The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I wasn't so much a primary-school reprobate as an eager investigator of taboos. I never have believed in hand-me-down experience. If something was forbidden, I wanted to know why the Establishment was keeping it to itself. Somehow my uncle seemed to understand that and, taking me aside after my latest transgression of a set of rules I couldn't see the sense in, he would talk to me.

  I don't remember exactly what we said, but I remember the feeling those conversations have always given me. It is a feeling of arrival at a place of clarity and warmth, a free border of selves where nothing is contraband because whatever you declare will carry no hidden charge against you. Guilt was not the question. Why you had done it was, and how it had felt, and what you thought about it now that you had done it, and where did you go from here. The dynamic of what your experience meant was always given back to you.

  It was only after his death I realised slowly that the gift was one he had made to others as well as myself. My increased awareness began in that extended conversational wake that follows a working-class death, the hoarded anecdotes brought out and passed around, the quiet shared wonder at what had been among us. I learned of the heroism of his self-education, of his mute suffering, of how he might, with Alexander Pope, have referred to ‘that long disease, my life’. I was reminded of his skill in drawing, of the peace posters he made alone at night when my grandmother was in bed.

  I learned of the time some chancer put the head on him at a charity dance because my uncle was on the door and wouldn't let the man brass his way in free. The man still didn't get in, but there were no recriminations. My father, five feet four but with a PhD in outrage, spent a long time trying to get the details so that he could trace the man and exact summary retribution. But my uncle wouldn't help. He was my mother's brother and like her he lived his principles to the limit, pain or pleasure. Pacifism was one.

  I was reminded as well of what an awkward bugger he could be. He couldn't be intimidated, only convinced, and that was one difficult trick. He liked to argue the way Gargantua liked to eat. I remember once, during my Vaughan Monroe period, when I was trying to bring my voice from the soles of my feet and sing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, he took me to task for singing such an ideologically unsound song. I knew even than that his attitude was ridiculous, like quarrelling with a vacuum. But I took him seriously anyway. I still do. He remains one of the small but bright and unnamed stars by which I steer.

  Holding his copy of Childhood, I sense him as being like the book, unflashy but substantial - and out of date. The human stock he believed in so sincerely has crashed, probably beyond the point of recovery. For my Uncle Josey was a deeply committed Communist.

  I didn't believe in his political philosophy then, I never did since, and I don't now. I am happy to see the present apparent liberalisation of Eastern Europe. But I hope I retain enough intellectual precision and emotional honesty not to be bullied by the aggressive rant of contemporary British and American politics into confusing Eastern Bloc Communism with the humane and pragmatic form the same ideology found for itself in Scotland.

  Since John MacLean, Scottish Communism has remained its own animal, less Russian bear than beast of social burden, helping hurt lives in the small ways that it could, given its continuously enfeebled state. It has remained almost entirely free from the theoretical rabies to which its English counterpart has sometimes succumbed.

  Besides my uncle, I have met many Scottish Communists. Sometimes they were boringly dogmatic. But then so have been many Catholics and Presbyterians and those of other faiths. More often they have been generous of spirit and deep in their concern for others. Disagreeing with their theory, I have found myself time and again replenished by their practice and renewed in my belief in a more habitable vision of the future. They have long been a benignly crucial part of our awareness of ourselves.

  But these are meretricious times, in which slogan passes for thought and the intellectual scatter-gun is the favoured weapon of political precision. You may say with the mood of the moment that if one form goes, all should go. You may say, if you wish, that there was no distinctive baby in Scottish Communism, only the same old bath-water.

  You may say it. I won't. I owe these people. I pay my debts of gratitude.—

  WE OWE GRATITUDE IN SOME UNLIKELY PLACES, he would think, and we usually only realise it in retrospect. He was sitting at the table by the window, using the last of the sunlight to read an old letter from Grete. Her intelligence came luminous off the page, reminding him of her witty intensity clothed in a broad, sensuous face and a body of marvellous amplitude. The reasons for being grateful to Grete were obvious, of course, and he had always known them.

