Bury Her Deep

Topographical Note

Kellie Law and Largo Law are real, but the Lucken Law and the village of Luckenlaw are entirely from my imagination. Fife is a real place but none of this could ever have happened there.

I would like to thank:

My mother, Jean McPherson, who gave me Jam and Jerusalem: a pictorial history of the WI by Simon Goodenough and Wendy Bellars, who gave me The Wee Book of Calvin by Bill Duncan. These two together lit the spark.

Nan, (the spirit of) Jack, Grandad Hugh, Colin, Brian, Andrew, Ian, Elaine, Douglas, Aly, Mig, John, Gail and George for their Fifishness, the cadence of their voices and the gallows humour (I don’t think you even know you’re doing it). Thanks too to Ann and Elaine for the flavour of Aberdeen, which, of course, is even more so.

More thanks than usual to Lisa Moylett for steering everything through a difficult year and making it look easy and to Nathalie Sfakianos for the incisive comments on the first draft.

I am enormously grateful to Alex Bonham for her editing. This is a far better book than the one she first saw. Thanks too to Imogen Olsen, who has once again licked her hanky and wiped the face of the manuscript until it shines.

Finally, and most of all, I would like to thank my husband, Neil McRoberts, my favourite Fifer.