Obiter Dicta

Monday, February 20^th.

I have been working on a memoir of my time in teaching, and it put me in mind of some of the odd characters who taught me all those years ago in Bathgate St. Mary’s. (Names slightly altered.)

I was taught Geography by Miss Rennie, who was an ancient, sibylline woman when she taught my parents. By the time I arrived at the school, she looked like something dug out of a bog in Jutland. She was elderly and frail and a leftover from the teaching of forty years earlier. Trotting timorously down the playground, where the lumpen boys were hoofing a football about, she was in mortal fear of being taken out by a bye-kick. “Hold the ball, boys!” she would pipe and increase her unsteady trot until she was in the safety of the school building. It only took two or three days of this before the oafs themselves would gleefully stop the kickabout with hoarse calls of “Hold the ball, boys” and usher the old lady onwards with exaggeratedly courteous bows and sweeps of the arm, like Restoration dandies.

            In her classroom, discipline was almost non-existent – and we were the A stream, the swots, the well-behaved ones. Things would start off quietly. We would talk in whispers, then in increasingly bolder tones. Pellets and other projectiles would flick through the air when her back was turned. Soon, pupils were openly eating their sandwiches, drinking from bottles of ginger, reading Fabulous and playing dominoes. Gradually, the shindy got worse until, eventually, we were jumping up and down on top of the desks, whooping and cackling like chimpanzees in an enclosure. All that were missing were tyres hanging from ropes. Then she would take a stand.

Turning from the blackboard and dusting down her hands, she would call, “Four instructions!” and hold up her right hand with her thumb tucked behind her four very skinny and knotted digits.

            It was obvious what she expected to happen – in general terms. She expected us to stop acting like shits and behave like the cleverest pupils in First Year. We did, to a degree. But we had no idea what the hell the Four Instructions were. Obviously formulated in her younger days, when she taught Julius Caesar and they were known as the Quattuor Doctrinae, they had never been explained to us. Older pupils could recall that the Four Instructions consisted of things like 1) sit up straight; 2) pay attention to the teacher; 3) stop talking; and 4) stop acting like shits.

            But the finest Miss Rennie moments came whenever she caught a pupil picking his or her nose. Generations of St. Mary’s pupils knew of her repulsion and, at least once a year, someone would provoke her. A simple insertion of the forefinger up to the first knuckle was enough. Digital emunction of the nasal passages is fairly unpleasant, but Miss Fennie’s aversion bordered on the pathological. The merest glimpse of a pupilary finger up the nose had Miss Fennie backing against the blackboard in horror, her wrinkled hands clutching at her breast.

            “Aaargh!” she would shriek. “Waargh! You! Urrgh!”

            When she went through this routine in our class, I had forgotten all about the snot legends and assumed she had seen a devil, in the back row of the class. It soon became apparent, though, what was going on.

            “You vile creature! Go and wash your hands at once! Touch nothing! Keep that finger in the air!”

            I turned to see the girl Keenan rise from her desk with her right index finger held up in the air a short distance from her head, as though she had just been petrified in the process of being struck by a good idea, or at least of giving a batsman Out.

            “Touch nothing, now! Touch nothing! You – open the door for her.”

            This instruction – an unscheduled Fifth – was intended for the boy O’Hanlon who sat in the seat by the door.

            “And go and turn on the taps for her!”

French was taught by Jim Doran, head of Modern Languages. A terminally shy man, Jim was also Depute Rector. He had been in the navy during the war and his speech was peppered with naval idioms, a mannerism that was singularly incongruous in a school like ours. But he was massively popular because of his jovial eccentricity.

            “Nip up aloft, laddie, and fetch down a packet of jotters,” he would say, this being a request that you should go upstairs to the French store and bring back the required articles. ‘Laddie’ was a generic form of address he used for all school pupils, irrespective of gender. So any girl would be addressed as ‘laddie’, just as I was.

            “Stow that away, laddie,” meant that he wished you to put the offending article out of sight. Otherwise, you might “qualify for a swift one.”

            He also had a habit of standing between  the front desks of two rows and addressing everyone else in the class from there. This was unfortunate if you happened to sit at the front, for he had another habit of resting his hands on the heads of the two front pupils. If, as often happened, someone  made a mistake, the hand on your head exerted a powerful grip on your cranium. He once squeezed the boy Byrne’s head when a girl called Mary Clark made an elementary error in replying to one of his questions. She said something like, “J’ai allé au magasin ce matin.”

            Jim gave a hissing intake of breath through pursed lips, as if someone had just driven a stiletto heel into his foot. At the same time, he was exerting such a pressure on Byrne’s skull that he almost squeezed it like a marshmallow.

