“While most people were getting married and settling down, thereby ensuring that they had a husband in their bedrooms, I was contentedly trapping in jam jars the night fliers – those heavy-winged creatures that invade our home of a summer evening. The moths. The night fliers. Not the children I might have had perhaps, but they filed a place and a purpose and they kept me content.”
A bitter-sweet, turn-of-the-century memoir about the Seventh Daughter, a child blessed with strange powers and an almost pagan reverence for nature, growing up in Edinburgh and the countryside of Midlothian. Childhood’s Hill is in turn bitingly funny and tragic, innocent and utterly wise. With acute powers of observation and a sharp wit, Marjorie Wilson paints her life in vignettes – dancing classes, a garden lit by moonlight, the loss of her friend Eilleen, her mother’s bustling restaurant on the Bridges and the grandfather with a horse called Taliban. A rhythm of dreaming and waking pervades this deeply interiorised portrait of the self, “the dot within the circle.”
Luminous, episodic, sensual, rather like memory itself.
— Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman
Out of print
In her youth, Marjorie was a regular contributor to BBC radio, reading her own stories, and had many articles published in Scots Magazine. She travelled widely, went sailing, and was a Red Cross nurse during WWI. Then, for twenty years, she stayed at home to nurse her sick mother.
Marjorie attended Lynn’s writing group in her nineties. It was there that Lynn recognised the power of Marjorie’s lyrical prose. Childhood’s Hill was published two years before Marjorie died.
“luminous, episodic, sensual, rather like memory itself”
— Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman
“As lovely as read as I can remember. Wonderful descriptive passages.”
— Maurice Fleming, Scots Magazine
