by Archie Hind
They sat sipping their beer and waited. The dinner would be ready at six o’clock. In the meantime, they sat and basked in the warm room. Nobody had switched on the lights and as it grew darker outside the bottles, the crockery, the polished furniture, the brass knick-knacks, even the apples on the sideboard, glimmered in the firelight.
Before Mat had gone into the army the Craigs had all lived on top of one another in a tiny room and kitchen in Bridgeton. A rough smoky district where the railings had been torn away in the back yard and the outside wash-houses merely a heap of bricks, the flagstones in the closes tilted at crazy angles. The building in which they stayed was all crazy and out of plumb. You went up several flights of worn dirty steps in a spiral staircase and along a wooden-floored verandah affair to the door of the house. In front of each door was an iron grill and you could look right down through the grill and through the other grills on the landings beneath, right on to the cobbled yard. The floor of the kitchen tilted towards the window and when Mat stood washing at the sink he was often near vertigo as he imagined them all being couped out into the street. In these days life had been very different. Jake had worked in the slaughter-house nearby as a ‘blood boy’, Mat worked as a labourer in a warehouse that sold flour and sugar to bakers. There hadn’t been a lot of money and during the years when Mat and Jake had been at school they were, like their kitchen with its sloping floor, continually propped on the edge of some disaster. Often they were exposed to humiliation and abuse. Mat could remember from a very early age the Means Test man who would question the children in the street, or the collectors to whom he’d say, ‘My Mammy’s no’ in’. Later there were the Schoolboard Inspectors and the teachers who’d examine their semmit and drawers, then the grocers and coal men and property factors who’d want money and rent. There were the neighbours who fought and squabbled out of sheer frustration and misery. His father then had done shift work, fire-drawing in a locomotive shed. He worked the coal dust into his fingers and hands and was lucky when he got a square meal seven days in the week. There was plenty of violence – beatings from his tired and exasperated parents, and in the street he saw many a furious fist fight, real accomplished stuff, skilled punching and gouging and butting. There were the women who got knocked on the head with tomato sauce bottles by their husbands. Occasionally Mat saw the razor being used or the broken bottle. Twice he had seen men being killed.
To Mat there was a deep and intimate connection between his memory and his writing. Yet he consciously eschewed all the violence and misery which had been a part of his childhood. He could remember these things but he did not consciously weave them into the stuff of his reveries, never in the same way that he did with those memories of his childhood which characterised his way of seeing things at that time. This part of his remembrance was almost like an object which he had put behind him. Sometimes it all seemed like a very long time ago.
When he had been demobbed from the army he had come back to live in this house with a bathroom, electric light, bedrooms, a living-room. This was a typical period in the life of a working-class family when the children had grown up and there was more money coming into the house. They were additionally lucky in the fact that this period in their lives coincided with the Labour Government’s first term of office, with the initiation of the Health Service and decent social security. All his life up till then Mat had thought of domestic life, family life, as a life of sordidness and squalor. Then all of a sudden it had become decent.
It was because of all this that whenever he saw a big brownstone tenement with its walls plumb and its brickwork and pointing in good condition, especially in the dusk when the windows lit up, especially now, in the festive season with Christmas trees in the windows, he felt a feeling almost of ecstasy, powerful in its capacity to move him. A feeling of the slow peacefulness of time when life was full, protected, and without anxiety. This was the fourth year in which they had celebrated Ne’erday like this.
Mat stood in the lobby with his back against the wall and a glass in each hand. He wasn’t quite drunk but when he finished his drinks he would be. From the kitchenette he could hear his mother talking to Helen. He had difficulty in hearing what she was saying over the sound of a set of bagpipes being played in the living-room. They were being tuned by his Uncle Tam. A scrap of conversation came from the kitchenette which he could hear: ‘– if he starts that politics again I’ll get Dad to throw him out.’ Mat looked at the row of empty bottles ranged against the wall along the floor of the lobby. He could still hear his mother’s voice, raised now with indignation, ‘It’s politics, politics, all the time when all we want to do is enjoy ourselves.’
