Shortly before the wedding I got a letter from Helen asking me to phone her at the house of a friend. I did. She said tensely, “Jock, please come and see me tonight. I need to tell you something.”
I said, “Helen, three days from now I will promise before witnesses to see you practically every day of my life. Do we need to start sooner than that?”
I heard her draw breath and moan as if I had punched her so I apologised and went to the home of the friend. Helen opened the door and led me into a room with floral wallpaper, thick Persian carpet, Chinese display cabinet and a fat 1930s three-piece suite. A shadowy brothel atmosphere was imparted by wall-lights in orange parchment shades with scarlet fringes. We sat on the sofa with two feet of space between us. Helen told me that she was not pregnant after all. That morning her bleeding had started again. She said, “It was all psychological – hysterical, if you’d rather call it that.”
295 COWARDS
I thought hard for a while then said, “Good. You can go back to college and finish your education as you planned. Yes, a baby would have been an economic disaster for us at this stage. Thanks for the news, but you could have told me over the phone.”
She said, “You still want to marry me?”
“No, but I must. Because of the presents. Do you still want to marry me?”
“No, but I will. Because of the presents.”
We both laughed hysterically until Helen, at last, started crying, then I think we cuddled each other. There was no love between us but there was sympathy. Each knew how miserably lonely the other was. I could not ask my parents to return the thirty-odd presents to acquaintances all over the long town, still less could Helen ask her parents to return fifty-odd presents to theirs. No explanation, no excuse, no apology could justify a mistake which had made so many folk spend such a lot of money.
I now think my mother would have had no difficulty in returning these presents. I seem to hear her saying in her driest voice, “Our Jock is a soft mark where the lassies are concerned. One of them persuaded him she was in a state which she turned out not to be in, and her hoity-toity parents took her seriously: However, the mistake was discovered before any real harm was done, and Jock has learned to be more careful in future. I’m sorry to have to return this – I hope you soon find another use for it.”
Mrs Hume could easily have found a similar formula to win sympathy for Helen by discrediting me: “I’m afraid my daughter’s fiancé misled her as to his social origins. We discovered that for all his fancy ways he was nothing but a miner’s son and an inveterate liar. The poor girl is very cast down, of course, but she’ll recover. Please forgive me for having to return this but I’m sure you understand.”
Why did Helen and I not see that returning the presents would hurt our parents a lot less than a marriage would hurt us?
Cowardice. Cowards cannot look straight at the world. I proved a coward when I let Mr Hume bully me into marrying his daughter. Helen proved a coward when she decided she was pregnant, or when she realised she was not. Stop. Do I believe that? Helen never looked like a coward to me, not even when she was near to screaming in the middle of Miss Rombach’s restaurant with her father and brothers ready to attack me from a nearby table. When she seduced me, when she told me she was pregnant, when she told me she was not pregnant, she struck me as a self-willed woman just managing to keep hold of an unbearable situation. That is not cowardice. But if she was not a coward then she married me because she wanted to. What a queer idea. Can it be true?
296 NOT A BAD MARRIAGE
The marriage was not a bad one at first. There was no excitement or discovery in it but our life together felt more like freedom than life with our parents had felt, and we never quarrelled. We occupied two rooms in a shared flat at a corner of Elmbank Street, and we worked hard to qualify for dependable, well-paid jobs because Helen had now no interest in acting as a profession, and without Alan I saw that my dreams of becoming some sort of inventive pioneer were just fantasies. We became friendly with another young student couple whose names, faces and natures I cannot remember, except that they were more outgoing than ourselves, and took us on a camping holiday to a highland glen where we experienced alternations of heavy rain and hideous midge-clouds. Helen and I preferred sinking into domesticity in the evening and at weekends. We played a lot of Scrabble – no it was cribbage, Scrabble had not been invented. Helen concentrated harder on being a housewife than I did on being a househusband, though I was never unfaithful to her, except with bondage magazines. She became a primary teacher, I joined National Security Ltd. We bought the flat which is still my home.
I enjoyed my work in those days. I had complete charge of the installations from start to finish, only one assistant, and had to use my hands as well as my head. But the head came first. When I visited a really large plant some underling would show me round the entries, stores, safes and power points, give me plans of the wiring, ventilation etcetera, and think he could leave the rest to me; but to secure a place against acts of God, and human carelessness, and criminal intent, I must know the work schedules, work routines (which differ from schedules) and work habits (which are outside schedules and routines and can contradict them). I needed information which many employees preferred keeping to themselves, and I seldom left a big job without a close talk to the production manager in which I told him some facts about his own internal organisation which he would have to take account of, if he had any loyalty to his firm. I installed our systems (yes, I’m boasting) with love and understanding, and this was recognised and noted, which is why I have sat on committees responsible for the actual design of new factories, banks and museums. That came later. In those days all my work was in the Glasgow area so I could be home by six-fifteen and find Helen ready with the dinner – her teaching job stopped at four. What a good time that was! I had every domestic comfort and a job which used all my faculties and brought me money and a sensation of power. I would have liked some passionate sex too, but only a fool expects to enjoy every good thing in the world.
