To say that I came out of my shell altogether during this period would be an exaggeration. But I did realise that my days at Chelmsford had been effectively wasted. I had allowed myself to become marginalised. I had relinquished control of my own destiny. I had thought at the time that I was ensuring the objectivity that would be necessary for formulating a new large-scale theory of the psychopathology of societies as a whole. But really I had been teetering towards institutionalisation.
Wandering the MacLintock estate, moodily kicking failed, wet divots into the expectant faces of short Highland cattle I developed a new resolve to go back into the fray. I realised that to make any lasting contribution, to be listened to, I would have to manifest myself in some way. I would have to unite my own personality with my theories.
So, of an evening, while MacLintock fulminated and stalked, I parried with my pirated idiosyncrasies. We would sit either side of the baronial fireplace, wherein a few slats from a broken orange box feebly glowed. He, nibbling charcoal biscuit after biscuit, only to discard each sample, half-eaten, into a sodden heaplet on the lino, while I would suckle ballpoint pens, stare up at the creosoted rafters and make either whiffling or ululating noises, depending on the phase of the moon.
To MacLintock’s credit he never paid much attention to the generation of this personal myth. He was possessed of a delightful self-obsession that guarded him against being interested in anyone else. A short man with absurd mutton-chop sideburns, he always wore a business suit. His notable efficiency, punctiliousness and businesslike manner — while inspiring devotion and respect at Head Office, at the plant and at the experimental testing station on Eugh — at home came across as a wearing emptiness of human feeling.
The great lodge was empty but for him, me and an aged housekeeper, Mrs Hogg, a woman so wedded to Calvinist fatalism that she would happily watch a pullet burst into flame, rather than adjust the oven setting. Bizarrely lit by vari-tilted spotlights of some cheap variety, the great hall would occasionally be enlivened of an evening as Mrs Hogg progressed towards us down a promenade of joined carpet offcuts. Her squashed profile was thrown into shocking, shadowed relief against the stippled wall, the angles, for a moment, cheating the fact that her nose actually did touch her chin. She would deposit a chipboard tray on the fender, gesture towards the Tupperware cups of tea and the fresh mound of burnt biscuits and then depart, rolling back over the causeway and into the darkness.
Eventually MacLintock became dissatisfied with my work. He had had very precise objectives which he believed my work should fulficlass="underline"
1. The creation of an ideal community in which men and cattle would live together on equal terms. This was to be jointly funded by MacLintock and the Scottish Development Office.
2. The publication of a popular work which would make MacLintock’s theories accessible to a mass audience (he was also quite keen on the idea of a television documentary).
He couldn’t blame me solely for the failure to realise the first of these objectives, although I suppose my work didn’t altogether help to convince the relevant bureaucrats. On the other hand he certainly did blame me for the collapse of the second objective. Blame, I felt, was unjustified. I had consulted with him on a regular basis during the writing of Men and Cows: Towards the Society of the Future? And he had passed each chapter as it came. Nonetheless he became nasty when the book failed to find a mainstream publisher. Eventually it was brought out by one of the small, alternative publishers that were beginning to operate, but it was instantaneously remaindered. MacLintock wandered the lodge for days, skipping from carpet tile to carpet tile, buoyed up by fury. Every so often he would swivel on his heel and deliver a tirade of abuse at me. At last, sickening of his tirade, I packed my bag and departed.
The last thing I saw as I squelched down the drive, away from the lodge, was Mrs Hogg. She was standing in the paddock behind the house, leaning on the fence, apparently adopting a conversational tone with a giant Herefordshire bull.
That wasn’t the last I heard of Euan MacLintock, or of the work I had done for him. About eight years later, when the controversy that blew up around Quantity Theory was reaching its height, Harding, one of my staunchest critics, found a copy of Men and Cows. He brandished this, as it were, in the face of my reputation. Naturally the attempted discrediting backfired against him nastily, the general public took to the book, seeing it as satire. I believe a twelfth edition is about to appear.
As for MacLintock he went on without the Scottish Development Office and founded his utopia in an isolated glen on Eugh. There was never any information as to whether the experiment met with success. But after a shepherd heard unnatural cries in the vicinity of the commune the constabulary were called in. MacLintock was subsequently charged with murder. No doubt the story is apocryphal, but it was widely rumoured at the time that the insane (note please the entirely plausible reclassification from ‘eccentric’ to ‘mad’) bovine comestibles magnate was found naked with a group of rabid cattle. MacLintock and the cows were eating strips and straggles of flesh and sinew; all that remained of the last of MacLintock’s fellow human communalists.
And so to Birmingham, at that time unpromising soil for the psycho-social plant to grow in. Fortunately this was a period when if you had an idea that was even halfway towards being coherent, there was at least the possibility of getting some kind of funding. Added to that, I discovered on my return from the wastes of cow and man that I had obtained a ‘reputation’. A reputation, however, that existed entirely by proxy. None of my doing, but rather the fact of Alkan’s breakdown. Busner, Gurney, Sikorski, Hurst and Adam Harley. All of them were beginning to make little names for themselves. And there was a rumour that there was some ‘purpose’ to their work, that Alkan had vouchsafed some ‘secret’, or inaugurated a ‘quest’ of some kind before he went mad.
As a member of this select band I was accorded a good deal of respect. I had no difficulty at all in gaining a modest grant to do some research towards a book on aspects of grant application. The form of this project took me away from the precincts of Aston (to which I was nominally attached) and into the ambit of the Institute of Job Reductivism, at that time being run by John (later Sir John) Green, who went on to become Director of the Institute of Directors.
Things were informal at the institute, there was a kind of seminar-cum-coffee morning on Wednesdays and Fridays. Research fellows were encouraged to come in and chat about their work with one another and even present short papers. Here was a socialised setting which I at last found congenial. The roseate glow of synthetic coals; bourbons passed round on a blue plastic plate; the plash of tea into cup — and over it all the companionable hubbub coming from the people who sat in the groups of oatmeal-upholstered chairs.
Most of the fellows were engaged in straightforward reductivist studies. There were papers being written on — among other things — recruiting personnel to the personnel recruitment industry, writing in-house magazines for corporate communications companies, auditing procedures to be adopted for accountants, and assessing life cover rates for actuaries. The resident Marxist was engaged on a complex analysis of the division of domestic cleaning labour among people who worked in the domestic cleaning industry. I fitted in rather well with these people, they accepted me as being like themselves and this was a tremendous relief to me.