CHAPTER 13.
A Hostel
The house was changing. Obscure urgency filled it and in bed at night he heard rumours of preparation and debate. Coming home from a friend’s back green he stuck with his head on one side of the railings and his body on the other. Mr. and Mrs. Thaw released him by greasing his ears with butter and pulling a leg each, laughing all the time. When free he flung himself howling on the grass but they tickled his armpits and sang “Stop Yer Ticklin’, Jock” until he couldn’t help laughing. Then one day they all came out onto the landing and the house was locked behind them. His father and mother carried his sister Ruth and some luggage; Thaw had a gas mask in a cardboard box hanging from his shoulder by a string loop; they all went up to his school by the sunlit bird-twittering back lanes. Murmuring groups of mothers stood in the playground with small children at their side. The fathers spoke in noisier groups and older children played halfheartedly between.
Thaw felt bored and walked to the railings. He was sure he was going on holiday and that holidays meant the sea. From the edge of the playground’s high platform he looked across the canal and the Blackhill tenements to remote hills with a dip in the middle. Looking the opposite way he saw a wide valley of roofs and smokestacks with more hills beyond. These hills were nearer and greener and so distinct that along a gently curved summit a line of treetops joined like a hedge and he saw the sky between the trunks underneath. It struck him that the sea was behind these hills; if he stood among the trees he would look down on a grey sea sparkling with waves. His mother shouted his name and he strolled toward her slowly, pretending he had not heard but was returning anyway. She adjusted the string of the gas mask which had got across his coat collar and was cutting the side of his neck, then made the coat sit better on his shoulders with tugs and pats which shook his head from side to side. He said, “Is the sea behind there?”
“Behind where?”
“Behind where those trees are.”
“Who told you that? Those are the Cathkin Braes. There’s nothing behind there but farms and fields. And England, eventually.”
The sparkling grey sea was too vivid for him to disbelieve. It fought in his head with a picture of farms and fields until it seemed to be flooding them. He pointed to the hills behind Blackhill and asked, “Is the sea over there?”
“No, but there’s Loch Lomond and the highlands.” Mrs. Thaw stopped tidying him, lifted Ruth on her left arm and stared straight-backed at the Cathkin Braes. She said thoughtfully, “When I was a girl those trees reminded me of a caravan on the skyline.”
“What’s a caravan?”
“A procession of camels. In Arabia.”
“What’s a procession?”
Red single-decker buses suddenly came into the playground and everyone but the fathers climbed on board. Mr. and Mrs. Thaw said goodbye through the window and after a long wait the buses drove out of the playground and down to the Cumber-nauld Road.
A dim broken time followed when Thaw and his mother, with Ruth on her lap, sat in buses at night hurling through unseen country. The buses were always badly lit with windows blinded by blue-black oilcloth so that nobody saw out. There must have been many such journeys, but later he remembered a single night journey lasting many months in a cabin full of hungry tired people, though the movement of the bus was interrupted by confused adventures in dim places: a wooden church hall, a room over a tailor’s shop, a stone-floored kitchen with beetles crawling over it. He slept in strange beds where breathing became difficult and he woke up screaming he was dead. Sores appeared on his scrotum and the bus brought them to the Royal Infirmary where old professors looked between his legs and applied brown ointment which stung the sores and smelled of tar. The bus was always crowded, Ruth crying, his mother weary and Thaw bored, though once a drunk man stood up and embarrassed everyone by trying to get them to sing. Then one evening the bus stopped and they got out and met his father, who led them onto the deck of a ship. They stood in the dusk near the funnel which gave out comfortable heat. The air was cold between slate-dark clouds and a heaving slate-blue sea. A reef lay among the lapping water like a long black log, and at one end an iron tripod upheld a lit yellow globe. The ship moved out to sea.
They came to live in a bungalow among low concrete buildings called the hostel. This stood between sea and moorland. Munition workers slept there and it held a canteen, cinema and hospital and had a high wire fence all round with gates that were locked at night. Each morning Thaw and Ruth were taken in a car along the coast road to the village school. This had two classrooms and a kitchen where a wife from the village made flavourless meals. A headmaster called Macrae taught the older pupils and a woman called Ingram the small ones. The pupils were all children of crofters excepting some evacuees from Glasgow who lodged in farms on the moors.
On his first day in the new school the other boys rushed to be Thaw’s neighbour in the queue to go out to play, and in the playfield they gathered round to ask where he came from and what his father did. Thaw answered truthfully at first but later told lies to keep their interest. He said he spoke several languages and when asked to prove this could only say that “wee” was French for “yes.” Most of the group went away after that, and next day in the playfield he had an audience of two. To stop it getting smaller he offered to show them round the hostel, then other boys approached him in threes and fours and asked if they could come too. Instead of going home that night in the car with Ruth, Thaw trudged along the coast road at the head of a mob of thirty or forty who talked and joked with each other and, apart from an occasional question, totally ignored him. He was not sorry about this. He wanted to seem mysterious to these boys, someone ageless with strange powers, but his feet were sore, he was late for tea and afraid he would be blamed for arriving with so many friends. He was right. The hostel gateman refused to allow the other boys in. They had walked two miles and missed their tea to accompany him and though he walked back with them a little way apologizing they were still very angry and the evacuees began to throw stones. He ran back to the hostel where he was given a cold meal and a row for “showing off.”
