There seem no adults presiding over anyone, so we join the crowd at its thickest beside Greendyke Street where the procession should start, edging in as far as possible and looking around for guidance. It is provided, unexpectedly, by the police. They form a barrier between the crowd and the street and let us through in numbers that can start walking ten abreast, thus filling the width of the road without flooding pavements on each side.
We await our turn in this good-natured, very patient crowd. I can see none of the friends I had arranged to meet on the Green, see several others in my line of business: novelist Bernard MacLaverty, A. L. Kennedy, the poet Aonghas MacNeacail, several teachers and lecturers. Some senior citizens carry a banner saying THE TAYSIDE PENSIONERS’ FORUM. My lawyer friend tells me Blair proposes to abolish old age pensions because workers’ contributions are now too small to pay for them, I suppose because of inflation. This steadily reduces the wages of the poorest paid while used as a reason for taxing the wealthy less, thus letting them invest more in private business of global extent. So New Labour may undo the main achievement of Lloyd George’s Liberal government in 1908! We talk about the arms industry: how the 1930s depression only ended when Britain and the USA prepared for war. How both nations have been preparing for wars or fighting them ever since. How making and exporting weapons is now Britain’s main industry. I recalled that the Principal of Glasgow University, Professor Sir Graham Davies, chairs the Universities Superannuation Scheme, providing pensions for many British academics, and which (a handbill tells me) has £60 million invested in British Arms Enterprise. Some students a month ago were threatened with expulsion from Glasgow University for protesting against such investments. Should I not have supported them? But I have drunk and talked cheerfully with Principal Sir Graham Davies, who supported me, James Kelman and Tom Leonard when we were Creative Writing Professors. I did not want to criticise him publicly. I am an arselicker too.
I get letters nowadays from people wishing to discuss or discover views of Scottish identity, as if more than five million folk could possibly have one. But if asked what chiefly characterises my nation I will repeat what I wrote in 1982: arselicking. We disguise it with surfaces of course: surfaces of generous, open-handed manliness; surfaces of dour, practical integrity: surfaces of maudlin, drunken defiance: surfaces of quiet, respectable decency. The chorus of a Scottish national anthem proposed by a Dundonian poet comes to mind
Hermless, hermless, naebody cares for me.
I gang tae the library, I tak oot a book
And I gang hame for ma tea
– as I usually do. There have been eminent Scots with strong independent minds but now the most eminent are the worst arselickers. Our Labour MP’s lick Tony Blair’s bum. Tony Blair licks the bum of President Bush. Licking U.S. Presidents’ bums is a British Prime Ministerial tradition.
At last the police are letting us through and, roughly ten abreast, we process down Greendyke Street then up the Saltmarket to Glasgow Cross. Occasionally those around us burst into wild cheering, seemingly inspired by folk waving encouragement from upper tenement windows. Our stream divides neatly to pass the gawky clock tower of the Tollbooth, all that remains of Glasgow’s seventeenth-century Town Hall, magistrates’ court and city jail.
In John Prebble’s book about the Glencoe massacre I read that two British officers were imprisoned there in 1692. They had opened their sealed orders before reaching Glencoe village and found themselves ordered to put men, women and children to the sword. They broke their swords and told their commander at Fort William that no decent officer should obey such an order. So they were sent south by ship and jailed for a while in this Glasgow Tollbooth. Prebble says there is no other record of them so they may have escaped further punishment. I would love to see a big plaque on that tower commemorating these two brave soldiers. Scotland’s castles, cathedrals, public parks, city centres contain many war memorials, some of the most elaborate commemorating a few officers and men who died in Africa and Asia while killing hundreds fighting on their own soil without the advantage of gunpowder. Are these two officers the only British soldiers to disobey a dishonourable order? Then I remember hearing that in the Gulf War authorised by the last President Bush, four British officers resigned their commissions in protest against the dropping of cluster bombs (which “mince up everything that lives within a three-mile strip”) onto Iraqi ground forces, though most UK and US airmen queued up enthusiastically to airstrike those who could not strike back. One bomber said they looked like swarms of cockroaches.
From the helicopter that sometimes passes above us we too probably resemble cockroaches as we ascend the High Street, turn left down Ingram Street, turn left then right again. Our biggest roar goes up as the Civic Chambers come in sight. Why are no Glasgow Town Councillors waving from those upper windows? My wife reminds me they are on holiday because this is a Saturday. Why are there none in our procession? (I am delighted to learn later there is one, at least.) Approaching George Square from the east we can now see a silhouette of the procession crossing the summit of Blythswood Hill a quarter mile ahead.
Coming abreast of an Irish pub we call in for a refreshment, emerging half an hour later to join the procession behind the banner of Unison, the local government employees’ union. A small brass band is playing a melancholy Scots ditty and I am astonished to find myself on the brink of tears. This sentiment owes nothing to a recent sup of lager. Our huge movement is composed of Scottish workers, tradespeople, professional people who identify with them – all people I feel at home with. These folk will suffer most if our businessmen take the advice of an expert in Scottish Enterprises, formerly known as The Scottish Development Agency. He has advised Scottish businesses to have their goods made by workers in Eastern Europe or Asia.
