Boswell's Bus Pass

by Campbell, Stuart

Patrons were warned that any person found either possessing, using or distributing any type of drug would be banned from the premises and reported to the police. This explains the ugly scenes when Johnson cut a line of snuff with his credit card.

  The vending machine promised Naughty Toys for Boys and Girls. For five pounds you could buy either a set of vibrating Bunny Lugs or an artefact called Wild Willy. Dr Johnson stood alongside Boswell and shook a leg of his breeches, ‘No James, Oi won’t lend yow a sovereign, and watch where yer pointing that thing!’

  On the Sunday they worshipped at the ‘English Chapel’ which was a single room in a house in Baron Taylor’s Street. It was not easy peering at Cactus Jakes Cougar Bar or Ladbrokes (Ross County 7/2 to win the Scottish Cup, not bad odds) to work out which of the properties might be using a neglected chapel as a storage room.

  Sadly I had to leave the pair of them at prayer and return home. I was also growing increasingly disillusioned with travelling on my own and vowed to persuade some other charitable soul to join me on the next stage.

  Inverness August 28th

  My Dearest Fragrant Margaret,

  The Doctor in his room writing, the master too is writing, I think to you. I also write you. Life is strange that two men write to same woman. I know my Margaret, this is letter you wait for, not silly letter from master full of pretend sighs for you and boring things doctor say, and more clever things he say in reply.(1)

  We travel over empty lands and my master and the doctor talk about Macbeth. They have competition to see who can say most lines. I too know Macbeth, famous play but I do not say they get some lines wrong, I am servant only and know my place.(2)

  Then very strange thing happen. Again we stop as doctor wishes to make water, it takes him very long time, I hope he is not a sick man. While he wait for water to come my master rush off to see dead man hanging from gallows. The man is falling apart and smell very bad but my master stand beneath him and make sign of the cross. He shakes a lot but will not take eyes from dead man’s face. Sometimes I think my master is not well man.(3)

  Later we visit fort, it is biggest in world. Vlad he left forts in my country but they are small and fall down. This fort go on for ever and reaches to sea. They must have very big fear of natives if they build fort like this. When we wait for supper the drums go loud and my master, thinking I sleep, he look round and puts on red soldier hat and marches round room with his arms very stiff. He has proud look on face. My laughs they shake me and I am very sore in stomach so I pretend to wake up and stretch arms loudly.(4)

  My master send for me when they are eating big meal that feed all my family and friends. He has forgotten black book and needs pen to write down things they all say though their mouths are stuffed with chicken and other birds and lots of meat. They talk about drinking blood of camels. I think this not nice to talk about but I am not important person.

  Always my master worry about little Veroni. He keep thinking she dead and he cry a lot. I tell him letters do not come easy to this place and, as they say in my country, no news is not bad news. Still he worry. I think he has conscience, when he do things with women he know he is bad person and bad things will happen to him. He is very odd man but I do not like to see him not happy.

  He cry too when we pass place called Cullodi where there was big battle. He shake with crying and he mutter prayer under sobs, then he sing sad song in strange voice – not his own. The doctor get very angry, even Joseph have big fear as he bang big knob stick on floor of carriage. His face go strange colour like he struggle with stools. The master look full of shock and he shake his fist at doctor. Bad thing to do. The doctor make bull noise and hold master in strong bull grip. Joseph put himself between them both and get hit on head. I see stars in carriage sky but master and doctor stop fighting and sit not saying, not looking at the other. (5)

  My candle is nearly down (my big candle is not down when I think of my dearest Margaret – I know you like my joke). It winks at me. I want to be your house again in James Court, I want to breath the air escaped from your mouth and smell perfume from you. Even if I am in the dark downstairs, at least I would be fond and close to my best love, My (how I wish and prey God) Margaret,

  Your Bohemian Rhapsody,

  Jo.

  (1) The journal confirms that Boswell wrote to Margaret from the inn, while Johnson sent letters to Mrs Thrale and his house keeper, Miss Williams.

