Andrew Tickell: In Liminal Moments

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Andrew Tickell

IN LIMINAL MOMENTS I’m an awful switherer. My tendency towards irresolution has deep and frustrating roots. As a child, I developed the mortifying tick of turning buck-toothed, glassy-eyed and weeping with frustration at menus, unable to choose. My inevitable, pitiable welling up was a source of weary anticipation for my parents, who hit the bottle.

My wee sister cackled with douce cruelty at her dissolving big brother, seeing and understanding this bizarre behaviour in its proper aspect. My days of sobbing over culinary variety are – gladly – behind me, but the switherer’s imprint on the boy remains perceptible in the man.

It cuts against l’Esprit du Siècle, but the superabundance of choice has always struck me as an oppression, rather than an emancipation.

And from time to time, I can still feel that paralysing, frozen worm, wriggling through my system. If my intuition is silent, if I’m abandoned to the conclusions of my intellect and of my deliberate analysis, I proceed gingerly, in a hirpling mind. Many folk in my position might envy the dauntless few their hard, conclusive natures. Scotland has built many such men – almost always men – from girders, many under a red flag, whose steely, doubtless motto could be “though cowards flinch.” They’re the same grey-eyed spirits who thrust the brand into Patrick Hamilton’s pyre in Saint Andrews, and who drew the razor across the sainted Ogilvie’s belly. No havers, no qualifications: their minds move in bold, direct and conclusive strokes.

The independence referendum has thrown up countless hectoring partisans of this character, the voices of dead certainties, in both senses of the phrase. Imperturbable, untouchable and unempathetic, for them, the referendum can seem like a Manichean trial of the electorate’s soul, with all of the justice and injustice on one side or the other.

Between these two entrenched fastnesses, the great majority swither, a much more complex knot of attractions and antipathies, inheritances and forgettings, audacious but cautious, ambitious but hobbled by self-doubt. If this referendum has revealed one thing, it is that we contain multitudes.

The dualistic metaphor at the heart of the notorious warring polarities of the Caledonian antisyzygy understates our complexity.

In liminal moments like this, many Scots will be looking both backwards and forwards, pondering the future and the lessons of the past, some wondering what to do in September, others guessing in hope or fear about the consequences of whatever we decide.

“I’m voting No because it is what my father would have wanted,” another overheard voter remarks.

“I’m voting Yes for the sake of my grandchildren.”

In life’s eternal present, generational differences in politics, differences in core assumptions, are readily overlooked. I find that few of those who lived through the Cold War can quite imagine the extent to which the collapsing wall in Berlin is, for children of the 1980s and 1990s, a remote historical footnote, with all the burning contemporary resonance of the Peterloo massacre, the Seuz crisis or the assassination of Spencer Percival. The referendum campaign has developed its own historical canon

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The books Angus handed down form an eclectic shelf. Tomes about Melrose Abby and the Heart of Bruce. Histories of the Scottish People. The Golden Bough. George Outram’s Legal Lyrics, including the notorious “multiplepoinding” song.

A barking mad racist tract about the Irish, brought to you by TWH Crosland, the author of The Unspeakable Scot. A whole chapter of is committed to the London Irish, of whom Crosland contends...

of incidents, lessons and betrayals whose relevance is felt keenly by some, and utterly meaningless to others. Here, as in so many other areas, we conspire to talk past one another, like the Old Soldier and Me of the last edition. Anxieties about these gaps and mistranslations has induced me to reconsider the implications of own inheritances, and multiplied them.

Angus Miller, my great-grandfather, was a curious fellow. A rural doctor, he was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, and tended to the health of his community long before the Labour government of 1945 introduced the National Health Service.

A borderer by origins, he lived – and is now buried, in an unmarked grave, at his own request – in Lochaline in Morvern on the west coast of Argyll.

He died long before I was born, but is preserved in the eccentric collection of books he helped assemble across his long life and in my father’s memories of childhood.

