The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Perhaps this was something in the blood. My ancestry is entirely Highland Scottish, Celtic-Norman-Viking mostly, and they have always been great story-tellers; my own grandmothers, one a Glencoe MacDonald and the other a Hebridean MacNeill, used to hold me spellbound with their tales; for that matter, everyone in the family told stories, usually of a quite sensational nature, which is right in the Celtic tradition—as witness the names of Scott, Stevenson, Buchan, Ian Fleming, J. M. Barrie, Conan Doyle, and many others. Romance and adventure are at the heart of Scottish literature—or rather, since literature is a pretentious word, at the heart of their storytelling. Anyway, for whatever reason, the bug of the senachie, the Highland teller of tales, seems to have bitten me early, and has never let go.

  My father was a family doctor, the son of a grocer in the village of Cardross, near Glasgow. Grandpa Fraser had left his people’s croft in Sutherland as a boy, walking south to Glasgow to find employment, and sustaining himself on his southern journey with oatmeal and water mixed in his shoe. He prospered, and two of his four children, my father and an uncle, graduated in medicine at Glasgow University, thanks to the “Carnegie money” which Andrew Carnegie provided for young Scots who couldn’t afford the tuition fees. At Glasgow Royal Infirmary my father met and married a nursing sister, Anne Struth Donaldson, in 1916, and then went off to war in East Africa where he became Captain William Fraser, Royal Army Medical Corps, serving briefly with the Legion of Frontiersmen, a remarkable group of adventurers too old for normal military service, but enlisted for their irregular experience and knowledge of rough service.

  Having come out of the war with a wound and a Mention in Despatches, my father, like many another young Scottish doctor, came south after the war, and settled in Carlisle, the Border City which had been England’s northern bulwark in the old days. My sister Ila (named after my Hebridean grandmother’s island birthplace) was born in 1920, and I followed in 1925, on April 2, a birthdate which I share with Hans Andersen and Casanova, and that piece of irrelevant information is typical of my talent for accumulating trivial and utterly useless knowledge which I will share at the drop of a hat. (What did Claude Rains drop in a wastebasket at the end of Casablanca? Who were the quartermasters on HMS Bounty? What was the name of Tarzan’s ape mother? These things remain, but don’t ask me what exegesis means.)

  My birth took place in a house built on the site of a medieval leper colony (my mother claimed that she suffered from a sore throat all through our occupation), but when I was two we moved to a house which my father had built on a hill in the suburbs, where the ancient Britons had had a fort, or curragh, hence the district’s name, Currock. And there I had a very happy childhood, climbing trees, playing football, killing pirates and redskins in the woods nearby, being chased off railway property by gruff men in big boots, and running in gangs with like-minded urchins. My education began in a small private school from which I was once sent home in disgrace for saying “piss” (female teachers were easily shocked in 1930) and was continued at Carlisle Grammar School, a foundation of immense antiquity—officially it was twelfth century, but it traced its history back six hundred years before that, to the days when Christianity came to the Border country.

  Like the dear old red city itself, the school had survived more than a thousand years of siege and battle, of invasion by Norse sea-rovers, medieval Scottish armies, Cromwell’s Ironsides, and Prince Charlie’s Highlanders; its boys had helped the townsfolk man the city walls against Bruce’s besiegers after Bannockburn, and played football under its castle wall for the entertainment of Mary Queen of Scots. School and city had endured those turbulent centuries when the Borderland had been dominated by the terrible armed bands of pillagers known as the Border reivers who created a lawless noman’s-land between England and Scotland in Queen Elizabeth’s time—and the surnames of those riding brigands were identical with the names of the boys in my class at school, if not with mine, for I was a Scot, “an outman and forroner”, and I learned much about racism and race rivalry, if not about race hatred, in those early years under the chestnut trees of the old school, with its strange traditions and catchphrases which Chaucer might have recognised.

