Boswell's Bus Pass (17 page)

When no longer in the lee of the island the wind shook their boat or in Boswell’s childlike words, ‘the sea was very rough. I did not like it.’

The tame Jacobite legend, perhaps irritated by the large aloof Triton squeezed into the prow, or upset at being described as a half wild Indian, retaliated by singing a song ‘in Erse’. Perceptibly riled, Johnson concentrated on the brewing storm and mentally composed a letter to his beloved Hester, ‘The wind blew enough to give the boat a kind of dancing agitation.’

He soon experienced his own agitation when Joseph, the ever present but rarely mentioned retainer, dropped his spurs over the side of the boat. Why did he have them out in the first place? Was he cleaning them, picking off the flesh flayed from the flanks of numerous put upon horses? Was he dangling them before Johnson to provoke him? ‘One more sea shanty in Latin and I’m dropping these effing spurs overboard?’ I considered borrowing David’s
beloved
Swiss army knife and consigning it to the deep in a comparable 18
^th
century existential gesture but thought better of the idea.

After his initial anger Johnson turned the loss of his spurs into a discourse on the second sight saying he had dreamed the night before that he dipped his staff into a river and it floated away. Not to be outdone the tame minister steered the conversation back to himself. He claimed to have banished all vestiges of superstition from his parish by boldly inviting all of the local witches to do their worst and wither the udders on his cattle. The women’s guild knitted spells and baked imprecations long into the night.

The rowers drowned out the minister’s hubristic tale by
improvising
a chorus to the erse song probably along the lines of,
Seall air an duin’ uasal reamhar, is a sporan is a chiall air seachran!
or ‘Look at the fat gentleman, with his spurs and his sense gone a’wandering!’

As the boat drew near to the land the singing of the reapers on shore mingled with the song of the rowers. This romantic tableau was
orchestrated by the Laird of Raasay, determined to milk the moment for every piece of clichéd Highland kitsch. ‘Right lads when I click my fingers I want you to swing your sickles – yes son, it’s called a sickle – from left to right and sing that song I taught you yesterday.’ The pantomime worked. Boswell and Johnson were delighted with their reception.

Boswell, having promised to walk barefoot to Jerusalem if spared from the storm at sea, kissed with udder-curdling fervor a primitive cross carved in the sea wall.

We failed to find the cross. In our defence the new pier works may have swamped the symbol in concrete. We certainly attracted muted derision from the navvies working on the improvements.

Raasay House was gutted by fire four years ago. It had suffered the same fate in 1745 when every house on the island was reduced to charred embers. It had been common knowledge that someone on Raasay had given shelter to the Young Pretender. At present it is an impressive ruin with blind black holes where the windows blew out.

Johnson declared, ‘Our reception exceeded our expectations. We found nothing but civility, elegance and plenty.’

Boswell is more inclined to itemise the snack prepared for them, ‘We found here coffee and tea in genteel order upon the table … diet loaf, marmalade of oranges, currant jelly … excellent brandy … mutton chops and tarts, with porter, claret, mountain and punch.’

We too were desperate for food and ordered breakfast at the Raasay Hotel. Instantly insolvent, bankrupt and broke, we staggered penniless towards Raasay House.

When they stayed Johnson computed that thirty seven revelers were crammed into eight rooms. ‘I suppose they put up temporary beds in the dining room, where they stowed all the young ladies.’ Boswell must have thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had stumbled across his own private island seraglio. How many excuses did he fabricate to visit the dining room? ‘Sorry to disturb you again ladies, I wonder if the doctor left his spurs by the settee …’

Long-resigned to the dullish sport of geriatric trespass we ignored the keep out signs and walked past the portacabins and dumper trucks. We were interrupted by a small woman in a hard hat. After explaining our mission she relaxed her site-manager veneer and introduced herself as Lynn, one of the four trustees of Raasay House. She described how she had been closing the curtains in Johnson’s bedroom
when the fire started. The cause had never been discovered. In her more rueful moments she blamed Johnson himself who may have disapproved of the half-completed renovations. She made no secret of how traumatised she had been by the fire and was still bitter that various national bodies had declined to fund the renovation of yet another decayed and ruined home.

