More Teachers

After Miss Robson our next teacher was a small bright, neatly dressed woman called Miss Russell who lived with her sister and had always whistled as her childhood party turn. I knew this because my father told me,

                              The next one to sing was wee Jean Russell,

                              She couldnae sing, so she started to whustle.

Despite this, like many country people, she was remarkably well informed. She told us how the school children had given pennies and collected silver paper to finance the building of HMS Belfast. She told us how Spitfires were built. She who told us how terrifying and obscene a telegram from the War Office saying a husband or son had been killed could be. We saw the effects for ourselves as time passed.

By now,  WW2 was three years old and the classroom windows had brown anti-shatter screens stuck on them and smelled of the glue used to stick the screens to the glass.

Officially, she taught us tables, but she also allowed the boy at the front of the class to sleep.

For some fault, or maybe for maintaining my innocence, I was sent to the front of the class beside him. I felt it my duty to try to keep him awake; how could he learn otherwise? He didn’t take kindly to that and I was blamed for the resulting disruption. At the time I was upset by the injustice, but realised later that there was little chance of rest in the hovel the boy lived in and Miss was making allowances. Thankfully, his old place of residence has long since been bulldozed.

A Land fit for heroes has it's origins in those days and those teachers who had lost sweethearts in WW1.

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Cairndhu boys

Cairndhu - Rob and I wandered all over the hills and the moors beyond among the nesting larks and lapwings and black headed gulls. His father was a postman, whose route was the outlying farms and shepherd's cottages. If we needed a drink we drank from the nearest burn, ignoring any creatures that might have done something unmentionable or even died upstream. If we felt hungry, however, we went to a shepherd's cottage and asked for a drink of water. The woman would ask who we were and Rob would explain he was the postman's son. 'You'd better come away in and get a scone and cheese,' the woman would insist. IN exchange she would get our version of the latest news. 'Has Mrs Jones had her bairn?' 'Aye, she has but it wasn't a bairn it was a twins.' 'Oh my,' the woman would exclaim. 'And the doctor said nothing about it.' No doubt she got the right story from Rob's father.

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Mine dump playground

The waste dump, or bing, as we called, like the dull one in the picture, was always there and it's slope an attraction for sliding down on bots of cardboard or even  a decent bit of wood but I got a stiff lecture from Dad any time I ventured near the thing. While there wasn't much coal in it to burn it did get hot and many years later I saw what it could be like the second picture. Apart from the gas it produced we'd have been roasted alive if it had collapsed under us. Strill, I suppose we could have broken our necks climbing up to rooks nests.

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Cinemascope

Cairndhu, Cinema, James Mason, Bette Davis, Gene Autry, Lone Ranger, John Wayne, Zorro, Wee Breella loved the cinema, especially a romance or a thriller with a damsel in distress. The films were shown in the Miner's Welfare Hall. On Saturday afternoon it was a serial, often Zorro. On Friday evening the serial was more adult and could be The Lone Ranger. One wet Friday evening, a crowd of us were sitting at the front giving of the smell of wet boys, the Lone Ranger serial was finished and in place of the Gene Autry film that was supposed to be in the canister, the projectionist found he had been sent a drama with James Mason in it. We watched for a while but got bored and began to fidget.

Wee Brella was already upset with Mason. She been warned to keep quiet after getting up to shout to the heroine, Bette Davis, or someone similar, to ‘get away oot o’ there’ and to threaten Mason with all kinds of violence.

Fortunately, the screen was on the back wall of an elevated stage that separated the front seats from the screen and, even standing on tiptoe, Wee Brella could just get her arm above the stage, high enough to shake her umbrella and threaten Mason but she couldn’t get near enough to the evil James to hit him where it would save poor Bette.

She was sitting in front of us and her shouting added to the commotion we boys were creating. The Welfare Committee member who was on duty came to warn us all to behave but when Mason felt it was time to push Bette Davis off the cliff, we were cheering him on.

Our shouts of encouragement were too much for Brella. She lashed about her with her brolly and about a dozen small boys collapsed in a moving jelly of yelping and giggling arms, legs, and warm bodies.

The projectionist stopped the show and the lights came on to allow the duty member of the Welfare Committee to restore order.

Wee Brella got a caution. We were banned from anything but Zorro, cowboys, or pirates, or John Wayne winning the war, and the projectionist checked very carefully what was in the canisters after that. 

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Wee Brella at Football

Let me introduce Wee Brella. With her umbrella, she could have been the model for Mary Poppins. She was passionate about two things, romantic films and the local football team. One particular Saturday, despite the fact that they all knew each other, the two local teams were trying as hard as they could to kick lumps out of their opposite number. The referee let most of it go - for diplomatic reasons. It wasn’t unknown for a referee who gave the opposition needless fouls and especially penalty kicks to need a police escort to get him to the bus stop. The river was handy and remember, there was a war on.

That particular day, one of the opposition forwards was giving a good-looking young lad from our village the run around. Our lad just couldn’t get a decent tackle at the forward, either to get the ball, or maim the forward enough to slow him down. It really was a man’s game in those days.

