Boswell's Bus Pass Read online

  We passed Pie Bob’s Cafe and the Ghurkha Tandoori in quick succession. Locals have to choose between two Little and Large posters, one showing a smiling fat man, presumably Bob and the other depicting a more austere and undeniably hungrier figure thin as a whippet and fierce as a fierce thing in the face of the enemy.

  On a sign above the windows an unnaturally grinning baby mouthed the imprecation Let’s talk. In anticipation of the campaign’s success and the challenge of an emerging army of articulate, demanding toddlers, MENSA waiting lists have already been capped and tenders invited to build new elite universities for the under-fives.

  A potential passenger spat belligerently in the general direction of the slowing bus. Dressed in army fatigues and of pensionable age he occupied the seat in front of me, affording a close up of a large scar down the back of his head that had proved impressively stubble-resistant. All facial or head scars invite speculation. Accidents happen, so do muggings and general badness leading to insomnia, anger and flash-backs, thoughts of revenge and self-blame.

  Spitting was going to be the theme of the day; through the window a workman in a high visibility vest tossed an arc of saliva over a ditch that he was inspecting for a reason known only to the Roads Department and God.

  Like all good buses the M9 refused to adhere to the route of the ubiquitous flying crow and shot into housing estates whenever the chance arose. A road in a rundown suburb of Arbroath provided the answer to one of the great mysteries of the universe: where do boy racers go when they are not boy racing? Consecutive semi-detached driveways were hosting identically garish hybrid vehicles with a surfeit of fins, darkened windows and stencilled monikers. They looked impotent, all thunder stolen. The disillusion was comparable to finding Cinderella’s coach in a Tesco car park.

  Two visual haikus from the outskirts of Montrose:

  A single red flower

  shone fiercely against gray stones

  in a church yard.

  A garden overlooking

  the swollen sea basin

  a wind turbine and a pony.

  ‘About eleven at night we arrived at Montrose. We found but a sorry inn, where we dined on haddocks, pickled salmon, veal cutlets and fowl, and I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr Johnson’s lemonade, for which he called him “Rascal!’’ It put me in great glee that our landlord was an Englishman.’

  The great lemonade scandal was turning into a national disaster. The Dishonourable Company of Waiters had been mobilised, and the word passed among them, ‘Put yer fingers in the big bastard’s lemonade and watch him go aff his heid!’

  The offending hostelry was the Ship Inn at 107 High Street. The building is still there and is approached down a narrow close. I surprised myself by feeling a genuine frisson as I opened the gate between a Polish bakers and a bargain store. My reverential progress was observed by a friendly Irishman leaning out of an upper window in the close. His languid demeanour suggested that he might well have been leaning on his window sill for the last 250 years. The Ship Inn is now a private home with chintz curtains.

  From Montrose Johnson and Boswell travelled the few miles to Laurencekirk. Their incentive was to see the village where Ruddiman, a scholar they both admired, had been schoolmaster. A further incentive was the Gardenstone Arms named after the village’s virtual owner and benefactor. Lord Gardenstone’s misguided philanthropy had extended to endowing the local pub with an extraordinary collection of reading material for the benefit and erudition of any passing tinkers, mountebanks or unclassifiable rogues. Any rancid pedlar could sit with a foaming tankard of Old Bedlam and lose himself in Magno’s Observations on Anatomy in Latin or Boerhaave’s Commentaries on the Aphorisms of Diseases, naturalised into English. If he wished to further hone his capacity for intrigue or indeed figure out how best to escape from the inn without paying he could always skip read Machiavelli in Italian.

  It is a concept whose time has come again. Little Chefs and motorway service stations up and down the land are luring customers with promises of a free Will Self with every latte.

  As I waited for the number 9 to Laurencekirk I was approached by a deaf, dumb woman who had decided that I needed help and was determined to be of assistance. Having removed her teeth to provide even greater mobility to her face she managed to ascertain where I was trying to get to, drew my attention to the digitalised display of bus times and wished me well with a deliciously wicked and life-enhancing beam that stretched from ear to ear.

