Why the Highlanders nurse a grievance over the Clearances was a mystery to me at the time, and still is. In no land in the world is the disproportion between natural attraction and sentimental attachment more extreme, except possibly Poland and Palestine. Expelled from their sodden Sinai to Canada and New Zealand the dispossessed crofters flourished, and those who remained behind had at last enough land to feed themselves, but their descendants still talk as if they’d been put on cattle trucks to Irkutsk.
It was my habit, when I had nothing better to do on a Saturday, to accompany my father on his rounds. I did not, of course, attend his consultations, but I would either wait in the car or brave the collies who’d press their forepaws on my shoulders and bark in my face, to the inevitable accompaniment of cries of “Och, he’s just being friendly,” and make my way through mud and cow dung to the hospitality of black tea in the black houses, and the fussing of immense mothers girt in aprons and shod in wellingtons.
We’d visited an old man in Aird that morning in the summer of ’63, and my father turned the Hillman off the main road and up to the NATO base. Gannets dropped like dive-bombs in the choppy sea of the bay below the headland’s cliffs, and black on the Atlantic horizon the radar turned. Though militarily significant — Lewis commands a wide sweep of the North Atlantic, and Tupolev’s deep-shelter factories in the Urals were turning out long-range jet bombers at a rate of about one a month, well above attrition — security was light. A nod to the squaddie on the gate, and we were through.
My father casually pulled up in the officers” car-park outside the NAAFI and we hopped out. He was just locking the door when an alarm shrieked. Men in blue uniforms were suddenly rushing about and pointing out to sea. Other men, in white helmets and webbing, were running to greater purpose. Somewhere a fire-engine and an ambulance joined in the clamor.
I spotted the incoming bomber before my father did, maybe two miles out.
“There — there it is!”
“It’s low —”
Barely above the sea, flashing reflected sunlight as it yawed and wobbled, trailing smoke, the bomber limped in. On the wide concrete apron in front of us a team frantically pushed and dragged a big Wessex helicopter to the perimeter, while one man stood waving what looked like outsize ping-pong bats. The bomber just cleared the top of the cliff, skimmed the grass — I could see the plants bend beneath it, though no blast of air came from it — and with a screaming scrape and a shower of sparks it hit the concrete and slithered to a halt about a hundred yards from where we stood.
It was perhaps fifty feet in diameter, ten feet thick at the hub. Smoke poured from a ragged nick in its edge. The ambulance and fire-engine rushed up and stopped in a squeal of brakes, their crews leaping out just as a hatch opened on the bomber’s upper side. More smoke puffed forth, but nothing else emerged. A couple of firemen, lugging fire-extinguishers, leapt on the sloping surface and dropped inside. Others hosed the rent in the hull.
My father ran forward, shouting “I’m a doctor!” and I ran after him. The outstretched arm of one of the men in white helmets brought my father up short. After a moment of altercation, he was allowed to go on, while I struggled against a firm but not unfriendly grip on my shoulder. The man’s armband read “Military Police.” At that moment I was about ten yards from the bomber, close enough to see the rivets in its steel hull.
Close enough to see the body that the firemen lifted out, and that the ambulancemen laid on a stretcher and ran with, my father close behind, into the nearest building. It was wearing a close-fitting silvery flying-suit, and a visored helmet. One leg was crooked at a bad angle. That was not what shot me through with a thrill of horror. It was the body of a child, no taller than my five-year-old sister Margaret. The large helmet made its proportions even more childlike.
A moment later I was turned around and hustled away. The military policeman almost pushed me back into the car, told me to wait there, and shut me up with a stick of chewing-gum before he hurried off. Everybody else who’d come at all close to the craft was being rounded up into a huddle, guarded by the military policemen and being lectured by a couple of men who I guessed were civilians, if their snap-brimmed hats, dark glasses, and black suits were anything to go by. They reminded me of American detectives in comics. I wondered excitedly if they carried guns in shoulder holsters.
