I saw a round, pleasant, pleading face with lipstick not efficiently applied. I said, “Not much,” and rushed away trembling as if from an electric shock. Terry found me attractive! I tried bringing her image into erotic fantasies and failed. She was too real. For nearly a year I visited the Co-op meaning to ask her out to the Salon or Grosvenor and each time the shock of seeing her struck me dumber than she was. I could not imagine what I could say about Burns, Rabelais etcetera to her that would interest Terry. I would hand her a note of the items we wanted and before leaving with them would mutter, “Thanks.” One day when I entered someone shouted, “Terry, here’s John!” and she came over and served me in a straightforward friendly way, like the other assistants, but perhaps with a slight air of triumph. She had grown out of me, and was happy to show it. I knew I had missed an opportunity. Forty years passed before there was another, though something else may have delayed my maturity.
The Holiday Fellowship guest houses where we vacationed had originally been the country seats of minor aristocrats or rich Victorian merchants, the sort of country houses that after World War 2 the very rich kept wailing that they could no longer afford because the Welfare State was forcing them to pay iniquitous taxes. Nan told me that when Britain became truly Socialist under Harold Wilson (a prime minister in whom she had faith for nearly a year) every great country house would be run by the Holiday Fellowship as guest homes for The People or the elderly. I loved them for their large, unkempt, usually neglected gardens and big libraries of books, none published later than the middle thirties. I also liked the custom of the staff, who were usually young foreign girls, sharing the guests’ lounge, quiet room and outdoor excursions when they were not working. Younger guests liked helping waitresses and kitchen staff clear tables and wash and dry dishes after meals, a custom mostly enjoyed by young unmarried males, among whom I was always the youngest. At Minard Castle on Loch Fyne one summer I became sweet on a couple of lovely German girls. Leni was tall, slim and dark haired. Ute was plump, blonde and not much taller than me so I fancied her most, though I never met her apart from Leni. I later realized they encouraged my friendship as a way of avoiding older, more sexually knowing youths, but they certainly encouraged it. Their questions disclosed that I meant to be a writer and they saw nothing incredible in that. Leni started talking about Goethe which I thought remarkable, because I was sure no Scottish teenage girls liked great writers. I remember a sunny day when the three of us climbed Ben Nevis at the tail of a walking party. They asked questions about Scotland and my answers naturally led me to quote various verses by Burns that seemed to entertain them. More questions drew from me details of his private life, which Leni said showed he was a free spirit like Goethe, then Ute said, mischievously, “And your sex life, John?”
I felt we were talking like unusually friendly equals so said promptly, “It hardly exists. I only discovered the connection between sexual intercourse and birth a year or two ago through my affair with poor Doig.”
“An affair? With a poor dog?” said Leni, grimacing incredulously.
“No! Dee — oh — eye — jee, Doig, a boy I knew.”
They wanted to hear about that so I told them. At the end both went into fits of laughter through which Ute said, “O you funny little boy!”
It would be wrong to say I felt she had slapped my face. I felt like someone happily using a band saw that in a split second takes off his hand. Shock would at first prevent pain, he would only feel astonished that his hand was lost for ever. My shock must have shown because at once Ute apologized, but the damage had been done. I turned and walked away downhill from these climbers so never saw the summit of Ben Nevis. I am told it is a rocky plateau, a field of boulders with patches of snow in odd nooks even in the hottest summers, and on a clear day like that one I could have seen every high summit between England and the Orkneys.
17: FURTHER EDUCATION
After finishing in the evenings I began trying to turn my fantasies and learning into a single continuous story, always burning the results because what I wrote was obviously the work of an adolescent schoolboy. These stunted efforts still made me more of a writer than our teachers, who gave us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thomas Hardy and only two books by Scots. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, set in the 12th century, told how Norman conquerors and Saxon commoners are at last united as Englishmen — what a good lesson for a Scottish school child! Scott’s best novels have Scottish folk using local speech that teachers and examiners wanted us to forget. The other novel, John Buchan’s Prester John, told of a Scots minister’s son, working for the British Empire in Africa, who thwarts a black revolt planned by a black African who has fooled the white bosses by pretending to be Christian.
Gordon MacLean left Glasgow because his dad got a job elsewhere. I did not much miss him, having now other friends who also enjoyed discussing their emotional problems with an interested listener who seemed to have none. Before Gordon left he enlarged my political views without intending to. Hugh MacDiarmid’s son, a boy of nineteen, had been jailed for refusing to do his National Service,34 because the 1707 Treaty of Union with England said no Scottish soldier could be ordered overseas against his will, and MacDiarmid’s son refused to fight for the remains of the British Empire in Kenya, Crete or Malaysia, Ulster and other places he might have been sent. Gordon and I agreed his attitude was ridiculous. We thought the Treaty of Union, having merged Scotland’s parliament with the English one, was now an obsolete document. We had no wish for Scottish self-government. Gordon believed Scottish people could not rule themselves; I agreed because Britain had achieved a Welfare State through the efforts of a parliamentary Labour Party founded by Scottish Keir Hardie. I also thought Scotland and England had equal representation in London — my general knowledge was good, but I had no head for numbers. Gordon explained that England had ten times more MPs in Westminster than Scotland, a fair arrangement (he pointed out) since England’s population had always been ten times greater. I at once saw that a minority of Scots MPs in the midst of England’s richest city must be constantly outvoted to benefit the southern kingdom. For many years this did not stop me voting Labour but from then on I began to see how the Union with England had warped Scotland’s institutions, especially schools and universities.
At Gilmorehill our lecturers were mostly Oxford or Cambridge graduates, some of them Scots.35 They assumed ordinary students like me would stay in Scotland to teach the next generation what we had been taught, while brighter ones — their elite — would find work in England, former British colonies or the U.S.A. Bright Scots had been doing so for centuries, and bright people will want to please foreign masters by conforming to them, so the only tutor who mentioned Burns called him “a poor man’s Alexander Pope”. But they agreed that Wordsworth at his best, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats had not just been naytcha poets but (like Burns) had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of universal liberty, equality, fraternity. This enthusiasm was presented as forgivable but out of date, since Britain had now all the liberty, equality and fraternity it needed. I also learned that most great modern poets thought monetary greed had made life ugly. Ezra Pound turned Fascist because he thought only a dictator like Mussolini could make bankers fund important public works — Yeats wanted a nation where heroic landlords ruled admiring peasants — T.S. Eliot was nostalgic for the 17th century Anglican Church where peace with God came more easily — Auden was a bouncy English public-school Communist, until World War 2 converted him to something like Eliot’s Christianity. Auden also said poetry made nothing happen and our professors agreed.36