The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  During this time Mat acquired an unusual obsession. When he had first left school he had worked for a while in a big department store where they had put him to work in the leather goods section. There he had sold leather bags. They had been made of pigskin of the finest quality hide and their prices were always marked in guineas. Now he had the idea of working them up into some image – the remembrance of them was connected so strongly with a certain mood – and he became interested in trying to catch the quality of this mood. The bags had been so solid with an opulent patina on them that they reminded him somehow of the sheen on a Dutch painting. At this time too he bought a copy of Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ and had hung it in their bedroom. Although he couldn’t catch for himself the quality of this image or its usefulness for himself, he seemed to be seeing it everywhere – in the big wooden doors in churches with their great iron hinges, studded and with massive hasps – the glint of ivory or the intricate dovetailing in the drawer of an old cabinet in an antique shop – these things seemed to him to hint in some way at the pathetic urge in man to ward off the circumstantial. In the end he managed to write a story in which something of this was expressed. He couldn’t quite get into the story what he felt was significant about the human artefact, to say directly how this significance touched him. Its meaning was at once so powerful and so elusive that his equipment was simply insufficient to incorporate it into a work with all the strength of its echoes and reverberations, all its shadows and glimmerings. He wrote instead a story almost straight from memory.

  When he was a boy there had been an unroofed lavatory in his school with walls made of red glazed brick which were topped with half-round glazed brick tops put there to prevent boys from walking along the top of the wall. After school hours several boys would often take the urge to climb up round the lavatory and jump from one wall to another. Mat hated when they did this because the more daring ones would shout ‘Feartie’, and taunt anyone unwilling to climb up on the walls along with them and share their risk. He was so terrified also of the sickeningly hard concrete floor of the lavatory, that however much they taunted him he would never attempt to climb up. In a way he wasn’t even ashamed of being afraid. Trees were different, being full of branches and leaves and rough bark and knobs which you could cling to, and if you slipped all you got was your knees and elbows skinned. Across the road from the school in an empty yard there was an old brick mill with an iron fire escape that went away up higher than even the roof of the school. Mat wasn’t afraid to climb that and it was much higher than the lavatory walls. Of those implacable tiled walls he was afraid. Once when he had been playing at a game which the boys called ‘hudgies’, that is stealing rides on the backs of motor lorries, he had fallen off a lorry that had accelerated suddenly and cracked his head on the ground. He remembered how odd he had felt and how he had wandered about for some time saying funny things and not quite knowing what he was doing. Now when he looked at those dizzy, slippery walls and that hard wet lavatory floor he would think of what it would be like to fall into that awful square chasm and he would feel as if his head had gone empty and his skull had been rung like a bell.

  Once Mat had come out of school with his pal Geordie and they had stood in the playground arguing about what they would do. Some of the bigger boys had already gathered about the lavatory walls and Geordie wanted to stay and climb them. Mat tried to coax him off elsewhere.

  ‘C’mon and watch the waterworks,’ he had said.

  Geordie was disgusted. ‘The waterworks! You’re always wanting to go and watch the waterworks. There’s nothing there. Nae fun.’

  They had gone across to the yard beside the factory and walked up and down, arguing and scrunching their feet in the piles of broken glass which seemed to collect there. Mat couldn’t understand why Geordie liked climbing the walls. Nothing, not the attraction of the bigger boys’ company, not even the fact that sooner or later someone would eventually summon up the nerve to climb over into the adjoining chocolate works and come back with some cartons of stolen chocolate, could get Mat over his aversion for these walls.

  ‘You stay if you like,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the water-works.’

  ‘The waterworks!’ Geordie was scornful and as he ran away from Mat towards the school he kept turning back and shouting, ‘Feartie, feartie.’ Mat stood and watched him go, but he didn’t care.

