The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  At this point Mat must have ceased to type for the manuscript continued in his small cramped hand. Instead of going on reading he took up his pen and started to make more notes. The last passage had moved him, it had evoked the memory of so many things; for where the river had taken these last loops into Glasgow had been his own stamping ground in his first years as a child, and the banks of the river with all its old factories and mills; from away out in Carmyle right into the heart of the city, right to the spot where St. Mungo had fished, all was as familiar to him, more familiar to him than the room in which he sat. He knew every waste pipe that gushed its mucky sediment into the river, every path along its bank, every forsaken spot and lonely stretch where no one but children ever went, where between long factory walls and the river there were narrow paths that led merely from one open stretch of dumping ground to the next. Here he had played as a child in the oldest industrial landscape in the world, amongst the oldest factories in the world, and it had been through this landscape that he had walked when he had once felt so unaccountably happy.

  Inside one of these loops in the river he had been born, in a tenement building surrounded by factories. Nearby, in a house overlooking the yard of an electric power station, where coal trucks were shunted into a machine and tilted over to empty the coal into the furnaces, underneath the massive chimneys, here his mother had been born. And here, in the midst of the alchemist’s paraphernalia, his grandfather had worked and raised his family, weaving in a nearby factory the muslins that clothed the far away Asiatic. One of his earliest memories was of getting a licking from his father when he had come home all soaked and muddy from falling into the water. On some parts of the river where the banks were very steep the children used to climb down them, then on to one of the iron pipes which projected over the water, lie down with their legs straddling the pipe and hold their hands in the mucky torrent which gushed out of its mouth. The fascination of the game was in creating a variety of effects, as for instance if the hands were pressed round the lip of the pipe the increased pressure scooted the water far out into the river in a delightful curve; another way of holding the hands over the pipe would cause the water to spread out in a smooth fan with a ragged tassel of drips at its base where it fell into the water; and there was the additional fascination of feeling the force of the water as it gushed from the pipe.

  For a long time Mat sat without writing any more. He was thinking of these days long ago which his passage about the Clyde had evoked. He was trying now to remember whether his grandfather had been standing or sitting in front of the loom on the day long ago when Mat had carried his pieces of bread and cheese and the can of hot soup down to the mill where he had worked. But all he could remember were his grandfather’s deft hands and the taut lines of cotton which jerked up and down at the back of the machine, and of course his grandfather’s mop of white hair on top of his magnificently shaped long head. He had a fierce curve to his nose, a pair of arrogant hooded blue eyes and was as deaf as a door-post; his temper belied his appearance as he was the mildest of men and Mat remembered especially the way he would say ‘Eh!’ and curve his hand over the back of his ear. All his family, his children and his grandchildren called him ‘Faither’ and a great many myths were current in the Devlin family about him, all indicating that he was a poor man mainly because of his wilful stubborn integrity. However, he had spawned in the tenement where he lived an extravagant family of red-haired children, all talented in a completely useless way, the same as he had been. This background which that family had created, against which Mat grew up, was one which he loved to remember and which was always mingled, somehow, with his thoughts of the mucky old river about which he so often tried to write.

  Mat looked up towards the clock in the room again. Its hands pointed to two-thirty which would make the real time two-fifteen. All this time he hadn’t been writing at all, just sitting dreaming. Anyway he was too tired to go on. He got up and went into the scullery to drink a glass of water, then came back into the room to smoke another cigarette. He tried to count how long he had been up without sleep. He had risen that morning at seven-thirty, which was now nineteen hours away, and he had had hardly any sleep the night before. However, the next day was Sunday. He would get a long lie, a read at the papers, then perhaps it would be back to writing again.

  The last thing Mat did before going through to his bedroom was to brush up the ashes that had fallen into the hearth.

  2

  THE OFFICE WHERE Mat worked was outside the city. Instead of the usual thing for office workers who more often travelled into the city, Mat travelled outwards. The tram took the main road out of Glasgow in the direction of Hamilton and Mat had to get off and walk down southwards towards the banks of the river. Again he was in the midst of that strange mixed landscape which occurs on the skirts of big industrial cities. There were old farmhouses, grass fields, ploughed fields, scraggy hawthorn hedges, then open spaces full of rank grass growing over the debris from the heavy engineering industry – rusty boilers, lumps of concrete with the rusty dowelling still sticking out of them – and all over this, in the early morning sun, a natural freshness with the green grass growing hard up against the frozen slag.

