POLLDUBH

     By day we worked on the roads - cutting hedges, scraping weeds from the verges. In the evening, after bean-time, we climbed the slabs which covered the hillside, above and beyond the cottage, like armoured plating. Tom and I took turns to go first. It was a great honour to go first because the one who goes first is the one most likely to break his neck. "Why is it," McCallum said to me once - McCallum doesn't come in to this story - he just sort of hovers in the background offering words of wisdom like the old blind priest in Kung Fu - "Why is it grasshopper," he said, "That when I was young and had my whole life in front of me, I kept trying to throw it away. But now that I don't have very much left, I'm holdin' on tight."
     In this contest (the who's going to kill himself first contest) John didn't rate at all. He had another role altogether. Uncompetitive and undriven by an excess of adrenalin, John had a tidy sports jacket and a polite manner. So he was our spokesperson. He was also the one who tried a bit harder when it was his turn to cook the beans - pepper, a touch of oregano perhaps, and not to be eaten straight from the tin.
     John climbed too, but he didn't do what Tom and I did. Even as a young man, John was holding on tight. Perhaps he had a premonition that he hadn't as much life to come and go on.
     Once, Tom broke the rules of the game and nearly killed me with a huge sod. It weighed perhaps half a hundred-weight. He cast it out of the crack up which he was struggling. Sixty feet above my head he was and he said not a word. It landed on the ledge beside me where I sat dangling my legs in space and innocently paying out the rope. I felt the breath of it. If I had leaned to one side a second before, perhaps to ease the ache in my rock-embossed buttocks, my head would have been removed. Another time, in far off Switzerland, Tom saved my life with a snatched rope when I slipped on ice during our descent from the Matterhorn. These things we did for each other. These things stick in the memory.
     Polldubh means "black pool" which is funny because there never was a place less like Blackpool. No towers - unless your looking at the crags which flanked the glen and gave us our evening entertainment. No promenade unless you mean the narrow earthen track with the varicose tree roots which led through the woods to our tiny cottage which was named after the gurgling hollows in the river nearby. And absolutely no illuminations. Only a paraffin lamp, hung from the hook in the blackened ceiling and orange flames guttering in the old iron fire-range.
     It was John (of course) who found the cottage and rented it from the waterboard - or was it the Forestry Commission? Some such. And it was John who found us work as county roadmen. I had arrived, totally broke, from a climbing holiday in Skye. Tom was still in Glasgow chasing women. John and I cycled the six miles to Fort William, made enquiries and ended up talking to the Borough Surveyor who was surprisingly accommodating. We found out afterwards he had a son who was a student, so he knew the score. He told his foreman to give us the jobs. Tom had given us delegated authority and so we gave his name as well.
     In late evening, when the midges had driven us indoors and darkness had settled into the glen, we sat by our wood-fire and talked. Tom and I of climbs done and planned. John of philosophy and the meaning of words. He opened my eyes and my mind. I don't think he realised that for I, at that age, could not admit defeat.
     The foreman gave us a three minute lesson on how to use and sharpen a scythe. The equipment, we were told, could be hidden in the bushes. It was true. Folk were honest in those days. Daily we cycled betwixt the job and our cottage. Nine miles. Three of us. But with only two bikes. John had brought his own bike from Glasgow on the train. Like John it was neat and tidy. It behaved responsibly. The other, we inherited with the cottage. It was not neat and tidy. It did not behave responsibly. It was very large. It had been built for very large Highland postmen with flat feet. It was black. It had upright handlebars and had those ancient roller-brakes, all rods and levels and cams, which looked like the way they distributed the machinery-power in a factory during the industrial revolution. The bike had no gears so ascending hills required determination.
     Tom and I shared this bike. One pedalled. The other sat on the handlebars with his feet cramped on to the ends of the spindle of the front wheel. For a young man it was very intimidating thing to look down from this position at that thick black knobbly rubber tyre revolving in a blur just below his crotch. The Glen Nevis road, in that summer of '55 was not as it is now. It was just a narrow band of apologetic tarmac laid over rough ground. In places the pot holes went through to the earth. In others the grass erupted upwards. And in places those old road-builders hadn't bothered to remove the underlying boulders so that the surface looked as though it was afflicted by boils. The Youth Hostel was half way down the glen and beside it there was a long hill. This was the only point which defeated us - the only point where the handlebar-rider had to dismount and walk. (Once, in a fit of illegal bravado, we did our circus act right up the main road through Fort William).
     But it was the bike which dominated our thoughts and it was about the bike that the rivalry between Tom and I, spilled over into rancour. Sitting on the handlebars was subordination. The engine-man had all the glory. We took turns. Later I rebelled and refused to sit on the handlebars. My excuse was Tom's carelessness. The sod-throwing incident on the crags had already weakened my trust in Tom's good sense. But the suitcase incident was the last straw. It was John's suitcase, sent by a careful mother to her careful son, full of neat tidy well washed clothing. Tom and I collected it from the Fort William railway station left-luggage office. Tom had the pedals so I had, perforce, to perch and hold on with only one hand, the other being fully occupied clutching the suitcase to my lap. Naturally we walked up the long hill, but foolishly tried to make the descent - en masse. Tom took the downward slope without brakes and hit one of the biggest boulder-bumps dead center. I found myself first levitated and then, a second later, running like hell with a suitcase in my arms and with one leg on either side of that whirling front wheel. That arrangement could not be sustained. Tom and the bike overtook me and we all went spinning into the bramble-filled ditch.
     It was after that that I refused to let him skipper the ship. Revenge was sweet but entirely unintentional. (I just hope he believes that). We were descending the same hill. I, like a responsible citizen, braked gently.
     "STOP!" he (in his handlebar-suspended position) roared. I applied the brakes more strongly. He repeated the cry an octave higher. Strangely the bike did not slow in any way. We continued, in this fashion, down the hill, he shouting hysterically, me trying hard to arrest our descent by pulling with great strength on the brakes. We rolled to a stop on the next incline upwards. I released the brakes. Tom extracted a great lump of buttock-flesh from between the handlebars and those ancient roller brakes and said, in a surprisingly plaintive voice,
     "Why didn't you stop pulling the brakes when I told you?."
     Years pass. Tom became a much respected family doctor and was, for many years, a mainstay of his local mountain rescue squad. John became a teacher of English. Later he wrote and edited schoolbooks on language and was a confidante of Ian Critchon-Smith one of Scotland's greatest poets. I took off in other directions which led me, by a circuitous route, to the writing of a book about language. The long reach of John's influence was still with me.
     Many decades later, we met at a university reunion. John accepted an invitation to supper and we sat, once more, by an open wood fire. The years vanished. Mountains, bicycles and the philosophy of language tumbled out and were re-examined. We devoured each other's words. My wife, recognising what was happening, plied us with tea and from the flickering shadows, watched with amusement. John promised to read my book. I delighted in his promise, for if fulfilled he would probably have been the second person ever to have done so. I planned further discussions and began to map my arguments. Three days later, while visiting his son, John died of a coronary. I miss him.