Boswell's Bus Pass Read online

  The ubiquitous Big Issue seller greeted us like long-lost friends. Was it a sign of racism that noting her Eastern European origin I scoured adjacent street corners for the ubiquitous gang master waiting to take her money? The warmth of her smile suggested that she should be redeployed in one of the many charity shops that punctuate the High Street, presided over by the sullen, resentful and discourteous. The book of the day was A Beginner’s Guide to Chickens. It was probably a bargain at 30p.

  Johnson introduced the topic of begging early in his narrative, ‘… there are many beggars in Scotland. In Edinburgh the proportion is, I think, not less than in London, and in the smaller places it is far greater than in English towns of the same extent. It must, however, be allowed that they are not importunate, nor clamorous. They solicit silently, or very modestly, and therefore though their behaviour may strike with more force the heart of a stranger, they are certainly in danger of missing the attention of their countrymen.’

  Soon Rory announced inelegantly that he had to dive into the nearest pub as a collapse of the bowels was imminent. Perhaps this was a subliminal acknowledgement of Dr Johnson’s physical ills. Either way it necessitated his purchasing the first pint of the day. It was after all 11.15 in the morning. He soon redeemed himself by lurching into a gift shop determined to purchase a token for Jane, his wife. He dropped the money on the floor and struggled to pick it up. Had I noticed I would have helped.

  On resuming his full height he asked the astonished assistant why the shop was called Tippecanoe Gallery. Not convinced by the reply that the name tripped off the tongue nicely, Rory launched into a loud rendition of the American election slogan from 1840 ‘TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO’, explaining that President Harrison had been dubbed the hero of the aforementioned battle, ‘He also delivered the longest inauguration speech on record before enjoying the shortest reign as president before dying of pleurisy.’ The shop assistant muttered something inaudible and went to lie down in the back office. Rory had not been showing off. It is just the way he is. It was exactly the impact that Johnson’s erudition had on the unsuspecting.

  The first bus of the journey was a Perryman’s 253. Our bus passes, Saltires facing upwards, were duly accepted despite the journey starting in England. Our fellow passengers consisted of two hoodies and a young harassed couple with an enormous baby shoehorned into a pram it had long outgrown. None of them glanced at the pair of inappropriately beaming old buffers at the back.

  We briefly considered leaving the bus after ten minutes to sample a pint in the first pub in Scotland but we needed to catch up with the post-chaise. Certainly an early stop would have enabled us to test the observation made by Wolfe in 1753 that he had barely crossed the border when he noticed the contrast between ‘the clean and laborious English and the Scotch excessively dirty and lazy’. This particular prejudice was later parodied by Smollett’s Mathew Bramble who pronounced that ‘the boors of Northumberland are lusty fellows, cleanly and well clothed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled and shabby.’

  Settling into the undeniable comfort of the Perryman’s bus we savoured the pleasure of being secretly initiated into a geriatric conspiracy of retired folk who plan their free travel with military precision: outdoing each other with tales of adventure on the road; grumbling happily about mechanical failures, driver anecdotes, unforgettable teashops and the relative merits of First Buses and the small independents. I considered too the probability that there must be a hard core of pensioners who had escaped from their care homes under cover of darkness, preferring to live out their lives out on a succession of long distance buses crisscrossing the length of Scotland. Baby boomers who had hitch-hiked their way round the sixties in a fog of illegal drugs and the constant promise of sex and transient relationships.

  Rory pointed out the Torness nuclear power station that rose like a cubist’s nightmare from the sea edge. He explained that only one of the reactors worked. In an adjacent field a small notice expressly forbade DIGGING. Was it aimed at a literate race of nuclear moles or at treasure hunters whose metal detectors would glow briefly before melting, the Saxon gold reduced to a Dali watch?

