The Physic Garden (3 page)

A few years ago, I found myself looking among old records in the college library. They would not have known who I was. I am a
different
man now, in all but name, and they would never have made any connection between the raw under-gardener I once was and the crabbit old bookman with the cautiously radical reputation, whom they had asked to catalogue some of their manuscripts. But there I was, ensconced in my favourite position among books and papers, and I found myself comparing the written hands of the various gardeners who had been employed to oversee the
college
gardens over the years. It was an interesting exercise and not only because one could easily track the sad decline of the physic garden through its pages. My father had been appointed as college gardener in the year 1784, two years after I was born, and there was his signature on various agreements and bills of sale. It was strange to me to see his hand. It brought him so vividly before my eyes. He was not at all confident with a pen, though better than his wavering predecessors. And better still with a spade, as he used to say.

He wrote his name laboriously, as though the letters were somewhat unfamiliar to him, or as though his fingers were stiff, which I’m sure they were. Most gardeners succumb to
rheumatism
in the end. His salary was ten pounds a year, so the records
told me, and he had a house for which he paid no rent. It was not, I remember, a good house, neither wind nor watertight, but it was a roof over our heads and we made the best of it. He was to look after both college and physic gardens with all that that entailed. He could harvest and sell the grass from the college garden but in return for that privilege, he must pay back his ten pounds as rent for the land. But when he undertook other work, such as taking down a bridge over the Molendinar Burn, or laying new
pathways
, he would be paid extra accordingly. Which meant, I suspect, that he was always over-extending himself, promising more than he could deliver.

He had married my mother, Margaret Tarrant, a quiet girl from Helensburgh, sent into service in Glasgow, which was where they met. He was an under-gardener by that time and she was a parlour maid. Attachments between servants were frowned upon but that didn’t prevent them from happening. Still, respectable society, in the shape of masters and mistresses as well as mothers and fathers, continues to try to control the desires of the young. The urge to control nature is almost as strong as the urge to
procreate
. Almost but not quite.

They were wed a short while before he was made college
gardener
, perhaps on the expectation of his acquiring the position, and I was born a year later. My mother, Maggie, as she was always called, was a good-natured woman who quickly ran to stoutness and was perennially short of breath. She was prone to anxieties, easily beset by nerves and yet she smiled a great deal in an effort to please. Perhaps her experiences in service had affected her but she never spoke about them. I remember when my sister Bessie went into service, our mother was very keen that the place should be ‘decent’ as she put it. Whatever those tribulations were, she survived them, and I think she was very fond of my father.

There was a story always told in the family about me, her
firstborn
. Although my mother was far gone in pregnancy, my father had, perhaps unwisely, coaxed her out of the house to watch the Italian balloonist, Lunardi, the Daredevil Aeronaut as he was
known, ascending into the grey Glasgow skies over St Andrew’s Square. My father (and I find this incredible but he must have been very much in love – it is the only explanation) had already paid the extortionate sum of two shillings, one apiece, to take her to see the balloon, where it was being exhibited in the choir of St Mungo’s Cathedral, the only public building in Glasgow big enough to contain it. It was suspended there, floating above the choir, magnificent in pink, green and yellow silk.

‘Enough,’ said my mother when she told the tale afterwards, ‘to make quite a hundred fine spring gowns. And such beautiful stuff!’

Having seen the balloon, my father was anxious for a glimpse of the flight, and he persuaded my mother to come too. But Lunardi was a great dandy. ‘I thought his balloon very marvellous but I did not take to
him
,’ observed my father, dourly.