He used to despatch my old man to the cliffs to snaffle gull’s eggs from their nests, professing to enjoy the fishy savour which infused them. When the last residents of St Kilda were cleared off the island by the British Government in 1930, many were despatched to the remote and sparsely-populated corner of Argyll, where my great-grandfather dealt with their aches and pains and broken bones. In one of my family’s darkest episodes, he buried his wife and eldest son, who was not yet twenty, when tuberculosis killed them both. His best pal was a communist shipwright whose son went on to become an Orange-tinged Unionist, much to the chagrin of the old tanky. Some years later, my father was summoned to the house of a dying man in Tayvallich. As a child, this fellow’s life had been – he firmly believed – saved by my great-grandfather.

He wanted to pay his regards to Angus’s descendants; grateful even on his deathbed for the long life that he had been given.

“... the London Irish do not shine effulgently. None of them is at the top of things, as it were; none of them has got very far above the middling. The reason no doubt is that the Irish temperament is coy. The Scotchman who comes to London knows that he is an alien and an interloper, and despised of his fellow-men, but he blusters it out. The Irishman, on the other hand, feels his position keenly and refuses to be other than diffident.”

Big, leather-bound copies of Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. An English translation of the Koran. A childhood favourite was F A Mitchell-Hedges’ (1923) Battles with Giant Fish, with marvellous black and white plates of “the author,” pipe in mouth, casual as you like, brandishing gargantuan but luckless forms of water-life, pried from some far-flung river or sea – sharks, sawfish, sting ray - alongside the demure figure of Mitchell-Hedges’ constant female companion – not his wife.

In retrospect, this library – which I used to dip into regularly as a boy – has a strong British imperial flavour to it. They must have been his son’s books, I suppose. The kinds of pre-World War II boy’s own adventure stories, sent-up by Michael Palin and Terry Jones in Ripping Yarns, predominated. Audacious tales of starchy and unflappable British gentlemen doing outrageous things against the backdrop of “our” colonial possessions. Explorers flanked by biddable but expendable phalanxes of sweetnatured “natives” and “coolies.” A story of crossing the Andes by Frog wouldn’t have been out of place.

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Folk like Jim Corbett, who plunged into the Indian jungle to hunt down and exterminate man-eating leopards, tigers, and even the odd sun bear, only narrowly missing being devoured himself on several occasions. Just So stories. Gerald Durrell. Musty tales of enterprising explorers, picked off by anacondas in the mangroves. Out of date zoology, and wrongly reconstructed iguanadons, splay-limbed and lizard-like, a solitary thumb-spike perched erroneously on its snout. As a nipper, I lapped up all this stuff, desperately un-PC as much of it – rightly – has become. It is a strange thing, really, that I have never been able strongly to identify as British. My juvenile imagination was chock-full of imperial figures from Edwardian and Victorian central casting.

But there’s something else interesting about Dr Angus Miller. He was the first member of my family to join the Scottish National Party, way back at the beginning. It was an inheritance which, four generations on, continues to mark my family. I have written here before about my grandmother – his daughter – who insisted on the party symbol being incorporated into the front page of the order of service at her funeral, and had to be persuaded that holding a collection for party funds after the ceremony represented an iffy manipulation of people’s grief. No member of that side of my family have ever shown any strong in clination towards religious belief. As my younger sister has observed, support for Scottish independence was faith enough.

But I sometimes wonder what prompted this then-eccentric, now more mainstream, impulse for independence of which I am, in some sense, an inheritor. There are clues – hints perhaps – in the themes which dominate the fusty bookshelves: of Scottish history, geography, culture, literature – but at such a distance of time, and politics, it is difficult to say. As we stand here, on the cusp of realising the goal which back in the 1940s looked remote – I wonder, would Angus approve of the kind of independence we are now seeking in this referendum – and perhaps more disturbingly, would I approve of the vision of independence which prompted him, all those years ago, to sign-up and plough cash into a no-hoper political outfit while Atlee’s government was enacting what would become the post-war consensus?

He converted my grandfather – the soul responsible for the faint touch of the absurd which comes of being called Tickell – who was half-Scottish but essentially an Englishman. Thomas James Tickell – Jimmy – married my grandmother and moved back to Argyll, having fought in north Africa and Burma in the Second War, leaving one brother dead at the

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bottom of the Atlantic, and another under a spare white cross in the soil of Sicily. Needless to say, for a man whose green salad days had been saturated by horror, and who had lost so much, he did not regard independence as a betrayal of the unforgotten comrades he left behind, in the sands of Africa and in the hell of the war’s south-east Asian theatre.

