The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  And so he wrote on. He wrote of the merry Devlins – of his ‘Faither’ of the fierce hooked nose and the hooded blue eyes, with his easy tolerance, of his silly disorganised grandmother who was ‘Faither’s wife’, who kept pots of soup on the fire and who ruled over her sprawling brood with a rod of nothing. He wrote of the merry brood themselves – of Eric, with his beautiful disciplined tenor voice who could sing in the old bel canto style and who had sung to Mat and played old records of Caruso and McCormick and Schipa, teaching Mat to love and know the human voice, not least Eric’s own, or John with his weird collection of musical instruments, dulcimer, mandolin, fiddle, button accordion, who taught Mat to play the penny whistle by ear and who earned himself an occasional bob or two by playing jazz piano at the local gigs. He wrote of the rakish prematurely bald Jimmy with his boxing trophies, who had taught Mat to sing ‘The International’ and ‘Vote, vote, vote for Jimmy Maxton’, of the witty Lizbeth who could stand on her hands on the backs of chairs, who wore slacks and who had done her ‘acrobatic’ turn in every small theatre on the Clyde coast, of Mary who made Lizbeth’s spangled tights on the sewing machine and Sissie the raconteur and Bertha who was a breadwinner and Jetta who carried all the guilt for the rest. He wrote on, peopling his novel with the ploys and mistakes and recklessness of these poor penniless Devlins and their cluttered comforting household.

  Mat wrote chapter after chapter through the weeks. As he began each chapter he would give it some title, private titles which he meant to keep for himself. One chapter he wrote with particular care. He had felt something problematical in his idea and in this chapter he half expected his notion of emergence to have some success. The scene of the chapter was a coup, an old dump where lorries had once come and emptied their loads of ash. At one time, this many years ago, before the avulsion and alluvium, there had been a green high bank on the inside of the river’s curve. But in the years the loop of the Clyde had sprung, had grown and widened out until the river’s edge had receded away from the high green bank. Then a little meadow had grown between the bank and the river’s edge. Now the little meadow had been filled up again with the accumulation of ash and slag from the nearby steelworks. Then the sediment from the other factories came – cans, drums, slates, oily rags, rope, old bricks, broken pieces of cement and asbestos sheeting – until there had been no more space left for dumping and the earth, left alone, had thrust up the virulent foxglove through the refuse. Then the rat’s tails and the long coarse grasses had followed. It was left as a wilderness except for some dovecotes knocked up out of waste wood and soap boxes which were built round the edges of this waste.

  To the young Mat and his friend Geordie this unfrequented wilderness of thistle, nettle, docken leaves, dog’s flourish, ashes, long grass, broken bottles and old disused railway sleepers was a paradise. As they sat near the edge of the dump overlooking the sluggish water they could look out through the smoke and dirt of the city to the countryside beyond. They could see softly undulating hills fuzzed with trees, straight lines of hedges marking out the fields of corn and wheat, ploughed fields like tiny patches of corduroy cloth, here and there the white sides of a farmhouse. Sometimes, when the air was damp with rain about to fall and the hills were marked brightly against the livid sky, they could see plainly through the clarified air cattle, horses, and sheep grazing in the fields. These were strange unfamiliar things which attracted, looked at through the obscurity of ash dust, wreaths of smoke and Mat’s child’s eyes. Always, as he sat on top of the man-made ash heap, he wondered at the sight. It was the smooth dissolution of one scene into the other; the dust, smoke, chimneys, fires, locomotives, electric pylons mingling with and slowly changing to the beauty of the hills beyond.

  Mat often went out into those hills. At weekends or during the summer holidays he would get sandwiches and a bottle of milk and with Geordie take the tram to the outskirts of the city and walk out into the fields beyond. They would stay all day and at night coming home tired from the fresh air he would remember the long cool shadows of the trees, the tumultuous whirling and cawing of the rooks in the branches above. Mat remembered it in contrast with the light at night over the coup, reddened and angered through the factory haze when the sky seemed to burn and the buildings were silhouetted like dead black embers against the blazing clouds of smoke. Up there the sun slid down easily like snow falling and seemed to lie among the trees and on the grass, cool and languorous. Down in the coup, even at dusk with cool gusts of wind blowing across the grasses and making him shiver, the setting sun still seemed to burn like an inflammation.

  Often they’d make hideaways, marvellous secret dens out of sheets of corrugated iron and railway sleepers. Sometimes they’d sit in them until late, with a fire burning in a drum, and they’d talk. As the nights got duller they’d talk in mysterious hushed voices about all the important things in life, like stars and ghosts and sex and war and from the older boys there would come strange rumours of that other faraway world of men and women. Mat and Geordie would stay there in fascination listening to these stories, feeling strange incumbencies, vague premonitions, the glamorous awesome fear of living. It would only be the shivering which would drive them home. Mat would feel the pricking of cramp in his limbs from sitting too long and when he’d stand up his legs would ache to the bone. The evening would have suddenly come, like a sadness, not dark but grey, and the smooth surface of the river would shirr suddenly in a gust of wind. There would be a lonely last-out feeling in the air so that the rattle of the trucks, the glissando of the distant trains as they crossed the bridge, the whistle of the wind in the cables above the pylons, its rustle among the grasses and weeds – all these sounds would seem to have a lamenting poignant quality like the cry of these lost ghosts in their stories as all the locks clicked and everyone moved inwards to the warm lit interiors, leaving the ghosts, the bills, the city streets, to the sky and the night.

