Boswell's Bus Pass (21 page)

When the coast was clear I stopped cowering and joined Roy who had discovered two other hostages. While the rude woman was busy outside imposing order on the natural world they opened up, all the while glancing guiltily as the door lest their vengeful jailer returned. A gentle retired couple from Sussex, they explained how they had been captured nearly two weeks previously. They had eventually
negotiated
a parole under the terms of which they were permitted to leave their cell during daylight hours. They would spend each evening in a lay-by reading in their car, eating sandwiches until their electronic tag dictated their return. The man took a small risk and disclosed that the real reason behind their visit was, and here he looked at his wife for unspoken permission to continue, his passion for Scammell lorries of which there were apparently many on Mull. Roy announced that he was off to ‘run a shallow grave’.

At least we found our sheets were clean unlike Boswell who ‘was shocked at their dirtiness. I threw off only my boots and coat and waistcoat, and put on my greatcoat and a night-gown, and so lay down. The mixture of brandy punch at the inn and rum punch here, joined with the comfortless bed, made me rest very poorly … After I had tossed long in weariness, Joseph came and called me and let in light. I would have risen, but was afraid to put my hand anywhere in the dark, for fear of spiders, or some uncleanly circumstance of sloth. I was not well at all.’

We felt fine in the morning despite Roy having produced bottles of wine from nowhere to help us through our evening captivity. We set off towards Ulva, our panniers crammed with silver snuff boxes and china horses.

We stopped to chat with a late middle aged couple who were manning a battery of surveillance equipment apparently focused on nothing. After signing the official secrets act we were invited to squinny into the telescope and saw a close up of a rag that had been thrown onto a stick. It was, allegedly, a sea eagle intent on claiming the pole-squatting record which was now only days away. Our empathy became less false once the man animatedly recreated from memory the bird’s flight as it plunged lochwards and plucked a fish from its waters. His arms became elongated, his eyes narrowed and his neck hunched down into his shoulders for the final descent.

The low point of the ride was the predictability with which our efforts to drag aging bodies through the treacle of hill climbs were met with condescending encouragement from car drivers. ‘Well done boys, you can do it!’ tossed in our direction through lowered windows. The same patrician tones would have been equally familiar to members of the Light Brigade and the young frightened boys prodded from their trenches in the Somme.

The tiny Ulva ferry is summoned by moving a red board which is visible from the island. Boswell and Johnson found the trip much more problematic and only made the crossing thanks to an Irish sailor whose ship was at anchor in the strait.

They stayed at the ‘mean’ house of Lachlan Macquarrie who owned the island. We walked down the drive of Ulva House, a 1950’s building which was sufficiently grand to have been built on the same spot as the Macquarry residence. We joined a queue forming outside of the main door. The woman in front seemed very friendly as she manoeuvred a three-wheeled racing pram which could have doubled as a sand buggy or indeed a hang glider if push came to shove, or indeed flight. The queue exuded wealth.

I glanced uneasily at Roy whose resemblance to a superannuated but still alarmingly lusty pirate grew stronger with each passing hour. Everyone ahead was greeted with either a manly embrace or a kiss on both cheeks from a swarthy, dapper man who was presumably the owner. When our turn came he grasped our hands and told us we were most welcome and hoped we would enjoy ourselves. It seemed churlish to point out that we had not actually been invited to anything and so explained our quest. He reminisced for a short while about how his grandfather had burned down the original building decades earlier before pointing us towards a distant steading which
incorporated
the original walls of the Macquarrie residence. Roy asked about the marquee rising behind the house and he explained that he was getting married the following day.

Had we played our cards differently we could have stayed as guests; no one would have known who we were and good breeding would have dictated that nobody asked. We learned subsequently that he was the owner of the island and presumably had the power to summarily execute fraudsters and bearded vagabonds.

Dr Johnson had interrogated the earlier owner of Ulva about the custom of
Mercheta Mulierum
, a fine, normally a sheep, due to the Laird at the marriage of a virgin. Would the current resident virgins of Ulva rest easier in their beds knowing that their laird had finally made a choice?

