Behind the Scenes at the Museum (29 page)

Unfortunately, our brains are still trying to digest Iunch when we hit the outer circle of Glasgow, which must account for our erratic progress towards the inner circle, a hellish journey on which hope and good manners are both abandoned. ‘I thought he was supposed to be a bloody RAF pilot,’ George hisses with disgust as the Ropers’ left indicator goes on – and then off – followed by the same behaviour from their right indicator – until we’re weaving crazily along Sauchiehall Street as if we’re harpooned onto Moby Dick rather than a 1963 Consul Classic. ‘How did he find Dresden? He couldn’t find his way round bloody Woolworth’s.’

‘Neither could you,’ Bunty says, her lips moving like a pair of scissors. The real crisis occurs when we are separated by a traffic light at the top of Sauchiehall Street and Bunty lets out a wail of despair, ‘
We’ve lost them, we’ve lost them now!
’ I think it’s at this point that I decide to play dead. Patricia, I see, is already faking a coma.

Things improve a little on the other side of Dumbarton, a highway of tranquillity lies ahead of us until Crianlarich. Patricia entertains us by reading aloud from
Tristram Shandy
. Bunty shifts uneasily in her front seat because all eighteenth-century prose sounds smutty to her and she has trouble believing it’s on Patricia’s A-Level reading list. Every so often she glances behind to check we’re not sniggering at something dirty – completely missing the Stone Age genitalia with which Patricia has adorned the rear window. Patricia seems to be quite obsessed by human biology.

Crianlarich passes in a blur of raindrops and it’s only several miles up the road that we discover we’ve gone right when we should have gone left:
What’s he doing? He’s turning, he’s turning!

Where is Scotland? What is Scotland? Is it rain solidified into the shapes of houses and hills? Is it mist, carved into roadside cafés with names like The Crofter’s Kitchen? (
Don’t give that to the baby, Christine – he’ll be sick. There – what did I tell you?
) Who knows? We are going to a place that sounds like it’s called ‘Och-na-cock-a-leekie’. The Ropers and our parents have been seduced by a brochure temptingly entitled ‘Scottish Farmhouse Holidays’ and their brains are awash with hot bannocks and griddle scones dripping with salty sun-yellow butter and thick porridge in a pond of cream, warm from the cow.

I’ve just fallen into a fitful doze on Patricia’s uncomfortable, bony shoulder when we screech to a halt yet again.
What’s he stopping for now?
‘Pit-stop!’ Mr Roper yells, making helpless, apologetic gestures with his hands as ‘Harriet’ yanks the baby-David out of the car and holds him over the grass verge. A stream of liquid like weak tea emerges from his nether regions. ‘I don’t see why she has to put things like that on public display,’ Bunty says with distaste. ‘She [she means Mrs Roper] may have a posh accent, not to mention having been to boarding-school (‘Send me,’ mutters Patricia. ‘Please.’), but really she’s just a slattern.’

Slattern! What a wonderful new word. ‘Slattern,’ I murmur appreciatively to Patricia.

‘Yes, slattern,’ Bunty says firmly. ‘That’s what she is.’

‘Not a slut like you then?’ Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed. There is a starched silence for a while and then somewhere around Dalmally Patricia breaks it by embarking on the
Patricia Lennox Songbook
, which is full of songs about tender maidens, dead union officials, unfaithful lovers and a lot of people hanging their heads and weeping and wailing and generally having a great deal of ‘trouble’, which we rollick along to in fine spirit. We’ve just reached a wailing crescendo (‘ve-ey-ey-ey-al’) when Bunty’s nerves finally snap (Had we not realized it was about adultery?) and she shouts, ‘Shut up the pair of you!’ and gives us cheese and onion crisps to prevent us singing any more.

