Get Lost
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: None.
Description: A well-remembered fleeting instant.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A well-remembered fleeting instant.
Nowadays when I get restless I put another cushion behind my back and wriggle around until I get comfy. It wasn’t always like that, of course.
I was inspired by all those cowboy movies where a fat old man takes an enormous cigar from his mouth and tells the hero: ‘Go West, young man!’ I was particularly susceptible since I was born in Dalmuir, the western fringe of Clydebank that itself clings to the western coattails of Glasgow.
My earliest restlessness was occasioned when in 1941 much of Clydebank went west under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. My Mum with a headscarf in place of the traditional bonnet mounted the covered wagon and headed west. It was actually an SMT double-decker and the bottle neck was at Dalnottar rather than the Cumberland Gap but you must allow a four year old a certain width of poetic licence.
The truth is that at the time I had a full belly and a clean nappy so I slept through much of the epic journey. Reflecting on this incident in later years I concluded that I was not born restless but had restlessness thrust upon me.
When I reached the age where I was seeking the moving finger that would point me to my destiny, I did consider going west but by that time there were ‘No vacancy’ signs all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Californian gold had run out unless you were an inarticulate Austrian body-builder.
Ever ready to settle for the humdrum I was shaken out of my comfort zone by being sent to the San Francisco Bay area on my first overseas trip. We were flying out of NASA Ames Research Center mostly over the Sierra Nevada but with a couple of excursions over the San Bernardino Mountains. I was the least experienced person on the trip – and one of the ten least experienced people in the western world, I shouldn’t wonder – but I was second-in-command and heir apparent to a doughty Yorkshireman.
So there I was, as far west as you can go with dry feet, without having made any effort and without, so far as I can remember, ever feeling restless. I’m inclined to ascribe it to the major change I made to my philosophy after I moved to Glasgow. I was a student at the University with a young man’s reverence for numbers and the world at my feet.
I was raised in a small village and I was then and still am, to some degree, a trusting person. Not altogether stupid, I worked out a strategy for survival in the big city. Buses and even trolley buses like the wind goeth where they listeth but you can’t go far wrong with a tram. They run on tracks and can’t veer off on unplanned excursions.
Well I say that, but we had a series of lectures cancelled when we were in second year because the lecturer trusted trams. On an especially foggy night he checked the destination board of a shuggly and then followed it in his car since it would take him past the end of his street. Sadly, the tram turned into the depot and he finished up in the Western Infirmary once they got him out the inspection pit.
I’m not sure now whether I was ever so naive as to expect the route numbering system to be based on a logical assessment of the geography of the city but I was flabbergasted when I discovered that the 51 and the 51A trams only shared about a hundred yards of track at the top of Bath Street.
Walking back along a tram line from an unplanned destination is wonderfully stimulating to philosophical musings. You either curse Glasgow City Council or your fairy godmother for getting you into this mess or you look around in wonder at the unsuspected sights revealed by your navigational error.
I found that I revelled in the gems of city life that would have remained hidden if I had bothered to learn more about the transport system. Before I graduated, ‘Go West’ had been replaced by ‘Get Lost’ as the corner-stone of my life. I recommend it.
Even on the way to California on that first overseas trip the value of the philosophy was illustrated. We spent a night in New York, leaving most of our baggage in the airport left-luggage. During our excursion the length of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too, our hotel room was rifled: all they found of mine was my driver’s licence although others were much less fortunate.
We discovered a great deal about the inside of the Sixth Precinct that they rarely show in even the grittiest movies about New York’s finest. In a cage in a corner a boy of about fifteen was being baited by overweight policemen – he had driven an articulated lorry down 5th Avenue but even so he deserved more humane treatment.
The loss of my licence opened up a fascinating excursion into corporate life of California. I had to sit a driving test in a building in what is now called Silicon Valley. The written test was very simple with multiple choice questions that clearly signalled the right answer. I almost failed the practical test.
The only thing that saved me was the examiner. He had spent the war in Norfolk keeping bombers fit to fly over Germany. He interrupted his happy memories of these days with a frequent litany: ‘I should really fail you for that, but gee you guys were so great to me…’ I did forty in a residential area with a twenty limit and I overtook a school bus stopped on the opposite carriageway as well as a host of minor infractions of the California Highway Code.
