Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  Next morning I asked Ian to call the ship’s doctor, who entered the cabin and sat beside the bunk. He was an elderly friendly Scotsman, straight-spined, red-faced and silver-moustached. His uniform had several rings of braid round the cuffs. His speech was all sudden, decided statements interrupted by abrupt silences in which he sat erect, gripping his knees with his hands and looking at the air in front of his eyes. He felt my pulse, touched me with a stethoscope, agreed that I was asthmatic and went away. After a while a nurse came and gave me an intravenous injection which made me slightly better. Later that day Ian told me it was quite warm on deck and a whale had been sighted. The following day the doctor came back, sat erect beside me and asked how I felt. I said a bit better, I hoped to get up soon. He said abruptly, “How are your bowels?” I said I had no trouble with them. He sat in a tranced rigid silence for a while, then said suddenly, “Buy a tin of Eno’s salts from the ship’s store. Use them reguIarly,” and left.

  That night I developed an obstruction of the throat which coughing could not shift nor spitting reduce. Erotic images brought no relief though I tried to remember the most shameful parts of all the obscene things I had ever heard or read. Next day I asked again to see the doctor. He told me I had pneumonia and must be taken to the ship’s hospital. He left and then the medical orderly came with a wooden wheeled chair. I panicked while being put in it, my mind crumbled for a few moments and I became quite babyish. I was not slapped but I was shouted at. Then I made my body as tense in the chair as possible in order to hold the mind in one piece. I was trundled along narrow corridors into the hospital where the nurse and orderly put me in a real bed. I was able to be calmer there. The hospital was a neat, bright little room with four beds and small flower-patterned curtains round the portholes. I asked for an intravenous injection of adrenaline. The nurse explained that this would not help pneumonia. She tied a small oxygen cylinder to the head of the bed and gave me a mask connected to it by a rubber tube. This helped a little. The orderly brought a form, asked several questions and filled it in. My religion puzzled him. I said I was agnostic and his pencil dithered uncertainly above a blank space. I spelled the word out but he wrote down “agnoist”. Ian came and I dictated a letter to my father to be posted from Gibraltar. A radio telegram had been sent to him and I wanted to mitigate any worry it might cause. I noticed nothing special in lan’s manner but later he told me he had difficulty restraining his tears. The doctor had diagnosed pneumonia with probable tuberculosis, and said it would be a miracle if I reached Gibraltar alive. While we were at work on the letter the doctor entered with a man wearing a uniform like his own. This stranger looked on with a faint embarrassed smile while the doctor spoke to me in a loud and cheery bonhomous Scottish way. “Aye, Alasdair, keep your heart up!” he cried, “Remember the words of Burns: ‘The heart’s aye the part aye that maks us richt or wrang’.” “Just so, Doctor, just so,” I said, playing up to him. He told me that I would be shifted to a land-hospital next morning when the ship reached Gibraltar, meanwhile (and here he looked at the dial on my oxygen cylinder) I’d better go easy on the oxygen, I’d used up half a tube already and there was only one left in the store. The two visitors went away and the nurse told me the other man was the captain.

  After that life was hard for a while. I finished one oxygen cylinder and started on the last, which had forty minutes of comfortable breathing in it. It was difficult to disperse these forty minutes through the eighteen hours before we reached Gibraltar, sleep was impossible and I was afraid of becoming too tired to make myself breathe. During this time I was well cared for by the nurse and the orderly. She was a plain, slightly gawky, serious, very pleasant young woman. She gave me penicillin injections and clean towels to wipe away my sweat. The orderly was a blockily built smallish sturdy man with a clumsy amiable face. He gave me a large brandy at nine in the evening and another at midnight. I felt these two were completely dependable people. At one in the morning the doctor came in wearing dress uniform. I had never seen a celluloid shirt front before. He leant over the bed, breathed some fumes in my face and asked, with an effort at cheeriness, how I felt. I said I was afraid, and in pain. He indicated the oxygen mask, told me to use it if I got worse and hurried out. The cylinder was almost empty. When it was completely empty I rang the bell behind my bed. The orderly ran in at once in his pyjamas. I asked for more brandy, and got it. This did not lessen the pain but made me unable to think clearly about it. I may or may not have rung the bell for other brandies, my subsequent memories are muddled. I remember just one incident very clearly. The nurse entered wearing a flower-patterned long dressing-gown and seeming very beautiful. She looked at the empty cylinder, felt my brow then went away and brought in another cylinder. I laughed and shook her hand and I am sure she smiled. I felt an understanding between us: she and I were in alliance against something dismal. I don’t know if she had disobeyed the doctor in giving me the third cylinder. Maybe he had very few and wanted to keep a certain number in case someone else needed them later on the voyage.

