The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  ‘As long as you don’t get any more fancy notions.’

  ‘Look. I’ll not get any fancy notions. I’ll go and work in the slaughter-house if Jake can get me in.’

  ‘I think it’s pretty sure, Mat. We’re pretty busy.’

  ‘It’s a good job really,’ said Doug. ‘The money’s good enough and it’s steady. Ye can carry on your writing at night – as a hobby.’

  ‘As a what? A hobby? Look, you’d better get a haud o’ this – maybe I’ve not explained it to you before. I’m not writing to pass my time in the evenings, or to kid myself I’m cultured . . .’

  ‘Aye, all right, son.’

  ‘. . . or because of any fancy notions, or to show people what a lovely deep soul I’ve got . . .’

  ‘Aye, all right, son.’

  ‘. . . or to get my worries off my chest, or relieve some neurotic compulsion . . .’

  ‘Aye, all right, son.’

  ‘. . . or to indulge a whim, or gratify my ego . . .’

  ‘Aye, all right, son.’

  ‘. . . or because of some daft social aspiration. What I have to say has to be said aside from a’ that aforementioned guff . . .’

  ‘Aye, all right. All right.’ Doug rose with his hands protesting in front of him. ‘I’m sorry I said it. Now let’s not get started all over again.’

  Yet this outburst was still no explanation. Mat had been thinking about something which was, he felt, essentially serious, something which he knew as ‘literary values’. Consciously in his mind he even referred to Eliot’s idea of poetry as an escape from the personality and emotion. Yet the very sophistication of these ideas seemed to him, in his circumstances, to be over-wheening. These ideas had no equivalence in his actual experience. They were serious matters for the practising writer, but they had no reference to the outward facts of his life. Privately they were to him exciting and serious, but in his actual life as lived they were just as Jetta would describe them. Fancy notions. He had no language in which to say these things. The emotions which he experienced inwardly in relation to his writing were as foreign to his mundane life as Hudson’s Argentinian pampas, or Flaubert’s original French.

  ‘You sound awful sure of yourself wi’ all your clear consciences and your got-to-be-saids . . .’

  ‘Aye. There’s thousands of people thought like that and they wound up wearing wee canvas jackets.’

  ‘I think what I said is important. If not . . .’ Mat shrugged. He might go on as long as he lived thinking about these matters which would in the end be trivialities if he couldn’t actually create a world for himself in which they would be real and applicable. He would go on to the end of his days thinking that literature was important, but never feeling it so. ‘If I’m right?’ Mat left this question unanswered. Life would be glad then. It is best not to tempt fate by naming names. ‘I don’t know. But if I’ve nae convictions, I’m nothing. That’s what we always try to dodge in the end.’

  ‘Well, what about the noo?’

  Jake and Doug turned towards Jetta with their fingers to their lips. ‘Wheesht!’

  ‘Don’t start again.’

  ‘Or we’ll be arguing all night.’

  ‘Well, he’s got a wife to think of,’ said Jetta.

  Helen had been standing all this time away from the others at the door. Now she came forward. She leaned her hands on the table and stood over them. Mat had sat down and was sprawled out on his chair.

  ‘No! No!’ Helen said. It was the first time she had ever said anything with such definiteness since she had come to live in the house. They were all surprised except Mat. ‘Don’t bring me into it. I’m out. I didn’t think when I married Mat that I was marrying him for money or security.’ She laughed. ‘He isn’t exactly what I would call the gentry. And I didn’t ask him to be responsible to me . . .’

  Jetta was offended. ‘And whit, might I ask, did you marry him for?’

  ‘For his fancy notions. Aside from a few – unmentionable things. You know, living in this house has made me realise one very curious thing. You people don’t feel any entitlement to anything; not even Mat. You seem to be in a perpetual state of apology for your very existence. Well I’m not in that frame of mind and’ – Helen suddenly broke into broad Glasgow speech – ‘if ma man wants to acquire any fancy notions he needn’t look to me to reprove him for them. You’re a’ entitled to a bit mair than a mess o’ pottage.’

  They were all a bit taken aback, first because of the sentiments, then by her speech when she broke into the broad Glasgow sound. But there was a dawning light on Doug’s face.

  ‘Nell, hen! I always thought you were a wee bit of a Tory.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with politics, it’s just the way I feel. Blessed are the meek as long as they don’t have any high falutin’ ideas. That’s your whole philosophy. Even you with your Marx. My God! If you people ever got the dictatorship of the proletariat it would be the mildest tyranny in history. If you took any property from anybody you’d give them it back if they gret too loud. As a matter of fact that’s what you did.’

