Salvage by Mark Baillie

When I was a bairn, back in the seventies, every year at tattie-howkin time the Meadows in Crieff, my home town, used to be taken over by Scots Travellers in their vans and caravans, dozens of them. They’d converge on Crieff for the howkin and then disperse again a couple of weeks later. When I was very young, seven or eight, my mother used to warn me away, saying the “tinks” would carry me off and I’d never be seen again. I’ve never understood why my mother chose to frighten me like that. She knew it wasn’t true, and indeed, when she was a girl she used to play with Traveller children herself, among them the mother of Jess Smith, the eminent writer. She would get beaten by her faither for doing so. 

I now understand that, from the 1900s to the 1960s, the reality was that the only children in danger of being taken away were children of the Travellers, many of them subjected to enforced removal by “the social” – social services backed up by police – and ripped from their families forever. The lucky ones – under fives – would be put up for adoption. Older children would be sent to work. The middle age group were the ones who suffered most, ending up in religious or local authority-run children’s homes where they were routinely beaten and abused and left with little hope of a good life. 

I discovered this through reading Mark Baillie’s brilliant new novel, Salvage, published by Tippermuir Books. Set in 1983, it takes as its focus the enforced removal of a six-year-old girl, Jenny Lacklow from her family in a Traveller campsite in Carluke in 1929. Her brother, Nash, a few years older than Jenny, witnessed the removal, and the ferocious fight put up by his mother to protect Jenny, the violence, police using billy clubs to beat the Travellers back while the Social people removed a child from its family and ripped the family asunder. 

In 1983, the now elderly Nash is told he is dying. Thoughts of mortality lead him to revisit the past and he decides he wants to find out about his little sister. Where did she go? What life did she have? Was she still alive? His nephew, Spence, thinks this is a bad idea, but Nash enlists Spence’s daughter, Emma to help him. Emma is at university, the first in the family to do so, and she’s smart. She’ll be able to find Jenny, surely? And so begins an absolutely fascinating – and at times heartbreaking, at other times uplifting – adventure. 

There is a lot in the novel about truth. Emma’s university professor says during one of her classes: “When it came to the telling of history, truth was a complicated business.” Edna O’Brien, who died the day I wrote this review, once noted: “History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.” This is a truth picked up on in his poetry by the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, who talked of the difference between received history and lived experience – what’s in the history books and what people felt as they experienced life. MacLean was referring to the Highlanders and Islanders who were cleared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the Irish who fled the famine. Scots Travellers, too, have endured traumas over the generations and their voices have gone equally unheard. The official records, such as they were, would list that a child had been taken into care for the good of its health, to protect it from illness and deprivation and abject poverty. That official record did not talk about a covert but concerted campaign to obliterate the Traveller lifestyle, to ensure that Traveller encampments could be broken up and “trouble makers” (in the official argot) could be moved on. Truth? Truth is what people can be made to believe. Ask Donald Trump. 

Emma and Nash and Spence come up against the truth time and again. And, time and again, they are on the wrong side of the narrative, cast as the ones at fault, the modern day trouble makers. It is an insidious thing, the way a society can see what it wants to see and ignore what is inconvenient. Privilege is at the heart of it. Protest is easy when you have a safe, warm bed to return to afterwards. Emma, Nash and Spence, Travellers by descent, now live in static homes but they are still outsiders. The law, truth, is different for them. 

The trouble is, the powers that be always believe themselves to be right. They are the upholders of faith, decency, honesty, truth. They run the system, and the system controls everyone. 

Nash talks about and seems to see “the Social” as if it is a “mindless machine”, a “depersonalised system of the state” but Emma is more curious about the faceless people behind the machine. Who were the men who would rip an infant from her family? What possessed them to do such a thing? 

She tracks down evidence of Dr Banks, a 1920s public health official who talked about the need to take Traveller children into care. It was a matter of public health, he said: “tinker sites are unhygenic – and what does a tinker do but travel? … they spread their muck and waste and … this is what creates disease.” Dr Banks had weighed the matter up, he said, and removing Traveller children was “not only the right thing to do, it is the Christian thing to do.” The “Social”, then, was delivering a public good. And how do you fight that? 

Salvage is a wonderful book, part mystery, part historical record, part social study, part political analysis. It is immensely readable but genuinely thought-provoking. The characters of Nash, Emma and Spence live and breathe on the page. This could easily have turned into an exercise in didacticism, the characters becoming weary saints battling an alien system, but Mark Baillie’s acute characterisation brings them to life, flaws and all. He doesn’t offer easy answers for our injured bystanders, but he does offer hope. Lots of that. 

And that’s enough to be going on with.