  (2) Boswell records that ‘In the afternoon, we drove over the very heath where Macbeth met the witches, according to tradition. Dr Johnson again solemnly repeated, “How far is’t called to Forres? What are these, So wither’d and so wild in their attire?’’ He repeated a good deal more of Macbeth. His recitation was grand and affecting.’

  (3) ‘The sight impressed me with a degree of gloom,’ is Boswell’s comment on the event.

  (4) This is not quite the version we get from Boswell, ‘At three the drum beat for dinner. I could fancy myself a military man, and it pleased me.’

  (5) This astonishing account of the two men coming to blows contributes to the ongoing debate over Dr Johnson’s political sympathies. Although it has long been assumed that he was initially attracted to the romanticism of the Jacobite dream his attitude appears to change on the journey. After all he later makes a joke when as Flora Macdonald’s guest he sleeps in the pretender’s bed, ‘I have had no ambitious thoughts in it.’ Boswell also records the doctor reflecting that if he could have secured victory at Culloden by holding up his right hand, he was not sure he would have held it up. (Some critics have seen in this statement a reference to Johnson’s non jurist status. According to this theory it was his refusal to take an oath of allegiance [holding up his left hand] at Oxford University that prevented his graduation, not his poverty). Joseph’s anecdote gives credence to the view that, along with many others, Johnson came to appreciate that sentimental adherence to Jacobinism counted for nothing in the face of brutal vengeful massacre. This would explain why he was so sorely provoked by Boswell’s tears.

  STAGE SIX

  THE GREAT GLEN

  A Sad Chinaman – A Hopeless Love – A Tasteless Episode featuring an Old Woman – An Attack of Vertigo – A Patriotic Song – The Interrogation of a Guilty Couple – A Monstrous Goat – Dispensing Charity to the Natives – A Frightful Apparition in a Bed

  Inverness – Foyers – Fort Augustus

  The intervening weeks before I could travel again weighed heavily on me. I knew that Boswell and Johnson were waiting for me – frozen in time. I was the only one who could release them from the spell and let them move on. Only by travelling north again could I breathe life and animation into Rowlandson’s black and white cartoon figures and let them jerk alive and finish the strident conversation abandoned in mid sentence.

  Roy, now grizzled and wiry as a whippet, joined me when the Inverness train stopped in Dunkeld & Birnham. We had also known each other from University days. After a long career in teaching Roy had moved north to run a private hostel where, in the absence of neighbours, he was able to develop his musical talents and by interrogating guests, further hone his talent for inquisition. I had missed him since he left Edinburgh. Most Sunday nights for at least a decade had besen marked by increasingly awful geriatric squash and three pints of much needed real ale during the consumption of which we would confide, confess and support each other in a way that defied gender stereotyping. I was not surprised to learn subsequently that he had chosen to give his time to a helpline that offered succour to the distressed and lost.

  ‘We were now to bid farewell to the luxury of travelling, and to enter a country upon which perhaps no wheel has ever rolled … At Inverness therefore we procured three horses for ourselves and a servant, and one more for our baggage, which was no very heavy load … We took two Highlanders to run beside us, partly to show us the way and partly to take back from the seaside the horses of which they were the owners. One of them was a man of great liveliness and activity, of whom his companion said, he
would tire any horse in Inverness.’

  It must have been one heck of a run for the unfortunate Highlanders trying to keep up with the horses all the way from Inverness to Fort Augustus, the pair of them staggering along, flailing in their plaids and cursing in Gaelic at the privileged travellers. Spare a thought too for Johnson’s unfortunate horse which must have increasingly resembled a Thelwell cartoon pony, its legs progressively buckling and splayed under its corpulent burden.

  Boswell provides a more humane insight into the situation of their departure. ‘We should have set out at seven. But one of the horses needed shoeing; the smith had got drunk the night before at a wedding and could not rise early; so we did not get off set off til nine.’ He at least humanises their running companions by revealing their names, John Hay and Lauchlan Vass.