  The three men, Mat, Doug and Jake all burst out laughing. ‘You’re absolutely right, hen!’ Doug was grinning ruefully. ‘You’re absolutely right. My God! I didn’t think you had it in you.’

  7

  WHEN MAT STARTED work in the slaughter-house he stopped writing altogether. In the first place he had so many obligations throughout the day – his work, his family, so many of the things which one does when one is alive – that he had no time to write. He found that writing in the direct glare of the day was inimical to him, and nobody can stay up late at night when they have to rise at five in the morning to go to work. Besides, the hard physical work made him all the time so sleepy. He decided during the first few weeks when he started his new job that he would defer any schemes he had, and he got into the habit of procrastinating. In the second place, he felt quite happy in his new job and he had so many things to occupy his mind – new events, new experiences, new people, a new world full of physical activity. The habit of writing dropped away slowly and easily. If writing was a kind of illicit need, then a cold bath and a run round the block were the best cure. Mat started to take the cure.

  The slaughter-house was inside a huge area, surrounded by buff coloured walls. This area, which was all roofed-in, comprised the cattle market where the pigs, sheep and cattle awaited sale and slaughter, the slaughter-house, where the animals were killed and dressed, and the meat market where the animals, now transformed into beef, pork and mutton, were sold to the butchers. Inside this place on a Wednesday afternoon, which was market day, there was always a welter of activity; big livestock trucks backing into the various entrances and disgorging their loads of cattle or sheep, butchers’ lorries and vans everywhere, farmers with their big boots, labourers with the dungarees beginning to shine and darken with grease and coagulated blood, white-coated salesmen who were cutting, pinching and slapping at the hanging meat; there were swinging slabs of meat which hung from cambrels fixed to an overhead trolley and which were sliding down from the slaughter-house to be lost in the rows of meat hanging in the various stalls and stances; the red gape of cut meat, the yellow-marbled sides of beef, the sawdust that soaked up the dripping blood from the necks of the carcases, barrowfuls of day-old calves with slacked limbs and lolling heads, the pink schoolgirl complexions of the scalded pigs, droplets of red blood on the cobbles. This was the meat market.

  You went up to the slaughter-house through a big lorry-filled entrance gate and underneath a tangle of lights and girders which supported the system of rails on which the cambrels hung, then right through and up a wide pass, tarmacadamed and with red glazed brick walls. In the slaughter-house itself were rows of big cubicles where the animals were dressed and flayed. Outside these rooms hung the freshly killed steaming carcases awaiting the porters who would stick a meat hook into the spaul and slide them away. There were heaps of feet being cleaned up by labourers into barrows, heaps of r
ound manyplies, the fat stuffed fourth stomach of the ox, which the killers would skite out of their rooms like curling stones, slipping on the blood soaked floor, and limp hides with the hair all soaked with water and blood lying in folds amongst the other stuff. The men, all rubber booted, walked carefully with an odd mincing gait among the pools of blood and water, among the slippery refuse, the feet, manyplies, pieces of fat and lumps of jelly-like lappered blood. In the middle of the pass barrows were being pushed up and down as the labourers collected the offal – tripes, livers, hearts, lungs, heads. And all the time the grinding of machinery, the cries of men, the clatter of iron-felloed wheels, the crack of the guns, the lowing and bellowing of the cattle and the crunch of big heavy bodies being felled on to the concrete floor.

  Mat worked in one of these slaughter-rooms. At first he had felt slight revulsion, though perhaps less so than most who started work there. It was not the shambles that caused this, however. He found it quite easy to have his arms covered up to the elbows in reeking blood, and he handled the dripping gobbets of offal and fat with no qualms. What he did dislike was the moment when the animals, the frisky wee bullocks, the quiet maternal cows, the placid indifferent bulls, had their heads tied to the stunning post, and the gun, the bolt pistol, was fired into their foreheads between the eyes. The gun cracked and the animals went down on to the floor in the same sudden moment. Like a felled ox, Mat would think. For nothing, other than the thing itself, could convey that quick loosening of the limbs as they slackened and folded under the animal and it would drop on its knees, its stomach, and its chin, all together, making an odd sound combining the slap of soft flesh and the solid but dull crunch of the padded bone as the chin bounced loosely on the concrete floor. Then the shuddering sigh and the spasm of the muscles as the animal tensed them to grip at the soft elusive life which suspired from the tiny hole in its forehead. Mat found this difficult to get used to, and with every crack and thud of a beast dropping he would ponder on the fragility of bone.

