Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  The country opened out again beyond the hospital, and the river made an erratic series of turns to the north, the east, the southeast, and, finally, the southwest, forming an irregular loop about two miles broad. Anybody moving overland from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane would cross this loop, and so did we, first going through the Haugh of Kercock, a low-lying meadow by the river. In a fank in the meadow, men were shearing sheep. Lambs were bleating wildly. Shorn ewes stood around looking silly and naked. One man had the head of a ewe in his arms, and was wrestling with her desperately, rolling on the ground. Moving on, we skirted a marshland called the Bloody Inches. Beautiful farm country followed toward Kinclaven, a village by the Tay, on the far side of the loop. In the fields, huge strawstacks had been constructed like houses—rectangular, with vertical walls, and tops sloping up to ridgelines. Moving along an unpaved lane, we came to a church that was black with age, and among the tombstones beside it a man was digging a grave. We stopped to ask him the way to Dunsinane. He said he had been digging graves there forty-four years and had been born and raised in Kinclaven but had no idea how to get to Dunsinane. He said, “It’s not far. It’s a small place, I can tell you that.” His shovel struck something in the ground. He explained that when he digs graves he often encounters the foundations of churches that, one after another, had been on the site before this one. A church must have been there when Macbeth’s castle stood on Dunsinane Hill. According to the Scottish historian R. L. Mackie, Macbeth was so religious that he once made a pilgrimage to Rome. All the way to the Vatican and back, he flung money at the poor. Since he lived less than five miles away from Kinclaven, he and Lady Macbeth must have gone to church here from time to time.

  We crossed the river, made a right, went through a railway embankment, made a left at Cargill Smithy, and began a long upgrade toward Gallowhill, Wolfhill, and Dunsinnan, through villages of strawstacks, and more wheat, oats, and barley in dark-red earth. We found Donald Sinclair among his steadings, some two miles from Dunsinane Hill.

  Sinclair seemed amused that we wanted to climb his hill, and not at all put out. I had thought that people must come in battalions to Dunsinane, and that Sinclair probably spent a lot of his time protecting his land. He said that was not the case. A busload of Boy Scouts from Perth might turn up once in a rare while, but that was about all. Few people seem to realize that there really is a Dunsinane Hill. Shakespeare, he said, took an “n” out of Dunsinnan and added an “e,” but did not create the hill. “The name in Gaelic means ‘hill of the ants.’ Streams of little men went up and down the hill when the castle was being built. Shall we go?”

  We drove with him through fields and in woodland, made a few turns, and all at once saw a high green hill fringed with rowan trees and mountain ash in blossom. Dunsinane is at the southwestern end of the serrated line of the Sidlaw Hills. The other Sidlaws, reaching away to the northeast, were all mauvebrown with heather, and Dunsinane stood out among them because it was bright green. Heather apparently will not grow where man has ever performed his constructions. Even from the foot of Dunsinane, we could see that its summit was flat—absolutely truncated, as if it had been sliced level with a knife. We started up its grassy, southern slope. Sinclair’s Herefords were grazing there. “I raise beef cattle,” he said. “They summer on the hill. When a busload of Boy Scouts comes, it is much to my horror, because I’ve got a bull amongst the cows here.” Sinclair was wearing wide-wale corduroy trousers, a threadbare baggy sweater, a shirt, a wool tie. Still in his forties, a tall man, he looked weathered, as if he had always been there. He seemed to be at one with his land and his hill, and nothing about his loose-postwed walk suggested that he was a graduate of Sandhurst, which he was—a career military man, born on a wheat farm in Manitoba, raised in England, an Army officer from the Second World War until the early nineteen-sixties, when he became the tenant farmer of Dunsinane Hill. We went around a shoulder of the terrain. “There he is,” Sinclair said. We passed close by a congenial-looking Hereford bull. He was rust-red, almost top-heavy, the kind of animal that appears to consist of about nine tons of solid steak, and, with his white-rug face, to be as fierce as Ferdinand. “We call him Old Joe.”

  The slopes of the hill rose and converged with an almost volcanic symmetry, so the climb became quite steep. We passed a spring. “This is where Macbeth got his water,” Sinclair said. “The sort of outer fortifications must have reached this far.” We kept moving up, breathing hard and not talking for a while, until Sinclair paused for a moment, tilted his head back, looked up at the summit, and said, “It’s pretty impregnable, I should think. I shouldn’t like to climb up here and have people pouring boiling oil on me.”

  The summit was flat and oval, and Macbeth’s floor plan was evident there, for the foundation protruded in lumpy ridges under the turf. The castle was no cramped little broch. It was a hundred and twenty feet wide and two hundred and twenty-five feet long—just slightly larger than the Parthenon. Hill of the ants, indeed: Macbeth apparently did not do things by halves. The view from the summit over the patchwork Scottish countryside was extraordinary. It is a virtual certainty that Shakespeare never set eyes on Dunsinane. If he had, he would have described it. In fact, his entire description of Dunsinane Hill comes in two words, “high” and “great”

  Macbeth shall never vanquished be until

  Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill

  Shall come against him.

  Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies :

  Some say he’s mad.

  Curlews and oyster catchers cried overhead. This was June, and we could see the Grampians, far in the distance, with snow still on them. We could see, three hundred and sixty degrees around us, a fifth of Scotland—to Fife, to Dundee—and out over the North Sea. It would be hard to imagine a more apt or beautiful setting for a fortress home. Sinclair said that the Picts had chosen the spot centuries before Macbeth, and that Dunsinane had been only one of a whole line of Pictish forts in the Sidlaws—“a sort of defense effort against the Vikings.”

  We sat down on the base of a rampart. A cool, erratic wind was blowing. Sinclair told us, offhandedly, that the supposed Stone of Scone now in Westminster Abbey is actually a worthless rock from Dunsinane Hill. He said that the real Stone of Scone had been buried in Dunsinane Hill long ago, when the substitute was chosen, and that the real one had been dug up in the nineteenth century only to be reburied after a short time, and that despite all the more recent flurries about the (fake) Stone of Scone in Westminster Abbey, the real one was still there in the hill. Sinclair pointed out Scone, over toward Perth, and added that that was the dullest direction to look in, for, with the dubious exceptions of Scone and Perth, “you can’t see anything madly exciting.” Closer in and on a more northerly line, he called attention to a small stone house trimmed in red, and he said, “That is where Macbeth settled his three wise women.” Moving his hand, pointing, he said, “That farm down there is called Balmalcolm. The next one is Fairy Green, where they found a Pictish stone called the Spunky Dell. The trees down here on the north slope were planted by my father-in-law. He’s reforesting. They are five-year-old Scotch pines and some larch.”

  Macbeth did not die at Dunsinane. Birnam Wood moved, and so forth, according to Holinshed’s questionable Chronicles, but Macbeth was ignominiously driven away, a fugitive king humbled before his people, and he lived three more years before he was killed, by Malcolm Canmore (Big-Headed Malcolm), on some undramatic moor in Aberdeen. I had been reading W. C. Mackenzie’s history of the Highlands only a few days before this, and there on the summit of Dunsinane I found that I could almost remember verbatim Mackenzie’s summary line: “By the irony of circumstances, Macbeth, branded as long as literature lasts with the stain of blood, was the friend of the poor, the protector of the monks, and the first Scottish king whose name appears in ecclesiastical records as the benefactor of the Church.” It simply was not in him to shout at an enemy here on these ramparts in the hour of his death:

/>   I will not yield,

  To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet

  And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.

  Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,

  And thou oppos’d, being of no woman born,

  Yet I will try the last. Before my body

  I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,

  And damn’d be him that first cries “Hold, enough!”

  The race being what it is, we prefer him the second way, and Shakespeare knew what we wanted. I had been twirling by its stern the leaf from the Birnam oak, and I dropped it on the top of the hill. We went down to Sinclair’s farmhouse for tea, and tea included, among other things, banana sandwiches and Nesquik chocolate milk shakes.

  Mr. Macbeth, after a struggle over the check, paid for my breakfast. As we parted, he told me that he had once been a salesman of advertising space for a magazine, and that he had spent half his days in reception foyers waiting to get in to see various kinds of executives. On arrival, he would give his name routinely to the receptionist, then sit down, pick up a magazine, and wait. During this interval, slow, obscure, primordial stirrings would apparently go on in the receptionist’s mind, for time and again—and never, he thought, with conscious intent—the receptionist would eventually say to him, “You may go in now, Mr. Macduff.”

  Basketball and Beefeaters

  BASKETBALL PLAYERS, years ago, used to spend hours telling about the weird places where they had played the game. They played in dance halls under ceilings they could touch with their elbows. They played on the stages of theatres where they could hip one another into the orchestra pit. They played in poorly lighted warehouses, taking shots that would disappear into upper blackness and emerge great distances away to drop without touching the rim. The game is glossy and standardized now. Courts are neat, bright rectangles in the middle of floors big enough for golf. The players are the best ever, but dull. The old stories are seldom heard.

  I have one, but until recently I had never come right out with it, for fear of being taken for my grandfather. I saw my chance as I listened to a fellow I know talking about the days when he played for a grocery store in the Pacific Northwest. He had been a steady, “set-’em-up” guard on the Melrose Market five. One night, he said, Melrose played in a dense cloud of Bull Durham in the mess hall at the Washington State Penitentiary, in Walla Walla. Here was a man I could talk to. “That’s nothing,” I said to him. “I once played basketball in the Tower of London.”

  I was lying, as a matter of fact, but the truth is so close to this particular lie that I didn’t mind telling it. One season, during the middle nineteen-fifties, I was a member of the basketball team at Cambridge University. I had come there, after finishing Princeton, to read English literature, and I absorbed a fair part of it in the buses that carried us all over the Midlands to play our various matches. At first, when I arrived in Cambridge and began looking through the University handbook for some sort of team to play on, I decided against basketball without so much as looking into the matter. I thought that since basketball had been invented by an American, the Cambridge team would obviously be just a group of American students; if there were any scheduled games at all, they would be played against soldiers and airmen at American bases. I wouldn’t have needed to cross the ocean for that. So, with some inconsistency, I went out for lacrosse, the game invented by American Indians. I had foreknowledge that it was played in England by Englishmen, but it turned out that they don’t play lacrosse the way we do in the United States. It is a non-contact sport in England, with no pads or helmets—all ballet and stickwork. In the first scrimmage, my own stick forgot itself and all but disassembled the lower jaw of a chap from Jesus College. That was considered a poor showing. I soon decided to play basketball after all.

