Boswell's Bus Pass (13 page)

I traipsed out in the general direction of Oliver’s Fort through the docks where a small steam tug puffed smugly, blissfully unaware that it had been caught in a time warp and dropped back into the River Ness a hundred years after setting out. The skipper chewed on his plug of baccy and spat into the water. I made the mistake of asking a parked van driver if there was a commemorative plaque somewhere. I would have received a better response if I had asked if his mother gave good oral sex. Eventually I found an oddly squat runt of a tower covered in scaffolding. It was surrounded by a township of DIY warehouses the combined contents of which would have been more than sufficient to rebuild the original garrison.

The pair of them held court in Mrs MacKenzie’s inn, the Horns situated at the north-west end of Bridge Street and described by Boswell as ‘dirty, and ill-furnished’, although he conceded that ‘the entertainment was good.’ The nearest licensed premises to the original tavern is the Gellions, reputedly the oldest pub in Inverness and dating back to 1820. Its only claim to fame apart from a dubious vending machine in the gents, of which more later, was the fact that William McGonagall read his poetry there to a suitably startled audience towards the end of the 19
^th
century.

Patrons were warned that any person found either possessing, using or distributing any type of drug would be banned from the premises and reported to the police. This explains the ugly scenes when Johnson cut a line of snuff with his credit card.

The vending machine promised Naughty Toys for Boys and Girls. For five pounds you could buy either a set of vibrating Bunny Lugs or an artefact called Wild Willy. Dr Johnson stood alongside Boswell and shook a leg of his breeches, ‘No James, Oi won’t lend yow a sovereign, and watch where yer pointing that thing!’

On the Sunday they worshipped at the ‘English Chapel’ which was a single room in a house in Baron Taylor’s Street. It was not easy peering at Cactus Jakes Cougar Bar or Ladbrokes (Ross County 7/2 to win the Scottish Cup, not bad odds) to work out which of the properties might be using a neglected chapel as a storage room.

Sadly I had to leave the pair of them at prayer and return home. I was also growing increasingly disillusioned with travelling on my own and vowed to persuade some other charitable soul to join me on the next stage.

The intervening weeks before I could travel again weighed heavily on me. I knew that Boswell and Johnson were waiting for me – frozen in time. I was the only one who could release them from the spell and let them move on. Only by travelling north again could I breathe life and animation into Rowlandson’s black and white cartoon figures and let them jerk alive and finish the strident conversation abandoned in mid sentence.

Roy, now grizzled and wiry as a whippet, joined me when the Inverness train stopped in Dunkeld & Birnham. We had also known each other from University days. After a long career in teaching Roy had moved north to run a private hostel where, in the absence of neighbours, he was able to develop his musical talents and by interrogating guests, further hone his talent for inquisition. I had missed him since he left Edinburgh. Most Sunday nights for at least a decade had besen marked by increasingly awful geriatric squash and three pints of much needed real ale during the consumption of which we would confide, confess and support each other in a way that defied gender stereotyping. I was not surprised to learn subsequently that he had chosen to give his time to a helpline that offered succour to the distressed and lost.

‘We were now to bid farewell to the luxury of travelling, and to enter a country upon which perhaps no wheel has ever rolled … At Inverness therefore we procured three horses for ourselves and a
servant, and one more for our baggage, which was no very heavy load … We took two Highlanders to run beside us, partly to show us the way and partly to take back from the seaside the horses of which they were the owners. One of them was a man of great liveliness and activity, of whom his companion said, he would tire any horse in Inverness.’

It must have been one heck of a run for the unfortunate
Highlanders
trying to keep up with the horses all the way from Inverness to Fort Augustus, the pair of them staggering along, flailing in their plaids and cursing in Gaelic at the privileged travellers. Spare a thought too for Johnson’s unfortunate horse which must have increasingly
resembled
a Thelwell cartoon pony, its legs progressively buckling and splayed under its corpulent burden.

Boswell provides a more humane insight into the situation of their departure. ‘We should have set out at seven. But one of the horses needed shoeing; the smith had got drunk the night before at a wedding and could not rise early; so we did not get off set off til nine.’ He at least humanises their running companions by revealing their names, John Hay and Lauchlan Vass.

Roy has always inclined to interrogation as a mode of conversational engagement and had soon extracted a full life history from the
diminutive
Chinaman waiting at the bus stop with a full sized lawnmower in a box. The cardboard package which claimed to hold a Bosch Rorak 34 was the size of a small tractor and may equally have been housing all of his grandchildren from the Far East. He happily waved his ‘Old Man Pass’ and told us that its equivalent in Singapore would ensure that he would never again have to hand over money for goods, chattels or services including prostitutes, casino chips and gardening magazines.

