by George Friel
‘Mob?’ said Mr Alfred, disliking the word.
‘Gang,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘The boys here call themselves the Young Hawks. All these gangs, they put their name up. There’s hardly a blank wall anywhere now. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘You must know the Cogs,’ said Mr Murdoch.
‘Cogs?’ said Mr Alfred.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know the Cogs,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘You must have seen the name on the walls when you were in Tordoch.’
Mr Alfred said he hadn’t.
‘They were in the papers not long ago,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘A lad was knifed in a Cog fight. It happens every day. There’s always somebody knifing somebody now. You should keep up with current affairs.’
He wanted to drop the topic and ask Mr Alfred if he still wrote any poetry. But he was afraid the question might sound derisive instead of friendly. And he wanted to be friendly, but Mr Alfred’s face put him off. So he said nothing. At the same moment Mr Alfred wanted to ask him why the boys called him Wee Bobby when his name was Harry. But he didn’t want to seem nosey. So he said nothing either. Yet in their silence there was the respect of one old soldier for another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mr Alfred took Harry Murdoch’s advice. He tried to keep up with current affairs. He began to read a morning paper, which was more than he had done when Rose brought him one every day at lunchtime. Buying something she used to get for him was only one of the many trivial acts that resurrected her. It made him wish he could go back over the script of his life and rewrite the dialogue. But he knew he had no option. He had to read the part he had been given.
Travelling across the city on a route not yet stale to him he would glance from his paper to see where the bus was going. Every day from the top deck he saw another gang name on the walls and hoardings. Every day he read of another boy of seventeen knifing a boy of eighteen or vice versa. His route and his paper told him he had been missing all Murdoch took for granted.
He saw a new rash break out on the scarred face of the city. Wherever the name of a gang was scribbled the words ya bass were added. The application of the phrase caused some dispute at first. Nobody doubted YA BASS MEANT YOU BASTARD. But the grammarians who discussed it were undecided about its vocative or apostrophic use. Some said COGS YA BASS meant O COGS! YOU ARE BASTARDS! Others said it meant WE ARE THE COGS, O YOU BASTARDS! A fifteen- year-old boy charged with assault and breach of the peace, and also with daubing tongs ya bass on a bus-shelter, said in court that ya bass was an Italian phrase meaning for ever. But the sheriff didn’t believe him.
Some of the intelligentsia seemed to believe him. Following a fashion, as the intelligentsia often do, they wrote the names of miscellaneous culture heroes in public places and added YA BASS. Thus soon after the original examples of COGS YA BASS, TOI YA BASS, TONGS YA BASS, fleet ya bass, and so on, which were plastered all over the districts where those gangs lived, a secondary epidemic occurred on certain sites only. SHELLEY YA BASS suddenly appeared in the basement of the University Union. In a public convenience near the Mitchell Library MARX YA BASS was scrawled in one hand, LENIN YA BASS in another, and TROTSKY YA BASS in a third. When The Caretaker was put on at the King’s Theatre PINTER YA BASS was pencilled on a poster in the foyer. BECKETT YA BASS, later and more familiarly SAM YA BASS, was scribbled on the wall of a public-house urinal near the Citizens’ Theatre the week Happy Days was on. When the same theatre presented Ghosts somebody managed to write IBSEN YA BASS in large capitals on the staircase to the dress circle.
In bus shelters, railway stations and tenement closes, on factory walls and shop fronts, on telephone boxes, junction boxes, police boxes and pillar boxes, outside churches, libraries, offices, schools and warehouses, on the back of the seats upstairs on the buses, with the rexine ripped off to show plain wood, wherever there was a wall or a hoarding, a gang name and ya bass were flaunted. Always in big clumsy capitals, in white paint, in yellow paint, in green pencil, in blue pencil, in black ink and purple ink. The more recently a surface was cleaned or repainted the more immediate the writing.
Mr Alfred was puzzled.
‘When do they do it?’ he asked. ‘What do they use?’
‘A paint spray,’ said Harry Murdoch. ‘Or a felt pen.’
