Thanks to impending fiançailles between Victor, the Registrar at the University of Ulster (and fellow-member of the “Gaelic Club”) and Aisling, a young lady in the registrar’s office at the University of Edinburgh, as well as to some serious liquid bribery of Victor by me at the Harbour Bar and elsewhere, the formalities of transferring my files from one little-known brand-new institution of higher learning in the wilds of Ireland’s black North to one of the most august and ancient universities in the Three Kingdoms were deftly finessed. Consequently, exactly one year after arriving on a cold rainy September night to start anew in Coleraine I found myself arriving on a cold rainy September night to start anew in Edinburgh. No red carpet was rolled out. The streets were unlined with cheering crowds and no colored scarves of Celtic laughter floated in the air. Once again, I knew no one and no one knew me. I snuggled inside my insignificance as a weasel burrows into its hole. But we were proud, my mother and I, that I was at last enrolled at a fine ancient university whose name would roll majestically off the tongue like the aged sherry we fondly imagined would be served in the paneled precincts of the University’s club in future days of prosperity and bourgeois ease.
Ha!
At the time, Ireland was all the Celtic culture I could handle. I knew little about Scotland. I imagined a place full of retired colonels in kilts and drunken football hooligans. And indeed, these two forms of life exist in profusion in the right places: Callender or Gairloch (the “Highland Riviera”) and the Borders, for instance, are ideal areas for retired-colonel spotting, and to see your average drunken lout any Hearts or Hibs rugby stadium on match day, and any Saturday night after closing time on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow and Princes Street in Edinburgh and many more places besides. But of course things are depressingly predictable when you let them be: Anglo-Saxon tourists eagerly seeking rude natives in Paris will inevitably antagonize a sufficient number of Parisians to elicit rudeness. I predicted colonels and drunks in Scotland and I found them; indeed, I became one of the two myself (not a colonel).
But, having read, as curious lads once did, the familiar lusty potboilers by RLS and Walter Scott and John Buchan in my little Swiss bedroom beneath the oddly Scottish confluence of blue Jura highlands and baa-baa’ing black sheep, I also secretly anticipated high romance in Scotland, by which I mean not only romance of the winkie-drinkie-nookie variety but also, and mainly, of the windswept, tangle-locked, Manfred-astride-purplish-moors kind of caper, with ivy-loaded monastic ruins in the distance and keening kestrels above. I was not disappointed, for although Scotland as a country has romantic rivals in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and France, and, some would say, Spain, Edinburgh is the most romantic city in the world. When you arrive, as I did, by train, having come north from London through the sooty Midlands and the Victorian gloom of Newcastle and the mist and medieval borderlands of Berwick and the Pentlands into the dim brick recesses of the Caledonian metropolis, the city’s profile bursts upon you like a vision of Ruritania: above, the blackly looming castle atop a sheer cliff of unforgiving rock that on one side mounts step by step to a crenellated summit and on the other plunges into Princes Street Gardens, below. Auld Reekie, the higgledy-piggledy medieval mess where they used to empty their chamber pots with a cry of Gardez Loo, is on the right; on the left is the Athens of the North, the clean, orderly Georgian New Town, that homage in stone to the Enlightenment, where RLS and Arthur “Sherlock” Conan Doyle were raised. This split personality appealed to me, and indeed in my mind Edinburgh’s cityscape acquired a metaphorical character as the Dichotomy in the Celtic Soul, a subject on which I was known to dilate to such an extent as to transform acquaintances into strangers, strangers into enemies….but that was later. Early on, I had no time for idleness, or metaphors, and no acquaintances to bore. I was entranced by rainy romantic Edinburgh and moved into a bedsit on East London Street on the fringes of the New Town, and in the early days spent many an hour, as the inveterate window-watcher that I was, sitting at the window staring at the rain sifting softly in the pale purplish streetlights and at imaginary hansom cabs and top hats above swishing capes. As in Geneva, a city with which Edinburgh shares much, the past haunts the present. Indeed, I soon discovered how Edinburgh’s past, to paraphrase Faulkner, is not only not dead, but not even past. At the Registrar’s office in the University, where I had gone to sign up and to pay my respects to Victor’s fiancée Aisling, an old porter was coming and going and pausing between comings and goings to deliver himself of profound and sonorous coughs that sounded imminently life-terminating but seemed in no way to impede his briskness, as if they were as much a part of his life as breathing, which he presumably managed to do in between. I commented, sympathetically, on the probable effect of the city’s dampness on the lungs, helpfully miming a cough.
“Right enough, it’s a bronchial kind of place,” said Aisling. “Especially in winter. Oh, you mean Old Jock? Och, he’s had that cough since the German gas attacks on the Somme.”
The Somme: 1916. Before me, then, was a living relic of the First World War, walking straight out of the end of the long nineteenth century. Old Jock would have been born before the turn of the last century, and his father a full generation before that, say in the 1870s, when Victoria’s reign, and the Empire, were at their blazing zenith. And so back across another couple of generations to Jock’s grandpa and great-grandpa—who could have fought at Waterloo—to the eighteenth century, the age of Boswell and Hume and Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment that in Edinburgh was neither out of sight nor out of mind. In my time there the 1700s still lurked in the wynds and closes—and in the lecture halls, for university life, I soon discovered, was conducted at two very eighteenth-century levels, one of serious learning, the other of flamboyant dissolution. I attempted both and succeeded more in the latter department than in the former (although I probably did more reading there, out of sheer hunger for it, than at any time before or since). My Edinburgh in the 1970s was closer to Boswell’s and Ferguson’s two centuries previously than to whatever boring anti-Vietnam or anti-nuclear binge was going on at the same time at, say, Yale, or Columbia, or at one of those new universities in England—Keele, Sussex—that I’d spurned in favor of Greece.
