The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  Son of the manse. The phrase conjures up a whole set of stereotypes, all as close to and as far from the truth as stereotypes always are. You could draw up a battalion of sons of the manse and it would strike something, though maybe not terror, into the heart of anybody with an imagination: among its members would be Gordon Brown, David Steel, John Reith, John Buchan, John Logie Baird and William Kidd. I wonder what elements of such an upbringing conspired to produce a Lord Reith or a Captain Kidd, a Chancellor Brown or a Governor-General Buchan. Well, anyway, stereotypical or not, these were some of the features of the manse at Ochtermill that informed my early years:

  The house: large, solid, stone-built, cold, its eyes heavy-lidded with brocade curtains, its mouth always decently, firmly shut; windows that rattled in their frames in spring breezes and were thick with frost etchings on the inside on winter mornings; walls devoid of pictures, prints or any other decorative addition; woodwork clogged with dark paint, green outside and brown within; linoleum in the hallway, flags in the back lobby; thin carpets that ended two feet short of the skirtings in the reception rooms; worn rugs in the bedrooms, islands of relative warmth on the lino; a house in need of rewiring, at an estimated cost that so frightened the Kirk Session that we were still using brown bakelite round-pin plugs and adaptors, and lights with plaited cord flexes, long after they had disappeared from other homes; a house devoid of central heating or any other fripperies, and equipped only with essentials; its atmosphere quiet, stern and restrained, as of a household setting an example to others – but, as visitors were few and infrequent, failing.

  The minister’s study: a room with a coal fire never lit before November or after March, and between these months only in extremis; its walls lined with books – Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts, theological tomes of great worth and tedium, dictionaries, encyclopedias, histories, tracts, biographies of long-dead heroes of the Kirk. Not a sniff of a work of fiction except a set of the Waverley Novels, and even these (until I discovered them when I was nine or ten) with their pages uncut; a huge desk of dark, stained oak, with drawers stuffed with letters and Church business, and a leather-backed chair on a swivel; another leather armchair near the window where my father would sit when he was thinking, looking out on the vegetable plot in which my mother cultivated, not very successfully, soft fruit, potatoes, cabbages, carrots and onions; a room in which, over a period of twenty-odd years, nothing changed and nothing moved except the books as they were taken out and replaced on the shelves.

  (Those Waverley Novels were a wedding present from my mother’s mother, who had herself received them when she was married in 1914, an era when the novels of Sir Walter Scott were considered a safe, sensible gift, the kind of thing any respectable couple could happily display in their drawing room, whether they read them or not. That was the point about Scott: one didn’t have to read him, only to have him in the background along with – an option eschewed by my parents – a tasteful print or two of Highland scenery; and nothing perhaps demonstrates better the antique character of the manse at Ochtermill than the fact that the only novels my parents possessed were ones that they had never opened, and that most of the rest of the world had closed for a good three decades before.)

  The minister: grave, forbidding, slow to anger but fearsome when roused, emotion displayed by a slight reddening of the usually grey upper cheeks; sense of humour not entirely absent but so dry you could have used it for kindling; the lawmaker, the sayer of grace before and after meals, the inculcator of good manners, the overseer of cleanliness and industry; a man, to my childish eyes, so fashioned in what I presumed was the image of God that God, looking at him, might have momentarily thought himself in front of a mirror.

  The minister’s wife: dutiful, timid, destined always to wear beige and browns, or unshocking blues, unremarkable blouses, shapeless skirts with hems well below the knee, and no make-up; a worrier, thin and birdlike, habitually apologetic and creeping for cover; sense of humour crushed like chalk beneath a schoolmaster’s heel.

  And the son: gangly, nervous, good at schoolwork, fumbling and awkward at all games except cross-country running; well practised too at running away from trouble in the playground or the street; having few friends, and those few kept at bay by the fact of his being ‘of the manse’; sense of humour present but suppressed, biding its time; a lonely boy politely storing up rebellion until it would least inconvenience his parents, probably after they were dead.

  I was so alone that I wonder I never had an imaginary friend, like Katie’s Friend, but I have no recollection of one. I did, of course, have Jesus at my side, but I never thought of him as a friend. ‘What a Friend we have in Jesus,’ the hymn says, but I found the tune too sugary and the words slightly menacing.

