Old Men in Love

18: MY WORLD HISTORY: PROLOGUE

A sudden endless gas explosion made all the material in this universe. Some parts collided with others, swirling into gassy clumps that got denser and hotter and became radiant globes as they rotated. Big neighbouring globes began turning round each other while smaller ones became satellites of a bigger partner. The lightest materials floated on the surface of the globes, sometimes cooling into floating plates of crust that grew bigger until their edges met, making a surface that only let out light where red-hot or where volcanoes exploded through. The air above this world of ours was of gases no life could breathe: methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. The world’s crust thickened. The surface cooled until rain water could lie there without being scalded into steam. At last a sea of water covered the world except where a rocky continent, thicker than the ground under the sea, rose above it near the equator.⁴⁰

The molten minerals under the Earth’s crust had currents slowly cracking it apart, making long submarine canyons on the ocean floor with bottoms constantly restored by lava welling up through volcanic vents. Boiling water above the vents was stopped evaporating by the weight of colder water over a mile-deep above it. In the hottest depths, in a broth of dissolved chemicals, droplets started circulating. They grew larger when they touched and merged with similar droplets, but when this made them too big for their skins they split in two and went on separately. Such droplets evolved into single-celled creatures we call living because they sense things outside their bodies that can nourish them and help them reproduce, having motive power to reach for them. The evolution from these chemical drops to living cells has never (yet?) been achieved in a human laboratory. It has to happen first in deep water because in those days lethal ultra-violet sunlight penetrated water to a depth of over thirty feet. In submarine depths the sun’s rays and Earth’s heat were reduced, yet still strong enough to generate and support single-celled microbes that were the only living things for at least three quarters of life on Earth before today.

Tiny primitive creatures fed on dissolved chemicals in the earliest sea, then bigger ones started also feeding on the smaller, breathing out carbon dioxide that rose above the sea, mixed with the atmosphere above and began screening out the lethal ultra-violet rays. This let larger living things evolve near the surface. More complex bacteria converted carbon dioxide into oxygen until the air above was two per cent oxygen, which let a kindlier sunlight shine on sea and land. Life now crossed the beaches, entering rivers, lakes, swamps, plains in the first great continent. Lichens, mosses, fungi were followed by primitive insects and those segmented worms that are ancestors of every lizard, fish, bird and mammal with a backbone. The whole upper Earth, fluid and solid, came to hold living things of every size — plankton, seaweeds, sponges, fish, squid, sharks in the oceans, — crawling things in submarine volcanic vents, rock pools and soil, — herbs, trees, amphibians, lizards on land, — spores, seeds, insects, bats, birds in the air. This living layer around our planet has been called the zoo-sphere. It is thinnest at the poles, thickest in tropical rainforests. There were many such forests on the swampy first continent.

The Earth’s interior moves more slowly than the zoo-sphere but is never still, currents in the molten rock under the solid crust always moving huge plates of crust apart on one side, and ramming them together on the other. Mountain ranges are raised when one plate is forced over another, then rain, wind, frost and lichen starts wearing the mountains down. Rocks and gravel fall into glens and valleys, rivers wash grit onto plains, spreading it and mixing it with dead plants and creatures, creating new soil. Meteor bombardments killed great sections of zoo-sphere through sudden global winters and ice ages, spreading seas have drowned them, the world’s shifting crust has covered them with new rock making underground layers of coal and metal, reservoirs of oil and gas. The world’s subterranean currents broke the earliest continent into smaller ones and drove them so far apart that they joined again on the other side of the world near the south pole. This again cracked into continents that drifted north and started roughly corresponding to those we know, though not in the order we know them at first. Some of the oceans between them widened, some narrowed or disappeared. The great plate of crust carrying India collided with Eurasia, elevating the Himalayas, our highest and youngest mountain range. The Alps are hardly middle-aged. The Wicklow Hills are all that remain of more ancient mountains.

