Walking the Border

ONE

CONUNDRUM

Borders, barbed wire and bonny bairns

It's, well, a more or less borderless world. And that's as it should be.

Except for the borders where they check your passport for hours, the child's small voice says from the other end of the table.

- Ali Smith, There But For The (2011)

I don't know how many times I've crossed the Border. Maybe a few score times, maybe several hundred. I never counted. Sometimes I've known the moment, sometimes not. No one's ever stamped my passport.

The first crossing would have been some cold spring night in 1955 or 1956. Every year my mother would take us south from Edinburgh to spend Easter with our grandparents in the Isle of Wight.

In what felt like the middle of the night we'd be stirred out of bed with low lights and whispers. Still in our pyjamas we'd be bundled into jumpers and coats and a taxi, and drive off into the urgent dark.

Waverley Station in the steam age was a cavern of black walls, black girders, blackened glass. Even the locomotives were soot black, not the red, blue or green of engines in picture books. Yellow lights glared through smoke and steam. Everything was in motion, nothing certain. The air shook with shouts, whistles, hisses, the din and clang of metal on metal.

Tottering along the platform half asleep, one hand in my mother's, my other hand let go its burden. Panda slipped between train and platform. The loss was incomprehensible, irrecoverable, complete. I was too tired to cry.

Once in the tiny sleeping compartment, my mother pulled down the blinds, lowered the cover over the basin, tucked me and my sister toe-to-toe in the bottom bunk, our heads at either end. Foot-fighting soon gave way to half sleep, rocked by the jerk and rattle of the train. And so, sideways, we travelled southward. And somewhere, at some point in the dreamlike dream of sleeping and waking and sleeping through a night punctuated by the rhythm of rails, sleepers, points - somewhere, at some point, I crossed the Border for the first time.

When the sleeper attendant knocked in the early morning with tea and biscuits, he told us we would soon arrive in London. I had no idea what that meant.

Other crossings have followed: by rail on the East Coast Line or the West Coast Line; by road on the A1 north of Berwick, or by Coldstream Bridge over the Tweed or the hill pass of Carter Bar, or the A7 south of Canonbie, or over the Sark on the M74 as it flows imperceptibly into the M6. In the days I worked for Collins Publishers in Glasgow, I would sometimes take the early morning shuttle to Heathrow, changing countries somewhere high above the Solway Firth or the Irish Sea. 'Anything to drink, sir?' a flight attendant would ask. 'Coffee, please. Black.' I'd've been up too early for breakfast, could only cope with a coffee. Some businessmen on the flight would order a double vodka.

Hurtling towards Edinburgh on the East Coast Line, you've got to have your wits about you to spot the England-Scotland Border. There is a sign, but it flashes past in an instant. The guard makes no remark, the passengers remain unmoved. North of here you won't pay for your prescriptions or your university education or your care in old age. You can walk where you want without fear of prosecution. And if you find yourself in court for some other misdemeanour, a jury may judge you neither innocent nor guilty, but conclude instead that the case against you is merely 'not proven'.

In contrast to the rail routes, all the main road crossings have enormous signs welcoming you to either Scotland or England, the former streaked with the Blue Saltire, the latter adorned with the Cross of St George. 'Welcome to Scotland', the former says. 'Fàilte gu Alba'. No one has spoken Gaelic in these Border regions since the Dark Ages - if then. In the west it might have been Welsh, in the east Pictish or Anglo-Saxon.

The summer of my walk, as the temperature rose in the independence debate, small posters began to appear on the back of road signs on the English side. They bore a Cross of St George and the slogan 'HOME RULE'. The local authorities were incensed. They'd have to pay taxpayers' money scraping them off. The English Defence League was suspected, but did not claim responsibility. Nothing they'd like better, one suspects, than to cut off the Celtic Fringe.

On smaller roads, the Scots keep up the national welcome, but on the English side you're more likely to be welcomed to Northumberland or Cumbria, with no mention of the country you're entering. The only place there's any real fuss is at Carter Bar, where there's a magnificent view north over Scotland, a snack bar in a caravan, and a man in a kilt who stops picking up the litter when a coach party appears, hoists his bagpipes aloft and bursts into a medley of popular tunes. He has a sign:

This is my livelihood

Please leave a tip.

