by Bill Bryson
Moments later, for such is Thurso’s diminutive size, I was out on the open highway and cruising with a light heart towards John O’Groats. It was an arrestingly empty landscape, with nothing much but fields of billowy winter-bleached grass running down to a choppy sea and the hazy Orkneys beyond, but the feeling of spaciousness was exhilarating and for the first time in years I felt comparatively safe behind a wheel. There was absolutely nothing to crash into.
You really are on the edge of a great deal of emptiness when you ‘ reach the far north of Scotland. Only 27,000 people live in the whole of Caithness - roughly the population of Haywards Heath or Eastleigh in an area considerably larger than most English counties. More than half of that population is accounted for by just two towns, Thurso and Wick, and none of it by John O’Groats since John O’Groats isn’t a community at all but just a place to stop and buy postcards and ice-creams.
It is named for Jan de Groot, a Dutchman who ran a ferry service from there to somewhere else (Amsterdam if he had any sense) in the fifteenth century. He charged 4d a trip apparently, and they will tell you in these parts that that sum became known ever after as a groat, but alas it is a pathetic fiction. It is more probable that Groot was named Groat after the money rather than it for he. But anyway who gives a shit?
Today John O’Groats consists of a capacious car park, a little harbour, a lonely white hotel, a couple of ice-cream kiosks and three or four shops selling postcards, sweaters and videos by a singer named Tommy Scott. I thought there was supposed to be a famous finger-sign telling you how far it was to Sydney and Los Angeles, but I couldn’t find it; perhaps they take it in out of season so that people like me don’t carry it off as a souvenir. Only one of the shops was open. I went in and was surprised to find that there were three middle-aged ladies working there, which seemed a bit excessive as I was obviously the only tourist for 400 miles. The ladies were exceedingly cheerful and chipper and greeted me warmly with those wonderful Highland accents - so clinically precise and yet so dulcet. I unfolded some jumpers so that they would have something to do after I left, watched open-mouthed a demo video for Tommy Scott singing perky Scottish tunes on various blowy headlands (I’m saying nothing), bought some postcards, had a lingering cup of coffee, chatted with the ladies about the weather, then stepped out into thegusty car park and realized that I had about exhausted the possibilities presented by John O’Groats.
I wandered around above the harbour, peered with hooded hands into the windows of the little museum, which was closed till spring, looked appreciatively at the view across the Pentland Firth to Stroma and the Old Man of Hoy, and then wandered back to the car. You probably know this already, but John O’Groats is not the northernmost point of the Scottish mainland. That distinction belongs to a spot called Dunnet Head, five or six miles away down a nearby single-lane road, so I went there now. Dunnet Head offers even less to the world in the way of diversions than John O’Groats, but it has a handsome unmanned lighthouse and sensational sea views, and a nice sense of being a long way from anywhere.
I stood on the gusty eminence gazing at the view for a long time, waiting for some profundity to steal over me, since this was the end of the line, as far as I was going. Part of me longed to catch a ferry to the outward islands, to follow the scattered outcrops of stone all the way up to distant Shetland, but I was out of time and anyway there didn’t seem a great deal of need. Whatever its bleak and airy charms, Shetland would still be just another piece of Britain, with the same shops, the same television programmes, the same people in the same Marks & Spencer cardigans. I didn’t find this depressing at all - rather the contrary - but I didn’t feel any pressing need to see it just now. It would still be there next time.
I had one more port of call in my hired Ford. Six or seven miles south of Thurso lies the village of Halkirk, now forgotten but famous during the Second World War as a deeply, deeply unpopular posting for British soldiers on account of its remoteness and the reputed unfriendliness of the locals. The soldiers sang a charming little refrain that went,
This fucking town’s a fucking cuss
No fucking trams, no fucking bus,
Nobody cares for fucking us In fucking Halkirk
No fucking sport, no fucking games.
