by William Boyd
The oldest part of the building was invariably the stairs and stairwell. Stone and spiral, they survived the periodic destructions. The steps were smooth, concaved by the stigmata of a million boots. The doors off were small—easier to defend, I suppose; or built for smaller, earlier Scotsmen. The well was always dark. A faint light drained down from a high window at the roof. Here and there a gas mantle hissed. There was a musty vegetable dampness about these stairways—like an old gloomy cellar: earthy, mossy, feculent.
Our apartment was on the first floor. Through the tiny doorway was a hall with wooden boards, empty save for a fireplace with a coal fire always burning there winter and summer, as if to shield our home from the stairs’ chill grip. To the right a door led to the kitchen; to the left, the living rooms. It was as if one moved not only from one climate to another but also to another era. From a world of stone and steel (the pocked handrail) to wood, paneling, paper, rugs and pictures. The drawing room had a fine molded ceiling, the library an Oriental silk carpet. The corridors were paneled in fumed oak, the bedrooms lined with hand-blocked printed papers. This was a legacy of my mother’s last, fatal confinement. After her death, the character of the apartment—which had been tasteful, soft and comfortable—changed, so I was told. The house I grew up in was comfortable enough, but in a severe way. Few traces remained of my mother’s presence. Or rather, by the time I was old enough to notice them, they had been transformed by time: sun-faded platinotypes, damp-stained wallpaper, worn-flat rugs. My father did not believe in change for change’s sake. Thank God my mother had installed a water closet—at least we could shit in a civilized manner. There were still not a few apartments in the “lands” (as these great tenements were known in Edinburgh) further down the High Street where a housemaid collected chamber pots from every bedroom and emptied them down some infernal funnel set in the corner of the kitchen floor, where the excrement dropped a hundred feet into a communal septic tank, emptied once or twice a week by corporation night-soil workers.
We had an inspiring view from our drawing room windows. Princes Street, with its department stores and hotels, dense with pedestrians, omnibuses, tramcars and motors; the National Gallery, the Scott Monument, the Calton Hill; and below us the lush greenness and always busy pathways of the Waverley Gardens. They never seemed to be empty, these gardens; they were always populated by strolling families of Edinburgh folk, staring at the fountains, listening to brass bands, gaping at the humdrum flowerbeds. You would have thought they had never seen grass and trees before, so assiduously did they frequent the place. And yet the city is overwhelmed with views of the countryside, wherever you look. Stand on George Street and you have an unobstructed panorama of the Forth and across the wide water to the farmlands of Fife. Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags form a backdrop to the east. To the west the gentle Pentland Hills …
I used to be annoyed by the seemly traffic of the gardens. I always, from my earliest memories, preferred the Old Town—the uneven, black, friable descent of the High Street, dirty and reeking as it might have been. The most modest fall of rain had the gutters overflowing with mud. Farther down the hill, past the North Bridge, the gray water would foam past the haggard derelict lands, the grim pubs, the fetid coffeehouses and “residential hotels.” Here the drunks, itinerants and prostitutes lived, plied their trade and whiled away their time. A castle at one end, a palace at the other and a cathedral in the middle. It was the spine of the city but also its large intestine, as it were, stretched out, coiled around the linked vertebrae—bile mixed with bone.
* * *
The child accepts his environment, however bizarre, as a norm, unaware of alternatives. It was a long time before I thought of my upbringing as anything out of the ordinary. Was I happy at Number 3 Kelpie’s Court? I suppose I was, in that I never thought of posing myself the question. Thompson and my father were irregular companions, Thompson at school, my father at work. I grew up, almost entirely, in the care and charge of our housekeeper, Oonagh McPhie. She had a succession of scullery maids who helped in the kitchen, made the fires, swept and cleaned, and Oonagh’s husband, Alfred, looked in every day to bring up coal if the bunker needed replenishing. But everything was controlled by Oonagh. During the day between breakfast and supper it was her demesne and answered to her sway.
