Wendy MacIntyre

The Promise of Horses

by Wendy MacIntyre

It is fully five years since I began my daily visits to the horses, Willie and Johnny. I met them first when the pandemic protocols imposed physical distancing. I needed a road wider than the narrow river trail I habitually walked. The dirt and gravel Quarry Road, with its bordering meadows and two dairy farms, was the solution.

And there they were, behind the wooden railings of their roadside paddock – two well-groomed graceful horses who approached when I passed by, apparently curious. The taller of the two, a rich chestnut colour, has a white diamond on his forehead. This, I later learned from Kevin, their owner, is Johnny. The smaller horse, a charcoal black, is Willie. Because Kevin is often listening to country music in his garage, I assume the horses are named after Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. But I have never had this confirmed. read more

John Sakeouse, from Stowaway to Cherished Citizen of Edinburgh

by Wendy MacIntyre

21/6/2023 read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more