  ‘We drove over a wild moor. It rained and the scene was somewhat dreary. Dr Johnson repeated with solemn emphasis Macbeth’s speech on meeting the witches.’

  Perhaps I had just met my own friendly, helpful witch.

  The driver stopped in Laurencekirk and with a patience normally associated with the caring professions eventually asked, ‘Far ye gain?’ For some reason I was expecting somewhere bigger and had failed to realise that we were at our journey’s end.

  A bulldozer was squatting on the heap of rubble that used to be The Gardenstone Arms. Peering through the wire mesh I failed to see a single copy of Tull’s Horse-hoeing Husbandry, not even a page blowing in the wind. Just page three of The Sun and an empty milk carton. According to Linda who ran the local garage, it had lain empty up until three months ago when a young lad, his brain addled from having watched all the repeats of Get Britains Talented Big Celebrity Dancing Brother Out of Here, broke in and set fire to the place. On a previous visit he had been unduly influenced by the copy of McPherson’s Truncated History of the Vandals he had found tucked behind the cistern in the Gents.

  Having confirmed that Monboddo House, Boswell and Johnson’s next port of call, was not on or anywhere near a bus route I consulted the unwritten rules of my journey. They are quite unambiguous and clearly specify that travel must be by bus. Furthermore the equally unwritten small print addresses all contingencies; if the proposed route is not served by bus then the only permissible alternatives are the boot, the bike or the boat. In fragrant violation of these rules I returned to Linda who conveniently also doubled as the local taxi driver. The negotiated exorbitant fare left me fearing bankruptcy while Linda was dreaming of replacing her aging Cadillac with a completely new model before driving in the general direction of a Tuscan sunset, a restored villa with vineyard and a new life.

  Lord Monboddo was obviously barking mad. Tucked away in one of his six volumes of Ancient Metaphysics is the assertion that ‘not only are there tailed men extant, but such as the ancients describe Satyrs have been found, who had not only tails, but the feet of goats, and horns on their heads … We have the authority of a father of the Church for a greater singularity of the human form, and that is of men without heads but with eyes in their breasts … There is another singularity as great or greater than any I have hitherto mentioned, and that is of men with the heads of dogs.’ Neither of the farm workers we passed had dog heads but their possibly all-seeing-breasts were covered.

  Although he may have eventually gained a tongue-in-cheek reputation as an evolutionist before his time Monboddo’s research findings seem rooted in the opium pipe and a very full moon.

  He also tried to convince a gullible public that the orangutan was ‘a character mild and gentle, affectionate too, and capable of friendship, with the sense of what is decent and becoming.’ This translates as no picking fleas off each other or dropping banana skins.

  Lord Monboddo was an early exponent of the benefits of frequent cold baths. Such a view would have been anathema to Johnson who was never known to take a bath, warm or cold. Because of his determination to plunge his own children into cold water the amiable landowner attracted a degree of criticism from the authorities. Had there been an At Risk register in eighteenth century Angus the young Monboddos would have been on it.

  ‘I knew that he and Dr Johnson did not love each other; yet I was unwilling not to visit his Lordship, and was also curious to see them together.’

  Not loving each other
is an understatement given Monboddo’s belief that Johnson had compiled a dictionary ‘of a barbarous language, a work which a man of real genius rather than undertake would choose to die of hunger’. Perhaps the reference to hunger provides a clue as to why, once they met, they both got on splendidly. They dined on ‘an admirable soup, ham, peas, and moor-fowl and parted the best of friends’.

  Although on this occasion Boswell’s instinct proved well-founded he still too often resembles an impresario with an obsession for arranging intellectual cock fights and freak shows. He was a social alchemist whose party trick was to bring together combustible elements and then sharpen his quill to cement his reputation.

