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“Erif Der was sitting on a bank of shingle and throwing pebbles into the Black Sea; for a girl she threw very straight. She was thinking a little about magic but mostly about nothing at all.”

You can tell from the first page that the author can write well. But the prospect of 700 more pages is not a comfortable one. A didactic mixture of Fabian socialism, Oxford classicism and The Golden Bough weighs heavily on 21st century sensibilities.

I am sitting on Carradale beach trying to read The Corn King And The Spring Queen. Fifty years ago, it was a classic of English literature. Now it is almost entirely forgotten; at this moment, there might be no other person in the world with this book open in front of them. There ought to be some criteria to explain why some things last and some don’t, why in 50 years time Geoff Dyer will have disappeared while Toby Litt will be boring schoolchildren with his set books. Or vice versa. Why, at Pooh sticks, some twigs are carried far away on the stream while others come to nothing among the stones.

Behind the beach, rising above the trees are the turrets of Carradale House, where the book’s author, Naomi Mitchison, lived for most of her life and where over 50 years ago as a very small child I spent a summer.

Every holiday, Dick and Naomi Michison kept open house for some 20 or 30 adults and a dozen or more children who were allowed to run wild. In that summer of 1952 or 3 or 4, I was the youngest, definitely at the bottom of the pecking list.

She was the laird from the big house. It is now almost impossible to imagine what a shock that must have been to such a small, tight society as Carradale: tight as in tightly knit, uptight and, for most of the men, given any excuse to escape responsibility, drunk. In the days before television, remote communities were seriously remote. This was a time when women were not allowed in the public bars of most Highland pubs. She believed in equality, open marriage, nude bathing and socialism, but she fought the corner of the local community better than anyone before or since.

One night on the back seat of the bus from Tarbert, she spent the journey kissing one of the local fishermen. The bus was dark but all the other passengers would have been starkly aware of what was going on. And before noon the next day, so would the whole village. She wrote a nice poem about being a fishing boat out at sea and coming alongside her lover’s boat (a different lover from the one on the bus): “And sometimes your face is above me/and sometimes below.”

When we stayed, 50 years ago, she and the other adults went out at night with the local poacher to poach her own salmon.

Carradale bay is over a mile long, warmed by the Gulf Stream, and protected on all sides from the worst of the weather. Trees grow tall, rhododendrons are rampant and the gunnera, like radioactive rhubarb, is as much at home as in Cornwall’s Roseland peninsula. Carradale days are as I remember them, starting grey, the mist rolling in, very low and damp, from the hills, then often turning into beautiful, bright evenings until the sun sets below the saddle of the hills.

The beach is almost entirely empty, a few people walking their dogs, no one swimming. At one end, largely hidden among the ponticum, gorse and bracken is a small campsite where we are staying. It rains most nights, but there are few better sensations than lying warm and comfortable in a tent listening to the rain on the flysheet (so long as you are confident that it isn’t going to leak). When it isn’t raining, we can hear the sea.

This part of Kintyre suffered the usual dour history of plagues and clearances. Near here, the Macmillan met his death by falling into the “Black Pit of the Goat”, as one often does. Here, the river Carra meets the sea: the water is black and peaty and terribly cold. At the tideline on the beach, I find oak and hawthorn leaves among the seaweed, which seems unnatural, almost magical. Very Erif Der. Fifty years ago, the Mallalieus went swimming every day to the amusement of the rest of the house party who would wrap up in woolens and come down to watch. The new generation of Mallalieus are not so hardy.

For some reason, we never went back to Carradale. Naomi had a talent for friendship, and I was sorry not to have known her as an adult. I would have liked her to have met my wife and children, turning up unexpected on a rainy winter night and being made welcome, the still point of a turning world.

For the last 30 years of her life the house and garden slowly unravelled around her, which seems only right.

I had not realised how much my taste in gardens owed to Carradale.

The house with its beautiful windows looks much as I remembered it. (At the age of four or five, I was very impressed to find a turret room converted into a loo.)

It was, I suppose, a gathering of the British upper middle class intelligentsia, a surprisingly small group of interconnected families, which dominated the intellectual life of Britain for over a century and has now effectively disappeared, like a village that has been subsumed into the outskirts of a town. They were, for the most part, families who had made large amounts of money in the industrial revolution, relocated to Oxford, Cambridge or London and devoted their time to the arts, sciences and radical causes, in which they were immensely successful, although none of their efforts did much to restock their family coffers. Naomi wrote more than a book a year for 70 years as well as innumerable articles. It helped that she could afford not to spend much time on childcare, running a house or earning a living.

There are still people who share their values (probably more that ever) but they don’t have the money, and they lack the assurance. I cannot imagine Naomi or any of the adults I remember from 50 years ago ever thinking they might be wrong. I feel like Matthew Arnold on Dover beach: “The Sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled./ But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

One of the cleverer Mitchison grandchildren (they were all clever) told me a story, which I believed for certain for several years, that nearby there was a grove of trees on a small hill and in the middle was an entrance to a cave full of gold, but the further you went inside the more you lost the will to return to the surface and you stayed there until you starved to death. Fifty years ago, as we set out on the journey home, I thought I saw the grove of trees through the car window. My sister was more sceptical. This time, I looked out to see if it was still there, but I failed to find it.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Oldie.

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