  We eavesdropped on the conversation of a new passenger, a middle aged, slightly dishevelled man who spoke with his eyes shut to a woman in the next seat about the relative price of washing machines and the trouble he had with his knees. I had hoped that the journey would enable us to garner and then recycle surreal nuggets of conversation for narrative currency. But in practice there seemed something unethical about listening to the conversations of strangers, as if in some way stealing something very personal, a slice of their hearts for profit. If they knew they might react in anger like the Native Americans when photographers snatched their souls with a flash of phosphorus.

  An unexpected pleasure of the journey from Berwick-on-Tweed was the discovery that the bus would lurch off the straight and narrow of the A1 at the merest hint of a byway. Perryman’s mission statement specifies a commitment to ensure that every inhabitant of every hamlet or clump of farmers’ cottages can have regular access to the approaching conurb of Dunbar.

  Much sooner than expected we had our first experience of antisocial onboard behaviour. It wasn’t the aforementioned hoodies who were talking happily to each other on their mobile phones. Nor were we attacked by marauding vigilantes from a rival bus company. The culprit was a little old lady armed with a shopping trolley equal to her in size. When the driver reversed in a cul de sac in a remote and rightly forgotten housing estate she stealthily approached the door and pressed the emergency button. As the doors slid obligingly open she politely thanked the driver and made her exit. ‘No! No! No!’ he shouted. ‘It’s all right’ she replied gently, ‘I live here.’

  On stepping down from the bus in Dunbar we were confronted by the sight of a frightened woman clutching a TV set whilst rushing down the High Street. We presumed that some local disaster had occurred and accordingly the locals had felt obliged to loot and plunder. Alternatively Comet had reduced its prices to desperation level. Perhaps she was a soap addict who couldn’t bear to be parted from her only source of pleasure and so took the set with her wherever she went.

  We should not have been surprised that the tourist information office was closed until Easter.

  Every other shop belonged to a solicitor. The shops in between the solicitor’s were again charity shops, one of which yielded the most astonishing of titles. Unfortunately Sex for One, half hidden under the arm of a furtive customer, had already been claimed. I felt cheated. But there again, at whom was the book aimed? Who needs a DIY manual of this nature? Whose hand eye coordination is so poor as to need such instruction? Samuel Johnson for one had no such need. Despite his frequent New Year’s resolution to ‘Rise at eight each morning to combat evil habits singly’ the letter M frequently appears in his diaries. His entry for January 4th 1765 was ‘M.d Rose at 10 … Drank wine for the first time this year.’ Not a bad day then.

  Meanwhile Rory was displaying a commendable loyalty to the local economy by swearing that nothing other than Belhaven Best would pass his lips. This necessitated opening the door of several pubs trying to scan the taps while carefully avoiding eye contact with the locals, all of whom looked as if they would eat their young rather than welcome strangers. Eventually we succeeded. Moments after crossing the threshold I was offered a leather jacket still in its cellophane for a mere £40. Despite assurances that it would fit perfectly I managed to decline the offer, whereupon the pushy salesman metamorphosed into unctuous barman.

  After his first pint Rory suggested that I really wanted to wander round the town. The thought had not occurred to me but I left nonetheless.

  The tourist sign near the castle ruins tells the bizarre tale of Black Agnes, the temporarily abandoned wife of the lord of the manor who was away fighting 13th century wars. Evidently the deranged woman struck terror into the hearts of the vicious English who were laying siege to the ca
stle by nonchalantly dusting the ramparts. This staggeringly unlikely story is no more than a moral fable concocted to encourage housework, general diligence and thorough dusting.

  The harbour is pretty enough and technically still functional with two trawlers tethered to the quay. The famished seagulls wheeled in a very threatening way and would have pecked my eyes out if I had stood still. I don’t know if the birds were the catalyst but my spirits plummeted very suddenly. I felt ineffably sad for reasons I didn’t understand; I felt simultaneously lost and sorry for myself.

