Ten Tales Tall and True (15 page)

The chiming sounds and the familiar voice announces that this is Captain Rogers speaking, that three and a half minutes remain before impact, that Captain Rogers should proceed immediately to the guard's van. With a touch of his earlier, gentler, apologetic manner the driver says goodbye, and explains he is forced to leave them because someone must survive the wreck to report it at the official enquiry. The mother cries, “Oh sir, please unlock Patsy and take him with you, she's only a little child …” but Patsy screams, “No Mum, I'm staying with you Mum, he's nasty nasty nasty!” so the driver says quickly, “Goodbye good people,” and leaves.

When the door snaps shut behind him the mother says in a kind, careful, trembling voice, “You know The Lord Is My Shepherd, Patsy.
Let's say it, shall we?” and together they murmur, “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters …”

With a clang of metal sheeting the windows are blotted out by shutters.

“Pitch, pitch dark,” says Mr Dear, “They haven't even allowed us light.”

He is clasping his wife's body so that her unconscious head rests upon his shoulder, and he finds some comfort in this pressure.

“I know it is a small mercy,” says the voice of the teacher, “But I'm glad that military band no longer sounds.”

In the darkness the throbbing of the train wheels is more audible and the mother and child pray louder to be heard above it, but not much louder. They reach the end of the prayer, start again at the beginning and continue reciting till the very end.

“Do you remember,” says the teacher suddenly, “When every carriage had a communication cord that any traveller could pull and stop the train?”

“Yes!” says Mr Dear with a noise between a groan and a chuckle, “Penalty for improper use £5.”

“Once upon a time every small boy wanted to drive a train when he grew up,” sighs the teacher, “And in rural communities the station-master played a rubber of whist on Sunday evenings with the schoolmaster, the banker and the local
clergyman. I remember a bright spring morning on the platform at Beattock. A porter took a wicker basket from the guard's van and released a whole flight of carrier pigeons. I remember signal boxes with pots of geraniums on the sills.”

Mr Dear sighs and says, “We had a human railway once. Why did it change?”

“Because we did not stick to steam!” says the teacher firmly, “We used to be fuelled by coal, our own British coal which would have lasted us for centuries. Now we depend on dangerous poisonous stuff produced by foreign companies based in America, Arabia and …”

“You're wrong,” says Mr Dear, “These companies aren't based anywhere. I've shares in a few. The people running them have offices in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, bank accounts in Switzerland and homes on several continents.”

“So that is why we are driven from outside,” cries the teacher, getting excited, “None of US is in charge of us now.”

“Some of us pretend to be.”

They hear the faint distant scream of an approaching train siren. It swells so loud that the teacher is forced to yell over it, “But nobody is really in charge of us now! Nobody is in charge of us…”

She has braced herself for an explosion, but does not hear one, or hears and forgets it immediately. The train is no longer moving. The
blackness enfolding her is so warm and snug that for a moment she dreams she is at home in bed. When she hears the voice of a child calling drowsily, “Mummy … Mummy …” she almost believes it is her own. The voice of a mother answers on a wondering note, “I think – Patsy – we're going to be all right.”

A moment later the teacher, like other passengers on that train, hears the start of a truly huge and final explosion, but not the end of it.

At the age of five I was confined to a room made and furnished by people I had never met and who had never heard of me. Here, in a crowd of nearly forty strangers, I remained six hours a day and five days a week for many years, being ordered about by a much bigger, older stranger who found me no more interesting than the rest. Luckily the prison was well stocked with pencils and our warder (a woman) wanted us to use them. One day she asked us what we thought were good thing to write poems about. The four or five with opinions on the matter (I was one of them) called out suggestions which she wrote down on the blackboard:-

A FAIRY

A MUSHROOM

SOME GRASS

PINE NEEDLES

A TINY STONE

We thought these things poetic because the verses in our school-books mostly dealt with such small, innocuous items. The teacher now asked everyone in the class to write their own verses about one or more of these items. With ease, speed and hardly any intelligent thought I wrote this :-

A fairy on a mushroom
,

sewing with some grass
,

and a pine-tree needle
,

for the time to pass
.

Soon the grass it withered
,

The needle broke away
,

She sat down on a tiny stone
,

And wept for half the day
.

The teacher read this aloud to the class, pointing out that I had not only used every item on the list, I had used them in the order of listing. While writing the verses I had been excited by my mastery of the materials. I now felt extraordinarily interesting. Most people become writers by degrees. From me, in an instant, all effort to become anything else dropped like a discarded overcoat. I never abandoned verse but came to spend more time writing prose – small harmless items interested me less than prehistoric monsters, Roman arenas, volcanoes, cruel queens and life on other planets. I aimed to write a novel in which all these would be met and dominated by me, a boy from Glasgow. I wanted to get it written and published when I was twelve, but failed. Each time I wrote some opening sentences I saw they were the work of a child. The only works I managed to finish were short compositions on subjects set by the teacher. She was not the international audience I wanted, but better than nobody.