  Love and fear: they are not so far apart. Once, when I was about nine, my father was giving his usual short address to the younger children in the congregation before they left for Sunday School. Other nine-year-olds still slipped out at this juncture, but I was expected to stay. He was talking about God’s infinite wisdom, how he knew what was best for us all. ‘He is our father,’ my father said, ‘and because he is our father he cares for us, even if sometimes we make him angry because of the foolish things we do. Doesn’t your own father ever get angry, and isn’t it often for your own good?’ I heard a dispersed squeaking sound – small backsides squirming on the pews – and imagined small faces looking up at parents to check what they were thinking. ‘It’s no bad thing to be afraid of God. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Aren’t you all just a little afraid of your own fathers? Hands up if you are.’ There was a pause. I risked a backward glance. Small hands were raised like flags of surrender throughout the kirk. Titters of quiet, approving laughter ran round the adults. Some of them even had their hands in the air. I too had my arm half-lifted, and my father gave me a tiny smile as he surveyed his flock. Then his gaze alighted on something that displeased him: his eyes went cold and his nostrils flared. I half-turned my head again and saw, three pews back across the aisle, a boy of about my age sitting alone on his hands, boldly staring back at the pulpit. I turned back. All my father’s concentration now focused on that boy. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Not – even – the tiniest – bit – afraid?’ The words came out like hard little pebbles. There was a long silence: a contest of wills between the minister and the errant boy. I knew that my father would keep it up indefinitely. Fifteen, twenty seconds passed – an eternity. I could not see, but could feel, the boy wilting. Then his hand must have gone up, for the smile returned to my father’s face. ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it is right to fear God. He is mighty and he loves us with a mighty love. Very good, you may all put your hands down. Away you go now, and enjoy your Sunday School.’ There was a rush of movement as children fled. When I next looked back, the wilful boy was gone.

  It was my father’s decision to name me Gideon – I doubt if my mother had any say in the matter – and, perhaps to close off any softer options in later life, he gave me no other names. Although his faith was Christianity, he preferred the Old Testament to the New: its theology was simpler and its stories better. He liked the Book of Judges and the story of God working through Gideon. He liked the way Gideon, an ordinary man, did extraordinary deeds because God was on his side; and therefore he called me after him. He must have told or read me that tale dozens of times: how God called Gideon when he was threshing wheat by the wine-press, to keep it hidden from the Midianites, and made him the leader of Israel; and how he instructed him to reduce the Israelite army from 32,000 to a mere 300, first by sending the fearful home, then by separating the men who took water to their mouths by hand from the majority who lapped it like dogs on their knees; and all this so it would be clear, when victory came, by whose arm the Midianite host was felled. And when I stumbled as a bairn, or was too small to reach something on a shelf, it was my father’s habit to help me, but only just enough to enable me to help myself; and it was a joke of his (almost his only one) to say as I clambered to my
feet, or grasped the desired item, ‘The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour’; and, on occasions of supreme achievement, such as when I learned to ride a bicycle, to applaud thunderously with the words, ‘The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!’ So that I, who felt duty-bound to live up to his expectations but often failed, thought of myself, aged six or thereabouts, as some kind of pale imitation of an Old Testament hero.

  Did my father love me? Was he capable of love at all? I think he loved the idea of a son more than he loved the actuality. He wanted a Gideon, but what he got was a Gideon Mack. Thus, when he saw his progeny for the first time in the hospital, the girning, black-haired beast with elfin-like lugs and a screech in its mouth, perhaps his heart jumped with some spontaneous feeling he could not identify. (This is conjecture, from a distance of forty-six years, based on my mother’s unreliable memories and a single, small, black and white photograph of me in my pram that must have been taken by someone else, for my parents never possessed a camera.) He may even have felt warm and grateful towards my mother; perhaps at that moment he held her hand and thanked her, and together they thanked God, and he imagined the great things his son might do, and the pride he would have in seeing him do them. But as I grew to a boy and then to a young man, he must have seen my failings increase with every inch of growth. He must have understood that in the biblical tale this Gideon would have been one of the thousands who went home fearful, or one of those who lapped like a dog. And he must have recognised that, apart from my height, I was more like Agnes than him, and this would have depressed him, that the blood of a feeble body like hers should have overmastered his in the one product of their union.

  For whether or not my father ever loved me, I am certain he never loved Agnes Campbell. He tolerated her, in the way somebody not keen on dogs will thole a dog so long as it doesn’t lick or bark or seek attention. My mother learned not to seek my father’s attention during the ten years preceding their marriage, and practised the lesson for the twenty-three years it lasted. I don’t think he was being deliberately cruel, but that sort of neglect drives a person back on their own resources, and my mother didn’t have many of those.

  And yet I didn’t grow up loathing my father, as a better son might have, for treating her in this way. I imitated him. I inherited from him an indifference to my mother’s views and opinions, and she in turn distanced herself from me just as she’d learned to distance herself from him, as if it were indecent to display her feelings in that hushed house. We were not strangers to one another but we kept ourselves apart. The three of us were really a good match for one another; and I took my lessons from them accordingly.

  From my mother I learned how to function in a reasonably practical everyday way: how to wash and dress myself, how to eat and drink, how to go shopping, when to speak, and when to keep silent. I followed her around the house and garden, and through the village, observing and copying. It was the natural thing to do.

