The Kingdom by the Sea (37 page)

"It's full of broken windows," I said.

"Aye. And broken
hids!
" one said.

The other man said, "We got our Catholics. Ha' ye nae heard of the Rangers and Celtics fitba matches? They play each other a guid sux tames a year, but there's nae
always
a riot."

No alphabet exists for the Glaswegian accent—phonetic symbols are no good without a glottal stop, a snort, or a wheeze. I met rural-dwelling Scots who told me they could not understand anyone in Glasgow. The Ulster accent took a moment to turn from noise to language: I heard someone speak and then in the echo of the voice there was a meaning. But this did not always happen in Scotland: the echo was meaningless, and in Glasgow it was a strangled peevish hiccup, sudden and untranslatable.

I rode in an empty railway car up the Clyde, past tenements. I wondered about their age. They were striking in their size and their darkness—six stories of stone, looking like prisons or lunatic asylums. Had the Scots originated the tenement? Their word for these old blocks was
lands,
and they had been using the word since the fifteenth century.

We went past Dumbarton (Dun Bretane, "Hill of the Britons"), along the muddy rock-strewn shore, the Firth of Clyde. Across the firth was the busy port of Greenock ("birthplace of Captain Kidd, the pirate"). There were hills behind it. I always had trouble with hills. These were not so much risen loaves as smooth and sloping and lightly upholstered...

A big old man came through the connecting door, and though there was not another person in the whole railway car, he sat beside me. I put my notebook into my pocket.

"I hope you're not embarrassed," he said.

Not embarrassed, but something—perhaps startled.

"I'm going to Oban," I said.

"Good," he said. "We can talk." He was also going the hundred miles.

But he did most of the talking. He was very old, and even sitting next to me he was a foot higher. He looked like a Pope. He had a fat nose and big baggy-fleshed hands. He wore a long black overcoat and carried a small parcel of books tied with twine: detective stories. His name was John L. Davidson and he had been born in Lanarkshire in 1895. He said that occasionally he did feel eighty-seven years old. How long had he lived in Dumbarton? "Only fifty years," he said. He lived in the Dumbarton Home for Aged Gentlefolk now. Everyone he had ever known was dead.

He said, "I'm only seven years younger than John Logie Baird. Have you not heard of him? He invented the tellyvision. He was born here in Helensburgh."

I looked out the window.

"Over there somewhere," Mr. Davidson said. "His teachers at school didnae think he was very bright. They thought he was a head case. One day he decided to invent a tellyphone. He put a wire across the road, a tellyphone instrument at either end, one in his house and one in his friend's. A man was riding a horse down the road, didnae see the wire—and strangled! Hanged himself on the wire of John Logie Baird's tellyphone! That's a true story. But he never hanged anyone on his tellyvision."

We came to Garelochhead; we traveled past Loch Long. The mountains above it were dark and rough, like enormous pieces of dusty coal. They were surrounded by pine woods. The loch was blue-black and looked depthless.

"This loch is so long, so deep, and so straight, they test torpedoes in it," Mr. Davidson said. "You can shoot a torpedo from one end to the other—thirteen miles or more. Want to see something interesting?"

He stood up and beckoned me to the window, slid it down, and said, "Watch."

We were coming to a junction, more tracks, and an isolated signal box. There were woods and hills all around. I expected the train to stop, but it did not even slow down. Mr. Davidson stuck his parcel of books out the window and dangled it. A railwayman was standing on a small raised platform near the signal box. He snatched the books and yelled, "Thank you!"

"I've come this way before. The trains don't stop. I heard that the signalman here likes to read a good book. There's no shops here, no library, so I brought those books for him."

Mr. Davidson had no idea who the signalman was, nor did he know his name. He knew only that the man liked to read a good book.

"There used to be ever so many wee houses on this line, but now there's nae many. It's out of touch. You see people on the train—after they've finished with their newspaper, they throw it out the window to someone on the line to read."

Then Mr. Davidson screamed. He erupted in anger, just like that, without any warning.

"But some of them make me cross! People who travel through Scotland on the train, doing the crossword puzzle! Why do they bother to come!"

