When they moved on again, this time to their last address, they found themselves once more in a 1930s confection – but, this time, a ground-floor flat in a low-rise tenement in a corporation estate in west Edinburgh. Not a million miles from Murrayfield as it happens – though no-one much associated Tom’s name with the national stadium any more. And anyway, the old ground, the one he (and his father before him) had helped build, had now been re-modelled in tubular steel.
This was no return home. Certainly not in the way that the heroes of quests return home, changed by the experience, annealed, made wiser, braver, transcendent. Not, for sure, in the way that Hannay returns home (perhaps his 39th Step) in the Hitchcock version of the yarn.
The flat was hardly a slum – and actually the estate (or their bit of it) was cleaner, tidier, prouder and more resilient than scores of other seemingly identical estates I (or you) could think of. But it was brown. All the buildings were finished in a dun-coloured rendering that had not weathered well.
Brown. Brownish. A brown that was somehow less than brown: a sort of discoloured grey. Stained. A pale, insipid dirtiness. And though in some respects it wasn’t at all bleak (it was far from being a heroin-raddled sink estate), it was ill-favoured in others. The whole place was cracked, as if someone had dropped it, in transit, somewhere along the way. The rendering on the buildings was webbed with fissure lines or in some places it had just plain fallen off, revealing great continents of decaying brickwork on gable ends.
And it was always windy there, especially along the parades of shops folded around the innermost of the estate’s concentric circles, an eddying wind that’s specific to only certain disinherited parts of towns; the sort of wind that was created by H-bomb tests in the 1950s rather than fresh-minted by anticyclone weather systems out in the Atlantic; the sort of wind that takes whatever litter there is and makes it swirl and scrape but never actually sends it anywhere. Swirling, scraping, mindlessly, for ever.
Dogs roamed, solitary or in two and threes. They quivered as they shat on the cracked paving stones outside the shops on the parades. Many of the shops were boarded up, the rest were protected by wire mesh screens or aluminium pull-downs that were cack-handedly tagged with aerosol paint.
Tom’s funeral was well attended… but not one single representative from the SRU turned up, though a number of its former and current office holders had been contacted.
The Scotsman didn’t get around to publishing an obituary – and worse than that, it managed to lose all the archive material we’d dropped off at the paper’s offices following a brief chat on the telephone with the deputy editor.
The city’s indifference angered many… but it was a matter of resigned acceptance to others. This is the way the world works. Cities, nations, sports, companies, institutions, clubs, societies, bodies politic or cultural or commercial… they have no memory. Only individuals do. People. Almost all of Tom’s people had preceded him.