            “Whhhhh….. laddie!” he admonished Mary. “The verb aller is conjugated with…?”

            “Oh! With être, sir.”

            “With être, laddie, yes,” agreed a relieved Jim, so relieved in fact that he released his grip on Byrne’s head. Byrne had eyes like a marmoset; he saw double for the rest of the period and his head looked like he had just undergone a forceps delivery.

            Latin I got from Mr. Bird, a quietly spoken gentleman of the old school, with one eccentricity. He was balding and wore his remaining hair very long and white. He had a finely chiselled set of patrician features and looked like a bust of Cicero or Tully come to life. (He also, in later years, impressed me more than any other human being ever has. In the staffroom of Our Lady’s High, Broxburn, twelve years or so later, he refuted a sneer from a left-wing colleague that he knew nothing about the hazards of mining by saying in his characteristically quiet way that he had been in a mine under Hiroshima, the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on it. Now, that caps any story you care to mention.)

            And finally, for now, the teacher nicknamed Wee Kapoori was a small man with a glass eye from Fauldhouse. Well, he came from Fauldhouse. I don’t know where the glass eye came from. I was never taught by him but he seemed a straightforward and down-to-earth man. Indeed, his lack of height made him downer to earth than most. I have no idea how he got his ludicrous nickname, but it awakened in my mind images of smiling-faced and voluptuous Eastern goddesses, dancing with extended arms, palms upwards and that characteristic lateral movement of their heads. Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Wee Kapoori. He did not actually ting finger cymbals but stood from time to time at the top of the Boys’ Stair and jingled his keys, calling occasionally, “Quiet there, O’Donnell or you’ll be belted!”

            Maybe I should write about their teaching careers, rather than my own.

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, February 8^th.

Today would have been my paternal grandmother’s 112^th birthday. She was a woman I revered as a child, the absolute epitome of a grandmother: loving – O, more than that, doting; smiling, cheery and a tubby wee bundle of fun. That she was tubby was almost entirely due to her having borne ten children, the second of whom was my father. She had nine sons, one of whom she lost as an eleven-year-old, and one daughter, my aunt Evelyn.

            I have alwaye been ludicrously blessed in my female relatives. Both Nana and Evelyn lavished love and time on me, the eldest of – I think – twenty-three grandchildren. I was a bright kid at school. (I wonder often where that brightness went, these days.) And both women encouraged my reading, my scholasticism and my attempts to devour as much as I could of any branch of knowledge that came my way. They provided me with an extra layer of love and support, in addition to the insulating one I received from my parents. I mourned them both deeply when they died, my grandmother at the age of 86, and my aunt at the far too early age of 68. I miss them still. I’m happy to record my unabated love and gratitude to them both.

            Both women were devout Catholics, two of the few genuinely ‘good’ people I’ve met in my life. And that brings me on to a different topic.

            In other news, I have been upbraided of late in the pub about my atheism. A man who has read The Locked Ward took me to task for my comments about religion in that book. It has been many years since I believed in the faith I was brought up in. Or any faith, for that matter. It struck me as a child about to enter my teens that absolute certainty about religious faith was a stance with very little foundation. Some of the more fundamentalist of the parish – including many of my teachers - believed and taught that Catholicism was the one and only way to heaven. Believers in other creeds were damned to hell. It came as a revelation to me that some fundamental Protestants felt exactly the same way about their religion, and that we, as adherents of the Roman persuasion, were idolaters and doomed to everlasting damnation. In later years, I learned about Judaism and Islam. Hinduism and Buddhism. Jainism. All these people, believing all these things, and all of them certain that everyone else was wrong. I was logical enough in my thought, even then, to realise that, if most of them were wrong, then the extreme likelihood was that all of them were wrong. I’ve never believed since. Like Machevil in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta:

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

And yet I can still amaze punters in the pub, or anywhere else for that matter, with my knowledge of the Bible, the Catholic liturgy and all matters religious. I consider these things among the eseential requisites of a well stocked mind. Like a knowledge of classical mythology; some basic competence with at least one foreign language; some knowledge of art, music and the drama; the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide in one’s head; acquaintance with at least basic scientific truths, a working knowledge of Scottish, British, European and world history, world geography and so on. Nowadays I have learned a little about religions such as Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and others. As I say in The Locked Ward, I don’t believe them, but many people do, and it’s as well to have some knowledge of what motivates people to act as they do.

            And much of the religion of my childhood still has the power to move me. I realise that a major part of this is nostalgia for an era when I had certainty about most things, as well as the unswerving love of my aunt and grandmother, but nonetheless I still love plainsong, for example. I have several examples of it on the PC and often play it as I write (I’m not doing so now). It soothes me. Many old hymns do likewise. I’ve written of my childhood religiosity in an essay called A Saintly Life, as yet unpublished. I no longer believe it, but I look back on those times fondly.