All did not go smoothly. A local worthy known as Lothian Tam managed to get entangled with the ropes and was lifted some twenty feet into the air, yelping like a dog, before Lunardi cut through the rigging and the unanticipated passenger fell to earth, to the mingled horror and entertainment of the crowd. He
tumbled
onto soft ground, luckily enough for him, and lived to relate the story and cadge a free drink or two on the strength of it in many a Glasgow ale house. My mother was among the
spectators
and she always swore that it was the shock of the sight that sent her into labour. She was confined immediately afterwards and I was born a few hours later. She had, I believe, some idea of naming me Vincenzo in the balloonist’s honour, but my father would have none of it, although he did buy her a Lunardi bonnet with a straw brim and a fantastic balloon-shaped crown, which I’m told she wore to my christening. She kept it in a box for many years afterwards, as a memento of the occasion, until one day she found that mice had nested in it, whereupon it was consigned to the midden. I have sometimes wondered if the circumstances of my birth did not lend a certain sense of adventure to my nature, much as children with strawberry marks on their faces are said to
be born to women who have consumed too many fruits, late in pregnancy. All nonsense of course and besides, my father’s
influence
would bring me back to solid ground as surely as our very own Icarus, poor Lothian Tam, came tumbling down.

Over the course of some years, Robert and Maggie had seven more children. I had a comfortable enough childhood, for we were generally well fed and well clothed. My father was a man of great energy and enterprise and always seemed to make the very best of what he had, even if it meant that he was constantly overworked. There was hardly ever an evening when he was not exhausted, sinking into his chair beside the fire, the chair that nobody else was allowed to use, with my mother pulling off his boots and rushing around with warm water for his calloused hands and ale in a pewter pot to slake his thirst, until the meal should be on the table.

‘Ah Maggie! Maggie!’ he would say, stretching out his legs, ‘That was a hard day!’ and she would look up at him and,
setting
the boots to one side, she would run her hands tenderly over his poor feet. I mind those naked white feet yet. They made me uncomfortable, although I couldn’t have explained why. Perhaps it was that he was such a force in our lives, and yet his feet seemed so vulnerable, so defenceless.

‘There now,’ she always said. ‘Drink your ale and take your rest.’ This exchange between them was the same, every working night, for all the years of their marriage. Such familiarity is, I
suppose
, one of the chief comforts of the married state.

I find, somewhat to my surprise, that my own signature has changed greatly over the years. Back then I can see that it was fine and firm and stylish, with those confident high-flying loops on the W of William, on the capital L of Lang and a big flourish on the final ‘g’. Now, time and experience have transformed it into a spidery scrawl.

While I was working alongside my father and even before I began to gather specimens for him, I spoke to Thomas Brown quite frequently. He must have been in his mid-twenties then, which seems a mere lad to me now, although I thought him a good deal older than me at the time. I remember his thin face, his high
forehead
, the curly hair just a wee thing too long, his pale grey eyes that missed nothing. He had a reputation in the college as a clever man with an excess of high spirits when he had taken a drink. But mostly, he seemed wiser than I was, and made me feel raw and untried. Yet all that was down to me and not him, because I
cannot
remember that he ever patronised me or indeed did anything to make me feel uncomfortable in his presence. The fault, if fault there was, lay with me. I was in awe of him and somewhat afraid of him, his learning, his self-possession, his wit and what seemed to me very like wisdom.

He had studied medicine at Edinburgh and was working as a doctor in Glasgow because – so he told me during our increasingly friendly conversations – the growing population and prosperity of the inhabitants of that city would provide excellent
opportunities
for him. His father was a banker with an interest in surgery. Even then it seemed an odd combination to me, but I was to learn that all kinds of professional men were fascinated by the novelty of surgery, the prospect of cutting open the human body to ascertain what went on inside and what could be done to alter it. When Thomas was just a lad of six, his prosperous father had built
himself
a new house at Langside, near Glasgow, and that was where he had grown up, but upon his marriage to Marion, he had rented a property not far from the college, which was where he lived and had his consulting rooms.

Thomas’s professor at the college, James Jeffray, was an
anatomist
first and foremost, and his mind was all fixed on the intricate workings of the human body. Plants held no fascination for him, as they did for Thomas and myself. He considered their medical
applications
to be little better than a string of old wives’ tales, so he was very ready to farm out his summer lectures in botany to Thomas.