When the Atlantic was a much narrower sea, the North American and Baltic landmasses had offshore islands with the same geology: granite, the world’s oldest rock, and granite volcanically mixed with newer stuff, which is called metamorphic. The Eurasian landmass edged up from the south west, with offshore islands made of mainly sedimentary rock: chalk, clay and limestone. Slow convulsions jammed the north eastern islands together and rammed them onto a larger, more level coalition of the southern islands, creating an archipelago visited in the 4^th century BC by Pytheas, a Greek explorer who gave it a Greek name. Nearly sixty years before Christ’s birth it was invaded by Romans who learned most of their science from the Greeks and Latinised the name into Britannia. This happened because an unusual beast had appeared half a million years earlier.

Different thinkers have called Homo Sapiens a featherless biped, a tool-using animal, and “the glory, jest and riddle of the world”. We are the only creature who drink when not thirsty, eat when not hungry, and take twelve years or more to become adult. One year old humans totter on unsteady legs when horses of that age walk, gallop and feed themselves in open fields. One year old birds have hatched, learned to fly, mated, built nests and begun feeding their own children because birds, bees, ponies etcetera mostly act instinctively; human instincts are so weakened that our actions have to be learned through imitation of adults (starting with mum and dad) who act differently from each other. This forces self-conscious choice called learning upon us, hence our prolonged immaturity. Adults are usually compensated for this by being ready for sexual intercourse all year round. Conscious choice has made us capable of new inventions — lighting fires, shaping sharp-edged tools, and sewing needles — so since homo sapiens learned to stand upright and use our hands in Africa we have kept a common body pattern by changing our minds, habits and societies. The Arctic ice cap once expanded south until most of Britain and adjacent lands were under a mile-thick layer of it. This thawed, retreated and returned, altering climates and sea levels. Other species were killed off or survived by evolving different bodies and instincts. Our kind survived by killing other creatures, roasting their flesh, turning their bones and skin into tools and clothing. As we spread around the globe some details of our physique changed a little. Hunters in the frozen north grew paler and plumper, those in the south leaner and darker. Where food was abundant the average human height grew to six feet or more. Poor food supplies made us dwarfish, led to immigration, warfare and murder, for we lacked the instinct that stops other beasts killing helpless members of their own species. Settled farmers on Chinese plains grew extra inches of gut to draw more nourishment from their rice, yet they too are of the same species as Inuits in Alaska, Pigmies in the Congo, Cleopatra, Robert Burns, Mahatma Ghandi and Condoleezza Rice. The big differences between races, nations and tribes come from folk learning to live in very different landscapes. A vast plain watered by three rivers explains why China is the largest, most peopled and most ancient nation. A smaller, equally self-centred nation was made by layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though a similar language.

Like all efficient imperialists Romans divided lands they invaded along natural borders. They called the south mainland Albion, the north mainland Caledonia, the western island Hibernia. Albion was very woody and marshy but had few natural barriers impeding the march of Roman legions. The tribes of Albion that joined to fight those were defeated, then the level parts of the south British mainland (all Albion except Wales) were planted over by Roman camps. These were connected by well-built roads to each and to Londinium, Britain’s first big city. The camps were sited in fertile places and grew to be centres of still-thriving towns: Bath, York, Lincoln, Carlisle and other cities with names ending in chester or caster. The broad, fertile, generally level nature of Albion with its road network explains why it fell quickly to later invaders after Rome pulled out — first fell to Saxons and Angles who renamed it Angle-land or England, then to King Canute’s Danish empire, then in 1066 to the Norman French. It explains why London-on-Thames became the capital of the English state, and why the the Bishop of Canterbury has been the High Priest of England since 598, and why England had only two universities in market towns near London until 1828.

