And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  Sometimes he’ll pull an issue down and glance through it, and is still surprised by the range of people who wrote for the magazine: ecologists, feminists, anarchists, churchmen, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, historians, social scientists, retired diplomats, civil servants, and politicians and party workers of every hue – even some renegade pro-devolution Tories. Some of those contributors are dead, some retired, but others are senior members of governments in either Edinburgh or London, and many of the non-politicians have become prominent in their own fields. The rebels became professors, the barbarians walked through the palace gates and took over. And not a shot was fired.

  Mike remembers clearly the night Gavin asked him to be involved. He had no hesitation in saying yes. He attended the meeting the next evening and from then on, for five years, supplied photographs, designed covers, worked on the layout, and rediscovered his schoolboy talent for cartooning. Others, led by Gavin, later joined by his cousin Ellen Imlach, drove the magazine editorially. Mike was happy in his back-room role. There were other, more visible, magazines with similar agendas that achieved much more in political terms, but Mike still feels a touch of pride when he looks at a copy of Root & Branch. And yet the argument that was conducted in its pages, as it was in the pages of those other journals, should not have been necessary. What was it again? It was, in the end, so convincingly won that it is hard to reconstruct it. Did the professors, when they were rebels, have a clearer sense of direction than he did? It seemed at the time that they did, but perhaps that wasn’t the case. Sometimes, he thinks, the surest thing you do is a confused scuffle with fate. You push forward into the dark, not with certainty but with determination. If you keep going forward, you may eventually come out of the dark and into a place you recognise.

  It wasn’t until the years of Root & Branch that Mike really got to know Ellen, even though when he was first with Adam she was already living in Joppa with Robin Piggott and their daughter, Kirsty. Only Kirsty wasn’t their daughter, not Robin’s anyway. They behaved as if she was, but there was a story there Mike did not know, and that even Gavin and Adam seemed in the dark about. Whatever had happened in the past, Mike decided, it was none of his business. Robin was working for himself. Kirsty was in primary school. Ellen seemed happy. She’d published her first, slim, sparky book, The Other Lady Macbeth, a few years before and was at work on a second. The first had been attacked not only by some male reviewers but also, with greater ferocity, by both radical and conservative women. ‘I must have got something right,’ Ellen said. Her journalistic skills and freely donated opinion pieces were major assets for the magazine.

  Robin didn’t like to stray far from his nest, so he usually took care of Kirsty after school. Occasionally, following an editorial meeting or some other evening event, Ellen would go with Mike and Adam to Jean Barbour’s for an hour or two. From what Mike remembers, Ellen seemed to enjoy the atmosphere and the conversations, but then would come those moments when everybody had to hush for a song or a story. The fact was, she and Jean didn’t get on. Ellen disliked or was jealous of Jean for having never had to work for a living – and for being, as she saw it, self-indulgent. She baulked at the sight of grown-up people sitting on the floor like schoolchildren before their teacher. On the one hand she thought ‘tradition’ was another word for ‘conformity’; on the other she used to get annoyed at Jean’s penchant for twisting postmodernist knots into the tales she told. If that was what she was doing. ‘Either tell them straight,’ Ellen complained, ‘or don’t tell them at all.’ Eventually she stopped coming, after being asked once too often to keep her voice down.

  For her part, Jean disliked the self-righteous streak in Ellen and thought her opinions insubstantial. It was true, Ellen’s book wasn’t remarkable for its footnotes or extensive bibliography, but that wasn’t the point: the point was she wrote cracking polemic. She was also almost as critical of female behaviour – the ambitions, deceits and treacheries of her various Lady Macbeths – as she was of men, and this was what drew the feminist as well as the chauvinist guns on her. Ellen didn’t care. Mike remembers going out to Joppa one day: Robin answered the door and said, ‘Welcome to Dunsinane,’ and there was Ellen behind him, roaring with laughter. As if the whole thing, the serious import of her book, were nothing but an enormous joke. ‘Don’t believe a word you read,’ she told Mike. ‘Not just in my book. Any book.’ She had in her, she said, in more or less equal quantities, a thirst for the truth and a conviction that there was no such thing. ‘All stories are lies, Mike. The secret is to work out how big the lie is. That’s why we keep believing in a thing called truth. It doesn’t exist but we can’t help looking for it. It’s one of the most endearing of human failings.’

