Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  This plunged me again deep into a nightmare that made intelligent thought and connected speech impossible. I muttered over and over with increasing violence, “I can’t tell you anything” or “I will NOT go to school today,” which alarmed them. Nell, the youngest, pled with me and wept, whereupon Nan said loudly and sternly, “Very well! You will NOT go to school today as usual, but you WILL come to school and see the headmaster with us!”

  She had never spoken severely to me before. I could not argue back and later, sick at heart, walked drearily school-ward between them. On one side Nell attempted some feeble, encouraging chirps but Nan stayed grimly silent, gathering her forces for a conflict whose nature she could not even guess.

  The headmaster had always been remote from boys he did not punish, always austere with those who were not good at sports. He greeted my aunts with grave politeness, leaving his office desk to do so and offering them chairs before it. I was not greeted at all and left standing. He sat down and told them, “I am sorry I have had to ask you here. We have never had trouble with John before, but he has now done something that the mother of a fellow pupil brought to my attention yesterday, denouncing it as downright wicked. She provided me with such evidence that I was reluctantly forced to agree.”

  He paused. Nan said coldly, “What evidence?”

  From a drawer in his desk he produced and laid on top Health and Nudism with its cover photograph illustrating the Eves on Skis article, and a number of Sheena the Jungle Girl with Sheena on the cover in a state that made me shut my eyes tight. I heard him explain that according to Mrs Doig, Stewart always told the truth when confessing his sins before going to bed, and had confessed that John Tunnock had led him into temptation and had thrust these vile publications upon him. The dreadful silence following these words was broken by Nan asking crisply, “John gave these as a present to poor Stewart Doig?”

  “Yes, John persuaded Doig to accept this unmitigated filth.”

  “Is that all?” cried Nan in a voice so loud with gladness and relief that I opened my eyes wide and saw her lean forward and lift Health and Nudism. After glancing quickly inside she put it back saying, “My dear sir, when we received your letter this morning John became so speechless with shame and horror that I feared he had made a girl pregnant, or been discovered in some act of adolescent homosexuality, or had publically exposed his genitals. Do you really believe pictures of undressed female bodies are unmitigated filth?”

  “Of course not, but trading in pornography is filth.”

  “John did not trade in these publications. You admit he gave them as presents.”

  “It is no mitigation for a rich boy to gain no money while deliberately using his own to corrupt a very poor boy!”

  “My dear man, you are in charge of a teaching establishment founded in Queen Victoria’s reign but this is 1954. You surely know that boys over the age of twelve have adult sexual organs and appetites. My nephew John is thirteen. In a tribal society he would be earning his living and selecting a mate in a year or two. Civilization makes that impossible. Our schools must fit young adults for modern life by suppressing their natural instincts, but you cannot expect to completely suppress them, especially when they are outside your school.”

  She paused and stared grimly at the headmaster who sat with hands clasped tightly on the desktop, frowning and chewing his under-lip. A short silence was broken by Nell saying faintly, “In France, I believe …”

  “Yes, be quiet Nell,” said Nan. “In France until recently brothels were licensed and kept free of disease by medically-qualified municipal inspectors, so unmarried youths with some cash could easily obtain sexual relief, often with parental approval. In modern Britain, alas, most adults are still too Victorian to teach their children the facts of sex. Nell and I are examples. We read Marie Stopes and D. H. Lawrence yet were too shy to tell our nephew John about the act of penetration and use of contraceptives. Your science teachers are equally reticent. I entered this office today fearing the worst and am glad to know John has only been purchasing aids to masturbation. Every woman who washes teenage boys’ underwear knows how often they masturbate. You must have done so when you were that age. There is no point discussing something so commonplace or making a fuss about it. Modern doctors now know it does not induce blindness or soften the brain.”

  This speech made me realize there was some connection between the pale grey jelly with which I stained my underpants four or five times a week and the phenomenon of birth. After quite a long silence the headmaster pointed to the two magazines and in a distant-sounding voice said, “You think these aids to masturbation should be openly passed around among my pupils?”

  “No. It was silly of John to trust poor Doig with them, but please bear in mind that this was on Saturday when the boys were not legally under your administration. He will not give such publications again to Stewart Doig or anyone else – will you John?”

  “No! No! Never!” I almost shouted.

  “Mr MacRae, I sympathize with the dilemma Mrs Doig has forced upon you. Her complaint cannot be ignored, yet a big fuss about it will be bad for the school. You know that last week a daft Church of Scotland minister made a story for the Glasgow Evening News by denouncing pupils of Glasgow Girls’ High School for conversing with boys during lunch hour in a Sauchiehall Street espresso café. A gutter journalist could keep such a story running (as they say), if he heard of this equally innocuous Hillhead Secondary boy’s misdemeanour. He would tell easily shocked clergy and parents about him and quote their reactions under headlines with shock and sex and horror in them. He would pester you for an opinion and if you did not say you had dealt with John by savagely punishing him you would be accused of being permissive – a cant word now current in the gutter press.”

  “That,” said MacRae grimly, “is what I mean to prevent.”

