Born and Bred
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: One mild one only.
Description: An exiled Scot examines the Scottish character.
_____________________________________________________________________
Apart from one week holidaying in Howth, I did not leave Scotland for the first twenty-five years of my life. By the time I did leave, I had a fully operational philosophy of life that has developed but has not fundamentally changed in the half century since: I am, perhaps, a little more tolerant now than I was then. Was it nature or nurture? Is there a genetic disposition for Scots to be, well, Scottish or is our schooling, within and without the educational system, at the root of our character?
Looking back I can see that the foundations were laid before I went to University but things moved a lot more purposefully after I arrived on Gilmorehill. Many of my classmates never saw themselves as more than mathematical physicists but I felt that there was a more subtle meaning to Natural Philosophy (the subject on my degree certificate). Science, particularly physics, observes the world and mathematics enables us to model it. Change a word and you can extend Newton’s Laws of Planetary Motion to explain human society: ‘A society will remain at rest until it is operated on by an external force’; ‘the extent of the change will be proportional to the force’.
It is often difficult to identify the force causing social changes but you can always see the consequent displacement. In mathematical terms, differentiate the change twice and you get the acceleration caused by the force. The size of the society corresponds to the mass in planetary motion. Only widespread famine provides the degree of force needed to move large numbers of people; ideas on the other hand, like electrons in conductors, move quickly and easily between societies requiring much less time and effort than the migration of nations.
I read a great deal, mostly fiction, swiftly graduating from the Beano and Oor Wullie to the Rover and Hotspur. I got to know a fair bit of Shakespeare, from school, and the bible, from the minister. I did read some purportedly non-fiction including a little Freud and Jung. I tried reading philosophy and I still have copies of Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s Prince that are well-thumbed for the first few pages with the rest of the book pristine, unread testament to several attempts over the years that petered out.
In fact the only work on the nature of society that I read with any pleasure was Asimov’s Foundation novels. The problem then and now is that philosophers are more concerned with institutions than with people. Whether they approach the topic from the side of the rulers, like Machiavelli, or from the viewpoint of the ordinary folk, like Karl Marx, they finish up producing systems to control the lives of individuals. I have, of course, read George Orwell. I did think that the Nurnberg trials changed the balance between state and individual responsibility but it still seems that ‘just obeying orders’ (‘just applying the protocols’ in new-speak) is sufficient excuse for any outrage.
So where did my philosophy come from? I was obviously strongly influenced by family and friends. The villages around us were so small that not only did all the kids play together but a compromise had to be made in the rights of Roman Catholics to have their own schools. My primary school had all the Catholics from the surrounding area and the only difference we noticed was that once a week they had religious education apart from the rest of us
We were separated when we went to secondary school, of course, but it is difficult to demonise people when you have been best friends with them for six years. This scepticism with lumping people together under banners stood me in good stead later when I began to get about the world, meeting people from other cultures, with different skin colours. The need for open-mindedness was reinforced when I went to university. I was fortunate to spend three of my four years there in Maclay Hall.
There were three lads with very black skin who were as different as the spectrum of human behaviour allows. One was the son of an ambassador who had spent his holidays from boarding school in embassies: not only was he suave and sophisticated, he had the only car that would start without pushing. At the other end of the scale was a very clever guy who had lived at home, walking five miles each way every day to the convent school: he had to be shown how to use a flush toilet. The third was a New Yorker who loathed white people: he was astonished when his racial overtures were rejected by the other two black men. So I learned that it was impossible to categorise people into sets because of their religious beliefs or the colour of their skin; I have been wary ever since of labelling folk like parcels.
Wherever it came from, my philosophy was in place by the time I discovered its intellectual sources. We studied the English romantic poets at school but they did not expose us to Burns – I think they felt it was bad enough that we talked like him! At least we knew ‘Auld Lang Syne’. I had not even heard of James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, before I moved to England!
I did find Don Camillo, a fictional priest in a small town on the River Po. He is staunchly Catholic and irrevocably committed to saving his parishioners from the wiles of the mayor, a fiercely dedicated communist. Except: the two men have much in common, loving each other like brothers while they oppose each other’s mouthings; they had fought together in the resistance to fascism.
