An Edinburgh Notebook
FOR me Edinburgh is the most personal and romantic of cities. I was born and spent part of my childhood in the house of my grandfather, who was Professor of International Law at the University. It was here, at a very early age, that I first became interested in crime. On winter evenings when the tea-things had been cleared away (round pats for the fresh butter, long ones for the salt) I would climb the step-ladder in his library, pick out from the top shelf the fat, red volumes of Notable British Trials and sit there in a dream until called to supper or bed. In those days I was much moved by what I thought the grave beauty and immaculate precision of English justice. Ah, me! Willian Roughead, the great criminologist and editor of the series, lived a few doors along the crescent.
I was very fond of my grandfather. He had been a great golfer in his time, captain of Muir field and St Andrews, and when he was seventy and I eleven, we used to trundle down to Barnton in a bus and play level. In the winter he took me ice-skating at the Haymarket or to the docks at Leith, and at Christmas there was always a box at the Kings to see Tommy Lorne and Dave Willis tease us at the pantomime. But almost my favourite treat was to ride the trams with him, Marchmont Circle and Granton especially, for both involved stops for chocolate nut sundaes at a greasy Italian ice-cream shop at the top of Leith Walk. No one before or since has in- dulged me quite so grossly.
Past is present Most return journeys to the scenes of one's youth are failures, because too often the scenes have changed beyond recognition. The odd and charming thing about Edinburgh is that in thirty- five years it has hardly changed at all. True, the trams have gone and I suppose I am about the only person in Scotland to miss them. The Georgian houses in Randolph Crescent and Ain- -she Place are now given over to consulting rooms and offices, but their elegant facades are as they were. One or two new buildings have gone up in Princes Street, and one or two old ones have, Malraux-fashion, been cleaned, and the Royal Mile has been spruced up to look like a Holly- wood filmset, though why J. McLachlan, Betting Agent has been allowed to set up shop there, only the City Fathers can tell. Otherwise things stand much as they stood. Jenners remains the centre for the carriage trade: Dymock and Howden are still one of the best grocers and Douglas .and Foulis one of the best bookshops in the kingdom; and down the Queensferry Road Mr Lupan, apothecary, dispenses medicines from a:counter of coloured bottles which in four de- cades do not appear to have budged an inch. , , And. wherever yoo go, whether in the mediae- val wynds of the old town or along the classical crescents of the new, the ghosts of Edinburgh are everywhere; John Knox on his way to answer Mary's summons to Holyrood; Cromwell sack- ing the judges; Prince Charlie riding out for the last time to Prestonpans and Culloden; Montrose walking to the gallows; Burke and Hare about their grisly business; Dr Johnson reeling from the smells; Burns at work in Upper Baxter's Close; Scott and later Stevenson in Advocates Hall; Raeburn at Stockbridge. In what other city of comparable size does the past reach out to grip you at almost every turn?
-Burdies And now the Festival is here again, a three weeks jollity which to many Edinburgh residents is a period of quarantine; for the festival is in Edinburgh but not for it. Some people move out altogether, letting their flats at comfortable rents to the visitors (too comfortable, some visitors say). Others stay put, letting the junketings go by them. Coming into the city the other evening I saw a long queue outside the Empire Theatre. Ah, I thought, the Moscow Puppets at least! But it was only the ladies of Newington lining up for weekly Bingo. Locals who do attend the festivi- ties are apt to praise with faint damns. 'She's good,' a surprised visitor to an Annie Fischer concert was heard to mutter the other night, to which her companion grudgingly replied, 'Aye, but, she's been working awfu' hard at it ever since she was eight.' It is not in money matters that the Scots are mean, but in spirit; as though to praise were somehow grossly corrupting.
As for the visitors, they have been so stunned by the unexpected sunshine that they have been prepared to overlook such shortcomings as the unco-ordinated efforts to dress Princes Street and the lack of a bar at the Gateway Theatre. Nor will more than a handful of them get the message that the theme of the festival is "Athens of the North." This is one of those owlish ideas that occurs to festival directors desperate for new thoughts. It has meant Aristophanes in Greek, Aristophanes in English, and Aristophanes in Lallans: visitors to this last say it is still Greek. In addition we have had such sturdy Athenians as Laurence Harvey, Catherine Sauvage and David Frost. Chief among my own souvenirs are a memorable performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony by the Moscow Radio Orchestra in which the horn playing the motto-theme sounded like oil flowing darkly through an empty cathedral: it was, as one local critic said, as if all Edinburgh's buildings had been cleaned overnight, and one was suddenly seeing them for
the first time. And down Leith Walk Max Adrian is giving a stunning performance of G.B.S. giving a performance of Henry Irving. But bushier eye- brows when it comes to London please.
Uhura: And soon now the Festival will be over, and Edinburgh return again to its old, undistracted ways. Or will it? To an increasing number of Scotsmen, including myself, it seems a strange thing that 'a country which has its own systems of law and education (both admitted even by the English to be superior to theirs), its own Church, its own unique history, traditions, language and music, should at the same time not be considered politically mature enough to run its own affairs. If Malawi and Guyana and Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man can have self-government, why in the name of God can- not we? When one discusses this subject with Englishmen they are apt to giggle; but then the english hike s never thought that any formerly dependent territory was capable of self-govern- ment until it was forced upon them.
That we shall have our own parliament again within the next ten or fifteen years, I have not the slightest doubt. The problem is, what is going to be the most effective political instrument to bring it about? The Conservatives are called Unionists up here and as their main aim is to conserve the Union, they are non-starters. The Labour party's policy stops short at a woolly regionalism. The Liberal party's policy of self- government within a federal framework is far and away the most realistic; but the trouble with any national British party is that it is in a sense compromised. In theory the Scottish National- ists are the natural standard-bearers; but they have few people of talent and alienate much sympathy by extravagant and unrealistic de- mands for total separation. Still, their growth in recent years is impressive. England, beware!
LUDOVIC KENNEDY
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