Boswell's Bus Pass

by Campbell, Stuart

  We considered the irony of Johnson’s reputation as the quintessential embodiment of intellectual Englishness having been fostered by a fawning Scot and how in many respects Boswell’s Journal of a Tour was a dry run for the Life of Johnson.

  We said that our next port of call was The Saracen’s Head in the Gallowgate which was directly opposite the site of the original inn where Boswell and Johnson stayed. Nigel Leask then told us that a rumour had persisted that Adam Smith actually went to confront Johnson in The Saracen’s Head and called him a ‘son of a bitch’. He assured us that this particular term of abuse was current in the late 18th century and was not a term invented by Hollywood. We agreed that Joseph Ritter would have been ideally placed to comment on this explosive encounter. Johnson and Adam Smith held diametrically opposed views about almost everything. Smith was a confirmed atheist, anti monarchist, neoclassicist and decidedly ‘Frenchified’. Nigel Leask explained how Smith was not only the original exponent of English Literature as a legitimate area of academic study, but was arguably the founder of the modern university curriculum. He explained how in many ways Adam Smith is the hidden presence in both accounts of the journey.

  He then gently steered the conversation to the fact that Johnson had only consumed one nip of whisky on the entire journey. Not having challenged a Professor of English Literature for a good forty years I decided it was time to try again. While I earnestly suggested that it had perhaps been two drinks Nigel smiled broadly and offered us a Glen Grant from a bottle nestling on a shelf next to Samuel Smiles’ Self Help. We accepted with Boswellian alacrity and thanked him for his kindness and insight.

  *

  On the 62 bus we were exhorted to Feel the Freedom of a Job if we were Claiming Health Related Benefits, or else we could escape the Glasgow streets altogether by taking the Nightflyer to London. We thought of starting a new life with our possessions in a spotty bag hanging from a pole, a pair of Dick Whittingtons ignoring all advice to turn again while stepping carefully along pavements paved with Embassy Gold.

  The tenements in St Vincent Street were lit in a random chequer board as residents settled back into their lives, pausing at the windows to stare into the night, wondering what to make for tea, hoping he won’t come home drunk again.

  From the roof of the bus a line of yellow handcuffs swung into each other in a demonstration of Newton’s Cradle.

  I accidently caught the stare of a shell-suited girl who glanced up momentarily from her one fingered texting. ‘Y is tht mn st’ing @ me rdng my txts? Perhaps I had misjudged her, ‘In gp of xistntial angst plse help’.

  A slowly revolving disc on the top of a van at the corner of Pitt Street suggested it was transmitting instructions to unseen drones. The third flat on the right does not have a valid TV licence, direct fire to reduce collateral damage. Destroy.

  A Mother Teresa lookalike moved to the back of the bus to carry out missionary work with the young who protected themselves by wielding a mobile phone in her direction like a light sabre. It flooded the bus with a burst of white noise, stifling conversation as the bus negotiated the urban rapids.

  The driver embraced a risk-taking strategy to offset the tedium of the day and managed his speed to ensure that every traffic light he approached was poised on the infinitesimal cusp between amber and red.

  Casino land, Cash Generator, Coral, Ladbrokes, neon-lit invitations to borrow and gamble and spend and spend again; garish money brothels promising intense, transient respite from the attritional grind of being unemployed. Nobles Entertainment offers anything but. Punters are even denied the simple pleasure of pulling down on the puggie handles, an action as satisfying as stamping a die or pulling a pint. Just press the button instead and enjoy disappointment without the foreplay while watching the spinning aces, hearts and diamonds configure themselves into the wrong combination. Next door the Fireworks Factory offered pleasures even more intense and transitory; become a flash in the pan, light up the sky with your inner brightness before extinction.

  Caught in traffic the bus paused outside KFC beneath the smiling monster, the nightmare uncle with the over white beard; the sort of man parents warn their children about. Inside every table had a single occupant all facing the same way; at six o’clock all unattached people must face their own lonely Mecca. In the bleak street human heads had been replaced by black umbrellas jostling and nudging angrily. ECO bags were apparently available from Waterstones. They also had supplies of ego bags for passersby whose sense of self had been utterly crushed.