  Later the ship’s engine stopped and I knew we were at Gibraltar. I think this was about five in the morning. I don’t recall who did it but I was shifted to a stretcher, wrapped up as snugly and tightly as an Egyptian mummy, carried into a bare kind of cabin and left on the floor. The stretcher had little legs which kept it above the planks. My breathing was easier now and I was beginning to feel comfortable. The doctor, in ordinary uniform, stood nearby looking out of a porthole. He was less drunk than when he had visited me in the night but mellow and communicative. I saw now that his erect abrupt manner disguised a wonderfully controlled, almost continual intoxication. I felt very friendly toward him and he toward me. He sighed and said, “There she is – Gibraltar – under the moon. I never thought to see her again, Alasdair, I forget how many years it is since I last saw her.”

  “Were you in practice ashore?”

  “This National Health Service is rotten Alasdair. Forms to be filled, paperwork, the pen never out of your hand. In the old days the doctor worked with a stethoscope in one hand and a s,s,s, a scalpel in the other. How do you feel?”

  “A lot better.”

  “You’ve come through a bad time, Alasdair, a very bad time .... a Catholic priest told me I was a lost soul last night.”

  He looked out of the porthole again then said, “I was married once. The girl died a month after the wedding.”

  “Do you think I could have another brandy?”

  “Would ye not like a whisky? I can give ye a good Glenlivet.”

  I won’t pretend the doctor used these exact words but he referred to these things in the order I have recorded them, and stuttered on the s of scalpel, making me imagine a surgical knife vibrating in a trembling fist. Later we heard the chugging of a small boat. He said, “That’s the lighter,” and went out and came in again with three seamen and a Spanish doctor, a broad, duffle-coated, rimless-spectacled, crew-cut, laconic man. He spoke quietly to the ship’s doctor, tested me with a stethoscope then left, refusing the offer of a drink. I heard the chugging of the boat going away.

  I was shifted into hospital later that morning in bright sunshine. I was still wrapped tightly on the stretcher with only my face exposed. I felt comfortable, privileged and so incurious I did not try to see anything not directly above my eyes. I saw a section of the high side of the ship against a pale blue sky. I heard a babble of voices and felt a hard cold breeze on my cheek. I think I recall the top of a white mast or flagstaff with a wind-taut flag on it. This must have been aboard the lighter. Sometimes my upward view was irregularly framed by downward-staring faces: the doctor, Ian, customs officers and strangers. Once the lined dry face of a middle-aged lady looked down for a moment, smiled and said, “l say, you hev hed a bit of bed luck, you’ve come rathah a croppah, heven’t you,” and some other terse kindly things full of English-hunting-field stoicism. I liked her for her kindness, and for being so easy to classify. I saw the wooden ceiling of a customs sh
ed, the low steel ceiling of an ambulance, and then, after a ten-minute sound of fast uphill car travel, the cream ceiling of a hospital vestibule. In this way I arrived in Gibraltar without seeing the rock. Indeed, since leaving London, I had only once seen the sea, through portholes, during the first breakfast afloat. I was now put to bed under a suspended bottle of cortisone solution, which dripped down through a rubber tube into my arm. I was visited by the hospital chief, the laconic doctor who had examined me on board the ship. He said, “You are suffering, of course, from a bad but perfectly ordinary asthma attack. I was sure of that as soon as I saw you this morning, but could not say so. You understand, of course, that it is against professional etiquette to question the decision of a colleague.”

