Love Libraries – Bringing my ancestors’ heritage to life

Written by Mark Baillie

Nearly 20 years ago I spent a spellbinding afternoon in the Library’s Special Collections room, reading Walter Simson’s History of the Gipsies, a 500-page, richly detailed book from 1865.

What brought me there was an oral history I’d completed with my 94-year-old grandad. He was from a Gypsy-Traveller family and I’d grown up listening to his stories of summers going to horse fairs in the Scottish Borders and north of England, and of hawking rugs and carpets for a living.

Simson’s book was a revelation, with sections on customs, traditions, and the Traveller language, ‘Cant’. In one chapter, I discovered I was descended from ‘Captain’ William Baillie, a larger than life, Robin Hood-style character of the 1700s, whose swashbuckling exploits were detailed at length.

Despite taking copious notes, I never did much with the research beyond writing a couple of articles for a family history society. But five years ago I dug them out again with a notion to write a novel about Scottish Travellers.

It irked me that, despite a rich culture and history, very few books are published about Travellers, especially in fiction.

I struggled for a while, not sure if I was writing a family drama or historic fiction story. In the end, my debut novel Salvage turned out to be both.

Author Mark Baillie

Set in the 1980s, it’s a missing person mystery based on the removals of Gypsy-Traveller children from their families.

It tells the fictional story of Nash Lacklow and his attempt to trace his sister, who was removed by officials 55 years earlier. Nash enlists the help of his great-niece, Emma, a student activist, who delves into old records, takes on prejudiced bureaucrats and pieces together the mystery of what happened to Nash’s sister.

Salvage is a novel steeped in old records and the National Library makes a number of appearances in its pages. These scenes were a pleasure to write and allowed me to revisit the memory of my original visit; the smell of the old book’s leather cover and the crackle of its delicate pages.

But setting my novel in a pre-internet period presented many obstacles in plotting the storyline. In fact, while I was writing it, one expert advised me that anyone searching for a long-lost relative under such circumstances in the early 1980s would have had virtually zero chance of success.

For a while I even considered abandoning writing it. Then I decided to embrace the difficulties and translate them into the story. In some scenes, I really went to town with it, showing Emma up to her elbows in dust and cobwebs and various items of the past intermingled with old papers and letters.

Despite those plot headaches, I’m glad I set the story in the 1980s. It would have been much less atmospheric if Emma had carried out her search on a laptop, sitting in a swanky coffee shop.

At its heart, Salvage is a novel about the will to discover against the odds, to trace back and find something that is missing. To me, this is the essence of special collections; a place where the past is kept alive and connections can be made back through generations.

Mark Baillie’s debut novel Salvage is published by Tippermuir Books.