‘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.’
He put his cigarette back in his mouth and withdrew from the discussion. He thought he had said all that needed saying about corporal punishment.
‘The way I see it,’ said Mr Campbell, ‘the strap is our symbol of authority within a recognised code. The boys know what to expect and we can get on with the job.’
‘You must have something to maintain discipline,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘Some quick sanction. Even if you never use it.’
‘No discipline, no learning,’ sai
d Mr Brown.
‘But tell me this,’ said Mr Dale. ‘What do you do if a boy refuses to take the strap?’
‘Only a stupid teacher would create a situation where that would happen,’ said Mr Campbell.
‘But supposing,’ said Mr Dale.
‘It’s a case for the headmaster then,’ said Mr Brown.
‘I’ve never met many cases of a boy refusing the strap,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘And those I have, they all came to nothing. The boy had to submit in the end and apologise. Then of course once he gets a public apology the teacher acts the big man. He won’t condescend to strap the boy. The rebel ends up looking a bit of an ass.’
‘Well, I’m deputy-boss here,’ said Mr Brown, ‘and I’ve never had any boy refuse the strap. We don’t seem to get that kind of stupid defiance.’
So it was an occasion for headlines when Gerald defied Mr Alfred and kept on defying him the morning after the fight in the Weavers Lane.
Before proposing to strap him Mr Alfred told the class what he had seen in the Weavers Lane. He said those who egged boys on to fight were worse than the boys who came to blows. Even a good boy might get into a fight if he thought his honour was at stake. He would fight in case his classmates jeered at him if he didn’t. That was silly. Nothing was ever solved by violence. Still, it was a pardonable mistake in a young person. But few boys would fight at all if nobody talked them into thinking they had to. This was usually done by trouble-makers who took jolly good care never to risk their own precious skin. It was a far, far better thing to tell your schoolmates there was no need to fight. Our saviour said, Blessed are the peacemakers. The really wicked ones were those who were not content to start two boys fighting with their bare fists but got them to use belts and even brought a knife into it. They were not blessed like the peacemakers. They deserved a deep damnation more than a ticking off.
He spoke very well and enjoyed having the class hushed at his rhetoric. Then he said quietly, ‘Come out Gerald Provan.’
He raised his strap.
‘You know what I’ve been talking about. You know why I’m going to punish you.’
Gerald refused to hold his hand out. He said he had done nothing wrong, it was after four o’clock when he was in the Weavers Lane, Mr Alfred had no right, he was picking on him. He spoke with a rough insolence. His tongue darted between his lips and he went through the motion of spitting at Mr Alfred’s feet.
Mr Alfred nearly slapped him across the face there and then. But he saw the trap. If he let himself be provoked and hit Gerald with his hand he would put himself in the wrong. His case against Gerald would be obliterated by Gerald’s case against him. He knew he had blundered. He should have referred the whole business to Mr Briggs. And he was uneasy to think it was just possible he had jumped at the chance to get at Gerald Provan because he didn’t like the boy. It vexed him even more that now he would have to take the matter to Mr Briggs not as something he was merely reporting but something he had failed to handle.
The class watched his defeat with placid interest.
He grabbed Gerald by the scruff and pushed him to the door.
‘You come and see the headmaster,’ he said.
‘Take your hauns aff me,’ said Gerald.
His dialect vowels were themselves a form of insolence. Normally a boy spoke to his teacher in standard English.
Mr Briggs wasn’t pleased when Mr Alfred shoved Gerald in and said his piece. But he could only support his teacher. He ordered Gerald to take his punishment. He said he was sick and tired of all the feuding and fighting that was going on in the school and he was determined to stamp it out. He nearly said with a firm hand. He said he himself had told all those boys in the Weavers Lane to go home at once. If for nothing else, Gerald deserved to be punished for disobeying that order. Mr Alfred was quite right to strap him. He would do it himself if Mr Alfred wouldn’t. And in order that justice would not only be done but be seen to be done, Mr Alfred or he himself would strap Gerald in front of the whole class.
Gerald was stubborn. He said Mr Alfred had a spite at him. He wouldn’t take the strap from him. And he wouldn’t take the strap from Mr Briggs. It was the same thing. Whoever did it, he was still being strapped for nothing. He put his hands behind his back. No, he wouldn’t take it.
He had worked himself into a mood and he was stuck with it. But he was thrilled with the stand he was making. He knew his cause was just.
‘Here’s the knife I told you about,’ said Mr Alfred.
