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John Sakeouse, from Stowaway to Cherished Citizen of Edinburgh

by Wendy MacIntyre

21/6/2023

Two weeks ago in Edinburgh’s Scottish National Portrait Gallery, I sought out a painting I have long wanted to see. Amidst the elaborately attired kings and queens, politicians, scientists and poets is the image of a young man in a sealskin suit holding an upright harpoon. He is neither Scots-born nor of Scots descent, but an Inuk born in Greenland. He is also probably the only former stowaway among the Portrait Gallery’s luminaries,

His name is John Sakeouse, and he was – from the time of his arrival in Edinburgh’s port of Leith until his death – one of the city’s best loved and most celebrated citizens. Fittingly, his portrait in the Gallery hangs at eye-level so that we seem to greet him face to face. His gaze is clear and far-seeing, the set of his head proud. That he feels very much present to us is in large part due to the skill of the artist, Alexander Nasmyth, who was Sakeouse’s friend and teacher.

By the time the two met, Sakeouse was already a man of rare accomplishment and daring. He was born in Disko Bay off the Davis Strait where British and Dutch whalers took anchorage each year. An expert hunter and kayaker, he was baptized by resident missionaries who likely encouraged his skills as a draughtsman. But at age 18, distraught because the mother of the woman he loved would not consent to their marriage, he turned his back on his home and set out to sea in his kayak. He may have been obsessed with the idea of becoming a qivittoq, the Greenland Inuit word for a man stripped of his name and his past life, a solitary wanderer who communes only with animals and spirits. He was lovelorn, in despair and seeking a kind of living death upon the open sea.

That fate was transformed by the sudden appearance of a whaling ship, The Thomas and Ann, on her return journey to Leith. His decision to smuggle himself and his 16-pound kayak on board must have been instantaneous. He was probably helped by seamen on the whaler sympathetic to his plight.

There is a variation of his story that has Sakeouse boarding The Thomas and Ann in secret while it was still anchored at Disko Bay. But it is the first version – of a man severed from the woman he loves, engulfed in despair, vowing his own isolation from all humankind – that I find most satisfying. All that follows in his life, the vast distances he traversed geographically, socially and psychologically, demands a generative myth at its heart. By throwing off the crabbed, alien existence of the qivittoq, he opened his own horizon to a world in which he would find fame and an ancient city’s undying affection.

When Captain John Newton discovered the stowaway, he was so impressed by the young man’s desire to study drawing and see the country from which the missionaries came, he agreed to take him. It was in the waters of Leith harbour that John Sakeouse first captivated the people of Edinburgh soon after his arrival. Captain Newton helped him advertise displays of his nautical skills, and the money collected covered the cost of his lodging and food. Hundreds of residents of Edinburgh attended these events, enthralled by Sakeouse’s speed in the kayak, his ability to roll it “turning turtle”, and re-emerge immediately unharmed. His mastery of the bird dart and harpoon drew gasps from the elegantly dressed women who came to watch and from the men and boys who thronged the roofs of the harbour buildings for a better view. He could spear and split a ship’s biscuit bobbing on the waves at 30 yards.

In September he won a taxing race against six oarsmen in a whaling boat. With his exceptional strength and muscular build, he was able to complete the 10-mile course in just 16 minutes, far outstripping his competitors.

A genial and modest man, he soon fitted into his new home. He loved to walk, exploring the world of the harbour and the streets of Edinburgh. I imagine him striding the Royal Mile from the Castle on its volcanic base down to the Palace of Holyrood where Mary Queen of Scots once danced. I see him in the Grassmarket smiling at the shepherds, then wandering up through the Cowgate and the grounds of Greyfriars Kirkyard. He climbs Calton Hill and the escarpment of Arthur’s Seat for the aerial views of the city’s soaring spires that lure the eye to look ever farther beyond.

Compared with the tiny community of Disko Bay with its scattered wooden homes, Edinburgh must have seemed to him at first overwhelmingly vast and disorienting, its stone buildings wider and taller than the greatest of the ships he had seen. Because he was a brave and adventurous man, he sailed through this disorientation, as sleekly as in his kayak. In this case, he sailed by walking.

It was on one of those walks that Sakeouse met Alexander Nasmyth who offered to give him drawing lessons. Nasmyth painted Sakeouse wearing his sealskin jacket and with a look of the open sea in his eyes. Sakeouse was in fact soon to find himself once again sailing the waters of the Davis Strait. Another of his Edinburgh friends, the eminent scientist Sir John Hall, recommended him to the British Admiralty as an interpreter on the 1818 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. Sakeouse agreed to go, but only on condition he not be left in Greenland, but allowed to return to Edinburgh. He sailed on commander Captain John Ross’s flagship Isabella, as a paid supernumerary.