  Near the school there were quite a few high tenements and buildings which were either warehouses or factories and all the streets around were bustling with life; the dust never seemed to settle anywhere with the continual stir. On a piece of waste ground there was a game of football going on and Mat could hear the uncomfortable gritty sound of the ball as it bounced and scraped on the stony hard packed earth. And the ragged scraping sound which the boys made as they scuffled and dunted with one another set his teeth on edge. He moved away from all this torrid congestion, looking back from time to time until a bend in the road cut out the sight of the wall. The last Mat saw of Geordie was his tiny figure straining up, his arm outstretched as someone sitting astride the wall leaned down and tried to pull him up.

  The long road which led to the waterworks was very quiet. It led straight out to the banks of the river and had been so long disused that grass had grown up round the cobbles and only a rudimentary pavement was left. After Mat had rounded that bend which had hidden Geordie from sight, the road in front stretched out long and straight and empty, pointing across the river, past a collection of low greystone buildings to the countryside beyond, where some long glass hothouses reflected the rays of the sun. At the end of this road on the right-hand side were the waterworks, shallow square pits bedded with gravel which was combed by rows of curved silvery jets of water squirting from big metal pipes. These metal pipes moved to and fro across the gravel beds. The whole of the waterworks was surrounded by a high neat green-painted iron fence. Mat just stood at the fence and listened to the hiss of the water falling into the gravel.

  There was nobody about except for a man in dungarees standing still just inside the furthest part of the fence. His presence only seemed to intensify the loneliness of the place. Mat felt an emotion which had something to do with the peace and quiet of the spot. Everything about it was so neat, the green-painted iron fence with not a rail bent or missing, the big metal pipes running up and down in orderly parallels, the tidy flat surface of the gravel; even the water, usually so inchoate and turbulent, was now formed out into even rows of identically curving jets and everywhere there was a quiet implacable activity. Mat stood for a while by the fence simply enjoying being there amid the peace, then he went down towards the river and made a little nest among the long grass. He sat and whittled at a stick and listened to the hissing sound coming from the waterworks. He tried to feel something of the permanence of the place, with its own road on which the grass grew and to which nobody came.

  It was later, after teatime, when he was coming home from a message which his mother had sent him, that Mat met Geordie’s sister. She was quite excited by the news she had to tell him, full of importance and unaware of the seriousness of what she was saying.

  ‘Geordie fell off the lavvy wall and landed on the back of his head and he’s got a mark just here’ – she pointed to the back of her skull – ‘and it’ll never go away. I’ve got to go a message. Cheerio!’

  When he got back to the house his mother had asked him about Geordie’s accident. Her questions showed her anxiety that Mat should not be implicated in the affair.

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘And did you see him climb?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Did you fall out with him?’

  ‘Naw. I don’t even know what has happened.’

  ‘He broke his skull,’ Ma said. Mat felt his head go all empty and he could imagine the cracking of bone on the hard lavatory floor. His mother continued, ‘The ambulance took him to hospital.’

  After this Mat sat in a corner brooding. H
e had to try not to think of the sheer walls from which Geordie had fallen. Instead he tried to think of the waterworks. Just about half-an-hour before bedtime a knock came at the door and his mother went to answer it. She stayed there for a long time talking and Mat could hear the women’s voices rising and falling in a regular rhythm. He could hear odd phrases. ‘Terrible, uhuh!’ – ‘Is it no’ awful?’ – ‘Uhuh!’ – ‘Uhuh!’ The note of the women’s voices was of that avid complacency, a mixture of smugness and fear with which people discuss other people’s disasters. Although the sound of their monotonous voices humming on at the doorstep increased Mat’s depression, the natural tone of pity was missing which would have prepared him for what his mother told him when she came back into the room.

  ‘I just heard there, that wee Geordie’s dead.’

  Mat didn’t answer his mother. He tried to think about it but he couldn’t. He couldn’t imagine Geordie dead. He couldn’t feel anything except that he was miserable and cold. All this while his mother was clucking her tongue and commiserating with herself.

