Docherty (21 page)

But their mutual sadness was submerged for the moment in the increased tempo of the evening. Danny’s arrival meant that he and Mick would soon be going for the train and everybody came together frenetically in last attempts to say what they had been wanting to say and to touch and to extract a final essence from the occasion. In the scrum of affection the form of what was happening was lost, and then suddenly Mick and Danny were among the men and moving towards the door. Jean was lying back on her pillow, lips compressed and wet with her own tears, the sensation of Mick’s embrace still warm on her cheek. Kathleen was standing herself, just crying. Tam was gently easing Jenny out of Mick’s arms and Mary Hawkins was being prised away from Danny. Then the men receded like a tide and left the women stranded in an empty room.

The group collected more men at the corner. By the time they reached the station, they were a small battalion. On the platform they stamped and jostled, waiting for the train that would take Mick and Danny on the first stage of the journey to their camp on the east coast. Their breaths fluttered around them, a cluster of small pennants. Their voices were raucous, trying to match the size of the situation. There was a lot of determined laughter. People laid hands on Mick and Danny till they bruised.

The train just saved the whole thing from hysteria. Seats were found and the men who had been carrying the kitbags left them while everybody piled out again and Mick and Danny stood at the window. With about a minute to go Kathleen, pregnant as she was, came running along the platform. They had forgotten the fags which were to be shared between them as a parting gift. Also, Mick’s grandmother had been meaning to give them a clothes-brush each as an extra item of kit.

‘We’ve goat wan,’ Mick said.

But they had to take them.

‘No’ somethin’ else,’ Danny said, laughing. ‘Christ, ma mither wantit me tae take the chist o’ drawers. But it widny fit intae ma kitbag.’

Those were the famous last words of their departure. The train was moving. In spite of all the careful preparation that had gone into the evening, the heart of it was in that suddenness, the clank of the wheel-rods, the chuff and lurch of the train, the wrench of distance. The rest of it had only been a ceremony for discovering that surprise, for savouring it by contrast. The real farewell was in those slightly shocked expressions, the words deflected by the wind, the gestures that fell into the distance.

7

‘War’s Remedy. Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage -a personage less imposing in the eyes of some – perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array.

Lord Brougham

Speech, 1828’

Conn’s voice had baulked on the name, his hesitation advancing and receding like someone contemplating a jump. Finally he had settled for Bruffam, pronounced almost inaudibly. In compensation he declaimed the date with impressive sonorousness.

His father said, ‘Read that again.’

While Conn did, slanting the book towards the window to snare the last of the light, Tam’s lips moved silently in pursuit of the words.

That’s true, son,’ he said. That is true.’

Conn recognised in his father’s tone the implication that it was especially true for Conn. Before Conn had said anything, his father was already arguing with his silence, because he knew the stubborn attitudes that lay behind it. Conn found himself wishing that his grandfather hadn’t gone to bed so early or that Angus would come in or that his mother hadn’t found it necessary to go down to Kathleen’s house. Why did Kathleen need to be having a baby anyway? Feeling himself in the familiar position of being betrayed by a conspiracy of adult whims, Conn surrendered himself to the inevitability of having to confront his father’s mood alone, to undergo a ‘serious talk’.

Tam was lighting one of the many clay pipes he had started recently to use. As the shred of newspaper flared in his fingers, face and throat inhabited for a second the poetry of the flame, achieved in the half-dark a vivid isolation of line and texture held focused in the concentration of a trivial act, like a luminous painting instantly destroyed. Tam fluttered the charred paper, serrated like a feather, into the fire.

‘Is that no’ whit Ah’ve been tryin’ tae tell ye a’ along?’ Conn waited. ‘It’s education, son. That’s whit ye’ve got tae hiv. You’re clever enough tae go oan et the schil. Ah ken ye are. Yer mither’s got a note there fae a teacher. A lassie. Whit’s her name?’

‘Miss Anderson.’

‘Miss Anderson. That’s who it wis. Miss Anderson. She says ye’re capable. An’ so ye are. But why are ye no’ interested?’

Conn shuffled in the chair.

‘Ah jist want tae work in the pits.’

‘Christ, son. The pits! Ponies work in the pits, son. That’s as mony brains as ye need tae work in the pits. They go blin’. Did ye ken that? They’re doon in the daurk that long that they canny see. An’ they’re no’ the only wans. Ah’ve been blin’ fae Ah wis ony age masel’. That’s whit it does tae ye. When Ah wis your age, Ah had ideas, son. Things Ah could see that Ah wid like tae dae. But the pits took care o’ that. Ah’m jist a miner noo. Ma days don’t belong tae me. Ah’m doon there. An’ Ah canny see beyond the seam that Ah’m tryin’ tae howk.’

