Mr Alfred, MA Read online

  ‘You’re so new in primary teaching,’ said Mr Lindsay, ‘you don’t seem to know the line. All children are equal. So why should the clever ones get prizes? Either give them all prizes like in Alice in Wonderland or give nobody a prize. If everybody can’t get something it’s only fair nobody should get anything. If you deprive a child of a prize you make him feel he’s inferior. You might warp him for life. We’ve got to discourage the competitive spirit. It’s a bad thing. So no more exams. Some poor sod might fail.’

  Mr Alfred said the new schemes of work, and the new methods they involved, were making life difficult.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to do,’ he complained.

  ‘Does anybody?’ said Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Another thing,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘It doesn’t seem this school was ever meant for teaching in. It’s more like a welfare centre. I’ve never met so many cases of free dinners and free clothes and getting tokens for the clinic. We feed them and clothe them and give them medical care. Next thing is we’ll be putting them to bed.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘Once you start with the idea all children are equal, next thing is you say some of them don’t get a fair chance because they come from a poor home. So tomorrow or the day after we’ll be having legislation for equal environments. We’ll have the mums and dads in barracks and all the weans brought up together in one bloody big comprehensive sleeping-and-feeding-centre.’

  ‘Back to Sparta,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘It’s bound to come,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘You can have liberty or you can have equality. You can’t have both.’

  ‘What about fraternity?’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘Haven’t seen it since I left the army,’ said Mr Lindsay.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ said Mr Alfred.

  There was a young teacher, Miss Seymour, two doors along the veranda from him, a female non-graduate, college-trained for three years. She had been teaching for a year and a bit. He thought her youth and her zest for the job might help him if he discussed the new methods with her. Inadvertently he mentioned poetry.

  She boggled.

  ‘Poetry? Oh, I never do poetry. I encourage the children to write their own poetry.’

  She was airy-mannered, brisk-moving, swift-speaking, and fully fashionable. She decorated the walls of her classroom with the drawings and paintings of her pupils and pinned up the foolscap pages of a handwritten class-magazine.

  Mr Alfred inspected the display, hoping to learn something.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to let the children see some good reproductions of famous paintings?’ he asked. ‘Or even coloured posters of Scotland’s beauty spots. You can get them from British Railways.’

  ‘That’s no good,’ said Miss Seymour. ‘It’s the children’s own work that’s important.’

  ‘I see there’s a lot of bad spelling and bad grammar in your magazine,’ he said.

  ‘Spelling and grammar don’t matter,’ said Miss Seymour. ‘Just so long as they write something. Creative activity, that’s what counts.’

  ‘But very few folk are creative,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Even those that are need examples when they’re young. Shouldn’t you let them see a painting by a great painter, let them learn a poem written by a poet? Instead of all this rubbish.’

  She laughed at him.

  ‘Rubbish? I like that! You’re a right old fossil! What you see there is what the inspectors want. This is the day of the child-dominated classroom.’

  ‘The child is master of the man,’ he muttered.

  ‘Pardon?’ she said.

  She used a pale pink lipstick, her nails were varnished silver, her hair was a long sheeny blonde, she wore fishnet tights and a miniskirt. She had pale-blue eyes, a small nose and a big bosom. But she didn’t attract him. Since the day he lost Rose he had become impotent and lost interest in women. He had even forgotten Stella. He never went to her pub now.

  ‘Don’t worry so much,’ Mr Lindsay patted him on the elbow. ‘All this will pass. In education the experts of one generation always discover the experts of the previous generation were a crowd of bloody eedjits.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘But I’m afraid the new fashion will last my time.’

