The Kiln (27 page)

Instincts move of their own volition. Margaret's skirt is round her waist. She steps out of her pants and he puts them in his pocket. He moves to push into her and the hair abrades the tender skin. It's like trying to ride a hedgehog. Not that he's tried that yet but if things keep on as they are . . . But suddenly the hair parts wetly and he is entering her slowly.

‘Tom,’ she says urgently. ‘Wait.’

‘
I'VE GOT THE CURSE
.’

The sentence would stay with him, would feel for a time like a statement he could apply to himself. As she pulled away, it was immediately as if all the hope of that summer moved away with her. Initially, he hadn't known what she meant. The term was strange to him. She sounded like someone speaking from inside a fable.

Once he realised what she meant, he couldn't believe his bad luck. ‘O bloody period!’ (William Shakespeare). ‘I second that’
(Tom Docherty). She explained that she had just realised her period was coming. It could happen as suddenly as that? The expression of panic on her face made him wonder if it was about to take place with a sudden rush on the spot.

In retrospect he would decide that the worst times of the summer dated from that moment. It was in the following week that his grandmother died. He had known how ill she was but the sadness of her death was compounded by guilt. His self-absorption appalled him. He had been so busy agonising over Margaret that he had let his grandmother die in the wings, as it were. Listening to his gathered relatives talk of her, while her body stiffened in the bedroom, he understood for the first time the remarkable endurance of her living. Her courage and resourcefulness and decency were preserved in anecdote and passed round among them. He remembered a vivid moment from the past—

HIS GRANDMOTHER IS SAYING
, ‘Ah've been readin’ some mair o' that book.'

She sits at the fireside in her pinny with her grey hair coiled into a bun. Released, that hair still reaches to her waist. He takes a bite of the dry madeira cake and melts it with a mouthful of tea.

‘What book is that. Granny?’

‘Ye ken the one Ah mean. The one Ah told ye about the last time ye were here.’

‘Ah don't remember that.’

‘Ye've a memory like a sieve, boay. Whit's his name?’

He takes some more tea.

‘That McGorkey. That's it,’ she says.

‘McGorkey?’

‘The one yer Uncle Josey gave me tae read. McGorkey.’

He remains puzzled.

‘It's on the sideboard there. Get it and bring it over here.’

He gets up and crosses to the sideboard. As he lifts the plain brown hardcovered book and turns its spine towards him, he sees the title and the author's name: M. Gorky -
Childhood.
And as he
buckles slightly, clamping his laughter in, the book he holds in his hand, seen in proximity to the porcelain clock that refuses to keep the right time any more, becomes an enduring cipher of his grandmother.

—and he felt the wanton carelessness of failing to appreciate her more. He came out of the house and went for a long walk alone. Leaning on the gate of a field, he found that, in mourning his grandmother, he was able for the first time properly to mourn his Uncle Josey.

—
AFTERWARDS
, he would write:

I came across an old book the other day, one of those working-class equivalents of an heirloom; something that is kept and passed on, not because it is supposed to have any intrinsic value but because it evokes a labyrinth of memory to which it acts as a clue. I don't think I'll take it to the
Antiques Roadshow
in case I am led from the room in a net. But, holding it in my hands, I felt its worth beyond doubt. Like ashes, it doesn't look much. Like ashes, it testifies to an old fire - a passion for social justice that burned undiminished to the point of death in a man in whom I, as an admittedly naive boy, found hardly anything that wasn't worthy of love and admiration.

The book is
Childhood
by Maxim Gorky. With the passage of time, the title has acquired an extended significance for me. In writing about his childhood, Gorky incidentally created an object that has become for me a cipher of my own. Handling the book, I found summoned up in me, through the necromancy of touch, reminders of where I come from and why I think as I think and believe as I believe.