Although Captain Ross failed to find the elusive passage to the Pacific, his expedition was a success of in terms of mapping and discovery. For his part, Sakeouse bravely fulfilled his mission, going out on to the ice alone to meet with a group of northern Greenland Inuit − the Inughuit – who were alarmed by the apparition of the expedition’s ships. He approached the group bearing gifts and two white flags. The Inuit brandished their hunting knives, threatening to kill him. Their languages were similar enough that he was able to reassure them he was a man like them, with a mother and father, despite his strange naval top hat and white breeches. They asked about the ships. What were these strange creatures? He explained they were houses made of wood, come out of the south, beyond the land of the ice.

After that first encounter, the northern Greenland Inuit stayed away two days. When at last they returned, Sakeouse persuaded them to go aboard and meet the Captain and his officers. All these details we can see in his watercolour “First Communication with the Natives of Regents Bay, as Drawn by John Sakeouse and Presented to Captain Ross, August 10, 1818.” His precision in depicting the anchored ships in full rigging, the surrounding glaciers and sporting whales vividly conjures up the setting. Yet it is in portraying the human drama that Sakeouse excels.

He shows us the courage in his lone approach toward the frightened Inuit, carrying his gifts and two white flags. In his sailor’s top hat, navy jacket, white breeches and knee-high boots, he stands, a proud yet non-threatening figure. His portrayal of the meeting between the Inuit in their parkas and the British naval officers in their ceremonial uniforms and cocked hats conveys their eventual ease in one another’s company as they smile and join hands. My favourite details of his watercolour are the Inuit’s sled dogs, and the figure in a sled, thrown back in his seat by the dogs’ onward rush. This person wears white breeches, a naval jacket and knee-high boots. It appears this is Sakeouse himself, exhilarated at being reunited with the sled dogs of his own culture. His delight in observing and capturing a full range of human character and emotion is evident in this work. Engraved copies of his vibrant depiction of this historic encounter are today held by Library and Archives Canada and the Royal Museums, Greenwich.

After Captain Ross’s expedition returned to London, the Admiralty offered to pay for Sakeouse’s continuing art lessons with Alexander Nasmyth, as well his tutoring in English. He had sadly less than a year left to wander the streets of Edinburgh and Leith, greeting his friends and showing particular kindness to children. Despite his prodigious strength, he contracted typhoid, which he may have caught in London where there was an epidemic. His old friends Captain and Mrs. Newton nursed him lovingly and for a time it looked as if he would recover. But he suffered a relapse and died on Valentine’s Day, 1819, just 22 years of age.

The city’s newspapers reported that he was followed to his grave by a “numerous company, among whom were not only his old friends and patrons from Leith, but many gentlemen of high respectability in this city.” His obituaries praised his kindness, recounting the occasion he had led home two children lost one snowy day in Leith, and given them the coat off his back.

In his two years in Edinburgh, he had become a legendary figure, admired and cherished for his skills, strength, modesty and gracious, gentle manner. I thought of him when I visited Leith and saw the Royal Yacht Britannia, now permanently docked in the harbour, and one of the U.K.’s most popular tourist attractions. It pleased me to picture John Sakeouse in his kayak, outstripping the massive yacht, with its gargantuan steam engines and 250-man crew. He sweeps by them, swift as a bird, and unencumbered.

A Brave Journalist’s Foray into the World’s Most Toxic Wastelands

by Wendy MacIntyre

What happens when the world’s most devastated sites are left to recover on their own, free of human interference? In her meticulously researched Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, Scottish investigative journalist Cal Flyn gives us an answer both apocalyptic and optimistic.

A writer of remarkable physical and emotional courage, Flyn takes us to the city of Pripyat in Ukraine, largely abandoned after the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Although visitors are barred from entering the decaying buildings, she defies the order and finds everywhere a new forest of birch, maple and poplar rising amidst the ruins. This resurgence is astounding, given that Chernobyl is the most radioactively contaminated site in history. In the worst affected areas in the aftermath of the meltdown, every mammal perished within a few days. However, by 2010 wildlife had rebounded, including deer, elk, lynx, boar, beaver, and even the brown bear, not seem in the region for a century.

That said, the region’s flora and fauna are all radioactive and therefore unfit for human consumption. But they are nonetheless flourishing and animal populations continue to grow. Flyn’s book was published prior to the current war in Ukraine. Only time will reveal the full extent of this terrible conflict’s impact and how it may affect the Chernobyl region’s hopeful resurgence of wildlife and woods.

