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ОглавлениеA Report to the Trustees
The original of this is also a sheaf of lined fullscap pages folded together, covered with my manuscript in ink. It was written in 1959 over a year after my return from an unhappy trip to Spain. I took many months to turn the events into a careful account of facts without overemphasis. The result was a piece of prose so professional that the trustees thought it was fiction. 25 years later, having run out of ideas for short stories, I used it to fill my space in a book of stories I was sharing with my friends, Agnes Owens and Jim Kelman. This anthology was first suggested to me by a Quartet Books editor, but published by Bloomsbury in 1985 with the overall title Lean Tales, which is now long out of print.
IAPOLOGIZE TO THE TRUSTEES OF THE BELLAHOUSTON TRAVELLING SCHOLARSHIP AND TO MR BLISS, the director of Glasgow Art School, for the long time I have taken to write this report. Had the tour gone as planned they would have received, when I returned, an illustrated diary describing things done and places visited. But I visited very few places and the things I did were muddled and absurd. To show that, even so, the tour was worth while, I must report what I learned from it. I have had to examine my memory of the events deductively, like an archaeologist investigating a prehistoric midden. It has taken a year to understand what happened to me and the money between October 1957 and March 1958.
On learning I was awarded the scholarship my first wish had been to travel on foot or bicycle, sketching landscapes and cityscapes around Scotland, for I knew very little of it apart from Glasgow, two islands in the Firth of Clyde, and places seen on day trips to Edinburgh. However, a condition of the scholarship was that I go abroad. I decided to visit London for a fortnight, travel from there to Gibraltar by ship, find a cheap place to live in southern Spain, paint there as long as the money would allow, then travel home through Granada, Malaga, Madrid, Toledo, Barcelona and Paris, viewing on the way Moorish mosques, baroque cathedrals, plateresque palaces, the works of EI Greco, Velazquez and Goya, with Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Brueghel’s Triumph of Death, and several other grand gaudy things which are supposed to compensate for the crimes of our civilization. The excellence of this plan, approved by Mr Bliss, is not lessened by the fact that I eventually spent two days in Spain and saw nothing of interest.
On the 31st of October I boarded the London train in Glasgow Central Station. It was near midnight, dark and drizzling, and to save money I had not taken a sleeping car. The prospect of vivid sunshine, new lands and people should have been very exciting, but as the train sped south a sullen gloom settled upon me. I looked at my reflection in the rain-streaked carriage window and doubted the value of a tourist’s shallow experience of anywhere. I was homesick already. I do not love Glasgow much, I sometimes actively hate it, but I am at home here. In London this sickness increased until it underlay quite cheerful feelings and weighed so heavy on the chest that it began to make breathing difficult. I had been in hospital with asthma during the three previous summers, but a doctor treating me had said another very bad attack was unlikely and a trip abroad might do me good. I had a pocket inhaler which eased difficult breathing with puffs of atropine methondrate, papaverine hydrochloride, chlorbutol and adrenaline; and for strong spasms I had a bottle of adrenaline solution and a hypodermic needle to inject myself subcutaneously. In London I slept in a students’ hostel in a street behind the university tower. The dormitory was not large and held about fifty bunks, all occupied. I was afraid to use the inhaler at night in case the noise of it wakened someone, so used the needle, which should have been kept for emergencies. This made sleep difficult. At night I felt trapped in that dormitory and by day I felt trapped in London.
The main shops and offices in London are as large as ours, sometimes larger, but the dwelling houses are mostly of brick and seldom more than half the height of a Scottish sandstone tenement. Such buildings, in a country town surrounded by meadows, look very pleasant, but a big county of them, horizon beyond horizon beyond horizon, is a desert to me, and not less a desert for containing some great public buildings and museums. I visited these oases as the trustees would have wished, but had continually to leave them for a confusion of streets of which my head could form no clear map. Like most deserts this city is nearly flat and allows no view of a more fertile place. The streets of central Glasgow are also gripped between big buildings but it is always easy to reach a corner where we can see, on a clear day, the hills to the north and to the south. I know I am unfair to London. A normal dweller there has a circle of acquaintance about the size of a small village. Only a stranger feels challenged to judge the place as a whole, which cannot be done, so the stranger feels small and lonely. I visited several publishers with a folder of drawings and a typescript of my poems. I hoped to be asked to illustrate a book, perhaps my own book. I was kindly received and turned away from each place, and although I could not feel angry with the publishers (who would have been out of business if they had not known what was saleable) I turned my disappointment against the city. I grew more asthmatic and walked about refusing to be awed.
The least awesome place I saw was the government church, Westminster Abbey. This once fine Gothic structure is filled with effigies of landlords, company directors and administrators who got rich by doing exactly what was expected of them, and now stand as solid in their marble wigs, boots and waistcoats as the Catholic saints and martyrs they have replaced. Among them is an occasional stone carved with the name of someone who has been creative or courageous. A less pretentious but nastier place is the Tower of London. Built by the Normans for the enslavement of the English natives (who before this had been a comparatively democratic and even artistic people, judging by their export of illuminated manuscripts to the continent) this fort was used by later governments as an arsenal, jail and bloody police station. Nobody pretends otherwise. The stands of weapons and the pathetic scratchings of the political prisoners on their cell-walls are clearly labelled, and folk who would feel discomfort at a rack of police batons or the barbed fence of a concentration camp feel thrilled because these are supposed to be part of a splendid past. The tower also holds the Crown jewels. There were more of them than I had imagined, twelve or fifteen huge display cabinets of crowns, orbs, maces, swords and ceremonial salt-cellars. Most of it dates from the eighteenth century – I recall nothing as old as the regalia of the sixth Jamie Stewart in Edinburgh castle. I noticed that the less the monarchs were working politicians the more money was spent ornamenting them. The culmination of this development is the huge Crown lmperial, an art nouveau job created for the coronation of Edward the Fat in 1901, when the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the world’s most expensively useless hat on the world’s most expensively useless head.
