Fergus Lamont Page 11

  The fist she shook at me was hostile yet in some way kin.

  Once she had summoned the police to deal with her man who had beaten her worse than usual. Blood was pouring from her nose. When they were dragging him off to jail she had attacked them with her shoe. I had laughed, but not any more cruelly than the other boys watching.

  Your auntie’s deeing,’ she cried. ’When did you last pay her a visit?’

  The reproof was justified. I had not been to see Aunt Bella and Uncle Tam for years.

  The other women comforted and scolded her all at once, in their characteristic way.

  ‘This is nono’ the time to bring that up, Aggie,’ they cried. ‘It’s true Bella Pringle’s deeing, and he’s never been to see her; but if he deserves punishment for that, he’ll be punished, don’t you worry. Wars were made for the likes o’ him. Either he’ll come back wi’ medals, or wi’ an airm or leg missing, or maybe he’ll no’ come back at a’, for snobs get killed as weel as decent men. So let’s wish him weel, Aggie.’

  All the time, as they were patting and hushing her, they were giving me winks, as an indication that I wasn’t to take seriously what they were saying, though they meant every word of it.

  TWENTY

  I was never a glib passer of examinations or smug collector of prizes and certificates. For generations in Scotland bursary-winners and gold medallists have passed out of the schools and universities, fixed in the belief that nothing has a value that cannot be marked out of a hundred. This is the reason why the Scots have failed as artists and patriots, but succeeded as engineers and theologians. Before a man can enjoy fully the singing of blackbirds, or understand his country’s history, it is necessary for him to have felt, when a child at school, the mortification of scoring less than fifty per cent.

  In my final year the dux prize for English was withheld from me by Mr Birkmyre and awarded to a nonentity called Wotherspoon, who became a teacher and, later, a headmaster.

  There was never any question of my proceeding to university, like Mary. Apart from my not having high enough passes in sufficient subjects to be entitled to a certificate of fitness, as it was called, I had no wish to go where originality and enthusiasm would be quenched. Besides, as Major Holmes pointed out, for the purpose of establishing myself as a gentleman and aristocrat, no Scottish university would have done: it had to be Oxford or Cambridge, or nothing. It was true, he admitted, that when war broke out and I tried for a commission, having been a member of a University otc might be helpful; but there again, since I would naturally wish to be accepted by some pukka regiment and not by makeshift territorials, it would probably be better not to have been in the otc at all than in one attached to a provincial university, with the possible exception of St Andrew’s, which was half-English, and of which the Major himself was a Master of Arts.

  Therefore I took the job of reporter on the Gantock Herald, in spite of a letter sent secretly to Mr Kelso, its owner and editor, by Mr Birkmyre, warning him that I could not spell or punctuate correctly, and used vulgar language. Thus, while waiting for war to liberate me, I wrote descriptions, in suitably emasculated and edentate prose, of small local events. At the same time, in Major Holmes’s flat, I kept practising my landed gentry accent, and in other ways prepared myself for the election board, which, no matter where it sat, would consist of officers not likely to know anything about Gantock.

  It was decided that I would give my address as Siloam House, hinting that its policies extended for many acres. I would also let it be supposed that I had a small estate in the Hebrides. This, like the rest of my story, was not entirely false. There was a croft belonging to the McGilvrays in Oronsay that might one day come to me.

  It would never do to confess that my mother had drowned herself: gentlemanliness and tragedy were irreconcilables. I would simply say, if asked, that she had died when I was a child. It would not do either to have it known that my foster father was a joiner. Therefore we promoted John Lamont to doctor, basing him on John and Cathie Calderwood’s father, of whom I acquired a photograph, just in case. At some opportune moment I would let drop the information that my real father was the son of the Earl of Darndaff. I would let it be assumed that I often visited Corse Castle. Using my imagination, and with the help of some pictures in a magazine, I should be able to display some knowledge of the place.

  Everything would depend on whether or not their first glance at me convinced the selection board officers that I was a gentleman and therefore one of them. If it did, they would not pry; if it did not, they would be after me with the zeal and, fortunately, the brainlessness of huntsmen after a fox.

