Abstract
“That view. That stunning, dystopian panorama…Spikes of flame, so fast moving that they seemed solid, roared implacably into the sky, day and night.”
The opening words of the late Deborah Orr’s memoir, Motherwell, describe the writer’s home town but could describe the book itself, a coruscatingly honest account of growing up in Scotland’s industrial heartland, where Orr believes both families and communities were distorted by the social pressures of the time.
Motherwell was the centre of the country’s steel industry, home to the mighty Ravenscraig, the biggest hot strip steel mill in western Europe. Looming over the town and people’s lives, it commanded the loyalty and pride of its workers in a similar way to the shipyards of the Clyde, but the loyalty was misplaced. As Orr points out, this “de-natured, slightly hell-like, hyper-mechanised landscape”, provoking so much awe in the community which served it, was nothing more than “an elaborate folly” – it lasted a mere 33 years, from 1959 to 1992. Its closure by the Conservative government left its former workers lacking not just jobs but identity.
The name Motherwell leads her to the central question of the book: did her own mother mother her well? The answer, unequivocally, is no. Win came from rural Essex and was a vibrant and creative woman, adored and regarded as special by her own family, but her attitude to her daughter was repressive and demanding. In this, she was no different from many parents of the time. Sex might have begun in 1963 in England, as Larkin said, but Scotland was sternly puritan well into the 1970s, taking a long time to embrace the Swinging Sixties, despite its earlier history – the main entertainment of the rural poor in Burns’s time was houghmagandie.
Orr was a child in the 60s (she was born in 1962) but her parents’ tenets included the purity of woman, the sanctity of marriage – and the essential dirtiness of sex. When Orr was 20, they opened and read a letter she’d written to a lover. She was no better than a common whore, according to her father. Her mother told her she was ruined and that no decent man would marry her. In the midst of all her anger and anguish, she feels pity for them, that despite the closeness of their own relationship, they were never able to enjoy the physical freedom and release of sex. Nor, apparently, to enjoy the singular mix of sensitivity and fierceness that was their daughter’s nature.
“My parents were the gaolers that I loved,” she says. It took her years to realise that her relationship with them was toxic and had affected all her relationships afterwards, creating a pattern of seeking attention and approval from narcissists who were never going to give it to her.
She considers narcissism to be the root of most of people’s psychological contortions (acknowledging her own in writing the book) but sets it firmly in the context of pressure from the society around them. Her mother might not have come from Scotland but seems to have absorbed the Scottish need to cut down tall poppies. GK Chesterton said of the Catholic Church that it took on the characteristics of the religion of its host country, and Win became even more negative than those around her, slashing at her daughter’s self-confidence.
In person, Deborah Orr was stylish and sarcastic, her lips slick with red lipstick and biting bons mots. She was formidable and appeared fearless. Bob Granleese, a food editor, at Guardian Weekend, remembers being warned to watch out for her. A day of peace misled him – then “an abso-bloody-lutely terrifying Scottish Boudicca-alike turned up with a mass of hair, fag ablaze (those were the days), raging about this and that, before turning to me with a ‘Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing here?’”.
But beneath the sophisticated carapace was a vulnerable and sometimes lost person, wracked by doubt and self-loathing. Orr was bullied at school but too fearful to tell her parents. She braved their wrath and insisted on leaving home to go to university in St Andrews, but her first three sexual encounters there were rape. After her father’s death, she realised that his life had been governed by fear. “We were alike,” she writes. “I see that he coped with the world using similar strategies to my own – by pretending not to be afraid.”
Despite all the inner turmoil, she went on to create the best colour supplement in modern journalism, and later roared out spikes of flame implacably as a columnist. But it is the revelation of her vulnerability that makes this memoir so powerful, so haunting. It’s uncomfortable to read at times, not because of Deborah Orr’s questioning of her own life, but because, like the best memoirs, it forces you to question your own.