No fucking fun. The fucking dames
Won’t even give their fucking names In fucking Halkirk
and carries on in a similarly affectionate spirit for another ten stanzas. (In answer to the obvious question, I’d looked earlier and, no it wasn’t one of Tommy Scott’s standards.) So I went to Halkirk now, along the lonely B874. Well, there was nothing much to Halkirk - just a couple of streets on a road to nowhere, with a butcher’s, a builder’s merchants, two pubs, a little grocery, and a village hall with a war memorial. There was no sign that Halkirk had ever been more than a dreary little interruption to the general emptiness around it, but the memorial contained the names of sixty-three dead from the First World War (nine of them named Sinclair and five named Sutherland) and eighteen from the Second World War.
You could see for miles across grassy plains from the edges of the village, but there was no sign anywhere of tumbledown army barracks. In fact, there was no sign that there had ever been anything in this district but endless grassy plains. I went into the grocery in investigative mood. It was the strangest grocery - a large shed-like room, barely lit and nearly empty except for a couple of .racks of metal shelves near the door. These, too, were nearly empty but for a few scattered packets of odds and ends. There was a man on the till and an old guy ahead of me making some small purchase, so I asked them about the army camp.
‘Oh, aye,’ said the proprietor. ‘Big POW camp. We had fourteen thousand Germans here at the end of the war. There’s a book here all about it.’ To my small astonishment, given the meagreness of the other stocks, he had a stack of picture books by the till called Caithness in the War or something like that and he handed me one to examine. It was full of the usual pictures of bombed-out houses and pubs with people standing around scratching their heads in consternation or looking at the camera with those idiot grins that people in disaster pictures always wear, as if they’re thinking, Well, at least we’ll be in Picture Post. I didn’t find any pictures of soldiers looking bored in Halkirk, and there wasn’t any mention of the village in the index. The book was ambitiously priced at £15.95.
‘Lovely book,’ said the proprietor encouragingly. ‘Good value.’
‘We had fourteen thousand Germans here during the war,’ said the old boy in a deaf bellow.
I couldn’t think of a tactful way of asking about Halkirk’s dire reputation. ‘It must have been pretty lonely for the British soldiers, I bet,’ I suggested speculatively.
‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ disagreed the man. ‘There’s Thurso justdown the road, you see, and Wick if you fancy a change. There was dancing back then,’ he added a trifle ambiguously, then nodded at the book in my hands. ‘Good value, that.’
‘Is there anything left of the old base?’
‘Well, the buildings are gone, of course, but if you go out the back way’ - he gestured in the appropriate direction - ‘you can still see the foundations.’ He was silent for a moment and then he said, ‘So will you be having the book?’
‘Oh - well, I might come back for it,’ I lied and handed it back.
‘It’s good value,’ said the man.
‘Fourteen thousand Germans there was,’ called the older man as I left.
I had another look around the surrounding countryside on foot, and then drove around for a bit in the car, but I couldn’t find any sign of a prison camp, and gradually it dawned on me that it hardly mattered, so in the end I drove back to Thurso and returned the car to the Ford dealer, to the frank surprise of the friendly fellow since it was only a little after two in the afternoon.
‘Are you sure there isn’t anywhere else you want to go?’ he said. ‘It seems a shame when you’ve hired the car for the day.’
‘Whe
re else could I go?’ I asked.
He thought for a minute. ‘Well, nowhere really.’ He looked a little downcast.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen plenty,’ and I meant it in the broadest sense.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
NOW HERE IS WHY I WILL ALWAYS STAY AT THE PENTLAND HOTEL WHEN I am in Thurso. The night before I left I asked the kindly lady at the checkout desk for a wake-up call at 5 a.m. as I had to catch an early train south. And she said to me - perhaps you should sit down if you are not sitting already - she said, ‘Would you like a cooked breakfast?’
I thought she must be a bit dim, frankly, so I said: ‘I’m sorry, I meant five a.m. I’ll be leaving at half-past five, you see. Half-past five a.m. In the morning.’
‘Yes, dear. Would you like a cooked breakfast?’
‘At five a.m.?’
‘It’s included in the room rate.’