To celebrate my pass, I drove six of the guys into San Francisco to watch the Chinese New Year. I got lost but we found a parking place in the end. It was only when we got out the car that I discovered that we were on Haight at its junction with Ashbury. I got a ticket for parking facing the wrong direction but it was worth it. Man – I was there when it was happening, right where it was going down!
My main task was to draft the flight plan for the day. It meant getting up early and driving to San Francisco International Airport to sit in on the meteorological briefing. Armed with appropriate charts I would dash back to Ames and convince my boss and our navigator that the best chance of finding mountain waves was where I had already decided. I didn’t mind listening to their opinions if they didn’t take too long to agree with me!
In certain weather conditions, when air has risen to clear a mountain range it falls into the valley behind the ridge. In the Sierra Nevada there are more ridges behind the first and in the right conditions they can reinforce the wave and cause the air to become dangerously agitated. You have probably felt it as turbulence crossing the Alps but in a very few cases the energy is sufficient to cause a crash – think of a sea wave rising and breaking as it nears the beach.
We had been there for about a week when a weather front coming in from the Pacific made mountain waves very unlikely. I phoned from the met office to stand down the crews and then I drove straight to Ames to pick up some of the ground-crew. We only had two cars so we filled them to capacity when we had any time off.
My boss and our instrument man were photographic nut cases. We’d be driving along beside a meadow when one of them would demand an emergency stop. Out would come their camera bags and they would settle beside some insignificant blossom and spend twenty minutes discussing light and lenses. The resulting photographs were excellent, I will admit, but the rest of us were understandably bored rigid by the performance.
Today both of them were to face a court martial. Our Canberra was a hybrid but part of it had once been a bomber. The only explosives in it now powered the ejection seats. Once the pilot and navigator were in their seats our armourer fitted the charges and he was first into the plane when it stopped to dis-arm the seats. He was the smallest man in the crew, completely bald and in our first week of operations he had banged his head three times causing some bleeding.
Standing Orders in Ames ops room was that the aircraft had to be grounded after the third incident until an investigation was held into the circumstances. Our crew, including the armourer himself, thought that he was a force of nature and could not be prevented from cutting open his head. We all felt protective of the aircraft’s reputation and there was more than a hint that there were anti-British influences at work within the base. There had already been a heated discussion on the word ‘inflammable’ – liable to burn, in English but fire proof in American.
The rumour was that the trial wouldn’t last long so we got away fast after a hasty lunch in case the boss demanded a car. Once under weigh, we discussed possible destinations: two us didn’t care, two fancied paddling in the mighty Pacific and one wanted to see the military cemetery somewhere in the Coastal Range behind Palo Alto. We had no maps so we headed up into the wooded hills in that general direction and hoped for the best.
Our final passenger came up with an intriguing idea that we could check en route. There was a bowling alley on the far side of El Camino Real from our hotel (Yes, we did know the way to San Jose, it passed by our door). Over a few beers he chatted to an employee of the State of California who spent his days driving round corners as fast as he could.
If he got round, tyres squealing, at say fifty miles per hour, he would turn and take the corner from the opposite direction. Once he had used enough tyre rubber he would write up his findings and send a requisition for a road sign giving the tried and tested maximum speed at which the corner should be attempted.
You can see for yourself that it was a challenge that we could not resist so we spent an hour scaring ourselves. We later found out that the road we had been driving on had not yet been tested and the signs we had been reading were no more than guesses, inspired by the unused speed signs cluttering up the depot. I was driving but I deeply resented the implication that I should have kept track of where I was going.
The Pacific was west and San Francisco Bay was north and east so it was stretching things to describe us as ‘lost’. After half an hour without even spotting a direction board I was prepared to concede that we were seriously mislaid. I argued that the only thing we could be sure of was that there was nothing helpful behind us but it’s fair to say that I had no support for that view when we turned a corner and entered Boulder Creek.
As my confidence dwindled I had let the speed drop so moderate braking was all I needed to stop before we left the township again. I may be doing a thriving community an injustice: there may have been fifty houses hidden amongst the trees but on the road we were on there was only enough space between ‘Boulder Creek Welcomes Careful Drivers’ and ‘Call Again Real Soon’ for a single wooden building.
