"What about dog licenses?" I asked.
Dog licenses! It was Malcolm Biles's favorite subject. The price of a dog license was 37½ pence (about sixty cents), because in 1880 it had been fixed at seven shillings and sixpence. The fee had never been changed. Wasn't that silly? I agreed it was. There were six million dogs in Britain, but only half of them were licensed. But the amazing thing was that it cost £4 (almost $7.00) to collect the dog license — the time, paperwork, and so forth.
"Why not abolish the fee?" I asked.
Malcolm said, "That would be giving up."
"Why not increase it to something realistic — say, five quid?"
"That would be unpopular," he said. "No government would dare try it."
"How long do you figure you'll be staying in the post office?"
"For the rest of my life, I hope," he said. The train jolted. "Ah, we're away."
I tried to imagine a whole lifetime in a post office. I could not imagine it. I got to the end of a few years and then nothing would come — a blur, fatigue, bewilderment, indifference. It was easier to imagine the life of that crofter talking gently to his dog at Strath-peffer.
Still, we discussed the post office and debated the issue of dog licenses until we came to Dingwall ("birthplace of Macbeth").
19. The Flyer to Cape Wrath
MY BLUE GUIDE'S description of the northwest coast of Scotland suggested a setting that was straight out of Dracula or The Mountains of Madness. "The road crosses a strange and forbidding mountain wilderness," it began, "of sombre rock-strewn glens, perched glacial boulders, and black lochs." And then, "after 8 m. of lonely moor and dark bog… the road from the ferry's w. end to Cape Wrath crosses a bleak moor called The Parph, once notorious for its wolves," and at last, "the road rises across a desolate moor…"
It made me want to set off at once. It seemed the perfect antidote to the Presbyterian monotony of Dingwall. If the guidebook's description was accurate, it would be like traveling to the end of the world — in any case, the British world. Cape Wrath was not merely remote — the ultimate coastline — it was also such a neglected place and reputedly so empty that the method for getting there had not changed for eighty years or more. Baedeker's Great Britain for 1906 said, "From Lairg, mail-cart routes diverge in various directions, by means of which the highly picturesque country to the W. and N.W…. may be conveniently explored…"
At Dingwall Station I asked the best way to Cape Wrath.
"Get the post bus at Lairg," Mr. MacNichols said.
In other words, the mail cart. There was no train, there was no bus, there was hardly a road — it was paved the width of a wagon for fifty-six miles. There were people who still called the post bus "the flyer," as they called tenant farms "crofts" and porridge "crowdie."
The train to Lairg left Dingwall and passed along the edge of Cromarty Firth, which at this state of the tide was shallow water seeping into the mudflats. Not long before, the railway line was to have been shut down, but it had been reprieved. It passed through the bleakest, boggiest part of Caithness, where the roads were often bad, and in winter it was an essential service. But Mr. MacNichols had confided to me that in the off season there were sometimes only three or four people on board.
To save money on the line, some of the stations had been closed. The ruined, boarded-up station building at Alness resembled many I had seen in Ulster. A large aluminum smelter had just closed at Invergordon — nine hundred more people out of work and another building left to rot. Decrepitude was decrepitude — the fury of terrorists was indistinguishable from the willfulnes of budget-cutters and accountants.
Beyond the village of Fearn there were farms and fields of a classic kind: long vistas over the low hills, quiet houses, and smooth fields of fat sheep. There were steeples under the soft gray sky at Tain — the Tolbooth, with a conical spire and turrets, and a church spire like a freshly sharpened pencil. Pink and purple lupins shook on the station platform.
People used this train for shopping, traveling to a place like Tain from miles up the line. Two ladies were sitting next to me. They were Mrs. Allchin and Mrs. MacFee. They were discussing the butcher.
"Duncan is very obliging," Mrs. Allchin said. "We often give him a lift on stormy days."
"I think it's an ideal place, Tain," Mrs. MacFee said.
Mrs. MacFee had two large bags of groceries, and she had also managed to find a packet of "toe-spacers" at the chemist's shop. It eased her mind to know that she had these for pedicures and nail-varnishing. Kenneth had mentioned a dinner-dance at the Lodge, and she did not want to fuss at the last minute.
Mrs. Allchin had been very lucky in Tain. Ian's lad, wee Colum, was having a birthday, and she had found a box of something called "indoor fireworks." Apparently, you just cleared a space on the table and set them off. Apparently, they were perfectly safe. Chinese.
"What won't they think of next," Mrs. MacFee said.
But Mrs. Allchin's mind was elsewhere. The indoor fireworks reminded her that she was chain-smoking again She often chain-smoked in trains. It worried her, like nail-biting.
"I dinna drink, at any rate," Mrs. Allchin said.
We traveled inland, toward the hills at Culrain, which had a ruined look. And the roof was off the station at Invershin. Some other stations had clearly been sold off to be turned into common bungalows or holiday homes. There were cabbages growing where the platform had been.
We went through Acharry Glen — the River Shin on the left. I had settled down to watch the mountains passing, but soon we came to Lairg and I had to get out.
There was something very disconcerting about leaving a train in the middle of nowhere. It was all activity and warm upholstery, and then the clang of a carriage door and the train pulled out and left me in a sort of pine-scented silence. Lairg Station was two miles from Lairg, but even Lairg was nowhere.
I saw a man throwing mailbags and bundles of newspapers into the back of an old-fashioned vehicle. It was a cut-down version of a bus, about the size of a hearse. Still the man went on loading it with the bags and bundles the train had left.
I cleared my throat. He looked up. I said I was going to Durness on the post bus.
"This is the post bus," he said. "We can leave as soon as I get these bags loaded."
His name was Michael Mathers. He pronounced it "Maithers." His accent was not Scottish. It was fairly Gaelic and very Scandinavian, a soft Norse whirr in every syllable. Later, I discovered that everyone in his part of Sutherland had the same accent, a legacy of the Vikings. This accent was all that remained of the local dialect, Norn.
We set off for Lairg and picked up more mail and an old couple on their way to Scourie. Michael said that this was a Bedford bus, only ten years old. It had gone 400,000 miles.
"When I took over," he said, "we had an Albion. Made in Glasgow. That one went 650,000 miles in fifteen years."
He had been driving for twenty-one years. He was forty-four and had the solemn, kindly face of a fisherman. He had once tried working on a fishing boat. He said, "You need a strong stomach for that." It was cold, it was hard, there wasn't much money. At midnight on a pitching boat, struggling with nets, he would look into the distance and see the lights of Durness: the lucky people indoors. So he had chucked it.