She must have been in her mid-twenties when I was born. She was a braw, buxom girl from the isle of Lewis. She had dull fair hair, always worn up in a bun, and big strange protruding eyes with heavy lids. She was illiterate but had a tough, sharp mind. Her husband was a French polisher and they lived not far away in the Grassmarket. She had three children, two boys and a girl, all school age, but they were never in our house. Oonagh would arrive at six in the morning and leave after dinner at eight. How did she run her own household? What happened to her children? We never inquired. Actually I did, from time to time, but she always deflected my questioning: “Oh, they’re fine. They can look after themselves,” or “Why do you want to see my tiny place when you’ve got this lovely home all to yourself?” I did not persist. I was not really concerned, to tell the truth; all that was important was that Oonagh should be there, at home with me. I never remember her taking a holiday.
Of course, I loved her desperately, with an aching violent passion that even now can make my eyes smart. Can you blame me? I never called anyone mother in my life. By the time I was old enough to discover the truth, it was too late. I assumed everyone had an “Oonagh” who arrived in the morning and went home at night. What else could I do? My mother’s death wreaked its baleful consequences on me before I even knew it had occurred.
First memories. The rot setting in. Oonagh, holding me, saying something, crooning in her foreign Gaelic tongue. Oonagh looking at me. “Poor wee man. Who’s got no mammy? I’ll be your mammy, Johnny.” Did she unbutton her coarse blouse, heft out a breast for me to nuzzle, tug and kiss? From where do these imaginings come? Infant memories, buried deep? Did she ever … Did I ever press my small hot head to those cool, pale breasts?
One day—I am sure of this—I must have been seven, in the kitchen, Oonagh pinning up the flap of her apron, glowing white, new-starched, to her blouse, The thrust of her big bosom. Her raw hands smoothing the crispness round it. My huge eyes.
“John James Todd! What’re ye staring at?”
“Nothing, Oonagh … I mean—”
“Cannae take your eyes off my bobbies, eh?” Her hands unpinning. “D’you want a keek?”
I fled, burning-eared, breathless with embarrassment, Oonagh’s delighted laughter chasing me from the room.
My God, Oonagh had a lot to answer for—along with everybody else in that household. I look back now and understand that the prime function of a mother is to protect and shelter the unformed malleable character of her child. A mother’s constant unquestioning love gives the child a bland but fertile mulch of normality and ordinariness in which to grow and flourish. What chance did I have in that house? My strange father, cruel plump Thompson and Oonagh … I had to turn to Oonagh. She loved me, after a fashion, but I was the child of her employer. She cared, but she established limits to her caring. So the need flowed one way, from me to her. Fortunately, I seemed genuinely to amuse her; my presence, my personality, was somehow diverting, and if I could gain her attention she would happily preoccupy herself with me.
At first, I made the child’s mistake of thinking that I needed only to behave badly to achieve this, but Oonagh had powerfully deterrent penalties. She would flick my ears with her short hard nails—my ears would glow hot for hours. She would pinch me under the arm, squeezing the soft flesh below the armpit between blunt forefinger and sharp knuckle of her thumb. She would lead me from room to room by the volute of one nostril. She would crack me on the head with a particular wooden spoon—and my skull rang with a deep bass bell—and once, once only (once was enough), after a truly heinous offense (what on earth had I done?) she put washing soda on my penis. Three days of boiling, flaming agony that no wate
r could quench (how could I tell my father?).
So my transgressions were few. I took to winning her attention by the idiosyncratic direction of my conversation, by making up stories. Once engaged, she would chat away herself and then, sometimes, would come the endearments—a kiss, a Gaelic pet name, a hug, the soft yielding crackle of a starched apron in my ear, my nose full of the mild oniony smell of sweat from her armpit. The embraces diminished as I grew older, but my need for her love never waned.
Because her affection was so disinterested, at first I experienced no jealousy when she became pregnant with her fourth child. I was six when it was born, a boy—Gregor. She would bring him with her when she came to work and prop him in an empty log basket in the corner of the kitchen. Did she breast-feed Gregor? Was that the source of my own false memories? (He was a large, ugly, though mercifully quiet child.) Did I mentally transpose positions with him? Was that where I saw those round stretched blue-veined breasts, Gregor’s snotty button nose against their gooseberry tightness?… Quite possibly. I was a jealous child. I still have that abrupt and destructive jealousy within me. It has cost me dearly, once, as you shall see. My neutrality towards Gregor swiftly disappeared. I hated him. He was the first person I hated.
