Boswell's Bus Pass (2 page)

On stepping down from the bus in Dunbar we were confronted by the sight of a frightened woman clutching a TV set whilst rushing down the High Street. We presumed that some local disaster had occurred and accordingly the locals had felt obliged to loot and plunder. Alternatively Comet had reduced its prices to desperation level. Perhaps she was a soap addict who couldn’t bear to be parted from her only source of pleasure and so took the set with her wherever she went.

We should not have been surprised that the tourist information office was closed until Easter.

Every other shop belonged to a solicitor. The shops in between the solicitor’s were again charity shops, one of which yielded the most astonishing of titles. Unfortunately
Sex for One
, half hidden under the arm of a furtive customer, had already been claimed. I felt cheated. But there again, at whom was the book aimed? Who needs a DIY manual of this nature? Whose hand eye coordination is so poor as to need such instruction? Samuel Johnson for one had no such need. Despite his frequent New Year’s resolution to ‘Rise at eight each morning to combat evil habits singly’ the letter M frequently appears in his diaries. His entry for January 4
^th
1765 was ‘M.d Rose at 10 … Drank wine for the first time this year.’ Not a bad day then.

Meanwhile Rory was displaying a commendable loyalty to the local economy by swearing that nothing other than Belhaven Best would pass his lips. This necessitated opening the door of several pubs trying to scan the taps while carefully avoiding eye contact with the locals, all of whom looked as if they would eat their young rather than welcome strangers. Eventually we succeeded. Moments after crossing the threshold I was offered a leather jacket still in its cellophane for a mere £40. Despite assurances that it would fit perfectly I managed to
decline the offer, whereupon the pushy salesman metamorphosed into unctuous barman.

After his first pint Rory suggested that I really wanted to wander round the town. The thought had not occurred to me but I left nonetheless.

The tourist sign near the castle ruins tells the bizarre tale of Black Agnes, the temporarily abandoned wife of the lord of the manor who was away fighting 13th century wars. Evidently the deranged woman struck terror into the hearts of the vicious English who were laying siege to the castle by nonchalantly dusting the ramparts. This staggeringly unlikely story is no more than a moral fable concocted to encourage housework, general diligence and thorough dusting.

The harbour is pretty enough and technically still functional with two trawlers tethered to the quay. The famished seagulls wheeled in a very threatening way and would have pecked my eyes out if I had stood still. I don’t know if the birds were the catalyst but my spirits plummeted very suddenly. I felt ineffably sad for reasons I didn’t understand; I felt simultaneously lost and sorry for myself.

Shivering I returned to the bar where Rory was finishing his pint with a finely-honed technique that would have delighted an apprentice sword swallower. In the context of a small and futile disagreement over the relative merits of Prince Charles and Camilla he mentioned someone he knew whose family had been touched by suicide. Johnson’s lifetime friend, John Taylor, frequently hinted that they discussed suicide in non-theoretical terms.

It was a relief then to enter the comforting fug of the next 253 on its way to Edinburgh. The bus was in fact a travelling oven; it was at least gas mark 5. Any moment the passengers would start divesting themselves of clothing and begging for water. Glancing round, I immediately understood that this was not an attractive prospect.

Rory declared himself pleased with the day and responded with enthusiasm when he saw an East Lothian mobile library van parked under a hedgerow. He may have been right in his praise of any initiative that brought books to the masses but it occurred to me that the van was probably stolen and would without doubt burn well.

I became increasingly aware of faces fleetingly glimpsed from the window of the bus: a young woman in a small village stretching in front of her bedroom mirror; perhaps she was on a promise, perhaps
she was looking forward to an evening on her settee in front of the TV with a glass of wine.

As we saw the small, distant outline of Arthur’s Seat through the twilight, I tried to see the landscape through Johnson’s eyes by demolishing whole housing estates, extinguishing all lights, removing fences and reconfiguring the fields.

