by George Friel
‘Hey, mind ma jacket, you! Ma clothes cost good money, no’ like yours.’
Mr Alfred shook him and threw him away.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said.
He saw the knife lying on top of a docken on the margin of the arena. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. He thought it was evidence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It must not be supposed that the boys and girls gathered in the Weavers Lane that night were a fair representation of the pupils attending Collinsburn Comprehensive, the only school in Tordoch for post-primary education. Collinsburn was a local place-name, derived from the legend that a stream once ran through that part of Tordoch formerly owned by a Collins family whose members, like the vanished burn, had long gone underground. As a comprehensive school Collinsburn harboured all kinds and ages (mental and chronological). So while Mr Alfred was shaking Gerald Provan, Graeme Roy was sitting with Martha Weipers in Ianello’s cafe round the corner from the main road. It was a roomy, almost barnlike place, that sold cigarettes and sweets and ices and offered half-a- dozen stalls where the young ones could sit with a coffee or a coke and criticise the world.
Graeme Roy was eighteen, in his last year at school. Martha was a year younger and not as clever as he was. At least, that’s what she thought. She even found pleasure in believing it. They should have gone straight home, but they had got into the habit of using Ianello’s for half-an- hour.
They were under parental orders to stop meeting. Their daily sessions in the cafe after school gave them the satisfaction of at once obeying and ignoring the order. They no longer met in the evenings, so they were obedient. But they still managed to meet for a little while on the way home, so they evaded the full severity of the law.
She was the poor one, the eldest of seven, a bricklayer’s daughter. He was an only son and well-off, a handsome youth. He had a driving licence and a car of his own. He used to take Martha out for a run in the summer evenings after the exams were over. When the quartet of parents found out what was going on they slammed down hard on the pair of them. Graeme’s folks had never thought he was taking a girl out when he used his car, and Martha’s had no idea she had a rich boyfriend. Nasty suspicions were aroused, some accusations were made that hurt and even shocked them, and then the forthright veto was proclaimed. Without collusion, without ever meeting, the two sets of parents reacted in the same way and came to the same conclusion. His parents said only a girl with no self-respect would accept an invitation to go out alone with a boy in his car. Her parents said no decent right-thinking boy would ask a girl to come out alone with him in his car. Unless of course, both sides conceded independently, the boy and girl were engaged. Which would be absurd at their age. Further meetings, with or without the car, were bilaterally banned. It was for their own good their parents said.
‘They try to tell us we’re too young,’ he said.
‘That’s how they see it,’ she said. She was a fairminded girl. ‘They’re so old. My dad’s nearly forty.’
‘But that’s not the real reason,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother. I hate to say it. But she’s an awful snob. She thinks because your father works with his hands I shouldn’t talk to you. I told her a surgeon works with his hands, but she wouldn’t listen.’
‘My dad’s the same,’ she said. ‘He won’t listen. He thinks if folks are well-off they must be on the fiddle. Because your father’s got a car and could buy you one too my dad’s sure he’s a crook.’
‘Oh, my father’s honest enough,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t cheat anybody.’
‘My dad would cheat anybody for five bob,’ she said. ‘For all his supposed principles. That’s the funny thing.’
‘My dad wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But then five bob’s nothing to him. It’s my mother’s the trouble. She’s hard. A lot harder than my father. It’s my mother I blame.’
‘My mother doesn’t count in our house,’ she said, and added with a young laugh, ‘and she doesn’t read either.’
He smiled. He was happy. He liked to see her laugh when she was with him. He didn’t like it when he saw her laugh in any other company.
They got on well. They never had any difficulty talking.
There were never any silences. They tore their parents to bits, and put the bits together again with the quick adhesive of filial tolerance. They were two earnest adolescents, able to vary their solemn dialogue with a private joke. They had the same liking for the depreciatory aside, the same bias on current affairs, the same cynical tone when they talked about their teachers. Never before, in all their long experience, had they felt such affinity with anyone else.
