She ignored that, and asked what I had dreaded her asking. ‘And what was this awful swear word that he is supposed to have used?’
Ice was dripping from each syllable she uttered, but I could only say, ‘I didn’t find out until after Malcolm went home. He had said “Hell”, that was all, but . . .’
She didn’t let me explain about my last school. ‘Oh, dear! Hell? Now that is a dreadful swear word!’ This was sarcasm to the nth degree. ‘My goodness, your delicate ears must have been truly assaulted by that!’
She slammed the receiver down, and I turned apprehensively to Mr Robertson, who had heard only what I’d been saying, and gave him the whole story. His reaction, thank goodness, was completely different. ‘Silly bitch!’ he grinned. ‘Never mind her.’
At Hazlehead, Primary Five classes went to Stirling for a day in two coaches, and although I was to have my student and one of the parents to help, I wasn’t looking forward to it. As it happened, it wasn’t bad behaviour of any kind that upset the apple cart. The trip was at the end of May, and I’d been instructed by the mother of a girl called June on my first afternoon that she was a diabetic, and that she always carried two sugar lumps, which I had to give her if she started acting peculiarly. There had been no sign of anything so far, and I had almost forgotten the warning.
The day of the trip eventually arrived, the bags containing the children’s packed lunches were stowed into the boot of our coach, and off we set. This wasn’t like Smithfield, where an afternoon’s outing to the beach had revealed that it was the first time most of them had seen the sea. This bunch, or most of them, were accustomed to being driven around in cars, and were quite blasé about the scenery. The second coach, Mrs McLean’s class, was to visit the Robert the Bruce Memorial first and then the Wallace Monument, while we were to go to the Wallace Monument first and then the Bruce Memorial. The two coaches were to meet up eventually at the Castle, where they could accommodate larger numbers.
Arriving in Stirling, our bus went to the Wallace Monument as scheduled. It’s a long, very steep walk up from the car park to the monument, and when I saw the toilet block at the foot of the hill, I said, ‘If any of you want to go to the toilet, you’d better go now.’
My student went in with the girls who opted for it, while Mr Smith, the parent helper, went in with the boys and I took the remainder very slowly up the hill. Everything was going well; we all enjoyed what we saw inside the tall building, the boys, especially, being impressed by the armour and weaponry – in particular the huge double-handled sword hanging outside, said to be the actual one William Wallace had used.
Before we attempted the descent, I warned my class, ‘Please keep behind me, all of you. If you start running, you won’t be able to stop, the path’s so steep.’ I set off, slowly and steadily downwards, and we were almost at the foot when I became aware of heavy feet overtaking me. When I looked round, I saw June plodding purposefully, one foot after the other landing with a thump on the gravelly surface. ‘June!’ I warned, trying to grab hold of her, but she appeared not to have heard and carried on.
I couldn’t run after her, it was too dangerous, but she had only a few yards to go to reach level ground, so I let her go. At the toilet area, of course, those who hadn’t paid a call before we went up, were now desperate to go, myself included.
I was washing my hands when I heard the racing footsteps. ‘Mrs Davidson! Mrs Davidson!’ and in burst about half a dozen girls. ‘June’s gone all stiff, and she doesn’t know what the student’s saying to her . . . or anybody. She’s on a seat and you’d better come quick.’
All of us ran as quickly as we could to where June was sitting on a bench with her legs straight out in front of her like a dummy. The other girls were hovering anxiously around her. It was only then that I remembered that she was a diabetic, and searched her blazer pocket – no sugar lumps. I asked if anyone would recognise her lunch bag, but all I got was a mass of negative headshakes.
By means of getting each child to take out his or her own bag, I was left with the one I needed, but even after going through it with a fine toothcomb, I found no sugar lumps. Mr Smith ran to ask the nearby hotel to phone for an ambulance, but the receptionist went one better than that. She offered to take the girl to the hospital in her car.
