Mavis Belfrage
Page 12
A school in the east of Glasgow taught children who could barely read, or found it hard to sit still and concentrate, or had other traits which unsuited them for normal schooling without qualifying them for medical care. In times of full employment (and this was in a time of full employment) such children can be prepared for ordinary jobs by teaching them to read, count and talk with greater confidence, but they cannot be taught really well in classes of more than ten. The average class size was twenty-five so the teachers often had to teach badly. Before 1986 this meant threatening and sometimes inflicting physical pain. Deliberately inflicted pain was in those days used by teachers in schools for normally healthy and even wealthy children – why should the damaged children of poor folk suffer less?
The pupils mostly came from a council housing scheme built for the very poor in the early 1930s. People there felt that the police were more of a threat than a protection, so small weak people believed that a strong male member of their own family was their likeliest defender. In many Scottish schools the most effective-sounding threat a pupil could hurl at a punitive teacher was, “I’ll get my dad to you!” This threat was almost a ritual. Teachers had a stock of equally ritualized replies to it. But many children in the school I speak of had no father or uncle or big brother in their family, and knew that their teachers knew it. A few had mothers with dogs, perhaps for protection. These were able to say, “I’ll get my dug to you.”
One day at this school a small boy faced a teacher wielding a leather belt designed for striking people. The boy was either trying to stop himself being beaten or had been beaten already and wished to show he was not completely crushed. Either in fear of pain or in a painful effort to keep some dignity he cried out, “I’ll get my –” and hesitated, then cried, “I’ll get my Alstation to you!” He lived with a granny who could not afford to keep a big dog. The way he pronounced Alsatian proved that his dog was nothing but a badly learned word – a word without power – a word which got him laughed at.
This happened in 1971 or 72 when public education and health were better funded, when British manual workers were better paid, when the middle classes were almost as prosperous but less in debt than today, when the richest classes were (by their own obviously high standards) much poorer.
Other tales in this book have sour endings
but none as bad as this because
the others are fiction.
Glasgow, 20th December 1995
Also by Alasdair Gray
Novels:
LANARK
1982 JANINE
THE FALL OF KELVIN WALKER
McGROTTY AND LUDMILLA
POOR THINGS
A HISTORY MAKER
MAVIS BELFRAGE
Short story books:
UNLIKELY STORIES MOSTLY
LEAN TALES (with Agnes Owens and James Kelman)
Verse:
OLD NEGATIVES
Polemic:
WHY SCOTS SHOULD RULE SCOTLAND
THE STATE WE ARE IN (with Angela Mullane)
Anthology:
THE BOOK OF PREFACES
First published in 1996
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Alasdair Gray 1996
The moral right of the author has been asserted
“Money” first appeared in Scotlands, 1994; “Edison’s Tractatus” in New Novel Review, April 1995; “The Shortest Tale” in Madam X, Published by Colophon, 1996.
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