Mat laughed. If he knew anything Uncle Tam would be talking politics sooner or later because Jake would egg him on. While Mat sipped his beer his father opened the living-room door and the sound of the chanter slapped its way along the walls of the lobby while the floor reverberated from the boom of the drones.
‘Ah want an accompanist,’ Mat’s father shouted. ‘Jetta – Jetta. Ah want an accompanist.’
Uncle Tam wouldn’t stop playing the pipes until Mat tapped the drones with the flat of his hands and the reeds locked and stopped playing. Tam stopped and looked sadly at the drones. ‘A song from the old man and a drink for the piper,’ Jake was shouting and Tam took the drink quite pacific. Ma was at the piano already and was pounding out an old music hall song. Mat’s father sang in a gentle husky voice that nobody could hear, so unlike his powerful speaking rumble, and Ma played the same chords all the time with her left hand, beating the keys as if they were a drum. In one corner there were some young girls who were cousins of Mat and they were sitting quietly, sipping self-consciously at their sherry. They didn’t appear to notice any noise going on around them. When Ma stopped playing the piano a sudden silence occurred amidst the noise. Tam’s wife’s voice was isolated in the middle of the silence, laughing emptily, and everybody turned at once to look at her. Propped up against the wall with his eyes shut and a drooping smile on his lips was a neighbour; a shy inoffensive wee man, a thief and ex-convict who had somehow wandered into the house. Jake had given him too much to drink and now his face was all clammy white and his upper lip beaded with sweat. Mat just managed to rescue the bagpipes from someone who was about to sit down on them. He lifted them from the stool across which they had been laid, put the drones across his shoulder and held the chanter in his left hand; he stood there feeling a bit drunk. Jake bawled at him across the room.
‘Give us “The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir”.’
Mat took the mouthpiece between his teeth. There was a whiff of treacle and mouldy leather from the bag. Mat blew and the tartan cloth cover filled out and stretched as the leather bag inside became tight and plump with air. As he gave the bag a quick punch with his fist the drones rasped then plopped harmonically into the simple major chord. As he tucked the bag under his arm the chanter screamed out in the dominant note of the chord. Mat always liked to play the big difficult march tunes to impress Tam because he sometimes teased him about the ridiculous ease with which anyone could be taught to play the pipes. Even the ‘big music’ – the pibroch – he used to say, was technically child’s play, if it was also musical nonsense. Mat played while everyone stopped to listen. It was impossible to talk above the sound of the pipes in a room. Mat began to be more and more irritable as he played. There were three fat female neighbours sitting in a corner and Mat resented seeing them drinking, especially gin, like some cockney harridans. When he played ‘The Mist Covered Mountains’, a slow air, the three women looked soulful and woebegone; when he played ‘Highland Laddie’, a quick march, they became all braced up and military as the staunch wee Scottish soldiers, the bow legged kilties, went over the top with their bayonets fixed and an open razor tucked down their top hose. Mat tried out all the stock responses. He played ‘The Highland Cradle Song’ and they wept for the sticky weans, whom they had dragged up in a cursory and absent-minded fashion and who later became th
e brawling nuisances who disappeared to Canada. Uncle Tam was listening to him as if he was an artist, a virtuoso, a piping Paderewski. Mat really got to dislike the pipe music he was playing so intensely that in the end he started to play a few bars of a rumba, then a bit of an Orange song. There was a chorus of shocked ‘Shs – shs – shs’s’ and Mat lifted his arm from the bag and stopped playing. Tam looked at him reproachfully.
‘Oh! But you’re a great piper, Mat. You should have been a great piper, Mat. But these kind of tunes don’t fit –’
Jake had sidled up to Tam. ‘D’ you not think so, Tam?’
‘Na! Na!’
