The Red Mist
Dougie McAteer and I were exploring along the wooded bank of the Water of Leith just behind Roseburn Cliff in Edinburgh. This was a favourite place to play. If we felt adventurous and had plenty of time we could keep going along the riverside for several miles all the way down to Stockbridge, passing the Dean Village on the way. There wasn’t a path all that way – at least not a regular, permitted, maintained path to be used by the public for recreation. There was a path of sorts, but it was the kind of irregular, rough, meandering and uncharted path used, we imagined, by villains, footpads, burglars and pirates as they journeyed from one atrocity to the next. It often required climbing over tree-trunks, ducking under branches and occasionally even stepping out onto slippery stones in the river to get by a particularly difficult fall of earth. We knew every yard, no matter how it changed, of this muddy ribbon. But today we were just playing around in the trees opposite Coltbridge – there wasn’t much time before we would have to go home for tea.
I was carrying an air-pistol – a wicked weapon capable of firing a lead slug (or optionally a small dart with a coloured hairy flight) at high velocity. I had been warned, on pain of confiscation, never to point this gun at anyone, and particularly not at anyone’s face, and not to shoot it at animals (except possibly rats), birds, windows, cars or anything ‘breakable’. It was for firing at dartboards attached to tree trunks, paper boats floating down rivers and similar rather boring targets. It fired one slug and then had to be re-loaded by unscrewing a plug from the breech, inserting a new slug, screwing the plug back in place then pressing the muzzle hard down onto the ground till it was cocked back in place against a strong internal spring.
Even in those early days, my untrained appreciation of physics allowed me to understand, with a blinding clarity that was to elude me as I got older, that there was something contained in this huge spring that, being imparted to the tiny slug, gave it its enormous velocity. I also realised that this something was put into the spring by myself as I compressed it. Without knowing it, and never having heard of energy except as that which I would get if I ate up all my dinner, I was already well on my way to understanding the law of its conservation.
It was a dry pleasant day. The sloping ground was covered in a fine friable dust which made it difficult to avoid sliding down into the river. The two of us were scrambling along holding onto tree roots and bunches of weeds to keep from slipping down. We knew our mothers would not have appreciated us getting our clothes ripped and muddy and our shoes and socks soaked.
We were both wearing short trousers, so our frequent falls resulted in scraped knees. But the pain of scraped knees was nothing compared to the almost intolerable discomfort caused by our thick grey flannel trousers. When dry these had the feel of sandpaper impregnated with itching powder. When wet – more usual when playing down the burn – they were heavy, cold and rough. If we were totally absorbed in our games we might not notice this, but sometimes, in less active mode, the feeling of these clammy itchy folds of cloth was almost unbearable. It was as if the insides of your thighs had been rubbed with crushed ice, scraped with a wire brush and sprinkled with salt. From just above the knees to just below the crotch, the skin was lobster red, cold, itchy and sore.
“Look! Ducks!” Dougie was pointing excitedly at a group of small black coots slowly gliding down the burn. This was our cue to start throwing stones at the birds. It was an unwritten rule that anything floating or swimming in the burn, animate or inanimate, was a target for stones. In this case the intention was not to hit the ducks, just to frighten them and make them fly off. The ducks were in less danger than might be supposed – we could throw stones with great precision. Stone-throwing was such a large part of our play that we had developed a degree of accuracy that an international cricketer would have envied. In fact, in later years Dougie actually became a mainstay of his secondary school cricket team, as a bowler, and his skill in delivering googlies and leg breaks was probably a direct result of the hours of practice he put in as a lad chucking stones at small wild creatures.
After the ducks had flown off quacking noisily at the insult, we found an empty bottle, threw it into the river and started throwing stones at it to smash it before it floated too far away. This required not only accuracy but considerable speed as well. Dougie later became adept at fast bowling as well as spin.
We then decided to set up some small towers of stones arranged in a line so that we could compete to see who could knock down the most. We stood about ten yards away from the line of towers and began to pelt them furiously with small stones. As we each knocked a tower down we’d shout, “one for me”, “two for me” … and at the last one, “beat ya!”, in triumph.
There is a phrase, ‘The red mist descended’ that describes the experience of being forced into disastrous action by some irrational, irresistible urge. I was about to get my first experience of it. Dougie was bending down to pick up some stones with which to erect a new set of towers. His short grey flannel trousers were stretched tightly across his buttocks and these buttocks were pointing directly at me. I just had time to notice with interest that on each buttock there was a circular greyer wet patch and that these were joined by a long thin wet streak so that his bottom looked like a pair of spectacles. Then, without warning, the mist descended. I took the already cocked air-pistol from my belt, raised it towards the right buttock, aimed and fired.
