The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  Then he remembered what he had forgotten in the luxury of all this introspection. That his novel, his bonny wean, had been torn and destroyed. Mat understood very well that he was divided against himself. But he was not prepared for what happened. A voice, a shrugging Glesca keelie voice, said to him: ‘Ye’re nut on, laddie. Ye’re on tae nothin’.’ Mat looked around the empty ferry, but still the voice spoke. ‘Ye’re not quoted. A gutless wonder like you, that hasn’t got the gumption of a louse. That has to have food brought into the house.’ A harsh, ugly, contemptuous, slangy voice. This time he didn’t look round, for it was his own voice, he had spoken aloud.

  Mat’s cheeks went cold, a little unfeeling spot right in the middle of each cheek. On his brow and temples he felt the sweat trickling. Right between the shoulder blades he could feel a sharp grip and as he wiped the sweat from his brow he shivered all over from the cold. He felt the nausea arise which seemed to come from the very marrow of his bones, a moiling utter revulsion as if the very physical elements of his body were coiling and recoiling from each other in disgust. In his self, apart from his body, he felt this deep spiritual boke. He started to retch and tried to check it, but the rippling spasms forced itself from the pit of his stomach up along his gullet until he felt himself choking. He felt his tongue flatten, the lower jaw open and stretch and his neck strain in an uncontrollable animal movement. He retched and retched and retched and retched, each time hoping it would be the last and each time retching stronger. Slowly his nausea changed to a fierce cramping pain as his stomach moiled and knotted and his thrapple contracted and twisted. At the last the strongest retching spasm locked itself at its very height until Mat felt a wild panic and he tried to straighten up and pull out the fixed knot at the bottom of his ribs. Then with a sharp cutting pain as if his gut had broken the last spasm unlocked itself and Mat came to himself on his hands and knees on the deck of the ferry, and with the echo in his ears of the animal boking noises he had been making. His nose and upper lip were covered in snot and his mouth full of a bitter watery bile. Beneath him on the deck was a little pool – it was all he had brought up – just a little watery bile which burnt his throat and tasted acid in his mouth.

  Later, as Mat made his way home, he passed a public well and he went over to take a drink to wash the taste of vomit from his mouth. He took drink after drink from the iron cup which felt so cool on his lips. Then when he had finished he searched through his pockets for a butt end and found one about an inch long with the tobacco gone slack inside it. He lit the cigarette and had to force himself to draw the sour smoke into his lungs. Then he stood and looked at the symbols cast in iron which decorated the public well. And there he saw it, his escutcheon, the coat-of-arms of his Gles Chu, his dear green place, cast in iron. The tree, the bird, the fish, the bell. Cast in iron. As he made his way home the childish jingle echoed through and through in his mind.

  ‘This is the tree that never grew,

  This is the bird that never flew,

  This is the fish that never swam,

  This is the bell that never rang.’

  FUR SADIE

  ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON a coal lorry stopped in front of Sadie Anderson’s close. The front half of the lorry’s platform still held a few bags of coal, but on the back half was spread a folded tarpaulin on which a big, light-coloured, upright piano lay upon its back. Two men got out of the cabin, fixed a pair of skids to the rear of the lorry then started easing the piano toward them, but before it reached the skids the tarpaulin rucked and the piano stuck. Andy, who owned the lorry, stopped pulling and said, ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘Pull the damned thing,’ said his mate Wullie, a bigger, more powerful man still tugging his side of the piano. The tarpaulin rucked up more. A loose corner was caught by the wind and flapped over the piano lid. Andy said, ‘A minute. A minute. You’ll tear the blinkin’ hap.’

  ‘My arse in parsley. It’ll not tear!’ said Wullie with a masculine confidence in technical matters that Andy thought misplaced. He murmured, ‘If you could sook as hard as you can blow’ – and stood back, looking at the job, his lips pursed in a silent whistle. Then he said, ‘We’ll walk it.’

