Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  I am starting to glimpse something truly original, like a great figure emerging from a fog, a narrative uniting global and Scottish history and my own without fictional masks, an immense task. Hurrah and onward, Tunnock, while keeping your eyes on the world around you.

  Last week, on the way back from Heraghty’s around noon, called in at the Hasta Mañana on Gorbals Street and saw the small big-nosed lawyer I met there over a year ago. Perhaps I was looking for her. I took an empty chair opposite as she talked into a mobile phone with her usual speed and intensity. She spoke to people about impending court appearances for over fifteen minutes without seeming to see me. I finished an excellent bowl of soup and was starting on a salad when she switched the phone off and said, “Well John Tunnock, how’s Medician Florence?”

  I told her I had been forced to abandon it and was embarking on something that would also show visions of the local and contemporary. She asked why and after pondering my very wordy answer thrust an unclenched fist at me across the table. I stared at it, puzzled, until I saw she was offering to shake my hand. I allowed this and found my new book has made me a new, very useful friend. Her name is ————21 She gave me her phone number. I gave her my address.

  Yesterday I received her postcard telling me Tony Blair (though she spelled him Bliar) would be addressing the Scottish Trades Union leaders in Glasgow Conference Centre, that folk from all over Scotland would be marching there to protest against another Anglo-American war with Iraq. Other big protest marches would be happening in London, most European capitals and New York and Sydney, so she would call in a taxi at nine today and pick me up to take part. This frightened me. I approve of people publicising their ideas in peaceful protest marches, whether they are workers who don’t want their industries shut, or pacifists who want nuclear missiles banned, or even Orangemen who think the world’s worst menace is the Catholic Church. Freedom of speech needs everyone to openly show what they believe, even if their beliefs are stupid and wrong. Without public discussions and demonstrations the only alternative to government by millionaire politicians is terrorist bombings. But I am emotionally incapable of public appearances. When the taxi came I went out and began explaining this, but before I had said two sentences through the taxi window this implacable woman opened the door and said “Stop talking, ostrich! Get in!” I did. It was a bright, fresh, sunny morning so I had no excuse to even go back indoors for a coat.

  So by taxi to Glasgow Green where not one crowd but many crowds were moving between triumphal arch before High Court, the Clyde to the south and People’s Palace Museum in the east.22 In many demonstrations weirdly dressed people are noticeable and reported by the press as typical. This multitude had hardly any. Most folk were pleasantly un-uniform and of every age. Young parents pushed toddlers in prams. Two boys of ten or eleven, with no apparent presiding adult, walked carefully side by side to display a single cardboard sandwich board with peace slogans written in fibre-tipped pens. The Eurydice Women’s Socialist Choir sang peace songs. A nice woman held up a sign saying I Trust No Bush But My Own. There was a group with a banner saying, Dumfries Ageing Hippies Against The War, a group of older folk whose banner announced THE TAYSIDE PENSIONERS’ FORUM. ———— told me Blair is proposing to abolish old age pensions because workers’ contributions are now too small. So New Labour will undo the Liberal Party’s People’s Budget of 1909? I am worse than an ostrich, I am Rip Van Winkle. Many held up printed placards saying Make War on Want, Not Iraq, Not In My Name Mr Blair, No Blood For Oil, and white cut-out polystyrene doves on the ends of little canes, and distributing radical party news sheets against the war and demanding Palestine liberation. Light brown people (who I refuse to call blacks) were over five per cent of the crowd.

  There were no visible organizers so we joined the people at their thickest beside Greendyke Street where the march was scheduled to start, edging in until pressure of other bodies made movement impossible. In this cheerful, good-humoured crowd ———— seemed to know everyone, pointing to musicians and actors I never heard of, besides the novelists A.L. Kennedy and Bernard MacLaverty, poets Aonghas MacNeacail and Liz Lochhead, the writer Angus Calder who was too far away for me to introduce myself. At last guidance came from the police who stood in a line between the crowd and the street. A small number moved aside and let us gradually through in numbers that started walking ten abreast, filling the width of the street without overlapping pavements on each side. We entered the procession about half a mile behind the leaders, from Greendyke Street marching up the Saltmarket to Glasgow Cross. Occasionally those around us burst into wild cheering inspired by folk waving encouragement from upper tenement and office windows. The stream of the march split neatly in two to pass the gawky clock tower of the Tollbooth, all that remains of Glasgow’s 17th century town hall, magistrates’ court and city jail.

