Maybe a prophet is someone who has the courage to truly become themself.
I’m thinking of Susie. Sue Innes was her professional name; and we were life partners until her death 19 years ago today.
It was a brain tumour. She was 56 years old.
She was the only child of Alec and Jean Innes, who belonged to a fundamentalist Christian sect, and expected their only child to have the same religious beliefs.
She spent her early childhood in Corwen, a wee village in a stunningly beautiful part of North Wales.
She loved it there, she told me. She and her best girlfriend would cycle around the country lanes in perfect safety. And they had such fun…
The local primary school taught their classes in Welsh, which she didn’t understand.
But she didn’t mind much: she sat in the back of the class and was free to draw and to read.
Later, when the family moved to Peterhead, it didn’t stop her becoming Dux of the primary school there.
That meant she was the top pupil of the school; she remembers her mum and dad being amazed and not quite knowing how to respond.
There had never been anyone that clever in the family before. She wanted them to give her a proper desk as a present when she went to secondary school.
But instead they saved up to give her a dressing table with a mirror, and she was furious. And guilty for being furious…
Struggling against guilt was a constant feature of her life.
Guilt for not being a good Brethren girl and not being content to be the wife of a good brethren husband.
Guilt at her refusal to be “saved”; and so going to hell; and being such a disappointment to her parents…
Guilt she struggled against with courage and fury, as she worked with all her strength to combat these restrictions of her fundamentalist upbringing and become her own true self.
The first step was to become a student at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen.
Because she was, among so many other things, an immensely gifted artist.
But the conflict between the person she was and the person she was supposed to be became too much and she attempted suicide.
Time to go further away…
She became an au pair for an American academic’s family in London; and then went back with them to Berkeley, California.
In London, they were neighbours to Yehudi Menuhin, whom she regularly heard practising;
In California she ended up in Haight Ashbury during the Summer Of Love in 1968.
She became a volunteer in a space where they took care of people recovering from bad acid trips.
She practised free love.
She met Janis Joplin in a loo queue.
She went to Chicago to take part in the demonstration against the Vietnam War that was violently broken up by Mayor Daley.
She ended up in New York working as a shop assistant in Bloomingdale’s; and they wanted her to stay on and train to be a manager.
But she knew if she stayed in America, she would cause her parents great distress.
On the plane home, she remembers freaking out the air stewardess by changing from her hippie clothing into the demure Brethren dress that she’d somehow carried with her on her travels…
She couldn’t bear to stay in Peterhead for long, and moved to Edinburgh.
She worked as a receptionist in the Roxburghe hotel and stayed with friends in a flat in Grindlay St. that became famous for its parties.
She decided to go to University; and began attending evening classes at Stevenson College to get her Highers.
And that was how she came to St. Andrews. She began working for the student newspaper, and soon became its editor. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation Group…
…because feminism was another of the incredibly powerful ideals she brought back from California.
She went to St. Andrews to study English. The Professor of English at the time was a man called Falconer, an expert in the use of sea terms in Shakespeare’s plays, and the author of the famously dull “Shakespeare And The Sea”.
Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were compulsory subjects; and in her second year, Susie wrote and published a remarkably restrained article that gently suggested the course could do with some improvement.
And that was why she failed her second year English exams.
Undeterred, she took a job as a barmaid in the university Union, became fascinated by Wittgenstein, and took our very large Alsatian dog, Nicky, to philosophy lectures.
She infiltrated the all-male Kate Kennedy procession dressed as Queen Victoria; and she was involved in a campaign to pinch men’s bottoms as a protest against the sexual harassment of women.
She became the director of the first St. Andrews Arts Festival, and got her degree.
We started a commune on the sea shore of Largo Bay and somehow in the middle of all this she became a trainee producer for BBC Radio Scotland.
She loved working for radio, and would have had a fantastic career working in it; only she got dropped at the end of her training course.
She was never told why, and that severely dented her self-confidence.
Years later, after her death, it came out that at that time MI5 were vetting candidates joining the BBC; so she was almost certainly banned as a possible subversive.
I wish she’d known that. It would have made her so proud.
We considered ourselves revolutionaries at that time. We were committed to communal living and self-sufficiency, in the fierce conviction that the personal was political and that this way of living was the prelude to the coming collapse of capitalism.
Because we were both in revolt against the values of our families, we were both convinced that the nuclear family was a source of immense unhappiness and wanted to bring up children within the commune.
Our fellow housemates didn’t share the same idea; and when Susie became pregnant they all left.
So we became a rather reluctant nuclear family after all. And ironically a very happy one.
But we stuck to the principle of sharing childcare right up to the time our two daughters were old enough to leave home.
We moved to a cottage very close to Rosslynn Chapel at the edge of the woods of Roslin Glen; and spent 9 unbelievably complicated, poverty stricken, happy and creative years with our two young children there as I signed on the dole and tried to establish myself as a writer while Susie…
…Susie did so many things I’m not sure I can do justice to them all.
I remember the feminist writing groups, the consciousness raising groups, the publishing collective.
I remember her editing the Scottish social workers journal. I remember her running a Fringe venue on the Royal Mile.
I remember her deep involvement with Women’s Aid and working with Franki Raffles the photographer.