So I left my native land believing that individuals are more important than institutions. I make my own choices and accept the knocks when I make a poor decision. If you are repaid wrongly-sold payment protection insurance, will you ever learn to be wary of bankers especially bearing gifts?
It is easy to adopt the maudlin ‘here’s tae us wha’s like us’ approach: if you don’t get about much. Take my word for it that the proportion of good and evil people is the same for Scots as for the rest of the world; there are no good nations or bad nations, only good and bad people. What the Scots seem to lack is the sort of xenophobia that is at epidemic proportions in many nations, perhaps especially amongst the English and Americans. I think both these countries suffer because they have no external idols: they think they are as good as it gets so they have no other society that they admire as much as their own: they even flip Genesis on its head by creating God in their own image!
Scots travel well and they settle well in whatever society they join. They often form colonies, I suppose, but in my experience we survive, even thrive, as individuals, often with no idea where the next nearest Scot lives. Since we do not believe Scotland is perfect we are happy to consider the mores of others, adopting those that please us.
On my first overseas trip I was served lunch by an old lady whose eyes filled with tears when she heard my accent. She had gone to California as a GI bride and had never found the time to go back to Scotland, being needed first by her children and now by her grandchildren. Then there was the guy who popped up in a restaurant when I got lost on the way from Kennedy Airport to Hartford. In the accents of New York he gave me directions, establishing his bona fides by claiming Yoker as his place of birth. We are proud to be Scots: we fit into our new environment but are always pleased to boast of our country of birth.
Our modern Scottish heroes come from a diverse background and have found fame in many spheres; in fact, the only thing they have in common is that they head for the exit the first chance they get! They all talk of their native land often with a nostalgic tear in their eyes but you can only have a good greet about Scotland if you have to live there!
I found that my accent ensured a welcome wherever in the world I travelled. It even stopped an international incident on one occasion. Four Englishmen and I drove up into the Californian Coastal Ranges on a rare day off from the trial we were operating out of NASA Ames. We wound up in Boulder Creek (pronounced ‘crick’) outside a wooden building with a raised sidewalk and hitching rail. Inside there were half barrels for tables and an array of relics including stuffed animals and a pony express rider’s bag. All it lacked was John Wayne and I for one would not have turned a hair if he had sauntered in!
The prize exhibit was a nickelodeon that had survived the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906. With typical American get-up-and-go it had been restored and modified to take dimes – ten cents instead of five! My English companions led the way in, as is their wont, talking loudly and confidently; by the time I adjusted to the dim light, the proprietor was just pulling a shot gun from a shelf under the bar. When he heard my voice he put it down but kept his hand on it until we had chatted.
He had left Ireland about ten minutes before the Black and Tans caught up with him. Arrived in the USA he had become a police patrolman in Philadelphia, appropriately the city of brotherly love. He had retired to California and was sinking his pension into keeping his saloon-museum afloat. He was a gentle old man except for an implacable hatred of the English. As we spoke his brogue became stronger and you could almost see the years dropping away.
“I might have taken a shot at these fellows if you hadn’t come in and spoken up for them,” he confided after we had somewhat depleted his stocks of beer. “Mind you, we were near as bad ourselves - except that our cause was just!”
Journeying as a Scot is a real pleasure. You always begin with an advantage: people expect you to be one of the good guys. I spent some years travelling about on my own and I developed a game to fend off loneliness. Once I had freshened up in my solitary hotel room I would get a drink in the bar and wait to hear a Scottish voice. At that point I would challenge the man or woman: I would assert that it would take less than five minutes for us to find a person or a place in common. I should have put money on it because the only time it failed was when the other Scot welched.
He came in to a small hotel in Bedfordshire with a group of friends. He was the only Scot in the party and he was casually welcoming when I went over and introduced myself. We chatted for a minute or two very amicably until, that is, I challenged him to find a mutual acquaintance. He put his half-finished pint on the bar, grabbed his coat and dashed off into the night, leaving his friends open-mouthed!
