I tried to concentrate on the tableaux of feudal gentility that unfolded very, very slowly; large country seats set back from the road and tended by serfs, their forelocks worn away by endless tugging as the 4x4s swept up the drive. I slowly passed a field of startled, haughty llamas as incongruous as chickens on the moon.
My legs told me that I was cycling in slow motion through a cloying mix of tar and treacle. I looked up at a sky totally devoid of vapour trails as all flights had been cancelled on account of the eruption of ash into the skies from an Icelandic volcano. In a self pitying cameo I saw an archaeologist from a future time carefully chipping away at my petrified body foetalled round what was thought to be a twenty first century mountain bike.
I was startled out of my reverie by the vacuum thump of a bus passing at speed. Where did that come from? There are no buses on this route. The supercharged post chaise was allegedly the 1A, a fantasy bus whose existence is a secret closely guarded by a few local masons and obviously en route to Brigadoon.
A vandalised road sign announced the apparent proximity to a C*UNT** FAYRE. Who drives out to the middle of nowhere, their glove compartment stuffed with an assortment of black permanent markers to indulge an adolescent and deeply unfunny sense of humour? Get a life. The sign did though provoke a moment of totally inappropriate speculation for an elderly person suffering from acute saddle-ache. How would the wares be displayed?
Distraction came in the form of another sign, this one untampered with and erected by the Scottish Tourist Board, Cawdor Tavern. Sweating like several pigs Lance Armstrong rested his bike against the stone wall, played idly with his maillot jaune and wondered where the rest of the race had got to.
At Cawdor Johnson and Boswell met a Mr Grant, minister at Daviot and Dunlichity, and Valentine White, a factor on the estate, both of whom are buried in the churchyard. The original manse has long gone but the graveyard is still there.
The clichéd dappled serenity of country churchyards masks the impact of individual deaths. The green idyll is a fraud. Despite the passage of time each crumbling stone with its unique indecipherable patina of letters and dates testifies to grief without expression, disbelief, abject despair and God damning. The dead included the weaver’s daughter who died young, extinguished; the young man who died of his wounds in France in 1917; the airman who failed to return in 1943. Nothing changes. The letter held at arm’s length. Better not to open it; thrust it into the burning grate. Although anticipated in nightmares this is not happening to us. This is not me screaming in denial; that is not my husband holding me in a pieta of silent supportive agony.
Predictably there was no sign of either Grant or the delightfully christened Valentine. Surely John Shanks had not wheeled his barrow this far. As I passed among the stones old bodies leaned upwards towards my footsteps in case they were being looked for, before sinking back in small flurries of dust and exhalations of relief.
It was Grant who subsequently told the unlikely tale of Johnson impersonating a kangaroo. ‘Johnson was in high spirits. In the course of conversation he mentioned that Mr Banks (afterwards Sir Joseph) had, in his travels to New South Wales, discovered an extraordinary animal called the kangaroo. The appearance, conformation, and habits of this quadruped were of the most singular kind; and in order to render his description more vivid and graphic, Johnson rose from his chair and volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared; and Mr Grant said nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man, like Dr Johnson, standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and gathering up the tales of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bound across the room!’
Johnson was not in kangaroo-impersonating mood when he visited Cawdor Castle. He seemed underwhelmed judging by his less than insightful description, ‘the drawbridge is still to be seen, but the moat is now dry. The tower is very ancient.’
It was of course closed like every other interesting place in Scotland. I had phoned in advance hoping to play the eccentric traveller card to secure a private tour. Fat chance. Although it was probably the biggest key hole I had ever put my eye to, it was still a keyhole with decidedly restricted view. It is though a long time since I had savoured the pleasure of trespass. By following the river, skirting round a salmon leap and climbing a wall I could at least wander round the grounds. At any moment I expected that policeman from the early sixties to turn up on his large black bicycle, take all our names and tell us never again to play football in what he claimed was a private field. Even then I knew he was lying; it was never a private field.