An unobservant Catholic, he only attended church on remembrance Sunday. Like so many others, my grandfather never spoke of the haunting and harrowing recollections of those days, and nobody ever asked. He fished. He pottered. He liked a good dinner, a drink, and the blether. He had a touch of the debonair. An Englishman by birth and education, he did the British state some service, but he believed in Scottish independence. Scratch any family in this country and you’ll discover similar inheritances and ambivalences, myths and stories. The tales told by these family palimpsests are sometimes, even often, difficult to decipher. We see even our most recent antecedents through what Keith Douglas characterised as “Time’s wrong-way telescope” which “will show a minute man ten years hence and by distance simplified.” Douglas ended on the haunting admonition, to “remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I’m dead.”

In this vision of remembrance as the Nietzschean belly, the loss of memory is both a life-giving and a consuming force. Forgetfulness isn’t a deprivation and a loss, or not only a deprivation and a loss, but the precondition for emancipation: “there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness.” There are paradoxes and misfits. The contemporary SNP understand themselves as the legatees of this idea of Britain and the social democratic principles undergirding it, but at the time, their party colleagues were no friends to the nannying state. As the author James Robertson notes dryly, we can’t orientate our lives and our politics with reference to the election address of an ancient Nationalist in the 1950s, but there are niggling ironies here which should remind us that forgetfulness is a creative force, continually reshaping, decontextualising and recontextualising the rough cast materials from which it creates its representations.

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This referendum poses a binary question. The unhelpful metaphor of “balance” between the two propositions ensures that this simple, divisive thinking will continue to dominate broadcasting right up until the 18th of September. Yet I find myself increasingly more interested these days in the crosshatching stories, the ironies, ambivalences, inheritances and disavowals lurking beneath the single logic of either/or and which folk up and down the land will be wrestling with. It is becoming commonplace for commentators to trot out – as if in sorrow – that the campaign is increasingly polarised.

This isn’t my experience. The polarities dominate the adversarial exchanges we hear on the airwaves and read in the press – but most folk I speak to in this mongrel nation find themselves pulled hither and thon by the referendum question. Given space to explain their view, treated respectfully, I find that even the most devoted are capable of recognising and giving a fair hearing to the other side of the proposition, and at least to an extent, to understand the passions, judgements and commitments involved. We aren’t half so unempathetic as we sometimes allow ourselves to be depicted.

On polling day, we must all decide on which side of the question we fall. In that great moment of choice, we must firmly resolve one way or the other.

I know where my own convictions lie. But until we stand in the booth, pencil in hand, let’s not be shy or ashamed of taking a moment to swither. To open up the family album, or run a finger down the spines of books which have not felt a living thumb for five decades, and reflect on the motley, halfcontradictory, ambivalent history told by these paper fragments and surviving, stolen snatches of family memory.

Biography also steals in quietly, the subtle webwork of connections, metaphors and inferences which jury-rig a life. I wouldn’t jump. I couldn’t jump. A teetering young hephalump at the top of the cliff face, I swithered towards the brink, peering down at my goading comrades. They laughed at my caution, crying, “jump, come on, jump!” Disdaining the plunge, they’d flown off with gusto and landed intact. With unboyish reticence, I hesitated over the precipice, fearing to fall. “Are you scared?” they mocked, chortling, beheading bracken fronds as my irresolution tested their patience. “For God sake, just come down. We’re leaving. Come on.” I scurried back along a gentler incline after them, through ashes and elders, into the Argyllshire scrub.

I never jumped.

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This memory of childhood has become a troubling parable of my disposition towards overcaution. In my late teens, I caught myself at it again. No. That’s not for me. No. We’ll have to think about it. No. Not today, perhaps tomorrow. No. You kid yourself on that you’ve given the opportunity for a testing new experience serious consideration, but it’s just a ruse.

