Review: Drystone, Kristie De Garis (Polygon, £14.99)
As a child, Kristie De Garis would escape the stresses of home and school by roaming the moorlands around Thurso, revelling in the solitude and exploring the tumbledown brochs and blackhouses made from Caithness flagstone. Years later, her affinity with the landscape and fascination with the rocks that littered it would lead her to the craft of building drystone walls, the lifeline that rescued her from an abyss of low self-esteem and alcoholism.
Drystone explains why she sought that solace in the first place, how racism at school and her fraught relationship with a mother “who regularly gave in to her demons” instilled in her a sense of worthlessness that manifested in a chaotic lifestyle. Uncompromisingly honest, it’s a harrowing read, underscored with hopelessness, self-loathing and shame.
De Garis was eight when she and her brother Matthew moved with their single mother from Jedburgh to Thurso, where she was taunted at school for being poor and part-Pakistani and at home was the focus for her mother’s pain and anger. Having internalised the lesson that “the people who love us hurt us”, she fell into an abusive relationship in her late teens that established a pattern of living recklessly and falling for the wrong men. The chapter dealing with this phase is a truly disturbing account of “an experience that destroyed me in every way a person could be”, but for years she would accept such treatment as no more than her due.
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Relocating to Perthshire and learning how to build and restore drystone walls has played a crucial role in her healing. The craft of it only occupies a small portion of the book, but it supplies the central metaphor of taking something apart and rebuilding it more strongly. De Garis’s attitude towards race, for instance, has shifted over the years, from deliberately leaning into her whiteness to informing acquaintances of her Pakistani heritage almost as soon as she’d met them. Accepting herself as a mixed-race woman came only when piecing herself together following post-natal depression, a process helped along by finally persuading her mother to open up about the racism she had experienced, a taboo subject in the family until then.
Even so, in much the same way as her account of her recovery is tinged with grief for the life she could have had, it’s hard to shake off a sense of bleakness in the face of her new-found optimism. As much as her new profession means to her, it still involves coming into contact with lewd, entitled men. And, although she has tried not to pass the toxicity she grew up with down to her children, the treatment she suffered became a feature of her daughter Joanna’s life too.
Following a courageous campaign in which the 16-year-old Joanna called out misogynistic, racist and homophobic bullying at her school, a council investigation found no case to answer. Joanna’s crushing disappointment that trying to do the right thing had only stirred up animosity against her is just confirmation to De Garis that outside the bounds of her “carefully curated” life little has changed since she was a girl: women are valued for their looks, their compliance and their capacity to be liked and “most people are fine with the way things are”.
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