  But he sometimes wondered what would have happened if Margaret Inglis hadn't rejected him that summer. He was so naively besotted with her he might never have seen past her. The fifties were not exactly a historical moment of free love, at least not in his experience, and your first fixation could swiftly be socially engineered into the probability of being your last.

  This reflection held no bitterness. Margaret had been right to reject him, although he couldn't help thinking she should have done it either a little earlier or a little later. He had to admit he remained somewhat critical of her timing. She was, he supposed later, one of those girls of the time who seemed to have been born with a blueprint of life like DNA. Obviously, screwing in the Kay Park wasn't included in that blueprint.

  He had learned to be grateful for that. If they had consummated the moment there in the Kay Park, his tendency to see sex as a kind of beautiful and bestial form of Holy Communion would have made it impossible for him to leave it there. And that would not have been good for either of them. Maybe it never had been good for him. (A woman had once told him, ‘You're the man who sets most store by the importance of physical love - as being more than just physical - that I've ever met.’) But, if so, he didn't regret it.

  But for Margaret that would have been an alien attitude. For her, communion belonged in church, where her father was an elder and she attended regularly. He wondered if, somewhere in the DNA, she had always known that all they had in common was physical attraction, when he had thought they might be kindred spirits. Perhaps she already saw in him the potential to be one of life's dishevelled vagrants, even though that vagrancy was still far in the future. Certainly, he suspected later, she had probably decided to close the door on random callers in her teens. She wanted her life consolidated, not disturbed.

  The last thing she said to him that summer tended to confirm him in this feeling. She repeated to him what she had said in the phone box: ‘You're too dangerous.’ He had briefly taken the remark away like a consolation prize, seeing himself through it as some kind of Heathcliff figure. But it wasn't long before he was talking to himself bitterly. Dangerous? The dangerous virgin? What is it Boris called that? Oxymoron? Still, maybe Senga told her about what happened to her skirt.

  The impression of Margaret as someone who would make life sign a contract hardened into conviction after he met her at a party when they were both in their late thirties. She was there with her husband. (Her late husband, as Tom found himself referring to him in his mind. Some wounds heal slow.)

  The man was a Clive Cunningham talk-alike, a bank manager with an ego as big as his vault. Margaret's conversation, when Tom talked to her, had become loud and long and phoney-hard. A presence which had seemed to him like a gulp of spring water appeared to have already reached the muddied flats of middle age and had a brackish taste. She complained about her husband while waving affectionately towards him. Tom had the suspicion that her marriage wasn't much of a job but the pay was good.

  The meeting depressed him and left him regretting what they had all become. The promise he believed she had once expressed just by being herself continued to haunt him for so long that he exorcised it in a poem, which was perhaps part-homage, part-revenge.

  Your talk a loud parade.

&nbs
p; Yourself a widow in a house it passes.

  Forgive me tenacious affections

  That worry the flesh of old times into bone.

  And it's maybe something like love

  To see that sheer girl

  In your blunted postures.

  My memory will be standing through cold nights,

  A lonely nuisance that police can't shift,

  Staring in moonlight at the window where

  Your head aches in its curlers and your man.

  Tupping and snoring, drowns in his own fat.

  Tipping its hat as you take in the milk.

  Its expression won't be utterly ironic.

  I shall remember who you might have been.

  But such retrospective gratitude to Margaret for rejecting him didn't mean he had forgotten the initial effects of that rejection, especially since it had been effected by remote control.

  After they had left the Kay Park, the imminence of Margaret's period had mysteriously lessened. She seemed to want the two of them to stay together for a while. They wandered the centre of the town through the early hours of morning. They looked in shop windows. They compared their tastes in furniture. They kissed and cuddled in doorways. They looked at the magazines in a newsagent's window and discussed their favourite film stars. He walked her home slowly and they stopped many times. At her house they arranged to meet again.

