The Ends of Our Tethers (10 page)

“
Tristram
means
sadly born
,” I said, “I'm not surprised the mother didn't want her boy called that.”

“You've forgotten what Aiblins means. That makes a difference.”

“What does Aiblins mean?”

“Look it up, wordsmith,” he said, laughing. “Consult a Lallans dictionary,
you antique Scottish nebula.”

“But how did you know a son was coming before he got born?”

He tapped his brow saying, “I heard it in here.”

I asked if his inner voice ever gave him poetry nowadays. He said, “I think it's trying to. Sometimes a good line gets through but never a whole couplet or verse because the government is jamming me.”

“The government? How?”

“It keeps sending other voices into my head, loud ones that accuse me of terrible things I've never done, never even imagined doing. Why? Why should the government spend money on elaborate broadcasting equipment just to torture me with false accusations only I can hear? It makes no sense. It's a total waste of taxpayers' money.” He did not say this angrily or miserably but with a kind of puzzled amusement. I said, “Some people in high places must think you very dangerous.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Tell me a line your inner voice has given you recently.”

He pressed a finger to the side of his brow and after a while said, “
Since breathing is
my life, to stop I dare not dare
.”

“I like that line. Any more?”

“Er …
Great vessels sink, while piss-pots
stay afloat
.”

“Better and better. Do you still think I'm a piss-pot?”

He grinned apologetically and murmured, “If the cap fits … Oh, here's another coming through:
To die, to me, today, is
like returning home from a war
.”

“That's the best line of all. You're still a poet, Luke, in a fragmentary way.”

“The government must want to keep me fragmentary. Has your inspiration ever been broken up by outside broadcasting?” “No.”

On his discoloured, distorted face appeared a smile of pure childish happiness mingled with sly mischief.

“Your work isn't good enough to frighten them,” he murmured and gave my shoulder a consoling pat.

“True. I must leave now.”

I gave him money that he tranquilly accepted. I hurried away in a state very near panic. By pretending to share his world view I had almost been convinced by it. I was glad to learn later that the
dare not dare
line came from the introduction to John
Lennon's
In His Own Write
, that the sunk ship and floating piss-pots were from a translation of a Gaelic proverb in one of McDiarmid's most rambling monologues. I haven't found the source of the third, which may be a genuine Aiblins invention. But I am afraid to re-examine the verses in the creased folder in my lobby cupboard, afraid to show them to people who might judge them differently. It might emerge that I have driven a great poet insane by suppressing his earliest works.

For the same reason I fear
to destroy them.

W
HEN LONDON WAS ADVERTISED Was the world's fashion capital – when The Beatles seemed the nation's greatest export – when a Conservative prime minister with a Scottish name said, probably truthfully, that the British people had never been so prosperous, two such people went for a weekend camping holiday in the Highlands.

They were building workers of seventeen and eighteen who lived with their parents in the town of Dumbarton. On Friday night after work they packed the panniers of their motorbikes, rode up the Vale of Leven, took the shore road by Loch Lomond to Tarbert, turned west to the head of Loch Long then zoomed over
The Rest-and-Be-Thankful. As darkness fell they passed through the Highland's only neat little eighteenth-century town and began looking for a camping place. There was a sea loch to their left, hedged fields to the right, and after a mile or two they saw a side road with a wide grassy verge. Here they stopped, spread a groundsheet, erected a tent and put the motorbikes inside. This left enough room to lay down sleeping bags with the panniers for pillows. Then they tied the tent flaps shut, walked back to the town and spent a pleasant evening in the bar of a small hotel.

There are many tales of Scottish country pubs serving drink after the legal closing time. This was one such pub. The boys, cheerfully drunk, left it after midnight and returned to the tent through a mild but sobering rain shower. They sobered completely on finding the tent flaps wide open and nothing but the groundsheet inside. They discussed returning to the town and phoning the police but gloomily decided that a Highland policeman might be hard to rouse at that hour, especially if the rousers were urban youths smelling of
drink. They agreed to do nothing before daylight and spent a miserable night huddled in their leather clothes back to back on the groundsheet.