I have said he was a quiet baby; he was almost suspiciously mute, in fact. But one week he was colicky, or teething. He squealed and girned all day, his wretched noise even keeping me from the kitchen. Oonagh would pick him up, sing to him, swing him round, pat his back. She did other things to quiet him too—strange Highland customs, I suppose—like blow on his face or dip his feet in blood-warm water. I came into the kitchen for my tea—cocoa, herring and turnips. Gregor wailed in the corner, a grinding costive yell, his fat face livid with effort, fat little fists hammering in the air. Oonagh handed me the plate.
“Little devil,” she said. “There’s nothing for it.” To me: “Go ahead, eat up.”
She lifted Gregor from his basket, unwrapped the swaddling from round him and laid him naked on the kitchen table. I looked on in some astonishment He bellowed.
“Angry wee man,” she said. To me: “It’ll go cold.” I loaded my fork with herring.
Oonagh bent over Gregor and took his tiny penis in her mouth. He stopped crying instantly. He gurgled. One hand beat the air. His walleyes turned sightless towards me. He shook his head to and fro as if resisting some powerful narcoleptic force. His eyes closed. He slept. Oonagh sucked on for a minute, rhythmically. At one moment our gaze met. I was immobile, fork in hand, dry-throated. Oonagh rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Here we go again.”
She stopped.
“Right. That’s you seen to.” Gregor’s small rigid penis glistened, a thin pink cone.
To me: “Sssh. Don’t make a noise, whatever you do. Come on now, finish your tea.”
Oonagh, Oonagh … Did you ever do that to me? Was I ever so fractious that you had to quiet me with similar ministrations?… My God, those are dangerous years. When I look back on my childhood her influence was in many ways the most powerful and long lasting. If the child is father of the man, then Oonagh shaped me. She educated me. She was the first woman I ever loved, unreservedly, wholeheartedly, unconsciously. From one point of view Oonagh made me.
But that is unfair.… It was not her fault that my mother died, that my father employed her, or that I turned out the kind of person I am. She just did not help. And the ticking time bombs she placed in my psyche have been detonating ever since. *
I never really liked my brother, Thompson Todd. He was a plump child, with an oddly mature, jowly, sullen face. He never lost that corpulence. He had pale-brown hair and pale eyelashes. In the summer, when the weather was fine, Oonagh would take us sea bathing at Portobello, along the coast from Edinburgh. My first, fixed memory of Thompson—he was twelve, I was six, I suppose—is of being pinioned on the beach, my small shoulders beneath his fat knees, as he gleefully washed my face with sand. I had grit in my teeth all day. I have no idea why he did not like me. Normally, with an age gap of six years, an older brother will treat a younger with a fond enthusiasm—a favorite sidekick, an instant fan, almost like a pet—but Thompson’s attitudes then, as far as I remember, were either indifference or irritation. Perhaps, unconsciously, he sensed our enmity growing already; sensed the divergent nature of our personalities.
Unlike Thompson, I was an attractive child in my prepubertal years. I was small, dark and dark-skinned, slim, with an unusually large, almost out-of-proportion, head with a shock of glossy black hair cut straight across my forehead in an uncompromising fringe by Oonagh. There is a photograph of me, age seven, standing with Thompson on the beach at Gullane. Beside his bulk (his almost girlish breasts swelling beneath the horizontal stripes of his bathing costume) I look sticklike and frail against the bright sand. We are holding hands, untypically. I have just emerged from the water and my hair is wet and slicked back from my forehead. The altered hairstyle causes me to resemble my older self, in my twenties, in Berlin—gaunt, ascetic, cold, ill used. A stiff breeze flattens the grass on the dunes; sand grains sting the backs of my legs as I gaze fascinated, innocent, into that neutral enticing lens.
