Although both John and his sister Anna (who later wrote under the pen name of ‘O. Douglas’) maintained that ‘Calvinism sat lightly on our shoulders’, it was to have a marked effect on their upbringing. Buchan recalled of his father, ‘The past to him was a design in snow and ink, one long contest between villains of admitted villainy and honest men.’ Old Marget, a favoured servant, could be relied on to add her pennyworth, reminding the children of the Ill Place, ‘where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched’. Drenched in biblical imagery and terminology, Buchan saw Israel warring in the dreaded woods, with backsliding Judah building altars to Baal ‘on some knoll in the pines’. This idea of temenos—a holy or unholy spot—was to remain with Buchan for the rest of his life and to reoccur regularly in his writings. At Pathhead, he knew exactly what a heathenish ‘grove’ was and could take you to it—a cluster of self-sown beeches on a certain high place. His fertile imagination readily identified abstractions with such localities: Sin was intimately connected with a particular thicket of brambles and spotted toadstools. Looking back nearly sixty years later, Buchan remembered the woods as, ‘on the whole, a solemn place, canopied by Calvinist heavens’.

To the rescue came a Holy Land. The Scottish Borders, the temenos of Walter Scott and James Hogg, was Buchan territory. His father’s family had settled in Peebles; his mother’s, the Mastertons, had for generations been sheep-farmers in the area. It was a countryside that the young Buchan quickly fell in love with: ‘the Border hills were my own possession . . . this attachment to a corner of earth induced a love of nature in general, and from my early affection I have drawn a passion for landscapes in many parts of the globe’. Each summer the youthful Buchan set out on longer and longer forays, by foot and by bicycle, into the surrounding hills and glens. He attended the clippings of the flocks, helped drive the sheep to local markets and, above all, listened to the shepherds’ tales, becoming ‘learned in the talk of the trade’. He was out in all weathers, often buffeted by sheets of rain with no cover for miles, returning very hungry, footsore, and soaked to the familial farm ‘on the brink of the heather’.

When, in 1888, the thirteen year-old boy moved with the rest of the family to Glasgow, where his father had been called to the John Knox Church, the sojourns in the Borders did not stop. But to the pastoral was added academe. First at Hutchesons’ Grammar School and then, more especially, at Glasgow University, Buchan came under the influence of the classics—an abiding love of Greek and Latin literature was to remain with him for the rest of his life. James Cadell, at Hutchesons’, and Gilbert Murray, the twenty-six-year-old Professor of Greek at the university, both introduced him to the literature and then the philosophy behind the ancients. Borders holidays were now a time to read the classics with ‘gusto’; but, Buchan recalled, ‘if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life, they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties’. He was developing a kind of relativism, a belief in degrees of truth and differing levels of reality.

By 1893, Buchan was in print—with an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine that August, entitled ‘Angling in Still Waters’. In his autobiography, Buchan dismissed his early attempts at writing as ‘chiefly flatulent little essays and homilies and limp short stories’. It is true that the writing is often precious, too often pastiches of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Pater, or literary echoes of Flaubert, Maupassant, and Kipling. However, what was developing were themes that were to inform much of his writing until his death. A scholarship to Oxford University enabled Buchan to get away from the increasingly restrictive life of the Glaswegian manse. He arrived in the city in October 1895 and plunged into university life. Although he failed twice to get elected to All Souls, the years were productive. Awarded a first in Greats in the summer of 1899, Buchan had also been elected President of the Union; written the history of his college, Brasenose; had three novels and two collections of short stories published; and made many important friends. He recalled those years as the time he ‘had some of my Gothic corners smoothed away, (but) there remained a large spice of the Shorter Catechist in my make-up’.