  Roy has always inclined to interrogation as a mode of conversational engagement and had soon extracted a full life history from the diminutive Chinaman waiting at the bus stop with a full sized lawnmower in a box. The cardboard package which claimed to hold a Bosch Rorak 34 was the size of a small tractor and may equally have been housing all of his grandchildren from the Far East. He happily waved his ‘Old Man Pass’ and told us that its equivalent in Singapore would ensure that he would never again have to hand over money for goods, chattels or services including prostitutes, casino chips and gardening magazines.

  The box competed for the space colonised by two elderly women at the front of the shelter who were clearly marking their private fiefdom with an entourage of Lidl and M & S bags. They discussed the forthcoming general election with a lack of comprehension and outrage in equal measure. They were both engaged by Gordon Brown’s gaffe when his errant microphone caught him referring to a pensioner as a ‘bigoted woman’. ‘I had to go and look it up in the dictionary … m’ mither, she’s 92, saw yon boy from the anti-immigrant party. He’s got the right ideas she said.’ The Chinaman looked over his shoulder fearful of forced repatriation at the hands of a spittle flecked army of racist nonagenarians.

  When the 302 bus to Foyers arrived the driver looked at the midget JCB and shook his head.

  As we left Inverness Roy pointed out his primary school, the house where his parents lived and the old folks’ home where his dad died. Even in your sixties the loss of parents hurt; we all become aging orphans.

  The driver’s quiff and dark glasses identified him as a member of the Roy Orbison fan club, northern branch. He knew the only other passenger and spoke to her in increasingly confiding tones. After small talk he nonchalantly introduced the name of a woman he had seen at a party recently. His quiff sank noticeably when she told him the woman was married. She ended the brief silence that followed with ‘Are you smitten?’

  He replied with one of the great answerable questions, ‘Why am I always attracted to married women?’ In his head he played Pretty Woman, Beautiful Dreamer, A Love so Beautiful, All I need is Time, I Can’t Stop Loving You, It’s Over and several reprises of I Drove all Night. The overtime from driving all through the night would enable him to renew his lapsed subscription to the Lonely Hearts (Bus Drivers) site.

  The pain of heartbreak was slightly alleviated by the pleasure of gossip, ‘Nancy told me he just showed his wife and kids the door.’

  As we faithfully followed Johnson and Boswell’s route down the East side of Loch Ness Roy pointed out Dochfour House on the opposite bank where his mother used to visit when young to pick daffodils. She and her companions were allowed to pick as many as they could carry and would all travel home by bus. The astonishing image of a flower-festooned charabanc superimposed itself on the functional interior of the 302; a travelling funeral parlour, a moving meadow, Wordsworth’s wildest fantasy.

  The bus developed a peculiar squeak as it accelerated past Dores. Initially an irritating tinnitus it gradually assumed a celestial quality until Aeolian harps and Pan Pipes sang us on our way; a special service offered by D & E buses, oddly not mentioned on their website.

  Explaining how Loch Ness functions as a wind tunnel Roy described how seagulls are swept down the water, impotent wings swept back, helpless to resist before being impaled on the trees at the far end. A strange harvest of dead birds hanging from the branches, gulls splayed and crucified by gale force winds.

  He mentioned a family tale about how his father’s cousin had been a wartime crew member of a small boat whose mission was to patrol the Moray Firth and look out for German aircraft flying low to bomb the aluminium smelting plant at Foyers. Steaming drunk, he had to be rugby tackled to the deck as he aimed his shotgun at the marauding Dornier which, if provoked by a spray of ill-directed grapeshot, would have enjoyed the additional diversion of blowing the small craft out of the water.

  As the 302 only passed this way once a day we decided against requesting an earlier stop so that we could search for the remains of the cottage where Johnson and Boswell had one of the strangest encounters of their journey.

  With hindsight Enid Blyton owes a debt of gratitude to Boswell. He introduces the adventure with ‘A good way up the loch, I perceived a little hut with an oldish woman at the door of it. I knew it would be a scene for Mr Johnson. So I spoke of it. ‘Let’s go in,’ said he.’ Appetites whetted by nursery rhyme evocations of gingerbread women and elderly single mothers who lived in shoes, they dismounted.