Tam spread his arms and shook his head, as if offering the image of himself to Conn as irrefutable proof of the failure he couldn’t find words to convey. Paradoxically, what Conn saw were the forearms bulging from the rolled up sleeves, the hands that looked as tough as stone. The whole person emitted an aura of impunity as cautionary as an electric fence. Sitting there, self-deprecating man and hero-worshipping boy, they made an irony of each other, Tam imparting to his son a conviction he had no words to counteract, Conn interpreting his father’s silence against itself.

‘Ye see that pair auld man through there? He’s leeved a slave an’ he’s deein’ a slave. They can gi’e it ony ither name they like. But that’s whit he is. An’ ye ken why?’ Tam jabbed a forefinger against his own temple. ‘Because they took ower in there. That’s the only wey ye’ll ever bate them, son. By findin’ oot the truth fur yerself an’ keepin’ it in there. Yer gran’feyther’s nearly seeventy. An’ he’s waitin’ tae leeve his furst day as his ain man.’

Tam sat looking into the fire, his head cocked delicately as if he was listening. He nodded to his own thoughts and, watching him, Conn experienced a moment that had the eeriness of a seance. He became conscious of the shadows emerging from the fire’s meeting with the approaching darkness, and they were assembling themselves around him in the room, like ghosts with whom his father was communing. A minute jet of gas burst from a break in the coal with a sound like a centuries old moan, before it ignited to a separate incandescence within the fire’s burning.

‘Yer Uncle James. Ah’ve never telt ye aboot him yet. Hiv Ah, Conn?’ Conn shook his head, his boredom animating for the first time into interest at the prospect of a story, at the thought of hearing about a man instead of all this incomprehensible talk about ‘them’ and ‘education’. ‘He wis fae Cronberry, then. Yer Granny’s nephew. Ma cousin, Ah suppose. Worked in the pits as weel. But a clever, clever boay. Ye ken whit he did? Every day he did his shift in the pits. But at nichts. He studied and he re-studied. Tired tae the marrow o’ his bones he wis. Aye. But every nicht, right reason or nane – the studyin’! It wis a’ . . .’ Tam’s rhetoric lost course for a moment in an absence of facts – ‘the rocks an’ that. You ken. Stanes an’ the earth. Whit is it?’

‘Geology.’ Conn felt casually and impressively knowledgeable, a state of mind he was careful not to spoil by dwelling on the fact that he had only learned the word from the teacher the day before.

‘That’s the wan.’ Tam paused as if about to repeat it but didn’t bother. ‘Oot in a’ wathers. Wi’ his trooser-legs rowed up. Wadin’ the burns. Lookin’ fur jist the special stane that he wid be efter at the time. Chappin’ them up wi’ a wee mell. Makin’ his notes. The names he had fur them! He could come oot wi’ a name that wid choke a horse. An a’ it wid be wis a wee thing like a causey. Ye’ve nae conception, son. Well. He persevered. An’ he wisny stuffy, either. In fact, he knew that he wis deein’. An’ him jist in his twinties. But he went oan. He wis efter some kind o’ qualification thing. Like letters ahint his name or that. He took his examinations. An’ ye ken. The week he dee’d, the word came through the post. The boy had passed. A certificate kinda thing. His mither his it in the hoose yet. Twinty-seeven when he dee’d. An’ she his a drawer there in her big dresser that she keeps the wey he left it. The first time we’re up, Ah’ll get her tae show ye it. It’s a thing tae see. Jist fu’ o’ stanes every colour o’ the rainbow. Every wan found by James himsel’. An’ every wan wi’ its wee caird, an’ oan the caird the special thing they ca’ it. Names ye never thocht were poassible. By, that’s some drawer. It’s no’ a drawer, son. It’s a monument.’

There was a silence of some seconds for the legendary James. Tam was remembering holding that certificate in his hands. The name on it was James’s but the official wording was relevant to all of them, an amnesty from the inevitability of the narrowness of their lives. Conn was imagining the drawer. He saw the stones like jewels, heaped fragments of blinding iridescence, having no point in his mind beyond their own beauty, a dead man’s treasure trove.

The man’s richt.’ Tam nodded at the book, ‘A Treasury of Prose and Poetry’, resting on Conn’s knee with his finger keeping the place. ‘Hoo can war help
us?
We’ll be in the same mogre when it’s a’ by. Poor Mick. He’s daein’ whit he has tae dae. But it’s no’ gonny make ony difference. That’s the thing, Conn. Yer brither’s life’s at stake. An whoever wins, it canny be us. We loast before it stertit.’ Caught in the renewed intensity of an old realisation, Tam looked for hope. ‘Conn. Why will ye no’ see the sense o’ goin’ oan at the schil, son. Why no’?’

