Despite more invasive modern methods of digging up dirt on me- after hacking my emails and my mobile, after searching my hard drive and my laptops- it seems the whisper network has had need to fall back on some old-fashioned gossip. This gossip stems from my village, back when I was a schoolboy. As far as I knew it petered out no sooner that it started. As I have come back to the village over the years, I have always been well received by women in pubs, and I would be asked to dance at ceilidhs, and I have been invited back to women’s houses for a drink when the pubs shut. It was only after the whisper campaign in Berlin, over two decades later, that suddenly every woman put on that I was a predator. This had never been the gossip in the village. It wasn’t even what was whispered about me in Berlin. It is hard to explain this sudden change of tune, this abrupt disconnect between past and present. This gossip is from the time before laptops, when home computers were rare, and you needed to call the world wide web and listen to it ‘ping, beep, and splutter’ while you waited for an answer. The gossip is from a rural community that could not be more different from the activist group in Berlin, and that is no bad thing.
I’m from a small rural village in Scotland where two rivers, winding down two parallel glens, meet at the head of a loch that is over 30km long. There is a string of Munros that rise up from the north side of the loch and beyond these lie the Scottish Highlands. That’s the backdrop looking north. If you drive south you need to rise over a pass, but after that, it’s a couple of hours drive downhill to the central belt where the towns and cities are. So, we are in the heartland looking down on the lowlands, and there is about 1,000 of us, including the farms and the odd Hotel in the surrounding area. There were 7 bars dotted down the main street before Covid, and all but one were in a Hotel. Now there are four bars which are full of tourists in the summer, most of them come for the castle, the waterfall, and the hill walking. Each bar gets it’s time in the spotlight for a while, as the locals favour it to regale themselves with stories of local heroes, characters and steamers. There is the classic village hall where the concerts and ceilidhs, and charity fundraisers are held. You might have a birthday bash in the hall if you were inviting whole the village, but if you were making it a family affair, you book the Hotel. ‘The Hotel’, the first in the village, was built in the 17th century and renovated to accommodate Victorians arriving on the steam train, but the trains are long gone now. The hotel has a large breakfast hall with tartan flashes hanging on the wall and a solid wooden floor where Queen Victoria once dined. This is where we celebrated my Gran’s eightieth with a disco. On the night in question, I was celebrating my Gran’s birthday in the Hotel.
My Gran was from Lincoln and a lot of the family had made it up from down south. Four generations were on the dance floor. The gents were in suits with a tie, the uncles in a simple shirt and tie, the cousins just in plain shirt and trousers. I was in my red tartan kilt, of course. I liked the kilt, but I was under strict instructions in any case. In the photos, I am holding onto my sporn with my elbows sticking out either side for the Sassenachs to have their photo with me in the kilt. I was on my best behaviour for a seventeen-year-old, although all the family wanted to buy me a pint. It was a good night, I tried to pace myself, but my instincts at that age were to get steaming. As the night progressed, I felt I timed it pretty well. That was until the Hotel curfew was called abruptly. It was normally my older cousins who were up to mischief, bringing their own gear up to the village and knowing as many locals as I did. This time I was on my own. Standing outside the entrance to the hotel I could hear the far-off sound of a rare thing in Scotland- a Barbeque.
It seemed the last people were leaving the dance floor, the patio on the right hand side. While those who had made it into the wee hours were sitting under the gazebo on my left. I wanted to keep the party going so I asked the nearest woman to dance and she accepted. Even as I was approaching her some men began making a scene about this. It continued while we walked the 3 meters onto the dance floor and we turned back to look at them. I resented their attempt to shame us and so I mocked them. Almost as soon as we started to dance, I started moved my hand a bit lower very slowly and looked at Elisabeth to see that she was in on it. There was hardly any contact involved. When my hand was hovering over her bum she said very warmly, ‘You better move your hand Kieran before you get in trouble’. Elisabeth was in total control of that situation. She might have been protecting me, but that only shows that she did not feel threatened while she played along. Elisabeth was a married women about 20 years my senior.