I noticed few additional highlights on the ride back apart from a gross overblown footballer’s mansion guarded by giant stone mastiffs, unusual heraldic beasts and a meadow full of witches. I heard them before I saw them. Hundreds of crones were practising synchronised mooning in a low lying meadow, cackling in low harmonies like Russian Orthodox priests.
The descent into Nairn was enlivened by a momentary loss of control when cycling downhill through a park and frightening a large youth by clipping his shell-suit at speed. Speechless, he could only finger his abuse at my disappearing figure.
The nearest I came to a real witch was a little old woman with very long white hair tottering down the High Street leaning on a sawn-off broomstick. No spells left. All incantations defunct but still clutching a message bag containing desiccated toads and a jar of newt eyes. Just in case.
From Nairn Johnson and Boswell travelled along the coast to Fort George one of several massive garrisons built to intimidate anyone still harbouring Jacobite sympathies.
The Nairn bus station, neither quite a parking lot nor designated waste land, faces a thirties Regal picture house that has morphed into a Somerfield. The same usherettes, now grown very old, parade different aisles. At the back by the dishwashing powders the same young lads in long shorts and large boots still pick inexpertly at bra straps and are slapped for their pains.
In the space adjacent to the one bus shelter seven council workers in high visibility vests discussed how best to open the boot of a car. There were so many of them they could have easily lifted it bodily and run with it to the nearest garage.
At least the watching was easy. The sun was shining, God may or may not have been in his heaven but his surrogates were there. The gulls occupied the heights while the song birds provided the descant.
The late middle aged driver shook as he dispensed tickets. His hands could barely operate the machine. He kept glancing nervously back into the body of the bus. Sweating. He was fleeing the scene of a dreadful accident; he was being pursued by Gaelic gangsters who had left a bleeding sheep’s head in his bed as a final warning. His life was under threat from money lenders, usurers, unscrupulous landlords owed rent. The explanation was more prosaic but equally disabling; he was in the grip of an anxiety attack, possibly without cause and with no end in sight.
Worry was his constant attention-seeking companion. He drove too fast as if trying to shake off the demons clinging by their fingertips to the outside of his vehicle and on one occasion called back a passenger whose ticket he had previously inspected for no apparent reason apart from the false belief that he needed to check it one more time if he was to stave off some terrible consequence for himself and his family. His sighs were audible the length of the bus which he just controlled despite his tentative Parkinson’s grip on the wheel.
Had I not been worried about the man’s health this would have been the best short journey so far with views of the Moray Firth and the snow blotched mountains beyond. The foreground though was dominated by a pig farm that ran the length of the route, a Soweto for pigs. There were hundreds of identical small corrugated shelters each with its own patch of land, washing lines and vegetable patch. Several pigs were chewing the fat with their neighbour over the fence, sharing tips on composting. Having led a sheltered life I had never appreciated ju
st how pink newly washed pigs were. In the sun they seemed a fluorescent plastic, the colour of a Disney poster.
The driver’s anxiety was not selfishly focused on the wellbeing of his family alone but on all of mankind and more specifically on the comfort and whim of each individual passenger. When he learned that I had never been to Fort George before he took a small but significant detour that left me with a reduced walk to the garrison. He seemed so desperate to please he would surely have whipped me up a breakfast omelette on a hastily assembled roadside primus had I but asked. I hope his day improved.
Unlike Johnson and Boswell I was unprepared for the size and scale of Fort George with its symmetrical complex of streets and squares. The authorities must have been petrified that the rag-taggle Jacobites would rise again and eat any babies left unguarded. Johnson at his dismissive worst commented ‘Of Fort George I shall not attempt to give any account. I cannot delineate it scientifically, and a loose and popular description is of use only when the imagination is to be amused.’ Boswell was equally sneering, and subsequently made a snide comment about their host’s library which was a ‘tolerable collection of books.’ Nevertheless they accepted the hospitality on offer and devoured yet another trough of mutton.