  From my father I learned many things, but two in particular stand out. The first was the beauty of austerity. As a child I didn’t like the sterile, unadorned barrenness of the manse, but now I have greater respect for his dedicated rejection of possessions. Austerity is not highly regarded these days: not to have things is considered a mark of poverty. But there is more than one kind of poverty, and I have not seen more wretchedly impoverished people than the desperate crowds shopping for the sake of shopping in the post-Christmas sales.

  The second thing I learned from him was how to think, how to argue, how to hold my own in a conversation. The evening meal, which the three of us ate together promptly at six, was an important time, when he would quiz me about my day, and I, in turn, would quiz him about his. He wanted detail from me, accuracy, precision – facts rather than impressions – and I would demand the same of him. He liked debate and controversy, in the way that some people like crosswords. Debate sharpened his tongue, made him re-examine his beliefs and confirm their correctness, but all the pleasure was in the arguing, not in the conclusion: like a completed crossword, the outcome was meaningless. His mind wasn’t closed, but it shut out the trivial and the unnecessary. I think the world for him was often a theoretical place, not a real one. Thus in our theoretical way we communicated for several years, filling the air with information that was about the world but emotionally detached from it, competing with each other, although at the time I didn’t know it was a competition.

  We were also competing with the rest of the human race. ‘There are many, many stupid people on this earth,’ my father said. ‘They are not born stupid, they are made so through their enslavement to material things, to the petty concerns of the world. The brain is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, and to abuse it is an act of gross ingratitude. Yet most people are stupefied by the world. I hope, Gideon, that you will not be one of them.’

  My mother said virtually nothing at meal-times: apart from her role as cook and server she was a spectator, and even had she wanted to participate she was not invited to do so. My father regarded her as stupid, although he could hardly have argued that an excess of possessions had made her so. If she and I had once been conspirators against my father in the night, he and I conspired against her at meal-times. And yet, in some unspoken, grey alliance of age against youth, at other times they conspired against me.

  I think my father saw me as wavering between the grace of intelligence and the damnation of stupidity. He wanted me to be saved, but there was only so much he could do – the rest was up to God and me. He would look for symptoms of my condition – glimmers of intelligence, dark clouds of stupidity – but sometimes he saw negative signs in other things – in my awkward thinness, for example, or my aversion to cabbage, or my left-handedness.

  By the time I was three it must have been obvious that I was what elsewhere in the village they called ‘corrie-fistit’, and within a few years we were having battles over my use of cutlery at table, as my natural preference for applying my left hand to spoon and knife asserted itself. Left-handedness used to be seen as a mark of the Devil. I wonder if that old superstition occurred to him and disturbed him. It occurs to me now, obviously, but it does not disturb me.

  The manse was a place, overwhelmingly, of silence. If I stood on the stairs and held my breath, often the only sound was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. What scant noise the three of us made, while outside the world’s volume was getting constantly louder! In the kitchen, where my mother toiled, even the pots and pans and plates seemed muted: if she had to perform a particularly clattering task, she would wait till my father was out. We hardly ever had guests, and all parish business was conducted behind the closed door of the study. The only voices heard in the manse other than our own came from the radio, which was located in the back parlour on the mantelpiece. It was switched on for the news, the football results on a Saturday (football was my father’s one earthly weakness) and not much else. I was forbidden to turn the dial or change the wavelength so I had no notion of the world of music that could have been accessed through that squat brown box. I had very few toys – some bricks, an assortment of plastic soldiers, some Dinky cars – and when I played with them I suppressed the sounds of my play to a low murmur. This reticence was much approved, so I continued to be quiet. I had no reason to suppose that other children’s lives were any different.

  As soon as I was at school and could half-read, my mother took me to the library and selected three picture books, each with a few easy words in them, and let me carry them home. I thought this was an act of great generosity on her part: it was a while before I realised that she chose only books I could manage by myself, and that they were intended to keep me occupied and silent. Still, I was grateful. The trip to the library became the weekly highlight of my home life.

  My father had learned to drive in the army and owned a grey Morris Minor, bought second-hand, which was used for occasional long journeys. He also had an old black bicycle on which he sometimes wobbled round the village, making hi
s pastoral calls. When I was seven he bought me my first bicycle and taught me to ride it. Again I was deeply moved by this bounty, and again it was only later that I understood the motivation: the bike would take me away from the house – first on to the manse driveway, then into the streets of Ochtermill and the surrounding country roads – and allow me to burn off my energies elsewhere. Between the weekly supply of library books and the bike, which was replaced a few years later by a larger model with three gears, I believed I had all the good things I could ever deserve. I experienced a kind of dull, warmish ache in the company of my father and mother, which I took to be the manifestation of that honour mentioned in the fifth commandment.