As his post-chaise entered Edinburgh Johnson was deafened by ambulance sirens as the scurrying vehicles threaded their way through the exposed entrails of a city mutilated by unnecessary tram works. I trust that his final stop in the Royal Mile was more welcoming than Edinburgh Bus Station which remains despite its extensive renovation a soulless monument to human misery.

I thanked Rory for his erudite, tolerant company and expressed regret that he would be unable to pick up the baton again until the last stages of the journey.

As I made my way home I kept seeing the young couple with their suitcases at Stand 6 clinging to each other with expressions of shared dread.

Dr. Johnson stretched, groaned and tried to stand up straight after being squashed for hours against the unfortunate Scott. Desperate to pee, unsteady on his feet, his unwashed wig at an angle far from jaunty and clutching an oak stave the size of a small tree – not that he had seen a tree since Streatham – he lurched towards the unwelcoming front door of Boyd’s Inn, Edinburgh.

A traveller who had stayed in the same house a year or so before Johnson’s visit described it in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
as being ‘crowded and confused. The master lives in the stable, the mistress is not equal to the business.’

Arnot in his
History of Edinburgh
commented on the typical inn, ‘their apartments dirty and dismal; and if the waiters happen to be out of the way, a stranger will perhaps be shocked with the novelty of being shown into a room by a dirty sun-burnt wench without shoes or stockings … an idle profusion of victuals, collected without taste, and dressed without skill or cleanliness, is commonly served up.’ No Scottish Tourist Board stars then.

Things go from bad to worse for Johnson who quickly makes an enemy of the first person he speaks to. Boswell describes how ‘the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter, upon which the waiter with his greasy fingers lifted a lump of sugar and put it into it. Johnson then hurled the drink out of the window.

‘Behave yersel big man, dae that again and I’ll stick my fingers up yer effin nose and stick yer manky wig where the sun disnae shine!’

On receiving a note from the venerable doctor Boswell scuttled down the High Street to rescue him and convey him to his own house in James Court.

This was the moment that Boswell had lived for. He would have paced and fretted in his elegant house at the top of the High Street, almost sick with excitement waiting to hear of his guest’s arrival, grinding his fist into his hand with each passing hour, snapping at his long suffering wife, barking at his bemused servant. Where was the great Cham? Where was the man who would finally seal his pact with posterity, the man whose biography he would now write to massive acclaim? To think that he, James Boswell, heir to the vast Auchinleck estate, at the precociously young age of 33, could count both Voltaire and Rousseau among his acquaintances. Not to mention a successful legal career and indeed his fabulous success with women who would swoon at the very mention of his name. He thought fondly and with a welcome stirring in his breeches of the many prostitutes who had fallen for his dubious charms and his large purse as he whored and wenched his way through London, fathering several illegitimate children in the process. What prowess! What talent!

He was a pathological star-struck groupie, a hanger-on of coat tails, a man who realised from an early age that his footnote in history would only be assured by basking in the reflected social and literary fame of others. With single minded application he had insinuated himself into the company of the Great and the Good. Yet his most prized trophy was only minutes away. Who else could have persuaded the ungainly ugly giant of letters to travel to the North Britain he disparaged at every opportunity? What a coup!

Why someone as clever as Johnson welcomed the unctuous brand of flattery bestowed on him by his sycophantic shadow remains a mystery. Equally perplexing is why Johnson agreed to undertake a
tour in a country which would soon come to despise his presence and his condescending observations.

In his journal Boswell captures every bon mot that fell from Johnson’s lips as he entertained the aristocracy of Edinburgh society over the next few days. Sundry clergymen, minor academic and literary wannabes came to pay homage. Most of them now require lengthy footnotes to explain their importance.

Judging by the letters to Hester Thrale, Johnson was less impressed by the chattering carnival of sycophants than Boswell realised. ‘At diner on Monday were the Dutchess of Douglass, an old Lady who talks broad Scotch with a paralytick voice, and is scarce understood by her own countrymen … At supper there was such a Conflux of company, that I could scarcely support the tumult. I have never been well in the whole Journey, and am very easily disordered.’

