And the Land Lay Still (48 page)

EDGAR
: Yes?

BOND
: When I think about it now it’s clear enough. Those months between the two General Elections that year, that was when the whole direction of Scottish politics for the next three decades was laid down. The SNP won seven Westminster seats in the February poll and came second to Labour in thirty-four more. Bound to loosen the bowels a bit, eh, if you were a Labour MP? So the party machine clanked into reaction. Wilson told the Scottish leadership they were going to have to go down the devolution road, like it or not, in order to shunt the Nats into the ditch. Result? Five years of bluster and barter, a failed referendum, eighteen years of Tory rape and pillage, ten years of Labour-led devolution and, at the end-up, a Nationalist government in Edinburgh.

EDGAR
: Some might call that a waste of effort.

BOND
: Aye, but think of all the oil and gas extracted from the North Sea over those years. Some might call that a good return.

EDGAR
: That’s a very cynical view.

BOND
: Cynical? I’ll tell you a story about cynical. Everybody was lining up to say devolution was the way forward. The STUC was for it, even the CBI wasn’t totally against it. Wilson was making public noises about the virtues of bringing power closer to the people, but privately telling his Cabinet it was the only way to dish the separatists. But a lot of folk in Scottish Labour didn’t agree with his analysis, thought it was playing straight into the SNP’s hands. There was a meeting of the party’s Scottish Executive. A list of five devolution options, drawn up by Wilson’s advisers in London, was on the table for discussion but the general principle of devolution wasn’t. Or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It was a Saturday, late June. The World Cup finals were on in Germany and a Scotland team had reached them for the first time since the 1950s. They were playing Yugoslavia that afternoon. They’d already beaten Zaire and drawn with Brazil. Drawn with Brazil! Fuck’s sake, there was a real possibility they might progress to the next round! Even Willie Ross was in Frankfurt for the game. Scotland
versus Yugoslavia or block grant versus tax-raising powers? Nae contest! The patriotic tendency on the Executive chose the game and who could blame them? Eighteen out of twenty-nine members didn’t turn up to the meeting. The anti-devo faction found itself with a majority of one and rejected every Home Rule option on the agenda. No extra time for constitutional tinkering, they decided. Probably about the same time Scotland drew 1–1 with Yugoslavia and went out of the competition on goal difference.

EDGAR
: I have never had the slightest interest in soccer.

BOND
: That’s obvious. So Wilson had to bring the lads to order. Force them to swallow Home Rule and if it made them choke, well, it was for their own good. He wanted to turn his minority administration into one with an overall majority as soon as possible, but he could do this only if he turned the Nat tide. No point in beating the Tories in England if honourable members were being huckled out the back doors of Scotland and Wales by the SNP and Plaid Cymru. The Jocks and the Taffies might be awkward buggers but between them they’d delivered more than sixty seats to Labour, and it was essential to keep all those and if possible add a few more. It was a tricky fix, but Harold would find a way: fixing was what he was best at.

First, he ordered the Scottish party to convene at a special conference. There was to be just one item on the agenda, devolution, and Wilson made it clear there was to be just one outcome, a reversal of the Executive’s position in June. Next, he got the union leaders who were in favour of devolution to deliver their block votes and persuade their doubting comrades that this was what was needed to keep Labour in power. There was support from the constituencies too. Even Willie Ross gritted his teeth and agreed that there didn’t seem to be any other way of stopping the Nats. The conference was held in August, at the Co-operative Hall in Dalintober Street, Glasgow. It was a dirty business, a grinding, clinical performance – Yugoslavian, you might call it – but it swung Scottish Labour behind Home Rule, committed it to a directly elected legislative assembly and freed Wilson to go to the country in October, when Labour won an extra seat in Scotland and an overall UK majority of …

EDGAR: Three. Again, one might ask whether all the effort was worth it.

BOND
: It was enough to be going on with. The SNP gained another four seats, but all from the Tories. The Labour vote held up pretty well. Everybody in the party breathed a sigh of relief, then started tearing lumps out of each other. The devolvers talked about how the Scottish Assembly would be a ‘powerhouse’, an engine for change and renewal, and this set alarm bells ringing all over the place. MPs from the north of England thought Scotland would have an unfair advantage over their areas, which faced the same problems of industrial decay, bad housing and unemployment. Left-wingers like Robin Cook in Edinburgh and Neil Kinnock in South Wales believed in British working-class solidarity and that any constitutional concessions to Scotland or Wales would be a betrayal of that solidarity. Even the Cabinet was full of sceptics who thought devolution was a slippery slope and a diversion from more pressing issues. Meanwhile the Tories dumped Ted Heath and replaced him with Margaret Thatcher, who started undoing the party’s dalliance with devolution. Apart from the SNP’s eleven, some Liberals and a handful of renegades from the two big parties, there wasn’t much enthusiasm at Westminster for the idea of siphoning political power off to the provinces. When the government presented its devolution White Paper at the end of 1975 it was torn to shreds – too weak for the devolvers, too strong for the centralists – and had to be withdrawn for major revisions.

EDGAR
: As I’ve already had occasion to comment, your powers of recall are remarkable. But why such attention to party politics? That wasn’t your area of interest, surely?

BOND
: It was all connected.

EDGAR
: What was?

BOND
: Everything. Everything was connected.

