John McPake and the Sea Beggars

by Stuart Campbell

  Each door into the nine greenhouses opened automatically when you pushed a button. After a short delay the double doors opened into a world that was markedly different from the one to which I had so recently returned. The wet walkway led between high ferns and fronds that climbed towards the glass roof. The intense smell of damp earth made me catch my breath. Water trickled into a dark grotto carved between lichen-covered rocks. Coins glistened at the bottom of the pond. Huge red flowers burst.

  Quite simply what I was experiencing was exactly the elation that must have suffused Johannes’ soul as he clutched his son as they wandered through Leyden lapping up the gratitude of the citizens. This awareness didn’t alarm me at the time and still doesn’t.

  Although I still do not fully understand the other world I entered or indeed created, be it psychotic delusion, an intense self-constructed fantasy into which I could escape at times of stress, or simply an experience that defies all explanation, I feel acutely fond of all three weavers and think of them often. Why did the Spanish take Michel to Leyden? Why was his life spared? His captors were hardly renowned for their compassion. How was their journey back to the village? In my mind’s eye I saw not the Hunters in the Snow, which was the start of this whole thing but Bruegel’s The Corn Harvest suffused with the heavy languid heat of summer.

  Most of the peasants take their hard earned rest while others continue to work bent double as they tie the corn. Did the weavers break their journey a while and accept bread from the woman with the basket in the foreground? There is a small boy at the edge of the picture seated on a rick of corn, drinking a white liquid from his bowl. Is it Michel? If so, where are the others? Come to think of it that might be Johannes and Balthasar next to him. A younger man in a white shirt, clutching a pitcher, emerges from the thin passageway cut through the heart of the cornfield. Perhaps that’s Cornelius. Two birds fly low over the field. The crickets ratchet the heat up another notch. The peasant lying full length on the ground snores, loudly drunk with the heat and the aftermath of toil. How will their journey end? Will Antonia shriek with pleasure and disbelief when she catches sight of her men folk coming down the track? Does she drop the wooden gruel basin she was cleaning and run towards Michel, her arms outstretched? I hope so.

  SIXTY-THREE:

  The Exhibition

  Come in. Yes, you with a copy of John McPake and the Sea Beggars under your arm. You who have travelled with me for three hundred pages. Shall I take your coat? No, it is a bit chilly. Have you been to the Drill Hall before? Nor me, though I know that Stevenson College has used it for their photography exhibitions. But this one is all mine. Remarkable isn’t it? I can’t even offer you a glass of wine; the official opening isn’t until tomorrow. Will I leave you to browse on your own, or will I bore you with a commentary? Ok, serves you right.

  Yes, well, that’s just my potted biography. ‘Born in Belshill in ’68. Educated at Aberdeen University, taught at Gracemount High. Dismissed from post in 2000. Eventually lived rough on the streets until diagnosed with schizophrenia … ’ Not a bad CV for an artist is it? It makes me sound interesting, you know, like Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. Even at the time the psychiatrists couldn’t agree. I had more Latin names then a Victorian cabinet of curiosities. ‘ … Lived in a hostel managed by the voluntary sector until 2008

  when he felt sufficiently well to live independently … ’ again, as you’ll appreciate, sufficiently well covers a multitude of interpretations. ‘Studied photography at college and won the BP Award in 2010.’ I love reading that bit. I know it’s immodest but hey!

  Enough of this narcissistic claptrap. This is the first snap I took in earnest. It’s the folk from the hostel. Bizarre, isn’t it. Like a school photo. All we need is for someone to run along the back row to get his picture taken twice. The old boy with the beanie pulled down his face, that’s Mick. It was Mick who gave me my first camera. To this day no one knows where he got it. A Nikon 435, nice bit of equipment. It took him ages to agree to stand in line. He’s deeply paranoid, an old Communist for whom life is one long conspiracy. ‘Photies can be used in evidence,’ he told me. ‘Don’t give them an inch’. I still see Mick sometimes. I love him to bits actually.