  The factory itself was old, just a collection of brick buildings which had gradually assumed their present functions as the various different types of plant were installed in them. It was an old family business at one time, and though the family were still connected with it in a vague way it had been a couple of generations since they had anything to do with the management. The type of work done in the factory was traditional in the district. Cotton finishing – the bleaching, shrinking, singeing, and mercerising of the cottons which had been woven in the local mills. Nowadays there was as much work came from Lancashire as did locally. The mills had gone but the business had grown, become modern and fairly prosperous.

  The approach to the factory was down a long hedged lane, past a farmhouse, and a small water reservoir. On the other side of the factory, facing the river, was a row of small cottages, built of stone and very old. The part of the factory next to the cottages had been built over and around them, so that now only the stone fronts showed. They looked like little pieces of semi-precious stone set into the rough crumbling brick of the factory. Some of the factory workers lived in these little houses along with their families.

  When Mat passed the old time clock he noticed that it was still early but he went upstairs to the empty office. First thing in the morning the office had a shining pristine look. Everything was either locked away in the safe or tucked away in the files and nowhere was there a single scrap of paper in sight to indicate that work was ever done in the place. The typewriters and the big electric calculating machine lay hooded on the desks, the mahogany woodwork had an opulent shine, the metal topped desks and paper racks were free of dust, the brown linoleum was waxed so that Mat’s shoes skited on its surface. It was the most perfectly run office that Mat had ever had anything to do with. It had a written constitution, a system of checks and balances, a Code Napoleon, in which every possible contingency was provided for. There was a set of wooden boards with typed instructions pasted to them laying down the exact procedure for every situation which arose in the office. If a bag of nails was purchased for the use of the factory, its purchase and reception in the factory was carefully noted down and checked, the advice note was signed and filed away for collation against the account, a record of the cost was kept so that the price of any past or future purchases could be checked against the current one, then the cost was marked against a particular operation, the amounts of the bill duly noted in the various ledgers and day books in the proper double entry manner. All these tasks, with the order in which they were to be carried out, were written down on the wooden boards so that no mistake could possibly be made. Provision was made for everything except deliberate human malice. Human error was certainly not discounted and every task which involved calculation was checked twice.

 
The author of this system, the secretary of the firm, was a Mr McDaid, an elderly inhibited businessman of the old type, very Scottish, a kirk elder and teetotaller. He was a complete mystery to Mat. Not that Mat didn’t understand and sympathise with the man’s fear of risk. It was not the neurotic ulcer-creating fear of impending doom of the modern businessman that moved Mr McDaid, but an active and intelligent estimation of the kind of events to expect and the right thing to do about them. What was a mystery to Mat was how Mr McDaid got on outside the office when he was not able to put his system of checks and balances into operation. All that Mat knew about him was that he was a nervous, almost incompetent car driver and that his wife pulled down the blinds during the day to prevent the sunshine from ruining the furniture. He was quite a kindly man in many ways but fussy and rather ruthless towards the things he didn’t understand. The man’s perfectionism was personally irksome to Mat and depressed him in the same way that army routine had done.

  Mat went through to one of the front rooms of the office and looked out over the grey muddy river. There was a fairly heavy spate on and where the river narrowed there was a rough striata running up and down the surface of the water. On the other side of the river, about three hundred yards from the office window, there was a great square brick power station completely blocking the view. A little way down to Mat’s right a weir curved into the stream and the water poured over it in a smooth liquid curve. On either side of the weir masses of foliage, small tree trunks and mud had heaped up in a squalid untidy pile.

  For some reason the view fascinated Mat. It was a particular kind of landscape, a mixture of human and natural industry which intrigued him. Each aspect seemed to take on and mingle with some of the characteristics of the other. The grass and willows growing along the banks of the river were grey and sooty looking; the weeds, dockens, dandelions and dog’s flourish were tattered and defiantly stunted; the mud selvedge of the river showed rainbow tints from an oily sediment. But the brick buildings were heavily marked from the weather, the power station had great damp streaks running down it, the pointing on the factory was all crumbled and the bricks eaten with damp and covered with a thin green mossy slime.

  There was a vague hum of machinery coming from somewhere inside the building and the faint clank of trucks from somewhere on the other bank of the river. Above it all, the roar and splash of the water.

