A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  He put his cigarette back in his mouth and withdrew from the discussion. He thought he had said all that needed saying about corporal punishment.

  ‘The way I see it,’ said Mr Campbell, ‘the strap is our symbol of authority within a recognised code. The boys know what to expect and we can get on with the job.’

  ‘You must have something to maintain discipline,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘Some quick sanction. Even if you never use it.’

  ‘No discipline, no learning,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘But tell me this,’ said Mr Dale. ‘What do you do if a boy refuses to take the strap?’

  ‘Only a stupid teacher would create a situation where that would happen,’ said Mr Campbell.

  ‘But supposing,’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘It’s a case for the headmaster then,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘I’ve never met many cases of a boy refusing the strap,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘And those I have, they all came to nothing. The boy had to submit in the end and apologise. Then of course once he gets a public apology the teacher acts the big man. He won’t condescend to strap the boy. The rebel ends up looking a bit of an ass.’

  ‘Well, I’m deputy-boss here,’ said Mr Brown, ‘and I’ve never had any boy refuse the strap. We don’t seem to get that kind of stupid defiance.’

  So it was an occasion for headlines when Gerald defied Mr Alfred and kept on defying him the morning after the fight in the Weavers Lane.

  Before proposing to strap him Mr Alfred told the class what he had seen in the Weavers Lane. He said those who egged boys on to fight were worse than the boys who came to blows. Even a good boy might get into a fight if he thought his honour was at stake. He would fight in case his classmates jeered at him if he didn’t. That was silly. Nothing was ever solved by violence. Still, it was a pardonable mistake in a young person. But few boys would fight at all if nobody talked them into thinking they had to. This was usually done by trouble-makers who took jolly good care never to risk their own precious skin. It was a far, far better thing to tell your schoolmates there was no need to fight. Our saviour said, Blessed are the peacemakers. The really wicked ones were those who were not content to start two boys fighting with their bare fists but got them to use belts and even brought a knife into it. They were not blessed like the peacemakers. They deserved a deep damnation more than a ticking off.

  He spoke very well and enjoyed having the class hushed at his rhetoric. Then he said quietly, ‘Come out Gerald Provan.’

  He raised his strap.

  ‘You know what I’ve been talking about. You know why I’m going to punish you.’

  Gerald refused to hold his hand out. He said he had done nothing wrong, it was after four o’clock when he was in the Weavers Lane, Mr Alfred had no right, he was picking on him. He spoke with a rough insolence. His tongue darted between his lips and he went through the motion of spitting at Mr Alfred’s feet.

  Mr Alfred nearly slapped him across the face there and then. But he saw the trap. If he let himself be provoked and hit Gerald with his hand he would put himself in the wrong. His case against Gerald would be obliterated by Gerald’s case against him. He knew he had blundered. He should have referred the whole business to Mr Briggs. And he was uneasy to think it was just possible he had jumped at the chance to get at Gerald Provan because he didn’t like the boy. It vexed him even more that now he would have to take the matter to Mr Briggs not as something he was merely reporting but something he had failed to handle.

  The class watched his defeat with placid interest.

  He grabbed Gerald by the scruff and pushed him to the door.

  ‘You come and see the headmaster,’ he said.

  ‘Take your hauns aff me,’ said Gerald.

  His dialect vowels were themselves a form of inso¬ lence. Normally a boy spoke to his teacher in standard English.

  Mr Briggs wasn’t pleased when Mr Alfred shoved Gerald in and said his piece. But he could only support his teacher. He ordered Gerald to take his punishment. He said he was sick and tired of all the feuding and fighting that was going on in the school and he was determined to stamp it out. He nearly said with a firm hand. He said he himself had told all those boys in the Weavers Lane to go home at once. If for nothing else, Gerald deserved to be punished for disobeying that order. Mr Alfred was quite right to strap him. He would do it himself if Mr Alfred wouldn’t. And in order that justice would not only be done but be seen to be done, Mr Alfred or he himself would strap Gerald in front of the whole class.