Johnson walked three miles, on his own, to visit the remains of a church on Ulva. Presumably Boswell was again hung over. We set out to follow in his footsteps but got so confused by the maze of different paths through the ferns that we gave up. Roy insisted that the lairds of Ulva traditionally yoked the natives together and forced them to trample the aforementioned paths just to confuse potential visitors or virgin stealers.

The licensed restaurant adjacent to the ferry was temporary home to a collection of trainee aristocrats. We assumed from their costumes that they were rehearsing for a pastiche performance of
Brideshead Revisited
. Sadly they were in earnest. Stalking jackets rubbed tweedy sleeves against waxed Barbours with just a hint of homoeroticism; they yah-ed, brayed and buffooned their way through copious pints of Pimms; the young women all betrayed a startling resemblance to their favourite horses and may have been in severe discomfort from cramming their own still soft hooves into green wellies. Thigh slapping, their own and others’, occurred at intervals to encourage the blue blood to hold its own against the invading tide of expensive alcohol. We briefly toyed with the idea of killing the lot of them and then living rough on the island while being hunted down by huge salivating Baskervilles.

The last ferry of the day found us in unwelcome physical proximity to these leaders of tomorrow. They quipped in code and
nudge-nudge
- winked each other knowingly. The one who had been brought along because she still knew how to talk with mere mortals asked why three people had been left on the slipway. The boatman
explained with a complicit glance at us that they were part of the owner’s family who had personally come to ensure that the riff-raff left the island. They all thought this was a jolly good joke. Typically, not one of them could muster the courtesy to thank the boatman as they left the ferry.

Disaster struck as I cycled up the slipway: both of my hamstrings snapped simultaneously. I briefly considered that I had been shot in both legs by someone who was objecting to the hint of class hatred creeping into my narrative. I howled for Roy to come back and comfort, rescue or carry me but he was already a speck in the distance. Mercifully the cramp disappeared as quickly as it came and for a brief moment I felt joyous empathy with the Lourdes pilgrims who, cured on the spot, add their crutches to an ever growing pyre.

We both felt exhilarated by the adrenaline-fuelled ride alongside Loch na Keal under the lee of the black cliffs that had realigned themselves after the ice age. We stopped and looked across the water at Inchkenneth. It was only a stone’s throw away but frustratingly not accessible by bus pass, bike or CalMac ferry. Had we been forty years younger we might have swum across.

The three-storey white house, a successor building to the former home of Allan Maclean, Boswell and Johnson’s host, enjoyed a more recent notoriety as the home of the Mitford family. It was odd to think that Hitler used to phone Diana when she lived there as part of the eccentric blue-eyed sisterhood. It was a pity too that we could not look for the swastikas she had etched into the windows or the retaliatory hammers and sickles added by Jessica. What price a discussion between the sisters and Dr Johnson? For his part Boswell would have been too busy ogling the other five sisters to contribute a great deal. For a moment we heard the faint strains of
The Valkyrie
being carried on the wind.

In his account Boswell mentions a nasty moment when Sir Allan broke the news before diner that the expected delivery of wine had not been ferried over but ‘luckily the boat arrived this very afternoon. We had a couple of bottles of port and hard biscuits, after some roasted potatoes, which is Sir Allan’s simple fare by way of supper.’

Boswell goes further and confesses to having been ‘disagreeably disappointed in Sir Allan’ because his host, despite his reputation and the company he kept, was not a drinker. ‘I apprehended that I should find a riotous bottle companion and be pressed to drink; in place of
which, the Knight was as sober after dinner as I could wish, and let me do as I pleased.’ So Boswell probably drank both bottles before necking the decanters and raiding the cellar.

The drink may have explained two odd passages from Boswell’s account of his stay. ‘I was for going to the chapel; but a tremor seized me for ghosts, and I hastened back into the house. It was exceedingly dark, and in my timorous hurry I stepped suddenly into a hollow place, and strained a sinew on my right foot. It was painful a while; but rubbing it with rum and vinegar cured it by next day at breakfast.’ Presumably the rum was applied both internally and externally. Either way the remedy seems to have worked, ‘I got a spade and dug a little grave in the floor of the chapel, in which I carefully buried what loose bones were there.’

