The man Coll he has many big, big dogs with him. One day doctor get off horse and grab dog by throat, he strong man and lift dog off ground and throw dog into sand.(5) All islands the same. Rain and sand. I tell you another thing Margaret, I get all things off chest. You clever woman you tell me why these men collect stones? And shells, like small boys they pick up stones. Joseph is tired from carry these stones. Horse is tired too.(6) The master too does bad thing with girl who wash his feet. But this not surprise my Margaret.(7)
Only one thing make me laugh up sleeve. Master fall from horse and land in water, he wet as duck and water pour from him. I stop laugh when master he ask for Joseph clothes. He make me give him breeches, he can keep breeches I not want them now.(8)
But I see him do strange thing. At night I hear him get up and make water but he not come back to bed. I follow him to old falling down church on island which monks build. He go to holy altar and hit with rock to make big bit fall off. Is this special stone for tired Joseph to carry? He is like the moon. I do not understand him.(9)
I also make confession to Margaret like to priest in Bohemia. You know Joseph is gentle man and not coward but I not like the doctors knob stick. I dream one day he get angry and hit Joseph’s brains. But to make long story less long, the knob stick fall from Doctor horse and he not see. I pick up stick and have good idea. I tell other servant he can have stick for sovereign. One day this stick is famous. I use sovereign to buy nice thing for Margaret when we see again in James Court.(10)
Oh Margaret, all is dark with me. I hate birds from sea, they chase Joseph like devils of guilt. I am sinner and will roast in flame of God’s anger, and not deserve your love.
Your bad Joseph
(1) This news is contained in Margaret’s letter which was waiting for Boswell in Oban.
(2) Boswell labours under no illusion about Coll’s motivation, ‘This could not be of the least service; but by employing me, he kept me out of their way …’
(3) Understandably neither of the main travellers records this moment although there are other occasions when Johnson refers disapprovingly to Boswell’s drinking.
(4) Boswell also records this odd episode, ‘We had the music of the bagpipe every day at Armadale, Dunvegan, and Coll. Dr Johnson appeared fond of it, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone.’
(5) We know that Coll brought several large dogs with him and given Johnson’s past history with dogs this episode is not too surprising. Boswell recollects a conversation with Beauclerk who ‘told me that at his house in the country two large dogs were fighting. Mr Johnson looked steadily at them for a little, and then, as one would separate two little boys who are foolishly hurting each other, he ran up to them and cuffed their heads till he had them asunder from one another.’
(6) Joseph has a point. On Inchkenneth Boswell searched on the beach for transparent white stones but ‘found hardly any pure ones’. At Grishipol having picked up ‘globular’ stones was unable to decide if they most closely resembled turkey’s eggs or small cucumbers. He had a similar interest in shells.
(7) Boswell names the girl, ‘Mary MacDonald, a comely black girl who had been three years at Glasgow, washed my feet with warm water, which was Asiatic enough’.
(8) Again we know this happened. ‘By the road, I fell into a brook and wet myself to the middle very much. My boots were almost filled with water. I stood in two lochs, as they would say here.’
(9) The notion of Boswell as altar wrecker is astonishing however he was deeply superstitious and Johnson does tell us, ‘In one of the churches was a marble altar, which the superstition of the inhabitants had destroyed. Their opinion was that a fragment of this stone was a defence against shipwrecks, fire and miscarriages.’
(10) If Johnson suspected Joseph he makes no mention.
STAGE NINE
THE ROAD SOUTH
An Humiliating Lecture from our driver – A Short Diatribe against the predilection for putting Dead Things in Cases – Some Harsh Words directed against Druids – More talk of Ghosts – An Interpolated Tale concerning Canine Neglect and a Marooning – Various Signs and Imprecations faithfully recorded
Oban – Port Sonachan – Inveraray – Luss – Loch Lomond – Glasgow
On the road south from Oban the travellers were drenched to the skin. Johnson recalled, ‘The night came on while we had yet a great part of the way to go though not so dark, but that we could discern the cataracts which poured down the hills, on one side, and fell into one general channel that ran with great violence on the other. The wind was loud, the rain was heavy, and the whistling of the blast, the fall of the shower, the rush of the cataracts, and the roar of the torrent, made a nobler chorus of the rough musick of nature than it had ever been my chance to hear before.’
