Boswell's Bus Pass (10 page)

One hundred and fifty five years later in 1955, volunteers cleaning the monument evidently found a parchment containing the names of twenty members of the Fraserburgh Rotary Club. It certainly puts Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Gold into perspective.

Any further reading was made difficult by a loud southern voice telling rancid racist jokes to the bar’s other inhabitant who forced an ambiguously complicit smile. He fell instantly silent and stared into his beer when the black manageress lifted the hatch. I considered engineering a life ban and a fight outside but Boswell wasn’t the only coward.

Whatever the cause – euthanasia, eugenics or social engineering – the demographic composition of the Strichen to Banff bus was markedly different from any so far encountered. There were many more young people, all of whom had gravitated to the furthest reaches of the bus. This is something of an unwritten law. There is a direct correlation between age and choice of seats. When someone
leaves the bus a subtle realignment occurs whereby the older folk will quietly move to whatever seat more closely reflects their age. This manoeuvre is partly determined by a Darwinian principle that the frailest will need to be closer to the door to minimise
death-by-lurching
when they attempt to move along a slowing vehicle prior to departure.

The stability of this particular bus must have been jeopardised by the sheer volume of rampant uncontainable adolescent hormones sloshing around the rear seats. A Babel of simultaneous mobile phone conversations – possibly to each other – threw up some unwanted comments, ‘She started the shit and expects other people to fight her battles … she looks like a, like a …’ All those English lessons devoted to simile and metaphor were about to deliver … ‘A bug!’ This was the cue for shouts of cruel recognition from her peers.

There were few sights to distract me from the stream of bitchery at the back apart from a JCB dredging aimlessly up to its oxters in a river at Luncardy, a compact triangle of migrating geese thousands of feet in the sky and several stupidly overdressed hopping pheasants at ground level.

The coastal route meandered through Macduff where a trawler squatted in its dry dock like a smug fat hen. The local cemetery had the highest proportion of fresh flowers of any observed so far. Ancestor worship must give the local Brethren a run for their money.

It was growing dark as I entered Banff of which Johnson observed, ‘I remember nothing that particularly claimed my attention. The ancient towns of Scotland have generally an appearance unusual to Englishmen. The houses, whether great or small, are for the most part built of stones. Their ends are now and then next the streets, and the entrance into them is very often by a flight of steps, which reaches up to the second storey.’

They dined at an ‘indifferent inn’ which was almost certainly The Ship Inn which still slouches towards the harbour.

The barman was distinctly nonplussed at the news that the famous travellers had dined there. He seemed in no great rush to commission a heritage site plaque and promptly served me with probably the worst pint I have ever tasted. On correctly interpreting my
disbelieving
grimace he apologised and said the beer had lain for a long while in the pipes, possibly since 1773. 

A sign on the bar captured the inn’s mission statement, BE NICE OR LEAVE. How long had it been there?

‘Roight James, Oi think we should slingg our ’ook and leave the premises now.’ ‘Whatever you say, Doctor.’

The barman did point out that the interior of his pub had been used for scenes from
Local Hero
and invited me to browse through some curling newspaper cuttings. I was distracted from fully digesting this momentous coincidence by one of the residents who seemed to be talking in parrot language into his phone. After dismissing the possibility that he was in the grip of a manic episode, I gave in and enjoyed the totally surreal performance. He milked his audience well, lowping over furniture as the one-sided parrot monologue reached its absurd climax. Several brightly coloured feathers lay on the carpet.

It was in Banff that Johnson started ranting again about Scottish windows.

‘The art of joining squares of glass with lead is little used in Scotland, and in some places is totally forgotten. The frames of their windows are all of wood. They are more frugal of their glass than the English, and will often, in houses not otherwise mean, compose a square of two pieces, not joining like cracked glass, but with one edge laid perhaps half an inch over the other. Their windows do not move upon hinges, but are pushed up and drawn down in grooves. He that would have his window open must hold it with his hand, unless what may be sometimes found among good contrivers, there be a nail which he may stick into a hole to keep it from falling.’

Who cares? Johnson suffered from frequent errors of editorial judgement. Perhaps his obsession with non-existent trees meant that he could only ever see the wood. This from a man who could describe a casement in excruciating detail but doesn’t even give a grudging mention to crossing the Spey described by Wesley, a later traveller, as ‘the most rapid river, next the Rhine, he had ever seen’.

