Boswell's Bus Pass (15 page)

Having sulked his way down the hill Johnson became distraught when Boswell went on ahead to secure their accommodation in Glenelg. ‘He called me back with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him.’ Beneath his apparent
indifference
to the scenery Johnson was disconcerted by the unfamiliar environment. For days they had travelled in the brooding shadow of the hills over genuinely challenging terrain. He was an old man, entitled to a moment of panic.

Increasingly bored with the incremental tedium of the walk Roy regaled me with a medley of marching songs that became more Tyrolean and Neo-fascist with every step. Soon tomorrow would truly belong to him. He then changed channels and launched into a horrible ballad in a cod Irish accent that apparently involved a traveller having consensual sex with the daughter of Riley, the landlord. By all accounts the experience was mutually pleasurable but the traveler launched a preemptive strike against the landlord’s wrath by waving a pistol in the air.

Roy then took his hobby of collie-teasing a stage further and deliberately provoked a bull that was brooding lustfully beyond a
mercifully secure fence. The animal roared and stamped in response to the verbal taunts. I think it was love at first slight.

On the outskirts of Glenelg we came to Bernera barracks, the last of the several forts built by Cumberland to warn the locals not to think of insurrection ever again. After the lavish and flattering hospitality they had met at both Fort George and Fort Augustus we can understand why Boswell ‘would fain have put up there; at least I looked at them wishfully, as soldiers have always everything in the best order. But there was only a sergeant and a few men there.’

We went one better and finding a partial gap in the barbed wire defences broke in to the derelict, roofless barracks. After eyeballing giant nettles we stood in the central square. To our right the stables were still visible, small bushes grew from the arched windows and in a corner of an out-building we found the remains of an oven that would have glowed red with fire as fresh bread was shoveled from its maw.

We had booked into the Glenelg Inn, Boswell and Johnson’s final destination before they left for the Isles. The site of the original inn is now a posh private house adjacent to the jetty from which they sailed to Armadale. In its day it was a fairground house of horrors, a monument to squalor and botulism. In Boswell’s words, ‘A lass showed us upstairs into a room raw and dirty; bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black fir greasy table, forms of the same kind, and from a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep like Edgar in
King Lear
.’ Johnson has his own simile to describe the apparition who rose to greet them. ‘Out of one of the beds, on which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge.’

Who was this fellow? Posterity demands an answer. Was it an evil sprite, an abandoned child fathered by a rampant soldier after the ’45, a relative of the Masonic goat encountered earlier, an escaped slave?

Roy too had a fright when he found me wandering round the bedroom in the middle of the night without the slightest idea where I was. It was an unwanted intimation of the Alzheimer years ahead. I suspect Roy was quite relieved that Glenelg marked the end of this particular leg of the journey. A combination of helpline duties, Wilma, and Portobello Ceilidh Band commitments gave him the perfect excuse to return home.

Like a young child waiting for Christmas I counted the number of sleeps before I could travel again. My vicarious life was assuming more importance than the real one of part time work, family and the weekly shopping. I sensed that Morag, my wife, was more than usually fearful for my sanity. I needed to get back. My chance came two weeks later when David once more nobly agreed to resume his role as my carer and travelling support worker.

Boswell noted how their hostess ‘made a kind of jumping for joy’ when she welcomed them to Armadale on Skye. Our arrival had no such impact on the CalMac workers who steadfastly refused to dance a jig in delight. The hostess’s movements may have had their origins in a medical condition as Boswell and Johnson felt distinctly unwelcome in the house of Alexander Macdonald. Their moaning and bad mannered host saw them as a distraction from his own imminent journey to England.

Our initially cordial welcome at our B & B was soon eroded by being told in unambiguous terms that we must remove all footwear at the bedroom door so as not to deflower the beige carpet. And, furthermore, if we had to ‘go during the night’, could we use the shaving light rather than the bathroom light which allegedly created mayhem on a par with a battlefield nuclear explosion. Now confused
by which cords could legitimately be pulled David tugged at the string hanging from the faux chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. The gale unleashed by the dervish fan blades had the same apocalyptic effect as a helicopter hovering above a cornfield. Desperate to stem the unleashed fury David thrust his hand upwards. The patina of blood on the flock wallpaper and a hand severed at the wrist seemed a small price to pay for peace.

Boswell commented ‘We had an ill-dressed dinner, Sir Alexander not having a cook of any kind from Edinburgh. I alone drank port wine. No claret appeared. We had indeed mountain and Frontignac and Scotch porter. But except what I did myself, there was no hospitable convivial intercourse, no ringing of glasses.’ Sadly we do not know how Sir Alexander reacted as he watched Boswell downing every alcohol tinctured liquid in the house including Jeyes Cleaning Fluid and the reserve supplies of Night Nurse before smashing several glasses in a series of strange and solitary toasts.

