Elephants, he counted on the fact that you w

https://yelhakim.instructure.com/eportfolios/47345 https://yelhakim.instructure.com/eportfolios/48256/Home/___12________2021 https://yelhakim.instructure.com/eportfolios/45740 https://nadams.instructure.com/eportfolios/16854/Home/____5__25________2021 https://nadams.instructure.com/eportfolios/17054 Olympic-sized. They contained a stew of thousands of screaming kids. The building smelled of human flesh and disinfectant; it steamed like a locker room; it was damp in a sickening way. It had a dark cafeteria and a Therapy Suite containing sunlamps and sauna baths ("OAP's Sauna—80 pence"). There were a number of Ping-Pong tables in one room, but no one was playing. In the lobby there were four electronic games being frantically played — boys feeding money into Space Invaders and Frogger and Moon Landing while the single parents and the pensioners and the unemployed came and went. It was in the metropolitan plan, in a world where there was no work and no money but plenty of time; it was part of the process of life in the years to come. Leuchars Junction was no longer a junction, though the name had stuck. It lay across the Firth of Tay, in Fife. It was as near as I could get by rail to St. Andrews ("perhaps the most fashionable watering place in the country"), and I began walking as soon as I arrived at the station. After a mile or so I came to Guardbridge. Some men were standing in front of the paper mill there. They said they were waiting for a funeral to go past— a man who had worked his whole life at the paper mill was being buried today. The hearse was overdue. "And I'll tell you something," one of the men said. His name was Gordon Hastie and he was fairly agitated, twisting his cloth cap in his hands as he peered up the St. Andrews Road. "Do you see those flags?" There were three on the flagpoles in front of the factory— a Union Jack, the Scottish national flag, and what I took to be the paper mill's own flag — all flying at half-mast. "What a morning it's been," Mr. Hastie said. "A couple of hours ago we had to raise those flags for Queenie. Then after she went by we had to lower them again for Donald." Donald was the dead man, obviously, but who was Queenie? "The Queen herself," Mr. Hastie said. "Aye." "You mean the Queen's here?" "In St. Andrews," Mr. Hastie said. "Hurry up, you might see her." Just as I started to run, Donald's hearse went by. I froze. The paper mill men doffed their caps. And then the funeral cars continued down the wet road, and the men went back to work. It was four miles more to St. Andrews. I walked fast and after a few miles I cut across a field, continuing along the estuary of the River Eden, ending up in the middle of a golf course. There were four golf courses here, but the one I found myself in belonged to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the capital of the golfing world. The course was just as rough and desolate as every other one I had seen in Scotland. Perhaps that was the point of golf? But there was not a town its size in Britain to compare with St. Andrews, and it was one of the most beautiful towns on the coast, the white stone ruins and the brown stone buildings perched on the rocky cliffs of a wide bay. The golf courses ran into the seafront, and the seafront was part of the playing fields of the university, which was a third of the town; but it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The whole effect was somewhat ecclesiastical, but with fresh air, like a lively cloister with the roof off. Today the streets were scrubbed, flags flew, the whole town gleamed with flowers and bunting. And there was a heightened hum, a vibration racing in the air, the equivalent in sound of twinkling light, something electric and almost visible. It was genuine. I felt it as soon as I entered the cobbled streets. It was as if the town had been refreshed with a blessing. In a way it had, for that atmosphere was the spirit left by the progress of the Royal Visit. The Queen of England had left just a moment ago. "What a pity you missed her," Freda Robertson said. Mrs. Robertson owned the largest bookstore in St. Andrews, and she looked dignified and indestructible in her Scottish way, her voice half-inquiry and half-reprimand and full of the precise ironies of a headmistress. She loved books. She recognized me. Did I want a cup of tea? With her finger tracing upon the sharp panes of her mullioned window, Mrs. Robertson described how Her Majesty rode up here in her Rolls-Royce, and got out there, and walked over there near the barriers. "I hung out of the window with a pair of binoculars and my camera," Mrs. Robertson said. "I didn't know which one to look through. I'm sure my pictures will have fingers and thumbs on them. But you should have heard the cheers!" Was this Falklands feeling, I wondered? No, Freda Robertson said, it was for the Queen's being a grandmother. The child had been born when I was in Mallaig, and now he had a name: Prince William. One of the largest St. Andrews signs said, health to PRINCE WILLIAM. "What brings you to St. Andrews?" Mrs. Robertson asked. I said that I was making my way around the British coast, clockwise. "Aye, so we're on your itinerary." "And a man in Guardbridge told me that the Queen was having become vocal. The Queen and the Prince were well-matched, but it was less the sovereign and her consort than the double-act that all successful middle-class marriages are. In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards sayingCraw's Nest Hotel— Souvenir of the Royal Visit? "We knew about it in January, but we had to keep it a secret until May," Eira said. "We kept praying that nothing would go wrong. We thought the Falklands