1982 Janine (24 page)

It is ignorance of my own nature which has made me an easy tool in the hand of others. (What others?) My employers, I suppose. Another thing: one solitary god is too few for me. I need more of you. (The Holy Trinity?) Too abstract and episcopalian. (JesusMaryandJoseph?) Too catholic and familiar. Nor do I want you splitting into Jupiter, Mars, Venus etcetera, those Mediterranean aristos make me feel cheap and inhibited. Why should you be less to me than all mankind? Now
there
is an audience which deserves my full attention. I'll burst my braces to tell a straightforward history if you can appear to me as that. (I'll try.) Good, then I'll begin. (Clear throat.)

Chrm
.

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, My Lords, Ladies, Officers, Non-commissioned Officers and Men and Women of the World, and also, and especially, those who lay claim to none of these titles, particularly the punters north of the Tweed:

Pray silence for the one and only Jock MacLeish, Lord Lyon King of Shocks, Sparks, Currents, Alarms and Others of that Ilk, Baron Magnum of Banks, Braes, Bonded warehouses, Faslane, Dounreay, Hunterston, the Shetland Radar Defence Net, Edinburgh Zoo Lionhouse and the Burrel Collection Basement, Various Distilleries but Smith's Glenlivet Malt for preference and London Gin when pubcrawling in Glasgow, where was I? Oh yes.
LIST, LIST,
O LIST! I will a tale unfold whose lightest word will
harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy
two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy
knotted and combined locks to part and each con
tiguous hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful
porpentine!

Thankyou and good night, Mr Shakehips Slopspeare. Don't call us, we'll call you.

(Excuse me Sir, you have just imbibed the last of the whisky. If you seriously intend to regale us with a sober and consecutive narrative before the advent of the sun I suggest that you go first to the basin and force down your thrapple not less than ten tumblerfuls of cold tap water.)

Thankyou G. The flesh is weak but will try to take that advice.

The depression was equally shared so we did not notice it. I only once heard my parents laugh and never heard them raise their voices in anger, or complain, or weep. The only one to raise his voice in our house was Old Red when he denounced the capitalist class or talked Utopian, which was why Mum and I disliked him. We knew that most families were noisier than us, but also felt that noise was abnormal and unhealthy. We believed very few people were as normal and healthy as us.

This is how I came to make them laugh.

I was seventeen and had sat an entrance exam for the Glasgow Royal Technical College. I still went to school, though the teaching would only have value if I failed that exam and had to try another. Leaving home in the morning I sometimes met the postman in the street and said, “Anything for me?” and one day, from the bundle in his hand, he extracted a buff official envelope with my name on it, the first letter addressed to me in my life. I placed it carefully in
my pocket. Instead of going to school I took the colliery road which led down through the skirts of the town to a bridge over the river, and then I turned along a track through the wood on the further bank. My heart was thudding very slow and hard. I was sure I had passed the exam, but how well had I done? The day was close and warm, the sky a ceiling of smooth grey cloud with no hint of rain. I left the track and climbed a steep path through bracken and bluebells and came to a flat place surrounded by birks and rowans under an overhanging rock. William Wallace was supposed to have hidden here from the English but most Scottish towns have an obscure corner where that is supposed to have happened. The place was better known because on Sunday nights some miners called the Boghead crowd used it for illegal games of pitch-and-toss. I sat on a low boulder, read my letter and sighed with relief. I had done well in the exam. Excitement gripped my legs. I left the boulder and waded uphill through the bracken by no path at all, delighting to feel my body break and tread underfoot the resistance of the fronds. Fifteen minutes later I paused, slightly breathless, and looked back. This part of the country was a sort of fertile plateau through which the river carved a steep valley, so the high land was good pasture and cornfield, the low ground was wooded and shaggy. Facing me, on a ridge across the valley, lay the whole length of the long town: a quarter-mile terrace of but-and-ben cottages in the east, a centre of two-storey houses where the shops, pubs and cinema were, a row of mansions and bungalows standing in their own gardens, and a council estate of semi-detached villas in the west. All this, with the railway station, four schools, four churches, cast-iron swings and roundabout in the park should have seemed familiar because I knew it thoroughly, but it did not look familiar. It looked queer and lonely, because I was going to leave it.