Did anything in London please me? Yes: the work of the great cockneys, the Williams Blake and Turner. Also Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Also the underground rail system. I found this last, with the H.G. Wellsian sweep of its triple escalators and lines of framed, glazed advertisements for films and women’s underwear, and tunnels beneath tunnels bridging tunnels, and tickets which allow those who take the wrong train to find their way to the right station without paying extra, a very great comfort.
But I was glad one morning to get on a boat-train at Liverpool Street Station and begin the second part of the journey to Spain. I was in the company of Ian McCulloch, who had arrived from Glasgow that morning. He is an artist who received his painting diploma at the same time as myself. He also wanted to visit Spain, and had saved the money to do so by working as a gas Iamplighter near Parkhead Forge, Shettleston. We had arranged to travel together and meant to share the rent of a small place in south Spain. The boat-train ran along embankments above the usual streets of small houses, then came to a place where towering structures, part warehouse and part machine, stood among labyrinths of railway-siding. The little brick homes were here also, but the surrounding machinery gave them the dignity of outposts. We arrived at the docks.
The ship was called the Kenya Castle and long before it unmoored we found it a floating version of the sort of hotel we had never been in before. Our cabin was small but compact. It held two bunks the size of coffins, each with a reading lamp and adjustable ventilator. There was a very small sink with hot and cold water, towels, facecloths, soap, a locker with coat-hangers, a knob to ring for the steward, another for the stewardess. In the lavatories each closet contained, beside the roll of toilet paper, a clean towel, presumably to wipe the lingers-on after using the roll, although there were washbasins and towels in the vestibule outside. (It has just struck me that perhaps the extra towel was for polishing the lavatory seat before use.) The menus in the dining room embarrassed us. They were printed on glazed-surface card and decorated at every meal with a different photograph of some nook of Britain’s African empire – The Governor’s Summer Residence, Balihoo Protectorate, The District Vice-Commissioner’s Bungalow, Janziboola, etc. The food, however, was listed in French. Obviously some foods were alternatives to others, while some could, and perhaps should, be asked for on the same plate. We wanted to eat as much as possible to get the full value of the money we had paid; at the same time we feared we would be charged extra if we ate more than a certain amount. We also feared we would be despised if we asked the waiter for information on these matters. Our table was shared with two priests, Catholic and Anglican. Ian and I were near acquaintances rather than friends. With only our nationality, profession and destination in common we left conversation to the priests. They mainly talked about an audience the Anglican had had with the Pope. He addressed the Catholic with the deference a polite salesman might show to the representative of a more powerful firm. He said the Pope’s hands were beautifully shaped, he had the fingers of an artist, a painter. Ian and I glanced down at our own fingers. Mine had flecks of paint on the nails that I hadn’t managed to clean off for the previous fortnight.
After this meal coffee was served in the lounge. The cups were very small with frilled paper discs between themselves and the saucers to absorb the drips. There were many people in the lounge but it was big enough not to seem crowded. Darkness had fallen and we were moving slowly down the Thames. There were magazines on small tables: Vogue, House and Garden, John O’London’s, Punch, the magazines found in expensive dentists’ waiting rooms, nothing to stimulate thought. I played a bad game of chess with lan and ordered two whiskies, which were cheap now we were afloat. I took mine chiefly to anaesthetize the asthma, but lan felt bound to respond by ordering another two, and resented this. He had less money than I and he thought we were starting the trip extravagantly. The ship was leaving the estuary for the sea. I felt the floor of that opulent lounge, till now only troubled by a buried throbbing, take on a quality of sway. I was distracted from the weight on my chest by an uneasy, flickering sensation in my stomach. I therefore left the lounge and went to bed after vomiting into the cabin sink.
While eating breakfast next morning I watched the portholes in the walls of the saloon. The horizon was moving up and down each of them like the bottom edge of a blind. When the horizon was down nothing could be seen outside but pale grey sky. After a few seconds it would be pulled up and the holes would look on nothing but dark grey water. The priests’ conversation seemed unforgivably banal. I felt homesick, seasick and asthmatic. I went back to bed and used my inhaler but it had stopped having effect. I took a big adrenaline jag. That night breathing became very difficult indeed, I could not sleep and injections did not help much. The impossibility of sitting up in the bunk, the narrowness of the cabin and the movement of the floor increased my sense of suffocation. I lost all memory of normal breathing, and so lost hope of it. However, I could clearly imagine how it would feel to be worse, so fear arrived. Fear lessened the ability to face pain, which therefore increased. At this stage it was hard to stop the fear swelling into panic, because the more pain I felt the more I could imagine. The only way to divert my imagination from its capital accumulation of fear was to think about something else and only erotic images were strong enough to be diverting. Having no experience of sexual satisfaction I recalled women in the London underground advertisements.
