The White Bird Passes

I finished reading Jesse Kesson’s The White Bird Passes. It was first published in 1958, one year after I was born. By that time the Scotland of which Jesse Kesson wrote was already passing into history but not entirely. Some of the references to tenement living and growing up in urban Scotland were familiar enough to me but they were fading fast. Today the Scotland of The White Bird Passes has entirely vanished. That’s not a bad thing.

It’s a short tale, retold through the eyes of a girl, Jeanie McVean, growing up in a town that might be Elgin then an orphanage (sketchily drawn) in Aberdeenshire. It’s well written, just staying this side of sentimental. As befits the semi-autobiographical voice of the author it ends with the passing of innocence, a sense of melancholy (it’s mid-century Scotland that’s writing the tale so how could it be other than melancholic?) but also a clear sense that life goes on, maybe even gets better (as it did). It’s worth a read but I wonder how many contemporary readers, even among today’s Scots, would stick with it beyond the first few pages. The past is, indeed, another country.