The Changeling

by Robin Jenkins

  Then she remembered his mother at the tree as he was punching it. If Mrs Curdie was her mother, would she be able to honour her? The question, with its dreadful but inevitable answer, brought her even closer to him, but never close enough.

  ‘Maybe I should go out now and see where Daddy is,’ she said.

  Suddenly the smallness, darkness, and desolation of the hut, and its uselessness as a refuge for him, overwhelmed her with terror. If she did not get out into the open at once, and see the sky, she would begin to scream and not be able to stop. Adding to her terror, too, were his patience and silence as he sat on the bucket, with his bandaged hand resting on his knee, and his face glimmering like the skull they had passed on the hill.

  She pushed at the door. When it did not instantly open, her hands became as if paralysed; her strength seemed all to have gone. Even her sobbing was low and difficult.

  He rose and pushed the door open with his foot.

  As she rushed out, she thought the sky had never looked so beautiful and spacious.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ she cried.

  She thought he answered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll not be long. We’ll have to hurry, won’t we, for it’s getting awfully dark?’

  She clambered up out of the hollow. When she saw the beam of the lighthouse and the lights of Wemyss Bay across the Firth, she felt reassured. Two or three stars twinkled in the sky. Making an effort to be calm she put her hands to her mouth and shouted, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ From faraway there seemed to come an answer. She shouted again, but this time no answer came. What she had feared must have happened; making for the hut her father had wandered off in the wrong direction.

  There was only one thing to do now: she and Tom would have to go down. She could scout on ahead and find out if the police were gone; but, of course, even if they were, they would come back again tomorrow. Besides, her mother and grandmother would be more angry with him than ever, because she had got herself into trouble by helping him. Her father too might be lost all night.

  With a gesture of surrender she went back down into the hollow, which in these last few minutes had grown much darker.

  The door was closed. Pushing it open, and calling his name, she screamed. He was a giant staring with a queer twist down at her. At first she thought he must be standing on the bucket until she remembered that the door in opening had struck it. Then she made out round his neck, in a noose, the rope which she had noticed lying on the floor. Often she had seen Alistair play thus, pretending to be a cowboy hero about to be lynched; she herself had joined in. It was the memory of those games, so lively and so happily foolish, that made this silent, lonely, melancholy imitation so terrifying.

  Then she knew. The rope was not loose, it was fastened to a nail in the rafter. She screamed again and again, but stopped suddenly, and was as still as death, when he tried to gurgle something to her.

  She knew if she could keep calm she might be able to save him; but that very effort at calmness exhausted her. First she held him up to take the weight off his neck; but she could not do that for long, so she dragged the pail over to her with her foot, kicked it so that it stood upside down, climbed on to it, still trying to hold him up with one hand, and with the other hand reached up and tried to untie the rope or break it or pull out the nail. All that happened was that her hand grew cramped and seared. If only she had a knife, she kept moaning; and vividly she remembered the little knife with the mother-of-pearl handle that Alistair was so proud of, and which their mother didn’t like him to have. When she tried to loose the noose her fingers against his cold neck became weak as a baby’s.

  That was all she had the courage to try. When the pail fell, bringing her down heavily and painfully, she ran out, limping, with her leg skinned and bleeding. Again she saw the beam of the lighthouse and the lights of Wemyss Bay, much brighter now that sky and sea and hills were dark; but this time there was no reassurance in their reminder of people at peace at the fireside in their homes.

  Weeping, and falling often, she made her way at a desperate pace down the hill.

  AFTERWORD

  Reincarnation may be an increasingly fashionable belief in the West but Robin Jenkins was a rare man in experiencing it firsthand. A novelist whose work spanned half a century, he was effectively rediscovered and reborn as a public figure in the 1980s, thanks to a combination of new books, and the republication of some of his earlier classics. Before he died in 2005, he had become a prophet honoured in his own country and his lifetime, an unusual fate for a Scot. Like countless others, I discovered him from the paperbacks that began appearing then. There was The Cone Gatherers, his haunting forest novel of the Second World War, still his best-known book, but then Fergus Lamont, Just Duffy, Dust on the Paw and many more. A fine novelist has an atmosphere, a saturated colour, all his or her own, and Jenkins has it. It’s ultimately indescribable, something to be seen or tasted, but it has something to do moral intelligence, social conscience, an acute understanding of life’s absurdity and deep human sympathy.