  Then after Geordie’s death, when his friend had fallen from that awful lavatory wall, Mat remembered the other awful premonitions. He remembered the desolation of the long nights afterwards when he would lie awake, cold and sweating, listening to Jake breathe in the bed beside him, to his mother and father turning in their sleep, to the creak of the rotten slum building, the dreary whistle of a locomotive somewhere far off, and he would think of death and hopelessness, of the long weary life leading to his last moment when he would be shut up in a wooden coffin and be no more. His bed sheets would become all clammy and he would lie on his back and imagine himself dead; dead, not in silence, nor rest, nor oblivion, but dead in loneliness, cold, surrounded by waxy white lilies. Then he’d imagine the windy spaces of heaven and eternity. He’d speak to himself, saying, ‘I. I. I.’ over and over again until the whole question of his identity became utterly strange and fearful and existence itself became an airy void in which his own self, his own life, became thinned out and lost.

  It may have been from this that he had turned with such comfort to the rumours of experience. To sing ‘The International’ with fist clenched along with his Uncle Jimmy was to abrogate these other questions in the cheery activist humanitarianism of the song. From that time Mat remembered black posters in crude type, books with pictures of fierce looking bearded men with great broad foreheads. Later there were words and names in the air – Marx, socialism, strikes, elections. Once he held a tar bucket for a man who wrote in big black letters the word ‘scab’ beneath one of the neighbours’ windows. During the elections, he stood at the school gates and handed out leaflets with a picture of the beloved long haired Jimmy Maxton on them. At that time they all sang ‘Vote, vote, vote for Jimmy Maxton’.

  There was all this fuss and seriousness, the sense of something being imminent, a great expectation in the air. All this excited and thrilled Mat. He wanted to know what it was about. But more, it helped to fill out that empty fearful void which Mat saw at night in his bed. It gave content and texture to living and out of the background of this talk of socialism Mat beg
an to acquire a crude intellectual apparatus which seemed to help combat his fear of nothingness. He overheard talk from Doug, his father, from his uncles, from men at the street corner and began to learn the logical play with ideas like free-will, God’s omnipotence, the dilemmas of creation in which the atheist arguments and syllogisms fitted together like an ingenious Chinese puzzle – if God is perfect and also omnipotent then all the irresolvable dilemmas of grace, free-will, divinity, sin and choice could be moved about in pleasing logical shapes and patterns. These questions which had made him shiver and sweat in his bed would lose their chilling reality and become domesticated into matters for enjoyable argument, excuses for the construction of rebellious and shocking ideas.

  Mat put all this into his chapter which he wrote with such care. He called the chapter, with mild irony, ‘Ontological Questionings’. Yet he went on writing with this emergence which he had expected still not taking place. Through the weeks the bright summer still held in spite of the shower which fell on Mat’s first morning. But in the middle of his section on ‘Ontological Questionings’ the weather broke. Mat was a slow six weeks into his time by then. There was little rain to mark the change but mostly it was just that in a few days the skies became grey and overcast and the temperature dropped. For a week or two the skies remained cloudy without much rain and the streets remained as dusty as they had been all through the summer. Then as Mat wrote on, still slowly, still waiting, a chill autumn came on. Mat stuck to his task, but with every day his reluctance growing slowly into aversion until gradually his old trouble returned – the old disgust, the old questioning, the old failure of the heart, the old sense of the complete unreality of what he was doing.

  He would wake up in the morning thinking about starting. By this time the money was getting tight. There was no toothpaste and his gums began to bleed and feel sore in the mornings. He stood in front of the mirror, with a sour wind scouring at his bowels, and tried to make a lather to shave with ordinary kitchen soap, then he scraped at his chin with an old razor blade which he had tried to hone inside a glass. He took to smoking butt ends first thing in the morning and then when he drank the weak tea and ate toast the bread was like dough in his mouth. It seemed as if his money and his creative energy were running out concurrently. When they were very near the end of their money the novel was not nearly finished and Mat sold his record player and some books. They didn’t get very much for them but it was enough for some toothpaste, some coffee and cigarettes. That same day Mat went into the slaughter-house to see Jake. He stood in the room watching the men work, with a feeling like nostalgia for the safety of employment. All the time he spoke to Jake he was conscious of keeping up appearances, but at the back of his mind was the depressing thought of his lack of money. He thought of the early morning cups of tea and the hot rolls, of egg and sausages. And of his own mornings now of toast and margarine. It was while he was thinking these thoughts that he got this windfall. The last couple of beasts that had been felled were old dry dairy cows, but from both of them had come first-class livers. While Jake and his mate went out to the pens at the back of the killing rooms Mat had idly inspected the livers. On both of them the part that was usually uneatable, because of the thick veins that were piped through it, was soft and tender. It was an impulse that made Mat take a knife and trim both the livers, making it look as if the piped ends had been trimmed off. But the parts that he had trimmed he wrapped quickly in a newspaper and stuck them in his pocket.