Next morning he pretended to be ill but unluckily the asthma and the disease between his legs weren’t troublesome and he had to go to school. Nobody spoke to him there and at playtime he kept nervously to the field’s quietest corner. On queuing to re-enter the classroom he stood beside an evacuee called Coulter who pushed him in the side. Thaw pushed back. Coulter punched him in the side, Thaw punched back and Coulter muttered, “A’ll see you after school.”
Thaw said, “A’ve to go straight home after school tonight; my dad said so.”
“Right. I’ll see ye the morra.”
At home that night he refused to eat anything. He said, “I’ve a pain.”
“You don’t look sick,” said Mrs. Thaw. “Where is the pain?” “All over.”
“What kind of pain is it?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not going to school tomorrow.”
Mrs. Thaw said to her husband, “You deal with this, Duncan, it’s beyond me.”
Mr. Thaw took his son into the bedroom and said, “Duncan, there’s something you haven’t told us.”
Thaw started crying and said what the matter was. His father held him to his chest and asked, “Is he bigger than you?”
“Yes.” (This was untrue.)
“Much bigger?”
“No,” said Thaw after a fight with his conscience.
“Do you want me to ask Mr. Macrae to tell the other pupils not to hit you?”
“No,” said Thaw, who only wanted not to go to school.
“I knew you would say that, Duncan. Duncan, you’ll have to fight this boy. If ye start running away now you’ll never learn to face up to life. I’ll teach ye how to fight—it’s easy—all ye have to do is use your left hand to protect your face….” Mr. Thaw talked like this until Thaw’s head was full of images of defeating Coulter. He spent that evening practising for the fight. Firs
t he sparred with his father, but the opposition of a real human being left no scope for fantasy, so he practised on a cushion and went confidently to bed after a good supper.
He was less confident next morning and ate breakfast very quietly. Mrs. Thaw kissed him goodbye and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll knock his block off.”
She waved encouragingly as the car drove away.
That morning Thaw stood in a lonely corner of the playfield and waited fearfully for the approach of Coulter, who was playing football with friends. Rain started falling and gradually the pupils collected in a shelter at the end of the building. Thaw was last to enter. In an agony of dread he walked up to Coulter, stuck his tongue out at him and struck him on the shoulder. At once they started fighting as unskilfully as small boys always fight, with flailing arms and a tendency to kick each other’s ankles; then they grappled and fell. Thaw was beneath but Coulter’s nose flattened on his brow, the resulting blood smeared both equally, each thought it his own and, appalled by the suspected wound, rolled apart and stood up. After that, in spite of encouragement from their allies (Thaw was surprised to find a cheering mob of allies at his back) they were content to stand swearing at each other until Miss Ingram came up and took them to the headmaster. Mr. Macrae was a stout pig-coloured man. He said, “Right. What’s the cause of all this?”
Thaw started talking rapidly, his explanation punctuated by gulps and stutters, and only stopped when he found himself starting to sob. Coulter said nothing. Mr. Macrae took a leather tawse from his desk and said, “Hold your hands out.”
Each held his hand out and got a hellish stinging wallop on it. Mr. Macrae said, “Again!” “Again!” and “Again!” Then he said, “If I hear of you two fighting another time you’ll get the same treatment but more of it, a lot more of it. Go to your class.”
Each bent his head to hide his distorted face and went to the next room sucking a crippled hand. Miss Ingram didn’t ask them to do anything for the rest of the morning.
After the fight Thaw found playtimes more boring than frightening. He would stand in the lonely corner of the field with a boy called McLusky who didn’t play with the other boys because he was feebleminded. Thaw told long stories with himself as hero and McLusky helped him mime the actable bits. The vivid part of his life became imaginary. Thaw and his sister slept in adjacent rooms, and at night he told her stories through the doorway between, stories with the adventures and landscapes of books he had read by day. Sometimes he stopped and asked, “Are you asleep yet? Will I go on?” and Ruth answered, “No, Duncan, please go on,” but at last she would fall asleep. Next night she would say, “Go on with the story, Duncan.”
“All right. Where did I stop last night?”
“They … they had landed on Venus.”
“No, no. They had left Venus and gone to Mercury.”
“I … don’t remember that, Duncan.”
“Of course you don’t. Ye fell asleep. Well, I’m not going to tell you stories if you don’t want to listen.”
“But I couldnae help falling asleep, Duncan.”
“Then why didn’t ye tell me you were falling asleep instead of letting me go on talking to myself?”
After bullying her some more he would continue the story, for he spent a lot of time each day preparing it.
He bullied Ruth in other ways. She was forbidden to stott her ball indoors. He saw her do it once, and terrified her for weeks by threatening to tell their mother. One day Mrs. Thaw accused her children of stealing sugar from the livingroom sideboard. Both denied it. Later Ruth told him, “you stole that sugar.”
