Mr Alfred, MA Page 15

  And now it had. They were jeering at him, and he could do nothing to stop them. The row they were making recalled the class that had baited the young Latin teacher next door to him a long time ago. He was humiliated to be a victim where once he had been only an observer.

  At that point Mr Murdoch came in. He had heard enough outside. He knew his class as a man knows his warts or corns. He picked on one conspicuous boy even as he crossed the door.

  ‘Hey, Jumbo! Pipe down! And get back to your seat or I’ll skelp your big arse hard, so I will.’

  ‘It’s no’ me, Bobby,’ Jumbo shouted back. ‘Ah’m daying nothing. It’s him.’

  He put the finger on the boy nearest him, shoved him accusingly. But he sat down. Grudgingly. Still, he sat. The class hushed in waves of gathering peace.

  Mr Murdoch, brighteyed and tubby, strolled up and down the silent passages. He whispered an auricular threat here, gave a nuchal smack there, padded to the front of the class and gave Mr Alfred a wink the boys couldn’t see.

  ‘Let it rest,’ he whispered on the way out. ‘They won’t do it again.’

  In the staffroom later he told Mr Alfred not to worry. It was only because he was still a stranger. This class always chanced its arm with a new teacher, no matter how old he was. The only answer was to hit somebody hard right away. Rough justice for these fiery particles. Show them who’s boss.

  ‘But even that’s failing,’ he elaborated sadly. ‘It used to be boys took a pride in taking the belt. They’d boast how many they got. They used to despise a man couldn’t use the strap. Ach him, they’d say, he canny draw it! But now they want to argue. It wasn’t me, it was him. They’re yellow. They know their rights. We can’t do this and we can’t do that, but they can do what they like. They’re outside the law. It’s all this child-cult. They’re starting to defy me even. I had a reputation here. Handed down. God, I taught their fathers! There was a time no boy ever dared look sideways at me. But not now. I’m losing ground. There’s no respect now for tradition. I’ve got to act the clown, speak their lingo, to keep on the right side of them. But there are limits. I’m telling you, it will be hell let loose when they raise the leaving age.’

  Mr Alfred didn’t need advice about showing who was boss. He didn’t need a lecture on the change for the worse in the attitude of the pupils. He didn’t need gloomy prophecies about the future. He knew all that. He had said it himself, often. Platitudes didn’t stop his belly quivering with anger. He was ashamed that his class had been silenced only by a colleague’s intervention. He was furious he hadn’t had revenge. He wanted to hit out and assert himself. He wanted to terrorise them so much they wouldn’t dare mock him again. But when Murdoch left the room all he could do was get on with his lesson, and a poor one it was. He was sick with frustrated passion. At the morning break he went to the staffroom toilet and vomited in the wash-hand basin.

  He wasn’t displeased when Waterholm was raided one night in what the papers called an orgy of destruction. Gang slogans were painted on the walls and blackboards, bottles of glue were emptied on the classroom floors, textbooks and exercise books were torn up and scattered, fire hoses were turned on, flooding four classrooms, and the secretary’s room and the gymnasium were damaged by fire. But the main attack was on a recent acquisition greatly valued by the headmaster. It was what he called the Language Laboratory, where a classroom had been converted into a number of cubicles with tape-recorders, headphones, and some French and German conversation on tape. The cubicles were wrecked and the sound equipment was smashed beyond repair.

  Mr Alfred used the break-in to justify his dislike of the pupils of Watty Compy, for nobody doubted some of them were the culprits.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of people you have here. I thought Tordoch was bad, but I see I was transferred from the Ostrogoths to the Visigoths. That’s all.’

