Stone of Destiny (26 page)

We drove on. We could do nothing else. And all the time we were thinking of the bloody mush the Stone would make if we overturned and it thumped on top of us. But gradually we forgot our fears, and remembered only our successes. Each mile that came up on the clock was yet another mile nearer home. Even if we were finished now, every mile was a victory. And when occasionally, in our tiredness, we wondered if we were not straining ourselves in vain, we would pull the coat back from the Stone and rub our hands against its dear roughness.

And straining we were. We found an all-night garage in the centre of Leicester. As we approached it Bill said to me, ‘Give the wheel to Alan. You’ve been talking so slowly this while back that I can hardly make you out.’

I did not argue. When we had filled up, I tumbled into the back seat and went contentedly to sleep. I felt I had earned it. When I awakened, it was almost dawn. I asked where we were, and to my delight was told that we were only 20 miles from York. We had come an amazing distance. The snow had now stopped and when dawn had bleached the shadows we stepped out into a morning, fresh and clear and brilliant. The country undulated into the distance, virgin white and clean. The air smelt new. The sky was
blue, the trees glittered with a rind of snow on all the branches. From further down the road came the roar of a tractor. It was the country, the beautiful country. When we had washed in the snow, we pushed on, furrowing the smooth road with our wheels. Soon we were in York, quiet and deserted in the Sabbath calm.

York was the place to say goodbye to Johnny and the car seat. We could bear the risk of it no longer. He was reluctant to go, but saw the necessity. We pulled up to let him off at a fork in the road in the northern outskirts of York. He wished us luck and climbed out, taking the seat with him. His trip north was not free from events. He stood watching the wisp of steam from our exhaust as we vanished up the sunlit snowy road, and then turned away to find himself face to face with a policeman. We had let him off at the door of a brick-built building which turned out to be a police box, and hearing the car a constable had come out.

‘Good morning,’ said Johnny politely.

The constable eyed him suspiciously. He was not used to seeing young men carrying car seats through York on Sunday mornings.

‘Where are
you
going?’ he asked; the sort of bloody stupid question to which there should be only two words in reply, although it is not wise to use them.

‘Mull,’ replied Johnny, shifting the seat from one hand to the other. The policeman did not seem to have heard of Mull. It was not on his beat. He scratched his head.

‘And what are you doing with that car seat?’ he asked. It was all very suspicious. It might be a stolen car seat.

‘I’m taking it to Mull to people who need a new seat for their car,’ Johnny explained patiently. ‘A pig crapped on the other one.’

The policeman thought that one over. Well! Perhaps it was all in order. Johnny’s accent was not that of a criminal. There was no law yet which forbade people to carry car seats through the streets. What could a poor constable do if Parliament refused to
forbid the things that people did? So again one of us had to bluff it out. Now it was Johnny’s turn.

I wish Johnny had stayed with us. It was miserable to send him off alone. I knew what the others did not know, that he suffered from a severe form of diabetes, which from time to time became uncontrollable, and which, one day soon, would kill him. It had kept him from following the family career into the Royal Navy, although it was the Royal Marines he had wished to join. It never affected his love of life, which he lived to an overbrimming fullness. John’s cup ever overflowed. He was a strange, wild, brilliant character. Like all my university friends I saw little of him after that Christmas. He had already graduated and gone. To this day I miss everything about him, especially his extremely phoney Scottish accent.

Johnny caught a train to Newcastle on the first leg of his journey to Mull. At Newcastle, he found he had all afternoon to wait for a connection, so he passed the time by calling on a mutual friend of his and mine who lived in Sunderland. She had known nothing of our plot, although she had immediately thought of me when she heard that the Stone had vanished. When she saw Johnny nonchalantly swinging the car seat everything became abundantly clear to her. She was not impressed. A great verbal storm broke over him. He was a fool. He would lose his job. He would go to prison. Ian Hamilton was a worthless lout who got everyone he met into trouble. Three years later I married that young woman. She is the mother of three of my four children.

While Johnny was getting my character reference in Sunderland, we three were driving steadily onwards. Here and there we picked up a hitchhiker, because the buses did not seem to be running. The hitchhiker sat in the back seat, while Bill sat in the front on the Stone. With them we talked gravely about current events, particularly the one that was in the headlines. Acting irony is better even than speaking it. With such incidents we enlivened the drive north.

We were again in need of petrol and we stopped at the Croft Hotel, only to be told that the pumps were closed. However, we were able to purchase some Sunday papers, so forgetting the worry about getting fuel in the joys of the newspapers we continued on our way. As we crossed the Tees, Bill sat in the front seat and read out titbits. The front pages were full of us, and there were very learned and heavy articles inside. The heavier the newspaper, the heavier were the frowns and thunderings against us. Yet it was official England that was outraged, and I sensed among the ordinary people a huge delight at deflated pomposity. Bill read on.

‘Look at this,’ he suddenly cried in delight.

I took my eye for an instant from the road and glanced at the banner headline he was holding up. It read ‘
STONE: »1,000 REWARD
’. I had never had as much money as that in my life. I wondered if I could surrender myself and claim it. That amount of money could buy a house. Yet a funny thing happened to that reward. Next week the offer was withdrawn. Not only was the paper boycotted in Scotland, but there was such strong protest in England at the idea of a newspaper offering blood money that the circulation managers insisted the editorial policy of the paper be changed. The people of England (who, according to Chesterton, have not spoken yet) were speaking out. In our favour.

We filled up at a garage at Salutation Corner on the south-west outskirts of Darlington, and as the garage attendant came to serve us I thought of that £1,000. Perhaps it was in his mind also. When he heard my accent he said, ‘Scots? You haven’t got the Stone of Destiny with you?’

‘It’s in the boot,’ I quipped back and we both laughed.

