The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  My second objection was that Scotland needed another layer of government like a dose of influenza. It does nothing but clutter the corridors of power with more red tape, serving no purpose but the aggrandisement of politicians, the waste of money on the salaries of unnecessary civil servants, and the impoverishment of the unfortunate Scots who are going to have to foot an ever-lengthening bill.

  That the leaders of an independent Scotland will be only too happy to trade away that independence in return for admission to the fleshpots of Brussels for themselves and their families, goes without saying; they have the example of Westminster to copy.

  So while hoping against hope for the best for the dear old country, and wishing her people a greatness to match their ancestors’, I fear the worst—and that’s a right Scotch characteristic, too. I do hope it comes right for her, because she deserves it, and I, like the rest of mankind, owe her so much. She gave me my blood and bone and being, and that loyalty, so strong in the Highlander, that comes from clanship and pride in those forefathers who were the centre of the charge in the last brave cry of “Claymore!” at Culloden, and a few years later were Wolfe’s pathfinders up the Heights of Abraham. “Aye, indeed,” as my MacDonald grandmother used to say, “it’s no small thing to be a Friseal, a black Fraser, one of the smiling folk—and don’t you forget it.” I shan’t, honest, and neither will Simon and Nick and young Andrew.

  And yet, despite the pull of blood and history, and having finished my schooldays in Scotland, and served in a famous Highland regiment, and worked on its greatest newspaper while my children grew, and turned back at last to those western shores of my Viking MacNeill ancestors (for what is the Isle of Man but the most southerly of the Hebrides?)—despite all that, Scotland has never been home. A place to dream of returning to, perhaps, as the “Wandering Star” song has it, but above all a place to remember, although I know that the Scotland in my mind, the Scotland of summer holidays in childhood, is a never-never land that no longer exists.

  But it did, and I have never felt closer to it than I did then, running with bare feet squelching inside sodden gym-shoes, splashing through shallow burns the colour of whisky, slipping on stones fringed with brown slimy weed, and scrambling up the earthy scree beyond. It was dangerous work, for that scree was the side of the Khyber Pass, and the whole countryside was hotching with Afridis; how they hadn’t picked me off as I crossed the burn was a miracle. There were always at least two of them waiting in ambush when I scrambled over the heathery lip of the scree, but I disposed of them in a hectic tussle on the springy turf, wiped my sheath-knife in the grass, chased their baaing sheep deep into the bracken, and then raced full tilt down the hillside to the fort (my parents’ caravan) to refresh myself with Creamola Foam and biscuits. When you’ve been without food or water for three days, you need your Creamola Foam.

  Caravans were quite rare in those days. The car which pulled ours was an old Argyle, with carbide lamps, a hood, and a petrol-can strapped to the running-board; many of the roads we travelled were unmetalled and maintained by solitary men with red-rimmed eyes, shovelling chips into the pot-holes from their wheelbarrows. It was a Scotland of AA scouts and tweedy men in plus-fours, of occasional hikers and quiet farm-folk who sold us milk and eggs and spoke in strange, mincing accents, of still lochs like glass in the sunlight, and bakers’ vans chugging through empty glens to our camp sites. All you needed was a level patch to pull up on at the roadside, close to a burn, sufficient flat stones to build a fireplace, a grassy stretch for cricket and rounders, and screes to climb. Pine woods were essential, too, for kindling—if you could get it before the Iroquois got you, for the cool dark depths were haunted by their war-parties, and you needed to steal softly from tree to tree, making no sound on the carpet of pine needles.

  It will be gathered that I had a vivid imagination, fed by the “tuppenny bloods” which I devoured in the back of the car as we drove north from England each August, when I should have been drinking in the beauties of the scenery. “You’ll hurt your eyes,” my parents would say. “Look, there’s Ben Hooligan, and Tilliegollacher Castle, and just over that hill is where your great-grandfather broke his leg.” Often they would bicker gently about whether it was, in fact, Tilliegollacher or some other unpronounceable place—it might have been Glengoolicky or Aberinver or the wee house where Donald was sick after eating the cheese or the Camerons massacred somebody; I would leave them to it and get on with the Wolf of Kabul or Red Circle School, or fratch with my big sister on the back seat.