In accordance with the saying, it is not a book to be judged by its cover. It was, as far as I am aware, sent naked into the world without benefit of a coloured jacket. The covers are of a
dull, dark brown and rough in texture. It was a publication for people who believed that a book is a collection of words held together in the most convenient and least flamboyant form. I sympathise. The only lettering on the outside is on the spine. It gives the title and the author's name: M. Gorky.

It is that name which brought back the first memory. I remembered my grandmother referring, in her late sixties, to the fact that she was reading a book by ‘that McGorkey’. Whether that interesting linguistic conflation was the result of her fading eyesight or of her determined tendency to see Scotland as the paradigm of all experience, I'm not sure. But it has a certain aptness for me. She made Gorky a naturalised Scot in the same way that her son, who had given her the book to read, translated the ideological rigidity of the Russian political experience into a much more Scottish humanism.

My Uncle Josey was an unlikely manner of the social barricades. He had either been born with or acquired a chronically weak heart, a nice irony given the passion of his convictions. The condition wasn't accurately diagnosed until late in his life. But its effects plagued him from childhood. He was frequently housebound. He missed much of his schooling. He could work only intermittently and then usually only at manual work, to which he was desperately unsuited and which, presumably, helped to hurry on his death.

The death happened in hospital where he was undergoing treatment. It was during the visiting-hour. He had asked to be made more comfortable on his propped-up pillows and, as the members of his family who were there reached forward to help, he said ‘It doesny matter’ and died quietly. He was thirty-four.

That day in the hospital I had been in another ward, seeing a schoolfriend. As I entered the ward where my uncle was -having come down towards the end of visiting-time - I saw his raised body relax and his head droop, discreet as a closing flower.

Tragedy can be so quiet and casual and ordinary that sometimes it is gone before we know that it has been. We are left painstakingly to measure its enormity in retrospect. What I glimpsed that day in my first sight of a human death has stayed
with me, not in any dramatic way. It was a quiet occurrence and it has stayed quiet. But sometimes without warning he will come again into my mind and I think not of what is lost, but of the privilege I had in being his nephew.

At first, with the innocence of boyhood, I had thought that my experience of him was who he was. He was tall and pale and thin and shy, with bottle-bottom glasses and a great rampart of crinkly hair. He cared about people with a passionate intensity, too much to let them off with less than the best of what they were. He did the same with me, young as I was.

Never having been married, he lived with my grandmother until he died and I used to like being around their house. My reasons for that liking were curiously ambivalent. Like most children I had worked out early that the climate around a grandparent is often more tolerant of unbuttoned behaviour than the presence of parents is. Your ego can go barefoot there without catching too many chills of disapproval. But I also liked the fact that my uncle would be around to provide some kind of guidelines for my experiential wanderings, for children like freedom benignly picketed by adults. My uncle provided the limits all right, but he established them not with automatic authority but through reason and discussion. The only rank he ever pulled was logic. But he always did it by trying to understand your terms as well as his own.

For that reason I'm glad he was the one who often discovered my misdemeanours first. I'm glad, for example, it was down to him to find out I had been stealing cigarettes, cunningly and stealthily abstracted one at a time from his current packet of Senior Service, as if silence in an empty room were a talisman against the fates. I'm glad he was the one informed by an all-seeing neighbour that a girl of nine and I (by this time a worldly, cigarette-smoking ten-year-old who should have known better) had been seen partially naked, conducting a somewhat puzzled investigation of each other in a rockery. (The choice of venue suggests that even then I had an instinctive sense that the course of true love never would run smooth.) I don't think I would have minded too much if he had been the one to discover that I had been sampling - in the stoical manner of a
boy accepting his punishment of manhood - my granny's sweet stout, thus tasting the meaning of misnomer before I knew it. But nobody ever did discover that one.

I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I wasn't so much a primary-school reprobate as an eager investigator of taboos. I never have believed in hand-me-down experience. If something was forbidden, I wanted to know why the Establishment was keeping it to itself. Somehow my uncle seemed to understand that and, taking me aside after my latest transgression of a set of rules I couldn't see the sense in, he would talk to me.