He said “yes. But if you tell Mum I said so I’ll call you a liar and she won’t know who to believe.” Ruth at once told their mother, Thaw called Ruth a liar, and Mrs. Thaw didn’t know who to believe.
During the first few weeks at school he had looked carefully among the girls for one to adventure with in his imagination, but they were all too obviously the same vulgar clay as himself. For almost a year he resigned himself to loving Miss Ingram, who was moderately attractive and whose authority gave her a sort of grandeur. Then one day when visiting the village store he saw a placard in the window advertising Amazon Adhesive Shoe Soles. It showed a blond girl in brief Greek armour with spear and shield and a helmet on her head. Above her were the words BEAUTY PLUS STAMINA, and her face had a plaintive loveliness which made Miss Ingram seem commonplace. During the dinner intervals Thaw walked to the store and looked at the girl for the length of time it took to count ten. He knew that by looking too hard and often even she might come to seem commonplace.
CHAPTER 14.
Ben Rua
Mr. Thaw wanted a keener intimacy with his son and liked open-air activities. There were fine mountains near the hostel, the nearest of them, Ben Rua, less than sixteen hundred feet high; he decided to take Thaw on some easy excursions and bought him stout climbing boots. Unluckily Thaw wanted to wear sandals.
“I like to move my toes,” he said.
“What are ye blethering about?”
“I don’t like shutting my feet in these hard solid leather cases. It makes them feel dead. I can’t bend my ankles.”
“But you arenae supposed to bend your ankles! It’s the easiest thing in the world to break an ankle if you slip in an awkward place. These boots are made especially to give the ankle support—once a single nail gets a grip it can uphold your ankle, your leg, your whole body even.”
“What I lose in firmness I’ll make up in quickness.”
“I see. I see. For a century mountaineers have gone up the
Alps and Himalayas and Grampians in nailed climbing boots. You might think they knew about climbing. Oh, no, Duncan Thaw knows better. They should have worn sandals.”
“What’s wrong for them might be right for me.”
“My God!” cried Mr. Thaw. “What’s this I’ve brought into the world? What did I do to deserve this? If we could only live by our own experience we would have no science, no civilization, no progress! Man has advanced by his capacity to learn from others, and these boots cost me four pounds eight.” “There would be no science and civilization and all that if everybody did things the way everybody else does,” said Thaw. The discussion continued until Mr. Thaw lost his temper and Thaw had hysterics and was given a cold bath. The climbing boots lay in a cupboard until Ruth was old enough to use them. Meanwhile Thaw was not taken climbing by his father.
One summer day Thaw walked briskly along the coast road until the hostel was hidden by a green headland. It was a sunny afternoon. A few clouds lay about the sky like shirts scattered on a blue floor. He left the road and ran down a slope toward the sea, his feet crashing almost to the ankles among pebbles and shells. He felt confident and resolute, for he had been reading a book called The Young Naturalist and meant to make notes of anything interesting. The shingle gave onto shelving rocks with boulders and pools among them. He squatted by a pool the size of a soup plate and peered in, frowning. Below the crystalline water lay three pebbles, a small anemone the colour of raw liver, a wisp of green weed and several winkles. The winkles were olive and dull purple, and he thought he saw a tendency for the pale ones to be at the edges of the pool and the dark ones in the middle. Taking out a notebook and pencil he drew a map on the blank first page, showing the position of the winkles; then he wrote the date on the opposite page and added after some thought the letters:
SELKNIW ELPRUP NI ECIDRA WOC
for he wished to hide his discoveries under a code until he was ready to publish. Then he pocketed the notebook and strolled onto a beach of smooth white sand lapped by the sparkling sea. Tired of being a naturalist he found a stick of driftwood and began engraving the plans of a castle on the firm surface. It was a very elaborate castle full of secret entrances, dungeons and torture chambers.
Someone behind him said, “What’s that supposed to be?” Thaw turned and saw Coulter. He gripped the stick tightly and muttered, “It’s some plans.”
Cou
lter walked round the plans saying, “What are they plans of?”
“Oh, they’re just plans.”
“Well, mibby you’re wise no’ to tell me what they’re plans of. For all you know I’m mibby a German spy.”
“You couldnae be a German spy.”
“Yes I could.”
“You’re just a boy!”
“But mibby the Germans have a secret chemical that stops folk growing so they look like boys though they’re mibby twenty or thirty, and mibby they’ve landed me here off a submarine and I’m just pretending to be an evacuee but all the time I’m spying on the hostel your dad is managing.”
Thaw stared at Coulter who stood with feet apart and hands in trouser pockets and stared back. Thaw said, “Are you a German spy?”
“Yes,” said Coulter.
His face was so expressionless that Thaw became convinced that he was a German spy. At the same time, without noticing it, he had stopped being afraid of Coulter. He said, “Well I’m a British spy,”
“You are not.”
“I am so.”
“Prove it.”
“Prove you’re a German spy.”
“I don’t want to. If I did you could get me arrested and hung.” Thaw could think of no answer to this. He was wondering how to make Coulter think he was a British spy when Coulter said, “Do you come from Glasgow?”
“Yes!”
“So do I.”
“What bit of Glasgow?”
“Garngad. What bit do you come from?”
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