  The ward was three times longer than broad with eight beds to each long wall. The wall facing me was all window from pillow-level to ceiling. I saw through it a glassed-in veranda containing a few beds and beyond that the water of a wide bay. The hospital stood high up so steep a slope that I could see only the top of the building in front, two elegant towers faced with biscuit-coloured plaster. Far beyond and below these the bay had several sorts of ship moored in it, protected by long breakwaters with cranes on them. Distance made the ships look too small even to be useful toys while the breakwaters, exceptional bits of engineering to surround such a great body of water, seemed a few lines of forlorn geometry drawn upon it. The far side of the bay was all hills and small mountains with the whitish jumble of a town along the coast at their foot. This was Spain.

  Although the head doctor was Spanish the routine and discipline of the hospital was British, the matron was a Scot, and of the three sisters two were English and one Welsh. The nurses were small plump Spanish or Gibraltarian girls, and most of the patients were Gibraltarian: that is, bilingual Spaniards who lived on the rock. They were inclined to be middle-aged and gaunt. There was a Velazquez-type dwarf called Paco with a calm, smooth, dignified face and slightly amused mouth. He would stand beside a bed resting his folded arms on it and talking quietly to the occupant in Spanish, or just leaning his brow on his folded arms. To my right was Major Mellors, elderly, gaunt and hawk-nosed. Facing me across the ward was Sigurdson, a taciturn humorous ship’s mate from Lancashire. I learned the names and manners of these people gradually. The inmates of a hospital ward observe their neighbours closely but avoid, at first, contacting them, for each is too engrossed by their own illness to want the burden of sympathizing with someone else.

  During my first week in hospital I was visited regularly by lan, who had taken lodgings in Gibraltar, but after finding I was out of danger he set off into Spain. He was going to the village of Estepona a few hours journey up the coast, for he had heard good reports of it. He meant to find decent rooms there, settle in, and I would join him when I left the hospital. I made him take two pounds to compensate him for some of the money he had lost by the delay. The day after he left for Spain I was surprised to see him enter the ward. He sat by my bed and explained that he did not like Spain.

  “It’s so unhygienic, Alasdair. I got off the bus at Estepona and set out to find a place to stay, but the flies! I travelled everywhere inside this cloud of flies. I mean, it was ridiculous. And the children who kept following me, begging, were almost as hard to shake off. And everybody stared. I mean, they didn’t do it sideways or behind your back, they stood still in the street and really looked at you. I found a place. I won’t describe the sanitation because there wasn’t any. I went out for a drink with a bloke I had met in the bus. We went into a bar and ordered wine at the counter. Before pouring it out the barman put down two wee plates each with a wee dirty bit of fish on it. I mean, we were expected to eat that. The counter was filthy – nothing was properly clean. I mean, outside the village you get these farm buildings with nice white walls, very picturesque. And when you go near you see the ground covered with little heaps of shit. They must just have squatted in the shadow to get rid of it.”

  “What was the countryside like?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s picturesque all right. I mean, it’s beautiful in a queer way. You get these low brownish hills in the dusk with a line of donkeys and their riders going along the top against a fantastic sunset. I mean it might grow on you. But I realize now that what I want to paint is in Scotland. I don’t think I’ve wasted my money if I’ve discovered that. I think l’ll use what’s left to do some painting up the East coast, in Fife or Angus. Maybe I’ll call in at Paris on the way home.”

  I won’t pretend l used these exact words but he talked in that style and mentioned these things. Three days later he got on a boat which took him to France.

