Boswell's Bus Pass (26 page)

I instantly regretted wiping the condensation from the window through which I saw a cow lying dead in the corner of a field. It was dead. It was not resting or sleeping, it was dead. It had fallen by a fence, its legs splayed at an unnatural angle. To complete the tableau a crow pecked its hide in a pastiche of a safari documentary.

A crumpled mother and four weans got on at the stop nearest to Kilmarnock Prison. While she looked desolate, her children were excited at having seen dad in his new surroundings. Perhaps she knew that most prison violence happens in the hour after visiting time when the pain of separation meets the frustration in those who have not had a visit.

By intentionally blurring my vision I tried to inure myself from reliving the horror that was the bus station. To an extent I succeeded until David pointed out the verbal inanity of the sign reminding us that THE PUBLIC MUST REFRAIN FROM WALKING ON THE VEHICLE RUNNING SURFACE. I blame the teachers.

It was late when we got off and walked the mile or so to Loudoun Castle. Fabulously floodlit it was impossible to miss. The gates were also fabulously shut. We managed to avoid them altogether by hugging the ditch but were twice stopped by security staff who
emerged from the gloom to ask us where we thought we were going. On realising that our bizarre mission posed little threat to national security we were allowed to continue.

The castle had recently abandoned its theme park, the Dutch owner claiming that increases in VAT, coupled with the bad weather made financial viability impossible. He may not have been able to anticipate the first obstacle but the second should not have come as a great surprise. Most of the rides, slides, flumes, carousels and whirligigs had been dismantled and taken away. A few cranes remained and the silhouette of something large, perhaps the Looping Twist N Shout or the Vertical Launch Double Shot Barnstorm. The air above the fairground site was turbulent with the ghosts of grand days out and the sticky energized excitement of countless children. Loudoun Castle was brazenly lit with a cavalier disregard for global warning, the early evening crows diving in and out of the black window gaps.

Boswell, in gushing unctuous mode, praised his host to the hilt of his regimental sword, ‘I cannot figure a more honest politician … While I live, I shall honour the memory of this amiable man’. This despite the fact that Lord John’s Hanovarian army had been scared witless by a few members of the Clan Chatton, banging old kettles and generally making a lot of noise, at the ignominious Rout of Moy. He had an equally undistinguished military record in both America and Portugal. Nevertheless, ‘His kind and dutiful attention to his mother was unremitted. At his house was true hospitality; a plain but a plentiful table.’ In other words, a rubbish sodger but aye guid to his mammy and he put on a fine spread.

The Kilmarnock to Glasgow bus was a revelation, warm,
comfortable
, clean, spanking new and no one sitting in the front upstairs seats. David gripped the hand rail and made revving noises. My fantasy was quite different; any sane person could see that we were cocooned in a simulator set for low flying, and surrounded by winking lights. We glided silently across the surface of our new found planet, easily dodging the incoming flack from ill prepared aliens. It was bonfire night and Glasgow seen from the perspective of the moors was catching fire.

The sky was crowded with falling angels with lit sparkly wings. A
whole carousel appeared on the horizon over Rutherglen and then morphed into a darting sand-dancer of light while a strange blazing mushroom quickly extinguished itself with a crenellated popping sound. On tenement back greens across the city kids were
experiencing
a type of joy never to be replicated in adulthood and a thousand cats arched beneath spiky fur. Some wanton profligate hurled her pearl necklace into the night; the clown retaliated by tossing his chrysanthemums which disintegrated into a million vermillion spores.

As we entered St Vincent Street the crew prepared to land. A man stood proudly at a traffic light as if he owned the city; the Great Controller, all in all, a job well done. ‘That’s all folks,’ he said, throwing the switch and turning the sky dark.

Another double decker for the trip back to Edinburgh but this time all front seats had been commandeered by six or seven young lads who had skillfully improvised their own cocktail cabinet on the front ledge; all that was missing was a single optic for the vodka bottle. One of their number destined for a career in catering or the caring professions solicitously administered the mixers while the others decibelled ever louder. Their party progressed well and even prompted envious comments from the less fortunate travellers until we hit the outskirts of Baillieston. The bus stopped. The driver, a huge man, came up the stairs and told the lads to get off. ‘Ave seen yous on the CCTV, get aff?’ ‘A bit harsh’ muttered one of the observers until fixed with a viperous stare by the driver who was starting to resemble everyone’s least favourite teacher, probably the techi teacher, a fat man with his Lochgelly Special neatly resting beneath the shoulder of his jacket. The peacemaker shrugged and returned to the soft porn of
Men’s Health
, his lips moving as he looked at the pictures. Unexpectedly the driver relented, ‘Get aff … or ditch the booze.’ The compromise was instantly accepted and the lads tottered their way down the stairs and tipped the now minimal vodka dregs into the gutter. What a nice man.