The road grows narrower. The weather grows wetter. The air seems darker – although whether this is due to the evening or the rain, it’s hard to tell. We plough slowly on through the gloaming, as if it was a tangible force slowing us down. We jolt gracelessly to yet another halt (
I don’t believe it!
) and sigh as Kenneth trots off into a clump of gorse bushes, unbuttoning the flies on his grey flannel shorts as he goes. ‘Why didn’t he go when they stopped before? Doesn’t she have any sense?’ Bunty blows air out of her mouth like a carthorse. Christine gets out of the car and follows her brother into the bushes while Mrs Roper holds out the baby-David-teapot again. ‘They went at the hotel, didn’t they?’ Bunty asks, snorting with incredulity at the slack state of the Roper bladders. (Ours, under Bunty’s tutelage, are made of cast-iron.)

‘It’s not the destination that’s important,’ Patricia says in a dreamy way, ‘it’s the journey.’ (She’s reading
On the Road
as well as
Tristram Shandy
so it’s hardly surprising that she’s turning a bit zen.) But finally we’re off! yet again, following the yellow brick road, or rather, a dubious single-track. ‘Does this road have a number?’ George asks, huddling over the steering-wheel to see better. ‘I wish he’d put his bloody lights on!’ he adds, flashing his own headlights furiously.

Then a new hazard presents itself on the road without name or number – sheep! ‘They’re bloody everywhere!’ George exclaims in horror. Bunty has to go on sheep alert (
There’s one! Mind that one! That one’s going to cross! Keep an eye on that one on the left!
)

Tired of
Tristram Shandy
, Patricia and I play ‘Spot the . . .’ again but really there isn’t anything to Spot except for sheep.

Then disaster strikes – not as expected from the sheep slalom but a flat tyre on the Consul Classic. ‘See!’ George says triumphantly because Bunty’s been rattling on for weeks about how nice the Ropers’ car is compared to our own (which it is), but Bunty just tosses her head and says tartly, ‘A flat tyre can happen to anyone.’

‘That’s the road of life for you,’ Patricia says, the smile of the Buddha playing on her features.

Reluctantly, George gets out of the car and helps Mr Roper change the tyre – or rather Mr Roper changes the tyre and George hands him things, like a nurse assisting at an operation. Bunty also gets out and stands around observing George’s incompetence with spanners and nuts and Mr Roper’s manly grace under pressure. (‘Well done, Clive!’) All the while, Kenneth buzzes around with his arms out, pretending to be an aircraft, or a fixed-wing insect, or perhaps both. ‘Thank God I’ve got girls,’ Bunty says when she climbs back into the car (the only statement she ever produces indicating gratitude for our existence), and when George has sighed his way back into the driver’s seat, we’re off! again.

We are approaching our Mecca, there’s no doubt about it; we pass through several ‘Och-na-cockna’ villages and finally arrive at the right one. We take a left turn, double back, take a right turn, double back again and take the original left. ‘Oh fucking hell,’ George says wearily as he executes yet another three-point turn, and Bunty flaps her hands at him in disgust. But then, at last, we’re off! for the final time, splashing and rocking our way along a dirt track until we arrive in a muddy yard amongst a flurry of angry chickens. On one side is a long, low outbuilding, on another a dilapidated barn, and on the third is a big, square, grey-stone building – our Farmhouse. The Hammer Holiday from Hell is about to begin!

Mrs Roper puts all the girls together in an attic bedroom that reeks of must, and Patricia makes a dive for the single bed, leaving me to share the double with Christine, who spends half of every night telling me to move up, even though I’m already sleeping on the edge, and the other half grinding her teeth and muttering in her sleep.

For our first breakfast, seated at a long, dark-oak table in a gloomy, cold dining-room, we are served plates of lukewarm, salty porridge (to Patricia’s dismay) with neither milk nor sugar, and afterwards a strip of bacon each and a little pile of cold baked beans. This is prison food, not holiday food.

‘
Cold
baked beans?’ Bunty puzzles.

‘Maybe that’s how the Scots eat them,’ Mr Roper suggests, ‘or the Germans,’ he adds as an afterthought. I think it was at this moment that Patricia lurched from the table, informing everyone that she was going to be sick and indeed was as good as her word, throwing up before reaching the door (‘Heinrich, fetch a clout – the lassie’s boaked!’) And she hasn’t even eaten any breakfast yet! We have been on holiday less than twenty-four hours and three people have vomited already. How many more times will this happen? (Many.)