  For sadly I was something of a Philistine about Caledonia. I have no idea of where those magical camp-sites were, except for one that was always our first and last stop, in Dumfriesshire, where the misty rain would come sweeping over Glen Elven at dusk, and another at Halfway House on the Dalwhinnie road. Another was in Sutherland, at a place pronounced Scootchy Hall (how it was spelled, heaven knows, but there was a Wee Free kirk with a corrugated iron roof that we went to, where a precentor who must have been a hundred and ten years old would line out the psalms in an ecstatic, quavering falsetto, and I disgraced the family by giggling and had to be put out).

  I think I almost had a resistance to my national heritage, born no doubt of having to wear the kilt on Sundays in England—something which should not happen to any right-thinking seven year old. I was conscious of being half a stranger when we went to Scotland, and yet I knew I was a Highlander of the Highlands, and felt resentful of the natives who regarded me as an outsider. I had a knack of putting my infant foot in it: there were incidents like the precentor, and the occasion when I fled in terror at the sight and sound of an old crone in a shawl whining Gaelic songs by the roadside; I thought she was a witch (and still do), but I was rebuked by my grandmother for not showing a proper appreciation of “your country’s songs”.

  She was at pains to instruct me in my traditions; I remember when we visited my great-grandfather’s grave (to my shame, I don’t know whether it was at Balquhidder or Blair Atholl), and it was pointed out to me that he rested alongside the great Rob Roy MacGregor—and I suspect that one has graves in half the kirkyards in the southern Highlands—I asked, in my childish innocence: “Rob Roy was a robber, wasn’t he?” Granny’s basilisk eye turned on me. “He was no more a robber,” she said sternly, “than those who hunted him.”

  I learned something about the Highlands in that moment, and even more when we visited Killiecrankie, and stood by Dundee’s stone, with my father murmuring Aytoun’s verse and Granny, brooding grimly as she watched the mist swirling over the Garry, told me how the broadsword charge had shattered the government army in five minutes, and that was right, but the clansmen had been fighting for the Papist king, and that was wrong.

  “What’s the difference between us and the Catholics, Granny?” I asked, and my father coughed and sauntered off, whistling vaguely, while Granny took a deep breath. “The difference,” she said, and I wish John Knox (and Sir Thomas More) had been there to hear it, “is that we’re going to be saved, and they’re going to be damned.”

  She was, as you may gather, a very old and very formidable lady of strong opinions. I went in awe of her, and would listen wide-eyed on those golden August evenings to her stories of Campbell iniquity and MacGregor cunning, of Cameron subtlety, Stewart treachery, and MacDougall general wickedness. And I remember her moved, in a very strange way, when we visited the Field of Shirts, where in 1544 my Fraser ancestors deliberately put themselves in the way of a superior force of MacDonalds whose land they had been raiding, and fought all through a sweltering summer’s day until the MacDonalds were exhausted and there were only three Frasers left.

  “Only three,” said Granny, with tears in her eyes. “And you are all their people.” As I’ve said, she was a MacDonald.

  But for the most part those summers were running about the hills, and falling in deep brown pools, and building dams, and helping my father fry the breakfast on damp mornings, wriggling through bracken, learning to take “heather ste
ps”, fishing from boats on Loch Leven and Loch Awe, catching trout in the Breckachy burn by Halfway House, listening to my father reading Kidnapped and Blackcock’s Feather, shuddering at the huge red heather spiders spinning their webs among rotten branches, and jumping from boulder to boulder or rolling down grassy slopes, and collecting the milk from a farm at Portsonachan and watching the great crabs scuttling through the cool green depths of a Highland harbour, and seeing the glorious sunset behind Duncan Ban’s monument.

  It’s getting close to seventy years since, and I’ve hardly been back, except to the fringes, with my wife and my own children, picnicking by Loch Chon and skiting flat stones across the water and beating off the midges. We went to Glencoe once, my grandmother’s valley, to enjoy the gloom of that awesome place, and when we stopped by the roadside the children scattered into the wild like gulls. A busload of American tourists pulled up just as our younger son, aged four, emerged from the bracken in his tiny kilt and shirt, bare-legged and tousled, looking like a very small Highland bull. There were squeals of delight from the American females at the sight of a genuine little Scotch laddie—they probably imagined he lived in a cave somewhere up the hill—and cameras clicked while he surveyed them stonily before turning silently and plunging back into the undergrowth, no doubt going off to find a scree to climb.