Boswell always had a penchant for dressing up. When not hankering for the austere robes of the priesthood he lusted after the uniform of a soldier. ‘At three the drum beat for dinner. I could for a little fancy myself a military man, and it pleased me.’ Although there were several military men in desert camouflage wandering through the fort I had no wish to swap with them. How many friends and colleagues had they already lost? The screensaver on my nephew’s lap top shows a huge semi circle of men with a draped coffin in the centre. Meanwhile Boswell played the toy soldier in his head, strutting, preening and barking orders.
He had by now been absent from the foolishly loyal Margaret for almost two weeks. His loins stirred when introduced to the Governor’s wife who was ‘… though not a beauty, one of the most agreeable women I ever saw, with an uncommonly mild and sweet tone in conversation. She had a young lady, a companion with her.’
Temporary celibacy must have been a challenging option for Boswell who had always boasted of his sexual appetites, prowess and indeed size. His pathological fear of masturbation must have been counterproductive. According to McEnroe and Simon he had been mightily influenced by the pamphlet, Onania; or, the Henious Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful consequences in both sexes, considered which had run into twenty editions by the end of 1759. The fatal practice filled him with guilt. After a night of ‘low lasciviousness’, he once swore an oath on a drawn sword, ‘never pleasure but with a woman’s aid.’
The small talk over the evening meal at the governor’s residence ranged from Garrick’s acting prowess to the fact that ‘the Arabs could live five days without victuals, and subsist for three weeks with nothing else but the blood of their camels, who could lose so much of it as would suffice for that time, without being exhausted.’
Boswell, increasingly obsessed with his fear that something terrible had happened to his daughter steered the conversation round to the second sight. He said that his intention was to ensure that if the worst had happened he would at least get credit for having had the gift of prophetic insight. Basically he was savouring the possibility of enjoying an enhanced reputation were he to learn subsequently that his daughter had died.
Neither Boswell or Johnson mentioned the sad knot of whisky-breathed women who habitually assembled at the gates of the fort to sell their weak bodies and strong drink to the soldiers to whom a posting to the northern garrison must have felt like a one way ticket to Guantanamo Bay without the sun. A contemporary notice admonishes the infantry;
No man to make Water but in Place for that Purpose
No dirt or filth to be put under the Bedsteads
No water, Dirt or Filth to be thrown opposite the Barrack Rooms, in the Passages, on the Stairs or out of the windows.
No Woman is to be permitted to walk in any Part of the Barrack Rooms.
The whisky women had dispersed by the time I left the fort which is some ways was a pity. In any case they would not have been allowed on board the salubrious, completely empty double-decker bus that arrived to take me to Inverness. Spanking new and bouncing it veered out of habit into the airport where all planes were grounded on account of the ash with blankets draped over their engines as if they all had bad colds.
This must be the only bus in Britain which enables passengers to sit back and indulge in a spot of dolphin spotting. This is surely a missed advertising opportunity.
A blue Scottish Heritage sign indicated that the Culloden Battle Field was two and a half miles away. There is a mystery here. Why didn’t Johnson and Boswell make this tiny detour to visit the site of such a significant battle? Johnson was not without Jacobite sympathies. On this occasion he seems lost for words, something of a first. Was he embarrassed? Was he scared? Did he glance with apprehension at the roadside beggars fearful lest they rose up and hurled their crutches at the fat Englishman and his pal lording it over them in a posh post-chaise?
Birkbeck Hill had the same thought. ‘That an Englishmen could travel in safety, unarmed and unguarded, through a country which only seven and twenty years before had been so mercilessly treated seems not a little surprising.’
