More Matter For a May Morning

Being the 72nd and Last Post of my

Journey into Scotland

Everywhere I went in Scotland, I met people who were proud of their culture and happy to bring a friendly pedaller up to speed with what I should be reading and watching if I truly wanted to become au fait with life north of the border. A drunk near the Burns’ Memorial in Alloway ordered me to read Lewis Grassic Gibbon. I hadn’t even sought his opinion. Mind you, he also threatened to kill me with a knife. I was paying close attention. A nurse near Crianlarich took my notebook off me and wrote a long list. I’ve probably still got the notebook as it’s not the sort of thing I throw away. From memory, it contained two books by Robin Jenkins: The Cone Gatherers and The Awakening of George Darroch.

At Soldier’s Leap, Killikrankie – I’m the one with my hand up

 

“They don’t teach any Scottish history in English schools. It’s a shocking omission. None of our history. And when was the last time a class read a Scottish book in one of your literature classes? No. As far as education in England is concerned, we don’t exist.”*

He went on to add the names of Alasdair Gray and Iain Banks to my reading list. I wasn’t short of advice.

I’m a believer in the power of the novel, above all other arts forms, to give an insight into a culture. Well, not a single novel. Too small a sample can give a very distorted picture. I read Lanark and I read Unlikely Stories Mostly by the brilliant Alasdair Gray and I thought them wonderful. I’d already read Grey Granite by Lewis Grassic Gibbon but I added Sunset Song from his Scots Quair and I’ll soon complete the trilogy with Cloud Howe. I read both of the books by Robin Jenkins and by that time I was on a roundabout with one book suggesting its successor. When I began this project I’d only dipped my toe into the water. Now I’m fully immersed and ready to have a go at swimming across the wide stream of Scottish literature. The country has only produced one winner of the Booker Prize, but that says more about the metropolitan tastes  (and backgrounds) of the judging panel. If I were to choose my shortlist of the best 100 books published in Britain over the last fifty years it would contain at least twenty Scottish titles. Here are a few that I have read especially for this journey.

Whisky Galore by Compton MacKenzie

It’s a hoot. I laughed my way through it and immediately ordered the dvd of the 1949 film. The writing isn’t perfect, the characters are over-drawn to the extent of approaching caricature, the setting is idealised and, like Dylan Thomas’s The Outing, makes a bunch of men getting drunk sound almost fabulous; my experience is that it is rarely thus. But it has magic. It pulls together it’s different strands (it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t set in wartime) to make a very special weave. Very few books have made me laugh more than this one. I hasn’t made me want to drink whisky but it has provided a more than ample substitute.

Sutherland at sunset

Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

The book describes an almost idyllic isolation in the north west of the country. A touch sentimental. A touch from a previous time. I bought this with paper-round money when I was 12. I think I would have enjoyed it then. I certainly enjoyed it 44 years on. I like human company and I like being left alone. But I would hate to live without animal companionship. The real achievement of this book is as a celebration of what animals bring to us.

Also serves as a first-rate wildlife guide to the north west of Scotland.

How Late it Was, How Late by James Kelman

Caused controversy when it won the Booker. The sniffy reviews caused Kelman problems later on when looking for publishing deals. A rare case of winning the Booker closing doors for a writer. It opened doors for other writers though. This is brilliant. To manage the first thirty pages is impressive, to write the entire novel in faultless, poetic, realistic, crude, funny, genuine language is an immense achievement.

What did the gripers want from a novel? Storyline – gripping; characterisation – superb; language – as good as it gets; settings – you’re there! I’ve waited a long time to read this novel. It was worth the wait.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Sadly Iain Banks died last year but he left us with great  grace and dignity.

This is the first book he published and the only one I’ve read so far. It certainly held me, it un-nerved me and it surprised me. It seemed gruesome and I wondered at the wisdom of having it on the English syllabus in schools and then I watched the news and realised that it was no more x-rated than the lunch-time bulletin. What makes it disturbing is the voice. Sustaining this voice throughout is quite something. It isn’t a fun read but it is a worthwhile one.

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

I’m glad I read this. It seemed dated at first and has fallen out of fashion (it is dated but you soon get into the trick and rhythm of the language), and the story seemed a little slow in getting going. The Prologue is worth reading at the end as well as at the beginning. A history of the Highlands told through the history of a few square miles.

It reminded me most of DH Lawrence (also fast falling out of fashion). It most nearly resembles The White Peacock and it is a much better book. For all its limited geographical range it paints a broad canvas. It is a great rough pastoral to go alongside Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherers and decrepit huntsmen and idiot children. It is a great picture of the First World War and its effects on the people far from the monstrous anger of the guns. It is a magnificent telling of the end of Crofting. It is a great Feminist novel. It is modernist and determined to speak with a Scottish voice and it is in this that it has aged badly. The style interferes with the narrative flow (ironic for a stream of consciousness) and the Scottishness is of a 1930s vintage. It may succeed in always making you aware of itself as a human construct but this prevents me (at least) from becoming totally immersed in, what is otherwise, one hell of a story.

Farr Bay

Hebridean Connection by Derek Cooper

A personal description of the western islands by the burgundy voiced former presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

A well written account of the Hebrides as a place to live and work with much less time for those who come in search of their own idyl (and bugger up everybody else’s by bringing a guitar and a passion for making crap out of shells); and much, much less time for those who use their obscene and ill-gotten wealth to play the landowner at the expense of real people and a real way of life.

Perhaps a few years out of date but I haven’t come across any thing more recent that is anything like as good.

The First Fifty: Munro Bagging Without a Beard by Muriel Gray

Buy this book and read it. End of review.

Portrait of Orkney by George Mackay Brown

A near perfect gentle guide. George Mackay Brown is the ideal companion. It’s an afternoon stroll or a morning walk rather than a detailed archaeological exploration. A pleasure. (Bonus fact: Robert Frost’s grandmother was an Orcadian.)

Swing Hammer Swing by Jeff Torrington

Christopher Brookmyre gives a much better summation of this brilliant book than I could do so I’ll unashamedly print his. “A surreal portrait of Sixties Glasgow, related via the keen – if well-bevvied – eyes and coruscating patter of amateur philosopher, father-to be and diligently dedicated waster Tam Clay. The essence of my home city finely distilled; every dram is a relished drop.”

Culloden

Scottish Journey by Edwin Muir

A gem of a book that takes you around a Scotland reeling from the blows of the great depression in the company of someone worth listening to. A companion piece to JB Priestley’ English Journey and a worthy one. Like Priestley he deliberately travels to parts of the country that tell different stories, that have suffered differently in the economic turmoil of the times. Muir has been criticised for waxing political as he wanders among Glasgow Slums or talks of farm labourers’ struggles under surf like conditions; their wives dying in childbirth to avoid the cost of a doctor or refusing to take time off to become ill because they know it will cost a livelihood; in the end it costs a life. How can a sensitive and caring man wax anything other than political? (Priestley certainly does as he visits Tyneside).

Here is a proud Scot who doesn’t care for the cult of Burns and Scott (though he admires both as writers). A man who resents the wrongs done to his countrymen, who is happy to point out the good when he comes across it…and he comes across plenty… and who sees a great need for change (and who sees hope in that need).

The book is a pleasure to read and a warning to myself that I have a long way to go before I can call myself a true travel writer.

Oh, and the prose is as beautiful as you’d expect from a true poet.

Outside my old front door

 

I read plenty more but I think that gives a flavour. I learned an enormous amount by cycling around Scotland the autumn of 1987. I went off in search of myself and came back a different person. The more I discover about Scotland the more I like it and the less I seem to know. At 10 miles per hour you see so much and there is so much to see. Every day revealed a landscape as different from the day before as Norway is  from Portugal. And my education has continued through this writing. In school’s there is an old saying that if you really want to know something, then you should teach it. A good teacher should be a good learner else what are they in the classroom for? I’ve found the same thing to be true of writing. I’ve discovered as much about the country by writing about Scotland as I did by visiting.

A great many people have dropped by to read chapters and leave messages. Some of you have been with me through the whole 100,000 plus words (and who knows how many photographs?) All I can say is thank you; I have really enjoyed your company, appreciated your likes and comments and hope that I have given you a few new views of a very auld country.

* Some Scottish writers have made it onto the English Schools’ Syllabus; among them are Anne Fine, Iain Banks Liz Lochhead and Robert Louis Stevenson. Liz Lochhead adding something very different as you don’t get many words with a double h in them!

