Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Except in your time,’ he sneered.

  He really believed that. He was sure of it. At least on top he was sure of it. The world beyond Scotland was merely for him a point of distraction. A series of places where people dreamed secretly of the Firth of Clyde. As if they even knew where it was.

  Yes. He would draw on the great cities of the world as examples. This disaster zone in Helsinki. That excellent housing estate in Madrid. The example of Brooklyn, the model of Denver. ‘As illustrated by the northern suburbs of Tokyo.’ In his high-housing days, he would mention these places as if they were theories, to be deemed useful, or else rejected. He used to excite his colleagues with the mention of such places, but he didn’t quite grasp the nature of their excitement. He had no notion of them as places too with life and death, or the homes of people with dreams of their own. His father had died ‘in a hole somewhere’, not in Belgium, or the Continent, or any place with movements, and tears.

  Hugh really wanted to bring the whole world home to Scotland. The best of its ideas. The core of its great lessons. Le Corbusier was an honorary Scot. Only in these glens of time, he seemed to imagine, where people stored their memories of loss, would the modern ethos serve to redeem the troubled years, and teach the people how to live. He liked Russia, a Russia of the mind.

  Hugh was never on an airplane. Never once.

  ‘Always too busy,’ he’d say. ‘Too busy with here.’

  He was the sort of man who couldn’t afford to feel diminished. This was his world. He was a great man here. He wanted no part of foreign soils. Let us water our own gardens he would say. All his waking life he pretended not to hear other voices. He had no ear for differences, no time for the opposing view, valiant in his deafness to contradiction. As I say, he pretended: I’d come to know he was obsessed with his detractors. But in his flurry of greatness and domestic pride, he imagined nothing could really be wrong with his country, nothing wrong that it made wrong itself. It was part of his great charm. All his life he remained alert to the faults of outsiders – outsiders like me.

  ‘Look at that coast, Jamesie,’ he said on the bus. ‘The best days of yer life.’

  The sale of council houses. Hugh would say it was all evil. And that would be an end to it. It was not what he taught me, not what he and his mother had fought for. And I learned in those months that it was too late to contradict Hugh. It was too late to argue. I came home thinking I might unteach my teacher. But no I would not: I’d offer my teacher his own best lessons. I’d bring his words back home.

  He had given me his past. He had given me his tools. I would use them to piece together his life’s end. And use them to explain something of my own life, separate now from his, but bound the same, by ideals and plans, and futures we could never know. Hugh and I had the same disease: we wanted the world to answer to us. But it wouldn’t answer: we could only, in time, make peace with the land, and hope for love in this flurry of moments. We couldn’t complete the world or ourselves. We could only live, and look for small graces, and learn to accept the munificence of change. Once upon a time, it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.

  He wanted that. I knew he did. That was why he called me back. With Margaret to save him from an agony of doubts. He would never admit it. And he would never need to. I didn’t want to convert Hugh: I wanted to let him die as himself.

  I looked at Hugh. The bus took us forward. His hand on the glass.

  ‘No one has been where we have been.’

  A light came up, a glitter of sea.

  We could only live, and look for small graces. Our dreams were neither true nor untrue: our dreams were out there, immersed in the self-renewing seas of the Clyde Firth.

  ‘Troon,’ Hugh said. ‘The best-lit town in Ayrshire. Do you know it was one of they from around here that invented the gas lighting?’

  That was pure Hugh. He always had stories about the Great Men. (His mother was a special case.) Most books had forgotten James Taylor, one of the men who first applied steam to the spurring of ships. ‘Another local boy. He hardly had a thing to eat, bar the turnips out there.’

  Whatever you were doing with Hugh, he could always fashion a quick story on the wonders of human ingenuity, so long as the effort was local. ‘Feel how good this bus is on the road,’ he said. ‘John Boyd Dunlop was the boy for this. Pneumatic tyres. Worked out of his wee shed in Dreghorn. Died when I was still a boy. We would be living in Govan by then.’

  So every outing with my granda became a journey into the past, and into our own past now, and into Hugh’s sense of his place in this line of great men. He loved memory. And people remembered his father.

