BOOK REVIEW: 'Salvage' by Mark Baillie

‘Some people are born into inequality. They’ll never get away from it. That’s why I’m doing sociology, so I can look into the past and understand the causes - and do something about it.’     

    Student, Emma Lacklow is already radicalised by the injustices and inequality clearly prevalent in society in the early 1980s when she discovers her beloved great uncle, Nash is terminally ill. Not only that, he has been bearing the burden of an untold family tragedy for more than half a century.

     The only ‘Child Catcher’ Emma had ever experienced was in a scary movie, but as a nine-year-old back in 1929, Nash Lacklow had witnessed his five-year-old sister, Jenny being torn violently from her family by police and council officials who had descended in force on a Traveller campsite in Lanarkshire, Scotland. The brutal abduction had little to do with the child’s welfare and a lot to do with intimidation and forcing the Travellers to move elsewhere.

     Now in his sixties and on borrowed time, Nash and his nephew Spence, a struggling carpet salesman, are making the best of the hand they have been dealt, looking out every day from their shabby flat on the edge of a council estate across a cricket pitch dividing their world from that of the wealthy in their grand mansions. But Emma is young and an idealist with the fire, energy and determination to right a wrong visited on her family.

     What follows is a heart-rending search full of hopeful leads and blind alleys, encountering opportunist reporters, firebrand students, indifferent council officials, fantasists and various degrees of support from Travellers and Gaj who share her growing outrage as the scale of the abductions becomes apparent.

     Edinburgh-base author Baillie knows his subject, the tale is well-researched and crafted in a way that allows his readers to see his protagonists, flaws and all, identify with their motivations and come to appreciate their outlooks and how an environment of prejudice and relentless struggle has chipped away at dreams leaving expectation as something belonging more to fantasy than possibilities.

     In the world of the Lacklows there is little of the romanticism that so often seeps into stories of our culture. Their's is a world of adversity with no guarantees that tomorrow will bring anything other than more struggle.

     But persistence, like Emma’s battle with an authority keen to keep guilty secrets buried and Spence’s dream that, despite the odds against him, he might succeed if he can only get a break, can sometimes be enough to keep hope alive - and when hope is all there is, that can mean everything.

     Salvage, despite the darkness of the plot, is essentially that, a story of hope. You will find yourself rooting for the Lacklows and admiring their refusal to accept the role society expects them to play. It’s also a cautionary tale about what happens when bureaucracy overrules compassion, when those we elect become uncomfortably distant from the realities of life for many of their fellow human beings - and when those we expect to uphold the rule of law find themselves instead acting as blunt enforcers for those whose prejudices and emotional disabilities make them wholly unsuitable for office.

Review by BZ Rogers for the Travellers' Times

‘Salvage’ by Mark Baillie is published by Tippermuir Books £9.99. ISBN: 9781913836375.

BZ Rogers is the author of ‘The End of the Sky’ published by The Vanner Press.