Old Men in Love

FOURTEEN TUNNOCK'S DIARY 2002-3

Damn Angus Calder. Through Joy Hendry’s Chapman the greatest encouragement I ever received ends by demanding that I abandon years of research and invent a new ending to my masterpiece. Had a Scottish Enlightenment setting occurred to me twenty years back I might have used it but I CANNOT now~fling aside years of research and undertake more. How can I possibly write well about life in Edinburgh around 1780 — 90 when I hardly know Glasgow in 2003 though surrounded all my life by detailed information about it? I could write nothing after reading that letter yesterday and went for a meditative stroll that ended in another bad shock.

The weather was neutral, neither cold nor warm, wet nor sunny, the sky one ceiling of smooth grey cloud. I love such dull days, perhaps because I am a rather dull man. I wandered through the University grounds, crossing Kelvin Way and entering the park. Mastermind tells me Glasgow parks are now dangerous places, infested by gangs of youths from District Council housing schemes who, when Glasgow was productive, would have been apprentices learning to build or operate ships and machines, but now live on Social Security benefits while stealing money for drink and drugs. Casual violence is their main recreation. Some openly call themselves Nazis and patrol the inner public parks, maiming or murdering folk who seem homosexual or foreign, and folk with darker skins are the usual victims. The chief Kelvin Park terrorist calls himself Hitler — how does a quiet, erudite, stay-at-home body like Mastermind know such things? I saw that the monolithic bust of Carlyle facing the old park bridge had its nose smashed off again. Ten years ago it was restored in ciment fondu after a similar act of vandalism by people who (judging by words spray-painted on a nearby statue of a soldier commemorating the Boer War) were feminists defying patriarchal authority. This time the nose was probably removed by one of Hitler’s henchmen who did not know Hitler the First was encouraged by Carlyle.²⁰

When writing hard I often find sentences in an accidentally opened book that help the work forward, so on leaving the park I visited Voltaire and Rousseau. This big low-ceilinged shed (probably once a livery stable) has all kinds of second-hand books stacked in high cases and in piles on the floor. In a box of dog-eared paperbacks I found Picture This by Joseph Heller, published by Pan Books of London. I had never heard of it, though Heller’s Catch 22 is one of the three great novels about World War II. Glancing into Picture This I was stammygastered to find it a one volume trilogy about (1) Socrates and Athenian democracy, (2) Rembrandt and the Dutch Republic, (3) the modern New York art market. Paid 50p, brought it home, read, digested it before sleeping.

Picture This reports on Periclean Athens more than dramatising it, but tells much that I missed. Socrates went barefoot. Heller also shows the rapacity of Dutch capitalism better than I show that of Florence. His presentation of Rembrandt is masterly — he knows more about oil colour than I do about tempera and fresco. His third section shows modern capitalism working through millionaire art deals in New York and refers to the Vietnam war in a way that exposes my writing as antiquarian exercizes. I have not shown the ignoble sweat, toil and mercenary warfare that PAID FOR the freedom and confidence that let Italians make astonishingly lovely towns. Why does modern Capitalism, despite commanding much more wealth, only produce more cars, motorways, pollution, drugs, weapons and warfare? What is it doing to Britain? To Scotland? To Glasgow? Why did that never occur to me as a subject?

Doctor Johnson said the only measure of a good nation is how well it treats the poor. Surely orphans, the sick and disabled, homeless and unemployed and unemployable are treated better now in Britain than in Italy five centuries ago? Perhaps not. I once read that British travellers used to greatly admire schools, orphanages and hospitals for the poor in Italy. These, of course, were attached to monasteries and staffed by monks and nuns. Britain had such places until Henry VIII first nationalized monastic lands and buildings, then sold them to private owners, thus destroying what had been (no doubt) a semi-corrupt welfare state, but one which was meant to care for the poor. Henry’s Protestant reforms kept him and his greatest supporters rich, made many in the middle class richer while increasing the number of beggars. Why does this sound familiar?

I was deluded to think I could know Athens and Florence as well as Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Joyce knew London, Paris, St Petersburg, Dublin. Making Socrates go barefoot won’t change that. Mastermind tells me tomatoes were impossible in Filippo’s Florence because they came from America which Columbus reached twenty-seven years after Filippo died. Changing them to artichokes won’t help. The Mona who put him into the Carmelite monastery, I have discovered, was his mother, not his aunt. Diamante assisted Filippo until he died, but Filippo had a sister who did the housekeeping. And Pope Eugenius died five years before Filippo seduced Lucrezia. And perhaps she seduced him. And I haven’t the faintest idea how ordinary people made their livings in the weaving sheds and dye-works that made Florence rich. Maybe most lived fairly satisfactory lives, like fully employed, well-paid British workers between 1945 and 1970.

