Lanark: a life in 4 books (22 page)

The lower slopes were mostly widths of granite tilted at the angle of the mountainside, level with the heather and cracked like the pavements of a ruined city. Higher up the heather gave way to fine turf, where grasshoppers chirped and flowerets grew with stalks less than an inch high and blossoms hardly bigger than pinheads. Becoming thirsty he found a shallow pool collected from last week’s rain in the hollow of a rock. Stopping to drink he felt rough granite under his lips and warm sour water on the tongue. The mountain steepened into nearly vertical blocks with ledges of turf between. For half an hour he used his hands as much as his feet, squirming and wriggling up crooked funnels, pulling himself over small precipices, then lying flat on his back on a ledge under the shadow of the summit to let the sweat dry out of his damp shirt. At this height he heard noises that had been shut off from him on the moor: a barking dog on one of the farms, a door slamming in the hostel, a lark above a field behind the village, children shouting on the shore and the murmuring sea. He contained two equal sorts of knowledge: the warm lazy knowledge that above on the mountain a blond girl in a white dress waited for him, shy and eager; and the cooler knowledge that this was unlikely and the good of climbing was the exercise and view from the top. There was no conflict between those knowledges, his mind passed easily from one to the other, but when he stood up to begin the last of the climb the thought of the girl was stronger.

He was at the foot of a granite cliff about four times his height with a ledge sloping up it made by a lower stratum projecting beyond the one above. As he climbed his fear of height made the excitement keener. The ledge was decayed and gravelly, each step sent a shower of little lumps rattling and bouncing down into the sky beyond the edge. Gradually it narrowed to a few inches. Thaw pressed his chest against the granite, stood on tiptoe and, reaching up, brought his fingertips within an inch of the top. “Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell,” he muttered sadly, gazing at the dark rock where it cut against a white smudge of cloud. A face suddenly stuck over this edge and looked down at him. It was a small, round, wrinkled almost sexless face, and the shock of it nearly made Thaw lose balance. It took him a moment to recognize Mr. McPhedron, the minister from the village. The minister said, “Are you stuck?”

“No, I can go back.”

“Aye. The right way up is round the other side. But bide there a minute.”

The face was withdrawn and Thaw saw something black and straight with a curled end poke over the edge and slide toward him. It was the handle of an umbrella. Swallowing the fear that slid up his gullet Thaw gripped the handle with his left hand and tugged. It stayed firm. He put the toe of his sandal against a bump in the rock face, gripped the handle tighter, heaved himself at the edge and got an arm across. The arm was grabbed and he was pulled onto the summit. He sat up and said, “Thank you.”

The summit was a rock platform as big as the floor of a room and tilted so that one side was higher than the others. On the highest corner stood a squat concrete pillar like a steep pyramid with the top cut off. With a sad pang he saw that this had seemed the beckoning white woman. The minister, a bald dry little man in crumpled black clothes, sat nearby with his legs over the edge, fists resting on thighs and back as upright as if sitting in a chair. The rolled umbrella lay behind him. He turned and said, “Now you have your breath back, give me your opinion of the view.”

Thaw stood up. The moor lay below with dots of sheep grazing on it, some shrub-filled glens and the green coastal strip beyond. The village was hidden by the trees of the largest glen but its position was shown by the hotel roof among its conifers and by the end of a pier sticking into the Atlantic. To the left of this, between the beach and the white road, the hostel stood in neat rectangular blocks like a chess game, human specks moving on the straight paths between. Farther off still, the road—a bus moving down it like an insect—turned from the coast into a district of moorland with small lochs and blue-grey bens paling into the distance like waves of a stone sea. The ocean in front, however, was as shining-smooth as slightly wrinkled silk. It stretched to the dark mountains of the Isle of Skye on the horizon, and the sun hung above these at the height of Thaw himself. It was dimmed and oranged by haze but firing golden wires of light from the centre. Thaw stared at it miserably. The minister was someone he tried to avoid. On coming to the hostel his mother, who went to church, sent him to a Sunday school held by Dr. McPhedron after the morning service. He had expected to sing little hymns and draw little pictures of Bible stories; instead he was given a book of questions and answers to learn by heart so that when Dr. McPhedron asked a question like “Why did God make man?” Thaw could give an answer like “God made man to glorify his name and enjoy his works for ever.” After the first day of Sunday school he didn’t want to go back and his father, who was an atheist, said he needn’t if he didn’t enjoy it. Since then Thaw had heard his parents discuss the minister several times. His mother said there was too much Hell in his sermons. She thought churches were good because they gave people something to look up to and hope for, but she didn’t believe in Hell and it was wrong to frighten children with it. Mr. Thaw said he saw no reason why people shouldn’t believe what pleased them but McPhedron was a type found too often in the highlands and islands, a bigot who damned to Hell whoever rejected his narrow opinions.

