Hill. And Twa Corbies.

I often listen to music while writing and, for me, the music has to be fitted to the book I'm working on. It creates the atmosphere. For the Sterkarms, it had to be traditional folk, especially the Border Ballads. The music and words of the ballads were as much a part of setting the Sterkarm scene as details of their food, clothing, furniture and buildings.

I wasn't too purist, though. In A Sterkarm Handshake, Per Sterkarm is hurrying through the alleys of the tower, on his way to Andrea's 'bower' (which always sounds so romantic, but just means 'private room,' 'bedroom' or 'sleeping place.') Per thinks he's on a promise. The song that runs through his mind is:

Oh, pleasant thoughts come to my mind

As I turn back smooth sheets so fine,

And her two white breasts are standing so

Like sweet pink roses that bloom in snow.

The second book, A Sterkarm Kiss ends with the lines:

For there's sweeter rest

On a true-love's breast

Than any other where.

 Neither of these quotes come from the Border ballads, although folk-song is, by its very nature, hard to date or pin down to a specific place. The first verse, as far as I know, comes from 'The Factory Maid.'

I'm a hand-loom weaver by my trade,

But I'm in love with a factory-maid,

And could I but her favour win,

I'd break my looms and weave with steam.

Mayhew's ballad seller

     This dates it, roughly, to the late 18th or 19th century and means that this version is likely to have been a 'broadside ballad.'
These were lyrics, printed on the long sheets of paper which gave them their name. Often written about hot topics of the day, such as industrialisation, they were sold in market-places. There was no music but the name of some well-known tune would be given. 'To be sung to the tune of...'

The lines about the true-love's breast come from a song with a beautiful tune, which I know as 'Searching for Lambs.' (This being what 'the loveliest maid that e'er I saw' was doing when her lover walked out one midsummer morning.) It's very hard to guess at a date for the lovely maid and her ewes, but the song doesn't have that robust mix of extreme vengeful violence and the supernatural that typifies the Border ballads, so it's probably later.

The date for my Sterkarms is about 1520 (though there were reivers long before and after this date. It wasn't until James I of England and Scotland took the English throne in 1603 that concerted action was taken to bring peace to the Borders.) Some of the songs I quote are certainly later than the 1500s and can be roughly dated to the late 1700s, but this doesn't mean that the Sterkarms wouldn't know something close to these lyrics and tunes. I justify my inclusion of them by the way that elements of folk-tales and ballads 'migrate,' from song to song and tale to tale over long periods of time.

The songs and stories were spread by word of mouth. If a singer or story-teller couldn't remember a detail, they invented their own. Or inserted a verse they could remember from another song. They might also take a verse from one song and put it into another simply because they liked it. They might change an ending to make it happier (see Johnny of Briedesley below) or change the relationships within a song, for example, having the hero murdered by his mother instead of his lover.

The same applies to the music. If they couldn't remember a tune, then they set the words to another or made up a variation. Other lyrics and tunes were updated. These tried-and-tested old tales can go on for centuries. Some researchers think some folk-tales go back to the Bronze Age.

There are old songs which almost seem to be compilations of verses:

Oh had I wist, when first I kissed

That Love had been so ill to win,

I'd have shut my heart in a silver cage

And pinned it with a silver pin.

The men of the forest, they asked it of me,

How many sweet strawberries grow in the salt sea?

I answered them well, with a tear in my e'e;

'As many fish swim in the forest.'

When cockle-shells turn silver bells

When fishes swim from tree to tree

When ice and snow turn fire to burn

It's then, my love, that I'll love thee.

The writers of broadside ballads certainly drew on these old songs too, re-using verses to save time as they tried to make a living. So because a verse about a factory maid was published in a broadsheet ballad in, say 1810, it doesn't mean that something very like it wouldn't have been known very much earlier and sung about a dairy maid.

And just because a gentle love song doesn't mention treachery, incest, fratricide, infanticide or any of the other -cides so popular in the Border ballads, it doesn't mean it wasn't known on the Borders. Even there, they had their quieter moments.