After a brief interval act two started. There was only one actor on stage. He stood up pacing the aisle and roared into his phone. ‘Julie, dinnae embarrass me, yer steamin’, totally steamin’. Ah cannae walk tae Musselburgh. Ah havnae got one twenty. It’s ten miles!’ He put
the phone down and waited patiently for his audience to react. In addition to spontaneous applause most of those present wanted to give a more tangible sign of their appreciation. He graciously accepted the coins offered from all sides before returning to his seat to discreetly unwrap his vacuum sealed packet of Marks and Spencers sandwiches.

I left David in town and took the 31 bus back to Gorgie. The night was dark and wet. A tiny splash of colour on the pavement turned out to be a dead pheasant looking for all the world as if it had flown blind into the tenement building and brained itself. What was the bird doing in an urban street? It couldn’t have flown there. I could understand the odd errant cock if the French had been playing at Murrayfield but not a pheasant. Had it been dropped by a returning poacher? Had it been stolen and dropped when the butcher gave chase in his pheasant blood stained apron? It had been a strange day.

The ten days Boswell and Johnson spent in Edinburgh at the end of the tour were limbo times; they had had enough of each other’s company. Johnson was desperate for the salons of London, and titillated by the prospect of rekindling his coded conversations with Hester Thrale. Boswell too must have looked forward to seeing Margaret after one hundred days apart but he makes no mention of their reunion. His infidelities squatted in the space between them. His less than witty tee-shirt WHAT GOES ON TOUR STAYS ON TOUR cut no ice with her, she had a drawer of them, and why was he still dragging that opinionated bear of a man after him? The maid had only just picked the last of the candle wax from their best carpet.

Boswell felt flat. ‘It was near ten before I got up. I had a certain degree of uneasiness from fearing that after my hardy and spirited tour I should sink into indolence. But I made myself easy by considering that it was allowable, natural, and happy that I should enjoy the comfort of repose when returned home.’ Nevertheless by his own admission Boswell’s narrative loses its momentum. ‘As I kept no journal of anything that passed after this morning (Thursday 11
^th
November), I shall, from memory, group together this and the other days till that on which Dr Johnson departed for London. They were in all nine days.’

There follows a desultory list of the minor Edinburgh literary and legal dignitaries who invite Johnson to various meals or who traipse round to James Court to hear his disparaging comments about their
backward land. They visit Edinburgh castle but Johnson is
unimpressed
and doesn’t even mention it in his narrative. Boswell scuttles round and fills the gap, ‘Dr Johnson affected to despise it, observing that “it would make a good prison in England.’’’

Boswell had engineered the perfect excuse not to spend any more time in Johnson’s company, ‘I could not attend him, being obliged to be in the Court of Session; but my wife was so good as to devote the greater part of the morning to the endless task of pouring out tea for my friend and his visitors.’ Sorry Doctor, but some of us have to work.

He was not insensitive to the extent to which his guest wanted away, ‘Such was the disposition of his time at Edinburgh. He said one evening to me, in a fit of languor, Sir we have been harassed by invitations.’

Boswell went through the motions of entertaining his guest; ‘(we) spent one forenoon at my Uncle Dr Boswell’s, who showed him his curious museum, and made him a present of a Scotch pebble. He afterwards had it cut into a pair of sleeve-buttons, which he constantly wore.’ Who was his uncle and what on earth did he display in his most curious of museums, apart from pebbles? The pebble collecting must have been a family trait recalling as it does Boswell’s search of the beach on Coll. The nearest that Edinburgh has to a curious museum is the collection of anatomy specimens in the Royal College of Surgeons. We do know that Boswell’s strange uncle was a physician.

The anatomy museum exists in a parallel universe to our own. Here the surreal is king and the bizarre is worshipped, all wrapped up in the pretence that the exhibitions contribute in a meaningful way to the serious study of medicine.

A prominent portrait depicts Lord Sandy Wood, a former president of the college who was accompanied on his professional rounds by a raven and a sheep. He was also the first man in Edinburgh to carry an umbrella with which he bullied the sick into making a contribution to the Edgar Alan Poe Appreciation Society.

