Mr Alfred, MA Page 14

  ‘IT’S ALL MY FAULT’ said the thirty-two point caption above a picture of her smiling pretty face. She cut it out and kept it with a bundle of holiday-snaps in her handbag.

  Part Two

  The Writing on the Wall

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mr Alfred didn’t like his new school. The old journey to Collinsburn was long enough, but this was twice as long. He had to change buses in the city centre, and if he missed one by a few seconds he had a long wait for another. It meant he had to rise a lot earlier to allow for delays. He soldiered glumly on, suffering life patiently.

  He was still in mourning for the loss of Rose. Even before he left Collinsburn she was taken from him. There was a quick alteration made in his timetable and someone else was given her class till his transfer came through. He gained free time by the adjustment, but that was no compensation. He still felt she had treated him badly, and yet he wanted to see her again. He hoped for her every day, but she never came near him.

  Rather than tell his aunt the truth he said he had asked for a transfer.

  ‘You were always saying that’s what I should do,’ he reminded her.

  ‘It took you a long time,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘And why so sudden? Are you sure there’s not something behind it you’re not telling?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ he said. ‘I just got fed up with Tordoch. That’s all. Collinsburn used to be a good school, but not any longer.’

  He changed the subject. He was afraid he would give himself away if he said any more.

  The transfer made his visits to her less frequent than ever. If any of his old pupils saw him in Tordoch any night they would think he was looking for Rose. That’s how he saw it, for he believed his love was common knowledge. He believed a rumour of it had preceded him to his new school. He knew his very appearance when he entered the staffroom for the first time would make him seem an oddity. He was sure the teachers already there saw him as a tall, grey, haggard old man who came sidling in unsociably. And he was sure they talked about him behind his back and said a man of his age wouldn’t be shifted from one school to another unless he was no use at his job.

  He took more and more to drink in the evenings. He found he had to drink more to get the right effect of not worrying about anything. He drank in different parts of the city, in a kind of judicial assizes, to observe the customs and customers in a variety of bars. To prevent any barmaid seeing how much he took he never spent the whole night in one pub. His circuits helped him to get over Rose. He recovered as from an illness, with diminishing relapses.

  It wasn’t just the tedious journey to an outlying housing scheme made him dislike Waterholm Comprehensive, called Watty Compy by its pupils, with an ah and a glottal stop in the Watty. It was also the boys he had to teach. They frightened him. He had never been frightened in a classroom before.

  It started the day he arrived and came to a climax at four o’clock. He left promptly because he wasn’t sure about the times of the buses. He never left promptly again. A mob of boys at the stop outside the school tried to board the first bus that came. A score of them jammed the platform and the staircase to the top deck. The rest milled between the bus and the pavement. The Pakistani conductor was angry. The boys were merry. Especially to have made the conductor angry. The driver came out of his cabin and announced he wasn’t going on till the surplus boys got off. The boys wouldn’t get off. They were in good spirits. They jeered at the driver, they called the conductor nigger boy, they argued with the passengers.

  Mr Alfred was shocked. He hated disorder and bad manners. He raised his voice. He told the boys to line up quietly in a proper queue. Nobody bothered. Nobody knew him.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, mac,’ said an old-age pensioner watching the world go by from the kerb. ‘The young ones the day! They’ll no’ listen to anybody.’

  A fresh wave of boys surged on to the platform, leaping joyously on their schoolmates’ backs.

  ‘Come on, get off!’ the submerged conductor shouted. ‘Some of you get off.’

  The adults already on the bus grumbled at the hold-up. They said the conductor should put the boys off. They said the driver should drive on. They said they didn’t know what the world was coming to. They made remarks about modern education when the boys gave in and the bus moved off.

  ‘Makes you wonder what they learn them at the school nowadays,’ said a stout lady with a labrador under the seat.

  ‘It’s all these free travel passes,’ said the conductor. ‘They should take them from them. Make them walk. All I get is cheek.’

  A squad of boys ran alongside the departing bus, chanting.

  ‘Watty Compy! Cha-cha-cha!’

