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.