The result was truly amazing. Dougie’s body snapped upright and then arched backwards. His hands grabbed his buttocks. He leapt into the air and gave a huge cry of ‘Ooh Yah’, then started running wildly about still holding his bottom. Although I knew I had overstepped the mark, I was convulsed in laughter, tears streaming down my face. I could hardly breathe for laughing as I watched Dougie’s crazy flight.
After several minutes, he began to slow down. He was rubbing the spot where the slug had impacted and was still mouthing ‘Ooh yah, ooh yah’ over and over again. He had tears in his eyes too, though not from laughter. I was half expecting him to attack me – and if he had done so I would have been in trouble because Dougie was far harder than me. Instead he pulled the back of his trousers down to inspect the damage. On his right buttock there was a weal like a huge bee-sting; a protruding red boil-like lump of pure pain. “Look what you’ve done!” he said balefully, his voice quivering, “I’m going to tell on you”. And he ran off.
I knew that was the last of my air-pistol, and sure enough, when I at last made my sheepish way home I found that Dougie’s mother had already been to see mine. I was made to hand over the pistol and told to go straight to bed, without even a wash or anything to eat. Next morning my father ritually destroyed the air-pistol in front of me by smashing the muzzle with a lump hammer. But apart from a longish lecture - how stupid I had been – it could have taken his eye out – thought you knew better – thought you could be trusted – there were no other punishments. They saw how remorseful and frightened I was.
Two days later I bumped into Dougie. To my amazement and chagrin he was boasting about the lump on his bottom and showing it off proudly to his pals. For a short period, he revelled in the nickname ‘Lumpy Bum’. In school his teachers were instructed to allow him to stand up whenever he felt like it – a privilege he made the most of, ostentatiously wandering about the classroom as the rest of us had to remain seated.
My real punishment was self-inflicted. For several months I could not really enjoy playing with my pals. I was sure that Dougie, or some pals of his, would ‘get me back’. It was nerve-wracking to maintain constant vigilance and I suffered several nights of nasty nightmares involving severe and painful damage to my nether regions.
And this was a salutary lesson that I later realised applied to a far wider and much more serious range of situations. The principle can be stated as ‘don’t do to anyone something that will invite retaliation – especially if they are more powerful or reckless than you’. It is, of course, at the heart of the MAD (mutual assured destruction) doctrine that hopefully keeps nuclear weapons in check. And it is what guided the university to inaction in the story ‘A Brush with Heroin” (qv.)
Dougie McAteer and I were exploring along the wooded bank of the Water of Leith just behind Roseburn Cliff in Edinburgh. This was a favourite place to play. If we felt adventurous and had plenty of time we could keep going along the riverside for several miles all the way down to Stockbridge, passing the Dean Village on the way. There wasn’t a path all that way – at least not a regular, permitted, maintained path to be used by the public for recreation. There was a path of sorts, but it was the kind of irregular, rough, meandering and uncharted path used, we imagined, by villains, footpads, burglars and pirates as they journeyed from one atrocity to the next. It often required climbing over tree-trunks, ducking under branches and occasionally even stepping out onto slippery stones in the river to get by a particularly difficult fall of earth. We knew every yard, no matter how it changed, of this muddy ribbon. But today we were just playing around in the trees opposite Coltbridge – there wasn’t much time before we would have to go home for tea.
I was carrying an air-pistol – a wicked weapon capable of firing a lead slug (or optionally a small dart with a coloured hairy flight) at high velocity. I had been warned, on pain of confiscation, never to point this gun at anyone, and particularly not at anyone’s face, and not to shoot it at animals (except possibly rats), birds, windows, cars or anything ‘breakable’. It was for firing at dartboards attached to tree trunks, paper boats floating down rivers and similar rather boring targets. It fired one slug and then had to be re-loaded by unscrewing a plug from the breech, inserting a new slug, screwing the plug back in place then pressing the muzzle hard down onto the ground till it was cocked back in place against a strong internal spring.
Even in those early days, my untrained appreciation of physics allowed me to understand, with a blinding clarity that was to elude me as I got older, that there was something contained in this huge spring that, being imparted to the tiny slug, gave it its enormous velocity. I also realised that this something was put into the spring by myself as I compressed it. Without knowing it, and never having heard of energy except as that which I would get if I ate up all my dinner, I was already well on my way to understanding the law of its conservation.
It was a dry pleasant day. The sloping ground was covered in a fine friable dust which made it difficult to avoid sliding down into the river. The two of us were scrambling along holding onto tree roots and bunches of weeds to keep from slipping down. We knew our mothers would not have appreciated us getting our clothes ripped and muddy and our shoes and socks soaked.
