Fergus Lamont Read online

  SEVEN

  My grandfather did not allow my mother to be buried in her own mother’s grave; nor did he go to her funeral. He displayed atrocious callousness; yet, by the sheer effrontery of faith, he compelled most people to think of him as a Christian of formidable and magnificent staunchness.

  About a month after the funeral, feeling helpless, with that utter lack of authority children have, not to be confused with innocence, I resumed my Saturday afternoon visits to ‘Siloam’, but I nearly always went alone. When he asked me why I no longer brought my friends I made excuses: their mothers needed them to go messages, or they wanted to play football themselves or watch Gantock Rovers play, or they grumbled that the brae up to his house was too steep, or they were too shy. I did not tell him the real reason was that I did not want them to come, not even Smout who would have been as discreet as a mouse. I did not know it myself then, but I was profoundly ashamed of him.

  Never once did he mention my mother. Nor did I. After we had worked in the garden we would sit on the seat, in the sunshine, and he would ask me questions, about school, about my friends, and about Bessie, who was going to marry my father and become my stepmother. As soon as I told him she never went to church, and refused to get married by a minister, he immediately lost interest in her. I realised then that he was never interested in people who didn’t go to church. It puzzled me all the more therefore why he disliked Catholics so much. Even Mick Flynn and Pat McGuire, the worst swearers in our district, went to chapel regularly.

  If it was rainy or cold we would sit in the parlour. Across the hearth from me he would read, stroke his beard, occasionally nod, and now and then look up and give me a smile. I was to fall heir to those books, turgid priggish self-satisfied accounts of missionary work among the heathen.

  Anyone looking in would have been touched by the scene, the small silent kilted boy and the tall, bearded godly man, in such rapport apparently that they did not have to say a word to each other for half an hour at a stretch. The truth was, I felt more and more oppressed. In desperation I would try to count the ticks of the big clock with the wooden eagle on top. I felt relieved when I had to slide off my chair and go outside to the cellar to fetch more coal. I took longer than I needed to.

  Without knowing clearly what I was doing, I put him to tests. A family called Frame had been thrown out of their room-and-kitchen in Laverock Street, near the Vennel, for not paying their rent. Their furniture had been dumped on the street. Mrs Frame had a baby in her arms; she had five other children, all young: one of them, Jean, was in my class at school. Mr Frame hadn’t worked for years: he said he had hurt his back. Some people thought he was, to use the local word, ‘scheming’, that was, keeping up a deliberate, cunning pretence. My friends and I once followed him to see if he would, when he thought no one was looking, straighten up and walk normally. He hadn’t. Either his pain was genuine, or he was a very good ‘schemer’.

  The eviction itself had not shocked me: it had been too exciting. What had shocked me, though, was the anger shown by neighbours of the Frames against the factor’s men and the police. Women had screamed and shaken their fists. It had struck me as strange that so much misery, and so much hatred, could be caused just by a lack of money.

  I was curious to know what my grandfather thought.

  The Frames were put oot o‘their hoose on Tuesday,’ I said. ‘I saw it.’

  He paused in his reading. His mouth went hard.

  The polis were there. Women were yelling at them.’

  ‘I don’t think you should have been there, Fergus.’

  ‘Mrs Frame had six weans. They were taken to the poorhoose.’

  ‘They will be well looked after there.’

  ‘She didnae think so. She bawled it was a disgrace.’

  ‘Not paying what you lawfully owe is a much greater disgrace.’

  I pondered over that. It was too deep for me.

  ‘Couldn’t somebody hae gi’en them the money to pay the rent?’ I asked.

  There were lots of people in Gantock who could. I saw dozens of them every Sunday in the Auld Kirk. Some came in carriages from the villas in the West End. My grandfather himself had money in the bank: so, anyway, Aunt Bella maintained.

  ‘It isn’t helping people to give them money like that, Fergus. If money isn’t honestly worked for it does more harm than good.’

  ‘But Mr Frame cannae work. He’s got a sair back.’

  Somebody had once said it couldn’t be all that sore, considering he had six weans. I could see no connection. Perhaps my grandfather could.

