Notes From a Small Island (28 page)

other thing had changed mightily since 1951 - the view of Princes Street from the terrace.

In 1951, Princes Street remained one of the world's great streets, a gracious thoroughfare lined along its northern side with solid, weighty Victorian and Edwardian edifices that bespoke confidence, greatness and empire - the North British Mercantile Insurance Company, the sumptuous, classical New Club building, the old Waverley Hotel. And then, one by one, they were unaccountably torn down, and replaced for the most part with grey concrete bunkers. At the eastern end of the street the whole of St James' Square, an open green space surrounded by a crowd of eighteenth-century tenements, was bulldozed to make way for one of the squattest, ugliest shopping centre/hotel complexes ever to spill from an architect's pen. Now about all that is left of Princes Street's age of confident grandeur are odd fragments like the Balmoral Hotel and the Scott Monument and part of the front of Jenners Department Store.

Later, when I was back home, I found in my AA Book of British Towns an artist's illustration of central Edinburgh as it might be seen from the air. It showed Princes Street lined from end to end with nothing but fine old buildings. The same was true of all the other artists' impressions of British cities - Norwich and Oxford and Canterbury and Stratford. You can't do that, you know. You can't tear down fine old structures and pretend they are still there. But that is exactly what has happened in Britain in the past thirty years, and not just with buildings.

And on that sour note, I went off to try to find some real food.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TWENTY-SIX

SO  LET'S  TALK  ABOUT  SOMETHING  HEARTENING.   LET'S  TALK  ABOUT

John Fallows. One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.

I bring this up here to make the point that if there is one golden quality that characterizes the British it is an innate sense of good manners and you defy it at your peril. Deference and a quiet consideration for others are such a fundamental part of British life, in fact, that few conversations could even start without them. Almost any encounter with a stranger begins with the words 'I'm terribly sorry but' followed by a request of some sort - 'could you tell me the way to Brighton,' 'help me find a shirt my size,' 'get your steamer trunk off my foot.' And when you've fulfilled their request, they invariably offer a hesitant, apologetic smile and say sorry again, begging forgiveness for taking up your time or carelessly leaving their foot where your steamer trunk clearly needed to go. I just love that.

As if to illustrate my point, when I checked out of the Caledonian late the next morning, I arrived to find a woman ahead of me wearing a helpless look and saying to the receptionist: 'I'm terribly sorry but I can't seem to get the television in my room to work.' She had

come all the way downstairs, you understand, to apologize to them for their TV not working. My heart swelled with feelings of warmth and fondness for this strange and unfathomable country.

And it is all done so instinctively, that's the other thing. I remember when I was still new to the country arriving at a railway station one day to find that just two of the dozen or so ticket windows were open. (For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that as a rule in Britain no matter how many windows there are in a bank, post office or rail station, only two of them will be open, except at very busy times, when just one will be open.) Both ticket windows were occupied. Now, in other countries one of two things would have happened. Either there would be a crush of customers at each window, all demanding simultaneous attention, or else there would be two slow-moving lines, each full of gloomy people convinced that the other line was moving faster.

Here in Britain, however, the waiting customers had spontaneously come up with a much more sensible and ingenious arrangement. They had formed a single line a few feet back from both windows. When either position became vacant, the customer at the head of the line would step up to it and the rest of the line would shuffle forward a space. It was a wonderfully fair and democratic approach and the remarkable thing was that no-one had commanded it or even suggested it. It just happened.

Much the same sort of thing occurred now, for when the lady with the recalcitrant TV set had finished with her apology (which the receptionist, I must say, accepted with uncommonly good grace, going so far as to hint that if anything else in the woman's room was found to be out of order, she wasn't to blame herself for a minute), the receptionist turned to me and another gentleman who was also waiting and said, 'Who's next?' and he and I went through an elaborate after-you, no-after-you, but-I-insist, well-that's-most-gracious-of-you routine, which made my heart swell further.