I am haunted, oppressed by feeling I should write about the life I know, but what do I know about life? What has life taught me about Glasgow? How can an old man of very little experience put the world where he lives into a good story?

Think about it, Tunnock. You have nothing else to do.

Unable to start thinking about it. After penning last entry around two in the morning I bathed, changed into clean pyjamas slippers dressing gown and was enjoying small whisky-toddy nightcap by livingroom fire when doorbell rang and rang and rang until I opened door to large crying baby upheld by woman saying hysterically, “Can I come in Johnny? I’ve nowhere else to go.” In she came and it was Niki. Not knowing what else to do I led her into kitchen. She sat down at table, burst into tears so I had two weeping females (the wean was female) in this house where to my certain knowledge nobody since I was a baby has wept. I tried quieting them with tea and warmed milk which she put into bottle for baby. I made cold beef pickles tomato cheese sandwiches because she was hungry and stiff hot toddy that she gratefully drank after to my horror adding some to baby’s bottle. Between bursts of hysterical tears in phrases I did not try to fully understand she spoke of being beaten deserted involved in vague unspeakable crimes by someone who then attempted murder and suicide with or without success. Only two of her sentences were clear and often repeated, “Don’t throw us out Johnny, we’ve nowhere else to go,” and, “Please don’t send for the polis.”

I escaped from her by rushing upstairs to make a bed. Luckily wardrobe in main bedroom still has thanks to Nan big drawer of sheets blankets pillowcases I never needed so quickly made up bed in small room opposite so now Niki and Mo (what is Mo short for? Surely not Moses or Moloch) are sleeping there. I hope. How long will they stay?

During our session in kitchen Niki produced photograph from pathetic little knapsack that had held Mo’s bottle, gave it me saying, “This is yours, sorry there’s no frame.” Without pleasure recognized young self in gown and mortarboard between Nan and Nell. Asked why had kept it she said, “I sometimes liked looking at it.” This suggests she sometimes liked remembering me how strange. I hardly gave her a thought after she vanished two years ago.

In the wee small hours last night, perhaps around three o’clock, I heard the tapping on my bedroom door that I had been dreading for over a week. I unlocked and opened it a few inches and saw Niki in nothing but her knickers. In a voice low enough not to wake Mo in the room behind her (Mo wakens horribly easily) she asked if she could join me? I whispered, “Sorry, not with a baby in the house,” and cautiously shut and locked the door again, feeling terribly guilty. I have never before had the chance of comforting a young thing and gratifying myself at the same time, but have no sexual appetite for pitiable women.

Cannot work on my book with Niki and Mo in the house and am afraid to leave them alone here for longer than it takes to run to the Byres Road shops and back. She won’t go out because she says people are after her. I do not ask who or why because her answers would certainly be lies. For three weeks she has hardly left the bedroom. I am sick of carrying trays of food upstairs, sick of the queer looks shopkeepers give me when I buy disposable nappies, women’s underwear (since she brought no change of clothes) also lipstick, mascara and false eyelashes. When asked why she who wants to see nobody must doll herself up she said her face in the mirror was all she had to look at, and why didn’t I have a television set? I answered that television is a drug that added nothing to life, that it distracts, deludes, insulates people from reality and she yelled, “That’s why I want it!” When I said it was unhealthy to keep a baby in one room all day she said I could take it out as often as I wanted. I do NOT want to take it out. If Mo starts liking and trusting me I will start feeling responsible and be stuck with the child until it is old enough to support itself, which will not happen before I die of natural causes.

A dull dreadful day. Having paid one of the cleaners to buy Niki and Mo warm coats with big hoods, also the modern equivalent of the sling-seat squaws used to carry papooses, I got my lodgers out of the house by going for a taxi, using it to collect them from the house and take us to Anniesland station. Here Niki was sure nobody would recognize her if I carried Mo and she kept her head well back in the hood and a scarf over her mouth as if she had toothache. We took a train to Helensburgh, walked along the esplanade, looked in shop windows, had tea and ice cream in café, took train and taxi home. They enjoyed the outing. I would have enjoyed it too had I been a character in a sentimental Victorian novel. I did not enjoy it.

