It is hard not to be charmed from the outset at the telling of the story by a precocious 13 year old, who is super protective of her 10 year old sister, Peppa, and seemingly super savvy about outdoor survival skills just from reading an SAS manual and learning from Wikipedia and TV and youtube videos. Sal tells us she knows about survival, how to make fires, shelters, snare food, filter water, read tracks, watch weather. She knows about trees and plants, cooking and food hygiene, health and ailments. She knows how to read timetables, set up e-mail accounts nick stuff, drill and fit locks, and clean and hoover. She knows some ‘bits of history’, maths, how to read maps, use a compass, work out elevations and gradients, shoot an airgun and cast a fishing rod. Her eclectic set of knowledges are what she hopes will keep her and her sister safe and fed in the wilds of Scotland, on Magna Bra, when they run away.
We quickly learn that Sal was born to a 16 year old mother whom she calls Maw, and whose father died in a car accident before Sal was born. Peppa’s father was a Nigerian student who could knew 8 or 9 languages and was learning to be an architect. Sal and Peppa seemed to have lived with their alcoholic mother (Maw) in a flat ion Linlithgow House, where the hall
smelled of piss and junkies sometimes slept under the first set of concrete steps going up (p14)
Also living with them is one Robert, who hits Maw, and who had ‘started on’ Sal when she was 10, and because Peppa was now 10, Sal was determined to get her little sister away from Robert, knowing he was going to start going into Peppa’s room.
Sal had already missed a lot of school, and she
worried they’d send the plunkieman to get me to go (p14).
What worried Sal was that social services would split up her family, and take her sister from her.
When we were wee, we were hungry a lot because maw was out or drink or we had no money and Peppa used to go to other flats round the close and ask for food. […] I nicked food for her a lot […] and she stopped begging food and nobody told the social on us” (p7).
It seemed that Robert used Sal’s fear of social services to keep her quiet about his abuse:
And when Robert started on me he said if I told, even if I told Maw, we’d get took and split up. He said Peppa would gets fostered and adopted By Africans because she is half an African and I’d get adopted by old people and we wouldn’t be together. And that is never going to happen (p7).
A lot of the delight of the novel lies in how it is told in Sal’s deadpan manner, with her regional vocabulary, and unique sentence construction. The way she processes information is at once very intelligent and yet also curiously childlike.
And the night before I had killed Robert and locked Maw in her room (p30)
Heartbreakingly, Sal says it was not the killing of Robert which was difficult; it was the telling of what he did to her, to Peppa, which was hard. Sal knows that the law in Scotland means unless she is mentally ill, she will be convicted of Robert’s murder because it is a planned action on her part; hence her carefully laid plans to take her sister and disappear into the wilds of Scotland. The landscape described in the story is beguilingly lovely, cold and hard of course. but also enchanting and alive.
In the wilds, Sal’s priority is keeping Peppa safe. When food is scarce, she gives most of it to Peppa. She looks after Peppa in every way, physical and emotional. Sal may be only 3 years older than Peppa, but she comes across as being a lot older. Peppa struggles to even light a fire in Sal’s absence. Sometimes, the survival techniques Sal manages sounds almost too easy to be true.
To skin a rabbit first you cut off the head and the paws, then you pull the skin down each leg until they pop out and then you drag the whole lot back up the body slowly until it all comes off in a oner. […] I had seen a video of Inuit women in Alaska curing and stretching skins on round frames made from alder siblings…” (p21).
Most likely, Sal is one of those naturally very deft with her hands, to be able to manage to set snares and catch grouse and trout and build shelters and so on, inexperience as she is, and with such high success rate and with such seeming ease, after a lifetime living in council housing.
Or perhaps it is that one wants to suspend disbelief, to cocoon in an almost-fantasy the survival of these courageous waifs against the odds. It is also part of this almost-fantasy that the people Sal and Peppa meet seem exceptional and wonderful too. Ingrid, in particular, a seventy-five year old from DDR, is a character whom one could cheerfully fall in love with. Whether the end is credible or not, it is an end I hope could happen. I just wish I knew what happened to Ingrid… And I also wish Kitson would write more novels, because his writing is so very readable!
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