Boswell's Bus Pass (22 page)

Boswell and Johnson found a proliferation of No Vacancies signs in Oban before settling for an inn, a slated house of two storeys where they were well enough entertained, ‘at least we were satisfied, though we had nothing like what is to be found in good inns upon a frequented road.’

On account of its superior view overlooking the harbour the owner of our B & B charged an exorbitant price and implied by his supercilious manner that he was only dabbling in the trade to placate his wife. He was equally scathing of the restaurant where earlier we had dined like lords happily bathing in the red light of a ferocious sunset.

Up almost before the dawn had found its crack we waited for the CalMac ferry to Coll. In the terminus lounge every available seat had been commandeered by kilted warriors abandoned by their piper who was still lamenting away in a hotel toilet somewhere. In their grunting self hugging dreams earlier encounters with bar maids and female guests at the Oban Ball were ending quite differently.

CalMac ferries exude the comfortably familiarity of motorway service stations during the off peak. The noise of the ship’s engines approximates quite convincingly to the ceaseless rumble of HGVs under the bridge. While the views are better the menus are identical. We eat bacon rolls. Boswell tells us, ‘I eat bread and cheese, and drank whisky and rum and brandy.’ This merely whetted his appetite; ‘Dinner was dressed … I eat boiled mutton and boiled salt herring,
and drank beer and punch.’ Moments after exulting ‘in being a stout seaman’ he turned ‘woefully sick, and was obliged to get above board, though it rained hard’. He was a one-man booze cruise who spent much of the journey vomiting over the side.

Between vomits he caught sight of Eigg and ghoulishly wished he could visit the cave where ‘every man, woman and child had been smoked to death during the reign of James IV.’ His unsavory imagination had been titillated by Coll’s tales of ‘great quantities of big bones … big and small, those of a man and wife and children, are found lying together’.

The dead children of Eigg rallied and punished Boswell for his lugubrious and drunken speculation by conjuring a spectacular storm. He was petrified and now had at least three reasons for continuing with his boke-fest; drink, fear and a wild sea.

One of the sailors waved a glowing peat to alert the shore of their danger. Even in his fuddled state Boswell understood that waving flames about in close proximity to gunpowder is not the wisest course of action. Their sails ‘were in danger of being torn to pieces’. The vessel, under the dubious command of Old Macdonald and a one eyed sailor lay on its side before ‘a prodigious sea with immense billows’. Boswell was given a rope to hold to keep him out of harm’s way while Dr Johnson slept serenely below decks ‘quiet and
unconcerned
’.

By comparison our voyage was easier as we poked our way through the mist punctured at intervals by the fog horn.

We retrieved the bikes from the car deck and cycled from Arinagour to Arnabost where Boswell and Johnson stayed with Captain Lauchlan Maclean, a relative of Coll and the first man from the island to serve in the Indian army.

The ruins of the house are still there close to the farmhouse of Achamore. Egged on by Roy I climbed the barbed fence and waded through the waist deep thistles and reeds to stand in what would have been the main room of the house where the early travellers would have first entered. Boswell says they were ‘wet to the skin, both at the neck and legs. Captain Maclean had but a poor temporary house, or rather hut, just a little larger than the common country house. However, it was a very good haven to us. He gave me a dry shirt and dry stockings directly. There was a blazing peat-fire, and Mrs Maclean, daughter of the minister of the parish, got us tea. I felt still
the motion of the sea. Mr Johnson said it was not imagination, but a continuation of motion in the fluids, like that of the sea after the storm is over.’

The only part of the building half intact was the chimney piece which was originally bisected by a board serving as a book shelf. I reached out and took down Burnet’s
History of His Own Times
. Dr Johnson said the first part of it was quite dramatic …

Boswell confesses that ‘At night I was a little disconcerted’ as the sleeping arrangements dictated that he would have to share a bed with Coll, ‘I have a mortal aversion at sleeping in the same bed with a man; and a young Highlander was always somewhat suspicious as to scorbutic symptoms … Upon inspection, as much as could be without his observing it, he seemed to be quite clean, and the bed was very broad. So I lay down peaceably, kept myself separated from him, and reposed tolerably.’

