On the Island (11 page)

Later after the period was over, one of the members of the class who was repeating the first year stood outside the door of the Science Room shouting to the rest of the boys gathered around him, “They may have invented the lavatory pan but they did not invent the
MIND
.” And they all burst out into a perfect storm of laughter which left them helpless. A lavatory pan, imagine a teacher talking about a lavatory pan!

Back in the staff room Mr Trill, for that was the name of the teacher, was stuffing tobacco into a pipe, and saying, “I saw my first year last period. I think they'll do, I think they'll do. By the time I'm finished with them they'll be all right.” And he turned his attention to
The Times
and its ominous headlines.
The Times
was the only paper he bought, because he said, “You can attack
The Times
on many grounds but you can't deny that it writes sentences.”

When at five o'clock the bus stopped at the path leading to his house, Iain stood for a moment gazing around him. It was as if the village had suddenly become very small and unimportant. Here there was no castle and no trees, no drifters, no motor boats, no big shops, no noise of traffic. The huddled quiet houses seemed becalmed in front of him, and the moor ancient and lifeless.

He walked up the path to where his mother was standing, waiting for him at the door. Even she had suddenly become more distant, as if she belonged to another world, where the Greeks and the Romans and the “mind” and the castle and the trees had no place. He did not wish to tell her what had happened during the day: he wanted to keep it secret. But he knew that she would ask him all sorts of questions till every morsel of his experience had been chewed and devoured. There was no sign of Kenneth anywhere: perhaps he was playing with the other boys of the village.

Clutching his new case in his hand, his case which contained his new books and his new jotters and his assignments for the following day, Iain walked up the path towards his mother who was still standing by the door shading her eyes against the glare of the sun.

19

“I'
M NOT GOING
to put that on,” said Mrs Campbell.

“Well, we all have to,” said Angus Macleod in his most officious voice. “We all have to try them on. You never know what they'll do. And the two boys will have to try them on as well.”

“I wouldn't be able to breathe,” said Mrs Campbell inflexibly. “Anyway they won't come as far as here.”

“You never know about that. You never know when they'll come.”

“I would look daft wearing that,” Mrs Campbell said determinedly. “And as for the two boys they're too young.”

“No, we're not,” Kenneth interposed. “We're not too young.” He was glad of the novelty and ready to prove that he was not frightened.

“You never know,” Angus Macleod repeated. “They're beasts, animals. Have you heard what they have been doing in Belgium?” His small malicious eyes flickered at the savagery and cruelty of it. But he couldn't bring himself to tell her that they had been raping nuns, and in any case he had never seen a nun in his life. A part of him seethed happily with the idea of it.

“Well then,” said Mrs Campbell, “you show us how to put them on.”

He took the gas masks out of their boxes, and laid them on the table. “Perhaps Kenneth would like to try his on first,” he said. “He doesn't seem to mind.” And when Kenneth immediately stepped forward like a soldier on parade he fixed the gas mask to his face.

“I can't breathe,” Kenneth thought, feeling the coldness of the rubber, then staring at his mother and brother and Angus Macleod through the large bulbous eyes like a fish's eyes.

He danced up and down in the room like a monster, putting his hands out to touch, first, his mother and then Iain. He was swimming in the sea, he was a fish, the room had become an ocean.

Iain stared at his masked brother, and couldn't recognise him. It was as if Kenneth had been replaced, as in a fairy story, by a complete stranger, ugly and distant and frightening, snouted like a beast.

Keep away from me, Kenneth, I don't know you, you're someone else, why are you swimming towards me like that, from the bottom of the ocean, why are you holding out your hands towards me as if to destroy me, as if you hated me? Why are your eyes glittering behind the mask?

I don't want to wear it, it's evil, I hate it.