As a matter of interest, if you have never tried to stuff a board-stiff ten-year-old girl inside a Mini, you have missed one of life’s most frustrating experiences. We did pack her in eventually, and Mr Smith accompanied her to hospital. The rest of the class had still to see the Bruce Memorial, and I couldn’t leave them in the hands of one poor student.
Sadly, because of the long delay, we had missed our time slot at the Memorial, and pupils from another school had already gone in. We did see the statue, the warrior King Robert sitting proudly astride his mighty steed on the grass outside, but that was all. On, then, to our last port of call – the Castle and there was June, running around amongst Mrs McLean’s pupils, an ice cream cone in her hand. It seems that the insulin injection the hospital gave her had been all that she needed.
In Primary Six, I went to Edinburgh with the same pupils for five days. The boys were most impressed in the Science Museum, while the girls loved the story of Greyfriars Bobby and took photos of the dog’s statue sitting outside the cemetery where his master lies buried. They all seemed to be fascinated by the Waxworks, even if some of the girls – and one or two boys – were wary of going down to the Chamber of Horrors.
What did surprise me was their lack of interest in the Museum of Childhood. They raced through all three floors within ten minutes, while I was still on the first floor recognising toys I’d had as a child but which had been thrown out years before. My nostalgia was brought to an end by the pounding of feet on the stairs and the cries of, ‘Can we go to the Pancake Shop now?’
The Castle got a mixed reception, but the Zoo was more to their liking, and taken all in all, our visit to Edinburgh was quite worthwhile. As a last treat, we took them to St James’ shopping centre to buy something for their mums.
I had the same class in Primary Seven, and the trip was more adventurous – seven whole days in Belgium. This time, Mr Robertson came with us, taking a final responsibility before retiring. Our hotel was a tramride out of Ostend, thoroughly equipped for parties of children. There were two buildings, one old and one new, round a covered quadrangle lined with slot machines. This was ideal for wet spells, but we spent most evenings on the beach. We also had a two-hour bus run into Holland one day to a theme park, which was a great success – before such pleasures were made more available by Disney. On the very last forenoon, we went shopping in Ostend, the headmaster gave both children and teachers free rein to go where they liked as long as we all met up at a certain time.
There were fifteen boys and fourteen girls on that trip. Mr Robertson split them up thus: five boys each to the three men (himself and two fathers) and the fourteen girls to me. Most of the party was in the new building, but I was in the old part with only two of the quiet girls next door, so my nights were undisturbed. The men, however, didn’t get off so easily. By this stage, with most of the kids eleven or twelve years old, the boys (and some of the girls) were up to all kinds of tricks. As one of the fathers said to me one morning, ‘Some of the little blighters are like dogs after bitches on heat. We hardly got a wink of sleep for making sure there were no shenanigans.’
Even with unbroken nights, it took me all my time to keep watch over the fourteen girls during the days. There was a small nucleus of them who flirted with every boy who passed, and the Belgian youths would have been delighted to make merry with them . . . if I hadn’t intervened.
The next three years followed the same pattern – Stirling in Five, Edinburgh in Six and Belgium in Seven, and there were upsets of some kind during each trip. I’ve heard people saying that teachers are lucky being paid for going abroad with pupils, but they have no idea of the stress involved. These trips are no picnic, and take that from one
who knows. I also heard, while standing in a queue at a baker’s van, two mothers talking to each other during the first week of summer holidays.
One said, ‘My two kids are driving me mad already.’
The other agreed. ‘My two are the same. I wish it was time for them to go back to school.’
If they found their own two children too much of a handful, how did they think teachers coped with well over twenty of other people’s?
In spite of all that I’ve said, I look back on my days in both Smithfield and Hazlehead Primaries very fondly. For every troublesome child, there were usually ten or more who posed no behaviour problems. On the other hand, as far as learning was concerned, quite a few in every class had difficulties with one aspect or another, and it was a wonderful feeling when, after struggling for weeks, even months, to get a child to understand something, he or she suddenly saw the light. That, I would say, is why teachers teach. That is their reward.
