I'm guiltily conscious that during the present lead-up to my exams I've been neglecting this blog to focus on procrastination. Here, then, is something I'm working on: not finished, as usual, but perhaps even as much as half-done.
Eric Hobsbawm, who is the best, was on the radio the other day and the interview set me after some books by him and others. At length (who even puts Eric Hobsbawm in
psychology? Fortunately it was on the short-loan shelves so I didn't have to visit their floor; I mean, who knows what they keep up there?) I unearthed his classic study
Primitive Rebels. He said of this in the interview that, although almost everybody in it now disagrees with him, he feels proud to have pretty much founded the history of how the anonymous masses of ordinary people thought about society, justice, resistance, and rebellion before the invention of modern politics.
One of the things he explores in the book is the noble or 'social' bandit. Every culture has got one of these and as one of the prototypes for all heroism, his shadow is everywhere. Humble-birth-foreign-war-return-family-wronged-blood-vengeange-outlaw-steals-rich-gives-poor-got-swagger-good-life-sense-humour-strong-drink-superhuman-skill-band-outlaws-huge-sidekick-jolly-priest-daring-escape-royal-pardon-betrayal-last-stand-but-escaped-disguise-and/or-sleeping-under-mountain; the English-speaking example is of course good old Robin Hood.
The narrative pattern is staring us in the face: the more controversial assertion of the book is that while you can't entertain any illusions about them - they certainly weren't revolutionaries, and they sometimes were really ruthless criminals who made a show of acting this way because of the power of the story - such people very often actually existed; until very recent times, in countries like Italy. They embodied an early kind of social protest: they were, arguably, a force for good.
This brought to my attention a bit of laxity in my thought and language. When roused to politics by my revolutionary chums I'm awfully fond of the word 'bandit' as a term of abuse towards the Parasite Exploiter Class; and yet as a good Marxist dedicated to the nationalisation of the boat-race, the abolition of Yorkshire pudding, and the overthrow of all that the
Daily Mail holds dear I have rather a good opinion of
actual bandits. Ho-hum.
So I did what any sensible person would and started to write a story about it.
I am rather pleased with ‘Langdreen’, which means, approximately, Longsuffering. It is located in Scottish Myth and Legend somewhere between Auchenfankle and Balwearie.
Nithsdale in the West March of Scotland, on a moor nearest to the farm-town of Langdreen. About 1570.
It was a day of fog, grey and cold as iron, piling up on the horizon until there was no horizon but only the ghosts of hills - perhaps low and close, or perhaps far away and towering. It was a wet, clammy day: the very air seemed to grope and grip. It was a short day: it fell at the soggy end of Winter, that grimmest season of the year when the snow has retreated to expose the black nakedness of the exhausted earth. To cap all this it was a day nearing its end.
Sunshine, then, for bandits!
Down the moors they went: pistols and sabers clattered like teeth shivering in the cold. They were stout little men on stout little nags: all gristle and bone, no fat to spare between them. The faces of the riders were drawn, silent, and alert under their steel bonnets; but below each face as it came out of the fog and briefly into view was the face of his weary, wild-eyed horse. They seemed made to contrast with one-another, like the masks of comedy and tragedy.
There were riders there from up and down the March country. They came from Scotland and from England, but then, those grand old names mattered little here. What mattered were the harsh, unwelcoming names of all the valleys with their old grudges, all the villages strung out along rushing rivers between the dark shoulders of the hills. What mattered were the names of the families, and the men. There were Laidlaws, Armstrongs, Hunters, Stampers. Grim old Hirplin Watt was there, and Skellit Harry who had sprung him out of the castle of Carlisle and, on another occasion under different circumstances, shot him through the knee (this being why he hirpled). Although the documents clearly show that he was at this time in Ireland, serving a life-sentence as a soldier as punishment for his crimes against the Queen’s Majesty, Nebless Tom was nevertheless there. So was Jack Pott the Bastard, who was in a similar condition except that it was the King’s Majesty and he’d been hanged.
There were no cattle with them, nor any torches lit: this was a raid, and on its way out.
Down the moors and up again: as the fog and the dark gathered and stirred thickly together, it became impossible to distinguish one ridge from the next. Down and up again went the riders; down and down went the sun. But just as vision grew useless it sent a few final rays over the horizon - like men laying an ambush where their raid has retreated – and showed in silhouette the rievers’ destination.
It was a tower: there were a lot of towers in the border-country, then, and this one was much like the rest. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.