  Our bus bent around the golf course at Royal Troon. You could see Ailsa Craig beyond the fairway, out in the sea. A craggy pyramid. A sinking oil-rig. Paddy’s Mile Stane. A lavender-tinted boulder in the slovenly-coloured sea.

  ‘In every golfer you’ll find a bastard,’ said Hugh. ‘They take up too much space.’

  ‘I think that was probably your secret mission, Hugh,’ I said. ‘To rid the country of golfers.’

  ‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘Pissing in the wind out there. Their stupid bonnets. Folk who think you need to hit a ball with a stick to earn a drink. Aye. I’d send them all back to America. We should get the boys from HMS Gannet to come and drop shells on them. Then they’d have a use for their bunkers. Arseholes.’

  Hugh came back to Ayrshire as the famous housing consultant. He hated golf, though. He despised golfers. And he thought tourism was a plague on the nation.

  ‘Torpedo the fuckers with shortbread!’

  Hugh was never going to do well on the New Town Development Corporation. His hatred of golf and tourism made him a legendary curmudgeon.

  ‘Did ye leave any golf links in the city?’ I asked him.

  ‘In Glasgow? Well, I tried to put a bulldozer through the lot of them,’ he said. ‘But the thing about golfers, Jamesie – they always have their say. Masons. Coppers. The Chairman of IBM. Every one of them is at the golf. But ye know the flats in Sandyhills? The Balbeggie flats. The eight blocks. They were a golf course. And people screaming for new houses. I just took a plough over the whole field. Three weeks. And the blocks were up in the sky in three months. That was news for the golfers.’

  We passed through Monkton. The fields around Prestwick Airport brought the smell of manure into the bus. We swallowed the gusts of sweet putrefaction. The tractors were busy at the December spreading. On the other side we could see them lifting the last of the season’s potatoes. Clear skies overhead.

  *

  Hugh had picked a horse. Burmese Summer. The 2.45 at Ayr. We got off the bus and he sat down in the open wheelchair. Off to Ladbrokes in the Sandgate.

  He twisted his cap on his knees. We waded through the mothers and prams; skateboarders in baggy jeans hung about the litter bins. We were in a hurry. Two-thirty. I pushed the chair faster and faster.

  ‘Ride ‘em, cowboy!’ said Hugh, leaning back, laughing hoarse, as we cut up the town. The bookie’s was the usual smoke cupboard. Clouds to the ceiling. Hugh smiled, breathed in, coughed, and asked for a fag. I sat him in front of one of the televisions. Ceefax dribbling down the screen. I found a pen. Betting slip. The guy beside us tore one of the pages off the wall and spat on it. He bounced it off the floor. His jacket was shiny like his face.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said.

  Hugh stared up at the screen: Burmese Summer, 6–1. The room was red. The men all craning their necks or scribbling into cupped hands. Hugh handed me his slip with two pound notes. I tried to hand him back the notes. He nodded at the cashier. On ye go.

  Guy in front with a can in his pocket. He kept lifting his finger as if to say something to the woman behind the glass. Nothing coming. A new slip on the desk. I scribbled ‘Corncrake. £2. To Win. No tax.’ The girl took the money and stamped the two slips without looking
up. A scraggy English voice came at us from the sound system in the corner. I stood behind Hugh’s chair. The heat in the room was up. Men closed in around the screen – the blue light flashing on their faces – sideburns and fingers bristling to know. When they opened their mouths to speak the smoke curled out, like shadows of words.

  Whack!

  ‘Off they go, and it’s Lentil Broth making a good start … Up sides there with Gunga Din, and Gunga Din going steady on the inside …’

  The heat was up. Blue light on the men’s eyes, and into the deep behind them …

  ‘The Earl of Stratford hanging back, and slowly picking up now, The Earl of Stratford, odds-on favourite, and a slow-burner, but coming up, coming up now … But it’s Gunga Din, Gunga Din …’

  The drunk with the can was pointing in the air, one leg anchored in front, the other tapping the floor at the back, his hands going here and there, reaching around the pole of himself.