  “But you cannot possibly use the tawse on such a good, obedient, hard-working pupil as John who has never defied his teachers and the Hillhead rulings in any way at all. We have told John that if any teacher so much as threatens him with the belt he must walk out of the school and come home. If he does so we will send him to Kilquhanity33 – a really permissive school – what a tit-bit for journalists that would be. I expect you will write to poor Stewart Doig’s mother saying you have taken firm steps that ensure John will never again lead Stewart or anyone else into temptation. That is all you need do. Let us now agree to forget this sorry business. Please treat these publications on your desk as waste paper for their sexual aroma is not open or clean. John has never brought material like that to Hillhead Secondary and won’t give it to anyone else. You have taught him a lesson he will not forget.”

  The headmaster said abruptly, “Good,” and stood up. So did my aunts. He asked what class I should be attending. Maths, I told him. He said, “Go to it then. You have a remarkable aunt, John Tunnock,” – (adding with a polite nod to Nell) – “aunts, I mean. Don’t let them down again.”

  I had always loved Nan but before this interview had thought her an ordinary old lady. I was so astonished and braced by her words that I said firmly, “Thank you Sir! Never again Sir!” I stepped up to the desk and held out my hand to him. After the briefest of pauses he held out his own. We shook, then he grunted, “Off you go Tunnock.”

  We walked in silence from the Headmaster’s office until, turning a corner, Nell started laughing and said, “You were wonderful Nan.”

  Nan said, “Yes, I astonished myself, especially with my lie about telling John to leave school if threatened with the belt. I’m glad you recovered your confidence at the end, John, but sorry your pal has let you down.”

  I wiped what felt like a wide grin off my face and said firmly, “He is no longer my pal.”

  They looked at each other and sighed because they thought I should forgive Doig’s honesty to his mother, but said no more about the matter nor ever spoke of it again. They must have known that discussing masculine inclinations with a male is useless. My pur
chases of pornography became rarer from then on. My erotic fantasies found enough to stimulate them in maturer literature and visits to the Hillhead Salon and Grosvenor cinemas. And ever since then I have loathed the taste of sherry and drunk alcohol cautiously.

  But before going home that day I approached my usual classroom very dourly, knowing the teacher at least would know I came from the headmaster’s office and why I had been summoned there. I later learned that the whole school knew why: earlier that morning in the playground Doig had been surrounded by a crowd of urgent questioners and, unused to such popularity, had told everything. I entered the room halfway through a geometry lesson and the teacher fell silent in the middle of a sentence. By an effort I think I managed to look thoughtful, even absent-minded, as I walked between staring faces to an empty desk. From my briefcase I removed my Euclid and exercise book then sat with hands clasped on them (as the headmaster had clasped his) and looked enquiringly at the teacher who, with heavy irony said, “Have I your permission to continue, Tunnock?”

  “Certainly, Sir! Certainly!” I said, and from that moment my reputation as a swot and a snob ended. Classmates who thought I had been savagely belted were astonished by my composure, the rest knew something unimaginable had happened. When questioned afterwards in the playground my only words were, “MacRae is not a barbarian. We reached an agreement and he dismissed the matter as a storm in a teacup.”

  When several boys asked me to supply them with dirty books and offered to pay more than the purchase price I smiled thinly and said, “No no. Once bitten, twice shy.”

  But how had two gentle spinsters born in Victoria’s reign (Nan 1897, Nell 1900) become so broad-minded without me noticing before the Stewart Doig catastrophe? The 1914-18 war must have changed them as it changed many others. When Nell heard a pipe band playing on the wireless she was inclined to weep. Nan told me privately this was because in 1914 young soldiers marched behind bands between cheering crowds from Maryhill Barracks to the train that would take them on the first lap of their journey to the Flanders slaughterfields. That kind of public jubilation cannot have lasted much more than a year, even though most British private businesses profited by that war. I do not know if Nell lost a sweetheart in it, but many young women of my aunts’ and Miss Jean Brodie’s generation were deprived of potential husbands and their faith in a God praised in churches because he had made Britain victorious. Jean Brodie became a Fascist but was exceptional. More folk turned to Socialism, my aunts among them. It had broadened their minds without changing their behaviour, hence my astonishment when Nan firmly dominated a Scottish headmaster. Being Socialists they were ashamed of having a house much larger than they needed, and living upon rents from two tenement blocks in Partick inherited from their father. Before 1939 this income let them employ a cook and housemaid. When these were directed into war-work they managed without, and like most middle-class folk after the war could not afford servants. Unlike many they never complained.

  “I’m sure this exercize is good for us,” Nell would murmur with a sigh as she came home heavily laden from a shopping expedition, and Nan would say sharply, “Of course! It keeps us young.”

  They always referred to my mother as a superior being because she had earned her own living, and also (I think) because she had borne a child. After my first week’s work as a teacher Nan said, “Me and Nell would be two useless old women if we had not helped to educate a useful man.”