  ~

  John Jenkins (as he was known outside writing) had been brought up in a tough Lanarkshire mining village in deep poverty, before becoming a school-teacher, a wartime conscientious objector working in Argyll’s forests and, for a while, a militant socialist. Yet after the collapse of his party, the Independent Labour Party, he described himself as a moralist rather than anything else, and it is the moral cutting edge of his writing that makes him a lot more directly challenging than most contemporary novelists, even if they are slicker and subtler in style. At his finest he is the Scottish Ibsen, or even Chekhov, in the intensity and dark plunge of his thinking. My favourite for a long time was an historical novel, The Awakening of George Darroch, about the least likely of subjects, the struggle of a Church of Scotland minister about whether to abandon his living when the Kirk split over its relationship with the early Victorian state. Jenkins took this very important but also musty-smelling issue as the background for a book about conscience, frailty and oppression that could help anyone today to understand life in Communist Eastern Europe, or indeed the agonising choices currently faced by Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan—a part of the world Jenkins knew well.

  Then I came across The Changeling. It usurped even George Darroch, which it much resembles. The setting is nearer to us in time but yet a world away already. This is emphatically not a book which ‘could have been written today’ and that’s part of the point. It tells the story of a fat, sentimental, not very successful schoolteacher who believes in human goodness, and who tries to reclaim, or save, a bright boy from the Glasgow slums by taking him on his family holiday. That, by the way, already distances the story. Once, not so long ago, middle-class people did sometimes do things like that. The more Christian atmosphere of Scotland in the middle of the twentieth century, and the equally idealistic socialism of the time, could provoke people to reach out, as they don’t today, after another half-century of rising incomes and waning faith—religious and political. Even in 1956–7, roughly the time of the novel’s setting, the majority of people regard the teacher’s action as naïve and possibly hypocritical (perhaps he’s trying to attract attention to get a promotion). But it was less outlandish then.

  Jenkins was interested in naïve people, including those trying to do good in a cold, materialist world. In The Changeling the teacher, Charlie Forbes, is both risible and impressive. The story depends upon him being, like most of us, a curdled mix of vanity, ambition, selfishness, sentimentality—and altruism. We are frequently reminded of his clumsy, flat-footed absurdity; on a bicycle with buckled wheels, ‘in mauve corduroy shorts, leather moccasins, and white open-necked shirt that revealed the hairiness of his broad chest, he sang as he zig-zagged in the sunshine …’ He responds to the beauty of the Argyllshire landscape with unrestrained romanticism, an absurd mix of half-digested history and childish romance. He is what Scots call ‘a terrible blether’, a humbug and a bore—as one of the other teac
hers tells him to his face, ‘smug and phoney’. And indeed he is almost completely impossible. But only ‘almost’. Though most of those around him reckon that he is a hypocrite, Forbes is more interesting than that. He has had Quixotic moments before. Once he invited a labourer to join a family picnic—almost casually we learn that eight years on, the bitter and bereaved man recalls the tea ‘still sweet in his mooth’. Random acts of goodness ricochet and reverberate. He knows it, even if hardly anyone else seems to remember. In his galumphing, ridiculous way, Forbes retains a fundamental optimism about humanity without which we are lost souls.