Next morning I asked Ian to call the ship’s doctor, who entered the cabin and sat beside the bunk. He was an elderly friendly Scotsman, straight-spined, red-faced and silver-moustached. His uniform had several rings of braid round the cuffs. His speech was all sudden, decided statements interrupted by abrupt silences in which he sat erect, gripping his knees with his hands and looking at the air in front of his eyes. He felt my pulse, touched me with a stethoscope, agreed that I was asthmatic and went away. After a while a nurse came and gave me an intravenous injection which made me slightly better. Later that day Ian told me it was quite warm on deck and a whale had been sighted. The following day the doctor came back, sat erect beside me and asked how I felt. I said a bit better, I hoped to get up soon. He said abruptly, “How are your bowels?” I said I had no trouble with them. He sat in a tranced rigid silence for a while, then said suddenly, “Buy a tin of Eno’s salts from the ship’s store. Use them reguIarly,” and left.
That night I developed an obstruction of the throat which coughing could not shift nor spitting reduce. Erotic images brought no relief though I tried to remember the most shameful parts of all the obscene things I had ever heard or read. Next day I asked again to see the doctor. He told me I had pneumonia and must be taken to the ship’s hospital. He left and then the medical orderly came with a wooden wheeled chair. I panicked while being put in it, my mind crumbled for a few moments and I became quite babyish. I was not slapped but I was shouted at. Then I made my body as tense in the chair as possible in order to hold the mind in one piece. I was trundled along narrow corridors into the hospital where the nurse and orderly put me in a real bed. I was able to be calmer there. The hospital was a neat, bright little room with four beds and small flower-patterned curtains round the portholes. I asked for an intravenous injection of adrenaline. The nurse explained that this would not help pneumonia. She tied a small oxygen cylinder to the head of the bed and gave me a mask connected to it by a rubber tube. This helped a little. The orderly brought a form, asked several questions and filled it in. My religion puzzled him. I said I was agnostic and his pencil dithered uncertainly above a blank space. I spelled the word out but he wrote down “agnoist”. Ian came and I dictated a letter to my father to be posted from Gibraltar. A radio telegram had been sent to him and I wanted to mitigate any worry it might cause. I noticed nothing special in lan’s manner but later he told me he had difficulty restraining his tears. The doctor had diagnosed pneumonia with probable tuberculosis, and said it would be a miracle if I reached Gibraltar alive. While we were at work on the letter the doctor entered with a man wearing a uniform like his own. This stranger looked on with a faint embarrassed smile while the doctor spoke to me in a loud and cheery bonhomous Scottish way. “Aye, Alasdair, keep your heart up!” he cried, “Remember the words of Burns: ‘The heart’s aye the part aye that maks us richt or wrang’.” “Just so, Doctor, just so,” I said, playing up to him. He told me that I would be shifted to a land-hospital next morning when the ship reached Gibraltar, meanwhile (and here he looked at the dial on my oxygen cylinder) I’d better go easy on the oxygen, I’d used up half a tube already and there was only one left in the store. The two visitors went away and the nurse told me the other man was the captain.
After that life was hard for a while. I finished one oxygen cylinder and started on the last, which had forty minutes of comfortable breathing in it. It was difficult to disperse these forty minutes through the eighteen hours before we reached Gibraltar, sleep was impossible and I was afraid of becoming too tired to make myself breathe. During this time I was well cared for by the nurse and the orderly. She was a plain, slightly gawky, serious, very pleasant young woman. She gave me penicillin injections and clean towels to wipe away my sweat. The orderly was a blockily built smallish sturdy man with a clumsy amiable face. He gave me a large brandy at nine in the evening and another at midnight. I felt these two were completely dependable people. At one in the morning the doctor came in wearing dress uniform. I had never seen a celluloid shirt front before. He leant over the bed, breathed some fumes in my face and asked, with an effort at cheeriness, how I felt. I said I was afraid, and in pain. He indicated the oxygen mask, told me to use it if I got worse and hurried out. The cylinder was almost empty. When it was completely empty I rang the bell behind my bed. The orderly ran in at once in his pyjamas. I asked for more brandy, and got it. This did not lessen the pain but made me unable to think clearly about it. I may or may not have rung the bell for other brandies, my subsequent memories are muddled. I remember just one incident very clearly. The nurse entered wearing a flower-patterned long dressing-gown and seeming very beautiful. She looked at the empty cylinder, felt my brow then went away and brought in another cylinder. I laughed and shook her hand and I am sure she smiled. I felt an understanding between us: she and I were in alliance against something dismal. I don’t know if she had disobeyed the doctor in giving me the third cylinder. Maybe he had very few and wanted to keep a certain number in case someone else needed them later on the voyage.
Later the ship’s engine stopped and I knew we were at Gibraltar. I think this was about five in the morning. I don’t recall who did it but I was shifted to a stretcher, wrapped up as snugly and tightly as an Egyptian mummy, carried into a bare kind of cabin and left on the floor. The stretcher had little legs which kept it above the planks. My breathing was easier now and I was beginning to feel comfortable. The doctor, in ordinary uniform, stood nearby looking out of a porthole. He was less drunk than when he had visited me in the night but mellow and communicative. I saw now that his erect abrupt manner disguised a wonderfully controlled, almost continual intoxication. I felt very friendly toward him and he toward me. He sighed and said, “There she is – Gibraltar – under the moon. I never thought to see her again, Alasdair, I forget how many years it is since I last saw her.”
“Were you in practice ashore?”
“This National Health Service is rotten Alasdair. Forms to be filled, paperwork, the pen never out of your hand. In the old days the doctor worked with a stethoscope in one hand and a s,s,s, a scalpel in the other. How do you feel?”
