A History Maker

by Alasdair Gray

  The company who had developed the powerplant foresaw it could replace monetary housekeeping. They also knew it would cause panic in the bankers, stockbrokers and executives who then ruled the civilized world by manipulating money. (Note that civilized = citified.) Money was then the most beautiful and desirable of possessions and wars were fought against people who reduced its value: the Japanese therefore promoted their powerplant in secret, selling seedlings at huge prices to heads of governments and transnational businesses as a means by which the wealthy could get self-supporting private households. Millionaires saw that such households were safer than any others and began seeding them on privately owned islands off the shores of their native lands, but not all millionaires and heads of state acted selfishly. Without openly saying so the governments of Japan, Switzerland and Israel planted the roots of a powerplant economy which would eventually benefit their whole country. Soon after an Arab syndicate began secretly donating cuttings to Islamic nations everywhere. By then news of powerplant culture had spread to users of the open intelligence network, who saw it could be used to liberate everyone from want. Millionaires faced the fact that their private havens would only be perfectly safe in a world where most people were safe.

  The first of the national plantations reached maturity near the end of the century, after which the foreign imports of nations possessing them dwindled to zero. By this time every country in the world was following their example though in highly organized police states (Britain and the U.S.A. were the last) an underclass was maintained for many years by denying powerplant housekeeping to folk herded in ancient cities which were used as concentration camps, causing the destruction of several beautiful buildings (Saint Paul’s Cathedral, for example) which the modern world would have preserved as song schools, exhibition halls or travellers’ hotels.

  Page 36.

  clyped = to have made public a private matter which the publicizer was expected to keep private. The noun clype (sometimes clype-clash) means, one likely to inform on others. sleekit = soft and smooth to the touch. In a great poem Burns applies it affectionately to a field mouse. Applied to a person, however, it connects with the adjective slee meaning clever, skilful, deft, but also furtive or cunning, therefore not to be trusted.

  Page 38.

  blethering = making a wordiness as senseless as those windblasts Yorkshire farmers call wuthering, but less offensively than is implied by blustering. It derives from the Old English word for bladder or windbag.

  obstrapulous = loudly or assertively troublesome, from the Latin adjective obstreperus meaning noisy.

  Page 39.

  weans = infants or children, so almost synonymous with bairns, but tending more to the baby end of human growth.

  The world holds hardly a dozen tribes of professional Amazons.

  Greek legends say the Amazons were a nation of women on the banks of the Danube whose strength in battle kept them independent of men. They had a wholly female population because they conceived from the men of a neighbouring nation, getting rid of male offspring at birth. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European travellers gave the Amazon name to large female regiments who fought for the African kingdom of Dahomey. Sometimes conscripted before birth — often recruited from slaves — trained to endure pain, fight in the hardest areas of combat and wholly at the disposal of their king and his chieftains when out of it — they had as little independence as other soldiers of the historical epoch. Through most of history women only attached themselves to armies when they had no better livelihood. Homeless travelling women lived parasitically on equally parasitic hordes of male mercenaries, trading sexual relief and alcohol for money between the battles, trading water and crude medical help for anything they could get during them. With total nationalization of warfare in the twentieth century women were conscripted into army storekeeping, driving and signal work. Few were directly employed to shoot and bomb people.

  The independent female armies imagined by the Greeks only appeared in the early modern era. Every continent but Antarctica got two or three Amazon Warrior houses, none recruited from local clans but drawing highly combative volunteers from all parts of the globe. Broadcasts of their battles were highly popular with men, but since modern Amazons refused to recognize the Geneva Conventions no male army dared fight them. They had nothing in common with North American military sisterhoods who dressed in parodies of male combat dress, marched to war beside their brothers and lovers, lined up on the edge of battlefields and incited their clans to greater efforts with choral chanting and synchronized body jerks. Counted together the military sisterhoods and Amazons were less than 0.05% of the world’s female population. Since warfare stopped invading their homes or supporting their families over 99.95% of women have avoided it. Many younger women, however, still found fighting men more attractive.

  Page 40.

  neep = tumshie or turnip.

  Page 44.

  stoor = tiny particles in a chaotic or stirred-up state. In Lament for the Makaris Dunbar uses it for the dust clouds raised by battling warriors. In To a Mountain Daisy Burns applies it to newly ploughed topsoil. It can also mean windblown spray. Twentieth-century Scots most frequently applied it to fluff collected in vacuum-sweeper bags.

  Page 45.

  Groombridge … was testing my fitness for immortality.

  Since dead parents and friends meet and talk with us in dreams we are sure to return as dreams in the heads of those who remember us. Folk who entertain others with tremendous examples, ideas, stories and music can survive in thoughts and actions for many years after their deaths. This was human immortality until the twenty-first century when a federation of transnational pharmaceutical companies (who pretended to be competing for tax avoidance purposes) found a treatment which could make bodies younger again. They could not be made younger than when the treatment began, but after seven years they could be restored to the exact state they were in when it began. The rejuvenated brain cells had therefore no recollection of the previous seven years.