The first time she met him he liked her. It was at the inaugural meeting of the Debating Society. Mr Briggs had started it with a view to entering a team in an annual inter- schools debate. There was a big silver cup for the winning school and a plaque for the runners-up, and he thought either would look rather well beside the football trophies in the display cabinet at the Main Entrance. Maisie Munro, a beaming jumbo of a girl with glasses, who lived near Graeme, introduced them. She was a prefect in Martha’s class.
‘This is Graeme,’ she said. ‘You know, the famous Roy.’
He was famous at that time because he had scored a goal that put Collinsburn into the semi-final of the City Cup, but Martha didn’t know that. She had no interest in football.
‘Tell me,’ she said when Maisie left them stuck alone together in a corner, ‘is your name Graham Roy or Roy Graham?’
‘Not Graham,’ he said. ‘Graeme.’
He made one syllable where she made two. Her speech was looser than his. She was more Scotch, he was more anglified. She was apt to say fillim for film, to make no distinction between hire and higher. She could even insert a neutral vowel between the two consonants at the end of warm and learn and such words. It was the way she trilled the r made her do it. Sometimes it offended his ear, but his heart didn’t mind.
‘Graeme,’ he repeated to her stare. ‘Not Graham.’
‘However you say it,’ she retorted, ‘you still haven’t said if it’s your first name or your second.’
She wasn’t put out by his correction. Far from it. She was amused. He was so tidy, trim, well-dressed and superior, and spoke so correctly.
Her levity pleased him. He explained. His father’s name was John Barbour Roy, his mother’s name was Alison McKenzie Graeme. They had the egalitarian idea of calling him Graeme Roy, so that each would contribute their share to his name as they had already done to his existence. Later on, when he knew her better, he confessed that his mother’s name was really Graham but she thought Graeme was a more stylish version.
From the night they met at the Debating Society he began to look out for her and she looked out for him looking out for her. They grew in affection with the growing season. He had to tell her everything. He wasn’t boasting. He just had to tell her. He didn’t want to hide anything. He told her his father was a director in an engineering firm, he told her his mother was the graduate daughter of a defunct Conservative m.p. He described the big house where he lived. It was in an old-world residential outpost, an Edwardian if not Victorian survival from the days when Tordoch was still rural. His parents weren’t happy to have him attending Collinsburn. They regretted not moving him to a fee-paying school in the west end when Collinsburn changed from a local Academy to a regional Comprehensive. But he was so near his exams for university entrance it seemed best to leave him where he was.
He mentioned one of his mother’s complaints. She was brought up in a house with a maid that lived in, and now she couldn’t get anything better in her own house than an unreliable daily-help, a dismal widow who scamped the work.
In class-conscious retaliation Martha gave him an account of her domestic troubles. She had to do it all herself.
‘It’s worst in the winter. I’m up at six in the morning. Oh my, oh my, it’s that cold! And it’s that dark! I’ve to get the fire lit and start making my dad’s porr
idge and give him a shout but he won’t get up till I’ve got the fire going. Then when I’ve got rid of him I get my three young sisters up and make their breakfast and while they’re taking their cornflakes I get my two wee brothers up and after I’ve got them dressed and fed and got them ready for school I get Jean up and wash her and dress her. Jean’s only three. And by that time I’ve got to get myself ready for school.’
‘But what’s your mother doing?’ he asked.
‘She stays in bed till I take her a cup of tea before I go out,’ said Martha. ‘She’s a poor soul really. She doesn’t keep well. She gets up when we’re all away and looks after Jean.’
He brimmed with pity and fell in love.
But let’s have no misunderstanding. Although she was Martha and not Mary she never felt sorry for herself. She never saw herself as Martha in Beth-ania, the House of Care. She was no spiritless drudge, no pallid, thinlegged, flatchested, dullfaced little skivvy, but a lively, chatty, slim, brighteyed, clearskinned young blonde, promising at seventeen to be what blondes are vulgarly supposed to be anyway, that is, lushus – if she lived long enough.