But when Angus Macleod handed him his own gas mask he put it on, fumbling with it, till finally he had fitted it over his face. And now he and Kenneth were glaring at each other, through the bulbous eyes; and then his mother was wearing hers as well; and the three of them, masked and snouted and goggled, were watching each other, remote and cold inside their new insulated worlds. Kenneth stalked Iain about the room, while their unrecognizable mother stayed where she was, uncertain and frightened.

One was a German soldier and one was a Scottish soldier. It was a fight to the death in a country and landscape that they didn't know. They hunted each other round chairs and round the table, their disguised heads thrust out, imaginary daggers in their hands. All around them was the hissing of gas, the crackling of gunfire: the island was alive with lights and noise.

And Kenneth thought, I'll get him. He's an officer, he's left us all, he's deserted us. I'll get him. He thinks he's better than me, but he's not.

And Iain was thinking, Kenneth doesn't like me. He really wants to kill me. I'm on my own on this island, this insula, I'm an officer who's gone on a mission of his own.

Suddenly he removed his mask and shouted, “I don't like it. I don't like it.” But Kenneth kept stalking him till his mother, after her mask had been removed, made him stop. She was remembering her own father, bearded and heavy, setting off for another war, his rifle strapped to his shoulder.

“Stop that at once,” she shouted at Kenneth and Kenneth stopped, frightened at the violence in her voice. Slowly he removed his gas mask and laid it on the table, from which Angus Macleod took it to return it to its box.

“They're just boys,” he said. “It's natural. They don't know.” And he remembered his own son who would be setting off to the Navy that very week. He might never see him again, and yet not so long ago, it seemed, he had been the same age as these boys. The house would be quiet without him, he and his wife would feel the silence.

“Well,” he said, “that's that. You know how to use them if you need to.”

They watched through the window as he made his heavy way down the path to the road.

“Well,” said their mother, “that's enough. You get on with your homework,” she told Iain, “and as for you, Kenneth, you go to the well and bring me some water.”

“I don't want to,” Kenneth complained. “I always have to go and get the water.”

“Iain has his homework to do,” said his mother in an even inflexible voice. “You're not doing anything.”

With a glance at his brother, Iain said that he himself would go for the water but his mother immediately checked him. “No. He's not doing anything. He has to go.”

Kenneth sulkily left the room and the two of them were left alone. “You have to work hard. Remember what I'm doing for you. You'll have to become a minister or a teacher.” It was as if she had already forgotten about the war and the unforeseen disasters it might bring. “I don't want you to end up with nothing after the sacrifice I'm making for you.”

Iain said nothing but turned back to his books while he thought of Kenneth making his slow reluctant way to the well.

Insula, insulam, insulae, insulae, insula …

Of an island, to an island, from an island …

The teacher's head was crowned with flames and he was shouting, “Who invented the mind? Eh? Who invented the mind?” The head was burning and men in gas masks were attacking from all directions while in the far distance Kenneth was dipping the buckets into the well, his cool head bent over the cool water, far from the guns and the action.

“I don't like these gas masks,” said his mother. “And who does Angus Macleod think he is? He's going about there like a sergeant major. Soon he'll be thinking that he runs the village.”

Around the ‘insula' the waters were bitter and salty and briny, and over them a fierce sun was shining with red vertical rays. “Kenneth will have to do more of the work now,” said his mother, her head bent over a jersey which she was knitting. “You've done it long enough. I'm not standing his nonsense. I don't know how I'm going to get you a school uniform and that's for sure.”

Come, Kenneth, come back from the well. Let us be as we always were, fighting and shouting at each other. I don't want to be an officer on this island. I'll help you with the water from the well.

And Iain felt a pain bitterer than he had ever known surge through him as if for the first time in his life he was truly alone, freed of both his mother and brother, freed of the battle and the war, inside his own world of the mask and the goggles, gazing down on those other two, climbing steadily over the moor, over the sea, frightened, exhilarated, solitary: so that for a moment as he looked at his books it was as if he was still wearing his gas mask and he couldn't see them clearly.

“Yes, mother,” he said.