We arrive in a desert of car parks covering the site of the former Princess Dock, a vast basin surrounded by huge cranes where giant ships unloaded cargoes and took them aboard during the Suez War when Glasgow was a great international port and centre of manufacture. The huge car parks are more crowded with multitudes than Glasgow Green. Beyond them I see some big arched metallic structures that seem to have slid out of each other, a building locally nicknamed The Armadillo. I realise for the first time that this Armadillo is the Glasgow conference centre. A line of yellow-jacketed police is looped protectively around it. From the height of an open-topped double decker bus near the river someone is making a speech, but loud speakers are banned so few phrases are audible. Some storms of applause are heard and we hope the Prime Minister hears them and sees how many we are. We later learn that –
(A) Tony Blair did not speak to the Scottish Trade Union conference that afternoon, as scheduled, but changed it to ten in the morning so he could leave the district, and perhaps Glasgow, before we left the Green.
(B) The speaker aboard the bus was Glasgow’s Lord Provost, or the leader of the Scottish Socialist Party Tommy Sheridan, or a spokesman for the Church of Scotland, or for Scotland’s Asiatic communities, or for CND, because all made speeches from there.
After half an hour we come away, moving against the flood of people still approaching from the City Centre, for the procession has been longer than its three mile route. The ruler of Britain will learn nothing from this peaceful rally, or those in New York, Sydney and most major European capitals. Are the commanders of armies in great and small, rich and poor nations right to think only destructive violence can defeat destructive violence? No. Tyrants ruling by force and torture in Greece, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Russia collapsed without invasion and warfare. What that Jewish extremist, Jesus, preached from a small hill near Jerusalem, was not idiotic.
* Originally a Herald article published 17 February 2003, I first used it as a non-fiction tale in The Ends of our Tethers, 13 Sorry Stories published 2003 by Canongate Books, then made it a fictional episode in the life of John Tunnock in Chapter 14 of Old Men in Love, published 2007 by Bloomsbury.
Of Susan Boyd*
SUSAN BOYD, television playwright, was born in 1949 and died of a brain haemorrhage on 18 June 2004 in Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital.
Her mother was actress Katy Gardiner; her father playwright Eddie Boyd, who left his family too early to be an influence, though she met and became friendly with him in her mid-twenties. Susan lived at first with her mother and grandmother in Riddrie, one of the earliest and pleasantest of Glasgow’s municipal housing schemes, and in a Loch Lomond-side holiday cottage near Rowardennan. Granny, a schoolteacher, had been wife of the archaeologist Harrison Maxwell. Susan’s home was well furnished with books and radical ideas, artistic and political. When Granny died, mother and daughter moved to an equally well-furnished flat in Great George Street, Hillhead, from which Susan attended Hillhead Secondary School then Glasgow School of Art.
She left the last after two years, having made lifelong friends there but now sure she was going to become a writer. Like many with uncommon ambitions she went to London, partly to show independence from her tolerant and strong-minded mother, and partly because London in the 1960s seemed far more exciting than Glasgow. It dominated the British publishing and entertainment industries by which she hoped to live. Several Glasgow friends were there already for the same reason, documentary filmmaker John Samson and his wife Linda among them. But first Susan lived for ten years on low earnings from factory, warehouse and street market – in work as a postman, a supply teacher and (for several evenings) a life model at a Civil Service art class in the War Office basement. Her mother’s influence once got her employed by BBC television’s wardrobe department. Pay was good, hours few, bosses and colleagues pleasant, but the job involved typing long lists of properties. She soon left because that stupefied the imagination her writing needed, so until able to support herself by writing full-time, she preferred a variety of less middle-class jobs.
Thus she eventually equipped herself to write plays with London settings. Like many authors, her first effort was a semi-autobiographical novel, never finished, and short stories published in short-lived literary magazines. Her first success was Another Day, a BBC 2 Play of the Week, which attracted attention by showing love between a white woman and black man. It also showed the kind of modern life Susan could dramatise. In 1985 the EastEnders series began and she was in its writing team from then until her death. She also wrote episodes of Casualty, Paradise Club and Crown Court, several single television plays and eleven for sound radio.
By 1990 she was earning enough to buy a flat in Partick, Glasgow, where a computer now let her confer as closely with colleagues as she had done in London, with a few flying visits there for script conferences. Susan liked her work and brought to it (as all who work well in television must) the integrity and cynicism of a good professional journalist or policeman. In recent years she had to struggle with many new EastEnders producers and directors whose bright ideas (she thought) ignored common sense and continuity of character.
Susan Boyd lent money willingly, without assurance of return, and also gave it. Though shy she was kind to lonely, eccentric and desperate folks. A London neighbour specialised in finding homes for feral cats; Susan adopted three, which she brought to Partick. She was always careful to keep in touch with friends. When John Samson** died she was careful to locate and inform all his friends in Scotland of the funeral and flew down to it, despite being troubled by intermittent headaches. She died two days after returning. She is survived by a loving mother, brother, sister, daughter, two grandchildren, three very old domesticated feral cats and many, many friends.
