After that, Buzz and I became quite friendly for the next three years, till he left school to go down the pit. I don’t know if he stuck with it but if he did he’d have got about twelve years’ redundancy when they closed the pit after the miners’ strike in the mid-eighties. I wonder where he is now. We learned something from each other that day, and it wasn’t about masturbation.
XI
The academic education I received at Tullie High was as thorough as the social one. I excelled at English, was good at History, Geography, French, Latin – still quite a common subject in state schools in the 1970s – and nobody came close to me in Religious Education, but then nobody else cared a button for it. I ran cross-country for the school but had no interest and no skill in team sports. I found my days at school rewarding and refreshing; a welcome release from the tedium of life at home.
In the 1970s my parents retired still further from the world. My mother spent more and more time alone in the back parlour with the television for company; there were no longer any restrictions on what could be watched, and she watched anything and everything with the same apparent indifference. Was she, I wonder now, practising for her last years in the care home?
My father still carried out his duties around the parish, walking in the village (he’d given up the bicycle after the stroke) and, at great peril to himself and other road-users, driving the old Morris Minor when he had to go further afield. But it was obvious that he was presiding over decline. The church buildings were in disrepair; the congregation was, collectively and individually, shrinking and ageing. At home he stayed in his study, supposedly poring over Church papers or pursuing abstruse theological points in the ranks of commentaries and tracts he had accumulated over the years. But once or twice, passing the door and seeing it slightly ajar, I observed the Reverend James Mack apparently asleep in the leather chair by the window; a man in his sixties, tired of living. I was an adolescent, brimming with energy and opinions: I should have despised, deplored or raged at my parents, but I didn’t. I simply didn’t care about them.
Nevertheless I continued to lead a double or even triple life for most of my teens. It suited me to do so. The fewer people I crossed, the easier life was. At school – outside the classroom – I could be as coarse-mouthed and broad of accent and disrespectful of authority as any of my peers, although I always remained at the edge of the crowd, careful to avoid serious trouble. But in classes I kept my head down and worked. Others, who didn’t have my knack of disguise, were mercilessly taunted and assaulted for being good at schoolwork. I studied hard enough to be successful, so that my teachers had no cause for complaint, but my talent for duplicity enabled me also to avoid being the victim of the bullies. Some of my more academically challenged fellow pupils even admired my fraudulence: it was the kind of thing they couldn’t get away with, but I could make life easier for them too by helping out with their homework. I was sleekit and cowardly, even though my name was Gideon.
At home, I maintained an air of piety. Although within myself I had abandoned my faith, I continued to go to church and be the dutiful son of the manse. My hair may have grown longer, and I may have slouched in front of the TV watching Monty Python – in comparison with which, had he ever seen it, my father would have found Batman a beacon of lucidity and common sense – but that was about the extent of my revolutionary activity. I had hypocrisy down to a fine art.
And so, when my father in his systematic, post-stroke slowness began to instruct me for my first Communion, when I was thirteen, I did not refuse to participate, but went through with the whole business. This was a rigorous undertaking. One of my father’s jobs was to prepare others for admission to the Kirk, and indeed throughout the year a trickle of young people came to the manse for this purpose. He didn’t let them off easily, I am sure, but turned his fierce eyes on them in search of the light of conviction in theirs; and a few abandoned the process under his interrogation. This flushing out of the unworthy he would have reckoned almost as much of a victory as bringing the chosen few safely into the Kirk. But from his own son he required an even greater commitment.
Think of this: the 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, in all their Calvinist glory. You would have to go a long way west and north of Ochtermill in the 1970s to find Presbyterians who learned their Shorter Catechism by heart, but I did. I was no Calvinist, the Church of Scotland had long since paid only lip-service to the tenets of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and even my father, old-fashioned in so many ways, had moved some distance from a rigid interpretation of such ideas as election and justification. Yet he used the Catechism to educate me in the Presbyterian faith; and we worked through the questions and answers much as we’d once worked through the detail of our days over the dinner table, as a kind of exercise in pigeon-holing holy information. We dissected and deciphered the nature of God, the nature of mankind, the nature of sin, the nature of faith, the requirements of the ten commandments, the form of the sacraments and the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. ‘What is prayer?’ he would ask me, and I, who had given it up months before, would say, ‘Prayer is an offering up of our desires to God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgement of his mercies,’ and then we would talk about what that meant, and look at the several texts from the Bible that proved the points. And all the while, the many, many hours that this took, the apostate in me was picking holes in the arguments, but saying nothing, and the voluble hypocrite was mending them. I’ll say this: the grounding for the ministry I would later have at New College was less thorough than the one I had from my father in his stoury study. We understood each other better then than perhaps we ever did. I wouldn’t say there was warmth between us, but there was something like mutual respect. And yet, though I was there with him, a part of me was keeping its distance.