Naturally regenerated forests are springing up worldwide, Flyn tells us, on vast tracts of abandoned agricultural land, including on the former collective farms of the U.S.S.R. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these lands were first covered with wildflowers and brambles, then softwood saplings, and finally, hardwood forests. It is estimated that about 40,000 square miles of forest have regrown in Eastern Europe flourishing on lands human beings have forsaken. As Flyn points out, an unexpected benefit of the Soviet Union’s termination is the prospect of large-scale carbon sequestration in the soil of abandoned collective farms. Studies suggest that this equates to the reduction of at least 7.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Near Verdun, France, Flyn ventures onto a site that initially seems irretrievably damaged – the region that saw one of the First World War’s most horrific battles. Within an area of eight square miles, 300,000 men perished as a result of months of relentless shelling and onslaughts of poisoned gas. She describes the area as an “annihilated landscape” with no discernible landmarks of any kind. The desolation is the result of as many as 40 million shells being fired into the hills. This dead zone was therefore not only devastated but also riddled with unexploded shells and chemical weapons.

After the war, the authorities strove to restore the battlefields of the Somme and Ypres to workable farmland. But near Verdun, with its extreme damage, the land remains largely off limits. The French authorities planted this area they called the Zone Rouge with black pines, a hardy species that can still thrive in soil stripped almost to bedrock. In this area of dark forest, thick with brambles, Flyn finds 15 species of fern, wild thyme, and rare orchids along the edge lands. She hears the trill of birdsong and feels “the astonishing fortune of living in such a vast and endlessly forgiving world.”

A mere five miles away is a hellish place where no tree grows. This is the site the authorities call the Place à Gaz. Here, in 1928, the French government made the decision to dig a trench for the 200,000 unused chemical weapons gathered after the armistice. They set these ablaze, poisoning the land. Because of its dangers, the soil dense with arsenic and heavy metals, Place à Gaz proves difficult for Flyn to locate. In her hotel room she pores over satellite imagery of the Zone Rouge until she spies an unusual mauve splotch in the woods not far from the farm where the chemical weapons were first stockpiled.

The next day she finds the elusive Place à Gaz, surrounded by an eight-foot-high military-type fence of wire mesh, with razor wire at its base. Peering through, she can see a clearing with a drift of pale butterflies and at its centre, a pool of arsenic-laden ash. Around the lethal pool grows the tufted grass commonly found in marshes, and hidden beneath, the lichen known as Cladonia fimbriata. It is these plants Flyn most wants to see because of their adaptation to living in particularly perilous environments. The tufted grass and lichen limit their intake of the metals so as to avoid a toxic buildup.

Their neighbouring plant, a moss (Pohlia nutans) with tiny, many-headed fronds, uses a different strategy, transporting the metal salts through its tendrils and then consolidating them. Plants of this type are known as hyperaccumulators, Flyn tells us. Given their thirst for toxic metals, they have tremendous potential for the recovery of extremely polluted soils. She mentions the brake fern, which removes arsenic from the soil and is being tested as natural filter for contaminate water in Bangladesh.

In keeping with her utter dedication to her journalistic craft and quest, Flyn shimmies through a hole she finds under the fence, dug by either a badger or a dog. She adds she is thankful she is a small person. To prevent contact with the arsenic-laden soil, she clamps her mouth shut and closes her eyes. Once she is through, she feels the soft ground shift beneath her feet. The green of the forest is “intoxicatingly bright,” an effect of the arsenic itself.

Despite the fact she stands on ground consisting of ash from 200,000 incinerated chemical weapons, she sees that this treacherous forest does indeed offer hope. Through the work of the hyperaccumulators – the specialized mosses and grasses – a nightmare site is being transformed into a habitable environment for other plant life. The surge of adrenalin she feels is only part fear; it is a charged response as well, to the earth’s mysterious, merciful ways.

Flyn’s research takes her to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, stricken by the eruption of a super-volcano, to Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains where native trees and shrubs wage a war of survival against thousands of alien species introduced by German colonial powers, to California’s artificially created Salton Sea, now brewing lethal toxins, and to the remote deserted Scottish island of Swona where the once domestic cattle have reverted to ancient behaviours, including mourning the death of an elderly black bull.

Gathering and analyzing her findings, she concludes her book with the urgent plea that we find faith enough to fight the looming apocalypse of climate disaster. It is we, she maintains, who are today’s super-volcanoes. It is humankind that continues to wreak havoc in a world that still strives to heal itself.

Lambhill

by Wendy MacIntyre

Last month I had to cancel a planned trip to Scotland because of the sudden decline and death of our beloved cat Mumbai. He was a rare, sunny-natured, empathetic being, sensitive to our least physical or mental anguish, and always generous with his comfort. He was with us fourteen and a half years, a stretch of time I now recognize as akin to living with a guardian angel. I do not say this lightly. His compassion was palpable, warm as his fur.