  ‘… we and our guides went in. It was a wretched little hovel, of earth only, I think; and for a window had just a hole which was stopped with a piece of turf which could be taken out to let in light. In the middle of the room was a fire of peat, the smoke going out at a hole in the roof. She had a pot upon it with goat’s flesh boiling. She had at one end, under the same roof but divided with a kind of partition made of wands, a pen or fold in which we saw a good many kids.’

  The idea still has potential. POOR PEOPLE TOURS. COME AND GAWK AT REALLY POOR PEOPLE IN THEIR HOMES, AND SEE WHAT THEY EAT. TWICE DAILY. BOOK EARLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT.

  ‘Mr Johnson asked me where she slept. I asked one of the guides, who asked her in Erse. She spoke with a kind of high tone. He told us she was afraid we wanted to go to bed with her. This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a like being was truly ludicrous.’

  This from the same Boswell who by his own admission when on the grand Tour in Dresden, flirted with ‘easy street girls and by way of sport sought out the ‘ugliest woman I could find’.

  ‘Mr Johnson and I afterwards made merry of upon it. I said it was he who alarmed the poor woman’s virtue. “No, sir,’’ said he. “She’ll say, ‘There came a wicked young fellow, a wild young dog, who I believe would have ravished me had there not been with him a grave old gentleman who repressed him. But when he gets out of the sight of his tutor, I’ll warrant you he’ll spare no woman he meets, young or old.’’’

  The social tourists took snuff and whisky from the old woman and salved their consciences by giving her a shilling.

  *

  We had to abandon our post-chaise at the falls of Foyers. Although the West coast of the Loch is well served by buses this was as far as we could go by public transport on the opposite bank.

  We delayed starting the fourteen mile walk to Fort Augustus by ordering impressively expensive rolls in the one shop that services the intermittent tourist trade. On sale was an eclectic range of goods; a tube of Migibite rubbed shoulders with a bottle of whisky last seen on the bridge of SS Politician and a packet of contraceptives; a still life tribute to a blissful one night stand in a tent. The same goods were also worth having at your bedside in case two condescending 18th century travellers should drop by to inspect your goats.

  A notice in the window of the Wells Fargo store advertised a service that guaranteed to exterminate Rats, Mice, Wasps, Bees, Ants, Rabbits, Moles and Birds. An entire eco system eradicated at a stroke, a precursor to a nuclear winter and the formation of Mole Appreciation Societies across the empire.

  Johnson was impressed by the Falls. ‘We desired our guides to shew us the
fall, and dismounting, clambered over very rugged crags, till I began to wish that our curiosity might have been gratified with less trouble and danger. We came at last to a place where we could overlook the river, and saw a channel torn, as it seems, through black piles of stone, by which the stream is obstructed and broken, till it comes to a very steep descent, of such dreadful depth, that we were naturally inclined to turn aside our eyes.’

  We eschewed the red squirrel trail in favour of the zig-zag decking descent. After all we felt no need to demonstrate solidarity with squirrels as they did not feature on the exterminator’s list.

  Every corner of the staircase was occupied by similarly dressed men talking on mobile phones. This was a synchronised event beyond explanation.

  Johnson was not wrong about the falls. The drop viewed by leaning over the protective railings was conducive to vertigo, lightness of the head and a tumbling of the bowels. Roy idly tossed his apple core into the water. Boswell makes no mention of the Falls whatsoever. He probably feared a repeat of the cowardice that disabled him at the Bullers of Buchan.

  The road out of Foyers passes one of the sturdiest and underused of public conveniences in the Highlands. On the other side of the path its overgrown and obsolete ancestor is still visible. In its time it doubled as an air raid shelter which is why, by straining our ears, we could hear someone singing Keep the Home Fires Burning in a tiny distant voice. The Public Convenience Replacement, Renewal and Upgrading Programme by far surpassed anything that general Wade achieved by building roads.

  Lord grant that Marshal Wade

  May by thy mighty aid

  Victory bring

  May he sedition crush,

  And like a torrent rush,

  Rebellious Scots to crush

  God save the King!

  We followed one of his better efforts for the first four miles. Newly minted lambs were doing what lambs do, gambolling for high stakes and head butting the nearest available set of udders.