It was long and low and the sag in the roof line suggested that it was soon going to be even lower. There was a veranda at the front of bat-wing doors and a hitching rail at the roadside. Not promising, I concede, but we were in desperate need of somewhere to stop and have a bitter argument about who was to blame for our predicament and what to do about it. The first thing they did was to take the keys from me since they were unanimous that my driving was largely to blame.
A ‘Coors’ sign flickered into life at that moment so we accepted the omen and trooped onto the porch and through the swinging doors into a museum. The light wasn’t good and it came from an unusually large variety of sources. Electricity seemed to be reserved for advertising signs but they were supplemented by two brass oil-lamps with large bowls in etched glass. Further illumination came through a large number of gaps in the roof shingles and there was quite a lot of light through the door once we had stopped blocking it.
The tables and chairs were formed from barrels of various sizes and there was a pool table in one corner that looked to be a century younger than anything else in the room – including the barman! He was probably over seventy with a shock of white hair. He wasn’t tall but he had broad shoulders and his chest was still bigger than his beer belly.
If he was pleased to have our custom, he hid it well. The five Englishmen, shouting their opinions as they do, were intent on checking out the pool table so they missed seeing the owner bring from beneath his counter a most remarkable weapon. It had the stock and chamber of a Colt revolver but the barrel was long and it flared at the end like a blunderbuss. He placed it on the counter in front of him but he kept his right hand on it.
My first impression was of animals, dead and stuffed many a year ago. I know nothing of taxidermy so I can’t tell if they were good examples of the science when they were new but the stitching had gone and there were large areas of blotchy skin showing where the fur had once been. The birds were even worse without enough feathers amongst the lot of them to decently cover a robin. They were on every horizontal surface
I went to the bar to get the drinks in. In the first place I was feeling just a bit guilty about getting lost and in the second place I was paid a lot more than the other guys. In the week since we had arrived the twelve of us in the party had settled well into two groups. The five guys with me together with the armourer were the ground-crew set and I socialised with them because they were closer to me in age and temperament. The other group was headed by the boss and included the air crew.
I had a foot in both camps but I hadn’t made up my mind where I belonged. I was welcomed by the lads when I brought over the beer and was offered a pool cue but I made a choice at that moment that defined my life: I turned and walked away from the group back to the solitary bartender.
I was an important cog in the machine that put the Canberra into the skies as an airborne laboratory but I had no wish to become an insider. Eighteen months later I led a team to Singapore that included an American aircraft but by then I had settled for the fact that I wasn’t a team player. I could play the game but I didn’t feel comfortable unless I was responsible for and answerable to myself and no one else.
The barman was truculently drinking the beer I had bought him but he was watching the pool players with his hand still clutching his strange gun. My attention was drawn to the walls. While the horizontal surfaces were covered in stuffed animals the vertical surfaces were not neglected. There were harnesses and bugles, Indian headdresses and saddlebags.
Behind the old man’s head was a leather and canvas saddle with two large padlocked pockets. The bartender was watching me with a glimmer of a smile. At that moment there was a yell from the lads and his scowl returned as he turned towards them. I explained that I worked with them. He considered that for several moments before he leant across the bar and accurately directed a stream of brown tobacco juice into a spittoon about six inches from my desert boot.
“Dey still sound like Black and Tans,” he told me clutching the blunder-pistol. His accent was American but he hadn’t overcome his native difficulty in pronouncing ‘H’.
Then he turned back to me and pointed at the odd saddle with his thumb.
“Dat’s a mochita and de pockets are called cantinas. A hundred years ago dey were used to carry mail across the Great Plains – have you heard tell of the Pony Express?”
“Wells Fargo and wild Apaches,” I ventured.
“Wells Fargo provided the postal service – they issued the stamps, that’s all. These pockets, now not only had mail but a bible and a revolver as well as a horn to wake up the man at the next depot!”
He was proud of his collection and relaxed as he told me the history of each item. I had to remind myself that he was telling me things he had learned – the way he described the exhibits it sounded as if he had been there at the time and used them himself. However long it had been since he left Ireland he had lost none of the Blarney!
It turned out that he had sailed from Cobh in 1920 with a warrant out for his arrest.