One more bus would take me to meet my friend John who was putting me up for the night before accompanying me on the next leg. There was only one other passenger on the 305, a woman in her late 70s who was presumably talking on her phone to an errant partner. Her words were those of a lovelorn contrite teenager. ‘I’m missing
you … we’ll have to sort things out … I’ll just do whit am telt in the future … You’ll have to eat, dinnae pit aa yer guilt oan t’me … But you were picking on things for na reason.’ I made myself miserable trying to picture the earlier falling out. We should all reach an age where the living is easy, if only for a tiny while between the kids leaving and ill-health lodging permanently.

On the horizon a wind turbine was slowly winding up for the night shift; lots of small zephyrs and dark gusts to be harvested and tamed.

That evening John explained that he was soon to retire from his job as head teacher of a local school, tired of assuming a consistently jovial, managerial persona which was light years from his real, essentially antisocial and thrawn self.

He told me that for one day every year he would revert to his real identity. This transformation would occur when he acted as quiz master for an annual event at the Dallas (pop. 138) community hall. Oddly his performance had attracted something of a cult following over the years and in a packed hall the previous week he had heard himself asking the attentive family audience. ‘Question number 23, can you tell me the average duration of a pig’s orgasm? Is it 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes or 33 minutes?’ (The correct answer, Dear Reader, might induce the unfamiliar emotion of pig envy). The farmers took the question very seriously. One of them subsequently thanked John for giving him the perfect opportunity to explain the facts of life to his now curious children. Another couple had a conspiratorial word as they left and asked for his views on a recent tabloid article which identified a celebrity who allegedly pleasured pigs.

I had the difficult thought that I know several very large men whose unfortunate partners know the feeling only too well.

I was woken during the night by a rook banging its beak against the bedroom window. The neurotic bird has done this for years and has successfully avoided retribution by poison, shotgun and lasso. Given his nervous – if not cowardly – disposition Boswell would have had a fit of the staggers if he had been similarly disturbed. He would have endowed the intrusion with all manner of spurious superstitious significance before scuttling into the bed of his surrogate father.

In the morning a deer was peering in at me through the same window.

John is the only person I know who was awarded a university degree without attending a single lecture, tutorial or seminar. He graduated with joint first class honours in sloth and outrageous behaviour. He nevertheless spent several happy years writing regularly to the pope and various members of the royal family keeping them informed of his progress. He specialised in a nice line of apoplexy-inducing letters of application whenever a public school headship was advertised and also achieved a respectable fifth place when he stood for election as Rector at Aberdeen University in the late 1960s.

He joined me in the bus shelter in Banff Low Road which is guarded by an eighteenth century cannon which points for no apparent reason at the queue. As a deterrent to vandalism the strategy has manifestly failed judging by the foul graffiti scribbled on the adjacent public building.

For the first time on this journey a bus was late. When it arrived the driver drew up and said that he couldn’t take on board any more passengers as the bus was about to break down and would manage to limp to the depot in Macduff but no further. He promised to return with a spanking new vehicle.

As good as his word he confided that this was in fact the fifth bus he had driven so far – it was only 9.30 in the morning, all of the others
had developed mechanical defects of some sort. When pressed he listed their various faults including one errant bus on which the doors refused to open. This explained the ashen demeanour of the surviving passengers. At some point in the early morning they would have pressed their sad clown faces and hands against the windows desperate to escape as the bus careered away from their homes, friends and family into an uncertain future in an alien land.

Questions had to be asked of the driver. Was he suffering from some bus-related Munchhausen syndrome by proxy that led to him secretly disabling the very vehicles on which his livelihood depended?

Keeping an eye on him throughout the trip we could only glance towards the domain of Lord Findlater between the road and the coast. Johnson had also declined the opportunity to survey the lavishly landscaped gardens declaring that ‘he was not come to Scotland to see fine places, of which there were enough in England, but wild objects – mountains, waterfalls, peculiar manners: in short, things which he had not seen before’.

John, a comfortingly large travelling companion, has always
revelled
in showing off his local knowledge. What he doesn’t know he makes up. On the Cullen road we passed the outbuildings of the Ladybridge Hospital, formally the Banff Lunatic Asylum. John pointed out the former site of the railway station whose sole function had been to transport inmates.

A subsequent internet search confirmed he was right, and led to images of the institution compiled by Decayed Scotland. Adherents of this dubious organisation specialise in entering abandoned buildings and photographing, in this instance, a solitary wheelchair and a strange, haunting statue of four children apparently staring into a Reich-inspired future. Integration into the community would not have been the preferred option for the mentally unwell whose numbers would have included not only those designated idiots, morons, imbeciles and cretins but also women suffering from PMT, young unmarried mothers, inarticulate persistent poachers, unwanted relatives and annoying eccentrics.