At the end of that time, I made public profession of my faith, took Communion, and was received as a member into the Church of Scotland. In spite of that long and rigorous induction, I thought lightly of it. It seemed, considering under what roof I was raised, just a small step, almost an insignificant one, beyond where I already was. But I was wrong, for it took me further along the road to where I find myself now.
There is one incident that occurred at this time that I must record. For most of my childhood, I had been discouraged from disturbing the books on the shelves of my father’s study – with the exception of the Waverley Novels. But while I was being catechised, we made use of Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible, Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland and other great tomes (many of which are on my own shelves now). Inevitably, as I reached for this book or that, others would catch my eye. There were some very boring volumes there, and some very ancient ones, and some that were both boring and ancient. But I would have missed one particular book altogether had it not fallen from the shelf one evening when I pulled out the larger volume beside it. I would not say it had been deliberately hidden, but it was pushed far back on the shelf and its spine was not visible until I accidentally dislodged it. It landed on the desk between my father and me, a slim blue book in a grey dustjacket, about six inches by eight. I picked it up and read the title: The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies.* I opened it and saw an inscription in blue ink: To remind you of better days and other worlds. G.M.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
I had never before seen my father with what I can only describe as a sheepish expression on his face.
‘That?’ he said. ‘A piece of silliness from my youth. Put it back, Gideon.’
‘Elves, fauns and fairies?’ I said, still clutching it. ‘What on earth is it?’
‘A curiosity,’ he said. ‘A curious book, written by a curious man. I use the word curious in both its senses.’
He held out his hand and I passed him the volume. He turned it over, opened it and leafed through a few pages, as though he hadn’t looked at them in a long time but
hadn’t forgotten them either. Then he closed it and put it on the desk between us.
‘You’ll not have heard of Mr Robert Kirk,’ he said. ‘We will have a diversion for five minutes. He was a man who should be remembered for one thing, but because human beings are fickle and fanciful he is remembered for quite another. He was the minister at Aberfoyle, over in the Trossachs towards Loch Lomond, a very beautiful part of the country. I used to go there sometimes before the war, when I was in Glasgow. Robert Kirk was minister there in the 1680s, an era we have spoken about often, the time of the Covenanters and the persecutions. Kirk was an Episcopalian, though not a bad man for all that. He gathered the old classical Gaelic translations of the Scriptures, which were printed in Gaelic script and hard to read, and modernised them. Most of his parishioners were Gaelic-speaking. It was a skilful and scholarly undertaking, and his Bible was widely used for eighty years and more. It was a great thing he did for the Gaels, to give them the Word of God in a modern form, but it’s because he was the author of this book that his name has come down to us.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘He was interested in fairies, Gideon. In his day superstition and religion still walked side by side. People believed that there was a land under the earth, where the fairies lived. Not flittery things like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan,’ he said, betraying a literary knowledge I hadn’t suspected, ‘but dwarfish, devilish, thieving folk who could do you great harm. This book is a study of those beings.’
‘He believed in them too?’ I said.
‘Perhaps. As I said, he was a curious man. We know it was all nonsense, but things were different then.’ He paused, staring at the ceiling, and I had to remind myself that he was speaking of the seventeenth century, not of his own youth. ‘Well,’ he said, snapping out of his reverie, ‘that was Mr Robert Kirk, and that was our diversion. Now, where were we?’
I made a last effort to keep him on the subject. ‘Did you buy it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I had better things on which to spend what little money I had. It was sent to me during the war, when I was in France.’
I flipped open the front cover, pointed to the inscription. ‘G.M.,’ I said. ‘My initials.’
‘So they are,’ he said. ‘A coincidence. Somebody I met on one of those jaunts in the Trossachs sent it to me. He thought it would amuse me, bring some light relief. Hence his foolish note. He was a foolish man.’
And yet my father still possessed it. It was an incongruous item in his library – as incongruous as the idea of him going on a ‘jaunt’ – but then again he very seldom threw anything out.
‘May I borrow it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you may not. It is not suitable.’ His big hand slid over the slender book and pulled it towards him. I could have kicked myself. The next day, when my father was out, I searched the study shelves for Kirk’s book, but he had put it somewhere out of my reach, and I did not see it again for years.
XII
My teachers approached my Higher exams with more visible confidence than I did, but in my heart I knew I would easily pass them. There was no question of me not going to university, but what was I to study? My strongest subjects were English and History, so an arts degree was the obvious choice; but Law was a possibility, and so too was Divinity. Not that I had any intention of becoming a minister; but it would be a natural extension of the training my father had already given my mind, and would not inevitably lead me towards the Church. I didn’t care much what I ended up studying. All I really wanted was to get away from Ochtermill and establish some independence. The idea of being a student was all that concerned me; but, knowing that this wouldn’t satisfy my father, I decided that, some time in the distant future, I could possibly be a teacher.
The question of where to go also had to be addressed. He had studied at Glasgow, but I thought I’d prefer Edinburgh. It was bonnier, older, more compact. Also, it wasn’t where my father had been.