  I should have warned him about the Afridis, perhaps—but on second thoughts I probably didn’t need to.

  * Equally alarming are the signs that England, that most tolerant and easygoing of nations, is beginning to get fed up with Scotland. This is not surprising. They are ruled by a Scottish cabinet, and a most inferior one. They have no say in Scottish affairs, but Scottish M.P.s sitting at Westminster (where they are grossly over-represented) can vote on purely English matters. And England continues to foot a disproportionate amount of the bill. One wonders when English patience will finally wear through.

  SHOOTING SCRIPT 5

  “Phlam with Cheese” for the Stars

  I DON’T KNOW where Djablak is, and at this stage of the game I don’t much care. I don’t even know how to spell it, although I’ve hunted every conceivable combination of Dj-, Jh-, Dy-, Zh-, and even Dzh-through all my maps and gazetteers. Its pronunciation lies between Zh-and Dj-, and it’s somewhere in Yugoslavia, several hours drive up the road from Titograd, but whether it is in Montenegro or Serbia or Kosovo I cannot say. No doubt clued-up people like Edward Fox and Harrison Ford could place it immediately, but they were there longer than I was, and probably it is burned more deeply in their memories.

  It’s no more than a village of a few houses and the most eccentric hotel in the world, all in a beautiful mountain setting, lofty peaks, springy turf, rocky outcrops, and air so pure you can almost drink it. But it contains something which is worth going a long way to see, and is one of the most moving sights I’ve ever been privileged to look at. Zhablak cemetery is much too large for such a little mountain village, row upon row upon row of tombstones, each with the photograph of the buried person glazed into the stone by that astonishing process which I’ve seen only in Eastern Europe. So far as I remember, they are all men, young and middle-aged for the most part, but some are old and white-haired and some are boys no more than children.

  They have one thing in common: the year of death in every case is 1943. For Zhablak is the place where the Yugoslav partisans, driven back into their mountains by the German advance, made their last stand, and stopped the invaders in their tracks. They did it at terrible cost, and every year Marshal Tito used to come to honour the heroes who sleep in the hillside cemetery.

  In 1977 there was a sort of fictional re-enactment of the Yugoslav Thermopylae, filmed under the title of Force Ten from Navarone. It was a sequel to The Guns of Navarone, and starred Robert Shaw, Harrison Ford, Barbara Bach, Edward Fox, Franco Nero, the late and much lamented Alan Badel, and Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed of the Rocky films). Guy Hamilton directed, assisted by the irrepressible Bert Batt (singled out by John Huston as one of the assistant directors). They had a script but weren’t satisfied with it, and I was called in, probably because Guy and I had already worked together on Superman and found ourselves to be highly compatible.

  It was a very sudden summons that took me to Yugoslavia, and in the short interval between a signing session at Hatchards and the flight to Zagreb I was briefed at his Jermyn Street office by Carl Foreman, who had done the original screen story from Alistair MacLean’s novel. I say briefed: we spent most of the time discussing a project which he thought I might like to write, about Phileas Fogg’s American son going round the world in eighty hours or eighty minutes or whatever. But he did find time to tell me that in addition to making adjustments to the beginning, middle, and end of the story, which was about British and American parachutists helping the partisans to blow up a bridge, I would have to write a new part for Edward Fox, a last-minute replacement for another actor who, during a phone call to the producer, had become so incensed with his employer that he had wrenched the phone off the wall. This had concluded their conversation and the actor’s connection with the picture. Edward, the ultimate laid-back Englishman, was as different as could be from the phone-wrencher, a volatile Scot, so adjusting the part would be an interesting exercise.

  Oh, and one other thing: there would have to be two versions of the final script, one for shooting and the other for the Yugoslav authorities. (This was a not uncommon procedure at the time, when regimes, especially totalitarian ones, tended to be terribly sensitive about how they were portrayed in the movies.) I asked Carl, no doubt sarcastically, if that was all; he said, please, would I give the Phileas Fogg idea serious thought, lent me his typewriter, and wished me luck.

