‘Yes,’ Torquil agreed.
He went on board the ship after kissing his mother and shaking his father by the hand. As the ship sailed away from the pier he saw them standing there with a lot of other people who were seeing relatives off. The sails swelled and soon they were far from shore and the island was a long line of green with lights twinkling here and there. Then it could not be seen at all.
He had a hard time of it in Canada for it was during the thirties that he emigrated. Sometimes he slept in doss-houses, sometimes he worked on the railway tracks. At nights he and the other boys from Scotland kept themselves warm by dancing the Highland Fling. His underclothes were in rags and one morning in spring after washing them in a stream he threw them away. Eventually he reached Vancouver and there got a job as a Fire Officer. He trained hoses on charred bodies in burnt rooms.
One night at a ceilidh in another islander’s house he had an argument with him about the Garden of Eden.
‘It wasn’t an apple that was mentioned,’ he said. ‘It was just any fruit. I’ll show you.’ And, after asking him to get his Bible, they both studied it. It didn’t mention an apple at all. It simply said the Tree of Good and Evil.
‘You know your Bible sure enough,’ said the islander whose name was Smith, and who was lame because of an accident on the grain elevators.
Torquil didn’t say anything.
‘The funny thing is that I never see you in church,’ said Smith.
‘You will never see me in church,’ said Torquil.
But he didn’t say why not. It seemed to him strange that he felt no anger towards Macrae whom he still regarded as having been a good teacher, especially of navigation. Sometimes when it was snowing gently he would see the belt descending, he could hear the words of that poem which he had never forgotten and he could see the thick neck and face of the minister.
‘No,’ he repeated, ‘You’ll never see me there.’
The Play
When he started teaching first Mark Mason was very enthusiastic, thinking that he could bring to the pupils gifts of the poetry of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Keats. But it wasn’t going to be like that, at least not with Class 3g. 3g was a class of girls who, before the raising of the school-leaving age, were to leave at the end of their fifteenth year. Mark brought them ‘relevant’ poems and novels including Timothy Winters and Jane Eyre but quickly discovered that they had a fixed antipathy to the written word. It was not that they were undisciplined – that is to say they were not actively mischievous – but they were thrawn: he felt that there was a solid wall between himself and them and that no matter how hard he sold them Jane Eyre, by reading chapters of it aloud, and comparing for instance the food in the school refectory that Jane Eyre had to eat with that which they themselves got in their school canteen, they were not interested. Indeed one day when he was walking down one of the aisles between two rows of desks he asked one of the girls, whose name was Lorna and who was pasty-faced and blond, what was the last book she had read, and she replied,
‘Please, sir, I never read any books.’
This answer amazed him for he could not conceive of a world where one never read any books and he was the more determined to introduce them to the activity which had given himself so much pleasure. But the more enthusiastic he became, the more eloquent his words, the more they withdrew into themselves till finally he had to admit that he was completely failing with the class. As he was very conscientious this troubled him, and not even his success with the academic classes compensated for his obvious lack of success with this particular class. He believed in any event that failure with the non-academic classes constituted failure as a teacher. He tried to do creative writing with them first by bringing in reproductions of paintings by Magritte which were intended to awaken in their minds a glimmer of the unexpectedness and strangeness of ordinary things, but they would simply look at them and point out to him their lack of resemblance to reality. He was in despair. His failure began to obsess him so much that he discussed the problem with the Head of Department who happened to be teaching Rasselas to the Sixth Form at the time with what success Mark could not gauge.
‘I suggest you make them do the work,’ said his Head of Department. ‘There comes a point where if you do not impose your personality they will take advantage of you.’
But somehow or another Mark could not impose his personality on them: they had a habit for instance of forcing him to deviate from the text he was studying with them by mentioning something that had appeared in the newspaper.
‘Sir,’ they would say, ‘did you see in the papers that there were two babies born from two wombs in the one woman.’ Mark would flush angrily and say, ‘I don’t see what this has to do with our work,’ but before he knew where he was he was in the middle of an animated discussion which was proceeding all around him about the anatomical significance of this piece of news. The fact was that he did not know how to deal with them: if they had been boys he might have threatened them with the last sanction of the belt, or at least frightened them in some way. But girls were different, one couldn’t belt girls, and certainly he couldn’t frighten this particular lot. They all wanted to be hairdressers: and one wanted to be an engineer having read in a paper that this was now a possible job for girls. He couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her that it was highly unlikely that she could do this without Highers. They fantasised a great deal about jobs and chose ones which were well beyond their scope. It seemed to him that his years in Training College hadn’t prepared him for this varied apathy and animated gossip. Sometimes one or two of them were absent and when he asked where they were was told that they were baby sitting. He dreaded the periods he had to try and teach them in, for as the year passed and autumn darkened into winter he knew that he had not taught them anything and he could not bear it.