At eight in the morning they were themselves roused by a man wearing well-cut tweed clothes and accompanied by a policeman. To the boys this man seemed very tall and fresh-faced, perhaps because they felt tired and dirty. He said, “You have insolently camped upon my land without asking my permission. What have you to say for yourselves?”

The elder boy said they didn't know that the roadside was not public, also that their motorbikes and other things had been stolen.

“Not stolen. Impounded,” said the man, “I had them removed last night to the police station. You can thank your lucky stars that I was kind enough to leave you the tent. So now dismantle it, collect your chattels from the station and clear out. I do not object, as a rule, to visitors who behave properly and drop no litter. I regard this –” he indicated the tent – “as a form of litter. I have a friend, a very brave soldier who had similar trouble with a family of
people like you. Well, he discovered their address, went with a friend to the municipal housing scheme where they lived and pitched a tent of his own in the middle of their back garden. They didn't like that one little tiny bit. Quite annoyed about it they were as a matter of fact.”

The man turned a little and looked steadily

toward the loch, mountains, glens, rivers,

moors and islands that he regarded

(with the support of the police)

as his back garden.

M
Y PARENTS TAUGHT ME that getting attention by unconventional actions (they called it “showing off”) was bad manners. By pleasing teachers, broadcasters, publishers and others in authority I have become a noted author and Professor of Glasgow University. Why should I walk with many others through the centre of Glasgow, complaining about a government that lets me vote for or against it at least once every five years? I am not driven by
esprit de
corps
, take no pleasure in feeling part of a crowd travelling in the same direction. Most goodness, truth and beauty has been achieved by people like Jesus, Galileo and Van Gogh who were out of step with crowds of people. Soldiers marching in
unison appal me as much as a line of high-kicking chorus girls appals ardent feminists. I only take part in political demonstrations when I feel it wickeder to stay away: a state first experienced in 1956.

I was then a student who, twice a week on his way to Art School, called at a clinic for injections to reduce allergies causing asthma. As I bared my arm for the needle one morning a nurse treating me said, “What do you think of this war?”

“What war?”

“The war with Egypt. We invaded it two days ago – we and the French and the Israelis.”

“But … but what's the BBC saying about it?”

“The BBC hasn't said anything about it yet, but it's in all the morning papers.”

This war is called the
Suez
war because Britain and France were fighting to get back control of the Suez canal which Egypt had nationalised the year before. Israel was fighting because Egypt had barred it from what had been an international waterway. Like the USA's war with Vietnam the Suez war was never
openly declared. The British public and Parliament only heard of it on the third day when the government could no longer keep it an official secret. I hurried out of the clinic, excited by my certainty that public opinion would drive that government (a Tory one) from office in a week. I was naïve.

Though fellow students at the Art School were excited by the news not all were horrified by what I considered a lawless action, even when the BBC broke silence and announced the RAF was bombing Alexandria, chief seaport of a nation without an air force. A friend who I thought was socialist said cheerfully, “The old lion is wagging its tail again!”

Like most of the popular press he thought the war a revival of imperial health. I heard an anti-war rally was being held in Glasgow University Union, rushed there and found it a rally against the USSR invasion of Hungary, which was happening at the same time. Like everybody else there I too decided to forget the bombed Egyptians in my sympathy for the invaded Hungarians.

The Suez invasion killed 22 Britons,
10 French, about 200 Israelis and 921 Egyptians, yet Britain and its allies lost that war because the United Nations, the Vatican and the United States condemned it – also the British Parliamentary Labour Party. Yes, I voted Labour then because Labour (I believed) had created a welfare state and abolished government by stock exchange (unlike the USA) and was part of a nation providing a democratic alternative to single party dictatorship (unlike the Soviet Union). I was grateful to the Labour Party for my healthcare, my further education and for condemning the Suez War.