I remember her designing writing and drawing a leaflet guide to the walks in Kielder Forest.
I remember her being asked to edit the children’s section of the first Scotsman Magazine, and then getting the job of Women’s Page editor on at the start of Scotland On Sunday.
And that meant for the first time we had a regular salary and buy a house on Calton Rd.
The tall narrow multi-storied house in a converted brewery where she so passionately loved to be.
I don’t know how to do justice to the person she was and all she achieved in what turned out to be the last dozen or so years of her life.
I’m just totally in awe of it.
She was ahead of her time as a feminist women’s editor and then a weekly columnist of a not conspicuously radical newspaper.
People still remember her columns. They meant so much to so many women in Scotland.
When her column got dropped for being too radical, she began to study for a doctorate.
Her thesis was a groundbreaking piece of cross disciplinary work that straddled history and sociology and examined the new ideas of citizenship that arose from the radical work of the women who had fought for women’s suffrage and maintained their radical activities after the vote was won.
She got her doctorate, but was ahead of her time, and never found her place in academia.
So she wrote a groundbreaking feminist book, “Making It Work”.
She travelled to Russia and to China. She was fascinated by the position of women in both these countries.
She was passionately committed to Scottish independence, fiercely proud of the new Scottish Parliament, and one of its first official reporters.
She lectured part time. She was one of the founders of Engender, the Scottish Feminist organisation.
She poured forth a steady stream of articles and academic papers and and activist interventions….
And then she flung herself into the founding of “The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women”.
How passionately she loved that book. How she loved working with her fellow founding editors.
It was in this work that she finally fully found herself.
How deeply she loved life. How passionately proud she was of our daughters, at that moment entering into their adult lives.
She had a special toast she used at family celebrations. She’d have us clink glasses and toast: to life.
Our family life together at that time was intense and astonishing: so full of creativity and laughter. And doors slammed shut in anger and then flung open wide again.
Flung open wide in joy and in love…
How cruel it was for that to be the time that cancer attacked her.
Crueller still that the cancer attacked her brain.
But even then, in all the times of unbearable sorrow and rage, there were still times of what felt like crazily defiant outbursts of joy and thankfulness and of love.
How proud she was holding court in her wheelchair at the reception in the Scottish Portrait Gallery her dear colleagues organised for her to celebrate the forthcoming Dictionary.
That dictionary that was her pride and joy and that she insisted on working on throughout her illness, though the tumour tormented her by making her unable to use her computer and depriving her bit by bit of her concentration and her memory.
I remember her suddenly discovering a taste for peach schnapps as she slowly slipped into what we thought would be her final coma just before Christmas.
But the life force was so strong in her she refused to go.
She came back to everyone’s astonishment just before new year.
She always loved new year. We would all go up to watch the fireworks on Calton Hill and she’d be carrying the words of Auld Lang Lyne because she loved them and wanted them to be sung right.
But not that year.
She was completely paralysed down one side and totally unaware of it, somehow, and furious because she had to go the hospice when she had so passionately wanted to die eat home.
And in the hospice it was fine wines filling up a whole cupboard in her room and making up a song about the hoist the nurses had to use to get her on the bedpan.
It was plans to start a slow travel business and a slow food catering business and a trip back to Bologna, which she so loved, and wouldn’t it be fun to go by the Channel Tunnel?
And haven’t you got the tickets yet?
And then it was Knoydart. She loved the Highlands too and the idea of this magical peninsula you could only reach on foot or by boat.
I remember when I was a child reading these words somewhere:
“We love life, and want to go on living.
Not so much because we want to go on living, but because we want to go on loving”.
And that was her. Loving right up to the end.
And beyond the end.
I see her in the love our eldest daughter so fiercely and passionately shows our grandchildren.
I see her in our grandson’s brilliance and courageous need to be himself, and be different.
In our granddaughter’s gift for happiness and impossibly tangled hair.
I see her in our younger daughter’s gift for friendship and joy in living.
I see her in the beautiful words she is always writing.
I see her in the buildings our elder daughter’s engineering brings into being.
I see her in the Biographical Dictionary that has pride of place in my bookshelf.
I see her in the feminist ideal she so brilliantly and beautifully articulated; that still form the very fabric and structure of all our lives.
I see her joyful and creative in my dreams.
I feel her in my blood and in the marrow of my bones.
And I won’t say “Rest In Peace”, dear love, for you were never much of a one for resting.
I’ll say thank you for the love and the life in you that keeps on living.
I never managed to write a proper tribute to Susie. It’s always hurt too much, somehow.
So this is the first attempt. She was so awesome; and it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Do feel free to use the comment button to share your memories of her; or to add things I’ve left out or not done proper justice to.
Joyce McMillan wrote a lovely obituary here:
And our daughter Katie has just written two beautiful and moving tributes in her substack here
Susie inspired so many of my plays. In particular this one:
And these five, which can still be heard on BBC Sounds:
Five Days Which Changed Everything
She saved my life. She helped me become the artist I am.
I hope I helped her too….
This is so beautiful. I never met her but feel that I have now . Thank you x
This taught me so much about her, I loved it and I love you. I’m so, so lucky to have been raised by you both xxxx