  They straggled behind when the bus gathered speed, and one of them picked up a stone and threw it at the conductor who was leaning from the platform giving them the v-sign Gerald had given Enrico.

  Mr Alfred walked on to the next fare-stage to get away from the remnants of the mob. He was in a bad temper. He saw why he was the only teacher who had waited with the pupils for a bus. Most of his new colleagues had a car, and they had given a lift to those who hadn’t. Nobody had offered him a lift. He didn’t mind that, but he thought somebody should have warned him what he would walk into if he went to the stop outside the school.

  He tried to settle down in Waterholm. It seemed an ugly place. He was familiar with the pupillary scribblings that raped the virgin flyleaves of textbooks. He had seen them countless times in Collinsburn and he wasn’t surprised to see them in Waterholm. There was nothing new in the otiose curves intended to represent the female breasts, waist and hips, in the crude sketches of the male organ, and certainly nothing new in the four-letter words whose use in print was sometimes supposed to prove the author had a literary talent never attributed to the boys who wrote them in their schoolbooks. What was new was the sheer quantity of obscene scribbling. And the quantity became quality. It gave Waterholm a peculiar aura, increasing his dislike and fear of it.

  What was also new, and what puzzled him, was the frequent occurrence of the word ‘Hox’. He saw it everywhere in Waterholm. In textbooks, in exercise books, cut on the desks, scratched on the twelve-inch rules, pencilled in the corridors. The janitor told him it was in the lavatories too, chalked on the walls, scrawled in the cubicles, chiselled on the doors. Sometimes it was ‘Yung Hox’.

  He unfroze far enough to ask what it meant when he was alone in the staffroom with a brighteyed tubby little man known to the boys as Wee Bobby. This was Harry Murdoch, a man of Mr Alfred’s age. Though unknown to Mr Alfred he had been his contemporary at university, and like him had taken an ordinary degree in Arts and trained for teaching. The day Mr Alfred arrived at Waterholm he recognised him as the student who had been famous for the amount of poetry he contributed to the university magazine. Murdoch had found the poems unreadable, but in middle age he was willing to be pleasant to a contemporary. He laughed agreeably at Mr Alfred’s question.

  ‘Hox?’ he said, echoing Mr Alfred’s precise rhyming of it with Box and Cox. ‘It’s really Hawks. That’s our local mob.’

  ‘Mob?’ said Mr Alfred, disliking the word.

  ‘Gang,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘The boys here call themselves the Young Hawks. All these gangs, they put their name up. There’s hardly a blank wall anywhere now. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘Can’t say I have,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘You must know the Cogs,’ said Mr Murdoch.

  ‘Cogs?’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know the Cogs,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘You must have seen the name on the walls when you were in Tordoch.’

  Mr Alfred said he hadn’t.

  ‘They were in the papers not long ago,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘A lad was knifed in a Cog fight. It happens every day. There’s always somebody knifing somebody now. You should keep up with current affairs.’

  He wanted to drop the topic and ask Mr Alfred if he still wrote any poetry. But he was afraid the question mig
ht sound derisive instead of friendly. And he wanted to be friendly, but Mr Alfred’s face put him off. So he said nothing. At the same moment Mr Alfred wanted to ask him why the boys called him Wee Bobby when his name was Harry. But he didn’t want to seem nosey. So he said nothing either. Yet in their silence there was the respect of one old soldier for another.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mr Alfred took Harry Murdoch’s advice. He tried to keep up with current affairs. He began to read a morning paper, which was more than he had done when Rose brought him one every day at lunchtime. Buying something she used to get for him was only one of the many trivial acts that resurrected her. It made him wish he could go back over the script of his life and rewrite the dialogue. But he knew he had no option. He had to read the part he had been given.

  Travelling across the city on a route not yet stale to him he would glance from his paper to see where the bus was going. Every day from the top deck he saw another gang name on the walls and hoardings. Every day he read of another boy of seventeen knifing a boy of eighteen or vice versa. His route and his paper told him he had been missing all Murdoch took for granted.