  As the Cadillac negotiated farm tracks it was difficult to connect with the wild moor that Boswell saw. Linda told me that, in any case, I was three months too late as the previous owner who loved showing his house off to complete strangers had sold up and moved to Stonehaven. Increasingly paranoid, I half expected to hear that the house had been next on the young chuckling arsonist’s list or had been ransacked by a vengeful orangutan. My fears were partially realised. The new owners, being ridiculously young, had ordered that the home be gutted, stripped and transformed.

  I was greeted by another bulldozer, more scaffolding and a lurching Portaloo. One of the workmen confirmed that the new owners were not about and invited me to look inside the temple soon to be dedicated to IKEA. It was a totally unedifying experience. Back in the garden I peered in vain at the rhododendrons hoping for at least a glimpse of a goat-footed satyr or a stray dog with a man’s head.

  After asking Linda to drive me to an Auto Bank, the entire contents of which I emptied in an attempt to pay her, I waited again for the number nine bus to take me back into Montrose. The driver, a one man harbinger of doom, regaled me and the other passenger who was in his nineties, with a lurid account of the bomb scare at Aberdeen Station earlier in the day. His subtext was that it is safer to travel by bus. Behind a hayrick I caught sight of three thwarted Mujahideen sharing a kebab and a packet of Camels.

  The further North you travel the better the quality of books in charity shops. Not only did the Montrose Shelter boast a 1903 Gaelic dictionary for £10 but also Macaulay’s Essay on Johnson for £3. It had to be bought. It proved to be a difficult purchase as the gently shaking assistant insisted on inspecting every page lest an unpleasant aphorism or surprise lurked in the Notes, Glossary and Aids to Study.

  As I waited for the 113 to Aberdeen I was disappointed not to be greeted by my friendly gurning guide. She was probably dozing somewhere, tilting in her dreams at bus shelters.

  The boy racers were warming up in the High Street after their anonymous suburban sojourn. The trophy cars throbbed incongruously and prematurely with the aural after burn of fighter jets. For the drivers the twilight was the harbinger of octane-fuelled conquests ahead; the girl from third year who was not usually allowed out after dark and the blonde from the chip shop whose perfume could not mask the day job.

  My fellow passengers on the Aberdeen bus included an androgynous punk with deep carrot coloured hair and more piercings than a High Church martyr. Despite exuding aggression she nursed a small white cardboard box as if it held the Holy Grail. Inside were her hopes for a future unclouded by family hatred, untainted by an abusive partner, and a tiny seed of happiness which if kept in the dark might, just might, grow and blossom years from now in a better place.

  The bus driver was either sporting the ripest of black eyes or had a secret life as the only member of the Aberdeenshire Panda Impersonation Society. Perhaps he too was a victim of domestic violence living with some huge woman from the pages of the Beano who counted the notes from his wage packet with the rolling pin tucked under her ample armpit. The speed at which he drove suggested that he was eager to seek consolation in the bosoms of his mistress who had already bought the fillet steak to drape over his wounded eye.

  Black eye notwithstanding, he was able to josh the two pensioners who fumbled with their bus passes, accusing them of having broken the automatic reader. As a consequence they laughed like haddies for the rest of the journey.

  The spirit-level horizon kept its equilibrium despite the bus ducking and diving down braes. The North Sea was battleship grey smudged with white where the tide messed with the wooden groins.

  The Macaulay proved even more of a bargain that I had hoped. For some reason I had assumed that the essay would be a stuffy and pompous piece of hagiography. This was not the case.

  ‘He had become an incurable hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons, and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady’s shoe. He would amaze a drawing room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord’s Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back and repair the omission.’

  Even the benevolent driver of the 125 would have struggled with him. ‘Look pal, I understand that for some reason you feel obliged to finger every seat on the bus and touch ma ticket machine every time we go round a bend but if you dinnae sit down ye can get aff at the next stop. And nae blaspheming!’