Had the journey to Scotland gone ahead, I would have been visiting the gravesite of one of the kindest persons I have ever encountered – my grandmother Jessie MacIntyre. She is buried in Glasgow’s Lambhill Cemetery with her parents. I last saw my grandmother when I was five, the year my parents immigrated to Canada. She doted on me, her only grandchild. I was aware, even at that young age, of her tender concern for others’ well-being and her always gentle nature.

As a young woman she had worked briefly as a wardress in a women’s prison. She would sit listening to the women describe the misfortunes they had suffered and cry along with them. She was ill suited for the job because their affliction was more than she could bear.

It is only in recent years that I have considered fully how unbearable it must have been for her to see her only son, and her grandchild and daughter-in-law leave Scotland. She died a mere six years later, age 67. Her many years as a domestic cleaner no doubt took a toll on her health. My grandfather, a man of irrepressible bonhomie ever ready with a joke and a song, would spend his wages in the pub entertaining his friends. My grandmother was therefore the breadwinner who paid the bills, through hard labour on her hands and knees making other people’s homes spotless.

My great-grandmother Jessie Doig Millar also worked as a cleaner. When she was over 60, she was still scrubbing the ornate corridors of Glasgow City Chambers. Like her daughter, she cleaned floors on her hands and knees, labour she took on to sustain her family after her husband died in 1923. It was his position as an institute janitor with a Christian mission in the Maryhill district of the city that had brought the Millar family from Perth to Glasgow in 1916.

That move – during the First World War where many men were serving overseas –opened employment opportunities for woman never seen before. My grandmother became the first female tram conductor in the history of Glasgow. I treasure the photograph of her in her uniform and broad-brimmed hat with numbered badge. She has a whistle and a box-shaped change-making machine attached to a leather strap across her chest. She appears to be holding bundles of tickets. She looks clear-eyed, proud and radiant. Her face bears an uncanny resemblance to my sister Jackie’s.

My own face, serious, lean, with high-cheekbones and prominent nose, I find in photos of my great-grandmother as a middle-aged woman. When I was given these photos a few years ago, the strong resemblance came as a shock. The great-grandmother I remembered from 1952 was a frail, stooped, wizened person, always in a lace mob cap and knitted shawl. She was nearly always seated, with a sturdy, gnarled cane in her hands. Her face and her body bore the marks of her lifelong toil, raising seven children and a grandson, and cleaning and taking in laundry to make ends meet. At five I believe I was a little afraid of her. She was the oldest person I had ever met. Her spine was badly bent. She had a sharp wit I was far too young to appreciate.

Her working life had begun when she was in her teens, as a domestic servant in rural Perthshire where her father was a farm labourer. She would get one weekend a month to visit her parents. According to my third-cousin Ewan Hebenton, the family archivist, their farewells were always tearful. When she was 20, working as a maid on a farm in southern Perthshire, my great-grandmother Jessie met her future husband, William Brand Millar, then employed as a ploughman. The newlyweds lived first at Gallowhill, Cargill where Jessie’s parents worked a pendicle − the Scottish term for a smallholding rented from a larger estate.

It was at Gallowhill that my grandmother Jessie, their first child, was born in 1891. Three years later, they moved to the small village of Ladybank in Fife, close to the farming area where William had grown up. In 1907 the family moved again, this time to Perth where my great-grandfather had secured a position as Park Ranger of all the city’s green spaces. Among the functions held on these parklands was “hiring out day” when district farmers would come to interview and hire new farmhands. During the summer holidays, my great-grandmother would take the younger children to her parents’ pendicle where they could enjoy the countryside and help care for the cow, pigs and poultry.

Given my great-grandmother’s attachment to these quiet, rural settings, it must have been wrenching for her to make the move to the huge industrial city of Glasgow in 1916. But it was there she continued to live, amidst the reek of the smokestacks, until her death, age 85, in 1956.

It was only five years ago I learned there was no memorial stone marking the plot where my grandmother and great-grandparents are buried. At the time of their deaths no one in the family could afford to purchase a monument. I determined I would give them a memorial stone and made my request to the City of Glasgow which owns and administers Lambhill Cemetery. I was rebuffed because I did not hold the legal deed of title for the plot. That deed had long ago been lost. I sent a letter of appeal to the appropriate authorities which met with silence.

Then I had the idea of writing to the Glasgow City Councillor for Maryhill, the district where my grandparents lived for decades in a tenement flat that was just a room and kitchen. In my letter to Councillor John Letford, I emphasized my need to pay tribute to these two women whose working lives were entwined with Glasgow’s history – my grandmother Jessie as the city’s first female tram conductor and my great-grandmother, as a widowed 60-year-old scrubbing the marble floors of City Chambers.