Any map shows Scotland’s difference from England what it originally was — several different islands jammed together. They are so narrowly joined that the Romans found it convenient to wall Caledonia off. Scotland’s grotesquely irregular coastline shows the tip of the most southerly peninsula is only twelve miles from the Irish coast; the nearest neighbour on the European mainland is Norway, with the Orkney and Shetland islands like stepping stones between. Inside Scotland’s ragged coastline the glens and plains are so separated by highland sea-lochs and mountain ranges, by lowland moors and firths, that cultivation produced very little surplus wealth before the mid 18^th century. The natural barriers made conquest of the whole impossible for invaders, and a united Scotland almost impossible for the natives. It was four kingdoms, each an unstable union of fiercely independent clans, each with a capital city on the rock of an extinct volcano. Dumbarton (meaning Fort of the Britons) was capital of Strathclyde, a mainly Welsh-speaking kingdom that included Galloway and the west coast down to Barrow in Furness. Edinburgh was capital of a nation in east Scotland, south of the Firth of Forth and partly English-speaking, for it had been part of Northumbria before Duke William conquered all England up to the Tyne. Fife and the north west, with much of the Highlands, belonged to a people called Picts whose language is unknown and whose capital was on Craig Phadraig, Inverness. The Scottish king’s nation, Dalriada, had its capital on Dunadd in Argyllshire, where the Scots tribes, Gaelic-speaking incomers, had arrived from Ireland. It is also pertinent that Shetland, Orkney, and Sutherland for centuries belonged to Norway and there were Scandinavian settlements all round the place, though that was also frequent in England.

In days when kings were hardly anything but warlords, King Kenneth mac Alpin of Dalriada gave the Caledonian clanjamfrie the name of Scotland by conquest of some neighbours and alliances with others. That Scotland continued as a nation, however, is an English achievement, because ever since then the government of the bigger, richer nation tried and usually failed to make Scotland one of its counties — a kind of Cornwall or Yorkshire. Scotland’s people have never been more than a tenth of England’s, so why did England’s far greater military power fail to incorporate us before Oliver Cromwell’s brief success under the Commonwealth? Why did Scotland’s three centuries of being Scotlandshire never quite destroy her independent culture? Why is she at last bound to win the same freedom as Portugal from Spain, Austria from Germany, Iceland from Denmark?⁴¹

Robert Louis Stevenson gave the simplest answer when he noted that Gaelic-speaking Highlanders regard English-speaking Lowlanders with a suspicion the Lowlander is inclined to return unless both meet in English company where they at once feel like blood brothers. Why? There are many partial answers. One is the comparative poverty ensuring that for centuries the Scots gentry, whether Lowland lairds or Highland chiefs, did not speak wholly differently from their lowly employees, unlike England whose chief officials still speak a mandarin dialect learned in expensive private schools like Rugby, Marlborough etcetera. Around 1370 a French traveller visiting Scotland thought it remarkable that if a knight rode his horse over a Scot’s grain field an angry peasant ran up and cursed him. No peasant dared do that in rich lands where the nobility had hundreds of workers so could have one flogged or hung without loss of income. Scots aristocrats were mostly too poor to damage crops on which they and their peasants depended. In the late 19^th century Robert Louis Stevenson was dismayed by how completely his English friends behaved as if their servants and other low-class folk did not exist. Such national differences may be thought obsolete relics, and should be forgotten. This book will explain otherwise, not by inflaming anti-English sentiment, but by showing how local conditions have created a unique culture, so a separate government has always been required by those who share this land, these conditions.

The following chapters explain how Scottish people’s land, rocks, soil distribution, mineral resources, waters and those great potential dynamos the sea lochs, ensure that all who live and work here come to feel part of it like the Irish who came to found Dalriada and later fled here from the potato famine — the Anglo-Saxons who escaped across the border from Duke William and Margaret Thatcher into the Lothians — Jews driven here by Czarist and Nazi pogroms — Italians by the phylloxera epidemic that destroyed their vineyards — Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and other former subjects of the British empire, together with refugees from wars Britain has fought since then and who are now wickedly labelled asylum seekers. I believe that all who stay to live, work and vote here will invigorate this nation that has always been a colloquium of different people, as every sane nation must be.