297 QUITE A GOOD JOB
One day in the office of the old Cosmo Cinema the manager told me he was having a preview at which Tom Courtenay or Albert Finney would be making a personal appearance. I told him that my wife and I had once known the great actor socially, so he invited us along. Helen refused to come so I stood sipping a sherry at the edge of a small crowd in the foyer. Tom or Albert suddenly saw me and said with very pleasing warmth, “Jock! The genius of the lamp! How are you getting on? What are you doing?”
I said, “Fine thanks. I’m with the National Security company.”
He said, “A professional company I hope?”
I smiled and said, “It’s not a theatrical company if that’s what you mean. And though it has a local base it’s pretty big. We install fire alarms, burglar alarms, every sort of alarm you can imagine.”
He said, “Oh!” and after a pause, “I don’t suppose you’ll last long at that.”
298 TWO CULTURES
I said, “Why not? The pay’s excellent.”
He looked at me as if his earlier recognition had been the result of an accident. He said, “Yes, why not? Good luck Jock.”
He moved away leaving me slightly annoyed with him. Theatrical folk think everybody who is not one of them dwells in outer darkness, but Albert or Tom had a broader experience than most theatricals. I thought he would have known that modern technology is far greater than a theatrical device. It maintains our prosperity and security. It guarantees a future of increasing peace, prosperity and quack quack quack quack quack.
In the sixties I still believed such quackery. A lot of folk did. On a station bookstall one day I saw that the New Scientist or New Society or New Statesman and Nation was advertising an article by C. P. Snow, the only modern English novelist (apart from the thriller writers) I had been able to read. None of his characters was memorable but the research and administration they engaged in was described with a fair degree of ac
curacy. This article was called “The Two Cultures”, and pointed out that most middle-class people either had arty or scientific educations. The scientific lot often read books and saw plays, so they knew something about art, but most arty folk knew nothing and cared less about science – the laws of thermodynamics aroused no enthusiasm in them whatsoever. C. P. Snow thought this a pity, because it condemned writers and artists to a hopeless view of the world. They saw life as a matter of individuals being born, copulating and dying, which were pretty hopeless pastimes, being only half of what we actually did. Viewed socially, however, we were immortal because we kept adding to the amount of human knowledge and technical skill. Scientifically and politically the most advanced nations had abolished hunger and poverty among themselves and were now preparing to help the backward nations up to the same level. This heroic task would be tackled by the scientific part of our culture, and the arty lot would feel more cheerful if they learned to celebrate the achievement. Heech! On reading that I squared my shoulders, smiled smugly and thought how true, how true. In those days I was as politically naive as Lord Snow.
299 MAN IN MOON
When did my job start to sour? When did my marriage start to stale? When did I start drinking too much? When did capital leave Scotland in a big way? When did the depression come to Britain? When did we start accepting a world without improvement for the unlucky? When did we start accepting a future guaranteed only by the police, the armies, and an expanding weapons race? There was no one point after which things got worse but my last spasm of scientific, social delight was in 1969.
I was delighted when Armstrong stepped on to the moon in 1969. As a Scot I was envious but as a skilled technician I was jubilant. The backing for the enterprise was military, yes, but the scientific and technical skill which did the job was not working to kill men but to lift them safely across a 225,000-mile vacuum to another world and back. We did it! Scientific technical men did it. So what?
I was depressed when the first photographs of the far side of the moon showed it very like this side, but more monotonous. And when the Viking probe landed on Mars and showed it more like the moon than we expected. And when we pierced the icy clouds of Venus and found no steaming jungle or bubbling mineral-water sea but just a blasted redhot dust desert. There was some excitement when radio telescopes picked up the first pulsar waves and a Cambridge team thought it might be the “Hullo there, folks!” of an extraterrestrial superintelligent civilisation. But there is no evidence of intelligent, or commercial, or even downright stupid broadcasting from the stars, and of the forty-odd planets (counting moons) which spin round our own star, only the earth and her useful wee moon are worth a docken to a living soul. Why does this make me feel trapped? Why do I feel trapped upon the most intricately varied, richly vital world I will ever discover? The only world which can bear me? A world where technically minded men like myself (and I include the political, business, army and arty folk who batten on us) are undoubted masters?
300 POISONERS
Self-disgust. We have committed horrible crimes which do no practical good. We make deserts.
