Sitting having a tea and scone with
my mum, she told me once again about how much I had hated going to primary
school. Sadly, I can no longer be sure that her memories are accurate. I cried
a few times when I started school - this is not in doubt- but
apparently my teacher used to skelp me so that she knew I had something to cry
about.
By the time I got to P5, I had come
to a grudging acceptance that I had to go to school. At that stage, I would have described Mrs
White as my favourite teacher when she wasn't firing off an ill-considered rant
at some unfortunate wean, but on reflection that might have been the Stockholm
Syndrome kicking in. I had her in primary five. She was based in a bright, airy
annexe with normal-height ceilings and bitumen floors pock-marked by the
stilleto heels of ladies younger than the nearing-retirement Mrs White. Mrs
White was one of the most unfair teachers I ever had. She never relented in
attempting to wring the best out of her pupils. This could involve storming
theatrically around the class dispensing insults or shooting first and asking
questions later. A wee boy had written "damny" on every page of his
daily story book. If she'd thought about it before she hauled him off to the
headmaster, Mrs White would have realised that he was not using profane
language. Rather, he was failing to spell "diary".
I was the subject of Mrs White's
displeasure several times. One day I brought in a crude electric light circuit
I had constructed. Mrs White praised me and said that Mr White, her secondary
science teacher husband, could show me how to build a small table lamp.
"Oh.. eh... I might have a book that would show me that," I
stammered. I was only nine and shy of meeting an unfamiliar adult. Mrs White
failed to or chose not to appreciate this. On more than one occasion she
berated me in front of the class or another teacher for preferring learning
from a book to being shown how to do something by a real live person. She
quoted the "I might have a book..." line back at me, clearly
inferring that I must think myself very superior to Mr White since I would not
condescend to be in his presence when a book was there as an alternative. If
this was her way of persuading me not to be shy then it didn't work.
Another of my apparent faults was
that I watched ITV. What pre-teen boy wouldn't when that broadcaster screened
all the Gerry Anderson puppet series? Mrs White was immune to the virtues of
Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds and didn't like ITV because of the adverts. When
the commercial channel produced Ivanhoe, she made an exception. Did I watch
Ivanhoe? No? Why not? Did I find Sir Walter Scott a bit beneath me? Mr White
didn't.
Some of Mrs White's insults seemed
to predate Sir Walter. "Galloot" and "gomeril" were two of
her best. She also had a tendency to announce that "someone in the class
does not exactly smell like a sweet lily." Stupidly, she once told my pal
he'd never be as bright as his sister. Does anybody still do that, and why
didn't it seem like a bad idea, even then?
If a teacher had spoken to either
of my own children like that I would have done something about it. But this was
the sixties. Things were different then. Better? Only if you read the Daily
Mail. As to Mrs White, she would have been horrific if that was all there was
to her. To be fair, it was the vehemence of her put-downs rather than their
frequency that was notable. She could be magic. She read to us with expression,
humour and feeling. She was excellent at encouraging an interest in nature or
science. It was in her class I wrote the "when I grow up" story which
predicted that I would be a science teacher. I think Mrs White would be pleased
that I actually did become one. She could certainly take some of the credit
even if she did once suggest I should be a doctor, on the strength of my
appalling prescription-style writing.
When it came down to it, Mrs White
was a part-time lovely old lady who turned into a wolf every now and again. I
thrived in her class on
the days I didn't hate going there.
P7 teacher Mrs Glenmuir doubled as the school
nurse. She had a cure for every ailment. It was bicarbonate of soda. I didn't
do too badly in her class, despite a formative experience there that seemed to
be designed to knock any tendency towards lateral thinking sideways. Run the
tape:
The class are doing an
interpretation exercise called "The Bottle of Salad Cream" It begins:
"Regular customers at our restaurant are always amused when someone picks
up the bottle of salad cream..." there follows an account of the amusing
but flawed techniques employed by diners to dispense the glutinous liquid. The
first of the questions asks: "Do you think the restaurant in the passage
was a good one?" Of course it wasn't. They'd have a fresh bottle of salad
cream on every table if it was. But wait... was there not another possible
answer? I thought so.
When the exercise is complete, Mrs
Glenmuir goes over it. Did we think the restaurant was a good one? A forest of
hands goes up. "No," answers John Sculler, redeeming himself from the
time he was overheard saying: "Shite!"
"And why
not?"
"They
would have a fresh bottle of salad cream on every table if it was a good
restaurant."
"Correct. Did anyone think it was a good restaurant?" Two hands
go up. One belongs to a shilpit lassie with straw-coloured hair and clothes
made of artificial fibres. The other belongs to me (doubtlessly also wearing
artificial fibres). Mrs Glenmuir's skeletal frame re-arranges itself in light
of this deviation.
"Why do you think that?" she asks the shilpit lassie in a tone
of practised exasperation. The girl shakes her bowed head. Her eyes are turning
pink, like a white rabbit's. Mrs Glenmuir turns to me. "And what about you?" she says, turning the
practised exasperation up to gas mark 7.
"Well,
if it wasn't a good restaurant, they wouldn't have any regular customers,"
I venture.
"That's
a really interesting slant, Gregor. Overall, I disagree with you but I see
where you're coming from," Mrs Glenmuir doesn't say. What she does say is:
"Ooooorgh!" It is a noise like a steel pipe sliding off the
back of a lorry.
So that was me tellt.
Mrs Glenmuir fancied herself as a
linguist. Every morning, she greeted us with: "Bong sure maze ong-fongs!
Commong tally vooz?" Dutifully we would reply: "Noose along bee hen
mad dam."
"Aye,
youse will be at an advantage when you get to the big school after all the
French I've taught you," she once told us, though her exposition of the
language never went beyond the daily greeting. It is easy to caricature
teachers like Mrs Glenmuir by picking on their hobby horses or predilections
for powdered alkalis. It's not very fair either. They taught us English and
arithmetic, a little history and geography and not very much else unless they
did have an interest in science or languages. It was all they had to do in
those days. They taught us the way that they had been taught themselves. If you
responded to that kind of teaching, you did well. If you didn’t, the problem was
yours. My only problem was that I wanted to be somewhere else and often,
mentally, I was.