  ‘Walk it?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘It’s a piano, not a bloody horse. Have you noticed it’s got no legs?’

  ‘Ach, use the few brains the guid Lord gave you. Lift your end and I’ll lift mine. Right?’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Now tilt it on your corner and I’ll swing it round. Right?’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Now tilt it onto my corner and you swing it round.’

  In this way they moved the piano until it swung over the back of the lorry and tilted onto the skids. They slid it gently to the ground, pushed it upright on its castors, then with an effort got it onto the pavement.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Wullie asked. Said Andy, ‘Run upstairs with it and slip it through the letterbox.’

  He went into the cabin and came back with furniture slings. They rolled the piano on its castors into the close and at the bottom of the stairs slipped the slings under the piano, tied them behind their necks, then lifted. Andy was first to climb the stairs, an awkward job because he had to walk backwards, though Wullie was taking most of the weight on his big shoulders.

  ‘Two up did you say?’ panted Wullie.

  ‘Aye, two up.’

  On the last flight of steps a young woman appeared above pushing a pram down toward them.

  ‘Ye cannae get past,’ said Andy more abruptly than his normal courtesy to women with prams allowed, for the weight on the sling round his neck made speech difficult.

  ‘What’s happening?’ said Wullie behind the piano, easing some weight off his shoulders.

  ‘Keep going,’ croaked Andy and continued backing upward a step at a time as the young woman pulled the pram up the next flight of stairs. Both men grunted and sighed with relief when they got the piano onto the landing and took the slings from their shoulders. The woman said, irritably, ‘Tt, tt. I’m in a hurry for my messages and I can’t hold this here all day.’

  ‘We’ll not be two shakes of a lamb’s tail – and I’ll give you a hand doon.’ Andy said, knocking on one of the landing doors. Wullie folded his arms on the piano top, leaning heavily with his chin resting on his wrists. The young woman was still clicking her tongue.

  * * *

  The door had been skilfully stained, varnished and artificially grained, and its old-fashioned, well-polished brass plate bore the name ‘Alec C. Anderson.’ When Sadie Anderson opened it she was plainly embarrassed and started apologising to the younger woman saying, ‘I’m haudin’ ye back, Mrs Matheson,’ then opened the door wide saying, ‘In ye come!’ and backing into the lobby. The men pushed the piano in far enough to let the young woman past. Andy lifted the pram’s front wheels and helped her take it downstairs. Again Wullie leaned on the piano while Sadie, blushing, tugged at the other end as if it was something she wanted to hide away, embarrassment giving the lines of her face a strange undefined look.

  ‘You’ll rupt . . . I mean, the piano’s too heavy for you Mrs Anderson,’ said Wullie, ‘We’ll wait on Andy.’

  ‘But it’s half blocking up the landing.’

  ‘Andy’ll not be a tick.’

  Sadie murmured about ‘the bother’ she was causing. Andy returned and the men tilted up the piano enough to swing it round in the tiny lobby and push it into the kitchen while Sadie fussed around, giving it little tugs she hoped were helpful or anxiously twisting the bottom of her apron in her hands. When the piano was finally standing against the back wall of the kitchen Sadie wanted to make the men a cup of tea, saying, ‘I’ve given you a lot of bother. I didn’t know a piano was that heavy.’

  ‘Well, you see, they’re full of big bits of cast iron,’ Andy said.

  ‘Oh I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right. We’ve moved pianos before.’

  Sadie took two pounds from her purse and held them
out saying, ‘Here – take this.’

  ‘But we agreed on thirty bob.’

  ‘No, but take this. It’ll pay for your extra bother. The two of you are baith sweating.’

  ‘Don’t give him money,’ said Wullie, ‘he’s got enough already. Gie it to me.’

  He held out his big paw but when she offered him the notes he grinned and said, ‘Away you go.’

  Sadie laughed shyly, gave Andy the notes and when he tried to offer ten shillings change she took him by the shoulders and turned him to the door saying, ‘Naw, naw. Keep it and buy yourselves a drink.’