Deliberation is a pose, faint-heartedness‘s affected costuming, designed to prevent you from seeing your behaviour in its proper aspect. Above all with such insulating strategies, it is yourself that you fool and your own lack of spiritual elasticity and tenacity which you excuse.

immense. Many futures will be determined, and alternative skeins of fate ravelled up, by the conclusion we reach. Either way, numberless opportunities will be created and forgone.

At seventeen, I resolved to stop: to join the knot of children at the foot of the crag, encouraging myself over life’s edges. Jump, jump, jump. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become better at distinguishing between my disinclinations, and the bad and good reasons undergirding them. But muted though it has become, I can at times still hear that small internal voice, speaking against audacity, speaking up for complacency and torpor. Don’t jump, you’ll break a leg. Don’t leap, you’ll crack your precious skull.

Parents amongst you might sympathise with the safety-first aversions of my weanhood self: serious, reticent little creature that he was. But it was hardly a childhood committed to the maxim that “he either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small, that puts it not unto the touch to win or lose it all.”

Even without following James Graham and exposing yourself to the full mercy of fortune, or vaulting off every cliff, there’s a prudential balance to be struck.

Today, I try to live up to my teenaged admonition.

Instruct your thoughts to spy on one another. Divine your real motives. Be stern with your self-serving excuses. By all means, say No sometimes, say No if you mean it. But do so for the right reasons, on good grounds.

A sense of confidence is of the essence in September’s independence referendum. But confidence in what? We have all of us been burdened with a historic choice. For many, this duty is a precious opportunity, jubilantly assumed.

For others, it is one peppered with anxiety about the scale and the significance of the decision to be made. Jim Sillars has a lovely line, that between 7.00am and 10.00pm on the 18th of September, the Scottish people will be absolutely sovereign.

Using only the elementary technologies of pen and paper, over that day, we will connect with millions of fellow citizens, taking a decisive view about our future. That is marvellous, uplifting. But it is also a choice which many folk will approach in fear and trembling. I empathise. It is a difficult thing, to be sovereign. You are exposed. The responsibility is

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“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow,” says T.S. Elliot. First strayed into, that shadowy judgment space is intimidating. But to occupy that space, day in day out, to transform ourselves into a selfassured, courageous nation of active citizens is the referendum’s essential challenge, Yes or No. Do we have the nous and the gumption to govern ourselves? Do we have faith in Scotland’s hidden powers, in the wits, talents and political judgment of the people who live here? Or would we prefer instead stoically to endure, or to rail uselessly against, decisions we have chosen to outsource to a legislature in London? In Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson writes of the “bleak” years after the 1979 devolution referendum miscarried: At my desk on North Bridge, the steady inflow of political handouts, reform plans, party statements and counter-statements which had been running for the previous five years dried to a trickle within weeks of the referendum. Much more upsetting was the impact on my own friends and acquaintances.

During those years, they had grown accustomed to the idea that Scotland was to become an exciting, lively little country in which their talents would be needed. In the diary, I wrote: “The future existed for many years; people became used to it as a background: now it has vanished and there is a blankness only.” People seemed to shrink and fade.

Many turned to alcohol, some to hard drugs.

Many more fell back into the old assumption that Scotland was a dead-end (“there’s nothing for young folk here”), and they left for London, America or continental Europe. The failure of self-government ruined many lives, and they were not the lives of the politicians.

Is the #indyref generation of bright young things doomed to dissolve into fags, gassy, obliviating lager and alienated, unpolitical private enterprises if Scotland votes No, feeling robbed of the opportunities of independence which their fingertips just grazed? It is difficult to say. A sense of powerlessness has its perverse psychological compensations. Familiar, futile resentments and disappointments externalise the burdens of responsibility. Life living down to your expectations confirms the horizonless cynic in his fatalistic conceit that nothing can or will ever change, validating the sense that political ambition is a weariness of the flesh at best, and at worst a misguided diversion

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rom humanity’s real vocation of lethargic pessimism and atomised commercial consumption.

Sir Walter’s Mrs Howden, in a famous passage from Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, reasoned: “Ah dinna ken muckle about the law, but I ken, when we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.” Taking responsibility in a country committed to an engaged, vernacular politics will not always be comfortable. Not least for those on the receiving end of the occasional volley of popular missiles. Embarking on an engaged life, marbled through with self-respect, is often hard won. But what we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly.

