Boswell's Bus Pass

by Campbell, Stuart

  Presumably Coll was asleep when Boswell carried out his inspection. Had he woken things might have gone horribly wrong. ‘What are you staring at, weirdo?’ ‘I’m sure I saw a louse leaping from your armpit.’ ‘There’s only one leaping louse in this room …’

  Boswell and Johnson mounted horses and visited Hector Maclean, the minister. We cycled the same route which gave Roy ample opportunity to gently cajole the errant sheep that wandered into our path, ‘Don’t be silly now, that’s not very clever.’ Once a teacher, always a teacher. He called out the names on the register and gave detention to the fat one that wasn’t paying any attention. Another sheep stared ruefully at us from the middle of a small island in a lochean. Was its exile self imposed? Was it attention seeking? Was it being punished? Did it have a lairdlike sense of its own superiority? Should we rescue it?

  We knocked on the door of the only large building still standing in Cliad. We were greeted by a mother earth figure surrounded by an aura of flour. She happily abandoned domestic chores to show us the walls of the original building and the likely room where Johnson got exceedingly grumpy with the seventy seven year old minister as they argued about Newton and Leibnitz. Boswell was embarrassed and subsequently tried to excuse his mentor’s rudeness. For his part the minister was reduced to ‘pulling down the front of his periwig’.

  They rode to the north of the island to inspect an ancient graveyard and chapel at Cill Fhionnaigh. We cycled past a farmhouse dominated by an Irish Tricolour signalling instant collaboration with any invaders from the over the sea. Another property was protected by the totemic powers of a large wooden otter.

  The bright light picked out the dew on delicate beards of discarded wool on the verges, and through sun-clenched eyes the splatter of yellow dandelions brought Lucy in the Sky to mind. We ran the gauntlet with several farm collies intent on lacerating their muzzles in our wheels before we found the churchyard.

  The sea blast had reduced some of the stones to mere pock marked stumps in a stern warning from posterity that nothing will remain of the lives they commemorate, nay not a jot or iota. Other stones which had had the foresight to lie on the ground were just legible. This time there were at least four graves marking the last resting place of anonymous merchant sailors. They had been buried on the 12th and 18th October and the 3rd and 6th of November 1940. A cruel harvest of bodies washed ashore days apart. Who found them foetal-curled on the tide line, face down in pools, or spread-eagled against the rocks?

  The two boys in long shorts with identical wire rimmed spectacles had shared hopes of finding a Spitfire on the beach with live ammunition and perhaps a parachute strip to show off at school. The smaller of the two screamed when he stepped on the body. His pal had an asthma attack. After that day he was regularly beaten by his father for bed wetting and was eventually expelled from school for violent behavior. The taller lad suffered nightmares.

  We couldn’t find the remains of the chapel and deciding that it must have been set back from the churchyard, quietly trespassed into the grounds of a newly built house that seemed unoccupied. We climbed a small hill and startled the woman sun bathing in the back yard. She shouted out a guilty explanation of how her partner had installed the central heating and said it would be all right for her to stay in the property for a few days. I knew that Roy was sorely tempted to elicit from her a spontaneous confession of imagined transgressions. She was spared as her dog seemed to be choking as it shuttled manically between its owner and Roy. ‘I think it’s got something in its mouth,’ said the woman hoping to establish a relationship with her potential bailiff. ‘It’s a sheep’s turd,’ said Roy, ‘I believe they are especially tasty with a hint of garlic.’ For the first time I regretted my choice of travelling companion. The woman retired in a state of mental distress and we looked around for any stones that might hint at ecclesiastical ruins.

  Now on a mission, Roy suggested we invade the adjacent property which was still covered in scaffolding. The descent was difficult and Roy was rightly punished for his earlier oddness when he sank up to his thigh in bog. Our approach had been witnessed by two builders who stared out of the open eaves suspiciously. By the time Roy had explained our quest the men were convinced that we were jointly sponsored by Historic Scotland, the Church Commission and the police with powers to confiscate the goods and chattels of anyone suspected of building on sanctified ground.

  We had, in fact, been wrong; the chapel remains were clearly visible within the churchyard.