My life a hopeless nightmare. Now nearly a year since she came. Work on my book at a standstill. Whole idea of it awkward, wrong, impossible. Can sometimes snatch half hour in library reading dull social histories of Glasgow, half-heartedly meaning to write another. My former womanless, childless existence used to make me feel outcast from life’s feast — know now it was a paradise of freedom and hope. An implacable force, probably Nature herself, has enslaved me to a selfish bitch I neither love nor have sex with. Only a masochist could stand more of this. I was not a slave when I shopped, cooked, cleaned for Nell and Nan — they had done as much for me before taking to their beds, and I knew they would one day leave me by dying. Niki and Mo won’t die unless I

Have never never never lost my temper because nothing annoying used to happen, but for weeks now am containing with difficulty rage that must end in bloodshed and infanticide when it finally overwhelms me. This diary will prove I was driven to it. I may only be suffering what many married men endure but they must have been immunized against weeping women, screaming infants by miserable childhoods full of frantic mothers and blubbering siblings. I was spared that normal-family-life shit and am too old to take more. Am on brink of breakdown, verge of insanity. Another day of this life will drive me to

Amazing improvement. This morning overheard cleaners casually refer to me as Mo’s father! Cross-examined, they said Niki told them so. I thanked them politely for that news, went upstairs, and to stop myself grasping Niki’s throat seized an ornate vase I have never liked and hurled it to smash in the fireplace. Then I stamped around the room clawing the air with hooked fingers, howling like a wolf, growling like a tiger, spitting at Niki the filthiest names I knew — “Inconsiderate mother! Untruthful parasite! Selfish manipulator!” I only went quiet when starting to enjoy this undignified performance. Its effect was remarkable. Baby Mo stopped wailing and watched me with obvious delight. Niki stopped weeping and when silence fell asked in a plaintive but sensible voice what I wanted? I pointed to the mess in the fireplace and said, “Clean that up, bitch, and you’ll hear!” — using an American accent which somehow seemed appropriate. She has now agreed to take Mo out after breakfast each morning when I go to the library. She will not be given a key to the house but receive twelve pounds a day for expenses and be let back in when I return after five to make dinner. In the evenings she and Moloch will be left in the house if I go to Tennants, but if I find she has let people in when I am out she and infant will be evicted, and if she robs me again I will call the police. She knows I will keep my word so at last, with peace of mind and enriched experience, I can devote myself to a new and better book. What kind will it be?

I am starting to glimpse something truly original, like a great figure emerging from a fog, a narrative uniting global and Scottish history and my own without fictional masks, an immense task. Hurrah and onward, Tunnock, while keeping your eyes on the world around you.

Last week, on the way back from Heraghty’s around noon, called in at the Hasta Mañana on Gorbals Street and saw the small big-nosed lawyer I met there over a year ago. Perhaps I was looking for her. I took an empty chair opposite as she talked into a mobile phone with her usual speed and intensity. She spoke to people about impending court appearances for over fifteen minutes without seeming to see me. I finished an excellent bowl of soup and was starting on a salad when she switched the phone off and said, “Well John Tunnock, how’s Medician Florence?”

I told her I had been forced to abandon it and was embarking on something that would also show visions of the local and contemporary. She asked why and after pondering my very wordy answer thrust an unclenched fist at me across the table. I stared at it, puzzled, until I saw she was offering to shake my hand. I allowed this and found my new book has made me a new, very useful friend. Her name is ——²¹ She gave me her phone number. I gave her my address.

Yesterday I received her postcard telling me Tony Blair (though she spelled him Bliar) would be addressing the Scottish Trades Union leaders in Glasgow Conference Centre, that folk from all over Scotland would be marching there to protest against another Anglo-American war with Iraq. Other big protest marches would be happening in London, most European capitals and New York and Sydney, so she would call in a taxi at nine today and pick me up to take part. This frightened me. I approve of people publicising their ideas in peaceful protest marches, whether they are workers who don’t want their industries shut, or pacifists who want nuclear missiles banned, or even Orangemen who think the world’s worst menace is the Catholic Church. Freedom of speech needs everyone to openly show what they believe, even if their beliefs are stupid and wrong. Without public discussions and demonstrations the only alternative to government by millionaire politicians is terrorist bombings. But I am emotionally incapable of public appearances. When the taxi came I went out and began explaining this, but before I had said two sentences through the taxi window this implacable woman opened the door and said “Stop talking, ostrich! Get in!” I did. It was a bright, fresh, sunny morning so I had no excuse to even go back indoors for a coat.