At the age of twelve I entered Whitehill Senior Secondary School, a plain late 19th-century building of the same height and red sandstone as adjacent tenements, but more menacing. The
playgrounds were walled and fenced like prison exercise yards; the windows, though huge, were disproportionately narrow, with sills deliberately designed to be far above our heads when we sat down. Half of what we studied there impressed me as gloomily as the building. Instead of one teacher I had eight a week, often six a day, and half of them treated me as an obstinate idiot. They had to treat me as an idiot. Compound interest, sines, cosines, Latin declensions, tables of elements tasted to my mind like sawdust in my mouth: those who dished it out expected me to swallow while an almost bodily instinct urged me to vomit. I did neither. My body put on an obedient, hypocritical act while my mind dodged out through imaginary doors. In this I was like many other schoolboys, perhaps most others. Nearly all of us kept magazines of popular adventure serials under our school books and when possible stuck our faces into
The Rover, Hotspur, Wizard
and highly coloured American comics, then new to Britain, in which the proportion of print to pictorial matter was astonishingly small. Only the extent of my addiction to fictional worlds was worse than normal, being magnified into mania by inability to enjoy much else. I was too clumsily fearful to enjoy football and mix with girls, though women and brave actions were what I most wanted. Since poems, plays and novels often deal with these I easily swallowed the fictions urged on us by the teachers of English, though the authors (Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Walter Scott) were far less easily digested than
The Rover
et cetera.

Mr Meikle was my English teacher and managed the school magazine. I met him when I was thirteen. He became my first editor and publisher, and a year or two later, by putting me in charge of the magazine's literary and artistic pages, enabled me to edit and publish myself. There must have been times when he gave me advice and directions, but these were offered so tactfully that I cannot remember them: I was only aware of freedom and opportunity. Quiet courtesy, sympathy and knowledge are chiefly what I recall of him, and a theatricality so mild that few of us saw it as such, though it probably eased his dealings with those inclined to mistake politeness for weakness. I will try to describe him more exactly.

His lined triangular face above a tall thin body, his black academic gown, thin dark moustache, dark eyebrows and smooth reddish hair gave him a pleasantly saturnine look, especially as the carefully brushed-back hair emphasized two horn-shaped bald patches, one on each side of his brow. While the class worked quietly at a writing exercise he would sit marking homework at his tall narrow desk, and sometimes one of his eyebrows would shoot up into a ferociously steep question mark, then sink to a
level line again while the other eyebrow shot up. This suggested he had read something terrible in the page before him, but was now trying to understand the writer's frame of mind. Such small performances always caused a faint stir of amusement among the few who saw them, a stir he gave no sign of noticing. Sometimes, wishing to make my own eyebrows act independently, I held one down with a hand and violently worked the other, but I never managed it. Outside the classroom Mr Meikle smoked a meerschaum pipe. He conducted one of the school choirs which competed in the Glasgow music festivals. His slight theatrical touches had nothing to do with egotism. As he paced up and down the corridors between our desks and talked about literature he was far more interested in the language of Shakespeare, and what Milton learned from it, and what Dryden learned from Milton, and what Pope learned from Dryden, than in himself.

Not everyone liked Mr Meikle's teaching. He did not stimulate debates about what Shakespeare or Pope said, he simply replied to any question we raised about these, explained alternative readings, said why he preferred one of them and went on talking. Nor did he dictate to us glib little phrases which, repeated in an essay, would show an examiner that the student had been driven over the usual hurdles. He let us scribble down what we liked in our English note-books. This style of
teaching seemed to some as dull as I found the table of elements, but it just suited me. While he told us, with erudition and humour, the official story of English literature, I filled note-book after note-book with doodles recalling the fictions I had discovered at the local cinemas, on my parents' bookshelves, in the local library. I was not ignoring Mr Meikle. While sketching doors and corridors into the worlds of Walt Disney, Tarzan, Hans Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and H G Wells I was pleased to hear how the writers of
Hamlet, Paradise Lost, The Rape of the Lock
and
Little Dorrit
had invented worlds which were just as spooky. I was still planning a book containing all I valued in other works, but one of these works was beginning to be Glasgow. I had begun to think my family, neighbours, friends, the girls I could not get hold of were as interesting as any people in fiction – almost as interesting as me, but how could I show it? Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
suggested a way, but I doubted if I could write such a book before I was seventeen. Meanwhile Mr Meikle's voice often absorbed my whole attention. I remember especially his demonstration of the rhetorical shifts by which Mark Anthony in
Julius Caesar
changes the mind of the mob.

My private talks with Mr Meikle took place before the class but out of its earshot. We could talk quietly because my head, as I stood beside his
desk, was level with his as he sat leaning on it. I remember telling him something about my writing ambitions and adding that, while I found helpful suggestions in his teaching and in the music, history and art classes, the rest of my schooling was a painful hindrance, a humiliating waste of time for both me and my teachers. Mr Meikle answered that Scottish education was not designed to produce specialists before the age of eighteen. Students of science and engineering needed a grounding in English before a Scottish university accepted them, arts students needed a basis of maths, both had to know Latin and he thought this wise. Latin was the language of people who had made European culture by combining the religious books of the Jews with the sciences and arts of the sceptical Greeks. Great writers in every European language had been inspired by Roman literature; Shakespeare only knew a little Latin, but his plays showed he put the little he knew to very good use. Again, mathematics were also a language, an exact way of describing mental and physical events which created our science and industry. No writer who wished to understand the modern world should ignore it. I answered that Latin and maths were not taught like languages through which we could discover and say great things, they were taught as ways to pass examinations – that was how parents and pupils and most of the teachers viewed them; whenever I complained about the boring nature of
a Latin or mathematical exercise nobody explained there could be pleasure in it, they said, “You can forget all that when you‘ve been through university and got a steady job.” Mr Meikle looked thoughtfully across the bent heads of the class before him, and after a pause said he hoped I would be happy in what I wished to do with my life, but most people, when their educations stopped, earned their bread by work which gave them very little personal satisfaction, but must be done properly simply because their employers required it and our society depended upon it. Schooling had to prepare the majority for their future, as well as the lucky few. He spoke with a resignation and regret I only fully understood eight or nine years later when I earned my own bread, for a while, by school-teaching.