  The men left, grinning and shrugging.

  For a while Sadie stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking at the piano, until there came a knock at the door. She opened it to Andy who said, ‘Here, we forgot the piano stool.’

  She took the stool inside, set it before the piano and sat on it silently, again simply looking. Then she opened the lid and timidly struck middle C with her thumb. After another moment or two she started to pick out a melody with her forefinger in the key of C. She did not notice a pathos in the infirmity of the tone and in the rhythmic hesitation of her single playing finger. But the melody was recognisable: Brahms’ lovely little waltz in A flat.

  Sadie was worried because she had told neither her husband nor sons that she had bought a piano, and in that small kitchen it looked huge. She had not appreciated its great bulk before the coalmen half jammed it into the lobby. She saw that the display cabinet filling the space between the piano and a corner looked ridiculous and would have to be shifted. All this had happened through a moment of exuberance the previous Friday morning.

  It had been a beautiful sunny day. After Alec and the two boys had gone to work she was tidying away the breakfast things when she heard Schubert’s overture Rosamunde on the wireless. When it ended she switched the set off but the tunes kept running in her head when, as usual on Friday mornings, she went shopping. While standing in the Co-op pay queue, her baskets full to the brim with groceries, she remembered the many years when she had had to budget carefully. Nowadays she was able to shop without thinking too much of the cost, and bought many things that once seemed extravagances – soft toilet paper and kitchen tissues, for instance. She now enjoyed shopping. After buying staples like sugar, butter, flour, salt, tea, vegetables, it gave her a wonderful sense of opulence to wander round the store picking out something unusual in the way of biscuits, table figs, a tin of crab. When Alec asked her, ‘What’s for tea?’ her standing joke was to say, ‘Something nice, and no’ common.’ She enjoyed picking out uncommon things without thinking of the price. Alec and the boys didn’t mind her branching out a bit sometimes, as long as they were frequently fed with mince and doughballs, Scotch broth and rhubarb tart.

  She was passing the newsagents with the straps of the shopping bags biting her fingers when she saw a card in the window offering a piano for sale. She had taken the bags home, left them unpacked on the kitchen table, returned to the newsagents and asked for the address of those selling the piano. She had then walked through several streets toward it, thinking nothing of the absurdity of buying a piano, of the fact that the kitchen would be too small for it, and it would have to be explained to Alec and the boys. She meant to play it, and they would certainly demand an explanation for that. They would think this urge whimsical and erratic in a timid, working class housewife, and their kindest reaction would probably be amused tolerance because she was nearing the menopause. But she walked along a busy Glasgow pavement on that sunny Friday morning, crossed the road at Parkhead Cross, went down Springfield Road to one of the streets behind Celtic Football Stadium, and enjoyed a clear, lucid specific happiness at the thought of owning a musical instrument. It could not be explained by her outward circumstances, or character. She walked onward, not thinking about it but remembering Anna who she had neither seen nor heard of for over thirty years.

  You could see the Irish in Sadie. She was small, freckled, with good bones, frizzy auburn hair, a small straight well-formed nose, a large mouth with big strong teeth which nearly parted her lips so that in the act of closing them her mouth took on a clear shape which gave her face some beauty, and gave her expression both compassion and irony. Her intelligence was questionable, for that is often, at least in maturity, a matter of how one acts. As a child she had been a gamine, unquestionably bright, and her smiles had been brilliant. Without this gamine quality she would probably never have got to know Anna Bermant.

