Nairn in Darkness and Light by David Thomson

“Nairn in Darkness and Light” is a mixture of personal experience and past history, in which the author recalls his boyhood spent in the small town on the Moray Firth, on the borders between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Nairn has witnessed many of the triumphs and tragedies of Scottish history, and these are recalled with intuitive understanding in the book; but it is also the scene of David Thomson’s formative years, when he was afflicted by eye trouble which shaped his whole future. This is a marvellously sensitive autobiography which in the process recreates the divided community of Nairn, with its fisher community and its townsfolk, the lives of crofters and of the prosperous upper middle classes of the 1920s.