  Gerald was stubborn. He said Mr Alfred had a spite at him. He wouldn’t take the strap from him. And he wouldn’t take the strap from Mr Briggs. It was the same thing. Whoever did it, he was still being strapped for nothing. He put his hands behind his back. No, he wouldn’t take it.

  He had worked himself into a mood and he was stuck with it. But he was thrilled with the stand he was making. He knew his cause was just.

  ‘Here’s the knife I told you about,’ said Mr Alfred.

  He put it on the headmaster’s desk.

  Mr Briggs glanced at it, wrinkled his nose and looked away. He didn’t touch it.

  ‘It’s not mines,’ said Gerald. ‘I’ve got witnesses.’

  ‘Mine,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘We’re not discussing that,’ said Mr Briggs. He lolled back in his swivel chair, looking at his clean nails. ‘That will come later. At the moment all I’m concerned with is you were one of the boys in the Weavers Lane and you returned after I had sent you all away. You’ll either take your punishment for disobedience or you’ll go home and tell your mother I want to see her.’

  The option was his final bluff. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a boy capitulated rather than bother his parents. This time it failed. Gerald went home at once. He even banged the door on his way out.

  ‘You should never have tried to strap him just for watching a fight,’ Mr Briggs scolded Mr Alfred. ‘You know what he’s like. And his mother’s worse. The knife? That won’t get us anywhere. It’s just your word. He’ll deny it. If you had only sent him to me in the first place I could maybe have talked him into taking the strap. Even if he had defied me it wouldn’t have been in front of a class. That won’t do you any good with the rest of them, you know. I could have got round it somehow if it had been kept in this room. But now God knows what we’ve started.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Before the week was out he found he had started plenty. Gerald turned up the next day, early and unworried. Mr Briggs spotted the fair hair in the assembly and beckoned.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  He waited.

  Gerald said nothing.

  ‘Go away,’ said Mr Briggs, ‘and don’t come back here without her.’

  Mrs Provan came to his room at nine o’clock the following morning with Gerald by her side, her hand on his shoulder. She was angry again. She said her boy hadn’t taken part in any fight. The truth was he had done his best to stop a fight. He had even brought one of the boys home with him and used his hankie to stanch the blood flowing from the boy’s nose where a big bully had punched him.

  ‘I can show you the hankie,’ she said.

  ‘And I can show you a knife,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘It’s not just a penknife. It’s more like a dagger. Just look at it. Do you allow your boy to go around with a thing like that in his pocket?’

  ‘No, and I don’t allow him to tell lies either,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘That’s not his knife. He told you so himself.’

  ‘Mr Alfred saw him with it,’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘That’s his story,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘Gerald never had a knife like that in his life. I should know. I’m his mother. Not Mr Alfred.’

  ‘All I’m asking,’ said Mr Briggs, ‘is for Gerald to take the strap. There’s no question of severe punishment. If he’ll take even one. It won’t kill him.’

  ‘I never said it would,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I’m only saying you’re not strapping my boy for nothing.’

  ‘I’ve go
t to think of the discipline of my school,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘The boy disobeyed an order from me in the first place. I can’t just ignore it.’

  ‘That was after school,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘It had noth¬ ing to do with you.’

  ‘He also disobeyed Mr Alfred. In the classroom. Not after school.’

  ‘Aye, but it was about something that happened after school,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘And that man has a spite against Gerald.’

  She wouldn’t give in. Mr Briggs said if the boy wouldn’t accept the laws of the school he had no option but to suspend him. He told her to think it over and sent them both away.

  ‘I’ve no need to think it over,’ said Mrs Provan at the door. ‘I’ll be back here tomorrow. It’s you had better think it over. I know my rights. You’ll take my boy in if you’re wise. You’ve no authority to keep him out.’