  No biological solution has yet been found to this problem, which scientists called the Struldbrugg factor from Jonathan Swift’s diagnosis of it in 1726. A brain cannot contain more than a normal lifetime of experience without being wasted and warped by it, so youth can only be restored by undoing biological experience. However, the problem had a technical solution. Shortly before a person of thirty or forty was restored to their twenty-three-or thirty-three-year-old state they recorded a summary of what their renewed cells would find useful to know. Since the businessmen and scientists who financed and discovered this process valued information more than sensed experience they embraced the treatment but kept it secret. In the twenty-first century lifespans varied greatly from nation to nation and class to class, but competitive housekeeping ensured that malnutrition, disease, famine and warfare kept the average human lifespan for the whole planet less than forty years. The effect on even a prosperous nation of many people not dying would have been catastrophic.

  Immortality only became possible for many after the creation of extra-terrestrial living room. By that time powerplant housekeeping had returned the earth to a stable ecology and most intelligent people had come to prefer sensed experience to manipulating units of information. Since fear of death is an obvious sign of an unsatisfying life few nowadays want their bodies to exist forever.

  Page 50.

  perjink = trim, neat, of smart appearance.

  Page 55.

  I hate women for their damnable smug security and for always being older than me, always older and wiser.

  This spasm of rage against women from a man who personally preferred them to men was a symptom of the spreading war fever.

  CHAPTER THREE — WARRIOR WORK

  Page 59.

  jorries = small glass or porcelain balls and the game children play with these on pieces of level ground. In Dumbarton it is called jiggies (from the verb jig meaning to turn or dodge quickly) and in other parts of Scotland
, bools. It should not be confused with the bools played by adults with much larger, wooden balls on smooth green lawns, though the rules of play are similar.

  Page 61.

  whaups = curlews.

  Page 63.

  The Warrior house was built over the short river flowing into Saint Mary’s Loch from Loch of the Lowes.

  This modern structure was on the site of Tibbie Shiel’s Inn where James Hogg (poet, novelist and tenant farmer at Altrieve and Mountbenger) gathered with his neighbours in the first decades of the nineteenth century. A large statue of the poet with crook, plaid and sheepdog was placed on the lower slope of Oxcleuch Rig near the end of that century, and now overlooks the Ettrick veterans’ garden of remembrance.

  The Warrior house was drill hall, armoury, canteen, dormitory, gymnasium, infirmary, cinema, library, stable, garage, youth hostel, club room and old men’s home. Four distinct ranks used it.

  1 – The Boys’ Brigade. These soldiers of any age over twelve had joined the army but not yet fought a battle. They spent a third of their time in martial exercise. A dedicated few spent more time on that but most enjoyed playing other games too.

  2 – Officers. Between wars these spent two days a week training the Boys’ Brigade, the rest in martial sport, study and love affairs.

  3 – Veterans: officers who had tired of war or grown too old for it. Their pastimes were advising the Boys’ Brigades, playing bowls or cards and visiting old men and women in quieter houses.

  4 – Servants. These had a talent for housework, no wish to fight and preferred the company of men to women. They seldom left the Warrior house because their love affairs were with each other. The only class conflict was slight tension between servants attached to the officers’ mess and hero-worshipping cadets who sometimes worked as waiters.

  Page 65.

  March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale etc. Based on March, March, Pinks of Election, a song published by Hogg in his Jacobite Relics, Blue Bonnets Over the Border is one of the many lyrics which Walter Scott (1771–1832) scattered through his novels. It is sung by Louis (one of Julian Avenel’s followers) in The Monastery. Set to a pleasant marching tune and slightly bowdlerized it was so popular with anglophone choirs in the late historical era that T.S. Eliot quotes it in The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles. Like other Scottish songs its local popularity was ensured by emphatic use of place names.

  Page 74.

  coronach = a Gaelic lament for the fallen.

  Page 75.

  bogie = a call to cancel a game while people are still playing it.

  Page 80.

  glaikit sumphs = irresponsible dullards.

  Page 82.

  girning = whining or wailing through teeth exposed as in a grin.

  dour = determined, hard, stern, dull, severe, obstinate, unyielding, sullen, humourless, slow, sluggish, reluctant.

  ahint = behind; at the rear end.

  disjaskit = disjoined or discombobulated.

  pawkie = crafty; shrewd.

  couthie = friendly; sympathetic.

  Page 88.

  YE GOWK! = you cuckoo.

  YE DOITED GOMERIL! = you crazed idiot.

  YE STUPIT NYAFF! = you puny insignificance.