I wandered about the town all morning, mostly in the outskirts, sometimes in the main street, and every ordinary friendly thing from the monkeypuzzle tree on the Church of Scotland manse lawn to a fat old cat basking on a sill had that queer foreign look. I stared a long time at an advert in a
chemist's shop. It showed tall white identical castles receding to a horizon. Before them a knight in white armour held a shield labelled
GIBBS TOOTHPASTE
and waved a triumphant sword over a batwinged reptile labelled
Dragon
Decay
. A slogan somewhere said

I had known that advert for years, why? Nowadays companies change their displays, slogans, packets and products continually, they spend millions on advertising to stop the government taking it in taxation. My seventeenth year was closer to the time of thrift and rationing when only the government spent money on adverts, adverts which told us to buy as little as possible. MAKE DO AND MEND they said, above a picture of a cheerful housewife sewing a patch on her husband's jacket, DIG FOR VICTORY, above the husband planting cabbages on his suburban lawn, HOLIDAY AT HOME! IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? That daft toothpaste advert had been in the window since 1940 and had entered my daydreams. I still sometimes wore the armour, rescued Jane Russell from the dragon and, finding her ungrateful and treacherous, chained her up in those castles. But I was not daydreaming now. I was asking the advert, ‘Will I remember you when I'm gone? Will you remember me when I'm gone?' and the answer, ‘Probably not', confused and puzzled me though I was too excited to feel depressed. I stared an equally long time at a three-foot-high marble soldier in puttees, cape and round puddingbasin helmet, his hands clasped and head bowed over a grounded rifle. He stood on a pillar carved with the names of over two hundred men from the town and its surroundings who had died in the First World War. A recent bronze plate listed an additional forty killed in the Second World War.
Their Name Liveth for Evermore
, was inscribed above the lists, and
Lest We Forget
underneath, and
I could not connect the inscriptions, which seemed to deny each other. The two wars did not interest me but I suddenly wished that the soldiers who had fought and survived them were also listed, for then I could have read my father's name.

I arrived home for dinner at twelve-thirty as if I had just come from school and said nothing about the letter. I kept my mouth shut till later that evening when we were all gathered round the table for tea. This was usually a meat or fish course with bread, biscuits, cakes and (of course) a big pot of tea. Dad received, in addition, the remains of the soup or pudding Mum and I ate at dinnertime. Half-way through the meal tonight Dad said, as I expected he would, “I wonder when we'll hear from the Technical College.”

I said casually, “I got the letter this morning.”

A fork with a bit of potato on the prongs stopped still for five whole seconds in front of Dad's open mouth and was then laid down carefully on his plate. He said, “Well?”

“I've passed,” said I, calmly continuing to eat.

He said, “Passed have you? Good! But what's wrong? What are you trying to hide?”

“Nothing,” said I, and handed him the letter. He read it with a face wrinkled and concentrated in a great worried frown while Mum turned her startled stare from me to him. He laid down the letter, tilted his head back and made a dry, hacking noise like this: “AKHA! AKHA! AKHA! AKHA!” My mother cried out, “
What's wrong
?”

He said, “Wrong? He's sixth best out of two hundred and eighty-two applicants! He's sixth best in the whole West of Scotland!”

My mother chuckled, left her seat and cuddled me and I cuddled her back. Then she got embarrassed and pulled away. If I had not surprised her with my news she would never have cuddled me. Dad was grinning and shaking his fist at me and saying again and again, “Ye bugger! Ye bugger! Ye bugger!”– so I allowed myself a small smile. If I had proudly told him the news when he came in from work he would have given that small smile, and said something like, “Fine! You arenae the best, but you certainly are not the worst.” Like most parents he did not want his child to
openly display pride and happiness, because these states make other people envious, and often go before a fall. By hiding my feelings I had tricked him into showing his, and had risen above him.

