Boswell's Bus Pass (20 page)

Once again in Edinburgh I experienced the sense of suspended animation. I was increasingly desperate to sneak a look round the curtain as Boswell lay awake on his last night on Skye listening to the thunder and lightning, his legs aching, ‘fatigued with violent dancing’, his head addled with whisky.

David may have been lying when he claimed to have secured temporary employment as a supply teacher of physics in East Lothian. Either way in a moment of self-sacrificial stoicism Roy once more resigned himself to the task of accompanying me.

The early travellers had sailed from Coll to Mull to Ulva to Inchkenneth to Iona to Mull again and thence to Oban. Faced with the constraints of the ferry timetable we had no option but to start in Mull and wend our way between the islands.

The highlight of Boswell and Johnson’s voyage to Mull was an encounter with what appeared to be a ‘desperate armed Irish
smuggling
’. It was in fact a government ship that presented little threat. Boswell describes the episode with the studied nonchalance of
someone
disappointed not to be spending the afternoon in mortal combat with desperados, villains and generally bad people. In different
circumstances his account would have described how the good doctor felled a brigade of brigands with volume two (L to Z) of his dictionary while he himself carved welts on their bloodied cheeks with his rapier wit.

The highlight of our journey on the Oban-Craignure ferry was passing close to a floating palace vessel modestly called
The World
. According to an article in that day’s
Glasgow Herald
a mere half of a million pounds would buy you a suite and entitle you to roam the earth indefinitely making use of the onboard golf course and a different restaurant every day of the week. The boat would be useful in a post-apocalypse world sailing contaminated oceans, cocooned in a floating bubble of opulence, steering a path through rafts of corpses swelling with the tide. When
The World’s
passengers eventually die of ennui and overeating, right-wing governments will vie with one another to strip it out and use it as a prison ship which could be left to rot on a marsh somewhere.

As the bus routes on Mull are limited we brought bikes with us and stowed them beneath the decks of the 495 to Tobermory. The driver, Alasdair to his regular passenger, had a penchant for Indian music which percolated sinuously through the bus. At Salen he abandoned his vehicle and sought refuge in the Spar grocery. Had he not already been warned as to his future conduct he would have opted for a speed wash at the adjacent launderette and checked on his investments at the café which also provided postal and banking services.

Rejuvenated by his purchases he accelerated onto the slipway for the Lochaline Ferry, raising the possibility that Bowmans Coaches had invested their six-monthly profits in amphibious vehicles similar to the DUKW craft that plunges into the Mersey. Either that or he simply wanted to find out if the bus would float. Having second thoughts he rejoined the road.

The bus slalomed and skewed as two large deer cantered down the white line. They fleetingly looked Alasdair in the eye before
disappearing
back into the heather. He seemed relieved at not having to pick deer bits off his radiator grill. A sign pointed the way to a Stickmaker Craft Centre. Why does anyone need to make more sticks? Are they better than the real thing?

Three trawlers leant drunkenly against each other on the foreshore, old pals. Their rib cages had become entangled in an embrace that must have lasted several decades. Roy told me that it was considered
bad luck to dismantle a boat which is why the island shores are littered with wrecked and unwanted vessels. Soon not an inch of beach will remain as ocean going tankers, aircraft carriers, cruise ships, coracles and canoes cuddle up.

Boswell counted ‘twelve or fourteen vessels’ in Tobermory
harbour
. Roy counted sixty seven and then revised his tally to sixty six. I looked for the bubbles showing where a yacht must have recently sunk. He pointed out that it had just sailed out of the harbour so could not feature in his nautical census.

