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Jessie Kesson (1916–1994)

Author of The White Bird Passes

10+ Works 252 Members 7 Reviews

Works by Jessie Kesson

Associated Works

The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories (1995) — Contributor — 102 copies
The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories (1990) — Contributor — 100 copies
Infinite Riches (1993) — Contributor — 54 copies
The Virago Book of Wanderlust and Dreams (1998) — Contributor — 36 copies

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Autobiographical work, describing the 1920s slum childhood of a Scottish girl. She recalls the "characters" in her lane, days out in the country...and the fraught (but not always) relationship with herr mother:
"Those rare moods of communication between Janie and her Mother more than made up for the other thoings lacking in their relationship. And yet, if these moments had never existed, it would have been so much easier for Janie in the years to come."
Janie ends up "put into care."
 
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starbox | 2 other reviews | Sep 8, 2021 |
A short, elegant rural tragedy, set in the 1950s in a farming community somewhere in the north of Scotland (around Aberdeen?), pivoting on the long-standing rivalry between Hugh Riddel, a steady, reliable agricultural worker, employed as dairyman on a large farm, and his sometime schoolfellow Charlie Anson, who has ambitions to get into local politics and has been seen hanging around Hugh's daughter. When Hugh is invited to give the "Immortal memory" toast at the Burns Supper and the text of his address gets into the local papers, Anson is burning with jealousy, and trouble seems inevitable.

Kesson takes an odd approach to structuring the story, where we start in the aftermath of the trouble and then loop away into the back-stories of characters indirectly involved in it — Hugh's cattleman father; Sue Tatt the shameless village "woman of shame" (based on Kesson's mother?); the Vicar; Hugh's social-worker daughter Helen (Kesson herself?); the gossiping Greek chorus of farmworkers in the dairy — and she tells us a lot about conditions of employment in agriculture, the social structure of villages, the misguided way youth work is organised, the eccentricities of Scottish local buses, and so on. We keep feeling that we are losing our grip on the story just at the point when she swoops back to where she was meant to be and we suddenly see how relevant it all was. In the background throughout is the figure of Robert Burns, as a farmer and as a lover, his experiences contrasting with and sometimes paralleling the lives of the modern farmworkers. But there's also the important symbolic presence of a hill with a Pictish horse on it, and of a modern mental hospital: neither ever quite enters into the story, but they are both clearly essential somehow.

I also loved the way Kesson quite naturally and undemonstratively reaches for a Scots word whenever that expresses what she wants to say better than standard English could. She doesn't write in dialect, but she ends up with English prose that feels unmistakably Scots.

Wonderful stuff, it seems to pack something like the breadth and scope of a Thomas Hardy novel into 150 pages...
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thorold | Jan 20, 2021 |
[Another Time, Another Place] is definitely an apt title for this novel. Set on a farm in northeast Scotland during WWII, it is definitely a world onto itself. "The woman", never given a name, or even capitalized, is an outsider, a dreamer, set down in a cottage in this place by dint of being married to a dairyman, a protected occupation during the war.

Working piece work at various seasonal jobs around the farm, she was caught between her neighbours Meg and Kristy. Debating the nature of triangles, she felt there should never be threes, but then realized a third is always necessary as a foil or a go-between for the other two. The woman is judged and made fun of by the pair for her solitary nature and dreaminess, yet they have to grudgingly accept her as she has "the knack" for doing the chores that need doing. This is a culture which respects good work.

Enter another threesome - a trio of Italian POWs, conscripted to farm labour. They were housed in the bothy next to the woman and her husband, so she was given the chore of delivering their milk. Speaking neither English nor Scots, the Italians were isolated by language and prejudice, make worse by the fact that one of the villagers' own was missing in Italy after the battle of Monte Cassino.

Little by little, the woman came to know the Italians. Fantasizing about one, pursued by another, she learned enough Italian and they learned enough English to communicate. The village was not so kind however, going so far as to lump the woman and the Italians together as outsiders. They did not have "the knack".

This is a slow paced novel built around the year's agricultural cycle. The war ended and the Italians were to be sent home. However, in a twist of fate, the kind where everyone is too keen to judge, and swiftly at that, a misunderstanding had lasting consequences.

Kesson knew that Scottish judgemental streak all too well. The fatherless daughter of a young prostitute, she was taken into state care at age eight. Denied a full education because of her origins, she was placed in domestic service at sixteen, eventually marrying and turning to hired farm work. There is no bitterness here though, just a feeling of listening to a story about another time and another place.
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3 vote
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SassyLassy | 1 other review | Jan 8, 2019 |
Kesson’s autobiographical novel The white bird passes tells the story of a young girl growing up in a slum district of a Scottish small town (Elgin) in the years after World War I. It could easily have been the Scottish A tree grows in Brooklyn, but that’s not the way Kesson wants to go: her heroine is a wonderfully sharp observer, refreshingly free of any sort of conventional morality. She revels in the way her neighbours - whores and petty criminals - somehow manage to maintain their dignity by defying authority and supporting each other at times of trouble. Of course, we readers get to see a bit further than little Janie, and realis e the adult misery behind the defiant attitude, and the way no-one in the community is really strong enough to maintain the mutual support when their own survival is at risk. It’s not an uplifting story, in the usual sense, nor is it a story of triumph over adversity - in Janie’s world, it’s pretty clear that adversity will get you every time. But it is a magnificent, very Scottish, account of how important it is to be proud of being human and keep on struggling for the impossible.… (more)
 
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thorold | 2 other reviews | Jun 17, 2018 |

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