And, just as suddenly, he was calm: "They call that mountain 'the Cobbler.' There's an open trough just behind it"—he pronounced it
troch,
to rhyme with loch.

At flat, mirror-still Loch Lomond, white as ice under a white sky, Mr. Davidson began talking about printing unions. I had told him I was in publishing.

"You're nae one of these bloody Fleet Street buggers!" he roared. It was another of his angry eruptions. "The printing unions are bloody! They're just protecting their own interests. They show up drunk and they get paid! 'Pay up!' 'But he's drunk!' 'Och, aye, but ye cannae bag Wully!' 'I'll bag him!' 'Bag him and we'll all go out!' It's bloody stupid!"

Mr. Davidson was roaring at the window, at the creamy clouds reflected in the loch, not at me.

"I'm nae a Queen Anne Tory," he said. "I'm a moderate Labour man. Aye, Jimmy, I was a trade unionist in 1912!"

He said he had been in the retail trade all his life—the grocery trade, another man's shop. He worked long hours. Eight in the morning until eight in the evening. A half-hour for lunch, a half-hour for tea.

The hills were bare from their midsection upward, and below this line were small pine trees. Mr. Davidson was very silent and then he leaned toward me and whispered sadly, "Everything you read's nae true."

He exploded again.

"They went daft with afforestation! It takes forty years for a tree to be useful. You could have forty years of lambs here, and instead they have trees!"

But there were not many trees. Three hundred years ago this district was full of hardwood forests—oak and beech. They were cut down and made into charcoal for the iron smelters at Taynuilt, up the line, famous for its cannonballs—Lord Nelson had fired them at the Battle of Trafalgar. Now the trees were wispy pines, and the hills were rocky and bare and black-streaked with falling water. The dark clouds were like another range of mountains, another foreign land, and the sun on some stones gave them a pale bony gleam.

I suppressed a shiver and said that it seemed rather bleak around here.

"Aye," Mr. Davidson said. "That's where its beauty comes from."

And he went to sleep. His mouth dropped open and he slept so soundly, I thought he had died.

***

Later, Mr. Davidson awoke and gulped, seeming to swallow what remained of his fatigue. He recognized Kilchurn Castle. He said there had been a crazy old woman living in the ruin until very recently. She had thought she was the last of the Campbells. But he had also known hard times, he said. He had had "three spells of poverty"—no work and nothing to eat.

"And I couldn't join the army. I wore spectacles, you see. If you wore spectacles, a gas mask was useless."

Then he was talking about the Somme.

"This country has no friends"—he meant Britain—"only enemies, and debts. We spent years paying off the Boer War debt. And we're still in debt."

He hugged his heavy coat around himself and frowned. When he did this, he looked shaggy and bearish. He was thinking.

"But there's nae debt for the Third World War. There'll be naebody left. Naebody can pay naebody! I blame"—he was erupting again—"I blame the poultices in the House of Commons! They'll start the next war and then there'll be naebody!"

We came to Oban. The railway station was white with a blue trim and had a clock tower showing the right time. There were seals in the harbor. On a hill above town was a full-sized replica of the Roman Colosseum, started in 1897 by a banker who thought something so ambitious would solve the unemployment problem. It was never finished; it was lovely and skeletal, symmetrical, purposeless. McCaig's Folly, they called it.

Even in Oban Mr. Davidson stayed by my side as he had in the empty railway car. He said the folly had a window for every day of the year.

"I'm a bachelor," he then explained. "I never married."

"No woman at all in eighty-seven years?"

"Nothing. And no drinking."

"Never had a drink?"

"Maybe a toddy or two," he said. "And I never smoked."

"A blameless life," I said.

"I've been sick, though," he said. "But nothing as far as sexual, drinking, or smoking."

Oban was made of stone. It was Scottish and solid, no honky-tonk, no spivs. It was a town of cold bright rooms, with rosy-cheeked people in sweaters sitting inside and rubbing their hands; it had fresh air and freezing water. If you were cold, you went for a walk and swung your arms to get the circulation up—no hearth fires until October. In Oban it struck me that most Scottish buildings looked as durable as banks. Here the dull clean town was on a coast of wild water and islands.