  §

  Liz stood in the bay window of the drawing room, looking down on the world, and it was green and alive and unbearably beautiful. For weeks now, months, something had been wrong and she could no longer deny it. Even this view didn’t stop the sick feeling she had about herself. It wasn’t that she was in any particular pain, although there were pains, sudden and sharp and insidious, it was more the constant exhaustion that told her she was in trouble. Her energy was gone by mid-morning. Lately she’d been stopping twenty minutes early and having a coffee to recover, before walking slowly home down the hill. Then she would sleep for an hour, sometimes longer. She didn’t tell Don about this. But Don would be retired soon and then she wouldn’t be able to hide it from him.

  She could hardly believe it but she’d been working for Mrs Cotter twenty years. They’d agreed a few years back – about the same time Mrs Cotter finally said, ‘Liz, this is ridiculous, please call me Elaine’ – to cut her hours to two days a week, but even at that there was very little to do. Maybe she should retire herself, she was old enough, she was already drawing her pension. But if she quit she wouldn’t ever have the house to herself again. And if she couldn’t come to the house then whatever was wrong wouldn’t go away even for those few hours. But the reality was that it didn’t go away. She was going to have to do something.

  The worst thing was being sure what it was. She felt things. There was a lump in one breast, there was something else that didn’t feel right under her arm. Why had she not done anything before? The answer was simple: fear. She’d seen it take her own mother, quick as anything, and that ought to have made her act but it had had the opposite effect, it made her incapable of action. Maybe if she and Don had been talking more she’d have had more courage. Maybe if she told him, even now, it could still be all right.

  Mrs Cotter – Elaine – had turned grey in an elegant, sophisticated kind of way. But when Liz looked at herself the greyness was anything but sophisticated. It was the grey of sickness. Sometimes Elaine said, ‘Are you all right, Liz?’ And she always replied that she was fine, just a little tired.

  And Mr Cotter was a surgeon. His job was cutting into bodies like hers. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  She left the window and sat on the piano stool. It was a quarter to twelve. An hour to go. All she wanted to do was sleep. She pressed the white keys, one, two, one, two, three, and heard the start of a tune. By accident, because she didn’t know how to play, she’d struck the first few notes of a song. What was it? She tried to think of the words. Then she tried to play the notes again but they were gone, she couldn’t get them in the right order.

  Oh my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch …

  She hadn’t had a letter from Charlie for months.

  She just wanted to put her head down and sleep.

  §

  Adam and Mike lay awake at night, talking. They would have sex then talk, or they would talk then have sex. They talked about everything. They were the best times they had, some of the best hours of Mike’s life. The intimacy of shared bodies, shared thoughts. They played word games to induce sleep, but the words would stimulate more words and they’d stay awake. They talked about survival – which one of them would survive out in the desert or lost in
the hills, which one would have survived in a concentration camp. Adam was physically tougher but he thought Mike was more stoical, therefore more resilient. ‘You survived in that school,’ he said. ‘You survived being gay in a mining town in the 1950s,’ Mike said. ‘Up on the bings.’ And they would wrap themselves around one another, and maybe one or both of them would be thinking of those distant times.

  They both learned about survival afresh in the 1980s. Something began to seep into their lives around the middle of the decade. They heard rumours, then more detailed stories, then definite news, emanating from California, from New York, from London. They weren’t in any kind of scene. They knew where in Edinburgh to go if they wanted it, but they didn’t want it. Mike didn’t anyway. They kept themselves, mostly, to themselves. But even so they couldn’t avoid it when people started talking about ‘the plague’. It was supposed to be about gay men, so they couldn’t ignore it – but to begin with in Edinburgh it wasn’t about gay men at all. It was about a different scene altogether, involving people they hardly saw, hardly knew existed, out in the peripheral schemes, heroin users sharing needles. That was where HIV flourished in Edinburgh at first, but eventually it touched everybody.