  Guy Hamilton was waiting in Zagreb, where we started work at the hotel. Every director has his own methods, and I knew one of Guy’s from our time on Superman: where practicable, and a scene seemed to call for it, he liked to work out positions, movements, lines of sight, perspectives, and so on, in as much detail as possible, before the scene was even written. For example, A and B are hiding in a railway wagon, watching their comrade C, disguised as a German, talking to an enemy sentry D, who mustn’t see A and B, so C has to block his line of sight, but since C is actually a traitor, he must use looks and body language to convey this to D, without giving himself away to A and B, etc., etc.…you get the idea (I hope).

  So Guy and I spent much time walking around a hotel room, manoeuvring for position, looking at each other over our shoulders, peering round furniture. working out who could see (or not see) what from where, and even getting carried away to such an extent that we finished up improvising dialogue, acting it up with cries of “Das is not correct, schweinhund!” and “Barnsby, I think the bastard’s selling us out!” or words to that effect. Anyone, say a waiter or cleaner, who had happened in on us would have thought us certifiable—but it worked marvellously, for I could then write the scene knowing exactly how it would play physically, to the last look or turn of the head.

  At the other extreme were such scenes as the closing moment in the picture, when the bridge had been destroyed, the Germans foiled, and we were looking for an ending. I suggested that since our heroes were cut off behind German lines, their mutual congratulations could be interrupted by their leader pointing out that they were going to have a hell of a long walk home; without hesitation, Guy said “Sold”, and no further discussion was needed. (Robert Shaw loved it, did it as only he could, and it worked.)

  Given his film background, it wasn’t surprising that Guy treated absolute clarity as a priority—if only more modern directors did likewise. He went to what some film-makers might have thought an odd length, showing the rough-cut of a picture to the cleaning ladies of Pinewood, or whatever studio he was at, looking not for a critique, but to satisfy himself that an ordinary audience would understand everything they saw and heard.

  We drove up to Zhablak on a bleak winter evening, through endless gloomy forests fringing deep ravines and surrounded by t
owering cliffs. There seemed to be no other vehicles on the road, and the only sign of life was the occasional gleam of a light deep in the woods; it was real Dracula country, the road wound on and on and ever upwards, civilisation seemed to be dwindling away behind us, and we beguiled the time imagining how the gigantic size, flowing beard, and menacing appearance of Richard Kiel (Jaws of the Bond films) who was in the cast, could be used to advantage by having him lumber out of the woods by night, dressed à la Karloff, for the benefit of any American tourists who might chance by. Our facetious speculations didn’t seem quite so amusing when we arrived, after hours of weary driving, on the Zhablak plateau in the dead of night, with its double line of villagers’ houses and the Hotel Zhablak, presently to be rechristened the Hotel Japlacquered, standing in sinister isolation at the end of the street.

  For a mountain-top in Montenegro, or wherever, I guess it wasn’t bad, and certainly worth more stars than some I have struck, like the old Hotel Tashkent with its bathrooms from whose bourne no traveller returned. But it wasn’t the Savoy or the Ritz either, being constructed, so far as I could see, entirely of wood, with tiny bare rooms, no heating, medieval mattresses, and as for porters, don’t make me laugh. I can still hear Bert Batt’s plaintive Cockney cry as we dragged our luggage up the darkened stairs: “Why are we ’ere, George? Why are we ’ere?” As C. P. Snow would say, I had no comfort to give him.

  But the glory of the Hotel Zhablak was its dining room, a curious long chamber divided halfway by an open fireplace, with communicating arches either side—not that anyone in his right mind would have wanted to communicate, for while we occupied the VIP end, the popular side was patronised by the locals, a typically Balkan clientele, which is to say they were an armed, passionate, and occasionally violent crew whom Blackbeard Teach would have thought twice about enlisting. On two occasions fighting broke out beyond the fireplace, and while no shots were fired it may have been a near thing—the catering manager of our company, touring the countryside in search of delicacies to supplement the Hotel Zhablak’s eccentric menu (of which more in a moment) returned to report that at one of the farms he had visited, his host had kept a loaded revolver on the table and kept glancing hopefully out of the window, waiting for a neighbour who had displeased him to pass by.