  A short ride brought us to the White House of Grishipol. Our hostess at Cliad had said the present residents were friendly folk so we walked confidently down their drive. A completely new architect designed building had been dropped into the shell of the original house which was cracked from top to tail, a passing god having lobbed a thunder bolt in its general direction thinking it was a chicken leg. As the doors were open but no one was home we walked across the rocks towards the sea.

  A motor launch hove into view and a woman and two small children climbed ashore while the man went off to park his boat. We declined her kind invitation to come inside for tea as she wrestled with the younger howling child who, rigid as a board, refused to be carried. She seemed unclear which was the best way to cross, yet she must have completed this short journey many times. In that moment she was lost in a very strange country miles and light years from her true home. The other child carried a dead emerald mackerel with a degree of ceremony normally reserved for crown jewels; an honorary brother to every raggedy urchin by every urban canal where fish can be caught.

  The father prowled in the background on his quad bike as we cycled back down the driveway. The family dog having packed its bags and favourite bone happily followed us. ‘All my dog days I have waited for two bald strangers on metal horses who are my destiny’ intoned Roy in the sort of voice he thought the dog would use if it could express its innermost thoughts. Two miles into its new life the quad bike caught up with the dog who meekly abandoned all hopes of freedom and clambered aboard.

  On the road to Breacachadh we passed Ben Hogh with the balancing stones that so engaged Boswell and Johnson who touched them, tilted them, measured them, speculated over their origins, and became generally excited. We felt we could take them or leave them so left them but did stop briefly by the triangular stones planted in an adjacent field. Boswell actually included two small triangles in his text for the benefit of readers not familiar with the concept of triangles. ‘They have probably been a Druidical temple’ he speculated.

  He soon became bored and galloped with Coll across ‘a large extent of plain ground’. This may have been the site of the New Year Shinty match which interested Boswell. ‘There is a ball thrown down in the middle of a space above the house, or on the strand near it; and each party strives to beat it first to one end of the ground with clubs or crooked sticks. The club is called the shinny. It is used in the low-country of Scotland. The name is from the danger the shins run. We corrupt it to shinty.’

  Soon the road stopped being a road in any true sense of the word and became a track across sand dunes. Cycling in sand is hard. It is even harder when you have to slow down to let a taxi pass. ‘Taxi for Johnson!’ They crossed the dunes to look at a lead mine, the precise location of which has long been swept under cubic tons of sand, sea and time.

  Breacachadh Castle, where they stayed storm-locked for ten days, has fallen on hard times. It is surrounded by decaying vans and a clothes line of Saltires. The notice on the gate, ‘THIS IS OUR HOME RESPECT OUR PRIVACY was at odds with the spontaneous hospitality we had met elsewhere on the island. Speculating that it had been conquered by an army of old hippies too doped to care, we chose paradoxically not to trespass where we weren’t welcome.

  Instead we made our way to the dunes beneath the Old Castle and looked out to the horizon where the faintest of black smudges hinted at tiny remote islands extending as far as St Kilda where the morose women were still tramping wearily in their tubs, desperate to be reli
eved, and the boys were sulking at not having sold a single fulmar.

  The tide was far out and there was little to interest the most desperate of beach combers, certainly no repeat delivery of the mahogany and casks of Malaga which ‘the country people, finding it sweet and mild, drank of it without fear of intoxication, till they were mortally drunk.’

  Boswell and Johnson were ground down by the weather on Coll and felt trapped. Boswell’s spirits plummeted and his imagination ‘suggested a variety of gloomy ideas … I found the enamel of philosophy which I had upon my mind, broke, or worn very thin, and fretfulness corroding it.’ In this mood he describes MacSweyn’s young wife as ‘one of the hardest-favoured women that I ever saw, swarthy and marked with the smallpox, and of very ungainly manners’. He must have been depressed as there were very few women, young or old, who could not be accommodated somewhere in his private world. When he ventured out he fell into a river.

  We watched a large sea bird slapping the wet ribbed sand as it attempted an emergency landing, and then we fell asleep in the sun.

  *

  On the car deck of the Oban ferry I made eye contact with one of many sheep peering expectantly through the slats on its lorry. Despite the frequent tender ministrations of the driver it was not going to end well.