“Queenstown, they called it in those days but it was always Cobh to us.”
He was a Dublin boy and joined the IRA at fourteen after the Easter Rising. He had spent four years carrying messages before he was sent to Cork with a gun and a bitter hatred of the Black and Tans in his heart. Forty years later the hatred was just as fresh and strong. The sound of the voices from the pool table with their loud, confident English accents had struck deep into his nerves.
At that time an Irish lad landing on Ellis Island was treated as a hero and he was soon employed.
“De got me de ideal job for a man of my persuasions,” he chuckled. “I became a peace officer in the city of brotherly love!”
He had risen to the rank of Captain in the Philadelphia Police Department before a drunken fishing holiday marred his retirement. He had come out to California with a friend to catch mountain trout and viewed the surrounding area with that lack of discernment that follows the drinking of too much Jamison’s. He had sunk his retirement pay into this bar and had been slowly sinking with it further into oblivion ever since.
We had been getting through a few cans of beer as we spoke and I remember thinking – although not too clearly – that one of the others had better be sober enough to drive. He still shied when there was a particularly loud outburst from the lads at the pool table but he had replaced the blunder-pistol under the bar counter.
“It was used by the guard on a stage coach,” he explained. “It was loaded wit’ four-ten shot and it must have freshened up your ideas if it was fired at close range.”
He took a sly look at the pool table then beckoned me over to a corner where a tarpaulin covered what proved to be a Nickelodeon. According to him it still worked although it needed a good clean, he did admit. It had, he said, been rescued from Barbary Row after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. He was at pains to point out that it wasn’t totally authentic since it had been converted to take dimes.
He totally ignored the farewell shouts from the guys when we stumbled out at last. He would go to his grave hating the English. My friends hadn’t even noticed that he was cool towards them so the only person punished by him was himself but I’ve sometimes wondered about the outcome if I hadn’t been there to coax his finger from the trigger of his blunder- gun.
I can’t remember who drove home but we decided to retrace our route. Within five miles we came to a crossroads with a very clear sign showing our route back to Mountain View. My theory is that the man who tested corners for California had been there while we were drinking and put up the sign – I swear it wasn’t there when we drove up!
I was inspired by all those cowboy movies where a fat old man takes an enormous cigar from his mouth and tells the hero: ‘Go West, young man!’ I was particularly susceptible since I was born in Dalmuir, the western fringe of Clydebank that itself clings to the western coattails of Glasgow.
My earliest restlessness was occasioned when in 1941 much of Clydebank went west under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. My Mum with a headscarf in place of the traditional bonnet mounted the covered wagon and headed west. It was actually an SMT double-decker and the bottle neck was at Dalnottar rather than the Cumberland Gap but you must allow a four year old a certain width of poetic licence.
The truth is that at the time I had a full belly and a clean nappy so I slept through much of the epic journey. Reflecting on this incident in later years I concluded that I was not born restless but had restlessness thrust upon me.
When I reached the age where I was seeking the moving finger that would point me to my destiny, I did consider going west but by that time there were ‘No vacancy’ signs all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Californian gold had run out unless you were an inarticulate Austrian body-builder.
Ever ready to settle for the humdrum I was shaken out of my comfort zone by being sent to the San Francisco Bay area on my first overseas trip. We were flying out of NASA Ames Research Center mostly over the Sierra Nevada but with a couple of excursions over the San Bernardino Mountains. I was the least experienced person on the trip – and one of the ten least experienced people in the western world, I shouldn’t wonder – but I was second-in-command and heir apparent to a doughty Yorkshireman.
So there I was, as far west as you can go with dry feet, without having made any effort and without, so far as I can remember, ever feeling restless. I’m inclined to ascribe it to the major change I made to my philosophy after I moved to Glasgow. I was a student at the University with a young man’s reverence for numbers and the world at my feet.
I was raised in a small village and I was then and still am, to some degree, a trusting person. Not altogether stupid, I worked out a strategy for survival in the big city. Buses and even trolley buses like the wind goeth where they listeth but you can’t go far wrong with a tram. They run on tracks and can’t veer off on unplanned excursions.
Well I say that, but we had a series of lectures cancelled when we were in second year because the lecturer trusted trams. On an especially foggy night he checked the destination board of a shuggly and then followed it in his car since it would take him past the end of his street. Sadly, the tram turned into the depot and he finished up in the Western Infirmary once they got him out the inspection pit.