  ‘His back is not so sore as to prevent him from frequenting public-houses.’

  ‘You mean, going into pubs?’

  ‘That is what I mean, Fergus.’

  I pondered again. Nothing was easier than going into a pub: you just pushed the door and walked in. Even Mr Chalmers who had only one leg found no difficulty.

  ‘I believe he also gambles.’

  I had never seen Mr Frame put a bet on with a street bookie, but it was likely he did, like lots of other men. I couldn’t see what his sore back had to do with it.

  ‘You may be sure, Fergus, that if people are deserving of His help the Lord will not withhold it.’

  He spoke with not even the merest tremble of doubt or indeed of pity. Young though I was, it seemed to me that it was really my grandfather himself who decided whether or not people deserved Jesus’s help. Hadn’t he decided that my mother did not deserve it?

  Then there was the case of Jack Burnett.

  While Miss Cochrane was writing on the blackboard Jack picked up his inkwell and, with his left hand, for he was corry-fisted, hurled it at her. Luckily he missed, though some of the ink splashed over her face, like black blood. Jack was always in the front row because he never got his sums or spelling right. Miss Cochrane was never done taunting him. This was easy to do, for he always wore clothes too big for him, and his ears too were very big. Usually he endured, with only a scowl. Therefore we were all amazed when he suddenly lost his temper and threw the inkwell.

  Mr McGill, the headmaster, was sent for. He arrived with his slippers on and his tawse in his hand. Jack refused to say he was sorry: he knew it wouldn’t have lessened his punishment. He was given, in front of us, six on each hand, as hard as the headmaster could manage. After the fourth he broke and went down on his knees, howling for mercy. Girls wept. Smout, sitting beside me, with his arms folded like the rest of us, shut his eyes and licked his lips; like mine they had gone dry.

  Afterwards, when Jack showed us his hands, they put me in mind of lumps of mince.

  I had told Bessie. She had gasped with anger. If she was Jack’s mother, she said, she’d go straight to the school and teach Mr McGill and Miss Cochrane something they evidently didn’t know: the difference between cruelty and proper punishment. She didn’t say how she would teach them, but I felt reassured. As long as there were grown-ups like Bessie, children didn’t have to feel their cause was hopeless.

  Telling my grandfather, I took care not to show my own feelings, or to mention Bessie’s anger.

  ‘So he got twelve. He was howling. He went doon on his knees.’

  ‘So he should have, Fergus, in repentance.’

  ‘He just wanted them to stop hurting him.’

  ‘Surely he deserved his punishment, Fergus? It was a very wicked thing he did. He could have killed Miss Cochrane.’

  ‘She said she could get her cat to coont better than him.’

  ‘Sometimes stupidity is wilful, Fergus.’

  ‘Does that mean he could be clever if he tried?’

  ‘Not clever, perhaps, but certainly less stupid. People are often stupid because they are lazy, inattentive and disobedient.’

  I had seen Jack baring his teeth like a dog in an effort to concentrate.

  ‘You mustn’t be alarmed, Fergus. You may be sure his punishment will have done him good.’

  It had made Jack plunk school the very next day.

/>   Why, I wondered, had Bessie, who never went to church, reassured me, while my grandfather, who carried round the plate, frightened me? She was always on the side of people, he on the side of God. Bessie might have said it was the same thing, but I felt sure he would not. There were some people with whom God, in my grandfather’s opinion, was displeased: like the Frames, like Jack Burnett, and like my mother.

  EIGHT

  In those days not all teachers were physically brutal, but too many of them were spiritually dull. It was no compensation that they were conscientious and diligent: the harder they worked at quelling originality and instilling conformity the less they deserved praise. After forty years they looked back in retirement with benign satisfaction upon careers more heinous than Herod’s: he extinguished life only, they had extinguished the spirit.

  My friends and I in Gantock did not suffer our spirits to be extinguished. Outside school we had our own games and pursuits. These taught us to be enterprising, inventive, quick-witted, courageous, and persevering. It is true they did not improve our parsing.

