Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

Party conference. One of the leaders had tried to persuade the Party that bits of Britain should not be leased to the U.S.A. as bases for their nuclear weapons. Under a photograph of him looking pugnacious were the words “Number one American-hater, rabble-rousing Aneurin Bevan”.

      But I admired Mr Sweeney quite apart from his national style. With energy, skill, and a total absence of what I thought of as intellectual reserves (a developed imagination, analytical subtlety, wide reading) he had managed ships and men in two world wars and the Korean war. He had worked and enjoyed himself and taken knocks among the solid weights and wide gaps of the world I would not face. Death worried him now that his body was failing, but since the age of twelve he had never been embarrassed by life. And by wrestling with the fear of death openly and aloud he made it a public comedy instead of a private terror. Aboard the Kenya Castle, when I was afraid of dying, my fear did nobody any good.

      Of course, I had to face the world in the end. Only everlasting money can keep us from doing that, and mine was being used up. Each day in hospital cost me twenty-one shillings and I had been over three weeks there. When to that was added the train fare to London, and cost of lodgings there, boat fare to Gibraltar, ship’s hospital fee, the price of the ambulance journey and being X-rayed for tuberculosis, and the small sum I had forced upon lan, I found I had spent, or else owed, more than half the scholarship money. I recalled, too, that I had never been discharged from hospital feeling perfectly well. It was possible that something in the nature of hospitals pandered to my asthma after the worst of an attack had been cured by them. I asked to see the head doctor and explained that, for financial reasons, I must leave next morning. He shrugged and said, “lt cannot be helped.” He advised me, though, not to leave Gibraltar until I felt healthier, and even so not to go far into Spain in case I had another attack, as in Spain the hospital charges were extortionate, especially to tourists, and the medical standards were not high. This seemed sensible advice. I asked the nurses for the name of a lodging which was cheap, plain and good. I heard there was an armed-forces leave centre in the south bastion which usually had spare beds, was run by a retired Scottish soldier, and easy to reach. Next morning I dressed, collected my rucksack, left the hospital doorstep and struck with my feet the first earth I had touched since the port of London.

      I was on a road slanting up from the town of Gibraltar to the rock’s outermost point. The day must have been clear because across the sea to the south I saw the African coast looking exactly as Africa ought to look: a dark line of crowded-together rock pinnacles, domes and turrets with beyond them, when the eye had grown used to the distance, the snowy range of Atlas holding up the sky. The modern hospital behind me, the elegantly towered building in front (a lunatic asylum) stood on a great slant of white limestone rock interspersed with small tough twisted trees. I turned right and walked to the town, breathing easily because I was going downhill. I came to a wall with an arch in it just wide enough to take two cars, and beyond this the road became the main street of Gibraltar. A small lane leading to the left brought me almost at once to the south bastion.

      This was a stone-built cliff protecting the town from the sea. The townward side was pierced by vaulted chambers. The lower ones, which had been barracks, were entered from a narrow piazza; the upper, which had been munition storerooms and gun emplacements, were entered from a balcony. All windows faced the town. High tides had once lapped the other side of this bastion but now a broad road ran here with docks on the far side. The guns and gunners had shifted elsewhere long ago and the chambers were used as a guest-house by the Toc H. The Toc H (I never learned the reason for that name) developed in France during the First World War, among British soldiers who wanted spiritual communion and found the official army priests too sectarian and not always near when things got tough. The only communion service was to light a brass oil-lamp in a dark place and pray that human pain would one day produce happiness and peace. Apart from that the organization existed to share extra food, clothing and shelter with whoever seemed in need. Jock Brown, formerly of the Highland Light Infantry in Flanders, was the Toc H man in south bastion. He was small, balding, mild-faced and wore a blazer with a white cross badge on the breast pocket and flannel trousers with bicycle clips at the ankles. His instincts were all turned to being mildly helpful. He believed that youth was a beautiful and noble state but was not surprised when young soldiers brawled, contracted venereal diseases and stole. He liked lending them cameras, books and records in the hope that they would come to enjoy using these instead. With the help of Isabel, a Spanish maid, he kept the hostel tidy and clean, the meals plain yet tasty, the general air of the place as mild as himself. I once heard him called “an old woman” by somebody who thought that a term of abuse. The critic was a man of Jock’s age who had not been very useful to other people, so wanted to believe that everyday kindness was an unimportant virtue.

      On that first morning Jock led me up a ramp to the balcony and into the common room, a former gun emplacement with a triangular floorplan. A hearth was built into the angle facing the door so that smoke left by the hole through which shells had been fired. The interior stonework was massively rough except for seven feet of smooth wall on each side of the hearth, and later I painted mural decorations here. Jock showed me to a dormitory next door holding four beds and introduced me to room-mates who had not yet risen. These were a private on leave from the Royal Surrey regiment, and an Australian and a German who would both be departing by ship next morning. I unpacked my things into a locker beside my bed then visited a bank in town where I uplifted the second part of the Bellahouston Scholarship money, the first having been received in Glasgow. I pocketed a few pounds and hid the rest in a plastic envelope containing my shaving-kit.

      That night, to obtain sound sleep in a strange bed, I decided to become drunk and found a big crowded bar nearby where I would not be conspicuous. The customers were mostly soldiers and sailors but there were women among them. A small plump one approached and asked if I would like a companera? I said I would. She sat beside me, called a waiter and ordered a glass of pale green liquid, for which I paid. She was Spanish and her English was too poor to tell me much else. She tried to be entertaining by folding a handkerchief into the shape of what she called pantalones and unfastening the flies, but I did not find this exciting or feel she wished to seduce me. With each green drink I bought, the waiter handed her a small brass disc. When she went to the lavatory I tasted what was in her glass and found it to be coloured water. I got the waiter to refill the glass with green chartreuse but when she returned and sipped this she grew thoughtful and depressed, then left me. Clearly the management paid her no commission on the real drinks I purchased. So I drank by myself and listened to a small, very noisy band. It played a round of tunes chosen to cause nostalgia in as many customers as possible: Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, Men of Harlech, Galway Bay, etc. The Scottish number, I Belong to Glasgow, was repeated every ten minutes. It is not a tune I normally like but in this place it induced an emotion so heartrending that I had to grapple with it as if it were a disease. However, I stayed drinking until I was sure my head would lose consciousness as soon as it touched a pillow, then returned to the dormitory (which was in darkness), undressed, put the shaving-kit under the pillow, my head on top of it, and did indeed lose consciousness.

      I wakened late next morning feeling brighter and healthier than I had done for many weeks. I also felt guilty (the straw mat beside my bed was crusted with vomit) but I knew that a day of brisk sketching or writing would cure that. The English private remained curled below his blankets, the Australian and German had already left to catch their boat. I took my toilet things and the straw mat to the lavatory and washed the mat and myself perfectly clean. Then I dressed and breakfasted, then climbed by an iron ladder to the esplanade on top of the bastion and sat on a shaded bench planning what to do. I still owed money to the hospital. I took my wad of notes from the shaving-kit and found it contained twenty pounds. The rest had been removed.

      My instinctive reaction to a painful event is to sit quiet for a very long time, and as I brooded on my position this struck me as an intelligent thing to do. The thief must be one of three people, two of whom were at sea. If I could persuade the police to act for me, which was unlikely, they could do little but spread to others a nasty feeling I had better keep to myself. The thief had left me enough to live on for a while. Although my father was not rich he had some money banked. I wrote him a letter explaining all the circumstances except my intoxication and asking for a loan of the stolen amount, which I promised to repay by taking a regular job when I returned