A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  ‘They’re not weans,’ he shouted. ‘They’re innocent children. And Christ has said unless ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Christ now, is it?’ cried his baffled mother. ‘You’d gar anybody grue so you would the way you talk. Moses! Christ!’

  She returned to the dishes in the basin in the sink.

  At that point in their friendly discussion he banged out of the house, scampered down the three storeys to the close, went into the littered smelly street and walked across the city to the University. He liked passing through the Main Entrance in University Avenue. He felt he was entering the land he should have inherited. He often walked through the University to comfort himself. When he crossed the Arts Quadrangle and approached the Bute Hall he felt happier and lighter. All his grudges dropped from him. He was where he ought to be. If the girl in the library could see him now she would think he was a student all right. A university student, that was the life.

  Bach’s music didn’t get over to him, but he was pleased to be sitting there while the choir and orchestra went through it. His attention drifted peacefully. Music always made his mind wander. That was why he liked to go to orchestral concerts. He felt liberated. So while the sopranos got lost in ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ he plunged contentedly through the jungle of his grievances.

  All he wanted was peace, peace and quiet, and he couldn’t get it. He wanted to be free from the need to earn his living so that he could be a poet like Shelley or make documentary films like Peter Scott or be a novelist like Tolstoy or even a television personality. He knew he had other talents too. He had helped to prepare and move the scenery when the Drew Rowan Youth Club put on a pantomime, and he enjoyed being back-stage. He knew he had a good sense of the theatre. He could produce plays, or he could travel round the world with a cinecamera and do a series about strange places and peculiar peoples. There was nothing hard in what David Atten- borough did. Anybody could do it. All you needed was money. Anything was possible if you had the money to give you the leisure to do it. He could be an authority on modern art. Nobody else in Packing and Dispatch had read the amount of stuff he had read on Picasso and Henry Moore. Shelley and Wordsworth had enough money to write poetry without having to work as well. If they had been a janitor’s son like him they wouldn’t have had the chance. If he had the money he could buy a house on some lonely part of the coast in Devon or Cornwall, and it would be peaceful enough there to be a poet. To be a poet you had to see things as children saw them, all fresh and unspoilt, like the smell of apples or the colour of the sky when the sun was setting behind the Campsies in summer or the touch of a cat’s fur or the taste of a glass of milk and a buttered roll. And because he liked to be with kids and listen to them blether so that he could keep roots in the world of his childhood people laughed at him. They said he was soft.

  They had said he was soft since the first day he went to school. He blamed it on his name. He hated it for years. Percy was a sloppy name. It was too uncommon in the tenements, too Kelvinside, too English, to get respect. It was worst in the qualifying class, where even the teacher made jokes about it. She kept on saying he was slow in arithmetic and backward in reading and poor at spelling and hopeless at composition. Her daily crack was to tell him he must persevere.

  ‘Ah, here’s Percy again,’ she said to the class every day when those with no sums right lined up for the strap. ‘He tries very hard. He’s very trying, is our Percy. It’s a fine old English name, Percy. So is Vere.’

  She raised his hand a little higher, straightened his palm, and addressed him as she strapped him.

  ‘Well, Percy, you must Percy Vere. That’s all.’

  And every day the boys and girls preparing for the eleven-plus examination laughed at the same joke and laughed at him. It was the girls’ laughter hurt him most. It fell from Heaven like the merriment of angels looking down on the antics of a clod-hopper who couldn’t get his big feet out of the mud. He grew sullen at Miss Elginbrod’s daily joke and one bright morning in May he challenged her. The room was stuffy in the early sun. Miss Elginbrod always kept the windows closed because she disliked draughts. His head was hot and he didn’t know what the sums were about. It was trains one minute and marbles the next, then it was rolls of cloth, then it was tons and quarts. One minute she was saying you add the speeds, then she was saying you subtract them. She kept on hopping about. You were just beginning to think you were bringing pounds to pennies when she made you bring pounds to ounces. She never gave you peace. So for the thousandth time he had only two sums finished out of the five, both wrong, and for the thousandth time she shrugged over him.