Because of the amount of preparation for lessons that needed to be done, I had given up all thought of writing, but promised myself that I’d give it another go once I retired. My sixtieth birthday, 30 June 1982, meant I could stop working, but I spent the next twenty-one months helping my sister to care for Mum, who had suffered a stroke in 1981.
Sadly, she died in March of 1984, something I took many, many months to get over. I often thought back to the stroppy youngster I’d been, spoilt rotten until Bertha came on the scene and put my nose out of joint. I had given my mother much stress in my time, though we became very close as she grew older. Bertha and I have also grown closer, time has narrowed the gap between us. A woman of thirty-one had more in common with a woman of twenty-one than a woman of twenty-one had with a girl of eleven, for instance. At one time, I resented being saddled with a little sister when I wanted to be speaking to boys, but, since our own children grew up, we’ve had many lovely weekends away together with our husbands, in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Coylumbridge and so on, staying in hotels that would have seemed like palaces to me when I was younger and having to count every brass farthing. Some of them still did, even when we were seasoned travellers.
Even now, when Jimmy and I are not fit enough to be going far from home, we have many days out with Bertha and Bill, and also with Sheila and John, who moved from Surrey to Cruden Bay a few years ago. Alan doesn’t like driving and has never bought a car, but he has been roped in over the past two or three years, to drive his dad around a bit if the weather is good. I am quite content to enjoy the peace at home, to get on with some writing while I know Jimmy is being well looked after.
It was 1986 or into 1987 before I felt the urge to write again, but this time, my sights were set much higher than short stories.
I wanted to write a novel.
22
The interwoven initials on the pendulum of our grandfather clock had always fascinated me. JT and WD. The story goes that William Davidson, Jimmy’s great-great-grandfather, had the magnificent Spanish mahogany clock made as a gift for his bride, Jean Tawse, on their wedding day. It has been passed to the eldest son down through the generations and Jimmy, an only son, fell heir to it when his father died. The weights, unfortunately, had become entangled during the transportation from Laurencekirk to Aberdeen, and we thought it best to have it thoroughly checked and overhauled. We chose Jamieson and Carry, one of the city’s finest jewellers, and it cost us £9 10 shillings (in 1957) to have the innards made like new again – fully three weeks of the average weekly wage.
‘It’s over 150 years old,’ said the man who brought it back, ‘and the new plates we put in should keep it going for as long again.’
I have no hope of living long enough to learn the truth of that prediction, but it was made almost fifty years ago and our ‘old friend’ is still sending its comforting ‘tick tock’ along the hallway. Sadly, we had to stop it marking the hours when we moved into the flat, because we didn’t want it to annoy the neighbours. Not that any of them had complained, but it sits very close to the door to the landing, and its chime, despite being elegantly sweet, was also fairly loud.
Mind you, it used to sit in the living room at Mastrick, next to the fire, and I can remember times when I sat down of an afternoon for half an hour’s rest before getting ready to go to my evening job, sure that I’d hear the clock striking four. My chair was practically rubbing against the long-case, so how could I fail to hear it? Believe me, I could and often did! You can get used to anything . . . as the auld wife said when her bosom got caught in the mangle. Oops, sorry!
I regarded the pendulum’s duogram – if that’s the correct word for two sets of initials – as the absolute epitome of romance and often wished that I knew the whole story of that long-ago love affair. With more time for thought after I retired, it eventually dawned on me that I could invent a story, and that is how I came to write Time Shall Reap – my very first attempt.
In the late sixties, I had attended a Creative Writing class in the evenings; following this, I became a member of a Writers’ Circle. The highlight of each year for me was the Writers’ Conference held in Pitlochry, which most of our group attended. There were competitions for short stories in the different genres: love, children’s, mysteries, etc., and although there were almost 100 people from all over Scotland in the same hotel, we could talk comfortably with anyone we met in the corridors. They were all, like we were, aspiring to be published writers. There’s a great difference between saying, ‘I’m a writer’, and being able to say, ‘I’m a published writer.’