The End

 

Bouldering on the Ridiculous

Tags

Arthur Holmes, Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Principles of Physical Geology, Professor Iain Stewart, Scotland

A Journey into Scotland : Bibliography Part Four

Geography and Geology

Bouldering: Definition: The sport of climbing without ropes or other technical gear on boulders or relatively small rock faces. (Which is pretty much how I regard my ability and knowledge as a geographer)

I left school when I was 16. It wasn’t that I was giving up on learning. I always had an idea that I might want  top-up at some time. It was just a huge desire to get off someone else’s carousel and  find one of my own. Anything I did find wasn’t anything to write home about, but at least I could write home. In reality I was progressing from one job to another just as soon as each revealed that it didn’t have much to reveal. A girlfriend took me to the theatre about this time and that excited me more than what I was doing for a envelope of notes and coins and a payslip. Between jobs I signed on for some courses at night school. It wasn’t a sudden kindling of ambition but I was drawn to the warmth of the promise of a better place.

Camping on the strand, Arisaig

I didn’t stay out of work for long (standing in line to be quizzed, probed and insulted by a junior clerk in return for a giro cheque wasn’t my idea of a good career move) and the enlightened powers that be, at the technical school, informed me that I was going to have to decide which A level to drop because they couldn’t allow someone in full-time employment to take three. I quiver at the stupidity of this decision but at the time I accepted it. (It was half way through the second year of study). I couldn’t give up English Literature. I didn’t think much of the class and less of the teacher, but as it consisted of reading books and thinking about them it wasn’t a much of a burden. The same was true of British Government and Politics. This was a rattling good shindig with angry young voices once a week. So out went Geography, despite it being with the nicest bunch of people, and the fact that classes would as often take place on the moors as in the college.

In reality it didn’t make a big difference. I soon found myself working shifts and couldn’t make very many of the classes anyway. To get the certificates required  personal study. The college got a course fee and an empty desk most weeks. I did ok. I’d secured a passport to higher education if I ever needed to use it. The certificate said I was pretty good at understanding books and governance. There was nothing to show for 18 months of learning about incised meanders and soil profiles; geomorphology and plate tectonics. Well, nothing outward anyway. I’d bought the books and continued to buy the books. The teacher gave me a reading list and said the pity was not being able to take a geography degree. Not caring much for badges I read them anyway and topped them up with late night Open University programmes delivered by strange men with long hair and tank tops. I wasn’t finished with earth science.

Ben Nevis

You cannot get away from landscapes, in life or in art. In galleries I like a human face or two but you’ll more often find me standing before a painting of the ocean or some mountains. In music, I travel readily into Beethoven’s woods or Sibelius’s lakes or the wide open spaces and cloudscapes that Copeland reveals (once he’s got past the bloody hoe-downs!). My favourite westerns wouldn’t work without the epic settings. Odysseus is all very well but it’s the journey we’re really interested in. Give me the rock and the whirlpool. And the passion has remained. There are two things to admire in any landscape. The first being the way it is and the second, how it got to be that way. You can take them one by one or you can take them both together.

All of the early geography books, including the world atlas, were given to charity shops before they became outdated. One, at least was by Harry Robinson who I later got to know and like very much as he taught at the polytechnic where I spent 18 months as a caretaker. One was emerald green and turquoise which isn’t much help as publishers like inappropriate colours for geography text books. So they all belong in that part of my bibliography that has to go down as “stuff I learned from books years ago but just which books, I cannot remember.” A bit like someone asking “How do you know that?” when you get a question right on University Challenge*. “What do you mean “How do I know that?” I just bloody know it.

Glenfinnan: you will have seen the viaduct if you’ve watched the Harry Potter films.

My second job in teaching was as a history master. Nobody quibbled. My second last job was teaching geography. The teacher in the next classroom liked causing problems and questioned my qualifications: three quarters of an A level, a degree in the humanities, thirty years in the classroom, a hill-walker and canoeist and a lifelong passion for the subject. She was a PE teacher who’d been shoved into the department  when she found she couldn’t keep up on the netball court. I never questioned her right to teach…but many of her students did.

The head of department was a fine geographer (as was the head teacher)  and we enjoyed long chats about delivering the subject. He knew what he was doing and I was happy to follow his schemes to the letter. He used the Geog 123 series of textbooks from Oxford University Press and they were excellent. They came with all sorts of extras of an interactive nature and were popular with classes working together and students learning independently. When I was at school our teachers wouldn’t accept new fangled theories about the movement of the earth’s surface. In this school, even with an English teacher in charge, the students were all pretty well-versed on tectonics  and knew more vulcanology than we required, at a much higher level in 1975, by the end of year 8 (aged 12/13). It was impressive to be a part of.

As a brick-layer I’m happy to split stones but in the field I don’t carry a hammer. Up in the wild north-west of Scotland you don’t need to hit anything to be awed by the rocks. As an aesthete I was thrilled; as a poet, inspired; as a geographer I was in seventh heaven.

Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell

In Scotland I was more taken with the story of the the development of geology as a subject than by the geology itself. The whole of this academic discipline grew out of Scotland, brilliant Scottish minds and Scottish rocks. This book has been over-taken many times by modern geologists but Charles Lyell was one of those giants who allowed others to stand on his shoulders in order to see a little further. Charles Darwin advises anyone reading On the Origin of Species to put his book aside until you have read Charles Lyell. As a lover of art and literature I was drawn to the book by it’s reported influence on George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Ruskin among others. I enjoyed it as much for what it revealed of the scientific process as for the advances in geological thinking it contained.

Principles of Physical Geography by Arthur Holmes

I’ve had a copy of this for years and it has been quite a companion. In fact it has been my substitute teacher and go-to guide for anything that puzzled me about what goes on under the grass and heather. It was only when researching my re-telling of the story of geology in Scotland that I discovered just how important Holmes was to that very story. My copy is a fourth edition. The first edition, published in 1944 gave the world his reluctantly published hand-sketched drawings explaining how convection might (just might) explain the movement of the earth’s land masses (they didn’t become known as plates until 1968). It’s a university level text book; and a weighty tome. I haven’t read it from cover to cover but I have left tea stains and biscuit crumbs on more than half of its pages. If it isn’t the last word for the current generation, it is the last word for this enthusiastic amateur.

Professor Iain Stewart : Making Scotland’s Landscape BBC

I came upon these accidentally and very possibly when looking for some post pub late night television. They became must-see programmes and form the framework of my own telling of the story of rock science. Thanks to Youtube these are readily available and (again with tea and biscuits) I settled down and watched them, one after another, with a fat notebook and a fast moving pen. Seldom has a subject been so well expressed to a general audience without either simplifying or patronising. Iain Stewart has followed Michael Wood into that rare club of academic television presenters who are almost as much admired for themselves as for their knowledge of subject. I wasn’t over-bothered about his boyish good looks but his enthusiasm and love of subject went along way with me.

 

to be continued…

 

* My wife also left school at 16 and later forged a successful career as a teacher. Between us it is rare that we don’t score between 20 and 40 on University Challenge. And that’s only counting the ones we get before the students answer. Let’s hear it for the drop-outs!

Stuff and Nonsense

Tags

Anna Massey, Calgacus, Christopher Lee, History of Britain, History of Scotland, Magnus Magnusson, Mons Graupius, Neil Oliver, Simon Schama, This Sceptered Isle

A Journey into Scotland  Bibliography Part Three

The West Coast : History Books

It’s impossible to give a full inventory of the source materials for this project. Most of this blog has come straight from the reservoir of memory; and this includes memory of books read, lectures attended, galleries visited, films and television programmes watched and conversations enjoyed. Obviously it also includes what happened along the roads of Scotland in 1987. Being something of a compulsive reader and naturally curious, I’ve always enjoyed finding things out. Cataloguing knowledge may suit the writer of the school curriculum or Mr Dewey in his library but, to me, there has only ever been one subject; and that is stuff. Knowing stuff has always felt like a good thing. It’s nice to know a little more and to this end, I have failed to be a respecter of the confines of my own discipline. This could lead to the accusation of being a Jack of all trades and master of none. Guilty Your Honour!

Why is he pretending to know about geology and geography? How can what he has to say about the past be true history when he isn’t an historian? Well, I cannot necessarily sing, but I can do a pretty good impression of someone who can. Why not share enthusiasm when you’ve got some to spare?  I cannot look at a hill, a holt, a wood, a river valley without wondering how it came to be like that. I cannot read a newspaper without hearing echoes from the past. Teachers have helped too. My favourite geography teacher says that it is the fact that her subject contains all other subjects that is its main appeal. As a student, and occasional teacher, of words, I feel the same. A student of science  can only talk about what is: a student of poetry and philosophy  can talk about what could be as well. It’s all stuff and knowing it makes me feels like I’m fulfilling my purpose. Like oxygen, it’s good to suck it in; it feeds the system. Each of us can only draw in so much; there will always be an infinite amount we don’t breathe in, that we don’t know or even consider not knowing. We are each our own fruit and to strive towards ripeness is all.