  ‘Well, Percy, you’ve just got to persevere, that’s all.’

  He faced her, rather round-shouldered because of his height. Even then he was much taller than other boys of his age, and it made him look gawky.

  ‘Please, miss,’ he said, and then his nerve failed.

  ‘Yes?’ said Miss Elginbrod, looking at him with patronizing patience, swinging the strap in a practice smack. ‘Is there something you don’t understand?’

  Her question gave him back his determination to oppose her.

  ‘I don’t understand why you call me Percy Vere. My name isn’t Percy Vere, it’s Percy Phinn.’

  An earthquake unpredicted by the eight o’clock weather forecast shook the class. A cyclone of laughter lifted the roof and a tornado of girlish screams whipped the walls apart. He felt himself naked to the wind and weather when he had expected to stand there proud and respected in an awed silence. He was frightened. There was never a mockery like this, clawing at him on all sides and tearing him apart to eat him up.

  For causing a disturbance in the class Miss Elginbrod gave him three hard ones with her strap, not the thin one she always had in her hand but the thick one she kept away at the back of her desk out of sight until she was really angry. And when she had done that she said he had been insolent, and gave him another three.

  When he was reborn at sixteen he looked back on his past life and blamed Miss Elginbrod for his failure in the examination. She had discouraged him. She ought to have seen he was a case of late development like Sir Winston Churchill. She ought to have seen his true merit and given him love and understanding. She wasn’t fit to be a teacher. People like her would have failed to see Shelley’s gifts when he was a boy at school. She had never even told him he had the same name as Shelley. She just made a joke of it. That proved she was so ignorant she didn’t know Shelley’s first name. He had to find it out for himself after he had left school. The discovery excited him. He stopped hating his name. He became proud of it. It made him something of a poet too. He read up on Shelley. In a biographical dictionary in the public library he found a sentence that he copied out and learned off by heart. ‘Percy was a boy of much sensibility, quick imagination, generous heart, and a refined type of beauty, blue-eyed and golden-haired.’ He hadn’t only the same name as Shelley, he had the same colour of eyes and the same colour of hair – though his mother said his hair was ‘like straw hinging oot a midden’. But his mother had no sensibility, no quick imagination. It was a mystery where his had come from. And he was a rebel too, just like Shelley. It was for being a rebel that Miss Elginbrod had given him six with her Lochgelly strap. Well, he would remember her, and when he was famous as a poet or a producer or an authority on modern art she would be ashamed of herself. But to get fame he would have to get leisure, and to get leisure he would have to get money. It always came back to money.

  ‘If only!’ he dreamed while the choir exulted in the Gloria. ‘If only I had enough money to live without having to go out to work every day. If only I had a private income like Shelley and Wordsworth. I could get peace then I’d show them. If only I’d got a fair deal out of life I could play my cards better.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  While Percy Phinn was attending Bach’s Mass a search- party was out from the gang that bowed to him as patron, chairman, a
nd final arbiter. They were frightened, and they wanted advice. Some of them laughed at Percy behind his back, some of them argued he was ‘dead clever’, but they all agreed he would never do them a dirty trick and they were all scared of him a little, especially when he fixed them with his big, sad eyes and lectured them on the good life. And now they needed help from somebody clever, somebody older, somebody they could trust. It could only be Percy. That was the unanimous decision, taken in full assembly in the cellar. But they couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in Johnny Hay’s billiards-room (billiards was the one game where he showed any talent), he wasn’t in the public library, he wasn’t in the house, he wasn’t at the corner watching the big girls go by, he wasn’t in the playground refereeing five-a-side football, he wasn’t at the swings pushing the kids higher and higher, he wasn’t anywhere. He had simply vanished. It showed how clever he was. They were baffled. They had never heard of the Bute Hall or Bach either. They were only ten or eleven years of age. Hughie Savage, the oldest of them, was not quite twelve. He couldn’t read very well, but he was shrewd and he could write out a three-cross double with no difficulty. He was far cleverer than his teachers ever suspected, and his line of humour was to put on a la-dee- da voice and speak in what he thought was an English accent. He had a big head on a bull neck and his ears stuck out like a couple of cabbages.