He went back to his homework and she continued with her knitting.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON
BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Consider the Lilies

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTJO

‘Retrained, finely wrought … Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference' –
New Statesman

‘Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty – are all vividly depicted … one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases' –
Observer

The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland's history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community.

Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scott herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.

The Last Summer

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXSGI

A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland's most distinguished twentieth century writers.

Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends – and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Sheila, are marvellously realised. Above all, this is the story of a boy, on his own, trying to discover himself and through himself to find his way in life.

My Last Duchess

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKA

Iain Crichton Smith's third novel is as different from his second,
The Last Summer
, as that was from his first,
Consider the Lillies
. Crichton Smith is at the height of his powers as poet and prose writer. This new work of fiction follows hard upon his Selected Poems and his volume of short stories, Survival Without Fear.

Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event, which he has by no means expected, has jolted him into a major reassessment of himself, of his place in the universe. He realises that he has become bitter, cynical and disillusioned: he is a failure intellectually – he wanted to be a writer, but for years he has striven at one book, which he privately knows to be not very good. He is a failure as a teacher – he wasn't competent enough to obtain a post at a university. He is a failure as a husband, because his wife was daily moving away from him. He is a failure as a father, because he and his wife had had no children. Above all, he is a failure as a human being, because he despises everybody, not least himself. Mark Simmons hates himself for being more concerned with argument than happiness.

My Last Duchess
is a novel of great resourcefulness and energy.

An Honourable Death

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQQU

‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' –
The Times

In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter's son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria's army. He joined the Gordons – the 92nd Highlanders – whose reputation was second to none as the fearsome cutting-edge of the British Army. Posted to India, Afghanistan, South Africa and the Sudan, he became a formidable soldier, rising up through the ranks to become the glorified and much-decorated Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald or, more commonly, ‘Fighting Mac', the true hero of Omdurman.

Then, in 1903, at the peak of his remarkable career, he was accused of homosexuality. Ordered to face court martial and unable to bear the disgrace, he ended his life.

From this true story, with a poet's insight and precision, Iain Crichton Smith has crafted an exquisite novel: a tale of honour and elitism, equivocation and hierocracy, victory and despair.

The Dream

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‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim' –
Scotland on Sunday

‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' –
The Times

In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures.

Their marriage frays in the silence as Martin clings to the Gaelic he teaches at the university, the dwindling bedrock of the culture of the isles, while Jean refuses to speak a language that brings back memories of the bitter years of her childhood. While Jean chatters with her friends of relationships and resentments, Martin turns to Gloria who seems to share his dream of the islands of the Gael…

Iain Crichton Smith's The Dream explores the precarious survival of a modern marriage with a poet's lean, evocative precision and all the spellbinding authority of a master storyteller in the time-honoured Celtic tradition.

In the Middle of the Wood

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Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened.

In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith's most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith's case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.

The Tenement

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The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding.

The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper's role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife.

Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement's most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town's down-and-outs.

The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons' child. But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Search

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBU

Trevor Griersor, a Scottish university lecturer, is spending a term in Canberra, lecturing on Scottish authors. One day a stranger phones, with garbled news of Trevor's brother Norman who vanished in Australia many years before, and has since, according to the caller, become an alcoholic and been in trouble with the police.

Trevor feels overwhelmed with guilt, for having neglected his brother for so long. He imagines him penniless now, a down-and-out, drunk in the gutter; or perhaps even lying in a pauper's grave. He resolves that he must trace him, and travels to Sydney to begin his search. The search takes him to government offices, police stations, the Salvation Army, a squalid doss-house; and his experiences drive him into a state of panic.

But why does he feel so compelled to search? As Douglas, that ambiguous Iago-like figure who first phoned him, now says, Norman won't be at all the younger brother of eighteen years ago; he'll be a stranger. If he's an alcoholic, he may be violent. He's unlikely to thank Trevor for seeking to patronise him by ‘rescuing' him. Trevor has asked himself – and it's the basic question that faces the reader too – ‘Am I my brothers' keeper?' Does he really care about his brother, or is he acting from a sense of duty?