  ‘Ah, now!’ said Harry Murdoch. ‘Be fair! It could happen in any school.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The love affair between Martha Weipers and Graeme Roy was over. Mr Alfred read about them in the paper at a quarter to five one evening the week before Christmas. He bought a paper in the city centre when he changed buses. Sleet was falling and the bus windows were misty. He couldn’t see through them. All he could do was read his paper. It was the name Weipers caught his eye and gave his heart a knock. But it wasn’t Rose. It was Martha. She was found dead in Graeme Roy’s car at 8 a.m. She must have died in the small hours of the morning. Graeme Roy was dead beside her. He was in the driver’s seat and she was leaning against him with her head across his chest. His left arm was round her shoulder. The car was in the garage at the side of his father’s house. They had been at a latenight dance in the University Union and Roy’s parents were asleep at the time he was expected home.

  Mr Alfred went to see his aunt. It was his first visit for a long time. She knew he hadn’t come just because Christmas was near. She too had seen a paper. She knew he wanted to hear what they were saying about it in Tordoch. But she knew he wouldn’t ask. He would never admit he liked gossip.

  ‘I see your old school’s in the papers again,’ she said.

  ‘So long as it’s not on television,’ he answered her.

  He spoke lightly, pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t care, implying she ought to know he wasn’t interested in anything to do with his old school.

  ‘Former dux-girl at Collinsburn,’ she read from the paper. ‘She looks such a happy girl in that picture. You’d wonder how the papers get hold of these old photos. I thought you might have seen it.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  His lie meant he had to read the report as if he hadn’t seen it before. He was ashamed of his deceit. But its purpose was to hide his true feelings. He kept thinking of Rose. He wanted to comfort her.

  ‘You see the police think it was fumes poisoned them,’ said Granny Lyons.

  ‘That would be carbon monoxide,’ said Mr. Alfred. ‘If the engine was running and the doors closed. It doesn’t say. Or does it?’

  He acted a second reading of an account he knew by heart.

  ‘They’re saying here it was suicide,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘The pair of them together. Because she was in trouble.’

  ‘There’s always folk want to gossip,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Folk that like to think the worst.’

  ‘Did you know them?’ asked Granny Lyons.

  ‘I didn’t know her,’ he said. He wouldn’t mention Rose.

  ‘I taught the boy once. A very intelligent boy as far as I remember.’

  ‘He couldn’t have been all that intelligent,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘It was the girl was clever. See what it says. Prizes for French and German. But see what it says about him. He gave up his studies at the university a year ago. He must have been a right failure, him.’

  ‘Many a boy good at school fails at university,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I’ve known highly intelligent boys had to give it up. Not their bent.’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t very intelligent,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘What he did. If all they say is true.’

  ‘If all they say is true,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Suppose it is. Perhaps he loved her.’

  ‘He took an odd way of showing it,’ said Granny Lyons.

  ‘He was young,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘They were both young. Perhaps they thought love was all. How can a man die better than with his loved one dead beside him? Maybe that’s what he thought.’

  ‘A strange kind of love,’ said Granny Lyons, ‘to want to die together. They had their whole life before them.’

  ‘But if they saw no future?’ said Mr Alfred.

  The way he saw it, the death wish was in them. He remembered he had known it himself when he first saw he would never get his poems published. But he had drawn back from suicide. Graeme Roy hadn’t. That was the difference between them. What he didn’t know, and knew he couldn’t know, was the temptation Graeme Roy had met and what had led him into
it, how great the despair imposed by age and circumstance, what defeat or resistance he had suffered from Martha, who may have chosen to die in the flesh rather than die in the Elizabethan sense. Perhaps he had lost heart because he was a university failure. Perhaps his parents had forbidden any talk of marriage till he qualified for some profession. Or even forbidden him to see Martha at all because she lived in the worst street in Tordoch. Then it was a worldly ban had made him choose eternity and take Martha with him.

  He brooded over them. Over Martha too young to die and over Roy persuading her death was life’s high meed. Dying together was one kind of communion. He thought he understood them. He sorrowed for them. How could any love or beauty live in Tordoch? Only weeds could survive there, like the flat ugly dockens in the Weavers Lane.

  He knew his meditation proceeded on the assumption that the local talk of a suicide pact was the truth. But he knew he couldn’t be sure about that. He longed to speak to Rose, to encourage her to live, whatever had happened. It was unthinkable that nobody should ever break the curse of Tordoch and grow up to a proper life. And who more deserving salvation than Rose?