All his days Samuel Johnson feared he might go mad. Boswell claimed that his mentor ‘Felt himself overwhelmed with a horrible melancholia, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery’.

Adam Smith described how Johnson would ‘bolt up in the midst of a mixed company; and, without any previous notice, fall upon his knees behind a chair, repeat the Lord’s Prayer and then resume his seat at table. He has played this freak over and over, perhaps five or six times in the course of an evening. It is not hypocrisy but madness.’

Hester Thrale described Johnson as ‘her friend who feared an apple should intoxicate him’.

I also feared for my sanity on observing in a field on the outskirts of Cullen a full-sized Flowerpot Man from my childhood. Was it Bill or …?

Boswell too had profound bouts of depression or hypochondria from which he sought relief not only in travel but also promiscuity, drink, visiting the sites of executions and military fantasies. His Highland jaunt provided ample opportunity for all of these remedies.

While in Cullen Boswell took the opportunity to introduce Johnson to William Robertson who had recently travelled to France to meet Memmie le Blanc, the central figure in his translation
An Account of a Savage Girl caught Wild in the Woods of Champagne.

Chambers Edinburgh Journal
also ran with the story.

‘One evening the people of the village of Songi were alarmed by the entrance into the street of a girl, seemingly nine or ten years old, covered with rags and skins, and having a face and hands as black as those of a negro. She also had a gourd leaf on her head, and was armed with a short baton. So strange was her aspect, that those who observed her took to their heels, ran in-doors, exclaiming, “The Devil! The Devil!’’ Bolts were drawn in on all quarters, and one man thought to ensure safety by letting loose a large bull-dog. The little savage flinched not as the animal advanced in a fury, grasping her club with both hands, she discharged a blow at the head of the dog with such force and celerity as to kill it on the spot. Elated with her victory, she jumped several times on the carcass; after which she tried in vain to enter a house, and then ran back to the wood where she mounted a tree and fell asleep.’

The article becomes increasingly hysterical describing how she could fly from tree to tree, swim like a duck, eat raw frogs, not to mention the rumour that on one notable occasion she killed and ate her sister.

I asked John if he had encountered any wild girls during his long career in teaching. In his head he wearily surveyed a line of errant
adolescents stretching across several decades and into infinity. Surly, pouting, eyes raised heavenwards, petulant, bored, chewing,
disrespectful
, downright rude, permanently angry, dismissive, yawning, yearning, defiant, condescending, loud, sulky, rebellious, unruly, disengaged, disinterested. Yes, all of the above but he had not yet encountered any dog killers or caught anyone eschewing school meals in favour of cannibalism. But he did have several months to go before retirement.

And then we caught sight of the Cullen Wild Girl; she was an old girl admittedly but undeniably wild. She was careering down the High Street in a fabulously unstable invalid car, a supercharged capsule, a blue motorised scarab hurtling under the viaduct that held back the sea. Soon, after a slow-motion arc she would land on water, capsize and float serenely towards Norway.

Several of the aforementioned adolescents were on the bus to Elgin and none too pleased to see their rector. One lad visibly sunk into the back seat, his baseball cap pulled down to his chin. Parents too were represented and chose to treat John with total deference despite their surprise on seeing a pillar of their community dressed like a midden.

The bus driver on the route through Morayshire’s fishing villages was a frustrated aircraft mechanic from RAF Lossiemouth. Only by moonlighting could he practice the skills that will one day enable him to claim his rightful place both in the sunset and in the cockpit of a Red Arrow. While whistling
The Dam Busters
theme tune through the bus intercom he thrust his vehicle up roller-coaster braes, guided it into rapid descents and as a memorable climax to the display negotiated at speed a full hair-pin bend. As his passengers buried their faces in the brown paper bags, thoughtfully positioned, he eased back on the throttle to glide through Portknockie, Findochty, Portessie and Buckpool.

The official sign welcoming visitors into the proud conurb of Portknockie declared with a hint of triumphalism and parochial pride KNOCKERS AYE AFLOAT. The image conjured distant memories of childhood swimming lessons at the local pool.

As we passed through Buckpool John pointed out the beach which was the centre of claim and counterclaim in
The Northern Scot
. A gypsy traveller had allegedly relieved himself in full public view thereby scandalising most of the inhabitants who enjoyed having their
prejudices
confirmed.

The destination board on the bus should have read THE FIFTIES. The only goods for sale in the shops were innocence and nostalgia.

