Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

As children we lived much in the past, and, as commonly happens, we interpreted that past by the present, and also permitted bygone ages to colour our everyday lives. The history of Scotland, of which alone we had much knowledge, was to us not a legend but a living memory; we took violent sides in its disputes and attached ourselves vehemently to its protagonists. Like most Scottish families we believed ourselves to be gently born. A certain John Buchan, a younger son of the ancient Aberdeenshire house of Auchmacoy, came south in the beginning of the seventeenth century and was supposed to have founded our branch. There was a missing link in the chain, and an austere antiquary like my uncle would never admit that the descent had more than a high probability; but we children accepted it as proven fact, and rejoiced that through Auchmacoy we could count kin back to the days of William the Lion. So in the high story of Scotland we felt a proprietary interest. A Countess of Buchan (with whom we had no conceivable connection) had crowned Robert Bruce; an Earl of Buchan as Constable of France had avenged Joan of Arc; a Buchan of Auchmacoy had fallen at Flodden beside the King; another had led the Jacobite remnant after the death of Dundee.

Brooding over Scottish history made us intense patriots of the narrowest school. Against our little land there had always stood England, vast, menacing and cruel. We resented the doings of Edward I, Henry VIII and Elizabeth as personal wrongs. The brutalities of Cumberland after the 'Forty-five seemed to us unforgivable outrages which had happened yesterday. We early decided that no Englishman could enter Heaven, though, later, our delight in the doings of the Elizabethan seamen forced us to make an exception of the inhabitants of Devon. Even when we grew older and the intolerance abated, England remained for us a foreign place, not too friendly, to be suspected and even dreaded. My interest in London, when I first visited it, was not in its metropolitan wonders, but in its connection with Scotland's history -- that Simon Lovat had died on Tower Hill, that Balmerino's head had been stuck up on Temple Bar, and disguised Jacobite spies had hid themselves in Soho. I had myself one particular reason for this suspicion. As a child I was always in terror of being compelled to earn my bread as a clerk should my father die. This gloomy fate I associated with some kind of English domicile, probably a London suburb. The suburbs of the metropolis, of which H knew nothing, became for me a synonym for a dreadful life of commercial drudgery without daylight or hope.