‘I’m surprised nobody is ever caught doing it,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘Maybe it’s leprechauns. Or monsters from outer space. You know, psychological warfare. Demoralise us before they invade in force.’
Murdoch laughed at his passing fancy but Mr Alfred wasn’t amused. The rash seemed to him so mysterious he was ready to believe anything. It upset him. He used his pubcrawls to make a perlustration of the city, north and south of the river, east and west of the Square. He began to compile a list of what he saw. The words weren’t inspired graffiti. They weren’t the poetry and pathos photographed and commented on by two young Londoners to make up a book at a couple of guineas. They weren’t political or surrealist, they weren’t witty or comic. They were only the monotonous evidence of a civic battology. He brooded over the inexplicable words that turned up irregularly alongside YA BASS. He noted fuzz, JOEY, DOTT, PEEM, MUSHY, BUNNY, ETTIE, CLAN, BIM and forty more. Sometimes the gang name was followed by ok instead of ya bass, sometimes it was preceded by YY, but he couldn’t find out what YY meant.
He became obsessed with the unending defacement of the city. He was angry nobody seemed to care, nobody did anything about it. The correspondence columns of the papers were filled with debates about the need for comprehensive schools and a technological education in a twentieth-century Britain, about the duty of adults to hand on a moral code and maintain the nation’s cultural heritage, about the prevalence of bad language in television plays. But never a word about the writing on the wall. He made himself irritable, worrying. Harry Murdoch laughed at him. He said ‘YA BASS’ was a contribution to Scottish literature. It was even used as a joke in one of the pantomimes.
‘There’s a housing-sketch about the multistorey flats,’ he explained. ‘And the dame does a solo piece in the old panto couplets. Something like,
If you’re a stranger in Auchenglass
Just shout the password, Fangs ya bass!
It brings the house down they tell me.
Mr Alfred was shocked.
Meanwhile, his attempt to make the best of Waterholm and forget Rose wasn’t very successful. He couldn’t get much work done with the classes he was given. They seemed barely literate. He had Murdoch’s registration class for two periods every day and he risked a comment since Murdoch was the only man on the staff he cared to talk to.
‘I’m finding it hard to do much with your fellows,’ he said. ‘I can’t get anywhere.’
‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ said Murdoch. ‘Neither can I. We’re out of date, you and me, with our M.A. Ordinary. After thirty years in the job we’ve no future. We don’t rank in a Comprehensive, so we get the worst classes.’
He smiled. He wasn’t bitter. He did what he could to teach some maths, went home, and put the school out of his mind. He had his garden in the spring and summer, his classical records in the autumn and winter, and golf when the mood and weather suited.
Mr Alfred was different. He had no garden and no hobbies. He worried. Anxious to get on good terms with the boys he tried chatting to them paternally with his hands in his pockets. He would be patient and pleasant. He wouldn’t get rattled. He gently discouraged a forward youngster who always wanted the limelight, he wagged a hushing finger at another who kept answering out of turn. He had seen enough to know a class could be goaded into insurrection by tyranny, clammed to sullenness by sarcasm. He wanted to be benevolent without being a despot. He wanted to be friendly and get communication. But there were no dividends from his policy. Only idleness, noise and bad manners. That was what frightened him. He saw something uncivilised in their eyes, something rude in their smirk, something savage in their slouch. They
were foreigners. They didn’t speak his language. They were on a different channel and he couldn’t switch over. He believed that like animals they would sense he was afraid and turn on him. He tried to hide his fear, to conquer it by a kind of auto-suggestion. He put on a free and easy manner, pretending they didn’t frighten him. He failed.
Then on a Thursday morning came what he had always thought impossible. Mr Murdoch’s class came to him the first period, lads of fourteen and fifteen. The team they supported had won a European Cup match the night before. Mr Alfred had seen the result in the paper, but it meant nothing to him. He didn’t appreciate it was a glorious victory. So he didn’t expect the entry of a choir singing the song the fans had sung the night before. He bawled at them. They went on singing. Some sat down sideways with their long legs stretched out. Others hunched round the hot pipes, fondling the warm metal, and argued with a nonconformist who said their team was lucky. Somebody played a party tune on a mouth-organ.