Swords were drawn, but without that satisfying ‘shing!’ noise which is actually, I believe, produced by cleaning a kitchen-knife with a damp flannel; without even so much as a steely glint, since polishing with sheep-grease had given the blades a dull bronze colour. After all, this was all clearly taking place long before the age of Hollywood. Clearly.
Finnieston, Glasgow, Scotland. About now.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel glowered across the Clyde. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.
After all, the people able to stay there didn’t need it to be beautiful, because they didn’t have to look at it. They stayed in it, protected by its mirrored sides, and looked at the rest of the world: there was even a glass lift for this purpose. The appalling tower-blocks of Glasgow were being busily blown up so that they wouldn’t spoil the view for the people in the equally appalling high-rise hotels; they were to be replaced with more high-rise hotels.
In the function room, representatives of LifeSunTechGrowLife Private Equity were busy acquiring a controlling share in the utilities of Bolivia. Of course they didn’t look terribly busy: they sat around a table with representatives of that distant and beautiful country (one of whom, by an astonishing coincidence, was himself Bolivian!) and the World Bank; and listened to long speeches recited partly in numbers and partly in that special coded language known as advertising-copy. They could, in the conditions of complete privacy for which they had paid a good deal, have been frank about what they were doing - but habit is powerful. And the view from the windows, as the lights of the city winked on like eyes, would have made them uncomfortable.
Busy as they apparently were, at least one of them was profoundly bored. Peter Laidlaw was discreetly trying to build a tripod out of his fountain-pens, without success. It was the wretched rounded ends, he was sure of it. He was a great picker-up of fountain pens. He was probably a rich man these days – of course the thing about being rich is that, no matter how much money you receive on a monthly basis, there is always less after you’ve finished spending it – and still he refused to buy his own pens, instead picking them subtly off other people’s desks. Perhaps it was a kind of cosmic defense. Were he ever to confront his namesake saint at the celestial gate and be asked about his sins, he could cite his habit of stealing pens. This saved him from pondering just how he’d gotten his money, and whether it was possible to steal something from the other side of the world.
Outside the dark gathered, stirred thickly together with the fog from the Clyde.
A lone nag, shaggy and long-suffering and clearly wondering why it put up with his sort of thing, wondered into the car-park of the Crowne Plaza. It shook itself and whinnied irritably.
Hearing this in his booth, the duty guard looked up from his reading and stared. He was a Glasgow boy, and had never actually seen a border-nag in the flesh, never mind in the car-park. He regarded it as it was about to explode.
Jack Pott grimaced. A decent watchman who knew his part in the proceedings would have chosen this moment to run out into the dark to restrain the stray animal and been clouted neatly over the head. But clearly standards had declined.
He urged his own pony up to the barrier, drew a pistol from under his oily cloak, and fired it lazily in no particular direction.
‘Staun’ tae! Haunds ower yer hied!’
Ah, good. At least they still understood the basics.
Peter Laidlaw’s mind was already on the way home, so it is hardly surprising that he was the first to hear the noise being made by the unexpected guests that it met on the way out. Like the unfortunate security guard now trussed to his swivelling chair, he for a while did nothing about it, since it almost certainly didn’t exist.
Hirplin Watt hirpled into the glass lift and glared suspiciously at the control panel.
‘Aicht,’ said Nebless Tom helpfully, and prodded the appropriate button with his pistol.
‘Why for thare’s no ony thriteen?,’ said Watt.
‘It’s ill-luckit,’ said Nebless Tom, who’s job it was to know this sort of thing.
Watt wrinkled his nose. ‘Are thay
daft here?’
‘An anither thing,’ said Skellit Harry, attempting to work himself a corner, the iron sewn into his shirt clanking unpleasantly. ‘Gin this is the Crowne Plaza Hotel, whaur’s the Crowne Plaza?’
Nebless Tom sighed – causing an odd, unsettling noise to come from the hole where his nose had been. ‘We daed confabble anent this. It’s cried efter the fowk that awn it.’
There was a contemplative silence, broken by Jack Pott. ‘Crowne Plaza? Bluidy stupit name.’
On this, at least, there was general consensus, and the lift completed its journey in silence.
Peter Laidlaw had just succeeded in erecting his tripod. Most unfairly, the conference did not choose that moment to end. And now it’s droning was accompanied by an intensification of those odd noises from outside: clattering metal and harsh raised voices. Wasn’t this place supposed to be four-star?