  Not only would they not be clever themselves, they would be very distrustful of cleverness in others. Eccentric opinions, however, would not be frowned on; indeed, they would be approved, provided they were not too articulately and coherently expressed.

  Since the British Army was made up almost entirely of working class men, my knowledge of these would be regarded as an asset. I would not be so foolish, though, as to let it be known I had acquired that knowledge by living among them. It would be easy enough to give the impression that I knew them in the way every gentleman knew his servants, or a conscientious and kindly keeper his monkeys.

  The Major was confident that that quality in me, which caused urchins to yell ‘Lord Muck’, would, properly controlled, have me recognised and welcomed as a ‘demn good chep’ in any officers’ mess.

  Since it was part of every gentleman’s education to be able to ride, I spent hours learning in a field near McSherry’s Wood, on a fat horse called Jock, that usually pulled a farmer’s trap.

  When war was declared in August, 1914, and appeals were made for young men to join the army, few were readier than I. But I could not afford to be in a hurry to enlist. I had to wait while Major Holmes made soundings and wrote letters. To that extent, therefore, it could have been said I was not so precipitately patriotic as Smout McTavish.

  I was among those at the station seeing Smout off. His mother was weeping. A believer in spiritualism, she was being consoled by others of that faith: if her Willie was killed, she would still be able to keep in touch with him in the hall in Thurso Street.

  I remembered how, once, when a boy, seeing flies stuck to flypaper hanging from the pulley in her kitchen, I had remarked that Hindus believed flies had souls. Mrs McTavish had stared at them in horror, wondering whether she should pick off those still moving. Perhaps there in the station she had a vision of the war as a gigantic flypaper suspended from the sky, to which millions of men, among them her Willie, were stuck, bodies and souls together.

  Mrs Grier was there, and other women who had known him all his life. They were fond of him, they had brought him presents, but they could not help letting it be known that in their view there were hundreds of men in Gantock with far more urgent reason than he to be grateful to king and country. They had big villas to defend, he a single-end. (This was pardonable exaggeration: the McTavishes had long ago moved into a room-and-kitchen.) Thus they reasoned, aloud, but it was obvious they were proud of him for going before his turn. There being no word in their vocabulary, or in anyone else’s, for a hero who was also a mug, they were obliged to season their admiration with disapproval.

  I shook hands with him. He hardly came up to my shoulders. He would be given jobs like peeling potatoes or cleaning latrines.

  ‘Good luck, Smout.’

  He was embarrassed. ‘Thanks, Fergus. Good luck to you.’

  Then I was pushed aside by women wanting to pat his shoulder or shake his hand or tweak his cheek or, in one case, kiss him. I was astonished. I had not known that he and Jessie McFadyen were sweethearts. I had not known either that Jessie, bonny as ever, had apparently at long last caught up with her runaway wits, like a boy his girr. Kissing Smout she looked, in the Scots phrase, as ‘wice-like’ as any lass whose lad is off to war.

  Not everyone agreed with me. After the train had gone and we were leaving the station I overhea
rd a woman say to another—I knew neither, they weren’t from Lomond Street—that the war would be a blessing for Willie McTavish if it saved him from marrying poor Jessie McFadyen, who as a wean couldn’t keep her nose clean and as a young woman couldn’t keep her legs shut. The other woman agreed, and added that the war was going to be a blessing to a lot more, particularly shopkeepers: wasn’t it scandalous how the price of eggs had shot up already?

  TWENTY-ONE

  On Sunday morning I was at the station again, this time waiting for Mary Holmscroft. Now a teacher in Glasgow, she came to Gantock almost every weekend to visit her family and the Calderwoods. That day’s journey would be a bitter one for her, not only because the German workers had let her down, but also because the train she sat in belonged to the nation, the railways having been nationalised that very week: not, alas, for the benefit of the people, but for the convenience of the army. She would not enjoy that irony. Her bag would be heavy with books and pamphlets showing how war could be abolished and a socialist Utopia achieved. She would not enjoy that irony either.

