Читать книгу The Green Hills Far Away - James William Barke - Страница 4

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A FEW YEARS ago I had occasion to accompany on a quick motor tour through Scotland an English student of the film producer Pudovkin. He had been born and brought up in London but had just returned from a number of years sojourn in eastern Europe.

He was a Cockney by birth; but much travel and intensive study in the fields of philosophy, political economy and æsthetics had so modified the effects of his early environment that he was able to pass himself off as an almost denationalised Englishman of more than ordinary learning and ability.

We had much in common, were indeed brother soldiers on the philosophic and cultural front. Above all we had the basis of common language on which to build a common bond. We did not speak our mother tongue. He had broadened his clipped Cockney and had restored the letter H to its rightful dignity; I had shortened my broad Scottish vowels and I rolled my R’s with a sense of phonetic proportion. The language we had acquired was indeed a form of English Esparanto: we approximated to a standard pronouncing dictionary. Now and again a native word or a native idiom would cause one or other of us to pause and ask for a translation; but on the whole our verbal intercourse was smooth and perfectly intelligible.

And yet we were foreigners to each other. There were many national traits and characteristics we did not share in common and had no wish to share in common.

We could talk intelligently about English, American, German, French and Russian culture. We had so to speak a common slant on affairs in South America, India, China and Japan. We shared a common pool of mutual knowledge, interests and enthusiasms that would have withstood a conversational drought for years.

But what amazed me and hurt me and often infuriated me was his colossal ignorance of Scotland and Scottish affairs. And to do him justice there was no one more amazed at his own ignorance than himself. Had he known as little about China as he knew about Scotland he would have been ashamed to have opened his mouth in intelligent company.

What notions he had about Scotland were grotesque and fantastic. No sooner had he crossed the Border than he had expected to see kilts and hear the skirl of bagpipes. He expected his staple diet would consist of some unheard of concoction of oatcakes and haggis—though he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what haggis might be like.

Glasgow was rather a shock to him because he found Glasgow rather more beautiful and civilised than London—and he had been taught to think of Glasgow as the “cancer of the Empire.” But while he was acute enough to accept Glasgow almost at a glance he could not think of Glasgow as being in any way characteristically Scottish. Glasgow was much more than a large industrial city. It had a rich communal life of its own. Here were groups of people who could discuss art, literature, music, painting, philosophy, the cinema—indeed what could they not discuss? And it was not merely a question of discussion—many of such groups were headed by men and women who were practising votaries of no mean ability and distinction.

There were slums—horrible slums. But London had slums more horrible. There was more than enough poverty, misery and starvation and filth and squalor and ugliness—but only so many drops in the bucket to London’s quota.

Glasgow was a pleasant surprise—and something of a revelation. But still Glasgow was not Scotland. He wanted to see kilties and pipers and mountains and floods—something that might suggest Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Prince Charlie. There was Ramsay MacDonald for example ...

So we left the hospitality of Glasgow and went furth into Scotland. We went by way of Loch Lomond and Glencoe and the Caledonian Canal. We climbed up through Glen Garry down into Glen Moriston and Glen Shiel and on to Loch Duich. The majesty of the mountain scenery had almost numbed his ability to express appreciation. And it was with thoroughly malicious joy that I told him how here the great Dr. Johnson objected to the hills in that they obstructed his view. We crawled up Mam Ratagan, bowled merrily into Glenelg and explored the vitreous forts: by Dornie and Loch Carron and Gairloch; by Altbea, Dundonnell, Ullapool and Loch Inver we penetrated into the wilds of Sutherlandshire.

In the fantastic and almost incredible wilds of Sutherland I introduced my friend into the bosom of a Gaelic family. With honest scientific accuracy my friend referred to them as peasants; and thereby he committed an almost unforgivable social faux pas. Try how I might I was unable to convey to him the heinousness of his offence.

Here he met a girl of such incredible physical and facial beauty as almost drove him crazy. The cinema of Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, England or America had produced nothing in any way comparable to her.

She spoke intelligently of The Blue Angel and conducted some conversation in French. My friend was now floundering in a world of incredible fantasy. He began to rave. He was incredulous when I informed him that the girl had never seen a cinema and that here in the wilderness we were sixty miles from the nearest railway station.

He was a teetotaller: so I took a solitary nip of whisky to steady my nerves. I had begun to fear for him on the mad journey up—we had motored from dawn till dusk each day—now I thought he would go mad. I could sympathise with him. I had experienced the madness that Sutherlandshire can inflict on the imaginative.