‘Ah jist don’t want tae, feyther.’

‘But whit is it? Why no’?’

‘Ah don’t like it.’

‘Is it the teachers? His somebody goat it in fur ye?’

‘Naw. It’s no’ that.’

‘Ah don’t understand ye, son. Ah mean, that’s where ye could make somethin’ o’ yerself. See Mr Pirrie. He’s aff the same kinna folk as oorselves, Ah hear. An’ ye see whit he’s made o’ himself. Noo is that no’ an example fur ye?’

Clumsily, Tam had activated Conn’s antagonism towards school, which had so far remained in the lethargy of long-established attitudes. Now, mobilising against that name, past convictions mustered confusedly in his head, the more determined for being inarticulate. So irrational as to be anonymous forces, those convictions nevertheless represented areas of real experience for Conn. They related to truths he had earned for himself, no matter how incapable he was of proving his right to them with words, to the fact that nothing he was taught at school took the slightest cognizance of who he was, that the fundamental premise underlying everything he was offered there was the inferiority of what he had, that the vivid spontaneity of his natural speech was something he was supposed to be ashamed of, that so many of the people who mouthed platitudes about the liberating effects of education were looking through bars at the time, that most teachers breathed hypocrisy, like tortured Christians trying to convert happy pagans, that the classroom wasn’t a filter for but a refuge from reality. His indignation came in a welter of incoherent images, a mob of reasons that drowned reason, and the only expression of it all he could achieve was a dogged, sullen silence.

‘Mr Pirrie. Noo is that no’ somebody ye could look up tae an’ try tae dae the same?’

Seeing his father so mistaken in his estimation of himself, Conn couldn’t let it pass. It was all right being silent on the question of staying on at school. He had made up his mind on that one. Nothing short of being taken there in handcuffs every day would have induced him to stay on after he was fourteen. But it depressed him to see the way his father was so misled about the school. Mr Pirrie. Why did his father reduce himself to an admiring boy in front of someone who wasn’t a match for him? Conn struggled to say something he knew. What came out, like a hiccup after long meditation, was:

‘Och, feyther. Ye could easy win him.’

Conn didn’t just mean it physically. There was in him a hazy desire to express the result of some ultimate and ideal confrontation of the two men. The words were an attempt to convey a deep faith in his father, something which had survived in spite of what they had taught him in the school, an unshakeable commitment, not unlike ‘I love you’.

His father’s response was to burst out laughing, shake his head in a patronising way, and then to seem saddened by his son’s remark. Conn held in his hurt.

‘Whit are ye talkin’ aboot, son? Whit’s that got tae dae wi’ onything? Life’s a bit mair complicated than a fist-fight. Ah’ve maybe goat muscles. But maist o’ them are in ma heid. Naw, son. Ye need education.’

They sat hopelessly together in the darkening room, their shapes unfinished sculptures in the firelight, affirming the worth of each other and injuring each other in the affirmation. Conn turned the book over in his hand. He had always loved the feel of it, bound in soft leather and on the front two circles, one within the other, embossed in gold, like a medallion, inside which was the figure of a lady in a wide, sweeping dress. But at the moment he resented it. Running his fingers over the braille of that design, it was as if the gesture taught him he was blind, as if the book could only be a tactile object for him, and he and his father were locked out from the rest of it, rejected by the complex patterns of words which it contained. The sensation which his fingers casually imparted to him now was never entirely to leave him, like a burn that mutes all subsequent touches to a partial memory of itself, one of those perceptions that remain precisely because their truths outreach our rational comprehensions, have no need of it, though our comprehension will repeatedly come back to illumine them, intensifying the mystery.

So, in later years, holding again this book, Conn as a man was to understand this evening better, and so many others like it. He would realise how much it had meant to his father, to have this, the only book in the house, given to him at the corner by somebody whose possession of it remained unexplained. He would understand the balm his father felt in listening to the words Conn read from it, those extracts which were often incomprehensible to both of them but which had another meaning for his father, the statement that there were men who understood what was happening to them, that somewhere out there there was meaning. He would even appreciate his father’s respect for that leather parcel of words, so that, passing it to his son, he handled it as if it was TNT. But all these laggard insights would only deepen the mystery of what the book had been for both of them, conceal in more impenetrable shadows what it was they had really been trying to say in those evenings of stumbling talk among the carefully cultivated words of strangers.