Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

Nobody will understand what followed without a digression.

When I asked my aunts where people came from I was very very young but remember the guilty glance Nell always gave Nan when wishing her to speak for them. After a moment Nan said slowly and deliberately, “Everybody begins as something the size and shape of a tadpole. It floats in an elastic bag of fluid the size and shape of an egg and this bag is in a woman’s stomach. The bag stretches as the wee fishy thing gets larger, growing a human head, arms, fingers, toes etcetera. After nine months, usually, it hatches out of the mother’s stomach, just as chickens hatch out of eggs.”

“You mean babies break their mother’s stomachs open?” I cried, because one Easter I had been given a brown chocolate egg which, cracked open, contained a chicken made of white chocolate. Nan said, “Not at all! The narrow groove between the halves of a woman’s bottom continues between her legs to the point at which males. . men like you. . have a. .” (She hesitated and flushed slightly) “. . toot. Uretor. Penis is the adult word for it. Through this groove that only women possess the baby emerges in what is technically called birth. Births are seldom fatal but always painful. Many women like Nan and me choose not to give birth. We have never needed children because we have you.”

I brooded on this. The fact that other children had mothers and I had aunts had never before struck me as strange enough to need an explanation, but Nell cleared her throat and Nan immediately supplied one: “Your mother was a wonderful woman who left this house, toiling in a British government office until she gave birth to you. She then handed you over to us, returned to the service of her country in London and died bravely in a Nazi blitzkrieg. You should be proud of her. It has been our privilege to serve her by caring for you.”

Nell clapped her hands saying happily, “O good, well done Nan, that covers everything.”

I thought so too. After that my aunts often referred to my mother. The meals they made were so good that I have never enjoyed meals as much since they stopped cooking for me, but after that first mention of my mother they never served me with anything, not even a soft boiled egg, without telling me how much better it would have been if my mother had supplied it. She had also (they said) been much better than them at knitting, darning, washing clothes, lighting fires, handling money and schoolwork. My school reports gave me high marks. They would nod happily over them saying, “Yes, you have your mother’s brain.”

Years passed before I learned that babies needed fathers. I thought nature ensured half the animals born were masculine because women needed a breadwinner to support them by working in an office or factory, for in those days the only women I knew who worked for a living served behind counters in shops. The mothers of everyone I knew at school were housewives. In the Hillhead Salon I saw Tarzan and the Amazons which showed the jungle hero in South America where he is captured by a savage tribe of blonde white women, all wearing very little and in their early twenties. In those days I believed all films except Disney animations were based on truth, and decided a completely female nation would be possible if a natural fluke made the mothers incapable of giving birth to males, thus forcing the women to learn hunting. The necessity of fathers dawned on me when I was twelve or thirteen and too old to embarrass Nell and Nan with a question about a matter too delicate for them to have mentioned. When anyone asked about my parents I would say crisply, “Don’t remember them. Both killed in the London Blitz.”

Only when Nan and Nell were dead did I learn from my birth certificate that I was a bastard.

Through most of my schooldays boys and girls had separate playgrounds and sat on opposite sides of the classrooms. When five or six I started noticing the girls’ side contained someone fascinating — a girl who seemed better than the rest, and who I wanted to continually stare at and come close to, had that been possible. Her name was Roberta Piper. Nobody told me my desire for Roberta Piper was a weakness but I knew I would be mocked if I admitted it and hid this desire so completely that I am sure none suspected it. Slowly, from small signs, I realized most boys on my side of the class felt the same about Roberta Piper and were equally reluctant to admit it. We shared a general idea that girls were inferior creatures, why? I suspect we were trying to reject the power Roberta Piper and her kind had over us, without exactly knowing what it was.

In the summer holidays Nan, Nell and I always had a fortnight in an Aitch Eff guesthouse. Aitch Eff (I later learned) stood for Holiday Fellowship, an organization founded early in the twentieth century by middle- and working-class Socialists who wanted social equality for all and felt that sharing holidays was a step toward it. They leased big houses in mountainous and coastal parts of Britain where members enjoyed most of a good hotel’s facilities without paying as much, and where staff and guests mingled in a friendly way I thought natural and ordinary until years later when I stayed in a conventional hotel. In our second week at Minard Castle on Loch Fyne Roberta Piper and her parents arrived. When they sat down at the morning breakfast table Nell asked me, “What’s wrong?” I suppose because I was blushing or had gone pale. I whispered that the girl was in my class at school.

“How nice! Your little girl is in this young man’s class at school!” said Nell, and began a cheerful conversation with Mr and Mrs Piper who agreed with my aunts that Roberta and I should sit together. We did, which I both wanted and hated. I saw she was willing to chat with me but I could not say a word, my heart was beating too loudly and my face was too hot. “I’m afraid our young man’s terribly shy!” said Nan and all the adults treated this as an entertaining joke. I hated that and hated Roberta because she was grinning too. For the rest of the holiday I insisted on us eating at a different table from the Pipers, which the aunts thought a pity. I was then six or seven.

This hopeless, helpless, useless obsession with Roberta lasted through primary school. At secondary school she was replaced by someone it is pointless to name. These fascinating girls changed as we advanced from one year to the next, but among boys in my class there was a general agreement about which one she was. I sometimes heard bolder, coarser ones discuss her and speculate on who might “get her for a lumber”. 31By that time a new sexual distraction had entered my life: American comics.

Throughout Scotland and (I suspect) Britain most children’s leisure reading was printed by D. C. Thomson Ltd of Dundee. Each week before the age of ten we took The Dandy and Beano , jocular cartoon magazines with characters like Freddie the Fearless Fly, Lord Snooty and his Pals, an ostrich called Big Eggo and a kindly cowboy of immense strength called Desperate Dan, who lived in a land that was partly American West and partly a British suburb. These comics had a minimum of words, speech being printed in bubbles coming from people’s mouths. At secondary school age these were replaced by The Rover and Hotspur whose every double page had a serial adventure story in printed columns, with a single quarter-page illustration in black and white under the title. No girls, no women were in these stories which were about ordinary, believable boys like ourselves assisting detectives, explorers, athletes, soldiers or scientists. The aunts ordered these comics for me from Barretts, the Byres Road newsagent. I first saw American comics at school in the days following examinations, when our teachers were busy marking the papers and let us read anything we liked. Some students brought in these astonishing novelties: magazines with brightly-coloured pictures on every page, showing the adventures of super-heroic adults and villains with amazing powers and no children at all. Women among them had faces and figures like Hollywood movie stars but often wore less clothes. About sex the American comic publishers were as puritan as Thomsons of Dundee. They evaded it by showing violence instead. Fantastic punch-ups and explosive shooting matches were continuous, with much capture, bondage and torture. I had never before seen anything so exciting, except in Tarzan films. I instinctively knew my aunts would dislike these comics and that I should never bring them to the house, but fellow pupils had more than they could read at one time so I borrowed a few, after which Wonder Woman and Sheena the Jungle Girl drove Roberta Piper’s successors out of my head. With real girls I could only imagine chivalrous courtships leading to marriage, but there was no limit to what I could imagine doing to Sheena. I was entering the state described by a character in Albee’s Zoo Story , who says American men start using pictures of women as substitutes for reality, then use women as substitutes for the pictures. I only reached the second half of that state after the death of my aunts.