Friday,
August 24th.
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 5th
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.