After about fifteen minutes my father came out of the building and walked over to the car. One of the civilians intercepted him. They talked for a few minutes, leaning towards each other, their faces close together, one or the other of them shaking their fingers, pointing, and jabbing. Each of them glanced over at me several times. Although I had the side window wound down, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Eventually my father turned on his heel and stalked over to the car, while the other man stood looking after him. As my father opened the car door the black-suited civilian shook his head a little, then rejoined his colleague as the small crowd dispersed.
A knot of military policemen formed up at the building’s doorway and surrounded two stretcher-bearers as they hurried to the Wessex. There was only the briefest glimpse of the stretcher as it was passed inside, moments before it took off and headed out to sea on a southerly course.
My father’s face was pale and his hand shook as he took his hip-flask from the glove compartment. The top squeaked as he unscrewed it, the flask gurgled as he drank it dry.
“Leave the window down, John,” he said as he turned the key and pushed the starter. “I need a cigarette.”
He lit up, fumbling, then engaged the gears and the car moved off with a lurch. As we passed the soldier on the gate my father gave him a wave that was almost a salute.
“What sort of people will that poor laddie be fighting for?” he asked me, or himself. His knuckles were white on the wheel. The swerve on to the main road threw me against the door. He didn’t notice.
“Monsters,” he said. “Monsters.”
I sat up straight again, rubbing my shoulder.
“It’s awful to use wee children to fly bombers,” I said.
He looked across at me sharply, then turned his attention back to the single-track road.
“Is that what you saw?” he murmured. “Well, John, we were told very firmly that the pilot was a midget, you know, a dwarf, and that this is a secret. If the enemy knew that, they would know something they shouldn’t know about our bombers. About how much weight they can carry, or something like that.”
I squirmed on the plastic leather, swinging my legs as though I needed to pee. I had read about dwarfs and midgets in Look and Learn. They were not like in fairy stories.
“But that’s not true,” I said. “That wasn’t a dwarf, the pro — the portions —”
“‘Proportions’.”
“The proportions were wrong. I mean, they were right — they were ordinary. The pilot was a child, wasn’t he?”
The car swerved slightly, then steadied.
“Listen, John,” my father said. “Whatever the pilot is, neither of us is supposed to talk about it, and we’ll get into big trouble if we do. So if you’re sure it was a child you saw, I’m not going to argue with you. And if the Air Force says the pilot is a midget, I’m not going to argue with them, either. I set and splinted the leg of that, that” — he hesitated, waving a hand dangerously off the wheel — ’craitur beag ’us bochd — of the poor wee thing, I should say, and that’s all I know of it.”
I was as startled by his lapse into the Gaelic as by the uncertainty and ambiguity of his reference to the pilot, and I thought it wise to keep quiet about the whole subject. But he didn’t, not quite yet.
“Not a word about it, to anyone,” he said. “Not to your mother, your brothers and sisters, your friends, anyone. Not a word. Promise me?”
“All right,” I said. I was young enough to feel that it was more exciting to keep a secret than to tell one.
The following day was a Sunday, and although it meant nothing to us but a day off school we h
ad to conform to local custom by not playing outside. It was a sweltering hell of boredom, relieved only by the breath of air from the open back door and the arrival at the front door of two men in black suits, who weren’t ministers. My father escorted them politely into his surgery. The waiting-room door (I found, on a cautious test) was locked. They did not stay long; but the following morning, on the way out to catch the van to school, I overheard my mother telephoning around to postpone the day’s appointments and noticed a freshly emptied whisky bottle on the trash.