The box competed for the space colonised by two elderly women at the front of the shelter who were clearly marking their private fiefdom with an entourage of Lidl and M & S bags. They discussed the forthcoming general election with a lack of comprehension and outrage in equal measure. They were both engaged by Gordon Brown’s gaffe when his errant microphone caught him referring to a pensioner as a ‘bigoted woman’. ‘I had to go and look it up in the dictionary … m’ mither, she’s 92, saw yon boy from the
anti-immigrant
party. He’s got the right ideas she said.’ The Chinaman looked over his shoulder fearful of forced repatriation at the hands of a spittle flecked army of racist nonagenarians.

When the 302 bus to Foyers arrived the driver looked at the midget JCB and shook his head.

As we left Inverness Roy pointed out his primary school, the house where his parents lived and the old folks’ home where his dad died. Even in your sixties the loss of parents hurt; we all become aging orphans.

The driver’s quiff and dark glasses identified him as a member of the Roy Orbison fan club, northern branch. He knew the only other passenger and spoke to her in increasingly confiding tones. After small talk he nonchalantly introduced the name of a woman he had seen at a party recently. His quiff sank noticeably when she told him the woman was married. She ended the brief silence that followed with ‘Are you smitten?’

He replied with one of the great answerable questions, ‘Why am I always attracted to married women?’ In his head he played
Pretty Woman, Beautiful Dreamer, A Love so Beautiful, All I need is Time, I Can’t Stop Loving You, It’s Over
and several reprises of
I Drove all Night.
The overtime from driving all through the night would enable him to renew his lapsed subscription to the Lonely Hearts (Bus Drivers) site.

The pain of heartbreak was slightly alleviated by the pleasure of gossip, ‘Nancy told me he just showed his wife and kids the door.’

As we faithfully followed Johnson and Boswell’s route down the East side of Loch Ness Roy pointed out Dochfour House on the opposite bank where his mother used to visit when young to pick daffodils. She and her companions were allowed to pick as many as they could carry and would all travel home by bus. The astonishing image of a flower-festooned charabanc superimposed itself on the functional interior of the 302; a travelling funeral parlour, a moving meadow, Wordsworth’s wildest fantasy.

The bus developed a peculiar squeak as it accelerated past Dores. Initially an irritating tinnitus it gradually assumed a celestial quality until Aeolian harps and Pan Pipes sang us on our way; a special service offered by D & E buses, oddly not mentioned on their website.

Explaining how Loch Ness functions as a wind tunnel Roy described how seagulls are swept down the water, impotent wings swept back, helpless to resist before being impaled on the trees at the far end. A strange harvest of dead birds hanging from the branches, gulls splayed and crucified by gale force winds.

He mentioned a family tale about how his father’s cousin had been a war-time crew member of a small boat whose mission was to patrol
the Moray Firth and look out for German aircraft flying low to bomb the aluminium smelting plant at Foyers. Steaming drunk, he had to be rugby tackled to the deck as he aimed his shotgun at the marauding Dornier which, if provoked by a spray of ill-directed grapeshot, would have enjoyed the additional diversion of blowing the small craft out of the water.

As the 302 only passed this way once a day we decided against requesting an earlier stop so that we could search for the remains of the cottage where Johnson and Boswell had one of the strangest encounters of their journey.

With hindsight Enid Blyton owes a debt of gratitude to Boswell. He introduces the adventure with ‘A good way up the loch, I perceived a little hut with an oldish woman at the door of it. I knew it would be a scene for Mr Johnson. So I spoke of it. ‘Let’s go in,’ said he.’ Appetites whetted by nursery rhyme evocations of gingerbread women and elderly single mothers who lived in shoes, they dismounted.

‘… we and our guides went in. It was a wretched little hovel, of earth only, I think; and for a window had just a hole which was stopped with a piece of turf which could be taken out to let in light. In the middle of the room was a fire of peat, the smoke going out at a hole in the roof. She had a pot upon it with goat’s flesh boiling. She had at one end, under the same roof but divided with a kind of partition made of wands, a pen or fold in which we saw a good many kids.’

The idea still has potential. POOR PEOPLE TOURS. COME AND GAWK AT REALLY POOR PEOPLE IN THEIR HOMES, AND SEE WHAT THEY EAT. TWICE DAILY. BOOK EARLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT.

‘Mr Johnson asked me where she slept. I asked one of the guides, who asked her in Erse. She spoke with a kind of high tone. He told us she was afraid we wanted to go to bed with her. This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a like being was truly ludicrous.’

This from the same Boswell who by his own admission when on the grand Tour in Dresden, flirted with ‘easy street girls and by way of sport sought out the ‘ugliest woman I could find’.