And damn me if this wonderful little establishment didn’t fix me up with a handsome plate of fried food and a pot of hot coffee at 5.15 the following pre-dawn.
And so I left the hotel a happy and fractionally fatter man, and waddled up the road in darkness to the station and there met my second surprise of the morning. The place was packed with women, all standing around on the platform in festive spirits, filling the chill, dark air with clouds of breath and happy Highland chatter, and waiting patiently for the guard to finish his fag and open the train doors.
I asked a lady what was up and she told me they were all off to Inverness to do their shopping. It was like this every Saturday. They would ride for the best part of four hours, stock up on Marks &c Spencer’s knickers and plastic vomit and whatever else Invernesshad that Thurso hadn’t, which was quite a lot, then catch the 6 p.m. train home, arriving back in time for bed.
And so we rode through the misty early morning, a great crowd of us, crammed snugly together on a two-carriage train, in happy, expectant mood. At Inverness the train terminated and we all piled off, the ladies to do their shopping, I to catch the 10.35 to Glasgow. As I watched them go, I found to my small surprise that I rather envied them. It seemed an extraordinary business, the idea of rising before dawn to do a little shopping in a place like Inverness and then not getting home till after ten, but on the other hand I don’t think I had ever seen such a happy band of shoppers.
The little train to Glasgow was nearly empty and the countryside lushly scenic. We went through Aviemore, Pitlochry, Perth and on to Gleneagles, with a pretty station, now sadly boarded. And then at last, some eight hours after rising from my bed that morning, we were in Glasgow. It seemed odd after so many long hours of travelling to step from Queen Street Station and find myself still in Scotland.
At least it wasn’t a shock to the system. I remember when I first came to Glasgow in 1973 stepping from this very station and being profoundly stunned at how suffocatingly dark and soot-blackened the city was. I had never seen a place so choked and grubby. Everything in it seemed black and cheerless. Even the local accent seemed born of clinkers and grit. St Mungo’s Cathedral was so dark that even from across the road it looked like a two-dimensional cut-out. And there were no tourists - none at all. Glasgow may be the largest city in Scotland, but my Let’s Go guide to Europe didn’t even mention it.
In the subsequent years Glasgow has, of course, gone through a glittering and celebrated transformation. Scores of old buildings in the city centre have been sandblasted and lovingly buffed, so that their granite surfaces gleam anew, and dozens more were vigorously erected in the heady boom years of the 1980s - more than £l billion of new offices in the previous decade alone. The city acquired one of the finest museums in the world in the Burrell Collection and one of the most intelligent pieces of urban renewal in the Princes Square shopping centre. Suddenly the world began cautiously to come to Glasgow and thereupon discovered to its delight that this was a city densely endowed with splendid museums, lively pubs, world-class orchestras, and no fewer than seventy parks, more than any other city of its size in Europe. In
1990 Glasgow was named European City of Culture, and no-one laughed. Never before had a city’s reputation undergone a more Dramatic and sudden transformation - and none, as far as I am concerned, deserves it more.
Among the city’s many treasures, none shines brighter, in my view than the Burrell Collection. After checking into my hotel, I hastened there now by taxi, for it is a long way out.
‘D’ye nae a lang roon?’ said the driver as we sped along a motorway towards Pollok Park by way of Clydebank and Oban.
Tm sorry,’ I said for I don’t speak Glaswegian.
‘D’ye dack ma fanny?’
I hate it when this happens - when a person from Glasgow speaks to me. Tm so sorry,’ I said and floundered for an excuse. ‘My ears are very bad.’
‘Aye, ye nae hae doon a lang roon,’ he said, which I gathered meant Tm going to take you a very long way around and look at you a lot with these menacing eyes of mine so that you’ll begin to wonder if perhaps I’m taking you to a disused warehouse where friends of mine are waiting to beat you up and take your money,’ but he said nothing further and delivered me at the Burrell without incident.