A couple of years later, when I was ten, my father sold his practice to a younger, less financially straitened and more idealistic doctor (a Nationalist, to my father’s private disgust) and took up a practice in Greenock, an industrial town on the Firth of Clyde. Our flitting was exciting, our arrival more so. It was another world. In the mid-sixties the Clyde was booming, its shipyards producing naval and civilian vessels in almost equal proportion, its harbors crowded with British and American warships, the Royal Ordnance Factory at Bishopton working around the clock. Greenock, as always, flourished from the employment opportunities upriver — beginning with the yards and docks of the adjacent town of Port Glasgow — and from its own industries, mainly the processing of colonial sugar, jute, and tobacco. The pollution from the factories and refineries was light, but fumes from the heavy vehicular traffic that serviced them may well explain the high incidence of lung cancer in the area. (My father’s death, though outside the purview of the present narrative, may also be so accounted.) Besides these traditional industries, a huge IBM factory had recently opened (the ceremonial ribbon cut by Sir Alan Turing himself) in the Kip Valley behind the town.
The town’s division between middle class and working class was sharp. One the eastern side of Nelson Street lay the tenements and factories; to the west a classical grid of broad streets blocked out sturdy sandstone villas and semi-detached houses. Though our parents’ disdain for private education saved us from the worst snobberies of fee-paying schools, the state system was just as blatantly segregated. The grammar schools filled the offices of management, and the secondary moderns manufactured workers. Class division shocked me: after growing up among the well-fed, if ill-clad, population of Lewis, I saw the poorer eight-tenths of the town as inhabited by misshapen dwarfs.
It was while exploring what to my imagination were dangerous, Dickensian slums, but which were in reality perfectly respectable working-class districts, that I first encountered evidence that this division was regarded, by some, as part of the greater division of the world. On walls, railway bridges, and pavements I noticed a peculiar graffito, in the shape of an inverted “Y” with a cross-bar — a childishly simple, and therefore instantly recognisable, representation of the human form. Sometimes it was enclosed by the outline of a five-pointed star, and frequently it was accompanied by a scrawled hammer and sickle. These last two symbols were, of course, already familiar to me from the red flags of the enemy.
It was at first as shocking a sight as if some Chinese or Russian guerrilla had popped out of a manhole in the street, and it gave me a strange thrill — a frisson, as the French say — to find that the remote and gigantic foe had his partisans in the streets of Greenock as much as in the jungles of Malaya or the rubble of Budapest. One day in 1966 I actually met one, on a street corner in the East End, down near the town center where the big shops began.
This soldier of the Red horde was a bandy-legged old man in a cloth cap, selling copies of a broadsheet newspaper called the Daily Worker. He met with neither hostility nor interest from the passers-by. With boyish bravado, and some curiosity, I bought it. Its masthead displayed the two symbols I already knew, and an article inside was illustrated by, and explained, the third.
“Against the warmongers and arms profiteers, against the reckless drive to destruction, against the forces of death, it is necessary to rally all who yearn for peace. The situation cries out for the broadest possible united front, one broader even than the great People’s Fronts against fascism, one in which every decent human being, every worker, every woman, every honest businessman, every farmer, every patriot can take their place with pride and determination. It is not for any political party, or class, or ideology that such a front shall stand, but for the very survival of the human race.
“This greatest of all united and people’s fronts exists, and is growing.
“It is the Human Front.”
I understood barely a word of it, and the only reason why I clipped out the article and kept it, long after I had secretly disposed of the newspaper, long enough for me to reread and finally understand it, years later, was because of coincidental resonances of its author’s name — Dr. John Lewis.
After that initial naive exploration I settled down to a sort of acceptance of the world as it was and to learning more about it, at school and out. Science was more interesting than politics, and it soothed rather than disturbed the mind. The war was a permanent backdrop of news and a distant prospect of National Service. The BBC brought it home on the wireless and, increasingly, on black-and-white television, with feigned neutrality and unacknowledged censorship. News items that raised questions about the war’s conduct and its domestic repercussions were few: the Pauling trial, the Kinshasa atomic bombing, the occasional allusion to a speech by Foot in the Commons or Wedgewood-Benn in the Lords.
