Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

On my way from Glasgow Central to Queen Street Station, I fell in with two postmen. They asked me where I had come from. I told them Ulster. They said, "Och!"

"It's full of broken windows," I said.

"Aye. And broken hids! " one said.

The other man said, "We got our Catholics. Ha' ye nae heard of the Rangers and Celtics fitba matches? They play each other a guid sux tames a year, but there's nae always a riot."

No alphabet exists for the Glaswegian accent — phonetic symbols are no good without a glottal stop, a snort, or a wheeze. I met rural-dwelling Scots who told me they could not understand anyone in Glasgow. The Ulster accent took a moment to turn from noise to language: I heard someone speak and then in the echo of the voice there was a meaning. But this did not always happen in Scotland: the echo was meaningless, and in Glasgow it was a strangled peevish hiccup, sudden and untranslatable.

I rode in an empty railway car up the Clyde, past tenements. I wondered about their age. They were striking in their size and their darkness — six stories of stone, looking like prisons or lunatic asylums. Had the Scots originated the tenement? Their word for these old blocks was lands, and they had been using the word since the fifteenth century.

We went past Dumbarton (Dun Bretane, "Hill of the Britons"), along the muddy rock-strewn shore, the Firth of Clyde. Across the firth was the busy port of Greenock ("birthplace of Captain Kidd, the pirate"). There were hills behind it. I always had trouble with hills. These were not so much risen loaves as smooth and sloping and lightly upholstered…

A big old man came through the connecting door, and though there was not another person in the whole railway car, he sat beside me. I put my notebook into my pocket.

"I hope you're not embarrassed," he said.

Not embarrassed, but something — perhaps startled.

"I'm going to Oban," I said.

"Good," he said. "We can talk." He was also going the hundred miles.

But he did most of the talking. He was very old, and even sitting next to me he was a foot higher. He looked like a Pope. He had a fat nose and big baggy-fleshed hands. He wore a long black overcoat and carried a small parcel of books tied with twine: detective stories. His name was John L. Davidson and he had been born in Lanarkshire in 1895. He said that occasionally he did feel eighty-seven years old. How long had he lived in Dumbarton? "Only fifty years," he said. He lived in the Dumbarton Home for Aged Gentlefolk now. Everyone he had ever known was dead.

He said, "I'm only seven years younger than John Logie Baird. Have you not heard of him? He invented the tellyvision. He was born here in Helensburgh."

I looked out the window.

"Over there somewhere," Mr. Davidson said. "His teachers at school didnae think he was very bright. They thought he was a head case. One day he decided to invent a tellyphone. He put a wire across the road, a tellyphone instrument at either end, one in his house and one in his friend's. A man was riding a horse down the road, didnae see the wire — and strangled! Hanged himself on the wire of John Logie Baird's tellyphone! That's a true story. But he never hanged anyone on his tellyvision."

We came to Garelochhead; we traveled past Loch Long. The mountains above it were dark and rough, like enormous pieces of dusty coal. They were surrounded by pine woods. The loch was blue-black and looked depthless.

"This loch is so long, so deep, and so straight, they test torpedoes in it," Mr. Davidson said. "You can shoot a torpedo from one end to the other — thirteen miles or more. Want to see something interesting?"

He stood up and beckoned me to the window, slid it down, and said, "Watch."

We were coming to a junction, more tracks, and an isolated signal box. There were woods and hills all around. I expected the train to stop, but it did not even slow down. Mr. Davidson stuck his parcel of books out the window and dangled it. A railwayman was standing on a small raised platform near the signal box. He snatched the books and yelled, "Thank you!"

"I've come this way before. The trains don't stop. I heard that the signalman here likes to read a good book. There's no shops here, no library, so I brought those books for him."

Mr. Davidson had no idea who the signalman was, nor did he know his name. He knew only that the man liked to read a good book.

"There used to be ever so many wee houses on this line, but now there's nae many. It's out of touch. You see people on the train — after they've finished with their newspaper, they throw it out the window to someone on the line to read."

Then Mr. Davidson screamed. He erupted in anger, just like that, without any warning.

"But some of them make me cross! People who travel through Scotland on the train, doing the crossword puzzle! Why do they bother to come!"

And, just as suddenly, he was calm: "They call that mountain 'the Cobbler.' There's an open trough just behind it" — he pronounced it troch, to rhyme with loch.

At flat, mirror-still Loch Lomond, white as ice under a white sky, Mr. Davidson began talking about printing unions. I had told him I was in publishing.

"You're nae one of these bloody Fleet Street buggers!" he roared. It was another of his angry eruptions. "The printing unions are bloody! They're just protecting their own interests. They show up drunk and they get paid! 'Pay up!' 'But he's drunk!' 'Och, aye, but ye cannae bag Wully!' 'I'll bag him!' 'Bag him and we'll all go out!' It's bloody stupid!"

Mr. Davidson was roaring at the window, at the creamy clouds reflected in the loch, not at me.

"I'm nae a Queen Anne Tory," he said. "I'm a moderate Labour man. Aye, Jimmy, I was a trade unionist in 1912!"

He said he had been in the retail trade all his life — the grocery trade, another man's shop. He worked long hours. Eight in the morning until eight in the evening. A half-hour for lunch, a half-hour for tea.

The hills were bare from their midsection upward, and below this line were small pine trees. Mr. Davidson was very silent and then he leaned toward me and whispered sadly, "Everything you read's nae true."

He exploded again.

"They went daft with afforestation! It takes forty years for a tree to be useful. You could have forty years of lambs here, and instead they have trees!"

But there were not many trees. Three hundred years ago this district was full of hardwood forests — oak and beech. They were cut down and made into charcoal for the iron smelters at Taynuilt, up the line, famous for its cannonballs — Lord Nelson had fired them at the Battle of Trafalgar. Now the trees were wispy pines, and the hills were rocky and bare and black-streaked with falling water. The dark clouds were like another range of mountains, another foreign land, and the sun on some stones gave them a pale bony gleam.

I suppressed a shiver and said that it seemed rather bleak around here.

"Aye," Mr. Davidson said. "That's where its beauty comes from."

And he went to sleep. His mouth dropped open and he slept so soundly, I thought he had died.

***

Later, Mr. Davidson awoke and gulped, seeming to swallow what remained of his fatigue. He recognized Kilchurn Castle. He said there had been a crazy old woman living in the ruin until very recently. She had thought she was the last of the Campbells. But he had also known hard times, he said. He had had "three spells of poverty" — no work and nothing to eat.

"And I couldn't join the army. I wore spectacles, you see. If you wore spectacles, a gas mask was useless."

Then he was talking about the Somme.

"This country has no friends" — he meant Britain—"only enemies, and debts. We spent years paying off the Boer War debt. And we're still in debt."