Twin track. The lines on that graph do their jerking, swooping tango across the paper, across Peter’s mind. 1975 was the year the Intelligence community decided it had had enough of Major Boothby. That was the year they gave him enough rope to hang
himself, so to speak. If he’d ever really ‘belonged’ to them, as Croick had claimed, by 1975 he was no longer considered a valued possession. Maybe he’d outlived his usefulness. Maybe he’d become a liability. Maybe he was about to blow his cover. Or maybe none of those things. Peter still doesn’t know. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of a night, in the middle of a day, in a chair, on a floor, and in the brief flicker between coma and consciousness it bears in upon him that Major Frederick Boothby wasn’t a spy or a stooge or an agent provocateur; he was just a man with delusions of adventure who really believed all the crap he printed and spouted.

Whatever the truth, the APG trial was a total gift to the opponents of the SNP.

Croick said, as if he wanted Peter’s opinion, Have we made progress, do you think?

Well, Peter said, they’re all inside. I’d say the Army of the Provisional Government has carried out its last campaign. (Its only campaign, he could have added.)

But is that progress? Croick said. He sounded genuinely unsure. They didn’t bring the big fish in for us, after all. We just netted a bunch of sprats. Maybe we should have left them out there longer.

Wouldn’t have made any difference, Peter said. You were hoping for links to the SNP, and there aren’t any.

Was that what I was hoping for?

That’s what you said.

And is that what you think? There are no links?

Aye.

So we’ve been wasting our time?

Well, like you said before, these people are prepared to use guns and bombs, rob banks.

They’re not really important, though, are they?
These
people.

Peter had never known Croick ask so many questions, look so doubtful. He said, So why
have
we been wasting our time on them?

A misguided sense of duty, Croick said. Then he brightened. We’ll just need to try harder. Take better aim.

Everything had finally gone belly up for the Army of the Provisional Government. The previous year one of the Merseyside bank robbers had been released after serving three years of his five-year sentence. Before long he was back in touch with Boothby, or Boothby with him. Others too: a boy recruited in Perth Prison; a couple of hardmen from Aberdeen and Glasgow; some guys who played in a band together. And there was somebody else. A guy Croick had moved in, Peter reckoned, but what the fuck did he know? Because Croick was shutting him out, closing him down, that’s what it felt like. He had to work it out for himself, and there was always the nagging, growing fear that he was working things out wrong.

The APG needed funds. The hardmen had weapons and had identified a couple of possible sources, more banks in Glasgow. In January the boys in the band hired a van and drove it through to Glasgow and everybody piled in and cruised the streets till they found a bank that was actually open. In they went with a shotgun and out they came with eight thousand pounds, much of it in specially marked notes kept in the bank for just such an eventuality. The gang split. The money went in several directions too. By the end of the month all the men involved had been picked up, a couple of them after a prolonged drinking spree in London. Then the police, acting on information received, maybe from Croick’s plant if there was one, dropped in on Major Boothby’s cottage and took away a few pieces of possibly incriminating evidence. That was in February. At the end of March they came back for Boothby himself. In May eight members of the APG went on trial and were put away for various crimes, for periods ranging between one and twelve years. Hugh MacDiarmid appeared as a character witness for Boothby, which may or may not have helped the Major’s case. He got three years.

What about Boothby? Peter said. Did you want him in the net or wasn’t there any choice? He wasn’t involved in the bank raid. But then he wasn’t involved in the other ones, was he?

Croick didn’t rise to it. All roads led to Boothby, he said. He’ll be all right. He’s a tough old bugger.

He’s sixty-five. He’s not keeping well.

Your concern is touching, but unnecessary. I’ve told you before not to waste your sympathy. He’ll be out in no time.

He seemed very sure of this.

History, he said. Things move on.

And after a pause he said, in a contemplative tone, As one cell-door slams shut, another opens. I wonder who’ll be pushed through it.

Peter sprawls about on the floor, working his way over to a bookcase next to the gas fire. The room smells of many things, all of them bad, and often it smells of gas. Peter doesn’t think, I should tell Mr Fodrek, there may be a leak. He doesn’t think, sniffing the gas and observing the sliding hills of paper everywhere, thank fuck I don’t smoke or this place would go up like a grouse moor in a heatwave. He doesn’t think that because he doesn’t give a fuck, remember? He’s after something, a book stuck behind a jumble of other books on the bottom shelf. He pulls it out, riffles through the pages: a single sheet of notepaper falls out. Yes! Somehow, even lying on his back amid the chaos, he can still home in on what he’s looking for. By Christ he can still do it. There.

He is aware of Edgar, hovering near by. Probably mildly amused at the spectacle Peter presents. Fuck him. Peter scrambles back into a sitting position, hauls himself on to the settee, clutching the book and the letter.

EDGAR
: So you did contact MacDiarmid?

BOND
: Aye, but not till much later, as the date shows. It wasn’t much to do with Croick and Boothby by then. I had my own reasons for going to see him.

EDGAR
: Previously, you’d had your own reasons for
not
going to see him.

BOND
: I was afraid he’d see through me.

EDGAR
: And now you didn’t think he would?

BOND
: No, now I
knew
he would. That was what I wanted.

(
The book is MacDiarmid’s
Collected Poems
of 1962, and on the title-page is a dedication, ‘To Peter Bond, with all good wishes’, and the poet’s autograph. The handwriting is shaky, and slopes downwards across the page, but the signature is strong, and finished with a line under it that has pierced the paper. Peter remembers the way
GRIEVE
,
having signed the book, held on to it for a moment before speaking.
)

EDGAR
(
as
GRIEVE
): Only a fraction of my life’s work is contained in here, but it was very welcome when it was published. A real breakthrough, that year.

BOND
: 1962.

GRIEVE
: Yes. You’ve had it since then?

BOND
: I was in London at the time. I got it in Foyles.

GRIEVE
: There is quite a lot wrong with it. There is quite a lot wrong with me too. But the book will be superseded! My complete poems are being prepared for publication, in two volumes, but it’s a long-drawn-out process.