  A man in white stained overalls paid his fare. He was carrying a large spirit level, the working man’s Hippocratic staff. He was for hire, moonlighting of course. If anyone was uncertain if they were on the straight and narrow he could tell them just by squinting expertly as his tame bubble. A brief conversation about some ‘lanky bastard’ broke out at the back of the bus. A large Asian woman looked at her reflection in the rain smeared window and adjusted her head scarf to better show off the sequins.

  *

  On October 29th the post chaise delivered Boswell and Johnson into the liveried and flunkied care of The Saracen’s Head in Glasgow. The inn complex included stabling for one hundred horses, a blacksmiths and an assembly room. The current pub, the Sarry Heid, is situated directly opposite the original site. A fiercely loyal Celtic pub next to the Barras, it has garnered a certain reputation down the years. My friends in the know urged me to keep my mouth shut lest my Southern vowels precipitated summary execution and David had been firmly instructed to leave his army flak jacket at home.

  Reputation is of course an idle imposition oft got without merit and lost without deserving. The barmaid with the manly tattoos could not have been more accommodating as she disappeared behind the bar and proudly reemerged with her scrap book of newspaper cuttings referring to the pub. The men passing through looked us up and down before acknowledging our presence with ‘All right boys’, which was not necessarily a question more a discreet warning that we would be tolerated for a while at least. On the gantry a tiny icon of the Virgin Mary nestled against a huge green framed portrait of Jimmy Johnstone.

  The most dominant motif though was a caricature of the original Saracen who presumably lost his head in a moment of madness. With bushy beard and mad staring eyes he bore an uncanny resemblance to someone else. Only after the second pint of Guinness (a choice made to deflect suspicion) did things fall into place. It was Osama Bin Laden. Cave searches in the Afghanistan hinterland will never be successful so long as OBL continues to skulk in the vicinity of Parkhead. He had been initially misled by tabloid references to Paradise. There may have been no need after all to embark on a campaign of Jihad, mayhem and general carnage; virgins were obviously plentiful in this green corner of Glasgow. There was then no need for martyrdom. Just buy a season ticket, learn a few sectarian songs and infiltrate the stadium. By the time he realized that his search for virginal solace was in vain he had become fond of the banter, especially when the British Army was its focus, and found a ready outlet for his hatred in Old Firm vitriol. He must tell that smooth-tongued ranter with the claw hand that he could learn a few things by listening to the match day bile hurled from the terraces.

  The Guinness seemed to be imparting something more than an inner glow as I felt the sort of arse-warming satisfaction only previously experienced after accepting a lift in a state of the art Range Rover with heated seats. The recycled tram benches had been placed on top of the pub boilers. Hell’s fires are never far from Paradise.

  A faded cutting from the scrapbook gleefully recalled how excavation on the site of the original inn had revealed heap upon heap of human bones including some complete skeletons facing East with humerus neatly folded across thorax. In more recent times ghost hunters had descended into the pub basement and emerged decidedly unwell. Johnson and Boswell would have loved all of this.

  I had read that the pub also had on display the skull of the last witch hanged in Glasgow. I had assumed that the unfortunate
remains had long since been granted burial in sanctified ground by the local coven or the Catholic Women’s Guild on a mission. But there she was squatting in a case on the wall above us, a gray amoeboid blob. Judging by its size witches were not the brightest creatures in 18th century Scotland. In her daft innocence she had mistaken the Sarry Heid for the local masonic lodge and never lived long enough to regret her error.

  As we left the pub David stopped and stared at previously unseen glass cases screwed to the wall. Rarely had I seen him so animated as he provided a complete inventory of their contents; a 19th century cavalry sword (British), a Nazi dirk, an Indian sabre, a seventeenth century cutlass, a British bayonet from World War 1, a Ghurka kutri, a Mughal push dagger, a Japanese Katana, an Indonesian Kris and a gentleman’s dress sword.

