A while after this abortive visit I entered a public house, bought a drink and sat beside a friend who was talking to a stranger. The friend said, “I don’t think you two know each other,” and introduced the stranger as a sound technician with the British Broadcasting Corporation. The stranger stared hard at me and said, “You may not know me but I know you. You arranged for a whole BBC camera crew to record you talking to your old school-teacher in his home, and did not even turn up.”
“I never arranged that!” I cried, appalled, “I never even discussed the matter — never thought of it!”
“Then you arranged it when you were drunk.”
I left that pub and rushed away to visit Mr Meikle at once. I was sure the BBC had made a mistake and then blamed me for it, and I was desperate to tell Mr Meikle that he had suffered intrusion and inconvenience through no fault of mine.
Again I entered his close and hurried up to his flat, but there was something wrong with the stairs. They grew unexpectedly steep and narrow. There were no landings or doors off them, but in my urgency I never thought of turning back. At last I emerged onto a narrow railed balcony close beneath a skylight. From here I looked down into a deep hall with several balconies round it at lower levels, a hall which looked like the interior of Whitehill Senior Secondary School, though the Whitehill I remembered had been demolished in 1980. But this was definitely the place where Mr Meikle lived, for looking downward I saw him emerge from a door at the side of the hall and cross the floor toward a main entrance. He did not walk fast, but a careful firmness of step suggested his arthritis had abated a little. He was accompanied by a party of people who, even from this height, I recognized as Scottish writers rather older than me: Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, Robert Garioch and Sorley Maclean. As they accompanied Mr Meikle out through the main door I wanted to shout on them to wait for me, but felt too shy. Instead I turned and ran downstairs, found an exit and hurried along the pavement after them, and all the time I was wondering how they had come to know Mr Meikle as well or better than I did. Then I remembered they too had been teachers of English. That explained it — they were Mr Meikle’s colleagues. That was why they knew him.
But when I caught up with the group it had grown bigger. I saw many Glasgow writers I knew: Morgan and Lochhead and Leonard and Kelman and Spence et cetera, and from the Western Isles Black Angus and the Montgomery sisters, Derick Thomson, Mackay Brown and others I knew slightly or not at all from the Highlands, Orkneys and Shetlands, from the North Coast and the Eastern Seaboard, Aberdeenshire, Dundee and Fife, from Edinburgh, the Lothians and all the Borders and Galloway up to Ayrshire.
“Are all these folk writers?” I cried aloud. I was afraid that my own work would be swamped by the work of all these other Scottish writers.
“Of course not!” said Archie Hind, who was walking beside me, “Most of them are readers. Readers are just as important as writers and often a lot lonelier. Arthur Meikle taught a lot of readers that they are not alone. So did others in this mob.”
“Do you mean that writers are teachers too?” I asked, more worried than ever.
“What a daft idea!” said Archie, laughing, “Writers and teachers are in completely different kinds of show business. Of course some of them show more than others.”
I awoke, and saw it was a dream,
though not entirely.
Notes, Thanks and Critic Fuel
DEDICATION
This book is inscribed to Tom Maschler because in 1989 he suggested I write another book of stories; to Xandra Hardie because she reminded me of his suggestion; to Morag McAlpine because she gave me the home where I wrote it.
HOUSES AND SMALL LABOUR PARTIES
This tale is informed by three sources: five weeks as a joiner’s labourer in the summer of 1953; talks with my father who, after a spell of manual labour, worked ten years as a wages and costing clerk on Scottish building sites; a paper by A J M Sykes called Navvies: Their Work and Attitudes published in Sociology, Volume 3, Number 1, by The Clarendon Press, Oxford, January 1969.
THE MARRIAGE FEAST
This tale was inspired by the Memoirs of Kingsley Amis published by Hutchinson in 1991, and especially by the account of his meeting with Dylan Thomas.
FICTIONAL EXITS
This gives two examples of people overpowered by strong organizations, one of them fantastic, one which happened. The true example is included because its mad logic harmonized with the fantastic. It should not be read as propaganda against our police for the following reasons.
1. Most of the police I meet are polite and helpful. I also know a detective who enjoys my fiction.
2. Propaganda, like pornography, is a low class of art. The Bible and the writings of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Dickens, Tolstoy et cetera often denounce or promote social organizations, but readers who notice these bits usually find them dull or offensive.
3. Although High Court judges have recently released people unfairly imprisoned by our police the police are less to blame than those who have forced bad working conditions on them. Our police used to have a good reputation because they seldom arrested folk without evidence against them. It was illegal for them to break into our houses without a warrant signed by a justice of the peace; illegal to arrest without charging the arrested person with a crime; illegal to quote as evidence what they said we had said, if we denied it and no independent witness confirmed it. As a child in a Yorkshire primary school I was taught that these safeguards of British liberty were guaranteed by the Magna Carta.
In 1982 the government abolished these safeguards because Irish Republican Army bombers were getting away with murder. In effect the government told the police, “Fight the dirty bastards as dirtily as you like. Arrest people on suspicion and get the evidence afterwards. Up and at them!” So careful search for evidence was put second to quick results, and since our police now had some of the freedom enjoyed by Stalin’s police they got quick results. After IRA bombings in Guildford and Birmingham clusters of Irish were arrested, tried, convicted and jailed. The British government, press and people were sombrely glad; the police were relieved. Had they worked carefully, without using torture and perjury to back their suspicions, innocent Irish would have walked free but the guilty might not have been caught and the government would have looked impotent. Conservative governments willingly declare their impotence when confronted by unemployment and widespread wage reductions (their strongest supporters are enriched by these) but when confronted by violence they prefer injustice to looking impotent.
The lack of old police restraints allows many more than the Irish to be falsely accused and punished. It let some muddled policemen break in on a blind man, knock him down and have him fined for it. I use this event to make my story funnier, not for propaganda purposes. If you dislike such mistakes vote into power a radical party which will restore the ancient safeguards.