I had a drink in my hand and I chatted a bit, but the party was clearly over. As I went to leave the garden there was a football sitting up plump on beautifully flat bit of grass, like the left wing of a football field. The barbeque was in the grounds of the old Royal Bank of Scotland and the house had a huge stone gable end. I was quite a good footballer back in the day, so I gave it a kick with my left to collect the rebound on my right. I did not see the window in the kitchen extension at the back of the house. The ‘fitbaw’ went straight through the fuckin’ window. The barbeque was being held by the local metal worker who is about as wide as he is tall. He is a really nice cheery guy, but he has the reputation of being a bit wild with a drink in him. So, I bolted from the garden like a hare. This was quite serious, because I was in my kilt. I always thought those words from Hugh MacDiarmid about wearing red applied, above all else, to a red kilt:
WHY I CHOOSE RED
I fight in red for the same reasons
That Garibaldi chose the red shirt
-Because a few men in a field wearing red
Look like many men – if there are ten you will think
There are a hundred; if a hundred
You will believe them a thousand.
And the colour of red dances in the enemy’s rifle sights
And his aim will be bad- But, best reason of all,
A man in a red shirt can neither hide nor retreat.
This was not the end of the matter. Earlier that night, wee Tommy the painter who had moved from Glasgow had been refused entry to the Barbeque for being drunk, and some other gossip perhaps. When his window was broke Gordon the metal working heard footsteps running at pace up the side street across the street. Poor Tommy the painter lived at the bottom of this side street. I estimate that 10 minutes after I kicked that fitbaw, Gordon was at tommy’s front door throttling the painter, presuming he had returned to break the window out of spite. When I called the next morning to apologise for breaking the window, and for legging it away, all this was relayed to me. Gordon’s wife had seen me running up the street in my kilt from the window upstairs, but she could not catch her husband as he took off to Tommy’s door. She decided not to tell him who the real culprit was until the morning.
I do not feel as bad about the incident with Elisabeth because I only made myself vulnerable to village gossip, while Elisabeth was an adult who was in control of the situation. To put this in context, I had a lot of female friends at school and the confided in me and looked to me for support. I was the class clown, and my humour was often an ironic play of masculinity. I was more mature than most. I even accompanied a friend on a couple of busses to the sexual health clinic in Stirling while I was at school. She wanted to go on the pill, but her boyfriend would not go with her. As a 17-year-old before the days of social media, I felt my world was no bigger than all the women who I was friends with. I resented the old-fashioned men shaming me and Elisabeth for dancing together.
Even 20 years later, I would still think the same way. As if me supporting women or intervening in sexist behaviour would be noted and respected. The problem is the main reason women approached me was for my maturity and discretion. So, who would ever know? I might have been arrogant when I dismissed and mocked those men, but I was a drunken teenager. However, I think Elisabeth knew that I was just acting the goat. Why else would she pay along? Our society has been accused of infantilizing women, taking from them any sense of cognitive maturity and moral agency. Even while the same bundle of stereotypes grant women are perceptive, empathetic and adept at exchanging social cues. There are studies that demonstrate that women are more empathetic, more concerned with social status and standing, and at an earlier age, and they develop the exchange of social cues much earlier than men. Elisabeth is a fully functioning adult. I did not use any privilege over Elisabeth, nor any power or strength, nor any speed or sudden movement. She was very much in control the whole time. There was very little contact because my behaviour was a parody of the men mocking us. I do not offer any further explanation to protect ‘a lady’s reputation’, that is not my concern at all. I only want to explain my behaviour and how it was in tune with the people around me. I do not blame people for asking what Elisabeth was doing though.