  He saw a new rash break out on the scarred face of the city. Wherever the name of a gang was scribbled the words ya bass were added. The application of the phrase caused some dispute at first. Nobody doubted YA BASS MEANT YOU BASTARD. But the grammarians who discussed it were undecided about its vocative or apostrophic use. Some said COGS YA BASS meant O COGS! YOU ARE BASTARDS! Others said it meant WE ARE THE COGS, O YOU BASTARDS! A fifteen- year-old boy charged with assault and breach of the peace, and also with daubing tongs ya bass on a bus-shelter, said in court that ya bass was an Italian phrase meaning for ever. But the sheriff didn’t believe him.

  Some of the intelligentsia seemed to believe him. Following a fashion, as the intelligentsia often do, they wrote the names of miscellaneous culture heroes in public places and added YA BASS. Thus soon after the original examples of COGS YA BASS, TOI YA BASS, TONGS YA BASS, fleet ya bass, and so on, which were plastered all over the districts where those gangs lived, a secondary epidemic occurred on certain sites only. SHELLEY YA BASS suddenly appeared in the basement of the University Union. In a public convenience near the Mitchell Library MARX YA BASS was scrawled in one hand, LENIN YA BASS in another, and TROTSKY YA BASS in a third. When The Caretaker was put on at the King’s Theatre PINTER YA BASS was pencilled on a poster in the foyer. BECKETT YA BASS, later and more familiarly SAM YA BASS, was scribbled on the wall of a public-house urinal near the Citizens’ Theatre the week Happy Days was on. When the same theatre presented Ghosts somebody managed to write IBSEN YA BASS in large capitals on the staircase to the dress circle.

  In bus shelters, railway stations and tenement closes, on factory walls and shop fronts, on telephone boxes, junction boxes, police boxes and pillar boxes, outside churches, libraries, offices, schools and warehouses, on the back of the seats upstairs on the buses, with the rexine ripped off to show plain wood, wherever there was a wall or a hoarding, a gang name and ya bass were flaunted. Always in big clumsy capitals, in white paint, in yellow paint, in green pencil, in blue pencil, in black ink and purple ink. The more recently a surface was cleaned or repainted the more immediate the writing.

  Mr Alfred was puzzled.

  ‘When do they do it?’ he asked. ‘What do they use?’

  ‘A paint spray,’ said Harry Murdoch. ‘Or a felt pen.’

  ‘I’m surprised nobody is ever caught doing it,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘Maybe it’s leprechauns. Or monsters from outer space. You know, psychological warfare. Demoralise us before they invade in force.’

  Murdoch laughed at his passing fancy but Mr Alfred wasn’t amused. The rash seemed to him so mysterious he was ready to believe anything. It upset him. He used his pubcrawls to make a perlustration of the city, north and south of the river, east and west of the Square. He began to compile a list of what he saw. The words weren’t inspired graffiti. They weren’t the poetry and pathos photographed and commented on by two young Londoners to make up a book at a couple of guineas. They weren’t political or surrealist, they weren’t witty or comic. They were only the monotonous evidence of a civic battology. He brooded over the inexplicable words that turned up irregularly alongside YA BASS. He noted fuzz, JOEY, DOTT, PEEM, MUSHY, BUNNY, ETTIE, CLAN, BIM and forty more. Sometimes the gang name was followed by ok instead of ya bass, sometimes it was preceded by YY, but he couldn’t find out what YY meant.

  He became obsessed with the unending defacement of the city. He was angry nobody seemed to care, nobody did anything about it. The correspondence columns of the papers were filled with debates about the need for comprehensive schools and a technological education in a twentieth-century Britain, about the duty of adults to hand on a moral code and maintain the nation’s cultural heritage, about the prevalence of bad language in television plays. But never a word about the writing on the wall. He made himself irritable, worrying. Harry Murdoch laughed at him. He said ‘YA BASS’ was a contribution to Scottish literature. It was even used as a joke in one of the pantomimes.