  ‘Oh but I have,’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘That’s two days now he hasn’t had his milk,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘He’s got a right to his free milk every day. It’s laid down by the law of the land. Lucky for you you didn’t stop him getting his dinner here yesterday.’

  ‘I didn’t see him or I would have stopped him,’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘He’s got a ticket for free meals,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I’m a widow woman. I applied for free meals for my children and it was granted. You can’t stop it.’

  ‘I can,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘In certain circumstances.’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I know different. Not to mention the fact he’s missed his education for two days through your fault.’

  ‘Education! For that fellow!’ Mr Briggs cried to Miss Ancill, giving her a line by line account of the interview over his morning coffee. ‘He leaves in a couple of months. He’s hardly a candidate to stay on for O levels. He has learned all he’ll ever learn at school. And God knows that wasn’t much.’

  When Mrs Provan brought Gerald back again he offered her a compromise. He wouldn’t punish the boy nor would Mr Alfred, if she would concede they had a right to punish him.

  ‘Not for doing nothing,’ said Mrs Provan.

  The peace talks broke down. Mr Briggs told her to come back when she changed her mind.

  She didn’t. She wouldn’t. She phoned the fourth estate.

  She knew enough to know a free press is the guarantee of liberty. Within twenty-four hours a counter-attack was organised. Gerald arrived at school in a Ford Anglia driven by a bearded reporter accompanied by a bald photographer. He got out at the gate and went straight to Mr Briggs’ room while his escorts waited in the playground. Five minutes after he sauntered out smiling. The photographer had a word with him and then took his picture against the wall of the boys’ urinal. By an unfortunate coincidence Mr Alfred came along at that moment. He slowed down when he saw Gerald being photographed by a bareheaded man in a sheepskin coat and saw another man, similarly clad, shepherding a jolly crowd of pupils out of the picture. He was puzzled.

  ‘That’s him,’ Gerald whispered.

  The man with the camera turned quickly. Mr Alfred gaped. The man with the beard stepped forward.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Would you give me your views on corporal punishment?’

  The man with the camera took aim.

  Mr Alfred looked round for escape. He was jostled by cheering boys and girls and confronted by this bearded stranger with the big smile and the unexpected question. He faced him fiercely, glare answering grin.

  The man with the camera snapped.

  ‘Thank you,’ he sang out.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Alfred, and barged on.

  When the evening paper came out there wasn’t only Gerald full length on the front page. Mr Alfred was there too, head and shoulders. A single column story under a three column headline separated the two pictures. The headline was Teacher Has Spite Says Mum.

  Mr Brown brought in a copy next morning in case Mr Alfred had missed it.

  ‘You look a right badtempered old bastard there,’ he said.

  Mr Alfred hadn’t seen his picture. He seldom bought an evening paper. He was shocked. He had the same irrational disbelief as some people have when they hear their voice on tape for the first time. That wasn’t him. To increase the offence, Gerald looked boyish and handsome, happy and innocent.

  ‘Crabbed age and youth,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘That face doesn’t do our image any good, does it?’ said Mr Dale.

  Mr Alfred drank more than usual that night. He went on a pub-crawl in what Granny Lyons called his disguise, but he was sure everybody recognised him. He couldn’t forget how his face looked in the paper. And that would be how it looked to other people, he supposed. Yet he knew he had once been tall, dark and handsome, with a profile and a moustache that made his fellow students say he looked like Robert Louis Stevenson.

  When he got back to his lodgings he hunted out the typescript of his poems. It was a long time since he last looked at them. He had an alcoholic whim to read them again and enter the mind of the man he had been in the green years that had no ophidian Provan lurking in the grass. He thought he would comfort his troubled spirit by saying his own verses aloud.

  He had called his poems Negotiations for a Treaty. He meant a treaty with the reality of philosophers, politicians, economists, scientists and businessmen. The thirty-two poems he had typed in a fair copy after countless revisions were meant to be a lyric-sequence showing the attempt to come to terms with a material world. The poet would insist on his right to live in the independent republic of his imagination. But he would let reality be boss in its terri¬ tory if it gave up all claims to invade and conquer his. If it didn’t he would organise his own resistance movement.