I’ve written this whole thing to find out. To find out things that I didn’t know and for that I have been a frequenter of libraries as well as my own study. And that is the purpose of this appendix; to acknowledge a debt to other writers, academics and friends. But it is also written to find out and catalogue what I did know without realising it. It has been a Socratic project where the slave boy has shown himself more capable than he had previously contemplated. To know more at the end than at the beginning would be a measure of success. 

The Songs we Sang at Primary School

The music lessons we had at infant and junior school would all be classed as satisfactory, at best, by a twenty first century inspector. For the inspector’s clip board wouldn’t have boxes to tick for all the good things there were about them; merely the absence of what he/she is looking for. We went to the music room, (a room whose only distinction from our normal classroom was the presence of a Lancashire County Council standard school-issue piano) and got out our songbooks and sang. All of our teachers retired at the end of the year they taught us; something of a coincidence and nothing to do with the undue strain our class put on the nervous system. It does, however, show just how old-fashioned our education was. Up until the age of 10 all my teachers had left training college shortly after the first world war. We didn’t study Victorian education in history lessons but we re-lived it on a daily basis; right down to the slipper or the sharp crack across the knuckles with a ruler for losing concentration.

The song-books were just about holding together. They were nothing short of a golden treasury of the English and Scottish folk tradition. Cecil Sharp could have saved himself years of trekking around rural villages if he’d merely opened the music room book cupboard. In out-of-school life we sang Beatles songs (then freshly in the charts) and Peter and Gordon and Herman’s Hermits. In music lessons we sang Tom Bowling, Cherry Ripe and John Peel. And we ventured into Scotland too and it was memories of these music lessons that had me belting out full verses and choruses of Loch Lomond, Annie Laurie, The Presbyterian Cat and My Love is Like a Red Red Rose as I pedalled a contented way from Dumbarton to Mallaig. On my way to Kilmacolm I serenaded crows and sheep with “In Kirkintilloch there’s nae pubs and I’ll sure ye’ll winder why. Well, me brother and me we went on a spree and we drank the pubs all dry, all dry. We drank the pubs all dry.” Pedalling down Glencoe I was singing “The Campells are Coming Yo Ho! Yo Ho!” As I approached Ullapool my lay was to “Come Buy my Caller Herring”. On the way south I rattled out the Carlton Weaver and the Braes of Killikrankie. I got a couple off  Corries LPs but most came straight from those music lessons. We sang hearty boys and we absorbed huge chunks of our culture. Thank you to Miss Kitchen and Miss Wren who only pretended to be able to play the piano, and to Mr Whitney who really could.

Neil Oliver: historical romance in cargo trousers

History Books

The History of Scotland by Neil Oliver (television series and accompanying book)

I was delighted when I found out that the BBC had finally got round to making a series of programmes about the history of Scotland and transmitting them at a time when people were likely to be watching. I had mixed feelings when they chose popular, long-haired archeologist and presenter of Coast, Neil Oliver as the man to do it. The series, and the book, are excellent on the ancient history of the country. The enthusiastic Mr Oliver is able to paint bold canvasses from long before the land thought of itself as a country; from Calgacus sending the Roman legions fleeing back from where they came at the battle of Mons Graupius through the setting up of the clan system up to the establishment of a single nation. He tells the story of Wallace and The Bruce and Bannockburn exceptionally well and with the relish of a proud Scot. It is with the establishment of the House of Stuart (or Stewart) that he begins to waver and perhaps a modern historian should have taken over at this point. First class on sweeping legends and drawing some truth out of mythological figures; less good on the known and the well-documented. Still the series is worth getting and watching in full box set indulgence. In England we still get our Scottish history distorted through an English lens. Oliver at least gives Scotland its rightful precedence in the story.

I delved into countless other books from Simon Schama’s History of Britain which is excellent once you get past Schama himself (a delightful, authoritative and charming presence but a huge presence nonetheless) to Magnus Magnusson’s 600 page labour of love. This is eminently readable and as amiable as we always found our favourite Icelandic on Mastermind. But it is, shall we say, a little loyal to the royals. I’m not sure if he ever became Sir Magnus, but it wasn’t through lack of deference. To paraphrase the quizmaster, I’ve started the book but I’m afraid I haven’t yet finished it. (Actually I’ve used it to dip in and out of to give a different perspective and to add a little flesh to the bones).

I’m a big fan of (and occasional donor to)  Wikipedia. I think it a magnificent resource and every time I have heard Jimmy Wales interviewed on the wireless I have been impressed. However, I’ve tended to use it as a series of signposts rather than as a storyteller. I figured that anyone who wanted to know what Wiki says will probably look it up for themselves.

I’ve also used the various volumes of the Cambridge Cultural History of Britain edited by Boris Ford and Brewer’s Britain and Ireland, an indispensable volume whether preparing a holiday, an outing or merely wanting to find out about the folk-lore of a place or the origin of a name. Christopher Lee’s “This Sceptered Isle” was written to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It’s a complete history of Britain and tends to view Scottish history though any impact it had south of the border. Enjoyable nonetheless not least for the magnificent lesson in pronouncing consonants offered by Anna Massey. It may not be the most comprehensive history lesson but it gives an insight into elocution RADA style.

to be continued…

These Are Scottish Roads: Please Keep to the Left

Tags

Edwin Muir, George Mackay Brown, Hugh MacDiarmid, Jimmy Reid, Kenneth Williams, Parkinson, Robert Burns, Scotland

A Journey into Scotland

Part Two of the Bibliography

The South West of Scotland

Selected Poems  :  Robert Burns

I bought my copy of this book at a church hall jumble sale when I was an impressionable teenager. I have always been drawn to the presence of the poet in the verse. A funny, satirical, observant, subversive voice that celebrates the verities of decency and the pleasures of youth. A voice in tune with the natural world and critical of hypocrisy, vanity and cant. Just as every Englishman over the age of forty loves to have an opportunity to sing along with Lee Marvin’s gravel delivery of Wandrin’ Star from Paint Your Wagon, there isn’t a true-blooded Englishman who doesn’t get pleasure out of trying out his Scottish voice and Burns is a place to try this out.

Who hasn’t twisted their vocal chords into their best celtic snarl to observe a “wee sleekit, cowrin’ tim’rous beastie” ? or to pipe in the
“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!”?

The well known poems are rightly famous but his reputation, as a poet, rests upon a considerable body of work and he is one of the poets who repays reading his verses at length. I’m sure Scots would rightly cringe at our feeble attempts to imitate a Caledonian brogue but these poems simply have to be read aloud and you would kill them if you gave them your best RP Donald Sinden.

The Auld Brig o” Doon

 

Burns is most associated with Ayr and in particular the village of Alloway where he was born but he spent significant periods of his life in Edinburgh and around Dumfries. He is for all of Scotland and he has a true Scottish voice: intelligent, articulate, musical and not slow to point out the faults of the ruling classes. There is something wonderful in encapsulating the superior vanity of the upper class lady in church, with her finery outshining the rest of the congregation, and keeping them in their place, only to have the effect under-mined by a louse crawling out from beneath her collar. She sees everyone looking up to her admiringly. Everyone else sees someone to keep clear of.

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

My journey took me on an evening cycle along the very route followed by Tam O’Shanter in my favourite of the better known verses. Happily I wasn’t in the same state as Tam (Burns like many of his fellow Romantics was a powerful advocate of the dissolute life and the power of drink). The ride led ultimately to the superb Auld Brig ‘o Doon which was lit by a slanting evening sun when I reached it. An ancient bridge over the River Doon. No finer spot could be devised for a story of witches.

Burns’ Cottage Alloway (Near Ayr)

A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid

My friend Laurence and I used to walk the moors above Saddleworth taking it in turns to recite verses of this poem to each other. He was from Bray near Dublin and I was from Barrow in Furness. The poem is beyond Burns’ use of the Scottish dialect. Here MacDiarmid helps to develop a new form of literary Scottish called Lallans. With our various Irish and Northern accents we loved the sounds we could get out of the words. The poem is now regarded as one of the most important of what became the Scottish Renaissance. It’s a state of the nation work and one that is informed both by a desire to establish a new Scottishness and by MacDiarmid’s communism. (As students at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1980s we were very much in the spirit of Marxism that was the beating heart of that institution).