So by taxi to Glasgow Green where not one crowd but many crowds were moving between triumphal arch before High Court, the Clyde to the south and People’s Palace Museum in the east.²² In many demonstrations weirdly dressed people are noticeable and reported by the press as typical. This multitude had hardly any. Most folk were pleasantly un-uniform and of every age. Young parents pushed toddlers in prams. Two boys of ten or eleven, with no apparent presiding adult, walked carefully side by side to display a single cardboard sandwich board with peace slogans written in fibre-tipped pens. The Eurydice Women’s Socialist Choir sang peace songs. A nice woman held up a sign saying I Trust No Bush But My Own. There was a group with a banner saying, Dumfries Ageing Hippies Against The War, a group of older folk whose banner announced THE TAYSIDE PENSIONERS’ FORUM. — told me Blair is proposing to abolish old age pensions because workers’ contributions are now too small. So New Labour will undo the Liberal Party’s People’s Budget of 1909? I am worse than an ostrich, I am Rip Van Winkle. Many held up printed placards saying Make War on Want, Not Iraq, Not In My Name Mr Blair, No Blood For Oil, and white cut-out polystyrene doves on the ends of little canes, and distributing radical party news sheets against the war and demanding Palestine liberation. Light brown people (who I refuse to call blacks) were over five per cent of the crowd.

There were no visible organizers so we joined the people at their thickest beside Greendyke Street where the march was scheduled to start, edging in until pressure of other bodies made movement impossible. In this cheerful, good-humoured crowd —— seemed to know everyone, pointing to musicians and actors I never heard of, besides the novelists A.L. Kennedy and Bernard MacLaverty, poets Aonghas MacNeacail and Liz Lochhead, the writer Angus Calder who was too far away for me to introduce myself. At last guidance came from the police who stood in a line between the crowd and the street. A small number moved aside and let us gradually through in numbers that started walking ten abreast, filling the width of the street without overlapping pavements on each side. We entered the procession about half a mile behind the leaders, from Greendyke Street marching up the Saltmarket to Glasgow Cross. Occasionally those around us burst into wild cheering inspired by folk waving encouragement from upper tenement and office windows. The stream of the march split neatly in two to pass the gawky clock tower of the Tollbooth, all that remains of Glasgow’s 17^th century town hall, magistrates’ court and city jail.

John Prebble’s book about the Glencoe massacre mentions that in 1692 two British Army officers were jailed in the Tollbooth. Before reaching Glencoe village they opened their sealed orders and, finding themselves commanded to put men, women and children to the sword, broke their swords, marched back to Fort William and told their commander that no decent officer should obey such an order. They were sent south by ship for court martial, but Prebble says there is no record of one so they may have been released without punishment. It occurred to me that a great anti-war memorial should be set on that tower commemorating soldiers who had bravely refused to obey wicked orders. Scotland’s city centres, castles, cathedrals, public parks are so full of war memorials to heroically obedient killers that visitors might think warfare had always been Scotland’s main export. Some of the most elaborate put up before 1918 commemorate a few officers and men who died in Africa, Egypt and Asia where they were part of regiments killing thousands of natives fighting on their own soil without the advantage of gunpowder. The company of so many people who wanted peace suddenly filled me with enthusiasm for this anti-war memorial. I thought it could also carry the names of the four British officers who resigned their commissions during the 1991 Bush war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — they were protesting against bombing Iraqis who could not fight back against cluster bombs “that minced up everything living within a three-mile airstrip.” I started explaining my great idea and it hardly left my mouth when —— said, “Don’t waste time thinking about it. No local government, no public body in Scotland will ever allow it.” But surely many folk in Scotland and England admire brave refusers and would agree with Berthold Brecht (or was it Heinrich Böll?) who said the worst German vice was obedience. Yet in 1991 I read that British and U.S. airmen enthusiastically queued to airstrike Iraqi ground troops. One bomber said that from above they looked like swarms of cockroaches.

From a helicopter that crossed back and forward above our march must also have looked like cockroaches as we went via Ingram Street to George Square. Our biggest roar went up as the Civic Chambers came in sight. Why were no Glasgow Town Councillors waving encouragement from the windows? Why were none in the procession holding up a banner saying GLASGOW COUNCILLORS AGAINST THE WAR? They could have marched behind the banner of Unison, the local government employees’ trade union. But in that case the Labour Party leaders might not let them stand at the next election, so they would lose their wages. From George Square we saw a silhouette of our procession crossing the summit of Blythswood Hill far far ahead.