  Shivering I returned to the bar where Rory was finishing his pint with a finely-honed technique that would have delighted an apprentice sword swallower. In the context of a small and futile disagreement over the relative merits of Prince Charles and Camilla he mentioned someone he knew whose family had been touched by suicide. Johnson’s lifetime friend, John Taylor, frequently hinted that they discussed suicide in non-theoretical terms.

  It was a relief then to enter the comforting fug of the next 253 on its way to Edinburgh. The bus was in fact a travelling oven; it was at least gas mark 5. Any moment the passengers would start divesting themselves of clothing and begging for water. Glancing round, I immediately understood that this was not an attractive prospect.

  Rory declared himself pleased with the day and responded with enthusiasm when he saw an East Lothian mobile library van parked under a hedgerow. He may have been right in his praise of any initiative that brought books to the masses but it occurred to me that the van was probably stolen and would without doubt burn well.

  I became increasingly aware of faces fleetingly glimpsed from the window of the bus: a young woman in a small village stretching in front of her bedroom mirror; perhaps she was on a promise, perhaps she was looking forward to an evening on her settee in front of the TV with a glass of wine.

  As we saw the small, distant outline of Arthur’s Seat through the twilight, I tried to see the landscape through Johnson’s eyes by demolishing whole housing estates, extinguishing all lights, removing fences and reconfiguring the fields.

  As his post-chaise entered Edinburgh Johnson was deafened by ambulance sirens as the scurrying vehicles threaded their way through the exposed entrails of a city mutilated by unnecessary tram works. I trust that his final stop in the Royal Mile was more welcoming than Edinburgh Bus Station which remains despite its extensive renovation a soulless monument to human misery.

  I thanked Rory for his erudite, tolerant company and expressed regret that he would be unable to pick up the baton again until the last stages of the journey.

  As I made my way home I kept seeing the young couple with their suitcases at Stand 6 clinging to each other with expressions of shared dread.

  Edinburgh

  Dr. Johnson stretched, groaned and tried to stand up straight after being squashed for hours against the unfortunate Scott. Desperate to pee, unsteady on his feet, his unwashed wig at an angle far from jaunty and clutching an oak stave the size of a small tree – not that he had seen a tree since Streatham – he lurched towards the unwelcoming front door of Boyd’s Inn, Edinburgh.

  A traveller who had stayed in the same house a year or so before Johnson’s visit described it in the Gentleman’s Magazine as being ‘crowded and confused. The master lives in the stable, the mistress is not equal to the business.’

  Arnot in his History of Edinburgh commented on the typical inn, ‘their apartments dirty and dismal; and if the waiters happen to be out of the way, a stranger will perhaps be shocked with the novelty of being shown into a room by a dirty sun-burnt wench without shoes or stockings … an idle profusion of victuals, collected without taste, and dressed without skill or cleanliness, is commonly served up.’ No Scottish Tourist Board stars then.

  Things go from bad to worse for Johnson who quickly makes an enemy of the first person he speaks to. Boswell describes how ‘the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter, upon which the waiter with his greasy fingers lifted a lump of sugar and put it into it. Johnson then hurled the drink out of the window.

  ‘Behave yersel big man, dae that again and I’ll stick my fingers up yer effin nose and stick yer manky wig where the sun disnae shine!’

  On receiving a note from the venerable doctor Boswell scuttled down the High Street to rescue him and convey him to his own house in James Court.

  This was the moment that Boswell had lived for. He would have paced and fretted in his elegant house at the top of the High Street, almost sick with excitement waiting to hear of his guest’s arrival, grinding his fist into his hand with each passing hour, snapping at his long suffering wife, barking at his bemused servant. Where was the great Cham? Where was the man who would finally seal his pact with posterity, the man whose biography he would now write to massive acclaim? To think that he, James Boswell, heir to the vast Auchinleck estate, at the precociously young age of 33, could count both Voltaire and Rousseau among his acquaintances. Not to mention a successful legal career and indeed his fabulous success with women who would swoon at the very mention of his name. He thought fondly and with a welcome stirring in his breeches of the many prostitutes who had fallen for his dubious charms and his large purse as he whored and wenched his way through London, fathering several illegitimate children in the process. What prowess! What talent!