  She didn't turn up. His attempts to phone her house were always dealt with by her mother or father. Her mother always dropped the same phrase like a little piece of ice into his ear: ‘Not in.’ The rest was silence. Her father's responses were somewhat more extended and definitely more tropical. He breathed fire, threatening at different times visitations from someone he described darkly as ‘a very large friend’, the minister of his church and the police. He claimed to know an inspector in the force. Tam gave up before he gave the local fire brigade his address.

  But he haunted the streets, looking for Margaret. His mind was in turmoil. He needed to talk to her. He needed to know why she no longer wanted to see him. In his dementia he began to believe that the entire evening of the party at Caroline Mather's was an elaborate set-up, a conspiracy to get revenge on him for standing Margaret up that time. Had Caroline invited him at Margaret's suggestion? Has Margaret's dream been a ploy by which to turn him off after leading him on? Had that look she had given him, nodding towards outside, been a contrivance? Certainly, he didn't any longer believe she'd had her period that night. But this was ridiculous. He had explained to her about the plook and they had laughed about it together. He'd had an enormous plook on his nose. How could having a plook on your nose deserve all this? It was like bombing a butterfly. He'd heard of revenge tragedies. Could you get a revenge comedy? This was ridiculous. He was in love with her, for God's sake. Did that mean nothing? He had to talk to her.

  When he did, it was a very brief conversation. He saw Margaret and Margaret saw him as she was following her mother into a shop.

  ‘Margaret,’ he said.

  ‘You're too dangerous,’ Margaret hissed.

  ‘Margaret!’ her mother shouted. ‘If you don't come in here at once, I'll call the police.’

  People were looking at them. He walked on. He kept looking for her for days after that. But he felt ill-fated from that moment. He felt vulnerably abandoned. He didn't expect to be lucky. He was right.

  In his last week at the brickwork, Frank, who worked with Cran in the kiln, went off ill. The gaffer decided to replace him with Tam. It was the thing he dreaded most in his life, being trapped in the kiln with Cran. It was a prospect so frightening, he wished he could go in without being who he was, find a neutral identity for the night.

  IN THE KILN, he would think, you will find the very way you breathe threatened. The heat is too intense, as if you have entered an alien atmosphere and must wonder if you can survive in it. Soon you will have to peel off some of the clothes you have worn like social assumptions. This is a place for stripping to the skin. The heat is too intense. You will want out. But to do that you will have to leave your self-respect behind. You will have been judged and found wanting by others and, more importantly, by yourself, if you are honest. For this is a test. What is being tested is you. You will have no time for learning how to pass the test. It will always be new to you. You take it as it comes. The test is not simply to be there. The test is to be there and not lose yourself. No matter the pressure you feel, you must hold on to who you are or a part of you may be gone and may be difficult to get back. But it is not enough to hold on to who you are. You must at the same time try to do whatever else is required of you. There is always something else to be done besides the saving of yourself.

  AND CRAN IS THERE, guardian of his little bolgia. Cran is always there. For every thumbscrew there must be someone to turn it. This is his terrain, not yours. You may have studied Latin and Greek. He may have studied nothing more enlightening than the racing pages. You may know many big words from the dictionary but his grunts will outrank you here.

  This is not a place for poetry readings. Here it's all down to bodies and sweat and strength and manual skill. You live on his terms here. Those are hard terms.

  First, he refuses to help. You each bring your hutch of bricks into the kiln on the rails. You must then unload them and stack them in ranks one on top of the other like a lattice-work wall so that the hot air can pass among them. This must be done with speed and skill, so that the empty hutch can be outside the kiln in time for you to receive the next load of bricks.

  He does it effortlessly, making a wall so firm the spaces might as well have mortar in them, and stands watching. You cannot do it. The speedy precision required eludes you. Bricks fall off and you have to begin again. You start to imagine a line of loaded hutches stretching from the kiln to the brickwork by the end of the evening. Perhaps he is imagining the same, for he laughs.