‘And so I decided to make of it what I could!’ Thomas told me. He was very confident in those days. There was a spring in his step, a liveliness in everything he did, and people were attracted to him. Somewhat later, while our friendship still flourished, he told me that he had possessed a youthful self-love which was a good substitute for experience. He thought that he would do very well indeed at the work, better certainly than Jeffray, who was known to be but a tedious exponent of botany and given to
reading
aloud long lists of plants and their properties, very slowly and drearily, so that the young gentlemen might copy them down, practically breaking their jaws with yawning as they did so at the sheer mind-numbing weariness of the undertaking.

I had heard tales of those lectures of Jeffray’s – how the lads would take food and strong drink into classes and
commence
throwing bread pellets at each other and once, a young Highlander, the son of some minor laird, smuggled a tame rat in under his blue wool coat and let it loose in the room to the consternation of Jeffray who couldn’t abide vermin at any price. The professor leapt onto the desk calling for somebody, anybody, to fetch a dog to catch the rat. The scholars would do anything to relieve the monotony.

Perhaps because of the force of contrast, Thomas’s lectures were wildly successful, so successful in attracting students that, as the century turned, he was given a permanent appointment. There was still no payment from college funds of course. I doubt if he needed the money, or not in the way that we needed it for winter warmth and the avoidance of starvation, but his lectures were certainly attracting students and with them came fees.

His knowledge and enthusiasm drew them in, but his wife Marion used to say that his propensity for making dubious jokes helped. The students were young men of a robust nature, rustic for the most part, as unversed in the liberal arts as I myself, the only difference between us being the accident of birth. There was always an admixture of Highlanders, the sons of small landowners who scarcely understood English, never mind the Latin tongue
in which some (but not much) of their learning took place. And they were all raw, with not a thought in their heads, most of them, beyond ale, oysters and a pretty woman. Thomas would lecture to them in a mixture of English and Scots. They came to his classes with relief at understanding something, stayed because he
entertained
them and – in spite of themselves – became interested in what he had to tell them. His enthusiasm for his subject, coupled with his natural charm, lent him an irresistible eloquence.

I don’t know why it seems so important to me to lay all this out now, so late in the day, to clarify it in my mind. I suppose I’m looking for beginnings, for the start of those events that were to change my life. An outsider, seeing the course of my life in retrospect, would never see what I see, understand what I now understand. If I would describe my subsequent prosperity, my work, my marriage and my beloved family, I have been more blessed than might have been supposed, and there are many who would envy me. I have had my tragedies, it’s true, but a great deal of good fortune has also befallen me. There is nothing now about the public perception of my life which would give anyone to understand that things have been otherwise than smooth and rewarding. I have been, I would say, a very lucky man. I am lucky still in what has turned out to be a happy life.

But there cannot, surely, be a single person, man or woman, who, looking back on a long life, carefully lived, does not have secrets buried deep in heart and mind. Secrets, regrets, moments of joy so intense and so acute that to confess them seems at once a shame and an urgent necessity.

I wait until the house is very quiet before daring to look through Thomas’s commonplace book. I wait for an afternoon when the family are all away on business of their own, the children
imprisoned
with their dominie, all save my wee Jenny who is sleeping, having exhausted herself with running after her new spaniel puppy this morning. My daughters-in-law are paying afternoon calls, one of my sons is down in the shop and the other about the town on book business. When I have heard the last slam of the door, when I am reasonably sure that I will not be interrupted, when I can almost feel the house sighing and settling around me into its
afternoon
torpor, only then do I slide the commonplace book across the table and tease the pages gently apart.

As I thought, it spans a great many years, a large folio, bound in calf, a fat book with plenty of loose leaves, copies of letters, notes and cuttings tucked into it here and there. The first thing that falls into my hands is a detailed ‘receipt for the very Best Raisin Wine’, written in a faint scrawl which is certainly not Thomas’s own. His hand was small, almost cramped. It always surprised me to see such a crabbed hand emerge from such an expansive personality. The receipt covers several pages, recommending Smyrna raisins for Madeira wine, Malaga raisins for Spanish wine, and so on. There follow all kinds of specifics including the cost of
making sixteen gallons of good wine with one hundredweight of fruit, producing sixty-four bottles at less than sixpence per bottle. ‘There are many delicious wines to be made with gooseberrys and currents mixt with the raisins,’ the writer tells us. ‘But be sure to use none but good, sound fruit, for bad raisins will never make good wine.’ And it strikes me that this might be a maxim by which one might live one’s whole life. If only one could be sure of
getting
good, sound fruit. But there are some fruits that decay from the centre, while maintaining a glossy outward appearance. How can you ever know?