  See that sleikit man with the supercilious expression, that’s Kevin, he caused me a lot of pain. You know all that stuff about my brother, well, I know it was him who sent me the postcards. Wee bastard.

  And that’s Paul, I’ve told you about Paul before. He told me straight that he would not look at the camera or say ‘cheese’ as he had his book to read. He must have memorised it by now.

  Do you see that wee man hiding next to Paul? Well that’s Dennis, and that’s the first time he was ever seen with the other residents, let alone in a photo with them. I was really touched that he left his bedroom for the first time in a blue moon to say goodbye to me. I’d only ever spoken to him before through the narrow crack between his door and the frame. I didn’t even know he had a second eye, but there he is. Good on him. I’ve heard since that the photo opp was something of a turning point for him. After that he would sometimes come down for breakfast. Brilliant isn’t it? Sadly, Jack’s not in the picture. His death wish finally came true.

  And that’s Beverley, great woman. She’s the manager. She always looked after me, never gave me a row not even when she was dragged out of bed by the police who were returning me, more or less intact, to the hostel. I owe her.

  This next sequence is called ‘Silence’. I know, some of them are a bit clichéd. The Meadows at Dawn, a poor man’s Colin Baxter. Likewise Arthur’s Seat, I had a strange experience at that very spot. Let’s face it, I had strange experiences all over the place. I wanted to go back. To be honest I wanted to see if it would all start up again. But no. Nothing. Just a high wind. That one’s better. Mr Heron standing on one leg in the Water of Leith near Stockbridge. Despite the proximity of the traffic, everything in that moment became still, and utterly silent. And that is what never ceased to astound me in those early days, a life without Voices.

  Do I still hear them? I’m often asked that. Let me put it this way, even if I don’t hear them as I used to, I still anticipate what they might say if they were there. I have always had an impressive capacity for self-criticism which was the specialism of my least favourite Voice. From that point of view he might as well still be there, except I have much greater control now. Part of my brain has always enjoyed finding out things, I’m probably what they call a theorist. As a result my inner voice often resorts to a parody of what the Academic used to say to me. He was one of the Voices; I didn’t mind him too much, although I never ceased to be amazed at sheer range of his knowledge. Does any of this make sense? Am I boring you? Thank you, you’re very kind.

  I mentioned Mick earlier didn’t I? Well this series was taken in the High Street during the Fringe. In all the time I’ve known Mick I’ve never seen him without that hat. I’m sure he sleeps in it, it must be mingin’. I still think of that day, actually you couldn’t make it up. Just look, there’s a geisha girl, next to her is someone with his hand up a squirrel’s arse. If you look you’ll see that the fellow there has a propeller on his head. And that, unless I’m mistaken, is Adolf Hitler giving out leaflets. I remember Mick shaking his head muttering ‘The medication’s wearing off,’ and then these lads, students, came up to us and tried to guess which show we were in. ‘It must be Beckett.’ ‘No, it’s Pinter’s Caretaker.’ ‘It’s called Psycho, and there’s no tickets,’ growled Mick. It was a great day.

  This one, umm, do you recognise it? Yes, well done, close, it’s a pastiche of Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. I took it last winter during the cold snap. It’s actually Duddingston Loch seen from Holyrood Park. Do you remember, the loch froze over for the first time in a hundred years or something like that? Eventually I persuaded three dog walkers to pose for me on the slope above the loch. They were getting a bit grumpy but I think it worked. And look there, do you see that bird floating in the middle
distance? Yes, just like the original. It’s the one I won’t sell. You know what happened don’t you? I’ve told you before. Yes, my obsession with the Eighty-Years Dutch war and all the times I believed I was living through the Inquisition. I’ve had lots of discussions with psychiatrists since then. They have suggested all sorts of explanations: a variant on bog standard psychosis, a type of Dissasociative Identity Disorder. I know, I know, in fact as the term came out of my mouth I knew exactly what the Academic would have said. He would have had fun with that one.

