Peter Geoghegan from The People’s Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never be the Same Again
Throughout the referendum campaign I was continually surprised by the range of answered elicited by the obvious question ‘why do you want independence?’ For Mark Frankland leaving the Union was necessary to deliver a written constitution and a bill of rights. He had, he said, seen authoritarian states first-hand travelling in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the 1980s and 90s. His concerns about civil liberties regularly featured in the thrillers he wrote with impressive alacrity. ‘How many books have you written?’ I asked at one stage. ‘Oh, about 18.’. A copy of one, Mere Anarchy, looked down from a shelf in the consulting room. The cover was a skeleton in what appeared to be the uniform of a Nazi Lager framed by a blood red sky. He had written a book about a Palestinian refugee family in Glasgow and another, the Cull, about drug abuse in Dumfries. (The area has a long-standing smack problem. Earlier in 2014, police seized heroin worth £1.2m from a car on the M74 near Dumfries.) An Amazon reviewer commended Frankland’s Terrible Beauty, set in Belfast during the Troubles, for its verisimilitude: ‘The author has taken a heavy subject and written a page turner, having read it again, I still couldn't put it down.’ Frankland was ‘hugely confident’ of victory in the referendum, predicting a 60/40 vote for Yes. And what about Dumfries and the Scottish Borders, renowned bastions of Unionist sentiment? ‘It’ll be 50/50 here, which means we’ll win everywhere else. I asked how he would feel if it was a No. He grimaced. ‘I’d be sick as a parrot.’ Throughout the campaign he had been publishing a new book, Toxic, chapter-by-chapter online. ‘It’s like Dickens did,’ he smiled. Toxic was set against the backdrop of the referendum. The final instalment appeared on 18 September. The closing lines were less hopeful than their author had been a few weeks earlier: ‘And then they climbed back on board their quad bikes and left the old glacial rocks in the clearing to another million years of silence.’
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Everyone admits the Border countryside is of another world, of a limpid beauty, tranquillity and gentle intensity that stuns if only because the visible gawping tourists are almost nil. John Murray, Reiver Blues.
The border between England and Scotland is often envisaged as a straight line running east to west. Perhaps the erroneous journalistic shorthand for Scotland ‘north of Hadrian’s Wall’ is at least partly responsible for this fallacy. If anything, the meandering border stretches broadly north to south, from its most easterly point beyond Berwick’s town limits to Gretna, 80 miles or so southwest. The Scottish Borders is often depicted as a peaceful land of picturesque villages, panoramic valleys and horizon-filling peat bog. Conservative, with a small ‘c’ and a large. The Borders were expected to deliver a solid No on September 18, just as they had done in the ill-fated 1979 devolution referendum. Then as now, why change what does not need changing was a common sentiment in prosperous Borders’ towns and villages. But the border between England and Scotland was not always so tranquil. Between the 13th and the 16th centuries the Borders was a wild, dangerous place. During the violent, intermittent wars between England and Scotland, Godfrey Watson wrote, Borderers could ‘rarely go to sleep without the fear of attack’. Often the assault came not from armies of one kingdom or another, but from Border ‘Reivers’, the rough balladeering men who launched frequent raids into enemy territory, stealing livestock and disrupting quotidian life. As it is at borders from Kosovo to South Sudan today, the trouble at the frontier often served a political purpose for the Scottish and English potentates.