Boswell's Bus Pass (5 page)

Something must be said about the quiet rituals of courtesy that govern the behaviour of elderly bus travellers. Where old people join the queue is determined not by who got there first but by where they can find a seat in the shelter, where it is most convenient to leave shopping trolleys as big as themselves and by which friends they have spotted. When the bus arrives the original order of arrival is skilfully recreated, polite questions asked to determine priority, followed by a slow motion tea dance before anyone gets on board.

Once on the road I guessed at the average age of my fellow travellers. This difficult calculation led me to misinterpret a neon sign proclaiming 80’s CLUB NIGHT EVERY WEDNESDAY. I could hear the surly bouncers rejecting desperate clubbers with ‘You’re not a day over 79. Piss off!’ I could just see the rack by the cloakroom for
hanging colostomy bags and any prosthetic limbs that might get in the way of dancing.

A striking feature of Kirkcaldy is the way in which you turn a corner and see an ocean-going tanker neatly framed by the tenements that slope downwards. Equally striking but less dramatic was the plague of inflatable Santas that could be seen abseiling up the walls of semi detached houses, reminiscent of television images from the siege of the Libyan embassy in the 80’s. Many of the gardens even in the poorest schemes boasted huge trampolines that made the equally numerous satellite dishes seem like innocent prototypes. As a
consequence
of this literal wish to keep up with the neighbours the Victoria Hospital has a specially trained trauma unit that specialises in putting back together small children whose bodies have been impaled on clothes poles and broken on coal bunkers.

One of the strangest but most revealing of passages from Boswell’s entire account describes the thoughts he had on the road to St. Andrews. ‘We had a dreary drive in a dusky night to St. Andrews, where we arrived late. I
saw
, either in a dream or vision, my child, dead, then her face eaten by worms, then a skeleton of her head. Was shocked and dreary. I was sunk. Mr Johnson complained I did not hear in the chaise, and said it was half abstraction. I must try to help this.’

It is difficult to sustain a view of Boswell as a sycophantic buffoon when he is capable of such disclosure. I wonder if he hasn’t given honest expression to the thought that dare not speak its name in the hearts of most parents. For his part Johnson was no stranger to the terror that can come in the night and was frequently visited by dreams of his brother Nathaniel who died young.

Boswell and Johnson made the most of their time in St Andrews. They enjoyed a candle-lit walk to St Leonard’s College. They ate well at the houses of the Professors; ‘salmon, mackerel, herrings, ham, chicken, roast beef, apple pie’. There must have been many
opportunities
for chewing the cud and hen clucking. They inspected the student accommodation which they found to be ‘very commodious’. They make no mention of the stereos, iPods, Pot Noodles, discarded underwear, Snap Faxes, stolen police bollards, posters, pin ups, and condoms bought, as ever, more in hope than expectation. Boswell would certainly have noted the condoms had he seen any. He may even have stolen one or two as they were something of a specialist interest given the frequency of their appearance in his
London Journal
,
but were not always available judging by the existence of his illegitimate children.

At several points in St Andrews Johnson insisted on doffing his cap whenever he came across ecclesiastical demolition perpetrated in the name of the Reformation. David suggested his reaction was mirrored by most in the West when the news bulletins showed the mutilation by the Taliban of the Buddhas in Bamiyan Valley.

Writing to Mrs Thrale, Johnson describes meeting an old woman who lived with her cat in a semi-collapsed vault under the cathedral ruins. She claimed to be of royal extraction, thought her sons were probably dead and exalted in her two main possessions, these being a heap of turf for burning and ‘balls of coal dust’. When she told Boswell that her main occupation was wandering though the
graveyard
at night he asked if she had met any ghosts. She replied that although her evening strolls were largely ghost-free she always had premonitions before hearing that a relative had died. Perhaps her sons had chosen to avoid even this method of contacting their mum.

I struggle with St Andrews. Yes, it’s attractive and smart but I can’t get beyond my own prejudices. It still feels elitist and unnecessarily exclusive with pretensions beyond its status. Although Glass’s Inn where the two of them enjoyed ‘a good supper of rissered haddocks and mutton chops’ is no longer there we had agreed to buy a pint in the pub nearest the original site. This was easier said than done. The Castle Tavern was bricked up. Most of the adjacent premises bore names such as Psychic World, The Miller’s Tale and Anyone for Tennis. Not a decent boozer within 100 yards. Eventually we settled for the Central Bar and squeezed in alongside troops of yahs happily braying their way through the menu and ordering food that should have been beyond the means of your typical student.