Within a week Councillor Letford had waved away the bureaucratic obstacles. I received an email from the Manager of Bereavement Services for the City of Glasgow, informing me I could have a memorial stone erected at the gravesite, but that I could not be buried there myself without the deed of title. In 2017 my sister Jackie and I visited the plot with its new hand-carved green granite memorial stone. It pleases me that the cemetery is named Lambhill, so reminiscent of the rural landscape of Perthshire where my grandmother and great-grandmother grew up.

From my grandmother I have inherited a cameo brooch whose intaglio image is a woman in Grecian robes cradling a lamb. They are both depicted in profile and look into each other’s eyes with a most tender regard. Although admittedly a sentimental Edwardian image, it is also unmistakably fine, an evocation of loving kindness between creatures.

This morning as I did my five-mile walk past farmlands and grazing cattle where the two Jessie’s would have felt at home, I met the woman whose Border collie always barks at me in a frenzy. “He thinks you are a sheep,” she told me. And I thought that of course I would far rather be a lamb. Mumbai, like many Siamese an eloquent cat with a wide-ranging vocabulary, would on occasion make a sound much like the bleating of a lamb. I was uncertain what he intended by this utterance, but its gentleness was never in question.

The Happy Prince in Reading Gaol

by Wendy MacIntyre

Sentenced to two years’ hard labour for so-called “gross indecency, Oscar Wilde spent his first month in prison bound to a treadmill. Six hours day, he laboured up the same short, steep incline, with five minutes’ rest every twenty-five minutes − activity lacking all purpose other than degradation. His next punishment, carried out all day alone in his cell, was picking apart tarred rope to extract the fibre known as oakum. This work split open the flesh of his hands.

He suffered regular bouts of dysentery and diarrhoea as a result of the wretched prison diet and unsanitary living conditions. An ear infection, which prison authorities refused to treat, left him partially deaf. The glittering, self-created dandy who delighted in outraging convention was no more. Gaunt, with shaven head and coarse prison garb, he had come to resemble the statue in his children’s story, The Happy Prince, rendered repulsively drab once his jewels and gold leaf covering were stripped away.

Wilde wrote The Happy Prince and other fairy tales to read aloud to his young sons at a time long before his trial, when he still had a home life with his children and his wife Constance. The story is a retelling of Buddha’s awakening. The Prince grows up in the walled Palace of Sans-Souci, insulated from the world’s woes. It is not until his death, when he is made into a statue atop a high column, that he is able to see all the suffering in his kingdom: the seamstress with her ailing child, who must work all night to embroider passion flowers on the gown of a heartless client; the writer, faint with hunger in his freezing garret, who lacks the strength to finish the play due at the theatre the next morning; the barefoot match girl who has dropped her wares in the gutter and whose father will beat her if she comes home empty-handed.

The Prince’s agent in bringing aid to those in need is a swallow, who one night seeks shelter between his feet. The little bird’s companions have already departed for Egypt. He was late in joining them because he had fallen in love with a beautiful reed and was reluctant to leave her. But with winter coming, he must fly immediately to the land of the Nile. The Prince’s impassioned plea for help persuades the swallow to stay one more night, and then another and another….

On the first, the Prince asks the swallow to pluck the great ruby out of his sword hilt and take it to the slumbering seamstress. But on the nights following, the little bird initially refuses the Prince’s order that he prise out his sapphire eyes, one for the starving dramatist in his garret, and the other for the little match girl. I cannot, the bird insists, for you will be quite blind then.

Swallow, little swallow, do as I command you.

Then I will stay with you always, the bird replies. It is a decision tantamount to suicide for already the cold is depleting his strength. With what energy he has left, the swallow obeys the Prince’s command and removes leaf after leaf of the fine gold embellishment to distribute to the poor of the city. He has then only strength enough left to fly to the Prince’s shoulder to say good-bye. The Prince is overjoyed the swallow is leaving for Egypt at last. It is not to Egypt I am going, the bird replies. But to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep is he not? These are lines that moved me to tears as a five-year-old, and can do so still.

When God commands his angels to bring him the two most precious things in the city, they bring him the statue’s leaden heart and the dead bird. It is an ending that celebrates compassion and self-sacrifice − themes Oscar Wilde would not explore again in depth until after his own prison ordeal. He began his poetic masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, two years after his release. In every line, it might be the Happy Prince we hear describing for the little swallow the misery he sees and yearns to alleviate. The Ballad’s narrator is a prisoner whose experience mirrors Wilde’s own:

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,

We turned the dusty drill;

We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,

And sweated on the mill;

But in the heart of every man

Terror was lying still.

