“Two soldiers throwing Shakespearian quotations at each other from opposite ends of the cabin; a cockney sailor struggling into a clean shirt, quite a rare occurrence with him.”

A surveyor's comic eye for shipboard types before exile began in earnest · Voyage chronicle, outward passage to South Africa

• Humour
• Observation
• Travel

“The difficulty of translating my thoughts was a real trouble.”

A Scots speaker's first collision with official English · Recollection of speaking to his chief in Aberdeen

• Identity
• Language
• Speech

“I came to Aberdeen, a country lad of sixteen with a cockit bonnet and, because it was winter, a big gravit.”

The exile's first city self-portrait, still wearing the country mark · Later recollection of arriving as an apprentice

• Home
• Identity
• Youth

“The old man has done a bit of rhyming in his time too pointed to be printed.”

Affectionate pride in a family gift for satire too sharp for the press · Comment on his father Peter Murray's verses

• Family
• Poetry
• Satire

“I was raised upon Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns, and the old Scots, and all my life as a boy I was taught to look out for quaint phrases, out of the way expressions, and to study and delight in the old, original characters of the countryside.”

How a Doric childhood and the Scots canon trained his ear for speech and character · Recollection, 1912

• Childhood
• Language
• Poetry