I was happier still when a large majority of local Labour parties voted for Britain to abandon nuclear weapons: another good example we were giving to the world. But the Labour Party leaders rejected the majority opinion of the ordinary members who had voted them into Westminster. On this matter Labour MPs sided steadily with the Tories. By 1965 the London parliament's ability to turn local Socialists into British Tories had moved me to vote for Scottish home rule, which we are far from having achieved in 2003.

Britain now has a government to the right of Mrs Thatcher's, for hers spent more on social welfare than Mr Blair's. So did John Major's. Blair supports President Bush who has decided to break the Geneva Conventions by not just invading a country that cannot invade ours, but also occupying it in order to change the government. Bush declares that Iraq has acquired genocidal weapons of the kind the USA, Russia, Britain, France, India, China, Israel also possess, which makes us terribly nervous. To paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, “Do not do as I do, little nation, do as I say.” Can anyone doubt that if the USA and Britain backed a United Nations plan to inspect and catalogue the dangerous weapons of every nation it would be implemented? Of course every nation would have to include the USA and Britain and Israel. Saddam possesses evil weapons because Britain and the USA sold them to him and the means of making them. In the 1980s he was our ally and used them to exterminate many innocent Kurdish people, but now, in 2003, Kurds are fleeing
into
Iraq to escape from the government of our ally, Turkey. Certainly he arrests people on suspicion
and imprisons them without trial or legal advice, but since 11 September 2001 George Bush's government also does that.

That Iraq contains more oil than any other single nation – that the USA would fall apart without cheap petrol – is one reason for this war. Another must be a widespread desire in the USA to see some brownish turbaned Islamic folk suffer for what happened on 11 September 2001. An internationally orchestrated police investigation would not look sufficiently dramatic on television. The invasion of Afghanistan was not enough. It killed more civilians than those who died in the World Trade Centre, but bigger explosions, larger troop movements are needed by a President whose cuts in social welfare funding have damaged his popularity without curing a depressed US economy. And of course USA businesses and military leaders want total control of the world's oil wells.

A third of the British troops taking part in this war and occupation will be Scottish, though Scotland has a tenth of Britain's population. The Scots were hiring
themselves out to foreign armies many centuries before our union with England. I regret that tradition so I am going to Glasgow Green, and thanks for a sunny day, God.

Arriving with wife and lawyer friend I am amazed by the
many
crowds spreading from the triumphal arch before Glasgow High Court to the People's Palace in the east and Clyde on the south. All demonstrations contain weirdly dressed people who delight the hearts of antagonistic reporters, but here they are so outnumbered as to be invisible. Yet this multitude is splendidly un-uniform, though I hear the women of the Euridice Socialist Choir singing a peace song and some vendors of the Scottish Socialist Party newspaper. There are people of every age, from toddlers in prams pushed by parents to elderly men like me. Some carry doves made of white polystyrene, there are many printed placards saying ‘
Make War on Want, Not Iraq', ‘Not In
My Name, Mr Blair' ‘No Blood for Oil
' and asking for Palestinian liberation. Some hand-made ones are less serious. A nice woman upholds ‘
I Trust No Bush But My
Own
', a stout bearded gent shows the ‘
Dumfries Ageing Hippies Against the
War
' logo. Two boys often or eleven walk carefully side by side wearing a single sandwich board made of card with slogans written in fibre-tip pen. They seem to have no adult presiding with them.

There seem no adults presiding over anyone, so we join the crowd at its thickest beside Greendyke Street where the procession should start, edging in as far as possible and looking around for guidance. It is provided, unexpectedly, by the police. They form a barrier between the crowd and the street and let us through in numbers that can start walking ten abreast, thus filling the width of the road without flooding pavements on each side.

