Science, stories, and the sea
June Graham (née Morland) (BSc 1993) followed her heart to study by the sea in St Andrews before embarking upon an international career in scientific research. Learning her father’s native language – Gaelic – opened doors to the arts and led June to a change of direction to become a writer.
When deciding where to study, the University of St Andrews was always my first choice. I fell in love with the medieval town and was won over by the fact that I could study astronomy alongside physics. My parents wondered why I didn’t stay at home and commute from home to one of the universities in Glasgow, but my granny from Skye understood why I had to live on the coast. “The sea’s in your blood,” she said.
I threw myself into student life. I tried sailing, parachuting and even firewalking. The latter was organised by the Physics Society. Members were trying to demonstrate that this particular challenge is possible thanks to coal’s poor ability to transfer heat, rather than anything to do with mind over matter. Unfortunately, hot embers stuck to the side of my foot long enough to cause painful burns, demonstrating the gulf between theoretical and experimental physics.
I loved traditions such as the pier walk, May Day swims and ceilidhs, and I delighted in quirky practices such as not stepping on Patrick Hamilton’s initials when I passed St Salvator’s Chapel.
First in the family
I was the first person in my working-class family to go to university. Painfully shy and lacking in confidence, I expected to fail my exams and be thrown out by Christmas. In a larger university or city environment I might have been lost, but St Andrews gave me the space and confidence to ask questions if there was something I didn’t understand or was curious about. The academic family system helped me to find my feet and I enjoyed my own brood of academic children when I reached third year.
I had always had an interest in the arts as well as science although I never seriously considered an arts degree, feeling that I had to do something with more practical elements. At St Andrews, I was truly exposed to the arts. There were so many opportunities outside of academic study and I did a lot of things for the first time, like attending a music recital and watching student drama productions. I was able to take a class in Logic and Philosophy of Science, where we studied the lives and motivations of well-known scientists, and during my second year I edited the science page of Chronicle.
A career in physics
Having survived and even thrived academically, I decided to go into research. After completing my degree in 1993, I did a Masters in Remote Sensing at UCL followed by a PhD in the University of Reading’s department of Meteorology. Homesick for Scotland, I walked into Reading Library, found a copy of Teach Yourself Gaelic, and began learning my father’s native language.
I met my future husband at Reading. Fortunately, he shared my sense of adventure as my first job after leaving there was a post-doc position in Toronto in the Climate Research Branch of what was then Environment Canada. In 2002, I landed my dream job at the University of Bern as assistant leader on a project to study changes in water vapour due to climate change.
An Cat Coigreach
My two oldest children were born in Bern, and my life began to diverge from the scientific path when we acquired a large black cat called Pangur. He accompanied us when we moved back to Scotland in 2009 but disappeared a few weeks after we moved into our new home in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. Despite searching high and low there was no sign of him until two years later when he turned up in the grounds of Lews Castle.
I began writing about his adventures to give some form of explanation to why he left and what he did while he was away. By then I was speaking Gaelic to my children, and it seemed natural to write in Gaelic. I won a New Writers Award in 2019, which helped me to develop the story, and in 2024 An Cat Coigreach (The Foreign Feline), a middle grade novel in Scottish Gaelic, was published by Bradan Press.
A chance research journey
The other turn in the road also occurred during our time in Bern and further inspired my change of direction into writing. I happened to walk into a ‘Brockenhaus’ or charity shop one day and discovered a copy of The Bern Book by Vincent O. Carter, a little known African American author. It is a memoir of Carter’s first years in the Swiss capital where he lived from 1953 until his death in 1983. Curious to know more, I wrote to his partner Liselotte Haas, and we became friends. Six years ago, with Liselotte in her mid-eighties, I returned to Bern to interview her and others who had known Carter. Since then, I have been working on researching and writing his story.
My interest in Vincent O. Carter took me to Kansas City in 2023 to research his childhood years and then to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he studied after serving during the second world war. Recently I was invited to take part in an event in New York and a conference at Lincoln University to celebrate Carter’s life and writing. These trips to the US have given me the chance to reconnect with two good friends, Laura and Anita, who studied in St Andrews for their Junior Year Abroad.
As well as lifelong friends, St Andrews gave me the confidence and skills to pursue my scientific work, as well as a glimpse into a world where I could perhaps do other things as well. Studying at Scotland’s oldest university fostered a love of history and tradition which has emerged in other areas of my life – through my passion for the Gaelic language and my interest in research and writing. I will always be grateful for that.