I wait until the house is very quiet before daring to look through Thomas’s commonplace book. I wait for an afternoon when the family are all away on business of their own, the children imprisoned with their dominie, all save my wee Jenny who is sleeping, having exhausted herself with running after her new spaniel puppy this morning. My daughters-in-law are paying afternoon calls, one of my sons is down in the shop and the other about the town on book business. When I have heard the last slam of the door, when I am reasonably sure that I will not be interrupted, when I can almost feel the house sighing and settling around me into its afternoon torpor, only then do I slide the commonplace book across the table and tease the pages gently apart.
As I thought, it spans a great many years, a large folio, bound in calf, a fat book with plenty of loose leaves, copies of letters, notes and cuttings tucked into it here and there. The first thing that falls into my hands is a detailed ‘receipt for the very Best Raisin Wine’, written in a faint scrawl which is certainly not Thomas’s own. His hand was small, almost cramped. It always surprised me to see such a crabbed hand emerge from such an expansive personality. The receipt covers several pages, recommending Smyrna raisins for Madeira wine, Malaga raisins for Spanish wine, and so on. There follow all kinds of specifics including the cost of making sixteen gallons of good wine with one hundredweight of fruit, producing sixty-four bottles at less than sixpence per bottle. ‘There are many delicious wines to be made with gooseberrys and currents mixt with the raisins,’ the writer tells us. ‘But be sure to use none but good, sound fruit, for bad raisins will never make good wine.’ And it strikes me that this might be a maxim by which one might live one’s whole life. If only one could be sure of getting good, sound fruit. But there are some fruits that decay from the centre, while maintaining a glossy outward appearance. How can you ever know?
Right at the bottom of the last leaf of the receipt, Thomas himself has added a note. ‘My grandmother’s. Her blackcurrant wine was very good.’ It takes me by surprise, that little addendum in his preternaturally neat hand. I have a sudden vision of him, sitting beside his fire, in his library, opening a cobwebby bottle and pouring its contents carefully into two thin glasses, one for me and one for him, the glasses so fine, their intricately twisted stems so fragile, that I am almost afraid to handle them, never mind drink from them. The wine is very dark and has the scent of fresh blackcurrants. It is remarkably strong, and, when I drink it, I can feel it coursing through my blood and clouding my mind with a sudden intimation of pure happiness. Memory twists inside me like a knife. I set the book down and rest my head on my hands for a while. I cannot look at it.
I cannot let it alone.
I turn to the last few pages. I find myself at once curious and apprehensive. But Thomas seems to have conceived an interest in the mineral world in his later years, and I am disappointed to find that there are only inventories of various specimens along with their prices and very little else. I learn from these that he paid eighteen pounds for a seven-ounce specimen of gold and one pound twelve shillings and sixpence for a meteorite from Sowerby. Twenty-one specimens of red stilbite (‘a most magnificent collection,’ he adds, ‘perhaps unrivalled’) cost him all of thirty pounds. In 1851 he had his whole mineral collection valued at one thousand seven hundred and fifty-one pounds. The precision of this – I must confess – astonishes me, but the lists of glistening chunks of rock, for which he had acquired such a passion, fall dry as dust upon my eyes and make my head ache. How did he come to this? How did my Thomas come to this? In much the same way as I came to books, perhaps? And were we both taking refuge in something safer and more predictable than the world of living trees and plants?
Hesitantly, I make my way back through the book, back through time, through those years of our estrangement. Many of the entries are concerned with life in the countryside. From some ten years ago, dated 1845, there is news of the death of the local minister’s wife. ‘Mrs Kennedy died at six o’clock on the morning of 27th March and was buried on the following Friday.’ There is a copy of a note to the ‘Directors of the Farmer’s Annual Ball’ from 1836, to the effect that Thomas is ‘exceedingly sorry that it is out of his power to do himself the honour of attending the ball this night’. There are requests for subscription funds. One for a ‘subscription for a monument to Robert Burns’ catches my eye as does another for ‘Alexander McKinnon, in Spring Row, who has suffered from having his machinery destroyed by accidental fire on the night of 29th June last and from a consideration of the honest and upright character he has uniformly maintained, and of his enterprise in establishing and carrying on the bleaching business to the satisfaction of the public, we deem it is our duty to assist him in the expense of repairing his machinery.’ Fire seems to be a regular hazard in the country, as it is here in the town, for only a few months later a lady has had her ‘two good cows consumed by fire’ and seeks his help, which seems to have been readily given. As why would it not? A kindly man still, you see.
