Docherty. William McIlvanney

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СКАЧАТЬ of the McIlvanneys, the links and the echoes are unmissable. The book begins with the scenes around Conn’s birth at the end of 1903, which was pretty much when my father arrived in the world. His name was William but his father had been Con and he was widely known as Young Con. However, the character in the novel who is drawn most clearly (if by no means comprehensively) from my father isn’t Conn but his sire, Tam Docherty. Like Tam, my father stood ‘only five-foot fower’ but he was a strong, hard wee man with firmness of principle and will, somebody who made it easy to understand why my mother could say: ‘When he was there, I never knew a moment’s fear.’ Again like Tam Docherty, his relinquishing of Catholic faith encouraged in him a pragmatic ecumenicalism. Betty and Neil went to St Joseph’s school but Willie and I were subsequently enrolled at the Protestant primary serving our scheme, with traffic dangers cited as a justification the Pope doubtless found unimpressive.

      There were other similarities, large and small. My father worked in the pits for some years, he was vehemently socialist and he was capable of outstripping his sons physically with the feat of a prolonged handstand on a chair that Tam employs to counter Angus’s arrogance in one of the domestic episodes in which Docherty charges the trivial with significant tension. But, in contrast with Tam, my father never allowed his disappointments to deflect him from the unprissy teetotalism that had become a creed as a result of the devastation-by-drink he witnessed at close quarters in his childhood. Having presumably placated the ghost of Keir Hardie, through the latter part of his short life he intoxicated himself with quixotic dreams of entrepreneurial success.

      Enterprises as disparate as bookmaking, operating a second-hand shop and efforts at the mass rearing of chickens in our back garden invariably foundered against economic imperatives, and left my mother patiently clearing up the debris. Helen, or Nellie, McIlvanney (née Montgomery) wrought the kind of miracles with scant household finances that Willie attributes to Jenny Docherty, forever sacrificing her own comfort in the interests of her ­children, often giving us cause to mistake her for a saint with cardboard in her shoes. Despite having begun toiling in a textile mill at an obscenely young age, she had a good level of literacy and was a lover of poetry. In the attractive copperplate script she had acquired during her truncated schooling, she produced accounts of her memories to help Willie with his writing. Her High Street chronicles must have been especially useful as he moved through Docherty.

      What emerged in 1975 from the combined powers of his intellect, imagination and spirit must certainly be ranked among his finest works. Allan Massie, himself a distinguished novelist as well as a respected critic, credits Willie with the remarkable achievement of having written not one masterpiece but two, Docherty and The Kiln. There is no demurral from me but I would also put a book of a very different stamp, Laidlaw, in the frame. Yet none of Willie’s novels moves me more than Docherty does. Perhaps its themes and personal resonances make that natural. Revisiting it shortly after his death in December 2015, I was back in his company, remembering how much we had shared.

      We slept in the same bed for years; joined in a thousand banal boyhood sorties that we fantasised into adventures; participated in myriad over-populated football games that started in the morning and – with hunger imposing a shift pattern on the teams – kept going until darkness was total; eagerly widened our vistas through reading. And, always and inexhaustibly, we fed each other’s flights of fancy about what lay ahead for us. Nothing in the professional area of Willie’s future would mean more to him than the challenge (resolutely met) of championing the relevance of a multitude of unsung working-class lives. The profoundness of his belief in that endeavour is conveyed in a poem of his I quoted when memorial tribute was paid to him in the Bute Hall of Glasgow University:

       In any street an epic, any room

      Strange stories never told, testaments dumb.

      The richness overwhelms. A chance remark

      Can touch new land, unload another ark.

      Transactions of small change will sometimes yield

      Coins of a minting you have never held.

      Break any casual stone and find strange veins.

      The colours blind. The anecdotes will range

      Through wild geographies of spirit, form

      Plain men with unknown flowers in their arms.

      In each face new horizons, any day

      An archaeology more rich than Troy.

       As I said in the Bute Hall, when it came to the digs associated with such archaeology, we all benefited from having Willie’s hand on the trowel. Docherty is proof of that.

       Hugh McIlvanney

      PROLOGUE: 1903

      The year came and receded like any other, leaving its flotsam of the grotesque, the memorable, the trivial. On the first day the Coronation Durbar at Delhi saw King Edward established by proxy as Emperor of India. In the same month 5,000 people died in a hurricane in the Society Islands and 51 inmates were burned to death in Colney Hatch lunatic asylum. In July Pope Leo XIII died at ninety-three. In November the King and Queen of Italy visited England. Rock Sand was the horse, running up to his fetlocks in prize-money: 2,000 Guineas, Derby, St Leger. In Serbia King Alexander and Queen Draga were murdered, Peter Karageorgevitch became King, and dark conspirators regrouped around the throne, like actors obsessed with their roles although the theatre is on fire. In London Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show made genocide a circus. In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers put a heavier than air machine into flight for fifty-nine seconds. In High Street, Graithnock, Miss Gilfillan had insomnia.

      She called it ‘my complaint’, not unaffectionately. It grew as the year waned, so that by December her eyes seemed lidless. Most nights she nursed her loneliness at her window, holding aside the lace curtain to stare at the tenements across from her, to judge the lives that lay in them, to think that she would die here. The thought was pain and comfort. She would die among strangers, hard faces and rough voices, hands that hadn’t much use for cutlery, drunken songs of Ireland’s suffering in Scottish accents, swear-words in the street, children grubbing out their childhoods in the gutters. But her death would be a lifelong affront to her family, an anger in her father’s grave. So each night she would perfect her disillusion, her regret was a whetstone for her family’s, and High Street was the hell they would inherit.

      Late at night on 26th December one circumstance accidentally gave a special poignancy to her self-pity. Across the cobbled street two upstairs windows were still lit. Behind one window, Mrs Docherty was near her time. This would be her fourth. She would be lucky if it was her last. Here, where hunger and hopelessness should have sterilised most marriages, people seemed to breed with an almost vengeful recklessness. It appeared to her that the sins of the fathers were the sons.

      Behind the other window, Mr Docherty would be sitting in the Thompson’s single-end, banished to that uselessness which was a man’s place at such times, sheepish with guilt, or perhaps just indifferent with usage. Some of the folklore of High Street concerned the martyrdom of women: wife-beatings, wages drunk on the journey between the pit-head and the house, a child born into a room where its father lay stupefied with beer.

      With Mr Docherty, she felt, it would be different. She knew him only as someone to pass the time of day with, as it was with everybody here. She preferred to form no friendships. Pity, contempt, or sheer incomprehension, were the distances between her and everyone around her, so that she knew them by their more dramatic actions. Her vision of their lives was as stylised and unsubtle as an opera, and even then was distorted by those tears for herself that endlessly blurred her thinking, as СКАЧАТЬ