  In the lounge we listened to the tannoy announcement insisting that all dogs must stay in The Designated Area. Somewhere on board there was a tumble of yelping defecating dogs, sea dogs obviously, at least 101 Dalmatians, dogs of war, lap dogs with nothing to lap, St Bernards desperate to get to the bar for a refill, and just possibly, the very unloved metaphorical black dog of Johnson’s depression.

  A subsequent, more cheerful announcement asked for the woman who had handed her spectacles in for repair to make her way to the purser’s office. You have to hand it to CalMac. Other services included tattooing, Reki massage, fortune telling, colonic irrigation and cornea transplants.

  We had warned our latest Oban B & B landlady that we would arrive late. This was evidently one of the funniest things she had ever heard judging by her howls of laughter. After a mystifying sequence of nudges and winks she said the front door would be open, and so it proved. We were both apprehensive lest she was planning to alarm us by leaping naked from the wardrobe by way of a welcoming surprise or had liberally laced the towels with itching powder. I left Roy in the House of Fun and walked to find a cash machine, having spent my entire budget on the cornea transplant.

  Oban at night was disconcerting. For one thing there was no money left in the ATMs which had been emptied by the now disintegrating army of underage boy drinkers, its wounded stragglers still lurching between the kebab shop and the all-night newsagent. Within hours the urge to read the Highland Free Press could become so all-consuming that a queue of night-shirted news addicts would jostle with Fisherman’s Friend junkies. The ferry terminal, still fairground bright, hummed adjacent to the dark streets. A space station fallen from the sky but still functioning.

  After a night, mercifully undisturbed by jokes, japes, ruses, squirting flowers or leaping clowns, we tiptoed out early to catch the early morning ferry back to Mull, leaving money on the bed. This seemed an oddly immoral thing to do as if we were paying for services rendered.

  Oban – Craignure – Iona – Oban

  It was comforting to be back on a bus bound for Iona. Being a pilgrim bus the seats were upholstered with sackcloth and the public address system played muted psalms. Most of the passengers were crippled and bent by disease and guilt. One or two of them stood at intervals in the aisles and scourged themselves with knotted ropes. Most suitcases had faded blue Lourdes and Fatima stickers.

  It was comforting to be back on a bus bound for Iona. Half full, it sped through tourist web pages of touched-up vistas and perfectly framed landscapes. From the window we saw a huge bird of prey; talons outstretched braking hard, half dreaming, as if it had not realized until the last moment that its intended victim was in fact a large bus.

  St Columba walked languidly down the ramp towards the small boat at Craignure and sighed deeply. Could he really be bothered to conquer a small island, found a monastery, and a nunnery (not too close mind to the monks mind), build a church, dig a well, the odd farm, all this while keeping the natives happy with the promise of eternal life? It felt like hard work and all because of a small war he started over the copyright of a book he fancied. It didn’t seem fair somehow.

  Johnson describes landing on Iona, ‘Our boat could not be forced very near the dry ground, and our Highlanders carried us over the water.’

  They stayed at Neil Macdonald’s house near the shore where according to Boswell Johnson managed to eat a single potato and drink a mug of sweet milk. Oral tradition again has it otherwise. Still steaming from his paddle ashore Dr Johnson is alleged to have eaten a whole chicken. Fat dribbling down his waistcoat, he tossed the gnawed bones over his shoulder and, after belching loudly, licked his lips. For some reason he was also outraged at the lack of a fork.

  The woman in the corner shop pointed out the original house. Our knock was answered by an obliging young man who apologised for not inviting us in but explained that all his children had been stricken with … chicken pox.

  The early tourists were shocked to discover that the nun’s chapel was ‘covered a foot deep with cow-dung’ and were disappointed by the simplicity of the gravestones while Boswell decided that St Martin’s cross did not ‘come up to my expectations.’ They did though drink from the well. Like every known well in Christendom and presumably Islamdom too, the well was covered in a health-and-safety mesh through which generations of tourists have nevertheless managed to push coins. What is it with wells, ponds and money? Which penny-pinching gods sheath their thunderbolts on receiving a scattering of someone’s loose change? Fair enough, I’ll let you off this time! These wells must be a numismatist’s delight; launderette tokens, washers, a trove of Victorian pennies with Britannia on a bicycle on the reverse, and who knows, the odd farthing.