  It was officially what was called a “public” school, which in England conjures images of exclusive, privileged education of the kind provided by Eton and Harrow, from whom it could not have differed more dramatically. The old grammar schools carried the cachet of “public” simply because of their age, and Carlisle Grammar School from time immemorial had educated, without social distinction, the cleverest boys in the city, who entered it annually after competitive examination. I was not among them; I was one of the few whose fathers paid the annual £10 fee, and was consequently in danger of being swamped scholastically by the flood of talent that poured in from the elementary schools each year. I languished miserably at the bottom of my class in French, Latin, maths, and the sciences, but perplexed my fellows by coming first in English and history. Not that that mattered, any more than it mattered whether you were a fee-payer or a free scholar; the leading brains with their eyes on Oxford and Cambridge scholarships might compete with a ferocity worthy of their bandit ancestors, but for the rest it was games that counted, and I could hold my own at cricket and rugby, and aspire to championship at fives, that brutal and ancient fore-runner of squash which left you with red and swollen palms after an hour of thrashing a hard and tiny ball with your bare hands.

  It was a strange, wonderful education, in much more than book learning. That old school took you in, whoever and whatever you were, and wrapped you up and absorbed you in a tradition that went back almost to the time when King Arthur sat in “Merrie Caerlile” and Childe Roland set off on his mythical pilgrimage. You wore the black and gold jacket and the cap with its odd hollow star as though they were robes of honour (which, of course, they were) and sang the school song, which naturally, unlike any other school anthem, was a blood-thirsty war-chant about the city’s desperate past, with an intense but only half-understood pride. Children who grow up in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, and invade the city museum to sit in its ancient punishment stocks, and scramble over the very chair in which Bonny Prince Charlie slept, and view the graffiti scratched by prisoners of war in the battered old Cathedral where Cromwell stabled his horses, and play on the battlements where Edward I and Richard III once walked—such children tend to take history for granted and give it little thought. Perhaps I was different; outman and forroner though I was, the Border City left its mark on me, and on my voice (for I can slip with perfect ease into that strange snarling dialect that is the Cumbrian speech).

  The Grammar School has gone now, a millennium and more of incalculable worth and tradition swept away by socialist reformers to whom competitive examination seems to be anathema; what Bruce couldn’t subdue has been destroyed in the name of “progress”. It taught me more of life than it did of learning; my education, such as it has been, was founded on ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia which my parents bought for my sister and me in a moment which I can only count inspired. Hour after hour I seem to have spent, prone on the carpet on summer afternoons when sunlight fell on the pages, and winter days with the rain lashing the windows, lost in those marvellous volumes.

  I went for the stories, at first, the tales and fables of every land on earth, but the genius of Mee’s work was that to get from one section of stories to another you had to leaf through pages of poetry and painting and natural history and science-simply-explained—it was just one dam’ thing after another: coloured pre-Raphaelite paintings and verses by Shakespeare and Browning and pictures of volcanoes erupting and proverbs and puzzles and How To Make Your Own Telephone With A Tin Can And A Piece Of String (which didn’t work) and How To Blow Over A Brick (which did, oddly enough—you use a paper bag) and photographs of Italian statues and French churches and Albanian peasants and snakes and Turkish janissaries and spiders (“Little Many Legs” was the caption to a tarantula, so help me) and illust
rations of famous people’s autographs from Erasmus to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and stuff about Greek philosophy and Egyptian burial rituals and religion and history and you-name-it, it was all there—and some of it stuck. Haphazard, no doubt, disorganised and random, but if there is a name that I thank God for, it is that of Arthur Mee, whose books influenced me more than any other.

  It was, by modern standards, hopelessly reactionary, being thoroughly Christian and British Imperial, preaching values which are now thought outmoded, and inculcating lessons which are no longer taught. It was strong on duty and responsibility and discipline and good manners; it was not, repeat not, politically correct, for it was honest and true. Not that I imagine I came away from it a better and wiser child; I was only there for the information and the pictures and statues and stories and Six Easy Tricks A Boy Can Do With An Empty Matchbox. And I have seen to it that my three sets of grandchildren have the Children’s Encyclopedia. Who knows, they too may be entranced by the picture of some emperor or other picking up Titian’s brush for him, and Michelangelo striking the rock and bringing out Moses, and even Little Many Legs, when their computers and electronic games break down.

