Boswell's Bus Pass

Huge thanks to my fellow travellers, Rory MacLeod, Roy Henderson, David Raitt and John Aitken for their company, insight and general nonsense. I am also very grateful to Ian Chisholm and Jean Taylor for wielding their fine toothcombs; Veronica Denholm from The
National
Library of Scotland; George Reid for helping out with the Gaelic; Stuart Brett for wrestling with JPEGS and PDFs; Jim O’
Sullivan
from whom I stole the idea of the Grim Reaper travelling on public transport; the nice couple who stopped to give us a lift in fragrant violation of the unwritten rules of the journey, and above all, to Morag for tolerating her increasingly eccentric husband.

I would also like to thank my editor, Robert Davidson, of Sandstone Press.

When quoting directly from Johnson and Boswell I use their original spelling and punctuation unless their usage now seems so
anachronistic
that it is a distraction

The journey described in these pages had its origins in a most extraordinary find at my local car boot sale. Nestling just behind the fake Lladro ornaments and several sets of false teeth I caught sight of a pile of old 45’s. Hoping for some early bootleg Beatle tracks I reached over causing several crudely framed prints of smiling dogs in scarves to fall off the trestle table. After my initial disappointment on realising that I had in my hands a six inch tower of sleeveless Doris Day’s greatest hits, I glanced at the sheets of paper being used to separate the discs. The handwriting was distinctly 18
^th
century. The stall holder accepted £4 for the small heap, and started to crumple up the damp paper before I grabbed his hand, in a gesture that he initially misunderstood, and asked him to include them with the records that he was cramming into a plastic bag.

When I got home I flattened the crumpled sheets with the back of my wrist while idly watching
Sky Sports News
. Imagine my surprise on discovering that not only was I holding a wodge of original 18
^th
Century letters but that they seemed to be describing a journey through Scotland that was strangely familiar.

Several of the signatures were just legible
Your Loving Servant Joseph
, and
He Who Would Willingly Sacrifice Ten Years of His Life to Be With You Now JR
, and
Your Bohemian Rhapsody Joe
.

I knocked the remote control into my pint of Old Peculier as the significance of my find dawned on me. By the sort of good fortune that normally only occurs in the fiction of Fielding and Richardson I was holding with shaking hand correspondence from Joseph Ritter, James Boswell’s servant who accompanied his master and Samuel Johnson on their journey to the Western Isles in 1773.

All of the letters were addressed to Boswell’s wife Margaret.
Overcome by the significance of my discovery I spilled the remaining Old Peculier over my laptop. Mercifully it still functioned and I was able to Google both Joseph Ritter and Margaret Boswell.

Very little is known about Joseph beyond what Boswell tells us at the start of his account. ‘Dr Johnson thought it unnecessary to put himself to the additional expense of bringing with him Francis Barber, his faithful black servant, so we were attended by my man, Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian, a fine stately fellow above six feet high, who had been over a great part of Europe, and spoke many languages. He was the best servant I ever saw. Let not my readers disdain his
introduction
. For Dr Johnson gave him this character: ‘Sir, he is a civil man, and a wise man.’

And what of the woman to whom the letters were addressed? Chauncey Brewster Tinker in his biography
Young Boswell
said of her; ‘(she) was one of those kindly, long-suffering women whose lives are a quiet blessing to men; unhonoured by the world, but eternally dear to a few who are privileged to be near them. Through a long wedded life, through years in which bitterness must have been her portion, she was a devoted wife to Boswell.’

Not according to the letters. Even a superficial glance makes clear that Margaret and Joseph’s relationship far transcended that deemed appropriate between the mistress of James Court, Edinburgh, and her husband’s manservant.

Infuriatingly it is difficult to be precise about their degree of closeness as some of the letters have been rendered illegible by the insistent rain that was falling in the Asda car park on the day of my auspicious discovery. By some censorial quirk of fate most of the ruined sections coincide with what may have been references to a number of amorous encounters.

The discovery of the letters sent me back to both Samuel Johnson’s
Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
, published in 1775 and James Boswell’s
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
published in 1785. Re-reading the accounts only added to my determination to see for myself how Scotland had changed in the intervening 237 years and if possible to insinuate myself into the minds of the original travellers.

Recreating Johnson and Boswell’s journey to the Western Isles is a well-established literary indulgence, but no one has done it with a bus pass. Judging by noises emanating from the Scottish Parliament
it seems likely that the free-travel-bonanza-for-old-folk will soon belong to the dim and distant. A one-off opportunity then. I also hoped that the discomfort, inconvenience and frustrations of
travelling
by bus in the first part of the twenty first century would, in a very small way, mirror the challenges faced by Boswell, Johnson and Joseph.