  We snacked outside the main chapel and watched a party of immaculately dressed Italians paying homage to the God Gucci. We listened wincing to the happy-clappy sounds emanating from an adjacent building from which young virgins with seraphic expressions and worthy full-length socks would emerge at intervals, bouncing to a holy beat we couldn’t hear.

  Boswell slunk off on a couple of occasions to wallow in the spectacle of himself, role playing at being a Christian as he knelt at prayer, ‘I offered up my adorations to GOD. I again addressed a few words to Saint Columba; and I warmed my soul with religious resolutions.’

  Had they visited the craft shop adjacent to the abbey they may have had a better time. Dr Johnson could have chosen a present for Mrs Thrale from a huge array of silver Celtic crosses and charms attached to bangles, bracelets and chastity belts while Boswell could have sent Margaret a piece of drift wood carved to look like one of the serpents that Columba sent packing from the island.

  Like Dr Johnson, Roy and I would not like anyone to think that we had looked on the ruins ‘without some emotion’. Even more spiritually uplifting though was the walk to the far shore of the island and the view across the Atlantic. We climbed adjacent hills and lay in the sun watching as the first pilgrim boat rose and fell with the tide. It eventually came ashore in the cove beneath us. A thin aesthetic man crossed himself and drove his staff into the sand. His companions lay exhausted on the wet shore. The thin man went round each of them and gave them water from a skin vessel round his waist. Eventually they revived sufficiently to drag the boat into the undergrowth where they disguised it with branches and sea-weed.

  *

  On the return journey the bus shook with the ecstatic thanks of the cured. The road behind was covered with walking sticks and single crutches which had been taken down from the overhead racks and hurled triumphantly from the windows. The driver joined in the Halleluiah chorus and beat out the rhythm on his steering wheel.

  On the return journey most of the p
assengers slept. There were several elderly men sitting with their spouses and wearing baseball hats. It is a strange fashion for old men. By aping youth they appear at least ten times older than they are. Adorned with care home logos and transatlantic street slogans they sit on top of white heads like a mocking reproach. Behind them as if to complete the painful tableau of passing time a young foreign couple snogged without drawing breath for many miles.

  We saw several rabbits scampering gleefully through the heather celebrating their release from the conjurer’s top hat. (He had fallen on hard times and couldn’t face putting them down).

  Boswell celebrated his last night on Mull by drinking himself senseless with the Laird of Lochbuie who ‘had admirable port. Sir Allan and he drank each a bottle of it. Then we drank a bowl of punch. I was seized with an avidity for drinking, and Lochbuie and I became mighty social. Another bowl was made. Mr Johnson had gone to bed as the first was finished, and had admonished me, “Don’t drink any more poonch.’’ I must own that I was resolved to drink more, for I was by this time a good deal intoxicated; and I gave no answer but slunk from him. But luckily before I had tasted the second bowl, I grew very sick, and was forced to perform the operation that Anthony did in the Senate house, if Cicero is to be credited.’

  Roy and I each enjoyed a bottle of aptly named Black Dog ale on the last of our ferries.

  Friday 22nd October Oban

  Dear Margaret,

  My heart is heavy and broke in two. I hear that my wife in Bohemia have second baby.(1) I am bad father, bad husband, and I make Margaret unhappy with my love for her. I hate this travel, I hate these sea islands. I hate my master who is coward. He cry on boat all the time. Joseph too not enjoy storms made by angry gods but he not cry like sick baby with thumb in mouth. The man Coll give him rope to hold, make him take mind off sinking.(2) When he not cry he drink all the time. Johnson doctor throw his bottle on ground and say, ‘You are drunk, you are disgrace’.(3) Then master and Johnson not speak. I see clouds above their heads. I think doctor go mad. I see him stop on horse and turn round many times before he carry on road. At night he also put his ear by bagpipe all time it play with look of bedlam on face.(4) He not well and need London streets and his Thrale.