  John Prebble’s book about the Glencoe massacre mentions that in 1692 two British Army officers were jailed in the Tollbooth. Before reaching Glencoe village they opened their sealed orders and, finding themselves commanded to put men, women and children to the sword, broke their swords, marched back to Fort William and told their commander that no decent officer should obey such an order. They were sent south by ship for court martial, but Prebble says there is no record of one so they may have been released without punishment. It occurred to me that a great anti-war memorial should be set on that tower commemorating soldiers who had bravely refused to obey wicked orders. Scotland’s city centres, castles, cathedrals, public parks are so full of war memorials to heroically obedient killers that visitors might think warfare had always been Scotland’s main export. Some of the most elaborate put up before 1918 commemorate a few officers and men who died in Africa, Egypt and Asia where they were part of regiments killing thousands of natives fighting on their own soil without the advantage of gunpowder. The company of so many people who wanted peace suddenly filled me with enthusiasm for this anti-war memorial. I thought it could also carry the names of the four British officers who resigned their commissions during the 1991 Bush war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – they were protesting against bombing Iraqis who could not fight back against cluster bombs “that minced up everything living within a three-mile airstrip.” I started explaining my great idea and it hardly left my mouth when ———— said, “Don’t waste time thinking about it. No local government, no public body in Scotland will ever allow it.” But surely many folk in Scotland and England admire brave refusers and would agree with Berthold Brecht (or was it Heinrich Böll?) who said the worst German vice was obedience. Yet in 1991 I read that British and U.S. airmen enthusiastically queued to airstrike Iraqi ground troops. One bomber said that from above they looked like swarms of cockroaches.

  From a helicopter that crossed back and forward above our march must also have looked like cockroaches as we went via Ingram Street to George Square. Our biggest roar went up as the Civic Chambers came in sight. Why were no Glasgow Town Councillors waving encouragement from the windows? Why were none in the procession holding up a banner saying GLASGOW COUNCILLORS AGAINST THE WAR? They could have marched behind the banner of Unison, the local government employees’ trade union. But in that case the Labour Party leaders might not let them stand at the next election, so they would lose their wages. From George Square we saw a silhouette of our procession crossing the summit of Blythswood Hill far far ahead.

  I have always been a stranger to group emotions, fearing and disliking even the idea of them, and was surprized by a warm relaxed friendliness spreading through me because I was part of this miles-long peaceful procession of folk I have taught or drunk with in pubs all my life, the Scottish workers, tradespeople and professional folk I feel at home with. This sensation became so strong that it brought tears to my eyes, perhaps because a small brass band not far behind was playing familiar melancholy tunes, The Floo’ers o’ the Forest, The Auld Hoose, The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond. I began describing my sensations but ———— said, “Yes, all these f
olk will suffer if our businessmen listen to an expert in Scottish Enterprise, a government body once called The Scottish Development Agency. He is advizing Scottish businesses to have their goods made by workers in eastern Europe or Asia. But crying about it won’t help.” At last we arrived in a desert of car parks covering the site

  of the former Princess Dock, a basin surrounded by cranes where giant ships unloaded cargoes when Glasgow was a big international port and centre of manufacture only fifty years ago. The crowds already seemed more of a multitude than they had been on Glasgow Green and confronted a shining white building locally nicknamed The Armadillo, a huge apparently windowless metallic structure whose arched sections seem sliding out of each other. A line of yellow-jacketed policemen was looped protectively around it and I realized The Armadillo is the Scottish Conference Centre where Blair would now be addressing the Scottish Trades Unions. We stood listening to occasional storms of applause from a crowd around an open-topped double-decker bus near the river. That speech was inaudible to those not near the bus because loudspeakers had been banned, so the orator may have been a spokesman for the Church of Scotland, or for Scotland’s Asiatic Communities, or for the C.N.D. or for the Scottish Socialist Party because later I heard all of these made speeches and so (amazingly) did Glasgow’s Labour Lord Provost, a woman. After half an hour we left, moving against the flood of people still coming because the procession was much longer than its three-mile route.

  I walked back home alone, needing peace to think about this wholly new experience. It cannot be ignored but how can I use it? Kelvingrove Park was crowded with others who had left the procession so I crossed it feeling safe from Hitler the Second. I called in at Tennants where Mastermind told me Blair had rescheduled his speech, delivering it before 10 o’clock when the procession left Glasgow Green and flying back to England before it arrived, adding, “No doubt when Blair dies the obituaries will praise his moral courage in ignoring the electorate’s opinion.”

  Home by 2.30 where Niki served me with afternoon tea as she has done regularly since I lost my temper last week. For the first time she had got the amount of sugar and milk in my cup exactly right. I praised her. She seemed pleased. Could I train her to become, not a mistress or wife, but a helpmeet who shops, cooks, serves nice meals? A companion who will help make my descent through senility to death a comfortable passage after I have published my masterpiece and enjoy the fame and fortune it cannot fail to bring?

  My lawyer friend phoned this morning and, her voice harsh with indignation, told me BBC television reports of Blair’s Glasgow speech yesterday were inter-cut with views of the protestors outside the building, thus suggesting he had delivered his speech as he had planned, instead of fleeing before the protestants arrived.23 I told her my book would correct that account of our march at the very end, unless I lived to see Blair arrested for his lie that Iraq is nearly ready to atom bomb Britain in 45 minutes.