“A lot better.”
“You’ve come through a bad time, Alasdair, a very bad time .... a Catholic priest told me I was a lost soul last night.”
He looked out of the porthole again then said, “I was married once. The girl died a month after the wedding.”
“Do you think I could have another brandy?”
“Would ye not like a whisky? I can give ye a good Glenlivet.”
I won’t pretend the doctor used these exact words but he referred to these things in the order I have recorded them, and stuttered on the s of scalpel, making me imagine a surgical knife vibrating in a trembling fist. Later we heard the chugging of a small boat. He said, “That’s the lighter,” and went out and came in again with three seamen and a Spanish doctor, a broad, duffle-coated, rimless-spectacled, crew-cut, laconic man. He spoke quietly to the ship’s doctor, tested me with a stethoscope then left, refusing the offer of a drink. I heard the chugging of the boat going away.
I was shifted into hospital later that morning in bright sunshine. I was still wrapped tightly on the stretcher with only my face exposed. I felt comfortable, privileged and so incurious I did not try to see anything not directly above my eyes. I saw a section of the high side of the ship against a pale blue sky. I heard a babble of voices and felt a hard cold breeze on my cheek. I think I recall the top of a white mast or flagstaff with a wind-taut flag on it. This must have been aboard the lighter. Sometimes my upward view was irregularly framed by downward-staring faces: the doctor, Ian, customs officers and strangers. Once the lined dry face of a middle-aged lady looked down for a moment, smiled and said, “l say, you hev hed a bit of bed luck, you’ve come rathah a croppah, heven’t you,” and some other terse kindly things full of English-hunting-field stoicism. I liked her for her kindness, and for being so easy to classify. I saw the wooden ceiling of a customs shed, the low steel ceiling of an ambulance, and then, after a ten-minute sound of fast uphill car travel, the cream ceiling of a hospital vestibule. In this way I arrived in Gibraltar without seeing the rock. Indeed, since leaving London, I had only once seen the sea, through portholes, during the first breakfast afloat. I was now put to bed under a suspended bottle of cortisone solution, which dripped down through a rubber tube into my arm. I was visited by the hospital chief, the laconic doctor who had examined me on board the ship. He said, “You are suffering, of course, from a bad but perfectly ordinary asthma attack. I was sure of that as soon as I saw you this morning, but could not say so. You understand, of course, that it is against professional etiquette to question the decision of a colleague.”
The ward was three times longer than broad with eight beds to each long wall. The wall facing me was all window from pillow-level to ceiling. I saw through it a glassed-in veranda containing a few beds and beyond that the water of a wide bay. The hospital stood high up so steep a slope that I could see only the top of the building in front, two elegant towers faced with biscuit-coloured plaster. Far beyond and below these the bay had several sorts of ship moored in it, protected by long breakwaters with cranes on them. Distance made the ships look too small even to be useful toys while the breakwaters, exceptional bits of engineering to surround such a great body of water, seemed a few lines of forlorn geometry drawn upon it. The far side of the bay was all hills and small mountains with the whitish jumble of a town along the coast at their foot. This was Spain.
Although the head doctor was Spanish the routine and discipline of the hospital was British, the matron was a Scot, and of the three sisters two were English and one Welsh. The nurses were small plump Spanish or Gibraltarian girls, and most of the patients were Gibraltarian: that is, bilingual Spaniards who lived on the rock. They were inclined to be middle-aged and gaunt. There was a Velazquez-type dwarf called Paco with a calm, smooth, dignified face and slightly amused mouth. He would stand beside a bed resting his folded arms on it and talking quietly to the occupant in Spanish, or just leaning his brow on his folded arms. To my right was Major Mellors, elderly, gaunt and hawk-nosed. Facing me across the ward was Sigurdson, a taciturn humorous ship’s mate from Lancashire. I learned the names and manners of these people gradually. The inmates of a hospital ward observe their neighbours closely but avoid, at first, contacting them, for each is too engrossed by their own illness to want the burden of sympathizing with someone else.
During my first week in hospital I was visited regularly by lan, who had taken lodgings in Gibraltar, but after finding I was out of danger he set off into Spain. He was going to the village of Estepona a few hours journey up the coast, for he had heard good reports of it. He meant to find decent rooms there, settle in, and I would join him when I left the hospital. I made him take two pounds to compensate him for some of the money he had lost by the delay. The day after he left for Spain I was surprised to see him enter the ward. He sat by my bed and explained that he did not like Spain.
“It’s so unhygienic, Alasdair. I got off the bus at Estepona and set out to find a place to stay, but the flies! I travelled everywhere inside this cloud of flies. I mean, it was ridiculous. And the children who kept following me, begging, were almost as hard to shake off. And everybody stared. I mean, they didn’t do it sideways or behind your back, they stood still in the street and really looked at you. I found a place. I won’t describe the sanitation because there wasn’t any. I went out for a drink with a bloke I had met in the bus. We went into a bar and ordered wine at the counter. Before pouring it out the barman put down two wee plates each with a wee dirty bit of fish on it. I mean, we were expected to eat that. The counter was filthy – nothing was properly clean. I mean, outside the village you get these farm buildings with nice white walls, very picturesque. And when you go near you see the ground covered with little heaps of shit. They must just have squatted in the shadow to get rid of it.”