As an English radical once reminded us, it is dearness alone that gives every thing its value: comfort isn’t the point.

Another adolescent snippet. A Glasgow school hall in the early 2000s, care-worn but serviceable.

Throngs of kids, plooky and precocious, in schoolwear outsize and ill-fitting. Half, in blockish blazers in green and black and blue wool, the rest, dressed less uniformly, in muted colours. The state and private school kids all muddled together in groups for some artificial, playful task. After the hubbub, a single soul from each group was obliged to stand and address the assembled about how they had fared. First to stand was a Saint Aloysius boy.

And then a young lady in Hutchesons’ Grammar blue. And another. And another. Privileged young voices made up less than half of the throng, but almost entirely dominated. Most of the rest seemed relieved that they hadn’t been called upon to speak, risking the embarrassment of exposure or inarticulacy.

One can interpret this scene in different ways. You might see a parade of horrid, over-entitled, privately educated youngsters, domineering. But that interpretation strikes and struck me as too easy, missing the more fundamentally disturbing quality of the phenomenon that we’d witnessed, and which nobody seemed to remark upon or discuss. It instilled in me a committed resolution that confidence too is a question of distributive justice.

It would be the wrong lesson to draw, to see a clutch of conceited young men and women needing taken down a peg or two. Folk aren’t formed shy and muted, or boisterous and self-assertive. Reducing the matter to individual psychology won’t do. We build the forward little mites who were happy to disregard their reserve and take to their pins. The silences too are eloquent.

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“Just keep your head down” is not a republican, egalitarian sentiment. I see it plainly in my teaching.

Bright, reticent young people burdened with impostor complexes, who wilt before or quietly brindle at the self-assertion of their more privileged classmates, and take time to realise that they’re smarter than many of the folk they find intimidating. Collectively, Scotland finds herself in a similar predicament. Will we be taken in by toom tabard miserabilism? Are we more attached to the discomforts of the familiar than the unfamiliar opportunities which self-government brings?

Will the British state’s confidence tricks work?

For some folk considering how to vote in September, this framing of the Scottish predicament will be unrecognisable. For them, the referendum is a matter of identity, a question of belonging.

Their No votes animated not by caution, but by a passionate attachment to Britain, its identity and state. I respect, but cannot share, this perspective.

I can’t be moved by the passions it commands for others, can’t be troubled by the connections and disconnections it frets over. But we’re confident now, many of those minded to vote No respond. Britain’s ours. Every corner, every institution, each blade of grass, daffodil, puff of flax, thistle and rose. I don’t doubt these arguments are made sincerely, but they are all too often the sectional voice of the privileged and the conservative which dominated the school hall: the voices of folk who’re doing quite nicely, thank you. This referendum is haunted by an empathy gap on both sides, and a tendency to talk past one another. But if the folk I meet are anything to go by, there are more, far more Yes voters and waverers – more soft Nos and Undecideds – who struggle to identify strongly with the romantic, backward-looking and sentimental British nationalism which has become the bread and butter of the campaign against independence.

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“It is not for flags and anthems that I fight, but for fairness and compassion.” Independence is not the end of the conversation, but only the beginning.

Independence is not a question of throwing off a Caledonian false consciousness, but a conscious opportunity to choose a different sort of political attitude and future. It pulls many hoary, unhealthy Scottish bugbears out from under the bed. We’re often strangely attached to our constant childhood monsters. Their presence both troubles and reassures. Independence allows us finally to get shot of them. With real home rule we can create a political culture which is unselfconscious in the best sense, abounding in the healthy, creative, happy confidence that finds its expression in generosity and reflexivity. A confidence that is not crabbit, or chippy, whose strength not in force of arms, but in a will to create and uphold a more just commonwealth that concerns itself with the capacity of all of its citizens to flourish. A commonwealth that is not just a sounding brass of good intentions, but which, in its decisions, gets down to brass tacks.

Some years ago now, I returned through the ashes and the elders to the cliff-edge I’d trembled to venture over as a boy. I marvelled. It was not ten feet tall. When I was young, I thought like a child and saw with a child’s eyes. It is time to put away childish things, I thought.

I jumped.

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