He laughed and said, “Well, I suppose you see more of the country than the rest of us, but is that all you get out of life?” I said, “It’s the main thing, but it also gives me security. I am heavily insured against several very nasty possibilities.” And being a bit of a Bolshie this man said slyly, “Are you insured against the collapse of the insurance system?”
183 DIVERSION
I said, “Of course! I vote conservative, like most of us.”
I am travelling in circles again. But it should be possible for me to tell a straightforward story. I have been practising since the age of twelve and perhaps earlier.
Perhaps earlier. When I was thirteen or fourteen or fifteen Mum suddenly said, “Why do you never talk to me now?”
“What about?”
“What you’re thinking.”
I did not say, “I can’t do that because half of it’s obscene,” I said, “I’m sure I talk to you as much as I ever did.”
She sewed a few more stitches then said quietly, “You’ve forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?”
“The stories you told me. You imagined that queer little people lived behind the grate and inside the furniture. The ones inside the cooker were the chefs and made the food turn out properly, and the ones inside the lavatory pan were the dirty ones and you had fits of the giggles when you told me about those. I didn’t always know what you were saying. The ones inside the wireless set made up the news and played the music, and the one inside the clock made the hands go round. He was called Obby Pobbly and he told the others what to do. You were very keen on that clock–” she nodded to the electric clock on the mantelpiece – “because it didn’t go ticktock like the one in the parlour but made a grumbling noise which is a bit like Obby Pobbly. But you’ve forgotten all that, it seems.”
I could not disagree. If I had not completely forgotten Obby Pobbly I wanted to forget him for I had started telling myself stories about a very free attractive greedy woman who, confident in her powers, begins an exciting adventure and finds she is not free at all but completely at the disposal of others. As I aged that story grew very elaborate. The woman is corrupted into enjoying her bondage and trapping others into it. I did not notice that this was the story of my own life. I avoided doing so by insisting on the femaleness of the main character. The parts of the story which came to excite me most were not the physical humiliations but the moment when the trap starts closing and the victim feels the torture of being in two minds: wanting to believe, struggling to believe, that what is happening cannot be happening, can only happen to someone else. And I was right to be excited by that moment because it is the moment when, with courage, we change things. Why should Janine feel helpless when she realises Max has lied to her and is abducting her? He is driving a fast car along a motorway, his hands are occupied, if she removes one of her ridiculous shoes and threatens his eye with the heel he will certainly stop or change direction if he sees she is serious. But she is not used to acting boldly, she finds it easier to pretend Max is honest and decent, hoping her act will make him more so, and thus he drives her into the mire. My fancies keep reliving that moment of torture for Janine because I have never fully faced it in my own life and I am travelling in a circle again.
184 I INVOKE
Telling a straightforward story is like cooking a meal, hard to do thoroughly if you are doing it for yourself alone. I must use my imagination again, deliberately this time, to conjure up a suitable audience.
God?
You’ve gone very quiet. You were raving away goodstyle back there, I was too excited about other things to hear the words before you told me to put three fingers down the gullet but I recognised the wee voice. You’ve been here for a long time, sabotaging my exotic sexdreams with old memories of the homely facts, upsetting my arguments with awkward questions slipped in among them (so to speak) between brackets. You sounded more like Groucho Marx or a critical housewife than the Universal Frame-maker. Which is all right by me. I hate Big Daddies. What I need just now is what we all need, the unprejudiced ear of someone too wise to be chilled by wickedness or softened by suffering. My wickedness and suffering are average for a middle-aged man in these parts, so if you curse, forgive or bless me you will be committing a serious irrelevancy. I need to see myself clearly. Guilt, self-pity, self-satisfaction will equally prevent this. Your old book says you are the source of light – help me become less mysterious to myself.
185 I PROCLAIM
It is ignorance of my own nature which has made me an easy tool in the hand of others. (What others?) My employers, I suppose. Another thing: one solitary god is too few for me. I need more of you. (The Holy Trinity?) Too abstract and episcopalian. (JesusMaryandJoseph?) Too catholic and familiar. Nor do I want you splitting into Jupiter, Mars, Venus etcetera, those Mediterranean aristos make me feel cheap and inhibited. Why should you be less to me than all mankind? Now there is an audience which deserves my full attention. I’ll burst my braces to tell a straightforward history if you can appear to me as that. (I’ll try.) Good, then I’ll begin. (Clear throat.)
Chrm.
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, My Lords, Ladies, Officers, Non-commissioned Officers and Men and Women of the World, and also, and especially, those who lay claim to none of these titles, particularly the punters north of the Tweed:
Pray silence for the one and only Jock MacLeish, Lord Lyon King of Shocks, Sparks, Currents, Alarms and Others of that Ilk, Baron Magnum of Banks, Braes, Bonded warehouses, Faslane, Dounreay, Hunterston, the Shetland Radar Defence Net, Edinburgh Zoo Lionhouse and the Burrel Collection Basement, Various Distilleries but Smith’s Glenlivet Malt for preference and London Gin when pubcrawling in Glasgow, where was I? Oh yes. LIST, LIST, O LIST! I will a tale unfold whose lightest word will harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part and each con tiguous hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine!