Johnson’s namesake, an eye witness to the battle and the subsequent shambolic retreat describes this particular stretch of road. ‘Having been pursued by the English cavalry, the road from Culloden to that town was everywhere strewn with dead bodies. The Duke of Cumberland had the cruelty to allow our wounded to remain amongst the dead on the field of battle, stripped of their clothes, from Wednesday, the day of our unfortunate engagement, till three o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, when he sent detachments to kill all those who were still in life. A great many, who had resisted the efforts of the continual rains which fell all that time, were then dispatched. He ordered a barn, which contained many of the wounded Highlanders, to be set on fire and the soldiers stationed round it drove back with fixed bayonets the unfortunate men who attempted to save themselves, into the flames, burning them alive in this horrible manner, as if they had not been fellow-creatures.’
Johnson, smelling the flesh and hearing the screams, ignored his companion jabbering about injustice, shivered, sunk deeper into his greatcoat and feigned sleep.
Just as Johnson and Boswell visited an Inverness castle under the misapprehension that it had once belonged to Macbeth so I visited another castle under the equally erroneous assumption that it was the castle that Johnson and Boswell had visited. Anyway it was a castle and it was in Inverness. It now serves as the Sheriff Court, a function confirmed by the sight of two hooded youths grunting to their friend who was stripped to the waist having escaped from Culloden. His arm was heavily bandaged after a glancing blow from a broadsword. They were joined by their begowned lawyer who did not look over hopeful of his clients avoiding deportation. As a salutary harbinger of what lay ahead another man, his crest decidedly fallen, was led away in handcuffs to the attendant Reliance van.
Boswell’s father had been a familiar figure on the Northern legal circuit with his full-bottomed wig, gown of purple cloth and crimson velvet with white cravats.
Their sightseeing took in Oliver’s Fort. Johnson later seized the opportunity to provoke the country whose hospitality he had enjoyed. He suggested that ‘what the Romans did to other nations, was in a great degree done by Cromwell to the Scots; he civilized them by conquest, and introduced by useful violence the arts of peace.’ The concept of useful violence is one that has not travelled well. Adding insult to prejudice he continues with a species of illogicality he would have derided in others, ‘I was told at Aberdeen that the people learned from Cromwell’s soldiers to make shoes and plant kail. How they lived without kail, it is not easy to guess: they cultivate hardly any other plant for common tables, and when they had not kail they probably had nothi
ng. The numbers that go barefoot are still sufficient to shew that shoes may be spared …’ it reads like a nostalgic Billy Connelly rant about deep fried Mars Bars and welly boots.
There now follows a party political broadcast on behalf of the British National Party. ‘Til the Union made them acquainted with English manners, the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestick life unformed; their tables were course as the feasts of Eskimeaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots.’ It is easy to see why the Tartan Army swung from the goalposts in 1775.
I traipsed out in the general direction of Oliver’s Fort through the docks where a small steam tug puffed smugly, blissfully unaware that it had been caught in a time warp and dropped back into the River Ness a hundred years after setting out. The skipper chewed on his plug of baccy and spat into the water. I made the mistake of asking a parked van driver if there was a commemorative plaque somewhere. I would have received a better response if I had asked if his mother gave good oral sex. Eventually I found an oddly squat runt of a tower covered in scaffolding. It was surrounded by a township of DIY warehouses the combined contents of which would have been more than sufficient to rebuild the original garrison.
The pair of them held court in Mrs MacKenzie’s inn, the Horns situated at the north-west end of Bridge Street and described by Boswell as ‘dirty, and ill-furnished’, although he conceded that ‘the entertainment was good.’ The nearest licensed premises to the original tavern is the Gellions, reputedly the oldest pub in Inverness and dating back to 1820. Its only claim to fame apart from a dubious vending machine in the gents, of which more later, was the fact that William McGonagall read his poetry there to a suitably startled audience towards the end of the 19th century.
Fifty years ago Dr Johnson came to this town
With James Boswell,
A biographer and his pal.
Both of them writers of some renown.
Boswell's Bus Pass Page 11
