Sentence The Onehundredandthird
Now it will, of course, be remembered that Lord Linkumdoddie, when he was plain wee Jockie George, biding in the cottage where his Grannie had been born, in a heathery glen in the West Highlands, a cottage with no name, just the number 5 painted in a large white numeral on the dark age-and-weather-hardened front door; what happened to cottages number 1 to 4 wee Jockie never knew, except that his Grannie used to tell him tales of the olden days and of whole families evicted from their homes to make way for sheep – The Damned Clearances, she called them, and wee Jockie learned to hate the Wicked Duke who had treated his tenants so harshly and burned out their homes so that no others might move in; old Grannie George knew a lot of Burns' by heart and on dark nights when the small boy and his old grannie sat by the peat fire, sipping cocoa and listening to the wind howl through the glen, she told him stories, recited poems and sang the songs – the Old Scotch Sangs Ma mither Sang Tae Me; and she called him by a strange name she had culled from Burns – Linkumdoddie, which she said meant “Bonnie Wee George” (Dod being the name commonly used in Scotland for anyone Christened George) for she was mother and father to the boy, and aside from from her own brother's family in South Uist, and Jockie's mother's sisters' families last heard of in France and trying to get visas for Britain or America, though no word had come from them, her closest living relation since her son and his young wife had been sent to a Concentration Camp in Poland when the boy was just two and who now knew whether they were alive or dead – John for his membership of the German Communist Party and his wife for being a Jew, at a time in the mid-thirties when anything could be declared a Crime Against The State, and anyone punished for that very anything, for this was in the frightening years of the Civil War in Spain and before the Second World War and the British Government seemed desperate to abase itself before the Fuhrer and his demands – but not so very long after that War, when he was an up-and-coming young Advocate, accepting any brief which came his way, but also beginning to feel that access to the Law was only easy for people with money and that wasn't fair, or just, and that he needed to be true to ideals which had cost his parents their lives and opposed to the ideas which had destroyed them, and certainly no dittohead, simply being a mouthpiece without either a mind or a conscience, John George, no longer so wee but still filled with the memories his Heilan' Grannie had given him, was able to trace the movements of his parents through the Nazi system: they had been separated almost immediately and passed through a series of Camps, each worse than the previous until they both perished in Gas Chambers within six weeks of each other in the Winter of 1944/5 – John managed to visit both Death Camps and obtained some ash from each (not his parents, probably only wood-ash, but that didn't matter, for individuals were just drops in that ocean of blood, but he kept these ashes, in memory of all who had met the same fate, in a small, black reliquary, a petrous box which he had been given by one of the survivors whom he had met and most significantly, a man who had known both his parents before they were rounded up with him in the frenzied days after the Reichstag Fire; the man, broken in body but never in spirit, said that the only day he should perhaps rue in his life would be the day he joined the KPD as a sixteen-year-old delivery boy. but he refused to do that, believing that the worst day for humankind was the day Adolf Hitler had been conceived, like some sort of Satanic version of the Immaculate Conception of Christ and to blame any decision or event in his own life would be taking responsibility away from the perpetrators – like saying a woman who smokes in public is asking to be raped; and John George believed that he could identify with the Christ Martyr as representing the Martyrdom of all peoples of all religions or none, simply because they are different from someone else; so when Jock George, Lord Linkumdoddie as he had become on his elevation to the High Court, heard from his nephew Riddle that Martin Elginbrod had called him a Pinko, he laughed and said that No, he was a Red, and from his German-Jewish Mother he was also himself a Jew with the same blood in him as that shed by Jesus on the Cross and like his Old Grannie, a member of the Free Church of Scotland and an Elder in his local congregation – “so Elginbrod can put that in his pipe and smoke it, for all I care”; and he had arranged to be in Jinglin' Geordie's that evening and while seeming just to be an old man sipping a Hot Toddy and doing the evening crossword, he had listened carefully to the discussion of his nephews and nieces at the adjacent table, and eventually he said to them: “I will tell you a few things you may not know about yon Elginbrod,” and his young relations drew their chairs closer to his and pinned back their lugholes, as he advised them to do!
