It’s a grand thing to live in a land where a’ the folks speak plain Scotch. They say Italian is a beautiful language; so it may be so to them that understands it. But a'body likes the tongue best that their Minnie used to sing hush-a-bye to them when they were weans, and it’s the language they would be fain to hear when they close their eyes in the sleep that needs no rockin’.
Marget Pow by Catherine Ponton Slater is designed to delight the senses and offer relief to the tired mind. Originally published in full form in 1925, Marget Pow offers an account of the ‘tapsalteerie’ of the early twentieth century as viewed by the eponymous heroine – a douce and loyal Scottish domestic servant with decided opinions. Opening in epistolary form, Marget Pow’s letters while she travels with her mistresses on the continent prove the maxim that one can take ‘the woman out of Scotland but not Scotland out of the woman’ as she sets all she encounters against the benchmarks of home.Her further accounts in diary and memoir form – of her return home, her description of her days in domestic service in the family’s home in Edinburgh and their holiday home in the west coast – are nothing short of a linguistic carnival as Ponton Slater utilises the unique characteristics of the Scots tongue to produce a work of high humour and wonderful entertainment.