Читать книгу A History Maker - Alasdair Gray - Страница 7

BY A HERO’S MOTHER

BEFORE VANISHING from the open intelligence net Wat Dryhope gave me a printout of the next five chapters saying, “My apology for a botched life, mother. Do what you like with it.”

I put it on a shelf behind old encyclopædias. The title scunnered me. Not knowing it was ironical I feared that his memoirs, like those of ancient politicians, would hoist a claim to importance by blaming his failure on wicked enemies and stupid helpers. The words “a botched life” suggested something different but equally dreich: the start of Augustine’s Confessions where the saint prepares us for his extraordinary conversion by denouncing his very ordinary early nastiness. I loved Wat most of my gets so had no wish to read what might make me despise him. Nor could I burn his writing unread. I placed it in easy reach and ignored it for years.

One grey dank autumn afternoon two months ago I had fed the poultry and was snibbing the henrun gate when I fell down flat and took an hour to regain breath and balance. I have had several tumbles lately, each worse than the last; have also started recalling events of twenty, forty, sixty years ago more clearly than this morning or yesterday. Lying on the cold ground I knew that if not killed by a stroke I must soon join my daughters softening into senile dementia in the house where I was born. On returning to the tower I took Wat’s printout from the shelf and dusted it. After filling a glass with uisge beatha I began to read and finished long before nightfall without sipping a drop. Admiration for Wat had become my strongest feeling; also anger with myself for keeping his work so long from the public. Later readings have not lessened my admiration for the clarity of the narration and honesty of the narrator.

A History Maker tells of seven crucial days in the life of a man with all the weaknesses that nearly brought the matriarchy of early modern time to a bad end yet all the strengths that helped it survive, reform, improve. Wat Dryhope, like Julius Caesar describing his Gallic wars, avoids vainglory and self-pity by naming himself in the third person and keeping the tale factual. He also writes so cannily that, like Walter Scott in his best novels, he gives the reader a sense of being at mighty doings. Adroit critics will notice his sly shift from present to past tense in the first chapter. Like Scott he tells a Scottish story in an English easily understood by other parts of the world but leaves the gab of the locals in its native doric. This shows he wanted his story read inside AND outside the Ettrick Forest, and I have warstled to help this by putting among my final notes a glossary of words liable to ramfeezle Sassenachs, North Americans and others with their own variety of English.

Yet with all its art four fifths of Wat’s story is proven fact on the testimony of a whole horde of independent witnesses. The first chapter is not only confirmed by public eye records but clearly based on them. These records also confirm his account of the reception before the Ettrick Warrior house, his platform announcement, his talk with Archie Crook Cot in the third chapter, and quotations from public reports and discussions of the new militarism in the fifth. Open intelligence archives confirm the judgement on the Ettrick–Northumberland cliffside battle by the Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva, and the night of puddock migrations to fresh water in southern Scotland that year, and the dates and wording of the advert and banquet invitation issued by Cellini’s Cloud Circus.

I have also sent copies of A History Maker to everyone I could find who is mentioned in it. Only Mirren Craig Douglas (that bitter woman) returned it without comment, which from her must signify assent. Wat’s brothers Joe and Sandy — his mistresses Nan and Annie and the Bowerhope twins — the veterans and servants of the Warrior house — the sisters who nursed him — I who schooled him — General Shafto who took him to the circus — all say he tells the truth as they recall it. Only the account of his doings with Meg Mountbenger in the gruesome fourth chapter are not confirmed by another protagonist, and why should he turn fanciful about her when honest about others? Some critics say Lawrence’s account of his rape in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an invention by which a lonely masochist got public sympathy for his queerness. Perhaps. Nothing else in Lawrence’s story depends on that rape so he may or may not have tholed it. But after Wat left Bowerhope that morning only a sore carnal collision can explain his state when he was found by the loch side, and explain his remarks to his sisters, and his story to me, and his dissemination of a plague which withered powerplants in every continent but Antarctica. If still alive Meg is sixty-three. Should she reappear and deny Wat’s story let none believe her. She was always a perverse bitch. She was the first of my gets, but I never liked her.

So I bequeath A History Maker to the open intelligence, having added to the end notes explaining what those who ken little of the past may find bumbazing. For posterity’s sake my notes about the immediate present are put in the past tense too, since the present soon will be. Wat was a scholar and a fighter. His tale of warfare, love and skulduggery also meditates on human change. It antidotes a dangerous easy-oasy habit of thinking the modern world at last a safe place, of thinking the past a midden too foul to steep our brains in. Last week a Dryhope auntie asked me, “Why remember those nasty centuries when honest folk were queered, pestered and malagroozed by clanjamfries of greedy gangsters who called themselves governments and stock exchanges? I wouldnae give them headroom.”

This wish not to see how we got here is ancient, not modern. Over three hundred years ago Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.” He was a practical genius who changed millions of lives by paying folk to make carriages in big new factories, while getting millions more to sell and buy carriages these factories made. Having mastered the new art of industrial growth he thought intelligent life needed nothing else. By 1929 the big new factories had made more carriages than could be sold at a profit. The owners closed the factories, millions of makers lost their jobs and houses, and even some rich folk suffered. Ford, not seeing that his method of making money had produced this poverty, blamed the collapse of industrial housekeeping on Communists and Jews and said Adolf Hitler’s fascism was the cure. He was partly right. The Second World War let him expand his factories again for he used them to make machines for the American armed forces. He was not nasty or stupid by nature, but ignorance of the past fogged his view of the present and blinded him to the future.

A History Maker shows that good states change as inevitably as bad ones, and should be carefully watched. My pedantical lang-nebbed notes at the end try to emphasize that. They also emulate my son’s modesty by naming me in the third person. If any future reader learns what happened to my brave, discontented, kindly, misguided, long-lost son I hope he or she will add a postscript for the satisfaction of posterity. I am sorry that I will not be here to read it.

Kate Dryhope

Dryhope Tower

8 December 2234