Ten Tales Tall and True

by Alasdair Gray

  “But in America last week there was a terrible accident…”

  “Yes, madam, through a fault in their central data bank at Detroit. These big continental systems are all far too centralized. The British branch of the system has enough autonomy to prevent such accidents here. So you see, although I am not drinking brandy in a London club (I never touch alcohol – doctor’s orders!) I look more like a Piccadilly lounge-lizard than like the legendary John Halifax here. My main task is to keep down the buffet prices and stop passengers bickering with one another. And I’m not always successful.”

  “I think you succeed splendidly!” says Mrs Dear enthusiastically.

  “Hear hear!” says her husband.

  “You’re certainly good with passengers –” says the teacher, and, “You aren’t the fool I took you for, I’ll give you that,” says the old man.

  “Thank you John,” says the driver gratefully, “With all due respect to the other passengers here, it is your opinion which counts with me.”

  The chiming is heard then the firm friendly voice says, “Good day good people, there is no cause for alarm. This is your driver Captain Rogers speaking. Here is a special message for Captain Rogers. Will he please proceed to the traction unit? Proceed to the traction unit. Thank you.”

  “Pre-recorded, of course?” says the old steam man knowingly.

  “Quite right,” says the driver, who has risen and pocketed his stool, “If the traction unit is empty when a message comes from HQ, the graphic print-out activates that announcement and – duty calls! I’m sorry I have to return to my cabin. I’ll probably find a rotten stock-market report that forces me to raise the price of tea again. I hope not. Goodbye John.”

  “Goodbye, er…?”

  “Felix. Goodbye good people.”

  He departs leaving nearly everyone in a relaxed and social mood.

  “What a nice man!” says Mrs Dear, and the mother agrees. Mr Dear announces, “He was informed – and informative.”

  The teacher says, “But the situation he laid bare for us was not reassuring. Nobody is driving this train.

  “Utter rubbish!” cries Mr Dear, “There’s a … there are all kinds of things driving this train, data-banks and computers and silicon chips all ticking and whirring in the headquarters at Stockton- on-Tees.”

  “Stoke-on-Trent,” murmurs his wife.

  “Shut up dear, the town doesn’t matter.”

  “Well,” says the teacher, “I find it disturbing to be driven by machines which aren’t on board with us. Don’t you, Mr Halifax?”

  The old steam man ponders a while then says hesitantly, “I might have done if I hadn’t met the driver. But he’s an educated chap. He wouldn’t take things so casually if there was any danger, now would he?”

  “Madam,” says Mr Dear, “We are actually far far safer being driven by a machine in Stoke-Newington. No thug with a gun can force it to stop the train, or divert us into a siding where terrorists threaten our lives in order to blackmail the government.”

  They sit in silence for a while then the teacher says firmly, “You are both perfectly right. I have been very, very foolish.”

  And then the chiming sounds and they hear that soothing voice again.

  “This is your driver, Captain Rogers. We are cruising above the Wash at a speed of two hundred and sixty-one kilometres per hour, and the Quantum-Cortexin ventilation system is keeping the air at the exact temperature of the human skin. So far our run has gone very smoothly, and I deeply regret that I must now apologize for a delay in the anticipated time of arrival. An error in our central data-bank has resulted in the 1999 Aquarian from Bundlon to Shaglow running on the same line as the 1999 Aquarian from Shaglow to Bundlon. The collision is scheduled to occur in exactly eight minutes thirteen seconds …” (there is a brief outcry which nobody notices they contribute to) “… at a point eight and a half kilometres south of Bagchester. But there is absolutely no need for alarm. Our technicians in Stoke-Poges are working overtime to reprogramme the master computer and may actually prevent the collision. Meanwhile we have ample time to put into effect the following safety precautions so please listen carefully. Under the arms of your seats you will find slight metal projections. These are the ends of your safety-belt. Pull them out and lock them round you. That is all you need to do. The fire-prevention system is working perfectly and shortly before impact steel shutters will close off the windows to prevent injury from splintered glass. At the present moment television crews and ambulances are whizzing toward the point of collision from all over England, and in cases of real poverty British Rail have undertaken to pay the ambulance fees. I need not say how much I personally regret the inconvenience, but we’re in this together, and I appeal to the spirit of Dunkirk…” (the old steam man snarls) “…that capacity for calmness under stress which has made us famous throughout the globe. Passengers near the traction unit should not attempt to move to the rear of the train. This sound …” (there is a sudden swish and thud) “… is the noise of the doors between the carriages sealing themselves to prevent a stampede. But there is no need for alarm. The collision is not scheduled for another, er… seven minutes three seconds exactly, and I will have time to visit your compartments with my personal key and ensure that safety precautions are being observed. This is not goodbye, but au revoir. And fasten those belts!”

