by George Friel
‘What fight?’ he asked.
She told him about it while they tacked double sheets of newspaper across the frame of the broken window.
‘Some of them were your boys,’ she said. ‘That big lump Provan was there. One of Wilma’s boyfriends.’
‘He’s kind of young to be anybody’s boyfriend,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘He’s her age,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘She’s at your school. Don’t you know her? Wilma Beattie.’
‘Can’t say I do,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘But then I don’t take girls’ classes.’
‘I’ve chased the pair of them out that back-close more than once,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Ah well! As God made them he matched them!’
CHAPTER SIX
Mrs Provan put on her Sunday coat and went to the school. She saw the headmaster at nine o’clock.
‘I’m very angry about this, Mr Briggs,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind anyone chastising my boy if he deserves it. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.’
A ruffled hen laying a complaint and making a song about it.
Mr Briggs listened carefully. He was a judicious little man, not long promoted. His brother had recently married a widow on the town council. He was perfectly happy signing the janitor’s requisitions and sending instructions round his staff in civil-service English and a neat hand.
Other clerical activities were used to keep him from working and allow him to claim he had a lot to do every day. He liked talking to parents because that too occupied his time to the exclusion of less sedentary duties.
Mrs Provan ended her aria on a high note of horror.
‘But to slap a boy across the face for nothing! That’s something I won’t have. No!’
‘Ah now come, it couldn’t have been for nothing, surely it must have been for something.’
The tenor responded to the soprano, and continued piano.
‘I don’t mean I condone striking a pupil. Oh no, on the contrary. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a man walked up to a boy and suddenly hit him for nothing right out of the blue. I mean to say, it doesn’t sound a very likely story. Now does it, Mrs Provan?’
His forearms on the desk, his stainless fingers laced, he leaned forward on his magisterial swivelchair as if he was the Solomon of David’s royal blood who had to decide how far maternal affection could influence veracity.
‘Surely the boy must have given some provocation,’ he coaxed her.
‘No, none, I assure you,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I have Gerald’s word for it. And Gerald never tells lies. He’s a good boy.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘And even if he did that’s not the point,’ said Mrs Provan.
‘Even if he did?’ Mr Briggs looked at her in shocked reproach. ‘Did tell lies?’
‘Give provocation,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘A teacher’s not supposed to lift his hand to a boy. And to call him a rat, well! As a matter of fact it was worse than that.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Mr Briggs.
‘He used a bad word. He called Gerald a so-and-so rat, not just a rat. Poor Gerald wouldn’t even repeat the word. But you and me can guess what he said. I ask you! What kind of language is that for a man supposed to be edu¬ cated?’
‘The question is, what did he say exactly?’ said Mr Briggs.
Always discreet he used initials only.
‘Did he say a bee rat or an effing rat?’
‘An effing rat,’ Mrs Provan sent word down from remote control.
‘I find it hard to believe,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘Still, if that’s what you say. Leave it with me and I’ll speak to the teacher.’
‘No, I want to see him myself,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I want an apology.’
Mr Briggs tried a weak inoculation of sarcasm.
‘In writing?’
It was a mistake. It didn’t take.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘But I insist on seeing him for myself.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘I think it would only make things worse. You’re too much upset for me to let you see anybody.’
‘Of course I’m upset,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘So would you be upset in my place. I’ve had to take the morning off my work to come here. It’s costing me half a day’s wages. Just because of a big bully that’s not fit for to be a teacher.’
‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘It could land you in trouble. He’s fully qualified and very experienced.’
‘Aye, so’s ma granny,’ said Mrs Provan.
Mr Briggs unlaced his fingers and leaned back. He saw no use discussing Mrs Provan’s grandmother.
‘It broke my heart to come to Tordoch at all,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘But I couldn’t get a house anywhere else. Everybody knows it’s the lowest dregs of the city lives down there. But don’t you go thinking I’m from a slum like the rest of them because I’m not.’
