ABSTRACT
He was, he assured me several times in his stumbling and anxious thick Glaswegian accent, ‘no good at things like talking at all’. He had been given a small part to play in a prison once, and although he had been terrified because it opened with his being discovered alone on the stage when the curtain rose, as soon as the first of the other characters entered and the dialogue actually began, to his astonishment he had found himself immediately perfectly at ease, with a faultless memory for all the words. Looking back on it he realised that had been the only occasion in his life when he had known exactly what to say, because all his lines had been learned by heart during months of preparation and rehearsal. He knew what the other person would be going to say, what his own reply would be, what response they would make to that and so on. It was a pity, he said wistfully, that there was no script written-out for the rest of his life.
