THE MAGIC TERMINUS
MY LIFE HAS CONTAINED VERY LITTLE PAIN. Even in childhood the worst I endured was boredom. My parents wanted dull lives because their own had been too exciting. They had belonged to an unemployed industrial class and lived in a slum in fear of having their dole money cut and in equal fear of sectarian violence. My dad’s family were Protestant bigots, my mum’s equally bigoted Catholics, and joined in matrimony were equally disliked by most of their neighbours. World War 2 greatly improved things, bringing employment, fixed wages, regular meals at the price of some danger. Dad fought in North Africa, was injured by a fragment of shrapnel, then found a safer job in the army pay corps. Mum was directed into an underground explosive factory. When reunited after the war he started working in Clydebank for Singer Sewing Machines, she became a steady housewife. I was born when politicians of every party wanted Britain to be a Welfare State for everyone. Only those who had enjoyed great pre-war privileges found this boring, and young folk like me who had never known worse times. I matured before The Beatles were famous and being a teenager became exciting.
But the dull routines of home and school were made bearable by steady doses of art. There were two local cinemas within an easy walk from our home and half a dozen others a cheap tram ride away, so Mum and Dad and me saw three or four films a week – not unusual in these mainly pre-television days – and I saw more, being in the ABC Children’s Saturday Film Club. I recently reread The Moviegoer, a novel about a lawyer in New Orleans who says the greatest moments of his life were not his love affairs, but when Gary Cooper straps on his guns and goes out to face the villains in High Noon, or when a cat runs across a dark lane, rubs herself against someone, and a spot of light briefly shows the sinister, slightly babyish smile of Orson Welles in the part of Harry Lime. My own best moments were when a whirling black tornado sucks the grey wooden shack of Dorothy’s home up into the sky – when she sees through the window a cow bobbing past, two men rowing a canoe, a bicycle pedalled through the air by the nasty woman who stole Dorothy’s dog Toto – when that woman and bike transform into witch on broomstick before the house crashes down – when Dorothy opens the door, and steps out of the grey monochrome bedroom into the full Technicolor land of Oz. In the local public library I found other exciting adventure stories, sometimes horrific but always safer than games played in the school playground. I am not a coward but have always avoided pointless risks. My favourite books had magic openings through which children not unlike me found wonderlands like those Alice entered through a rabbit hole and looking glass. I read Masefield’s Midnight Folk and Box of Delights, also an Enid Blyton series about children finding secret passages into The Valley of Adventure, Castle of Adventure, Island of Adventure, Mountain of Adventure. I read several times Dan Billany’s The Magic Door about an unruly class of primary school children with a silly teacher, Mr Rocket. One of the class finds a bronze doorknocker that, banged on any wall, creates a door into the past through which they meet Julius Caesar, King Arthur and prehistoric monsters. I would have enjoyed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but it was published when I had outgrown childish stories.
Visiting the library had an advantage over seeing films with Mum and Dad, because on the way home together we always cheerily discussed what we had seen, but never referred to erotically suggestive episodes that nowadays would hardly bring a blush to the cheek of the most innocent child. But they greatly excited me in ways I could only enjoy remembering when completely alone, so visits to the library were often more satisfactory. Here I filled my head with exotic fantasies whose only hero was me, daydreams so engrossing that I sometimes woke from them to find I had walked home with no memory of crossing roads busy with traffic. I would have been knocked down had a part of my mind not been unconsciously guiding me by noticing the traffic and traffic signals. It is commonplace for habitual actions to free our minds by becoming automatic, but the extent of my subconscious guidance was unusual, and I found it could be enlarged. Mum told me I had annoyed her friends by not answering their greetings and acting as if they did not exist when I passed them in the street. I promised this would not happen again. It did not. I still returned from the library in a complete daydream, but now unconsciously smiled back and exchanged conventional greetings with her friends.
Ever since I have enjoyed more and more imaginative freedom by making more and more conduct automatic. This meant deliberately learning the fewest words and actions that satisfy employers, after which I could forget and perform them in perfect intellectual freedom because I was truly living elsewhere in daydreams I absolutely controlled. At first their geography was banal and escapist with ancient castles, Oriental cities, Pacific islands, Tarzan jungles and Sherwood forests peopled by ruthless kings, mad scientists, American crime bosses and women who wore very little clothing. Between rising in the morning and undressing for bed at night, the minutes when I noticed what others thought reality added up to less than an hour, and only happened when occasional accidents required me to show initiative. I easily passed school examinations, automatically absorbing and regurgitating formulas I was given. Students who failed had either bad memories or a habit of thinking for themselves.