Two upstanding boys, as big as Mr Alfred himself, quarrelled about whose seat it was in the back row.
‘Sit down there!’ he roared. ‘Be quiet!’
The edge on his voice made him even angrier than he was already. He knew he was getting himself worked up, but he couldn’t stand the noise. The insult of an uproar in his classroom maddened him.
‘Sit down! Be quiet!’ he roared again.
‘Sit down! Be quiet!’ echoed a mocking soprano.
So sudden it was, so unexpected, he failed to pin the source. He walked in among them, up and down the passages. Young eyes looked at him with calm insolence, mouths grinned but said nothing. Feet stamped when he passed.
‘Sit down there! Be quiet!’ a parrot-voice squawked.
It came again. And again.
‘Be quiet! Sit down! Sit down! Be quiet!’
Always from behind his back. Bass, baritone and tenor.
All bogus. Putting the impossible challenge to spot who it was.
He fired glares right, left and centre. He was at bay, and he knew it. He trembled. He was ripe for murder. There came into his mind the question a colleague in Collinsburn had once put to him.
‘What would you do if a whole class started kidding you?’
‘It wouldn’t happen,’ he had answered then. ‘Not to me. I wouldn’t let it.’
‘No, it wouldn’t happen to you because they know you here,’ his friend said. ‘But suppose they didn’t know you. Suppose it did happen. What would you do? What could you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I can’t imagine it happening to me.’
And now it had. They were jeering at him, and he could do nothing to stop them. The row they were making recalled the class that had baited the young Latin teacher next door to him a long time ago. He was humiliated to be a victim where once he had been only an observer.
At that point Mr Murdoch came in. He had heard enough outside. He knew his class as a man knows his warts or corns. He picked on one conspicuous boy even as he crossed the door.
‘Hey, Jumbo! Pipe down! And get back to your seat or I’ll skelp your big arse hard, so I will.’
‘It’s no’ me, Bobby,’ Jumbo shouted back. ‘Ah’m daying nothing. It’s him.’
He put the finger on the boy nearest him, shoved him accusingly. But he sat down. Grudgingly. Still, he sat. The class hushed in waves of gathering peace.
Mr Murdoch, brighteyed and tubby, strolled up and down the silent passages. He whispered an auricular threat here, gave a nuchal smack there, padded to the front of the class and gave Mr Alfred a wink the boys couldn’t see.
‘Let it rest,’ he whispered on the way out. ‘They won’t do it again.’
In the staffroom later he told Mr Alfred not to worry. It was only because he was still a stranger. This class always chanced its arm with a new teacher, no matter how old he was. The only answer was to hit somebody hard right away. Rough justice for these fiery particles. Show them who’s boss.
‘But even that’s failing,’ he elaborated sadly. ‘It used to be boys took a pride in taking the belt. They’d boast how many they got. They used to despise a man couldn’t use the strap. Ach him, they’d say, he canny draw it! But now they want to argue. It wasn’t me, it was him. They’re yellow. They know their rights. We can’t do this and we can’t do that, but they can do what they like. They’re outside the law. It’s all this child-cult. They’re starting to defy me even. I had a reputation here. Handed down. God, I taught their fathers! There was a time no boy ever dared look sideways at me. But not now. I’m losing ground. There’s no respect now for tradition. I’ve got to act the clown, speak their lingo, to keep on the right side of them. But there are limits. I’m telling you, it will be hell let loose when they raise the leaving age.’
Mr Alfred didn’t need advice about showing who was boss. He didn’t need a lecture on the change for the worse in the attitude of the pupils. He didn’t need gloomy prophecies about the future. He knew all that. He had said it himself, often. Platitudes didn’t stop his belly quivering with anger. He was ashamed that his class had been silenced only by a colleague’s intervention. He was furious he hadn’t had revenge. He wanted to hit out and assert himself. He wanted to terrorise them so much they wouldn’t dare mock him again. But when Murdoch left the room all he could do was get on with his lesson, and a poor one it was. He was sick with frustrated passion. At the morning break he went to the staffroom toilet and vomited in the wash-hand basin.
