Up There on a Visit

I really should have known better. Young publisher I may have been, but I wasn’t completely wet behind the ears. I’d edited (and lunched) some pretty famous people in my time, and kept pace with an alcoholic crime writer who liked to kick off with a large one, though never before 11 in the morning.

It was the custom then, in the late ’70s, and still is for all I know, for editors to saunter forth from their ivory towers and visit bookshops with the reps, experience life at the sharp end of the book trade and so on. It was called being ‘on the road’ but tended to concentrate on large centres of population easily reached from London. Nothing could disguise the jittery bonhomie of the unfortunate rep chosen for this honour, or the loathing in the eyes of the bookseller forced to undergo ordeal by young puppy on top of the usual ordeal by rep. On this occasion I was in Edinburgh, doing the rounds of Thins, Bauermeister’s and other shops no doubt long gone. Some months before, I had commissioned a rather opportunistic anthology of dirty verse, to be edited by a Scots poet and littérateur of some notoriety. We had never met, so it seemed a good idea to join him for a drink on his home patch. At the appointed hour, 6 p.m., I turned up at a pub off the Royal Mile, still dressed in my meet-the-bookseller slate-grey corduroy suit. I had no idea what my poet looked like, but a quick scan of the crowded bar told me that he was the gravel-voiced party with scrubby beard and pink eyes. I was right. ‘The Grouse,’ he growled when I asked him what he’d like. Instinct told me he meant a double, and I was right about that too. I felt I should join him. I no longer remember what we talked about for the next hour or two. I suppose the anthology must have featured, and I dare say the iniquities of publishers made an appearance. I was beginning to think longingly of my hotel room, only a few hundred yards away, reserved but not checked into, when he suddenly said, ‘We’ll eat.’ He led me out of a side entrance. Parked in the narrow street was a small car. Behind the wheel sat a woman, while in the back seat was a small, furious girl of about 12. Opening the passenger door, the poet motioned me into the back. Once I had squeezed myself in beside the girl he slumped into the front seat and waved us into motion. I had just met the poet’s wife and daughter. They had been waiting outside in the car for several hours. The daughter was on her way home from a school camping trip and was whimpering with exhaustion. My conversational overtures were ignored. I knew that the poet lived across the Forth Bridge in Fife, and it gradually dawned on me that across the Forth Bridge was where we were heading. Frantically I offered dinner for all four of us anywhere, absolutely anywhere, as long as it was within tottering distance of the Royal Mile. Apparently this was out of the question because the daughter had to be got home to bed. I sympathized entirely. A grunt from the front seat brought us to a halt in a small grey town somewhere beyond the bridge. The poet strode into a Chinese takeaway and without reference to the menu or me gritted out a series of numbers – 7, 13, 24, 25. It occurred to me that the Chinaman impassively writing the numbers down was even further from home than I was. I paid the bill. It seemed to be expected. It turned out that the twenty minutes or so we had to wait for our order would most fruitfully be spent in the pub next door, and the poet ploughed into the crowd in front of the bar, with me trailing in his wake. More Grouse was ordered. Suddenly the poet was in a fight, the ripples of which spread out to where I tiptoed drunkenly but delicately around the edges, feeling more effete and metropolitan than ever in my publisher’s corduroys. I had no idea what the disagreement was about – Hamilton Academicals, perhaps, or the precise ranking of Edwin Morgan in the Scots pantheon. It was over as soon as it had begun, with very little spilt apart from pints of heavy, and we were back in the small car, clutching greasy, smelly bags of Chinese food. More driving along ever-narrowing roads brought us to a long driveway and a small lodge-like building with a solid, very Scottish looking door. The females went through it without a word and disappeared, leaving the poet to lead me to the kitchen. It must have been after 11, and I was very drunk. The poet produced homemade wine of a wild and fruity nature – elderberry? blackberry? who knows? I started casting around for somewhere to sleep. A sofa in the sitting-room seemed the best bet, and it was then that I made yet another mistake. I can rarely pass a piano without sitting down and playing, particularly when drunk. I was modulating sensitively into something I had resolved to call ‘Pissed Poet Blues’ when the man himself burst into the room in a towering rage. He’s going to hit me, I thought, though I quickly realized that, drunk as I was, I was still nimbler than him, and managed to keep out of his way with little difficulty. He didn’t seem to care. It turned out that my crime was not just playing the piano, but playing it properly, better than him, me with my fancy London ways, coming up here and playing the piano, for f ***’s sake! A few more curses and he was gone, leaving me to sleep the sleep of the drunk on the sofa. I woke at 6, my head and bowels roaring in unison, still dressed in rumpled and by now stained corduroys. There were no signs of life in the house. I let myself out and ventured down the drive. As I hovered uncertainly at the gate, help arrived in the shape of the postman in his van. ‘Ye’ll be wanting to get to Edinburgh,’ he said without emotion. While I babbled my gratitude he drove me to a station, into which after a long wait trundled an Edinburgh-bound train. The interminable ride into Waverley did my head no favours, and I felt iller by the minute. I had more resentful booksellers to see before I could go home, but I quickly convinced myself that nobody would care in the least if I failed to turn up. I fell into a taxi and demanded to be taken to the airport. The poet and I never met again. He wrote me a long letter, full of hand-wringing and self-loathing; he had never behaved like that before, apparently. I caught sight of him a few years later on a TV discussion programme, roaring and waving his arms about as if someone had had the effrontery to play the piano without consulting him. When he died some years ago the obituaries made mention of feuds and schisms in the Scots poetry world, and it was not hard to see how they might have arisen.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Mike Petty 2005