was that they had been earned. The men who had thronged its pubs in its heyday were noisy and sometimes crude and sometimes violent, but they knew they were stealing from nobody. Every laugh had been paid in sweat. The man who had embarrassed himself in drink the night before would turn up next morning where the job was and work like a gang of piece-work navvies.
When there was nowhere for him to turn up, what could he do? Like so many of the towns of the industrial West of Scotland, Graithnock had offered little but the means to work. It had exemplified the assumption that working men are workers. Let them work. In the meantime, other people could get on with the higher things, what they liked to call ‘culture’. At the same time, the workers had made a culture of their own. It was raw. It was sentimental songs at spontaneous parties, half-remembered poems that were admitted into no academic canon of excellence, anecdotes of doubtful social taste, wild and surrealistic turns of phrase, bizarre imaginings that made Don Quixote look like a bank clerk, a love of whatever happened without hypocrisy. In Graithnock that secondary culture had been predominant. While in the local theatre successive drama companies died in ways that J. B. Priestley and Agatha Christie and Emlyn Williams never intended, the pub-talk flourished, the stories were oral novels and the songs would have burst Beethoven’s eardrums if he hadn’t already been deaf. But it was all dependent on money. Even pitch-and-toss requires two pennies.
When the money went, Graithnock turned funny but not so you would laugh. It had always had a talent for violence and that violence had always had its mean and uglier manifestations. Besides the stand-up fights between disgruntled men, there had been the knives and the bottles and the beatings of women. The difference now was that contempt for such behaviour was less virulent and less widespread. Something like honour, something as difficult to define and as difficult to live decently without, had gone from a lot of people’s sense of themselves. Sudden treachery in fights had assumed the status of a modern martial art, rendering bravery and strength and speed and endurance as outmoded as a crossbow. An old woman could be mugged in a park, an old man tied and tortured in his home for the sake of a few pounds, five boys could beat up a sixth, a girl be raped because she was alone, the houses of the poor be broken into as if they had been mansions. This was not an epidemic. Few people were capable of these actions but those who weren’t were also significantly less capable of a justly held condemnation. That instinctive moral strength that had for so long kept the financial instability of working-class life still humanly habitable, like a tent pitched on a clifftop but with guy-ropes of high-tensile steel, had surely weakened.
Theorists rode in from time to time from their outposts of specialisation, bearing news that was supposed to make all clear. Television was setting bad examples. Society had become materialistic. Schools had abdicated authority. The hydrogen bomb was everyone’s neurosis. What was certain was that Graithnock didn’t know itself as clearly any more.
Even physically, the town had been not so much changed as disfigured. Never a handsome place, it had had at its centre some fine old buildings that had some history. They were demolished and where they had been rose a kind of monumental slum they called a shopping precinct. As a facelift that has failed leaves someone looking out from nobody’s face in particular so Graithnock had become a kind of nowhere fixed in stone. The most characteristic denizens of its new precinct, like the ghosts of industry past, were alcoholics and down-and-outs.
Thornbank, as the child copes with the parents’ problems, was suffering too. A lot of the redundancies from Graithnock had come here. But there were apparent differences. The same television programmes reached Thornbank, the schools had much the same problems, the hydrogen bomb had been heard of there too. But a stronger and continuing sense of identity remained. One reason was, perhaps, its size. It was a place where people vaguely felt they knew nearly everybody else. This absence of anonymity meant that in Thornbank they were often, paradoxically, more tolerant of nonconformism than people might have been in bigger places. Difference was likely to become eccentricity before it could develop anti-social tendencies.
There was in the small town, for example, a group of punks, working-class schismatics who had seceded from their parents’ acceptance of middle-class conventions. Their changing hair colours, purples, greens and mauves, their earrings that were improvised from various objects, their clothes that looked as if they were acting in several plays at once, all of them bad, were not admired. But they were mainly confronted with a slightly embarrassed tolerance, like a horrendous case of acne. Of Big Andy, who led a local punk group called Animal Farm and whose Mohican haircut stood six-feet-three above the ground and seemed to change colour with his mood, it was often mentioned in mitigation that his Uncle Jimmy had been a terrible fancy dresser. Genes, the implication was, were not to be denied.
This communal sense of identity found its apotheosis in a few local people. Thornbank knew itself most strongly through them. They were as fixed as landmarks in the popular consciousness. If two expatriates from that little town had been talking and one of them mentioned the name of one of that handful of people, no further elaboration would have been necessary. They would have known themselves twinned. Those names were worn by Thornbank like an unofficial coat of arms. These were people to whom no civic monuments would ever be erected. They were too maverick for that. Part of their quality was precisely that they had never courted acceptance, refused to make a career of what they were. They were simply, and with an innocent kind of defiance, themselves.
There was Mary Barclay. She was in her seventies and fragile as bell metal. They called her Mary the Communist and although nearly everyone in the town thought Communism something historically discredited, a bit like thalidomide, the epithet as it applied to her carried no opprobrium. It wasn’t that the term defined her so much as she qualified the term. She was Marx’s witness for the defence in Thornbank. Her life had been an unsanctimonious expression of concern for others. While helping everybody she could, she had also helped herself without inhibition to what in life injured nobody else. She had lived with three men and married none. She had buried the one who died on her, decently, and been loving to her two daughters who, as far as anybody knew, had never reproached her. She was who she was and you could take it or leave it, but you would have been a fool to leave it.
There was Davie Dykes, known as Davie the Deaver, which meant if you listened long enough he would talk you deaf. But it was mainly good talk. He told elaborate and highly inventive lies. Each day he reconstructed his own genealogy. His ancestry was legion. At sixty, he still refused to be circumscribed by his circumstances. Here was just a route to anywhere.
There was Dan Scoular. His place in the local pantheon was more mysterious. He was young for such elevation, thirty-three. His most frequently commented on talent was a simple one. He could knock people unconscious very quickly, frequently with one punch. It wasn’t easy to see why such a minimal ability and of such limited application should have earned him so much status. It was true that Thornbank, like a lot of small places which may feel themselves rendered insignificant by the much-publicised wonders of the bigger world, had a legendising affection for anything local that was in any way remarkable. There were those who kept a Thornbank version of The Guinness Book of Records: the heaviest child that had been born here, the fastest runner in the town, the man who had been arrested most for breach of the peace. But that hardly explained that converging ambience of something achieved and possibilities to come in which Dan Scoular moved for them.
Their name for him was, perhaps, a clue. They called him ‘the big man’. It was an expression used of other men in the town, of course. But if the words were used out of any explanatory context, they meant Dan Scoular. Though he was six-feet-one, the implications were more than physical. They meant stature in some less definable sense. They had to do with his being, they suspected, in some way more inviolate than themselves, more autonomously himself. They had to do, perhaps most importantly, with the generosity and ease with which they felt he inhabited what was special about himself, his refusal to abuse a gift or turn it unfairly to his own advantage. For he could be quietly kind.
Yet the image the people of Thornbank had of him was false. They had mythologised his past and falsified his