There was one other customer who looked as if he might join us in a quick burst of class war if push came to shove but even he displayed odd tendencies. He would disappear at intervals but not before carefully placing beer mats on the top of each of his three pints. Was he fearful that passing bats might defecate in his ale? Was it a defence against someone spiking his drink with Ritalin? On
reflection
, unless he had bladder problems he was sneaking out the back for frequent smokes and was using beer mat semaphore to warn
unsuspecting
bar staff against pouring his temporarily neglected drinks down the sink.

Samuel Johnson chose St Andrews to deliver his thoughts on smoking; ‘To be sure, it is a shocking thing-blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people’s mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet or so.’

FOREST could use the words in their pro-smoking propaganda. The idea of beating your feet as a method of preserving the mind from total vacuity although undeniably cheaper than smoking has not caught on greatly.

David finally achieved closure in his earlier fixation by stuffing a huge baguette in his mouth while declaring happily ‘You can stick your mutton up your jumper!’ It was unclear if this was a promise or a threat.

There was nothing pretentious about the second hand bookshop at the foot of South Street. The proprietor seemed genuinely pleased to see potential customers and on asking if he could be of help in any way David replied with a positively Johnsonian flourish, ‘I would like to purchase the one first edition in your shop that is outrageously underpriced’. Thankfully this piece of facetiousness was received with good grace and there followed one of those perennial discussions with booksellers about the one that got away. On this occasion it was a first of Ian Rankin’s
Knots and Crosses
which had been unknowingly tossed into the pound box outside.

Dr Johnson’s father had been a second hand book seller and binder before overreaching himself with a doomed paper-making venture. Father and son enjoyed a complex, often acrimonious relationship. When he left Oxford Samuel declined the opportunity to work in the family business, and on an occasion that returned to haunt him, refused even to accompany his father to Uttoxeter market where he had a bookstall. In later life he underwent a public show of
repentance
: ‘I went to Uttoxeter in the rain, on the spot where my father’s stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and hoped the penance was expiatory.’

Although it was raining when we left the shop there was no large ungainly figure in frock coat rocking and muttering to himself.

Just at the moment when I thought I might have misjudged St. Andrews, a young man emerged from a bijou property onto the street
and complained in sulky but formidably upper crust tones that ‘Apart from anything else my bloody jumper is on inside out!’

He needed a good skelp from his mammy.

The short bus journey in the dusk to Leuchars was notable for the fleeting image of an agricultural worker, his tractor nearby, setting fire to a single small bale of hay. What was he doing? It wasn’t the time of year for stubble burning. Was he addicted to the evocative smell; was he a lone rural arsonist? Was he destroying evidence?

Subsequent research offered a perspective on his furtive behaviour. Stubble burning is an illegal activity in England under the Crop Residues (Burning) regulations of 1993. Although there is no express ban on stubble burning in Scotland it is strongly discouraged by environmental regulators particularly when it causes dark smoke to be released. Proximity to roads is another important factor.

I was surprised to discover that there was more to Leuchars than a railway station and massive RAF base. How many utterly tedious days had I endured at the air show over the years? Never able to reveal to my younger son the depth of my antipathy, I would enthuse over high-octane and testosterone-fuelled vertical ascents of NATO’s latest killing machines, breathe the rank burgers and put my hand into my pocket to buy yet another Airfix model.

Boswell wrote ‘… observing at Leuchars a church with an old tower we stopped to look at it.’ We did the same.

St Athelstane’s, built in 1182, dominates the housing scheme that surrounds it. Against the night sky it loomed black, a stranded architectural dinosaur overlooked by the reformation and left to suffer in exile from its own times. The iron ring on the door was not for turning. Just as well lest the black arch shot a hot breath of fried imps into the night before we both tumbled into the dark nightmare shaft.

That night I dreamed not of Mandalay but of two excursions with Johnson. If I had kept a pen by my bed I could have recalled more details.

In a forest of deciduous trees, green as a painting by Gauguin Dr Johnson’s attention was drawn by the guide to a stack of huge fallen trees piled one on top of the other and still smouldering. They were hollow. As he approached it was just possible to hear the wind playing the most delicate of tunes through the trees as if they were pan pipes.

Then we stood on a viaduct overlooking Warrington, somewhere I’ve never visited. This time the landscape was more Bruegel with tiny figures toiling in pastel coloured fields. The whole area was
punctuated
by the smoke from hundreds of small steam locomotives.