North East Scotland 1944. Tough, remote, isolated. Life revolves round little beyond keeping body and soul together: planting and harvesting potatoes and other crops: livestock. Bits of extra money are spent on essentials like worn-out work shirts, not on frivolities like new curtains. Three Italian POWs are billeted on the community. They're regarded with suspicion, but also with interest ....

Each carefully chosen word in this novella evokes the tough lives lived in this community, in which little out of the ordinary happens, and quiet suspicion can flourish. It's atmospheric too. But in the end, this slight story didn't truly engage me. ( )

[Another Time, Another Place] is definitely an apt title for this novel. Set on a farm in northeast Scotland during WWII, it is definitely a world onto itself. "The woman", never given a name, or even capitalized, is an outsider, a dreamer, set down in a cottage in this place by dint of being married to a dairyman, a protected occupation during the war.

Working piece work at various seasonal jobs around the farm, she was caught between her neighbours Meg and Kristy. Debating the nature of triangles, she felt there should never be threes, but then realized a third is always necessary as a foil or a go-between for the other two. The woman is judged and made fun of by the pair for her solitary nature and dreaminess, yet they have to grudgingly accept her as she has "the knack" for doing the chores that need doing. This is a culture which respects good work.

Enter another threesome - a trio of Italian POWs, conscripted to farm labour. They were housed in the bothy next to the woman and her husband, so she was given the chore of delivering their milk. Speaking neither English nor Scots, the Italians were isolated by language and prejudice, make worse by the fact that one of the villagers' own was missing in Italy after the battle of Monte Cassino.

Little by little, the woman came to know the Italians. Fantasizing about one, pursued by another, she learned enough Italian and they learned enough English to communicate. The village was not so kind however, going so far as to lump the woman and the Italians together as outsiders. They did not have "the knack".

This is a slow paced novel built around the year's agricultural cycle. The war ended and the Italians were to be sent home. However, in a twist of fate, the kind where everyone is too keen to judge, and swiftly at that, a misunderstanding had lasting consequences.

Kesson knew that Scottish judgemental streak all too well. The fatherless daughter of a young prostitute, she was taken into state care at age eight. Denied a full education because of her origins, she was placed in domestic service at sixteen, eventually marrying and turning to hired farm work. There is no bitterness here though, just a feeling of listening to a story about another time and another place.

I was alerted to this author via the lovely bleuroses and the great Virago Modern Classics group who celebrate Virago authors. blueroses contributes bios of Virago authors to this thread. It's a very special thread with fabulous photos and very enlightening biographical information about the authors. The tribute to Jessie Kesson opens with a quote from [[The White Bird Passes]] "I don't want to dust and polish...And I don't want to work on a farm. I want to write poetry. Great poetry. As great as Shakespeare."

I found Kesson's writing style very different. At times I wasn't sure where one piece of action had finished and another began. The author assumes that the reader is familiar with Scottish idiom so I found it a bit of a struggle and ended up skipping over stuff I didn't understand or had to guess. So for this reason I found the text somewhat impenetrable.

Having said that, I did walk away with a distinct sense of time and place and an appreciation of the author's device to reveal the other prisoner in the story - i.e the young farmer's wife who, in looking after Italian prisoners of war, discovers her own prison of gender and time. ( )