  Even worse than this was the killing of the kosher beasts. From a commonsense view it was as humane as the bolt pistol. The animal was turned on its back inside a huge drum and its neck was stretched with a halter which was tied round its lower jaw. Then the Jewish killer, wearing his little black cap, would come and with his long gleaming knife would stroke the blade from the curve at the jaw, back through the muscles lapped around the gullet, windpipe and arteries of the neck, right through to the backbone. All in one stroke loosening the head and laying bare the big pad of muscle which stretched from the breast right up to under the chin, and the quivering arteries would spout rich frothy blood in spasms and the windpipe would rasp as the animal let out a great spasmodic breath. It was the possible moment of consciousness, when the head loosened and the animal took that last great breath through the chittering windpipe, that Mat thought about. The horror of a possible combination of consciousness and the irrevocable state of death. It was a kind of metaphysical horror that Mat felt at the idea of consciousness, if even only for a second, knowing that it was cut off from its animal source, a horror even worse than the ineluctable obliteration of the gun.

  In Scotland, an ox when it is killed by a bolt pistol, is pithed; that is, a long cane is passed through the hole in the skull down through the canal in the spine through which the spinal cord runs. The effect of this pithing, or caning, is to scramble the brain and prevent the nervous system of the animal from passing gratuitous and unnecessary messages to the muscles of the body, to destroy the organisation on which the animal depends for its life. In other words, caning kills the animal completely so that it ceases to kick and the muscles cease to flutter and it becomes safe to work on the carcase with a knife. When the beasts were killed with the kosher method, Mat would always, as soon as it was on the floor, draw back the skull and insert his knife between the last vertebrae and the skull to sever the white pulsing mass that was the spinal cord. He was hoping to obliterate the last possible gleam of consciousness which might lurk inside the narrow sloping skull.

  Mat now got up in the mornings along with Jake. They got themselves ready in the morning quiet, absolutely silent themselves, communicating only by grunts, each still wrapped in his thoughts of sleep. They drank tea in the kitchenette, more often than not standing up in the cold room. Then they’d put on their jackets and hitch over their shoulders the little ex-W.D. haversacks in which they kept their knives and stones. Then they would go out – slapping at their pockets to see that they had remembered everything, their tea, sugar, money, keys, fags, matches. Every morning they caught the same tram at the same time. When they got into the market they would walk up the long pass into the slaughter-house where everything was quiet except for the occasional bellow from some beast or the bleat of a sheep. The wide tarmacadam pass was a matt grey colour at this time in the morning. The night before it would have been hosed down and now it was all dry without a trace of refuse or blood. The concrete floors of the slaughter-rooms were the same, dry and light-coloured.

  They would switch on the lights that shone directly on to the floor beside the stunning post where the beasts would fall. They then switched on the overhead cranes and lowered the hooks on to which were suspended bags, aprons, rubber boots, cleavers and ropes, all the equipment needed for their work. The men carried on meaningless bantering conversations between the rooms. Occasionally some of the young blood-boys would vent a whoop, and from the back of the slaughter-rooms among the pens there would come a flurrying scuffling sound as an impatient or cross beast would butt another animal with its head. During this time they would dress in their bloodied dungarees, put on their stiff aprons and hitch on the belt which held the steel and the narrow wooden box for their knives. After that they would go into the cattle pens and push among the press of cattle looking for the marks on the hide and picking out the cattle which they would be slaughtering. If possible they would try to put their allocation of cattle for the day into a pen as near to their own room as possible. By the time six o’clock came and the whistle blew there would be two beasts tied up to the stunning posts in each room. Then the gunners would come along with their bolt pistols and the crack of the guns would start and the beasts thud on to the floor.

  Jake actually worked for himself. The system was that he hired a room from the market authorities and along with a mate he offered his services to butchers or dealers who had cattle which they wanted slaughtered. Payment was at so much a head so that the harder the killers worked the more they were paid. Mat’s job was to collect the offals from the room on behalf of a firm of offal merchants who paid him a weekly wage. His duties in the room were laid down precisely; he skinned the heads of the two felled beasts, cut the heads from the carcase, separated and emptied the tripes, trimmed them of fat, washed them and hung them on hooks for the barrowmen to collect. Then the same with the buffs, or cluster of lungs and heart, which were washed and trimmed and the pericardium or fatty sac round the heart cut off and the heart itself slit to release the lappering gobbets of blood from the auricular and ventricle cavities. His job was known as ‘benefit lifting’ and he was known as ‘a benefit man’. In fact the benefit man helped the killers in every way he could and for this he was paid at the end of every week what was called a ‘bung’, an unofficial tip.

