Luminous, episodic, sensual, rather like memory itself.
– Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman
Childhood’s Hill
by Marjorie Wilsom
Paperback:
“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.”
Out of print
“WOW! Stephanie Taylor really knocked my socks off with her novel! She has talent in spades and certainly made me cry.”
— Deborah J Miller, Writer
“An accomplished and impeccably penned narrative. Stephanie Taylor is a brilliant tour-guide through difficult and challenging human territory.”
— Christopher Rush, Author of Will
“This is a spellbinding book. A brilliant book, written with superbly accomplished skill and expressiveness, it is completely believable and authentic. It has heart, love and clarity, laced in and through, interlocked with dark apposite humour flashing out at just the right times like a harmonious symphony. There is not a wrong or discordant note throughout. Comic writing, which is passionate, truthful and spot on accurate.”
— Carol Norris, The Eildon Tree
About Marjorie Wilsom
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.