Watchers of EastEnders may soon
notice a lack of continuity
with former episodes.
* This obituary of a friend I had known since her childhood in Riddrie, my native housing scheme, was certainly written soon after her death in 2004, but I cannot remember where it was published, and maybe it was not.
** John Samson, 1946 – 2004, was a Scottish filmmaker and resident in London. He deserves mention in more than a footnote for his calm, completely uncensorious documentaries about how people are mostly mocked or denounced for unusual sexual needs or preferences in which they harmlessly enjoy themselves. Dressing for Pleasure is the best known. His method was to film them and their doings with their own voices explaining and discussing these. He would be better known if Scotland, as seemed possible 12 years ago, had acquired its own film industry.
The Declaration of Calton Hill
IN OCTOBER 2004 QUEEN ELIZABETH I of Scots and II of England opened Scotland’s new parliament building at the foot of Edinburgh High Street, while across the valley from it the Scottish Workers Socialist Party held a counter-demonstration on Calton Hill. The Scots parliament was then dominated by a Labour-Liberal coalition whose First Minister was then Jack McConnell. The S. W. S. Party was led by Tommy Sheridan. Members of his party at this demonstration were a minority. Most of us belonged to no established political group while agreeing with the aims of the great French Revolution as is still declared on coins of the French Republic – LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, which to me is the modern equivalent of St. Paul’s Faith, Hope and Charity.
I was flattered and excited when Mr. Sheridan said his party was planning to publish a Declaration of its Intent for Scotland, and suggested that I and James Kelman might consider drafting it, though we must submit it within 2 or 3 weeks. So Jim and I talked the matter over and came up with several drafts. Here is one of the last that passed between us. I believe it contains most of the text which the Scottish Workers Socialist Party received from us, though not much of our wording was used in the neat little document the S. W. S. P. (God rest its innocent, well-meaning soul) finally printed and distributed.
We, the Undersigned, want A Scottish Commonwealth where people of every origin, trade, profession and faith work for each other’s welfare.
We believe this State needs a parliament elected by Scotland’s people, and recognising these people as its only sovereign.
We believe this parliament’s members and agencies should be the servants, not masters, of Scotland’s people, through a written consistitution that promises everyone the right to freely vote, speak and assemble; the right to know all the doings of its government and its agencies, with all the sources of its members’ income, since a public servant’s income is the business of the public.
We believe that under this constitution, Scotland’s parliament should completely control Scotland’s revenues, and use them –
1 To negotiate as an equal with other governments.
2 To defend the health, property and safety of life in Scotland by limiting or acquiring land or properties within Scottish borders that are owned by outside corporations or government agencies.
3 To work to make public housing, transport, education, legal aid and healthcare as good as any purchasable by private wealth. None of these three requirements has priority.
We do not want an independent Scotland because we dislike the English, but because we want separation from that Union of financial, military and monarchic establishments calling itself Great Britain.
Introduction to The Knuckle End*
IN 1988 PHILIP HOBSBAUM, poet and professor of English, gave at Glasgow University a public talk on literature and the teaching of it in Scotland. These two often came apart, he suggested, as university students were taught nothing but criticism, so their own writing was usually a paraphrase of their teacher’s opinions. Intelligent writing could be better nourished by instruction that invited the composition of original prose and verse, though he acknowledged that this work would be much harder to mark through examinations.
Some of this mainly academic audience must have been annoyed at this argument for changes in established practices, for though not a new argument the speaker’s experience made it hard to dismiss. Tutored at Cambridge by Dr. Leavis (whose faith in living literature was a religion) Philip had published poetry and criticism, taught literature in Ulster and Scotland, been a member and instigator of writ
ing groups in London, Belfast and Glasgow – unofficial groups that had stimulated obscure authors now widely known. Seamus Heaney has written that in mid-sixties Ulster “one of the strongest agents of change was Philip Hobsbaum... he moved disparate elements into a single action. He emanated energy, belief in the community, trust in the parochial, the inept, the unprinted... I remember his hospitality and encouragement with the special gratitude we reserve for those who have led us toward confidence in ourselves.” From several writers in Glasgow he earned the same respect, not least because, through his group, we became friends with each other. I was one of these, so when the English Literature department of Glasgow University started a creative writing course in 1995 I assumed Philip Hobsbaum was mainly responsible.
He denies this. The scheme for the new course was worded jointly by him and Willy Maley a comparatively new member of the English Literature department. The scheme was rejected by a curriculum committee. Maley reworded it, resubmitted it and did so three times, each time suffering rejection. For a fourth attempt he submitted the original version, which was accepted: says Philip Hobsbaum. “No good story is ever completely true,” says Doctor Johnson, but this tale will surprise no one with experience of interdepartmental committees.
Of Me and Others Page 30