And, finally, the star of the show. That Jesus existed, I have no doubt at all. I just don’t believe that he was the son of a God I cannot believe in any more. I believe he was a powerful and charismatic rabbi with an extraordinary message for his time, and one that still has significance for ours. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is such a revolutionary concept that we still have trouble putting it into practice two thousand years later. ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ even more so. It is right up there, in this old hippy’s canon, with Shakespeare’s ‘Use every man after his deserts and who shall ‘scape whipping?’. Or even one of the few Burns dicta I think worth bearing in mind and quoting:

Then gently scan your brother man,

Still gentler sister woman;

Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,

To step aside is human.

Finally, on this subject, at least for the time being, one episode in the New Testament always moved me, and still does, when I think about it (which is, admittedly, not that often). And it’s not one that most people would consider particularly moving, I don’t think. It’s the story of the two thieves crucified along with Jesus – Dismas and Gestas, according to the Gospel of St. Nicodemus. (Amazing how it sticks.) Dismas, the ‘good’ thief, chides Gestas for upbraiding Jesus as no more than a common criminal like them. Dismas says to Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom’. And Jesus answers, ‘Verily, I say unto thee: this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.’

            I don’t know why I find that moving after all these years. Maybe it’s simply an embodiment of love, gratitude and compassion. Like those all too mortal women who cherished me all those years ago.

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, February 1^st.

Hello, yes, I’m still alive.

            My wee book, The Locked Ward, was officially ‘launched’ in the Word Power bookshop in Edinburgh’s fair city on Tuesday the 24^th of January. People stood by as I cracked a bottle of Tizer against the hull, and watched as it roared down the slipway with a rattle of chains. Or the literary equivalent thereof.  It was extremely gratifying to see so many people crushed into the admittedly fairly narrow confines of the bookshop – family, old friends, companions in drink, former colleagues from the hospital (including the consultant for the locked ward), former colleagues from my teaching days, one or two former pupils and, perhaps even more gratifying, strangers. People who had been drawn by an interest in the book.

            They listened politely as I read three short extracts – Stefan, Donnie, and the trip to the garage in Chapter 22. I chose them to give as wide an idea of the nature of psychiatric illness as I could  - as wide as is possible in three short extracts. Then they asked some crackingly good questions. And then many queued to have my invaluable signature plastered across the endpapers. I had to apologise often for my handwriting. I am afraid that the bold hand that once was mine has been badly affected by the passage of the years and the arthritis in the two main fingers of my right hand. (What I get for thrusting them up so often at the establishment for the last 40 years or so.)

            There was, I am told, excellent wine on tap. Or at least in bottle. And many partook. I did not. Oh, not for any fastidious reason. Not temperance, me. No, no; it’s just that wine is a drink I have never taken seriously. I like it occasionally with dinner. A glass of something red and robust slips ower a treat with the game pie. But for drinking – real drinking – no, no. I’d rather wash the dog with it. On the few occasions I have had to drink it as drink, usually at other folks’ soirees, I have slugged it like it is a weird kind of flat ginger (Scottish for ‘fizzy pop’) and then ended up with a mouth that tasted like I’d been sucking old pennies from the back of a drawer. Dey-vil take it; that’s no quaff for a man like me.

            Herself and I repaired, after the launching/signing/reading gig, to a howff hard by, where I drank strong ale and spirits in the company of the aforementioned consultant and two guys who used to work with me on the ward. One is from the Caribbean. I was drinking rum, and reminded him how we both had a session on the treacle, one evening  long ago in the fleshpots of Bathgate. Being a Carib, he prided himself on his knowledge of rum and suggested we drink something slightly more refined than the sump-oil the nasty little toad behind the bar had been vending us.

            “Like what?” I asked

            “Well, there’s several tawny Caribbean rums. How about Mountgay? Or Cockspur?”

            “If you think I’m asking for Mountgay or Cockspur at all, let alone in the same breath, in this den of iniquity, you’re sadly mistaken, old chum. They’ll think we’re Oscar and Bosie. We’ll stick to the sump-oil.”

            A literary reference that amused him. He did bring me back some Mountgay the last time he visited family in the Windies, and I have to say it is a tasty slurp of hooch.

In other news, I see that TLW is book of the month in Blackwells in Oxford. Ah, ye Oxonians, away oot and buy it in your numbers and make me a millionaire! Interview with Alban Maginnis of the Irish News tomorrow and, maybe more scarily, one with Natasha Coleman of ‘Your Voice’, the magazine for Rethink Mental Illness, on Friday.

            Keeps me fae wearyin’.

            Go placidly, my friends until we meet again.