‘Nobody ever said you were,’ said Mr Briggs.
He was tired of hearing parents tell him they weren’t like the rest of the folk in Tordoch. He was tired of Tordoch and all its inhabitants. Once it was a lovers’ walk on the rural margin of the city. Then it became a waste land of bracken and nettles surrounded by a chemical factory, gasworks, a railway workshop and slaghills. At that point the town council took it over for a slum- clearance scheme. They built a barrack of tenements with the best of plumbing and all mod cons and expected a new and higher form of civilisation to flare up by spontaneous combustion.
But the concentration of former slum-tenants in such a bleak site led in a few years to the reappearance of the slum they had left. The first native generation grew up indistinguishable from the first settlers and produced their likeness in large numbers. The fathers had no trade or profession. The mothers were bad managers, and worn out by childbearing they looked fifty when they were barely thirty. The untended children lived a life of petty feuding and thieving, nourished by free milk and free dinners at school when they weren’t truanting.
There was a constant shift of population. But there too Gresham’s Law operated. The scheme became a pool where sediment settled.
Further out, on the country road, there were half a dozen big houses owned by professional and retired men, and between them and Tordoch proper there were some streets of tidy new villas. Since they had never been part of any housing-scheme these people objected if anyone accused them of living in Tordoch. Regretting the present, they turned to the past. A local historian claimed to have found the name Tordoch in a twelfth-century register of bishopric rents. An amateur etymologist said the name came from the Gaelic torran, a hill or knoll, and dubh or dugh, signifying dark or gloomy, implicitly ascribing a touch of the Gaelic second-sight to those who had first named the place. For now indeed it was a black spot. The police knew it as a nexus of thieves and resettlers.
Mrs Provan wasn’t bothered about these matters. She had her own grievance.
‘It’s the way that man treats Gerald,’ she said. ‘Like he was dirt. He’s got the boy frightened for him, so he has.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘I come from a good family,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘And I rear a good family. And that’s without a husband at my back. I’m a hardworking widow I am. Not one of your Tordoch types, neither work nor want.’
‘Oh no, I can see that,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘I’m very angry about this,’ said Mrs Provan.
Duet da capo.
He got rid of her after the third time round without letting her see Mr Alfred. He never let a parent see a teacher. He knew it would only end in a slanging match. No teacher could soothe angry mothers the way he could.
By that time it was morning break. His secretary brought in coffee and a biscuit.
‘My goodness, Miss Ancill, is it that time already?’ he greeted her.
Over his frugal refreshment, for he never stopped working, he told Miss Ancill what Mrs Provan had said to him and what he had said
to Mrs Provan, and while he spoke and drank and nibbled he sorted an accumulation of forms intended for transmission to the Director. Amongst them he saw an application signed A. Ramsay for free meals for his family, six girls and four boys. Against Occupation the applicant had written ‘unemployed’.
‘They’re all unemployed round here,’ he muttered through his biscuit. ‘Unemployed and unemployable.’
‘Well, what with the family allowance and benefit it’s hardly worth their while,’ said Miss Ancill.
‘Should be occupation father,’ said Mr Briggs, and sipped.
He read the financial statement aloud. Weekly total, twenty-one pounds seventeen shillings.
‘And they talk about unearned income,’ he said.
‘It’s not the upper ten today have unearned income. It’s the layabouts. That’s your welfare state for you.’
‘Some folk play on it,’ said Miss Ancill. ‘But you can’t just do away with it.’
‘Aye, the poor we have always with us,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘Do you know, there’s a child born every two seconds. I read that somewhere the other day.’
‘Quite a thought,’ said Miss Ancill.
‘The trouble here,’ he said, ‘it’s the men of course. They never get a trade. Or even a steady job. They work as vanboys when they leave school, then they’re casual labourers. They earn just enough to start courting. Then they marry young and the children come and keep on coming. So the man sits back and stops working. They’re not working-class, these people. They’re just lumps.’