There are lists, some of them land values, some of them to do with the finances of the school, which Thomas is obviously helping to support. There is a piece of correspondence concerning a poor woman who is ‘evidently in indigent circumstances and will in all probability soon become an object of charity’ and another seeking written permission to travel unhindered about the parish so long as the bearer shall ‘keep the straight or postroad’. That one, in particular, gives me pause for thought, brings back unpleasant memories, but I pass over it, moving back through the pages.
There are many references to the weather. ‘This day snowed from the north and covered the earth four inches deep. More snow during last night. I rose about nine o’clock this morning. There is a strong wind from the north east with a very thick snow and drift, which continued until the evening incessantly. I never saw so deep a snow in general, although I have seen much greater weather.’ And earlier, much earlier than the lists of mineral specimens, but dating perhaps from his first years in the countryside, there are a few lists of plants and trees acquired for the gardens of his uncle’s house. But they seem half-hearted at best, or am I imagining things? Well, perhaps not, for I turn over a leaf and see another list, which includes various interesting specimen trees. Beneath it, he has drawn two broad, dark lines, the pen digging into the paper, and there I see the words, ‘Such as William might have appreciated.’
My own name, boldly written down there, comes as a great shock to me, even more perhaps than I would have anticipated. I have to pour myself a small glass of whisky. I sip it slowly and when my heart has stopped racing I go back to the book with shameful eagerness, but there are few other references to me. I find copies of such letters as he wrote on my behalf with his own neat corrections. I find the letter that I wrote at his behest, with similar, more extensive corrections overlying my own scrawl, tethering my flights of fancy to the page like Lunardi’s balloon in the cathedral, but I find nothing else either to excite or sadden me. There is, incautiously I’m sure, a quotation from a document which appeared all over Glasgow in 1820, a call for men to ‘rouse from that state in which we have sunk for so many years, we are at length compelled from the extremity of our sufferings and the contempt heaped upon our petitions for redress to exert our rights at the hazard of our lives’, but it is copied without comment of any sort, as a historical curiosity merely, although it was a call to arms for which many suffered the extreme penalty.
There had been a series of terrible harvests throughout the whole country, the Corn Laws had affected the price of bread and many poor working people were destitute. There had, of course, been riots. Those in authority were so alarmed by the threat of revolution that punishments were severe and repressive. Glasgow had attracted destitute people from the Highlands, from the Western Isles and from Ireland, people who had some fixed idea – or should that be desperate hope? – that a man prepared to work hard might make his fortune here. Well, some did. I can’t deny it. But many of them were soon disillusioned. Those who managed to secure employment in the burgeoning mills and manufactories were housed, fed and clothed but they were also physically exhausted in a way that the likes of Sandy Caddas seldom had been, and they were often injured by the new machinery. For those who could not find work, more often through age and infirmity than from any idleness on their part, conditions were even worse. The minister might preach against the vice of slothfulness, but I was aware of a kind of widespread and abject poverty that, even throughout my most difficult times, I could hardly have dreamed of.
So it was that groups of self-styled United Scotsmen sprang up, advocating reform. The pamphlet or proclamation that Thomas had incautiously copied out was in the nature of a call to arms, although most would now judge that it was a false and deliberate provocation on the part of the authorities. It allowed them to charge any who responded to it with high treason. Many Glasgow weavers, unaware of the duplicity, answered the call, among them two young men, Andrew Hardie and John Baird. They were ultimately sentenced to be hanged, beheaded and quartered, their bodies mutilated far beyond the doubtful ministrations of the anatomists, a savagery that even now revolts me.
Two things there are that further disturb me on this quiet afternoon. At the very end of the book, there is a letter, folded and tucked in upon itself and addressed to me. ‘For William, to be read after I am gone,’ it says. But I have read enough and I put it away for the moment, sliding it into the private drawer at the back of my desk. Besides, I can hear the house coming to life around me, the sound of pots and pans in the kitchen, Jenny’s light footsteps on the stair with the pup scurrying in her wake, its toenails slithering and scratching on bare wood. Then, in my haste to close the book, I cause a draught of air, and a few dried leaves float from between the pages and settle on my table. They are skeletons, light as thistledown, all colour and goodness long gone from them, leached away from them by time. At first, I don’t know what they are, or where they are from, but I think their presence among the pages of this book is no accident. Suddenly, the sight of them gives me such a pang of sadness, such regret, that it is all I can do to contain it. I want to cry aloud with the pain of it. But, of course, I do no such thing. I scoop them carefully together, fold them among the loose sheets of one of the letters and replace them from whence they came.