  ‘There’s a housing-sketch about the multistorey flats,’ he explained. ‘And the dame does a solo piece in the old panto couplets. Something like,

  If you’re a stranger in Auchenglass

  Just shout the password, Fangs ya bass!

  It brings the house down they tell me.

  Mr Alfred was shocked.

  Meanwhile, his attempt to make the best of Waterholm and forget Rose wasn’t very successful. He couldn’t get much work done with the classes he was given. They seemed barely literate. He had Murdoch’s registration class for two periods every day and he risked a comment since Murdoch was the only man on the staff he cared to talk to.

  ‘I’m finding it hard to do much with your fellows,’ he said. ‘I can’t get anywhere.’

  ‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ said Murdoch. ‘Neither can I. We’re out of date, you and me, with our M.A. Ordinary. After thirty years in the job we’ve no future. We don’t rank in a Comprehensive, so we get the worst classes.’

  He smiled. He wasn’t bitter. He did what he could to teach some maths, went home, and put the school out of his mind. He had his garden in the spring and summer, his classical records in the autumn and winter, and golf when the mood and weather suited.

  Mr Alfred was different. He had no garden and no hobbies. He worried. Anxious to get on good terms with the boys he tried chatting to them paternally with his hands in his pockets. He would be patient and pleasant. He wouldn’t get rattled. He gently discouraged a forward youngster who always wanted the limelight, he wagged a hushing finger at another who kept answering out of turn. He had seen enough to know a class could be goaded into insurrection by tyranny, clammed to sullenness by sarcasm. He wanted to be benevolent without being a despot. He wanted to be friendly and get communication. But there were no dividends from his policy. Only idleness, noise and bad manners. That was what frightened him. He saw something uncivilised in their eyes, something rude in their smirk, something savage in their slouch. They were foreigners. They didn’t speak his language. They were on a different channel and he couldn’t switch over. He believed that like animals they would sense he was afraid and turn on him. He tried to hide his fear, to conquer it by a kind of auto-suggestion. He put on a free and easy manner, pretending they didn’t frighten him. He failed.

  Then on a Thursday morning came what he had always thought impossible. Mr Murdoch’s class came to him the first period, lads of fourteen and fifteen. The team they supported had won a European Cup match the night before. Mr Alfred had seen the result in the paper, but it meant nothing to him. He didn’t appreciate it was a glorious victory. So he didn’t expect the entry of a choir singing the song the fans had sung the night before. He bawled at them. They went on singing. Some sat down sideways with their long legs stretched out. Others hunched round the hot pipes, fondling the warm metal, and argued with a nonconformist who said th
eir team was lucky. Somebody played a party tune on a mouth-organ. Two upstanding boys, as big as Mr Alfred himself, quarrelled about whose seat it was in the back row.

  ‘Sit down there!’ he roared. ‘Be quiet!’

  The edge on his voice made him even angrier than he was already. He knew he was getting himself worked up, but he couldn’t stand the noise. The insult of an uproar in his classroom maddened him.

  ‘Sit down! Be quiet!’ he roared again.

  ‘Sit down! Be quiet!’ echoed a mocking soprano.

  So sudden it was, so unexpected, he failed to pin the source. He walked in among them, up and down the passages. Young eyes looked at him with calm insolence, mouths grinned but said nothing. Feet stamped when he passed.

  ‘Sit down there! Be quiet!’ a parrot-voice squawked.

  It came again. And again.

  ‘Be quiet! Sit down! Sit down! Be quiet!’

  Always from behind his back. Bass, baritone and tenor.

  All bogus. Putting the impossible challenge to spot who it was. He fired glares right, left and centre. He was at bay, and he knew it. He trembled. He was ripe for murder. There came into his mind the question a colleague in Collinsburn had once put to him.

  ‘What would you do if a whole class started kidding you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t happen,’ he had answered then. ‘Not to me. I wouldn’t let it.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t happen to you because they know you here,’ his friend said. ‘But suppose they didn’t know you. Suppose it did happen. What would you do? What could you do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I can’t imagine it happening to me.’