  So he is genuinely moved by the sharp brightness of the slum boy, Tom Curdie. Unlike the rest of the school staff, his wife, children and mother-in-law, all more cynical and worldly-wise, he doesn’t see Curdie’s unsettling half-smile as insolence, but as rather brave. His scheme for Curdie has a trickle of sly ambition about it but even Forbes cannot work out how much. At one level, the other teachers who are brutal, coarse and unethical are right and he is wrong. Curdie is indeed a ‘practised liar and a thief’. He is deep and devious. Living with an alcoholic mother and a crippled stepfather in a tenement with his brother and sister, he is brutalised, veiled, armoured. In a few strokes, Jenkins draws the life of industrial poverty as deftly as Dickens, and without a flicker of sentiment. These are poor people. And partly because they are poor, they turn out to be nasty people too. Here, there is nothing redeeming about poverty. ‘Donaldson’s Court’, the slum where the Curdies live, is a place which stands in the book for the worst in modern life. The others are right to fear and shun it. In a rare example of authorial moralising, Jenkins picks up on one character’s assertion that he wouldn’t let a pet tiger into Donaldson’s Court, bitterly agreeing that ‘its sleek skin, indigenous to jungle striped with sun and shadow, would have been shamed, and its fastidious paws polluted, by the garbage, filth and overflow from broken privies’. Humans, however, he points out, ‘had begun to acquire the characteristics which would enable them to survive amidst that dirt and savagery … as irretrievably adapted to their environment as the tiger to his’.

  Yet, at a more important level, Forbes is right and his critics are wrong. Tom Curdie steals for money to help his friends, but also he steals to keep himself from going soft. The frightened, beaten-down, beautiful human being spotted by the teacher is there, hidden behind his circumstances and intelligence. Tom knows how the world goes. He brings a bite of apple to a mangy cat and strokes it: ‘Suspicious of kindness, it mewed in misery at being too weak to slink away. He did not speak either to reassure or sympathise. Pity was never shown by him, only comradeship.’ (There is a socialist undercurrent in the book as strong as in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair or the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid but much quieter.) For Tom stealing is something protective, a palisade which will shore up the distance between him and the Forbeses. It is self-definition of a pessimistic kind. It keeps out feelings that might weaken Tom in the vicious fight for survival that is slum life. He understands that if he lets himself believe that he belongs in the comfortable middle-class Forbes family, with their good food, indoor lavatories and country holidays, then when he goes back to reality, life will be intolerable.

  For Tom is not being offered adoption. He is not being ‘saved’. He is being given a tantalising glimpse of a better, brighter, more beautiful world, before it is snatched back and he is returned to a world that stinks of piss and booze and failure. This better world is embodied in the fictional Argyllshire village of Towellan, a magically beautiful seaside setting that anyone who knows the west of Scotland will instantly recognise, an apparent Arcadia which represents for the Forbes family their annual paradise. Like the Borders countryside in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, or Orkney in the writing of Edwin Muir, it stands for a dream of uncorrupted, pre-industrial human life, to be set against the worst of Scottish mid-century slums. For the Forbeses, ‘Towellan’ means family harmony, unforced laughter and shared experiences as banal as favourite walks or unsuccessful fishing trips—a seam of joy to be hoarded and savoured for the rest of the year. So to take Tom Curdie with him, Forbes believes, is not a small thing. It may somehow inoculate him—with optimism, or vital human spirit. It will at least show him another way of living. That this is both well-meaning and obtuse, even cruel, is something that hard, bright Curdie instinctively grasps but his teacher, brimming with naïveté, is simply too stupid to understand. What is he about? Does he think he can save someone with a fortnight in a cottage?

  So this is a moral battle, fought out by ordinary people, who rarely understand one another yet for whom time is short. Forbes, apparently risking nothing worse than a little gentle ridicule, finds himself risking and losing much more than that—in effect, his own human essence, for he becomes monstrous by the end of the story. Tom Curdie, who thinks he is well protected from love and pity, is physically destroyed because Forbes has done his (wholly well-meaning) work and shown the child the full horror of returning to his own background, while knowing that he cannot stay in Paradise either: he literally has nowhere left to go. His instinctive sense that he had to protect himself, build a wall, is shown to be bitterly accurate. Meanwhile, the more hard- bitten characters around these two have risked nothing and lose nothing, yet they are shown without sympathy as lost souls clothed in modern banality. Only Forbes’s daughter, Gillian, who starts by hating Tom and determining to destroy him as a spy and sneak, to get him out of the family, is transformed. If there is a scrap of hope in the book, it is her journey from selfish hardheartedness to deep empathy, of a kind which might in future be less clumsy and self-regarding than her father’s.