  Sadie had always been at the top of the class until one day, when she was nine, Anna was introduced to the class as a new girl by the headmaster. Sadie’s first impression was that he had brought a splash of colour into that roomful of working-class Scots children with their frayed woollen cardigans, snot-encrusted sleeves, scuffed and worn boots. Anna positively blazed. Sadie could still remember the tangerine coloured moiré silk dress, the off-white sash which bound Anna’s waist, fastened not in the convenient bow but in a tie-knot which left two trails of silk, also the black patent-leather pumps. All this against Anna’s cap of straight, thick, glossy black hair, the straight level eyebrows, the dark long eyelashes set against eyes such a light blue as to seem at one moment blank and pale against her dark skin and the next to glint and pierce like sparks from the trolley of a tramcar. When Anna sat down near her Sadie studied her with shy, underhand glances which discovered a curious little fault in Anna’s beauty. From the middle of her brow, across her left temple and down her cheek was a pinkish stain under the skin, a fault in the pigmentation, slightly mottled yet definite in outline.

  Sadie thought this fault, this delicate stain unbearably enviable and beautiful and she thought of it always as Anna’s ‘tan’ in contract to her own plebeian fault – the big orange freckles saddling the bridge of her nose.

  At playtime that morning one of the rougher boys, witlessly attracted by Anna, had pulled at her sash and she had immediately and soundly thumped him.

  ‘You’re a big boy? You’re brave? You fight with girls?’

  All the little girls in the class had their repertoire of sarcastic remarks, a defensive equipment kept hands to use on the boys and sometimes each other. It was usually delivered in an intonation of annoyance or displeasure, but Anna shouted in a mocking rhythm, her voice pitched high on certain words so that the rhetoric in her questions was controlled and sure and comical, so the other girls burst into laughter. She disclosed another exoticism to add to her ‘tan’ and silk dress, for her accent was unusual, not posh, not English, but nothing like the broad nasal speech of other children in the playground. It sounded foreign. She was fascinating. Sadie had been awed, then envious, and had then fallen in love with her.

  We fall in love with personality, not with moral characteristics. Attraction is mysterious, but the mystery creates strong curiosity, a desire to know more, and this curiosity can be life’s most exciting and important thing. So Anna went around in a glorious amoral blaze while Sadie, behind her dull orange-coloured freckles, felt that excited curiosity. She experienced it stoically, perhaps because it expressed something in Sadie’s own brilliance, sometimes shown in the heart-warming smile that drew Anna toward her with a kinder love.

  So the two children entered a friendship that was quite normal for all its intensity. Children’s emotions are too keen and anarchic to be classified and can only be labelled sexual by transferring them into adulthood where they would accommodate to a social pattern, or else into another milieu where they would be labelled crushes. But these were children in a co-educational, working class Glasgow school where the word ‘crush’ was unknown. They were free to follow their inclinations in questions, handclasps, secrets, giggles and tiffs. Otherwise Sadie, thirty years later, would never have allowed herself to remember her friend.

  Anna had immediately taken Sadie’s position at top of the class and Sadie was content to follow as second top, but kept trying to better Anna, less from competitiveness than from feeling that if she did better she would sha
re some of Anna’s brilliance and really know her. It was a long time before she beat Anna in any way, and when she did, and realised she too had some mastery, it was a moment of glory. This sense of mastery made her remember Anna years later as she walked the dusty Glasgow streets that sunny morning in search of a second hand piano. But she had discovered it only after visiting Anna’s home.

  Sadie had lived in the room-and-kitchen tenement flat where her mother had died when she was a baby. Her father drove a Glasgow Corporation tramcar. She had an eldest sister who looked after the home, two older sisters who went out to work, two older brothers who occasionally worked. This family, in its own estimation, was not poor because the father’s job was steady and the district where they lived, like many outlying parts of the town, contained wealthier and poorer homes. It was a mixture of sandstone room-and-kitchen tenements, others with four or five room flats with interior bathrooms and gardens in front, council houses and, near Sadie’s home, a street with a row of large grey stone houses, each with a big wall-enclosed garden. In one of these houses Anna had come to live with her parents. She was the only child who went to the local school from that area of big houses. Sadie and Anna went to and from school together, meeting and parting in the street, but for several months saw nothing of each other after school hours, so for the first weeks of the summer holidays Sadie did not see Anna at all.