Before its partial relaunch as an outdoor centre the house and its considerable contents had been boarded up. Over time the building was violated by both the elements and a succession of chuckling thieves who carted away boatloads of furniture and most of the library.

She said the acute sense of distress returned every morning when she arrived on site. She was certainly not in the mood to entertain tourists with hokum tales of hauntings but still outlined her strong suspicion that Johnson had returned after his death to the house where he had been so happy. She had frequently caught sight of a large figure skulking round the edges of her peripheral vision. I tried to repress the thought that this was the lot of most married Scottish women. As if embarrassed she counterbalanced her narrative with references to projection and wish fulfilment.

We left Lynn to brood and oversee. It was difficult not to glance backwards at Raasay House and see through her eyes the blowsy curtains dancing promiscuously in the night sky and hear the cracking glass, her own screams and the thunk of burning ceiling beams landing on each other, a charred haphazard wigwam. Meanwhile a black manna of scorched confetti pages from the
Dictionary of the English Language
fluttered onto the foreshore.

The ancient overgrown churchyard slightly up the hill from the house was another gem in the collection of beautiful and peaceful ruined places that was becoming a motif of this journey. Johnson had been less impressed and sardonically lambasted the slothful guardians who let such places fall into disrepair.

Boswell and Johnson were shown an Iron Age tunnel used when they visited to store oars. It subsequently saw service as a rubbish tip before being restored as, well, a tunnel. Compelled where possible to place our feet in precisely the same spot as the earlier travellers we entered the darkness. Claustrophobia has become an unwanted companion in recent years. I’m not certain where he came from; perhaps an intimation of entering the final long airless tunnel in a decade or so. On this occasion claustrophobia was less of a challenge
than stupidity. I stood up quickly and inflicted several flesh wounds on my bald pate. Streaming blood I emerged only to startle a gaggle of young children gathered outside. They ran away shrieking at the sight of the aging zombie, a refugee from the world of the undead.

When I had been staunched we hired bikes from the relocated outdoor centre as Raasay is entirely bus-free. We shared something of Boswell’s childlike eagerness to explore the island. ‘I last night obtained my fellow-traveller’s permission to leave him for a day, he being unable to take so hardy a walk.’ We have no reason to believe that Johnson could not have coped with the challenges presented by Raasay. He was not beyond the odd spot of physical recklessness. On occasions throughout his life he would, on a whim, hurl himself into the nearest river or swim in the sea. In his twilight years he looked at a wall which he used to climb, ‘with a degree of rapture … and determined to try my skill and dexterity I laid aside my hat and wig, pulled off my coat, and leapt over it twice.’The truth of the matter was that he had had enough of Boswell’s unctuous and irritating company. He must have relished the thought of a day spent annotating the books in the library with marginalia and huffy corrections.

I was increasingly reconciled to this cycling business but never found it easy. Pathetically neither David nor I could be the first to dismount and wheel the bikes up the steeper hills. Instead we resorted to using ridiculously low gears that required disproportionate amounts of energy just to stop falling off.

There were minor distractions: the synchronized breathy cromping of the feeding cattle; the Icarus bird larking skywards; the smaller tinny voice of an unidentified bird and above all else the insistent thump of blood in the ears. David contributed an improvised quiz: ‘How many teats on the following creatures, the cow, the sheep, unicorn and dodo?’ (4, 2, 1 and 0). This note of foolishness was echoed in the behavior of the various sheep that wandered into the road. There was the high noon, transvestite sheep in high heels, holster and handbag half hidden in the fleece. She was followed by several carnival sheep either garlanded with wreaths of ferny sticky fingers or waddling in hula hoops of unwanted wool. Out of sight their peers were either endlessly bidding against each other in a pointless auction or activating methane-powered fog horns.