Looking towards the Isle of Arran from Ayr

The poem contains a warning that an understanding of Burns’ shouldn’t be taken as a Scottish birthright. That the Ayrshire Bard is mis-applied throughout the world by bogus scots (and almost certainly clumsy English twerps like me). There is something angry about MacDiarmid that we loved, even though we suspected the anger was as much directed at us as at anybody.

No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is aabody’s property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They’s be the last a kennin haund to gie –

Croose London Scotties wi their braw shirt fronts
And aa their fancy freens rejoicin
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad – and Hell, nae doot – are voicin

Burns’ sentiments o universal love,
In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin ane wha’s nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin Genius wi their thochts.

Power Without Principles by Jimmy Reid

Jimmy Reid became a hero to me in the 1970s. His is a voice we don’t hear anymore in these most political of unpolitical times. Today the dominant political creed is of understanding the need for greed and justifying it on the flawed principle that if you let a few people become unbelievably rich and powerful they might sprinkle a little of their great wealth on the undeserving poor. That we should shuffle along being grateful that we also (or so runs the trick) can have our dreams and that good things go to those who deserve them. I found a copy of this in a Sheffield Library and read with equal admiration and disillusion as he points out what everyone came to loathe about New Labour (he wrote these essays in 1997 when everyone was cheering the odious Blair to the rafters). I didn’t have my ticket with me and didn’t take the book out. A huge pity as the book is now very hard to come by.

We loved Jimmy Reid for having principles. For understanding the dignity and value of the working man. He was brought face to face with Kenneth Williams on the Parkinson show which allowed the brilliant comic actor but seriously flawed human being a supposed equal platform with the Scottish trades unionist. Williams dominated the encounter through his inability to shut up. That a great man should be put on a light-weight talk-show to debate politics with a reactionary member of the Carry-On team seems to say something quite tragic about the truth behind truth in modern Britain.

Scottish politics are light-years ahead of English. They had sign posts where we settled for weather vanes. They maintained principles of decency and integrity. We ended up with politicians run by news baron(s?) who blow whichever way the current wind takes them; who would as happily trade on hate and fear as right and wrong. Jimmy Reid may never have been given the platform he deserved but he remains a hero of mine.

Scottish Journey  by Edwin Muir

OK so it’s another man of the left on a tour of Scotland. Did you expect me to take “The Astute Observations on the Economic Condition of the Celtic Nations” by Mark Thatcher with me in my saddlebag? I’m drawn to those who tell a Scottish story that they know from personal experience. I was led to this book by reading George Mackay Brown’s Portrait of Orkney. Muir is a fellow Orcadian and made his journey as Scotland was still reeling from the First World War and on the verge of the second. In the words of academic TC Smout “Muir held up a mirror to the face of Scotland all those years ago. It is frightening to see so many recognisable features in its glass.”

I gained an insight into Scotland through Edwin Muir as well as finding him a clever and amiable travelling companion. He intensified my dislike of injustice and (on a lesser theme) justified my reluctance to find very much to like in the works of Walter Scott. (Or at least in Scott himself.)  He also painted a Scotland with so many different facets and faces that I became reluctant to define anything as Scottish or to talk of Scottishness. (A reluctance I seem to have (at least partly) overcome.

A wonderful book.

To be continued…

The 2 Rs: Reading and Riding

Tags

Arthur Ransome, Badger on a Barge, Janni Howker, Kathleen Jones, Malton, Norman Nicholson, shoddy and mungo, Swallows and Amazons

A Journey into Scotland  :  Epilogue and Bibliography

 

To all intents and purposes my journey ended in Malton. I did ride from there to Huddersfield but have few memories and no pictures. I was very keen to complete the journey and was unimaginative in my choice of route. Bypassing York and skirting Leeds to the south gave me several hours of uninterrupted traffic through the less impressive parts of two great cities. From Leeds to Huddersfield I passed through the various stages of the West Riding Woollen Industry: tailoring, heavy woollens, shoddy and mungo, fine worsteds.

Journey’s end was an anti-climax. I’d cycled from Barrow where I was born to Huddersfield, where I finished school and started work, via the north of Scotland where my formal education commenced. Round about 1500 miles via many curves and detours. When I got there, my father and brother looked up briefly from watching football. “Oh, hello Sime. Put the kettle on could you?”The obvious train journey from Huddersfield to Exeter was to change at Staylybridge and Stockport (now officially a ghost line) but I couldn’t take a bicycle on this route. So, after a night in the old family home, I got up early to pedal to Halifax to catch a train to Preston. It was supposed to be a short hop of a bike ride but actually contained the two nearest misses of the entire journey. I was lucky to get to Halifax at all.

Back home in Exeter I completed a score for a stage version of Don Quixote, performed in some clubs which were the predecessors of open mic nights and rehearsed a show for the arts centre. I was making money from all of the creative activities I was engaged in; singing, acting, writing. Not enough to be a responsible parent but maybe that would come. This is what I would have to give up if I went into teaching. What was it to be? Feeding my creativity or feeding my family? I applied for a  single teaching job and got it. I left the profession from time to time to pursue various creative ventures, and when they offered me enough money to pay all of my bills and have a little left over, I retired.

In all of that time I have only been back to Scotland once, on a day trip to Berwick and up the River Tweed. I want to return. Writing these chapters has turned photographs and memories into a decent set of notes. All the time I have been writing I have been reading about Scotland and thought I’d complete the story with a round-up of the books I’ve read. I had, at one stage intended to repeat the journey and write a serious book about Scotland. But there are already many very good books about the country and the best of them are written by Scots.

I met a male nurse in a pub on the banks of Loch Lomond. We got talking about Scottish writers and Scottish history. Like me he’d divided his education between English and Scottish schools and bemoaned the absence of Scotland from the English curriculum. He was right in 1987 and he’d be just as right now. We have one of the great European cultures just over our northern border and we ignore it. The average English person knows more about America and Australia than they do about Scotland. Part of my intention in writing this has been to put this right for myself and I feel enormously enriched in so doing. Scotland had given the world great literature, great scientists, geologists and economists. About the only Scottish culture we get in England is a series of broadcasts from the Edinburgh Festival (a hugely English decampment to the Scottish capital every August) and an OMG! Yay!!! hogmanay celebration again from Edinburgh, again featuring thousands of English tourists.

My Scottish bookcase was a battered edition of Robert Burns, an un-read copy of Whisky Galore and a couple of books of story-telling history by John Prebble (a Canadian). In the past year, I’m pleased to say that I’ve now read a shelfful of Scottish novels, immersed myself in Scottish poetry and song and found the time to read some books of history and travel in this great nation. I’ve ordered and studiously watched box sets of documentaries. I’ve also seen the Scottish show us how to make politics real. The referendum process gave Britain its first vibrant political debate since James Callaghan left power. To see it cause fury, then admiration and finally relief in the English press was engaging and entertaining. To see how the same press and English politicians turn their fear and admiration into scorn and derision has said a great deal more about England than Scotland.

Bibliography Part One The Lake District

I bagan and ended in the north of England. The first morning of my ride took me right by (and into) the cottage where I was born. The early stages were all in the Furness fells and the Lake District. I’m reasonably well-read in the famous lakeland poets so I took the opportunity to find out more about some lesser known Cumbrian writers. I read my first Melvyn Bragg novel, completed a Hunter Davies I’d begun years earlier, re-read an anthology of Irvine Hunt poems and set about a bit of serious reading of the life and works of Norman Nicholson.

The Whispering Poet by Kathleen Jones

A fine and inspiring biography. One that left me wanting to fill in the gaps of my reading of the Millom poet. The biographer never intrudes, uses her source material sensitively and has a poet’s understanding of her subject and the landscapes and industries (and illness) that inspired it. 

Portrait of the Lakes by Norman Nicholson

It seems a pity that so many people read Alfred Wainwright when so few read Norman Nicholson. One is a true writer, a true lakeland man who knows how to express his thoughts on the whole of lakeland. The other is an outsider who points out the obvious to those who need the obvious pointing out to them. If you come from Cumberland, Westmoreland or Furness you will much prefer this. Written by one of our own and written with the pen of a true poet. We should cherish him.

Selected Poems  : Norman Nicholson

Many of the twentieth century poets I like the best are reflected in the work of Norman Nicholson. He had his influences but I’ll fight a round with anyone who would deny his influence on others. You’ll find the musical cadences and rhythms to match Dylan Thomas and an understanding of man married to the landscape that characterises the poems of RS Thomas. You’ll catch the morning hare or trout of Ted Hughes and, perhaps above the rest, (and he came after) the linking of the people’s lives with landscape, social and economic history and politics and geology of Seamus Heaney. He also gives a remarkable sense of the glory of being alive that perhaps is best expressed by one who very nearly didn’t make it. (And who ever afterwards had to count his every breath). Here is a poet who captures the pastoral in it’s truth; not necessarily beautiful, but permanent and ever-changing. But also the industrial man-made glories of pit shaft and smelting shed. My favourite poems are of the southern lakeland fells and passes and, particularly his poems of Millom.