‘You can’t stop them marrying,’ said Miss Ancill.
Mr Briggs changed the subject.
‘Phone the police and tell them I want a policeman for the Ballochmyle Road crossing. The trafficwarden’s absent.’
After lunch he reprimanded Mr Alfred for striking a pupil and advised him to be careful what he said in class. Mr Alfred denied he had used bad language, but Mr Briggs had never expected him to admit it. He smiled and nodded and let it pass.
In the afternoon Mrs Duthie came and complained that a boy called Provan had forced her son into a fight and then kicked him when he was down. She had taken the boy to the doctor. The doctor would certify the boy’s ribs were all bruises. Mr Briggs said he would speak to Provan about it. He said it was a pity she hadn’t called at nine o’clock. He would have found that information about Provan useful if he had known it earlier. She said she couldn’t have called at nine o’clock because she had a part-time job, mornings only, in the Caballero Restaurant. That led her to tell him about her husband, who hadn’t worked for ten years. He was under the doctor on account of his heart. Mr Briggs gave her his sympathy and they parted on excellent terms.
When she had gone he littered his desk with requisitions, class lists, publishers’ catalogues, and the unfinished draft of a report on a probationer. He wanted to look busy if anyone came in.
Miss Ancill disturbed him with a cup of tea and a buttered scone. He told her what Mrs Duthie had been saying to him and what he said to her. He was on about the cares and loneliness of office when the bell rang. He hurried out to his car.
Miss Ancill watched him go. She knew all the little jobs that had kept him busy since nine o’clock. She counted them off to the janitor.
‘A day in the life of,’ she said. ‘And the way he blethers to me! It’s not a secretary that man wants, it’s an audience.’
In the staffroom Mr Alfred raised his voice about the headmaster’s bad habit of dealing with parents behind a teacher’s back. His colleagues were too eager to get out to listen, and he finished up talking to the soap as he washed his hands.
He was the last to leave. Miss Ancill saw him from her window.
‘That poor man,’ she said. ‘I felt sorry for him today.
Briggs had him on the carpet. I think he’s getting past it. But still. It’s not right. A man like Briggs bossing a man like that. He’s so kind and gentle.’
‘I think he drinks too much,’ said the janitor.
‘He needs a woman to take care of him,’ said Miss Ancill. ‘Did you see the shirt he’d on this morning? Wasn’t even fit for a jumble sale.’
‘You can’t spend your money on drink and buy clothes too,’ said the janitor.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leaving school on a fine spring evening Mr Briggs had to go home by public transport. His car was laid up. There was something wrong with the clutch. He felt devalued. It was a long time since he last stood in a bus queue with ordinary people, some of whom in this case would be merely assistant teachers on his own staff. He was in a mood to find fault with the universe. Opportunity to let off steam was waiting ahead of him. En route to the bus stop he passed the Weavers Lane. A fankle of weedy boys loitered there in a state of manifest excitement. Mr Briggs was quick to appreciate the situation. There was something in the wind, and it wasn’t the smell of roses. Obviously a fight had been arranged and was due to begin as soon as the coast was clear. The guilt in the shifty eyes of his pupils showed they hadn’t expected him to come along. He stopped and scowled. He knew them all. His habit of checking against his index-cards whenever a boy came to his notice had made him familiar with their names, their intelligence quotient, their father’s occupation if any, and their address. He knew the good boys from the bad boys, though sometimes he believed the former category was an anomaly, as if one should speak of a square circle.
There they were. All the rascals. A dingy mob in jeans and donkey-jackets. Black, Brown, Gray, Green, White. With McColl, McKay, McKenzie, McPherson. He recognised Taylor, Slater, Wright and Barbour, Baker [and Bourne], Hall [and Knight], Latta [and MacBeath], Lid- del [and Scott], Ogilvie [and Albert], Gibson, Holmes, MacDougall and Blackie. A nightmare of classroom names. And lounging blondly, somehow the centre of the shapeless crowd, was Gerald Provan. He grinned, hands in the pockets of his tightarsed jeans, kicking the kerb, radiant with the insolence of an antimath idling out his last term at school.
