Another Not Scotland

      The Edinburgh Book Festival Ltd (International, of course) hired me to write this for publication by Cargo Publishing 2012 in a boxed set of four slim hardcover books with the titles Here and There, Somewhere and Everywhere. The set was named Elsewhere. The writers, asked “to explore what it meant to them to be elsewhere,” came up with prose grouped (said said the blurb) so that “Here were stories of home, There was travel and exploration, Somewhere a land of magic and imagination and Everywhere was what young adults find elsewhere.” My piece was 6th in Here. This essay spans more of my life that any other, showing how the more I have aged, the more interesting remote past has become to me. It does. Yes indeed.

      NOBODY IS MORE LIKE GOD than a baby. Babies live in eternity, a present tense without past, future and thought. When hungry or in pain their whole universe starves and is wholly evil until it supplies what they need, failing which they abolish it by dying. When fed, comfortable, awake they are fascinated by sensations, smells, tastes, noises, lights, colours – everything perceivable. Slowly they start noticing bodies besides theirs.

      As a baby I was taken out in a pram by my mother’s sister, Aunt Annie, through Riddrie Knowes near my home. Knowes is a Scots word for hills, which for years I thought meant trees, because though she pushed me uphill to reach it, we then went along an unpaved road between high elm and beech trees. Years later she told me that one day a dead crow fell into the pram from an overhead branch, perhaps struck dead by heart failure. This unexpected corpse did not hurt me, but she said that when we passed under that tree on later perambulations I looked up as if expecting another bird to fall from it. This showed I was starting to associate ideas, as Hobbes, Locke and Hume called the process. Pavlov later proved it anatomically by opening dogs’ cheeks to show they salivate on hearing dinner bells. More experience of that tree must have taught me that it was not a dependable source of dead birds, but proved I had begun connecting past events, however mistakenly, with future expectations.

      Before my son could walk or talk I saw that happening in his face when he was fed his first spoonful of ice cream. First a brief frown – What is this? – then a look of shock – It freezes! Hurts! His face tensed, mouth opened as he drew a deep breath to bellow out his rage, but before that cry emerged he suddenly stopped – his mouth was thawing the freezing cream, the pain of his cold palate roof was giving way to lovely new sweetness on his tongue. He swallowed, licked his lips, opened his mouth for more. The second spoonful made the first range of expressions happen again, but faster. When the last of the ice cream was eaten he was welcoming the coldness as an introduction to something better. Thus we learn to think, while discovering we are not God, but a body in times and places others share.

      Wordsworth is surely right to say that the younger we are the more wonderful appear realities like rainbows, sunlight, storms, flowers, mountains etcetera. So what also arouses our early appetite for tales of magic gifts, impossible monsters, fantastic kingdoms? I seem to remember that no sooner was home a familiar place to me than I wanted stories to take me elsewhere, to extravagantly different places. Two or three centuries ago some authors decided that fairy tales were invented by superstitious nursemaids who used them to fill the minds of respectable people’s children with nonsense. They wrote stories for children about children, tales about children who told lies and were disobedient so came to really bad ends, good children who sometimes suffered unfairly but were at last rewarded or else died and went to Heaven.

      Two very different poets hated such tales – Sam Johnson, a very sensible Christian, and Sam Coleridge, an intensely intellectual scatterbrained Romantic. They agreed that young children needed tales of giants and magical wonders – “to stretch their little minds” said Johnson. The reason was obvious long before Alfred Adler advertized his inferiority complex. Infants live in a world of giants because even children a year or two older tower over them. They can hardly ever redress unfair treatment so like imagining help from fairy godmothers, an Aladdin’s lamp, a Wizard of Oz. As a child in the 1930s and 40s I gloried in such stories and the Disney movies based on them, which were also wise enough to contain believable nightmares – the wicked witch’s gloating mockery of the skeletal prisoner dead from thirst, Dumbo Jumbo’s mother chained as a mad elephant when she revolts against her child being made a clown, Pinocchio growing donkey ears and tail after joining an orgy of vandalism. My appetite for fantasy was healthily abated between the years of eight and ten when I lived beside a Yorkshire market town.

      Our home was a bungalow at the side of a rural lane. On the other side was, a neglected field with trees and clumps of bushes, also an overgrown garden with an old draw-well smothered in ivy. I don’t recall even a ruined house nearby. Here with one or two school friends I made dens – secret places inside bushes or up trees which we wanted nobody else to see or know about. Much healthy open-air business was enjoyed searching for and making these as we explored the banks of the river Wharf, or cycled on country roads to places like the Jackdaw Crags beyond the town, looking for new ones. I recall nothing wild or remarkable done in these dens, not even stories we told each other there. Then in 1944 our family returned to Riddrie, the housing scheme in North-East Glasgow where I was born, and been as happy as most well-treated children, but which now felt like confinement. Secret dens could not be built in our back green or the adjacent public park. The banks of the nearby Monkland Canal would have done, being sufficiently wild, but were forbidden to me as dangerous. Other boys played outdoors by kicking balls about. I didn’t enjoy that. Fantastic fiction became my obsession. I visited Riddrie Public Library four or five times a week, never taking much more than a day to read a whole book.

      The genre I preferred began with someone who seemed like me in a commonplace world, who found an exit into a wonderland, a place of exciting adventure. The earliest classics of this genre were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and I had heard others dramatised on the