And so, on my second morning in Edinburgh, I stepped from the hotel in happy spirits, at one with the world, buoyed by this cheerful and civilized encounter, to find the sun shining and the city transformed yet again. On this day, George Street and Queen Street looked positively ravishing, their stone fronts burnished with sunlight, the damp, brooding darkness that had suffused them the day before banished utterly. The Firth of Forth gleamed in the distance and the little parks and squares seemed alive with green. I trudged UP The Mound to the Old Town terraces to take in the view andwas astonished to see how different the city looked. Princes Street was still a scar of architectural regrettabilities, but beyond it the hills were thronged with jaunty roofs and thrusting steeples that gave the city a character and graciousness that had entirely escaped me the day before.

I spent the morning doing touristy things - I went to St Giles' Cathedral and had a look at Holyroodhouse, climbed to the top of Calton Hill - and finally fetched my pack and returned to the station, happy to have made my peace with Edinburgh and pleased to be on the move again.

And what a fine thing a train journey is. I was instantly lulled by the motion of the train as we lumbered out through Edinburgh and its quiet suburbs and over the Forth Bridge. (And, gosh, what a mighty structure it is; suddenly I understood why the Scots are always on about it.) The train was mostly empty and rather splendidly posh. It was done up in restful blues and greys, which provided a sharp contrast to all the Sprinters I had been on in recent days and proved so deeply soothing that soon my eyelids were growing unsustainably heavy and my neck seemed to be turning to a rubbery material. In no time at all, my head was slumped on my chest and I was engaged in the quiet, steady manufacture of several gallons of saliva - all of them, alas, spare.

Some people simply should not be allowed to fall asleep on a train, or, having fallen asleep, should be discreetly covered with a tarpaulin, and I'm afraid I am one of them. I awoke, some indeterminate time later, with a rutting snort and a brief, wild flail and lifted my head from my chest to find myself mired in a cobweb of drool from beard to belt buckle, and with three people gazing at me in a curiously dispassionate manner. At least I was spared the usual experience of waking to find myself stared at open-mouthed by a group of small children who would flee with shrieks at the discovery that the dribbling hulk was alive.

Shrinking from my audience and daubing myself discreetly with the sleeve of my jacket, I attended to the view. We were rattling through an open landscape that was pleasant rather than dramatic - arable farmland running off to big round hills - under a sky that seemed ready to collapse under its own weight of grey. From time to time we stopped in some inert little town with a dead little station - Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars - before eventually entering a larger, fractionally more active world at Dundee, Arbroath and Montrose. And then, some three hours after leaving

Edinburgh, we were sliding into Aberdeen in a thin and fast-fading

light.

I pressed my face to the glass keenly. I had never been to Aberdeen before and didn't know anyone who had. I knew almost nothing about it, other than that it was dominated by the North Sea oil industry and proudly called itself the 'Granite City'. It had always seemed to me exotically remote, a place I was unlikely ever to get to, so I was eager to see it.

I had booked into a hotel which was warmly described in my guidebook (a tome that later went for kindling), but turned out to ' be a dreary, overpriced back-street block. My room was small and ill-lit, with battered furniture, a narrow, prison-cell bed with a thin blanket and a single grudging pillow, and wallpaper doing its best to flee a damp wall. Once, in a moment of ambition, the management had installed a bedside console that operated lights, radio and TV, and incorporated an alarm clock, but none of these appeared to work. The alarm clock knob came off in my hand. With a sigh, I dumped my stuff on the bed and returned to the dark streets of Aberdeen looking for food, drink and granite splendour.

One thing I have learned over the years is that your impressions of a city are necessarily coloured by the route you take into it. Enter London by way of the leafy suburbs of Richmond, Barnes and Putney and alight at, say, Kensington Gardens or Green Park and you would think that you were in the midst of some vast, well-tended Arcadia. Enter it by way of Southend, Romford and Liverpool Street and you would perceive it in another way altogether. So perhaps it was simply the route I took from my hotel. All I know is that I walked for nearly three hours up streets and down and I couldn't find anything remotely adorable about Aberdeen. There were some briefly diverting vignettes - an open pedestrianized space around the Mercat Cross, an interesting-looking little museum called John Dun's House, some imposing university buildings - but no matter how many times I crisscrossed through its heart, all I seemed to encounter was a vast, glossy new shopping centre that was a damnable nuisance to circumnavigate (I kept ending up, muttering and lost, in dead-end delivery bays and collecting compounds for cardboard boxes) and a single broad endless street lined with precisely the same stores I had seen in every other city for the last six weeks. It was like anywhere and nowhere - like a small Manchester or a random fragment of Leeds. In vain I sought a single place where I could stand with hands on hips andsay, 'Aha, so this is Aberdeen.' Perhaps, too, it was the dreary time of year. I had read somewhere that Aberdeen had won the Britain in Bloom competition nine times, but I saw hardly any gardens or green spaces. Above all, I had scant sense of being in the midst of a rich, proud city built of granite.