  ‘… and Lentil Broth now strong, and Corncrake just outside … Corncrake outside … Now Corncrake it is, coming up on the outside … Corncrake, and Gunga Din is losing ground. Gunga Din is … Lentil Broth is slipping … Corncrake …’

  Hugh sat still in his chair. He smelled of medicine.

  ‘Corncrake is now leading by a head. Lentil Broth and … Lentil Broth is fighting all the way. But Corncrake is … Corncrake pulling … into the final stretch … and yes … And it’s Corncrake the winner. Corncrake, Lentil Broth, Gunga Din, The Earl of Stratford …’

  Chorus of sighs. Betting slips ripped; tickertape to the floor.

  I put my own slip into my pocket.

  ‘No use to man nor beast,’ Hugh said. ‘Never a turn these days.’

  ‘Never you mind, old boy,’ I said, ‘at least you’re not a golfer.’

  Toothless grin.

  A trio of kids nearly crashed into us in the street. They beetled past; a game to top each other’s sniggers. Towels rolled under their arms. There was a bus on the other side of the road with a yellow sign: BURNS COTTAGE.

  ‘Let’s go to Alloway,’ I said.

  ‘You’re the driver,’ Hugh said.

  ‘We need this bus.’

  Hugh eased up the bus steps, gripping the pole. The driver was a member of that club whose members like to use the fewest possible number of words.

  ‘One-twenty,’ he said. I paid him.

  ‘There,’ he said.

  I put the folded chair in a gap at the back of his cabin.

  He nodded. A jolly squire: disability was one of the daily bores.

  We got off near the Brig o’ Doon. Hugh wanted to pee. We went into a hotel, the Cottars’ Arms, and I stood at the bar whilst the old man disappeared. The empty chair at my side. Deep amber glinting on the gantry. A man with a walrus-moustache craned round from his pint. Bleary-eyed. ‘The legs buggered?’ he asked, dropping his head to the chair.

  I just smiled a tight smile. Times are you just feel tall and stupid and too much scrubbed in your ironed jeans. Hugh wanted a whisky Two Glenlivets. Taste of peat I suppose.

  ‘Tastes like shit,’ said Hugh. ‘But God I love it.’

  Back in his chariot Hugh drained the glass. And another one.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  He wanted me to take him down by the River Doon, the park there.

  All by the road there were wild flowers. They nodded and shushed. We fell in with them, as the wheels turned, and we made our way to the river bank.

  Margaret had given us the love of flowers. Her time working in the florist’s shop was a time of eager smells and leaves. She had always loved them. She brought down to Ayrshire her old school jotters full of flower-pressings – the illuminated pages of her girlhood. All the wild blooms of the Highlands were there; the Latin names in a small hand. Hugh and I had grown together to love those books. They had everything of Maggie in them. And something between the faint blue lines of those jotters: the suggestion of a Maggie we never knew.

  The love of flowers became one of the secrets between us. The three of us. Our shared notions of the beautiful and the just, the high and the mighty, the glorious, the very ancient, suggested in the thinly ordered leaves of the Yellow Mountain Saxifrage …

  Her tiny letters: Saxifraga aizoides.

  We were joined by a sense of ordinary grace. Or so we thought. And couldn’t we see the shape of such a thing in the spreading petals of a Meadow Buttercup?

  Ranunculus acris.

  A promise of loss was held in the furry white pappus of the Northern Hawksbeard (Crepis mollis), or in the single flowerhead of the Milk Thistle (Carduus marianus).

  Many of these wild plants we never saw in Ayrshire. We only knew them from Margaret’s strange books. Margaret’s books. How we had pored over them in our living room at Annick Water. The stories of soils; volumes of rain.

  Plants are provincial and family-minded: they are made and are shaped by immediate conditions; ten miles up the coast and the air might kill them off, the soil soon enough might poison their stems. Plants only know their own ground. Their lives are encoded with local truths.

  So many of Margaret’s delicate flowers would never have made it in Ayrshire, and less likely still in any world beyond. But yes those flowerings were ones for the family. One-parent clones mostly staying near to home. But some of them made it away. Evolution tells us. Parts of each plant had travelled over water – a scrap of cells down a thousand streams. And others had seedlings, carried by insects, eaten by warblers, and blown from home on the changeable winds. And some had made new in their dying. Offshoots. Hybrids. Time making changes, again and again.

