Children of the Master. Andrew Marr
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and coming home covered in mud and bruises week after week. Grudgingly, Bob made his way to the touchline once or twice. Laddie worth something after all? Maybe he and David would finally have a real conversation – a Scottish one, of course, elliptical and self-mocking, more silence than words, but ending in grunts of assent and a feeling not unlike warmth.
They never made it. When Davie was seventeen, Bob was hit by a car as he was coming out of the pub. He was killed instantly, blood all over the pavement. Eileen laughed when Councillor Daley and the polis came round to break the news, which was put down to shock (‘The puir soul, she can’t accept it.’ ‘Aye, puir Eileen, what’s she going to do wi’oot Boab?’). But David watched as her smile failed to disappear, remaining almost constantly on her lips for a full week afterwards. It was the most shocking thing he’d ever seen, but the truth was, he felt better too. When he came home from school in the afternoons Eileen had sometimes put the television on and was sitting boldly in the best room, eating ginger snaps.
Bob’s funeral was a big affair in the village. The sun shone. The fields around, brimming with rasps and the dancing shaws of tatties – King Eddies and Désirées mostly – glinted and waved in the sunlight. There was a holiday air. By now many of the fields had been filled in by the spreading housing estate – nice houses, big windows, decent-sized rooms – Bob did good work – so that the boundary between town and village had almost closed up. Councillors and local bigwigs were all there, and the crowd from the pub, and a dozen relatives from Glasgow, so the RC chapel was packed. The local MP, a tall, pale, droning man, gave the eulogy, talking of how many houses for ordinary decent Labour folk Bob Petrie’s men had built, what a supporter he had been of good causes – ‘aye a haund in his pocket’ – and how missed he would be as a father and husband. At this he poked the air, almost animatedly, as if he was looking to be contradicted. Davie, a man today, almost bursting out of his new suit, looked straight ahead with a solemn expression. His mother caused a flutter in the pews behind her by audibly snorting. She raised her chin, smiled slightly, and looked straight at the priest, a ferrety, pockmarked little Irishman, who avoided her gaze.
Bob’s death had brought calm, even a kind of peace, to the bungalow. He didn’t leave much behind him in the way of clutter. Eileen took his golf clubs and the porcelain model of Robert Burns he’d once given her down to the Oxfam shop along with his clothes.
But David Petrie’s hopes for university were over. He’d been offered places at Glasgow, sixty miles north, and further away still, at St Andrews. Everybody said he was very smart. One teacher had used the word ‘preternatural’, which he and his mother had had to look up, and had a good laugh about. He had hoped to study engineering, or maybe even history. But the foreman, one of the few of his father’s friends David had liked, had come to him and Eileen and made it clear that the business would vanish if there was no one to succeed.
A plan was agreed. Uncle Markie, a prosperous lawyer from Airdrie, would step in as boss for a year or two while David learned the ropes. Then, if it still existed, the business would be his.
Nursing a pint in the railwaymen’s social club, Uncle Markie spoke about Davie to some of the lads from Petrie’s Builders: ‘He’s a big, braw boy. Good stubble on his chin. No’ as cheery, like, as the old man. Keeps himsel’ to himsel’. But bright, they say, a good head on him. And there’s naebody else, Bob always telt me, ready to tak the wheel. So gie the lad a chaunce, eh?’
And indeed, Davie did have an old head on young shoulders. He quickly understood that without the right political connections, the company’s work would dry up almost immediately. So he too joined the party, not bothering with the Young Socialists or any of ‘that militant rubbish’, and found he could speak well at meetings to creasy, crumpled, half-cut older men. He wrote cheques. He turned up for the quiet one-to- ones in back rooms. He picked up the council minutes before they’d been typed. He played ‘a round or two’, well enough, with lawyers and surveyors. As for the lads themselves, he learned the forenames and the nicknames and the kids’ names. He could tell Bluey from Ham, Sparks from Gerry-Antrim. He learned who lived with his mother and who was the bright-eyed woman in the office with two men at home, not one.
He turned up at the ward meetings, and the branch meetings, and sat patiently while lonely men rehearsed the history of the party and the mistakes of the current leadership. He was sent to the constituency general management committee, and with only a year under his belt was chosen as a delegate to the national party conference. It was there that the drug of politics first entered his bloodstream, and he realised that perhaps there was more to this game than simply protecting contracts.
Home again, and the arguments were vicious, as they were all around Britain at the time. The so-called ‘super colliery’ had closed in the next constituency; there was still open-cast, but in the dark-grey pit villages around Glaikit the mood was bitter, though too mournful to be revolutionary. David Petrie defended his party leader with a passion and fluency he hadn’t realised he had. It didn’t make him popular, at least to start with; but it did get him listened to. By his early twenties he was almost as big a figure in the town as his father had been in the village. But he didn’t stand for the council. He could either use his connections and reputation to build the business, and keep his mother secure, or he could renounce all of that – and for what? Ayrshire, Scotland, and the Labour Party could manage well enough without him.
So every day he came into work, as Petrie’s vans pulled up outside the unfinished Keir Hardie Close or James Maxton Way; as the number of ‘girls’ in the office doubled, then doubled again; as the smarmy wee Prod at the Clydesdale agreed a much bigger loan; as he bought out a local scaffolding company and leased a dozen new cement mixers, young Davie Petrie would smile to himself and think, ‘Fuck you, Big Bob. Aye – you, you second-rate cunt.’
So Petrie sat out the fag end of the Blair and Brown years, making money and growing thicker, and growing the company too. He married up, an Edinburgh graduate who had been to a posh school in St Andrews and whose father farmed a big estate. He built his own house, using stone from a new quarry north of Glasgow, and built a new bungalow for his mother next door to it. He fathered two children, and was a notably gentle and loving father to them. His PA noted that for the first time he was leaving work before 9 p.m., and told the office, ‘It’ll be the making of him.’
These were the years of the Scottish National Party’s triumphant hegemony. Labour folk in Scotland sucked sour plums, kept themselves to themselves. Petrie didn’t waver in his allegiance, but he made sure to get on well with his local MSP, and even to oil up to the housing minister in Edinburgh. He was old enough – just about – by now to play both sides.
From the outside, there was no doubt: Davie Petrie had survived, and more. Inside, it wasn’t so easy. He struggled with his wife; he was slow to express affection. He hated being touched. At times, triggered by the most meaningless, trivial things – one of his sons laughing on the telephone, losing some paperwork – he would be overwhelmed by a black rage that had him shaking, his fists balling, his teeth clenched. This scared him, and he learned to deal with it, turning his back and walking away, using breathing exercises he’d been taught at a gym class. He kept himself fit. He liked to walk up the braes behind the village, where there was a little birch wood and a burn running down. He’d squat down and stare at the magic of the colourless water running over green stones, and rub his fingers on the moss and smell the wild garlic. He loved the view that spread out in the distance – wobbly blue lines of Ayrshire hills, with Glaikit and the colliery hidden in the foreground. Good times.
Well, mostly. Even then, some days, there was a blankness from the moment he awoke, a wall of white vapour, a background drone. He felt almost outside himself. Some other dim creature, it seemed, a badly-put-together, ungainly homunculus, was acting the part of David Petrie. Away from Glaikit, they might have called it depression. There were occasions, in the pub or at Tesco’s, when he bumped into loutish young men he’d known as boys at school. In their presence, he felt himself shrinking: the wounds weren’t yet quite healed.
By the time David Cameron and his snooty coalition were in office, David Petrie was being asked to speak to Labour conferences on behalf of ‘small business’. Not that small, by now. He had money in his pocket.