We think of Lulworth Cove or Granchester or Upper Lambourne or Rydal Water when we think of English poetry. We should think more often of the Duddon and the little industrial town almost overlooked even by those of us who were brought up across the estuary.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

One of the best children’s writers of the last hundred years and a man who knew and loved the Lake District. The setting around the Coniston fells and on the waters of the lake is as much a part of the book (s) as the Walker family or their adventures. I spent many hours and days in similar parts of the region and no matter what I was doing, be it sailing sticks down a stream, riding the Windemere steamers, acting out episodes of The Last of the Mohicans, they were worth doing because of where I was doing them. Ransome brings the landscape as well as lakeland people to life. The charcoal burners who tend to Roger’s ankle and show the children a pet adder may easily have been the gamekeeper who showed me a buzzard’s nest and taught me how to sneak up close to grouse. Ransome sets some of his books in East Anglia and these are every bit as good as the lakeland ones. For lovers of the lake district though, let me highly recommend; Swallowdale, Winter Holiday and Pigeon Post. The Picts and the Martyrs is also set in lakeland but I haven’t read it (yet).

Badger on a Barge by Janni Howker

Another book that captures what it was like to be brought up and spend your childhood in the southern lakes. There are some excellent stories in the much under-rated book. Seriously admired by writers; largely ignored by teachers. I taught it to several classes who all loved the books and who all produced much excellent writing in response. I didn’t read it especially for this journey but did enjoy dipping back in and finding that the title story still got tears welling-up.

The Comedy World Of Stan Laurel by John McCabe

Have only dipped into this as yet. A full project on Stan and Ollie is a potential future venture. I’m slowly filling the shelves in preparation for that.

To be Continued…

Pain is Temporary: Just Keep Going

Tags

Helmsley, Lyke Wake Walk, Malton, Osmotherley, Pennine Way, Rievaulx Abbey

A Journey into Scotland   Part 67

From Osmotherley to Malton

Fancy there being two Osmotherleys in the north of England. The first is an area in the Furness Fells  where I spent  the happiest period of my childhood. The only people I ever heard refer to it as Osmotherley were my mother and a police inspector investigating a murder there. The other Osmotherley is better known for its key position in Britain’s network of long-distance footpaths. (Today actually marks the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the very first one: The Pennine Way). Osmotherley is the setting off point or destination (and sometimes both) for the Lyke Wake Walk: the only one of the long distance paths that has to be completed against the clock. The forty miles of North York Moorland between there and Ravenscar, on the coast, has to be covered in less than 24 hours. I’ve done it once, and it’s a fair challenge.

Hermit

About eight of us set out on a winter’s night in 1981. Half of these (and I’m afraid I was one of them) had spent the day drinking in The Spotted Cow in Malton and we were almost certainly in no condition. The landlord was so convinced that we’d fail  that he said that if we made it back into the pub before closing time the next day the drinks were on the house. We had transport and back-up from one hostel warden while the other joined us on the walk.

A strange bunch we made. Experienced mountain leaders, enthusiastic hikers, occasional dog-walkers, a lighthouse keeper and a member of staff’s boy-friend who dressed like a nineteenth century preacher apart from his plimsolls. Oh, and a bearded collie called Hermit. At first it was chilly, then icy. We marched up steps that had been constructed to stop the footpath eroding the moor. It felt like cheating until it kept on going up and up and up.

Streams were frozen enough to make getting over them fairly straight-forward. It was the scrambling up the shiny icy bank on the far side that took all the effort. By moonlight the countryside was magical. The beer continued to serve for bravado and fuel as the night progressed and the footpath followed a long stretch of disused mineral railway. With dawn came the cold and the first of the cramps. We kept going. That’s the way to do the Lyke Wake. Pain is temporary: achievement is permanent. The two strongest walkers were among the previous day’s boozers which was something of a leveller. We kept to a steady pace.

Sunset behind Malton Youth Hostel

With daylight came warmth. Not a great amount of it but enough to melt the frost and open up the bogs. There were well-equipped walkers in 1981 but we weren’t among them. There were some fleece jackets, an occasional Helly Hanson label but we were of the pull-your-socks-over-your-Levis and put on a thick pullover school of walkers. The distracted preacher had never done anything like this before but used his spiritual gifts to glide effortlessly over boggy ground that had the rest of us floundering. His flimsy plimsolls more than a match for the stoutest walking boot.

There were a few fallings out. A male walker (not me) questioned a female walker’s endurance and found she still had the energy to leave him counting his blessings. I suffered the savagest attack of cramp, in my living memory, on a rest stop somewhere near Wheeldale that had me muttering invective against the idiots who had suggested this walk. (I think I was one of them as well).

One of the mysteries will be just who exactly went on this walk. The picture was taken by an inexperienced photographer in the dark on someone else’s (mine) camera.

The huge early warning system golf balls of the American base on Fylingdales Moor were greeted as the beginning of the end. “The last moor,” someone said. It was a bloody long last moor if it was indeed the last. I remember a hillside that jarred every muscle in my, by then, very tired body. It descended to a beck called Jugger Howe and it managed the clever trick of throwing you down while sinking you in marsh and reeds at the same time. The lighthouse keeper just kept on smiling in his Trinity House issue jacket and shoes. The preacher looked like he was walking across a carpet. Everybody’s legs had become coated in every stain of soil between Goathland and Brown Hill Wood. Except that is, the preacher whose white football socks still looked like they’d just been used in a Daz advertisement.

We reached the end as dusk fell. Tempers recovered. Some of us slept in the mini-bus and some of us just didn’t feel like talking.

There was still a good couple of hours’ supping time as we entered the Spotted Cow and the landlord was as good as his word: called us silly buggers but poured out glasses of ale. The serious walkers (and drinkers) tucked in. I had nothing left. My pint took nearly an hour after which I walked home and slept for the next fourteen.

The tranquility of Hawnby

Osmotherley was about to have the same effect upon me six years later. I arrived from a gentle cycle across the floodplain of the Tees. I was fit and I had about forty miles of my journey to go. As in 1981 my ultimate destination was to get to Malton. As in 1981 I had under-estimated the challenge of the North York Moors. I got to Malton but it took an awful lot more effort than I had anticipated.

There are no high peaks on the North York Moors. The highest point is less than 1500 feet above sea level. By the same token, there are very few flat sections. The Lyke Wake has a long stretch of disused railway but most of the time you find that, for every half hour you spend grunting up a steep slope, (and the slopes are very steep indeed – many North York roads are of a much steeper gradient than the Alpine slopes you see cyclists struggle up annually on the Tour de France), you know that before long you are going to be down at valley level again. Until, that is, you get out onto the moors proper. These can stretch for miles of heather and gorse and bog.

The day was running out of light and I had the choice of keeping right on to the town where I’d spent a happy year, or to settle for stopping at the next Bed and Breakfast. To be fair it was a challenge I was enjoying. There is something glorious about reaching a state of tiredness where you simply don’t want to stop.

The light, the silence  and the solitude around Hawnby was something I will always remember. I may have been weary but I wasn’t immune to the staggering beauty of the place. I’ve spent a great deal of time in most of England’s National Parks and the Moors are my favourite.

I stopped at Rievaulx for a rest as much as to see the ruins. I wasn’t the first traveller to seek refuge here but once I’d eaten a Mars Bar and drunk a can of orange I was back on the bike.

Helmsley Castle in the Distance

Helmsley was getting ready for a quiet night in. I’d cycled between there and Malton on many occasions. But somehow the distance between the towns had grown. I was basically following the River Rye to the Derwent (yet another Derwent!). It should, by the laws of rivers, be mostly downhill. It didn’t feel that way. Through Hovingham and skirting the grounds of Castle Howard as dusk descended. I had no lights and nowhere else I could stop. Instead of wanting to keep going it had changed to having to keep going.

It was good to see my friend Grat again. The hostel was looking a deal sprucer than in my day and was busy with walkers and fellow cyclists. I rated the warden as the best in the region. I’d been the area relief and had divided my time between being based here and being based in Haworth. I’d seen how all the other hostels were run and this was the best one there was. For the night I was there it was like old times. I had my old room back. I ate heartily and we even ended up having a pint or two in the Spotted Cow. Some folk looked exactly the same. Others had changed from leather jacketed rockers to be-suited executives. The beer was still the best in the county.

