Agnes Owens (2009) The Complete Novellas.

I hadn’t heard of the not too lauded Scottish novelist Agnes Ownes, from Balloch. She was born in 1926, and most of her longer, short stories—novellas—were published in the 1980s. Five of them have been brought together. Like Birds in the Wilderness, A Working Mother, For the Love of Willie, Bad Attitudes and Jen’s Party.

What they have in common is stories mirror a working-class view of the world. Dialect isn’t dialect. Just the way people speak.

In Like Birds in the Wilderness, for example, a twenty-six-year-old brickie arrives in the big city in Glasgow looking for work.

‘A dour-faced youth answered the door. I explained the buroo had sent me.

‘Broo?’ he questioned.

‘Labour exchange then. They said ye took in lodgers.’

He jerked his head backwards to convey I should follow him down the lobby into a big kitchen that smelled of onions.’

Ownes tells the story from the male protagonist’s point of view. A Working Mother tells its own story from a woman’s point of view, as do the other stories. Owen worked as a typist and had seven children. So in these and other stories such as Bad Attitudes and, the shortest of the collection, Jen’s Party, it could be described as writer writes what you know, which is drink and violence and sex and not much love. But who knows? A wee twist at the end, adds bite.

For the Love of Willie was my favourite. Simplified plot. I’m not sure why we need a Foreword, but here it is.

‘Two patients sit on the veranda of a cottage hospital run by a local authority for females with mental problems, some of them long-term and incurable. Peggy, stoutly built, middle-aged, and with a hard set to her jaw…

…the companion, elderly and frail, but known as the duchess because of her imperious manner.’

Peggy is writing a novel longhand on scraps of paper. I think we’ve all done that, but they’ve not locked me up yet. Hospitals are run by matrons and nurses who don’t mind using a bit of casual violence to keep the patients in line. I thought, yeh, that’s exactly how it was. Peggy escapes into her writing.

She tells the duchess (and us the reader) the story of how she came to be a long-term patient. It’s in the title. Willie was a shopkeeper she worked for. Firstly, as a fifteen-year old, delivering papers. Willie was thirty-three, an old married man. He made concessions to her gender, although it wasn’t called that then. She was just a good looking wee lassie that didn’t have to pick up the bundled papers from the railway station, like the boys did. It was during the second world war. Corner shops guaranteed an income. But it was owned by his wife. And she has arthritis, and liked a little drink. All of the stories in this collection involve women and men that like to drink, which, of course, was true. Only perhaps Ireland had more boozers per head of population, but it was a close call. Willie’s wife had an excuse. The little bottle of sherry helped with the pain.

Peggy didn’t think Willie was that wee or that married. Willie had a bit of a track record with young girls, but Peggy didn’t believe that either. She thought he might even be handsome, in a James Cagney sort of way.

The story flips back and forth between the cottage hospital and how Willie snared the then sixteen-year-old girl into make believing herself they had something that had never happened before. The ending is a topper. But on carrying on the story from the end of the war to Peggy being discharged to a high rise flat in the early seventies makes logical sense, but perhaps we don’t need to know that? Peggy, in writing a novel, wondered who would bother reading it. Finish with a bang, earlier. Her first novella was published when she was 58. There’s hope for rest of us old yins.

Read on.