Eventually we enjoyed the deliriously long and fast descent to the bay dominated by the remains of Brochel Castle. When Boswell and
his entourage visited, the ancient family seat had recently been abandoned for the mod cons of Raasay House. The estate agent’s notice was just legible:
Dilapidated bijou castle-ette, excellent sea views, security a strong feature, would suit small clan
. The stones still standing on the outcrop of rock suggested a mean bleak home within which the residents huddled together for warmth in the winter, blinded and choked by the emetic smoke backing up in the chimney and constantly taunted by the ogre waves.

Boswell had visited the sea caves on the West coast of Raasay. Having taken directions at the outdoor centre we dropped the bikes into the heather and trekked towards the sea. The carcass of a dead lamb pointed the way, its fleece flayed and its eyes pecked out. Lying spread out on a small hillock it was hardly an unusual sight but was still oddly poignant; starkly unmourned, an irrelevant, infinitesimal speck of innocence. Next to it was a single ram’s horn.

At the foot of a gradual incline we found a small bay festooned with the usual flotsam. Which obscure bylaw decreed that every hundred yards of coast round Britain must contain at least one blue plastic glove? This one, sea-bloated, was fingering the air for its stolen Excalibur. There was also a huge roll of still serviceable sellotape. What flotsam would Boswell have tripped over? Timber planks, wooden struts, shards and splinters, pieces of heavy green and brown glass with sea smoothed edges, fishing creels, barrel staves, hempen rope and
probably
the ubiquitous single leather shoe; the legacy of shipwrecks, misfortune, drunken nights and poorly constructed harbours.

The bay must have seemed a cornucopia of possibility for
whichever
boat load of impoverished fishermen landed here. There was a small snatch of arable land and caves for shelter and storage.
Good cupboard space, satellite dish and own boat shed
.

As we walked back up the hill we stumbled through several separate stone cairns, each heap a memorial to unknown, long-dead inhabitants who lived the bleakest of short and brutal lives.

It was a large extended family perhaps. This heap belonged to the seemingly indestructible matriarch who was the scourge of both her married offspring. Over there lived the two brothers who never spoke to each other. That pile set back from the others belonged to the unpopular girning widow who would shake her fist at the
high-jinking
children. Those stones were home to the man of God who consoled the grieving and named the wicked.

Neither Johnson nor Boswell mentions the deserted crofts on Raasay. By this stage of their journey they had seen so many they hardly noticed. The reality of Cumberland’s revenge would have strained the credulity of a Hague war tribunal. It is unlikely that the commanding officer would have politely chapped on doors with his prepared speech, ‘Please step outside madam, unfortunately I have no alternative but to douse your humble dwelling with petrol. Please remove any items of sentimental value. I am merely following orders.’

Women scream. Outer and undergarments are rent. The flames light up the excited mad-eyed faces of the expectant soldiers. Rag carcass heaps proliferate as thin spirals of smoke rise from charred reptile skinned beams. Overhead the carrion birds circle.

Being basically old and unfit the bike ride and sea trek had taken their toll and yet there were miles to go before we slept, and miles to go before the summit of Dun Caan which Boswell and his party had climbed.

Deluded by his hard days in the paras David had strangely decreed that our rations for the trip should not exceed one apple each.

The penultimate straw was the act of pushing the bikes 2.9k up a steep and rocky path, along which good intentions were decreasingly being strewn. We both developed an incipient envy of dead people and rested at ever more frequent intervals until they virtually joined up and I fell asleep sitting upright like an Aztec warrior waiting to be buried.

The ultimate straw was the realisation that having reached the end of the path with Dun Caan seemingly just yards away we would have to descend steeply to sea level before climbing back up. We were tempted to hurl the bikes to the bottom and sulk, thumbs in mouths waiting either for our mammies or the Mountain Rescue helicopter.

We eventually forced the bikes down the path as if wrestling with unruly adolescents. At the bottom we looked longingly at the loch. It was the self pitying Lochan of Lethe twinkling seductively, ‘Come on lads, sink into my cold waters and all will be well …’

A sort of salvation seemed at hand when David pointed out that Dun Caan no longer existed; it had simply disappeared. It can never have been more than a figment of Boswell’s imagination. The mist
had indeed rubbed out Raasay’s cap. ‘Totally dangerous’ pronounced David. Twenty minutes later we reached the top.