  With a click his voice falls silent and is followed by bracing music of a bright and military sort, but not played loud enough to drown normal conversation.

  “Oh what can we do, Dad?” asks the mother, but the old steam man says gruffly, “Attend to the child Miriam.”

  The metal projections under the arm-rests pull out into elasticated metal bands with locking buckles at the ends.

  “I don’t want to be tied up!” says Patsy sulkily.

  “Just pretend we’re in an aeroplane, dear,” says the mother, locking the belt, “Look Grampa’s doing it! We’re all doing it! And now…” says the mother in the faint voice of one who fights against hysteria “…we’re all safe as houses!”

  “Dear, I…I’m terrified,” says Mrs Dear.

  Her husband says tenderly, “It’s a bad business, dear, but I’m sure we’ll pull through somehow.” Then he looks to the teacher and says quietly, “Madam, I owe you an apology. This rail system is more inept, more inane, more… altogether bad than I thought possible in a country like ours.”

  “You can say that again!” groans the old steam man.

  “I want to get off this train,” says the child sulkily and for while they listen to the quiet rushing of the wheels.

  Suddenly the teacher cries, “The child is correct! We should slow the train down and jump off it!”

  She fumbles with the lock of her belt saying, “I know our speed is controlled by wireless waves or something but the motor – the thing which makes the wheels turn – is quite near us, in the traction unit, could we not…”

  “By heck it’s worth a try!” shouts the fireman, fumbling at his belt, “Just let me get at that engine! Just let me get out of this … This bloody belt won’t unlock!”

  “Neither will mine,” says Mr Dear in a peculiar voice. None of the seat belts unlock. The teacher says forlornly, “I suppose they call this security.” But the old steam man refuses to sit still. Pressing his elbows against the chair-back he hurls his massive bulk forward again and again, muttering through gritted teeth, “I won’t – let – the bastards – do it!”

  Though the belt does not break it suddenly gives an inch then another inch as a rending sound is heard inside the upholstery.

  Then somewhere a door swishes open and the driver is beside them asking smoothly, “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Quick Felix!” says the old steam man, relaxing for a moment, “Get me out of this seat and into your cabin. I want a crack at the motor. I’m sure I can damage it with something heavy. I’ll shove my body into it if that will let some of us off!”

  “Too late for heroics
John!” declares the driver, “I cannot possibly allow you to damage company property in that wanton fashion.”

  His voice is clear and cold. He wears a belt with a gun holster, and has his hand on it. He stands at ease but every line of his body indicates martial discipline. All stare aghast at him. The old man says, “You … are … insane!” and flings himself forward against the belt again but the driver says, “No, John Halifax! You are insane and I have this to prove it.”

  He draws his gun and fires. It explodes with a thud, not a bang. The fireman slumps forward though his belt holds him in the chair. Mrs Dear starts screaming for help so he shoots her too. There is now a dim, sharp-smelling smoke in the air but the survivors are too stunned to cough. They stare at the driver in a way which clearly upsets him, for he waves the gun about saying testily, “I have NOT killed them! This is an anaesthetic gas pistol developed for use against civilians in Ulster, does anyone else want a whiff? Saves emotional stress. A spell of oblivion and with luck you wake up in the ward of a comfortable, crowded hospital.”

  “Thank you, no!” says the teacher icily, “We prefer to face death with open eyes, however futile and unnecessary it is.”

