It used to be that you could live a long time in Scotland and never meet a nationalist other than the kind who wanted to beat England at football
At midnight, when reporters and sub-editors on Glasgow newspapers ended their late shifts, there was nowhere to go but home or the press club. On Fridays, the second seemed the natural choice. The press club lived in a big room up a stair in the middle of town and sold beer and spirits – Glasgow in the 1960s confined wine to restaurants – but the atmosphere was usually fairly orderly and subdued, so that when Jim from the Daily Record asked his regular closing-time question, everyone could hear. "Would ye fight for Scotland then? Would ye? Would ye?" Jim had served in a Scottish regiment. The question was a test of both patriotism and manliness to anyone who happened to be within slurring distance. No women were present. Men standing at the bar would smile apprehensively at him and say it was time we were all getting home.
I don't know if Jim was a political or a sentimental nationalist, or a nationalist only at one in the morning, nor do I mean to suggest that an unfocused belligerence was all nationalism amounted to 45 years ago. The fact is that he was part of a tiny minority. You could live a long time in Scotland and never meet a nationalist other than the kind who wanted to see England beaten at football. By the age of 25 I had met only three who declared themselves politically. The first two were at school: a classmate, Norval Macphail, who wore a kilt and, in the usual "but-what-will-we-live-on?" arguments, spoke up for hydro-electricity and the fishing fleet; and a teacher, Mr Halliday, who was rumoured to be something quite big in the SNP but (so far as we could tell) kept his history lessons untainted by his views on the United Kingdom's future.
Then, across a newspaper's subediting table, I met Jack Wills. That a clothing chain catering to the middle-class young should later take the same name is an inappropriate coincidence: Jack wasn't a man for the rugby shirt. He came into the office every night muffled in scarves and waterproofs, having ridden his motorbike 40 miles from his house in the southern Highlands. Many aspects of his life were mysterious. He never went to the pub with the rest of us. He spoke severely and often impatiently. A bad legal mistake – not his fault, but on his watch – was thought to have ended his career as an executive on a rival paper. Now he was prized purely for his fine editing skills, and given the exclusive task of reshaping and rewriting the most important story in every edition, the front-page splash. Military service played a part in his history, too. He had been wounded in the Malayan Emergency, and in heated arguments (about what? You may well ask) had been known to pull up a trouser leg to show off a badly scarred shin. Everybody, including the editor, was slightly scared of him, and I was flattered that he thought well enough of me to make me his young friend.
One aspect of Scottish nationalism, perhaps of all nationalisms, is the honouring of the landscape. Jackie Kay has some fun with this in her memoir, Red Dust Road, when she describes driving through Glencoe with her parents. "Stunning," her mum says. "Nothing like it, our ain wee country. God, it's beautiful." Kay adds. "So many trips and journeys around Scotland involve paying it effusive compliments as if we believe the country has a large listening ear, cocked to one side. Sometimes I imagine I can see the land blush with recognition."
Such feelings, of course, aren't restricted to political nationalists. All kinds of people can have them – Kay's parents belonged to the Communist party. But a nationalist sees the land as part of his movement's purpose and spiritual identity. I think Jack did at any rate, because he invited me to go walking and climbing with him, to see as much land as possible. "Our land," Jack would say, implying that in an independent Scotland we would have some right to it; we would own, as it were, the view.
Our most ambitious expedition took us to the Cairngorms, where we camped for three nights in a hut at the end of Scotland's most famous hill pass, the Lairig Ghru, and climbed mountains during the day. The snow lay deep all around. Outside, it gusted into our faces. Melted, it covered the hut's concrete floor in a layer of water that we perched above on a pair of rusty bedsteads, fully clothed and inside our sleeping bags. There was neither fire nor light. We had a Primus stove, but only one pan. The tea tasted of onion soup, and the onion soup of tea. But worse, much worse, was that on every expedition Jack was always at least 100 yards ahead, moving easily upwards as I struggled behind. On the second day, fed up with his military level of fitness, I turned back halfway up a slope steep and slippery enough to need an ice axe, and went back to the hut. He was disappointed in me. We stayed friends, but things were never quite the same after that. Many years later, I heard he'd become a postman in Argyllshire and, more recently, I heard that he was dead.
It seems unlikely that the Scottish writer James Robertson ever met him, and yet in Robertson's novel, And the Land Lay Still, he has an almost perfect incarnation in the character of Jack Gordon, who leaves his wife and child to spend his life tramping across Scotland for no clear reason, to become the mystery who unites the book. Like my friend, he's a lonely nationalist who has been in the army. Like my friend, he doesn't disclose too much about himself. Both the real man and his fictional equivalent have a mystical belief in Scotland and its topography that would look odd in any novel written by an English writer, about England, since the second world war. But then Robertson's novel does all the things that some critics wish English novels would do: it takes the recent history of the nation as its subject, abstains from knowingness, draws characters from every social class and manages to be sympathetic to all of them, and plainly establishes the historical background. "Lothian Regional Council and Mike reached an impasse in negotiations over his community charge liabilities" is not a sentence you expect to find in a "literary" novel, and especially one so widely praised. Still, it may be the most politically significant Scottish novel ever written.
Alex Salmond chose it as his book of the year for 2010, which is perhaps not surprising given that he is mentioned in it, kindly, and that the novel is literally portentous in its telling of Scotland's progress towards a separate nationhood, with every station of the cross, such as the poll tax, getting its due. But Robertson also shows a country of believable decency, to which the Glasgow Press Club's pro patria mori might be applied.
On Wednesday, in his statement on the referendum, Salmond approvingly quoted a line from a poem by Robertson: "The bird that was trapped has flown." Salmond said: "The bird has flown, and cannot now be returned to its cage." Metaphors and mysteries, mountains and Robert Burns: political nationalism is making a bid to own all of them. If the bid isn't successfully contested, to be Scottish will be to vote SNP.