I’d completed a tour of most of the first twenty-five years of my life. I’d begun near the house where I was born and pedalled up to the very north of Scotland to where I started school. Malton was the last place I’d worked before going off to university as a mature student. The only place on my map of the north I still had to visit was Huddersfield and that was on the agenda for tomorrow.

 

 

I Suppose You’ll Be Wanting to Stay for Free

Tags

County Durham, Darlington, Edmunbyers, Hexham, Hexham Abbey, Humphrey Lyttleton, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, River Tees, River Tyne, River Wear

A Journey into Scotland   Part 66

My friend Ray had been warden of Edmundbyers Youth Hostel. We’d met on a wardens’ course in the Peak district in 1981 and had just about kept in touch. His region didn’t have a peripatetic warden so, when he wanted to attend a friend’s wedding in London, I hitched up to Durham and looked after the hostel for him. He was tall and affable, quick-witted and engaging. In short, he was a right laugh. After three long-distance-days my legs were shot and my lungs were wheezy. It was only fifteen miles from Acomb to Edmundbyers. It seemed a lovely opportunity to pop in and see Ray.

I’d committed myself to going no further than the oak beamed hostel with its open fire and cosy maze of little rooms quite early in the piece. It would be good to see Ray again, it would be good to re-live a very happy weekend. And it was good not to be in a hurry. To have time to explore a stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, some of the town of Hexham and to rest beside both bicycle and the Derwent Reservoir, betwixt sleep and wake, while birds sang. To re-charge my batteries by soaking up the sounds and sun of an autumn day in the North East.

Maybe Hadrian’s Wall

That was the plan and it went well for most of the day. I didn’t do too well with the Roman wall. The signs pointed in a general direction; a direction it was difficult to take a laden bicycle and, there being nowhere to leave it, I made do with what could well have been the wall or could just have been some other old wall. It was an impressive groundworks and I was in the right part of the world. It did for me and I’m sure Hadrian wouldn’t have minded.

Hexham had plenty of interest to the traveller as well as some decent shops. I was always on the look out for a bakery. In normal life I was more of a fan of the ale than the cakes but, when cycling, a good patisserie increased its allure. My father had advised that, when in Scotland, never pass a pub or a petrol station as you don’t know where the next one might be. I’d swapped petrol stations for cake shops. Hexham had a good one.

It also had a decent museum with Britain’s oldest gaol attached. I’d recently married into the Armstrong family and, according to the records kept here, they were amongst the most notorious of the border reivers of the seventeenth century and regular residents of the gaol. I was duly impressed and made a note not to leave my herd or flock unattended at family gatherings.

For a contented couple of hours I wandered around the town, visiting the abbey and warming one of their benches while I caught up with the first newspaper I’d read in over a week. Then I pedalled off slowly and spent the rest of the day on the banks of the Derwent Reservoir and wandered why, given the innumerable names the English have been able to give to towns and villages, they keep using the same names over again for their rivers and lakes. It was lovely and peaceful and a few beers with an old friend would have seen the day out very nicely.

Ray was no longer warden of Edmundbyers. Apparently he’d moved south and left the organisation. I felt a sense of betrayal, forgetting that this was pretty much what I had done myself. His replacement was his opposite in every respect. I signed in.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to stay for free.” I wasn’t expecting to but, despite the lack of grace in the offer, it wasn’t turned down. To be fair, I think the hostel was actually closed and she let me stay there out of some ex-wardens code of solidarity. There were certainly no other residents. I was left entirely to my own devices. The fireplace was cold and uninviting. The whole building was cold. The shop was shut and the pub didn’t open til 7. By that time I’d lost interest in doing much. I’d curled myself under some blankets and read my newspaper cover to cover. It wasn’t quite what I’d looked forward to but it made for a restful end to a restful day and it set me up for one of my longest days in the saddle.

The morning dawned bleak and grey. I left early saying goodbye to my hostess who was as grudging in my leaving as in my arrival. “I suppose you’ll want your card stamped.” I didn’t but didn’t like to say. I’d slept well and for nothing. I had few complaints.

Durham is a strange county. Apart form the unique way of putting the word county in front of Durham, it is a difficult one to describe. It contains some of the most beautiful sites in Britain and contains some of its grimmest landscapes. The city of Durham is a wonder to behold but many of the towns are drab and tired. They also have names that sound a little forbidding. I aimed first at Tow Law which just doesn’t fit in with any list of English place-names. Beyond this I skirted the town of Billy Row and on into Crook. From here I headed south through a thin drizzle that added to the general sense of dreariness.

The main road was far too main for a cyclist so I continued through the towns of Bishop Aukland and Newton Aycliffe and reached Darlington just as the drizzle turned into proper rain. And thus I’d crossed the valleys of the three great rivers of the north-east. Acomb and Hexham are firmly in the valley of the Tyne. Durham is drained by the rather lovely River Wear and now I found myself preparing to cross the Tees. I was once more in the land of my fathers. This is where my branch of the Johnson family comes from. Here is where we’ve spent a hundred generations being decent and kind and friendly and careful never to rise above the rank of farmhand or miner or chemical worker. My grandfather had been all three. He was a lovely man with a line in jokes that required a good deal of skill to make funny. He had that skill in abundance and I’d ask him to tell them again and again. Whenever I pass a graveyard, to this day, I can hear him describing it as the dead centre of the town. If I see a field of sheep, I can hear him asking “Why do white sheep eat more than black sheep?”* And I’ll still repeat, on cracking an egg, his grammatical paradox “Which is correct, the yolk of the egg is white or the yolk of the egg are white?”** He died when I was seven and I would have liked to have known him better.

It was my grandad who gave the sagest advice in finding your way through towns without a map. “Just keep following the white lines,” he said and it works almost every time. I followed the white lines through Darlington and crossed the river at Dalton-on-Tees. Which gives me an opportunity  to quote from one of my favourite unreliable guides to Britain.

“As the area  of the Tees Valley …is well-known for the proliferation of cuckoos, Darlington is home to the British Cuckoo Society, whose office is to be found on Church Street. It’s actually a branch of the Halifax, but whenever they go out to lunch, they come back to find the Cuckoo Society has moved in.”***

I kept pedalling along small residential streets until I found myself in the flat farmlands of North Yorkshire. Here roads seem to follow some ancient field or border pattern. They all go in straight lines and turn at right angles. It means you progress much in the same way as a knight on a chessboard. The rain had stopped and a sort of watery sun lit the distant slopes of the North York Moors which rise suddenly and in one go from the plain of the Tees. I was heading for Mount Grace Priory  and the village of Osmotherley.

 

*Because there are more of them!

** Neither. The yolk of the egg is yellow!

*** From Lyttleton’s Britain A User’s Guide ti the British Isles as heard on BBC Radio ‘s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue by Iain Pattinson

Barefoot in the Ruins

Tags

Carter bar, Dave Valentine, Melrose, Melrose Abbey, reivers, Rugby League, YHA

A Journey into Scotland   Part 64

Melrose to Carter Bar

Melrose is one of many towns that has lost its youth hostel since I rode this journey. I don’t think the loss is entirely down to my decision to tour Scotland but there were certainly a lot more YHA hostels when I set off than there are now. As someone who spent an enjoyable couple of years working for the organisation, I am saddened by this. As someone who wants to have a little luxury and not have to share a dormitory with half a dozen men who like sharing and who belch, fart and bore the socks off you with stories of their exploits; who wash like a bugler scrubbing a turnip and who have to show their great appetites by forcing spoonfuls of cornflakes into their mouths which they then keep open while eating them. Times change. People had a choice between paying £25 for a disturbed night among enormous underpants and body odour, with a mass produced breakfast and the annoyance of being obliged to do a job before you leave.  Or to pay £40 in a nice hotel for a private room with en suite bath, a telly, some tea and coffee making stuff and an individually cooked breakfast.  Not surprisingly they took the latter option.

I can’t remember my night at Melrose. I remember booking in just after dark. An elderly couple who looked and spoke like extras from the first series of Dr Finlay’s Casebook held differing opinions of my achievement in cycling from Perth.

” Och, you’ve covered a fine old distance today. And how far are you going the morrow?” enthused the lady who was careful to enunciate every single consonant.

The husband was curt to the point of rudeness. “Ah canna see the point in travelling all aroond the country if ye dunna see anything.”

And with that my memory switches off until I open the curtains of the room the following morning. The sun had risen and the angled light lit up the red sandstone walls of the ruined abbey in what seemed to be the back garden of the hostel. I had no idea there even was an abbey and to see it in this light; a light so sweet and clear you could travel on its rays; was stunning.