We can do splendid things. In Holland we laboured to grow food and flowers on the bed of a turbulent sea. Green fields in the Scottish lowlands cover what was bleak moor two centuries back. The great dams authorised by Roosevelt put thousands of unemployed men to work and laid the dustbowl caused by the destruction of the prairie. But we made deserts and still make them, deliberately and accidentally. By legal process, by fraud and by force highlanders were cleared from glens and islands because they profited only themselves, the lazy sods, and it was technically practical for big landowners to profit more by sheep instead. When sheep stopped being profitable the owners made wilderness which rich southerners rent for bird and beast-killing holidays. That wilderness now has a technically sophisticated fringe of weapontesting ranges, megaton warhead dumps, nuclear submarine bases, nuclear bomber bases, nuclear power stations, dumps for nuclear waste (from England) and in Gruinard Bay, sparkling bluegreen water over white sunlit sand when I saw it last, an island poisoned for at least a century with anthrax to show what we could do to central Europe if Germany invaded Britain. Practical economics, you see, plus the defence of freedom by advanced technology, as in Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Vietnam where military technologists also saved thousands of families from evil political regimes by burning them in their homes and poisoning their ground. But most of the deserts we make are accidental because in the race for quick profit accident MUST occur. Hence cancerous seafouling lakeshitting industry, rainpoisoning riverpoisoning forest withering factories, soilkilling cattle-crippling mencrippling fertiliser, nerverotting medicines, bonewarping babyfood, THALIDOMIDE THALIDO-MIDE THALIDOMIDE Here is the nine-o’clock news. Today the Prime Poisoner declared in parliament that recent falls in the poison rate had had an adverse effect upon Britain’s already unhealthy balance of poisons. She said that if the national union of poisonworkers persisted in its demand for a 15 per cent poison increase for its members it would poison the country right out of the European poison market. However, shortly before closing today the poison exchange index showed a point 4 per cent increase in response to the poison survey which indicates a clear victory of President Poison in the forthcoming American poison campaign. President Poison has promised to tighten his embargo on Russian poison exports along with a massive increase in public poisoning in order to give the free poisoners everywhere a clear lead in the nuclear poison race. Today’s fine weather caused a brisk flow of poison to the seaside resulting in a twenty-two-mile poison jam on the London to Brighton road and a multiple poison pileup on the M1 in which eighty-three were injured and seventeen lost their lives (stop this) I can’t because technology has magnified to world-destruction point the common smash-and-grab business tactics and bullyboy politics which everyone (not everyone) which too many seize as golden opportunities or take for granted (stop this) how stop when books say we are selfish competitive beasts and all the true bonny good things we discover or make/solar system/Sistine ceiling/penicillin/are got by overcoming and humiliating each other (crap) yes crap but in Scotland 1982 that shitty thought looks like Your Own Great Gospel, O Lord, for here is no dream or plan to make or share good things or set an example and honestly, God, I no longer think Scotland worse than elsewhere and I can only stop raving by retreating into fantasy (retreat).
301 POISONERS
Janine is worried and trying not to show it but she cannot see clearly for the dazzle. She concentrates on the sound of the two unfastened studs in her skirt clicking with each step she takes. A childish voice says, “That’s a sexy noise”, and giggles.
‘Act calm,’ thinks Janine. ‘Pretend this is just an ordinary audition’, and this is NOT the fantasy I intended.
One of the earliest aims of the United States space programme was to create a self-supporting human colony on the moon, and since the cost was astronomical, in 1960 they offered the problem of making and shielding a lunar atmosphere, along with the water and vegetation which would keep it pure while nourishing the inhabitants, to research teams in other countries. Nations helping the project would be represented in the colony by a proportion of settlers commensurate with the money they spent, and Russia was not excluded, because a lunar colony has no military value. Meanwhile America concentrated on the launching and carrier crafts which had military applications, but her best scientists and the best part of her public were guided by a nobler vision, so in 1982 everyone can see, on cloudless nights, a silvergreen glint in the globe of the full moon, a glint which casts a shadow. This is the garden village where young healthy skilled folk of several races co-operatively farm, construct, research, play and go out to explore. How does it look when the moon is crescent? Hislop once told me how it looked. In the months which followed him making a man of me I seldom listened to his mellifluous chanting, but I once heard him describe a becalmed ship in a seafog at night. The stars were very dim. Dew dripped from the sails. The onl
y clear light shone upon the face of the steersman, “till arose”, no, “till climbed above”, no, “till clomb above the eastern bar the hornéd moon, with one bright star within the nether tip”. I sneered because I knew that was scientifically impossible, but yes the lunar colony does shine like a small green star in the elipse of black sky between the horns of the crescent moon, a star where men and women make love, make children under a sky of stars surrounding the huge crescent of the earth. The lunar colony has only one disadvantage. It has no military value so it was never created.
1982 Janine Page 34