I thought it a pity that my readers couldn't hear the songs that are quoted so frequently throughout the Sterkarm books - and then realised that there was a way for me to share them. If you have a Facebook or Spotify account, here's a link (below) to my playlist for the Sterkarm books.


The songs here are the best versions I could find on Spotify of the ballads I quote, but they aren't definitive. For instance, in the linked Johnny of Breadiesley, sung by Ewan McColl, Johnny kills seven enemies and rides away triumphant. In other versions, he is killed: His good grey hounds are sleeping,/ His good grey hawk has flown,/ A grass green turf is at his head,/ And his hunting all is done. The verse quoted above, from January, [The higher on the wing it climbs...] also has slightly different words in the recording by June Tabor.

If you like songs about murder, revenge killings and executions - plus the occasional love-song - and if you like deep-dyed folk - this is for you.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

'Some years ago the late Miss Stewart Mackenzie of Brahan,

'The Drover's Dogs' by Susan Price. Artwork by D Simpson

Ross-shire, informed a friend that in the course of journeys by coach in the late autumn from Brahan to the South during her childhood about the year 1840 she used frequently to see collie dogs making their way north unaccompanied. On inquiring of her parents why these dogs were alone, [she] was informed that these were dogs belonging to drovers who had taken cattle to England and that when the droving was finished the drovers returned by boat to Scotland. To save the trouble and expense of their transport, the dogs were turned loose to find their own way north. It was explained that the dogs followed the route taken on the southward journey being fed at Inns or farms where the drove had ‘stanced’ and that in the following year when the drovers were again on the way south, they paid for the food given to the dogs...’

     It was this quote from A. R. B. Haldane’s ‘The Drove Roads Of Scotland,’ which gave me the idea for ‘The Drover’s Dogs.’ I first read Haldane something like ten years before I started writing it. Those dogs spent all those years prowling around my head, trying to sniff out a story.

     I’ve often been struck by how dogs distinguish between human adults and children, even though the child may be much bigger than the dog. I once knew a large Staffordshire bull-terrier who very clearly understood that I was a junior member of the family and took up a very protective attitude towards me. I’ve been told of collies who appoint themselves protectors of children at family gatherings, rounding them up and herding them together. They don’t attempt to herd the adults: only the children. 

       So I began thinking of a child in trouble, who runs away and is adopted and protected by the drover’s dogs. At first, I planned on the boy being an escaped factory ‘apprentice.’ These were child-slaves in all but name, who were bought from workhouses on the pretence that the money paid was to indenture them to a trade. This was a corruption of the long and honourable tradition of apprenticeships. The factory ‘apprentices’ were taught no skill except how to operate unguarded machinery, were badly-fed and clothed and, at night, were locked into the factory sheds where they slept on the floor.

       There were various reasons why this didn't work for the book I wanted to write. The dates didn't fit. Before the factory system was well underway, the droving trade was dying. Also, I wanted my drove-roads to be in Scotland and most of the factories which used children as slave-labour were a long way from Scotland. My runaway boy would have had to run a hundred and fifty miles or more before he met my drove dogs.

       Then my Scots partner, told me about the ‘bondagers.’ These were farm-labourers who were ‘bonded’ to a farmer and in Scotland, this system survived into the early years of the 20th Century. They often wore a distinctive costume — especially the women — which distinguished them. It seems, like many other professional costumes in the UK, to date from the 17th Century.

        For many centuries, in all parts of the UK, farm-labourers went to Hiring Fairs, and stood in a line, offering themselves for hire to farmers, who chose a likely looking man, or girl, and came to a deal with them about board and wages. The term of hire usually lasted for a year, from May to May, and the labourer might be provided with lodgings and food. Even clothing, or cloth to make it, might be included.

Bondagers by John Dougall

     In the North of England, and in Scotland, this system took on its own nature. A farmer would often hire a ‘hind’ or ploughman with the expectation that the hind’s family would supply additional labour at no extra cost to the farmer. (In the same way, fishermen’s wives and daughters were expected to work day after day at the stinking, dirty job of cleaning fish without being paid themselves.) If a hind’s children were too young to work and his wife unwilling or unable, then a hind would often hire people from outside his family, to fulfil his obligations to the farmer he worked for.