  The chiming sounds and the familiar voice announces that this is Captain Rogers speaking, that three and a half minutes remain before impact, that Captain Rogers should proceed immediately to the guard’s van. With a touch of his earlier, gentler, apologetic manner the driver says goodbye, and explains he is forced to leave them because someone must survive the wreck to report it at the official enquiry. The mother cries, “Oh sir, please unlock Patsy and take him with you, she’s only a little child …” but Patsy screams, “No Mum, I’m staying with you Mum, he’s nasty nasty nasty!” so the driver says quickly, “Goodbye good people,” and leaves.

  When the door snaps shut behind him the mother says in a kind, careful, trembling voice, “You know The Lord Is My Shepherd, Patsy. Let’s say it, shall we?” and together they murmur, “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters …”

  With a clang of metal sheeting the windows are blotted out by shutters.

  “Pitch, pitch dark,” says Mr Dear, “They haven’t even allowed us light.”

  He is clasping his wife’s body so that her unconscious head rests upon his shoulder, and he finds some comfort in this pressure.

  “I know it is a small mercy,” says the voice of the teacher, “But I’m glad that military band no longer sounds.”

  In the darkness the throbbing of the train wheels is more audible and the mother and child pray louder to be heard above it, but not much louder. They reach the end of the prayer, start again at the beginning and continue reciting till the very end.

  “Do you remember,” says the teacher suddenly, “When every carriage had a communication cord that any traveller could pull and stop the train?”

  “Yes!” says Mr Dear with a noise between a groan and a chuckle, “Penalty for improper use £5.”

  “Once upon a time every small boy wanted to drive a train when he grew up,” sighs the teacher, “And in rural communities the station-master played a rubber of whist on Sunday evenings with the schoolmaster, the banker and the local clergyman. I remember a bright spring morning on the platform at Beattock. A porter took a wicker basket from the guard’s van and released a whole flight of carrier pigeons. I remember signal boxes with pots of geraniums on the sills.”

  Mr Dear sighs and says, “We had a human railway once. Why did it change?”

  “Because we did not stick to steam!” says the teacher firmly, “We used to be fuelled by coal, our own British coal which would have lasted us for centuries. Now we depend on dangerous poisonous stuff produced by foreign companies based in America, Arabia and …”

  “You’re wrong,” says Mr Dear, “These companies aren’t based anywhere. I’ve shares in a few. The people running them have offices in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, bank accounts in Switzerland and homes on several continents.”

  “So that is why we are driven from outside,” cries the teacher, getting excited, “None of US is in charge of us now.”

  “Some of us pretend to be.”

  They hear the faint distant scream of an approaching train siren. It swells so loud that the teacher is forced to yell over it, “But nobody is really in charge of us now! Nobody is in charge of us…”

  She has braced herself for an explosion, but does not hear one, or hears and forgets it immediately. The train is no longer moving. The blackness enfolding her is so warm and snug that for a moment she dreams she is at home in bed. When she hears the voice of a child calling drowsily, “Mummy … Mummy …” she almost believes it is her own. The voice of a mother answers on a wondering note, “I think – Patsy – we’re going to be all right.”

  A moment later the teacher, like other passengers on that train, hears the start of a truly huge and final explosion, but not the end of it.

  Mister Meikle – An Epilogue

  At the age of five I was confined to a room made and furnished by people I had never met and who had never heard of me. Here, in a crowd of nearly forty strangers, I remained six hours a day and five days a week for many years, being ordered about by a much bigger, older stranger who found me no more interesting than the rest. Luckily the prison was well stocked with pencils and our warder (a woman) wanted us to use them. One day she asked us what we thought were good thing to write poems about. The four or five with opinions on the matter (I was one of them) called out suggestions which she wrote down on the blackboard:-

  A FAIRY

  A MUSHROOM

  SOME GRASS

  PINE NEEDLES

  A TINY STONE

  We thought these things poetic because the verses in our school-books mostly dealt with such small, innocuous items. The teacher now asked everyone in the class to write their own verses about one or more of these items. With ease, speed and hardly any intelligent thought I wrote this :-

  A fairy on a mushroom,

  sewing with some grass,

  and a pine-tree needle,

  for the time to pass.

