Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray
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won’t pretend the doctor used these exact words but he referred to these things in the order I have recorded them, and stuttered on the s of scalpel, making me imagine a surgical knife vibrating in a trembling fist. Later we heard the chugging of a small boat. He said, “That’s the lighter,” and went out and came in again with three seamen and a Spanish doctor, a broad, duffle-coated, rimless-spectacled, crew-cut, laconic man. He spoke quietly to the ship’s doctor, tested me with a stethoscope then left, refusing the offer of a drink. I heard the chugging of the boat going away.
I was shifted into hospital later that morning in bright sunshine. I was still wrapped tightly on the stretcher with only my face exposed. I felt comfortable, privileged and so incurious I did not try to see anything not directly above my eyes. I saw a section of the high side of the ship against a pale blue sky. I heard a babble of voices and felt a hard cold breeze on my cheek. I think I recall the top of a white mast or flagstaff with a wind-taut flag on it. This must have been aboard the lighter. Sometimes my upward view was irregularly framed by downward-staring faces: the doctor, Ian, customs officers and strangers. Once the lined dry face of a middle-aged lady looked down for a moment, smiled and said, “l say, you hev hed a bit of bed luck, you’ve come rathah a croppah, heven’t you,” and some other terse kindly things full of English-hunting-field stoicism. I liked her for her kindness, and for being so easy to classify. I saw the wooden ceiling of a customs shed, the low steel ceiling of an ambulance, and then, after a ten-minute sound of fast uphill car travel, the cream ceiling of a hospital vestibule. In this way I arrived in Gibraltar without seeing the rock. Indeed, since leaving London, I had only once seen the sea, through portholes, during the first breakfast afloat. I was now put to bed under a suspended bottle of cortisone solution, which dripped down through a rubber tube into my arm. I was visited by the hospital chief, the laconic doctor who had examined me on board the ship. He said, “You are suffering, of course, from a bad but perfectly ordinary asthma attack. I was sure of that as soon as I saw you this morning, but could not say so. You understand, of course, that it is against professional etiquette to question the decision of a colleague.”
The ward was three times longer than broad with eight beds to each long wall. The wall facing me was all window from pillow-level to ceiling. I saw through it a glassed-in veranda containing a few beds and beyond that the water of a wide bay. The hospital stood high up so steep a slope that I could see only the top of the building in front, two elegant towers faced with biscuit-coloured plaster. Far beyond and below these the bay had several sorts of ship moored in it, protected by long breakwaters with cranes on them. Distance made the ships look too small even to be useful toys while the breakwaters, exceptional bits of engineering to surround such a great body of water, seemed a few lines of forlorn geometry drawn upon it. The far side of the bay was all hills and small mountains with the whitish jumble of a town along the coast at their foot. This was Spain.
Although the head doctor was Spanish the routine and discipline of the hospital was British, the matron was a Scot, and of the three sisters two were English and one Welsh. The nurses were small plump Spanish or Gibraltarian girls, and most of the patients were Gibraltarian: that is, bilingual Spaniards who lived on the rock. They were inclined to be middle-aged and gaunt. There was a Velazquez-type dwarf called Paco with a calm, smooth, dignified face and slightly amused mouth. He would stand beside a bed resting his folded arms on it and talking quietly to the occupant in Spanish, or just leaning his brow on his folded arms. To my right was Major Mellors, elderly, gaunt and hawk-nosed. Facing me across the ward was Sigurdson, a taciturn humorous ship’s mate from Lancashire. I learned the names and manners of these people gradually. The inmates of a hospital ward observe their neighbours closely but avoid, at first, contacting them, for each is too engrossed by their own illness to want the burden of sympathizing with someone else.
During my first week in hospital I was visited regularly by lan, who had taken lodgings in Gibraltar, but after finding I was out of danger he set off into Spain. He was going to the village of Estepona a few hours journey up the coast, for he had heard good reports of it. He meant to find decent rooms there, settle in, and I would join him when I left the hospital. I made him take two pounds to compensate him for some of the money he had lost by the delay. The day after he left for Spain I was surprised to see him enter the ward. He sat by my bed and explained that he did not like Spain.
“It’s so unhygienic, Alasdair. I got off the bus at Estepona and set out to find a place to stay, but the flies! I travelled everywhere inside this cloud of flies. I mean, it was ridiculous. And the children who kept following me, begging, were almost as hard to shake off. And everybody stared. I mean, they didn’t do it sideways or behind your back, they stood still in the street and really looked at you. I found a place. I won’t describe the sanitation because there wasn’t any. I went out for a drink with a bloke I had met in the bus. We went into a bar and ordered wine at the counter. Before pouring it out the barman put down two wee plates each with a wee dirty bit of fish on it. I mean, we were expected to eat that. The counter was filthy – nothing was properly clean. I mean, outside the village you get these farm buildings with nice white walls, very picturesque. And when you go near you see the ground covered with little heaps of shit. They must just have squatted in the shadow to get rid of it.”
“What was the countryside like?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s picturesque all right. I mean, it’s beautiful in a queer way. You get these low brownish hills in the dusk with a line of donkeys and their riders going along the top against a fantastic sunset. I mean it might grow on you. But I realize now that what I want to paint is in Scotland. I don’t think I’ve wasted my money if I’ve discovered that. I think l’ll use what’s left to do some painting up the East coast, in Fife or Angus. Maybe I’ll call in at Paris on the way home.”
I won’t pretend l used these exact words but he talked in that style and mentioned these things. Three days later he got on a boat which took him to France.
I was not unhappy in that hospital. The staff kept pain out of me with doses and injections. I was nursed, fed and allowed to live completely to myself. The homesickness seemed to have been burned out by my experience aboard ship. Sometimes a faint “Over the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, my heart remembers how” feeling drifted through my mind like faint smoke, but that was romantic nostalgia, nothing like the earlier sick hunger for Glasgow and those I knew there. This new equanimity came partly from the routine of hospital, which was familiar to me, but there was another reason.
A few years earlier I had begun work on a tragicomical novel and meant to write some more of it in Spain. In my luggage was a Cantablue Expanding Wallet, a portable cardboard filing cabinet shaped like an accordion and holding two complete chapters and the notebooks and diaries from which I meant to make the rest. I put this on my bedside locker and began working. I was slightly ashamed of this activity, which struck me as presumptuous and banal: presumptuous because, like Scott Fitzgerald, I believed the novel was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, which meant that a novelist needed to understand great states of feeling, and although twenty-three years old I had never known carnal love and feared I never would; banal because one or two friends had also started writing a novel, and the rest had thought of writing one. So when the nurses asked what I was doing I lied and told them I was writing this report. But actually I was in Glasgow, the Glasgow of my childhood and adolescence and studenthood, and far more at home there than when I underwent these painful states, for now my mind hovered above the person I had been in perfect safety, without affection but with great curiosity. I found that person unpleasant but comic and was fascinated by the things and people it knew. My world was confused, shabby and sad, but had as much order, variety, good feeling and potency as any other. I tried to write an ordinary, easily-read language which showed the sadness and shabbiness but made the other things (which keep us alive) equally evident. While I worked at this writing I enjoyed the best happiness of all, the happiness which does not notice itself, until, stopping, we feel tired and see that an hour has passed like a minute, and know we have done as well as we can, and perhaps one day someone will be glad. I am sure this happiness is not rare. Everyone feels a little of it who makes or keeps something useful in the world, and does not just work for money and promotion. I suspect there is more of this happiness among skilled manual workers than in higher income groups,