He put it on the headmaster’s desk.
Mr Briggs glanced at it, wrinkled his nose and looked away. He didn’t touch it.
‘It’s not mines,’ said Gerald. ‘I’ve got witnesses.’
‘Mine,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘We’re not discussing that,’ said Mr Briggs. He lolled back in his swivel chair, looking at his clean nails. ‘That will come later. At the moment all I’m concerned with is you were one of the boys in the Weavers Lane and you returned after I had sent you all away. You’ll either take your punishment for disobedience or you’ll go home and tell your mother I want to see her.’
The option was his final bluff. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a boy capitulated rather than bother his parents. This time it failed. Gerald went home at once. He even banged the door on his way out.
‘You should never have tried to strap him just for watching a fight,’ Mr Briggs scolded Mr Alfred. ‘You know what he’s like. And his mother’s worse. The knife? That won’t get us anywhere. It’s just your word. He’ll deny it. If you had only sent him to me in the first place I could maybe have talked him into taking the strap. Even if he had defied me it wouldn’t have been in front of a class. That won’t do you any good with the rest of them, you know. I could have got round it somehow if it had been kept in this room. But now God knows what we’ve started.’
CHAPTER TEN
Before the week was out he found he had started plenty. Gerald turned up the next day, early and unworried. Mr Briggs spotted the fair hair in the assembly and beckoned.
‘Where’s your mother?’
He waited.
Gerald said nothing.
‘Go away,’ said Mr Briggs, ‘and don’t come back here without her.’
Mrs Provan came to his room at nine o’clock the following morning with Gerald by her side, her hand on his shoulder. She was angry again. She said her boy hadn’t taken part in any fight. The truth was he had done his best to stop a fight. He had even brought one of the boys home with him and used his hankie to stanch the blood flowing from the boy’s nose where a big bully had punched him.
‘I can show you the hankie,’ she said.
‘And I can show you a knife,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘It’s not just a penknife. It’s more like a dagger. Just look at it. Do you allow your boy to go around with a thing like that in his pocket?’
‘No, and I don’t allow him to tell lies either,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘That’s not his knife. He told you so himself.’
‘Mr Alfred saw him with it,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘That’s his story,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘Gerald never had a knife like that in his life. I should know. I’m his mother. Not Mr Alfred.’
‘All I’m asking,’ said Mr Briggs, ‘is for Gerald to take the strap. There’s no question of severe punishment. If he’ll take even one. It won’t kill him.’
‘I never said it would,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I’m only saying you’re not strapping my boy for nothing.’
‘I’ve got to think of the discipline of my school,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘The boy disobeyed an order from me in the first place. I can’t just ignore it.’
‘That was after school,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘It had nothing to do with you.’
‘He also disobeyed Mr Alfred. In the classroom. Not after school.’
‘Aye, but it was about something that happened after school,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘And that man has a spite against Gerald.’
She wouldn’t give in. Mr Briggs said if the b
oy wouldn’t accept the laws of the school he had no option but to suspend him. He told her to think it over and sent them both away.
‘I’ve no need to think it over,’ said Mrs Provan at the door. ‘I’ll be back here tomorrow. It’s you had better think it over. I know my rights. You’ll take my boy in if you’re wise. You’ve no authority to keep him out.’
‘Oh but I have,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘That’s two days now he hasn’t had his milk,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘He’s got a right to his free milk every day. It’s laid down by the law of the land. Lucky for you you didn’t stop him getting his dinner here yesterday.’
‘I didn’t see him or I would have stopped him,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘He’s got a ticket for free meals,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I’m a widow woman. I applied for free meals for my children and it was granted. You can’t stop it.’
‘I can,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘In certain circumstances.’
‘That’s what you think,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I know different. Not to mention the fact he’s missed his education for two days through your fault.’
‘Education! For that fellow!’ Mr Briggs cried to Miss Ancill, giving her a line by line account of the interview over his morning coffee. ‘He leaves in a couple of months. He’s hardly a candidate to stay on for O levels. He has learned all he’ll ever learn at school. And God knows that wasn’t much.’
When Mrs Provan brought Gerald back again he offered her a compromise. He wouldn’t punish the boy nor would Mr Alfred, if she would concede they had a right to punish him.
‘Not for doing nothing,’ said Mrs Provan.
The peace talks broke down. Mr Briggs told her to come back when she changed her mind.
She didn’t. She wouldn’t. She phoned the fourth estate.
Mr Alfred, MA Page 5
