A musical interlude

Miss Quatermass the singing teacher used to visit our primary school - in the sense that a plague visits - once a week. She was a monstrous regiment of a woman clad in paisley pattern curtains, a creature with large-pored foam rubber skin and a brittle undulation of translucent peach hair. Her face would probably have looked less fearsome inside out. Utterly humourless, she tolerated no misbehaviour of any description. "Someone's talking!" she once boomed. "I can always tell when someone is talking. Long, invisible tendrils come out of my ears and reach every corner of the class." This was all the proof I needed that I was dealing with a Doctor Who alien, and a malevolent one at that.

Miss Quatermass taught the doh ray me's, complete with hand signals. A deaf observer of our class might have concluded that three dozen reluctant nine year-olds were being coerced into shaking hands with wave upon wave of invisible freemasons of varying height. Never shy of letting us know how she had suffered for her art, Miss Quatermass once informed us that, as a little girl she had to protect her piano-playing hands at all costs. If she fell, she had to throw them upwards and land flat on her face. That explained a lot, viz-a-viz her visage, though in later years her more than ample chest undoubtedly bounced her straight back up again.

Visible over the top and at both sides of the piano simultaneously, our teacher would direct us to the page in our song book that contained the lyrics to that all time classic and virtual anthem of Carluke, the Devon Song. We got Burns too, but the foisting of "The Bold Men of Devon" on the terrified weans of Lanarkshire was merely one example of the incongruous choices our teacher made for us.

We had two or three periods of respite from this sort of thing. In primary three a young man briefly took over from Miss Quatermass. He broke the previously established laws of music and smiled as he sang as if he was enjoying himself and expected us to do so too. We did. Then, like all good Doctor Who monsters, Old Granny Quatermass was back. And you thought she'd been destroyed with her spaceship in the last series.

In the days before Mr Peebles was the headteacher, our primary school held assemblies every morning. These were in the charge of a beaming, white-haired gentleman whose name I remember as Mr Crappy, though this was surely not the case. Mr Crappy used to conduct the singing of the hymn - always the same one - we sang to start the day. It was for impersonating him that I was given my worst punishment of being made to sing in front of the rest of the class.

Whilst his efforts to keep us in time were laudable, Mr Crappy would have been still more effective as a musical director had he taught the words of the song. It appeared that no one had done this for years. The result was that not one of the three hundred children knew what he or she should have been singing, other than by a bizarre musical version of Chinese Whispers. "Mee showassal dazzal!" we belted out quasi-religiously. "Parra mee see oom!" It was a metaphor for so much of life that was to come.

Metaphors could doubtless be found to describe Mrs Fairylight, my first secondary school music teacher. In the absence of any good ones, the word "bonkers" would do. Looking like a sit-com elderly relative of the non-Lady Bracknell type, she'd smile at us and explain the theory of musical notation. This had something to do with all cows eating grass and every good boy deserving favour. "This note has a tail!" she informed us, "just like a pussy cat." She drew such a note on the interestingly-lined blackboard. "And this note has two tails," she continued, "what a funny pussy cat!" We must have been a pretty tame bunch. Rather than riot we merely admired the view from the best-placed room in the school or sang "So Sir Page" in a variety of Monty Python funny voices.

Although she treated us as sub-primary, Mrs Fairylight was an improvement on Miss Quatermass. Battiness was better than ill temper. Mrs Fairylight had a secret weapon in her armoury too. It was the glockenspiel and it added variety to the subject. They all had two missing black keys. Perhaps our teacher had hung them round the necks of her funny pussy cats to warn the birds. Plink, plink, plonk, I went, half a beat behind everybody else, my innately cautious personality forcing me to wait to hear what the rest of the class were playing before committing myself.

In second year a new music teacher arrived, almost too late to make a difference. Her name was Miss Vincent and she wore a vampire bat cloak. She was very strict at first, but only so that she could establish some ground rules. After a month or so things got more interesting. We were invited to bring in our own records.

Ronald McDonald, the second year king of the bootleg rock tape, took up her offer. He brought in albums by Uriah Heep and Status Quo. The latter had a lyrics sheet supplied. Miss Vincent asked Ronald to read out the words of the song he proposed to play.

Ronald was an early developer whose voice had not so much broken as collapsed in on itself like a crumbling Victorian drain. "Spent a low down evening in a low down honky-tonk bar," he intoned gravely. "Pulled a low down lady in a long black honky-tonk car..."

Miss Quatermass would have exploded, taking most of the Clyde Valley with her. Mrs Fairylight would have grabbed her funny pussy cats and shut herself inside her piano. Miss Vincent was of a different breed. She simply explained why she didn't care much for Status Quo but had a lot more respect for Uriah Heep.

We had seen the future.