Thankyou and good night, Mr Shakehips Slopspeare. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
(Excuse me Sir, you have just imbibed the last of the whisky. If you seriously intend to regale us with a sober and consecutive narrative before the advent of the sun I suggest that you go first to the basin and force down your thrapple not less than ten tumblerfuls of cold tap water.)
Thankyou G. The flesh is weak but will try to take that advice.
12:
LIFE WAS COMFORTABLE BUT DEPRESSED IN THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN.
The depression was equally shared so we did not notice it. I only once heard my parents laugh and never heard them raise their voices in anger, or complain, or weep. The only one to raise his voice in our house was Old Red when he denounced the capitalist class or talked Utopian, which was why Mum and I disliked him. We knew that most families were noisier than us, but also felt that noise was abnormal and unhealthy. We believed very few people were as normal and healthy as us.
This is how I came to make them laugh.
I was seventeen and had sat an entrance exam for the Glasgow Royal Technical College. I still went to school, though the teaching would only have value if I failed that exam and had to try another. Leaving home in the morning I sometimes met the postman in the street and said, “Anything for me?” and one day, from the bundle in his hand, he extracted a buff official envelope with my name on it, the first letter addressed to me in my life. I placed it carefully in my pocket. Instead of going to school I took the colliery road which led down through the skirts of the town to a bridge over the river, and then I turned along a track through the wood on the further bank. My heart was thudding very slow and hard. I was sure I had passed the exam, but how well had I done? The day was close and warm, the sky a ceiling of smooth grey cloud with no hint of rain. I left the track and climbed a steep path through bracken and bluebells and came to a flat place surrounded by birks and rowans under an overhanging rock. William Wallace was supposed to have hidden here
from the English but most Scottish towns have an obscure corner where that is supposed to have happened. The place was better known because on Sunday nights some miners called the Boghead crowd used it for illegal games of pitch-and-toss. I sat on a low boulder, read my letter and sighed with relief. I had done well in the exam. Excitement gripped my legs. I left the boulder and waded uphill through the bracken by no path at all, delighting to feel my body break and tread underfoot the resistance of the fronds. Fifteen minutes later I paused, slightly breathless, and looked back. This part of the country was a sort of fertile plateau through which the river carved a steep valley, so the high land was good pasture and cornfield, the low ground was wooded and shaggy. Facing me, on a ridge across the valley, lay the whole length of the long town: a quarter-mile terrace of but-and-ben cottages in the east, a centre of two-storey houses where the shops, pubs and cinema were, a row of mansions and bungalows standing in their own gardens, and a council estate of semi-detached villas in the west. All this, with the railway station, four schools, four churches, cast-iron swings and roundabout in the park should have seemed familiar because I knew it thoroughly, but it did not look familiar. It looked queer and lonely, because I was going to leave it.
187 THE LETTER
I wandered about the town all morning, mostly in the outskirts, sometimes in the main street, and every ordinary friendly thing from the monkeypuzzle tree on the Church of Scotland manse lawn to a fat old cat basking on a sill had that queer foreign look. I stared a long time at an advert in a chemist’s shop. It showed tall white identical castles receding to a horizon. Before them a knight in white armour held a shield labelled GIBBS TOOTHPASTE and waved a triumphant sword over a batwinged reptile labelled Dragon Decay. A slogan somewhere said
188 ADVERTISING
GIBBS IN THE MORNING,
GIBBS. IN THE NIGHT,
KEEPS EVERY CASTLE
SHINING AND BRIGHT.
(Your teeth are every castle.)
I had known that advert for years, why? Nowadays companies change their displays, slogans, packets and products continually, they spend millions on advertising to stop the government taking it in taxation. My seventeenth year was closer to the time of thrift and rationing when only the government spent money on adverts, adverts which told us to buy as little as possible. MAKE DO AND MEND they said, above a picture of a cheerful housewife sewing a patch on her husband’s jacket, DIG FOR VICTORY, above the husband planting cabbages on his suburban lawn, HOLIDAY AT HOME! IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? That daft toothpaste advert had been in the window since 1940 and had entered my daydreams. I still sometimes wore the armour, rescued Jane Russell from the dragon and, finding her ungrateful and treacherous, chained her up in those castles. But I was not daydreaming now. I was asking the advert, ‘Will I remember you when I’m gone? Will you remember me when I’m gone?’ and the answer, ‘Probably not’, confused and puzzled me though I was too excited to feel depressed. I stared an equally long time at a three-foot-high marble soldier in puttees, cape and round puddingbasin helmet, his hands clasped and head bowed over a grounded rifle. He stood on a pillar carved with the names of over two hundred men from the town and its surroundings who had died in the First World War. A recent bronze plate listed an additional forty killed in the Second World War. Their Name Liveth for Evermore, was inscribed above the lists, and Lest We Forget underneath, and I could not connect the inscriptions, which seemed to deny each other. The two wars did not interest me but I suddenly wished that the soldiers who had fought and survived them were also listed, for then I could have read my father’s name.