  ‘Ma? The sound of his voice startled even himself it was so desperate and cajoling. ‘Can I go round to Faither’s to stay the night?’ By ‘Faither’ he meant his grandfather Devlin.

  ‘All right,’ his mother said, ‘if you like, but you’d better get away before your father comes home or he’ll not let you.’

  Outside it had turned chilly and the street lamps were on. Mat’s shadow flitted round him silently as he passed the street lamps and he felt afraid. The street was so still and he was frightened of his own loneliness and of his shadow and of the quiet street. Suddenly, while he was thinking about Geordie, he realised. All through the summer the girls had played singing games in the street. Mat could almost hear their sharp indifferent voices as they sang.

  ‘Water, water, wallflowers,

  Growing up so high.

  We are all children,

  And we must all die.’

  As he remembered the girls’ song the night became empty and alien. As he looked up the sky seemed nothing but a vast black windy space. He fled through the street and ran up the stairs to his grandfather’s house knocking desperately at the door until it was opened; then he hurried into the warm bright room with its clutter of dishes, remnants, string, screwnails, pipes, people, knobs, newspapers and its smell of tobacco and women and people; he rushed up to the fireplace and sat down on the fender with his back to the oven door.

  Mat was quite pleased when he managed to finish writing the story about this experience. It was so seldom that he ever managed to finish anything now as ideas and inspiration were coming to him either in fragments or in big bald lumpy shapes. He found himself usually writing fragments or else so many long rambling processions of ideas each of which would retain their discreteness and which he hadn’t the strength or the skill to fuse together. Sometimes everything seemed to congeal into a hard intractable nothingness against which his imagination would bounce and exhaust itself. But he was fairly pleased when he managed to write the story. It seemed to have something in it of that thing which was glimmering in his mind and which was so peculiarly represented by the hide bags, the Rutherglen burghers, or a Vermeer landscape.

  So January, February and March went by and Mat sat up at night resisting the encroaches of time, casting his memory back and ever backwards to his childhood, writing with a sense of personal nostalgia the long accounts of his boyhood experiences, when the smoke and grime, the violence, the dizzy vertigo of life in the room and kitchen, had all been seen with a timeless sense. And further back he’d go, indulging himself vicariously in the timeless world of the Eighteenth Century Scottish burgher, writing more into his magnum opus ‘Rutherglen’s wee roon red lums reek briskly’ which would contain all his love – but what was the object or the nature of this love he could not say.

  Occasionally Mat would take a day off work and he’d go to the library and sit and write. This always caused an awful feeling of self-division in him. Like all Scotsmen Mat had inherited the Old Testament idea – this inheritance came to him through the secular facts, that work was – though it would be impossible to formulate what these ideas were; work was, of course, a curse and a bore; also it was the most valuable thing in the world; it gave you bread and butter, it was the source of your self-respect, it was the cause of great bitterness, it was the means of sustaining a decent respectable way of life, it was maintenance, protection, aliment, your stoke and your stay. Above all it was labour, it was the means to an end and Mat never suspected that it might have a value in and for itself. So although he was quite capable of enduring long hours of writing at a stretch, of sustaining intense periods of concentration even when he was otherwise fatigued, he had no doubt at all that this activity was neither labour nor work. He moralised to himself that when he took days off his work to write he was merely being lazy, indulging in temptation. In spite of his love of literature and writing he felt underneath that there was something slightly immoral in earning money by writing when it was not really working. It didn’t matter to Mat how arduous he might find the task of writing, and he probably found it more difficult than most people. The fact that it was what he wanted to do precluded it from being defined as work.

  It had all started when he had been staying up writing too late one night. The next morning he had felt so tired that he had lain over long in bed and had been late for work. This had made him feel unpleasant. From the day he had left school he had never been late for work, nor had he ever taken a day off. He had got himself ready very quickly and drank a cup of tea. Then he ran out of the house slamming the front door and pelting down the stairs with a piece of toast in his hand.