Now it will, of course, be remembered that Lord Linkumdoddie, when he was plain wee Jockie George, biding in the cottage where his Grannie had been born, in a heathery glen in the West Highlands, a cottage with no name, just the number 5 painted in a large white numeral on the dark age-and-weather-hardened front door; what happened to cottages number 1 to 4 wee Jockie never knew, except that his Grannie used to tell him tales of the olden days and of whole families evicted from their homes to make way for sheep – The Damned Clearances, she called them, and wee Jockie learned to hate the Wicked Duke who had treated his tenants so harshly and burned out their homes so that no others might move in; old Grannie George knew a lot of Burns' by heart and on dark nights when the small boy and his old grannie sat by the peat fire, sipping cocoa and listening to the wind howl through the glen, she told him stories, recited poems and sang the songs – the Old Scotch Sangs Ma mither Sang Tae Me; and she called him by a strange name she had culled from Burns – Linkumdoddie, which she said meant “Bonnie Wee George” (Dod being the name commonly used in Scotland for anyone Christened George) for she was mother and father to the boy, and aside from from her own brother's family in South Uist, and Jockie's mother's sisters' families last heard of in France and trying to get visas for Britain or America, though no word had come from them, her closest living relation since her son and his young wife had been sent to a Concentration Camp in Poland when the boy was just two and who now knew whether they were alive or dead – John for his membership of the German Communist Party and his wife for being a Jew, at a time in the mid-thirties when anything could be declared a Crime Against The State, and anyone punished for that very anything, for this was in the frightening years of the Civil War in Spain and before the Second World War and the British Government seemed desperate to abase itself before the Fuhrer and his demands – but not so very long after that War, when he was an up-and-coming young Advocate, accepting any brief which came his way, but also beginning to feel that access to the Law was only easy for people with money and that wasn't fair, or just, and that he needed to be true to ideals which had cost his parents their lives and opposed to the ideas which had destroyed them, and certainly no dittohead, simply being a mouthpiece without either a mind or a conscience, John George, no longer so wee but still filled with the memories his Heilan' Grannie had given him, was able to trace the movements of his parents through the Nazi system: they had been separated almost immediately and passed through a series of Camps, each worse than the previous until they both perished in Gas Chambers within six weeks of each other in the Winter of 1944/5 – John managed to visit both Death Camps and obtained some ash from each (not his parents, probably only wood-ash, but that didn't matter, for individuals were just drops in that ocean of blood, but he kept these ashes, in memory of all who had met the same fate, in a small, black reliquary, a petrous box which he had been given by one of the survivors whom he had met and most significantly, a man who had known both his parents before they were rounded up with him in the frenzied days after the Reichstag Fire; the man, broken in body but never in spirit, said that the only day he should perhaps rue in his life would be the day he joined the KPD as a sixteen-year-old delivery boy. but he refused to do that, believing that the worst day for humankind was the day Adolf Hitler had been conceived, like some sort of Satanic version of the Immaculate Conception of Christ and to blame any decision or event in his own life would be taking responsibility away from the perpetrators – like saying a woman who smokes in public is asking to be raped; and John George believed that he could identify with the Christ Martyr as representing the Martyrdom of all peoples of all religions or none, simply because they are different from someone else; so when Jock George, Lord Linkumdoddie as he had become on his elevation to the High Court, heard from his nephew Riddle that Martin Elginbrod had called him a Pinko, he laughed and said that No, he was a Red, and from his German-Jewish Mother he was also himself a Jew with the same blood in him as that shed by Jesus on the Cross and like his Old Grannie, a member of the Free Church of Scotland and an Elder in his local congregation – “so Elginbrod can put that in his pipe and smoke it, for all I care”; and he had arranged to be in Jinglin' Geordie's that evening and while seeming just to be an old man sipping a Hot Toddy and doing the evening crossword, he had listened carefully to the discussion of his nephews and nieces at the adjacent table, and eventually he said to them: “I will tell you a few things you may not know about yon Elginbrod,” and his young relations drew their chairs closer to his and pinned back their lugholes, as he advised them to do!
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