We were both wearing short trousers, so our frequent falls resulted in scraped knees. But the pain of scraped knees was nothing compared to the almost intolerable discomfort caused by our thick grey flannel trousers. When dry these had the feel of sandpaper impregnated with itching powder. When wet – more usual when playing down the burn – they were heavy, cold and rough. If we were totally absorbed in our games we might not notice this, but sometimes, in less active mode, the feeling of these clammy itchy folds of cloth was almost unbearable. It was as if the insides of your thighs had been rubbed with crushed ice, scraped with a wire brush and sprinkled with salt. From just above the knees to just below the crotch, the skin was lobster red, cold, itchy and sore.
“Look! Ducks!” Dougie was pointing excitedly at a group of small black coots slowly gliding down the burn. This was our cue to start throwing stones at the birds. It was an unwritten rule that anything floating or swimming in the burn, animate or inanimate, was a target for stones. In this case the intention was not to hit the ducks, just to frighten them and make them fly off. The ducks were in less danger than might be supposed – we could throw stones with great precision. Stone-throwing was such a large part of our play that we had developed a degree of accuracy that an international cricketer would have envied. In fact, in later years Dougie actually became a mainstay of his secondary school cricket team, as a bowler, and his skill in delivering googlies and leg breaks was probably a direct result of the hours of practice he put in as a lad chucking stones at small wild creatures.
After the ducks had flown off quacking noisily at the insult, we found an empty bottle, threw it into the river and started throwing stones at it to smash it before it floated too far away. This required not only accuracy but considerable speed as well. Dougie later became adept at fast bowling as well as spin.
We then decided to set up some small towers of stones arranged in a line so that we could compete to see who could knock down the most. We stood about ten yards away from the line of towers and began to pelt them furiously with small stones. As we each knocked a tower down we’d shout, “one for me”, “two for me” … and at the last one, “beat ya!”, in triumph.
There is a phrase, ‘The red mist descended’ that describes the experience of being forced into disastrous action by some irrational, irresistible urge. I was about to get my first experience of it. Dougie was bending down to pick up some stones with which to erect a new set of towers. His short grey flannel trousers were stretched tightly across his buttocks and these buttocks were pointing directly at me. I just had time to notice with interest that on each buttock there was a circular greyer wet patch and that these were joined by a long thin wet streak so that his bottom looked like a pair of spectacles. Then, without warning, the mist descended. I took the already cocked air-pistol from my belt, raised it towards the right buttock, aimed and fired.
The result was truly amazing. Dougie’s body snapped upright and then arched backwards. His hands grabbed his buttocks. He leapt into the air and gave a huge cry of ‘Ooh Yah’, then started running wildly about still holding his bottom. Although I knew I had overstepped the mark, I was convulsed in laughter, tears streaming down my face. I could hardly breathe for laughing as I watched Dougie’s crazy flight.
After several minutes, he began to slow down. He was rubbing the spot where the slug had impacted and was still mouthing ‘Ooh yah, ooh yah’ over and over again. He had tears in his eyes too, though not from laughter. I was half expecting him to attack me – and if he had done so I would have been in trouble because Dougie was far harder than me. Instead he pulled the back of his trousers down to inspect the damage. On his right buttock there was a weal like a huge bee-sting; a protruding red boil-like lump of pure pain. “Look what you’ve done!” he said balefully, his voice quivering, “I’m going to tell on you”. And he ran off.
I knew that was the last of my air-pistol, and sure enough, when I at last made my sheepish way home I found that Dougie’s mother had already been to see mine. I was made to hand over the pistol and told to go straight to bed, without even a wash or anything to eat. Next morning my father ritually destroyed the air-pistol in front of me by smashing the muzzle with a lump hammer. But apart from a longish lecture - how stupid I had been – it could have taken his eye out – thought you knew better – thought you could be trusted – there were no other punishments. They saw how remorseful and frightened I was.
Two days later I bumped into Dougie. To my amazement and chagrin he was boasting about the lump on his bottom and showing it off proudly to his pals. For a short period, he revelled in the nickname ‘Lumpy Bum’. In school his teachers were instructed to allow him to stand up whenever he felt like it – a privilege he made the most of, ostentatiously wandering about the classroom as the rest of us had to remain seated.
My real punishment was self-inflicted. For several months I could not really enjoy playing with my pals. I was sure that Dougie, or some pals of his, would ‘get me back’. It was nerve-wracking to maintain constant vigilance and I suffered several nights of nasty nightmares involving severe and painful damage to my nether regions.
And this was a salutary lesson that I later realised applied to a far wider and much more serious range of situations. The principle can be stated as ‘don’t do to anyone something that will invite retaliation – especially if they are more powerful or reckless than you’. It is, of course, at the heart of the MAD (mutual assured destruction) doctrine that hopefully keeps nuclear weapons in check. And it is what guided the university to inaction in the story ‘A Brush with Heroin” (qv.)