might finish it." So they had been putting the place in order and running up souvenirs for almost seven months. The royal lunch had lasted an hour. That night they held a celebration party in the hotel parking lot. It was a way of giving thanks. The hotel invited the whole town, or rather two— Easter Anstruther and Wester Anstruther. They had a rock band and eight pipers and some drummers. The racket was tremendous and continued until two o'clock in the morning, hundreds of people drinking and dancing. They sold sausages and fish and chips, and there were bales of hay for people to sit on. The band was bad, but no one seemed to mind. There were old people, families, drunks, and dogs. Small boys smoked cigarettes in a delighted way and sneaked beer from the hotel. Girls danced with each other, because the village boys, too embarrassed to be seen dancing, congregated in small groups and pretended to be tough. There was a good feeling in the air, hilarity and joy, something festive, but also grateful and exhausted. It wasn't faked; it was like the atmosphere of an African village enjoying itself. At eleven I took a walk down to the beach. I passed a man in rubber waders standing alone and looking puzzled on the road. A girl and her grandmother were eating ice cream cones in the half-dark. I passed a cottage; inside, a family of five was singing out loud. I saw more children smoking behind a wall. In another house a man and woman seemed to be proposing a toast. There was moonlight on the water, and this moonglow had settled on the waves and made them stand out like the ribs of a washboard. I walked toward this light, and on the stony beach, just below the seawall where I was standing, a boy was clumsily fucking a girl, his buttocks plum-blue under the bright moon and her upraised legs almost luminous and seeming to steady him. It was chilly, he was having a little trouble, but he was so eager, he did not see me. They made me feel invisible, but I left them there and I thought of the band and the dancing and beer and the hay bales and the moonlight and the smell of seaweed and the young couple fucking where the Queen had just been— it was like a mural, an allegorical painting, but a funny one, a Gully Jimson or a Stanley Spencer. The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning. "I couldn't believe it," Mrs. Ross said. "It didn't seem real. It was like a dream." I said, "What will Willie Hamilton think?" Willie Hamilton was their Member of Parliament and noted for being in favor of abolishing the monarchy. "Willie Hamilton can get stuffed." After breakfast, I set off for Leven. It was a gray morning, and rather chilly. After I had walked a few miles, it began to rain. I kept walking and heard a throstle, as it was called here. Then the rain was too much for me. I hurried to a village and waited for the bus to Leven. The villages on the coast of Fife had a quiet beauty, and the farmhouses and barns were built like fortresses in flat stone. On the way to Leven we stopped at Largo. "Alexander Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe, was born here in 1676." There was a statue of Selkirk in front of his birthplace, a cottage in Lower Largo. "Its proper name is the Seatoun of Largo," a man next to me said. He had just boarded the bus, and we began talking about Largo and Selkirk. The man said, "Alexander Selkirk was a rogue! He was no good at all!" I said that I had read somewhere that Selkirk had once kicked his mother and father downstairs. "Aye, a rogue," the man said. "And I'm a direct descendant of his, on my mother's side of the family." The man's name was David Gillis. He was ninety years old. It seemed my fate to be quite often encountering very old men. But it was these buses and trains— the old men didn't drive, didn't own cars, and I ran into them traveling. I was glad of it. David Gillis was bright-eyed and his hearing was fine. He could have been seventy or so. He was going to Leven to do a little shopping. I was always interested to know what work these people had done. What had Gillis done seventy-five years ago, at the age of fifteen? "I was apprenticed to a plumber in Largo and earned half a crown a week" — about twenty cents. "But it wasn't just plumbing I had to learn — all plumbers were tinsmiths and bell-hangers. I got my first job in 1906. I was offered a pound a week by a man in Largo, but I turned it down. I went to Glasgow and got two pounds. You I was reluctant to leave Scotland— I had liked nearly everyone I had met. But then in Dunbar I met a loudmouth named Billy Crombie. He was traveling south and had stopped to drink three pints of beer. He was a Glaswegian, with a mustache as large as a ferret and a cowering wife. His face was purple; he drove a Jaguar. "I'm going to a foreign country!" he declared. "Aye, England— it's a foreign land! Scotland's ruled by the bloody English. They dropped Exchange Control so that they could spend our money abroad — they don't spend it in Scotland, though they stole it from us in the first place by stealing our oil resairves. And you bloody Yanks have atomic bombs a few miles from Glasgow, and nuclear subs in Holy Loch! Why don't you put them in London, that's what I want to know. Don't mention politicians. They're beyond a joke. David Steel is a Unionist! Tam Dalyell is a carpetbagger! Jenkins is a Tory — it was an Orange seat and they ran a Catholic to oppose him — how could he lose? I'm a freedom fighter — don't let these tweeds fool you. You can ask my wife, if you don't believe I'm a freedom fighter. Now, listen, go home and tell them we don't want your bombs!" I headed south on the train, with his voice still ringing in my ears. Scotland ended at the tiny coastal village o