In an adjacent case is the pocket book bound with the skin peeled from the corpse of William Burke. Detailed instructions on how best to remove the flesh from a skeleton are followed by a line of skulls each with a neatly trepanned hole, reminiscent of the memorial to the victims of Pol Pot’s killing fields.

The truly squeamish can choose between the display of pickled aneurysms and the dissected eyes, no longer smiling at grandchildren
or jokes from the cracker. By way of light relief there is a gangrenous foot.

In 1775 an alert doctor evidently discovered that chimney sweeps often developed cancer of the scrotum. He was placed on a blacklist and members of the sweeping professions were warned that the aforementioned doctor might fondle their privates the moment they put their heads up the flue.

A line of jars contained a dubious yellow liquid and
disease-carrying
worms, some of them long enough to reach the moon if laid end to end.

The saddest display of all showed three tiny toddler skeletons trustingly following each other. Just when I thought it couldn’t get much worse it did, with a child’s skeleton seemingly hanging from a noose.

I escaped upstairs to look at war wounds and assimilate the subliminal message that our current military is full of state school weaklings. After the Battle of Waterloo, during which his arm was carried off by a cannon shot, Sergeant Anthony Twittmeyer of the King’s German Legion rode 15 miles into Brussels where he lapsed into unconsciousness, after which he recovered.

Outside the daylight was very welcome. Boswell, while feigning otherwise would have loved every artifact, every ghoulish, pinned specimen. Johnson would have demanded his money back within seconds of crossing the threshold, and would have exorcised his newly provoked demons by turning round three times in the street and reciting
The Lord’s Prayer
.

More than anything he wanted to leave Scotland. On Thursday November 18th he wrote to Mrs Thrale, ‘I long to be at home, and have taken a place in the coach for Monday; I hope, therefore, to be in London on Friday, the 26
^th
, in the evening. Please to let Mrs Williams know.’

There were still long days to be got through and endless fawning visitors to tolerate, or not. The exception was the elderly bookseller, Old Mr Drummond whom he had met in the past. Drummond’s name features often in the list of Johnson’s Edinburgh visitors. His own father had been a seller and binder of books in Lichfield. It was an occupation that was never far from Johnson’s thoughts although his own brief apprenticeship in the book trade was a notable failure. Apart from anything he owed his father a debt and in some small way
the attention he bestowed on to Drummond allowed him to pay a first instalment.

I too enjoyed the friendship of an Edinburgh bookseller and binder and so arranged to meet Dougie Telfer in a pub that evening. A single parent of two adolescent boys, Dougie combines his day job at Letts with running his own book business in the evenings and at weekends. Books are his life and his love; he makes them, binds them, repairs them, sells them and gives them away in the box outside his shop. His basement is a chaotic, inspired place where piles of leather tumble into bales of cloth; where gold dust forms a patina on spineless cowardly tomes and fat books are tortured flat in clamps and vices even Boswell could not have thought of.

We talked of dyes and tints and tanning. Dougie reminded me that Adam Smith fell into a tanning pit when earnestly discussing
The Wealth of Nations
with Charles Templeton; a dangerous profession this bookbinding.

Dougie’s essential goodness extended to a benevolent view of all the customers he had known over the years – with one notable exception which would have made Johnson snort with recognition. Some years back Dougie had rebound a fading copy of
Ossian
for a prominent civil servant who returned in a profoundly drunken state to collect his book. Declaring himself dissatisfied with the quality of the repair he hurled the book in Dougie’s face and ran out of the shop. Dougie gave chase and felled the man by skimming the disputed book through the air with the accuracy of a martial arts trained assassin.

Boswell, feeling compelled to make one last effort to entertain the ever gloomier Johnson, took a day off work and travelled with him to New Hailes, six or seven miles from Edinburgh town centre, to meet his first substitute father figure, Sir David Dalrymple. Although they had never met Johnson had admired Dalrymple from a distance and on one occasion drank a toast to him in The Turk’s Head coffee house in the Strand, ‘A man of worth, a scholar and a wit.’

I boarded the 44 to meet up with David who had again mastered the contradictory, serendipitous vagaries of the Lothian Bus timetable. On the front of the upper deck the CCTV camera mounted in a
tasteful tartan-clad box took a suspicious interest in all of the passengers. With an admirable sense of fairness it showed sequential shots of every seat and corner that might otherwise have hidden crimes against humanity, minor acts of vandalism and many moral transgressions in between. With very careful planning it would just be possible to happy-slap a pensioner at the back a nanosecond before being caught on camera and return to your seat undetected. This is how
The Great Escape
was conceived, difficult though to get a wartime motorbike upstairs. For most people the four seconds of fame on a bus CCTV screen is the best they can hope for.

