What emerged in 1975 from the combined powers of his intellect, imagination and spirit must certainly be ranked among his finest works. Allan Massie, himself a distinguished novelist as well as a respected critic, credits Willie with the remarkable achievement of having written not one masterpiece but two, Docherty and The Kiln. There is no demurral from me but I would also put a book of a very different stamp, Laidlaw, in the frame. Yet none of Willie’s novels moves me more than Docherty does. Perhaps its themes and personal resonances make that natural. Revisiting it shortly after his death in December 2015, I was back in his company, remembering how much we had shared.
We slept in the same bed for years; joined in a thousand banal boyhood sorties that we fantasised into adventures; participated in myriad over-populated football games that started in the morning and – with hunger imposing a shift pattern on the teams – kept going until darkness was total; eagerly widened our vistas through reading. And, always and inexhaustibly, we fed each other’s flights of fancy about what lay ahead for us. Nothing in the professional area of Willie’s future would mean more to him than the challenge (resolutely met) of championing the relevance of a multitude of unsung working-class lives. The profoundness of his belief in that endeavour is conveyed in a poem of his I quoted when memorial tribute was paid to him in the Bute Hall of Glasgow University:
In any street an epic, any room
Strange stories never told, testaments dumb.
The richness overwhelms. A chance remark
Can touch new land, unload another ark.
Transactions of small change will sometimes yield
Coins of a minting you have never held.
Break any casual stone and find strange veins.
The colours blind. The anecdotes will range
Through wild geographies of spirit, form
Plain men with unknown flowers in their arms.
In each face new horizons, any day
An archaeology more rich than Troy.
As I said in the Bute Hall, when it came to the digs associated with such archaeology, we all benefited from having Willie’s hand on the trowel. Docherty is proof of that.
Hugh McIlvanney
PROLOGUE: 1903
The year came and receded like any other, leaving its flotsam of the grotesque, the memorable, the trivial. On the first day the Coronation Durbar at Delhi saw King Edward established by proxy as Emperor of India. In the same month 5,000 people died in a hurricane in the Society Islands and 51 inmates were burned to death in Colney Hatch lunatic asylum. In July Pope Leo XIII died at ninety-three. In November the King and Queen of Italy visited England. Rock Sand was the horse, running up to his fetlocks in prize-money: 2,000 Guineas, Derby, St Leger. In Serbia King Alexander and Queen Draga were murdered, Peter Karageorgevitch became King, and dark conspirators regrouped around the throne, like actors obsessed with their roles although the theatre is on fire. In London Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show made genocide a circus. In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers put a heavier than air machine into flight for fifty-nine seconds. In High Street, Graithnock, Miss Gilfillan had insomnia.
She called it ‘my complaint’, not unaffectionately. It grew as the year waned, so that by December her eyes seemed lidless. Most nights she nursed her loneliness at her window, holding aside the lace curtain to stare at the tenements across from her, to judge the lives that lay in them, to think that she would die here. The thought was pain and comfort. She would die among strangers, hard faces and rough voices, hands that hadn’t much use for cutlery, drunken songs of Ireland’s suffering in Scottish accents, swear-words in the street, children grubbing out their childhoods in the gutters. But her death would be a lifelong affront to her family, an anger in her father’s grave. So each night she would perfect her disillusion, her regret was a whetstone for her family’s, and High Street was the hell they would inherit.
Late at night on 26th December one circumstance accidentally gave a special poignancy to her self-pity. Across the cobbled street two upstairs windows were still lit. Behind one window, Mrs Docherty was near her time. This would be her fourth. She would be lucky if it was her last. Here, where hunger and hopelessness should have sterilised most marriages, people seemed to breed with an almost vengeful recklessness. It appeared to her that the sins of the fathers were the sons.
Behind the other window, Mr Docherty would be sitting in the Thompson’s single-end, banished to that uselessness which was a man’s place at such times, sheepish with guilt, or perhaps just indifferent with usage. Some of the folklore of High Street concerned the martyrdom of women: wife-beatings, wages drunk on the journey between the pit-head and the house, a child born into a room where its father lay stupefied with beer.
With Mr Docherty, she felt, it would be different. She knew him only as someone to pass the time of day with, as it was with everybody here. She preferred to form no friendships. Pity, contempt, or sheer incomprehension, were the distances between her and everyone around her, so that she knew them by their more dramatic actions. Her vision of their lives was as stylised and unsubtle as an opera, and even then was distorted by those tears for herself that endlessly blurred her thinking, as though something had irreparably damaged a duct.
Her impression of Mr Docherty was not of one man but of several. It was as if among all the stock roles to which she assigned the people of the street, wife-beater, drunkard, cadger, or just one of the anonymous chorus of the will-less poor, he had so far settled for none, played more than one part. She knew him coming home from the pit, small even among his mates, one of a secret brotherhood of black savages, somebody hawking a gob of coaldust onto the cobbles. Cleaned up, dressed in a bulky jacket and white silk scarf, a bonnet on his black hair, he looked almost frail, his face frighteningly colourless, as if pale from a permanent anger. Yet shirtsleeved in summer, his torso belied the rest of him. The shoulders were heroic, every movement made a swell of muscle on the forearms. Below the waist he fell away again to frailty, the wide trousers not concealing a suggestion that the legs were slightly bowed.
She had watched him in the good days of summer, when chairs were brought outside the entry doors on to the street, playing with his children. At such times his involvement with them was total. But what impressed her most was the reflection of him that other people gave. The men who stood with him at the corner obviously liked him. Yet she had often sensed in passing them a slight distance between him and anybody else. It was a strange, uncertain feeling, as if wherever he stood he established a territory. She half suspected it might mean nothing more than that he was physically formidable. In High Street the most respected measurement of a man tended to be round the chest. But her own observations kept crystallising into a word, one she admitted grudgingly: it was ‘independence’.
She felt it was a ridiculous word in this place. For what claim could anyone who lived here have to independence? They were all slaves to something, the pit, the factory, the families that grew up immuring the parents’ lives, the drink that, seeming to promise escape, was the most ruthlessly confining of all. Whatever hireling they served, owed its authority to a common master: money, the power of which came from the lack of it. Poverty was what had brought herself to this room. It defined the area of their lives like a fence. Still, in that area Mr Docherty moved as if he were there by choice, like someone unaware of the shackles he wore and who hadn’t noticed that he was bleeding.
Like an illustration of her thoughts, he came out of the entry at a run, still pulling on his jacket, and became the diminishing sound of his boots along the street. It was a bad sign. Earlier, she had seen Mrs Ritchie go in. A midwife should have been enough. Doctors were trouble. Poor Mrs Docherty. She was a nice woman. They called her a ‘dacent wumman’, which was High Street’s VC. Given