  At the lunch-hour break, to get away from it all, he went for a walk round the neighbourhood. There was a new park five minutes away, and he felt the better for a walk round it in spite of the fact that the urinal at the main entrance had gate ya bass daubed on the wall and yy gate chiselled on the door of the solitary water-closet. There were two pubs, but he didn’t go into either. He never touched alcohol till his day’s work was over. One of the pubs was new, but the other, the Black Bull, was an old howff surviving from the days when Winchgate like Tordoch was only a village on the edge of the insatiable city. There was an old cinema, the Dalriada, dating from the Chaplin era, and behind the park a local railway line closed by Beeching. There was a public library and reading room. And further out, he was told, there was a cemetery beside the old village church. He meant to visit it some lunchtime, but procrastinated. He saw himself trying to make out the inscriptions on the weatherworn tombstones and going over some stanzas of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in his head. The library too he meant to visit. It would be peaceful there and in the cemetery.

  But he found no peace. He got used to the janitor accosting him every Monday morning.

  ‘Another break-in at the weekend, sir. Sorry it’s your room again. But you see, it’s you being at the far end. They’ve a clear getaway across the field and over the railway. Even if I spotted them I could never catch them.’

  The first time it happened was the worst. He thought it was an attack on him as much as on the room. He thought he must have antagonised his boys somehow. All his windows were smashed and the classroom entered. Textbooks and exercise books were torn to bits and the scraps scattered. The desks had been pushed about and overturned. The walls were sprayed with paint, and chalk was stamped into the floorboards. The pupils were jubilant when they came in and saw chaos. Mr Alfred tried to settle them and sort things out, but it took a long time.

  ‘Please sir, I still haven’t got the right seat.’

  ‘Please sir, I’ve got books here aren’t mine.’

  ‘Please sir, there’s dirt in my desk.’

  They were excited, curious to see what he would do. Mr Alfred rubbed his chin. He felt the bristles coarse under his fingertips. He never seemed to get a close shave in the morning now. He breathed in and breathed out, slowly.

  His windows were broken three weeks running, but when other rooms were raided as well he stopped thinking it was his fault. The fourth weekend Mr Lindsay’s room was nearly set on fire. All that was left of the register and the pupils’ documents, progress cards, medical schedules and report cards, was a charred mass in a corner where the floorboards and the wall were badly scorched. The invaders put the water-closets out of use by stealing the chains that flushed the cisterns. The janitor tied cords to the lever in lieu of chains, but they soon disappeared too. The ceiling in the toilets had big holes caused by boys swinging from the lintel of the cubicle doors to see how high and hard they could kick. The damage was so recurrent repairs became desultory.

  ‘I’m sick of this place,’ said the janitor.

  He was an old-fashioned man, impatient of children, much given to whining about the hard life he had. He spent his days moaning in the huts and his nights drinking in the Black Bull. He was there one night when his lonely wife heard glass breaking. She hurried out just in time to see three lads scampering. She was angry, and in her anger she spoke foolishly.

  ‘I know you,’ she called out in the twilight. ‘I know you, McCulloch! I saw you, Baxter! Yes, and you with the red hair, I know you too!’

  She told her husband. He challenged McCulloch and Baxter in the morning. He thought he would get the third boy’s name by threatening them. All he got was abuse. When it was dark that night somebody threw a brick through his
living-room window. At the end of the month he handed in his resignation.

  ‘I’m not putting up with this any longer,’ he told Mr Alfred. ‘I’m getting a job with the Parks Department.’

  He wasn’t there a week before he was moaning again. Mr Alfred met him on one of his lunchtime walks.

  ‘I’ve just lost eight young trees,’ said the ex-janitor. ‘They must have come prepared to do damage. It would have took a good axe to fell they trees. It would break your heart, so it would.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  To avoid having to listen to the ex-janitor’s grumbling he stopped going to the park. He went further out to have a look at the cemetery he had long meant to visit. It was a restful plot, away from the world and divorced from time, but before he was very far in he saw two tombstones lying flat. A wizened labourer was bent on putting them up again. He straightened when he heard Mr Alfred come along. He had to tell somebody.

