The class stared at this red-haired apparition in fear and amazement. What did he mean by asking, Who invented the mind? The question didn’t make sense. But the teacher, undismayed by the silence, his long nose thrust out like the beak of a ship below his hair of startling red answered his own question, emphasising the answer by banging the desk nearest to him with his pointer.
“The Greeks. The Greeks invented the mind. The Romans invented roads but the Greeks invented the mind. And don’t you forget it. Some day perhaps some of you will have the privilege of learning Greek but for the moment we are concerned only with ‘insula, insulam, insulae, insulae, insula’,” and at the last stressed syllable he banged the desk again with his pointer as if he wished to smash it into smithereens.
“ ‘Insula’ means ‘island’, and remember that we are living on an island. This school we are standing on or sitting in, as is the case with some of us, is situated on an ‘insula’. It is surrounded by water. If it weren’t surrounded by water we would call it ‘peninsula’ from ‘paene insula’ whihc is the Latin for ‘almost an island’. But as it is we are standing on an ‘insula’ that is a complete island.”
And he glared fiercely at them as if daring them to deny the statement he had just made, but all they did was to sit in amazement, timorous and obedient, watching the drama being enacted in front of them, and trying to escape the lightning which writhed all round the room from the peculiar man’s mind, while at that very moment though they did not know it a man who was not a Roman was pacing relentlessly up and down a room far from where they were, making plans to invade their island, sending out orders to Air Force and Navy, plotting their own overthrow and that of their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and the very teacher who was striding so restlessly about the room in which they were sitting. But as yet they did not know about this and were too busy evading the dramatic onslaught that was being made on them to care, an onslaught being conducted by an odd extraordinary man whose overpowering force impressed even them though they did not understand half of what he was talking about.
Later after the period was over, one of the members of the class who was repeating the first year stood outside the door of the Science Room shouting to the rest of the boys gathered around him, “They may have invented the lavatory pan but they did not invent the MIND.” And they all burst out into a perfect storm of laughter which left them helpless. A lavatory pan, imagine a teacher talking about a lavatory pan!
Back in the staff room Mr Trill, for that was the name of the teacher, was stuffing tobacco into a pipe, and saying, “I saw my first year last period. I think they’ll do, I think they’ll do. By the time I’m finished with them they’ll be all right.” And he turned his attention to The Times and its ominous headlines. The Times was the only paper he bought, because he said, “You can attack The Times on many grounds but you can’t deny that it writes sentences.”
When at five o’clock the bus stopped at the path leading to his house, Iain stood for a moment gazing around him. It was as if the village had suddenly become very small and unimportant. Here there was no castle and no trees, no drifters, no motor boats, no big shops, no noise of traffic. The huddled quiet houses seemed becalmed in front of him, and the moor ancient and lifeless.
He walked up the path to where his mother was standing, waiting for him at the door. Even she had suddenly become more distant, as if she belonged to another world, where the Greeks and the Romans and the “mind” and the castle and the trees had no place. He did not wish to tell her what had happened during the day: he wanted to keep it secret. But he knew that she would ask him all sorts of questions till every morsel of his experience had been chewed and devoured. There was no sign of Kenneth anywhere: perhaps he was playing with the other boys of the village.
Clutching his new case in his hand, his case which contained his new books and his new jotters and his assignments for the following day, Iain walked up the path towards his mother who was still standing by the door shading her eyes against the glare of the sun.
19
“I’M NOT GOING to put that on,” said Mrs Campbell.
“Well, we all have to,” said Angus Macleod in his most officious voice. “We all have to try them on. You never know what they’ll do. And the two boys will have to try them on as well.”
“I wouldn’t be able to breathe,” said Mrs Campbell inflexibly. “Anyway they won’t come as far as here.”
“You never know about that. You never know when they’ll come.”
“I would look daft wearing that,” Mrs Campbell said determinedly. “And as for the two boys they’re too young.”
“No, we’re not,” Kenneth interposed. “We’re not too young.” He was glad of the novelty and ready to prove that he was not frightened.
“You never know,” Angus Macleod repeated. “They’re beasts, animals. Have you heard what they have been doing in Belgium?” His small malicious eyes flickered at the savagery and cruelty of it. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that they had been raping nuns, and in any case he had never seen a nun in his life. A part of him seethed happily with the idea of it.