His compassionate eye focuses in particular, on a fellow prisoner condemned to be hung for the murder of his wife. Striving to wrench from within himself an understanding of the man’s crime, he comes to the insight that “each man kills the thing he loves,” some “with a bitter look, some with a flattering word and some with a sword.” In his refusal to judge and revile the murderer, the narrator wholly embodies the way of the Buddha.

Throughout the Ballad, Wilde’s narrator feels the agony of all his fellow prisoners: We were as men who through a fen/ of filthy darkness grope. The voice here belongs to a man, who like his Happy Prince avatar, has been stripped of everything but his essence. His is an urgent lamentation that something be done to ameliorate penitentiaries’ dehumanizing conditions.

After his release from Reading Gaol, Wilde wrote to the Editor of The Daily Chronicle documenting the many cruelties of prison life and advocating reform. He censured the treatment of children in particular: The terror of the child in prison is quite limitless…A child is utterly contaminated by prison life. But the contaminating influence is not that of the prisoners. It is of the whole prison system – the governor, the chaplain, the warders, the lonely cell, the isolation, the revolting food. The way children are treated at present is really an outrage on humanity and common sense.

It is telling that Wilde does not focus on his own misery during his two years’ hard labour, but rather on the most vulnerable of the prisons’ population. Broken, impoverished, infamous, separated from his own children whom he would never see again, he repudiates self-pity and embraces empathy. Through his experience of Reading Gaol, he became, for a time, as selfless as the Happy Prince and the swallow whose story he offered his sons.

Jennifer and the Flower Fairies

by Wendy MacIntyre

One of my most treasured childhood books, Jennifer and the Flower Fairies, is all in pieces. The pages have come away from the buckram spine. Pages 41/42 have fled altogether. In an historic raid, one of my younger siblings tore page 49 in half and defaced many of the delicate line illustrations with crayoned scrawls. Fortunately untouched is the flyleaf inscription in my mother’s small, neat hand: “To Wendy on her fifth birthday, with love and best wishes.”

The book’s cover is also still exactly as I keep it in memory, a deep blue border embellished with buttercup yellow drawings of the characters one will meet inside: Alfie the gnome with his teasel duster, the handsome Bluebell Prince in his billowing cape, the silly, arrogant high-hatted Lords and Ladies who fancies himself a fairy knight, and of course Jennifer herself, soaring on her newly acquired wings. Inset in this blue border is a photo portrait of the teenage Jennifer Gay, the host of BBC’s Television Children’s Hour. She has a lovely open face and smile, and a smooth pageboy hairdo secured by a red Alice band. She wears a flocked print dress of yellow-green with an immaculate white collar.

It was likely Jennifer’s photo image that immediately attracted me to the advertisement for the book in my parents’ News of the World Sunday paper. She looked, as I at five, wished one day to look. That I asked for this book and actually received it for my birthday was a piece of magic in itself. The tiny advertisement which had compelled my attention turned into the actual object in my hands.

I reread the book recently, revisiting the particular scenes that have lodged in my memory so strongly − like Alfie’s appearance in the BBC studio when Jennifer has closed her eyes, thinking how wonderful it would be if there really were fairies the size of her hand. And suddenly, there he is on her outstretched palm, weighing as much as “a rather heavy feather.” I loved Alfie’s rudeness and how he told Jennifer, when she first sees him, not to gulp like a fish in a bowl. He was my first experience of an external perspective on human beings, subjected to a purely critical eye. In Alfie’s opinion, we are noisy, dusty and of course much too big. “A horrible size, like a great mountain,” he tells Jennifer, as he gives her a pill to make her small enough to enter the fairy realm.

Alfie entices her there with dreams, whispering in her ear of how he can stand on his head inside a foxglove or visit the children of the Moon. These imagined visions have stayed with me subliminally, whereas Jennifer’s running through the air to reach the television camera – dizzy, knees shaking – has remained with me as a visceral sensation. As has Alfie’s softening of the camera lens so that they can both push through to his world.

I had not forgotten the ruined pink marble fairy palace. However, the thought-arrows the Bluebell Prince seeks hidden away there had completely slipped my mind. Armed with these, Jennifer returns to the mortal world on a fairyland commission. She is charged with confronting and dissuading a group of boys from destroying a bluebell wood. I had interiorized the pictured image of the wood itself, and am quite sure that my mother and I had at some point visited a real one outside Glasgow. That remembered luxuriance likely seeded my enduring love for blue flowers of all kinds.

Perhaps above all else, Alfie’s little song has stayed with me, a charming reworking of the Golden Rule, with enough silliness to catch a child’s attention: Do as you would be done by, do as you would be did. A boiling pot is mighty hot, so don’t sit on the lid.