Boswell says that Johnson was decidedly grumpy at the thought of being stranded on yet another island and could only be consoled with a ‘dish of tea, some good wheaten cakes (scones) and fresh butter.’ Young Coll who was their guide on this part of the tour, and the long suffering Joseph, managed to escape the increasingly competitive and tedious conversation by improvising a drinking spree with two ship’s captains. In their absence Boswell and Johnson discussed Alberti’s
Tour of Italy
, Addison’s
Remarks
, Moréri’s
Dictionary
, Selden’s
Table Talk
, Fénelon’s
Telemachus
, Voltaire’s
Universal History
, the Bishop of Meaux(?), Racine, Corneille, Moliere, Massillon and Bourdaloue. Meanwhile their fellow tea drinkers slit their wrists and garrotted each other out of kindness. Coll and Joseph had made the right choice.

Johnson was about to experience the quintessential Scottish
experience
of being buttonholed by a drunk. One of Coll’s new companions, a man called Nisbet, was determined to give the travellers the benefit of his wisdom and joined them. Boswell declared ‘He was much in liquor and spoke nonsense.’

‘Hey Big Man, a’ve some words that arenae in yer English dictionary …’

We cycled slowly down Tobermory main street feigning interest in the Hebridian Whale and Dolphin shop, a worthy, brown-rice sort of venture that targeted unscrupulous Japanese whalers covered in spermy gore.

The two main decorative features of the main street were a rusting mine with money slot for those with sufficient compassion to be mindful of Shipwrecked Fishermen Everywhere, and a curious fountain depicting a mermaid sitting astride of a pig’s snout which on closer examination revealed itself to be the neck of an ancient urn but with flared nostrils. The inscription had been partially eroded by the weather but was evidently a gift from Rasputin.

A SeaLife craft slowly crossed the bay. Its elderly passengers were all swaddled in beige anoraks and looked confused, as well they might, given they had been sucked out of the ocean in the 1940’s by a
B-movie
tornado and dropped decades later into Tobermory harbour.

The aisles in the Co-operative stores were blocked by a landing party from a yacht, the cost of whose papal red nautical clothing would easily have bought every item on sale in the shop with the possible exception of the drink display which was undeniably
impressive
in both its range and scale. Our co-op rolls would not have been a match for the meal of tongue, fowls, greens and a little brandy punch with which Boswell and Johnson stuffed themselves.

They spent the night at Hector Maclean’s house a mile away in the hamlet of Erray. The name still features on the road sign but there is no trace of any 18
^th
century building, only a golf course and the High School. We thought better of inquiring in the police station. ‘A stout gentleman you say, with a faint whiff of mutton, with a younger gentleman, fawning.’

On arrival ‘Mr Johnson took sowans and cream heartily. We had a bowl of rum punch.’ They had after all travelled at least a mile without eating.

Boswell describes how ‘We arrived at a strange confused house … ornamented with some bad portraits, ‘and a piece of shell-work’ made by Miss Maclean, the doctor’s daughter. We were received by Mrs Maclean, a little brisk old woman in a bedgown with a brown wig, and Miss Maclean, a little plump elderly young lady in some dress which I do not recollect farther than she had a smart beaver hat with a white feather … There was a parrot in it (the house not the wig) which Mrs. Maclean had had for sixteen years. She said it could speak very well in Glasgow, but it had rusted in Mull.’ There you have it, the quintessential Bed and Breakfast complete with bad décor, beavers and a rusted parrot.

‘We set out, mounted on little Mull horses. Mull corresponded exactly with the idea which I had always had of it: a hilly country, diversified with heath and grass, and many rivulets. Dr Johnson was not in very good humour. He said it was a dreary country, much worse than Skye. I differed from him. “Oh, sir, said he, ‘a most dolorous country!’’’

Johnson had reason to be grumpy. Not only could his horse barely support his weight, it didn’t have a saddle. How many broken nags 
did Johnson leave in his wake? He also had to endure a Dr Foster moment when he plunged though deep water where Loch na Cuilce had overflowed. To make matters worse he lost his staff. First his spurs and now his stick, what was going on? He had intended to donate his trusty pole to a museum and for a while convinced himself that it had been stolen by their baggage man.

Our journey was undeniably easier. Cycling through the forest we were accompanied by an escort of azure dragon flies which hovered as delicately as Conan Doyle’s fairies. Endless butterflies performed outrider duties.