‘The police have been round asking what Scotsmen I’ve given petrol to,’ he added. ‘When they come back I’ll tell them it went through this morning.’

We exchanged chuckles and I drove off. None of us spoke for about five miles. Then Bill said, ‘Some people go looking for adventure.’

‘Aye,’ said Alan and I together. ‘Some do.’

Our route took us away from the populous coastal plain of Northumberland and Durham. We turned inland towards the high hills of the Pennines, which we could now occasionally see rising clear and stately and unbelievably white before us. This was the backbone of England, and we would have to cross it. There was a chance that the roads would be impassable with snow, but there was an even greater chance that the main roads would be blocked by police. A quick telephone call to Bill’s friend confirmed that the aunt was in rude health, so we took the high road home.

As we climbed, the scenery changed from pits and plains to rolling fells and wide fertile dales. The world was pure with snow; all the man-made sores were covered up, and the country shone in the pink whiteness of sun and snow. The roads were easily passable, and although driving was always a strain we had no worry that we would not get through.

We passed through West Auckland and Corbridge, both asleep in the Sabbath calm, then on to Hexham. Hexham, Haydon Bridge, Haltwhistle, we passed through them all, and at Green-head began to descend the west slopes of the hills. We were now only 30 miles from Scotland, and I insisted on taking the wheel, as I was selfish enough to claim the honour of driving the Stone over the Border.

We came to Brampton. Still no sign of the police. We had not seen a police car for the last 100 miles. The next town was the border town of Longtown. At Longtown the road crosses the River Esk. Here, on the bridge, was the ideal place for a roadblock.

We grew tense and tenser. Bill rebuked me for speeding. I had unconsciously edged my foot down to shorten the suspense. My mouth was dry, and my stomach fluttered like a white flag in a storm.

‘What do we do if there’s a roadblock?’ asked Alan.

‘What can we do?’ asked Bill.

‘Toe down,’ I said. It was only two miles from the bridge to Scotland. Roadblock or no roadblock, we would reach Scotland. Of that I was sure.

We came down the hill into Longtown. As we reached the bottom and turned the corner, a policeman disappeared into the door of the police station, leaving the street deserted.

‘I hope that’s symbolic,’ whispered Bill. We turned another corner, and the long deserted length of the bridge was before us. I sighed.

‘That’s that,’ said Bill.

Two miles further on at half past two in the afternoon we came to a sign that said ‘
SCOTLAND
’. We passed the sign and gave a little ragged cheer, and shook hands. We were most moved. Success is a strange thing, much nearer to tears than to laughter.

A handful of miles inside Scotland we stopped. The symbol of her liberty had come back to Scotland, and we felt that some sort of rude ceremony was needed to mark the return of the Lia Fail to the custody of its own people.

We stopped and drew the coat back and exposed the Stone to the air of Scotland for the first time in 600 years. From the provision basket we produced the gill of whisky, and poured a libation over the Stone’s roughness.

Thus, quietly, with little fuss, with no army, with no burning of houses or killing of people, and for the expenditure of less than £100, we brought Scotland back the Stone of Destiny.

Before we started off again, we spring-cleaned the car, and satisfied ourselves that we had removed all evidence of our English trip. Our period of greatest danger had now passed, but there were still policemen in Scotland. They would be searching for the Stone, but they would not be searching so diligently. Indeed one nameless policeman had gone on record in one of the newspapers as saying, ‘Aye! Sure we’re looking for them, but no’ so damned hard that we’ll find them.’ In England we were foreigners, and as Scots natural suspects. In Scotland we were at home, and any check on our identity and destination must only be a routine one.

We now determined that we were three members of the Students’ Fifth Centenary Committee on our way back from a visit to Colonel Elliot, our newly retired Lord Rector. I had read that he was in London so it was unlikely that the police would check out our story. Bill and I were, in fact, members of that committee, and it was exactly the sort of story that might be true. We drove on in a daze through Dumfriesshire and Lanarkshire, our excitement over, our worry forgotten. We might indeed have been driving from a committee meeting, so simple our task seemed.

But another problem was looming up on the horizon and growing blacker like a fog cloud as we neared the city. When we
had left Glasgow 48 hours before, we had left with no definite plan in our minds. It had been an emergency action. We had been determined to get the Stone into safety before the frost did it any damage. We had succeeded in doing that, but now that we were approaching Glasgow we had no further idea of what to do, or where to go.

People who stand at the North Pole can go in only one direction. This is a very frustrating fact of life if you are of an independent cast of mind, and wish to exercise a personal choice. Sooner or later you realise that at the North Pole there is no personal choice. You must move south, or be frozen. We found ourselves in that position. More correctly, I found myself in that position. This had all started as a child’s dream of doing something for his country. The block of stone upon which I was now sitting was only incidental to that dream; it was not an end in itself. Had it been an end in itself, I could have persuaded the other two to get out the car, then driven off and dumped the Stone somewhere it could never be found, and that would have been the end of it, Stone, problem and all. It would have stayed in Scotland for ever, as part of the subsoil. That would have been no solution at all. The dream had been to wake Scotland up, and in that we had succeeded. It was the idea that mattered, not the corporeal thing. And the Stone was now very much a thing.

People who lack imagination see things only in physical terms. They do not speculate. They make statements. From that hour on we were showered with statements as to what we should do. Let anyone who cannot understand our problem read Mallory’s stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, or any other author’s rehash of these old tales. Then let him ask the question, ‘What do you do with the Holy Grail once you have found it?’ If he can answer that question he has found the secret of the universe. Meanwhile I was sitting on the Holy Grail; Alan was driving, and Bill Craig was in the back seat fast asleep. Ahead of
us were not the dreaming towers of Camelot, only a big city. I woke Bill up.