Within five minutes I was walking across the dew among the stones. I had to clear a wall but that was the only way I was going to be able to take in the rich ecclesiastical splendour of the place. Leaving my boots by a bench I walked barefoot and my tired feet have seldom had such a balm. No holy healing here (though the place felt rather special – the red sandstone so similar to that used to build Furness Abbey, some 300 yards from my birthplace and visited weeks earlier on the tour) just the freshness of a perfect October morning.

This is border country; a land of wonderful place-names; from the sweetly unusual in Galashiels, to the weirdly delightful in Hawick (pronounced like oik with an “h” on the front … at least it was by Bill McLaren), to the purely Scottish (with connotations of Robinson Crusoe) in Selkirk, to the names that sound like Sunday school teachers in Peebles and Moffatt, to the geographically obvious in Coldstream, to the very convenient J, for anyone playing alphabetical towns, in Jedburgh and the equally useful K in Kelso. I like the sounds of the towns around here; and my favourite sounding one of all was, indeed, Melrose.

There is a strong tradition of playing rugby around all of these towns. Many a Scottish international learned the game here and, in most cases, continued to play for their local team. Like many predominantly rural areas the population is either rich or poor. The well-off played on a Saturday and wore a tie during the week. Those who wore an overall and played were sometimes tempted by the lure of the rugby league chequebook. Two of the finest were the Valentine brothers from Hawick. Rob Valentine was a bloody good player, Dave was one of the best that ever played either code. They stayed in Huddersfield after they hung up their boots. These were the days when to take rugby league money meant becoming a social pariah in your homeland… at least as far as the rugby club went. The rugby union authorities said it was against professional sport. That it would destroy the ethos of the game if players were paid. Yet they welcomed players who had been paid to play any other sport than rugby league. League players were banned for life…even if they had only played at amateur level. The hypocrisy went deeper in that many union players were more handsomely paid than their league counterparts. The difference was that league players paid tax on their earnings.

Dave Valentine became a publican but died in his forties. I used to sup in the same pub (The Shepherd’s Arms on Cowcliffe) with Rob. It was an honour to talk to him. He remained very competitive and always spoke a great deal of sense.

The road from Melrose to the English border was much longer than I had expected. I’d always heard Melrose referred to as a border town but “the borders” is a whole region and not just a dividing line. To some the borders referred to any part of Scotland that housed seventeenth century raiding parties who used to come south to steal cattle. Like smugglers and outlaws the word Reivers has come to have a touch of romantic glory about it.

I had about twenty five miles to ride along a main road. I called in at Jedburgh for a piece of cake. My legs were tired from the long day in the saddle and cake often puts a bit of life into them. The last couple of miles were a good steep pull around lots of twists and turns. At the top was a huge stone with Enland written on it, a place to park a dozen cars and a piper all resplendent in full tartan, screeching well-known White Heather Club tunes out of the most justly maligned instrument in Britain. This was tourist busking of the most blatant variety. Cars heading into Scotland with expectant trippers, hungry for all things Caledonian were generous. Those heading south less so.

The English are great like that. As they approach another country they become passionate devotees of everything that country stands for. On cross channel ferries bound for France, English families dash to the restaurant and order up croissants and carefully constructed fruit tarts to go with their little French cups of coffee. Once the English have been subjected to non-English culture for more than a few days the enthusiasm wears off. The same families on the return trip order a full English and eulogise over just how much better the sliced bread is than those bloody French baguettes. And, as they let everyone know that the French simply have no idea how to make a cup of tea, they slurp back steaming mugs of Tetley and Typhoo. 

The piper was actually very good. He was also friendly and posed for a his picture (no great strain…that was why he’d dressed up like that) and was happy to take mine. He was also happy to tell me what he considered to be a very funny thing about the huge stone.

“You see that stone.” he began. “It’s standing right bang on the border itself and it’s got England written bold on one side and Scotland written bold on t’other.” He paused for dramatic effect. I expected something quite wonderful.

“Well, the funny thing is that England is written on the side of the stone that is in Scotland and Scotland is written on the side of the stone that is in England.”

He waited for my reaction which was fulsome and entirely faked. He thought he’d given me Xeno’s third paradox and opened up my mind to a completely new way of looking at the world. I gave him a pound, bought a mug of tea (Tetley) at a caravan and pedalled south along English roads.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff

Tags

Gothenburg pubs, James Kelman, Jeff Torrington, Just a Boy's Game, Newtongrange, Peter McDougall, play for today, Robert Burns, Scotland, Scottish Independence, Swing Hammer Swing, Whisky Galore

A Journey into Scotland … Part 63

If you pursue the stereotype of Scotland you will soon encounter alcohol and drunkenness. And the label isn’t all the fault of disparaging English. The Scots themselves make no secret of their love of a bevy or a dram. Scottish poets, songwriters, authors and comedians have turned drunkenness into an art form. Robert Burns’ great poem Tam O Shanter takes place on a ride home from the pub after taking a skinful.

“And getting fou and unco happy”*

In the brilliant Swing Hammer Swing, Jeff Torrington depicts a drunken week in the life of Tam Cley in the Gorbals of 1961 Glasgow. James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late is an equalling brilliantly written week in the life of Sammy Samuels. The beer and whisky flow freely in both and the bleak but perceptive comedy flies from it like sparks from a welder’s torch. Heroin may be the main mind-alterer in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting but alcohol is no stranger to the pages. All three books celebrate Scotland’s complex relationship with bar culture and all three would be contenders in my list for the best novel to come out of Great Britain since 1990.

Billy Connolly, who has been sober for many years, made stories of drunkenness the central plank of his stage act. In the seventies Peter McDougall made television worth watching with his ground-breaking plays; Just Another Saturday, Elephant’s Graveyard and Just a Boys’ Game. They dealt with inter-weaving themes of Scottish Independence, sectarian troubles and the overspill of the situation in Ulster into Glasgow and the economic depression caused by the closing of the Clyde shipyards. Drink fuelled these dramas which were some of the very best of the BBCs Play For Today series. To me the best television made in this country during my lifetime.

Scotland has long been the land of the fictional detective and whether it’s Taggart or Rebus, they are rarely very far from a bar and often seriously under the influence of strong drink. Compton MacKenzie’s war-time classic Whisky Galore tells of how Hebridean life almost comes to a close when a shortage of whisky hits the islands of Great and Little Todday and how it springs back into its full glory when a ship containing 50,000 cases of whisky runs aground just offshore. Music Hall acts of men in kilts in the later stages of inebriation were popular and there is even a song called the Drunken Scotsman wherein a fellow falls asleep on the side of the road in his cups. While asleep two young women approach and decide to find out for themselves the truth of what a Scotsman wears beneath the tartan. They only have to raise the hem by an inch to be impressed and as a joke tie a blue ribbon around the exposed manhood. Upon awakening the fellow goes to relieve himself after his sleep and is surprised to find himself thus decorated. He decides that whatever it was that he had been up to in his unremembered drunken state, he had won first prize for it.

In literature, a drunken Englishman is invariably either a bore or a beast. On the other hand the flying Scotsman is invariably portrayed with heroic nobility, no matter how far down life has cast him.

And yet Scotland is a country with a world-wide reputation for temperance, strict presbyterian observance and sobriety. My journey had been made to reflect the true nature of the nation and in this respect I had caught the national zeitgeist to a nicety. In Glencoe and Sutherland I had eventually taken to my bed after copious libations of beer and strong drink. In Kilmacolm and Kingussie I’d been as dry as a sixties Sunday on Benbecula.

Gothenburg pubs are a Scottish phenomena that began at the turn of the twentieth century and continues today. I’d passed a Gothenburg pub in Cowdenbeath but hadn’t gone in as it was too early in the morning. My long haul along the roads and by-passes to the south of Edinburgh had left me dry. The Dean Tavern in Newtongrange offered me a wall to prop my bicycle against and a bar to rest myself. I ordered a pint of heavy and, it being a quiet late lunch-time, was regaled with the history of the “goth’.

I’m not sure I got hold of the entire concept but the idea seemed to be to accept that the working man was going to fancy a pint at the end of the shift  but that he must be kept from drinking too much. Gothenburg pubs were designed to be as unattractive as possible and to be free from such attractions as music or gambling. The Dean Tavern seemed a reasonably accommodating sort of a place though I kept to the premise of the premises by only imbibing the one. The pubs were owned by shareholders who paid the staff and the overheads but who were then only allowed to take 5% of the profits. All of the rest was ploughed into local good works in a forerunner of the supposed precepts of our own national lottery. Profits from The tavern where I stood had provided a picture house, a row of shops, a sports ground with a pavilion and grandstand, a bowling club, a nurse’s cottage and a scout hall among other local amenities. You were served your pint, kept from having one over the eight and the profits sprouted up around you. It seemed a perfect mix of the two strands of Scottish opinion on the amber stuff that makes you wobble.

