Writer takes inspiration from Caithness upbringing
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A WICK-born writer has talked about how his childhood experiences growing up in Caithness with an "ideological" father have helped shape his new novel, which has been garnering rave reviews from critics .
The book by Ewan Morrison is called Nina X and deals with a woman who escapes from the cult she was born and raised within and who now has to survive in the real world. Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh called it an "amazing book" and said there are few writers left in Britain who have Morrison's "ambition, vision and empathy".
Ewan said: "At first glance, Nina X would seem to be about as far removed from Caithness as you can get.
"It's set in North London, within a Communist-run collective that has deteriorated into a cult keeping women imprisoned, and also within the departments of social services and the NHS that Nina comes into contact with after her escape at age 28. But there are elements connected to my upbringing with our family in Wick."
Now living in Glasgow, the author's formative years were spent in Wick and he said that people may well remember him as the "stuttering kid" at the local schools he attended.
"I know that stuttering causes many people to suffer, not just the stutterer, and I recall that some kids in Pulteneytown Academy and Wick High School used to have compassion for me as I struggled to speak."
Nina from the novel may not have a stutter but has to endure "total language control" by the five "comrades" who control her life. The comrades in the collective make her write a diary – or report of her thoughts, words and actions – every day, and they police her use of words, making her erase anything that they disagree with politically.
She is not allowed to say “want” or “like” or “pretty” or “good”, as the comrades in the collective see these as contaminated words from capitalism. Most of all she is not allowed to say the word “I” – as it is seen as selfish.
"For a child growing up in a collective where language is policed in this way, it messes with her mind, in much the same way that a stutter does.
"She becomes very self-conscious about saying the right words and not saying forbidden things like 'I want', 'I like' or 'I need' because she knows that if she does she will be punished. This, for me, was like growing up with a stutter, where some words become 'feared words' that you know you’re going to stutter when you speak."
Ewan remembered how some of his contemporaries helped him overcome the issue, with one bossy girl from the high school telling the other children to "just let him finish” if he was struggling.
"The other thing that connects with my childhood is that growing up in Wick, I came to realise that my sister and I were something of an ideological experiment. My dad was, of course, big Dave, the hippy librarian of the north, but he was also a man tormented by his politics.
"He’d moved to Wick and Thurso via Reaster – our first home which was pretty desolate and cut off, being in the middle of a moorland – and I think he wanted to cut his ties with the past and start over in 1968, in a place where nobody knew him."
Ewan said his father saw himself as an idealist – a Scottish nationalist very much against the constraints of the kirk, who ran the Wick folk club and the festival of poetry, folk and jazz in the 1970s.
"He was always getting into trouble and offending people by bringing hippies, beatniks and other arty types up north. But he had a deep-seated hatred of bureaucrats and money-men, of 'the system'.
"I think he had an idea that my sister and I would be brought up away from the contaminated ideas of modern capitalist Britain."
In the book, Nina is the child of a great utopian experiment. The collective believe they can cut her off from the rest of the world and bring her up without any contamination from values from the hated world of capitalism beyond.
"Her story is like a much more extreme version of my own," Ewan said. "We had no TV when we first moved to Wick – my parents were against it. Then we had a black-and-white one years after everyone else had switched to colour.
"For Nina in the novel, she has no TV, and no radio. She is not allowed out of the collective house and so her world is only what she can see from her window."
Despite his own childhood isolation, Ewan fondly recalls cliff-top walks round the Caithness coast during which his mind would wander. "No doubt, from that, I developed the desire to tell stories in the first place."
Nina X is available to buy on Amazon.