  An alcoholic whim took him back to Tordoch between two pubs one night. There was a decent interval since Martha’s death. If Rose came along the meeting would seem accidental and he could talk to her of Martha without appearing ghoulish. He slipped into the scheme through the Weavers Lane. On the wall of Donaldson’s paint works he saw REAL COGS RULE ALL, on the back of McLaren’s garage was COGLAND, and leaving the lane he saw COGS RULE HERE chalked on Kennedy’s soap factory.

  He loitered in a closemouth. It was raining. It had been raining all day. Across the dark street the windows of a fish-and-chip shop and a general stores stared through the downpour with a flood of inane brilliance. He would see Rose silhouetted there if she passed. He would know her walk and figure at once. He waited and waited, wearing an old coat and a waterproof cap as his disguise.

  A big puddle in the gutter reflected the building opposite him, making it plunge into the ground as much as it reared above it. He knew it was madness. There was no reason why she should come. He knew she lived just round the corner. That’s why he was waiting where he was. But where would she be going or coming from at that time of night with the rain lashing down? His feet were cold. He felt the damp seep into his bones. He gave it up and went back to his pubcrawl.

  The papers had an epilogue to their story of the young lovers. Roy’s parents had no comment. But there was an interview with Martha’s father plus his picture. He wanted to make a statement he said. He had a grievance. People were saying his daughter was pregnant when she died. He and his wife wanted to have it publicly declared there was no truth in the rumour. After that there was nothing more in the papers, and the Weipers moved quietly from Tordoch two months later.

  Mr Alfred too let it drop out of mind. He was having worries of his own. Before the session ended he was transferred to a primary school. Mr Charles Parsons, M.A. (Hons.), B.Sc., Ed.B., FEIS, saw him out with a smile and a handshake.

  ‘I should very much have liked to have kept you here. But you understand you were only standing in for Mr Auld till he recovered from his operation. Now he’s back I’ve no time-table for you. It’s a pity. But I’m sure you’ll enjoy teaching in Winchgate Primary. It’s a fine modern school. It was only opened a year ago.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Alfred.

  He knew he had lost face at Waterholm, but he had never expected to be sent to a primary school.

  ‘You’ve always taught post-primary, haven’t you?’ Mr Parsons asked as if he didn’t know.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I’ve been teaching secondary classes for—’

  ‘Then this will be a challenge to you,’ said Mr Parsons. He was smooth and quick. He didn’t want Mr Alfred talking back. ‘I always say teaching is a job that’s full of new challenges. One must accept the challenge.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘But I—’

  ‘Children are delightful to teach at that age,’ said Mr Parsons. ‘So innocent, so keen to learn. I’ve taught primary classes myself, you know. I’d love to get back into the classroom and do some solid teaching, instead of all this admin. I’m sure you as a graduate will find it most rewarding to work with primary children.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Mr Alfred.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  When he got to Winchgate Primary he was told his class was in an annexe a mile from the main building.

  Mr Chambers, the headmaster, received him in a pleasant office with picture windows, central heating, a fitted carpet, a modern desk with matching chair, glass fronted book-cases, a coffee table and a jar of mixed flowers. He had two phones on his desk, a master-radio and an intercom panel behind him, and four lounge chairs for his visitors.

  Mr Lauder, the deputy head, hovered respectfully. Mr Alfred recognised him as a type rather than an individual. A deferential man, useful to his superiors, discreet and stonefaced, conspiratorial if need be, and all the time taking care of his own interests. Never without a paper in his hand to make him look busy.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve got to put you in the annexe,’ said Mr Chambers, smiling broadly. ‘But I can’t send an established member of staff down there to make room for you here. You’ll have to sort of thole your assizes in the outposts of empire till there’s a vacancy in the main building. It’s the curse of a primary school, an annexe.’

  ‘There’s hardly a primary school without one now,’ said Mr Lauder.