189 DAD LAUGHS
I arrived home for dinner at twelve-thirty as if I had just come from school and said nothing about the letter. I kept my mouth shut till later that evening when we were all gathered round the table for tea. This was usually a meat or fish course with bread, biscuits, cakes and (of course) a big pot of tea. Dad received, in addition, the remains of the soup or pudding Mum and I ate at dinnertime. Half-way through the meal tonight Dad said, as I expected he would, “I wonder when we’ll hear from the Technical College.”
I said casually, “I got the letter this morning.”
A fork with a bit of potato on the prongs stopped still for five whole seconds in front of Dad’s open mouth and was then laid down carefully on his plate. He said, “Well?”
“I’ve passed,” said I, calmly continuing to eat.
He said, “Passed have you? Good! But what’s wrong? What are you trying to hide?”
“Nothing,” said I, and handed him the letter. He read it with a face wrinkled and concentrated in a great worried frown while Mum turned her startled stare from me to him. He laid down the letter, tilted his head back and made a dry, hacking noise like this: “AKHA! AKHA! AKHA! AKHA!” My mother cried out, “What’s wrong?”
He said, “Wrong? He’s sixth best out of two hundred and eighty-two applicants! He’s sixth best in the whole West of Scotland!”
My mother chuckled, left her seat and cuddled me and I cuddled her back. Then she got embarrassed and pulled away. If I had not surprised her with my news she would never have cuddled me. Dad was grinning and shaking his fist at me and saying again and again, “Ye bugger! Ye bugger! Ye bugger!”– so I allowed myself a small smile. If I had proudly told him the news when he came in from work he would have given that small smile, and said something like, “Fine! You arenae the best, but you certainly are not the worst.” Like most parents he did not want his child to openly display pride and happiness, because these states make other people envious, and often go before a fall. By hiding my feelings I had tricked him into showing his, and had risen above him.
190 THE INSURANCE SCHEME
My parents had been paying a weekly sum into a Scottish Co-operative insurance scheme which could be realised after my sixteenth birthday. It was devised to help working-class children across the gap between their schooling and their employment, and as I now needed new clothes for the Technical College, and as I had stopped growing, my parents decided to spend the whole sum on clothes which would last till I was fully self-supporting. At the time I thought this decision perfectly natural though now it astonishes me. Since setting up house together they had lived carefully on less than twelve pounds a week, where did they get the courage to dispose of two or three hundred pounds in less than ten days? They must have been mad, as mad as a woman I overheard in a London bank. She wore a smart leather trousersuit and in a loud hooting voice said to a friend, “It cost me nine hundred pounds. I couldn’t possibly afford it of course but we must be extravagant sometimes, just to cheer ourselves up.” She could afford it all right. Part of her knew that the price of that suit was the weekly take-home wage of six railwaymen working overtime or twenty families on the dole, so her delight in extravagance came from feeling superior to the rest of the world, superior to fate. I hope my parents felt some of that delight as they discussed spending the equivalent of half their yearly income on my wardrobe. If so they excused the feeling by pretending they were completing a job of work. They had produced a brain which the Scottish Education Department had stamped “First Class”. Now they would post it to the world in a suitable packet. Hitherto my mother had chosen all my clothes, so we were surprised when suddenly Dad uttered forceful opinions.
“A made-to-measure singlebreasted suit of the best quality Harris tweed is a … a … a … timeless garment. The style of it has remained virtually unchanged for well over half a century. American businessmen wear it to conferences. Highland crofters wear it to church. A British workingman can wear it anywhere without appearing a traitor to his class.”
191 THE 7-TROUSER SUIT
“Made-to-measure suits are very dear,” said my mother, “and not at all necessary. An off-the-peg suit may not fit Jock perfectly but I’m a good enough needlewoman to adjust it, as you well know.”
“I will prove to you,” said my father, taking such care to speak slowly and quietly that we knew
he was greatly excited, “I will prove to you that a made-to-measure suit of the sort I am imagining will be the best possible economy. In off-the-peg suits the trousers wear out long before the jackets do. They must! If a man is not crawling on his knees like a collier or humping weights on his back like a dustman then the part of his anatomy which suffers most wear is the seat. I am certain that – other things being equal – the life-expectancy of the jacket of an off-the-peg suit is more than twice that of the trousers. But those who bespeak a suit from a good tailor can order all the trousers they want, which is another instance of the rich spending less money in the long run through their ability to be lavish in the first place.”
“So you want us to buy the lad a jacket and two pair of trousers in the same cloth.”
“No!” said Dad, “I want us to buy him three jackets and three waistcoats and seven pairs of trousers and two overcoats of the same cloth! Let him change his trousers every day of the week. The fabric will suffer so little strain that with ordinary care it will look continually smart and last him a lifetime.”
1982 Janine Page 21