Lanark: a life in 4 books (20 page)

The children who had heard the argument whispered and giggled, and some beckoned friends who were standing at a distance. Thaw, frightened, said, “I havenae a pound.”

“But ye promised! Didn’t he promise?”

“Aye, he promised,” said several voices. “He bet a pound.”

“He’s got to pay.”

“I don’t believe the donkey is a hundred,” said Thaw.

“Ye think ye’re awful clever, don’t ye?” a thin girl shouted venomously and sarcastic voices cried, “Oh, Mammy, Mammy, I’m an awful smart wee boy.”

“Why does the smart wee boy no’ believe the donkey’s a hundred?”

“Because I read it in an ENCYCLOPAEDIA,” said Thaw, for though he was still unable to read he had once pleased his parents by saying encyclopaedia without being specially taught and the word had peculiar qualities for him. Pronounced in the service of his lie it had an immediate effect. Someone at the edge of the crowd jumped into the air, clapped hands above head and cried, “Oh, the big word! The big word!” and the mob exploded into laughter and mockery. Waving flags and blowing whistles, they raved and stamped around the frightened stone-still Thaw until his lips trembled and a drop of water spilled from his left eye.

“Look!” they yelled. “He’s greeting!” “Crybaby! Crybaby!”

“Cowardy custard, stick yer nose in the mustard!” “Riddrie pup with yer tail tied up!” “Awa’ hame and tell yer mammy!” Thaw was blinded by red rage and screamed, “Buggers! Ye damned buggers!” and started running down the darkening street. He heard the clattering feet of pursuers and Peely Wally laugh like a cock-crow and Boab roar, “Let him go! Leave him alone!”

He turned a corner and ran down a street past staring children and men who paid no attention, through a small park with a pond and the sound of splashing water, then down a rutted lane, going slower because they weren’t following now, with longer intervals between his sobs. He sat down on a chunk of masonry and swallowed air until his heart beat more calmly.

There was empty ground in front of him with the shadows of tenements stretching a long way across it. Colours had become distinctions of grey and close-mouths’ black rectangles in tenement walls. The sky was covered with blue-grey cloud, but currents of wind had opened channels through this and he could see through the channels into a green sunset air above. Down the broadest of these flew five swans on their way to a lower stretch of the canal or to a pond in the city parks.

Thaw started back the way he had come, sniffing and wiping tears from his nose. In the small dim park only the splashing of water was distinct. It was night in the streets. He was glad to see no children or grown people or any of the adolescent groups who usually gather by street corners at nightfall. Black lampposts stood at wide intervals on either kerb. The tenement windows were black like holes in a face. Twice he saw wardens cross the end of some street ahead, silent helmeted men examining blinded windows for illegal chinks of light. The dark, similar streets seemed endlessly to open out of each other until he despaired of getting home and sat on the kerb with his face in his hands and girned aloud. He fell into a dwam in which he felt only the hard kerb under his backside and awoke suddenly with a hushing sound in his ears. For a second this seemed like his mother singing to him then he recognized the noise of waterfalls. The sky had cleared and a startling moon had risen. Though not full there was enough of it to light the canal embankment across the road, and the gate, and the cinder path. He went gladly and fearfully to the gate and climbed the path with the hushing growing in his ears to the full thunder of the falling stream. Several trembling stars were reflected in the dark water below.

As he stepped off the bridge Thaw seemed to hear the moon yell at him. It was the siren. Its ululations came eerily across the rooftops to menace him, the only life. He ran down the path between the nettles and through the gate and past the dark allotments. The siren swooned into silence and a little later (Thaw had never heard this before) there was a dull iron noise,
gron-gron-gron-gron
, and dark shapes passed above him. Later there were abrupt thuddings as if giant fists were battering a metal ceiling over the city. Beams of light widened, narrowed and groped above the rooftops, and between two tenements he saw the horizon lit orange and red with irregular flashing lights. Black flies seemed to be circling in the glow. Beyond the power station he ran his head into the stomach of a warden running the other way. “Duncan!” shouted the man. Thaw was picked into the air and shaken.

“Where have ye been? Where have ye been? Where have ye been?” shouted the man senselessly, and Thaw, full of love and gratitude, shouted, “Daddy!”