With the help of Google, I have learned that Annette Mills, the author of Jennifer and the Flower Fairies, was also the creator of the Muffin the Mule stories. A YouTube video allowed me to hear at last Jennifer Gay introducing Children’s Hour on the BBC. I had not seen the program in Scotland because my parents did not own a television. Her articulation is as one would expect, immaculate as her white collar. She sounds very like the young Queen Elizabeth. Jennifer is every bit as lovely and quietly confident in this archival video as she is on the cover of my childhood treasure. I yearn to be like her still, even with the passing of so many decades.

A Japanese Tree in Scandinavia

by Wendy MacIntyre

In this time of pandemic and primeval fear, it is bracing to revisit Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, where one man’s potent prayers reverse the world’s destruction.

We first meet the aging actor Alexander on his birthday. He and his young son, Little Man, are planting a leafless Japanese tree on the shore of the remote Scandinavian island. “It looks dead,” Alexander says half-ruefully, then tells his son the tale of an Orthodox monk who planted a dead tree on a mountainside and instructed his apprentice to water it every day. The novice did so dutifully, until one morning he found the mountainside covered with blossoms.

This wondrous flowering is not the first miracle to which the film alludes. The opening credits have already unspooled over an image of the new-born Christ child in Mary’s lap, his tiny right hand raised in blessing and his left touching the kneeling wise man’s vessel of myrrh. These three figures – mother, child and magus – are the tranquil centre of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Adoration of the Magi, which the artist left unfinished at the underpainting stage of browns and yellows. The work’s sole colour is the dark green of the leaves of the tree beneath which Mary and her baby sit.

Alexander has a reproduction of the painting on the wall above the daybed in his study. Its powerfully executed figures, albeit seen through a glass darkly, reappear throughout the film, sometimes superimposed upon the action. Otto, the local postman and former history teacher, confesses he finds the picture sinister. “I’ve always been terrified of Leonardo,” he tells Alexander.

In fact, da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi overturns the hallowed serenity we associate with the event. The coming of the three Oriental kings has attracted a vast throng of onlookers whose faces are contorted by anguish and confusion. They crowd each other. They stare in opposite directions. There seems to be a frantic energy is on the loose, a frenzy the horses in the background absorb, pawing wildly at the air.

The Madonna, the Christ child and the magus make up the still point in this churning world. All around them is a reality as sinister as the one the postman intuits. Otto is a collector of people’s paranormal experiences. He perceives what others do not. In an insightful prediction, he tells Alexander: “You’re so gloomy. You’re grieving, waiting for something.”

And to Little Man, Otto says: “But you are mute, mute as a fish,” a simile that reveals the import of the bandage the child has around his throat. We come to understand the boy has recently undergone surgery, whose cause is never explained. His doctor, Viktor, who arrives for Alexander’s birthday celebration, assures Little Man the incision is healing well.

With Viktor’s coming, the household’s secrets begin to be exposed. Alexander’s wife Adelina is so clinging and effusively affectionate with him it is evident the two have had an affair. Yet she seems unaware of the palpable erotic tension between Viktor and Marta, Alexander and Adelina’s adult daughter. A former actress given to histrionic gestures, Adelina is almost entirely self-obsessed, pacing while loudly bemoaning the fact Alexander has chosen to leave the stage and their glamorous life in the city. She is callously demanding of their maid Maria, a woman of striking beauty, with a childlike open face. Maria hides her hair under a black headscarf. Her long dress resembles a nun’s habit. Otto the postman pays humble court to her, smoothing his thinning hair. He perceives her purity to which the others are oblivious. Maria simply stares through him, and after her work is done, leaves her employers’ house, where everything is about to change.

The apocalypse announces itself through the trembling of crystal goblets on a tray, a disturbance that might at first be a playful poltergeist causing minor havoc. Then a terrible roaring erupts above the house, a ripping open of the skies. A tall jar brimful of milk bursts out of the china cabinet, spilling its contents in a thick white stream. On the shortwave, an affectless government spokesperson urges citizens to stay calm and remain where they are. His tone makes clear the roaring has ushered in the End of Time. After the transmission goes dead, Adelina’s hysterical cries pierce the briefest cleft of silence. Her naked terror takes the shape of a prolonged corkscrewing wail, perilously infectious, that tests our endurance as viewers.

Only the sedative Viktor administers in a hypodermic syringe can quieten her. We are grateful for the respite of silence and for the camera’s lingering on the peacefully sleeping child, sealed away from mortal panic and despair between immaculate lace-edged sheets. Little Man’s metal bed frame, with its spare grid at head and foot, takes on the gleam of a Platonic form, unsullied by sin and worldliness. The gauzy white curtain at his open window bells in and out with the soft wind, a visible breath of spirit blessing the child.

