The Green Years
Page 5
I blenched. Looking closely at my sleeve I now perceived in the material a faint stripe, composed of little raised whirls: oh, heavens, a pattern of roses, beautiful for Grandma’s petticoat, but scarcely the thing for me.
“Let me put on my old suit for this morning, Grandma.”
“A pack of nonsense! I cut it up for dusters last night.”
Grandma’s praise of her creation sent me from the room partly convinced, but immediately Murdoch dashed me to the ground. Meeting me on the stairs he stopped in mock terror, shielding his eyes, then lay back against the banisters with a wild guffaw. “ It’s come! It’s come at last!”
In the kitchen Mama’s odd silence, her air of extra kindness as she handed me my porridge, did not reassure me.
I went out into the cold grey morning, unnerved, conscious that on the whole of that drab, wintry Scottish landscape there was one strange vernal note: myself. People turned round to gaze after me. In my timid shame, I shunned the main street and took the “Common way,” a quieter but longer road, which made me late for school.
After some difficulty, having lost myself in the corridors, I found the second standard—to which, on Kate’s recommendation, I had been assigned. The partition was thrown back, the double class assembled, as I entered; and Mr. Dalgleish, at his desk, had already given out the first lesson. I tried to edge, unobserved, to a vacant desk, but the master stopped me in the middle of the floor. He was not, as I discovered, a habitual tyrant, for he had days of splendid affability when he dowered us with a wealth of interesting knowledge; but there were other spells, dark and bitter, when a glowering devil seemed to rage within him. And I now saw, with dismay, from the manner in which he chewed the corner of his moustache, that his mood was unfavourable. I expected a reprimand for my lateness. But he did not shout at me. Instead he climbed down from his desk and walked round me in a leisurely fashion, with his head slightly to one side. The class sat up, startled and excited.
“So!” he said at last. “We are the new boy. And it appears we have a new suit. The age of miracles is not over.”
A titter of expectancy went round. I was silent.
“Come, sir, don’t sulk at us. Where did ye buy it? Miller’s in the High Street or the Co-operative Stores?”
Pale to the lips, I whispered: “ My great-grandma made it, sir.”
A roar of laughter from the class. Mr. Dalgleish, his blood-threaded eye unsmiling, continued to walk round me.
“A remarkable colour. But appropriate. We understand you are of Hibernian extraction?”
Great laugher from the class. In all that amphitheatre of grinning faces, magnified by my shrinking sensibilities to the vastness of a colosseum, yet seen minutely, vividly, there were only two that did not smile. Gavin Blair, in the front row, was gazing at the master with a kind of cold contempt; Alison Keith, across her lesson book, kept her brown, troubled eyes steadily upon me.
“Answer my question, sir? Are you or are you not a disciple of Saint Patrick?”
“I don’t know.”
“He does not know.” The sneering tone took on amazement, a more leisured deliberation; the class rolled about the benches with merriment. “ He bursts upon us, garlanded, as it were, with shamrocks, the walking apotheosis of that heart-moving ballad ‘The Wearing of the Green,’ yet he blushes to admit that the holy water still bedews his brow …”
This continued until, suddenly, he turned and, with a cold stare, stilled the class. Then he spoke to me in his natural voice.
“It may interest you to know that I taught your mother. It looks now as if I wasted my time. Sit over there.”
Trembling and humiliated, I stumbled to my place.
I hoped that this might end my suffering. Alas, it was only the beginning. At playtime I was surrounded, by a crowing, jeering mob. Already I had been marked as someone different from the others, now I was confirmed as a freak amongst the herd.
Bertie Jamieson and Hamish Boag were my worst tormentors.
“Green’s the colour! Blue’s its mother.” The wit was cruder than Mr. Dalgleish’s, but it followed the same pattern. The unhappy petticoat of an old woman had stirred racial and religious hatreds to their dregs. At the lunch hour I locked myself in one of the cubicles of the lavatory, my piece of bread, spread with rhubarb jam and wrapped in paper, resting untouched on my knees. But I was discovered and forced out to the light of day.
