Obiter Dicta

Friday, August 24^th.

The kids in Scotland went back to school this week. And the new football season has started. This week, I thought I’d share my earliest memories of both with you.

My first day at school was a long, long time ago. There were no nurseries in those days, no kindergartens or play groups, at least not in working-class Bathgate, and so I had no conception of what was about to be visited upon me when I went for my first day at St. Mary’s Primary in the spring of 1956. There were two intakes a year then: one after summer, as is the case still, and one after the Easter holidays for those, like me, who would be rather too old to wait a full year from my 5^th birthday in September. Consequently, of course, I was, if anything, rather too young to go when I did -  a mere 4½. Had there been preparatory classes or groups of any kind, the transition from Mummy’s boy to scholar might have been less harrowing than it actually was.

            The Primary School, (the ‘Wee’ School) in 1956, adjoined the church. Indeed, the chapel hall also served as an assembly hall and recreation area for the school. It was all one concern. You walked down Livery Street from Hopetoun Street at The Mall, and, in ten seconds, on your right, was the playground. The school was at the top of the yard’s slight incline, a featureless two-storey building with high windows. To the right, was the Infants block, where the Church Hall is now. You lined up at the door there, behind the toilets block, and were marched in to either 1A or 1B. The toilets referred to were in a low outhouse and the Boys’ smelt terribly of lots of wee boys’ piss. Whether or not the same olfactory indicator distinguished the Girls’, I am not able to attest, never having been on the interior. Although one day, a group of boys did make a feint of grabbing me and hurling me among the squatting urinators and I almost passed away from terror. There was a telegraph pole close to the gable end of this outhouse, behind which I hid for most of my first few weeks’ playtime – there was just enough room for a little squirt like me to squeeze behind it. If anyone spotted me I used to say that I was playing Hide and Seek. Well, almost. Nobody was seeking me; I was just playing Hide.

            The only other feature of interest in the yard was the fact that all of the walls that separated it from the church proper were extremely low, about six inches high, and punctuated at regular intervals along the top by curious dark metal cubes. Even the higher wall that divided the yard from the street had them. When I asked about these, I was told that they were the stumps of metal railings that had been cut down and taken away during the War years to be made into ammunition. I thought hard about this. I was no expert on the Second World War but I was sure things had never got so bad that they had to fire Bathgate chapel railings at the Germans. I imagined them as a hail of lance-like projectiles raining down on the forces of the Hun at Stalingrad, and places like that.

            On that first morning, my mother took me into the classroom. It was a dark place but, in the 1950’s, most places were. Sunlight was still rationed. There were two high windows in the wall but these hardly admitted any light into the room. There was a wave of desks, rippling from the front of the room to the back and many of these were occupied by other little debutants like myself. Some of them were fairly at home already, and were occupied with little pieces of handiwork. They played with plasticene, for example, or sewed. Other children, however, were evidently less enamoured of the setting. Some sat, miserably snuffling and snivelling. A few wept loudly and openly.

            I was appalled. But I knew why they were unhappy. The teacher was Miss Docherty, one of two teaching sisters from Livingston Station. I later grew to like Miss Docherty immensely – and she me, even to the stage of holding my hand as we crossed the playground together. I became an awful teacher’s pet. But, at first, she seemed old and wizened, a stepmother from a fairy tale, the Wicked Witch of the West. She had a daunting expression that was compounded by her big glasses. Her voice was not soothing. She did not smile. I was terrified.

            Also there was Father McCabe, one of the priests of the parish. His task, I can only guess, was to comfort the afflicted child, to wipe away every tear, and to fill each young heart with the love of study and the ambition required to become a good scholar. Whilst the reverend gentleman was, indeed, a fine man and a good one, he was from Northern Ireland and was very saturnine in his countenance. He had a blue shadow on his chin, a voice like a bull and a brogue so thick it could have passed for pea soup. He was a kindly man, though, and obviously wanted this first school day not to be a trauma for the kids.

            If that was the plan, it didn’t work. Not in all the nooks of the parish was there a wean that didn’t immediately cack its drawers the minute Father McCabe appeared on the horizon. I never understood a single word he said to me. I used to crane my neck to see where his face was and try to make some sense out of his speech, rumbling away up there like thunder.

            My mother left at this point and I set up a howling and a yowling that surprised even me. I was inconsolable. Bereft. My mother had gone and left me in this terrible dark place with this malevolent crone and a big-faced man in black, not a word of whose conversation I understood. I cried and cried.

