Dear Scotland: A Love Letter

Dear Scotland,

The details are hazy, blurred as they were by the speed of the car but the memory is no less vivid. I can recall nothing of the first five hours of the journey. Busyness always hung like fog in the south of England, obscuring the view with its predictability. Even though You lie side-by-side on the same island as your sister country, the change in the landscape was dramatic when we crossed the border. The hills would heighten into mountains, the green became a deeper, emotive green, bruised with heather and thin, silver streams veined the slopes. In later years, when I heard Celtic music for the first time, it made perfect sense that such vibrant, enchanting melodies came from a land which was itself vibrant and enchanting. There was a freedom to You, an openness which London had leached from the old south towns of England. You were true wilderness. You felt like a living thing.

I grew up in a countryside gradually filling with commuters. The landscape was verdant but tamed and there were always cities beyond the trees. We felt hemmed in by them and proud of our small, green spaces standing against the rapidly-growing suburbs. The friends we visited on the Kintyre Peninsula each summer however, seemed bored of small town life and have moved to cities in their later lives. There was a staleness to it, I could see that, but I loved the feeling of space. There were miles of untouched coastland and leagues of land beyond, but there was a sense of space in your atmosphere too and an openness in the people who inhabited your hills.

It’s difficult to describe but there was a feeling where I grew up, of being trapped inside as if there wasn’t room on the streets, or anywhere really, for one more person. The stipulations for success were high. Everything was expensive and everything cost money. We weren’t fashionable enough for London, we were too suburban for the real countryside further west.

In You, I sensed not only space in the landscape but in your culture. There were things to be explored, expanses waiting to be filled. Our friends, young as they were, had jobs and opportunities, they seemed to follow their talents and dreams with unthinking courage. The ventures they now seem amused by, still impress me. They recorded albums, ran local radio shows, learnt to dance, played instruments, wandered freely, raised pets, all while they were still children. It seemed that anyone who cared enough to try, was given a chance. In the south, pets were too expensive and houses were small, children did not perform on the radio, dance groups were for theatre kids; in short, everything was for professionals only.

In my adult life, I moved to Oxfordshire and the suffocation only increased. The rent was so high that with a fifty six hour working week between us and no childcare, my family and I were still living in a derelict caravan. I found there was a clear message to anyone with a low income; we were not welcome. We were cut off from almost everything. I remember in the summer, when the fields were too high to walk through, I was forced to trudge the main road into the village with my son in a buggy. There were no paths, there was no verge and for two miles I would watch people drive past in their thirty-thousand-pound cars, the rain soaking into my coat which was a hand-me-down and no longer water proof. It was the first time I felt humiliated by being poor. There was no way out and now way up so when the opportunity came to move to Scotland and escape our hemmed-in existence, we left without much hesitation. Driving an overpacked car past the big blue sign that me my siblings used to cheer at, and watching my children through the overhead mirror, brought back the memory of those childhood journeys.

I’ve been living here for almost two years now and that underlying sense of openness wasn’t a figment of my childish imagination. It’s still here. You have a thriving, humming, electrifying sense of potential. You are a breath of fresh air, the type of lungful you gasp in desperation after being underwater. I can climb a mountain and see nothing in the distance but more mountains and experience the thrill of knowing I have a civil right to explore it, that it's partly mine and everyone else's. Even in your cities, ancient though they are, there’s a sense of arriving at their very beginning. As if anything might happen. I’m not sitting on the fringes anymore, feeling as though my life is waiting tables at someone else’s party. You are open to people like me, beckoning over the border to anyone with the creativity and courage to leap across it.

The south of England, despite its prettiness and its people, is already carved out and allotted and I was born far too late to find a corner in it. I was always an outsider there. Even then, all those years ago, when I watched your wild coastland through the car window, I was visited with an inexplicable sense of coming home. It ached to leave every year, not only the friends we loved, but You. Now, at least once a week, I am struck anew by the realisation that I’m actually here, in Scotland, where my childhood self once dreamed of being. I am surrounded by those same heather-covered hills, I can see the shimmering river from my house. I am drenched in that same sense of freedom and fresh air. I am home.

Yours with sincerity,

The Newcomer.