  But if Arthur Mee was the bedrock, the icing on top were the prizes my father had won at school—books by R. M. Ballantyne and his like, telling tales of high adventure far away, and Hawthorne’s Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales (which I know I was reading at the age of five, for it was a Christmas present with the date inscribed), and Norse Legends, and Kingsley’s Heroes, and the children’s writers of the time, Grahame and Milne and, inevitably, Alice, and the “tuppenny bloods”, those boys’ weekly magazines like Wizard and Hotspur, packed with stories about cowboys and buccaneers and secret agents and defenders of the Empire—no wonder I finished up writing the same kind of stuff. Nor was comedy neglected—that immortal work, 1066 And All That, had just come out (and I maintain that there is no better starting point for a serious study of history than that book), and when I was eight I encountered a writer who was my humorous hero then and still is: Stephen Leacock. When I borrowed Nonsense Novels from the grammar school library a lordly prefect assured me that I wouldn’t understand it; the finer nuances may have escaped me, but I laughed myself sick over it nonetheless. No writer surely was ever so funny with so few words.

  And then when I was ten the thunderbolt struck. His name was Sabatini, and he opened up the past for me as he has done for millions—many of them writers. His great art was to present history not as a dry chronicle of names and dates and treaties, but as a real drama, an unending adventure story that far outstripped fiction, related in an elegant, sophisticated, half-cynical style that bore the reader effortlessly along. Critical opinion has not been kind to him, probably because he sold in vast quantities and translated easily to the cinema—that was another formative experience, watching open-mouthed as the curtains parted and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s trumpets came thundering out over the credits of Captain Blood.

  The cinema, to my generation, was what television is today, discouraged by teachers and parents, but caviare to the general. We patrolled the North-West Frontier with Gary Cooper and Victor McLaglen, went hand in hand through Sherwood and across the Spanish Main with Errol Flynn, sauntered nonchalantly through the dungeons of Zenda and the sands of Algeria with Ronald Colman (and learned much of courtly behaviour and imperturbable style from that hero); mimicked the wisecracks of Cagney, and fell about at Laurel and Hardy. Tom Mix and Barrack-Room Ballads; soccer stars and the poems of Henry Newbolt, Alfred Noyes, and Walter de la Mare; Edward G. Robinson and Drake going west; Cecil DeMille and Tchaikovsky’s Chanson Triste and Mendelssohn’s Spring Song (scraped out execrably on the violin my parents had insisted on my learning); vague names like Hitler and Mussolini in the background—it was a strange, mixed culture into which algebra and Latin verbs and Archimedes’ principle hardly intruded; no wonder my parents, despairing of school reports which included remarks like “A strict neutral in the battle for knowledge”, decided I needed a proper education, and a Scottish education at that.

  The choice lay between George Watson’s in Edinburgh, and Glasgow Academy, both prestigious public schools. Watson’s building looked new and energetic, but there was a trail of blood spots on one of its marbled corridors, and I voted for Glasgow Academy, which looked more used and familiar and informal, and the boys were a friendly, slightly raffish lot. I was to be a boarder, and I suspect my father was impressed by the boarding-house master, a bald and commanding ex-Indian Army officer, Captain John Colman Smith, with a cold eye and a parade-ground bark, usually of “What-what?” and “You silly young fool!”