  Outside there was a thin March sun. The first sun of the year, though the air was still cold. Mat ran up the street towards the tram stop. He suddenly halted and started to walk quite slowly. An impulse had come over him and instead of taking a tram to work he crossed over the street and took a tram going in the opposite direction altogether.

  He sat on the top deck of the tram huddled against the window, beginning to feel guilty already. It was so late that the trams were now going into town fairly empty and there were the long lines of rush hour trams coming back from the centre of the town where they had discharged their loads of busy workers. In the draught-proof car Mat felt the March sun warm through the glass, though outside as they passed the cemetery in the Gallowgate there was a shifting mist rising up from the earth. At Glasgow Cross the traffic was jammed up beneath the Tolbooth, lorries speeding back and forward from the fruit market, the carriers’ quarters and the warehouses, little busy vans and business men’s cars all in a tangle. From the top deck of the tram there was a vista up Argyle Street of trolleys and wires. There were girls window dressing in a draper’s shop and the precise policemen at the points. All the time a diastolic spasm as the streams of traffic surged and stopped, surged and stopped.

  The clock on the Tolbooth showed it to be ten o’clock. Already! Normally he would have got through a pile of work by this time, and he’d have been able to look back on a morning’s achievement, two long hours of work. Normally he’d be thinking, ‘It’s only ten o’clock’, now he was thinking. ‘Ten o’clock already’. This depressed him, gave him a feeling of sackcloth and ashes inside. And all the people hurrying about – errands, occupations, duties, schedules – while his day seemed to stretch out before him in rags and tatters.

  When he got off the tram car he walked down Stockwell Street towards the Clyde. The pavement was jammed with people and when he walked under the railway bridge he was forced at times to wait while the commercial lorries backed in from the street underneath the archways where the carriers’ quarters were, and chandlers’ stores and warehouses. There was a strong composite smell of oil and sugar, and as he walked further down the street, of fish. He turned to the left, walking through the street outside the fishmarket. At the angle between the pavement and the side of the buildings there was a minuscule of dried hors
e dung and fish scales. There were patches of wet on the tarmacadam of the road and scatterings of grain where an impatient horse had shaken its nose-bag, a terrific flurry and scatter of hooves as a carter backed his horse into an archway, his voice ringing out in authoritative yelps, ‘Hup! Hup! Hup!’ and the thudding of fish boxes as the porters lifted and dumped them, their heads covered in snoods of hessian. Mat walked on underneath the railway bridges, past the sordid street markets where all sorts of junk was sold, past the rag stores and the red brick city mortuary and the Police Courts. He turned up past the gates of the Glasgow Green to the parapet of the bridge from where he could see the old Clyde, the colour of a back court puddle, winding in through the Green towards the centre of the city. Up Crown Street was a vista of dust and ashes. Mat had walked all this time with his head down, watching the toes of his shoes as they peeped in and out, in and out, from under the hem of his coat. Now as he stood on the bridge he felt the need for some sensuous stimulation, something which would destroy his grimy grey feeling of nothingness. Above the buildings the sky was harsh from a washy diffuse sunlight.

  He was standing on the bridge looking over the parapet into the dirty water, at the very spot where Boswell had stood and looked at the widest streets in the whole of Europe. Gles Chu! Glasgow! The dear green place! Now a vehicular sclerosis, a congestion of activity! He felt for a cigarette in his pocket and the match which he lit flared bitterly in the cold air. The city about him seemed so real, the buildings, the bridge, the trams, the buses, so separate and hard and discrete and other. He felt again a wave of nostalgia for another kind of existence – waxed fruit, sword sticks, snuff, tobacco, shining brass valves, steam pipes, jet ware, wag-at-the-wa’s, horsehair sofas, golf cleeks, cahootchie balls – all the symbols of confidence, possibility, energy, which had lived before this knotted, tight, seized-up reality which was around him had come to be.