A contemporary account also suggests that either Johnson’s guests were genuinely underwhelmed by the Great man’s pronouncements or that Edinburgh has always had an astonishing capacity for
hypocrisy
.

Captain Topham, a cultured and extremely able army officer from England was resident in Edinburgh from 1774 – 1775 and as such was ideally placed to record the effect that Johnson had on the capital. ‘He was received with the most flattering marks of civility by every one … He was looked upon as a kind of miracle, and almost carried about for a show. Those who were in his company were silent the moment he spoke, lest they should interrupt him, and loose any of the good things he was going to say. He repaid all their attention to him with ill-breeding; and when in the company of the ablest men in the country, and who are certainly his superiors in point of abilities, his whole design was to show them how contemptibly he thought of them … A man of illiberal manners and surly disposition, who all his life long had been at enmity with the Scotch, takes a sudden resolution of travelling amongst them; not, according to his own account, “to find a people of liberal and refined education, but to see wild men and wild manners.’’’

It was time to seek wild men and wild manners in modern Edinburgh. Where better to find both than the High Street down which thoroughfare Boswell led Samuel Johnson.

My companion through the streets of Edinburgh and on the next part of the journey was David who had been in possession of a bus pass
for several years, using it to commute between his various places of employment as part time supply teacher of physics, college lecturer and weekend till operative at Marks and Spenser. His CV includes previous experience as a drug-taking hippy in Papua New Guinea, civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, university drop out,
paratrooper
and oil rig roustabout. He also possesses a massive historical knowledge. Probably a better man to have in an emergency than the Great Cham; although it is not impossible to picture the Doctor using his bulk to lift a stage coach out of a ditch before reviving the horses by breathing a well-chosen Greek homily into their nostrils.

We chose to complete the famous walk along the High Street in reverse and, hoping for a spontaneous recreation of the sugar incident, we chose a pub close to the site of the original Boyd’s Inn. Not a surly waiter in sight, just two disinterested staff flirting with each other in the most desultory fashion. Instead of a traditional eighteenth century menu of whisky and potatoes we were offered gastro food of ambivalent ethnic origin for an exorbitant price.

Perhaps we should have gone to The World’s End instead just over the road, the pub still associated with the murder of two young women who were last seen drinking with a stranger several decades back. The High Street has never been a place for the squeamish. Recently tourist tours have proliferated with promises of ghouls, ghosts, murderers in abundance, not to mention a fair quota of ‘jumper-ooters’ whose sole function is to lurk in dark wynds and leap out on the unsuspecting.

Having chosen to stay hungry we stepped outside into the Canongate. Despite the superficial veneer of the tacky, the kitsch and the downright tawdry, Edinburgh’s Royal Mile remains special. Boswell too must have been pleased to emerge with Johnson on his arm and the night ahead of them. Now, as then, the tunnel-like closes lose their sharp edges in the dark and spiral into a dark nothingness redolent of past sorrows and the barely imaginable hardships of communal life and death in the squalid tenements. The fact that the old town rebuilt itself on the collapsed foundations of earlier plague-marked dwellings conjures an image half Bosch, half Babel: lives squashed flat, generations concertinad together, random
blackened
limbs protruding from a grotesque pack of cards.

Even from a perspective of 250 years it is difficult to conceive that Johnson had the effrontery to confide in Mrs Thrale that ‘Most of
their buildings are very mean, and the whole town bears some resemblance to the old part of Birmingham.’ What a truly dreadful thing to say.

Other eighteenth century travellers reacted differently. Defoe ranked the High Street as ‘almost the largest, longest, and finest street in the world. The buildings compared favourably with those in England.’

Boswell, swelling with smug pride, walked arm in arm with Johnson up the High Street ‘… it was a dusky night; I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh … As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, “I smell you in the dark.’’’

Although David was loath to let me take his arm we did wonder what Edinburgh smells of now. Mercifully the natives no longer empty their crocks of effluent onto the heads of innocent passersby.