  Soon the grass it withered,

  The needle broke away,

  She sat down on a tiny stone,

  And wept for half the day.

  The teacher read this aloud to the class, pointing out that I had not only used every item on the list, I had used them in the order of listing. While writing the verses I had been excited by my mastery of the materials. I now felt extraordinarily interesting. Most people become writers by degrees. From me, in an instant, all effort to become anything else dropped like a discarded overcoat. I never abandoned verse but came to spend more time writing prose – small harmless items interested me less than prehistoric monsters, Roman arenas, volcanoes, cruel queens and life on other planets. I aimed to write a novel in which all these would be met and dominated by me, a boy from Glasgow. I wanted to get it written and published when I was twelve, but failed. Each time I wrote some opening sentences I saw they were the work of a child. The only works I managed to finish were short compositions on subjects set by the teacher. She was not the international audience I wanted, but better than nobody.

  At the age of twelve I entered Whitehill Senior Secondary School, a plain late 19th-century building of the same height and red sandstone as adjacent tenements, but more menacing. The playgrounds were walled and fenced like prison exercise yards; the windows, though huge, were disproportionately narrow, with sills deliberately designed to be far above our heads when we sat down. Half of what we studied there impressed me as gloomily as the building. Instead of one teacher I had eight a week, often six a day, and half of them treated me as an obstinate idiot. They had to treat me as an idiot. Compound interest, sines, cosines, Latin declensions, tables of elements tasted to my mind like sawdust in my mouth: those who dished it out expected me to swallow while an almost bodily instinct urged me to vomit. I did neither. My body put on an
obedient, hypocritical act while my mind dodged out through imaginary doors. In this I was like many other schoolboys, perhaps most others. Nearly all of us kept magazines of popular adventure serials under our school books and when possible stuck our faces into The Rover, Hotspur, Wizard and highly coloured American comics, then new to Britain, in which the proportion of print to pictorial matter was astonishingly small. Only the extent of my addiction to fictional worlds was worse than normal, being magnified into mania by inability to enjoy much else. I was too clumsily fearful to enjoy football and mix with girls, though women and brave actions were what I most wanted. Since poems, plays and novels often deal with these I easily swallowed the fictions urged on us by the teachers of English, though the authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Walter Scott) were far less easily digested than The Rover et cetera.

  Mr Meikle was my English teacher and managed the school magazine. I met him when I was thirteen. He became my first editor and publisher, and a year or two later, by putting me in charge of the magazine’s literary and artistic pages, enabled me to edit and publish myself. There must have been times when he gave me advice and directions, but these were offered so tactfully that I cannot remember them: I was only aware of freedom and opportunity. Quiet courtesy, sympathy and knowledge are chiefly what I recall of him, and a theatricality so mild that few of us saw it as such, though it probably eased his dealings with those inclined to mistake politeness for weakness. I will try to describe him more exactly.

  His lined triangular face above a tall thin body, his black academic gown, thin dark moustache, dark eyebrows and smooth reddish hair gave him a pleasantly saturnine look, especially as the carefully brushed-back hair emphasized two horn-shaped bald patches, one on each side of his brow. While the class worked quietly at a writing exercise he would sit marking homework at his tall narrow desk, and sometimes one of his eyebrows would shoot up into a ferociously steep question mark, then sink to a level line again while the other eyebrow shot up. This suggested he had read something terrible in the page before him, but was now trying to understand the writer’s frame of mind. Such small performances always caused a faint stir of amusement among the few who saw them, a stir he gave no sign of noticing. Sometimes, wishing to make my own eyebrows act independently, I held one down with a hand and violently worked the other, but I never managed it. Outside the classroom Mr Meikle smoked a meerschaum pipe. He conducted one of the school choirs which competed in the Glasgow music festivals. His slight theatrical touches had nothing to do with egotism. As he paced up and down the corridors between our desks and talked about literature he was far more interested in the language of Shakespeare, and what Milton learned from it, and what Dryden learned from Milton, and what Pope learned from Dryden, than in himself.