This observation brings me to the prompt for my own back-country tourism. I was in pursuit of my Scottish great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair, from Turriff in Aberdeenshire. In a chapbook, The Story of His Life and Times as Told by Himself, published in Columbo [Ceylon] in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took him). Born in 1832, there was a mean village upbringing. A book-hungry lad leaving school at 12 years of age and commencing his education, ‘such as it was and is’. Sinclair describes a farming family of ‘discounted’ Jacobite stock, a father getting work when he could as a thatcher and a barely literate mother. With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden—just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on his return journey to investigate his purchase. ‘As I walked from Aberdeen I could not help sitting down occasionally by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and the neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy rose at 4 a.m. to cultivate his own small patch among ‘a wilderness of moorland farms’. His special pride was a plot of potatoes. He bathed in a burn and caught trout. The pattern of his life, the intimacy with the ground, the eye on the weather, the threats from landlords and remote investors, was a northern version of the subsistence regime of the Ash à ninka. After reading Alexander Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants, Sinclair conceived an ambition to follow in the author’s footsteps over the Andes.
“Diary”
Sinclair, Iain. London Review of Books Vol. 41, No. 19 (Oct. 10, 2019), p. 48-49.
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