  As she walked slowly along the platform her face was tragic, and she seemed to be in pain. She could have been taken for a young Belgian woman raped by Germans.

  She let me take her bag. ‘I thought you’d be at church, praying for victory.’

  A patriotic service was being held that morning in the Auld Kirk. The pulpit would be draped with a Union Jack. The Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Baidland, was to be present. So was every influential Christian in the town, unless he happened to be a Catholic. I intended to be there myself.

  ‘Haven’t you joined up yet?’ she asked.

  ‘No. But Smout has.’

  ‘You mean Willie McTavish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does he think he has that the Kaiser wants?’

  I could have replied: ‘His honour as a free man. His right to stand up against tyranny.’ But I was merciful. I refrained too from reminding her that it wasn’t the Kaiser in person who was robbing and killing Belgians, it was German workers carrying out his orders.

  We were approaching Auchmountain Square. It was crowded with spectators watching the dignitaries arrive at the church. From his high pedestal Burns looked down, with the usual seagull on his head. Pigeons strutted and curtseyed about. They reminded me of Uncle Tam and Aunt Bella. I had not been to see her yet. I probably never would.

  The Auld Kirk was the heart of Gantock. There had been a church on its site from the days of William Wallace. It was recorded in the town’s history that the people had gathered there in 1314 to demand help from God in driving out the insolent English. Perhaps, though, being medieval Catholics and not twentieth century Protestants, they had not demanded but had humbly asked, on their knees on the earth floor.

  Arriving in his carriage with his wife was Kirkhope, the grocer: he owned half a dozen shops in the town. A woman in the crowd accused him angrily of having put up the prices of food. A small pompous man in a tile hat (years later he became Lord Kirkhope) he seemed about to deliver a lecture on the necessity of profiteering in wartime. His wife, stalwart in an expensive dark red costume, pushed him on up the steps into the church.

  Two other carriages appeared. From one descended Cargill the lawyer and his wife and three daughters, from the other Ettrick, managing director of a firm that made hawsers.

  ‘“The murderers of your mother. The betrayers of Scotland,”’ said Mary. ‘Do you still call them that, now you’re on their side?’

  I had meant to leave her there and go into the church, but I felt I had to give her an answer first.

  I still believed, or rather felt as a poet, that Kirkhope, Cargill, and Ettrick, and their kind had throughout the centuries set up in Scotland a morality that put the ability to pay far in front of the necessity to forgive and love. I also thought that just as the bourgeoisie in 1707 had sold Scotland to the English for the sake of bigger profits, so their counterparts today still kept up that profitable betrayal. Mary was wrong to say I was on their side: they opposed the Germans on behalf of the British Empire, I on behalf of Scotland.

  I was on the side of aristocracy: it was not corrupted by the urge to make more and more money; and of the working-class, who had been poor for so long that they had learned how to make life rich with little money.

  I was aware of course that these attitudes of mine might appear contradictory, especially to a doctrinaire socialist.

  I found myself walking beside her up Moray Street, away from the square and the kirk.

  ‘Don’t look so pleased,’ she said. ‘If you could stop the war by snapping your fingers you wouldn’t, would you? It’s the chance you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? Once you leave Gantock you’ll never come back, will you? It’ll cause you not one qualm if you never see John Lamont again, or Bessie, or Mr and Mrs Pringle, or even Cathie, your wonderful Cathie. Will it?’

  That wasn’t the first time she had accused me of hardness of heart, but never before had she done it so bitterly.

  It used to be Aunt Bella’s opinion that I lacked affection. It was still Bessie’s.

  Aunt Bella was dying, and I had not been to see her. Yet she had been kind to me when I was a child. So had Uncle Tam. It wasn’t just snobbishness that had kept me away. I still visited Lomond Street, and talked to women at the closemouths. Why then did I have this mean determination not to go to 91 Kirn Street, first landing, door on the left?

