Brond Read Free Page A

home.’
    ‘Are you all right?’
    ‘I don’t despise you,’ I said. ‘For being a conscientious objector. That’s your business. And anyway the war’s over a long time. That’s the way I look
at it. I don’t believe in wars myself – or violence. I’m a pacifist.’
    Baxter looked offended. ‘I’m not a bloody pacifist,’ he said. ‘Never have been.’
    I tried to get him into focus but his face ran like white fat melting against the smoke.
    ‘What about – what about all that stuff about being in a camp? What about all that crap about getting beaten up by the guards?’
    The oldest student in the world scowled at me. ‘I refused to join the army. But it wasn’t because I didn’t believe in fighting for my country. Only I’ll pick the country.
Do you understand?’
    I shook my head. The movement hurt; waves of pain came and went. ‘I don’t get a bloody word of what you’re on about.’
    ‘I could believe that,’ Donald Baxter said. ‘That’s why I don’t explain any more why I didn’t let them call me up. Who would know what I was talking about?
What’s the use in this country?’
    Before I left the Professor’s, things became a little blurred. I seemed to remember Professor Gracemount talking about being in Czechoslovakia. He had been in charge of
some examination – for the British Council? did that make sense? – and a young Czech girl had come to see him. My brother has to pass this exam, she had said to him. It’s very
important to the family. It’s very important to me. We would do anything to make sure he passed. I personally would do anything to make sure he passed.
    I could see that girl. She was wearing a long cotton skirt with the kind of bright pattern a peasant in a movie might wear. I could see the way she licked her tongue over her upper lip when she
murmured ‘personally’.
    Had the Professor told that story? Was that the kind of story he would tell?
    I wasn’t sure.
    Yet I could remember everything the Irish lecturer from Stirling had said. He had started just after the Professor finished. It had been a long speech, but he had delivered it with great
gusto.
    ‘What size was Shakespeare’s London or Plato’s Athens?’ he had asked rhetorically in a rolling brogue. ‘Or take Kierkegaard who was followed by jeering children
through the streets of Copenhagen. Isn’t it wonderful that a philosopher should be as public a figure as that? But it’s not astonishing if you get the scale right. Those places
weren’t conurbations. They had nothing to do with the nightmare cities of twenty million inhabitants we’ll have by the end of the century. Why, Stirling at the moment has more of a
population than Oslo had when Ibsen was scribbling. Yet I don’t expect to find some kilted Henry Gibson clutching a manuscript of A Doll’s Hoose when I drive back tonight. Not a hope,
not the measliest little chance of it. Why? Because you need not just a town – although you do need that – a town with its human scale – but a town that’s also a capital
with a capital’s sense of bearing a place in the scheme of things. The human scale Joyce going to George Russell’s door at midnight to knock and talk philosophy at him as an
introduction. Or encountering Yeats – and Joyce, remember, young and unknown – and telling him, ‘You are too old. I have met you too late.’ Dublin in 1903, you see, was a
small town. But it was a capital too – and that’s the point. In Europe’s eyes, a provincial town; but in the eyes of a sufficiency of its citizens, a place where a nation’s
destiny was being reforged. In 1903 who would have imagined that Dublin might be of more significance than London or—’
    At that, however, Jerry, who had given up showing people his copy of Cocksuck and grown morose, twanged loudly, ‘Talking of Dublin reminds me of a joke. Do you know what happened to the
Irishman who tried to blow up a bus? Do you, eh? Anybody? He burned his mouth