We are rather surprised to find that we aren’t near the sea and there’s quite a lot of discussion about whose fault this might be, Mr Roper’s orienteering skills once more being brought into disrepute by George (and defended by his mistress). Several day trips are planned to visit not only the sea but other places of ‘historic and architectural interest’ – Mrs Roper has brought a guide-book with her – and our first expedition is to Fort William via the famous Glencoe. ‘Why is it famous?’ I ask Mrs Roper, who is peering at the guide-book in one hand while wafting one of the baby-David’s dirty night-nappies in the other. ‘A massacre,’ she says vaguely.

‘A massacre,’ I tell Patricia.

‘Oh good,’ she says with relish.

‘No, no,’ I say hastily, ‘an historical one,’ but you can see from the look in her eye that Patricia isn’t thinking about Campbells and Macdonalds but Ropers and Lennoxes. Or perhaps just Lennoxes.

A black cloud, both metaphorical and real, settles above our heads as we enter Glencoe. (‘Aye,’ Mrs von Leibnitz confirms later, ‘it’s an uncanny dreich place that Glencoe.’) The hills rise, grim and threatening, on either side of us but we arrive safely
sans
massacre, and sample the delights of Fort William on a rainy day. We take immediate cover in another Kitchen, a ‘Highland’ one this time, which is full of people and pushchairs, sopping macs and dripping umbrellas, and a chrome Gaggia, hissing aggressively. The grown-ups, as they comically refer to themselves, have coffee in glass cups and saucers and Bunty smiles across the red tinfoil ashtray at Mr Roper and says, ‘Sugar, Clive?’ holding out the stainless-steel pot as if it contained Aphrodite’s golden apples and not brown-sugar crystals. ‘Thank you, Bunty,’ he says, locking his smile onto hers while the rest of us watch his spoon as if we’re hypnotized, as he stirs it round and round and round and round and round and round until Mrs Roper says suddenly, ‘You don’t take sugar, Clive!’ and we all wake up.

Patricia sips feebly at a glass of water, I have a cup of tea, Christine has milk, Kenneth has a Fanta and the baby-David is allowed a banana milk-shake which Mrs Roper pours into his baby-cup. The banana milk-shake is a sickly yellow colour that seems to owe very little to a bunch of Fyffes and it comes as no surprise to me when he dribbles most of it back up again after a few minutes. Patricia retires with precipitate haste behind a door marked ‘Lassies’ but everyone else, I’m glad to say, manages to hold their liquids down.

We discover that we’ve left the guide-book in Och-na-cock-a-leekie and wander the streets disconsolately, looking for something of architectural or historical interest, settling eventually on the Wee Highland Gift Shop where we buy many totally useless objects adorned with thistles and heather, although personally, I am delighted with my
Illustrated Pocket Guide to Scottish Tartans
, even if half the tartans are reproduced in hazy black-and-white. Foolishly, we buy sugar in large quantities – Whisky Fudge, Soor Plums (a Scottish delicacy, the woman in the shop tells us), Edinburgh Rock and long ropes of shiny liquorice. A sudden, painful August hailstorm prompts a group decision to abandon the Fort and we scamper back to the car park, and take the high road back to the Farmhouse.

On the journey back, we set about consuming our newly-bought confectionery in lieu of lunch and it isn’t long before the Ropers’ car is drawing up at the side of the road (
He’s stopping!
) for the baby-David to splatter the remains of his banana-yellow vomit all over the grass verge and, two minutes after we’re off! for the second time, it’s our turn because the lassie’s boaking again. Even the normally stalwart Mrs Roper has to ‘take some fresh air’ under the lowering skies of Glencoe. ‘Poor Harriet,’ George says, causing Bunty to look at him in speechless astonishment because he has never said ‘Poor Bunty’ in his life, but she never gets round to articulating this astonishment because Patricia moans gently and we have to
Stop!
again.

I commiserate with her, ‘Nobody knows the trouble you’ve seen, Patricia.’

‘Shutupruby.’