  The scattered groups of the search-party returned by arrangement to the cellar at half past nine. When they were all present for the second time that evening Savage took the chair and reported Percy’s disappearance. The chair he sat on was a high-legged one with a broken back and a foot-rail. It was the chair Miss Elginbrod had sat on when Percy was in her class, but the back spars and the shoulder-rest came off one afternoon when she threw a cheeky boy across the room. He fell against it and knocked it over. When he got to his feet he kicked it apart in a fury while Miss Elginbrod whipped him round the legs with her strap. She sent it to the janitor for repair, and the janitor put it away in the cellar till he could find time to look at it. Death found him first, and the chair had lain there ever since, in the cellar below the school, the secret headquarters of the gang that Percy sponsored.

  This was no picayune cellar. It was a sprawling low- roofed vault stretching below the main building and out under the playground, where it ended in an unexplored boundary of evil darkness. Not even Frank Garson had ever touched that far-off invisible wall, and when the Three High Clavigers of the Bethel Brotherhood ordered him to make a map of the cellar because Miss Elginbrod had praised his drawing and handwriting he left his sketch open at that side and along it he wrote in a scroll Here Be Rats. A door in the basement, at the end of an L-shaped line of wash-hand basins, opened to a dim and dangerous staircase that went steeply down to the bowels of the building, and that was commonly supposed to be the only door to the cellar. But because of the gradient on which the school was built there was another door to the cellar in Tulip Place, a blind alley round the corner from Bethel Street. It was a small, inconspicuous, dark-green door, hacked by many initials, and behind it was a chute. That was where the coal for the boilers had been delivered before the school changed over to electrical heating, and then the door was locked for good and forgotten.

  Percy had a key to it from his father’s days as janitor. Three other keys were cut from his and given to the three oldest members of the Brotherhood. The cellar became their church, the scene of enrolment, expulsion, and initiation rites. It was to be entered only from the blind alley after the school was locked up for the night. Percy found a word for the keyholders who alone had the power to permit entry. He got it when he was grazing in a dictionary in the reference room of the library. He called them the Clavigers. To be a Claviger in Percy’s gang was the highest rank you could reach. He gave himself the title of Regent Supreme because the boys knew those two words, but he went to great trouble to explain to them what they meant apart from their occurrence in a television advert.

  Over the undated years the cellar had become a junk- house, a dark neglected dump where people threw things they didn’t know what to do with. Scores of old registers, tied in tape and going back for decades, were stacked against a wall and crowned by bundles of ancient group mental tests and verbal ability tests, pupils’ record cards, report cards and medical histories. Nobody had ever dared destroy them. Such documents are intimidating. They have their own over-weening life. To burn them would be as brutal and immoral as committing murder. And you could never be sure they wouldn’t be wanted one day. Somebody might ask for the date of birth or the father’s name or the IQ of a pupil who had left years ago and was now in Barlinnie Prison for house-breaking. It would never do to reply, ‘The records have been destroyed.’ The whole point of keeping records is that they are kept after they are kept. Otherwise why keep them?

  Scattered alongside these sacred but forgotten documents there were blackboard compasses, blackboard rulers, pointers, pyramids, cones, cylinders and spheres, a carton of inkwells with the bakelite rims chipped off by vandals so that they fell through the hole cut for them in the pupils’ desks, the broken pole of a dead traffic warden, a punctured hose, brooms, spades, shovels and rakes, brown paper piled four feet high with the salvaged string wound round the sheets, a pail of stucco, a barrel half-full of washing-soda, empty bleach bottles put aside to be filled with ink made from a powder, political maps of Europe, Asia and Africa dating from before the First World War, a coal-scuttle and a stirrup pump. On one side of the outmoded boiler was a woodwork bench with a vice that wouldn’t screw up tight, and on the other a ziggurat of broken dual desks. In front of the desks was an old piano with occasional dumb keys. It had been put there twenty-two years ago, when an insistent music- teacher asked for and got a new piano. The janitor filled in the correct form to have the old one uplifted, but somehow nothing was ever done about it. On top of the piano was the large hand-bell that had been rung to assemble and dismiss the school before the electric bells were put in. It was a heavy bell, solid brass, and Savage said it was worth at least a fiver as scrap metal, but Percy wouldn’t let him hawk it.