The biggest jolt to the consensus came in 1968, with the May Offensive. Out of nowhere, it seemed, the supposedly defeated maquis stormed and seized Paris, Lyons, Nantes, and scores of other French cities. Only carpet-bombing of the suburbs dislodged them and saved the Versailles government. This could not be hidden, nor the first anti-war demonstrations in the United States: clean-cut students chanting “Hey! Hey! JFK! How many kids did you kill today?” until the dogs and fire-hoses and tear-gas cleared the streets. At the time, I was more frightened by the unexpected closeness of the Communist threat than shocked by the measures taken against it.
My first act of dissidense wasn’t until three years later, at the age of seventeen. I slipped out one April evening to attend a meeting in the Cooperative Hall held under the auspices of Medical Aid for Russia. The speaker was touring the country, and it may have been the controversy that followed him that drew the crowd of a hundred or so. It’s certainly what drew me. He was flanked on the platform by a local trade union official, a pacifist lady, and Greenock’s perennially unsuccessful Liberal candidate. (The local Labor MP had, naturally, denounced the meeting in the Greenock Telegraph.) The hall was bare, decorated with a few union banners and a portrait of Keir Hardie. I sat near the back, recognising no one except the little old man who’d once sold me the Daily Worker.
After some dull maundering from the union official, the pacifist lady stood up and introduced the speaker, the Argentine physician Dr. Ernesto Lynch. A black-haired, bearded man, about forty, asthmatic, charismatic, apologetic about his cigar-smoking and his English, he brought the audience to their feet and sent me home in a fury.
“You’re too gullible,” my father said. “It’s all just Communist propaganda.”
“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Moscow, Magnitogorsk, Dien Bien Phu, Belgrade, Kinshasa!” I pounded the names with my fist on my palm. “They happened! Nobody denies they happened!”
He lidded his eyes and looked at me through a veil of cigarette smoke. Bare elbows on the kitchen table, mother in the next room, the hiss of water on the iron, the Third Programme concerto in the background.
“If you had seen what I saw in Burma,” he said mildly, “you wouldn’t be so sorry about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the men who went into the Vorkuta camps weren’t sorry about Moscow, and —”
“And what troops ‘liberated’ Siberia?” I raged. “The dirty Japs! With their hands still bloody from Vladivostok! Their hands and their —”
I stopped myself just in time.
“Look, John,” he said. “We could go on shouting at each other all night about which side’s atrocities are worse. The very fact t
hat we can, that this Argentine johnny can tour the country and half the bloody Empire with his tales of heroic partisans in the Ukraine and sob stories about butchered villagers in Byelorussia, while nobody from our side could possibly do anything remotely similar in the Red territories, shows which side has the least to fear from the truth.”
“Britain didn’t let the Nazis speak here during the war — William Joyce was hanged —”
He poured another whisky, and offered me one. I accepted it, ungraciously.
“We listened to Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose for a laugh,” he was saying. “Then they were decently hanged, or decently jailed.”
“Pity we’re on the same side now,” I said. “Maybe the Yanks should let Tokyo Rose out. ‘Ruthki soldjah, you know what ith happening to you girrfliend? Big niggah boyth ith giving her big niggah — ’”
Again, I shut up just in time.
“Your racial prejudices are showing, young man,” Malcolm said. “I thought Reds were supposed to be against the color bar.”
“Huh!” I snorted. “I thought Liberals were!”
“The color bar will come down in good time,” he said. “When both whites and coloreds are ready for it. Meanwhile, the Reds will be happy to agitate against it, while out of the other side of their mouths they’ll spout the most blatant racialism and national prejudice, just as it suits them — anything to divide the free world.”
“Some free world that includes the American South, South Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Fourth Reich! That holds on to Africa with atom bombs! That relies on the dirty work of Nazi scientists!”
He tapped a cigarette and looked at it meditatively.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The bombers. They’re what’s made the whole war possible, from Dropshot onwards, and it was the Germans who invented them — to finish what Hitler started!”
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