Mr. Thaw tucked his son under one arm and ran back home. Between the jolts of his father’s strides Thaw heard the iron noise again. They went up steps into the close-mouth and Thaw was put down. They stood together in the dark, breathing hard; then Mr. Thaw said in a weak voice Thaw hardly recognized, “I suppose you know the worry you’ve given your mother and me?”

There was a shriek and bang and pieces of dirt hit Thaw on the cheek.

From the living-room window next morning he saw a hole in the pavement across the street. The blast had shaken soot down the chimney onto the living-room floor, and Mrs. Thaw cleaned it up, stopping sometimes to talk with neighbours who called to discuss the raid. They agreed that it might have been worse, but Thaw was very uneasy. His adventure with the midden-rakers was a horrider crime than not eating dinner so he expected punishment on an unusually large scale. After closely watching his mother that day—noticing the way she hummed to herself when dusting, her small thoughtful pauses in the middle of work, her way of scolding when he was stupid during a lesson on clock reading—he became sure that punishment was not in her mind, and this worried him. He feared pain, but deserved to be hurt, and was not going to be hurt. He had not returned to exactly the same house.

CHAPTER 13.

A Hostel

The house was changing. Obscure urgency filled it and in bed at night he heard rumours of preparation and debate. Coming home from a friend’s back green he stuck with his head on one side of the railings and his body on the other. Mr. and Mrs. Thaw released him by greasing his ears with butter and pulling a leg each, laughing all the time. When free he flung himself howling on the grass but they tickled his armpits and sang “Stop Yer Ticklin’, Jock” until he couldn’t help laughing. Then one day they all came out onto the landing and the house was locked behind them. His father and mother carried his sister Ruth and some luggage; Thaw had a gas mask in a cardboard box hanging from his shoulder by a string loop; they all went up to his school by the sunlit bird-twittering back lanes. Murmuring groups of mothers stood in the playground with small children at their side. The fathers spoke in noisier groups and older children played halfheartedly between.

Thaw felt bored and walked to the railings. He was sure he was going on holiday and that holidays meant the sea. From the edge of the playground’s high platform he looked across the canal and the Blackhill tenements to remote hills with a dip in the middle. Looking the opposite way he saw a wide valley of roofs and smokestacks with more hills beyond. These hills were nearer and greener and so distinct that along a gently curved summit a line of treetops joined like a hedge and he saw the sky between the trunks underneath. It struck him that the sea was behind these hills; if he stood among the trees he would look down on a grey sea sparkling with waves. His mother shouted his name and he strolled toward her slowly, pretending he had not heard but was returning anyway. She adjusted the string of the gas mask which had got across his coat collar and was cutting the side of his neck, then made the coat sit better on his shoulders with tugs and pats which shook his head from side to side. He said, “Is the sea behind there?”

“Behind where?”

“Behind where those trees are.”

“Who told you that? Those are the Cathkin Braes. There’s nothing behind there but farms and fields. And England, eventually.”

The sparkling grey sea was too vivid for him to disbelieve. It fought in his head with a picture of farms and fields until it seemed to be flooding them. He pointed to the hills behind Blackhill and asked, “Is the sea over there?”

“No, but there’s Loch Lomond and the highlands.” Mrs. Thaw stopped tidying him, lifted Ruth on her left arm and stared straight-backed at the Cathkin Braes. She said thoughtfully, “When I was a girl those trees reminded me of a caravan on the skyline.”

“What’s a caravan?”

“A procession of camels. In Arabia.”

“What’s a procession?”

Red single-decker buses suddenly came into the playground and everyone but the fathers climbed on board. Mr. and Mrs. Thaw said goodbye through the window and after a long wait the buses drove out of the playground and down to the Cumber-nauld Road.