On top of that, I couldn't settle on a place to eat. I hankered for something different, something I hadn't encountered a hundred times already on this trip - Thai or Mexican, perhaps, or maybe Indonesian or even Scottish - but there seemed nothing but the usual scattering of Chinese and Indian establishments, usually on a side-street, usually up a flight of stairs that looked as if they had been recently used for a motorcycle rally, and I couldn't bring myself to make that terrible climb into the unknown. In any case, I knew exactly what would be up there - low lighting, a reception area with a padded bar, twangy Asian music, tables covered with glasses of lager and stainless-steel plate warmers. I couldn't face it. In the end, I engaged in a desperate session of eenie meenie minie mo on a street corner and opted for an Indian. It was, in every degree, exactly like every Indian meal I had had in the previous weeks. Even the post-dinner burp tasted exactly the same. I returned to my hotel in a dim and restless frame of mind.

In the morning, I went for a walk around the town sincerely hoping that I would like it better, but alas, alas. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Aberdeen exactly, more that it suffered from a surfeit of innocuousness. I had a shuffle round the new shopping centre and ranged some distance out into the surrounding streets, but they all seemed equally colourless and forgettable. And then I realized that the problem really wasn't with Aberdeen so much as with the nature of modern Britain. British towns are like a deck of cards that have been shuffled and endlessly redealt - same cards, different order. If I had come to Aberdeen fresh from another country, it would probably have seemed pleasant and agreeable. It was prosperous and clean. It had bookshops and cinemas and a university and pretty much everything else you could want in a community. It is, I've no doubt, a nice place to live. It's just that it was so much like everywhere else. It was a British city. How could it be otherwise?

Once I had packed this small thought into my head I liked Aberdeen much better. I can't say I ached to up sticks and move there - but then why should I when I could get exactly the same things, the same shops and libraries and leisure centres, the

same pubs and television programmes, the same phone boxes, post offices, traffic lights, park benches, zebra crossings, marine air and post-Indian-dinner burps anywhere else? In an odd way the very things that had made Aberdeen seem so dull and predictable the night before now made it seem comfortable and rather homey. But I still never had the slightest sense that I was in the midst of a lot of granite, and it was without regret that I fetched my things from the hotel and returned to the station to resume my stately progress north.

The train was again very clean and nearly empty, with more • S0othing blues and greys. It was just two carriages, but it had a trolley service, which impressed me. The difficulty was that the young chap in charge was obviously keen - I had the impression that he had just started the job and was still at the point where it was fun to dispense teas and make change - but as there were only two other passengers and just sixty yards of carriage to patrol, he came by about once every three minutes. Still, the constant ruckus of the passing trolley kept me from nodding off and falling into a state of embarrassing hyper-salivation.

We rode through a pleasant but unexciting landscape. All my previous experience of the Highlands was up the more dramatic west coast, and this was decidedly muted in comparison - rounded hills, flat farms, occasional glimpses of an empty, steel-grey sea -but by no means disagreeable. Nothing of incident happened except that at Nairn a big plane took off and did all kinds of astonishing things in the sky, climbing vertically for hundreds of feet, then slowly tipping over and plunging towards earth before pulling out in a steep bank at nearly the last moment. I supposed it was some sort of a test base for RAF planes, but it was more exciting to imagine that it had been hijacked by a suicidal madman. And then an arresting thing happened. The plane began coming towards the train, really bearing down on it, as if the pilot had spotted us and thought that it would be interesting to take us with him. It got larger and larger and nearer and nearer - I looked around uneasily but there was no-one to share the experience with - until it nearly filled the window and then the train went into a cutting and the plane disappeared from view. I bought a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits from the trolley to steady my nerves and waited for Inverness to appear.