  It doesn’t really matter but the nearest I’ve found to an explanation that works for me is provided by what’s called psychosynthesis. No, I hadn’t heard of it either. Evidently some boy, Roberto Assagioli, his name was, a contemporary of both Freud and Jung. He believed in superconscious impulses that we repress at our peril. The trick was, he maintained, to make a bridge to that part of our being where true wisdom is to be found. And I honestly believe that’s what happened to me. The delusion, or whatever you want to call it, was not so much a symptom, more a way of connecting with something that would make me better. And so it proved. I’ve told you all this before, anyway, I honestly believe that the key to my recovery was being able to find, albeit vicariously, hope.

  It’s difficult to explain … you know when you wake from a good dream but can’t remember any of the detail. Sometimes the afterglow from that dream stays with you all day. You don’t know what you are remembering but you feel good somehow, full of hope. That’s as close as I can get to explaining why things changed so rapidly for me.

  God, I must be trying your patience, you’re a good soul. We had better move on before the caretaker switches off all the lights. Yes, there we are, Tangled Webs. I took it at the Dovecot Tapestry Workshop in Infirmary Street. It’s the strangest thing. Since my delusions, or ‘bridges to the superconscious’, ended I have developed a fascination with weaving. Yes, I know it’s odd. The irony is when I was first detained in the Royal Edinburgh, a few years back mind, an occupational therapist tried to interest me in weaving. It was obviously seen as the ideal therapeutic intervention for the barking mad. Anyway I joined the Dovecot and do you know what the oddest thing is? I instinctively knew what to do. The tutors wouldn’t believe me, they obviously thought I had a secret life as a weaver, and you know what? They may not have been far wrong.

  That one? That’s my sister. See the likeness? Something about the eyes perhaps. Didn’t I tell you about her? It’s a bit of a long story but basically she turned up out of the blue one day at the Hostel. Beverley, remember the middle-aged woman in the photo? Well she knocked on my door and said I had a visitor. A woman. I asked if it was my new social worker, but she said no, it was someone called McPake. Beverley was obviously anxious on my behalf and offered to chum me down to the dining room where she was waiting. I can honestly say I didn’t feel a great deal when I saw her. Just this woman sitting there. ‘I’m Lil,’ she said. ‘Your sister, well half sister.’

  To cut a long story short she explained how I had been taken into care days before she was born. ‘Mum just couldn’t cope,’ she said. For the first time in a long while I felt the sensation of total detachment as she spoke; I was somewhere on the ceiling looking interestedly at the expression on her face when I asked her about our brother, Andy. ‘What brother?’ she asked, ‘We haven’t got a brother’ and in that instant I understood everything. I came down from the ceiling. He too had been an attempt to connect, another bridge with my superconscious or whatever. An imaginary friend, an imaginary brother. A figure conjured from my own needs. A projection if you will. It sounds a bit clichéd but in some way I think it was me I was looking for. I desperately wanted to reconnect with who I had been, more than anything wanted to console that person and tell him things would be all right.

  Lil told me that Mum died some ten years back. I noted the fact with sadness but felt no real remorse. I still see Lil on occasions, she’s a nurse in Hamilton but, to be honest, she is a bit wary; part of her thinks that beneath this articulate exterior lurks an unreformed axe murderer. That’s nurses for you. Anyway.

  Just two more if you can stand my monologue for a bit longer. I do like this one. It’s Kate. Look at that hair, and that wicked look. We’ve actually been ‘going out’ for a few weeks. She’s completely off the wall, high maintenance but perhaps part of me needs to look after folk, put something back. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. It’s working just now and that’s all that counts.

  This last one? Mmm, it’s a bit freaky. At first glance it’s just a nice slightly moody shot of a flooded field near Falkirk. I chose black and white. Look at the cows, poor things up to their knees. But the thing is, you see those three shadowy figures in the foreground, they weren’t there when I took the shot.

  Well look, it’s late and you’ve to get back. Thank you for coming, and thank you for listening to me. Yes, it would be good to have a drink sometime. Can you find your own way out? I’d better switch off the lights. And you. Take care.