late afternoon snack at the Muir house consisted of a half slice of unbuttered white bread, a barley scone, and warm water with milk and sugar, a drink that was known, with characteristic Scots humor, as “content.” After this John and David would cross the high street to the Gilryes’, where in front of the ingle grandfather Gilrye would put them through their recitations. In the dark they would then come home to a mealy boiled potato, the inevitable scone, and family worship, in which Daniel Muir took the leading role, praying long and fervently that he and his should not fall into the many temptations. And then to bed. If this seems a cheerless routine, it is well to remember that the lot of many children in factories and on farms at this time was immeasurably worse, and soon enough the Muir children themselves would have cause in the Wisconsin backwoods to think fondly of these days of comparative luxury and idleness.
And they found their outlets, particularly John and David, not only on Saturday and holiday excursions along the shore and into the country to the west but also at night after they had been put to bed. In the high-ceilinged third-floor room the brothers played at voyaging under the bed covers, imagining themselves on tall-masted ships scudding before winds that took them to America or other outlandish places as they worked their ways farther down into the smothering warmth of the blankets.
They also played more adventurous and forbidden games of daring they called “scootchers.” John would formulate some tremendous scootcher such as dashing across the hall into the unused room where the first Dr. Wightman’s ghost was said to be eternally busy at his dusty, greening retorts. One night John climbed out of a streetside dormer window and scrambled up to the roof ridge, where he sat in triumph with his nightgown bellying like a sail in a sea breeze. David’s attempt to match this scootcher nearly ended in disaster, and he had to be rescued by his older brother.
At the age of seven or eight John Muir went on to the grammar school, a high-gabled stone structure bearing a telling resemblance to a church. In fact, the Dunbar grammar school was a secular arm of a Calvinistic culture. Its values were those of the old, unreconstructed Covenanters: the sanctification of work as the only activity morally and spiritually justifiable; an institutional understanding of the inevitable individual failings; and the consequent necessity of punishment, in this case administered with the tawse, a multithonged whip that was Master Lyon’s only apparent indulgence.
The small scholars, Muir remembered, had to learn daily lessons in Latin, French, and English with additional obligations in spelling, arithmetic, and geography. All of this education was instilled with regular whippings. “We were simply driven,” Muir said, “pointblank against our books like soldiers against the enemy. … If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”
In addition to these punitively administered school lessons there were equally severe ones at home, where Daniel Muir forced John to memorize a certain number of Bible verses each day; there was a whipping at the end of the recitation if he faltered. By the time John was eleven he said he had “about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh.” It is another indication of the impress of Calvinism on the Scots mind that there seems to have been no thought there might be some strange incongruity between the motives of masters and parents and the methods they employed. It was simply assumed that a godly mind and an educated one would have to be thrashed into the children. This method was, as Muir said, the traditional Scots one “of making every duty dismal.”
Naturally, the yard of the grammar school reflected the values of the school proper and the national culture. And as the demands and punishments of the school were more severe than those of the primary school, so were the schoolyard games. The individual fights were now often serious fistfights that resulted in bloody noses and black eyes. The evidence of the former, said Muir, could always be washed off in a fountain before going home. But the latter mark was more lasting, and it was no good to tell his wrathful father that the other boy had struck first. Whatever the case, Daniel Muir struck last, and so the boy was likely to suffer two beatings on any given day—three if Master Lyon had occasion to punish him.
Kindred diversions of the schoolyard included a game in which two boys would stand toe to toe and thrash each other’s bare legs with limber switches, the object being simple, sober-faced endurance. The boy who winced or showed the least bit of discomfort was the loser and the object of savage ridicule. “Wee Willie Wastle,” a game in which a boy would defend his sandhill against one challenger after another until knocked off it, was also popular. The game had its genesis in Cromwell’s siege of the Castle Hume in 1651, during which he indeed knocked Willie Wastle off his castle.
Still, after all these thrashings at home and school, John Muir was later able to find some redeeming quality in it all, for, he said, the thrashings had been “admirably influential in developing not only memory but fortitude as well.” Here, whatever the origins, were two qualities Muir was to need and display abundantly in those solitary adventures of his mature years for which he was now unconsciously preparing.
Cromwell and his defeat of Willie Wastle were facts of history, and as such Johnnie Muir and his fellows were compelled to learn them. But it is doubtful that such book facts were as exciting to them as that wider, more immediate history text that was their surroundings. Dunbar, geographical outpost though it was, had been a historic crossroads, and the crumbling hulk of Dunbar castle was both fact and metaphor of just how much history had been enacted here. A thousand years old, the castle lineaments were almost shapeless now, and little lawns of flowers and sod had grown in places where the masonry had at last grown tired of the centuries of effort and had sunk down to sleep. Through its remaining sagging arches the boys could see Bass Rock lumping up out of the Firth of Forth while the sea surged and ebbed through what once had been lower rooms but were now dangerous, sucking grottoes the boys dared each other to enter.
They knew in a general way the highlights of the castle’s history, and in later life Muir could recite these: his college roommate recalled Muir scaring the Wisconsin youths with ghostly tales of the castle and its inhabitants. They might have known, for instance, that Edward I had besieged the castle in 1296 while its defenders hurled insults at the invading “Sassenachs,” calling them long-tailed curs after the Scots belief that the English actually did have tails. And as good Scots boys aspiring to become soldiers themselves and perhaps recapture some of Scotland’s lost glory, they would have known that it was this campaign that had ended in Edward’s theft of the Scots stone of possession, the Stone of Scone, an action that launched the career of the great William Wallace. On the castle heaps the boys played Wallace, whose legend, Muir was later to note, was a sort of Scots Bible. They relived his great victory at Stirling Bridge, his single-handed slaughter of the Sassenachs as recounted in legend and ballad, and lamented his betrayal to the English, after which, said Holinshed in his famous Chronicles, the patriot chief was drawn and quartered and parts of him dispatched to various public places as a warning to potential Scots troublemakers.
Dunbar castle had also been the place of Edward II’s retreat after the Scots had defeated him at Bannockburn, and this event, too, was transformed into a schoolyard and castle game. Indeed, so many battles had been waged here that the boys believed that every bone they found about the ruins was the last relic of some ancient warrior, martyred in Scotland’s cause.
Daniel Muir did not approve of these informal lessons of the castle, the harbor, or the seashore. To him they could not prove anything but destructive, for in such random, unsupervised freedom John and David might easily learn bad words (which they did) and worse ways. He attempted to make a sort of prison-playground of the high-walled back garden and keep the boys in it whenever they had time on their hands. He was, of course, unsuccessful, and at some point he must have given up in all but a pro forma way. For when spring came to the Lothians and the birds—larks, mavises, and robins—began to call from the westward-lying meadows, the boys could not be kept home.
With