Life since then has been the maintenance of intellectual freedom through work needing no intelligent initiative. I found less than might have been expected in the army, when boys of eighteen were conscripted for two years of National Service. Obeying military rule and orders came easily to me. I must have been robust in those days because I hardly noticed the square-bashing that afterwards left other squaddies exhausted and cursing. This made me unpopular because they thought my indifference to what they most resented was a display of social superiority. Word got about that my father was a senior army officer I had quarrelled with, and that after this spell in the ranks I would enrol for Sandhurst. I became victim of practical jokes too painful to ignore. They stopped after I had thrashed two of the worst bullies. After that I was unpopular but generally ignored, however the continual forced intimacy of barrack life was often hard to shut out. One day I was summoned to an interview with an officer who suggested I apply for an officers’ training course. I told him that giving orders would distract me far more than receiving them, and I would be as unwelcome in an officers’ mess as I was among privates because I did not want friends to distract me. “Distract you from what?” he asked. He obviously meant well and seemed intelligent, so I explained the scope of my imaginary worlds at that time – a cluster of planets combining ideas got from H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon and Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, along with some of my own. He listened carefully then passed me to an army psychiatrist who discharged me as unfit for military service.
I then trained as an engineer, mistakenly thinking that those who design machines can also work mechanically. This was partly true at the lowest drawing-board level where the main distraction was office camaraderie. I managed to ignore that, achieving a smooth efficiency that soon led to promotion. In the headquarters of a firm making hydraulic engines I found myself discussing with three others the best design for a casing that must (1) be securely attached by screws and brackets that would not interfere with an interior motor, (2) be easily opened when the motor needed serviced, (3) be easily cleaned, (4) and look good. The discussion of how to satisfy all these requirements was so trivial, boring and endless that I muttered, “Use a tough transparent plastic bubble. Stick it on with polymonochloropolytetrafluroethyline adhesive. When necessary the operator can smash it off with a hammer and stick on a cheap replacement.”
I was joking so they laughed until the boss said, “Excellent! Our entire approach has been out of date. Your idea obviously needs refining but you are due for further promotion, my son.”
So I left that firm and went north to Aberdeen and the oil rigs. Another mistake. Safety is impossible on these structures if you don’t keep looking out for potential accidents. The only industrial jobs I found that paid steady wages for truly mindless toil were on
assembly lines. The best was at a belt carrying chocolate biscuits out of a slot to where I tapped them with a little rod, changing their position so that they passed easily through another slot. A newer machine made that job redundant. For years I attached windscreen wipers in a car factory assembly line that eventually closed like every other productive Scottish business. And then I did what I should have done at first: trained as a teacher.
The subject I chose was Careers Guidance, for I thought my previous experience of several different jobs would be helpful. Wrong again. Everyone else on the course had entered straight from secondary school and were learning Careers Guidance without knowing any other career. But at last I have found the social haven I always wanted. It is a small office in a vast secondary school serving a fifth of Glasgow. Single pupils arrive at twenty-minute intervals throughout the day, each leaving at least five minutes before the next. I ask automatic questions provoking predictable answers that I record by ticking boxes in a standard form. The outcome is always one of seventeen suggestions because there are only seventeen courses possible for people leaving this school. My desk contains a small larder and electric kettle so I need not visit a staff room during tea-breaks and the lunch hour, so apart from the Headmaster and his secretary hardly anyone else in the staff here knows I exist. I will tell you a secret. There is a cupboard in this office to which only I have a key. I have cut down a mattress to exactly cover the floor, where I can now sleep comfortably curled in a foetal position. Since travel to and from the office became pointless I gave up my lodgings, got rid of everything but a few essentials, brought these here and have since never left. I have keys that let me leave and return once a week with essential shopping. The janitor suspects I am here at unauthorised times but pretends not to know because I tip him well. Nothing – not even hostile applicants for careers guidance – interfere with my work of preventing old-fashioned catastrophes.
Many years ago, sick of fictional fantasy, my imaginary worlds became wholly shaped by real history and biography. I now know enough to travel back in time and, using no magic or miracles but my knowledge of the future and some basic physical science, give a few key people enough knowledge to prevent disease and warfare. Using freak tempests and tampering with his compass I stopped Columbus crossing the Atlantic and brought him to the coast of China, which he had set out to find. Europe learned of America in the following century when I had prepared the Mexican and Aztec civilizations to resist conquest by acquainting them with firearms and domesticated horses and vaccines that immunized them against European diseases. The rulers, alas, continued using human sacrifice as a means of limiting their populations, but no Native Americans were exterminated by foreigners and African slaves were never brought to the New World. I am currently preventing the miseries of the British Industrial Revolution by helping James Watt’s son (a hitherto neglected historical figure who favoured the French Revolution) to develop clean hydro-electric power so efficiently that by 1850 coal furnaces, steam engines, gas lightings and black Satanic mills were banished from Britain. I have no time to say more about this, except that I am free to enter any room at any time in the past through any door I choose, and I am always welcomed as an entertaining and useful friend by many splendid people, mostly still famous nowadays.