I’m not sure now whether I was ever so naive as to expect the route numbering system to be based on a logical assessment of the geography of the city but I was flabbergasted when I discovered that the 51 and the 51A trams only shared about a hundred yards of track at the top of Bath Street.
Walking back along a tram line from an unplanned destination is wonderfully stimulating to philosophical musings. You either curse Glasgow City Council or your fairy godmother for getting you into this mess or you look around in wonder at the unsuspected sights revealed by your navigational error.
I found that I revelled in the gems of city life that would have remained hidden if I had bothered to learn more about the transport system. Before I graduated, ‘Go West’ had been replaced by ‘Get Lost’ as the corner-stone of my life. I recommend it.
Even on the way to California on that first overseas trip the value of the philosophy was illustrated. We spent a night in New York, leaving most of our baggage in the airport left-luggage. During our excursion the length of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too, our hotel room was rifled: all they found of mine was my driver’s licence although others were much less fortunate.
We discovered a great deal about the inside of the Sixth Precinct that they rarely show in even the grittiest movies about New York’s finest. In a cage in a corner a boy of about fifteen was being baited by overweight policemen – he had driven an articulated lorry down 5th Avenue but even so he deserved more humane treatment.
The loss of my licence opened up a fascinating excursion into corporate life of California. I had to sit a driving test in a building in what is now called Silicon Valley. The written test was very simple with multiple choice questions that clearly signalled the right answer. I almost failed the practical test.
The only thing that saved me was the examiner. He had spent the war in Norfolk keeping bombers fit to fly over Germany. He interrupted his happy memories of these days with a frequent litany: ‘I should really fail you for that, but gee you guys were so great to me…’ I did forty in a residential area with a twenty limit and I overtook a school bus stopped on the opposite carriageway as well as a host of minor infractions of the California Highway Code.
To celebrate my pass, I drove six of the guys into San Francisco to watch the Chinese New Year. I got lost but we found a parking place in the end. It was only when we got out the car that I discovered that we were on Haight at its junction with Ashbury. I got a ticket for parking facing the wrong direction but it was worth it. Man – I was there when it was happening, right where it was going down!
My main task was to draft the flight plan for the day. It meant getting up early and driving to San Francisco International Airport to sit in on the meteorological briefing. Armed with appropriate charts I would dash back to Ames and convince my boss and our navigator that the best chance of finding mountain waves was where I had already decided. I didn’t mind listening to their opinions if they didn’t take too long to agree with me!
In certain weather conditions, when air has risen to clear a mountain range it falls into the valley behind the ridge. In the Sierra Nevada there are more ridges behind the first and in the right conditions they can reinforce the wave and cause the air to become dangerously agitated. You have probably felt it as turbulence crossing the Alps but in a very few cases the energy is sufficient to cause a crash – think of a sea wave rising and breaking as it nears the beach.
We had been there for about a week when a weather front coming in from the Pacific made mountain waves very unlikely. I phoned from the met office to stand down the crews and then I drove straight to Ames to pick up some of the ground-crew. We only had two cars so we filled them to capacity when we had any time off.
My boss and our instrument man were photographic nut cases. We’d be driving along beside a meadow when one of them would demand an emergency stop. Out would come their camera bags and they would settle beside some insignificant blossom and spend twenty minutes discussing light and lenses. The resulting photographs were excellent, I will admit, but the rest of us were understandably bored rigid by the performance.
Today both of them were to face a court martial. Our Canberra was a hybrid but part of it had once been a bomber. The only explosives in it now powered the ejection seats. Once the pilot and navigator were in their seats our armourer fitted the charges and he was first into the plane when it stopped to dis-arm the seats. He was the smallest man in the crew, completely bald and in our first week of operations he had banged his head three times causing some bleeding.
Standing Orders in Ames ops room was that the aircraft had to be grounded after the third incident until an investigation was held into the circumstances. Our crew, including the armourer himself, thought that he was a force of nature and could not be prevented from cutting open his head. We all felt protective of the aircraft’s reputation and there was more than a hint that there were anti-British influences at work within the base. There had already been a heated discussion on the word ‘inflammable’ – liable to burn, in English but fire proof in American.