  ‘But how did they manage it?’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘They broke into my toolshed,’ said the old man. ‘It took a crowbar to get these stones down. I give up. Folk that’ll do that, they’ve no respect for nothing.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I can’t understand it.’

  He was in low spirits at that time in any case, because Granny Lyons was in hospital. She was to have a mam- mectomy. He went out at midday to phone the hospital and ask about her. He didn’t like to use the phone in the school in case he was overheard. He preferred to keep his private life private. He walked round and round Winchgate for an hour and got nowhere. Every phone-box he tried was out of order.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I’ll never understand it.’

  Still searching peace and quiet he went next day to the local library. He liked going to the corporation’s public libraries, he liked showing his spare ticket to get in, and then browsing through the catalogues and the card-index of recent additions. The librarian on duty that day was a sedate little spinster with grey hair and a cameo brooch on her blouse. When she saw Mr Alfred come in she knew at once he was a booklover. She watched him go to where the catalogues should be, watched him squint for the card- index boxes. She sighed, padded over in flatheeled sympathy. She explained the library had no catalogues. There had been a break-in through the skylight. All the index- cards and the printed catalogues had been stolen. Some of the cards had been found scattered across the old railway line, but she couldn’t say yet how many were missing. The printed catalogues, bound in volumes, had still to be found.

  ‘We’ll have to recatalogue the whole library,’ she said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘What a shame.’

  She blinked and sniffed, acknowledging his share in her sorrow.

  ‘Fourteen thousand volumes,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how long it will take us. We’re short of staff as it is.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I don’t understand. Why do they do it?’

  He was glad he wasn’t a cinema-goer when he saw from the bus one morning that the Dalriada was only the hollow shell of a burned-out building. But he wasn’t surprised. He knew he was in a bad area. He seemed to have spent his life in bad areas. And he supposed the annexe where he taught was the prey of vandals because it was a neglected backwater lacking the amenities of the main building. It bred resentment, and resentment was expressed in destruction. That’s how he explained it to Mr Lindsay.

  Mr Lindsay smiled. He knew the main building was having trouble too. The climax came when a single-storeyed wing was gutted by fire. A passing motorist saw the flames at two in the morning. The wing included a dining- room, kitchen, gymnasium, and medical room. The papers said it cost more than £100,000 when it was opened. The police said entry had been gained through a pantry-window too small to admit anyone but a schoolchild. Mr Chambers had to make emergency arrangements to feed the children who used the dining-room their schoolmates had destroyed.

  ‘I can just see old Chamber-pot,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘Chasing his tail in ever decreasing circles till he disap- pears up his own arse.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘What a school!’

  ‘Ah now, wait a minute!’ said Mr Lindsay, aggressively loyal. ‘It’s not just here. It happens everywhere.’

  ‘The child-dominated school,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘That’s not a fair thing to say,’ said Miss Seymour.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mr Alfred liked the weekend. He could forget school and Miss Seymour then. On a Saturday afternoon he went strolling along Sauchiehall Street. He meant to go to Boots and buy shaving-soap and razor-blades. But he was on the wrong side of the road, and when he came out of a daydream he saw he couldn’t get across. Where there should have been four lanes of one-way traffic racing from west to east, with a break at Hope Street or Renfield Street on the Cross signal, there was only a crowd of pedestrians from east and west who kept going on a collision course. He thought it rather strange so many people should be walking right in the middle of a busy road. It took him a moment or two to make out that what he was seeing was two gangs, about fifty in each, armed with axes and hammers, throwing bottles and yelling as they advanced.

  He was frightened by the noise and the flourish of weapons. When the rearguards flowed from the road on to the pavement, routing neutrals there, he ran into a shop doorway. He wasn’t the only one. All the shopping housewives flocked for cover, and their hysterical screams made bedlam of a battlefield already bellowing and rebellowing. He saw a scampering matron trip herself in her hurry and fall on her face just as an empty bottle crashed beside her. He was terrified, but he thought he had to be at least a gentleman if not a hero. He dashed from his shelter and tried to helpher to her feet. She was fat and heavy. He couldn’t lift her. He felt the sag of big flabby breasts as he grasped her round the middle and he blushed. Some women, gabbling in dignantly, gave him a hand and raised their fallen sister. She got off her knees slowly, white and shaking.