  The Light Brigade burst heroically from the gents where they had been hiding for 156 years; they galloped over the Japanese warriors. The Tommies charging in vain from the trenches encountered some resistance from the whirling Dervishes before sweeping aside the remnants of the SS and cantering into the Gallowgate where they fell into the hand of the local Tim Malloys and were massacred, every last man.

  Kilmarnock – Auchinleck – Loudoun – Edinburgh

  In Buchanan Street bus station a tall angry man stooped to stand nose to nose with a petite Chinese girl. It was either the end of a relationship or an aggressive ritual enacted after every afternoon drinking session. The fact that he wore a child’s woollen hat with sticky-out rabbit ears did little to diminish the threat he posed. I hoped he wouldn’t hit her.

  The 76 to Kilmarnock jolted its way past four school kids who had skived off school, the girls’ skirts wrenched up and their ties hanging like nooses. A man with one leg swung his way across the road – cancer, war, a road accident, body dysmorphic disorder? He was watched by a line of men in overalls sitting on a low wall. An adjacent shop displayed a print of their iconic counterparts lunching on a girder high above New York. The grey Clyde was lined with graffitied pillars holding up various motorways as fabled elephants once held up the world. Where was the lone boatman whose life’s work was to drag bodies from the river?

  Once out of the city the autumn colours fought a rearguard action before capitulating to the insidious bleakness of Fenwick Moor where even the brown spumy burns were escaping as fast as they could. The ragged flags flying valiantly from the Fenwick Hotel had already lost the war of the winds. Wheelie bins lay slain at the end of every track. A stolen Jaguar sat abandoned plastered with POLICE AWARE stickers.

  Neither Boswell nor Johnson could be bothered to describe the journey to Auchenleck to visit the younger man’s father. It was an encounter that neither of the travellers would have relished. Johnson had already been urged to bite his tongue and behave when in the presence of the circuit judge who held diametrically opposed views about almost everything. Earlier Nigel Leask had pointed out that the meeting must have been difficult as, in so many ways, Johnson was the father whom Boswell had chosen.

  Kilmarnock bus station is the circle that Dante forgot. It is a transit point for Unthank. The concourse is managed by crypto-fascists with shrill whistles which they blow incessantly, ostensibly to guide incoming buses but in fact to intimidate all within earshot and induce a sense of mounting dread in the poor and dispossessed. The refugees flatten themselves against the bilious billboards to let pass the surreal scarab machine hoovering up fag ends and small children but not the gobbets of spit that emerge intact from under its brushes.

  A line of very threatening men in their late twenties scowled at the innocents weighed down with plastic bags as they tried to squeeze past. It was impossible not to think of them in their day job at the barracks intimidating recruits stripped of clothes and dignity, cupping their genitals as they brave the line of kicks and abuse. As we leave the station a woman wrestles with her dog as if it were a playful lover. The bus picks up speed and I see another woman falling down in a car park and spilling her shopping and then she has gone. Was she all right? Did she get up and brush herself down? Did people rush to help her?

  The bus provided much needed respite. It was after all an ECO Bus which presumably ran happily on recycled horse dung and old copies of the Daily Record. Its exterior was decorated with daisies. Everyone who got on knew and greeted at least three other people. Seats were gladly swapped to make the chat easier. The warm fug of community washed through the bus. The peaks on the conversation monitor indicated the outbreaks of laughter as days were swapped and embellished to give them structure and interest. The adolescent legs swinging from the bench reserved for heavier items belonged to people who were just listening to each other; not teasing, just listening. A fierce young man, his mane of electric red hair barely tamed by a reinforced headband chatted animatedly to his tiny and severely disabled partner. Whenever someone got off the courtesy was there again, ‘Much obliged, driver, thanks a lot.’

  The hamlets through which we passed were never more than one house thick. The back gardens had fought a lost battle with the encroaching moorland which was oozing its cold slaver over sheds and abandoned toys. A lone farmer marked out a muted green Saltire with his quad bike; a hidden act of agrarian patriotism.

  All roads led to Kilmarnock prison, which was probably a fair reflection of life’s realities for many.