  Mary herself gave me the answer.

  We stopped at the close in Mavis Street, where her family lived.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fergus,’ she said.

  I was taken aback. I had expected another attack, not an apology.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that. About your leaving Gantock and not coming back. You’ve got a right to hate the place. War’s a lot simpler. You just name the enemy and then try to kill as many as you can. When it’s your own people that harm you, you’ve just got to suffer it, there can be no victories then. Ask Meg Jeffries.’

  She really meant: Ask Mary Holmscroft.

  I was confused. I wanted to protest that I didn’t hate Gantock, that on the contrary I loved the town, particularly the East End, about which I intended one day to write great poetry; but I was held back by something, difficult to name.

  On the wall beside me I noticed chalk scribbles: ‘PL loves NT’; and ‘Deos he fuk.’ Such accusations of love, and such coarse denials, could be seen on all the walls round about.

  ‘Will I see you at Ravenscraig this afternoon?’ asked Mary.

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. See you then.’

  She went into the close.

  After the briefest hesitation, I turned and walked quickly towards the church, and away from Kirn Street.

  Yesterday I wept for Kirstie.

  In the morning it was cloudy but dry. Thank Christ the schools are not on holiday. An old man can walk through the streets without being insulted or harried. Because I wear a kilt and have a beard and look distinguished, I attract the worst insolence.

  Several times I felt tempted to creep back to my den. I had not slept well. But I needed air, even the sour sooty kind that hangs about these city streets; and in the park were trees, some space, and young mothers with babies in prams. So I persevered.

  It is less than half a mile to the park, but I was tired before I got there, and looking forward to a seat. The first bench I came to was turned over, with its legs in the air. I remembered Kirstie’s demonstrating to me how, if a sheep fell on its back, it had to have help to get up on its feet again. With her memory in my mind, I wanted to think ill of no one, not even of the young brutes who had couped over this bench for sheer wantonness. And the next one too. And the next. All twelve of them.

  There must have been a rampage the night before. Some young trees were snapped in two. Plants were scattered on the path. Two young women pushing prams were agreeing with each other that the district would soon not be worth living in. In my rage and grief I wanted to shout that
their own children, in a few years’ time, when society had become greedier and more selfish, would do their share of mindless destruction. It would have been unfair. Worse, it would have been a betrayal of my poets love of humanity; this, like a bird in a cage, no longer sings but still survives.

  Determined not to be defeated, I tried to put one of the benches on its legs again. It was too heavy. I could not, however I heaved and pulled, with risk of heart failure or rupture. No one came to help. I thought of two women I had loved: my mother, who had said, so bravely, that the young were the best, because of them there was still hope for Scotland and Kirstie, who would have lifted this heavy bench with no trouble, just as once she had set the world itself to rights for me. Tears ran down my cheeks. I would never see her again, or our croft at East Gerinish with the yellow irises at the door, and her grave speckled with tormentil.

  Part Two

  ONE

  I gaze at this old newspaper picture of a wartime wedding outside St Giles’ Cathedral. Only the bride’s arm can be seen: the rest of her has been cut out. The groom wears the full-dress uniform of a Highland officer, with medals for valour on his chest. Between him and the small anxious boy who once pushed a barrowful of dung up the brae to his grandfather’s cottage, what is the connection? And what have I, an old man with shaky hands, to do with either of them?

  I do not admire this handsome, successful, arrogant fellow. Nor do I pity him, though I know what he does not, that he is about to enter upon a marriage with as many humiliations as Rannoch Moor has bogs. I whisper the old Scots curse: ‘Hell mend ye.’

  I am hurrying on too fast. Here is another photograph taken three years earlier. It shows five young men in kilts, against the background of a battlemented castle. An expert would recognise them as junior officers of the Perthshire Highlanders. I am the middle one in the front. Any impartial stranger, asked to pick the one who looks most likely to be of aristocratic origin, would point to me. I can look at this picture of myself and feel proud. I have a right to think highly of myself. The later arrogance was then pardonable self-esteem.