At the age of sixty and being the proud owner of a concessionary bus pass that covers the whole of Scotland I had the chance to travel free of charge. I also had responsibilities so, regretfully, was not able to set off for a month or so in pursuit of geriatric adventures and surprises. Like many of my spoiled generation of baby boomers, collectively wondering where all the past years went, I was not yet ready to let go of the day job in case it precipitated a rapid onset of my final journey

I had thought of travelling alone and conjuring the shades of the earlier travellers to keep me company. On reflection the prospect of communing with non-existent dead people seemed something of a psychotic risk. Apart from anything else I would get lonely. As most of my close friends are in the same boat as myself, old but still working, I decided to deploy them as a sort of care in the community relay team and asked them to accompany me at some point on the journey round Scotland. This felt like a fabulous indulgence and still does. It was one thing for me to try on Boswell’s often comic and ill-fitting shoes: it was quite another to expect a single human being to occupy the vast intellectual hinterland that was Dr Johnson’s familiar territory.

The journey that follows took just over a year to complete. This compares unfavourably with the 100 or so days that Boswell and Johnson spent travelling by chaise, horse and boat.

I managed to persuade a total of four friends to accompany me at some point. That they are still my friends speaks volumes about their charity, patience and shared willingness to embrace the bizarre. I am hugely grateful to Rory, David, Roy and John who will be more fully introduced when they first appear in the narrative. That many of the observations and insights I pass off as my own were, in fact, stolen from them I openly acknowledge.

I initially feared that scuttling back to the warmth of home in Edinburgh between the various legs of the journey would be
self-defeating
. In practice this anxiety was unfounded. The journey despite the interruptions quickly assumed its own momentum.
Whenever I pushed the pause button I always had the sense that the images on my inner screen were shaking at the edges as if at any time the film would resume of its own accord. I even sensed a grumpy resentment from Boswell and Johnson whenever I met up with them again. Once I let them continue on their way they soon forgave and then forgot me.

I genuinely had little idea how the narrative would unfold although I was aware of many possibilities: simple tourist guide to modern Scotland; social satire; a critical reflection on Boswell and Johnson; a surreal grumpy old man’s road novel or a new genre best characterised as emotional picaresque. I just didn’t know and in that uncertainty I experienced something of the excitement that should precede any journey into unfamiliar lands.

I have interpolated Joseph’s letters into my own account of the journey and have provided explanatory footnotes.

Although Boswell and Dr Johnson started their journey together from Edinburgh I wanted to observe Johnson from the moment he entered Scotland. As the rules of engagement did not expressly prohibit travelling by train before officially boarding our first bus, we sped down the East Coast line past telegraph wires, witches and ditches to Berwick-upon-Tweed.

My first travelling companion was Rory. We are politically poles apart. As a former president of the Edinburgh University Students’ Association he claims to have met – and enjoyed the company of – Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell. And yet this is the same man who resigned his membership of a football supporters’ club, disgusted at a racial comment overheard in a toilet. He recently gave up his law career to work in a school for seriously disturbed adolescents who latterly referred to him with genuine affection as Big Bastard. He is big of body, brain and heart and, in all of these respects, resembles Dr Johnson.

While waiting for Johnson to arrive in Berwick-upon-Tweed we ordered a coffee in a cafe that was also hosting an early morning knitting bee. Purls were dropped before swine, stitches were hooked and stabbed into the emerging blanket of ectoplasm threatening to engulf all innocent customers. The knitters’ disembodied faces
grinned knowingly above the woollen tide. According to the
marginally
alarmed waitress the group had recently been banned from a neighbouring establishment.

Dr Johnson was late. The post-chaise from Newcastle should have been here at least half an hour ago. There had been two false alarms. The occupants of the first chaise were all women which was surprising given the rumours of trouble just north of Durham. Rory had rushed up to greet an especially fat passenger from the second only to be treated with disdain by the portly circuit judge who waved a embroidered handkerchief in his general direction. Rory grunted and wandered off to buy a bacon sandwich.

Shuffling, shambling, wrestling with troublesome demons in his sleep, snoring and farting his way in syncopation with the jolts and juddering of the chaise, Johnson would not have been the ideal travelling companion. At unpredictable intervals he would jerk involuntarily, a legacy of the king’s evil, a Tourette’s tick, or the same obsessive-compulsive trait that made him count and measure obsessively. His fellow travellers were now covered in a gossamer thin patina of brown snuff spilt from Johnson’s fingers which were too fat for the delicate horn box.

As Boswell noted, ‘His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of that
evil
which it was formally imagined the
royal touch
could cure. He was now in his sixty-forth year, and was become a little dull of hearing. His sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so much does mind govern and even supply the deficiency of organs that his perceptions were
uncommonly
quick and accurate. His head and sometimes also his body shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy; he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’ dance.’