     In theory, an unhappy farm-worker could leave his or her place and find other work. But in practice, it wasn’t so simple. There was no union, and pay was often desperately low. If you left one place, you couldn’t be sure of finding a better one — and risked earning a reputation for being unreliable, so no one else would hire you.

      Also, under the system in the North of Britain, if a whole family was hired as a unit, then your sense of loyalty to your family was brought into play. If a teenage son or daughter left, this might result in their parents and younger siblings being turned out of work — perhaps even out of their tied cottage. Younger children had little choice if their parents set them to work.

       My partner told me of an account he’d read, by an elderly man recounting his childhood. He’d been ‘bonded’ to a farmer who mistreated him, fed him badly and worked him beyond his strength. At night he had to sleep in a cold, damp shed, on a damp mattress through which thistles grew.

       He'd escaped this by joining the army when World War I broke out. All his fellow recruits complained bitterly about the terrible army food, the stark barracks, the uncomfortable beds and coarse uniforms — but the bondager-boy couldn’t remember ever being so well housed, clothed and fed. He thought all his birthdays had come at once.

       It was this boy I bore in mind when I invented Sandy Longmuir, the hero of The Drover’s Dogs who, at ten years of age, is bonded to a farmer until he’s twenty-one.  “I remember the day my mother sold me very well,” Sandy says. He doesn’t appreciate his mother’s desperation and is heart-broken when he runs back home to her, and she makes him return to the farm. “Thomson paid us good money, and that money is spent. You’ll go back.”

     When Sandy cries out that, if she makes him go back, he will never love her or speak to her again, she replies, “I will bear that burden along with all the others.”

     So Sandy returns to the farm and is beaten for running away. After that, he decides that he cannot bear this life for another eleven years and, despite believing that he will be hung for stealing himself if he’s caught, he waits for a dark night and runs away.

    Fearing pursuit, he walks himself into exhaustion and finally lies down and sleeps beside the road.

I lay on the grassy bank beside the drove road, locked up tight in sleep. I was jerked awake to darkness and cold, my ears filled with a wet snorting and snuffling.

     Above me, outlined against the night sky, were two pointed ears. Something panted, and dripped water on me.

     My head filled with monsters – things from the bottom of lochs, dragging themselves ashore, stinking of mud, to sink their fangs into me…A wet nose shoved under my chin, and whiskers prickled me. A hot tongue slathered across my cheek. I was about to be eaten!  Then the monster said, “Rrroof!” And I laughed. I forgot all about monsters. I forgot about being cold, damp and by myself in the dark at the side of a road. Or, at least, I minded those things less – because I knew I had been woken by a dog, and a friendly dog at that.

       Sandy realises that he has fallen in with drovers’ dogs on their way home, and decides that he will follow them to wherever they’re going, since he has nowhere in particular to go. He fancies himself a man in charge of two dogs — but soon discovers that it’s the dogs who are in charge.

I don’t think those dogs ever mistook me for their master. They were good herd-dogs and I think they knew exactly what I was — a little calf, lost from the herd. A lost little pup wandering loose. They knew that what they had to do was take me in charge, and herd me along, and watch over me, until they had brought me somewhere safe.

     So I’d engineered the meeting of boy and dogs — now all I had to do was discover where they were going, and get them there ‘over Scotland’s lochs and mountains.’

     I hope to tell of that, and more of the droving trade, in another blog.

Susan Price is the Carnegie Medal winning author of The Ghost Drum, and the Guardian Prize winning author of The Sterkarm Handshake.

The Drover's Dogs is the first of her books to be a self-published original.

  The long-awaited third book in her Sterkarm

 trilogy, Sterkarm Tryst, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

 

Thanks to Susan Price for stepping in with a reserve post as Antonia Senior is dealing with illness in the family.