‘The Siege o’ Delhi,’ Jake said, ‘The Relief of Lucknow, Magersfontein, Spion Kop, where the Boers whipped us, Tam. The 79th’s Farewell to Gibraltar, Blue Bonnets over the Border. The Barren Rocks o’ Aden, Modder River, the gatlings jammed, Gungha Din, ammunition’s gone, rally round the piper boys, unsheath your Malacca canes, over and at them, here comes the Gallowgate Hielan’men. These ’a fit, Tam?’ Jake nudged Tam with his elbow.
‘Pipe music,’ Tam was looking hurt, ‘went through a period of Capitalistic and Imperialistic influence.’ He stopped for a second to watch the effect of this trump, then he growled at Jake, ‘And we beat the Boers.’
Jake giggled behind his hand.
‘Hey, but listen.’ Jake was holding Tam by the arm and whispering to him confidentially. ‘How about the new Historical stage in pipe music? Listen. Vladimir Ilyich’s welcome to St Petersburg. A good stirring march. And a wee poky strathspey wi’ a set of steps to go with it – Uncle Joe’s Wee Cley Pipe. Or the Don Cossack’s Reel. The Kulak’s Lament. Or – listen – how’s this for a terrific jig – Wullie Stakhanovitch’s Laying the Bricks?’
Tam wasn’t very sure but he grinned a bit. Then he got up and brushed past them and sat down on the piano stool, turning his head and looking at Jake reproachfully. Mat went through into the kitchenette. In the middle of his laughter he suddenly felt horribly sick. From the living-room came the sound of voices and Tam had started to play ‘Für Elise’ on the piano. He often played ‘classical’ music on the piano, his drunken fingers stumbling on to all the wrong notes. He did this often when he was hurt and he wanted to demonstrate his cultural superiority to the rabble. He played ‘Für Elise’ or ‘Sobre las Olas’ – it was all one to him.
Helen was in the kitchenette trying to make coffee amongst a litter of glasses, beer bottles and wrappings. On the draining board there was a long cylinder of ash where a cigarette had been left to burn.
‘Here,’ Helen said, ‘coffee!’ Mat took the cup and half sat on the edge of the draining board, rubbing his face with his hand. His face was all stiff and cold and he felt quite sick, and sober.
A little later the piano stopped and singing started. Mat and Helen had put on their coats and were going out for a breath of fresh air. As they went down the stairs they could hear the voices singing sweetly in close harmony and in unison this time. Quite clearly Mat could hear his mother’s voice, his aunts’ voices, Jake’s voice and his cousins’ voices making a definite single family sound which was pitched accurately and dominated the other voices.
‘For the lamps were shining brightly,
’Twas a night that would banish all sin.
For the bells were ringing the old year out,
And the New Year in.’
Outside in the street they saw two men on the other side of the road. They were propping one another up and staggering back and forward on the pavement. One of them kept muttering away in a drunken persuasive tone of voice, ‘Ye’r all right, Jimmy. Ye’r all right,’ and he was trying all the time to get a firmer grip so that he’d send them both off balance and they would stagger and reel all over the pavement again. Yet somehow they seemed to be making progress, each fit of staggers would propel them up the street for another few yards. The man called Jimmy had a gash on his brow which went from one temple to the other and the blood had flowed in a sheet, like a little valance, down over his face and the breast of his white shirt. His face, now crusted in dark blood, had a blank mask-like appearance. Helen immediately ran across the road and stood in front of the man, putting her hand on his shoulder and peering into his face.
‘Could we help you?’ she asked. ‘You’ll be needing that cut stitched.’
The man knocked Helen’s hand aside and waved his arm in a heavy gesture which knocked him off balance. ‘Lemme alane,’ he shouted, while his mate staggered trying to keep him up. Together they staggered past Helen while Mat came up and took her by the elbow and drew her aside. The man looked back with bitterness and hate in every gesture while his mate tried to pull him on. He was muttering away in an indignant sounding voice and through his muttering all they could hear were the words ‘her’ and ‘she’.
‘Somebody did a good job on him,’ Mat said.