He talked to other teachers about them, and the history man shrugged his shoulders and said that he gave them pictures to look at, for instance one showing women at the munitions during the First World War. It became clear to him that their other teachers had written them off since they would be leaving at the end of the session, anyway, and as long as they were quiet they were allowed to talk and now and again glance at the books with which they had been provided.
But Mark, whose first year this was, felt weighed down by his failure and would not admit to it. There must be something he could do with them, the failure was his fault and not theirs. Like a missionary he had come to them bearing gifts, but they refused them, turning away from them with total lack of interest. Keats, Shakespeare, even the ballads, shrivelled in front of his eyes. It was, curiously enough, Mr Morrison who gave him his most helpful advice. Mr Morrison spent most of his time making sure that his register was immaculate, first writing in the Os in pencil and then rubbing them out and re-writing them in ink. Mark had been told that during the Second World War while Hitler was advancing into France, Africa and Russia he had been insisting that his register was faultlessly kept and the names written in carefully. Morrison understood the importance of this though no one else did.
‘What you have to do with them,’ said Morrison, looking at Mark through his round glasses which were like the twin barrels of a gun, ‘is to find out what they want to do.’
‘But,’ said Mark in astonishment, ‘that would be abdicating responsibility.’
‘That’s right,’ said Morrison equably.
‘If that were carried to its conclusion,’ said Mark, but before he could finish the sentence Morrison said,
‘In teaching nothing ought to be carried to its logical conclusion.’
‘I see,’ said Mark, who didn’t. But at least Morrison had introduced a new idea into his mind which was at the time entirely empty.
‘I see,’ he said again. But he was not yet ready to go as far as Morrison had implied that he should. The following day however he asked the class for the words of ‘Paper Roses’, one of the few pop songs that he had ever heard of. For the first time h
e saw a glimmer of interest in their eyes, for the first time they were actually using pens. In a short while they had given him the words from memory. Then he took out a book of Burns’ poems and copied on to the board the verses of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’. He asked them to compare the two poems but found that the wall of apathy had descended again and that it was as impenetrable as before. Not completely daunted, he asked them if they would bring in a record of ‘Paper Roses’, and himself found one of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’, with Kenneth Mackellar singing it. He played both songs, one after the other, on his own record player. They were happy listening to ‘Paper Roses’ but showed no interest in the other song. The discussion he had planned petered out, except that the following day a small girl with black hair and a pale face brought in a huge pile of records which she requested that he play and which he adamantly refused to do. It occurred to him that the girls simply did not have the ability to handle discussion, that in all cases where discussion was initiated it degenerated rapidly into gossip or vituperation or argument, that the concept of reason was alien to them, that in fact the long line of philosophers beginning with Plato was irrelevant to them. For a long time they brought in records now that they knew he had a record player but he refused to play any of them. Hadn’t he gone far enough by playing ‘Paper Roses’? No, he was damned if he would go the whole hog and surrender completely. And yet, he sensed that somewhere in this area of their interest was what he wanted, that from here he might find the lever which would move their world.
He noticed that their leader was a girl called Tracy, a fairly tall pleasant-looking girl to whom they all seemed to turn for response or rejection. Nor was this girl stupid: nor were any of them stupid. He knew that he must hang on to that, he must not believe that they were stupid. When they did come into the room it was as if they were searching for substance, a food which he could not provide. He began to study Tracy more and more as if she might perhaps give him the solution to his problem, but she did not appear interested enough to do so. Now and again she would hum the words of a song while engaged in combing another girl’s hair, an activity which would satisfy them for hours, and indeed some of the girls had said to him, ‘Tracy has a good voice, sir. She can sing any pop song you like.’ And Tracy had regarded him with the sublime self-confidence of one who indeed could do this. But what use would that be to him? More and more he felt himself, as it were, sliding into their world when what he had wanted was to drag them out of the darkness into his world. That was how he himself had been taught and that was how it should be. And the weeks passed and he had taught them nothing. Their jotters were blank apart from the words of pop songs and certain secret drawings of their own. Yet they were human beings, they were not stupid. That there was no such thing as stupidity was the faith by which he lived. In many ways they were quicker than he was, they found out more swiftly than he did the dates of examinations and holidays. They were quite reconciled to the fact that they would not be able to pass any examinations. They would say,
‘We’re the stupid ones, sir.’ And yet he would not allow them that easy option, the fault was not with them, it was with him. He had seen some of them serving in shops, in restaurants, and they were neatly dressed, good with money and polite. Indeed they seemed to like him, and that made matters worse for he felt that he did not deserve their liking. They are not fed, he quoted to himself from Lycidas, as he watched them at the checkout desks of supermarkets flashing a smile at him, placing the messages in bags much more expertly than he would have done. And indeed he felt that a question was being asked of him but not at all pressingly. At night he would read Shakespeare and think, There are some people to whom all this is closed. There are some who will never shiver as they read the lines
Absent thee from felicity awhile
and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
to tell my story.