Hospitable convivial intercourse in the Armadale Hotel must have been on the cards when the lone woman drinking in the bar asked if she could join us. Her Sisyphean task was to travel through remote corners of the kingdom checking insurance claims. She seemed bleakly lonely, a state to which she became instantly reconciled when David asked her if she fancied a wander along the beach looking for dead otters. She was a woman who must have survived many offers in tartan-trewed bars, but nothing like this. We patiently explained how Dr Johnson on finding his first dead otter on the very coast visible from the lounge bar flipped it over and commented how its ‘
underneaths
’ resembled those of a spaniel. Fearful lest the same happen to her and now desperate for one more night of loneliness our new friend excused herself, gulped her drink and went to bed.

The guests at Sir Alexander Macdonald’s house on Skye included ‘A little Aberdeenshire man, one Jeans, a naturalist, with his son, a dwarf with crooked legs.’ They were eventually joined by a posse of relatives but ‘Sir Alexander let them stand round the room and stuck his fork into a liver pudding, instead of getting room made for them.’ He then committed the cardinal sin of the worst oaf by dishing out the punch with the soup ladle.

We would have welcomed the distraction of a few dwarves with crooked legs or the odd fragrant violation of ladle etiquette. Instead we were forced to eavesdrop on the loud triumphalist roaring of an
American party who had invaded the bar with military bravado. One of the conquerors insisted in shocked tones ‘Taking notes from crevices is bad luck.’ While I was still trying to form a moral stance on this contentious issue their attention turned to a photograph album. ‘I like the way you’re straddling Atlantis.’ We hoped this was only a metaphor for massive strategic delusions of colonial greed.

Despite the inauspicious start the mood of both travellers improved during the four days spent in Armadale. Johnson felt better after describing one of their fellow guests as a woman who ‘would sink a ninety-gun ship. She is so dull – so heavy.’ He then declared that in seven years he would make Skye an independent island and that ‘he’d roast oxen whole and hang out a flag as a signal to the Macdonalds to come and get beef and whisky.’

Boswell too felt his spirits rising. He announced ‘I had felt a return of spleen during my stay in this mean mansion, and had it not been that I had Mr Johnson to contemplate, I should have been very sickly in mind.’

I had been struggling with my own mood and was irked by a sense of unreality hanging over the island. Paradoxically this may have had something to do with the sheer incongruity of seeing Skye in beautiful weather, as if the island had inappropriately insinuated itself into the photoshopped pages of an Aegean holiday brochure. The light made the ubiquitous rhododendrons an unnatural cloying pink and the shade endowed much of the ferny undergrowth with the synthetic quality of dark green plastic.

We walked along the coast as did Boswell and Johnson to Tormore House, previously the home of Alexander’s factor who received the guests with all the hospitality at his disposal.

We had been told that the house is lived in by a spry old woman in her eighties who would have welcomed us with the same fervor as the earlier owner. Unfortunately she was not at home although I thought I caught sight of a head nodding in the gloom of the sitting room.

Walking back up the hill we caught up with two elderly American flower spotters. They gleefully reeled off their finds so far, harebells, lilies, Michaelmas daisies, fuchsia, campion, ‘Yes, it was campion’. One of them then spoke the immortal line during the delivery of which time itself slowed down, ‘For years I have tried to grow fuchsias in my back passage.’ A flower therapy for our times. A meadow of flowers flowering in Magritte’s dream. Lie face down in your garden,
whip off your drawers and let your neighbours feast their eyes on the fuchsias – just a small treat, mind – before teatime.

Before we took our leave of our landlord and lady we glanced at the visitors’ book left reproachfully open. A very scary drawing of a rabbit leapt off the first page, the significance of which would soon become abundantly clear. The comments from visitors as far flung as Scarborough and Wick were astonishing. The fact that we had spent the night in Valhalla had passed us by. Had we slept on a bed of petals with a small army of compliant vestal virgins in attendance we would not have experienced the orgasmic state of rapture experienced by previous inhabitants of the room. Hyperboles dripped off the pages. Declarations of unctuous gratitude were interspersed with
descriptions
of breakfasts fit to be delivered on silver platters to condemned men on the morning of their executions. We felt that we had missed out somehow. ‘We will recommend you to all our gay biking friends, hope the oil comes off the sheets’ will have given them pause for thought.

Boswell writes on September 5
^th
‘Sir Alexander and Rorie and I walked to the parish church of Sleat. It is a poor one; not a loft in it.’ We set out to do the same.

Distracted, David wandered into the driveway of a large house. I followed and saw him in a standoff with possibly the largest rabbit that has ever lived (including the pair of famine-alleviating monsters presented by an American entrepreneur to the president of North Korea who promptly arranged for them to be cooked and served at the presidential table).