‘It must be interesting,’ he said, not quite insincerely. ‘Being one of a big family.’
‘It’s a bit of a bind at times,’ she said. ‘You never get any peace. You’re never alone. I’d love to be alone once in a while.’
They were sitting there in Ianello’s, quite content, with a coffee in front of them. Sometimes their hands touched across the table as they spoke, but they never actually held hands. He made no show of affection in public, nor did she. They despised teenagers that did. They considered themselves older, more mature.
Their conversation was disturbed by the loud entrance of Gerald Provan and his company.
‘See me in the morning, says he,’ Gerald was shouting as he came in. ‘I’ll fix him, the auld grey bastard! I’ll get ma maw on to him again. She sorted him last time all right.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Martha.
‘What are you laughing at, Poggy?’ said Gerald. ‘Think I’m feart for him?’
‘Ach, him!’ Poggy shouted, shoulder to shoulder with him at the counter. ‘Who’s feart for him? It’s a kick on the balls he needs.’
He was a big lad, Gerald’s loyal bondman.
Enrico Ianello came flustered from the backshop, flut¬ tered at them, wanting peace and quiet, good business with decorum. His parents had left Naples with similar ambitions for the unattainable. He was a smallish man, plump, darkeyed, darkskinned, a bit of a singer when he was in the mood. He had a good moustache and a double chin. Mr Alfred said he looked like Balzac. Granny Lyons had never seen Balzac, but she liked Enrico and hoped her nephew was being kind.
‘Where’s Smudge?’ Gerald called out, turning round to face his followers.
‘They didn’t used to come here,’ Graeme whispered.
A thin little swarthy miasmal wraith of a boy joined Gerald at the counter.
‘Here, boss,’ he grinned. His teeth were yellow and deficient.
‘Good lad,’ said Gerald.
‘Did you see him pick up the knife?’ Smudge shouted.
‘They’re taking over,’ said Martha.
‘I bet you he tries to say it was me had it,’ Gerald shouted back.
‘You’d think they were across the street from each other, the way they shout,’ said Graeme.
‘I’ll say you never,’ Poggy shouted. ‘Don’t worry, pal.’
‘Let’s get outa here,’ said Martha. ‘As they say on those old fillims on the telly.’
They rose at once together. They were always en rapport. They went out, backed by a medley of jeering fare- wells from their comprehensive juniors.
‘Ta-ta, toffee-nose.’
‘Wur we annoying you, blondie?’
‘Gie us a wee kiss, sugar-lumps!’
Poggy knew her name. He jumped, waving to her.
‘Hey, Martha Weipers! If I get a car will ye come oot wi me?’
She went red in the face.
‘Hoy! Windscreen-wipers! D’ye no hear me?’
Graeme held the door open, head up, and handed her out.
They stood a while fretting at the bus stop where Mr Briggs had waited half-an-hour earlier.
‘I’m not going back there,’ she said. ‘It’s getting worse.’
‘Where else can we go?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. But don’t ask me to go back there.’
She looked so upset he made up his mind to persuade her to meet him at night as she used to do.
It probably doesn’t matter, but in case you think this is all made up here are the names and ages of Martha’s brothers and sisters. [‘The bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore deny it not.’]
Mary, 15.
Rose, 12 [who has her own place in this true narrative, and of whom Martha once said to Graeme, ‘She’s a bit dopey. Dreamy I mean. I don’t think she’ll ever be a great scholar. But she’s quite pretty. And awfully good-natured. Do anything for anybody.’].
Christine, 10.
Angus, 8.
Billy, 6.
Jean, 3.
Martha looked after them all. Her mother was married at twenty-two, so she was thirty-six when Jean was born. She wasn’t an unintelligent woman, but bearing seven children had sapped her strength, rearing them had narrowed her mind, and the hard years had discouraged her. Sometimes she felt life wasn’t worth the living.