Newtongrange was built on coal. The mine had been famous and regularly appeared on news bulletins south of the border in the sixties and seventies. It closed in 1981. The effects on the local economy were obvious: there were only three of us in the bar.

From Edinburgh to the border, on the route I was taking, is really one long slow pull up the Pentland Hills and a long fast ride down the other side. Refreshed by my Gothenburg pint I made my way as best I could. I have no notes and no photographs of this stretch of the journey. I remember keeping going. I remember a typical Scottish sequence of sunshine and showers and wind and rainbows alternating like the horses on a carousel. I have never known a place like Scotland for rainbows. In England they are rare enough for people to point them out to each other or to say, “I saw a lovely rainbow this morning.” In Scotland pointing out  a rainbow would be on a par with pointing out the sky.

I can’t remember how many cars or trees I saw that afternoon. I can remember a van selling food in a lay-by and I stopped to buy myself a sausage sandwich. I was impressed that I’d got past Edinburgh and felt I was well on my way home. The occasional showers didn’t bother me. I was making good progress. Once over the top I expected the downhill to last maybe half a mile but it kept going. Gradual but very welcome after seventy miles or more of cycling that day. The landscape changed again. I’d passed the populated central belt of the country and was now rapidly approaching the once wild lands of the Borders. I was reminded of the less populated parts of North Lancashire. It was hilly and rural with fast moving streams that had been harnessed to run small woollen mills in the villages between farms where sheep kept to the high ground and corn was being harvested on the lower slopes.

At Stowe I stopped at a delightful pub and contemplated asking if they did Bed and Breakfast. Young farmers were exchanging harvest stories in the tap room and playing a few rounds of cribbage while they waited for a fourth. I was welcomed into the conversation and invited to join the game but declined as I’ve never mastered crib. It was with the greatest reluctance that I re-mounted the bike and continued to tumble downhill in the company of Gala Water on my way towards the River Tweed and the town of Melrose.

 

 

fou = drunk

Cowdenbeath Four, Edinburgh Nil

Tags

Cowdenbeath, Edinburgh, Forth Bridge, Forth Road Bridge, Scotland

A Journey into Scotland   Part 62

From Tay to Forth to Tweed

My thoughts as I left Perth were to try to get south of Edinburgh. I was in the heavily built-up and once heavily industrialised central belt of Scotland. Country lanes were at a premium. Getting anywhere in anything approximating to a straight line without going on a motorway took some planning. The B996 runs parallel to the main route. It’s a simple two lane road that was quiet for much of the journey. A strange feeling to be pedalling along an empty road with the roar of traffic in my ears. When cars and vans shared my road they did it in pairs from opposite directions. It seemed up to the cyclist to get out of the way. Valuing my life, and looking forward to breakfast, I took evasive action.

It’s amazing how quickly Scotland changes. I’m only about forty miles from Pitlochry and the gateway to the Cairngorms. Until Perth everything had been green and lovely. You pass Milnathort and you’re in a different landscape. This is urban Scotland. In 10,000 square kilometres you can find 3.5 million people. This is approximately two thirds of the population of the country crammed into a seventh of the space. Much of the reason for this is geological: there was an awful lot of coal under the ground. A fair bit of iron too. Central Scotland ranked with the Black Country, Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire as an industrial powerhouse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By 1987 many of the factories, mills and mines had closed and many more were to follow. The area looked tired. Even the wide expanse of Loch Leven looked weary. I’d passed Bridge of Earn, Glenfarg, and  Kinross. I was approaching Kelty with a plum name on the horizon. We English may have known the names of all the Scottish football clubs, and identified that they seemed to pair up, but we didn’t know where they were. Rangers always went with Celtic, Hibs with Hearts, Dundee and Dundee United. All of these have a strong geographical connection; most of the pairings didn’t. East Fife paired with East Stirling though they had little other than a prefix in common. Dunfermline were always paired in our minds with Dumbarton even though they were on different sides of the country. Finally Stenhousemuir and Cowdenbeath were forever joined on the simple fact of the unbelievability of their names. To the modern mind this logic was more evidence of insular thinking on our behalf and, to that, I think we will enter a plea of guilty.

Photo from Gannin’ Away web-site

I was delighted to be cycling through Cowdenbeath. So much so, that I did a couple of laps of the town; which didn’t add very much to my journey. It wasn’t a large town but it was a true mining town and could easily have been twinned with many a Yorkshire settlement. It felt very familiar. There were some buildings that evoked civic pride and there were some that failed to flatter the architects. But it felt like a town. It had been built around the mining industry. Before the first shaft was sunk the area had been known simply as Beath and Cowdenbeath was the name of a farm. The town had grown so fast that in the 1890s it acquired the nickname of the Chicago of Fife. A delightful use of light-touch irony surrounds several local names. The town may have grown rapidly, but at the end of this period of expansion the population was still under 10,000.

One real delight was to find the famous football ground practically in the centre of town. There is no irony in it being called Central Park: but there is considerable incongruity in the club’s nickname which is “The Blue Brazil”. I asked a man in the car park if he knew why they were so named. The accent was difficult to comprehend but I think he said “It’s to do with the mining in’t it?” And I suppose it was.

In those days I was never sure how traumatic a bridge crossing was going to be. I’m not all that keen to go out of my way to cross big bridges in a car. I have suffered paralysing vertigo from adulthood. On a bicycle it was sometimes a matter of taking it in my stride at others it was plain terrifying. I’ve contemplated long detours as well as catching trains to get me from one side of an estuary to another. In the back of my mind is the voice of the aversion therapist. “Face up to your fears and they will go away. It’s an irrational fear. There’s no more chance of you falling off this bridge than there is of you falling off a road.” Yet still I wobble.

And then there is the wind. I understand the basic physical and meteorological reasons why bridges are windy places. In these cases knowledge and power do not go together.

The fear factors for this vertigo sufferer are several. The height. It is only when you get out on these structures that you realise just how high they are. Second there is the fact that once you set off you know that you have to keep going. This eventually becomes a comfort but until you reach half-way, it is a torment. Wind is a factor. Not just the strength of the gale but the noise it makes through the structure of the bridge. The stirring waves of cold swirling grey/brown water seems to draw you. (there are some who suggest that bridge vertigo is more of a fear of throwing yourself off than an actual fear of heights. I’m not sure that’s the case. I’d happily be strapped to a safety cable. Then there is the fear of looking stupid. In your mind you are horribly aware of the childishness of not being able to cross a bridge that thousands cross every day. Again awareness contributes to the fear rather than rationally diminishing it. The fear of being laughed at is also present but most times you’re preoccupied with everything else that this doesn’t become a factor unless you are in company.

On the plus side, The Forth Road Bridge is iconically beautiful and offers views that make the beating heart and the jelly legs and the liquid stomach worth while. They started building it the year I was born and opened it the year we got our very first telly. For years it was one of the iconic images of Britain and people had debates over whether it was more beautiful than the Forth Bridge (as the cantilevered railway bridge is correctly named). In 1964 I favoured the modern lines of the suspension bridge. Today I still like the road bridge but think the older bridge one of the most beautiful on the planet. In 1987 I gritted my teeth, tightened my sphincter and pedalled like fury. On feeling terra firm beneath me again I felt like the first man to cross the Hindu Kush. In fact I was the 1.7 millionth person to cross the bridge that month.

Having got this obstacle out of the way I knew the road south was now clear and I wanted to cover as much ground as possible before nightfall. Edinburgh was there in front of me. It was almost harder to miss it than to go right through the middle. With hindsight it would probably have been quicker to take in some sights. When I began this paragraph I was struggling to remember and justify why I skirted one of the most glorious cities in Europe. Then, and this is the power of writing as a spur to memory, it suddenly came back to me just how much I was missing my family. I had a wife I wanted to see and a three year old daughter and a one year old son. I wanted to be back with them more than I have ever wanted anything. I knew I’d be back to Edinburgh one day. As I write that day still hasn’t arrived. It could wait. My love for my wife and children couldn’t. The view of the city over the sheet metal boxes of industrial estates and ring roads isn’t the best but the castle and Arthur’s Seat still look pretty enticing. I was heading for the Pentland Hills and, far beyond that, The River Tweed and England.