He wasn’t displeased when Waterholm was raided one night in what the papers called an orgy of destruction. Gang slogans were painted on the walls and blackboards, bottles of glue were emptied on the classroom floors, textbooks and exercise books were torn up and scattered, fire hoses were turned on, flooding four classrooms, and the secretary’s room and the gymnasium were damaged by fire. But the main attack was on a recent acquisition greatly valued by the headmaster. It was what he called the Language Laboratory, where a classroom had been converted into a number of cubicles with tape-recorders, headphones, and some French and German conversation on tape. The cubicles were wrecked and the sound equip¬ ment was smashed beyond repair.
Mr Alfred used the break-in to justify his dislike of the pupils of Watty Compy, for nobody doubted some of them were the culprits.
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of people you have here. I thought Tordoch was bad, but I see I was transferred from the Ostrogoths to the Visigoths. That’s all.’
‘Ah, now!’ said Harry Murdoch. ‘Be fair! It could happen in any school.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The love affair between Martha Weipers and Graeme Roy was over. Mr Alfred read about them in the paper at a quarter to five one evening the week before Christmas. He bought a paper in the city centre when he changed buses. Sleet was falling and the bus windows were misty. He couldn’t see through them. All he could do was read his paper. It was the name Weipers caught his eye and gave his heart a knock. But it wasn’t Rose. It was Martha. She was found dead in Graeme Roy’s car at 8 a.m. She must have died in the small hours of the morning. Graeme Roy was dead beside her. He was in the driver’s seat and she was leaning against him with her head across his chest. His left arm was round her shoulder. The car was in the garage at the side of his father’s house. They had been at a latenight dance in the University Union and Roy’s parents were asleep at the time he was expected home.
Mr Alfred went to see his aunt. It was his first visit for a long time. She knew he hadn’t come just because Christmas was near. She too had seen a paper. She knew he wanted to hear what they were saying about it in Tordoch. But she knew he wouldn’t ask. He would never admit he liked gossip.
‘I see your old school’s in the papers again,’ she said.
‘So long as it’s not on television,’ he answered her.
He spoke lightly, pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t care, implying she ought to know he wasn’t interested in anything to do with
his old school.
‘Former dux-girl at Collinsburn,’ she read from the paper. ‘She looks such a happy girl in that picture. You’d wonder how the papers get hold of these old photos. I thought you might have seen it.’
‘No,’ he said.
His lie meant he had to read the report as if he hadn’t seen it before. He was ashamed of his deceit. But its purpose was to hide his true feelings. He kept thinking of Rose. He wanted to comfort her.
‘You see the police think it was fumes poisoned them,’ said Granny Lyons.
‘That would be carbon monoxide,’ said Mr. Alfred. ‘If the engine was running and the doors closed. It doesn’t say. Or does it?’
He acted a second reading of an account he knew by heart.
‘They’re saying here it was suicide,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘The pair of them together. Because she was in trouble.’
‘There’s always folk want to gossip,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Folk that like to think the worst.’
‘Did you know them?’ asked Granny Lyons.
‘I didn’t know her,’ he said. He wouldn’t mention Rose.
‘I taught the boy once. A very intelligent boy as far as I remember.’
‘He couldn’t have been all that intelligent,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘It was the girl was clever. See what it says. Prizes for French and German. But see what it says about him.
He gave up his studies at the university a year ago. He must have been a right failure, him.’
‘Many a boy good at school fails at university,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I’ve known highly intelligent boys had to give it up. Not their bent.’
‘Well, that wasn’t very intelligent,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘What he did. If all they say is true.’
‘If all they say is true,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Suppose it is. Perhaps he loved her.’
‘He took an odd way of showing it,’ said Granny Lyons.