If he had read those lines to them they would have thought that it was Hamlet saying farewell to a girl called Felicity, he thought wryly. He smiled for the first time in weeks. Am I taking this too seriously, he asked himself. They are not taking it seriously. Shakespeare is not necessary for hairdressing. As they endlessly combed each other’s hair he thought of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens and the line
wi gowd kaims in their hair.
These girls were entirely sensuous, words were closed to them. They would look after babies with tenderness but they were not interested in the alien world of language.
Or was he being a male chauvinist pig? No, he had tried everything he could think of and he had still failed. The fact was that language, the written word, was their enemy, McLuhan was right after all. The day of the record player and television had transformed the secure academic world in which he had been brought up. And yet he did not wish to surrender, to get on with correction while they sat talking quietly to each other, and dreamed of the jobs which were in fact shut against them. School was simply irrelevant to them, they did not even protest, they withdrew from it gently and without fuss. They had looked at education and turned away from it. It was their indifferent gentleness that bothered him more than anything. But they also had the maturity to distinguish between himself and education, which was a large thing to do. They recognised that he had a job to do, that he wasn’t at all unlikeable and was in fact a prisoner like themselves. But they were already perming some woman’s hair in a luxurious shop.
The more he pondered, the more he realised that they were the key to his failure or success in education. If he failed with them then he had failed totally, a permanent mark would be left on his psyche. In some way it was necessary for him to change, but the point was, could he change to the extent that was demanded of him, and in what direction and with what purpose should he change? School for himself had been a discipline and an order but to them this discipline and order had become meaningless.
The words on the blackboard were ghostly and distant as if they belonged to another age, another universe. He recalled what Morrison had said, ‘You must find out what they want to do’, but they themselves did not know what they wanted to do, it was for him to tell them that, and till he told them that they would remain indifferent and apathetic. Sometimes he sensed that they themselves were growing tired of their lives, that they wished to prove themselves but didn’t know how to set about it. They were like lost children, irrelevantly stored in desks, and they only lighted up like street lamps in the evening or when they were working in the shops. He felt that they were the living dead, and he would have given anything to see their eyes become illuminated, become interested, for if he could find the magic formula he knew that they would become enthusiastic, they were not stupid. But how to find the magic key which would release the sleeping beauties from their sleep? He had no idea what it was and felt that in the end if he ever discovered it he would stumble over it and not be led to it by reflection or logic. And that was exactly what happened.
One morning he happened to be late coming into the room and there was Tracy swanning about in front of the class, as if she were wearing a gown, and saying some words to them he guessed in imitation of himself, while at the same time uncannily reproducing his mannerisms, leaning for instance despairingly across his desk, his chin on his hand while at the same time glaring helplessly at the class. It was like seeing himself slightly distorted in water, slightly comic, frustrated and yet angrily determined. When he opened the door there was a quick scurry and the class had arranged themselves, presenting blank dull faces as before. He pretended he had seen nothing, but knew now what he had to do. The solution had come to him as a gift from heaven, from the gods themselves, and the class sensed a new confidence and purposefulness in his voice.
‘Tracy,’ he said, ‘and Lorna.’ He paused. ‘And Helen. I want you to come out here.’
They came out to the floor looking at him uneasily. O my wooden O, he said to himself, my draughty echo help me now.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve been
thinking. It’s quite clear to me that you don’t want to do any writing, so we won’t do any writing. But I’ll tell you what we’re going to do instead. We’re going to act.’
A ripple of noise ran through the class, like the wind on an autumn day, and he saw their faces brightening. The shades of Shakespeare and Sophocles forgive me for what I am to do, he prayed.
‘We are going,’ he said, ‘to do a serial and it’s going to be called “The Rise of a Pop Star”.’ It was as if animation had returned to their blank dull faces, he could see life sparkling in their eyes, he could see interest in the way they turned to look at each other, he could hear it in the stir of movement that enlivened the room.
‘Tracy,’ he said, ‘you will be the pop star. You are coming home from school to your parents’ house. I’m afraid,’ he added, ‘that as in the reverse of the days of Shakespeare the men’s parts will have be to be acted by the girls. Tracy, you have decided to leave home. Your parents of course disapprove. But you want to be a pop star, you have always wanted to be one. They think that that is a ridiculous idea. Lorna, you will be the mother, and Helen, you will be the father.’
He was astonished by the manner in which Tracy took over, by the ingenuity with which she and the other two created the first scene in front of his eyes. The scene grew and became meaningful, all their frustrated enthusiasm was poured into it.
First of all without any prompting Tracy got her school bag and rushed into the house while Lorna, the mother, pretended to be ironing on a desk that was quickly dragged out into the middle of the floor, and Helen the father read the paper, which was his own Manchester Guardian snatched from the top of his desk.
‘Well, that’s it over,’ said Tracy, the future pop star.
‘And what are you thinking of doing with yourself now?’ said the mother, pausing from her ironing.
The Black Halo Page 32