  An ill-drawn silhouette of Robert Burns’ head swung from the sign that marked the borders of Mauchline. Our village may be as poor but, heh, the boy stayed here. A pity though they had not been blessed with real heroes like that place in Lanarkshire that could boast Matt Busby, Barry Ferguson, Tom Cowan and Sheena Easton. Still, beggars can’t be choosers.

  There was also no immediate sign that the Mauchline Belles had established a dynasty in the town. Burns must have been thirteen or thereabouts and living a few miles away when the post chaise swept by carrying Boswell and Johnson to the Auchinleck Estate. The only oblique connection between them is Burns’ derogatory reference to Boswell in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer.

  Alas! I’m but a nameless wight,

  Trod i’ the mire out o’ sight!

  But could I like MONTGOMERIES fight,

  Or gab like BOSWELL,

  There’s some sark-necks I wad draw tight,

  An’ tye some hose well.

  Boswell must have been gabbing nervously as the meeting between the two men came ever closer.

  In Catrine a man wearing an army surplus green and brown camouflage jacket left the bus and instantly disappeared apart from his disembodied head which bobbed briefly past the woodlands.

  In a cold Auchinleck we sought directions to the estate and castle from an enthusiastic butcher who also doubled as the postmaster, surely an informed and respectable member of the local community. Appearances however lived up to their reputation for deception. Despite greeting us like long-lost and greatly-missed blood relations who owed him money, he pointed us in completely the wrong direction. He may have been beset with folk memories of preparing Auchinleck to withstand Nazi invasion, choosing the verbal equivalent of turning all sign posts to face the wrong way and hence gain valuable time during which the Lowland Division of Dad’s Army would regroup and stick it up them, whether they liked it or not. The outcome was the same as we wandered through a housing estate wondering where all the human beings had got to. Eventually a woman taking shopping from her car was cornered by David until she provided accurate directions.

  The bus when it came was of the bendy variety. Although our expectations and pleasure thresholds had both appreciably lowered since entering Auchinleck this was a welcome intrusion of 21st century Manhattan into a bleak corner of Ayrshire. We shared this mobile accordion with a father and son, blue clones, both of whom had chosen every item of their clothing from the Rangers FC on line catalogue. They looked us up and down for any subtle indicators of religious affiliation, a Vincent de Paul lapel badge perhaps or a stray set of rosary beads hanging from a careless pocket. Beyond the black concertina a woman rested
her head on the seat in front, her eyes on springs like a toy caterpillar.

  We passed the A-frame memorial at the site of the former Barony pit which is presumably visible from the moon, an angry piece of machinery straddling the land below. If this represents but one letter of the alphabet what bitter, proud message would a complete sentence spell? The website dedicated to recording the names and lives of those who died in Ayrshire mines makes for salutary reading: falling rocks, suffocating fumes, runaway hatches, a man dragged along the pit by a frightened horse trailing a chain; a man stunned by a falling stone and knocked into a moving conveyor belt; a man who fell down the shaft, a dark nightmare tumble; a man crushed between a shunting pole and a wagon and the man dragged into the pit’s monstrous washing machine. Many of the dead had connections with junior football.

  Because of daftness or because we were blinded by the rain we took the wrong path after passing the gatehouse at the entrance to the Auchinleck estate. An already bleak day was made worse by the jacket-penetrating, will-sapping intensity of the downpour. Death by hypothermia was a comforting option. Brandy-bearing St Bernards cowered in their kennels, meteorologists in waders gleefully calibrated the flood waters rising in the burn and we shivered. I promised never again to think disparaging thoughts about Rangers supporters and would, next time, intervene whenever David looked like cornering innocent women getting out of their cars – anything if only the rain would stop. It didn’t and we floundered towards the only woodcutter’s cottage in a blasted landscape. Bring on the big bad wolf.

  Parked round the side was a psychedelic relic of a camper van decorated with fluffy clouds and the reminder that LOVE IS ALL. Our spirits lifted as we were ushered into a dope-smoke filled room by a tall beautiful woman with flowers in her hair who offered to help us remove our sodden clothes with a knowing look that promised much much, more. ‘Sah-ahr-geant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band …’