Meeting Margaret

my visit with the legendary author who inspired my own writing

Part One
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Our actions echo throughout eternity. The phrase is floating around social media lately.

I’ve thought a lot about it in relation to how lives overlap. My grandfather was born in 1903, a year when there may have been a handful of centurions born the year Lewis and Clark headed west; twelve years before Jack Williamson, a sci-fi writer, was still traveling by covered wagon. My grandfather knew people who remembered slavery, veterans wounded fighting for the North and women who lost husbands. 

We have a similar heritage of influence in literature. Millions of people love Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. But the story is not solely Tolkein. It also echoes his influences: Christianity; Norse, Finnish, and Germanic mythology, Shakespeare’s MacBeth, Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, the prose and poetry of William Morris, the work of George MacDonald, and a beloved childhood novel, H. Rider Haggard’ She, the story of a journey to a lost kingdom. Millions have in turn echoed Lord of the Rings in their own work and in the future, others will echo them: generations influenced by poets famous and lesser known.

Likewise, my writing carries the voices of other authors and work: C.S. Lewis (who, with Tolkein, was part of the Inklings), Narnia, many I can’t remember, and a wonderful children’s novel: 

In the Keep of Time by Margaret J. Anderson

It is the story of four siblings who go into a Scottish keep and emerge in the wrong century. (Sound familiar?!) Although I loved books, this one captured my imagination more than most. Along with Mirror of Danger by Pamela Sykes and Time for Andrew by Mary Downing Hahn, it carries the theme of meeting across time, those who have lived before. 

(As a side note, they all also contain the warning—or promise—as you like—that magical and dangerous things happen when left with your great aunt for the summer!)

I’ll be honest—I’m lucky to remember titles. I rarely remember author names. Moreover, as a child in the 70s, I didn’t care who wrote a book. I cared about the story. But I read In the Keep of Time often enough, including in later years to my own children, and the book kept turning up in my home, despite numerous moves, that I always remembered the name Margaret Anderson, along with the powerful images of Andrew, Elinor, Ian, and Ollie going into Smailholm Tower, of Red Hepburn, the Beef Tub full of cattle, the orphan Cedric so eager to see James of the Fiery Face take back Roxburgh with his great cannon -- and much more!

[Side note to musicians: do not go into battle with a canon. The round in a canon is futile against the rounds in a cannon, regardless of what they say about music soothing the savage beast.]

Margaret J. Anderson

I spent a lifetime with these images and people. And as my own story emerged, I thought more about the story that had worked its way into my own creative world--and about what started the ideas spinning in Margaret's head. But, well...Famous Author. She seemed somewhere out there in a vague mist, as distant as Red Hepburn and James of the Fiery Face themselves.

And then … something funny happened on my way to the 21^st Century: the internet—and a generous friend.

Chris took me to Scotland three times. On the second, we made it to Smailholm Tower—the place where the children in Margaret’s novel crossed into another century! There are hardly words to describe the thrill of finally, decades later, standing in a spot that so filled your childhood imagination; of seeing a place that was part of a fictional world standing before you in solid stone!

In the decades since reading the book, life had moved on. The tower Margaret knew, the one she described so vividly in her novel, was empty, no floors, a perilous drop from the top of the tower, four stories above, to the bottom floor.

By the time I reached Smailholm in 2015, it had been restored. Floors had been put in. The lower level holds a gift shop and the upper levels, displays of Scottish history. If you care to look, you will still see the small stone face by the hearth, which Ollie-Mae says was carved for her by John the Carver, hundreds of years ago.

It was a chance encounter with an employee working at Smailholm that day that changed everything and led to Meeting Margaret, the woman who brought Smailholm, Kelso Abbey, James of the Fiery Face, and history itself alive for me and for thousands of children in the 70s. 

The chance conversation with that employee led to a remarkable meeting I will forever treasure, a beautiful day, and the wonderful stories I learned from Margaret, of her remarkable life, her humor, of the inspirations behind her stories, and much more!

GO TO PART TWO

In the meantime, if you're interested in this book--which I enjoyed reading again just this past June, even as an adult, take a look at the book and visit Margaret's website!

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The Battle is O'er is now available!

Start from the beginning: Prelude One 

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