Presumably Coll was asleep when Boswell carried out his
inspection
. Had he woken things might have gone horribly wrong. ‘What are you staring at, weirdo?’ ‘I’m sure I saw a louse leaping from your armpit.’ ‘There’s only one leaping louse in this room …’

Boswell and Johnson mounted horses and visited Hector Maclean, the minister. We cycled the same route which gave Roy ample opportunity to gently cajole the errant sheep that wandered into our path, ‘Don’t be silly now, that’s not very clever.’ Once a teacher, always a teacher. He called out the names on the register and gave detention to the fat one that wasn’t paying any attention. Another sheep stared ruefully at us from the middle of a small island in a lochean. Was its exile self imposed? Was it attention seeking? Was it being punished? Did it have a lairdlike sense of its own superiority? Should we rescue it?

We knocked on the door of the only large building still standing in Cliad. We were greeted by a mother earth figure surrounded by an aura of flour. She happily abandoned domestic chores to show us the walls of the original building and the likely room where Johnson got exceedingly grumpy with the seventy seven year old minister as they argued about Newton and Leibnitz. Boswell was embarrassed and subsequently tried to excuse his mentor’s rudeness. For his part the minister was reduced to ‘pulling down the front of his periwig’.

They rode to the north of the island to inspect an ancient graveyard and chapel at Cill Fhionnaigh. We cycled past a farmhouse dominated
by an Irish Tricolour signalling instant collaboration with any invaders from the over the sea. Another property was protected by the totemic powers of a large wooden otter.

The bright light picked out the dew on delicate beards of discarded wool on the verges, and through sun-clenched eyes the splatter of yellow dandelions brought
Lucy in the Sky
to mind. We ran the gauntlet with several farm collies intent on lacerating their muzzles in our wheels before we found the churchyard.

The sea blast had reduced some of the stones to mere pock marked stumps in a stern warning from posterity that nothing will remain of the lives they commemorate, nay not a jot or iota. Other stones which had had the foresight to lie on the ground were just legible. This time there were at least four graves marking the last resting place of anonymous merchant sailors. They had been buried on the 12
^th
and 18
^th
October and the 3rd and 6th of November 1940. A cruel harvest of bodies washed ashore days apart. Who found them
foetal-curled
on the tide line, face down in pools, or spread-eagled against the rocks?

The two boys in long shorts with identical wire rimmed spectacles had shared hopes of finding a Spitfire on the beach with live ammunition and perhaps a parachute strip to show off at school. The smaller of the two screamed when he stepped on the body. His pal had an asthma attack. After that day he was regularly beaten by his father for bed wetting and was eventually expelled from school for violent behavior. The taller lad suffered nightmares.

We couldn’t find the remains of the chapel and deciding that it must have been set back from the churchyard, quietly trespassed into the grounds of a newly built house that seemed unoccupied. We climbed a small hill and startled the woman sun bathing in the back yard. She shouted out a guilty explanation of how her partner had installed the central heating and said it would be all right for her to stay in the property for a few days. I knew that Roy was sorely tempted to elicit from her a spontaneous confession of imagined transgressions. She was spared as her dog seemed to be choking as it shuttled manically between its owner and Roy. ‘I think it’s got something in its mouth,’ said the woman hoping to establish a relationship with her potential bailiff. ‘It’s a sheep’s turd,’ said Roy, ‘I believe they are especially tasty with a hint of garlic.’ For the first time I regretted my choice of travelling companion. The woman retired in a state of
mental distress and we looked around for any stones that might hint at ecclesiastical ruins.

Now on a mission, Roy suggested we invade the adjacent property which was still covered in scaffolding. The descent was difficult and Roy was rightly punished for his earlier oddness when he sank up to his thigh in bog. Our approach had been witnessed by two builders who stared out of the open eaves suspiciously. By the time Roy had explained our quest the men were convinced that we were jointly sponsored by Historic Scotland, the Church Commission and the police with powers to confiscate the goods and chattels of anyone suspected of building on sanctified ground.