David’s stint of supply teaching had finished and despite his best efforts he had failed to conjure sufficient reasons why he shouldn’t travel with me from Oban to Glasgow.
The weather looked fine from the window of the bus to Taynuilt. The journey passed without incident or interest until it came to getting off the bus. I approached the driver confident that my hovering presence would remind him that we would like him to stop when it was safe to do so. This was, after all, the established etiquette for the journey so far. This bus was different. An unexpected acceleration had me clutching at the thinnest of air having failed to find any sort of restraining rail; I made a split second decision not to grasp the folded disabled chair lest it ballooned open and enveloped the front seat passengers like an unloved, over-effusive relative. After a balletic realignment I managed to stay upright while clouting the driver round the head with a swinging rucksack. He did not enjoy the experience and subjected me to a detailed and humiliating lecture on how to leave his bus safely, which the other passengers enjoyed immensely.
Boswell and Johnson had followed the drove road to Taychreggan before crossing Loch Awe by ferry to Portsonachan. Previously David had phoned the owner of the Creggan Inn and charmed her into agreeing to provide some sort of boat to take us across. This offer was dependent on both the prevailing wind and the amount of daylight. There was precious little of the latter as we yomped in the path of untold thousands of cattle and their minders. An elderly couple stopped their car and kindly offered to take us the rest of the way. Mentally flicking through the unwritten rule book for the jaunt (and choosing not to remember the illicit taxi ride in the Mearns) I decided that in the circumstances and bearing in mind that refusal might cause offence, we could accept.
We were graciously received at the hotel though we soon understood why Boswell and Johnson had opted to cross to the inn on the other side of the water. For two bottles of beer we were charged £9. ‘Boogah that for a game of soldiers!’ said the Doctor in an unguarded moment.
While waiting for the boat to be salvaged we savoured each mouthful of the world’s most expensive ale and inspected the monstrous fish in glass cases along the wall. Things stuffed and mounted were to prove a motif on this part of the journey. The 56 pound salmon, the size of a small pony, had been hooked at 1.00 on June 12th 1923 and killed at 3.30 below the Ash Trees. The fish still looked vengeful, exhausted and undeniably dead.
We were summoned to the jetty guarded by a lurching, sun-faded pink telephone box and given rigid life belts that had evolved from village stocks. Our principle ferryman was Jacob, a pony-tailed lad from Eastern Europe with few words of English. His nautical mentor was Fergus, a graduate from Fagin’s den who shook a lot and licked nervously at orange-tinged lips. I asked him if he missed London. ‘This is great in it? I can drink ‘ere and at the pub up the road when it’s open.’
The dinghy was still semi-submerged when we stepped aboard. David assisted the baling operation by adding his weight to the front causing the water to slosh where it could more easily be scooped out. From the shore Fergus enacted an angular mime and shouted some indecipherable instructions to Jacob about the outboard motor. Jacob smiled benign
ly before accelerating suicidally towards the rocks we had just left. On balance he decided that life might after all be worth living and we soon faced the right direction although still sitting ominously low in the choppy loch waters.
The sackclothed drovers rowed up against the sodden bony flanks of the cattle, pushing them with both hands, hitting the most errant and scared with staves. The acquiescent beast at the front was being towed by the lead boat while the rest of the herd swam behind in an impressive display of bovine loyalty. The surface of the loch was obscured by a mist of cattle breath and the air was rent with bellowing.