  I was not unhappy in that hospital. The staff kept pain out of me with doses and injections. I was nursed, fed and allowed to live completely to myself. The homesickness seemed to have been burned out by my experience aboard ship. Sometimes a faint “Over the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, my heart remembers how” feeling drifted through my mind like faint smoke, but that was romantic nostalgia, nothing like the earlier sick hunger for Glasgow and those I knew there. This new equanimity came partly from the routine of hospital, which was familiar to me, but there was another reason.

  A few years earlier I had begun work on a tragicomical novel and meant to write some more of it in Spain. In my luggage was a Cantablue Expanding Wallet, a portable cardboard filing cabinet shaped like an accordion and holding two complete chapters and the notebooks and diaries from which I meant to make the rest. I put this on my bedside locker and began working. I was slightly ashamed of this activity, which struck me as presumptuous and banal: presumptuous because, like Scott Fitzgerald, I believed the novel was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, which meant that a novelist needed to understand great states of feeling, and although twenty-three years old I had never known carnal love and feared I never would; banal because one or two friends had also started writing a novel, and the rest had thought of writing one. So when the nurses asked what I was doing I lied and told them I was writing this report. But actually I was in Glasgow, the Glasgow of my childhood and adolescence and studenthood, and far more at home there than when I underwent these painful states, for now my mind hovered above the person I had been in perfect safety, without affection but with great curiosity. I found that person unpleasant but comic and was fascinated by the things and people it knew. My world was confused, shabby and sad, but had as much order, variety, good feeling and potency as any other. I tried to write an ordinary, easily-read language which showed the sadness and shabbiness but made the other things (which keep us alive) equally evident. While I worked at this writing I enjoyed the best happiness of all, the happiness which does not notice itself, until, stopping, we feel tired and see that an hour has passed like a minute, and know we have done as well as we can, and perhaps one day someone will be glad. I am sure this happiness is not rare. Everyone feels a little of it who makes or keeps something useful in the world, and does not just work for money and promotion. I suspect there is more of this happiness among skilled manual workers than in higher income groups, who have other satisfactions.

  I was not shut completely into my head. I often looked out across the bay. Hospitals are generous with pillows to their asthmatic patients and I could see the coast of Spain without raising my head. On bright afternoons a few long wisps of white vapour would trickle up into the sky from wide-apart points on the sides of the mountains. Perhaps it was a memory of old fairy-tales that made me think this smoke came from the huts of charcoal-burners. I tried to imagine myself wandering there and totally failed. Gibraltar has one of the Mediterranean’s moister climates and the view was often blotted out by low cloud. I also had an understanding with Major Mellors based upon definite but minimum communication. During the morning I might say, “Was it all right to tip the barber?”

  “Yes. How much did you give him?”

  “Ninepence.”

  “That was too much.”


  In the afternoon he might remark, on a wistful note, “l wonder how my garden’s getting on.”

  “ls there nobody looking after it?”

  “Oh yes, my servant Ali.”

  “Won’t he look after it properly?”

  “Oh yes, he’s very good with flowers.”

  But the most sociable time was between the half-past-five cup of tea and the seven o’clock breakfast when Sister Price sat at a table at our end of the ward. She was bright and talkative, and Sigurdson and the Major and l would interject and pass comments which seemed to us all increasingly witty and humorous. Yet l cannot now recall a single thing we said. The base of the conversation was four very different people wanting to enjoy and please each other and succeeding. For the rest of the day we were friendly in a quiet way which later struck me as British, or even European, when Mr Sweeney arrived.

  He was the first mate of a big American ship and was put in an empty bed beside Sigurdson. Had his flesh been firm he would have been a broad tough middle-aged man, but his cheeks were pouchy, he had a pouch under each eye, when not talking his mouth drooped to the left as if his muscles only kept hold of the right-hand corner. But he was usually talking because he could only think aloud. We learned he had a wife in America he seemed not to like much, and a daughter called Baby, living with the wife, whom he liked a great deal. “She’s well over forty, she’s twice divorced, but she’ll always be my Baby.”