Alone in his study, Alexander falls to his knees in abject prayer, watched over by The Adoration of the Magi. He implores God to deliver them from this terrible time, and his children, wife and friends from looming death. If only God will make everything once again as it was early that morning, Alexander promises to relinquish all that he loves. He will even destroy his house and give up Little Man.

The force-field of his impassioned prayer summons Otto who tells him there is one last chance to save the world. Alexander must go to see the maid Maria and make love with her. She is a witch in the best sense, Otto insists. Alexander is at first reluctant to follow this apparently absurd and adulterous course. But he soon yields, intuiting he is about to enter a ritual that has the power to redeem the world and all its species. He takes a last look at Little Man in his innocent slumber, and goes out an upper window and down a wooden ladder.

His descent is haunted by monochrome visions of the earth deliquescing beneath his feet, and of the frantic inhabitants of a devastated city colliding with one another in a roiling panic. As he sets off on the bicycle Otto has left for him, we see superimposed over the trees the Madonna and child at the centre of da Vinci’s unfinished work. Alexander’s bike veers wildly on the winding road, and he falls, injuring his leg and hand.

Because Maria has no radio, she has no idea a third world war is underway. Alexander holds the news of coming destruction in abeyance, first playing a Bach prelude on Maria’s organ; then relating a story of how his mother used to sit in the same chair by the window each day, looking out with pleasure at her overgrown garden. When she became ill, and could not leave her bed, he decided to tidy it up, working two solid weeks with shears and scythe. Once he had finished, he bathed and put on fresh clothes, and sat down in his mother’s special chair to savour what he had made for her. What he saw disgusted him. He had destroyed the natural beauty of the garden, leaving only evidence of violence − a cutting parable on an earth ruined by human weaponry.

“Can you love me?” he asks Maria. “Love me, I beg you. Save us.” She refuses, telling him with her habitual gentleness, to go home. In desperation, Alexander puts a gun to his temple as the bombers bearing the nuclear weapons roar over her roof.

Maria succumbs to his pleading, perhaps out of pity. “I know she is wicked,” she says of Adelina. “Do not be afraid, poor man.” The scene of their lovemaking is a leap into the impossible, a defiance of gravity, as their bodies levitate and rotate – a living fulcrum that will transform the fate of every creature on earth.

When Alexander wakes in the morning on his daybed beneath da Vinci’s Adoration, his first clue to the changed world is that the electricity is working again. He puts on the shortwave which is broadcasting music and not the fatal warnings of the day previous. His prayers have been answered and now he must keep his promise to God. He puts on his black silk Japanese kimono embossed with the yin/yang symbol.

His wife and children and Viktor are all out, gone for a walk on a faultless morning. Alexander is therefore free to assemble a tottering tower of bamboo chairs inside the house, which he then sets alight. The fire swiftly takes hold, his exquisite retreat ablaze from every window. Outside he runs back and forth, lopsidedly, because he is limping still from his fall from his bicycle. He resembles deranged King Lear on the heath, meandering and raging at the storm. Except that Alexander is silent, even when Adelina and Viktor and Marta come running, aghast to see the conflagration and his inane circling.

An old-fashioned ambulance van arrives to take him away, just as Maria comes running. He kneels at her feet. “Let him be,” she cries. Alexander runs and the ambulance attendants give chase. He seems at this point infantile, forlorn and lacking all dignity. Yet he has the sovereign assurance of a commitment kept: a yielding up of self that has enabled the world to draw back from the brink. The last thing we see Alexander do is scramble out of the back of the ambulance to embrace Otto, the inspired instigator of his ritual with Maria.

The film’s final scene belongs to Little Man. The ambulance passes the boy as he is making his unsteady way, carrying two pails. He waters the tree he and his father planted the day before and lies down beneath it. Little Man then speaks for the first time, his question addressed to the absent Alexander: “In the beginning is the Word. Why is that, Papa?”

The boy’s question goes to the crux of the Christian faith – the mystery of the Word made flesh, crucified to redeem humankind. In a last lingering take, the camera leaves the prone child and moves up to dwell on the tangle of bare twigs stark against the chill-blue Scandinavian sky. They resemble Christ’s crown of thorns, yet simultaneously, the Zen brushstrokes of naked branches quivering on the edge of blossom.

We observe this indwelling paradox to the accompaniment of Bach’s “Erbame dich, Mein Gott” from the St Matthew Passion. “Have Mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears.” It is Alexander’s prayer, answered through the child beneath the tree and the thriving world that lies all about him, reclaimed from annihilation by his father’s sacrifice.