We had, in fact, been wrong; the chapel remains were clearly visible within the churchyard.

A short ride brought us to the White House of Grishipol. Our hostess at Cliad had said the present residents were friendly folk so we walked confidently down their drive. A completely new architect designed building had been dropped into the shell of the original house which was cracked from top to tail, a passing god having lobbed a thunder bolt in its general direction thinking it was a chicken leg. As the doors were open but no one was home we walked across the rocks towards the sea.

A motor launch hove into view and a woman and two small children climbed ashore while the man went off to park his boat. We declined her kind invitation to come inside for tea as she wrestled with the younger howling child who, rigid as a board, refused to be carried. She seemed unclear which was the best way to cross, yet she must have completed this short journey many times. In that moment she was lost in a very strange country miles and light years from her true home. The other child carried a dead emerald mackerel with a degree of ceremony normally reserved for crown jewels; an honorary brother to every raggedy urchin by every urban canal where fish can be caught.

The father prowled in the background on his quad bike as we cycled back down the driveway. The family dog having packed its bags and favourite bone happily followed us. ‘All my dog days I have waited for two bald strangers on metal horses who are my destiny’ intoned Roy in the sort of voice he thought the dog would use if it could express its innermost thoughts. Two miles into its new life the quad bike caught up with the dog who meekly abandoned all hopes of freedom and clambered aboard.

On the road to Breacachadh we passed Ben Hogh with the balancing stones that so engaged Boswell and Johnson who touched them, tilted them, measured them, speculated over their origins, and became generally excited. We felt we could take them or leave them so left them but did stop briefly by the triangular stones planted in an adjacent field. Boswell actually included two small triangles in his text for the benefit of readers not familiar with the concept of triangles. ‘They have probably been a Druidical temple’ he speculated.

He soon became bored and galloped with Coll across ‘a large extent of plain ground’. This may have been the site of the New Year Shinty match which interested Boswell. ‘There is a ball thrown down in the middle of a space above the house, or on the strand near it; and each party strives to beat it first to one end of the ground with clubs or crooked sticks. The club is called the
shinny
. It is used in the
low-country
of Scotland. The name is from the danger the shins run. We corrupt it to
shinty
.’

Soon the road stopped being a road in any true sense of the word and became a track across sand dunes. Cycling in sand is hard. It is even harder when you have to slow down to let a taxi pass. ‘Taxi for Johnson!’ They crossed the dunes to look at a lead mine, the precise location of which has long been swept under cubic tons of sand, sea and time.

Breacachadh Castle, where they stayed storm-locked for ten days, has fallen on hard times. It is surrounded by decaying vans and a clothes line of Saltires. The notice on the gate, ‘THIS IS OUR HOME RESPECT OUR PRIVACY was at odds with the spontaneous hospitality we had met elsewhere on the island. Speculating that it had been conquered by an army of old hippies too doped to care, we chose paradoxically not to trespass where we weren’t welcome.

Instead we made our way to the dunes beneath the Old Castle and looked out to the horizon where the faintest of black smudges hinted at tiny remote islands extending as far as St Kilda where the morose women were still tramping wearily in their tubs, desperate to be relieved, and the boys were sulking at not having sold a single fulmar.

The tide was far out and there was little to interest the most desperate of beach combers, certainly no repeat delivery of the mahogany and casks of Malaga which ‘the country people, finding it sweet and mild, drank of it without fear of intoxication, till they were mortally drunk.’

Boswell and Johnson were ground down by the weather on Coll and felt trapped. Boswell’s spirits plummeted and his imagination ‘suggested a variety of gloomy ideas … I found the enamel of philosophy which I had upon my mind, broke, or worn very thin, and fretfulness corroding it.’ In this mood he describes MacSweyn’s young wife as ‘one of the hardest-favoured women that I ever saw, swarthy and marked with the smallpox, and of very ungainly manners’. He must have been depressed as there were very few women, young or old, who could not be accommodated somewhere in his private world. When he ventured out he fell into a river.

We watched a large sea bird slapping the wet ribbed sand as it attempted an emergency landing, and then we fell asleep in the sun.