My shoes

Three pairs of brothers

I have three pairs of shoes that are identical in in design and size, though they have aged differently. You can see their three ages above. And in a year, perhaps, I shall get another: four pairs of brothers.

They were all bought at the same shop, with about one year intervals between them.

Their shape is immensely pleasing to me. They are a little pointed, a hint of Gothic, but not so pointed as to arrive at the mannerism of the winkle picker. They do not have girly decorations: no whorls, or additional bits of leather, or preposterous seams. The leather is very good: supple, breaking in nicely.

A negative is that the soles are a little thin, though were they thicker, the shoe would be unbalanced, visually.

So I have to take them to a Paraguayan up in Trindade every few months. There are two Paraguayans and they have shops almost opposite each other: both have fat square faces and bad teeth and spade hands but one is charming but useless, the other brisk and efficient and seldom comes out from the back. A women, perhaps his wife, handles all the transactions. She isn't that friendly but once they gave replaced my laces for free. Last time she refused to repair the pair on the left, saying that the welts had gone, therefore the soles no longer worth fising: hence the purchase on the right two months ago. I respect a trademan when he refuses work, though I left saddened. I am considering, therefore, taking the shoes to the other Paraguayan repairer, who is certainly less conscientious, but more perhaps more sensible to  the demands of sentiment.

Another negative is that the the makers, Brooksfield, seem to have a passion for chocolate, so that their shoes are generally variations on chocolate colours, from dark through to Cadbury's milk. I'd be happier if Brooksfield had a passion for Chestnuts or mahogany, something redder.

But as the shoes get older and I add polish of a more pleasing hue, they change and develop a lovely patina. In the Hotel Mercury Hotel along the road is a wonderful machine, and not the worst thing you can do on a dull day is to cover the shoes liberally with polish and stand by the lift and put your shoes in the machine which has who entrances each with a different brush- one for the initial phase of brushing with a stiff brush, the second with a finer one for buffing up a glowing polish. But for some reason that glow doesn't stay for long. Perhaps had I trained in the Guards I'd know why: I'd be sure of the correct technique, which I think may have something to do with heating the polish a little before applying it, and then spitting on the shoe a good deal before polishing.

You can see the three generations of shoes in the photo: when I went to the shop last time and bought the newest pair the shop assistant exclaimed, "oh my God! They are like those shoes in old Italian films"- which delighted me: I love "Bicycle Thieves", even if I am not sure I want to be one of the characters in it.

I like these shoes because though they could certainly tell stories, having been been all over Europe and seen many things, they chose not too because they are stoical, they don't blab, they merely absorb experience: theirs will be the patient silent faces of photos by Dorotea Lange.

Making Friends with Michael Smout

 *

The birthday parties were an exchange between our mothers: a suburban pact, possibly never spoken, but certain nonetheless.  I had little, I suspected, in common with Malcolm. Naturally, I felt a certain kinship with any other boy who was weak of frame but, he was distracted, too soft, and ill constructed with thin legs and thin straight hair while I was merely small. 

And there was a current of aggression in the boys I usually played with: a tendency to destructiveness that I found charismatic, represented better in Graeme MacDonald's pugnaciousness and in Julian Dyer with his mad mass of blond hair and extraordinary collection of firearms (he shot Jonathan Rust in the leg, thus two weeks sentenced to a fortnight’s  nightly reflection in his bedroom in Deeside Gardens: we loved and admired him for this, though the shooting was surely accidental).

Michael Smout lived in one of those low suburban houses, coddled together like woodlice, pewter silver in sun-rain combinations, a dull violet most days. They’re a weird contrast to the august Georgian and Victorian that characterises central Aberdeen:  they sprall over Aberdeen’s wide hills, covering vast areas, but never really seem to add much to the city, they just lie there, mute, guarding  their tiny gardens.

His mother, avian, sweet, a friendly sparrow, so like my own mother, with that energy that small women sometimes possess; organising wonderful birthday parties in their densely carpeted front room with a game where you sang, “there was an old man called Michael Finnegan”, in a round over and over and another where each sat on the knee of the one behind, forming a sort of centipede, then laughing would topple over. I recall that game and its physicality, how the children became a squirming mass, too close, almost squalid, the smell of other skin.

But I could feel that it incumbent upon me to call alone, to cement the nascent friendship.  I can’t recall if that was because my mother said something: most probably there was more than a hint. But I made somehow the determination to visit Michael Smout. 

It was all arranged by the mothers.

Going up there, pollarded Elms remaining despite the British Elm holocaust,  twisted darked trunks, wiry, feeling that  the air up there on Countesswells road is damper,  windier too, no more sheltered by high granite walls  and soft green privet hedges, seeing the beginnings of muddy ploughed fields.

I arrived: Michael said, “let’s go upstairs”: he led me to a wooden stair rising from the narrow hall. He climbed; I followed to an attic, dark: inside was a dangling  bulb : he lit it and I saw the room with its low sloping ceiling, even for a boy of nine, too low to walk comfortably. There were coloured boxes of toys, a fair collection then piles of clothes, disorder, dampness. I had a stray sense of squalor, that something was not right. But I was determined to make the best of the play date.

