Gift from the Gallowgate (30 page)

‘Why was he in the psychiatric ward?’ I asked then, just out of curiosity.

‘It happened when he was in his second year at Drumgarth Infant School . . .’

‘Drumgarth?’ Now I knew what had been niggling at me. ‘Oh, my God! Of course! I did some teaching practice there. I should have recognised him ’

‘The report said that he was knocked down by a car, and when the driver got out to see if he was badly hurt, he jumped up and kicked the man in the shins. The psychiatrist at the hospital
said that the knock had affected his brain.’

Something wasn’t right about this account, as far as I was concerned. ‘But . . . you said he was in Primary Two at the time?’

‘That’s right. He should really be in Primary Four now, but . . .’

‘He was just as badly behaved in Primary One, when I was there. His teacher was nearly demented with him. She took him out of the class when I had the two weeks on my own, but I should
have recognised him. It wasn’t the accident that made him like this. He must have been born that way.’

Mr Robb pulled a face. ‘I don’t think I should say anything about that in my weekly report on him, though. It would probably cause trouble, so we’ll just keep an eye on him. I
see you’re down for an hour in the Art Room now, and the report says he reacts badly in big open spaces, so be careful. I’ll look in now and then to see how things are going.’

When John learned that we were going to the Art room, he said he loved to draw, and lined up quietly next to Colin after all. This room was big and airy, but he seemed to be quite happy there. I
walked amongst the tables, commenting on the pictures that were taking shape, and shrugged to Mr Robb when he poked his head round the door.

Soon after that, came the roar again. ‘Hey, you!’

Hands were arrested midway to paints, brushes were left static on the large sheets of paper I had cut from the rolls we used, but I decided to ignore him this time. I did squint at him out of
the corner of my eye in a minute or so, and was glad to see that he was looking down at the table as if planning what to do next.

‘Hey, teacher!’ He had ‘thunk’.

This was a fractional improvement, but still not what I wanted to hear. ‘I told you before, my name is Mrs Davidson.’

After a moment’s hesitation, he growled, ‘Hey, Davidson.’

‘What do you want, Wallace?’ I barked.

Dozens of breaths were held in fear of what this might precipitate, but thank heaven, it did have the effect I’d hoped for. He seemed to shrivel up. ‘My name’s John
Wallace,’ he said, timidly accusing.

‘And my name is Mrs Davidson. Did you want to ask me something? Do you want me to take a look at your painting?’

‘Aye.’ A long silence, then, ‘Yes, please . . . Mrs Davidson.’

We had got there, by fair means or foul, so I walked round the end of the long table to where he was standing. It transpired that he was really good at drawing, but the subjects he chose were
quite weird, to say the least. I had told them a very short story before they began, about different shapes having an argument as to which was most used, and their assignment had been to make a
picture using as many shapes as they wanted. Some had been most inventive, with squares and circles, some had used triangles, and, as usual, there were the odd few who hadn’t got the idea at
all.

Not so with John Wallace. He had understood what I meant, right enough, but he had chosen to draw a cemetery filled with rectangular gravestones. The church in the background consisted of
squares and triangles and the whole thing was strangely eerie, because the only paint he had used was black. I suppose the psychiatrists would have made something out of that. In later weeks, he
did begin to use other colours, but generally toned them down with a little drop of black mixed in.

The hour we were allotted finished at half past eleven, so, all brushes cleaned and everything tidied away, the children went quietly back up to the top corridor, turned left and along towards
Room 8. It was a lovely summer day again, and it was forty-five minutes until dinnertime, so instead of going into the classroom, I took them out to have some further practice for the sports
– just straightforward running, not the sack race, egg (potato)-and-spoon, obstacle, skipping and that sort of thing, because the equipment for those was down in the gym . . . or possibly
being used by another class. In any case, plain running was the most important.

The children had changed into gym shoes (plimsolls) first thing in the morning, so we just walked past our own room, through the cloakroom, past the girls’ toilets (not such a smell
emanating as from the boys’ area at the opposite end of this corridor) and through the outside doors.