Martha’s father was a big strong man who liked work and beer. He had a lot of commonsense about everything in general and anything in particular. He was very fond of Martha but he never showed it. He thought it wouldn’t be decent for a man his age to embrace a girl of seventeen, so he treated her with a cold obliquity. He ignored Mary because she was at a gawky age and made a favourite of Rose.
CHAPTER NINE
The teachers in Collinsburn used corporal punishment. Every time somebody wrote to the papers about the wrongness of it they laughed in the staffroom and agreed about the rightness of it. An English immigrant’s letter complaining about the place of the tawse in Scottish education set them off again.
‘The way these folk talk,’ said Mr Brown, Deputy Head and Principal Teacher of English, ‘you’d think we spent our whole day belting defenceless weans.’
‘You give some pest one of the strap to keep him in line,’ said Mr Campbell, Principal Teacher of Mathematics, ‘and they call it corporal punishment.’
‘Then in the next sentence it becomes flogging,’ said the Principal Teacher of Modern Languages, Mr Kerr.
He read aloud from the offensive letter.
‘Hyperbole,’ said Mr Brown.
‘They think we’re a shower of bloody sadists,’ said Mr Dale, the youngest member of staff. ‘They’ve no idea.’
‘The strap is only a convention here,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘Up to second year anyway. You don’t need it much after that. But if you abolished it altogether you’d raise more problems than you solved.’
‘It’s like the language of a country,’ said Mr Alfred from his lonely corner. ‘You’ve got to speak it to be understood.’
His colleagues hushed and looked at him. He seldom opened his mouth during their discussions. He seemed to think himself above them. They were surprised to hear his voice.
Mr Alfred acknowledged their attention by taking his cigarette out of his mouth. He went on chattily as if he was giving a reminiscent talk on the Light Programme.
‘I remember one school I worked in. There was a young Latin teacher next door to me. Very young he was. He wouldn’t use the strap he told me. He thought the language of the strap was a barbaric language. He would speak to the natives in his own civilised tongue. He would be all sweetness and light like Matthew Arnold.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried Mr Dale.
‘Bloody fool,’ muttered Mr Brown.
Mr Alfred smiled agreeably to them both and continued his talk.
‘But when the natives found he refused to
speak their language their pride was hurt. They felt he was insulting their tribal customs. They regarded him as a mad foreigner. They sniped at him till they saw it was safe to make an open attack. Within a week they were making his life hell on earth.’
‘Boys can be cruel to a weak teacher,’ said Mr Campbell.
‘He was baited and barbed,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘By defenceless children,’ said Mr Brown.
‘Until he broke under the torture,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘Once they think you’re soft they’ve no mercy,’ said Mr Kerr.
‘He went berserk one day,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘He thrashed a boy across the legs and buttocks and shoulders with the very strap he had wanted to put into a museum.’
‘Probably the least troublesome boy,’ said Mr Campbell.
‘It usually is,’ said Mr Kerr.
‘It was,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I heard the row. I heard the boy run screaming from the room as if the devil were after him. I nipped out in time to catch him in the corridor and managed to pacify him. I took him to the toilets and had him wash his face and calm down. I like to think I stopped what could have been a serious complaint from the parent.’
‘It would never have happened if he had used the strap just once the day he arrived,’ said Mr Campbell.
‘Precisely my point,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘I always let a new class see I’ve got a strap and let them know I’ll use it,’ said Mr Dale. ‘After that I’ve no bother. If you show the flag you don’t need to fire the guns.’
‘And you know,’ said Mr Alfred, ‘the tawse of the Scotch dominie is never wielded like the Jesuit’s pandy bat that distressed the young Stephen Dedalus. Not that the pandy bat did Joyce any harm. It gave him material. It showed him what life is like. These letterwriters would have us deceive the boys by pretending they’ll never be punished later on in life when they do something wrong. And even if a boy is strapped unjustly it isn’t fatal. Life is full of minor injustices. A boy should learn as much while he’s still at school, and learn to take it without whining. I admire the heroes of history who fought against social injustice, but one of the strap given in error or loss of patience is hardly a wrong on that scale.’