  ~

  As the action advances, barely a word or phrase is wasted. Everything is charged with moral meaning, from the diseased rabbits deliberately infected with myxomatosis to improve farmers’ profits, to the Americanisms of Forbes’s son, who calls his father ‘Pop’. In the apparently timeless Argyllshire of the late Fifties, which was Jenkins’s chosen home landscape for much of his life, the surrounding world’s politics is not so far away. The Holy Loch will very soon be visited by the first US Navy Polaris submarines and protestors will be marching along the roads where Forbes on his wobbly bicycle had teetered, dreaming. (One thinks of another Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay, who died a year after Jenkins: his garden refuge or temple in the Pentland hills, Little Sparta, featured stone-carved battleships, submarines and sharks: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’). In the Fifties, package holidays abroad would soon dilute the old raucous Glaswegian rituals of going ‘doon the watter’. Pop music would kill off the open-air singing competition shown in the book—indeed, it apparently already is dead. The teachers belting and abusing slum children are themselves on the way out. So too is the old culture of Scotland generally, so sentimentally admired by Forbes. Anyone who still thinks that Britain in the Fifties was a reassuring and stable society would be well advised to read this novel attentively.

  This being Jenkins at his best, all the characters are wholly human, fallible and at times ridiculous, from the middle-class mother-in-law to the drunken slum parents. Except for Tom and Gillian they appear at first as actors in a comedy, not a tragedy. Yet the world they live in is a tragic world because the possibility of transforming escape for Tom Curdie, or a universe in which Forbes is intelligent enough to think through the consequences of his actions, seems here unthinkable. Some readers may revolt against this. After all, better housing, less brutal education and the expansion of the universities did allow many people to escape, including Jenkins himself. The curt destruction of Forbes’s inflated do-goodery has a sadism about it too. There is no getting away from the fact that this is a bleak little book, for all the sunlight and summer laughter. Nor is it perfect. There is a strange cat-and-mouse pursuit of the family by Peerie, Tom’s friend, towards the end. Like everything else here it serves a particular function—it finally exposes cheerful Charlie Forbes—but it is ridiculous too. To this, I would only say that it is a traged
y, and tragedies may have interludes, and that there is a need for tragic insight always. This book makes me cry, and unsettles me badly, and yet I pick it up again, and press it on friends. It has settled itself somewhere inside my mind, and stayed. What more can you say?

  Andrew Marr, 2007

  For a taster of another Robert Jenkins novel, read on . . .

  The Cone Gatherers

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a good tree by the sea-loch, with many cones and much sunshine; it was homely too, with rests among its topmost branches as comfortable as chairs.

  For hours the two men had worked in silence there, a hundred feet from the earth, closer, it seemed, to the blue sky round which they had watched the sun slip. Misted in the morning, the loch had gone through many shades of blue and now was mauve, like the low hills on its far side. Seals that had been playing tag in and out of the seaweed under the surface had disappeared round the point, like children gone home for tea. A destroyer had steamed seawards, with a sailor singing cheerfully. More sudden and swifter than hawks, and roaring louder than waterfalls, aeroplanes had shot down from the sky over the wood, whose autumnal colours they seemed to have copied for camouflage. In the silence that had followed gunshots had cracked far off in the wood.

  From the tall larch could be glimpsed, across the various-tinted crowns of the trees, the chimneys of the mansion behind its private fence of giant silver firs. Neil, the elder of the brothers, had often paused, his hand stretched out from its ragged sleeve to pluck the sweet resinous cones, and gazed at the great house with a calm yet bitter intentness and anticipation, as if, having put a spell on it, he was waiting for it to change. He never said what he expected or why he watched; nor did his brother ever ask.

  For Calum the tree-top was interest enough; in it he was as indigenous as squirrel or bird. His black curly hair was speckled with orange needles; his torn jacket was stained green, as was his left knee visible through a hole rubbed in his trousers. Chaffinches fluttered round him, ignoring his brother; now and then one would alight on his head or shoulder. He kept chuckling to them, and his sunburnt face was alert and beautiful with trust. Yet he was a much faster gatherer than his brother, and reached far out to where the brittle branches drooped and creaked under his weight. Neil would sometimes glance across to call out: ‘Careful.’ It was the only word spoken in the past two hours.