How I like the Burrell Collection. It is named for Sir William Burrell, a Scottish shipowner, who in 1944 left the city his art collection on the understanding that it be placed in a country setting within the city boundaries. He was worried - not unreasonably - about air pollution damaging his artworks. Unable to decide what to do with this sumptuous windfall, the city council did, astonishingly, nothing. For the next thirty-nine years, some truly exceptional works of art lay crated away in warehouses, all but forgotten. Finally in the late 1970s, after nearly four decades of • dithering, the city engaged a gifted architect named Barry Gasson, who designed a trim and restrained building noted for its airy rooms set against a woodland backdrop and for the ingenious way architectural features from BurrelPs Collection - medieval doorways and lintels and the like - were incorporated into the fabric of the building. It opened in 1983 to widespread acclaim.
Burrell was not an especially rich man, but goodness me he could select. The gallery contains only 8,000 items but they come from all over - from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome - and nearly every one of them (with the exception of some glazed porcelain “gurines of flower girls, which he must have picked up during afever) is stunning. I spent a long, happy afternoon wandering through the many rooms, pretending, as I sometimes do in these circumstances, that I had been invited to take any one object home with me as a gift from the Scottish people in recognition of my fineness as a person. In the end, after much agonizing, I settled on a Head of Persephone from fifth-century-BC Sicily, which was not only as stunningly flawless as if it had been made yesterday, but would have looked just perfect on top of the TV. And thus late in the afternoon, I emerged from the Burrell and into the leafy agree-ability of Pollok Park in a happy frame of mind.
It was a mild day, so I decided to walk back to town even though I had no map and only the vaguest idea of where the distant centre of Glasgow lay. I don’t know if Glasgow is truly a wonderful city for walking or whether I have just been lucky there, but I have never wandered through it without encountering some memorable surprise - the green allure of Kelvingrove Park, the Botanic Gardens, the fabulous Necropolis cemetery with its ranks of ornate tombs - and so it was now. I set off hopefully down a broad avenue called St Andrews Drive and found myself adrift in a handsome district of houses of substance and privilege with a comely park with a little lake. At length I passed the Scotland Street Public School, a wonderful building with airy stairwells that I presumed was one of Mackintosh’s, and soon after found myself in a seamier but no less interesting district, which I eventually concluded must be the Gorbals. And then I got lost.
I could see the Clyde from time to time, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to it or, more crucially, over it. I wandered along a series of back lanes and soon found myself in one of those dead districts
that consist of windowless warehouses and garage doors that say NO PARKING - GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE. I took a series of turns that seemed to lead ever further away from society before finally bumbling into a short street that had a pub on the corner. Fancying a drink and a sitdown, I wandered inside. It was a dark place, and battered, and there were only two other customers, a pair of larcenous-looking men sitting side by side at the bar drinking in silence. There was no-one behind the bar. I took a stance at the far end of the counter and waited for a bit, but no-one came. I drummed my fingers on the counter and puffed my cheeks and made assorted puckery shapes with my lips the way you do when you are waiting. (And just why do we do that, do you suppose? It isn’t even privately entertaining in the extremely low-level way that, say, peeling a blister or cleaning your fingernails with a thumbnail is.) I cleaned my nails with a thumbnail and puffed my cheeks some more, but still no-one came. Eventually I noticed one of the men at the bar eyeing me.
‘Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I replied.
‘He’ll nay be doon a mooning.’ He hoiked his head in the direction of a back room.
‘Oh, ah,’ I said and nodded sagely, as if that explained it.
I noticed that they were both still looking at me.
‘D’ye hae a hoo and a poo?’ said the first man to me.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
‘D’ye hae a hoo and a poo?’ he repeated. It appeared that he was a trifle intoxicated.
I gave a small, apologetic smile and explained that I came from the English-speaking world.
‘D’ye nae hae in May?’ the man went on. ‘If ye dinna dock ma donny.’
‘Doon in Troon they croon in June,’ said his mate, then added: ‘Wi’ a spoon.’
‘Oh, ah.’ I nodded thoughtfully again, pushing my lower lip out slightly, as if it was all very nearly clear to me now. Just then, to my small relief, the barman appeared, looking unhappy and wiping his hands on a tea towel.