  I have already mentioned the stalking of butterflies. This induced in us patience, stillness, quickness, and pity. We learned that once the powder was off the wings they lost their power of flight. Remorseful at having robbed such beautiful creatures of so wonderful a gift as flying, we would feel, in the sunshine, shame dark as night, and we would vow never to do it again. That vow would be broken, perhaps on the same day, but, feeling guiltier than ever, we would make it again, and again. In our moral predicament, we used to put the blame on God for not giving butterflies stings or teeth.

  Bumble-bees had stings. Catching them took more nerve. I can still remember, as if it had happened yesterday and not sixty years ago, how, having snatched from a purple-headed knapweed and squeezed to unconsciousness (as I thought) in my handkerchief, a ‘sodger’, so-called because it was khaki in colour, I laid it gallously on my left palm, for Smout McTavish, Jim Blanie, and Jack Burnett to inspect. With its last flicker of life it stung me, painfully. I threw it to the ground and squashed it under my shoe; but even as I took that furious revenge, and as I licked my smarting palm, I knew, without needing Smout to tell me, that it had just been trying to defend itself, and I was the one in the wrong.

  We knew not to take hawthorn blossom into our houses. It was supposed to bring bad luck. Our other name for it was bad man’s flourish. We believed it had been used by the Romans to make the crown of thorns for Christ. Yet I loved its strong sweet scent, and its creamy abundance, and its association with mysteries long ago.

  We learned to distinguish mushrooms from toadstools, and whelks from mussels. We made peashooters out of the stalks of cow parsley, effective for a while if you could stand the smell and taste. Haws were used for pellets: baked in the oven they became hard as iron. We threw up sticks to knock down chestnuts, in a quest for a glossy Goliath that would become a ‘bully of a hundred’. We sought out birds’ nests, and had a pact never to harry them or steal eggs. We fished for minnows, but never in the Puddock Loch: after my mother’s death I never went there, and my closest friends, Smout and Jim, agreed not to go there either. At Hallowe’en we carved turnips lifted from local fields. We were alchemists, with our mysterious sugar-olly water, made of water, sugar, licorice, and any other ingredient that might give it a strange flavour. After being vigorously shaken, it was kept in a dark secret place for a certain number of days. Then we would chant:

  Sugar-olly water, black as the lum,

  Gether up peens and you’ll get some.

  We were close to our pagan past. The pins asked for were those used by witches to stick into the clay effigies of people they wished to put a spell on or make die.

  All those, and others, were the ploys of spring, summer, and autumn, carried on in the fields and moors above the town, and on the seashore below it. In gaslit winter we kept to the streets, closes, and backcourts. There we played Bethlehem, run-sheep-run, hunch-cuddy-hunch, foot-and-a-half, hop-step-and-a-jump, bubbly-jock, kick-the-knacket, moshie, cat-and-bat, and others I forget, as well as of course rounders and football. As I grew older and stronger, I became a leader. ‘Dockies’ was my favourite game. In it the leader performed various athletic and daring acts, which his followers had to do after him, otherwise they dropped out. I was the most dare-devil dockies-leader in the district.

  I would hang upside-down like a bat from a lamppost, with my legs twisted round the bar at the top: a feat easier for those wearing trousers. I would jump from the top of the coal-cellars over three dustbins. I would walk across the street on my hands. I would climb up a drain-pipe to the roof, touch the gutter, and climb down again: this too was easier for those whose legs were covered. Trying to emulate me, my friends sustained jarred ankles, scraped knees, bruised fingers, and split skulls. Smout hated ‘dockies’. He said it was a stupid game, and anyway his bones were too delicate; but we knew he was afraid. Mrs Blanie once gave me a row because Jim came home with his mouth full of blood, because he had put his teeth through his lip.

  Being poor, we had to make our own toys: bogies out of old boxes and pram-wheels; kites or ‘dragons’ out of crossed sticks, brown paper, paste, string, and a clod to give weight to the tail; sledges out of bits of wood, with the metal round barrels for runners; lassoes out of clothes ropes; aeroplanes out of paper; whips out of string or leather laces, to keep spinning the peeries we bought in the shop, but which we coloured with red, white, and blue chalks; and girrs out of iron hoops, and cleeks out of stiff wire bent at the end.

