Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell) wrote a trilogy of novels in Scots dialect published in the early 1930s, later combined as A Scots Quair. These novels evoked the life of communities living in the Mearns in north-east Scotland, where Mitchell grew up, to the south of Aberdeen. The first novel of the sequence, Sunset Song (1932), was set in the fictional hamlet of Kinraddie in the years around the First World War (circa 1911–1919). It affords an insight into the care of those with intellectual disability, using the terminology of the times (now unacceptable):
‘Andy and Tony were two dafties that Mistress Munro had had boarded out on her from an asylum in Dundee, they weren’t supposed to be dangerous.’
The Lunacy Act of 1862 had established the power to board individuals with mental disease in licensed houses.
Lodged at Cuddiestoun with the Munro family, one April morning ‘the daftie Andy stole out of Cuddiestoun and started his scandalous rampage through Kinraddie’ such that there was more than one woman that he ‘had near mischieved’. When ‘the Andy creature’ is returned to Cuddiestoun, Mistress Munro ‘took down his breeks and leathered him sore’ for having ‘scandalize[d] her name with his coarse on-goings’. In consequence, ‘next day the asylum officials came out and took him away in a gig, his hands fast tied behind his back; and that was the last they ever saw of Andy in Kinraddie’.
As for Tony, ‘though he wasn’t the daftest, he was the queer one’, perhaps because:
‘folk said he had once been a scholar and written books and learned and learned till his brain fair softened and right off his head he’d gone and into the poorhouse asylum’.
Tony is capable of errands to the local shop, always returning with the correct items as requested. On one occasion Mistress Munro sees him writing on a piece of paper but cannot decipher the script: ‘So she gave him a bit clout in the lug and asked him what the writing was. But he just shook his head.’ The paper is sent to the local schoolmaster, who responds that ‘the writing was shorthand’ and transcribes a sundry list of groceries. ‘So maybe Tony wasn’t so daft.’ A savant, perhaps?
Tony later breaks up an altercation between Reverend Gibbon and Long Rob. At the outbreak of war, the minister labels those not enlisting to fight, like Rob, as ‘pro-German’, provoking the latter’s animosity: ‘God knows what mightn’t have come of it but for the interfering of the daftie Tony’:
‘“He’s only a half-witted cleric, Rob, you’ll dirty your hands on him,” he cried, and both Rob and the minister, sore astounded, stopped from their fighting and stared at the creature … him only a daftie, like.’
These brief vignettes, incidental to the novel’s plot, show that these two boys with presumed learning disability were observed and gossiped about, just like all their neighbours, demonstrating their integration into the tight-knit rural community of Kinraddie.
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