This is the novel's crux, and Trevor's cross, which he bears with him to a highly ironical conclusion. It's an absorbing study of conscience and responsibility, written with all of Crichton Smith's quiet authority.

A Field Full of Folk

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBK

The world, in Iain Crichton Smith's vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even from his wife, but she had divined them. Mrs Berry cultivates her garden assiduously, and when Jehovah's Witnesses come quoting their texts, she tells them that the hill at the end of the village can be climbed by many paths. Old Annie has no doubts about her path: she has no use for Christianity (‘Protestants and Catholics, nothing but guns and fighting') and finds her answer in the East. On more mundane levels, Morag Bheag worries about her son serving in Northern Ireland, and Chrissie Murray shocks the village by leaving her husband and making for Glasgow – taking only a radio with her, that's what shocks most. Murdo Macfarlane vehemently urges his puritanical views – about, for instance, the use of the church hall for a young people's dance – and David Collins nurses his hatred of Germans, but cannot insult them when they come as tourists.

In short, it's a village much like any other, with its prejudices and certainties and kindliness and heartbreak: the whole and the small part. As the Minister sees in his visionary moment at the annual sports, when the petty disputes over the wheel-barrow race and the tragic news of young Bheag's death come together in his realisation that it's all a part of ‘this supremely imperfect and perfect earth.'

Mr Crichton Smith's novels never carry any superfluous weight: they're as spare as sprinters. He writes with a poet's concentration, and never more precisely, or more movingly, than here, in what amounts to a gentle, compassionate meditation on life and death, with a warm, affirmative conclusion.

An End to Autumn

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKU

Tom and Vera Mallow, who are in only their early thirties, might indeed be said to be in the autumn of their lives already, they are school teachers, both of them, but without any strong feeling for children, and without nay children of their own. Their outlook is wary; they hold themselves apart. When they invite Tom's mother to share their home, they do so from a sense of duty rather than love.

But after autumn, we find, comes summer; and it is the mothers – Tom's and, later Vera's – who in surprising ways reverse the march of the seasons: Mrs Mallow as irritant, with her incongruous friendship with Mrs Murphy, a Catholic and of a lower social class; and then Angela, the vivacious ex-actress, from the a different world, to provide catharsis.

Here is a sympathetic and unusual study of a marriage that, surprisingly and against the odds, takes the right turning; though lest anyone should feel that Crichton Smith is succumbing to sentiment, the novel's last page echoes the veiled foreboding of it first. Once again he reminds us, with oblique irony, of the poet lurking behind the novelist.

On the Island

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTN0

For an eleven-year-old boy, living with his widowed mother and younger brother in a remote seaside village on one of the Western Isles of Scotland, growing up has its difficulties, as well as its idyllic pleasures.

Iain Crichton Smith's vivid evocation is loosely based on memories of his own childhood on Lewis. There are so many discoveries to be made, along the shore and on the moor. Crossing a field under snow has its perils; exploring an empty cottage has its imaginative terrors; you might be humiliated by a village woman when your mother has sent you to a neighbour to borrow half-a-crown until her pension comes through: or playing along the shore with Pauline, a visitor from London with her wider knowledge of the world, you might find your own certainties called into question. There is poverty and richness; and eventually the war casts its shadows across your world.

Iain Crichton Smith has brought to life a gallery of distinctly memorable figures: the sure-footed Blinder with his amazing sense of the island terrain; Stork with his wooden leg; Speedy, the reluctant footballer; Jim returned after twenty years in America with such stories … The author's own sense of the terrain, and of the characters who inhabit it, is equally sure and beautifully precise; his book will evoke for all ages the inner-emotions of growing up, as well as the outward sights and scents of an island experience.