The rumour was that the trial wouldn’t last long so we got away fast after a hasty lunch in case the boss demanded a car. Once under weigh, we discussed possible destinations: two us didn’t care, two fancied paddling in the mighty Pacific and one wanted to see the military cemetery somewhere in the Coastal Range behind Palo Alto. We had no maps so we headed up into the wooded hills in that general direction and hoped for the best.
Our final passenger came up with an intriguing idea that we could check en route. There was a bowling alley on the far side of El Camino Real from our hotel (Yes, we did know the way to San Jose, it passed by our door). Over a few beers he chatted to an employee of the State of California who spent his days driving round corners as fast as he could.
If he got round, tyres squealing, at say fifty miles per hour, he would turn and take the corner from the opposite direction. Once he had used enough tyre rubber he would write up his findings and send a requisition for a road sign giving the tried and tested maximum speed at which the corner should be attempted.
You can see for yourself that it was a challenge that we could not resist so we spent an hour scaring ourselves. We later found out that the road we had been driving on had not yet been tested and the signs we had been reading were no more than guesses, inspired by the unused speed signs cluttering up the depot. I was driving but I deeply resented the implication that I should have kept track of where I was going.
The Pacific was west and San Francisco Bay was north and east so it was stretching things to describe us as ‘lost’. After half an hour without even spotting a direction board I was prepared to concede that we were seriously mislaid. I argued that the only thing we could be sure of was that there was nothing helpful behind us but it’s fair to say that I had no support for that view when we turned a corner and entered Boulder Creek.
As my confidence dwindled I had let the speed drop so moderate braking was all I needed to stop before we left the township again. I may be doing a thriving community an injustice: there may have been fifty houses hidden amongst the trees but on the road we were on there was only enough space between ‘Boulder Creek Welcomes Careful Drivers’ and ‘Call Again Real Soon’ for a single wooden building.
It was long and low and the sag in the roof line suggested that it was soon going to be even lower. There was a veranda at the front of bat-wing doors and a hitching rail at the roadside. Not promising, I concede, but we were in desperate need of somewhere to stop and have a bitter argument about who was to blame for our predicament and what to do about it. The first thing they did was to take the keys from me since they were unanimous that my driving was largely to blame.
A ‘Coors’ sign flickered into life at that moment so we accepted the omen and trooped onto the porch and through the swinging doors into a museum. The light wasn’t good and it came from an unusually large variety of sources. Electricity seemed to be reserved for advertising signs but they were supplemented by two brass oil-lamps with large bowls in etched glass. Further illumination came through a large number of gaps in the roof shingles and there was quite a lot of light through the door once we had stopped blocking it.
The tables and chairs were formed from barrels of various sizes and there was a pool table in one corner that looked to be a century younger than anything else in the room – including the barman! He was probably over seventy with a shock of white hair. He wasn’t tall but he had broad shoulders and his chest was still bigger than his beer belly.
If he was pleased to have our custom, he hid it well. The five Englishmen, shouting their opinions as they do, were intent on checking out the pool table so they missed seeing the owner bring from beneath his counter a most remarkable weapon. It had the stock and chamber of a Colt revolver but the barrel was long and it flared at the end like a blunderbuss. He placed it on the counter in front of him but he kept his right hand on it.
My first impression was of animals, dead and stuffed many a year ago. I know nothing of taxidermy so I can’t tell if they were good examples of the science when they were new but the stitching had gone and there were large areas of blotchy skin showing where the fur had once been. The birds were even worse without enough feathers amongst the lot of them to decently cover a robin. They were on every horizontal surface
I went to the bar to get the drinks in. In the first place I was feeling just a bit guilty about getting lost and in the second place I was paid a lot more than the other guys. In the week since we had arrived the twelve of us in the party had settled well into two groups. The five guys with me together with the armourer were the ground-crew set and I socialised with them because they were closer to me in age and temperament. The other group was headed by the boss and included the air crew.
I had a foot in both camps but I hadn’t made up my mind where I belonged. I was welcomed by the lads when I brought over the beer and was offered a pool cue but I made a choice at that moment that defined my life: I turned and walked away from the group back to the solitary bartender.