In an innocent aside Boswell mentions how he and Dr Johnson went searching for whelks while Col and Joseph went looking for otters.

We eventually found the farm track that led to MacKinnon’s cave which made a deep impression on both Boswell and Johnson despite Old Grumpy commenting, ‘We had been disappointed already by one cave, and were not much elevated by the expectation of another.’

For some reason the ingredients of which were probably stupidity and inability to read in equal measure, we both missed the undeniably prominent sign that directed all cave visitors to hug the fence. Accordingly we set out across bog and swamp in completely the wrong direction. Finally back on track we moved slowly down the cliff path. I lost my footing and fell head first howling like a child, Roy said. In my defence my knee had bent itself into an acute angle it had not known since a more supple adolescence and I must have been near death from the rash of nettle stings apart from anything else.

We clambered over real flotsam, man’s stuff. No namby-pamby bleached Squeezy bottles and sea-rounded sticks. Here were tree trunks from an Ecuadorian jungle and trawler wheel houses.

Boulders the size of giant’s bollocks blocked the way to the cave now visible next to the waterfall tumbling off the cliff. I made a comment about having fresh water on tap not realising that Johnson had been very dismissive of the same idea, ‘There is a tradition that it was conducted thither artificially to supply the inhabitants with water. Mr Johnson gave no credit to this tradition.’ That’s me told then.

We were wondering how on earth Johnson could have clambered
over these rocks when we remembered that he arrived by sea and was probably carried into the cave entrance by a sweating, swearing Joseph and a worse than useless Boswell. They only had a small candle to light their way and we only had our mobile phones. I accidently pressed iTunes and spookily Sibelius filled the space; a quick shuffle and Amy Whitehouse was rejecting rehab, especially if she had to stay in a cave.

There was the usual cave furniture, a tree trunk barely charred in the middle spite the best efforts of Special Brewed Satanists intent on barbecuing a mermaid.

Boswell mentions the legend of the piper and twelve men who marched into the cave and never returned. We listened intently, but nothing, not even the hint of a poignant pibroch or a strangled chanter. Allegedly the piper challenged the fairies to a competition. A great mistake. There is also the legend of the dog that entered only to emerge crazed and hairless on the other side of the island weeks later. Part of us wished we had brought along the landlady’s dog, but then we wondered if the process would work in reverse. If we set off into the dark might we emerge at some distant point in time and place with full heads of hair?

Time was tight if we were to make the last ferry of the day but we had to stop and gawk as we passed the same posse of yahs we had seen on Ulva. This time they were being led down a private pier towards a waiting fishing launch by a man dressed in a pantomime variant of a gillies’ costume complete with deer stalker and knobbed stick. There were several possibilities; this was the final stage of a rigorous selection procedure for fast track entrants into the aristocracy, a sort of Big Brother for knobs and tossers. Alternatively this was our first
encounter
with Toff’s Tours, a new venture by the same company whose vans, full of young Australians, hurtle round Scotland to the clank of tinnies and the swish of urine. Perhaps after all they were just an ordinary bunch of St Andrews undergraduates enjoying a typical weekend break.

Away from the coast a frenzied poster campaign announced forthcoming dog trials. What crimes had they committed; were they merely old and had failed to master new tricks? How was the jury selected? We rode towards Craignure with these and many other questions unanswered.

We reflected on the age profile of the long queue shuffling towards
the ferry. Visibly tired and slow moving this was, for many couples, their last holiday together. How long before a small disintegration in either partner would preclude even the coach tour and three star accommodation on Mull. The worry about toilets and the daily reckoning with the neatly compartmentalised pill box would become too much of a burden; better to stay at home and wait.

In time-honoured island tradition we watched the cars driving off the newly arrived ferry. The locals, mostly bored single drivers were easy to spot; harassed young families determined to have a good holiday despite the ominous presence of a mad granny in the back; laughing honeymooners en route to a remote spot, the car piled high with presents, toilet rolls and Tesco bags.