In addition to being the size of a small dog David’s nemesis was strangely striped. Irrespective of its size or decoration it was totally nonplussed by our presence and lollopped off into the shaking undergrowth. Our deviation from the main road had been observed by two of Skye’s finest champions of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme. ‘Can we help you?’ they asked with the barely hidden conviction that they had intercepted two house plundering rogues from the mainland. Moments later they looked in horror at each other. ‘Not the rabbit!’ one of them said before they both plunged into the vegetation never to be seen again. Puzzled, we decided to walk along the coast instead.

After the disconcerting rabbit experience we approached a beached trawler with caution as it was being guarded by a very still Alsatian
dog. Our trepidation was justified when we realized that the creature was made of tin and that half of its nightmare metallic skull was missing.

The church at Kilmore has a pervasive and wistful serenity. Boswell and Johnson went to inspect the monument erected to the memory of the Alexander Macdonald’s son who had died aged 25 in Rome six years before their visit. Johnson comments on the florid nature of the description without acknowledging the unquenchable pain endured by parents with a dead child.

Inside the new church a memorial tablet on the wall features a mayfly on a bas relief. On a summer’s day it seemed a powerful symbol of mortality and the transient nature of all things, more effective than more conventional
momenti mori
. The fragile beauty of the carved gossamer wings would have rattled Johnson who told Boswell ‘He never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him.’ In a letter to John Taylor he admitted that ‘the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid to think on that which I know I cannot avoid.’

If possible Boswell was even more obsessed with death. Three years prior to the journey he lay in bed alongside his infant daughter and ‘engaged her attention with telling her how pretty angels would come and carry her from the kirk hole (the grave) to Heaven, where she would be with GOD and see fine things.’ Needless to say the child was petrified.

We sat on the kerb outside of the church waiting for the Broadford bus. The adjacent shelter was a small monument to expressionism. A pink cycle was parked inside next to a beehive which contained copies of the
West Highland Free Press
. On the other side of the glass a stone shrine had been built around a spring, next to a small statuette with no arms.

While trying to superimpose meaning on the eclectic randomness of the shelter two geriatric Dutchmen swaddled in leather astride of Harley Davidsons appeared in the middle of the road. They circled several times while maintaining unflinching eye contact. They were in fact so old they could easily have seen us as young things fit for ritual slaughter. They may have been aging scouts for a younger tribe approaching rapidly over the horizon. Eventually the
Easy
Rider
moment passed and the ancient warriors shot off.

The warriors on the bus were predominately young Samurai. I
must have missed the gentle lilting request from the driver, ‘
Shentlemen
could you please be obliging and place your yumis, yaris and naginatas in the receptacle provided at the back of the bus’. In fact their weapon of choice was the Nikon L35AF2/One Touch. A lens rose and fell as its owner gauged whether his collection of foreign cloud formations would be further enhanced by a coiled nimbus with fluffy edges.

The only non Japanese voices were owned by an elderly couple from the North of England who became increasingly animated with each passing farmyard dung heap, ‘the smell of wet silage is the best thing in the world but you don’t want it too wet.’ Absolutely not. Did the bus company advertise its magical silage mystery tours throughout the world?

A craving for drink dictated a brief sojourn in a Broadford hotel. All of the bar staff spoke with English accents. There was evidence everywhere of a reverse demographic in operation in the Western Isles. Outgoers were being replaced by incomers. The whole
population
was swapping. The grass in Skye is greener than the sward in Tunbridge Wells. Hanging by a strap in the London Underground is better than being held to ransom by the infrequent bus service on the Islands. At least there is an element of choice. Throughout the Highlands Johnson found evidence of a more sinister demographic shift.

The bar itself had undergone some sort of clearance. Although the size of a football pitch and more than capable of accommodating all of the tour buses on which its survival depended, we were the only customers. We offered to run about a lot and create an illusion of business but the offer was treated with the disdain it deserved.

A highlight of Boswell and Johnson’s tour was the hospitable reception they met at Coriatachan, a farmhouse some six miles from Broadford owned by Mackinnon, a tenant of the grumpy Sir Alexander. Here they found good company, a copious supply of books and huge quantities of drink which Boswell was quite unable to resist.

The road to Coriatachan coincides for part of the way with the route of the long defunct Broadford quarry railway and initially follows the perimeter fence of the most dangerous electricity
substation
on the planet; more dangerous than eating cabbages grown on Gruinard Island, more dangerous than any nuclear waste processing
plant, more dangerous than a cynanide-tasting party. The evidence for this is the absurd proliferation of yellow signs showing a small man being felled by a bolt of electricity and the legend DANGER OF DEATH KEEP OUT. The signs hang nine inches apart for the entire length of the fence.

Having resisted the urge to climb the fence and find out what death felt like we walked through the occasional shower in the direction of the original farmhouse which lies between two streams. Tiny birds of prey hovered in the distance like marks on the retina.