In light of the impending referendum, it is instructive to look at the opinions of the Scottish character held by our literary greats. Sir Walter Scott was writing less than a century after Culloden so it is not surprising that his best organised heroes were all English; the Scots in his books are often admirable and likeable but they could not have been trusted to run a raffle. His heart was in the right place, though, because Dandy Dinmont and Meg Merilee’s are full and rounded characters compared with Mannering and young Waverley.
More than a century later, John Buchan held the same views about the organising skills of his fellow countrymen; only the totally anglicised Arbuthnot and Leithen are proper heroes. I still find his portrayal of Dickson McCunn and the Gorbals Diehards patronising. Even in my youth the mood was pessimistic so far as Scotland was concerned.
Lobey Dosser never did better than a score draw against Rank Badyin, the only character that spoke Standard English. Even El Fideldo only had two legs; one of them was the scenic nostalgia that is still with us and the other was the heavy industry of the Forth-Clyde axis, already in its death throes, that was given the coup de grace by the Iron Lady in the eighties.
Things have really improved in the last sixty years. The new confidence is exemplified by Angus Shoor Caan, a gentleman and no’ a bad wee writer. His faithful steed, Neigh Bovverpal, has almost as many legs as Sleipnir. We still have the scenery and nostalgia, of course, but the industrial legs are stronger and more diverse than ever before, what with oil and gas, electronics, whisky and financial services. Of course it takes time to master control of such an animal and we may have to wait until the mantle is passed to his wee son, MacShoor, before we enjoy the full benefits of a broad-based economy. Awesome to think that we might have passed up the chance of devolution if it had not been for Maggie’s clogs kicking the bits she failed to trample.
But what if Scott, Buchan and Bud Neil were right and we Scots simply do not have the skills needed to organise and run a country? Menelaus and his mates could leave their city states to go and put the boot into the Trojans because they employed Hebrews to keep the books and run their countries. The Attic kings thought it effeminate to read and write so they were happy to leave affairs of state to others while they got on with the manly pursuits of fighting and buggering wee boys in the gym. Maybe the Scots could get hold of some Eastern Europeans, recently members of the European Community, to come and run the place for us while we got on with our modern manly pursuits of eating chips and watching football on television.
Swearwords: One mild one only.
Description: An exiled Scot examines the Scottish character.
_____________________________________________________________________
Apart from one week holidaying in Howth, I did not leave Scotland for the first twenty-five years of my life. By the time I did leave, I had a fully operational philosophy of life that has developed but has not fundamentally changed in the half century since: I am, perhaps, a little more tolerant now than I was then. Was it nature or nurture? Is there a genetic disposition for Scots to be, well, Scottish or is our schooling, within and without the educational system, at the root of our character?
Looking back I can see that the foundations were laid before I went to University but things moved a lot more purposefully after I arrived on Gilmorehill. Many of my classmates never saw themselves as more than mathematical physicists but I felt that there was a more subtle meaning to Natural Philosophy (the subject on my degree certificate). Science, particularly physics, observes the world and mathematics enables us to model it. Change a word and you can extend Newton’s Laws of Planetary Motion to explain human society: ‘A society will remain at rest until it is operated on by an external force’; ‘the extent of the change will be proportional to the force’.
It is often difficult to identify the force causing social changes but you can always see the consequent displacement. In mathematical terms, differentiate the change twice and you get the acceleration caused by the force. The size of the society corresponds to the mass in planetary motion. Only widespread famine provides the degree of force needed to move large numbers of people; ideas on the other hand, like electrons in conductors, move quickly and easily between societies requiring much less time and effort than the migration of nations.
I read a great deal, mostly fiction, swiftly graduating from the Beano and Oor Wullie to the Rover and Hotspur. I got to know a fair bit of Shakespeare, from school, and the bible, from the minister. I did read some purportedly non-fiction including a little Freud and Jung. I tried reading philosophy and I still have copies of Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s Prince that are well-thumbed for the first few pages with the rest of the book pristine, unread testament to several attempts over the years that petered out.