Exhausted though we were we went out into the moonlight for there was no possibility of sleep—yet.

After an attack of gibbering incoherence his speech became more rational and I began to make sense of his words.

Just what kind of country was this incredible impossible fantastically beautiful Scotland? What was the real nature and character of the Scots? Whence came they? Where were they going? What was their history? What was their future? Why hadn’t he been told of Scotland and the Scots? To what end and purpose had he been inculcated, in a superficial way, with all this balderdash of heather and haggis and whisky and “Mon, mon!” and “Hooch aye!”

At first I answered him patiently. I flashed back to some of the more important aspects of Scottish history. I explained the greatness and significance of the Battle of Bannockburn but took care to add that de Brus was an Anglo-Norman baron for whom no honest Scot gave a tinker’s curse.

And then I became indignant, impatient and finally flew off the handle. In a paroxism of furious indignation I gave him a short but burning sketch of Scotland’s history. I explained why Sutherlandshire was a howling wilderness in terms of the Highland clearances, extirpation and mass murders. I painted the history of Butcher Cumberland. I dashed the froth from my lips and ranted on the Galloway clearances and the herding of the majority of the Scottish people into the hell of the industrial belt.

And then I fairly went berserk on the Union of the Crowns and the so-called Union of Parliaments and accused the English of every vileness under the sun. We had poured out the best of our blood for England. We had enslaved our minds in the service of England. Without the Scots there would have been no British Empire: without the Scots Britannia would never have ruled the waves; for England we had endured every conceivable kind of hardship and suffering. For our pains we had been robbed of our nationhood—relegated to the mere flunkey status of a northern grouse moor. We had been deprived of our honour, our glory, the light of our greatness in industry, science and the arts had been blacked out under the bushel of England’s imperial ambition. Was not Edward the First of Great Britain and Ireland crowned Edward VII. of England ...

The dawn was coming up and we crawled back to bed.

At Inveran later the same day, Angus MacPherson honoured us with a piobaireachd—Glengarry’s Lament. My friend was moved to silence and wonder and awe.

In a chip shop in Inverness we sat and discussed the Marx brothers. At this time I had never even heard of them for they had not reached the Caledonian fastness. Here my friend regained some of his composure and I resigned myself to sanity.

We sped down the Great North Road discussing the passing of quantity into quality and the interpenetration of opposites.

But it was no use. We deviated and went over by the Devil’s Elbow into Braemar, wound down into the Carse of Gowrie by way of Blairgowrie, battered our way through the Sma’ Glen and took it easy by devious ways across the Ochils.

I showed him the rolling pastoral plains of Clackmannan, Kinross and Fife and told him that here in very truth was my native land—the broad acres of my nativity.

But by now he was beyond speech and sat slumped in a numbed awe.

We returned to Glasgow exhausted by the ordeal of eight hundred miles of Scotland’s beauty and fifty hours of Scotland’s history.

Refreshed by sleep and rest we sat down at the fireside for a last talk and a recapitulation of our recent experiences.

Scotland was a small country but it had an incredible variety of incredible scenic effects. The variety of national characteristics amply reflected the variety of natural scenery. The bareness of its moors, the desolation of its glens, the loneliness of its loch shores was compensated by its richness elsewhere in fertile straths, generous carses and coal and iron fields. Against the foot-plough of the north-west Highlands stood the dour but unchallenged world supremacy of Clyde shipbuilding. In contrast to the ancient and inadequate transport ferries of the north-west was the engineers’ miracle of the Forth Bridge.

We agreed, he as travelled sociologist and artist and I as parish pump but discriminating enthusiast, that Scotland had fine potentialities for being one of the most glorious of the smaller countries. Its physical characteristics could be fully enjoyed by a race that had enormous potentialities for industry, art, learning and commerce.

We had to use the qualification of potentiality. The Scots possessed in a great measure all the attributes of a highly civilised race. But their attributes were rotting away or frustrated. What was needed was the dynamo of emergent nationhood geared to a scientific national economy, to save them, free them, and set them moving in harmonious human activity. We discussed the possibility of Scots engineers (civil, hydraulic, electrical, mechanical) sweeping away the remnants of feudalism—tapping, bridging, harnessing the wealth of the nation; the old seats of learning inspired by the renaissance of scientific learning broadening, sharpening, illuminating, inspiring the Scots mind; resurgent art freed from its bonds and blinkers warming, enthusing, ennobling, unifying the soul and the heart ...

It was a grand vision. All the grander for being as capable of realisation as boiling an egg.