‘Mr Johnson and I afterwards made merry of upon it. I said it was he who alarmed the poor woman’s virtue. “No, sir,’’ said he. “She’ll say, ‘There came a wicked young fellow, a wild young dog, who I believe would have ravished me had there not been with him a grave old gentleman who repressed him. But when he gets out of the sight
of his tutor, I’ll warrant you he’ll spare no woman he meets, young or old.’’’

The social tourists took snuff and whisky from the old woman and salved their consciences by giving her a shilling.

We had to abandon our post-chaise at the falls of Foyers. Although the West coast of the Loch is well served by buses this was as far as we could go by public transport on the opposite bank.

We delayed starting the fourteen mile walk to Fort Augustus by ordering impressively expensive rolls in the one shop that services the intermittent tourist trade. On sale was an eclectic range of goods; a tube of Migibite rubbed shoulders with a bottle of whisky last seen on the bridge of
SS Politician
and a packet of contraceptives; a still life tribute to a blissful one night stand in a tent. The same goods were also worth having at your bedside in case two condescending 18th century travellers should drop by to inspect your goats.

A notice in the window of the Wells Fargo store advertised a service that guaranteed to exterminate Rats, Mice, Wasps, Bees, Ants, Rabbits, Moles and Birds. An entire eco system eradicated at a stroke, a precursor to a nuclear winter and the formation of Mole
Appreciation
Societies across the empire.

Johnson was impressed by the Falls. ‘We desired our guides to shew us the fall, and dismounting, clambered over very rugged crags, till I began to wish that our curiosity might have been gratified with less trouble and danger. We came at last to a place where we could overlook the river, and saw a channel torn, as it seems, through black piles of stone, by which the stream is obstructed and broken, till it comes to a very steep descent, of such dreadful depth, that we were naturally inclined to turn aside our eyes.’

We eschewed the red squirrel trail in favour of the zig-zag decking descent. After all we felt no need to demonstrate solidarity with squirrels as they did not feature on the exterminator’s list.

Every corner of the staircase was occupied by similarly dressed men talking on mobile phones. This was a synchronised event beyond explanation.

Johnson was not wrong about the falls. The drop viewed by leaning over the protective railings was conducive to vertigo, lightness
of the head and a tumbling of the bowels. Roy idly tossed his apple core into the water. Boswell makes no mention of the Falls
whatsoever
. He probably feared a repeat of the cowardice that disabled him at the Bullers of Buchan.

The road out of Foyers passes one of the sturdiest and underused of public conveniences in the Highlands. On the other side of the path its overgrown and obsolete ancestor is still visible. In its time it doubled as an air raid shelter which is why, by straining our ears, we could hear someone singing
Keep the Home Fires Burning
in a tiny distant voice. The Public Convenience Replacement, Renewal and Upgrading Programme by far surpassed anything that general Wade achieved by building roads.

We followed one of his better efforts for the first four miles. Newly minted lambs were doing what lambs do, gambolling for high stakes and head butting the nearest available set of udders.

A single crow fretted in a cage surrounded by the new families of sheep. Its function was to lure other birds down to join it by entering through the one-way opening whereupon it would become trapped, squashed against its potential mate before being removed, its neck snapped then tossed aside. The cycle would then be repeated; attractive bird in cage flirts with stranger who is then executed. Blinded by love they fail to see the growing black heap of corpses.

Johnson enjoyed his first day on horseback, ‘Most of this day’s journey was very pleasant. The day, though bright, was not hot; and the appearance of the country, if I had not seen the peak, would have been wholly new.’ Up to his old tricks again, having compared Edinburgh with Birmingham he now pretends that the sight of a poxy hillock in Derbyshire had prepared him for the grandeur of the Highlands.

The remaining ten miles on the tarmacadammed A82 was for the main, more attritional than rewarding. Having grown used to scenery
changing by the moment from the window of a bus this stuff stubbornly refused to alter. Same old, same old. I was acutely aware of the wind playing on a continuous loop in my ears and the increasingly painful meditation of boot on road. The fault must be mine – I should be enjoying all this. The road kill yielded one distorted hedgehog, a stiff frog with its legs in the air, presumably it died of boredom rather than a brush with an intermittent 4x4, and a bird’s skeleton toothpicked clean.

Roy claimed to have spotted a dead sheep in a field, a supposition based more on the fact that the animal refused to respond to his line of gratuitous sheep abuse than much else.

The haul of hubcaps in the vicinity of cattle grids suggested a different type of road kill. If anyone was sad enough to collect hub caps as a hobby this was the place to look. Every make was there, tens of them lying in hedgerows, and lining the ditches. Under cover of darkness the hubgoblins would pile them onto carts and trundle them away.