He summoned me to his study one evening after we’d eaten. ‘Come and see me,’ he said, ‘when you have finished helping your mother with the dishes.’ He himself didn’t indulge in that activity. I was almost done when my mother told me to go to him. ‘He’s been wanting to talk to you about university,’ she said. I was surprised she had any idea what my father wanted, but, as I’ve said, there were evidently times when they conspired together.
He was sitting behind his desk, and as usual it was covered in papers and books. The room had that powdery smell you get in second-hand bookshops where the heating is inadequate and the books are slowly mouldering. I don’t think he’d opened the window for years. He was wearing his habitual grey suit with the clerical grey shirt and white collar. His face, as ever, was also grey. If you’d stood him in a mist you would have taken him for a gatepost or the end of a dyke, or you would have missed him altogether.
‘Well, Gideon,’ he said, ‘we must make some kind of decision about you. About what you wish to study, and where. What are your thoughts?’
‘I’d like to go to Edinburgh,’ I began, but immediately he waved a finger at me.
‘Let us start with why you would go anywhere,’ he said. ‘What is it you hope to achieve?’ It sounded like the Catechism all over again, though nearly four years had elapsed.
‘To get a degree,’ I said.
‘And then what?’
‘I’d like to teach.’
‘What would you like to teach?’
‘English,’ I said. ‘Literature.’
‘Literature,’ he repeated. ‘I suppose it is necessary to teach it. You didn’t have to be taught to read Walter Scott, but then his books aren’t very literary, are they?’ There was a twitch about the corners of his mouth which I failed to interpret.
‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘You’ve never read any Scott.’ I saw the twitch become a smile. ‘Have you?’
‘Enough. Whenever you returned one of those’ – he pointed to the twenty-five black cloth spines on the shelf – ‘with its pages newly cut, I turned them. Not unintelligent,’ he said, ‘but harmless. Harmless now anyway. The damage was all done when he first wrote them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He gave a wrong view of history,’ my father said. ‘A learned and godly man called Thomas McCrie exposed him when he defamed the Covenanters in Old Mortality, but McCrie was a minister and people thought him a humourless spoilsport.’ He sniffed, his equivalent of a dry laugh. ‘Scott had already turned the heads of too many silly women and romantically minded boys with his kind of history, and the generations that followed believed in it. The Victorians then were like Americans now. They thought the story of the world was theirs, and that it had been written by authors like Scott. It is the great danger of romance: too many people succumb to it, and forget the one true Author. But, as I say, Scott is harmless now.’
This was infuriating. I had waded through millions of Scott’s words and he, who had flicked through a few pages, was telling me that I had been taken for a ride. A harmless ride at that. It must have shown on my face, for he twisted the knife a little further.
‘If it were not so, do you think I would have let you read them?’
‘Then you were letting me waste my time,’ I said.
‘Not at all. You had set yourself a challenge, and I didn’t want to interrupt that contest between you and Scott. It helped to make you a very good reader, which is to be commended.’
‘But you didn’t want me to read the Bible from start to finish.’
‘Not if you were doing it as a chore or a contest, no. Scott is ideal for either, but there is no comparison between him and the Bible, Gideon.’
‘Well, I’ve read a lot more than Walter Scott,’ I said, thinking of my sex education courtesy of the local library.
‘No doubt you have. You’ve had your head in books most of your life, as I have. Different books, and maybe some of those I have valued are harmless too. Wrong-headed, even. Maybe. In the end
there is only the one that matters.’ Before I could respond, he went on: ‘However, I won’t oppose you reading English. But do you really see yourself as a teacher?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I’d have some years to think about it, though, and make sure.’
‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘You would have to attain a degree first. Training to be a teacher would come later. As would any other training,’ he added. ‘Do you never think of following in your father’s footsteps?’
It sounded almost as if he were speaking of someone else, not himself. He might have been some village worthy or my guardian – my real father having gone off on an expedition and got lost – telling me it was my duty to go and find him.
I dissembled, as ever.
‘Yes, I do. But it’s a calling. I don’t think I have the commitment.’
‘That’s a good answer, Gideon. I am not discouraged by it. I thought that too, when I was your age. I doubted whether God really wanted me to do this. Doubt’s a better place to start, you know, than certainty.’
‘I think,’ I said cautiously, ‘I need more time. I’m still at the doubting stage. But if I studied English, it wouldn’t rule out anything. Even that.’
‘Even this,’ he said, and turned his head slightly as if to remind me of who he was. I looked at him, this grey man in his cavern of slow decay, and it occurred to me that he might not have ended up there by choice, by a deliberate stratagem, but by a series of accidents. I vowed then that I would not do the same, that I would be different. And, if indeed he was there by accident, then different I have been. For I, in time, chose to enter the ministry. Though I did not believe, I chose to follow after him. Or did I? Perhaps I had no choice. I did it in part, as I thought, to spite him, and yet now, if he can see me, he is having the last laugh. Here I sit in the half-light, in a book-lined study in an empty manse, nearly thirty years on, and I have become him.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 10