  He was a pathological star-struck groupie, a hanger-on of coat tails, a man who realised from an early age that his footnote in history would only be assured by basking in the reflected social and literary fame of others. With single minded application he had insinuated himself into the company of the Great and the Good. Yet his most prized trophy was only minutes away. Who else could have persuaded the ungainly ugly giant of letters to travel to the North Britain he disparaged at every opportunity? What a coup!

  Why someone as clever as Johnson welcomed the unctuous brand of flattery bestowed on him by his sycophantic shadow remains a mystery. Equally perplexing is why Johnson agreed to undertake a tour in a country which would soon come to despise his presence and his condescending observations.

  In his journal Boswell captures every bon mot that fell from Johnson’s lips as he entertained the aristocracy of Edinburgh society over the next few days. Sundry clergymen, minor academic and literary wannabes came to pay homage. Most of them now require lengthy footnotes to explain their importance.

  Judging by the letters to Hester Thrale, Johnson was less impressed by the chattering carnival of sycophants than Boswell realised. ‘At diner on Monday were the Dutchess of Douglass, an old Lady who talks broad Scotch with a paralytick voice, and is scarce understood by her own countrymen … At supper there was such a Conflux of company, that I could scarcely support the tumult. I have never been well in the whole Journey, and am very easily disordered.’

  A contemporary account also suggests that either Johnson’s guests were genuinely underwhelmed by the Great man’s pronouncements or that Edinburgh has always had an astonishing capacity for hypocrisy.

  Captain Topham, a cultured and extremely able army officer from England was resident in Edinburgh from 1774 – 1775 and as such was ideally placed to record the effect that Johnson had on the capital. ‘He was received with the most flattering marks of civility by every one … He was looked upon as a kind of miracle, and almost carried about for a show. Those who were in his company were silent the moment he spoke, lest they should interrupt him, and loose any of the good things he was going to say. He repaid all their attention to him with ill-breeding; and when in the company of the ablest men in the country, and who are certainly his superiors in point of abilities, his whole design was to show them how contemptibly he thought of them … A man of illiberal manners and surly disposition, who all his life long had been at enmity with the Scotch, takes a sudden resolution of travelling amongst them; not, according to his own account, “to find a people of liberal and refined education, but to see wild men and wild manners.
’’’

  It was time to seek wild men and wild manners in modern Edinburgh. Where better to find both than the High Street down which thoroughfare Boswell led Samuel Johnson.

  My companion through the streets of Edinburgh and on the next part of the journey was David who had been in possession of a bus pass for several years, using it to commute between his various places of employment as part time supply teacher of physics, college lecturer and weekend till operative at Marks and Spenser. His CV includes previous experience as a drug-taking hippy in Papua New Guinea, civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, university drop out, paratrooper and oil rig roustabout. He also possesses a massive historical knowledge. Probably a better man to have in an emergency than the Great Cham; although it is not impossible to picture the Doctor using his bulk to lift a stage coach out of a ditch before reviving the horses by breathing a well-chosen Greek homily into their nostrils.

  We chose to complete the famous walk along the High Street in reverse and, hoping for a spontaneous recreation of the sugar incident, we chose a pub close to the site of the original Boyd’s Inn. Not a surly waiter in sight, just two disinterested staff flirting with each other in the most desultory fashion. Instead of a traditional eighteenth century menu of whisky and potatoes we were offered gastro food of ambivalent ethnic origin for an exorbitant price.

  Perhaps we should have gone to The World’s End instead just over the road, the pub still associated with the murder of two young women who were last seen drinking with a stranger several decades back. The High Street has never been a place for the squeamish. Recently tourist tours have proliferated with promises of ghouls, ghosts, murderers in abundance, not to mention a fair quota of ‘jumper-ooters’ whose sole function is to lurk in dark wynds and leap out on the unsuspecting.