I was an important cog in the machine that put the Canberra into the skies as an airborne laboratory but I had no wish to become an insider. Eighteen months later I led a team to Singapore that included an American aircraft but by then I had settled for the fact that I wasn’t a team player. I could play the game but I didn’t feel comfortable unless I was responsible for and answerable to myself and no one else.
The barman was truculently drinking the beer I had bought him but he was watching the pool players with his hand still clutching his strange gun. My attention was drawn to the walls. While the horizontal surfaces were covered in stuffed animals the vertical surfaces were not neglected. There were harnesses and bugles, Indian headdresses and saddlebags.
Behind the old man’s head was a leather and canvas saddle with two large padlocked pockets. The bartender was watching me with a glimmer of a smile. At that moment there was a yell from the lads and his scowl returned as he turned towards them. I explained that I worked with them. He considered that for several moments before he leant across the bar and accurately directed a stream of brown tobacco juice into a spittoon about six inches from my desert boot.
“Dey still sound like Black and Tans,” he told me clutching the blunder-pistol. His accent was American but he hadn’t overcome his native difficulty in pronouncing ‘H’.
Then he turned back to me and pointed at the odd saddle with his thumb.
“Dat’s a mochita and de pockets are called cantinas. A hundred years ago dey were used to carry mail across the Great Plains – have you heard tell of the Pony Express?”
“Wells Fargo and wild Apaches,” I ventured.
“Wells Fargo provided the postal service – they issued the stamps, that’s all. These pockets, now not only had mail but a bible and a revolver as well as a horn to wake up the man at the next depot!”
He was proud of his collection and relaxed as he told me the history of each item. I had to remind myself that he was telling me things he had learned – the way he described the exhibits it sounded as if he had been there at the time and used them himself. However long it had been since he left Ireland he had lost none of the Blarney!
It turned out that he had sailed from Cobh in 1920 with a warrant out for his arrest.
“Queenstown, they called it in those days but it was always Cobh to us.”
He was a Dublin boy and joined the IRA at fourteen after the Easter Rising. He had spent four years carrying messages before he was sent to Cork with a gun and a bitter hatred of the Black and Tans in his heart. Forty years later the hatred was just as fresh and strong. The sound of the voices from the pool table with their loud, confident English accents had struck deep into his nerves.
At that time an Irish lad landing on Ellis Island was treated as a hero and he was soon employed.
“De got me de ideal job for a man of my persuasions,” he chuckled. “I became a peace officer in the city of brotherly love!”
He had risen to the rank of Captain in the Philadelphia Police Department before a drunken fishing holiday marred his retirement. He had come out to California with a friend to catch mountain trout and viewed the surrounding area with that lack of discernment that follows the drinking of too much Jamison’s. He had sunk his retirement pay into this bar and had been slowly sinking with it further into oblivion ever since.
We had been getting through a few cans of beer as we spoke and I remember thinking – although not too clearly – that one of the others had better be sober enough to drive. He still shied when there was a particularly loud outburst from the lads at the pool table but he had replaced the blunder-pistol under the bar counter.
“It was used by the guard on a stage coach,” he explained. “It was loaded wit’ four-ten shot and it must have freshened up your ideas if it was fired at close range.”
He took a sly look at the pool table then beckoned me over to a corner where a tarpaulin covered what proved to be a Nickelodeon. According to him it still worked although it needed a good clean, he did admit. It had, he said, been rescued from Barbary Row after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. He was at pains to point out that it wasn’t totally authentic since it had been converted to take dimes.
He totally ignored the farewell shouts from the guys when we stumbled out at last. He would go to his grave hating the English. My friends hadn’t even noticed that he was cool towards them so the only person punished by him was himself but I’ve sometimes wondered about the outcome if I hadn’t been there to coax his finger from the trigger of his blunder- gun.
I can’t remember who drove home but we decided to retrace our route. Within five miles we came to a crossroads with a very clear sign showing our route back to Mountain View. My theory is that the man who tested corners for California had been there while we were drinking and put up the sign – I swear it wasn’t there when we drove up!
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 ten novels and many short stories. His seven latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty, Killing Cousins and Damaged Lives – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned ten novels and many short stories. His seven latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty, Killing Cousins and Damaged Lives – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.