Already, Too Late, Carl MacDougall, Luath Press

Luath Press, £14.99

Review by Susan Flockhart

Carl MacDougall’s impact on Scottish literature was profound. “He may well have had more influence on the Scottish writing scene than any other author,” wrote David Manderson in his Herald obituary, referring not just to MacDougall’s distinguished works, including the novels Stone Over Water and The Lights Below, but to his role as editor, creative writing teacher and former president of Scottish PEN.

When MacDougall died aged 81 in April it emerged he had recently completed a memoir of his early boyhood – a period he is said to have talked little about. Now that book is out, it seems clear that the author had long struggled to make sense of the seismic events that shook his childhood world.

He was born in Glasgow in 1941, shortly after the Clydebank Blitz, but as the book opens, he is living with his mother in a rural Fife railway cottage while his father and several uncles are away fighting in the war. When his maternal grandparents come to stay, his German-born grandfather becomes a focus of police attention and even little Carl is picked on at school for his “German name”. War ends, the women thank their lucky stars that everyone has survived. One by one the menfolk return and for a brief period, happiness reigns.

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Sort of. The spectre of two world wars is omnipresent. Schoolchildren are at the mercy of teachers who lost their hearts or minds in the trenches and his grandmother recalls nursing Somme casualties whose “brains were hanging out”. His father is clearly suffering from PTSD and the boy himself is haunted by having witnessed the shooting of a young German escapee from a nearby POW camp.

Yet despite all these horrors, MacDougall’s memoir positively shimmers as he conjures the people and places of his boyhood vividly into being, recalling the sights, scents and sounds of a lost land of steam trains, pipe smoke, factory whistles, working horses and fields of rippling wheat.

The sense, masterfully conveyed, is of a child struggling to interpret the world encountered by his senses – a confusion that reaches a terrible catharsis when his father is killed on the railway and nobody tells him what’s happened, leaving little Carl wondering if he is somehow to blame for his daddy’s disappearance and his mother’s grief.

When the MacDougalls move to Springburn, Glasgow, young Carl is again picked on for his German forename. Further tragedies befall the family. And although he finds refuge in books and a close friendship, he flounders. “That boy’s no’ right,” his granny repeatedly says and his teachers seemingly agree.

It’s never clear exactly what the problem is. Though he’s a voracious reader with a high IQ, Carl's schoolwork is poor and the possibility of a “nervous breakdown” is raised. He develops a stutter. “Parts of me didn’t connect,” he writes. “Something was wrong and I was part of it”. And soon the authorities, in the form of a body called Child Guidance, decide he would “benefit from care”.

Carl MacDougall (Image: free)

At Nerston Residential School near East Kilbride, he encounters children who have evidently experienced dreadful trauma or cruelty. Some try to run away; some who are sent home run back to Nerston. And Carl falls victim to a sadistic bully, whose own terrible backstory can only be guessed at. But by and large, staff seem well-meaning and – whether due to the twice-weekly visits by child psychologists or simply growing up – Carl comes through and goes home shortly after his 10th birthday.

In his afterword, MacDougall writes that he later returned to the school three times as a visitor – suggesting he bore the place no ill will. He also confirms that, as his granny suspected, he’d actually suffered from undiagnosed deafness and had probably taught himself to lip-read. That seems astonishing, given his uncanny ability to recollect verbal tics, vocal cadences and the colourful phraseology of relatives, in dialogue describing local hoodlums  as “bad, weekit b***ers o boys” or someone’s hair colour as “black as the Earl o’ Hell’s waistcoat”.

Then again, he admits that in sifting through the “flotsam” of the past, “I have to distinguish between remembering events and constructing the story” and the malleability of truth is a recurring theme in Already, Too Late. MacDougall’s mother, he writes, “had often implied her childhood was warm and cosy … full of promise, hope and dreaming”. Yet she would also recall her father (Carl’s grandfather) leaving his shaving strap out in the cold “so that it froze overnight and became harder and sorer when he leathered me”. She was, reflects her son, “capable of editing her experience in ways that weren’t always obvious, so that contradictions became synchronised”.

“I sometimes think he doesn’t know who I am.” Did six-year-old Carl actually say this of his war-shattered father, or is this the conjecture of the writer, seven decades on?

Doubtless, as with all our lives, there are as many versions of the events portrayed here as people who witnessed them. But MacDougall’s account is captivating. I loved this book, not least for the light it sheds on a vanished chapter of Scotland’s past – a decade characterised by immense human hope, resilience and kindness in the face of fear, turmoil and buried secrets.

READ MORE: Scots writer Paul Dalgrano on A Country of Eternal Light

Some of the themes that preoccupied MacDougall’s professional life are apparent in his memoir – particularly his fascination with Scottish languages, which he explored in his 2006 BBC2 television series, Scots: The Language of the People.

He remembers his father’s voice softening when he speaks in Gaelic; a schoolteacher appears keen to discourage the use of the Highland tongue; and his Scots-speaking mother will “try to be English” when in posh company, though never very successfully. “There was always the ghost of another voice, another language, lurking in the background.”

There are politics in here too, mainly as seen through the eyes of menfolk huddled around Springburn tenement close mouths, verbally sparring on imperialism, capitalism, communism and Scottish identity. As for music: fans of the song he co-wrote with Ron Clark will be pleased to discover that cod liver oil and orange juice played a real part in MacDougall’s childhood.

Lyrical, richly detailed and full of gentle humour, Already, Too Late is a wonderful book.