  The performance fell short of the intention. He was depressed to see how weak and derivative his verses sounded after lying long unread. He felt he was a failure, a lonely provincial hearing from afar rumours of the world of letters, the only world he cared about, a world he would never be allowed to enter. And he saw his failure didn’t come from an addiction to drink and idleness. It came from the whole cast and calibre of his mind. Sleep seemed impossible. He wished he had taken just one more whisky at the bar before it closed, or bought a half-bottle to carry out so that he could have another drink before he went to bed.

  Undressing slowly he saw himself as a man tossed aside by a God who had given him the ambition to be a poet without giving him the talent.

  Mr Briggs saw him as a bit of a fool who had brought unnecessary publicity to the school by mishandling a difficult boy. The evening paper that started the story followed it up for a week. So did the morning paper that was its stable companion. There was Mother Demands Enquiry on the front page with a picture of Gerald and Mrs Provan cheek to cheek like sweethearts. Then there was Banned Boy Tries Again on the middle page with a picture of Gerald at the school gate, like Adam outside the gates of Paradise, wearing his best suit, face washed and hair combed. But at the week-end a youth was stabbed to death in a brawl outside a dance-hall in Sauchiehall Street. His griefstricken girlfriend was a photogenic blonde who was interviewed on her thoughts about life and love. She displaced Gerald and his mother.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Although the Provan story was no longer newsworthy the papers went on drawing dividends from it. Letters to the Editor condemning corporal punishment were printed daily for several weeks and filled a lot of space. They appeared most frequently and at the greatest length in the Herald.

  ‘More letters this morning!’ cried Mr Brown.

  He breezed in waving his paper.

  ‘Hey, shut that door, there’s a draught,’ said Mr Campbell. A cross man.

  ‘A long one from Monica Trumbell,’ said Mr Brown.

  He slammed the door with a backheeler and pitched an eager question at Mr Alfred.

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  Mr Alfred stooped at the staffroom table sipping a cup of strong tea brewed by a kindly cleaner forty minutes before the
first of the staff arrived.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Who is Monica, what is she?’

  ‘One of our conquerors,’ said Mr Dale. ‘She’s up here on loan from England.’

  ‘She damn near names you as the villain of the piece,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Alfred.

  He sipped his tea.

  Mr Brown read to him with loud gusto.

  ‘“It is a sorry comment on Scottish education when some survivor from a prehistoric society thinks he can solve the most subtle problems of school discipline by resorting to brute force against a sensitive adolescent.”’

  ‘An excess of sibilants surely,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘Onomatopoeia,’ said Mr Brown. ‘She’s hissing you.’

  ‘Who is she, I was asking,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Monica Trumbell?’ said Mr Campbell. He frowned a moment, then identified a function. ‘That’s that dame is always writing letters. She’s the secretary of poise, isn’t she?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Mr Dale. ‘A poisonality.’

  ‘What is poise, saith my sufferings then?’ Mr Alfred enquired.

  ‘poise?’ said Mr Brown. ‘You mean to say you don’t know what poise is?’

  ‘Not as something having a secretary,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘It’s an acronym,’ said Mr Brown. ‘It stands for Parents’ Organisation for the Improvement of Scottish Education.

  You’re not keeping up! It’s old models like you poise is out to improve on.’

  ‘There’s always room for improvement,’ said Mr Alfred.

  He sipped his tea and glanced at the electric clock on the wall. Two minutes to the bell. He sipped his tea again.

  ‘She’s good, our Monica,’ said Mr Dale. ‘Mrs Monica actually. Oh Jaysus, I’d hate to sleep with her. I bet she’d tell you your way of doing it was out-of-date.’

  ‘How is she qualified to improve anybody?’ Mr Alfred asked. ‘Except herself of course.’