#witer

A tree covered in snow (or a giant mushroom?)

There will always be tomorrow to pick up your pen.

It's okay if you don't write tomorrow, too.

January 11th 1999, the novelist, poet and Political activist, Naomi Mitchison died.

Best known as a novelist and social commentator, but Naomi Mitchison also wrote and published poetry, much of which is rooted in her Scottish background.

Born to Louisa Kathleen Trotter and John Scott Haldane, a distinguished scientist based in Oxford, where Naomi Haldane grew up. The Scottish connection remained important throughout her childhood, and she spent many summers at Cloan in Perthshire, the Haldanes’ family home. Although her formal education was limited, she was steeped in an environment of scientific and creative enquiry which influenced her entire life.

Naomi married Dick Mitchison while he was on a short break from the Battlefields of Flanders in 1916, he was later injured in the war and it had a profound effect on the rest of his life and hers.

Both of them passionately wanted the post-war world to be a different and better place and were determined to do something about it, with explosive energy, Mitchison managed to write prolifically and variously; to work in the pioneer days at the North Kensington family planning clinic and for many other good causes. Her husband went into politics and she supported him and his socialist values wholeheartedly. He eventually went to the Lords and Naomi hated being called Lady Mitchison. The Mitchison house at Hammersmith was famous for its parties in happy or anxious times. The guest lists covered a wide spectrum from all walks of life, politicians, writers, lords, unknown proteges, refugees and strange lost foreigners from all over the world.

This generous style of hospitality continued at their Scottish home at Carradale in Argyll. The large house gathered in all kinds of waifs and strays among the famous and unreproached scroungers; and then the Mitchison grandchildren and great-grandchildren joined the mix. Naomi’s wartime diary, Among You Taking Notes… , is a vivid description of that period, and of her own pivotal role in it.

She would go on to become a local councillor and member of the Highland Panel, which began the process of Highland regeneration, but in both roles she was frustrated by bureaucracy and apathy, you can imagine The Highlands in the 60’s!

Mitchison was able to write anywhere, which helped because - as a compulsive traveller - she could get on with her writing on planes or in trains. She went to the US in the 1930s, because she was worried about tenant farmers rights; to Vienna in 1934 when the Nazi-era storm clouds gathered, and she smuggled letters from endangered people to Switzerland in her knickers. In 1952, she went to Moscow as a member of the Authors’ World Peace Appeal. She went regularly to Africa, especially to Botswana, where she was made a sort of tribal mother to the Bakgatla people and helped them practically. Wherever she was in the world, she seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the country and people around her, a remarkable woman.

In later years, she was sometimes anxious and depressed - not for herself, but for the future. She often said that two wars in a lifetime were too many. She was totally opposed to nuclear weaponry and was fearful that science would destroy, rather than enrich, mankind.

In old age, she watched many of her generation die: but with great generosity of spirit she visited and comforted many of them to the end.

Naomi Mitchison spent the last years of her life at Carradale, where she died in January 1999 aged 101.

Woman Alone by Naomi Mitchison