The camera was held by Donald Verulam, an acquaintance and sometime colleague of my father at the University. Donald was in his thirties, an Englishman, a bachelor and a lecturer in classics. He sat on some University committee with my father and a reserved form of friendship had grown up over several years and had strengthened since my mother’s death. Donald had a professional interest in medical history and had edited Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis and had published monographs on classical theories of reproduction and of circulation of the blood. He was very tall, well over six feet, and had the slight self-conscious stoop common to many shy, tall men. He had a bony handsome look about him, marred only by his long neck and a rather prominent Adam’s apple. His balding hair grew long at the back. He was a kind diffident man who came to dinner once a month and played golf with my father during the summer on the many links courses around Edinburgh and the Fife coast. These were the only “family” excursions I can recall from my early years. Oonagh, my father, Donald Verulam, Thompson and me. We went to Longniddry, Aberlady, Gullane and Musselburgh, and sometimes across the Forth railway bridge to Crail, Anstruther and Elie. We must have made a curious group: the two earnest men; strong Oonagh, effortlessly lugging a picnic basket (sometimes Gregor too); moody Thompson, with a catapult or a kite; and me, fervent with anticipated pleasure. And yet my merriment was always shadowed by a distant sadness, as if I sensed the disparity in this amalgam of personalities, realized that its very existence hinted at another life, one that I should have been living, had my mother survived the fatal day of my birth.
Donald was an accomplished amateur photographer. He had a new Houghton’s folding reflex camera, and after he and my father had played their round of golf they would return to the beach where we had had our picnic to collect us for the return journey. Then, more often than not, Donald would have us pose for his camera. Thompson could never really be bothered, Oonagh declined—suddenly superstitious—but I would obligingly stand on rocks, practice a swing with one of my father’s golf clubs or feed sugar lumps to donkeys—anything to aid Donald’s compositions.
The only photograph of my mother that we possessed (in a black-ebony and silver frame kept on my father’s bedside table) had been taken by Donald. It was only later that I discovered that he had taken many more.
I was not a clever child, academically speaking. I was alert, bright, chatty and energetic, but by the age of seven I could barely read. Thompson was by then attending the Royal High School, where my father hoped eventually to send me. However, it soon became clear that my difficulties in reading and writing were going to make entry into that strict establishment uncertain. Thompson had been taught to read, had been read to nightly, by my mother. Oonagh, as I have said, was illiterate. I spent my days with her as an infant and it was she who put me to bed at night. Without fail, I would ask for a sto
ry and she would tell me one. She spoke to me in Gaelic—old folk tales, I like to think—but I was completely entranced. The room dark, one lamp glowing, Oonagh’s haunch warming my side, and her soft lilting accent with its sonorous, soft gutturals. Oonagh’s square face crudely mimicking the effects of shock, surprise, horror, fabulous joy … It was more than enough. I am sure too that here lies the key to my development as an artist, that this was why my personality took the maverick course it did. In those crucial, early days my imagination was not formed by any orthodox literary or pedagogical tradition. Oonagh’s entrancing, meaningless tales and her big expressive face were sufficient fuel. I am convinced that it is this factor that separates me from my fellow artists, and it is this that makes my vision unique. Inchoate sound and dramatic expression were the foundations of my creative being. Sense, logic, cohesion, played no part. Oonagh’s mysterious voice and the bold analogues of her grimaces set my mind working independently. I owe nothing to any precursor, I had no tradition to guide me. What I saw in my mind’s eye was mine alone.
Of course, my father was convinced he had a backward child—another burden I had imposed on him—and he sought to resolve the problem by sending me, aged seven, to his own elementary school in Barnton. He was on the board of governors of the Barnton village school. As its most celebrated former pupil, he had no difficulty placing me there. For some reason he had a perverse faith in its ability to reproduce in me the same rigid self-discipline and unwavering ambition that had secured his own swift elevation to academic heights. He was wrong. I failed as dismally there (in all but one subject) as I would have elsewhere.
His truculent conviction that the Barnton village school held the answer had the irritating side effect of a long daily journey there and back by train. Every morning I would catch the 6:42 from Waverley Station to Barnton (whence I had a fifteen-minute walk to the school) and in the evening, if I was lucky, I would catch the 4:30 train back. Thompson had a ten-minute ride on a cable tram to handy Regent Road, while I spent up to two hours a day commuting to and from school. I was a lonely commuter too, moving against the tidal flow in and out of the city. More often than not I sat solitary in smoky third-class compartments as the train puffed slowly through the banal suburbs, on its meandering branch line.