To hide embarrassment Thaw turned and examined the pillar.

“Do you wonder what that is, now?” asked the minister. His voice was soft and precise.

“Yes.”

“It is a triangulation point. Your name is still on my Sunday school enrolment book. Would you have me remove it?”

Thaw frowned and rubbed his fingers round an odd depression in the pillar’s top.

The minister said, “
That
is to hold the base of an instrument used by government mapmakers. I notice you don’t come to kirk with your mother any more. Why?”

“Dad says I needn’t go to something I don’t like if it isn’t educational,” muttered Thaw. The minister gave a slight friendly laugh.

“I admire your father. His notion of education embraces everything but the purpose of life and the fate of man. Do you believe in the Almighty?”

Thaw said boldly, “I don’t know, but I don’t believe in Hell.” The minister laughed again. “When you have more knowledge of life you will mibby find Hell more believable. You are from Glasgow?”

“Yes.”

“I was six years a student of divinity in that city. It made Hell very real to me.”

A muffled blast came to their ears from a distance. A white cloud drifted up from a dip in the moorlands to the south, shredding and vanishing as it rose. The sound was batted back and forth between the mountains, then trickled into echoes among far off glens.

“Yes,” said the minister. “They are testing at the munition factory down there. The country must be preserved with all the Hell we can muster.”

Thaw was filled with baffled anger. He had bitten into the splendid fruit of the afternoon and found a core of harsh dull words. He muttered that he’d better be getting home. “Aye,” said the minister. “It is late for a wee lad to be far from bed.”

He got up and led Thaw from the summit by a fall of granite blocks which presented so many horizontal surfaces that he went down it like a flight of giant steps, hopping nimbly from one to another, using the umbrella to balance him in awkward places. Thaw jumped and scrambled sullenly after him. When they reached the more grassy slopes Thaw let the distance between them increase until the minister vanished behind a boulder; then he turned left and scrambled round the mountainside until a sufficient girth of it was between them and then set off toward the hostel.

The sun had set by the time he reached the road but it was still the gloaming, a protracted summer gloaming with the land dim but the sky lively with colours. He limped in at the hostel gate, the hard tarmac hurting his feet, and went by two straight paths to the manager’s bungalow. His mother sat knitting on a deck chair on the lawn. Nearby his father stabbed casually with a hoe at weeds in a small rockery. As Thaw approached Mrs. Thaw called reprovingly, “We were beginning to worry about you!”

He had meant to keep quiet about the climb as he had made it wearing sandals, but standing between his parents he said,“I bet you don’t know where I’ve been!”

“Well, where have you been?”

“There!”

Behind the hostel’s low straight roofs Rua showed like a black wedge cut out of the green rotund-looking sky. Soft stars were beginning to shine between a few feathery bloody clouds.

“You were up Ben Rua?”

“Aye.”

“Alone?”

“Aye.”

His mother said gently, “That could have been dangerous, Duncan.”

His father looked at his sandalled feet and said, “If you do it again you must tell someone you’re going first, so we know where to look if there’s an accident. But I don’t think we’ll complain this time; no, we won’t complain, we won’t complain.”

CHAPTER 15.

Normal

The Thaw family came home to Glasgow the year the war ended. They arrived late at night as thin rain fell, took a taxi at the station and sat numbly inside. Thaw looked out at a succession of desolate streets lit by lights that seemed both dim and harsh. Once Glasgow had been a tenement block, a school and a stretch of canal; now it was a gloomy huge labyrinth he would take years to find a way through. The flat was cold and disordered. During the war it had been let to strangers and the bedding and ornaments locked in the back bedroom. While his father and mother unpacked and shifted things he looked at his old books and found them dull and childish. He asked his mother, who was dusting, “How long will it be before we get back to normal?”