  The plants of Scotland had mostly stayed in one place. But some had travelled. And some had changed.

  ‘Negative geotropism,’ her father had written. Bending away from the sun. But many of the old scents were upon those newly flowering perennials. A shade of hair. A bitter fruit. The ancient traits of the family name still there in the cells of the new-going shoots. The ancient traits. The unseeable roots. All those stories in Margaret’s small hand.

  The Mountain Pansy – Viola lutea – had gone to the hills, had lost its hair, grown large in its flowers; the Heartsease went off to rise tall and more purple, its runners now shrivelled to nothing. The Pale Heath Violet has a shortened spur, and is milky blue, and requires the lowland scrub for its life; and the Bastard Dog Violet with the heart-shaped leaf, its pointed sepals, and its upstart life in the wildest of places. All of them gone to the world with their memory of colours. Long since different, each one breathing in their respective grasses, singing their songs of independence. And yet we remember, as each of them does in its fragile veins, the deep-lying truth of their family relations. They know who they are. Viola.

  Hugh was silent as we crossed the damp grass. The river smelt of rain. But with the quiet of Hugh in the meadow, and the coming grey of the meadow itself, there was nothing but riot in the branches overhead.

  Twittering. Stratagem of twittering.

  We could see the birds in their dark-stripped waistcoats. Their beady eyes, their semaphoring wings, black-beaking data from tree to tree, like a hall of stockbrokers at the close of the day. The sky was grey already.

  From the Lindsay-style houses there came a sound, the refreshing sound of the ice-cream van. People would be out for cigarettes. The clink of empty bottles. Smokes and sugars: a gush of need at the edge of the park.

  ‘Are you dreaming there?’ said Hugh. He looked up.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘I was just looking at the Lindsays.’

  ‘Good enough houses in their day,’ said Hugh. ‘Sturdy. But they take up too much space. I mean, think of the block that could come out of there. You could get a hundred more families in that gap.’

  I pushed Hugh to a garden wall and laid his back against it. The bricks were old and red. Dampened moss squeezing through the cracks.

  Two cigarettes rolled.

  ‘Ye know I’m right, Jamesie,’ he said. ‘High-rises: the only sensible thing.
We never wrecked a garden that wasn’t ugly. Now weren’t we the ones for progress?’

  I hardly missed a beat.

  ‘Yes you were,’ I said. The wall was cold at my back.

  ‘Well you mind and remember it then,’ he said. He drew a long time on the roll-up.

  For an hour or so we kept to the park; along the river, around the trees. And all that time Hugh spoke of nothing else but his unfinished plans for the buildings. He said he would head a consortium, builders and planners and architects, one day soon. He said – if I might learn to listen – that I could come back and make myself useful as a technical assistant. I might know something about how to make the high-rises more durable.

  ‘I’ve always been open to information of that kind,’ he said.

  He spoke of how his work wasn’t yet finished. And slowly his story of the future melted into his story of the past. That had become his manner of speaking. He told me how the great John Wheatley had come one day to his office in the Glasgow City Chambers. The old gentleman had not gone to the office of the Housing Chairman. No. He came to the door of the true champion of the people’s houses. The famous innovator. Mr Wheatley’s face was gaunt.

  ‘Like one of the old tenements,’ said Hugh.

  The old man’s yellow eyes. Hugh said he wore a pressed white handkerchief in his breast pocket. He was one of Famie’s Angels, said Hugh.

  Mr Wheatley stepped down the long corridor like an emperor, his walking stick tapping the tiles, his head nodding gently to the typing girls. His thin bony hand going out to the young man Hugh Bawn.

  My granda was absolutely certain about the words. They emerged from Mr Wheatley’s lips in the very certain manner of a Scottish gentleman well used to the London parliament. A voice full of polished vigour, and lurking at the back, a faded Scots brogue. The power of his voice made Hugh iron out his vowels on the spot.

  ‘It is a great pleasure,’ said Mr Wheatley, ‘to shake the hand of Mr Housing.’