Right at the bottom of the last leaf of the receipt, Thomas
himself
has added a note. ‘My grandmother’s. Her blackcurrant wine was very good.’ It takes me by surprise, that little addendum in his preternaturally neat hand. I have a sudden vision of him,
sitting
beside his fire, in his library, opening a cobwebby bottle and pouring its contents carefully into two thin glasses, one for me and one for him, the glasses so fine, their intricately twisted stems so fragile, that I am almost afraid to handle them, never mind drink from them. The wine is very dark and has the scent of fresh blackcurrants. It is remarkably strong, and, when I drink it, I can feel it coursing through my blood and clouding my mind with a sudden intimation of pure happiness. Memory twists inside me like a knife. I set the book down and rest my head on my hands for a while. I cannot look at it.

I cannot let it alone.

I turn to the last few pages. I find myself at once curious and apprehensive. But Thomas seems to have conceived an interest in the mineral world in his later years, and I am disappointed to find that there are only inventories of various specimens along with their prices and very little else. I learn from these that he paid eighteen pounds for a seven-ounce specimen of gold and one pound twelve shillings and sixpence for a meteorite from Sowerby. Twenty-one specimens of red stilbite (‘a most
magnificent
collection,’ he adds, ‘perhaps unrivalled’) cost him all of thirty pounds. In 1851 he had his whole mineral collection
valued at one thousand seven hundred and fifty-one pounds. The precision of this – I must confess – astonishes me, but the lists of glistening chunks of rock, for which he had acquired such a passion, fall dry as dust upon my eyes and make my head ache. How did he come to this? How did my Thomas come to this? In much the same way as I came to books, perhaps? And were we both taking refuge in something safer and more predictable than the world of living trees and plants?

Hesitantly, I make my way back through the book, back through time, through those years of our estrangement. Many of the entries are concerned with life in the countryside. From some ten years ago, dated 1845, there is news of the death of the local minister’s wife. ‘Mrs Kennedy died at six o’clock on the morning of 27th March and was buried on the following Friday.’ There is a copy of a note to the ‘Directors of the Farmer’s Annual Ball’ from 1836, to the effect that Thomas is ‘exceedingly sorry that it is out of his power to do himself the honour of attending the ball this night’. There are requests for subscription funds. One for a ‘subscription for a monument to Robert Burns’ catches my eye as does another for ‘Alexander McKinnon, in Spring Row, who has suffered from having his machinery destroyed by accidental fire on the night of 29th June last and from a consideration of the
honest
and upright character he has uniformly maintained, and of his enterprise in establishing and carrying on the bleaching business to the satisfaction of the public, we deem it is our duty to assist him in the expense of repairing his machinery.’ Fire seems to be a regular hazard in the country, as it is here in the town, for only a few months later a lady has had her ‘two good cows consumed by fire’ and seeks his help, which seems to have been readily given. As why would it not? A kindly man still, you see.

There are lists, some of them land values, some of them to do with the finances of the school, which Thomas is obviously helping to support. There is a piece of correspondence concerning a poor woman who is ‘evidently in indigent circumstances and will in all probability soon become an object of charity’ and another seeking
written permission to travel unhindered about the parish so long as the bearer shall ‘keep the straight or postroad’. That one, in
particular
, gives me pause for thought, brings back unpleasant memories, but I pass over it, moving back through the pages.