  When he had calmed her a little and taken her to the doorway Mr Alfred turned to watch what was going on in the street. He was still frightened, but he was interested too. He couldn’t believe that two gangs had the cheek to pick Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday afternoon as the venue for a challenge match, Sauchiehall Street above all places, the city’s most famous thoroughfare, its answer to Edinburgh’s Princes Street, to London’s Regent Street.

  He looked and listened. The medley of chanting and barracking made it hard to distinguish the words, but he recognised the same warcry coming from both sides.

  ‘Ya bass!’

  ‘Ya bass!’

  ‘What’s it all about?’ he asked in the doorway.

  Nobody seemed to know. Nobody even looked at him, far less answered him. All eyes front, all mouths open.

  Before the gangs were fully engaged six patrol cars and a Q car came speeding along. They barged through them and swerved to a stop in the middle of the road. A score of policemen jumped out. Mr Alfred wanted to cheer. He saw the crowd break like shattered glass, he saw youths throw away bottles and bayonets as they fled. He saw a butcher’s cleaver tossed in the air and heard it clatter in the gutter. A discarded hammer landed at his feet. He gaped at it.

  In the Sunday paper he read there were twenty-nine arrests. The printed story pleased him. He had to cut it out. He had to show it to Mr Lindsay in the staffroom on Monday morning.

  ‘I saw that,’ he had to say. ‘I was there.’

  The cutting seemed to give more reality to what he had seen, and what he had seen made the cutting more credible.

  He saw another fight in the street before he was much older. Mr Lindsay, a judicious beer drinker, told him of a bar on the south side that served good draught beer. Mr Alfred said he would give it a trial. A pub-crawl in that area might be interesting. He took a bus across the river on a Wednesday night. He thought Wednesday would be a suitably quiet night for a voyage of exploration and he got off the bus with the p
leasant feeling of a day’s work behind him and adventure in front of him.

  Between pubs he walked into trouble. Two companies of juveniles, moving against each other at the gallop, took over the whole street and made anybody who got in their way scurry into a close for safety. Mr Alfred resented having his hard-earned right to a pub-crawl obstructed. He had a drink in him, and he wasn’t going to run into a close just because of a clash of minors. He stood against a shop-window and superciliously looked on. What he saw alarmed him and wiped the sneer off his face. The vicious way the fangs were bared at the scream of ‘Ya bass’ seemed an appalling and yet appropriate accompaniment to the thrust of the knife.

  Squad cars and a dog-van bowled along and closed in as the battle rolled along Victoria Road and into Calder Street. The dogs were taken from the van but not released in pursuit. Their barking was enough to make the rioters run.

  The next morning he saw in his paper there were fourteen arrests. He read it out to Mr Lindsay. Again he had to boast.

  ‘I saw that. I was there.’

  ‘But you found my pub all right?’ said Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘You’re quite right. It’s a good beer they have there. But you know what I’m finding now? It’s hard to get a good light draught beer. It’s mostly heavy ale they serve now. That’s what the young ones ask for. They just want to get drunk quick. You can see it. Two pints and they want to fight their pal.’

  The frequency of gang-fights in the main streets of their city became a staple of conversation between them. They told each other what they had seen in town the night before, they read aloud from the paper over their cup of tea at morning break.

  ‘Policeman stabbed in gang affray,’ read Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Five stabbed on way to dance,’ read Mr Alfred.

  ‘Boy of sixteen gets six years,’ read Mr Lindsay. ‘Attempted murder by stabbing.’

  ‘Boy of seventeen gets four years,’ read Mr Alfred. ‘Used razor on a girl and a youth in gang-clash.’