Читать книгу The Green Hills Far Away - James William Barke - Страница 7

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In writing this first chapter of my life I have been moved by one dominant idea: to present essential elements as may cast some light, however unsteady and unclear, on my native country and on the native Scot. There is no other excuse: need there be any other justification?

There may be bitterness in this record: there is much to be bitter about; there may be gratitude: there is much to be grateful for; but there is no arrogance: for there is nothing to be arrogant about.

But I must warn the reader that here I can only present the tiniest facet of Scottish life and character. Scotland is a small country of some four million inhabitants. But the variety of characteristics is symbolised in our tartan.

Many and rich and strange are the threads woven into our national fabric: more vivid the hues.

There is the ancient Gaelic-speaking Galloway Scot of the Kingdoms of Fergus and Allan. To this royal Gaelic blood has been added the rich strains of the pure Celtic Irish potato-digger. There is the Border Scot and his lineage goes back (stopping short of the Stone Age) to the Saxons and the Danes and the Celts of Northumberland. There is the east coast Scot and in his blood flows elements from the Norse, sundry European sea reivers and the ancient Pict—whoever he may have been. There is the Hebridean Scot; but whether he is Scandinavian or Irish it is difficult to say. There is the Highlander or mainland Gael—a blend of Pict, Irish Celt tinctured with cast-away Spaniards (Iberian Celts?), English packmen and itinerant Jewish pedlars. There is the Scot of the Ancient Kingdom of Fife, the beggar’s mantle fringed with gold. Maybe he is the purest Scot of them all. He is Celtic, Pictish, Gaelic, Saxon, Dane and Scandinavian and maybe (with his Baltic trading) Russian, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian; and from the settlements of Polish miners he has gained something it would be difficult to appraise ...

Second in importance is the Edinburgh Scot. He is the heir of the capital that is no longer a capital but a damned and lost bourach of a place, cold and draughty and hollow inside—not inadequately summed-up as East-windy, West-endy. The Edinburgh Scot is almost too fushionless to be analysed. He has no real national present; he cannot conceive of a future; and the past hangs around him like the smell of decayed fish manure.

Most important of all is the Clydesdale Scot. He has come from all the airts of Scotland. He has even returned from Ulster where he was settled after the Battle of the Boyne. And with him have come many thousands of his southern catholic brothers—the Boyles, Doyles and O’Raffertys—and thus, in due course, a Mr. Patrick James Dollan becomes a Lord Provost of Glasgow.

But there he is, the Clydesdale Scot—dynamic even in his poverty, ignorance, superstition and malnutrition. And this Clydesdale Scot, because of the peculiar significance of his historical conditions, is the most glorious Scot of them all. It is he who supports (often on his physically stunted shoulders) the whole burden of the industrial belt. Naturally he is afflicted with many of the sores and running wounds of modern industrialism; too often does he bear painful evidence of the stunting produced on his forebears by the industrial revolution.

But he has also been hardened, toughened, experienced and educated for the special tasks history has ordained for him. For it is the Lowland Scot, but pre-eminently the Scot of the industrial belt, who will lead Scotland out of her present industrial and agricultural and rural chaos into the free and prosperous and happy Scotland that will yet, must yet be.

Many Scots have had their own visions of this future Scotland. William Power describes in his Should Auld Acquaintance a vision that finds a ready response in almost all Scottish hearts:

“That dream will come true when the children of the housing schemes, reading of the Scotland of their fathers, will want to link up their lives with the national tradition and to move out from their swept and garnished settlements into the real Scotland. These grey suburbs, gim-crack and featureless, cannot be the continuing city of the Scottish race. They are the first halt in the wilderness, where those who came up out of the Victorian Egypt will muster for a further advance. When they go up and possess the land the vital rhythm of national life will be restored.

“These things shall be. I had a vision of them when, as a boy, looking out from a high window in a Glasgow tenement, over wet roofs and smoking chimneys, to doleful Port-Dundas, I hummed an old Jacobite song and sensed a new prophetic meaning in it:

O this is no my ain hoose,

I ken by the biggin o’t,

For bow-kail thrave at my door-cheek,

And thristles on the riggin’ o’t.

A carle cam wi’ lack o’ grace,

Wi’ unco gear and unco face,

And sin’ he claimed my daddy’s place,

I downa bide the triggin o’t.

Wi’ rowth o’ kin and rowth o’ reek,

My daddy’s door it wadna steek,

But bread and cheese were his door-cheek,

And girdle-cakes the riggin o’t.

“The magic of Orpheus is no mere myth. Scotland is sung about; therefore it exists; and its existence, which I discovered through Scottish song, helped to assure me of my own. In our old songs there is a magnetic power that has held Scotland together and that will rebuild it. It is a uniquely permeative mode of the power of the Word, of literature, associating itself with family affections, love affairs, bereavements, partings, reunions, holidays, merrymakings, interesting people, and all kinds of cultural study. Scarcely anything of consequence happens to a Scot that does not bring to his lips a verse from the Bible or some lines of an old Scots song. I can fall in love with any country that has a good song-literature; and since my own country has perhaps the richest and most distinctive song-literature in the world I can be excused for loving her.”

It is a grand vision. But it lacks, like many visions, any realist perception of how the vision will come to pass in the flesh and blood and material of human achievement.

In the meantime I have thought it expedient to record, after a fashion, my experiences of the Scotland I knew and loved as a boy. This record has a personal value (it may even have a literary value): whether it will have any value for future historians and sociologists time will tell. If it heightens in any way the love of my fellow Scots for our native land, rids our English brothers of their hooch-aye-complex and indicates to the hypothetical foreigner something of Scotland’s real background, I shall be more than satisfied: indeed I shall be wildly delighted. For in a war of overwhelming odds any defeat, short of annihilation, is a potential victory.