“What was the countryside like?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s picturesque all right. I mean, it’s beautiful in a queer way. You get these low brownish hills in the dusk with a line of donkeys and their riders going along the top against a fantastic sunset. I mean it might grow on you. But I realize now that what I want to paint is in Scotland. I don’t think I’ve wasted my money if I’ve discovered that. I think l’ll use what’s left to do some painting up the East coast, in Fife or Angus. Maybe I’ll call in at Paris on the way home.”
I won’t pretend l used these exact words but he talked in that style and mentioned these things. Three days later he got on a boat which took him to France.
I was not unhappy in that hospital. The staff kept pain out of me with doses and injections. I was nursed, fed and allowed to live completely to myself. The homesickness seemed to have been burned out by my experience aboard ship. Sometimes a faint “Over the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, my heart remembers how” feeling drifted through my mind like faint smoke, but that was romantic nostalgia, nothing like the earlier sick hunger for Glasgow and those I knew there. This new equanimity came partly from the routine of hospital, which was familiar to me, but there was another reason.
A few years earlier I had begun work on a tragicomical novel and meant to write some more of it in Spain. In my luggage was a Cantablue Expanding Wallet, a portable cardboard filing cabinet shaped like an accordion and holding two complete chapters and the notebooks and diaries from which I meant to make the rest. I put this on my bedside locker and began working. I was slightly ashamed of this activity, which struck me as presumptuous and banal: presumptuous because, like Scott Fitzgerald, I believed the novel was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, which meant that a novelist needed to understand great states of feeling, and although twenty-three years old I had never known carnal love and feared I never would; banal because one or two friends had also started writing a novel, and the rest had thought of writing one. So when the nurses asked what I was doing I lied and told them I was writing this report. But actually I was in Glasgow, the Glasgow of my childhood and adolescence and studenthood, and far more at home there than when I underwent these painful states, for now my mind hovered above the person I had been in perfect safety, without affection but with great curiosity. I found that person unpleasant but comic and was fascinated by the things and people it knew. My world was confused, shabby and sad, but had as much order, variety, good feeling and potency as any other. I tried to write an ordinary, easily-read language which showed the sadness and shabbiness but made the other things (which keep us alive) equally evident. While I worked at this writing I enjoyed the best happiness of all, the happiness which does not notice itself, until, stopping, we feel tired and see that an hour has passed like a minute, and know we have done as well as we can, and perhaps one day someone will be glad. I am sure this happiness is not rare. Everyone feels a little of it who makes or keeps something useful in the world, and does not just work for money and promotion. I suspect there is more of this happiness among skilled manual workers than in higher income groups, who have other satisfactions.
I was not shut completely into my head. I often looked out across the bay. Hospitals are generous with pillows to their asthmatic patients and I could see the coast of Spain without raising my head. On bright afternoons a few long wisps of white vapour would trickle up into the sky from wide-apart points on the sides of the mountains. Perhaps it was a memory of old fairy-tales that made me think this smoke came from the huts of charcoal-burners. I tried to imagine myself wandering there and totally failed. Gibraltar has one of the Mediterranean’s moister climates and the view was often blotted out by low cloud. I also had an understanding with Major Mellors based upon definite but minimum communication. During the morning I might say, “Was it all right to tip the barber?”
“Yes. How much did you give him?”
“Ninepence.”
“That was too much.”
In the afternoon he might remark, on a wistful note, “l wonder how my garden’s getting on.”
“ls there nobody looking after it?”
“Oh yes, my servant Ali.”
“Won’t he look after it properly?”
“Oh yes, he’s very good with flowers.”
But the most sociable time was between the half-past-five cup of tea and the seven o’clock breakfast when Sister Price sat at a table at our end of the ward. She was bright and talkative, and Sigurdson and the Major and l would interject and pass comments which seemed to us all increasingly witty and humorous. Yet l cannot now recall a single thing we said. The base of the conversation was four very different people wanting to enjoy and please each other and succeeding. For the rest of the day we were friendly in a quiet way which later struck me as British, or even European, when Mr Sweeney arrived.
He was the first mate of a big American ship and was put in an empty bed beside Sigurdson. Had his flesh been firm he would have been a broad tough middle-aged man, but his cheeks were pouchy, he had a pouch under each eye, when not talking his mouth drooped to the left as if his muscles only kept hold of the right-hand corner. But he was usually talking because he could only think aloud. We learned he had a wife in America he seemed not to like much, and a daughter called Baby, living with the wife, whom he liked a great deal. “She’s well over forty, she’s twice divorced, but she’ll always be my Baby.”
He was a Christian Scientist and said he had only come to hospital because the company he served could take away his pension if he refused. When disease or death was mentioned he would shrug and say, “After all, what is the body? Just fifty cents-worth of chemicalization.”
If a silence lasted too long for him he sometimes broke it by remarking, at random, “After all, the only realities are spiritual realities.”
Beneath his bed were three large cases from which he got the hospital porter to produce, at various times, many electrical gadgets connected with hygiene and grooming, cigars, tissues, a radio, three ball-pens which wrote in different colours, and a steel-barrelled pen filled with spirit ink to which could be fixed several thicknesses of felt nib. He did not converse. He might call one of us by name, but his loud, even voice was clearly addressing our entire half of the ward. Once he called out, “Say, Major! Could you lend me just a small spoonful of that toothpowder of yours and tomorrow l’ll give you back a whole tin of it?”
“What’s that, old man?” said the Major, maybe playing for time.
“Could you lend me one little spoonful of that tooth-powder of yours and tomorrow I’Il repay you with a whole big new tin of it? I got one in the case.”
“Oh you mustn’t give away all your pretty things like that,” said the Major, gently.