I have always been a stranger to group emotions, fearing and disliking even the idea of them, and was surprized by a warm relaxed friendliness spreading through me because I was part of this miles-long peaceful procession of folk I have taught or drunk with in pubs all my life, the Scottish workers, tradespeople and professional folk I feel at home with. This sensation became so strong that it brought tears to my eyes, perhaps because a small brass band not far behind was playing familiar melancholy tunes, The Floo’ers o’ the Forest, The Auld Hoose, The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond. I began describing my sensations but —— said, “Yes, all these folk will suffer if our businessmen listen to an expert in Scottish Enterprise, a government body once called The Scottish Development Agency. He is advizing Scottish businesses to have their goods made by workers in eastern Europe or Asia. But crying about it won’t help.” At last we arrived in a desert of car parks covering the site

of the former Princess Dock, a basin surrounded by cranes where giant ships unloaded cargoes when Glasgow was a big international port and centre of manufacture only fifty years ago. The crowds already seemed more of a multitude than they had been on Glasgow Green and confronted a shining white building locally nicknamed The Armadillo, a huge apparently windowless metallic structure whose arched sections seem sliding out of each other. A line of yellow-jacketed policemen was looped protectively around it and I realized The Armadillo is the Scottish Conference Centre where Blair would now be addressing the Scottish Trades Unions. We stood listening to occasional storms of applause from a crowd around an open-topped double-decker bus near the river. That speech was inaudible to those not near the bus because loudspeakers had been banned, so the orator may have been a spokesman for the Church of Scotland, or for Scotland’s Asiatic Communities, or for the C.N.D. or for the Scottish Socialist Party because later I heard all of these made speeches and so (amazingly) did Glasgow’s Labour Lord Provost, a woman. After half an hour we left, moving against the flood of people still coming because the procession was much longer than its three-mile route.

I walked back home alone, needing peace to think about this wholly new experience. It cannot be ignored but how can I use it? Kelvingrove Park was crowded with others who had left the procession so I crossed it feeling safe from Hitler the Second. I called in at Tennants where Mastermind told me Blair had rescheduled his speech, delivering it before 10 o’clock when the procession left Glasgow Green and flying back to England before it arrived, adding, “No doubt when Blair dies the obituaries will praise his moral courage in ignoring the electorate’s opinion.”

Home by 2.30 where Niki served me with afternoon tea as she has done regularly since I lost my temper last week. For the first time she had got the amount of sugar and milk in my cup exactly right. I praised her. She seemed pleased. Could I train her to become, not a mistress or wife, but a helpmeet who shops, cooks, serves nice meals? A companion who will help make my descent through senility to death a comfortable passage after I have published my masterpiece and enjoy the fame and fortune it cannot fail to bring?

My lawyer friend phoned this morning and, her voice harsh with indignation, told me BBC television reports of Blair’s Glasgow speech yesterday were inter-cut with views of the protestors outside the building, thus suggesting he had delivered his speech as he had planned, instead of fleeing before the protestants arrived.²³ I told her my book would correct that account of our march at the very end, unless I lived to see Blair arrested for his lie that Iraq is nearly ready to atom bomb Britain in 45 minutes.

Am confirmed in my new plan for the book by Nicolai Gogol’s life who, like Burns and Walter Scott and me, was first inspired by the songs and ballads of his homeland, the Ukraine. He spent years attempting a history showing how different it was from the rest of Russia because Ukrainian Cossacks had kept Islam out of Christian Europe in the south when Polish Catholics were doing the same thing in the north. But he was no provincial! His Taras Bulba, fruit of that historical research, owes much to a Russian translation of the Odyssey. His Dead Souls, the first great Russian novel, owes much to his reading of Don Quixote and The Pickwick Papers. He tried to complete that vision of Russia (as a Hell of grotesque souls) with a Heavenly modern conclusion in which his fraudulent hero is redeemed by a good Russian prince and Orthodox Christianity. He failed, but with his friend Pushkin, generated all that is great, unique and worth world-wide attention in Russian literature between the failure of the December revolution of 1825 and the Soviet revolution in the 1920s. My book will fail to present a vision of self-governing Scotland becoming a unique example of good Socialism, but may manage to show why it could and should be. Forget fame and fortune. I recently read a story²⁴ about young American students asked, as a psychological test, to say what inanimate thing they would like to be. A black girl upsets everyone by saying, “a revolver”. I asked myself that question and immediately answered “a molecule”. Why? Molecules are invisible, anonymous, invulnerable and essential. My book will almost certainly appear after my death when I will be invisible and invincible. Start it tomorrow.