There was one asthmatic boy who couldn’t take part, so he went inside to collect two schoolbags as markers, and we started, short races for the girls at first, then the same for the boys,
increasing in length until we would reach the stipulated length for Primary Three, which I can’t for the life of me recall. Everything was going well, the boys cheering on the girls and vice
versa, until we came to the second last boys’ race. John had been hanging back, not entering into any that had been run so far, but I was pleased to see him lining up for this one.

How wrong can a person be? I had already made one big mistake with him that day, and this was to be far, far worse. I checked that they were lined up properly, then lifted my whistle to my
mouth. As usual, at least two didn’t wait for the proper signal, one being John Wallace, and the others shouted out in disgust. I expected a scene, but he trotted back quietly enough.

‘Get Ready! Get Set! Go!’ I blew the whistle and ran down the grass to see who would win. I was congratulating the winner when a shout got up from the girls behind me. ‘The new
boy’s run away, Mrs Davidson!’

Not only had he run across the grass, he was charging through the small gate on to Provost Fraser Drive, a busy bus route. My only thought was to save him from being knocked down again, so I
chased after him, turning left along that street and then left again down Anderson Drive, once a ring road round the city, but now one of the main routes through it.

Unknown to me in my inelegant flight, two of the girls had run inside to tell the headmaster what was happening, and he had jumped into his car and driven out of the front gate and along Kemp
Street to find the miscreant . . . and me, at his heels. He didn’t have to come far, John had almost reached Kemp Street, but he was yanked into the little Saab screaming and shouting while I
was left to limp back to school by myself.

By this time, of course, the dinner bell had gone, and my dear lambs had changed their footwear and were lingering in the cloakrooms to see what was happening. That was the end of my first
forenoon with John Wallace.

In case you are wondering, he ran off because he had come last in the race, and his excuse for that was, ‘It wisna fair. They’d on their jimmies, and I hadna.’

I had forgotten that he hadn’t arrived until the others had changed their footwear, so I suppose he did have a legitimate complaint.

Things were never dull in Primary Three, especially with John Wallace there. I had been trying one day to get the class to give me words beginning with letters going down the
alphabet, and had just got as far as B when John’s hand shot up. ‘I ken, Mrs Davidson. I ken a word beginning wi’ B.’

This was something of a breakthrough, so I smiled beatifically at him and he burst out, ‘Bugger off!’

I had to keep smiling. ‘Very good, John, but I don’t think we should use that one again. It’s not a very nice word.’

When I related this in the staffroom, the headmaster grinned, ‘I’d watch myself going down the alphabet if I were you, Doris, especially the next letter.’

He was right, of course. Smithfield was in what the government would later class as a deprived area, and the language could be very colourful, to say the least. I remember being at a conference
once, where the Depute Director of Education was plugging the latest gimmick (whether his own idea or that of the Education Authority, I don’t know) but I listened while he went on at length
about letting the children use their playground language in the classroom.

‘This would give them freedom to speak, and they would be able to say exactly what they think.’

There were murmurs of agreement from all sides of me, but I felt so strongly about this that I got to my feet. ‘Excuse me, but this may work in certain schools in certain areas, but not at
Smithfield. Every second word that’s spoken, or shouted, in the playground, especially from the boys, is a swear word.’

‘Ah, yes, Mrs . . .?

‘Davidson,’ I supplied.

‘Yes, Mrs Davidson, but what the children call swear words are usually rather innocuous – like knickers, or . . . What stage do you have?’

‘Primary Three, and believe me, Mr Liddell, what they say is far beyond being innocuous. I’m no prude, but I wouldn’t think of uttering some of the things they come out with.
Four letter words that I never knew existed until I was over thirty, and I wouldn’t soil my lips repeating.’

He looked at me in disbelief. ‘You must be exaggerating, Mrs Davidson.’

I was wondering if I should let rip and shock him, but, thank goodness, another lady stood up. ‘Mrs Davidson’s quite right. I teach at Middlefield, and it’s the same there.
Vile, filthy words from the worst boys sometimes, and they think nothing of it. If what you’re advocating comes into being, I for one would have to resign.’