There may have been another reason for Elisabeth playing along. My sister told me years ago that some women in the village didn’t like my mum. They thought my mum thinks she is better than them. Elisabeth and Margaret are two such women. One night I went up to Margaret’s house after the pub and she betrayed as much. Her husband was drunk with his head on the kitchen table, and she said smartly ‘what’s he doing here?’. Her husband’s drinking buddy, Donald, vouched for me since we had worked together before, but Margaret said, ‘but he’ll tell his mother’. I think both Elisabeth and Margaret enjoyed the idea of taking my mum down a peg or two. Whenever I went to the Hall with my folks on Hogmanay, and other occasions, they were conspiratorial in their mocking of my mum, more than me. Even the morning after the barbeque, Elisabeth would know she needed to get her story out first, nip the gossip in the bud, and tell her husband a simple white lie that he could recount to his workmates without feeling foolish. She would also get to take my mum down a peg or two. She was playing by the rules of village gossip in the 90’s. Elisabeth could have no idea of the consequences this would have for me 20 years later when a younger generation took it out of context. As my harassment started in Glasgow, Margaret’s daughter started to appear in the coffeeshop where I worked. I believe she took over the gossip for her own reasons.
Since I was about 18 years old I have only been out in the village over the festive period. One year, on the run up to Christmas, I joined some pals from school who were out with Hotel staff. The nurses from the retirement home were having their Christmas night out as well. There was one teenage girl amongst them who was already steaming. Each Christmas party was thinking that they had the run of the place. The women were laughing and filling the bar up with their chat, they had the beating of the men. Meanwhile, the feet of this young girl were rooted to a spot slightly off stage from her circle of pals, while her upper body moved around like an erratic pendulum. She had a pint of lager and blackcurrant in her right hand against her belly. As the night went on, her left foot took on the job of a buttress holding her up against the flow of the banter and the bevy. As she seemed to tip one way or tither, her left foot was thrown out and planted with leg fully extended. She would then leaver herself back up with that leg. Lastly, her left foot was swiftly tugged back in over the carpet tiles as her head was flung back straight. A few minutes later the pattern was repeated. All the time she was slowly and nonchalantly look around the bar oblivious to the battle her left leg was waging.
At some point she appeared to hover on the periphery of our group rather than the women. I looked to see if the women were aware. Among our group, among the hotel workers, was a man who was hilarious, but his antics was down to a kind of jovial madness that at one time could seem harmless and at another seemed a little, well, ‘off’. His chat was so unpredictable, even to him, and beside any notion of what people might think of him. He had a round face, with only so many teeth and protruding lips. It was hard to know whether you were doing him an injustice for having some sort of learning disability or suffering the effects of alcoholism. He was quite a bit older than all of us but was swigging pints just the same. At one point this girl stumbled around asking for a kiss. All my friends ignored her or laughed it off. We turned our back on her, hoping she might drift back over to her group. Before she got that far, she hovered behind this crazy guy who spun round with ‘”you want a kiss?”, put his hand behind her head, and gave her big slobbery kiss over half her mouth. My friends found this hilarious but mostly because it was disgusting. A big “awww…” was let out as people recoiled and their heads gave a quarter turn away from the scene. Everyone continued to laugh. The man took a look at the young women and decided to do it again. This time holding her in while he gave her a sloppy forceful kiss. I stepped forward and in between them, saying, that that was enough. The guy was taken aback, asking my mates who I was. Of all my group, only one guy said that ‘that was not OK’. The rest gave me a hard time and called me a ‘timothy tight arse’. The women she was with did nothing, except pretend they hadn’t noticed the cheering and laughing.
I ushered the young women stand beside me, and away from that man. Now and then I put my arm round her shoulders to keep her away from him. The young women said sorry, but I could tell she didn’t know why. It was now just an awkward situation spoiling my night. A woman from her group came over to say she noticed what I was doing and thanked me for it. Another woman did the same. Again, I did what was right, regardless of what other people did, and what other people might think. Something which now seems naively anathema to our times, if not actually wrong by any moral scruple. All this was back in the 90’s, but it is all that network of feminists have to build on after trawling through my email accounts, laptops and external hard drives. It is enough for the locals in my village to confirm the sexist stereotypes of toxic men and innocent actresses. They cannot even imagine the type of women who drive these campaigns in Berlin. They have no idea whose dirty work they are doing. Somehow, it has become acceptable to cancel a life, and drug a man in his own home, in work places and in bars, because of gossip. Chemically incapacitating men who reports being drugged, robbed, harassed, and sexually assaulted seems necessary for justice. God might be dead, but our belief in women seems incorrigible, and all is permitted.