Primary School

Carluke Primary School is now a bright, modern building. In the sixties it wasn't. It was a soot-stained sandstone edifice conceived in the days before electric lighting. This meant that ceilings had to be high to accommodate large windows. The knock-on effect was that the place was intimidating. Classrooms, their walls painted in an insipid institutional yellow, had wooden floors which bulged suspiciously when the rain got in. Large heating pipes ran round their sides. You could melt your crayons on them. If someone was sick or widdled on the floor, a gigantic janitor was summoned to sprinkle sawdust on the mess. This he would do without comment or facial movement.

The fierce-ish Mrs Glenmuir of primary seven doubled as the school nurse. With a permanent stoop and a voice wrecked by staffroom smoke, she was a woman of dark coloured clothing. She had a remedy for all ills. It was the same remedy: bicarbonate of soda and water, even for wasp stings, which it exacerbated.

Our street was in a rather undeveloped part of the town and was best reached by tramping over a dirt track. We had to wear wellington boots in winter, when the path turned to mud. This meant taking slippers to change into at school because, according to my mother (and I could almost hear the horror chord sequence when she told us) wellies were bad for your feet if you wore them indoors.

The predominant school smells were TCP, brick-red soap, melting crayons and feet. Bicarbonate of soda appeared to be odourless.

On a good day, the classrooms, brightly decorated with our pictures and posters, were pleasant enough places to be. The same could never be said of the toilets. The water closets were in an unlit cowshed of a building. Some of the cisterns were too large for the pans so it was a case of flush and run if an impromptu footwash was to be avoided. Urinals were roofless and unplumbed. When the wind blew the wrong way during a peeing up the wall contest it was advisable to approach the building wearing full wet weather gear. Some boys preferred to ignore the restrictions of the channelling round the walls and used all available floor space for their liquid waste disposal. One lad in particular had an incredible range and capacity. Swinging his willie with both hands like Luke Skywalker practising with his light sabre, he would produce an ornamental sine wave that sparkled in the sun. He was the first true piss artist I ever met. If you think that I'm being gratuitously vulgar then you weren't there.

Canteen facilities seemed to have been consciously designed to reinforce every negative stereotype of school meals. I developed gastric impotence, where the desire to please my teacher by clearing my plate led to a complete loss of appetite. The food wasn't cooked on the premises. BMC trucks, grey ones with extra windows at the driver's feet, brought it in stainless steel drums. If this still happened then these lorries would have to be subjected to the same stringent crash tests normally reserved for transporters of spent uranium fuel rods or anthrax samples.

Mince rolled grittily over the tongue. It was an Arthurian task to remove a spoon from any of the desserts apart from the runny pink custard. Mushy peas could have Artexed a troll's ceiling. Worst of all were the potatoes. Haloed in a semi-luminous fuzz, they tasted the way a wet dog smells. After a couple of weeks I was walking a mile home to get a decent midday meal. Packed lunches hadn't been invented then.

Its shortcomings with respect to the ends of the digestive tract aside, Carluke Primary was, for its time and for a pupil like me, a good enough place to be taught. After I accepted that I had to go there I was not exactly happy, walking towards school as if through snowdrifts whilst attached to my house by a large bungee rope and returning home as if attached to my house by the same bungee rope. Picture the be-shorted legs blurring and the grey-clad arms cycling as I made my escape. But I was learning to read and count.