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Kirriemuir - "A Window in Thrums"

"A Window in Thrums" - May 2006

This is the house made famous in Sir J. M. Barrie's book a Window in Thrums.  It stands South of Kirriemuir at the intersection of Bellie's Brae and the Forfar Road (A926).  The window referred to in the book is at the side of the house facing you and is overgrown with a shrub in this photo (2006).  (If you continue on Bellie's Brae to the South it turns into the Glamis Road.

This is "A Window in Thrums" in Kirriemuir.  The window in this house is called that because it served as a window onto the little world of Thrums, the fictitious name of Kirriemuir in Sir J. M. Barrie's novel A Window in Thrums.  The name Thrums comes from a weaving term.  A thrum is a little wisp of unspun fleece or roving that is knit into your project every so often. Thrumming makes the insides soft, fuzzy, and warm.

There is some subtle humor in the novel hinging on the ability of the occupant of the room behind that window to fathom the past, current, and future events of the day by activity in the streets.  The Capital Scot can relate to the "wireless" comunications that take place there.  When he visited Kirriemuir in 1957, he walked from where he was staying down The Roods to town, did what he did, and walked back up again.  On the return trip he neither saw nor passed anyone.  There was no telephone in the house.  Upon arrival back at the house, his aunt told him some of what he had done in the past hour and whom he had spoken to!

[Another View]

"A Window in Thrums" - June 1957

Here are some excerpts from A Window in Thrums that illustrate the atmosphere of the novel:
  "This is Jess' window.  For more than twenty years she had not been able to go so far as the door, and only once while I knew her was she ben in the room."
  "The little window commands the incline to the point where the brae and the point where the brae suddenly jerks out of sight in its climb down into the town.  The steep path up the commonty makes for this elbow of the brae; and thus, whichever way the travbeler takes, it is here that he comes first into sight of the window.  Here, too, those who go to the town from the south get their first glimpse on Thrums."
  "Jess' window was a beacon by night to travelers in the dark, and it will be so in the future when there are none to remember Jess. ..... To Jess, at her window always when she was not in bed, things happy and mournful and terrible came into view.  At his window she sat for twenty years or more looking at the world as through a telescope; and here an awful ordeal was gone through after her sweet, untarnished soul had been given back to God."
(Barrie, J. M., A Window in Thrums, pub. Henry Altemus, Philadelphia, 1894.)

According to a Barrie biographer, Jess ... though based physically on Bell Lunan, the Barries' crippled next-door neighbor, was Margaret Ogilvy [Barrie's mother], while Leeby, the daughter in the book, was obviously Jane Ann [Barrie's sister], and a caricature at that.  (Janet Dunbar, J. M. Barrie, The Man behind the Image, pub. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1970.)

"A Window in Thrums" - From an Old Book Circa 1899

This is a picture of "A Window in Thrums" in Kirriemuir taken from a family 'photo album handed down to The Capital Scot.

An' will ye ken the hoose abun,
As well as your twa thoombs,
The een that frae auld Jean wis laid,
An' ca'ed the house o' Thrums?

Who was "auld Jean"? It was explained to The Capital Scot that the "hoose abun" was the house above the Commonty.  (A commonty is, in Scots Law, a common; a piece of land in which two or more persons have a common right.  The Commonty, as used here, was apparently once a local reference to specific parcel of land in Kirrie.)  Across from the Commonty are a school (Websters Seminary) and a church which was later an undertaker's place.  At the school is a piece of ground, the "moon" (later a joiners' yard).  Beyond the school is the house known from the J.M. Barrie book as "The Window in Thrums".

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