  Mat had in his time come across horrified descriptions of shambles and he had shared in the horror of the writers, recoiling from what appeared to be the awfulness of the experience. He had only worked in the slaughter-house for a few weeks before he learned to despise this point of view. It began to seem to him that the morbidness was a projection by the writer on to the shambles that he viewed and that the recoil was a luxury which could be afforded by the writer in not being involved or responsible for the shambles.

  A man, Mat thought, need not be insensitive because he was not squeamish, nor devoid of pity – it was a point of professional pride to the slaughterman that he would kill an animal neatly and quickly without causing it unnecessary su
ffering. Mat noticed too that any visitors to the slaughter-house were more concerned with their own feelings, their own disgust, than they were with pity for the animals. In fact Mat was attracted to the work although he had difficulty in explaining to himself the nature of this attraction. But he had seen something in art which confirmed to him the sanity and health of his viewpoint. Once the slaughtering had got under way in the morning, the slaughtering floor would turn pink with watery blood, the electric light would begin to glare on the fleshy slabs which hung glistening and palpitating from the rails, the steam from the hot pipes and the gutted carcases cast a haze which was suffused with red reflected from the bloody floors, the meat, and the pans of steaming blood. All this caused the same effect of morbidezza which Rembrandt had caught so calmly in his painting of a flayed carcase which hung in the Glasgow Art Galleries. The ultimate wisdom of art, a healthy liveliness and acceptance of sensuous life. It was this that attracted him about the place – the liveliness, the tremendous sense of physical vitality which came from the hard work, the men, the cattle, the movement, even from the dead slabs of meat.

  Once the whistle blew at six the place began to resound, the cattle would become restive at being continually disturbed and would bellow violently, or the bulls which were chained in stalls would trumpet at the cows and cause them to mill and plunge round the pens, the overhead cranes would begin to whine, the killers bawl for the benefit men who would be standing smoking in the middle of the pass with their bare arms tucked into the tops of their aprons, the guns would start to crack and the cleavers begin to thwack into bone and flesh.

  When a beast was felled it was quickly pithed, the killer feeling for the hole in the skull and inserting the cane, pushing it down the spinal canal for about four feet, then working it in and out until the animal would thrash its legs about and its muscles would twitch and shudder. After he had pumped the cane in and out a few times the animal would be left lying absolutely slack and the killer would stand up between the animal’s forelegs, kicking the top leg back with his heel so that the skin about the throat would be stretched tight. Then casually, usually while bantering away with his mate, he’d stroke the eight-inch sticking knife on his steel then bend down and, inserting the knife’s point under the hide just above the dewlap, he’d bare the flesh in a long forward stroke to beneath the chin. The flesh would then be stroked lightly with the edge of the blade until the killer could feel the warm pulse of the carotid; again he’d insert the point of his knife and slit the artery longitudinally, releasing the rich purple frothy blood into the waiting pan. After this the beast was hung for a while by a rope, hitched round a hind foot and slung on to the crane. When the blood had drained from the carcase it was lowered back down on to the floor and turned on its back with its head twisted round and a loose foot wedged into the ridge of its spine to help prop it up. This was when the killer’s job really began. While the head was being skinned by the benefit man the killer would remove the feet with his straight sticking knife. This was done quickly, the killer swiftly laying open the knee with a semi-circular cut and a flick of the knife which folded back the skin pad of over the knee and exposed the white membrane over the joint; then he merely twisted the knee with his left hand and stroked the joint with his knife and the foot was off and flying through the air to join the pile of other feet lying outside the door of the room. Before the last foot had landed the long straight knife was being used to extend a slit in the hide, from the throat, over the dewlap and breast, down the middle of the broad flat belly, and back to the vent. The hide was then flayed with the curved skinning knife, from the forelegs, flank and rump of the animal and spread out leaving the flensed carcase all glistening and fresh with the hide attached now only to the tail, back and shoulders. A six-inch slit was made now in the muscle covering the belly, releasing gas with a gentle suspiration. Then the killer would split the breast-bone with the big seven-pound cleaver; a few controlled drops of the heavy blade and the narrow breast-bone was split in a clean straight line. The cambrels were pulled out from a rack, hooked on to the crane and their ends pushed into the spawl between bone and sinew, then the animal was half lifted from the ground to bring the tail up breast high with the killer and allow him to separate the hide from the tail and to clear the vent.