“What do you mean, normal?”

“You know, settled down.”

“I suppose in a week or two.”

He went to the living room where his father was looking through letters and said, “How long will it be before we get back to normal?”

“Maybe in two or three months, if we’re lucky.”

Mr. Thaw spent the next months typing letters at his bureau in the living room. With each post he got back letters with printed headings which he gave to Thaw, who drew on the blank backs. Thaw sat drawing and writing for hours at a tiny desk in the back bedroom, wearing a dressing gown and an embroidered smoking cap which had been his grandfather’s. He seldom looked at the letters whose backs he used, but once his eye was caught by the heading of the factory where his father had worked before the war. He read:

Dear Mr Thaw,

It would seem that a prophet is not without honour save in the city of his birth! I congratulate you on having done so well with the now defunct Ministry of Munitions.

Unfortunately we have no vacancy for a personnel officer at present. However, I am sure your manifest abilities will have no difficulty in finding employment elsewhere. Our hearty good wishes to you.

Yours faithfully,

John Blair

Managing Director

One day at dinner Mr. Thaw said to his wife, “I took a walk out Hogganfield way this morning. They’re building a reservoir to serve the new housing scheme.” He swallowed a mouthful and said, “I went in and got a job. I start tomorrow.” “What doing?”

“The walls of the reservoir are made by pouring concrete between metal shuttering. I’ll be bolting the shutters into place and taking them down when the stuff has hardened.”

Mrs. Thaw said grimly, “It’s better than nothing.”

“That’s what I thought.”

After this Mr. Thaw cycled to work each morning wearing an old jacket and corduroy trousers tucked into his stocking tops, and now when Thaw was not at school he scribbled at Mr. Thaw’s bureau or lay reading on the hearth rug, enjoying his mother’s proximity as she went about the housework.

One day Mr. Thaw said, “Duncan, you sit your qualifying exam in six weeks, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You realize how important this exam is? If you pass you’ll go to a senior secondary school where, if you work well at your lessons and homework and pass the proper exams, you’ll be able to take your Higher Leaving Certificates and work at anything you like. You can even do another four years at university. If you fail the qualifying exam you’ll have to go to a junior secondary school and leave at fourteen and take any job you can get. Look at me. I went to a senior secondary school but I had to leave at fourteen to support my mother and sister. I think I had the ability to do well in life, but to do well you need certificates, certificates, and I had no certificates. The best I could become was a machine minder in Laird’s box-making factory. During the war of course there was a shortage of men with certificates, and I got a job purely on my abilities. But look what I’m doing now. Have you any notion of what you would like to be?”

Thaw considered. In the past he had wanted to be a king, magician, explorer, archaeologist, astronomer, inventor and pilot of spaceships. More recently, while scribbling in the back bedroom, he had thought of writing stories or painting pictures. He hesitated and said, “A doctor.”

“A doctor! Yes, that’s a good thing to be. A doctor gives his life to helping others. A doctor is always, and will always be, respected and needed by the community, no matter what social changes take place. Well, your first step is the qualifying exam. Don’t worry about anything but that first step. You’re good at English and General Knowledge but bad at Arithmetic, so what you must do is stick in at Arithmetic.” Mr. Thaw patted his son’s back. “Go to it!” he said. Thaw went to his bedroom, shut the door, lay on the bed and started crying. The future his father indicated seemed absolutely repulsive.

Whitehill Senior Secondary School was a tall gloomy red sandstone building with a playing field at the back and on each side a square playground, one for each sex, enclosed and minimized by walls with spiked railings on top. It had been built like this in the eighteen-eighties but the growth of Glasgow had imposed additions. A structure, outwardly uniform with the old building but a warren of crooked stairs and small classrooms within, was stuck to the side at the turn of the century. After the first world war a long wooden annexe was added as temporary accommodation until a new school could be built, and after the second world war, as a further temporary measure, seven prefabricated huts holding two classrooms each were put up on the playing field. On a grey morning some new boys stood in a lost-looking crowd near the entrance gate. In primary school they had been the playground giants. Now they were dwarfs among a mob of people up to eighteen inches taller than themselves. A furtive knot from Riddrie huddled together trying to seem blasé. One said to Thaw, “What are ye taking, Latin or French?”