While my Quaker mother forbade war toys and anything that might encourage my bellicose boy instincts, Michael’s mother was lax , or too kind to be severe and it transpired that Michael had a fine collection of Dinky tanks. These included, to my patriotic horror, models of German panzers: a horrific presence, symbols of evil.  Their cannons held little springs, and you could fire matchsticks from them. We sat on the floor, spread them out, we fired the matchsticks.

The floor was dusty and uncomfortable but I tried to respond creatively to Michael’s hospitality, diligently firing the cannon and trying to demolish his plastic legions of Airfics infantrymen. Some time passed like that, but Michael became restless. He decided to take off his trousers: he was wearing brown polyester underpants. I chose to concentrate on firing the panzer cannons. We continued to play with the toys. Then he stood up again and went to the far corner of the attic, where he took a plastic bucket. “Look, we can use this”, he said. “Oh”, I said. Then Michael placed the bucket on the floor, pulled down his brown underpants, sat on the bucket and proceeded to excrete.

The smell of Michael’s turd was not pleasant. Indeed, it disgusted me: I had never perceived that shit was so foul: my stomach wretched.

*

I cannot remember now exactly how the visit ended : I suppose I made my excuses and left. Perhaps Michael had intended the act of excreting publicly as a gesture of fellowship, a sharing of intimacies: if so it was a miscalculation, for it had the opposite effect.

I did not mention the incident to my mother.

*

This is a true story, but the name Michael Smout is made up.

Climbing trees

*

I used to climb trees a lot. That was about freedom, of course: freedom from adults.

The top of trees were places they could not come, and I remember defying their pleas for me to come down, specifically the high shrill voices of old woman, tiny specks below calling from the old folks home across the road. I thought I wanted freedom from safety, but I did not really. Surely no-one really enjoys fear, except in the limited sense where they desire the controlled risks of sports or competition. Real fear is an appalling emotion, reckless and reductive.

I did not really understand the dangers inherent in climbing high and, moreover, pride had accompanied my ascent. I would not come down.

When I was high up I could see quite far, almost to the parade of shops on Great Western Road, certainly as far as the silent lawns and ashen Beech trees of the old folks home. Aberdeen is the granite city, and there is the harr besides: everything greyly softened by that shadowless light.

My imagination lent that I was a pirate, on a ship high at the crow’s nest, an image that keyed with my idea of rebellion, escape. I had no eye patch but I did have a dark blue jumper that my mother had knitted and which I considered very piratical. I also had the idea of myself as feline, agile, which in truth I was, as I was unusually adept at climbing and rapid besides, and as pirate rebel I shared the heights with cats alone.

The Chestnut was best: the Lime had been pollarded, so it was just a mass of green shoots, and the stickiness of Lime leaves was not pleasant either. The Maple had no lower branches and those it had above were too tightly packed to make climbing possible. In contrast, the Chestnut occasionally offered the alternation of almost ninety degree stems so desirable to climbers. Its bark was rough enough to grip even on wet days and did not come off.

I hoped it would be possible to go from the Chestnut tree to the Maple, and then across the branches of the Maple to enter my own bedroom window on the first floor. But the Maple branches were too slender, and the two trees too far apart. However, summer after summer I could see their arms nearing and thickening to grasp each other and I looked forward to the day when that mysterious journey from the chestnut to the maple and thence into my room would be possible.

But then when they did strengthen ten years later, and I was 20 and had come back from university one summer I found that they had been cut, pale yellow discs of timber where once limbs had been. My desire to climb across the trees into my bedroom conflicted directly my father’s cathartic need to amputate their branches. He did this in a haphazard way: they resembled the broken forms of painted trees by Vincent van Gogh. This implied a profound desire to do violence against nature*, the chainsaw-massacred trees like crime scenes. It also limited my arboreal wandering.

Another possibility was to go from the Chestnut tree to along the walls bordering our house, which were about 7 foot high, of rough granite but with a course of red bricks at the top. One could walk along the borders of our garden , along the borders of another pair of gardens and then on again. How much they varied, this one orderly, with vegetables in neat lines, the next merely a lawn, the third featuring a huge plastic pool- until one reached the Amatola Hotel, where if you were unlucky a kitchen porter or chef, smoking outside the kitchen back door, would shout and start as if to chase you; something that caused me genuine fear, but which I can now see was merely sport on their part.

*

The trees and my child’s mind showed me a freedom that home and family and school denied. I thought then that I would some day attain the splendour and liberty in real life that my childish imagination had projected. Instead, I find myself at forty unremarkable and compromised, shouting at children to climb down from tall trees.

* I visited a Hungarian family in Lugano, Switzerland. They had a fine house with a garden that was a former orchard and had many fine trees on the slope of the hill overlooking the lake. They also had two dogs. The dogs barked causing frequent altercations with the neighbors. Arguments about the dogs came and went over several months. One weekend the Hungarian family went away on holiday. When they returned, they saw that all the trees in their garden had been cut down by the neighbor. When I visited them, the Hungarian family still had their dogs.

*