  Fucking students,' he says.

  This will be his second rule for the shift. While you pour with sweat and struggle to keep pace with the arriving hutches, you will be obliged to listen to his comments. When you decide you have to take off your shirt, you are embarrassed by your frailness compared to his vast, overweight torso. He seems to have grown bigger. And the comments keep coming.

  ‘This isn't fucking theory. This is fact.’

  ‘This is where it really happens.'

  ‘Pathetic. Totally pathetic.’

  ‘Seen mair strength in an Abdine.’

  ‘Ye'll not find how to do this in a fucking book.’

  Certainly not in any you've read. Why does he hate you so much, you think self-pityingly. You hope your failure to respond to him isn't just fear. You try to persuade yourself it's because you need so much concentration to stay not too far behind the pace that there's nothing left with which to think up answers. But you're not convinced. If you could think of an answer, you'd swallow it. If that's how belligerent he is when you say nothing, what would he be like if you talked back to him? Why does there always have to be one bastard in any work you go to who decides it's part of his job to give you a hard time?

  You are sweating unbelievably. If you were thin enough to start with, you might disappear at this rate. You struggle on. You don't see how you can make it through the night.

  But by the time the tea-break comes, you're not as far behind as you had thought. Cran stands outside the door of the kiln, eating a sandwich the size of a Welma loaf and drinking a screwtop of beer. (He doesn't even sit down to eat?) You keep on working until you've emptied the two remaining hutches. You've just got time to put on your shirt, deliver the empty hutches and collect your piece. A mocking round of applause greets you as you collect your mug of tea.

  ‘Better goin’ to work on Senga than this. Tam, eh?'

  They don't know that your rating is about the same in both cases.

  ‘You okay?’ Jack Laidlaw asks quietly.

  ‘Okay? You gonny arrange to deliver the body to ma mother?’

  You'r
e not sure that you're joking, given the fierceness of Cran's antagonism. Will it increase during the second half of the shift? You're tempted to eat your piece and drink your tea here. But you decide to go back to the kiln. You don't know if this is courage or cowardice. Are you going in order to show him that you're not afraid of his presence or because you might annoy him with your absence?

  He has finished his break and is leaning against the doorway of the kiln, smoking and staring at you. You swallow the bread in doughy lumps, washed down with the tea. The second temptation is to return the cup when you're finished, collect your jacket and satchel and leg it home. That is maybe what you would do except that the first bogeys are already arriving.

  You slop out the remains of the tea, lay the cup against the wall of the kiln and, still chewing, collect the second hutch. Cran has claimed the first. You're dreading this.

  But something happens. Your pace has definitely quickened. It's not nearly as fast as Cran's, nowhere near, but by now this only means that Cran has leisure time and you don't. You are actually beginning to stay level with the hutches as they arrive. This is a good feeling. Your shirt is off again and you are still running with sweat but it doesn't feel so bad now. You are a workman who can do his job. This goes on for some time. You have found a rhythm. You think that the silence there has been for a while may mean that at last you have earned a little respect from Cran. This is a serious mistake.

  ‘Don't get carried away,’ Cran says. ‘Ye're still a useless bastard.’

  You know then that nothing you do or say is going to divert the enmity he has for you.

  ‘Useless bastard.’

  ‘But then ye're a Docherty.’

  You feel a chill beneath your sweat. You know that he is going to say anything he can either to call you out or make rubble of your sense of yourself. Why does he need to do this? But he does. He breaks the silence in which you are working by interjecting every so often with another insult to the Dochertys. You can almost hear the cracking of your own nerve. You hate the bastard for doing this to you, for making you ashamed of your own fear. You think of going to the foreman. You think of just walking out. But where will you walk to? How could you go into your own house carrying the shame of these unanswered insults? You hate the bastard. He isn't going to stop. You have to do something.