Obiter Dicta

Thursday, March 22nd

I received a Tweet from an old school chum the other day. He mentioned our English teacher in the bygone days of yore, a man known universally by the nickname Pud. That rang a few madeleines after all these years. I got to discussing him with Herself. She hadn’t been taught by him; she was taught English by a woman nicknamed Cluck. What a strange place St. Dementia of the Holy Tawse was, to be sure. Anyway, sufficient of this dribble. I mentioned to Herself that Pud introduced me to Chaucer’s work. And she reminded me of a piece I wrote for The Scotsman on that very subject in 1999.

            And here it is for your delectation.

“It’s 599 years since Chaucer died. Doesn’t time fly? I just turned around and he was gone.

            My introduction to the Father of English poetry came in 1967. To be perfectly truthful, so did most people’s. The line in Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale – “And so it was that later, as the Miller told his tale” was the first inkling many of us had of the existence of Chaucer, his Miller and the tale. If I hadn’t been studying for Higher English that year, my familiarity with old Geoff would have gone no farther than most folk’s.

            I sat the Higher exam in the years before the Flood, when texts for study were still set, and were still classics of Scottish, but more usually, English literature. This meant their authors had to be dead. There was none of this modern fad of letting pupils study living writers who put sweary-words into their novels and poems. If you read that stuff at all, it was for enjoyment, not for passing exams. Pud O’Hanlon, our English teacher, was a firm believer in this approach. In previous years, I had studied The Coverley Papers, Macauley’s Essays on Clive and Hastings and Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. I hated them all.  I was 14, for God’s sake! It was the 1960’s. Literature like The Catcher in the Rye, the works of the Mersey Poets and the plays of Joe Orton were being written. We were stuck with stuff we thought as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

            In fact, though I liked Pud a great deal, we came to blows over the Milton poems. Well, I say we came to blows, but actually he came to blows. Having read the two poems aloud, Pud asked one of the wee Marys in the class which she preferred. She said “L’Allegro, sir.” He looked at her for a moment. Then he asked some beefwit from Broxburn. Sussing that “L’Allegro, sir” was not the answer Pud required, he said “Il Penseroso, sir.” Pud shook his head in disbelief, as well he might, and then came to me. “O’Donnell, which do you prefer?” I said, “Neither, sir.” Pud beamed beatifically, and said, “Good answer, boy. The poems are, in fact, companion pieces, to be enjoyed together, aren’t they?” I said no, I just thought they were both rubbish. He belted me. My lifelong love of Milton started that day.

            Anyway, back to Chaucer, as Middle English ITV announcers used to say. Came the day when Pud doled out copies of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. These were musty, smelly volumes that had obviously been around since the Pope was an altar-boy. The pupils’ names written on their fly-leaves were things like Florence, Albert and Ernestina. One girl discovered her grandmother’s maiden name. The books were so foxed they should have had a red, bushy tail and been called Reynard. Pud started his spiel about one of the great comic poems of literature, a repository of beautiful lines and astute character observation. We weren’t convinced. But, when I opened my copy of the Tales, my arse nearly fell off in fright. This wasn’t a poem; this was a knitting-pattern. If you followed it closely, you could end up with a chunky polo-neck sweater in Fisherman’s Rib. Or maybe old Chaucer spoke in Algebra. Whatever it was, it bamboozled me. My bam had never been so boozled.

            “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote/The droghte of Merche hath perced to the rote…” What was I to make of this gibberish? We might as well have been reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or The Epic of Gilgamesh in the original Gilgameshi. Chaucer was a taucer.

            We ploughed our way through the damn thing for two terms. Pud intoned the ‘beautiful’ lines like the Swedish chef chanting the two-times table. He could see our heads bowed over the desks and must have inferred we were studying. What he couldn’t see, were the hankies being stuffed into our mouths and our knees being jammed together below the desk to stop us peeing ourselves.

            Next, he made us jot down suitable quotes for each character. By that, he meant one-liners from Geoffrey’s original text which we could regurgitate like feeding storks and use to tempt the examiners into giving us pass marks. What he didn’t mean was the sort of thing that Wee Louie jotted down in his exercise-book and which eventually earned him half a dozen strokes of the Lochgelly Leveller and a letter home to his parents. Louie made slighting references to things like the Cook’s private habits and the Pardoner’s sexual orientation. His gloss on the Reeve was his piece de resistance, questioning his hygiene, height and parentage. Something about his being a dirty wee … oh, I forget now.

            What I didn’t forget for a long time after I passed my Higher were short, pithy pen-portraits like the “verray parfit gentle Knight”, the Monk - “of priking and of hunting for the hare was al his lust” (several schoolboy jokes for the price of one, there) - and the Wife of Bath with her “hippes large”. Maybe, despite the fact that we loathed the poem, old Pud was right about the characterisation, after all. Luke found a short biography of Chaucer at the start of the book and drew our attention to the fact that he had also written something called The Boke of the Duchesse. “If she hud tae read this crap, nae wonder she boked.”

            I came to enjoy Chaucer much later in life. However, I don’t think it’s the thing to give teenagers in an attempt to inculcate a love of literature. When I had to teach it, 25 years later, I concentrated on some of the tales themselves and stressed how some of them were gripping stories with lashings of violence, rude words and plenty of what Chaucer’s contemporaries would have referred to as ‘swiving’. A cheat’s way in, maybe, but effective.

            You see, although I love literature, I’ve never been solemn or po-faced about it. This attitude not only got me the belt from Pud, but also a severe reprimand from a university tutor a few years later. I was studying an English Language course, part of which required me to read Anglo-Saxon poetry. Now, that stuff is even denser than the Middle English of Chaucer and its themes are all taken from the “Life is Hell” drawer – death, battles, exile and all that. There’s hardly a laugh in it. Anyway, one day we were studying the Old English poem, The Wanderer. Our tutor read the first two lines. “Oft him anhaga are gebideth, Metudes miltse . . . Mr. O’Donnell will now translate.” I hadn’t the foggiest what it meant. I looked at the title, The Wanderer, was suddenly inspired and sang “Aaah – I’m the kind of guy who will never settle down,” in my best 1962 Dion voice.

            The tutor favoured me with a look that would have stopped a clock. Everybody else just stared at their feet and wondered who the dickhead was. I was roundly castigated for not taking my work seriously. Well, it was a puerile joke, I’ll concede, but it was, after all, only a joke. Some folk cannae take a laugh. I still hate The Wanderer, but I love Chaucer’s writings now. And anybody who doesn’t, can perform the same act of devotion on me as Absolon did on Alison. While the Miller tells his tale.