  If there had been any suggestion that our games should be organised or supervised by teachers or youth club leaders or any adults however well-disposed, we would have felt insulted. Our independence was what we valued most. We were nobody’s prisoners or protégés. We belonged to ourselves.

  For myself, though, as officer and poet, it was a marvellous seed-time.

  NINE

  After passing the qualifying examination, we left Primary and went on to Advanced Division. This meant for us a building in Kidd Street that looked like a prison or poorhouse. Its corridors were tiled like public lavatories. The playground was divided into areas for boys and girls by a high spiked fence. It was patrolled by a black-whiskered janitor, nicknamed Kruger. He lined up the boys and marched them in as if they were the Scots Guards.

  I had heard of ‘Limpy’ Calderwood long before I met him. Older boys told stories about him. Lame in the right leg, he lurched across the classroom floor as if it was the deck of a ship in a storm. To the headmaster’s horror, he refused to give religious lessons. There was often a smell of pepperminted whisky off his breath. Other teachers had pictures of the king in their rooms, Limpy had one of a glum-looking man in a bonnet. I was to learn this was Keir Hardie, for Limpy called himself a socialist. He had visited the homes of outstandingly clever boys and girls to try and persuade their parents to send them to the Academy and perhaps afterwards to the University. Nobody knew of any parents who had been persuaded.

  What had puzzled me was that no one ever boasted of having been strapped by him. He was that rarity, that penny black, a dominie without a tawse.

  A University graduate with honours in history, qualified therefore to teach in the Academy itself, where his sister Cathie was a teacher of French and German, Limpy had chosen to come and educate the aborigines of the East End. It was to the credit of the school board, reactionaries to a man, that they let him teach at all, since he called himself an atheist as well as a socialist. But then his father and grandfather had been highly respected well-to-do Gantock doctors, and he and his sister lived in a fine big house in the West End, looking out on to the Firth.

  That first morning we newcomers entered his room apprehensively. Because he had no belt it was feared he must use some other more sinister methods of discipline. If the teacher was soft, the choosing of seats in a classroom could become a competitive scramble, since no one wanted to be at the front, and some liked to be near the warm pipes, and others wante
d to be near their friends or sweethearts.

  Whatever Limpy was, it wasn’t soft. He glowered at us with what he imagined was ironical sympathy (as I later learned) but which struck us as magisterial malevolence. It was certainly more effective than irate bawling would have been. Most of us sat in the nearest empty seat, and folded arms. I deliberately chose one in the front row. I was wearing my Sunday jacket and kilt.

  My fearless grin must have been conspicuous among the submissive frowns and nervous winces. Glancing round boldly, I saw more than one close their eyes in prayer, or lick their lips or press their knees close together. I winked at Smout McTavish and Jim Blanie, but neither winked back.

  ‘Well, Teuchter, what do you find funny?’ asked Limpy.

  Behind me the slaves giggled sycophantically, though many of them had names as Highland as mine. He had used the most contemptuous name a Lowlander can call a Highlander: it implies, among other things, heathery ears and sheep-like wits. It had often been shouted at me in the streets by fools.

  ‘Do you mean me?’ I asked.

  Behind me they gasped at my impudence. Locked in a cage with a bear, a wounded one at that, they hated me for poking it with a stick.

  Limpy had a thin, sallow, clever face, with a little black moustache and long sideburns. It wasn’t designed for expressing the love of humanity that his principles bade him possess. The scowl with which he looked at me was indistinguishable from that of any other teacher confronted by what he took to be impertinence.

  ‘Stand up while you’re talking to me,’ he snapped.

  I stood up.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Fergus Lamont.’

  ‘That extraordinary garment you’re wearing, do you always wear it or is it for special occasions?’

  ‘I always wear a kilt.’ By not saying ‘sir’ I was hitting back hard.

  ‘Really? I can’t believe it. You, there.’ He pointed to a girl beside me. ‘Is it true? Does he always wear a kilt?’