  Something could be done with this atmosphere, just simply out of the landscape. Mat remembered a description of Rome which he had read somewhere. It had been described as a kind of half buried history where everything, the houses, streets, monuments, churches were a huge physical agglomeration of the debris of history. Yet all of Rome could not have fascinated Mat half so much as the acts of the solid Scottish burghers which were embodied in this crumbling industrial landscape. There was something of their tradition even in this modern office in the bound ledgers, the carefully kept files, the records, catalogues and inventories, the meticulousness, the physical prosperity. Away on the other side of the river, hidden from Mat beneath a haze of smoke, was the old Royal Burgh of Rutherglen. That haze, that smoke, was for him a presence which caused in him the thrill of the imaginative excitement and brought out in him the lust for creation. He thought of the peculiar boast which the people of Rutherglen had and which he had written on the cover of his magnum opus – ‘Rutherglen’s wee roon red lums reek briskly’. This mixture of modesty, complacency, and sheer canniness thrilled Mat. He imagined these old burghers of the eighteenth century with their great heavy walking sticks, their breeches and embroidered coats, their horn snuff boxes, their freemasonry, their mixture of canniness and daring, their overwhelmingly male pursuits; and their women forming a solid domestic background with their crimping irons, warming pans, samplers, linen, and heavy cutlery and their utterly dull and regular lives. Mat felt a tremendous nostalgia for these people and their way of life. He loved the heavy solidity of the old burghers; their substantial broad fronts spread with waistcoat and fob, their great mansions, their big leather boots, their conservative art, their good plain substantial mundane safety.

  Mat’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of feet on the wooden stairs. He heard the cheerful early morning sound of voices shouting to one another. He went out to the top of the stairs and shouted down.

  ‘Hurry up you lazy bugger.’

  Bill, the head clerk, was coming up the stairs making a deliberate cheerful clatter. He interrupted Mat. ‘That wife of yours fairly kicks you out of bed these mornings.’

  ‘I’m just dying to get to work.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make you work all right.’ Bill was opening the door into the office which he and Mat shared. Although it was a bright warm morning he wore a coat and hat. He took them off, hung them up, fumbled for his keys, fiddled about with his pens, and put on his specs all at the same time. Next door the typists were removing their coats, changing their shoes, opening cupboards and desks, taking the covers from machines.

  Mat and Bill were very fond of one another but their relationship was strange. Bill felt sorry for Mat because of his gentle ways and his apparent naïveté. Mat in some strange way sensed Bill’s feeling and because of this acted out the part which Bill had given him. He found himself doing this often with people. Not deliberately or dishonestly or with any intention to deceive but because he became as they saw him. Bill’s attitude towards Mat was one of affectionate, slightly condescending, teasing.

  Occasionally Mat went to visit Bill at his home. Before Mat’s marriage he had gone regularly on a Friday night. Bill lived in one of the houses in a row of little miners’ cottages just off the main Glasgow to Edinburgh road. On these visits Bill’s wife, Joan, fussed and mothered Mat and made him eat too much. During one of these visits a relation of Joan’s had come as well. A beautiful blonde girl with wonderful creamy skin whose beauty had struck Mat dumb. She had flirted outrageously with him, teasing him unmercifully for his bashfulness. Margaret, the blonde girl, had sat on his knee and Joan had switched the light off. Mat, in a painful mixture of lust, delight, embarrassment and misery because he was so sure that the girl was merely teasing him, grabbed Margaret by the elbow and started to rub it. Even after Joan had switched the light on again he kept on doing this without being aware of it. Margaret shrieked with delight and shouted at Bill and Joan. ‘That’s what he does to the girls in the dark, rubs their elbows.’ Afterwards Bill made Mat drunk, Mat not being used to liquor, and while Mat talked a lot of nonsense and was comically tipsy Margaret and Bill shrieked with laughter and Joan slapped Bill on the shoulder and frowned at him for ‘making a fool of the boy’. Mat went on pretending to be drunk, but all the time he was touched by their good-natured and unmalicious laughter. He felt that they were treating him as a small boy simply because they were the kind of people who had to lavish love on their friends. And he felt that their estimation of his naïveté was a measure of their own goodness and simplicity, also that their ordinary domestic happiness and Margaret’s ordinary and wholesome beauty was something which he could only admire from the outside, but which he could never have. He envied them and would have loved to enter into their kind of life. Even this small share, this single visit seemed to him to be the very peak of happiness, but he felt strongly that his relationship with them was transient and the impossibility of ever becoming one of them was complete. He couldn’t understand why he felt like this but he explained it to himself as the consequence of a simple moral inferiority in himself. He accepted this as a fact. Of course from any commonsense or social point of view he was as good as the next man. But he did feel that somewhere in him there was a flaw.