But I must use great care to choose the right door when leaving any of these rooms in the past. I must summarise a short story by H.G. Wells to explain why. I read it when a child and it starts with a child, an unhappy little boy, an orphan lost in a dull London street. Here he finds a strange door admitting him to a sunlit garden where a lovely lady accompanied by tame leopards treats him wonderfully well, making him perfectly happy and at home. She then shows him an album with bright pictures of people who seem to be his parents with a baby which, as it grows older, becomes more like himself as he is now. She turns the pages until at last, fascinated, he sees the picture of himself in the street outside the magic door. She is reluctant to show him the next page but he insists, and when the page turns he is back outside in the street. That garden and woman become his most precious memory. He grows up into a man both rich and powerful, twice glimpsing the door again, but always in a wall he is passing on the way to a meeting that will advance his career or, if he does not arrive on time, completely damage it. Whenever he seeks the door after the meetings it cannot be found. He becomes a famous politician at the end of the 19th century when even these used the London Underground, and dies by stepping off a platform in front of a train for no known reason. The story suggests he thought he was stepping through the illusory door, and may have found his lovely garden and spiritual mother on the other side of death. Superstitious rot.
I always hated that end of a fascinating story. I did not want the garden to be an illusion. But when taking leave of a friend in the past nowadays – Jane Welsh Carlyle, William Blake, Charles II or Shakespeare – I usually find a door that is neither part of the room itself or the one by which I re-enter this office. It attracts me strangely though I know it leads to nothing, and when I go through I will go completely out like a candle flame.
MISOGYNIST
CHILDHOOD MAY CONTAIN everyone’s happiest times, though it is hard to live without looking forward to better. That must be why many poor souls believe in heaven. When nearly all British homes were heated by coal fires, I would sprawl on the hearthrug at my mother’s feet, warm and safe, playing with treasures from the Button Box while she knitted and read politely romantic stories in The People’s Friend. The Box was made of solid wood, about a foot square and nine inches high, with a hinged lid. It held buttons of all sizes and colours, beads from broken necklaces, earrings and brooches of what seemed rich jewels but were really coloured glass. There were also dominoes that must have come from grandparents or uncles who died before my birth, since nobody in our house played that game. Some were wooden and black apart from spots of many colours. The rest were pale bone or ivory with black spots, though smaller and more numerous – they went up to double nines instead of double sixes. I arranged the dominoes like the walls of a castle with a city round it where I was king. To mark my royalty Mum pinned to my jersey three medals from the Box, medals with vivid ribbons given to my father for no special action but being in the British army from 1914 to 1918. I then put the brightest jewels in my castle’s inmost rooms, and arranged the buttons in the streets outside, pretending they were admiring subjects and regiments of soldiers. Brass buttons were the officers, big coat buttons commanded enemy troops who, after battles, became prisoners in my dungeons or slaves in my factories. Amber and mother-of-pearl beads were princesses to be rescued, though after rescue I could not imagine what to do with them. These power games made me perfectly happy.
Late in the afternoon Mum would sigh, go to the kitchen and prepare the evening meal because Dad would soon arrive. I thought him a red-faced interruption with too loud a voice.
“Well!” he would say, entering and rubbing his hands. “How did things go today?”
Sometimes Mum mentioned a bit of gossip she had heard from a neighbour but usually she sighed and shrugged. Dad, looking down on my hearthrug, would say something like, “Well, General, what battles have you won today?”
I never answered. Over the evening meal Dad told us what he thought an amusing event from his work that day. He was a bookie when that profession was mostly illegal in Britain. Years later he and I became friends and I learned he had only told Mum the least interesting, most innocuous events that befell him. She disliked how he earned his money, though never complained of it. Dad was perhaps always slightly drunk when he came home, which added to Mum’s displeasure but made life easier for him. When in bed at night I heard sounds from the living room that were mostly television noises, but sometimes his mumbling voice produced sharp exclamatory notes from Mum. I once heard her yell, “I will not see a doctor!”, and another time, “I will not let you put me away!”
That was before I went to school, learned to please my teachers, make friend
s and play competitive games. Happy times became shorter but maybe more intense. Having no nostalgia for the old hearthrug game I found my mother’s company more and more embarrassing. Education made me a man like many others. I was in the last generation of smart exam-passers who, though children of common labourers, tradesmen, or shopkeepers like Margaret Thatcher, went to university without getting into debt. In the 1970s such graduates were sure of good jobs, so (if by nothing else) I pleased my mother by getting one in local government. Her death soon after was no surprise. She had obviously been sick for years.
On leaving the crematorium I saw Dad did not share the general relief most folk at once feel after a funeral. We went to a pub and had a drink together. This cheered him so little that I blurted, “Why did you love her, Dad?” – a coarse question prompted by recalling no sign that Mum had ever loved him. He understood me and said, “Your mother was once a lovely wee girl, and witty, with a very funny sharp tongue. Of course marriage changed her like it changes us all. When you were born she had what they call post-natal depression, but hers never went away. Her life might have been better if a doctor had seen her. Diabetes isn’t usually fatal nowadays, but doctors terrified her – she was afraid they would put her in hospital. She might have been happier if I had loved her less. Many women prefer the sort of men who don’t like them much. My own Dad was that sort. I hated him. Face the fact son: women cannot help being miserable most of the time. Decent husbands don’t complain. I’m no masochist, but I would rather be a hen-pecked wimp than a hen-pecking bully or a wife beater and – ” (he showed signs of cheering up) “ – my life has not been one long disappointment. I enjoy my job.”
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 70