  Across the cellar from the broken desks, under a tangle of legless chairs, educational publishers’ catalogues, pre- war copies of the Scottish Educational Journal, and five dozen derelict reading books called The Sunshine Way, were six tea-chests, three along and two deep, containing the costumes and small props used in the annual school concert. But there had been no annual concert for five years, and in that time there had been two new headmasters and Percy’s father had died of a thrombosis, so that nobody in the school knew exactly what was in them.

  There were two weak ceiling lights in the cellar, but the Brotherhood preferred not to switch them on during council meetings. They lit six candles, using the bleach bottles as candlesticks, and the dim unsteady light, with flickering shadows on the walls receding into the damp darkness where the rats were, gave a proper obscurity to the arguments of the assembly.

  ‘I vote we carry on without the Regent,’ said Hugh Savage, Chief Claviger, whose Christian name was locally pronounced ‘Sheuch’.

  ‘No, I object,’ said Specky, Second Claviger, sitting on the inverted coal-scuttle to the right of Savage’s chair. He was a brassy, blethering confident boy, wearing thick convex glasses with thin wire frames, a Schools Health Service issue, and he talked like a book.

  ‘Well, we’ll vote for it,’ said Skinner, Third Claviger, sitting on a drawing-board placed across the pail of stucco. He was always called Skinny in affectionate abbreviation of his surname. It was only a fortuitous anomaly that he happened to be a chubby child.

  The Three High Clavigers faced the ruck of the Brotherhood, obedient troopers who sat, knelt or squatted on the grimy stone floor. Savage was the strong arm, Specky was the brains and Skinny was the kind heart. In that cavernous gloom they looked like three subterranean judges addressing a jury of sooterkins.

  ‘I’m in this,’ Frank Garson shouted from the front row. ‘It was me that found it. You
can’t decide, Sheuch. You’ve got to wait for Percy. That’s the rule for urgent business.’

  ‘Don’t you call me Sheuch when I’m in the chair,’ Savage checked him crossly. Then he leered forward. ‘Anyway, how can it be urgent if we’ve got to wait for Percy? And you should be in the dock, so you should, but I move that Probationer Garson’s expelled. Come on, get him in the dock!’

  Garson was pushed and pulled by four of Savage’s faction and forced to stand behind a dual desk on the left of the chair.

  ‘What’s the charge?’ he screamed.

  ‘You broke the first commandment,’ said Judge Savage. ‘All for one and one for all, united we stand but divided we fall. That’s Percy. Percy’s a poet, ye know.’

  ‘That’s our motto,’ Garson objected hotly. ‘It’s not a commandment.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, you still broke it,’ the judge answered swiftly. ‘You wanted to keep it all for yersel’. If Specky hadn’t have been with you we wouldn’t have knew a thing about it.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Garson shouted, wriggling in the dock between his jailers. ‘Specky wouldn’t have knew a thing about it if I hadn’t told him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Specky admitted, standing up to address the judge. ‘I said it was a matter for the Brotherhood and he said we ought to tell the cops but he never said he wanted it all for himself.’

  ‘No, of course, he wouldn’t say it,’ Savage complained. ‘But that’s what he meant to do all right. Get the bell and expel him!’

  ‘You can’t do it like that,’ Specky whispered, horrified.

  ‘That’s wrong,’ Skinny called out, indignant.

  The campanologist, so named and appointed by Percy to perform the rituals of admission, expulsion, summoning and dispersal, grabbed the bell from the piano and Garson darted at once from the clutch of his warders and struggled with him. The bell rang irregularly as they wrestled for it.