In fact the only work on the nature of society that I read with any pleasure was Asimov’s Foundation novels. The problem then and now is that philosophers are more concerned with institutions than with people. Whether they approach the topic from the side of the rulers, like Machiavelli, or from the viewpoint of the ordinary folk, like Karl Marx, they finish up producing systems to control the lives of individuals. I have, of course, read George Orwell. I did think that the Nurnberg trials changed the balance between state and individual responsibility but it still seems that ‘just obeying orders’ (‘just applying the protocols’ in new-speak) is sufficient excuse for any outrage.
So where did my philosophy come from? I was obviously strongly influenced by family and friends. The villages around us were so small that not only did all the kids play together but a compromise had to be made in the rights of Roman Catholics to have their own schools. My primary school had all the Catholics from the surrounding area and the only difference we noticed was that once a week they had religious education apart from the rest of us
We were separated when we went to secondary school, of course, but it is difficult to demonise people when you have been best friends with them for six years. This scepticism with lumping people together under banners stood me in good stead later when I began to get about the world, meeting people from other cultures, with different skin colours. The need for open-mindedness was reinforced when I went to university. I was fortunate to spend three of my four years there in Maclay Hall.
There were three lads with very black skin who were as different as the spectrum of human behaviour allows. One was the son of an ambassador who had spent his holidays from boarding school in embassies: not only was he suave and sophisticated, he had the only car that would start without pushing. At the other end of the scale was a very clever guy who had lived at home, walking five miles each way every day to the convent school: he had to be shown how to use a flush toilet. The third was a New Yorker who loathed white people: he was astonished when his racial overtures were rejected by the other two black men. So I learned that it was impossible to categorise people into sets because of their religious beliefs or the colour of their skin; I have been wary ever since of labelling folk like parcels.
Wherever it came from, my philosophy was in place by the time I discovered its intellectual sources. We studied the English romantic poets at school but they did not expose us to Burns – I think they felt it was bad enough that we talked like him! At least we knew ‘Auld Lang Syne’. I had not even heard of James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, before I moved to England!
I did find Don Camillo, a fictional priest in a small town on the River Po. He is staunchly Catholic and irrevocably committed to saving his parishioners from the wiles of the mayor, a fiercely dedicated communist. Except: the two men have much in common, loving each other like brothers while they oppose each other’s mouthings; they had fought together in the resistance to fascism.
So I left my native land believing that individuals are more important than institutions. I make my own choices and accept the knocks when I make a poor decision. If you are repaid wrongly-sold payment protection insurance, will you ever learn to be wary of bankers especially bearing gifts?
It is easy to adopt the maudlin ‘here’s tae us wha’s like us’ approach: if you don’t get about much. Take my word for it that the proportion of good and evil people is the same for Scots as for the rest of the world; there are no good nations or bad nations, only good and bad people. What the Scots seem to lack is the sort of xenophobia that is at epidemic proportions in many nations, perhaps especially amongst the English and Americans. I think both these countries suffer because they have no external idols: they think they are as good as it gets so they have no other society that they admire as much as their own: they even flip Genesis on its head by creating God in their own image!
Scots travel well and they settle well in whatever society they join. They often form colonies, I suppose, but in my experience we survive, even thrive, as individuals, often with no idea where the next nearest Scot lives. Since we do not believe Scotland is perfect we are happy to consider the mores of others, adopting those that please us.
On my first overseas trip I was served lunch by an old lady whose eyes filled with tears when she heard my accent. She had gone to California as a GI bride and had never found the time to go back to Scotland, being needed first by her children and now by her grandchildren. Then there was the guy who popped up in a restaurant when I got lost on the way from Kennedy Airport to Hartford. In the accents of New York he gave me directions, establishing his bona fides by claiming Yoker as his place of birth. We are proud to be Scots: we fit into our new environment but are always pleased to boast of our country of birth.
Our modern Scottish heroes come from a diverse background and have found fame in many spheres; in fact, the only thing they have in common is that they head for the exit the first chance they get! They all talk of their native land often with a nostalgic tear in their eyes but you can only have a good greet about Scotland if you have to live there!
I found that my accent ensured a welcome wherever in the world I travelled. It even stopped an international incident on one occasion. Four Englishmen and I drove up into the Californian Coastal Ranges on a rare day off from the trial we were operating out of NASA Ames. We wound up in Boulder Creek (pronounced ‘crick’) outside a wooden building with a raised sidewalk and hitching rail. Inside there were half barrels for tables and an array of relics including stuffed animals and a pony express rider’s bag. All it lacked was John Wayne and I for one would not have turned a hair if he had sauntered in!