My parents had been paying a weekly sum into a Scottish Co-operative insurance scheme which could be realised after my sixteenth birthday. It was devised to help working-class children across the gap between their schooling and their employment, and as I now needed new clothes for the Technical College, and as I had stopped growing, my parents decided to spend the whole sum on clothes which would last till I was fully self-supporting. At the time I thought this decision perfectly natural though now it astonishes me. Since setting up house together they had lived carefully on less than twelve pounds a week, where did they get the courage to dispose of two or three hundred pounds in less than ten days? They must have been mad, as mad as a woman I overheard in a London bank. She wore a smart leather trousersuit and in a loud hooting voice said to a friend, “It cost me nine hundred pounds. I couldn't possibly afford it of course but we must be extravagant sometimes, just to cheer ourselves up.” She could afford it all right. Part of her knew that the price of that suit was the weekly take-home wage of six railwaymen working overtime or twenty families on the dole, so her delight in extravagance came from feeling superior to the rest of the world, superior to fate. I hope my parents felt some of that delight as they discussed spending the equivalent of half their yearly income on my wardrobe. If so they excused the feeling by pretending they were completing a job of work. They had produced a brain which the Scottish Education Department had stamped “First Class”. Now they would post it to the world in a suitable packet. Hitherto my mother had chosen all my clothes, so we were surprised when suddenly Dad uttered forceful opinions.

“A made-to-measure singlebreasted suit of the best quality Harris tweed is a … a … a … timeless garment. The style of it has remained virtually unchanged for well over half a century. American businessmen wear it to conferences. Highland crofters wear it to church. A British workingman
can wear it anywhere without appearing a traitor to his class.”

“Made-to-measure suits are very dear,” said my mother, “and not at all necessary. An off-the-peg suit may not fit Jock perfectly but I'm a good enough needlewoman to adjust it, as you well know.”

“I will prove to you,” said my father, taking such care to speak slowly and quietly that we knew he was greatly excited, “I will prove to you that a made-to-measure suit of the sort I am imagining will be the best possible economy. In off-the-peg suits the trousers wear out long before the jackets do. They must! If a man is not crawling on his knees like a collier or humping weights on his back like a dustman then the part of his anatomy which suffers most wear is the seat. I am certain that – other things being equal – the life-expectancy of the jacket of an off-the-peg suit is more than twice that of the trousers. But those who bespeak a suit from a good tailor can order all the trousers they want, which is another instance of the rich spending less money in the long run through their ability to be lavish in the first place.”

“So you want us to buy the lad a jacket and two pair of trousers in the same cloth.”

“No!” said Dad, “I want us to buy him three jackets and three waistcoats and seven pairs of trousers and two overcoats of the same cloth! Let him change his trousers every day of the week. The fabric will suffer so little strain that with ordinary care it will look continually smart and last him a lifetime.”

Mum said firmly, “I have never heard a more ridiculous suggestion. Why buy the lad a lot of nice clothes if we don't give him some variety? Jock needs a couple of ordinary suits for everyday wear, one in a medium grey check and one in brown. And he needs a dark suit for formal occasions and a blazer and flannels for sunny weather and holidays. I can see the sense in two trousers to a jacket, yes, fine, but seven identical trousers and three identical jackets are utterly daft.”

Dad replied in the cautious, downcast but obstinate tone he used when speaking of sexual matters.

“I do recognise that a variety of clothing is biologically
essential to women, especially to the young ones, because they use clothes to draw attention to themselves, and men (younger men) like them for that. But what an employer values in a man – what a man values in his workmates – what a man values in himself – is consistency. If Jock goes to Glasgow equipped as I suggest he will impress his teachers and workmates and prospective bosses with a neat, simple, consistent appearance bordering upon the miraculous. The material of the suit I have in mind is dark enough to wear at a funeral but not dark enough to suggest one, so with the right colour of necktie it can be worn on any occasion. In rough working situations, of course, it will be protected by overalls. But I agree that he requires a blazer and flannels for especially sunny days. We don't get many of these.”

Mum said firmly, “The idea is ridiculous. People will laugh at the boy.”

Dad said, “I doubt that.”

They could not agree so I was in a position to adjudicate. Like most seventeen-year-olds I had very little sense of my own identity, so the idea of striking a mysteriously consistent note in the turmoil of Glasgow appealed to me. I opted for six pairs of trousers, three jackets, two waistcoats and an overcoat of the same cloth, and a black dinner-jacket with matching trousers, and the blazer and the flannels.

The suit was ordered from a tailor in Kilmarnock and after the second fitting we visited a haberdasher to get socks, shirts and underwear. Since Dad had gained most of his own way in the matter of the suit he agreed completely with my mother's choice of the other things, so my wishes were not consulted before we came to the necktie counter. The salesman displayed ties of silk and cotton and wool in a great many patterns and colours. My mother fingered them, held them up and laid several aside before it occurred to her to ask, “Have you any idea of what
you
would like, Jock?”