On the other side Boswell and Johnson sheltered in a hut which had delusions of being an inn. ‘We were much wet’, Boswell records, ‘I changed my clothes in part, and was at pains to get myself well dried. Mr Johnson resolutely kept on all his clothes, wet as they were, letting them steam before the smoky turf fire.’
The Sonachan Inn, determined to put one over on its neighbour across the water, makes a feature of its large mouldy moulting collection of dead birds and animals. Behind the glass they cling to branches by their claw tips in a rigid and literal pecking order. The tawny owl lords it above the ptarmigan and the red grouse who looks disdainfully at the fieldfare. They all ignore the magpie. Creeping up the sides of the case are a mangy polecat and a moth-eaten stoat with a glass eye hanging out.
Having failed to capture the public imagination with its bestial taxidermy rank, the owners are putting the finishing touches to a new display in an adjacent room. By lifting the corner of the tarpaulin we catch sight of a stuffed ghillie circa 1920, a tinker with swollen poacher’s bags and visible gunshot wounds, early road-kill in the form of a little old lady in a tweed jacket, and an obese American child who went missing a decade previously.
*
David completely miscalculated how long it would take us to walk the four miles to get the early morning bus to Inveraray. Mercifully no one witnessed the unedifying sight of two overheated pensioners practising a death rattle duet as they lumbered up hill and down dale with barely breath to whistle the theme tune to The Bridge Over the River Kwai.
Reading between his lines Boswell also found the novelty of the journey wearing thin, ‘I recollect nothing of the country through which we passed … I remember but little of our conversation.’ His depression was returning.
At least our day was dry. On the summit of one of the many hills the sun broke from the sky and landed on our path in welding arcs of sparks and bouncing light, a blinding exhilarating encounter with an extraterrestrial force. The transient warmth activated the scent from an adjacent mountain of freshly sawn logs.
Even this Damascus moment would not have saved David from being garrotted and dumped in a ditch if the bus had not been ten minutes late.
Across the aisle
an elderly couple slept
holding hands.
Dr Johnson declared that the inn at Inveraray, now the Argyll Hotel, was ‘not only commodious but magnificent’. Boswell concurred, ‘a most excellent inn’ though he notes ruefully that ‘even here Mr Johnson would not change his clothes.’ Given his thrall to superstition and magical thinking Johnson may have struck a deal with his psyche, the terms of which guaranteed respite from some unspecified torment if he kept his clothes on. Perhaps he was just a manky old tosspot at heart.
Although the receptionist had not heard of the earlier guests she helpfully pointed us towards the massive leather bound visitors’ book that covered at least the last three years.
‘The proximity to the water and the attentive servility of the staff have greatly contributed to a creative indolence conducive to intimations of conviviality not often encountered in such a primitive country.’ Sam Johnson 25th October 1773.
Instead we read, ‘Thank you for sending on my gold ear ring’ and ‘Thank you for looking after us when my sister collapsed unwell.’
Every passenger on the Campbeltown West Coast Motors bus (Bringing people together since 1923) stepped down and returned fifteen minutes later having looted every garage and corner shop in Inveraray of every last copy of the Daily Record, Daily Mail, and Daily Express not to mention all bakery products and confectionery. They had after all been travelling since 1923, deprived of all food and reading materials. As the smell of bacon and belches wafted down the aisle we negotiated the summit of the Rest and be Thankful.
It was here that we caught our next glimpse of the party travelling very slowly on the track a hundred feet or so beneath us. There were four very small horses, or shelties, as Johnson called them. Joseph led the way, a tall aristocratic figure staring straight ahead. Dr Johnson followed, a hill of a man, all in black, his feet almost touching the ground. Boswell was third in line, head bowed, perhaps nodding off, and a baggage horse at the rear. In an instant they were gone.
Dr Johnson described the same section of the journey. ‘After two days stay at Inverary we proceeded Southward over Glencroe, a black and dreary region, now made easily passable by a military road, which rises from either end of the glen by an acclivity not dangerously steep, but sufficiently laborious. In the middle, at the top of the hill, is a seat with this description, Rest, and be Thankful. Stones were placed to mark the distances, which the inhabitants have taken away, resolved, they said, “to have no new miles’’.’ An instinctive glance at the overhead storage racks showed no heavy stones smuggled aboard.