  If Mike liked someone enough to want to have sex, then he probably wanted more than sex with him. That was how he felt. It’s how he still feels. It had been his objection to Sam, the biker. It wasn’t the sex that put him off, it was Sam. When he was with Adam, he didn’t want sex with anyone else but him. He believed Adam felt the same.

  They ran into Sam now and then, on rare occasions when they were out on the town, and each meeting reinforced for Mike the way he felt. Sam reminded him of what he didn’t want. There was even something reassuring about Sam’s strutting, peacock personality. Mike had grown to like him, in spite of his reservations. And – the worst kind of complacency – he felt sorry for him. It seemed to him that Sam had aged rapidly since their first encounter in Sandy Bell’s. He worked out a lot, but he looked haggard, not healthy. He still tried to get off with Mike, and when he saw that he was with Adam he tried to get off with them both. To avoid difficulties they made a joke of it, until finally, one night in the Marquis, Sam conceded defeat. ‘You can only take no for an answer so often,’ he said, ‘before your ego starts to protest. I was made for sex. It’s what I’m here for. I’m not sure what you’re here for, but you’re missing out, darlings. I mean, if you want to play mummies and daddies, why come here?’ ‘It’s an education,’ Adam said coolly. ‘No offence,’ Sam said, ‘but I’ve been trying to educate this one for years. He has to learn to separate this’ – he tapped Mike’s chest above his heart – ‘from this.’ He reached forward and briefly cradled his crotch in his hand. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Adam looked for a moment as if he wanted to punch him and then he smiled at Mike. ‘Aye, maybe,’ he said. ‘But no the night.’

  It was just what Mike didn’t want to do, separate love and sex. He wanted a relationship, deep and abiding, and he thought that was what he had. Adam’s smile was kind but it was patronising too. Mike should have paid more attention to it.

  Sam was restless, relentless. He went on crazy sex-filled holidays to Spanish islands, he went to London, he went to Amsterdam. And he got greyer and gaunter. And then they didn’t see him any more. Months went by without a sight of him. Mike didn’t think about it much. It wasn’t as if he missed him. And then one day he did. He hadn’t been in the Marquis for months, and he went in and asked someone about Sam. ‘Oh, you’ve not heard?’ And so he discovered that Sam was gone, wiped out, killed by devotion to his own desire. It was shocking and upsetting. He was the first AIDS victim Mike knew personally. He remembered him in the shadows at Greyfriars, telling him what he wanted, what Mike wanted, and he felt a terrible emptiness because Sam wasn’t there, would never be there again.

  §

  There were other issues to contend with. Every month, sometimes it seemed almost every week, there was another rally or march or demo in opposition to something. Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, factory closures, privatisations – the Thatcher government had opened up so many fronts that it ran the opposition, official or otherwise, ragged. Once, Mike remembers, they marched in support of unemployment benefit, because claimants were being penalised if they didn’t sign up for some useless training scheme or other. How mad that seems now, that they were cornered into defending the right not to work. But it didn’t seem mad at the time. It felt necessary to resist, like M. Lucas, at all levels and every opportunity.

  Whenever Mike began to flag, Adam would urge him on again. In his own way Adam was as relentless as Sam. Mike struggled to keep up. He can’t now remember all the places where bold pledges were made to keep factories open, but he can remember this: every one of those struggles ended in failure. British Leyland, British Steel, British Aluminium, Carron, Caterpillar, Singer – the names became a jumbled heap of rusting iron, broken concrete and junked machinery, and it seemed as if the corpses of thousands of workers lay crushed and trapped under it all. Bathgate, Linwood, Methil, Uddingston, Dundee, Falkirk, Clydebank – even when he checks the many photos he took of men gathered round braziers, of ragged marches snaking along grey streets, of chained-up gates and derelict sites, the details of who made what where don’t always come back. It was another country, and it is no more. And, for all the passion that was poured into defending it, he doesn’t miss it much. All that devastation is reduced now to the chorus of a pop song by the Proclaimers – a song that, even at the time, always sounded more sorrowful than angry.