There are many references to the weather. ‘This day snowed from the north and covered the earth four inches deep. More snow during last night. I rose about nine o’clock this morning. There is a strong wind from the north east with a very thick snow and drift, which continued until the evening incessantly. I never saw so deep a snow in general, although I have seen much greater weather.’ And earlier, much earlier than the lists of mineral
specimens
, but dating perhaps from his first years in the countryside, there are a few lists of plants and trees acquired for the gardens of his uncle’s house. But they seem half-hearted at best, or am I imagining things? Well, perhaps not, for I turn over a leaf and see another list, which includes various interesting specimen trees. Beneath it, he has drawn two broad, dark lines, the pen digging into the paper, and there I see the words, ‘Such as William might have appreciated.’

My own name, boldly written down there, comes as a great shock to me, even more perhaps than I would have anticipated. I have to pour myself a small glass of whisky. I sip it slowly and when my heart has stopped racing I go back to the book with shameful eagerness, but there are few other references to me. I find copies of such letters as he wrote on my behalf with his own neat
corrections
. I find the letter that I wrote at his behest, with similar, more extensive corrections overlying my own scrawl, tethering my flights of fancy to the page like Lunardi’s balloon in the
cathedral
, but I find nothing else either to excite or sadden me. There is, incautiously I’m sure, a quotation from a document which appeared all over Glasgow in 1820, a call for men to ‘rouse from that state in which we have sunk for so many years, we are at length compelled from the extremity of our sufferings and the contempt heaped upon our petitions for redress to exert our rights at the hazard of our lives’, but it is copied without comment of any sort,
as a historical curiosity merely, although it was a call to arms for which many suffered the extreme penalty.

There had been a series of terrible harvests throughout the whole country, the Corn Laws had affected the price of bread and many poor working people were destitute. There had, of course, been riots. Those in authority were so alarmed by the threat of
revolution
that punishments were severe and repressive. Glasgow had attracted destitute people from the Highlands, from the Western Isles and from Ireland, people who had some fixed idea – or should that be desperate hope? – that a man prepared to work hard might make his fortune here. Well, some did. I can’t deny it. But many of them were soon disillusioned. Those who managed to secure employment in the burgeoning mills and manufactories were housed, fed and clothed but they were also physically exhausted in a way that the likes of Sandy Caddas seldom had been, and they were often injured by the new machinery. For those who could not find work, more often through age and infirmity than from any idleness on their part, conditions were even worse. The minister might preach against the vice of slothfulness, but I was aware of a kind of widespread and abject poverty that, even throughout my most difficult times, I could hardly have dreamed of.

So it was that groups of self-styled United Scotsmen sprang up, advocating reform. The pamphlet or proclamation that Thomas had incautiously copied out was in the nature of a call to arms, although most would now judge that it was a false and
deliberate
provocation on the part of the authorities. It allowed them to charge any who responded to it with high treason. Many Glasgow weavers, unaware of the duplicity, answered the call, among them two young men, Andrew Hardie and John Baird. They were
ultimately
sentenced to be hanged, beheaded and quartered, their bodies mutilated far beyond the doubtful ministrations of the anatomists, a savagery that even now revolts me.

Two things there are that further disturb me on this quiet afternoon. At the very end of the book, there is a letter, folded and tucked in upon itself and addressed to me. ‘For William, to
be read after I am gone,’ it says. But I have read enough and I put it away for the moment, sliding it into the private drawer at the back of my desk. Besides, I can hear the house coming to life around me, the sound of pots and pans in the kitchen, Jenny’s light footsteps on the stair with the pup scurrying in her wake, its toenails slithering and scratching on bare wood. Then, in my haste to close the book, I cause a draught of air, and a few dried leaves float from between the pages and settle on my table. They are skeletons, light as thistledown, all colour and goodness long gone from them, leached away from them by time. At first, I don’t know what they are, or where they are from, but I think their presence among the pages of this book is no accident. Suddenly, the sight of them gives me such a pang of sadness, such regret, that it is all I can do to contain it. I want to cry aloud with the pain of it. But, of course, I do no such thing. I scoop them carefully together, fold them among the loose sheets of one of the letters and replace them from whence they came.