As we passed down the side of Loch Long David pointed out the remains of the pier that housed the Second World War torpedo testing site. In an instant everything was transformed into black and white, calibrated cross hair wires appeared on our periscoped eyes and shouts of Achtung! filled the bus. There were no survivors clinging to the debris on the ominously calm waters of the loch, just floating copies of The Daily Record and sweet-wrappers.
As Boswell and Johnson had enjoyed the hospitality of Sir James Colquhoun at Rossdhu House we left the bus at the start of the Luss by-pass. We stepped into the decidedly upmarket gift shop. No clan tea towels or ceramic Nessie poos here. For only £120 (reduced from £150) we could be the proud owner of a fully cured reindeer hide. In case we were anxious about how to clean our hide were we to purchase it all was made clear. ‘Place the hide on the wall, use a vacuum cleaner but choose the lowest power, Vacuum hide from head to heel. Please avoid stepping, sitting or walking on the hide to prevent shedding.’ David pointed out that such hides were still prized trophies among the Special Forces who would split them and use them as sleeping bags. Presumably shedding was not a problem for the SAS. If we were inclined to really show off we could purchase a zebra-print cow hide for the bargain price of £399.
We were soon lost in Luss which is an achievement given the size of the village more notorious as the location for Take the Highway. But Lost in Luss we were, bit players in a hastily titled, misspelled oriental porno movie, the sequel to Big Lock Suckers and several more. The consequences of our lost state were in fact more edifying as we had strayed into a pilgrimage trail dedicated to St Kessog, the patron saint of breakfast cereals.
We learned that the sixth century monk’s main claim to fame was averting war by raising various princes from the dead. He was killed abroad by some very bad druids and brought back to Scotland wrapped in a blanket of sweet-smelling herbs which promptly took root and made medieval Luss smell much better. Druids; sectarian scum. His name was evidently roared at Bannockburn to rally the troops. At this point David, a Richard Dawkins acolyte still recovering from the pope’s visit, was apoplectic with agnostic fury. An unfortunate consequence of his indignation was that he refused to ask directions to Rossdhu House, now the exclusive Loch Lomond golf course, and strode off in the wrong direction.
Hours later we crawled towards the electronic gates of the golf course. We were spotted by the security guard nonchalantly reading his paper one hundred yards from the entrance who phoned ahead to warn the lodge keeper that two bedraggleds were approaching. The warning was effective as the gate flunky flailed his arms
in a doomed attempt to shoo us off the path. He listened sceptically as I explained that as the result of an earlier phone call the manager had agreed to grant us temporary access.
As we waited to be driven to the clubhouse David reminded me that the term ‘exclusive’ means keeping people out. After all its website makes clear that ‘It is a singular place to meet on the world stage … it is a sanctuary not just for golf aficionados but for world thinkers.’
Looking at the world through the tinted glass of the 4x4 was a novel experience. For one thing the manicured greens looked more like manicured greys and it was difficult to work out the colour of the helicopter parked on the lawn or the livery of the caddies’ vests. By a subtle process of spectrum analysis we worked out that they were probably dressed in red. There were so many of them they would easily outnumber the entire Vatican Guard, whom they resembled and whom they would in all probability thrash at arm wrestling. As we passed, several golfers stared at the Range Rover, aching to spot celebrities even more celebrated than themselves.
‘Grant Oh Great God of Golfers that today I will stand in the gents next to someone truly famous; may our splash-guards be adjacent while, staring ahead in a manly sort of way, we exchange a few words. May I be able to drop his name into subsequent conversations with my bank manager, my annoying neighbour over the barbeque and the woman from the escort agency who I know likes me for being me.’
Boswell's Bus Pass Page 21
