With Wayward, Vashti Bunyan disidentifies her story from its countercultural return-to-nature mythology, writes Alice Keeling
Born in 1945 and raised in post-war London, Vashti Bunyan left the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford to pursue a quick and anxious career in the mid-sixties pop scene. It was dominated at the time by self-assured, musing and exclusively male movers-and-shakers huddled in smoky studios. In 1965 she met Robert Lewis, then just a hitchhiker on a dark Suffolk summer night, and peed in a field for the first time in her life. Years later, in 1968, all knotty inside at her lack of musical success and autonomy, she and him took to the road to live romantically and freely as nomads.
The next 200 pages or so of Wayward: Just Another Life to Live relate their fabled horse and wagon-led journey from London up to the Outer Hebrides. The idea was to join psychedelic minstrel and folk pioneer Donovan, who had funded their horse and wagon. They would become part of the artistic community he intended to build on islets he’d purchased on Scotland’s west coast. A year and a half of wandering, asking, and odd-jobbing later, they reached Skye and Donovan only to travel further, to a crumbling and wind-battered house on the island of Berneray. Finding the island as exceedingly hostile as it was beautiful, they migrated back to the mainland not long after. They lived at Glen Row with the Incredible String Band before finally getting a place of their own.
As the memoir of a musician who is now very well-known and widely celebrated, and whose pilgrimage north is a legendary hippie myth, Wayward does a considerable amount of filling-in. Vashti has said that people who knew her used her as a symbol, expressing grave disappointment when she and Robert shrugged off their nomad capes and gave up what the world perceived as an anti-modern, counterculturally articulate, rural return-to-nature kind of life. So unwillingly elevated, Vashti, now a mother to two children, was tutted for turning to the conveniences that everyone else relied on. She lost friends when she bought a car. Her experience speaks to a problem we still have, where we feel inclined to pin down the hypocrisies of others and collect them like magpies, more cruel than curious. In Wayward, we get the woman, not the fable, and there is so much of her there: her music, her drawings, her thoughts, and feelings. Like her voice in song, her prose has a shyness to it, nervous at times about its own honesty. It’s honest, nonetheless, particularly about her relationship with Robert. As it is with any relationship, there were complexities beyond story-time’s remit.
Between honesties, she slides into those wide, calm moments of reminiscence that tend to come when people have lived fully and bravely. Small strong hands unfold and flatten vast English landscapes, punctuating them with warm and cold pockets of civilization. They turn gently through seasonal hues and a whole spectrum of emotions as Bess, their horse, gently tugs the wagon along stretches of road and a parallel obstacle course of doors and faces. The fabular atmosphere is most strongly intact in Bess’s orbit. Her quiet resilience and commitment to Vashti and Robert’s pursuit of freedom at the expense of her own says something about strength, love, and patience – she is content with her own starry trips.
Vashti’s music is a big part of the narrative. The songs on her first album Just Another Diamond Day were written during the slow crawl north and recorded in on a brief trip to London during the Hebridean days. Reeling into obscurity for some 30 years, its rediscovery pumped life back into Vashti’s relationship with music, and she worked to produce more albums and tour internationally. The reasons people gave for not taking her seriously are the reasons people find her music unique and beautiful now. And although in Wayward Vashti is honest about the album not sounding exactly as she’d have liked, it basks in the same dreamy rural puddles that her memoir is dedicated to remembering. The soft, haunting sorrow and confusion recognizable in Vashti’s singing voice forms an important subtext in her memoir. Grey clouds drift occasionally across nostalgic surfaces, reflected all the more clearly for the polish and clarity that time brings. Wayward explains that childishness, which was the main criticism levelled against Vashti’s music, was naturally at the heart of her adventure. Months of living this way gave her a childlike way of looking at the world: she cites a wonder that is restored and pure. This explains most nursery-rhymey songs – their naivete comes from feelings we grow up and lose touch with. Vashti has since raised her own children and gained the skills and autonomy to make music as she wants to, but there is still a nostalgic tinge to her sound.
Although Vashti disidentifies her story with the countercultural return-to-nature mythology and politics that it gets co-opted into (she never set out to ‘make a statement’ and recalls shuddering at comments about ‘Beautiful People’ and free love), it does have political value. She writes about being outside and becoming a part of her surroundings rather than a player within them, about moving beetles carefully out of the way before sitting down, about feeling acutely aware of how unbearably stolen everything is. There is much to be gained artistically and personally from immersion in rural life, and, like the 60s feminism burgeoning across the Atlantic insisted, the personal is political. After thinking of humankind as distinct from and superior to nature for so long, the things we feel personally about are far away from it.
Reading Vashti’s memoir, I felt sad because I couldn’t picture her adventure happening here, now, 50 odd years later. I tried to imagine a horse and wagon moving along the roads outside my window and wince at the inevitable noise and pain that would happen. There are almost seven times more cars on UK roads now than there were in 1960. Today’s most visible nomads are digital. My next thoughts were heavy with the symbolic Vashti. Is she a symbol of a time when something that’s no longer possible was possible? Or proof that it’s always possible, just hard? How did we get so far from nature? And isn’t it sad? And maybe we need symbols sometimes. How would people feel if Greta Thunberg went back to school?
The ‘discovered on’ section of Vashti’s Spotify page lists ‘Classics for Crying’ and ‘sad girl starter pack’ playlists. This makes me think that no matter what Vashti is or isn’t, or how full of wonder her tumbled mind, her sadness is most accessible to us now.
Vashti Bunyan’s Wayward is published by White Rabbit Books
- The Woman Not the Fable: Vashti Bunyan’s Wayward - April 8, 2022