John reminded me that in the 1770s there would have been nothing but clusters of dreich hovels above the shingle up which the boats were dragged. Abject poverty and brutal short lives were the order of Johnson’s day. He brought to mind John Bellany’s stark paintings of fishermen who stare dislocated and consumed with dread at an unseen horizon.

As we crawled through Buckie a sullen youth pushed an empty shopping trolley down the street. In a burst of drunken benevolence he had presumably offered his mate not only accommodation for the night but also a lift home. His mother had been less than pleased to find her new lodger snoring in a trolley parked in the hallway.

His mates were sitting in a perfect line in the window of a cafe leering and making faces at every passing woman under the age of fifty. Two very young girls pushing prams crossed the road to avoid the sneering gauntlet.

The bus accelerated through the sound barrier on the approach to Fochabers. I assumed initially that the woman was merely rubbing her eyes, I then realised she had already surrendered one eyeball to the
g-force
and was keen to preserve its neighbour.

Boswell noted, ‘Fochabers is a poorlike village, many of the houses ruinous. But it is remarkable they have in general orchards well stored with apple-trees.’ Dr Johnson for his part made no mention of the orchards; he just shuddered lest some wizened person rushed out and offered him a poisoned fruit.

The fifty yards or so separating the Gordon Estate from the High Street was fenced off on account of the construction of the mighty Fochabers bypass. There were no eco-warriors in evidence, no
neo-Swampies
living in ditches. I did though listen to a woman at the bus stop who was clearly distressed that the construction work and the subsequent new road meant that she could no longer easily visit the lake where her grandparent’s ashes were scattered. To her the gulf was insurmountable; it was as if her acceptance of their death had been delayed so long as she could walk round the lake and talk to them. The by-pass had finally severed her thin link with her past.

More mundanely, the Folk Museum was closed for at least an eternity while the library proudly announced that free dog bags could in fact be uplifted from every library in the county. Forget pushing
back the knowledge frontiers with banks of computer terminals; this was the sort of innovative diversification guaranteed to ensure the survival of the library as an institution well into the twenty second century. The helpful picture of a dog on the leaflet failed to make clear if they were dispensing body bags for dead dogs or receptacles for the droppings of those still living.

The Elgin bus was full and we were told to step off the running board. I glanced at the roof to see if there were any emaciated local people each with a precious goat squashed against the hand rails in a pastiche tribute to the Indian sub-continent but no. There was though the strong likelihood that the driver recognised John as the teacher from his past who had made his life a total misery by suggesting that extortion, bullying, and arson were sadly not on the new Curriculum for Excellence.

By the time the next bus arrived the grieving grand-daughter had erected her own small cairn of fag ends.

Johnson would have been incredulous had he seen the extent of Forestry Commission activity. Clumps of mechanically wrenched roots and the mangled limbs of the fallen followed the road. The sense of devastation was magnified by the unexplained presence of single trees that had survived the cull. Paul Nash the war artist had set up his easel in a clearing and could be heard muttering ‘Wait until the Ministry sees this.’ In the forests that were still waiting to be cut down to size the bellicose theme found its reprise in the white samurai headbands tied round the waists of selected trees for an unfathomable reason.

ELGIN TWINNED WITH … I missed the list of fortunate but obscure European towns. Hades? Berchtesgaden?

‘About noon (we) came to Elgin, where in the inn, that we supposed the best, a dinner was set before us, which we could not eat. This was the first time, and except one, the last, that I found any reason to complain of a Scottish table; and such disappointments, I suppose, must be expected in every country, where there is no great frequency of travellers.’

Johnson was unimpressed with The Red Lion at 44 High Street. Unsurprisingly the premises are now residential. How could any self respecting inn keeper survive the vicious scrutiny of the fat restaurant critic from
The Rambler
?

Birkbeck Hill claimed to have solved the mystery of the foul
meal served to the travellers. The landlord, Bailie Leslie, mistook Johnson for another large pompous guest, Thomas Paufer, a commercial traveller, who had taken to abusing the ‘Buy a meal and drink all you can’ offer and would only order the tiniest snack that would enable him to become paralytic. Forewarned, the inn staff conspired to serve Johnson with the most revolting meal they could conjure by way of deterrent. Like disgruntled bar staff down the ages they probably spat, or worse, in his beef collops and mutton chops.

The licensed premises nearest to 44 High Street was the ubiquitous Wetherspoons where I left John in charge of a pint while watching Hearts v Hibs on Sky.