Sure of his power, speaking in loco parentis, since after all they were barely outside the limits of his bailiwick and the bell releasing them from his jurisdiction had barely ceased vibrating across the gasworks, he demanded the why and wherefore of their hanging about. He waited for an answer. None was offered. Sternly he ordered them to disperse.
‘Get home! All of you! At once!’
Curt. Staccato.
Slowly, grudgingly, they went. He stood till they were all on the move.
He went for his bus, pleased with himself. Perhaps the universe wasn’t so unjust after all. He wished some of his teachers would learn to put into their voice the same ring of authority as he had done there. The bus was prompt, he got a seat at once, and within half-an-hour he was safe and sound at home. He had a sandstone villa, with garden and garage, outside the city. Over dinner he told Mrs Briggs all the events of his day and what he had done about them.
But no sooner was he round the corner from the Weavers Lane than the scattered boys reassembled. Like birds chased from a kitchen garden they hadn’t flown far.
Last to leave the school, Mr Alfred took the same route to the bus stop as Mr Briggs. He had lingered longer than usual in the staffroom to give Mr Briggs plenty of time to get away. He always found it a bore having to make conversation on the bus, especially with someone who talked shop as loudly as his headmaster.
When he came to the Weavers Lane he heard a lot of shouting. He stopped and listened. He wasn’t even tempted to walk away. He was oldfashioned, and he believed without doubting it was his duty to break up any riotous assembly of schoolboys, whether in school or out of school, during hours or after hours. And anyway he was in no hurry. If he put off time he would be in the city centre when the pubs were opening. Then he could have one or maybe two before going on to his digs. For the evening he had already planned a route that would take him round some pubs he hadn’t been in for a month or so.
He put on a grim face and went deep into the lane. What he saw wasn’t a storybook fight with bare
fists. It was a battle with studded belts that had once been part of what the army called webbing equipment. His belly fluttered at the madness of it. He was as scared as if he was in there taking part. So excited were the spectators, encouraging Cowan and Turnbull with a good imitation of the Hampden Roar, that Mr Alfred was left standing behind them in the same situation as the three old ladies locked in the lavatory. Nobody knew he was there.
Besides swinging the heavy belt in a highly dangerous manner Cowan used an unpredictable skill, not without its own vicious grace, in getting inside the range of Turnbull’s equally heavy belt and endeavouring to kick his opponent in the testicles.
In one of those attempts he lost his balance, the belt arched from his hand, and he fell unarmed to the ground. The recoil of evasive action brought Turnbull over his prostrate foe. Naturally he kicked him. Then things happened so quickly Mr Alfred was never quite sure what he saw.
It appeared that Gerald Provan moved out of the mob behind Turnbull, raised his knee swiftly in a politic nudge, sent Turnbull sprawling beside Cowan. The two fighters scrambled up clinching. They wrestled into the crowd, and the crowd pushed them back into the ring. In that surge and sway Gerald Provan thrust a knife into Cowan’s hand and then shoved him off to continue the duel.
At that point Mr Alfred broke out of his paralysis. Partly he had been curious to see just what the two boys would do, partly he was afraid of raising his voice too soon and not being heard above the howling of the fans. But when it was seen that Cowan had a knife there was a breathless hush in the lane that night and Mr Alfred knew his moment was come. Cowan lunged, Turnbull dodged, and Mr Alfred spoke out loud and clear.
‘Stop that!’
His voice scattered most of the onlookers. They had no wish to be involved. Turnbull froze. Cowan threw the knife away and with coincident speed dissolved into the melting crowd. Provan tried to make a quick getaway by diving behind Mr Alfred. It was a blunder. Mr Alfred caught him on the turn and held him by the collar. Gerald wriggled.