One of the carrots dangled in front of us was that whoever wrote the winning first chapter of a novel would have the finished book accepted by a well-known publishing house. At that time, of course, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel and entered only the short story competitions . . . with no luck, let me add.
Over the course of perhaps four or five years, however, I did have a couple of short stories published – one in the Sunday Mail, one in Women’s World. The latter, a weekly magazine, folded up shortly afterwards, but I don’t think that my story was the cause of its demise. I hope not!
I also had a couple of articles accepted: one by Woman’s Own about choosing the quickest-moving till queue in a supermarket, and the other by Education in the North, produced by Aberdeen City Education Authority. I had been asked to write about my experiences with John Wallace, concentrating on how hard he had worked. The final showdown hadn’t then occurred, worse luck, for it would have made for much more interesting reading.
But this was a time when dozens of hopefuls were starting to write, anything from short shorts of 1,000 words, to 4,000 magazine length shorts, to novellas of around 50,000, to full-blown novels of 120,000 and upwards, and I collected so many rejections that I wondered whether to paper the toilet with them or give up writing completely. I gave up . . . for many years.
I wrote Time Shall Reap in exercise books in pencil and revising in blue biro and then red biro. More or less satisfied with it, I typed it out on a portable Smith Corona typewriter, giving each chapter to my friend Doreen Cruickshank on the floor above me for approval or otherwise. She was with me on this book from the very beginning and is still my No.1 fan. I selected some chapters of the completed manuscript to show how I dealt with love, tragedy, humour, jealousy (as we’d been advised in the Writers’ Circle) and sent them to one publisher after another. They homed back faithfully after every outing.
Then I remembered something else that we had been taught in the Writers’ Circle – if a manuscript is sent to a publisher without being addressed to a specific person, it is liable to be thrown on the ‘Slush Pile’ and returned unread. So I looked in the current version of the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book for a name to put on the packet.
From the names under the heading ‘Collins (William) PLC, 1819’, I chose Kenneth Murdoch – he had a good Scottish name, I was a Scot and the story was set in the northeast of Scotland. How could it fail?
By return of post, I received a letter inform
ing me that Mr Rupert Murdoch was meantime in America, and, in any case, he took no part in the publishing side of the business. Would you believe it? I’d bypassed all the Indians and gone straight to the chief. Redemption was at hand, though. The letter ended by saying that my manuscript had been passed to the proper department. I was still in with a chance.
It turned out that the proper department wanted nothing to do with it, so, having had enough disappointments to last for a long time, I finally put the entire story into a box and laid it to rest under the bed.
I started a whodunit next, as I’m quite partial to a good murder story myself – I’ve got all Agatha Christie’s. I decided to send the whole manuscript out this time, not just a few sample chapters as I had done before, as I had been taught to do at the evening class and the writers’ circle. How could anybody judge a whole novel from only a few unrelated chapters – especially a whodunit? I posted the compact parcel to Collins’ Crime Club but had it returned as too long – almost twice as long as was needed. Before I did anything to cut it, I thought I’d better phone to ask if it was worth my while to spend time on such a task. I was told that it was, and so I went ahead, chopping out as much as I could, but the new version was returned to me, too.
‘While we enjoyed your humour and thought that your detectives were well handled, the story lost its impact in the shortening.’
Jam and Jeopardy, therefore, also disappeared under the bed.
I wrote a third book but considered it a bit too autobiographical and never sent it out at all. (I’ve reached an age now when I’m not nearly so easily embarrassed, which is why I agreed to write a proper account of my life.) This third novel also languished under the bed for years. I’m not sure where the last two are now, kicking around somewhere no doubt, because I never throw anything out. My family will vouch for that. I could start a secondhand goods stall anywhere at the drop of a hat – if I could bring myself to part with any of my old rubbish . . . correction, any of my old treasures.
Gift from the Gallowgate Page 26