We await our turn in this good-natured, very patient crowd. I can see none of the friends I had arranged to meet on the Green, see several others in my line of business: novelists Bernard MacLaverty, A.L. Kennedy, the poet Aonghas MacNeachail, several teachers and lecturers. Some senior citizens carry a banner saying THE TAYSIDE PENSIONERS' FORUM. My
lawyer friend tells me Blair proposes to abolish old age pensions because workers' contributions are now too small to pay for them, I suppose because of inflation. This steadily reduces the wages of the poorest paid while used as a reason for taxing the wealthy less, thus letting them invest more in private businesses of global extent. So New Labour may undo the main achievement of Lloyd George's Liberal government in 1908! We talk about the arms industry: how the 1930s depression only ended when Britain and the USA prepared for war, how both nations have been preparing for war or fighting it ever since, how the making and export of weapons is now Britain's main industry and trade. Then I remember that the Principal of my University, Professor Sir Graham Davies, is chairman of the Universities Superannuation Scheme, a pension scheme of which many British academics are members and which (a handbill tells me) has
£
60 million invested in British Arms Enterprise. Some students a month ago were threatened with expulsion from Glasgow University for protesting against such investments. Should I not have supported them? But I have eaten, drunk
and conversed with Principal Professor Sir Graham Davies, a cheerful, friendly soul who has been very supportive of my university department. It would embarrass me to criticise him publicly. Yes, at heart I am an arselicker.

I often get letters nowadays from people keen to discuss or discover views of Scottish
identity
, as if more than five million folk could possibly have a single identity. But if asked what chiefly characterises my nation I will repeat what I wrote in 1982: arselicking. We disguise it with surfaces of course: surfaces of generous, open-handed manliness; surfaces of dour, practical integrity: surfaces of maudlin, drunken defiance: surfaces of quiet, respectable decency. The chorus of a Scottish national anthem proposed by a Dundonian poet comes to mind —

Hermless, hermless, naebody cares for me.
I gang tae the libray, I tac oot a book
And then I gang hame for ma tea

— as I usually do. There have been many eminent Scots with strong independent minds but now the most eminent are the worst arselickers. Scots Labour MP's lick Tony Blair's bum. Tony Blair licks the bum
of the US President. Any US President. It's a British Prime Ministerial tradition.

At last the police are letting us through and, roughly ten abreast, we process down Greendyke Street then up the Saltmarket to Glasgow Cross. Occasionally those around us burst into wild cheering, seemingly inspired by folk waving encouragement from upper tenement windows. Our stream divides neatly to pass the gawky clock tower of the Tollbooth, all that remains of Glasgow's seventeenth-century Town Hall, magistrates' court and city jail.

In John Prebble's book about the Glencoe massacre I read that two British officers were imprisoned there in 1692. They had opened their sealed orders before reaching Glencoe village, and found themselves ordered to put men, women and children to the sword. They broke their swords and told their commander at Fort William that no decent officer should obey such an order. So they were sent south by ship and jailed for a while in this Glasgow Tollbooth. Prebble says there is no other record of them so they may have escaped
further punishment. I would love to see a big plaque on that tower commemorating these two brave soldiers. Scotland's castles, cathedrals, public parks, city centres contain many many war memorials, some of the most elaborate commemorating a few officers and men who died in Africa and Asia while killing hundreds fighting on their own soil without the advantage of gunpowder. Are these two officers the only British soldiers to disobey a dishonourable order? Then I remember hearing that in the Gulf War authorised by the last President Bush, four British officers resigned their commissions in protest against dropping those cluster bombs which “mince up everything that lives within a three-mile strip” onto Iraqi ground forces, though most UK and US airmen queued up enthusiastically to airstrike such folk, who could not strike back. One bomber said they looked like swarms of cockroaches.

From the helicopter that sometimes passes above us we too probably resemble cockroaches as we ascend the High Street, turn left down Ingram Street, turn left then right again. Our biggest roar goes up as the Civic Chambers come in sight. Why are
there no Glasgow Town Councillors waving from those upper windows? My wife reminds me they are on holiday because this is Saturday. Why are there none in our procession? (I am delighted to learn later there is one, at least.) Approaching George Square on the St Vincent Street side we can now see a silhouette of the procession crossing the summit of Blythswood Hill a quarter mile ahead.