New Statesman Scotland - Stepping stones to a sense of self
My eight-year-old son and I are now well into our second shared World Cup campaign - with the oval ball this time. I well remember the build-up to our first. "That," I pointed out, "is Roberto. He's fantastic. Oh, and watch this from Ronaldo!" Cameron's shoulders slumped. "It's not worth us turning up. We're going to get thrashed." The dinosaur of nationhood rose up within me, and my six-year-old son and I had our first man-to-man exchange. "Look here," I said, "we're supporting Scotland, OK! And we'll support them with pride, and if we get beaten it doesn't matter as long as we play with passion. Understand?" Cameron blinked at me from the sofa and, when the teams took the pitch, waved his little Lion Rampant.
For this World Cup we are a better psychological match. We have made our first visit to Murrayfield - last season to watch the Italians. It was from that time Cameron began to save for the Scotland World Cup shirt he wore with his kilt and his Jimmy hat a week or so ago, as we sat on the sofa and sang "Flower o' Scotland" two lines ahead of the band. And I imagine - if all goes to plan - we shall be sitting again, in our pomp and our pride, watching the build-up to the big game with the All Blacks. Cameron knows the name of Lomu, but he will balance that name with those of Townsend and Tait, along with the phrases "on our day . . . " and "need fear no one . . . "
Alan Tait it is who has, for Cameron, assumed the larger-than-life mantle that almost places him in a line of heroes of the imagination which runs like a spine through his life: Peter Pan, Robin Hood, Rob Roy, William Wallace, Robert the Bruce. From each he has taken what he has needed at the time. It is what Bruno Bettelheim has shown, in The Uses Of Enchantment, children do. And, as is obvious from the list, part of what he has needed has been a sense of where he comes from - a sense of "identity". He sees himself as a Doonhamer, a citizen of Dumfries. And it is striking how powerful and pervasive a sense of Scottishness can still be for a child growing up in a Scottish town. A strong, locally inflected Scots directs him to key language questions ("Why do we speak English in Scotland?" "Why are we told it's wrong to say 'Aye'?"); an interest in Scottish history is sparked by the ruins that surround us; Scottish country dancing at 50p a head is the best bargain in town; the Church of Scotland, and the church hall, is still a Iively focus for the community.
So should we be concerned that our son - or our daughter - is turning into a tartan-clad xenophobe? Not in the least. He is exploring history, language and culture from where it means most to him. In addition, there is a family complication: he is half-Irish. At first it came as a shock to him that he wasn't "fully Scottish": now he is aware he has two teams to support. It is, I feel, a salutary muddying of the waters. Some years ago, in a television interview, I put it to Norman MacCaig that he had always been proud of his Gaelic heritage. "Nonsense!" he instantly responded. "How could I be
proud of something I had nothing to do with?"
MacCaig's is surely the mature response to the complex question of identity which is often a stepping stone to, or an evasion of, one's true sense of self. Some weeks ago in the London Review of Books the Palestinian exile Edward Said wrote: "I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance." I hope that the social scientists at Edinburgh University who have recently been awarded £1.1 million to discover what makes Scots Scottish can devise a measure that is sensitive enough to record such ambivalence.
For, as Cameron grows up into a Scotland that is more and more open to international influences, and as he makes his own meanings from what surrounds him, I would expect Cameron's sense of self to grow increasingly rich and complex. He may even grow towards the view of the poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, whose poem "High Treason" chimes so closely with the feelings of its translator, Alistair Reid, that Reid often feels he himself has written the poem. Pacheco states that he does not love his country, but would give his life:
for ten places in it,
for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
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