The Italians and the Americans and the Chinese queue up to have their photograph taken with him. His face is as stony as the Border Stone beside him. Only the tourists smile.

One of the last walks I had with my father, in his nineties, was up the path from Holyrood to Salisbury Crags. It was a grey, damp winter day. I kept my eye on the old man as he negotiated the wet paving stones, stick in hand. We slowly rose above the newly-opened Parliament. He was a fan of the building, I was not. It was too fussy for me, with too many unnecessary ornamentations, though it sat well in its setting. But my father was always thrilled with 'modern architecture'. In the 1960s he'd drive us out to see Livingstone New Town when it was still being built, show us the new Napier College, its glass and steel and concrete enveloping the old stones of Merchiston Tower. He'd taken us to see Basil Spence's new Coventry Cathedral, built next to the charred ruins of the medieval cathedral that had been blitzed in November 1940. It was a symbol of postwar reconciliation, he told us. His sister had married a German just after the war, and he'd introduced his German nephew to mountain-climbing. He was of the generation of 1945, the generation that looked forward to a new and better world, a world in which the modernist, collectivist, internationalist project in architecture was to play its part. He shared in the vision of a united Europe, one that would succeed the old empires and prevent the 'balkanisation' of the continent, in which smaller and smaller groups of shriller and shriller nationalists would insist on their separation from (and superiority to) their neighbours.

And yet - if it is an 'and yet' - he was very much in favour of Scottish devolution, and of the Scottish Parliament as an institution as well as a building. Scotland was not his country, but it was the country he and my mother adopted before I was born. They loved Scotland - its landscapes, its people, the richness of its past - and saw the Scottish Parliament as a revitalisation of a country that had been demoralised and impoverished under Thatcher. But at the end of the day, if he had still been alive, he would have voted for maintaining the Union come September 2014. Complete independence would have been a balkanisation too far. Had he lived, he would have had the opportunity to vote. His son, exiled in London for a quarter of a century, won't need to make that difficult decision.

I have never been prevented from crossing a border. The nearest I've come to it was in 1970. I was fifteen and driving with my older brother into Derry/Londonderry at the end of a family holiday in Donegal. At the edge of the city, just inside the border between the Republic and the North, there was an army roadblock. The barrier was down. Soldiers armed with FN automatic rifles ordered us out of the car. We stood at the roadside half-thrilled, half-terrified, under the watchful gaze of a lance-corporal up on a grass embankment. He was shielded behind sandbags and had his finger on the trigger of a Browning medium machine gun. The soldiers searched the car. Boot, bonnet and glove compartment were opened, door-pockets rifled, seats lifted. Even my brother's spectacle case was opened. Then they waved us on. No smiles, no thank-yous. I'm not sure if they said a single word. It was all done by gestures. Now I knew what it was like to be under armed occupation.

In the past, borders right across Europe were manned by armed guards. They still are if you are arriving from outside Europe. The combination of uniforms and guns, or even uniforms on their own, can be intimidating. It is dehumanising for anybody who comes under scrutiny. Are you who you say you are? And even if you are, will we allow you to pass? Or will we put you in handcuffs, hold you uncharged in a cell, send you back to where you don't want to go?

Five years after my visit to Northern Ireland I was travelling alone on the overnight train from Munich to Belgrade. I shared the small old-fashioned compartment with an elderly peasant couple. He wore a black suit, white shirt and no tie. She was also dressed in black, and kept her hair wrapped in a red headscarf. In those days many Yugoslavs worked as Gastarbeiter in West Germany, so I guessed this elderly couple had been visiting their children, maybe even their grandchildren. The separation must have been painful, but no doubt the money sent home was welcome.

Though I had no Serbo-Croat and they had no English, we understood each other well enough. The man cut chunks off a cold leg of lamb with a fierce-looking knife and offered them to me. I passed round the bottle of Swabian red my aunt had given me for...