I don't remember exactly what we said, but I remember the feeling those conversations have always given me. It is a feeling of arrival at a place of clarity and warmth, a free border of selves where nothing is contraband because whatever you declare will carry no hidden charge against you. Guilt was not the question. Why you had done it was, and how it had felt, and what you thought about it now that you had done it, and where did you go from here. The dynamic of what your experience meant was always given back to you.

It was only after his death I realised slowly that the gift was one he had made to others as well as myself. My increased awareness began in that extended conversational wake that follows a working-class death, the hoarded anecdotes brought out and passed around, the quiet shared wonder at what had been among us. I learned of the heroism of his self-education, of his mute suffering, of how he might, with Alexander Pope, have referred to ‘that long disease, my life’. I was reminded of his skill in drawing, of the peace posters he made alone at night when my grandmother was in bed.

I learned of the time some chancer put the head on him at a charity dance because my uncle was on the door and wouldn't let the man brass his way in free. The man still didn't get in, but there were no recriminations. My father, five feet four but with a PhD in outrage, spent a long time trying to get the details so that he could trace the man and exact summary retribution. But my uncle wouldn't help. He was my mother's brother and like her he lived his principles to the limit, pain or pleasure. Pacifism was one.

I was reminded as well of what an awkward bugger he could be. He couldn't be intimidated, only convinced, and that was one difficult trick. He liked to argue the way Gargantua liked to eat. I remember once, during my Vaughan Monroe period, when I was trying to bring my voice from the soles of my feet and sing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, he took me to task for singing such an ideologically unsound song. I knew even than that his attitude was ridiculous, like quarrelling with a vacuum. But I took him seriously anyway. I still do. He remains one of the small but bright and unnamed stars by which I steer.

Holding his copy of
Childhood
, I sense him as being like the book, unflashy but substantial - and out of date. The human stock he believed in so sincerely has crashed, probably beyond the point of recovery. For my Uncle Josey was a deeply committed Communist.

I didn't believe in his political philosophy then, I never did since, and I don't now. I am happy to see the present apparent liberalisation of Eastern Europe. But I hope I retain enough intellectual precision and emotional honesty not to be bullied by the aggressive rant of contemporary British and American politics into confusing Eastern Bloc Communism with the humane and pragmatic form the same ideology found for itself in Scotland.

Since John MacLean, Scottish Communism has remained its own animal, less Russian bear than beast of social burden, helping hurt lives in the small ways that it could, given its continuously enfeebled state. It has remained almost entirely free from the theoretical rabies to which its English counterpart has sometimes succumbed.

Besides my uncle, I have met many Scottish Communists. Sometimes they were boringly dogmatic. But then so have been many Catholics and Presbyterians and those of other faiths. More often they have been generous of spirit and deep in their concern for others. Disagreeing with their theory, I have found myself time and again replenished by their practice and renewed in my belief in a more habitable vision of the future. They have long been a benignly crucial part of our awareness of ourselves.

But these are meretricious times, in which slogan passes for thought and the intellectual scatter-gun is the favoured weapon
of political precision. You may say with the mood of the moment that if one form goes, all should go. You may say, if you wish, that there was no distinctive baby in Scottish Communism, only the same old bath-water.

You may say it. I won't. I owe these people. I pay my debts of gratitude.—

WE OWE GRATITUDE IN SOME UNLIKELY PLACES
, he would think, and we usually only realise it in retrospect. He was sitting at the table by the window, using the last of the sunlight to read an old letter from Grete. Her intelligence came luminous off the page, reminding him of her witty intensity clothed in a broad, sensuous face and a body of marvellous amplitude. The reasons for being grateful to Grete were obvious, of course, and he had always known them.

But he sometimes wondered what would have happened if Margaret Inglis hadn't rejected him that summer. He was so naively besotted with her he might never have seen past her. The fifties were not exactly a historical moment of free love, at least not in his experience, and your first fixation could swiftly be socially engineered into the probability of being your last.