“Well then,” said Mrs Campbell, “you show us how to put them on.”
He took the gas masks out of their boxes, and laid them on the table. “Perhaps Kenneth would like to try his on first,” he said. “He doesn’t seem to mind.” And when Kenneth immediately stepped forward like a soldier on parade he fixed the gas mask to his face.
“I can’t breathe,” Kenneth thought, feeling the coldness of the rubber, then staring at his mother and brother and Angus Macleod through the large bulbous eyes like a fish’s eyes.
He danced up and down in the room like a monster, putting his hands out to touch, first, his mother and then Iain. He was swimming in the sea, he was a fish, the room had become an ocean.
Iain stared at his masked brother, and couldn’t recognise him. It was as if Kenneth had been replaced, as in a fairy story, by a complete stranger, ugly and distant and frightening, snouted like a beast.
Keep away from me, Kenneth, I don’t know you, you’re someone else, why are you swimming towards me like that, from the bottom of the ocean, why are you holding out your hands towards me as if to destroy me, as if you hated me? Why are your eyes glittering behind the mask?
I don’t want to wear it, it’s evil, I hate it.
But when Angus Macleod handed him his own gas mask he put it on, fumbling with it, till finally he had fitted it over his face. And now he and Kenneth were glaring at each other, through the bulbous eyes; and then his mother was wearing hers as well; and the three of them, masked and snouted and goggled, were watching each other, remote and cold inside their new insulated worlds. Kenneth stalked Iain about the room, while their unrecognizable mother stayed where she was, uncertain and frightened.
One was a German soldier and one was a Scottish soldier. It was a fight to the death in a country and landscape that they didn’t know. They hunted each other round chairs and round the table, their disguised heads thrust out, imaginary daggers in their hands. All around them was the hissing of gas, the crackling of gunfire: the island was alive with lights and noise.
And Kenneth thought, I’ll get him. He’s an officer, he’s left us all, he’s deserted us. I’ll get him. He thinks he’s better than me, but he’s not.
And Iain was thinking, Kenneth doesn’t like me. He really wants to kill me. I’m on my own on this island, this insula, I’m an officer who’s gone on a mission of his own.
Suddenly he removed his mask and shouted, “I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” But Kenneth kept stalking him till his mother, after her mask had been removed, made him stop. She was remembering her own father, bearded and heavy, setting off for another war, his rifle strapped to his shoulder.
“Stop that at once,” she shouted at Kenneth and Kenneth stopped, frightened at the violence in her voice. Slowly he removed his gas mask and laid it on the table, from which Angus Macleod
took it to return it to its box.
“They’re just boys,” he said. “It’s natural. They don’t know.” And he remembered his own son who would be setting off to the Navy that very week. He might never see him again, and yet not so long ago, it seemed, he had been the same age as these boys. The house would be quiet without him, he and his wife would feel the silence.
“Well,” he said, “that’s that. You know how to use them if you need to.”
They watched through the window as he made his heavy way down the path to the road.
“Well,” said their mother, “that’s enough. You get on with your homework,” she told Iain, “and as for you, Kenneth, you go to the well and bring me some water.”
“I don’t want to,” Kenneth complained. “I always have to go and get the water.”
“Iain has his homework to do,” said his mother in an even inflexible voice. “You’re not doing anything.”
With a glance at his brother, Iain said that he himself would go for the water but his mother immediately checked him. “No. He’s not doing anything. He has to go.”
Kenneth sulkily left the room and the two of them were left alone. “You have to work hard. Remember what I’m doing for you. You’ll have to become a minister or a teacher.” It was as if she had already forgotten about the war and the unforeseen disasters it might bring. “I don’t want you to end up with nothing after the sacrifice I’m making for you.”
Iain said nothing but turned back to his books while he thought of Kenneth making his slow reluctant way to the well.
Insula, insulam, insulae, insulae, insula …
Of an island, to an island, from an island …
The teacher’s head was crowned with flames and he was shouting, “Who invented the mind? Eh? Who invented the mind?” The head was burning and men in gas masks were attacking from all directions while in the far distance Kenneth was dipping the buckets into the well, his cool head bent over the cool water, far from the guns and the action.