I thanked her for her support as we both sat down. Middlefield School was just a stone’s throw from Smithfield, so she knew I spoke the truth. I could see other teachers, however, those in
West End Schools or in the better areas, looking at each other as if we were from another planet – which we were, as far as that was concerned.

This little idea was swiftly squashed, to be replaced in a month or so by another controversial plan (to use Mr Liddell’s expression). ‘We had attempted to preserve the Doric, but I
agree that playground language was perhaps a little dangerous . . . in some cases. However, we now ask you to run a competition in your classes for writing a bible story in the Doric. Offer a small
prize for the best, and I look forward to reading some of them. We do not want the Doric to die out.’

The Doric, for those who don’t know, is a dialect spoken only in the North East corner of Scotland, and remains a foreign language even to the rest of Scotland. To give you a small
example: ‘Fit div ye dee wi’ yer aul’ claes?’ This means ‘What do you do with your old clothes?’ The trouble with the Doric, of course, as with dialects in other
parts of Britain, is that they change every ten or so miles.

Stonehaven, only about fifteen miles from Aberdeen, has its own accent and words. Laurencekirk, about fifteen miles farther south, is different again. If you recall, my husband comes from
Laurencekirk, so I can give you a couple of his choice words (innocuous, of course) as samples. ‘Sheenin’ means shining, as in ‘The sun is sheenin’; a ‘thievel’
is a spurtle (stick for stirring porridge) as in ‘Far dae ye keep the thievel?’, which I first heard years ago when he was drying my mother’s dishes, and I hadn’t the
faintest idea what he was speaking about.

The Doric is something I feel quite strongly about. I do not side with those who maintain that we should get programmes on radio and television in the Doric every day, as we do in the Gaelic,
because ours is not a national language, but I’d hate it to be lost altogether. The competition Mr Liddell had suggested may have gone down all right in rural schools, and I don’t know
how other teachers got on, but my children wrote in the only dialect they knew, what I might call ‘the Smithfield Doric’. The stories were hilarious; I even let my kitchen sink overflow
one evening because I was so engrossed in them. For instance, ‘The Prodigal Son didna wint the fatted calf, for he was wintin’ a bug o’ chips an’ a funcy.’ In other
words, ‘He would rather have had a bag of chips and a fancy cake,’ which, to most of them, would have been a proper feast.

No more was heard of the idea, thank goodness, but I regret not having kept those gems of Scottish literature.

John Wallace did settle in to a certain extent, his work did improve but . . . I never knew what would light his fuse. I was on heckle-pins all the time, and it must have
affected the other children, too. Thankfully, however, one or other of them came to my rescue, voluntarily, by running to fetch the headmaster at the least sign of imminent danger.

To give the boy his due, though, there was one occasion when he was punished for something that wasn’t entirely his fault. The regular ‘janny’ was off for some reason and a
temporary man had taken over for a week or two, so what happened wasn’t entirely his fault, either. He had been cleaning out the boys’ toilets late one afternoon when he was called away
to attend to something else – I know not what. Unfortunately, he left the hose pipe connected with the water still running, and the bell rang soon afterwards for ‘going home’
time. Well, you can guess what happened. A Primary Seven class was nearest the area, and so the big boys appropriated the hose and drenched everyone who came near them. My Primary Three kids were,
as I think I have mentioned, next to the girls’ toilets, and my boys were last to reach the battleground. When they did, our friend John Wallace took over, punching the boy who was holding
the hose and setting the jet of water on anyone who tried to take it away from him.

Then the janitor came back and yelled at him. Instead of dropping the weapon and taking to his heels, a surprised John turned round still holding the hosepipe. The man, as you can imagine, was
anything but pleased about this, and let fly at his attacker, who retaliated in like fashion, while dozens of boys stood around yelling, mostly hoping that John Wallace would get his
come-uppance.

As usual when John was on the warpath, another of my boys came charging back to tell me what was going on, but by the time I got there, Mr Robb, alerted by the din, had fixed John by the collar
and was dragging him down the few steps to his room, the boy’s arms and legs flailing as he roared, ‘It wasna just me. I wasna the only ane. It was them in Room 17 that started
it.’