EMBEDDED in this book of 370 pages, which represents about two-thirds of its author's entire output, is a short memoir which says a lot about who Agnes Owens is and the kind of stories she is drawn to telling. Marching To The Highlands And Into The Unknown was tagged on to the end of her collection, People Like That, published in 1996. When I first read it, however, I didn't know that and thought initially it was just another story.
"In June 1949," it begins, "my first husband, baby daughter of two months, and myself set forth for the north of Scotland." Couched thus, with a sense of Stevensonian drama inferred by the antique phrase "set forth", it reeked of romance. Soon, though, in the very next sentence, that was detonated. Owens and her family, one learned, were going north not for adventure but in search of employment, having been attracted by an article in a newspaper which said there were jobs for people who wanted to work on the land.
So, like the Joads in The Grapes Of Wrath, Owens travelled hopefully if not entirely willingly into the great unknown, a case, as she puts it, "of squaw follows Indian brave and asks no questions." What follows is a bleak account which would be hilarious if it were about a couple of naive hikers escaping Glasgow's mean streets for a weekend's slumming in bothies.
Dutifully, Owens followed her husband from one short-term job to another, the heavens often opening and the clegs voracious. In the beginning, their home was a tent, which she once nearly set on fire heating the baby's milk. Relations between husband and wife were fraught. After about a year they returned south where they were finally given a prefab by the council. Owens had three more children before her husband died at the age of 43. They had not been, she says, "particularly happy".
Thereafter, she worked in a variety of low- paying jobs, assuaging stress with a drink at the weekend in front of the television. She remarried and had three more children. Then, in 1984, at the age of 58, she published her first novel, Gentlemen Of The West - a series of related stories - which is included in the present volume.
A year later, she contributed eight stories to Lean Tales, which also featured two of her mentors, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. (A third champion, Liz Lochhead, has written an introduction to The Complete Short Stories.) "I suppose you could say my life was a struggle," reflects Owens in Marching To The Highlands, "as it is with most men and women of the working class even in years of good employment. Yet there was always a hankering to do something better."
A hankering to do something better pervades Owens's work, which is marked with humour and unsentimentality and an absence of self-pity or bitterness. The opening story is Arabella, which made its debut in Lean Tales. It is in pole position, we're told, because it was the first story Owens wrote. Familiarity has not lessened the impact of its overture: "Arabella pushed the pram up the steep path to her cottage. It was hard going since the four dogs inside were a considerable weight."
Monstrously fat, spectacularly unclean and unappealing, Arabella is a woman with indefinable powers, whose work involves her and her clients taking off all their clothes. Arabella strikes me as one of those women on reality TV shows such as Life Laundry who are terminally depressed and stuck in a rut.
The reality of life for most of Owens's characters, who are mainly working-class, uneducated and feckless, is that the hand they've been dealt holds few if any jokers. Mac, principal character in Gentlemen Of The West and its sequel, Like Birds In The Wilderness (which is not included in The Complete Short Stories), is typical.
A builder by trade, Mac is in his early 20s when we are introduced to him. The situations in which he finds himself are identifiably Kelmanesque. Pubs figure prominently. Money is tight. Violence is always a possibility. In Christmas Day At The Paxton, Dickens is parodied, the question of the hour being whether the eponymous pub will open or not. "Haud on Paddy," a dosser dying of hypothermia is told. "It's gaun tae open soon." When the owner is told to call an ambulance, he replies: "Whit dae ye think this is - a surgery?"
It would be easy - and a mistake - simply to read such stories as Para Handy repopulated with winos. Owens's vignettes, as Alasdair Gray argues in a postscript to the Gentlemen Of The West stories, may on first acquaintance be funny but they are also novel in that Mac is a gentleman, not your stereotypical, belligerent drunk.
Mac's world is one that Owens herself knows all too well and has an ambivalent attitude towards. On the one hand, she has sympathy for those who find themselves locked in poverty; on the other she appreciates that for those who aspire to another way of life, a life beyond bus and dole queues, random stabbings and super-strength lager, it is usually beyond their wit and ken to grasp it. In all sorts of ways, they have no means of escape.
But that is to talk of messages and the best writers are not interested in those. In story after story, Owens shows that her special talent is to catch a moment, see beyond it, and leave it at that. Nor is hers a world crudely divided by class. As often as not, as in The Collectors, the working class are at odds with each other. Davey collects lost golf balls; Tam wants to muscle in on his patch. The pair are interrupted by a pompous golfer who accuses them of stealing balls. Davey is glad to see the back of him as he is of Tam whom, he thinks, "was worse than bad - he was mentally retarded". Tam, meanwhile, is oblivious to Davey's dislike of him. "Whit's wrang wi' you?" he asks at the last. "Are you in the huff or somethin'?"
Fourteen previously unpublished stories are included here. Like their predecessors they are resolutely hard-headed and often hilariously funny. Owens, like Muriel Spark and Jessie Kesson, is drawn to the darker side of life, where death is a matter of fact and aberrant behaviour commonplace.
In The Phantom Rapist, for example, a boy's stepfather, whom he suspects of raping women, cross-dresses to seduce men. "I thought you were a rapist," he tells him, "but you're only a poofter. Wait till I tell mother about this." The stepfather gives the boy 20 quid to buy his silence then scarpers before his secret gets out. But one thing's for sure he, like so many of Owens's characters, won't get very far, because he has nowhere to go to.
The Complete Short Stories by Agnes Owens, Polygon, £ 10.99
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