  Am confirmed in my new plan for the book by Nicolai Gogol’s life who, like Burns and Walter Scott and me, was first inspired by the songs and ballads of his homeland, the Ukraine. He spent years attempting a history showing how different it was from the rest of Russia because Ukrainian Cossacks had kept Islam out of Christian Europe in the south when Polish Catholics were doing the same thing in the north. But he was no provincial! His Taras Bulba, fruit of that historical research, owes much to a Russian translation of the Odyssey. His Dead Souls, the first great Russian novel, owes much to his reading of Don Quixote and The Pickwick Papers. He tried to complete that vision of Russia (as a Hell of grotesque souls ) with a Heavenly modern conclusion in which his fraudulent hero is redeemed by a good Russian prince and Orthodox Christianity. He failed, but with his friend Pushkin, generated all that is great, unique and worth world-wide attention in Russian literature between the failure of the December revolution of 1825 and the Soviet revolution in the 1920s. My book will fail to present a vision of self-governing Scotland becoming a unique example of good Socialism, but may manage to show why it could and should be. Forget fame and fortune. I recently read a story24 about young American students asked, as a psychological test, to say what inanimate thing they would like to be. A black girl upsets everyone by saying, “a revolver”. I asked myself that question and immediately answered “a molecule”. Why? Molecules are invisible, anonymous, invulnerable and essential. My book will almost certainly appear after my death when I will be invisible and invincible. Start it tomorrow.

  15: WEE ME

  My character was shaped by two gentle, unmarried women who mothered me from infancy, providing all I needed and almost all I wanted without a word of reproof or complaint. If I am not now monstrously selfish it is because I loved them as dearly as they loved me, so tried to save them from the trouble a dependent, growing boy might cause elderly women. This was usually easy as I only felt perfectly safe and happy at home with them. The unsatisfactory parts of my world were outside it. Each Sunday we attended services in the church where a grandfather who died years before my birth had been the first Minister of God. I enjoyed the hymns, had no objection to prayers but would have found the sermons boring had Nell, the youngest aunt, not fed me a chocolate cream or liquorice allsort or peppermint humbug whenever I fidgeted. Too much sugar rots the teeth so I was only given sweets during Sunday sermons, blissfully sucking while my eyes dreamily explored the great interior like a spacious lantern. The church had been modelled on the gothic Sainte-Chapelle in Paris so there was no pillar or gallery to prevent a clear view of the coved ceiling and tall stained glass windows. I was too young to consciously enjoy its beauty but now believe it enlarged my soul like all truly good things we meet when young.

  But I stopped enjoying the Sunday schools held by a church elder in a comfortable part of the undercroft. She was a retired school teacher as kind as my aunts. She told us simple Bible stories chiefly about Jesus at first, but at the age of seven started teaching the early history of mankind and God’s chosen people with straight readings from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Samuel and Kings. She omitted dull begat chapters and sexually explicit ones like Abraham’s fraudulent prostitution of his wife in Genesis chapters 12 and 20, but did not censor the genocidal wars by which the children of Israel replaced the original inhabitants of Palestine. I thought the Lord God who ordered the Israelites to “smite them, and utterly destroy them; and make no pact with them, nor show mercy unto them” was cruel and unfair. I said so. The teacher was a gentle soul. She told me the war was not a fight for land between Jews and those earlier settlers, the Ammonites, Midianites, Canaanites and Philistines; it was a “life-and-death struggle between truth and falsehood for the cultural development of God’s people”.25 I asked what that meant. Becoming a little flustered she said God needed to order the slaughter of men, women and children who did not believe in Him, so that the Jews had a homeland where His son Jesus, Prince of Peace, could be born to preach the religion of peace for everyone. I did not then know that Christian nations had been as warlike as pagan ones, and had used the Old Testament for centuries after the crucifixion to justify the invasion and massacre of foreigners. But the teacher knew this, so skipped from the spread of Christianity by Saint Paul to the recent victory over Fascism by Britain and the U.S.A. She did not mention the essential help nations got from the atheist U.S.S.R. but said the German defeat was a Christian victory and had established a United Nations Organisation that would oppose warfare from now onward. Yet this explanation did not stop me thinking the Israelites had been cruel, greedy and unfair. I told my aunts so and Nell looked at Nan in a slightly guilty way. After a brief pause Nan her elder sister said firmly, “You are right to think that. Most of what the Bible says Jesus said should be believed. Some of the rest was written by poets as good as any you will find in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and some by propagandists as bad as any in Nazi Germany. But the Bible has so changed world history that nobody will understand that if they know nothing about it. But you need not attend Sun
day school if you do not wish.” So I stopped going. Nan also said, “Nell and I are faithful members of the Church of Scotland because, though agnostics like most religious people nowadays, we are also old maids ruled by force of habits drilled into us by a rigorous parent. You need not come with us to church if you dislike it.” But I liked hymns, stained glass, also the sweets which I only stopped sucking when I lost my taste for sherry. I attended church with my aunts until they were bedridden.

  At school my shyness and short, stout figure made me uninteresting to both pupils and teachers though I was scrupulously clean, always neatly dressed, and did well in all my lessons except physical training and sport. The clash between life inside and outside my home was shown in my schoolbags.