"The Orkney I was born into," he says in
The Story and the Fable: An Autobiography (1940), "was a place where there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous; the lives of living men turned into legend." But it was a hard life. At the age of fourteen, with his brothers away from home seeking work, his mother ill, and the family driven by their landlord to a farm that was poor and wet, Muir, always of delicate constitution and now emotionally as well as physically weakened, suffered the collapse of his peace and security as his father gave up farming and moved the family to Glasgow.
Muir found the transition total. In the slums and poverty of the city both his parents and two of his brothers were dead within five years, while he himself, supporting and nursing the family, worked at such jobs as were available to a youth whose schooling, at Kirkwall Burgh Grammar School, had ended with the move to Glasgow.
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