  YE BLIRT! = you unexpected squall of rain; rain or wind; you childish outcry; you externally visible part of the genitalia of a female horse.

  CHAPTER FOUR — PUDDOCK PLOT

  Page 107.

  carnaptious = irritable; contentious.

  Page 108.

  Secret societies (like governments, stock exchanges, banks, national armies, police forces, advertising agencies and other groups who made nothing people needed) had ended with the historical era.

  All these organizations existed to create and protect money which everyone needed in the last centuries of the historical era. Wat did not know the wonderful value huge amounts of money added to the lives of those who owned them.

  Page 111.

  The times are racked with birth pangs. Every hour Brings forth some gasping Truth, etc. These lines are by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) Bostonian doctor, professor of anatomy and essayist. In 1858 his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table made him famous by its playful wit, fresh unconventional tone and vignettes in verse. The monstrous but quickly domesticated truths he describes here are nineteenth-century geological and biological discoveries not foreshadowed in the Bible. At first many feared these contradicted the word of God, undermined organized religion and would overturn established authority. In a few years it was obvious that ecclesiastical, legal and political bosses were as firmly established as ever, and scientific discovery was making industrial investment more profitable.

  It was written by an American judge heralding fascism.

  This statement is untrue. The speaker has confused the nineteenth-century doctor and essayist with his son of the same name, a U.S.A. Supreme Court Chief Justice who ruled in 1927 that third generation idiots could be legally sterilized, and also lived to see the rise of Hitler. The first O. W. Holmes could not herald fascism. He lived when the world’s most fascist states were European monarchies or the colonies of European monarchic empires. In those days no American would have thought such places patterns for the U.S.A.

  Page 111.

  Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end! etc.

  Probably the best-known song recorded by Sir Harry Lauder (1870–1950) Scottish mill boy and coal miner who became one of Britain’s most popular music-hall comedians. The mindless, onward-trudging optimism of the words and tune comforted many in the era between two World Wars. Lauder’s trite verses and use of a Lowland Scottish accent while wearing a Highland kilt made him particularly loathed by the great poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who also spoke with a Lowland Scottish accent and often wore a Highland kilt.

  Page 116.

  Those [eighteenth-century] Europeans thought they were safer than the Imperial Romans.

  The historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) began his most famous book thus:

  In the second century of the Christian Aera, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence; the Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period, A.D. 98–180, of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the two Antonines.

  Gibbon deliberately used phrases prosperous Britons used about their own nation: most civilized portion of mankind, extensive monarchy, union of the provinces, free constitution etc. He then described Roman civilization slowly, continually collapsing through thirteen centuries of Christianity, German invasion and Mohammedan conquest until nothing remained but impressive ruins and words in books. However, he found differences suggesting his own civilization was more secure. The Roman Empire had failed because ruled by a single city: first Rome, then Constantinople. The civilization to which Gibbon belonged was European — not just British — and ruled the world from London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Madrid et cetera, from many capitals of nations too strong to be defeated by outside invaders, too united by shared advantages to seriously damage each other. Some were monarchies, some republics, but mutual toleration and an intelligent economic system were common to all, and their mastery of explosive armaments made them safe from barbarians.

  Gibbon completed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1788. The French Revolution started a year later and convinced him that civilization would always be a few brief decades between eras of barbarism. In this he differs from Thomas Carlyle who believed human history would
have been meaningless if the French Revolution had NOT broken out.

  Note: The notion that a civilization, empire or nation is a prosperous minority for whom the rest exist was a historical commonplace, though the size of the minority varied. Here are a few of their names: Aristocracy, Equestrians, Lords, Gentry, Officers, Brahmins, Mandarins, Court-and-Camp, Church-and-State, The City, The Bourgeoisie, Le Monde, Society, The Party, The Nomenclatura, The Executive Class and (in twentieth-century England where social manipulators were too modest to declare themselves) The Middle Class.

  Page 116.

  Our rational Utopia is about to go boom and fall apart too and you, Wat Dryhope, are the virus of the plague which is going to destabilize it.

  destabilize = to secretly undermine or subvert a government or economy so as to cause unrest or collapse, thus making a land available to outsiders who have not declared war on it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries civilized traders did this by giving native tribesmen, in return for local produce, blankets in which people had died of smallpox; but the most effective way of weakening people was by destroying their food supply. After the United States government had signed a peace treaty with the central American redskin nations it built forts across the prairies to ensure the treaty was kept. The soldiers in the forts, assisted by white settlers and sportsmen, then exterminated the buffaloes on which the Indians depended for food. Indians who fought to prevent this were killed with rifles and machine guns because they were breaking the treaty. The starving remainder (chiefly women and children) had to beg for food at the forts and were given some on condition that they shifted to less fertile lands, lands which the white man did not want until oil was discovered on them a few decades later.