Another chaise lumbered and lurched across the bridge over the Tweed. Although the curtains remained closed I was certain that Johnson was aboard, audibly parsing Latin to drown out the shouts from the wherrymen while stuffing more snuff up his nose to mask the smell of fish. It clattered its way past the line of parked cars but didn’t stop. The coachman waved his whip in the general direction of a traffic warden.

James Boswell had suggested a tour of Scotland within weeks of meeting Dr Johnson. An early exchange between the pair must have emphasised the extreme unlikelihood of the older man ever agreeing to visit a country still viewed by most in England as barbaric and wild. ‘Indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it’ spluttered Boswell as the cock crowed three times. ‘Sir,’ replied Johnson, ‘that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.’

Daniel Defoe some thirty years earlier had observed ‘Scotland has been supposed by some to be so contemptible a place as that it would not bear a description.’ A volunteer with the English army at the time of the Rebellion of 1745 wrote from Berwick, ‘Now we are going into Scotland but with heavy hearts. They tell us here what terrible living we shall have here which I soon found too true.’ Smollett noted ‘all of the inns northwards are scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of the Scottish nation … The English know as little of Scotland as of Japan.’

Nevertheless in August 1773 Samuel Johnson travelled from London to Edinburgh in nine days. His companion as far as Newcastle was Robert Chalmers, a newly appointed judge who was en route to bid his family farewell before taking up an appointment in India.

The journey was uneventful; the highlight for Johnson was being shown an impressive set of fetters by a jailer in York. He had, years before, confessed his masochistic tendencies to Mrs Thrale, the young married woman whom he loved to distraction. The lowlight was being ‘much disordered with the old complaints’, presumably a bout of depression or diarrhoea, possibly both.

He didn’t seem to be in the best of spirits and had low expectations of the journey ahead. ‘You have often heard me complain of finding myself disappointed by books of travels, I am afraid that travel itself will end likewise in disappointment. One town, one country is very like another. Civilised nations have the same customs, and barbarous nations have the same nature.’ In Newcastle William Scott, destined for high office in the Admiralty, agreed to accompany Johnson as far as Edinburgh.

I leaned over the castle walkway and wondered where Rory had got to. He was though his own man more than capable of wandering off on a whim and getting thoroughly lost, even in Berwick-upon - Tweed. Overhead a Phantom jet turned and arched, while next to me two elderly woman nodded agreement to each other as they grumped
and gossiped. The phrases ‘our young boys’ and ‘a corrupt
government
’ were audible, presumably echoing a tabloid rant against the mounting casualty figures in Afghanistan.

Yesterday had been Remembrance Day and every news bulletin had shown footage of the citizens of Wootton Bassett waiting patiently as six more coffins had been carried down from the Hercules. We had noticed earlier the display of wreaths by a church in Berwick’s High street. One of them in the shape of a cross festooned with fairy lights. Armistice Day meets Christmas.

Outside a newsagents’ the billboard announced BERWICK BOOZE CRUISE FEARS. What were these fears? Presumably the worthy burghers were concerned lest English wide boys despatch flotillas of tankers filled to the Plimsoll line with Newcastle Brown as part of a smuggling racket to ensure that Scottish drinkers could still buy cheap alcohol. There would be Buckfast barges and Somali pirates in the Tweed, gleefully opening crates of Wee Heavy. The paper in question raised the strange spectre of Berwick becoming the new Calais. There were few signs of a burgeoning café culture. Equally anomalous was the prospect of alcohol-fuelled nomads being herded into temporary transit camps set up along the A1.

The post-chaise was long gone by the time I found Rory with his head in the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘Unkind prank, nine letters, four letters?’ He asked. ‘Practical joke’ muttered a passerby. As we walked through the town I caught sight of a startled old woman in the passenger seat of a parked car. She reminded me of my own mother in advanced years, with no idea where she was and consumed with panic waiting for her frail husband to return from whatever small errand had separated them for what felt to her like forever. What had Johnson said about his own mother? ‘Of business she had no distinct conception: therefore her discourse was composed only of complaint, fear, and suspicion.’

The ubiquitous
Big Issue
seller greeted us like long-lost friends. Was it a sign of racism that noting her Eastern European origin I scoured adjacent street corners for the ubiquitous gang master waiting to take her money? The warmth of her smile suggested that she should be redeployed in one of the many charity shops that punctuate the High Street, presided over by the sullen, resentful and discourteous. The book of the day was
A Beginner’s Guide to Chickens
. It was probably a bargain at 30p.