Some of these Scottish coastal towns looked as if they had been thrown out of the ground. They were fine polished versions of the same rocks they were on, but cut square and higher—not brought and built there by bricklayers, but carved out of these granite cliffs.

I saw Mr. Davidson my second day in Oban. He looked dead on a George Street bench, facing the harbor. His big hands were folded across his stomach, his mouth hung open. He had no suitcase—nothing but a rail ticket. Where had he slept? But I resisted asking questions, because I feared his answers.

He opened his yellow eyes on me.

I said, "I'm thinking of going to Fort William."

"There's a train in an hour," he said. "Where's your knapsack, Jimmy?"

He called everyone Jimmy.

I said, "At the bus shelter. I'm taking a bus up the coast."

He said, "I wasn't planning to do that."

"I'm sticking to the coast."

"Aye, Jimmy, stick to the coast." And he closed his eyes.

But there was a wild-eyed man on the bus. His name was White-law, he chewed a pipestem, he watched the window and shouted.

There were cages in the sea.

He cried, "Fish farm!"

There was dark and frothy water under the Connel Bridge.

He cried, "Falls of Lora!"

I saw boggy fields.

He cried, "That's where they cut peat!"

He was animated by the landscape. I wondered whether it was a Scottish trait. I had never seen an English person behave like this.

He cried, "The tide's out!"

It was. Eventually he got off the bus, at Portnacroish, on the Sound of Shuna.

It was a complicated coastline of hills and bays, lochs and rushing burns. It could not have been anything but the Scottish coast—so much water, so much steepness, such rocks. Ballachulish was like an alpine valley that had been scoured of all its softness—the feathery trees and chalets and brown cows whirled off its slopes, and all the gentle angles scraped away, until it lay bare and rugged, a naked landscape awaiting turf and forest.

Most of this western coastline in Scotland looked elemental in that way—as if it had been whipped clean and was waiting completion. It was hard and plain, most of it. It was very cold. I imagined sheep dying on it. Fort William was powerfully craggy. I began to think that this was the most spectacular coastline I had seen so far in Britain—huger than Cornwall, darker than Wales, wilder than Antrim. I stared at it and decided that it was ferocious rather than pretty, with a size and a texture that was surprisingly unfinished. It changed with the light, as coastal cliffs always did; it was always massive, but in a certain pale light it seemed murderous.

***

I was anonymous in Fort William. The other visitors had knapsacks, too, and oily shoes and binoculars. With Ben Nevis above it, and all the campsites of the Highlands just behind it, Fort William was full of hikers and fresh-air fiends all frantically interrogating each other about footpaths. The town was crowded and unpleasant-looking, heaving with campers, so after lunch I wiped my mouth and walked north and west along the railway line to the coast. Once again I thought: Some travel is a fantasy of running away.

Three miles away I came to the lower end of the Caledonian Canal. I wanted to see a boat passing through, but there was nothing on it except ducks. It was a sunny day and I was glad to be alone in the empty glen.

Then a wheezing voice said, "Hae ye got a match?" and I almost jumped out of my skin.

It was Jock MacDougal, with red eyes and a filthy face, trembling next to a tree. He had a scabby wound on his forehead, and his clothes were rags.

"I just want a match," he said. "I'm nae being cheeky."

He was trying to reassure me: he knew he was filthy and dangerous-looking. I gave him my matches and he slowly lit an inch-long cigarette butt that was flat, as if it had been stepped on. What an odd person to meet in a green glen.

He said, "I was never had up for assault or bodily harm or a breach of the peace in me whole life."

I stared at him. I did not know what to say.

"Only for being drunk and incapable," he said.

He had a little camp nearby—a nest of rags, some bottles, a smoky fire, and two comrades. There was a frightened woman named Alice and a man named Crawfurd, who was even filthier than MacDougal. Crawfurd called himself Tex. He was from Aberdeen.

"But I'm a Glasgow man," Jock said. "A Glasgow man will stick by you."

Alice looked wildly at him, but said nothing. She looked injured and was very silent.

Jock sang a song,

"Coom doon the stairs.
Tie up your bonny hairs!"

This seemed to frighten Alice even more.

He sang a song about a place called Fyvie. He there's a statue of a cow!"