Edwin Muir was no stranger to the bitter pains of existence. When he was fourteen, his family had left Orkney and moved to Glasgow, then most overcrowded and slum-ridden of all Britain’s cities. Here, within the space of a few years, both his parents and two of his brothers died. He drifted from job to job, until in his early twenties he found himself working in a factory on the Clyde to which animal bones were transported from all over Scotland to be reduced to charcoal. Festooned with slowly writhing fat yellow maggots, the bones gave off a ‘gentle, clinging, sweet stench’ when shovelled into the furnaces, and on hot summer days this stood around the factory like a ‘wall of glass’. The dirt and stench left Muir with a sense of shame that settled within him ‘like a grimy deposit’. He would wake suddenly in the night with the chilling realization that his life had gone wrong. Walking beside the Clyde one evening, he wondered idly whether he might throw himself in.

~ Maggie Fergusson