  “Coley” was a martinet, and as kind and decent a man as I have ever known. He and his wife ran the house of thirty boys (reduced to four in the first year of the war) fairly and strictly; it was an education you didn’t get at home; you made your own bed, polished your shoes, looked after your own clothes and effects, and learned to take care of yourself in a way which was to pay dividends later. Coley was in charge of the Academy’s games, coaching the rugby team with fanatical energy, and it did me no harm that I was a competent full back and fast bowler, eventually winning my first team colours at rugby and cricket. But rugby was the game, played at a level unknown in Carlisle, and I thanked God I was a back and not a forward as I watched Coley training the heaving, straining pack, belabouring the crouched mass of bodies with his umbrella and bellowing “Get that bottom down!” He was also in charge of the school gymnasium, and during the war was employed by the BBC to keep the nation fit with early-morning broadcasts in which his stentorian commands ran through the length and breadth of the British Isles.

  Coley was a great man of the old school, what used to be called an English gentleman, and ruled by personality alone; he never needed to use corporal punishment, which was common in the school itself.

  Scholastically, Glasgow Academy was formidable. Its brightest boys won exhibitions and scholarships to the great universities, and for the rest it turned out aspiring doctors, lawyers, accountants, and businessmen for what was then one of the world’s great mercantile centres. Among its alumni were the playwrights J. M. Barrie and James Bridie; Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, and the musical comedy star, Jack Buchanan. Its teaching staff in my time was a curious mixture of Scots in the old, sound pedagogic tradition, and Englishmen, most of them young and enthusiastic sportsmen, from Oxford and Cambridge. They gave probably as good an education as was obtainable anywhere on earth, and if I continued on my placid way, first in English and nowhere in any other subject, it was not their fault. And one of them at least was a profound influence on my life, not by his teaching but by his unstinting encouragement: he was the man who convinced me that I was a writer.

  His name was Walter Barradell-Smith, head of English, and himself a prolific author of school stories for boys under the name of Richard Bird. He was small, sturdy, grizzled of hair and crimson of face, which earned him the nickname Beery, apparently irascible in speech and manner but invariably good-humoured and, to me at least, a priceless friend. Until I met him, I hadn’t thought of myself as a writer; indeed, I felt that English composition was something I wasn’t very good at. Beery never taught me to write; he never even said I might have a talent that way; he simply treated me as though I was already a writer at the age of thirteen, marking my essays extravagantly (it seemed to me) whatever the subject, whatever I wrote. Analysis and parsing I knew nothing about, and don’t try me even now; I was in my forties before I discovered what an adverb was. Beery didn’t seem to care; he simply returned my essays with eighteen or nineteen out of twenty every time, and when I ignored the subject he’d set for composition, and took off on some wild flight of my own, he would smile and nod and say nothing as he appended the inevitable high mark.

  Gradually I came to accept that this was something I could do; after all, he was a professional judging by professional standards, so who was I to argue? When I was about sixteen, Coley summoned me to his study, s
miling for once, and told me that he had heard Beery enthusing in the common room about some youngster who was going to make a name as a writer, and on inquiry discovered that he was talking about me. That impressed me, and I began to wonder about perhaps being an author some day—heaven knew I wasn’t educationally equipped to be anything else, and it was wartime anyway, and the Army would soon beckon, and writing or any other career would have to wait. Beery himself continued to say nothing, just marking me as highly as ever, and I would suggest to any teacher who thinks he has a budding writer on his hands, that he LEAVE HIM ALONE to write whatever he pleases the way he wants to write it. That was what Beery did with me, and however far short I may have fallen of the name he prophesied for me, it is thanks to him I’ve made a living doing what I like best.

  One thing he did teach me, a love for Shakespeare. He took us through Henry IV, himself playing Falstaff with a gusto worthy of the Old Vic; then it was Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth, and the comedies, and by some magic he brought it all to life so that the classroom became the Globe and we the players, with himself the star. He even inspired me to take part in a school production of Hamlet, but I was demoted from Laertes to Francisco for losing my temper in rehearsing the duel and trying to kill the Prince of Denmark.

  Strange, I can remember only one thing Beery said on the subject of writing: “Never say that someone is a bad writer. I once read Tarzan of the Apes, and thought it most appallingly written…until I thought, ‘No, this man has caught the imagination of untold millions with his words. How on earth can he be called a bad writer?’”