The tragic death of Princess Diana in a Paris underpass on 31 August 1997 held unexpected significance for Scotland, since it coincided with the run-up to a highly charged referendum on devolution. Some said that voting should be postponed out of respect, others that even if it went ahead as scheduled, a yes verdict would be jeopardized since campaigners had to cram their work into a mere 100 hours. Novelist James Robertson captures the political and emotional mood of the country on the day of Diana’s funeral.
The door was open, just a wee bit. I could see light through the frosted glass. Hope rose in me. I pushed the door, just a wee bit further, and stepped half-in.
‘Are you open?’
‘Aye we’re open. Of course we’re open,’ said the barman. There were two other men and a woman, sitting or standing at the bar.
I’d been up and down the street for half an hour, looking for a pub that would serve me. Most had posted signs saying that, out of respect, they would not be opening till one, or two, or five. The shops were the same. I imagined managers and owners had spent some time weighing up how much respect they needed to show before they could start running their businesses again. A bus had gone by, with a few folk on the top deck looking like they were trying to get home before a curfew. The bus was going pretty fast: there was no traffic and no one waiting at the stops.
But in Robbie’s Bar the man was saying, ‘Of course we’re open.’ I stepped inside, relieved. I could taste the IPA on my lips already. The place, it seemed to me, was an island of common sense in a sea of insanity.
One of the drinkers said, ‘And we’ve got fucking cartoons on the telly as well.’ . . .
Saturday 6th September 1997. I’d been determined not to be part of it, succumb to it. I was angry that you were expected to be silent, that at a moment when the country was supposed to make a crucial decision about its future the future was effectively put on hold by a media-induced hysteria over the death of an unfortunate, incredibly wealthy young divorcee. Before the television coverage got under way I was off, up Leith Walk to see if I could find a shop open, or a pub where I could sit the thing out. I walked towards the city centre but it was soon obvious that there was not much chance of browsing in a bookshop or trying on a new pair of shoes. The only shops still trading on the Walk were a couple of fishmongers, with their shutters half-down. Fish, I thought, stay fresh for no one, however famous, especially on a Saturday. And I remembered the words of Maggie Mucklebackit the fishwife in Scott’s The Antiquary, chiding Jonathan Oldbuck for haggling over the price of a bannock-fluke and a cock-paidle: ‘It’s no fish ye’re buying – it’s men’s lives.’
Jim Farry of the Scottish Football Association had been castigated in the media for refusing to postpone a Scotland international. He’d eventually had to bow to the pressure. Various sanctimonious shits had been offended by his question, Does the world come to a stop on Saturday? – a question which outraged them chiefly because there was only one obvious answer to it, as the crowded supermarkets and shopping centres that afternoon would testify: most of them would have kicked off by three o’clock, and some would stay open late for extra time, to make up for the sales lost when they and their customers were mourning Diana. The not altogether strange thing about Farry’s crucifixion in the press was that I had yet to meet anyone who didn’t agree with him.
Another refugee came into the bar when I was halfway through my pint, watching Donald Duck instead of Diana’s funeral, and started telling Diana jokes. They weren’t very funny but we laughed, a little. I thought of the taxi driver, who in the small hours of the previous Sunday had first given me the news of the car-crash in Paris. Stupidly, I’d said, ‘You’re kidding.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m no. I mean, I’m no royalist, but I wouldnae joke about a thing like that.’ In Robbie’s Bar, after seven days in which there had been non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage of Diana’s death to the exclusion of virtually everything else – Mother Teresa died the same week and was lucky to get a passing mention – it felt like we’d earned a bad joke or two. We were a wee knot of protestors, with nothing to protest against except that we shouldn’t have to feel like strangers in a strange land. We were in our own place, yet out of place. Or were we, really?
There was, I believe, a silent majority who thought that the Diana thing was so over the top as to be on another planet. One has to be careful with terms like ‘silent majority’ – a phrase coined by Richard Nixon in 1969, when, in appealing for support for the war in Vietnam, his ploy was to persuade his fellow Americans that most of them, out there in front of their TV sets, were just as decent, honest, courageous and fully prepared to do the right thing as he was. Nevertheless, I was sure at the time, and as time passes I become even surer, that a sizeable majority of people in Scotland thought that the rest of the ‘nation’, led or at least encouraged by the newly elected Labour government, had taken leave of their senses. The world was going up in flowers again, but the trail of cellophane and wilting stems thinned out rapidly the further north one got. But this is probably a false impression in one sense: I suspect a major percentage of people in England, Wales and everywhere else also thought they were the only ones for whom all four wheels were still on the trolley of life. But it was virtually impossible to say so, and for those working for a yes vote in the referendum campaign, it was unbelievably frustrating to be forced to take a week off. It was, however, necessary: there were elements in the media who would have slavered over the opportunity to taint the pro-parliament campaign with images of Scotland Forward workers out on the street, refusing to suspend their politicking while a nation, the nation, mourned.
However, maybe the hiatus was not, in the end, detrimental to the cause. On the Monday, when things were allowed to happen again, I was leafleting tenements and tower-blocks in Leith. At the first intercom I buzzed to get entry to a stair, a disembodied voice demanded angrily why I wanted in. When I explained, the voice exploded in my ear, ‘Oh thank Christ for that! Back to bloody reality.’ I think it was at that point, as the lock was released, that I knew everything was going to be all right.