  With the deceleration of a Hercules transport plane the bus embarked on a controlled plummet towards the hidden fishing village of Johnshaven. The war memorial was in a neat line with an impressively-sized public convenience and a playing field. War, death, emergency relief and football. We stopped just short of the point where the cottages with creels and clothes lines threatened to stagger into the sea. No one got on. No one had got on for several decades.

  At a remote stop on the main road a party of ramblers boarded with sufficient outdoor gear to make the south face of K2 at least a possibility before they reached Aberdeen. They were adults with special needs and their carers but such was the shared hilarity it was impossible to separate those with the needs from the wounded healers who accompanied them. As their joy became ever louder they elicited much tutting from a lumber-jacketed, baseball cap clad Neanderthal at the back of the bus. Sunken into a prematurely obese middle age he had failed to match up to the exacting standards demanded by the Kincardineshire Aryan Front and had no alternative but to join the White Doric Purity Party whose selection criteria are less rigorous. Had the bus been mine I would have torn up his ticket and thrown him off.

  There were surreal elements to the conversation as the party reminisced over previous social highlights; ‘Do you mind the power cut in the church when we had to start the pew in the dark?’All of them joined in the memory apart from a woman in her forties with Down’s syndrome. She sat morose and remote from the others. It seemed unlikely that her plight had gone unnoticed. Even when they reached her stop she left the bus without anyone saying goodbye. What had she done up the hills that merited this heavy sanction?

  When the next member left she had shouts of ‘Nae pubs Nancy!’ ringing in her ears.

  The bus drew into a lay-by for no apparent reason. Perhaps Black Eye wished he had used the facilities in Johnshaven or else his mistress was a gypsy traveller. The truth was less mundane: it was a secret rendezvous where drivers swapped the road kill they had collected en route and discussed recipes. Not too fanciful if you look at an archived review from The Guardian:

  ‘For most, a squashed hedgehog or flattened badger lying on the side of the road is a tragic sight – for Arthur Boyt it is an opportunity for a free, tasty and nutritious meal. Mr Boyt has spent the last 50 years scraping carcasses from the side of the road and chucking them, together with a few herbs and spices, into his cooking pot.

  Th
e retired civil servant has sampled the delights of weasel, rat and cat. His most unusual meal was a greater horseshoe bat, which he reckons is not dissimilar in taste to gray squirrel, if the comparison helps. Fox tends to repeat on him. He has tucked into labrador, nibbled at otter and could not resist trying porcupine when he came across a spiky corpse on holiday in Canada.’

  The idea of finding a dead porcupine in Aberdeenshire is of course, silly. The reason for the stop was soon apparent. There are fewer rituals more elaborate than that performed when one driver, his shift finished, hands over to a colleague. Log books, badges, keys, secret nuclear code, papal secrets and best wishes are exchanged with all due solemnity. Why this happened in the middle of nowhere remains a mystery.

  Boswell was bored by the journey to Aberdeen; ‘We had tedious driving, and were somewhat drowsy.’ Johnson seems to have endured the final 25 miles with more equanimity; ‘We were satisfied with the company of each other – as well riding in the chaise as sitting at an inn.’

  Aberdeen

  Johnson may have regretted the comparison as there was not a room to be had at the New Inn at the junction of Union Street and King Street in Aberdeen. It was only when some minor lackey recognised that Boswell was the son of the circuit judge given to transporting miscreants that accommodation was found. ‘Don’t send me away My Lord, I was a help to your son a few years back …’

  The inn became a bank and is now an inn again having been gobbled up by the Wetherspoon’s empire. If this trend continues all 18th century towns will subtly recreate themselves. Like other pubs in the chain The Archibald Simpson has taken over the function previously fulfilled by social work day centres. The beer and food are so cheap that pensioners can sit and gently booze all day long for very little outlay until they shuffle happily out into the twilight to be replaced by the first wave of office workers pausing on the way home.