  He raised sad eyes from a sheaf of foolscap held by a bulldog-clip.

  ‘Some have two,’ said Mr Chambers. ‘Sandy Logan over in Clachanwood, he has three, poor man.’

  ‘He must be getting on now, old Sandy,’ said Mr Lauder. ‘He’s about due to retire I should think. And did you see wee Jimmy Rae died yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, I saw it in the Herald,’ said Mr Chambers. ‘All that superannuation and he never lived to draw a penny of it.’

  ‘That means a new head wanted for his place,’ said Mr Lauder. ‘There’s bound to be a call-up soon. There’s only two left on the reserve list.’

  ‘You’d better get busy,’ said Mr Chambers. ‘If you want your own school.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Mr Lauder. ‘I don’t know anybody.’

  He lowered his head, darted a tick at the top sheet of his clip and turned it over.

  Mr Alfred waited silently.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Mr Chambers. ‘Well, yes, now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Alfred.

  The annexe he was sent to was a row of six classrooms in prefabricated huts. They were shoved up thirty years ago as temporary accommodation to take the overflow from the old school till the new one was built, and they were still needed because the new school was too small even before it was opened. They were drab lairs with hardboard walls and wooden floors. At the end of the row was a cell used as a staffroom. It had a deal table and no tablecloth, five hard chairs, a gas-ring and a two-bar electric fire, a tiny toilet round the corner and a wash-hand basin with no hot water. Mr Alfred sighed and tightened his jaws till his decadent molars ached again.

  He was uneasy in his new job. He had no idea how to talk to children ten years old. They might have been ten months old for all he knew about people so young. They seemed babies, and like Mr Briggs he thought there were already too many babies in the world. He had never had boys and girls in the same room before. He had never had forty-eight pupils in the same room before. He had never worked through the day without a change of class or a period off before.

  ‘You’ll be all right here,’ said Mr Lindsay, senior resident and cynic, an older man. ‘Nobody bothers us. Up in the main building you’ve always got the boss breathing down your neck. I prefer it down here. I don’t like these new schools they’re putting up. This is what I’m used to. That’s why I volunteered to stay here. You can be independent. Nothing to worry about. Old Chamber-pot, he won’t put any class in the
annexe for more than six months. So they come and they go and I stay. Suits me. Never see wee Lauder either. Can’t stand that man. That’s why I asked out of the main building. And they can’t pin a thing on you when you’ve had the class less than six months. You’ll like it here, an old hand like you.’

  Mr Alfred didn’t like it. He wanted to teach. But nobody wanted to learn. He knew it was his job to make them. He tried. He failed. It was like talking into a phone with nobody at the other end. His troubled conscience found a line of defence. He took the progress cards for every pupil in his own class, in Mr Lindsay’s class, and in two other classes. He listed the intelligence quotients recorded there and worked out the average. It was ninety-two. The mean was ninety.

  ‘No wonder we can’t do much,’ he said. ‘They just haven’t got it. Do you think it’s possible there are more stupid children now than there were in our time?’

  ‘Now, now!’ said Mr Lindsay.

  He raised a censorious finger and grinned. A man as earnest as Mr Alfred amused him.

  ‘What do you mean – now, now?’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘You must never say a child is stupid,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘There are no stupid children, just as there are no bad children.’

  ‘But there are,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Whether you believe in original sin or believe in evolution, you can’t deny there’s wickedness and stupidity in the world.’

  ‘You know that and I know that,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘But the top brass won’t admit it. They’ve never worked nine till four, Monday to Friday in a classroom. They talk as if there was only a shower of little Newtons and Einsteins who haven’t had a fair chance because you didn’t teach them right.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘And if the boy is a thief, a liar and a coward, it’s not his fault. It’s yours for not giving him enough love.’

  ‘It’s a very attractive theory,’ said Mr Alfred. He turned it over and looked at it. ‘No child is bad. Then all children are not bad. Does that mean good? No child is stupid. All children are not stupid. Does that mean clever?’