A dim broken time followed when Thaw and his mother, with Ruth on her lap, sat in buses at night hurling through unseen country. The buses were always badly lit with windows blinded by blue-black oilcloth so that nobody saw out. There must have been many such journeys, but later he remembered a single night journey lasting many months in a cabin full of hungry tired people, though the movement of the bus was interrupted by confused adventures in dim places: a wooden church hall, a room over a tailor’s shop, a stone-floored kitchen with beetles crawling over it. He slept in strange beds where breathing became difficult and he woke up screaming he was dead. Sores appeared on his scrotum and the bus brought them to the Royal Infirmary where old professors looked between his legs and applied brown ointment which stung the sores and smelled of tar. The bus was always crowded, Ruth crying, his mother weary and Thaw bored, though once a drunk man stood up and embarrassed everyone by trying to get them to sing. Then one evening the bus stopped and they got out and met his father, who led them onto the deck of a ship. They stood in the dusk near the funnel which gave out comfortable heat. The air was cold between slate-dark clouds and a heaving slate-blue sea. A reef lay among the lapping water like a long black log, and at one end an iron tripod upheld a lit yellow globe. The ship moved out to sea.

They came to live in a bungalow among low concrete buildings called the hostel. This stood between sea and moorland. Munition workers slept there and it held a canteen, cinema and hospital and had a high wire fence all round with gates that were locked at night. Each morning Thaw and Ruth were taken in a car along the coast road to the village school. This had two classrooms and a kitchen where a wife from the village made flavourless meals. A headmaster called Macrae taught the older pupils and a woman called Ingram the small ones. The pupils were all children of crofters excepting some evacuees from Glasgow who lodged in farms on the moors.

On his first day in the new school the other boys rushed to be Thaw’s neighbour in the queue to go out to play, and in the playfield they gathered round to ask where he came from and what his father did. Thaw answered truthfully at first but later told lies to keep their interest. He said he spoke several languages and when asked to prove this could only say that “wee” was French for “yes.” Most of the group went away after that, and next day in the playfield he had an audience of two. To stop it getting smaller he offered to show them round the hostel, then other boys approached him in threes and fours and asked if they could come too. Instead of going home that night in the car with Ruth, Thaw trudged along the coast road at the head of a mob of thirty or forty who talked and joked with each other and, apart from an occasional question, totally ignored him. He was not sorry about this. He wanted to seem mysterious to these boys, someone ageless with strange powers, but his feet were sore, he was late for tea and afraid he would be blamed for arriving with so many friends. He was right. The hostel gateman refused to allow the other boys in. They had walked two miles and missed their tea to accompany him and though he walked back with them a little way apologizing they were still very angry and the evacuees began to throw stones. He ran back to the hostel where he was given a cold meal and a row for “showing off.”

Next morning he pretended to be ill but unluckily the asthma and the disease between his legs weren’t troublesome and he had to go to school. Nobody spoke to him there and at playtime he kept nervously to the field’s quietest corner. On queuing to re-enter the classroom he stood beside an evacuee called Coulter who pushed him in the side. Thaw pushed back. Coulter punched him in the side, Thaw punched back and Coulter muttered, “A’ll see you after school.”

Thaw said, “A’ve to go straight home after school tonight; my dad said so.”

“Right. I’ll see ye the morra.”

At home that night he refused to eat anything. He said, “I’ve a pain.”

“You don’t
look
sick,” said Mrs. Thaw. “Where
is
the pain?” “All over.”

“What kind of pain is it?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not going to school tomorrow.”

Mrs. Thaw said to her husband, “You deal with this, Duncan, it’s beyond me.”

Mr. Thaw took his son into the bedroom and said, “Duncan, there’s something you haven’t told us.”

Thaw started crying and said what the matter was. His father held him to his chest and asked, “Is he bigger than you?”

“Yes.” (This was untrue.)

“Much bigger?”

“No,” said Thaw after a fight with his conscience.

“Do you want me to ask Mr. Macrae to tell the other pupils not to hit you?”

“No,” said Thaw, who only wanted not to go to school.

“I knew you would say that, Duncan. Duncan, you’ll have to fight this boy. If ye start running away now you’ll never learn to face up to life. I’ll teach ye how to fight—it’s easy—all ye have to do is use your left hand to protect your face….” Mr. Thaw talked like this until Thaw’s head was full of images of defeating Coulter. He spent that evening practising for the fight. First he sparred with his father, but the opposition of a real human being left no scope for fantasy, so he practised on a cushion and went confidently to bed after a good supper.