“Major, when I’m tired of giving I’ll be tired of living. If people are grateful, well and good. If not...”
He frowned, his mouth sagged into its expression of slightly puzzled vacuity and for some minutes his eyes searched the ward uneasily for something to think about. At last they focused on a point beneath the table where the sister wrote her reports. “Say!” he said, brightening, “That’s the saddest waste-paper basket I ever did see! It’s twisted, it’s all to cock, it needs a new coat of paint ...” and then he ran out of thoughts again and eventually muttered that the only realities were spiritual realities.
We were fascinated by Sweeney because he continually presented himself, which none of us did. At first meeting our accents had shown each other that Sigurdson was a Lancashire seaman, the Major an English army officer and I a well-read lowland Scot. The humorous pre-breakfast chats had confirmed this without adding detail. I knew the Major had commanded the household troops of some Moroccan or Algerian ruler, but had not heard it from his lips. He must have noticed that I was writing something larger than this report but my privacy did not disturb him. Mr Sweeney gave us his whole childhood in half a minute. “For the first twelve years of my life I was reared by my mother and wow, you should have seen me. Blue velvet suit. Satin shirt and necktie. Curly hair down to my shoulders. She had just about made a little girl of me when my pa came and took me to sea with him. She didn’t want it, I didn’t want it, but he said, ‘You’re gonna cry your eyes out but one day you’ll be grateful.’ And I cried. I guess I cried myself to sleep almost every night for six whole months. But after a year I was tough, I was a man, and I was grateful.”
He was not embarrassed by his sexuality. One day the Major asked what he thought of the Japanese.
“I like ’em. Collectively they’re skunks but individually I like ’em. I remember my ship putting into Yokohama in thirty-six. The Mayor entertained a few of us. I like Japanese homes. They’re clean. No furniture; you sit on mats on the floor. Nothing like that – ” he pointed to the top of his locker which, like our lockers, was littered with many more or less useful objects – “All that stuff is kept in a smooth box in the corner of the room. And there’s not much decoration either. But the room is built round an almond tree that comes out of a hole in the floor and goes out through one in the ceiling and the trunk and branches in the room have been given a coat of clear .... not varnish, but like varnish .... “
“Lacquer?” I suggested.
“Yeah. They’re lacquered. Well, nothing was too good for us. They saw we didn’t like their drink so without even asking they sent out for whisky. And when I went to bed, there she was. In a kimono. There are over fifty yards of silk in those kimonos. By the time she’d unwrapped herself I had almost lost my courage.”
One day it was announced on the wireless that President Eisenhower had burst a small blood-vessel in his brain, his speech was impaired and he was confined to bed. Sweeney heard this with unusual gravity. He said, “He’s sixty-two. My age.” and was silent for a long time.
“After all,” he said suddenly, “He’s an old man. What can you expect?”
He complained of headache. The nurse on duty told him it would go away. “But what’s causing it?”
He called the sister, then the matron, who both told him a codeine tablet would cure it. “I won’t take dope!” he cried, “You aren’t going to dope me!”
He huddled silently under the bedclothes for over an hour. “After all,” he said suddenly, “He’s old. He’s not indispensable, even if he is the president. He’ll be replaced one day, just like the rest of us.”
He clearly wanted to be persuaded that what he said was untrue. The Major and I kept glancing at each other with furtive, delighted grins, but we were glad when Eisenhower got well enough to make a speech and Mr Sweeney felt better. He was more entertaining when he was confident.
The trustees may wonder why I have spent so many words describing this man. I do so for reasons that would have made me describe Toledo, had I reached Toledo. He displayed a coherent kind of life. I admired his language, which was terse, rapid, and full of concrete detail. I realized this was part of his national culture and found an impure form of it in an American magazine he read each week with great seriousness. “Everything in this is fact,” he explained, “lt prints nothing but the bare facts. Other magazines give you opinions. Not this one.”
I borrowed it and read a report of the British Labour Party conference. One of the leaders had tried to persuade the Party that bits of Britain should not be leased to the U.S.A. as bases for their nuclear weapons. Under a photograph of him looking pugnacious were the words “Number one American-hater, rabble-rousing Aneurin Bevan”.
But I admired Mr Sweeney quite apart from his national style. With energy, skill, and a total absence of what I thought of as intellectual reserves (a developed imagination, analytical subtlety, wide reading) he had managed ships and men in two world wars and the Korean war. He had worked and enjoyed himself and taken knocks among the solid weights and wide gaps of the world I would not face. Death worried him now that his body was failing, but since the age of twelve he had never been embarrassed by life. And by wrestling with the fear of death openly and aloud he made it a public comedy instead of a private terror. Aboard the Kenya Castle, when I was afraid of dying, my fear did nobody any good.
Of course, I had to face the world in the end. Only everlasting money can keep us from doing that, and mine was being used up. Each day in hospital cost me twenty-one shillings and I had been over three weeks there. When to that was added the train fare to London, and cost of lodgings there, boat fare to Gibraltar, ship’s hospital fee, the price of the ambulance journey and being X-rayed for tuberculosis, and the small sum I had forced upon lan, I found I had spent, or else owed, more than half the scholarship money. I recalled, too, that I had never been discharged from hospital feeling perfectly well. It was possible that something in the nature of hospitals pandered to my asthma after the worst of an attack had been cured by them. I asked to see the head doctor and explained that, for financial reasons, I must leave next morning. He shrugged and said, “lt cannot be helped.” He advised me, though, not to leave Gibraltar until I felt healthier, and even so not to go far into Spain in case I had another attack, as in Spain the hospital charges were extortionate, especially to tourists, and the medical standards were not high. This seemed sensible advice. I asked the nurses for the name of a lodging which was cheap, plain and good. I heard there was an armed-forces leave centre in the south bastion which usually had spare beds, was run by a retired Scottish soldier, and easy to reach. Next morning I dressed, collected my rucksack, left the hospital doorstep and struck with my feet the first earth I had touched since the port of London.