Through the window of the number 30 Craigmillar Castle floated above the regenerated scheme of the same name as if it had broken free from a more romantic planet and couldn’t decide where to land. The journey past the line of reinforced shop fronts should be obligatory for any recession deniers. An
Evening News
billboard informed us that PORTABLE URINALS were being deployed TO BRING RELIEF TO DRINKERS.

Although New Hailes was closed for the season the National Trust for Scotland had obligingly agreed to arrange access for David and me. The dilapidated exterior hinted at mysteries not enjoyed since early black and white children’s television. The balustrade had been repaired with inexpertly applied Polyfilla.

One of the Trust’s learning officers, Mark Mclean, led us into the shuttered hibernating building. The obligatory disposable overshoes suggested that a body had been found in the parlour, but Taggart was on his way. Every item of furniture, every small domestic artifact was protected by a custom-made dust sheet or handkerchief as
appropriate
. The removal firm had gone into administration some 237 years previously and they had been unable to bring the tea-chests. The wedding’s been cancelled. Get over it, old lady.

If, at a given signal, the sheets were to have been peeled back the 18
^th
century would have coughed and spluttered into the room. Thousands upon thousands of leather volumes would have
rematerialized
in the stunning library, the empty shelves of which climbed towards a distant and invisible ceiling. Somewhere a virginal was playing. Lord Hailes raised himself from the armchair, stretched and hastened to welcome his guests. For some unaccountable reason he had liked Boswell ever since the 19 year old begged him to intercede with old Auchinleck and persuade him that his son would make the
most of whatever educational opportunities arose in the courts of Utrecht.

Boswell’s descent into depression was unstoppable, ‘At Lord Hailes’, we spent a most agreeable day, but again I must lament that I was so indolent as to let almost all that passed evaporate into oblivion.’

Johnson spent two of his remaining nights in Scotland at Lord Elibank’s home in Ballencrief. Elibank, an arch-Jacobite, had been partly instrumental in persuading Johnson to venture North and the two men held each other in high regard. He was a minor writer and patron to several poets of whom he spoke on one occasion with a turn of phrase that could have fallen from the mouth of almost any football manager, ‘I saw these lads had talents and they were much with me.’ He was also a former member of the Coconut Tree Club which may or may not have been the first establishment to introduce lap dancers to East Lothian.

The 128 from Musselburgh to Aberlady was memorable for letting on board the oldest woman either David or myself had ever seen. Not only was she so bowed as to seem circular but her nose almost met her chin like a child’s drawing of a friendly moon. She could probably still remember the night when Boswell propositioned her as she emptied the ashtrays at Ballencrieff and the look of shock on his face as she tipped their contents into his wig. Despite her translucent frailty and great age she was living independently and had just popped out to get her messages.

For much of the route the bus ran parallel to the main east coast rail track. When the High Speed train appeared in the driver’s rear mirror his accelerator hit the floor … one of these days, one of these days …

A much read
Metro
retrieved from the floor contained a heart wrenching story under the headline BIG ISSUE CONMAN SOLD MY DOG AT TESCOS FOR £20. The woman had tied her lurcher-saluki outside the store; the man, bored with trying to flog unwanted magazines had simply used his initiative. Next time he will try his hand at shopping trolleys, bags of coal and car-parking spaces.

The cold walk from Aberlady to Ballencrieff felt interminable and was only relieved by David straddling a fence to inspect a field of sprouts for reasons I couldn’t be bothered asking him about.

We were overtaken by a fire engine with an ice cream van in hot (?) pursuit. The fire engine was approximately 140 years late as
Ballencrieff 
castle suffered a serious fire in 1870 when the house keeper attempted to clear the accumulated soot from the chimney by setting it alight; a primitive method of chimney sweeping not uncommon in that part of the country, which had literally, back fired. She had little alternative as most of the sweeps had succumbed to testicular cancer. There is something odd about the number of homes visited by Johnson which subsequently caught fire. Perhaps the trustee of Raasay House had a point after all with her theory of posthumous arson, a scorched earth policy from beyond the grave.

Ballencrieff House is now restored as the centre piece in an upmarket pig farm. As we approached there was no sign of either human or porcine life; just a herd of superior Jacob sheep which nibbled at the manicured field in front of the building. Such a breed can only have evolved after Lucifer stumbled on an ordinary sheep after a night out in Longniddry. I swung on the bellpull which rang down the centuries. A few ghosts stretched but none of them could be bothered to come to the door.