The prize exhibit was a nickelodeon that had survived the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906. With typical American get-up-and-go it had been restored and modified to take dimes – ten cents instead of five! My English companions led the way in, as is their wont, talking loudly and confidently; by the time I adjusted to the dim light, the proprietor was just pulling a shot gun from a shelf under the bar. When he heard my voice he put it down but kept his hand on it until we had chatted.
He had left Ireland about ten minutes before the Black and Tans caught up with him. Arrived in the USA he had become a police patrolman in Philadelphia, appropriately the city of brotherly love. He had retired to California and was sinking his pension into keeping his saloon-museum afloat. He was a gentle old man except for an implacable hatred of the English. As we spoke his brogue became stronger and you could almost see the years dropping away.
“I might have taken a shot at these fellows if you hadn’t come in and spoken up for them,” he confided after we had somewhat depleted his stocks of beer. “Mind you, we were near as bad ourselves - except that our cause was just!”
Journeying as a Scot is a real pleasure. You always begin with an advantage: people expect you to be one of the good guys. I spent some years travelling about on my own and I developed a game to fend off loneliness. Once I had freshened up in my solitary hotel room I would get a drink in the bar and wait to hear a Scottish voice. At that point I would challenge the man or woman: I would assert that it would take less than five minutes for us to find a person or a place in common. I should have put money on it because the only time it failed was when the other Scot welched.
He came in to a small hotel in Bedfordshire with a group of friends. He was the only Scot in the party and he was casually welcoming when I went over and introduced myself. We chatted for a minute or two very amicably until, that is, I challenged him to find a mutual acquaintance. He put his half-finished pint on the bar, grabbed his coat and dashed off into the night, leaving his friends open-mouthed!
In light of the impending referendum, it is instructive to look at the opinions of the Scottish character held by our literary greats. Sir Walter Scott was writing less than a century after Culloden so it is not surprising that his best organised heroes were all English; the Scots in his books are often admirable and likeable but they could not have been trusted to run a raffle. His heart was in the right place, though, because Dandy Dinmont and Meg Merilee’s are full and rounded characters compared with Mannering and young Waverley.
More than a century later, John Buchan held the same views about the organising skills of his fellow countrymen; only the totally anglicised Arbuthnot and Leithen are proper heroes. I still find his portrayal of Dickson McCunn and the Gorbals Diehards patronising. Even in my youth the mood was pessimistic so far as Scotland was concerned.
Lobey Dosser never did better than a score draw against Rank Badyin, the only character that spoke Standard English. Even El Fideldo only had two legs; one of them was the scenic nostalgia that is still with us and the other was the heavy industry of the Forth-Clyde axis, already in its death throes, that was given the coup de grace by the Iron Lady in the eighties.
Things have really improved in the last sixty years. The new confidence is exemplified by Angus Shoor Caan, a gentleman and no’ a bad wee writer. His faithful steed, Neigh Bovverpal, has almost as many legs as Sleipnir. We still have the scenery and nostalgia, of course, but the industrial legs are stronger and more diverse than ever before, what with oil and gas, electronics, whisky and financial services. Of course it takes time to master control of such an animal and we may have to wait until the mantle is passed to his wee son, MacShoor, before we enjoy the full benefits of a broad-based economy. Awesome to think that we might have passed up the chance of devolution if it had not been for Maggie’s clogs kicking the bits she failed to trample.
But what if Scott, Buchan and Bud Neil were right and we Scots simply do not have the skills needed to organise and run a country? Menelaus and his mates could leave their city states to go and put the boot into the Trojans because they employed Hebrews to keep the books and run their countries. The Attic kings thought it effeminate to read and write so they were happy to leave affairs of state to others while they got on with the manly pursuits of fighting and buggering wee boys in the gym. Maybe the Scots could get hold of some Eastern Europeans, recently members of the European Community, to come and run the place for us while we got on with our modern manly pursuits of eating chips and watching football on television.
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.