“I don’t like these gas masks,” said his mother. “And who does Angus Macleod think he is? He’s going about there like a sergeant major. Soon he’ll be thinking that he runs the village.”
Around the ‘insula’ the waters were bitter and salty and briny, and over them a fierce sun was shining with red vertical rays. “Kenneth will have to do more of the work now,” said his mother, her head bent over a jersey which she was knitting. “You’ve done it long enough. I’m not standing his nonsense. I don’t know how I’m going to get you a school uniform and that’s for sure.”
Come, Kenneth, come back from the well. Let us be as we always were, fighting and shouting at each other. I don’t want to be an officer on this island. I’ll help you with the water from the well.
And Iain felt a pain bitterer than he had ever known surge through him as if for the first time in his life he was truly alone, freed of both his mother and brother, freed of the battle and the war, inside his own world of the mask and the goggles, gazing down on those other two, climbing steadily over the moor, over the sea, frightened, exhilarated, solitary: so that for a moment as he looked at his books it was as if he was still wearing his gas mask and he couldn’t see them clearly.
“Yes, mother,” he said.
He went back to his homework and she continued with her knitting.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON
BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH
Consider the Lilies
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTJO
‘Retrained, finely wrought … Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference’ – New Statesman
‘Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty – are all vividly depicted … one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases’ – Observer
The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland’s history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community.
Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scott herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.
The Last Summer
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXSGI
A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland’s most distinguished twentieth century writers.
Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends – and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Sheila, are marvellously realised. Above all, this is the story of a boy, on his own, trying to discover himself and through himself to find his way in life.
My Last Duchess
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKA
Iain Crichton Smith’s third novel is as different from his second, The Last Summer, as that was from his first, Consider the Lillies. Crichton Smith is at the height of his powers as poet and prose writer. This new work of fiction follows hard upon his Selected Poems and his volume of short stories, Survival Without Fear.
Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event, which he has by no means expected, has jolted him into a major reassessment of himself, of his place in the universe. He realises that he has become bitter, cynical and disillusioned: he is a failure intellectually – he wanted to be a writer, but for years he has striven at one book, which he privately knows to be not very good. He is a failure as a teacher – he wasn’t competent enough to obtain a post at a university. He is a failure as a husband, because his wife was daily moving away from him. He is a failure as a father, because he and his wife had had no children. Above all, he is a failure as a human being, because he despises everybody, not least himself. Mark Simmons hates himself for being more concerned with argument than happiness.
My Last Duchess is a novel of great resourcefulness and energy.
An Honourable Death
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQQU
‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times
In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter’s son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria’s army. He joined the Gordons – the 92nd Highlanders – whose reputation was second to none as the fearsome cutting-edge of the British Army. Posted to India, Afghanistan, South Africa and the Sudan, he became a formidable soldier, rising up through the ranks to become the glorified and much-decorated Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald or, more commonly, ‘Fighting Mac’, the true hero of Omdurman.
Then, in 1903, at the peak of his remarkable career, he was accused of homosexuality. Ordered to face court martial and unable to bear the disgrace, he ended his life.
From this true story, with a poet’s insight and precision, Iain Crichton Smith has crafted an exquisite novel: a tale of honour and elitism, equivocation and hierocracy, victory and despair.
The Dream
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQIS
‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim’ – Scotland on Sunday
‘Iain Crichton Smith writes lik
e a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times
In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures.
Their marriage frays in the silence as Martin clings to the Gaelic he teaches at the university, the dwindling bedrock of the culture of the isles, while Jean refuses to speak a language that brings back memories of the bitter years of her childhood. While Jean chatters with her friends of relationships and resentments, Martin turns to Gloria who seems to share his dream of the islands of the Gael…
Iain Crichton Smith’s The Dream explores the precarious survival of a modern marriage with a poet’s lean, evocative precision and all the spellbinding authority of a master storyteller in the time-honoured Celtic tradition.
In the Middle of the Wood
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQCE
Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened.
In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith’s most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith’s case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.
The Tenement
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQDI
The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding.
The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper’s role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife.
On the Island Page 11