Johnson introduced the topic of begging early in his narrative,
‘… there are many beggars in Scotland. In Edinburgh the proportion is, I think, not less than in London, and in the smaller places it is far greater than in English towns of the same extent. It must, however, be allowed that they are not importunate, nor clamorous. They solicit silently, or very modestly, and therefore though their behaviour may strike with more force the heart of a stranger, they are certainly in danger of missing the attention of their countrymen.’

Soon Rory announced inelegantly that he had to dive into the nearest pub as a collapse of the bowels was imminent. Perhaps this was a subliminal acknowledgement of Dr Johnson’s physical ills. Either way it necessitated his purchasing the first pint of the day. It was after all 11.15 in the morning. He soon redeemed himself by lurching into a gift shop determined to purchase a token for Jane, his wife. He dropped the money on the floor and struggled to pick it up. Had I noticed I would have helped.

On resuming his full height he asked the astonished assistant why the shop was called
Tippecanoe Gallery
. Not convinced by the reply that the name tripped off the tongue nicely, Rory launched into a loud rendition of the American election slogan from 1840 ‘
TIPPECANOE
AND TYLER TOO’, explaining that President Harrison had been dubbed the hero of the aforementioned battle, ‘He also delivered the longest inauguration speech on record before enjoying the shortest reign as president before dying of pleurisy.’ The shop assistant muttered something inaudible and went to lie down in the back office. Rory had not been showing off. It is just the way he is. It was exactly the impact that Johnson’s erudition had on the
unsuspecting
.

The first bus of the journey was a Perryman’s 253. Our bus passes, Saltires facing upwards, were duly accepted despite the journey starting in England. Our fellow passengers consisted of two hoodies and a young harassed couple with an enormous baby shoehorned into a pram it had long outgrown. None of them glanced at the pair of inappropriately beaming old buffers at the back.

We briefly considered leaving the bus after ten minutes to sample a pint in the first pub in Scotland but we needed to catch up with the post-chaise. Certainly an early stop would have enabled us to test the observation made by Wolfe in 1753 that he had barely crossed the border when he noticed the contrast between ‘the clean and laborious English and the Scotch excessively dirty and lazy’. This particular
prejudice was later parodied by Smollett’s Mathew Bramble who pronounced that ‘the boors of Northumberland are lusty fellows, cleanly and well clothed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled and shabby.’

Settling into the undeniable comfort of the Perryman’s bus we savoured the pleasure of being secretly initiated into a geriatric
conspiracy
of retired folk who plan their free travel with military precision: outdoing each other with tales of adventure on the road; grumbling happily about mechanical failures, driver anecdotes, unforgettable teashops and the relative merits of First Buses and the small
independents
. I considered too the probability that there must be a hard core of pensioners who had escaped from their care homes under cover of darkness, preferring to live out their lives out on a succession of long distance buses crisscrossing the length of Scotland. Baby boomers who had hitch-hiked their way round the sixties in a fog of illegal drugs and the constant promise of sex and transient relationships.

Rory pointed out the Torness nuclear power station that rose like a cubist’s nightmare from the sea edge. He explained that only one of the reactors worked. In an adjacent field a small notice expressly forbade DIGGING. Was it aimed at a literate race of nuclear moles or at treasure hunters whose metal detectors would glow briefly before melting, the Saxon gold reduced to a Dali watch?

We eavesdropped on the conversation of a new passenger, a middle aged, slightly dishevelled man who spoke with his eyes shut to a woman in the next seat about the relative price of washing machines and the trouble he had with his knees. I had hoped that the journey would enable us to garner and then recycle surreal nuggets of conversation for narrative currency. But in practice there seemed something unethical about listening to the conversations of strangers, as if in some way stealing something very personal, a slice of their hearts for profit. If they knew they might react in anger like the Native Americans when photographers snatched their souls with a flash of phosphorus.

An unexpected pleasure of the journey from Berwick-on-Tweed was the discovery that the bus would lurch off the straight and narrow of the A1 at the merest hint of a byway. Perryman’s mission statement specifies a commitment to ensure that every inhabitant of every hamlet or clump of farmers’ cottages can have regular access to the approaching conurb of Dunbar.

Much sooner than expected we had our first experience of antisocial on-board behaviour. It wasn’t the aforementioned hoodies who were talking happily to each other on their mobile phones. Nor were we attacked by marauding vigilantes from a rival bus company. The culprit was a little old lady armed with a shopping trolley equal to her in size. When the driver reversed in a cul de sac in a remote and rightly forgotten housing estate she stealthily approached the door and pressed the emergency button. As the doors slid obligingly open she politely thanked the driver and made her exit. ‘No! No! No!’ he shouted. ‘It’s all right’ she replied gently, ‘I live here.’