  But for all this it only meant a few days’ respite. For two mornings running they breakfasted gloriously on fried liver and coffee, for another week on toast and butter and coffee, then they were back to toast and tea and margarine again. Again he would get up each morning to a meaningless day and, unable to work, he would re-read what he had written until it went flat. The excitement and lust for work became more and more an insipid duty. The old idea which had excited him, the theme which had given him his title, became more and more a subject for distaste. Before the autumn had properly started he knew that he had lost, that his gamble had not come off.

  It was money they had gambled with in the first place, whether or not it would last them out as long as they thought. And as is usually the case with money, it hadn’t. It had leaked away in all sorts of unaccountable ways until now Mat realised that his time was up. But his novel was unfinished. In a way he was even more confused about it than he had been when he had started. Other questions arose. He began to avoid meeting people, even the neighbours in the street. His old trouble had grown larger than ever before, this feeling that his writing was merely a shameful self exposure, that it had no meaning, no place in his life, that against reality it was inept and half-hearted. Nor was there any argument against this feeling. It simply existed, that creativeness was something of which he was deeply shamed. And yet he had to go on writing, wilfully sustaining the creative mood against his anxiety, his self disgust, the reductive timorousness which would assail him, his fear of risk. Still wilfully, painfully he went on, writing and writing and writing, with his balance, his swing gone, his creative lust enfeebled to a rigorous duty, swallowing his toad, wrestling every morning to lift his ton of reluctance. Sometimes when he thought of Doug, of the reality of his absence, he would feel again his own ridiculous weakness and inadequacy, the meagreness of his spiritual possessions, his physical poverty, his feeble stumblings and gaucheries, the paucity of this world, the refractory city, the numbing tenements and streets, his crumbling damp rooms, the Scotch sneer on his neighbour’s face, the load, the weight, the density, the insistent immediateness of what is called living. His writing would become to him a jeering, ugly travesty. He would feel this sneering disgust which was in itself disgusting, a double disgust. And he was never sure whether his revulsions came from the grim, twisted mockery of life at art, or the inflated, lying mockery of art at life.

  16

  THE WHOLE IDEA had been a complete mess. All day long he had been wandering around thinking about it. Now he turned into his own street with reluctance, for in the street was that point where his life focused, his tiny house which was the centre to which everything that was bothering him was directed. As long as he was outside, wandering the streets he was anonymous, but once there in that place they could identify him, dun him, send him their bills. It was impossible to work there any more when every click of the letter box or knock at the door meant distraction. So he went outside to work, or merely, as he had been doing recently, to wander about – but to go away and live for a while away from his own reality. As if to justify his reluctance a cold wind buffeted him as he entered the street.

  Inside the close the gas lamp had just been lit for the evening. Part of the mantle had broken off and a tongue of flame stuck out and flickered in the intermittent draught that blew through the close. He turned the key and as he stepped into the lobby he heard voices from the kitchen. The sound of the voices made him feel glad at the thought of company. He went inside.

  It was his mother and Helen who had been speaking. Helen and Jetta were sitting on the easy-chairs on each side of the fireplace, Jake was half-standing, half-sitting against the draining board. Mat took off his W.D. haversack, which he had once used to carry his knives and which was now stuffed with sixpenny jotters and books. He hung the haversack over the back of a chair and returned to the lobby to hang up his coat and jacket. While he was doing this Helen and Jetta were finishing a conversation about children. When Mat came back into the room he spoke to Helen.

  ‘Is he asleep, the boss?’ He jerked his thumb towards the door of the tiny room where the baby had his cot.

  ‘Yes, you’re just in time. I’m going to make a cup of coffee.’

  Mat went over to Jake and Jake offered him a cigarette. Mat hesitated before he took it, remembering he had only one left in his own packet and no money to buy any.

  ‘How’s the market these days?’ he asked Jake.

  ‘Bags of work,’ Jake said.

  Beside Jake, on
the draining board, there were some uncooked sausages lying on the grill pan. Mat looked at them and felt the saliva trickle in his mouth but he drew at the cigarette to alleviate the hunger pangs.

  ‘Oot the road,’ he said to Jake. ‘If you let me in to the sink, I’ll fill the kettle for a cuppa.’

  After Mat had filled the kettle and lit the gas under it he squeezed past the table and sat down on the divan which was against the wall opposite the fireplace. It was only when he sat down that he realised how tired he was from walking about. He also felt a bit light headed and dizzy from hunger. Helen got up and put the sausages on the grill. All this time Jetta had hardly acknowledged his entry but went on talking to Helen.