I love the twelfth floor of this library. It allows views across Glasgow in every direction. Instead of reading today I strolled, just looking, from one glass wall to another. Recent strong winds had swept away clouds and haze so eastward I saw the Victorian terraces of Park Circus and tops of 1960s tower-blocks. Between a couple I saw the cathedral spire. The Cathkin Braes summit above Rutherglen has a line of trees with sky visible between the trunks — near there in 1820 Purly Wilson raised the red flag to start the Great Scottish Insurrection — that never happened. Further east was the dim Fuji Yama-like cone of Tinto, the ancient volcanic centre of Scotland round which the Clyde flows from the border country. I looked down on the Gothic-revival pinnacles and quadrangles of the university, with the red sandstone minarets of Kelvingrove museum and gallery beyond, and beyond them, then grey tenements and the long white wall of Yorkhill Hospital, and the tops of some big cranes to remind me Glasgow is still a port. Through a gap between facades a ship’s funnel slid past.43 The slender pencil of the research tower building reminded me how modern technology can get things wrong. South of the river were the wooded hills of Queen’s Park and Bellahouston Park, with white farmhouses, fields and lines of hedge on hills beyond rising to Neilston Padd, that queer, steep-sided plateau beside Fenwick Moor. Further west were the Gleniffer Braes of which poor Tannahill sang, and the dim but distinct summit of Goat Fell on Arran. On a summer holiday in my teens I climbed that mountain with Gordon MacLean. Why not climb it again with Zoe? It is a Munro, but the gradient is easy.
Yes, today I feel so happy that I no longer want to show how Scotland, Britain and the world is being messed about, probably destroyed by get-rich-quick financiers and corrupted politicians. Scotland is now exactly where I want to be and I refuse to worry about it.
Suddenly the story of Belovéd Henry James Prince dawned on me like a holiday excursion. The information needed to write it is in this library. Abandoning all other research notes crossed to the office of the Special Collection with its view to the North of the Campsie Fells, Kilpatrick Hills and Ben Lomond. Here I ordered Br. Prince’s Journal and volume one of Hepworth Dixon’s Spiritual Wives. They were brought.
Having immersed myself again in these familiar pages I will now write Prince’s tale as briskly as if singing love’s old sweet song — tell how a terribly conscientious Christian so loathed his evil Self (which Freud calls the Ego) that he cast it out, becoming nothing but a mad imagination with a penis — a Super-ego and Id in such harmony that he created a New Jerusalem in England’s Green and Pleasant Land where he was the only cock in a coop of crinolined hens, and enjoyed his Zoe for Ever and Ever Amen! I will enjoy writing this.
20: THE YOUNG PRINCE
Near the start of the 19th century there was a brief truce in the commercial warfare that France and Britain had fought from the reign of Queen Anne to the Battle of Waterloo. Gilray, a popular artist, depicted two statesmen enjoying a little supper, their meal being the world laid out like a big plum pudding on a table between them. At one side small swarthy Napoleon enthusiastically sliced western Europe onto his plate with a sabre; on the other Britain’s Prime Minister, tall, thin, pointy-nosed William Pitt, quietly helped himself to most of the rest of the globe. In 1815 Napoleon’s empire ended at Waterloo but the British King George III still nominally ruled Ireland, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, India, many Chinese and African ports: also Hanover, a German state that was his family’s homeland. The British Empire was now the richest and biggest in the world, without a single competitor, but the British did not yet trust their monarchs enough to give them the title of Emperor. Poor George was now incurably mad so the Prince Regent performed the crown’s few legaly required ceremonies. In 1816 Rossini’s The Barber of Seville was first performed, and Jane Austen’s Emma and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan were published.
Widdicombe Crescent, Bath, was then a terrace of smart houses in that most aristocratic of British holiday resorts and here a little boy had a pain in his side. It brought tears to his eyes and sweat to a brow he pressed against the cool glass of a window. Behind him a doctor told his widowed mother that he could help the boy no further: cold compresses had brought no relief; purging and reduced diet had merely weakened the lad; so had bloodletting which must not continue, despite the temporary alleviation it induced.
“I will give drops to ensure he sleeps at night, Mrs Prince. I could give more tincture of opium to reduce his pains when wakeful, but more will stupefy him. I fear that, like older people, he should learn that pain must be lived with.”
“I have told him so many times, Doctor, but he seems to want me to bear it for him. Two other sons, three daughters and a paying guest leave me no time for that,” said his mother.