Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

1958, and another two months. I wrote five chapters of my book and painted a Triumph of Neptune on the common room walls.

      And I made friends with other rootless people who used the hostel: a student from the Midlands who had left Britain to avoid national military service and seemed to live by petty smuggling; a tall stooping bronchial man, also from the Midlands, who hovered around the Mediterranean for health reasons; and a middle-aged American with a sore back who had been refused entry into England where he had gone to consult an osteopath of whom he had heard great things. He kept discussing the reasons for the refusal and asking if a slight tampering with the datestamp on his passport would make entry easier if he tried again. There was Cyril Hume, an unemployed able seaman with a photograph of a cheerful, attractive-looking wife in Portsmouth who “realized he needed to wander about a bit”. I think it was Cyril Hume who learned that a ship would be sailing to the Canary Isles from a port on the African coast just opposite. Apparently the fare was cheap and the cost of living in the Canary Isles even less than the cost of living in Spain. My health was improving at the time so we all decided to go together. We took a ferry across the bay to Algeciras in Spain, and another ferry from Algeciras to Africa. There was a bright sun, a strong wind, waves ran fast with glittering foamy crests. The jumbled rocky African coast, a steep headland with a medieval fortress on top looked theatrical but convincing. Cyril Hume had bought us cheese, celery, bread. Standing in the prow of the ship it suddenly struck me that cheese, celery and exactly this chalky white bread was the best lunch I ever tasted. Slightly breathless, I produced and used my asthma hand-pump inhaler. The surrounding crowd turned and watched me with that direct, open interest Ian McCulloch had found upsetting. I enjoyed being a stranger who provoked interest without even trying.

      The port we reached was Ceuta, a Spanish possession. It looked just like Algeciras: whitewalled buildings and streets bordered by orange trees with real fruit among the leaves. The ship we wanted had left for the Canary Isles the day before so we returned to Algeciras and took lodgings there. Next morning, having slept badly, I decided to stay in bed. After my friends had left a maid entered the room and began making the other beds by shaking up the feather quilts and mattresses. I am allergic to feathers and started suffocating. I cried out to her but had no Spanish and she no English. In my notebook I hastily sketched a feather and told her it was mal – I hoped that the Latin root for evil was part of her language too. She smiled and repeated the word with what seemed perfect comprehension and then, when I lay back, relieved, she returned to violently plumping out the quilts. I gripped my hypodermic needle to give myself a big adrenaline injection but my hand trembled and the needle broke short in my flesh. The maid and I both panicked. She screamed and a lot of women ran in and surrounded me, jabbering loudly as I pissed, shat, and grew unconscious.

      I wakened in a hospital managed by dark-robed, white-wimpled brides of Christ. A doctor came, gave me pills of a sort that can be bought cheap from any chemist, and charged dear for them. My friends arrived, discharged me, and escorted me back across the bay to Gibraltar and the Toc H hostel, where I stayed in bed for a week. I now had slightly more than ten pounds of money left: enough to buy a cheap boat fare back to London.

      One day Jock Brown came to me and said that if I gave him my passport he would get me a ticket for an aeroplane going to London that evening. The ticket cost thirty pounds. Jock did not offer to lend me money. He took my passport, returned with a ticket and helped me to the airport. I crossed Spain at twice the altitude of Everest. It looked brown and as flat as a map. The only memorable feature was the white circle of the bullring in the middle of each town. London was foggy. I went to the University hospital and was given an intravenous adrenaline injection to help me reach Glasgow by overnight train. At Glasgow Central Station I took a taxi to the Royal Infirmary where I was drugged and sent home by ambulance. The morning was fresh and springlike but I felt no joy in homecoming. Glasgow was as I expected.

      To sum up, what good was the tour? What did it teach me? Not much about the world, a lot about myself. That I fear to change is evident. Of course we must always change, since the moment of birth starts the alterations and adaptions called growth, which is often gradual and foreseeable. If our surroundings don’t change much, neither do we. But surroundings can change radically and suddenly. A war began and I hid with neighbours in a dark shelter, queer noises outside. My mother died, I left school, found another, was awarded a scholarship, went to a foreign land in the belly of a posh liner. These events should have made me more independent, but I feared losing the habits by which I knew myself, so withdrew into asthma. My tour was spent in an effort to avoid maturity gained by new experience. Yet in spite of the protective clutter of doctors in which I ended the trip that effort failed. Maturity is either bravely accepted or kicked against, but events always impose some of it. Before going abroad the idea of teaching art to children appalled me. I have now done it for five months, and compared with partial suffocation it is almost painless. I will soon have paid Jock Brown what I owe him, and will then pay my father. Since coming home I have had no more bad asthma attacks, and no longer fear them. The Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship has done me good.

       11 Findhorn StreetRiddrie, Glasgow C3April 1959