I was on a road slanting up from the town of Gibraltar to the rock’s outermost point. The day must have been clear because across the sea to the south I saw the African coast looking exactly as Africa ought to look: a dark line of crowded-together rock pinnacles, domes and turrets with beyond them, when the eye had grown used to the distance, the snowy range of Atlas holding up the sky. The modern hospital behind me, the elegantly towered building in front (a lunatic asylum) stood on a great slant of white limestone rock interspersed with small tough twisted trees. I turned right and walked to the town, breathing easily because I was going downhill. I came to a wall with an arch in it just wide enough to take two cars, and beyond this the road became the main street of Gibraltar. A small lane leading to the left brought me almost at once to the south bastion.
This was a stone-built cliff protecting the town from the sea. The townward side was pierced by vaulted chambers. The lower ones, which had been barracks, were entered from a narrow piazza; the upper, which had been munition storerooms and gun emplacements, were entered from a balcony. All windows faced the town. High tides had once lapped the other side of this bastion but now a broad road ran here with docks on the far side. The guns and gunners had shifted elsewhere long ago and the chambers were used as a guest-house by the Toc H. The Toc H (I never learned the reason for that name) developed in France during the First World War, among British soldiers who wanted spiritual communion and found the official army priests too sectarian and not always near when things got tough. The only communion service was to light a brass oil-lamp in a dark place and pray that human pain would one day produce happiness and peace. Apart from that the organization existed to share extra food, clothing and shelter with whoever seemed in need. Jock Brown, formerly of the Highland Light Infantry in Flanders, was the Toc H man in south bastion. He was small, balding, mild-faced and wore a blazer with a white cross badge on the breast pocket and flannel trousers with bicycle clips at the ankles. His instincts were all turned to being mildly helpful. He believed that youth was a beautiful and noble state but was not surprised when young soldiers brawled, contracted venereal diseases and stole. He liked lending them cameras, books and records in the hope that they would come to enjoy using these instead. With the help of Isabel, a Spanish maid, he kept the hostel tidy and clean, the meals plain yet tasty, the general air of the place as mild as himself. I once heard him called “an old woman” by somebody who thought that a term of abuse. The critic was a man of Jock’s age who had not been very useful to other people, so wanted to believe that everyday kindness was an unimportant virtue.
On that first morning Jock led me up a ramp to the balcony and into the common room, a former gun emplacement with a triangular floorplan. A hearth was built into the angle facing the door so that smoke left by the hole through which shells had been fired. The interior stonework was massively rough except for seven feet of smooth wall on each side of the hearth, and later I painted mural decorations here. Jock showed me to a dormitory next door holding four beds and introduced me to room-mates who had not yet risen. These were a private on leave from the Royal Surrey regiment, and an Australian and a German who would both be departing by ship next morning. I unpacked my things into a locker beside my bed then visited a bank in town where I uplifted the second part of the Bellahouston Scholarship money, the first having been received in Glasgow. I pocketed a few pounds and hid the rest in a plastic envelope containing my shaving-kit.
That night, to obtain sound sleep in a strange bed, I decided to become drunk and found a big crowded bar nearby where I would not be conspicuous. The customers were mostly soldiers and sailors but there were women among them. A small plump one approached and asked if I would like a companera? I said I would. She sat beside me, called a waiter and ordered a glass of pale green liquid, for which I paid. She was Spanish and her English was too poor to tell me much else. She tried to be entertaining by folding a handkerchief into the shape of what she called pantalones and unfastening the flies, but I did not find this exciting or feel she wished to seduce me. With each green drink I bought, the waiter handed her a small brass disc. When she went to the lavatory I tasted what was in her glass and found it to be coloured water. I got the waiter to refill the glass with green chartreuse but when she returned and sipped this she grew thoughtful and depressed, then left me. Clearly the management paid her no commission on the real drinks I purchased. So I drank by myself and listened to a small, very noisy band. It played a round of tunes chosen to cause nostalgia in as many customers as possible: Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, Men of Harlech, Galway Bay, etc. The Scottish number, I Belong to Glasgow, was repeated every ten minutes. It is not a tune I normally like but in this place it induced an emotion so heartrending that I had to grapple with it as if it were a disease. However, I stayed drinking until I was sure my head would lose consciousness as soon as it touched a pillow, then returned to the dormitory (which was in darkness), undressed, put the shaving-kit under the pillow, my head on top of it, and did indeed lose consciousness.
I wakened late next morning feeling brighter and healthier than I had done for many weeks. I also felt guilty (the straw mat beside my bed was crusted with vomit) but I knew that a day of brisk sketching or writing would cure that. The English private remained curled below his blankets, the Australian and German had already left to catch their boat. I took my toilet things and the straw mat to the lavatory and washed the mat and myself perfectly clean. Then I dressed and breakfasted, then climbed by an iron ladder to the esplanade on top of the bastion and sat on a shaded bench planning what to do. I still owed money to the hospital. I took my wad of notes from the shaving-kit and found it contained twenty pounds. The rest had been removed.