  The building we played in was on the edge of the University cricket grounds. It served as a gymnasium, but the lettering over the entryway said “Department of Human Ecology.” I walked in expecting to see thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Fulbright scholarships running around trying to keep warm. Sure enough, the first person to introduce himself was Bob Pinckert, of New York. The second was Russ Moro, also of New York. But then I met David Thomas, Scotsman; Howard Purnell, Welshman; Tudor Johnston, Canadian; Dye Thomas, Welshman; Michael Blackburn, Englishman; Dennis Cope, Englishman; Joe Romero, Filipino; and Dennis Solomon, from Trinidad. Before the season ended, we even had a man from Barbados. I was only the third American.

  From Hampshire to Derbyshire, Sussex to Shropshire, we went wherever the whim of our club secretary took us. Surprisingly, potential opponents were everywhere. There is a basketball club in nearly every town in England. The game was introduced there through the Y.M.C.A. movement in 1934, the Second World War stimulated its growth, and now there is an Amateur Basketball Association and even a monthly magazine, Basketball. R. William Jones, secretary of the International Amateur Basketball Association, which regulates and helps standardize the game all over the world, is British. Basketball is played in all of Britain’s armed services. Newspapers list basketball scores. The game, in short, is English now. And why not? It is the ideal team sport for the world’s foremost indoor nation.

  The first actual basketball I saw, as manufactured in England, was a disturbing sight. I suppose I was expecting at least a Voit Enduro ball out of a U.S. war-surplus store. The English ball was more like a surplus mine. Precisely, it was built much as a soccer ball is built, with the same thick leather, the same jigsaw quantity of small collected parts. Instead of going through the net with a swish, it would sometimes tear the net off. Dribbling was difficult, since the ball, to say the least, bounced unevenly. There was nothing in the English rule book requiring that a basketball be that way, so I sent back to Princeton for a contribution to Cambridge University, which was swiftly provided: three Spalding Top-Flite basketballs, the type used by nearly all American colleges—precision items that would bounce with obedience.

  Unfortunately, there was no sending home for a new gymnasium. The Department of Human Ecology was housed in a new building, just two years old then, but in the developmental chronology of American basketball it might have been the best new gym of 1922. Exercise bars stuck out from solid oak walls that were just eight inches from the sidelines. The backboards, with their attached baskets, were screwed into end walls of yellow firebrick, so that after a driving layup a player, unable to stop quickly enough, often collided with the brick. Naturally, these players were almost always our visitors, since no one on the Cambridge squad, unless carried away by excitement, would think of driving hard toward the basket even if he had a clear opening. We would usually stand back and waft long shots from safe distances.

  We lost only one game in our own gym during five months of steady matches with other universities, clubs from various towns and cities, and service teams. But for all the advantage of the Spalding basketballs and the yellow firebrick (which our opponents never even commented on), I nonetheless think it remarkable that we managed to run up winning scores consistently in the sixties and seventies when very few shots were risked from distances under fifteen feet. In the first round of the annual tournament—the somewhat inexact equivalent of the American N.C.A.A. championships—we were hosts to a team from Corby, in Lincolnshire, and beat them 100-32. But the next and, for us, final round was the one game we lost at Cambridge—to the U.S. Navy team from Grosvenor Square.

  We lost a good number of games played away from Cambridge, since conditions, including the size of the court, tended to favor the home team everywhere. While our gym was probably the newest in England, it was also in all probability the smallest. It was possible, though rarely attempted, to complete a solo fast-break from one end of the court to the other with a single high-parabola dribble. Hence, we were lost on the big courts at places like Ruislip, Loughborough, and Oxford. Had we played Oxford at Cambridge, we might have kept the score close, but I think we would have lost anyway. Whereas we were an essentially En
glish team with strong international overtones, Oxford’s basketball club was an exclusive clique of Americans. We were a sporting group. We always stopped off for a pint of mild after practice. The Oxford team was homogeneously composed of Rhodes Scholars, all of whom were dedicated to abstemiousness, exercise, and victory. They played hard, cleanly, and competently, and one got the feeling that they were representing a theological seminary.

  Since Oxford had no basketball court of its own, its players used a floor at a nearby American airbase. It was in an immense hangar, heated by a jet engine that was mounted in the wall at one end. The engine drove a devastating blast of superheated air onto the court. Moving toward it—even if you were in the clear on a fast-break—you were wise to stop and take a jump shot twenty feet away. The intense heat was spent, however, long before it reached the other end of the court. You could actually see your breath in the cold end. As a team, unfortunately, we were cold in both ends. We lost miserably.