Helen was shocked and Mat felt immediately ashamed of his reaction. He thought how much better it was to show restraint at this time of the year. It was probably a good idea at this darkest time of the winter to have a formal and ceremonious occasion for the release of inhibitions, for the release of all the hidden gaiety which was locked in men. But in Glasgow it never worked that way. There is always a cold deliberation in the Glasgow man’s drunkenness, as if the drink which makes the head spin and the stomach heave still leaves in them the sober certainty of the bitterness of life and the inexorable passage of time. So when they become gay at New Year it is always in a gauche left-handed sort of way which soon degenerates into viciousness and violence and a kind of bitter sentimentality.
Standing in the street watching the bloodstained couple stagger up the street they could still hear the voices coming from the house.
‘What a miserable song,’ Mat said. ‘It’s not sad or sweet or anything – just plain dreich.’ They walked up the street towards the main road, then they turned the corner and walked out towards the countryside. Mat was muttering away to Helen and shaking his head.
‘God, how I hate bloody Ne’erday.’
Next morning Mat woke early feeling strangely refreshed. Usually in the morning he felt as if he had not had enough sleep and it would take him some time before he would come to and feel like a human being. After he had been tight he always woke feeling bright in spite of spasms of nausea and remorse of conscience.
The party last night had ended as usual. Tam had called one of the innocent young girls ‘a painted Jezebel’. He always associated sexual ostentation, even the mildest kind, with ‘Capitalism’. He had gone home, weaving down the street, pipes squealing and out of tune, with a crowd of complete strangers weaving in a line behind his back. Jake’s comment was, ‘The comrades’ll be on his top if they catch him.’
Mat and Helen cleaned out some of the mess in the kitchenette and made themselves some breakfast. Then they put on their coats and scarves to go out walking for a while. It was a lovely clear frosty morning full of pale orange light and an angry red-looking disc for a sun. In the street they stood for a minute exhaling their breath in clouds. As they stood wondering in which direction to walk someone waved to them from the other side of the street. They waved back and stood waiting while he came across the street to join them. It was Andrew Fotheringham, slim, very dark, his belted coat neat and his scarf tucked in trimly round his throat. He had a long intelligent face and a habit of looking upwards towards you with his eyes. Mat liked him but he didn’t see much of him even though he lived just across the road. He was an engineering student and was usually too busy studying. As they shook hands together Mat felt more at home with the season. ‘How’d it go?’ Andrew waved the stem of his pipe in the direction of everywhere with a sarcastic smile on his face. Mat and Helen rolled their eyes up. ‘God in Heaven – and you?’
‘Got by.’ He laughed mischievously and shook his head. They walked down the street and round the corner towards the park. The shop at the corner was closed and this reminded Helen. ‘I’d better go and try and find a shop open
for some bread and milk. You two go and have a dauner.’
As she walked away waving her mittened hand she looked very soft and feminine. Mat felt a twinge of pity for her that she should have become connected with him. She had a marvellous walk. Not the staccato click-click provocative walk so beloved by models, but a smooth undulating glide which for all its sensuousness Mat found appealed to the heart and the affections as much as anything else.
Andrew laughed at Mat. ‘And to think I always said you’d end up with a doll.’
‘You do learn something from literature.’ Mat laughed. ‘“What is it that a man looks for in a woman? The lineaments of gratified desire.”’
Andrew laughed and they walked over the street and through the park gates and along a road that dipped down towards the misty trees.
‘The rest of that goes: “what is it that a woman looks for in a man? The lineaments of gratified desire.”’
‘Nobody will ever see that on your ascetic looking mug,’ Andrew said.
‘My what looking mug?’
‘Ascetic.’
Mat laughed this off. He was used to casting himself in a different role. At one time he used to boast of his capacities and successes to Andrew. That was when he had seen everything through the gay blur of hedonism, when he was self-consciously reacting against the Calvinism which all Scotsmen inherit.
‘I would say that you’re the one that’s an ascetic.’
‘Uhuh! Except that I enjoy it.’ Andrew was the type of man who’d just stop smoking when he had no money and refuse to smoke other people’s cigarettes. ‘I mean that there are certain simple desires which given good will, intelligence, a bit of – gumption – are easy to satisfy. But you . . .’