Alasdair Gray - A History Maker

“A light order now,” said the mother. “Granny Tibs?”

Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty and ordered a doll for her two-year-old great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. It had to be exactly like a doll she remembered playing with herself at that age, a china girl doll with curly yellow hair, blue eyes, a matching silk dress with a big bow at the back. When the diagram appeared she remembered that the hair had not been curly but smooth, and twisted in two long plaits tied with bows at the ends. The dress had also been of a historical kind called dirndl worn by the women of Bolivia or California — that should be a clue — the dress was illustrated in a book called Heidi Grows Up which had been published she thought in the eighteenth or perhaps nineteenth century. The doll was also made of cloth, not china at all. It took a long time to get exactly the doll Granny Tibs remembered and by then the colour of the stalk and temperature of the room were normal again. The children now spoke out. A young jeweller wanted two hundred grammes of silver wire and was persuaded to accept a hundred of copper. A young sculptor who asked for six kilogrammes of clay was told to collect it from Mountbenger where some aunts had a pottery; she said she hated Mountbenger because of a boy there, so was given a four-page geological guide to help her find her own supply of clay. A very young wood-worker wanted a sharp new chisel but the joiner said she would show him how to sharpen his old one. This answer caused outcries which the mother drowned with a blast of cheery sound.

Finally she faced the men and said, “Cigars, Joe?”

“I’ve all I need, Auntie,” he answered, blowing a smoke ring. She said, “Wat, you have a wanting look.”

“Have I? Then give me something that stops memories.”

“You can have Paxil, Zoloft, or Prozac, Gilbey’s London gin, The Macallan, Courvoisier or a thousand other derivatives of alcohol, opium and cocaine.”

“I want nothing that changes my chemistry,” he said coldly, “Give me a history book — not a statistical one — a book that reads like somebody talking.”

“What period?”

“A period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world.”

Only the mother looked straight at Wat but a new alertness in the room seemed shared by everyone except the boys, the oldest great-granny, Kittock the henwife and, apparently, Joe.

“There were many such times,” said the mother. She pressed the organ and a table of names and dates flowed onto the stalk.

“The foundation of Israel, A.D. or B.C.?” she suggested, “The rise of Islam? Children’s Crusade? Peasants’ Revolt? French Revolution? More books have been written about each than there are brands of alcohol.”

There was a silence in which Wat reddened with embarrassment. Everyone seemed to be watching him. A calm, monotonous yet oddly sing-song voice said, “Have you read Ten Days That Shook the World , Wat?”

Kittock the henwife had spoken without lifting her eyes from the novel on her lap.

“Never,” said Wat thankfully.

“Well, that’s the book for you.”

So Wat ordered Ten Days That Shook the World , Reed’s account of Muscovite politics in 1917. The plant substantiated it. A girl gave it to him.

“Come outside, Wat” said Joe setting his chair in motion, “I need to see some hills.”

Wat started following but paused when the mother said, “Wat, you have lost a father, brothers, friends. We have lost brothers, lovers and sons in a war we never wanted.”

“I pity you of course,” said Wat, shrugging,

“But a circus will be here in a few days. Men will be coming from all over Scotland and even farther. Make the most of them.”

He strode out.

On this sunny spring day the projecting eaves of Dryhope house neatly shadowed the surrounding veranda. Joe sat here watching the view with the intense frown of a starving man who cannot quite believe in the meal before him. From under the veranda a flow of pure water fed a series of pools linked by waterfalls. The nearest held trout and cresses and a marble bird table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The second was a play-pool where infants splashed and shouted in sight of two ten-year-old aunts who lay gossiping on a nearby lawn. The third was a fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house. The last was a duckpond from which Dryhope burn flowed down through a glen planted with fruit trees and berry bushes. On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife. A steepening of the hillside hid land immediately beyond but not Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan, reflected also three houses by the shore. Oxcleuch, Cappercleuch and Bowerhope resembled Dryhope: large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet. The summits appeared at cloud level, each a disc of bright vapour from which a line of vapour flowed east with the wind. More than fifty such discs patterned the sky. The remotest over powerplants in Moffat, Eskdale and Teviot, looked like tiny flecks in the wedges of blue air between the hills. Lines of vapour from these and many more in the west ruled the heavenly blue into parallel strips. The lines were more emphatic today, as always after big funerals.

Joe pointed to the view with his only foot and said wistfully, “There’s a lot of goodness out there.”

“But ye cannae feel it,” said Wat, who sat cross-egged and reading on a rug beside him.

“No yet.”

“Maybe you’ll never feel part of that goodness again. I lost the feeling with my first battle.”

“Pessimist. I’m no like you. I’ll feel as good as ever when I get back my arm and leg.”

Joe glanced wistfully down at the crystalline cylinders extending from his right shoulder and right thigh. Tiny atomic motors among the pinkish-brown broth inside were nudging together cells of new limbs, but a month would pass before outlines of bones appeared. Joe sighed then said, “You made them very tense in there. You should keep ill-sounding words for me or the Warrior house.”

“Dryhope women are stupid,” said Wat coldly,

“They think I’m mourning the Dad — that daft old prick.”

“It should be possible for you to mourn the Dad,” said Joe gently, “ I’m mourning him and he loved you most, loved you more than anyone because you’re our bonniest fighter and always argle-bargled with him. He liked contention. Are you mourning the bairns?”

“Rage not sorrow is my disease. Why did our fucking old progenitor con nearly all Ettrick into dying round a pole with a tin chicken on top? Why did he want us to fight after the decent chiefs of Teviot and Eskdale, Liddesdale and Galawater had surrendered? I’ll tell you why. He was past his prime and knew he was fighting his last war. He wanted to take our whole army into the roots with him. Our bairns were slaughtered because our Dad feared age and loneliness.”

“He made sure we’ll be remembered! The lot of us! Living and dead!” said Joe with a small firm smile, “The bairns too, in fact the bairns most of all. ‘All my fledglings have turned into eagles,’ he said. O he was right. Wee lads of fourteen have never chosen to die like that before — not since the dawn of television. If history wasnae a thing of the past I would say Ettrick made it two days ago. The strategy was the Dad’s but only you had the spunk to get the standard to the cliff top and kill the man you passed it to … What’s wrong?”