  Like many Scots in those days they believed teachers, doctors and Labour politicians were the noblest works of God because such people (they believed) strove to reduce ignorance, suffering and poverty. Perhaps what kept them attending Hillhead Parish Church on Sundays was their belief that Jesus was a Socialist. In their childhood before World War I there were many Scottish Socialist Sunday schools for Protestant children; also John Wheatley, though denounced by Glasgow priests, ran a vigorous Young Men’s Socialist Catholic Society. The 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher and everything that followed astonished and worried them. I am sorry I disappointed them by never marrying, glad I never again shocked or disturbed them after the Doig affair.

  Soon after that I was invited to attend a school debating society where I began voicing my aunts’ Socialist opinions, and was strongly opposed by an equally vocal Tory, Gordon MacLean. I was his social superior because my home was in a terrace house and his in a Byres Road tenement. He was my social superior because one of the school’s best athletes, and I so bad at games that the physical training teacher let me miss them. In other subjects our marks averaged out equal: he was better at maths, science, geography: I better at English, Latin, history, and we were equally bad at art and music. Our homes being near we started walking to and from school together, discussing books, films, sex but avoiding politics, which we only enjoyed discussing before an audience. Gordon, handsome and popular, had a complicated love life. Though not a boaster he liked telling me about it as much as I enjoyed hearing him. He even asked advice, which I was wise enough not to give, but I mentioned precedents for his troubles in the life of Burns, with relevant anecdotes from history and literature. He maybe found this flattering but I did not mean to flatter. His dealings with attractive girls fascinated me as much as anything I had read about, because they were real, and I knew great writers must study reality as well as books.

  I was resigned to not directly knowing attractive girls. They terrified me, making speech with them impossible until I was old enough to be their father. In their presence I kept my self-respect by an aloofness suggesting (I hoped) that I was thinking of better things. This was easy for a boy whose manners had been formed by the example of nice old ladies, and whose main education was from books that had stored my mind with my grandfather’s furtive man-of-the-world knowledge. Once in the street I passed two good-looking, giggling school girls. One rushed after me and said, “John Tunnock, my pal fancies you rotten. In fact she’d like you to shag her!”

  I said, “Tell her she’ll grow out of it.”

  I could be friendly and at ease with girls who did not attract me, like those behind the counter of a Co-op grocery in Partick where I usually shopped. One day a new assistant, a small plump dark-haired girl, served me in a surprisingly unfriendly way, head bent to avoid seeing my face and never speaking a word. When I went there next week the other assistants shouted, “Terry! Here’s John,” and let her attend me. I could not imagine why. Her behaviour was still unfriendly. The fourth time this happened she suddenly raised her head and with the manner of someone flinging themselves off a cliff said, “What do you do in the evenings?”

  I saw a round, pleasant, pleading face with lipstick not efficiently applied. I said, “Not much,” and rushed away trembling as if from an electric shock. Terry found me attractive! I tried bringing her image into erotic fantasies and failed. She was too real. For nearly a year I visited the Co-op meaning to ask her out to the Salon or Grosvenor and each time the shock of seeing her struck me dumber than she was. I could not imagine what I could say about Burns, Rabelais etcetera to her that would interest Terry. I would hand her a note of the items we wanted and before leaving with them would mutter, “Thanks.” One day when I entered someone shouted, “Terry, here’s John!” and she came over and served me in a straightforward friendly way, like the other assistants, but perhaps with a slight air of triumph. She had grown out of me, and was happy to show it. I knew I had missed an opportunity. Forty years passed before there was another, though something else may have delayed my maturity.

  The Holiday Fellowship guest houses where we vacationed had originally been the country seats of minor aristocrats or rich Victorian merchants, the sort of country houses that after World War 2 the very rich kept wailing that they could no longer afford because the Welfare State was forcing them to pay iniquitous taxes. Nan told me that when Britain became truly Socialist under Harold Wilson (a prime minister in whom she had faith for nearly a year) every great country house would be run by the Holiday Fellowship as guest homes
for The People or the elderly. I loved them for their large, unkempt, usually neglected gardens and big libraries of books, none published later than the middle thirties. I also liked the custom of the staff, who were usually young foreign girls, sharing the guests’ lounge, quiet room and outdoor excursions when they were not working. Younger guests liked helping waitresses and kitchen staff clear tables and wash and dry dishes after meals, a custom mostly enjoyed by young unmarried males, among whom I was always the youngest. At Minard Castle on Loch Fyne one summer I became sweet on a couple of lovely German girls. Leni was tall, slim and dark haired. Ute was plump, blonde and not much taller than me so I fancied her most, though I never met her apart from Leni. I later realized they encouraged my friendship as a way of avoiding older, more sexually knowing youths, but they certainly encouraged it. Their questions disclosed that I meant to be a writer and they saw nothing incredible in that. Leni started talking about Goethe which I thought remarkable, because I was sure no Scottish teenage girls liked great writers. I remember a sunny day when the three of us climbed Ben Nevis at the tail of a walking party. They asked questions about Scotland and my answers naturally led me to quote various verses by Burns that seemed to entertain them. More questions drew from me details of his private life, which Leni said showed he was a free spirit like Goethe, then Ute said, mischievously, “And your sex life, John?”