  §

  Then came the miners’ strike. It was an explosion that had been waiting to detonate for years: the right wanted revenge for 1974, the left wanted to stop Thatcherism in its tracks. A confrontation between Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill was probably always inevitable. Class warriors, dogmatists, idealogues – they could have swapped roles and people would hardly have noticed. They even had similar hairstyles.

  The miners’ strike kicked off in Scotland, a fact sometimes forgotten. The Coal Board wanted to close Polmaise Colliery as ‘uneconomic’ and the Scottish miners came out against it, and at the same time the Yorkshire miners came out over proposed closures in their area, and it spread from these two locations. There was never any question whose side Adam and Mike were on. You were either for the miners or for the Tories and that was it. And if you were for the miners then you believed in the rightness of the struggle, and that victory was possible. And if you couldn’t wholly subscribe to those articles of faith, as Mike couldn’t, you tried your best not to let it show. He always doubted that the miners could win, not because he doubted the miners, but because of their leader. Arthur Scargill made mistake after mistake with startling conviction. He refused to hold a national ballot, which would have legitimised the strike in the eyes of the world, he alienated not just public opinion, which was largely sympathetic to the miners, but even union opinion, and his egomania was such that he doomed the miners to defeat. The contrast with the leaders of the Scottish NUM, Mick McGahey in particular, was stark. McGahey might have been Scargill’s loyal deputy throughout the strike, he might have talked dismissively of ‘ballotitis’ and said that the issue was not the holding of ballots but the justice of the cause, but somehow when he said these things he sounded like a man of principle, whereas when Scargill said them he sounded like a bully. McGahey was an honourable, straightforward, card-carrying Communist. He had dignity, nobility even, and he stood head and shoulders above Scargill even when he stood in his shadow. Mike would have gone on strike for Mick McGahey.

  For many that kind of thinking was tantamount to betrayal. You had to take the whole package, including Scargill, and not deviate one inch from the true path. If you deviated you were suspect. Mike was suspect, and when he voiced his doubts Adam made no attempt to disguise his disappointment. ‘I don’t expect ye tae understand,’ he said, ‘but it’s like following your team. Ye stick wi them through the bad times as well as the goo
d. That’s what it means, tae be a supporter.’ ‘Sorry,’ Mike said. ‘I’m not into football.’ ‘Even if ye were,’ Adam said, ‘maybe this just isna your team.’ There was a cruelty in the way he said it. It hurt Mike deeply: it opened up a space between them that, naively perhaps, until then he hadn’t realised existed.

  There’s a photograph, taken near the end of the strike not by Mike but by Angus, that was widely used at the time. The NUM leaders have emerged from some meeting or other and are standing on an open bit of ground. Scargill is as defiant as ever: he is looking at the camera and his hand is making that characteristic chopping motion to emphasise whatever he is saying. But the figure your eye is drawn to is that of Mick McGahey. He is next to Scargill yet a little apart. His stance shows how weary he is of the strike, and there is a look in his eye, which Angus has captured though it must have been there only for a moment, that seems also to show how weary he is of his president’s voice. That’s what the photo says to Mike. Solidarity and despair combined. An old warrior staring defeat in the face. It is a tragic image.

  It is also, Mike sees, yet another example of how Angus made better pictures than he ever could.

  Meanwhile, in spite of their differences and along with thousands of others, Adam and Mike marched and chanted and sang and collected for the miners. Mostly Adam was involved on his own patch, at Borlanslogie. Things were peaceful there, because the strike was solid from first to last. Not a single miner crossed the picket line during the twelve months the strike lasted, though some must have been sorely tempted to do so. But, because of that very solidarity, there was much to be done in terms of fund-raising and supporting the Borlanslogie miners and their families. The difficulty for Mike was that Adam didn’t want him there. He went once but that space between them opened up immediately. Maybe, Mike wondered, Adam was worried in case they met one of his old lovers, but it wasn’t about that at all. It was simply that Mike didn’t fit. He embarrassed Adam. So after that one time he stayed away.