After leaving the tarmac we meandered over a lochside track. We held the farm gate to let through a frail elderly man who had slipped from the frame of an Edwardian family portrait. He was being guided in slow motion by his daughter who explained that he always inspected the blackberries at this time of year. He shook his head saying something was wrong, they should be further on. The daughter must have known this would be the last year they would enact this important ritual. Their outing was endowed with the poignancy of anticipated loss; the walk was already happening in retrospect. For our part we had encountered our own leech-gather like one ‘met with in a dream’.

The forest was again impersonating ocean depths. Looking up we caught sight of the dark swimmers pulling their way through the water while angel fish darted suspiciously through the waving fronds.

In clearings we skirted past the monochrome dereliction of
deforestation
. This time the battlefield was medieval. Massive dead trees with black earth roots barred the way like toppled siege engines. Gray weary knights rested their gray shields and built random ricks from their lances among their fallen comrades whose knees were oddly angled in death.

As we peched up the straggly endless hills we were overtaken by a brace of super fit, young cyclists. They seemed quite deferential as they steamed past, at least not sneering obviously, and were soon over the horizon and out of sight. By some warp in the time space continuum we had been overtaken by our younger selves. Had they not disappeared so quickly we would have sat with them, introduced ourselves to ourselves and given reassurance that life was going to be all right with only a few pitfalls which in retrospect could have been avoided; the odd haunting sense of the road not taken, but all things
considered, not bad lives ahead. They would have listened politely, not fully understanding, all the while distracted by the bald heads and slightly shocked by the old bodies.

The sight of a squashed hedgehog nudged the time space thing even further back. The hedgehog had been neatly bisected by the thin tyres of a Ford Popular or Standard 8. We stepped aside as a happy family drove proudly past in the new motor car, dad with neat moustache and greased-back hair, mum nursing the
Daily Express
on her lap.

Enthusiastic as ever Johnson records, ‘We travelled many hours through a tract, black and barren, in which, however, there were the reliques of humanity; for we found a ruined chapel in our way.’ Most of the gravestones in Kilmore churchyard have been sandblasted into hobbled shapes by the wind and made even more illegible by the moss. The only readable stone belonged to an unknown merchant seaman washed ashore in 1940. A tiny wooden cross was propped up against his grave.

The abandoned grocery shed at the start of Dervaig was still proudly advertising Wills’ Woodbines but had probably not sold much of anything for a few years. If there was any justice the same would apply to the coffee/ bookshop into which we foolishly strayed. Having been totally ignored by the owner who was regaling captured tourists with tedious tales of his former life as a journalist, he suddenly turned his attention to us, ‘Why did you come in?’ He asked belligerently. ‘We’re shoplifters,’ Roy explained.

If Boswell and Johnson’s landlady had specialised in beavers and parrots ours revealed a more catholic taste. Her specialist areas were horses, seventeen of them on the pelmet, cows, slightly fewer but placed in descending order of size on a purpose built shelf, a
nightmare
rag gollywog, snuff boxes, unidentifiable objects on the wall, possibly antique silver kebab sticks, a grandfather clock so large it would not fit in the room, its face disappearing into a purpose built hole in the ceiling, but above all else, colossal rudeness.

Our hostess resented our presence from the moment we disturbed her obsessively manicuring some midget plants in her garden. She barked prohibitions, restrictions and caveats in a strange clipped
tongue from which all vowels had been stripped on account of their lowly origins. I cowered in the bedroom while Roy was disciplined for leaving a door open which could have seen the house overrun with animals and other wild things, which presumably encompassed both parrots and beavers. Instead of meekly accepting his verbal lashing I heard Roy questioning the likelihood of this phantom menagerie traipsing though the house with muddy hoof and claw. He later explained that ‘a line had to be drawn’.

The landlady’s long-haired, long-suffering dog understood the situation in the house. It sighed knowingly and shook its head at every barbed observation forced out of its mistress’s permanently curled lips.