My instinctive reaction to a painful event is to sit quiet for a very long time, and as I brooded on my position this struck me as an intelligent thing to do. The thief must be one of three people, two of whom were at sea. If I could persuade the police to act for me, which was unlikely, they could do little but spread to others a nasty feeling I had better keep to myself. The thief had left me enough to live on for a while. Although my father was not rich he had some money banked. I wrote him a letter explaining all the circumstances except my intoxication and asking for a loan of the stolen amount, which I promised to repay by taking a regular job when I returned home. He posted the money to me as quickly as he could. The asthma returned. It worsened and improved, then worsened and improved. I remained in the hostel for my twenty-fourth birthday, and the New Year of 1958, and another two months. I wrote five chapters of my book and painted a Triumph of Neptune on the common room walls.
And I made friends with other rootless people who used the hostel: a student from the Midlands who had left Britain to avoid national military service and seemed to live by petty smuggling; a tall stooping bronchial man, also from the Midlands, who hovered around the Mediterranean for health reasons; and a middle-aged American with a sore back who had been refused entry into England where he had gone to consult an osteopath of whom he had heard great things. He kept discussing the reasons for the refusal and asking if a slight tampering with the datestamp on his passport would make entry easier if he tried again. There was Cyril Hume, an unemployed able seaman with a photograph of a cheerful, attractive-looking wife in Portsmouth who “realized he needed to wander about a bit”. I think it was Cyril Hume who learned that a ship would be sailing to the Canary Isles from a port on the African coast just opposite. Apparently the fare was cheap and the cost of living in the Canary Isles even less than the cost of living in Spain. My health was improving at the time so we all decided to go together. We took a ferry across the bay to Algeciras in Spain, and another ferry from Algeciras to Africa. There was a bright sun, a strong wind, waves ran fast with glittering foamy crests. The jumbled rocky African coast, a steep headland with a medieval fortress on top looked theatrical but convincing. Cyril Hume had bought us cheese, celery, bread. Standing in the prow of the ship it suddenly struck me that cheese, celery and exactly this chalky white bread was the best lunch I ever tasted. Slightly breathless, I produced and used my asthma hand-pump inhaler. The surrounding crowd turned and watched me with that direct, open interest Ian McCulloch had found upsetting. I enjoyed being a stranger who provoked interest without even trying.
The port we reached was Ceuta, a Spanish possession. It looked just like Algeciras: whitewalled buildings and streets bordered by orange trees with real fruit among the leaves. The ship we wanted had left for the Canary Isles the day before so we returned to Algeciras and took lodgings there. Next morning, having slept badly, I decided to stay in bed. After my friends had left a maid entered the room and began making the other beds by shaking up the feather quilts and mattresses. I am allergic to feathers and started suffocating. I cried out to her but had no Spanish and she no English. In my notebook I hastily sketched a feather and told her it was mal – I hoped that the Latin root for evil was part of her language too. She smiled and repeated the word with what seemed perfect comprehension and then, when I lay back, relieved, she returned to violently plumping out the quilts. I gripped my hypodermic needle to give myself a big adrenaline injection but my hand trembled and the needle broke short in my flesh. The maid and I both panicked. She screamed and a lot of women ran in and surrounded me, jabbering loudly as I pissed, shat, and grew unconscious.
I wakened in a hospital managed by dark-robed, white-wimpled brides of Christ. A doctor came, gave me pills of a sort that can be bought cheap from any chemist, and charged dear for them. My friends arrived, discharged me, and escorted me back across the bay to Gibraltar and the Toc H hostel, where I stayed in bed for a week. I now had slightly more than ten pounds of money left: enough to buy a cheap boat fare back to London.
One day Jock Brown came to me and said that if I gave him my passport he would get me a ticket for an aeroplane going to London that evening. The ticket cost thirty pounds. Jock did not offer to lend me money. He took my passport, returned with a ticket and helped me to the airport. I crossed Spain at twice the altitude of Everest. It looked brown and as flat as a map. The only memorable feature was the white circle of the bullring in the middle of each town. London was foggy. I went to the University hospital and was given an intravenous adrenaline injection to help me reach Glasgow by overnight train. At Glasgow Central Station I took a taxi to the Royal Infirmary where I was drugged and sent home by ambulance. The morning was fresh and springlike but I felt no joy in homecoming. Glasgow was as I expected.
To sum up, what good was the tour? What did it teach me? Not much about the world, a lot about myself. That I fear to change is evident. Of course we must always change, since the moment of birth starts the alterations and adaptions called growth, which is often gradual and foreseeable. If our surroundings don’t change much, neither do we. But surroundings can change radically and suddenly. A war began and I hid with neighbours in a dark shelter, queer noises outside. My mother died, I left school, found another, was awarded a scholarship, went to a foreign land in the belly of a posh liner. These events should have made me more independent, but I feared losing the habits by which I knew myself, so withdrew into asthma. My tour was spent in an effort to avoid maturity gained by new experience. Yet in spite of the protective clutter of doctors in which I ended the trip that effort failed. Maturity is either bravely accepted or kicked against, but events always impose some of it. Before going abroad the idea of teaching art to children appalled me. I have now done it for five months, and compared with partial suffocation it is almost painless. I will soon have paid Jock Brown what I owe him, and will then pay my father. Since coming home I have had no more bad asthma attacks, and no longer fear them. The Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship has done me good.
11 Findhorn StreetRiddrie, Glasgow C3April 1959