            “Ey tank yo shod te-uk a sayte an dew som soan,” said Father McCabe. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what he was on about. “Soa! SOA!” he roared.

            I didn’t respond to that either. He leaned forward and down in a gesture intended to be friendly. His saturnine features re-arranged themselves into a sickening attempt at a smile.

“Duh yo knoa haw tuh soa?” he said to me now, accompanying his question with a dumbshow of someone sewing. I understood the dumbshow.

“No.”

“Noa, Faddor!” he snapped.

“Eh?”

“Say, ‘No, Father’,” explained Mis Docherty.

“No, Father.”

            “Dass beddor. We-ull naow, if yo daon’t knoa haw tuh soa, dew yo tank yo cod strang som bee-uds?” A new dumbshow accompanied this utterance.

“Yes.”

“Yes, Faddor!” he snapped.

“Say, ‘Yes, Father.’”

“Yes, Father.” My, they were awfy hung up on their terms of address in this place.

            “Duh chile’s thack. Siddawn an awl guve yo som bee-uds tuh strang.”

            So I strung beads. A harmless, if vapid, pastime. I was provided with a long thin string like a bootlace, with an aglet at each end, and a box of coloured glass beads with holes in them. It had the desired effect; it shut me up. It was like the trinkets British Naval officers used to give to the fuzzy-wuzzies in the South Seas, to show friendliness and to stop them from trussing the white men up and bunging them in the big pot with a few onions and a bay-leaf. I spent most of the morning doing that and then it was playtime.  

The playground was full. A running, squealing, screaming, shrieking, tripping, falling whirl of childish humanity. I shrank from it. It was all together too loud and aggressive for a milksop like me. Thankfully, I found the niche behind the telegraph pole and scuttled into it like a hermit crab. One of my classmates, a girl called Rosemary, went down to the playground entrance, where she met her mother, who passed her over a  dummy tit to sook for the duration of recess. In my childhood nearly all children had their dummy tit for their early years. First year at school was pushing it a bit, though, in anyone’s book. Miss Docherty got wind of it (though probably not as much wind as Rosemary got from sucking on it) and confronted her mother at the gates one day. Rosemary’s mammy was similarly old-looking before her time, in a big coat and a headsquare, and it was like some clash of trolls, the altercation between them. But Miss Docherty won the day and Rosemary’s mother was forbidden to approach the school and pass the dummy tit to her from then on.

            Strange days.

            After a while, I tried to ingratiate myself with the boys by offering to take part in their playtime game of football. In truth, the game looked dull to me but I was desperate for acceptance and so decided to play, one interval. Hitherto, I had stood behind the telegraph pole and watched them run up and down the yard after a leather ball. It could not be that hard.

            They put me in goal. It seemed a fairly safe position, something of a sinecure, as I stood there, watching the play surge and ebb some yards away from me. And then an opposing forward jinked free of our defensive pack and headed towards me. His shot was not good. It trickled towards me and I drew back my foot to clear the lines. We were playing on a wet day, the playground was uneven and pocked with puddles. The ball was, unbeknownst to me, by this time as heavy and solid as the stone ball off a gatepost. My right big toe came into contact with it and the shock waves reverberated right up my leg and into the pit of my gut. I screamed  - only once, but very loudly. Everybody stopped and looked at me. I immediately changed its inflexion and lengthened it into a “Banzai”-like yell of aggression.

            “Great save, Denny,” they shouted as the ball trundled away in the opposite direction.

            I smirked through the tears. Praise indeed. It didn’t matter that my entire right foot felt as if it had been injected with Novocaine. Play came back. Another opposing forward let fly a high ball. It came at me like a shell, far too quickly for me to get out of the way. It smacked me right in the pan and I fell like I’d been shot by a sniper.

            “Great save, Denny!”

            I picked myself up very slowly and wondered where the twittering was coming from. Then I realised. It was coming from me. On the inside of my head, something had been dislodged that was fluttering about, making a noise like a family of swallows. The bell saved me from any further punishment.

            “You’re a great goalie, Denny.”

            I must have looked decidedly unusual, with the mixture of blood, snot and tears around my nose and eyes, and a perfect imprint of the ball’s laces on my forehead, for Miss Docherty asked me as I went in if I was okay. Her voice was tinny, tiny and seemed to come from an immensely long distance away. When I said yes, so did mine.

            I knew then that the beautiful game was not for me.