That afternoon we had drill, which was conducted in the school hall by the janitor, an ex-sergeant of the Volunteers. Here, as I removed my jacket with the others, Bertie Jamieson and Hamish Boag approached me with a threatening air. Bertie was a loutish boy with a bulging forehead who was always running and scrambling with the girls. He said: “We’re going to give it to you after.”
“But what for?” I faltered.
“For being a dirty little Papist.”
During the next hour, I excuted my “arms raise” and “ knees bend” in shivering foreboding. Whenever the exercises were over and the janitor had gone I was crowded back into the hall cloakroom. Most of the bigger boys were there, and when I had been pushed and kicked into a corner, Jamieson, catching hold of my arm, began to twist it painfully behind my back. In trying to escape I slipped and fell. Immediately, while Hamish Boag collared my legs, Jamieson sat on my chest and began to bang my head on the floor.
“Give it to him, Bertie,” cried several voices. “ Knock the stuffing out of him.”
This gave Jamieson an idea. He released my hair and exchanged a glance with the others. “ Who’s got a knife? We’ll see if he’s green inside as well as out.”
“No, Bertie, no,” I cried. I could scarcely speak for the frightened beating of my heart. Suddenly the bell rang and they were obliged to let me up. As I reached the corridor, from which we were to march to the classroom, Mr. Dalgleish, waiting, with his hand on the tongue of the bell, gazed at my dusty dishevelled form.
“What’s all this?”
The others answered for me—a sycophantic chorus: “ Nothing, sir.” Then little Howie, pert as a squirrel, cried out from behind: “We were just admiring Shannon’s new green suit, sir.”
Mr. Dalgleish smiled sourly.
All that week I felt the full misery of life. There was no end to the violations committed upon me. After school, opposite the Church of the Holy Angels, which stood quite near the Academy, there was usually collected a predatory band. Though I had never put foot within the edifice I was ribaldly urged to nip in and have my sins forgiven, to rifle the poor box, to kiss the priest’s toe—and other portions of his anatomy. My tormentors were merciless and when, in desperation, I struck out at them I was always overwhelmed by the mob.
To avoid them, constantly on the lookout and ready to run, I took circuitous and unfrequented paths—especially the “ Common way,” which led past the Boilerworks; yet even here I was not immune—that dreadful suit was on my back and the young engineers and fitters from the works would shout: “Hey! Green Breeks! Does your mother know you’re out?” Their remarks were good-natured, yet, by now, I was too cowed to know the difference between humour and abuse. I sank deeper into despair, I made a bungle of my homework, blotted all my copy-books in class, I was behaving like a halfwit. Once when Mr. Dalgleish asked me to stand and recite a poem we had learned I hesitated so long he shouted: “What are you waiting for?” I answered absently, vacantly: “Please, sir, for my green suit.” Stupefied silence. Then a great howl of laughter.
I could endure it no longer. That evening I burst into Grandpa’s room. The first whiff of the familiar fusty yet beloved smell—tears gushed from my eyes. Since Grandma had adopted me our estrangement had been complete, and though I had been prepared to offer him my forgiveness, he had passed me with his head in the air, wearing his chilly, aloof, disdainful smile, meeting my stammered explanation with the indifferent remark: “Sleep with who you like, my boy.” Now, he was seated, philosophically, yet with a certain air of apathy, doing nothing.
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��Grandpa,” I wept.
He turned slowly. Was I mistaken? Or did his eye brighten at the sight of me? A pause.
“I thought ye’d come back,” he said, simply; then, unable to resist his dreadful sententiousness, he added: “Old friends are better than new.”
Chapter Six
Calmed at last and seated on Grandpa’s knee—joyful proof of our reconciliation—I poured out my heart. He listened to me in silence. Then, with a firm hand, he took a charged pipe from his rack.
“There’s only one thing to do,” he said, in his most reasonable voice—and oh, how, after days of bedlam, I blessed its tranquil logic. “ The question is, will ye do it?”
“I’ll do it,” I cried fervently. “ I will, I will, I will.”
He lit his pipe and took a few calm puffs.
“Who is the strongest … sturdiest … stubbornest boy in your class?”
I need reflect only an instant: there was but one answer to that question. Unhesitatingly I declared: “Gavin Blair.”
“The Provost’s son?”
I nodded.
“Then——” He took his pipe from his lips. “You must fight Gavin Blair.”
I stared at him, appalled. Gavin was not really one of my tormentors. He had kept himself contemptuously aloof from the whole miserable disturbance. Indeed, at the Academy, he had only spoken to me twice. He was a superior boy: bright yet self-contained, the top boy of the class, a favourite even with Dalgleish. In all the games he was the best; it was acknowledged that he could beat Bertie Jamieson with one hand behind his back. I tried to explain this to Grandpa.
“Are you feared?” he asked.
I hung my head, thinking of Gavin’s wiry figure, small yet determined chin, his clear grey eye. Unlike the heroic boys of the fiction which had come my way, I was painfully afraid.
“I don’t know how to fight.”
“I’ll learn you. I’ll take a week and learn you. It’s not size that counts but spirit.” He shrugged his shoulders. “ We’ll write a letter to Dalgleish if you like, asking him to speak to the boys. But they’ll scorn ye all the more for it. It’s a matter of principle, to go in and whip the best of them. Will ye do it?”
I shivered; yet, strangely, in my extremity I found a certain resolution: perhaps the sort which makes suicides jump off high buildings. I gulped an incoherent: “Yes.”
My training began that same evening after I had dried the dishes for Mama. It was agreed that Grandma should be kept in complete ignorance of our design. Grandpa placed me in a series of stiff and uncomfortable attitudes with my knuckles advanced and my chin so drawn in I could see nothing but my own boots. Facing me in a corresponding pose, he then commanded me to “ let go with my left,” which I did with such precipitancy I caught him full in the midriff, doubling him up, gasping, in his chair.
“Oh, Grandpa,” I cried, shocked. “I did not mean to hurt you.”
He was very cross. I had not in the least hurt him, it was merely that I had taken a most ungentlemanly advantage in striking him in a region known as “ below the belt.” When he had got his wind back he lectured me severely on foul blows, then sent me out to run to the road end and back to improve my legs.
In the days which followed he strove hard to advance me in the noble art of self-defence. He told me bloody and inspiring stories of Jem Mace, Gentleman Jim, and Billy the Butcher, who had fought eighty-two rounds with a broken jaw and one ear hanging off. He bade me drink no water, or as little as I could, to toughen my skin. He even sacrificed his dinnertime cheese, the one food he cared about, making me eat it slowly as I stood before him while a bead of saliva ran down his whiskers.
“There’s nothing like Dunlop cheese, boy, to put real pith in you.” I did not doubt him, but I suffered dreadfully from heartburn.
On Saturday afternoon he took me along with him to the cemetery and demonstrated me to his friends. As I struck my pugilistic postures before them he explained, darkly, the reason for the coming conflict. I heard the Saddler laugh offensively.
“What about your grand ideas now, Gow? You’re aye talking about live and let live, and yet you start a fight.”
“Saddler,” Grandpa answered stiffly, “ sometimes it is necessary to fight so that we can live.”
This silenced Mr. Boag but I could see he held a poor view of my prospects of success.
The fateful day dawned. Grandpa called me to his room as I crossed the landing and solemnly shook me by the hand.
“Remember,” he said, looking me in the eyes: “Anything … but don’t be feared.”
I felt like bursting into tears—despite Grandpa’s cheese the soft and tender years at my poor mother’s apron strings were not entirely undone. What made it worse was that, although my persecution had not abated, Gavin had lately shown signs of taking my part: he had cuffed Bertie Jamieson for shouldering too roughly in a game of Hopping Charlie, and once, in class, seeing me in need of a rubber, had silently pushed his own across to me. But I had given my word to Grandpa, and nothing, nothing must hold me back. The hour selected for me by my mentor was four o’clock, immediately following the dismissal of school. All day long, in a continuous tremor, I sat watching Gavin’s calm, intent, intelligent face across the classroom. He was handsome, with deep-set dark-lashed eyes, a short proud upperlip: it was a Highland face, for his father was from Perth and his dead mother had been a Campbell from Inveraray. To-day, perhaps because he was going out with his grown-up sister that evening, he wore his kilt, the dark Blair tartan, austere leather sporran, black brogues. Once or twice his eyes touched mine, which must have seemed strangely pleading. My heart lay heavy in my side. I felt almost that I loved him. Yet I must fight him.
Four strokes from the old clock in the tall grey tower of the Academy … My last hope that Mr. Dalgleish would keep me in had vanished. I was dismissed with the others, I was even crossing the playground, Gavin striding ahead of me, his satchel slung carelessly across his back. The need for urgency—if I were not to return to Grandpa a pitiful failure—goaded me beyond my senses. Suddenly, I ran forward and pushed Gavin hard. He spun round to find me confronting him with my fists arranged one on top of the other, rather as though I were holding a candle in a procession.
“Knock down the blocks.” I croaked out the phrase, which, in case it is not fully recognized, is the traditional invitation to combat in Levenford. Immediately a shout, between wonder and expectation, went up from the other boys. “A fight! Gavin and Shannon. A fight! A fight!”
Gavin flushed—his fair skin coloured easily—and he glanced in annoyance at the ring of boys who already swarmed round us. He must accept the challenge, feeble though it was. With the palm of his hand he slapped my fists apart. Immediately I set them up again, holding them sideways from my body.
“Spit over the blocks.”
Gavin spat expertly over the blocks.
I proceeded with the ritual. With boots that seemed dissevered from my fluid legs I traced a wavering line on the gravel surface of the playground.
“I dare ye to step over it.”
Gavin, I perceived with dread, was growing angry. He promptly stepped over it.
I trembled in all my bones. Only the final act remained. Dead silence from the surrounding boys. With dry lips I whispered: “Give the coward’s blow.”
He rapped me, without hesitation, on the chest. How hollow my breastbone sounded—as though made of cardboard! How pale I felt myself to be! But there was no retreat. I clenched my chattering teeth and rushed at the beloved Gavin.
I forgot everything Grandpa had taught me, everything. My thin arms flailed the air in wild circular sweeps. I hit Gavin often, but always in the hardest and most resistant areas, like his elbows, his cheekbones, and especially the square metal buttons of his kilt. The unfairness of these dreadful buttons moved me to a surging bitterness. Always when I struck him I seemed to hurt him much less than I hurt myself. While his blows, on the contrary, sank painfully into my softest places.
He went down before me. Deathly stillness. Then, as Gavin got up, the voice of little Howie, the squirrel: “ You only slipped, Gavin. Give it to him! Give it to him!”
Gavin was more cautious now. He circled a good deal and did not appear to enjoy my rushes. We were both the worse for wear, and breathing like steam engines. I was flushed and warm, the clammy coldness had left my skin. I observed with strange wonder that one of his eyes was of a purplish hue and closing fast. Had I really inflicted such a mischief, on such a hero? Then, through the haze, the tumult, the confusion, a voice fell deliriously on my ear. One of the “big” boys, from the upper forms … A group had stopped on their way to the gymnasium.
“By God! Green Breeks is making a fight of it!”
Joy and ecstasy! I was not disgracing my grandpa. I was not such a coward as I had feared. I rushed again at my dear Gavin, as though ready to embrace him. Suddenly, but without intention, as we wrestled about, he raised his head.
I received the stunning impact of his skull upon my nose.
It began to bleed. I could taste the warm saltiness in my mouth, feel the river running down my nostrils, splashing all over my front. Heavens! I never knew there was so much blood in my puny body. I was not in the least inconvenienced. My brain, indeed, was more and more clear, though my legs, once again, had ceased to belong to me. Dizzily, I landed my knuckles once again on Gavin’s buttons. Dazzling lights, shouts, rockets in the sky … Halley’s Comet, perhaps! I was still swinging my arms when I discovered that someone was holding me back. Another of the big boys had Gavin by the collar in like fashion.