This dribbling round our lad didn’t fit the script as Wee Brella felt it should be.

The ball came out just in front of her and the forward came to take the throw-in.

‘What d’you think you’re doing, makin’ oor Billy look daft?’ demanded Brella.

‘It’s no’ me, he’s doin’ it all himself. Billy couldnae take the ball off a haystack,’ the forward told her, smiling at his own humour as he stepped back to take the throw-in.

He didn’t do much more that day. Maybe he was suffering from concussion from the clout wee Brella gave him with her umbrella.

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WW2 Eggs and Tomatoes

Instead of just telling how I wanted to write about a village like Cairndhu, this is turning into the story of my childhood among the gardeners of the village. My grandfather lived in the top house in his street and rented the plot next door on which he had built a greenhouse and a chicken run. Both were a boon during the war years, not just for us but for the local community. Gramps sold eggs and tomatoes and I was called in to feed chickens and pollinate the tomato blooms with a rabbit's foot. Pollinating was a springtime job and was often welcome if the weather was cold because the greenhouse was heated and always cosy. The chickens chased after me and pecked at my ankles when I had the feed bucket, and occasionally got cross when I discovered an egg hidden in the long grass at the edges of the compound. It was those eggs that were suspect and reserved for family use. Occasionally one was rotten and that put me off eggs for days - not for weeks - everything was rationed. If a hen stopped laying it went into the pot and was sometimes soft enough not to need mincing to make it edible.

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Teaching junior school

After the motherly Miss Drafan, we passed into Miss Robson's class. Miss Robson was another of those who had no chance to marry because of the lost generation of young men in WW1. She was more of a benevolent 'Grande Dame'. She was tall and slim and dressed in long clothes, smelt of scented soap and started us with numbers.  This was before the psychologists became involved in teaching and we learned by boys and girls standing in a row in front of the class.  There were no apples or oranges for illustration and none of us could remember having seen bananas.

      When it came to subtraction, six minus two for example, six of us stood in a row and two went back to their seats. She asked who was to be subtracted and it was usually boys because one or two of the girls came close to tears when they were chosen. Maybe she was more of a psychologist than we knew because she taught us not to pick on the vulnerable and to treat young ladies with respect; not that Grace, or Tiptoes as my dad christened her as she always looked ready to tiptoe through the tulips, needed any assistance over respect. When she deigned to speak to us, she ordered us rough rude boys around like a fairy queen.

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Cairndhu in WW2

Cairndhu- WW2 had started when we went to school. Because of the shortage of paper, we had slates with a slate pencil that made marks on the slate. If you made a mistake, all you had to do was wet a finger and rub it out, which was handy if you felt your neighbour had a better answer than you.
Our early teachers were maiden ladies who might have been married if a whole generation of eligible young men had not been killed in WW1.
The first of these ladies, motherly Miss Draffan, wore brown woollen clothes that she knitted herself and smelt vaguely of moth balls. She gave some of the less fortunate children their first touch of gentleness and encouragement.

      While anyone who dared to talk when she was saying something was 'shushed' by the class, those who might struggle with a word like ‘cat’ or ‘mat’ would be given stage whispered help. If you got help, you had to decide who was right, usually a girl, because there were sniggering boys who thought it was funny to mislead you.

      Miss Draffan had a complement for everyone's scrawl on their slate. There were special pencils for the slates and as the quality deteriorated as a result of the war, they could be made to screech across the slate. Girls didn’t do things like that, of course, their mission was to call out 'it was Jim Scott, Miss'.

       After some laborious copying of letters with tongues stuck out following progress, the slates were put neatly in the corner as only a class of five year olds can; the boys closely supervised by the girls, who straightened any slate that was out of line.

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When the war started in 1939 a few of the men, especially those who were in the territorials went off to France but coal was important for all sorts of things, the railways used it, electricity was dependent on it, the steel industry needed coke and the result was that most of the miners were exempt from army service. Some even turned miner to escape going away, though, at that time the mines were not particularly safe. For us boys it produced films about heroes and one boy, two or three years older than Rob and I was particularly affected. We had our pwn fantasies about cowboys and indians and the French Foreign Legion, which included Laurel and Hardy, of course and we lived those out enthusiastically but when this older lad wanted us to pretend, we knew it wasn't real and despite his enthusiasm, couldn't get into dive bombing ships, or being commandos at all. Dad saw him once throwing a pretend hand grenade at a pretend tank and he got the nickname of Sojer. We had Polish soldiers camped in the castle grounds and, of course, Sojer discovered an imaginary spy among them and wanted us to sneak about to find out who it was. Fortunately it was tea time and we were too hungry to become spy catchers.

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As wee boys we were noisy and one fine sunny day when one of the men who lived among us was on night shift and was trying to get some sleep we were whooping it up below his window. He gave up at last and opened the window and pointed an old WW1 rifle at us and shouted, 'Who must I shoot first?' As we ran off squealing we could hear his wife admonishing him for frightening bairns. How he had retained his rifle after 1918, we never discovered but he was one of the local worthies and some of his escapades nudge their way into a book now and then. The home guard were practising creeping down the burn across the road from the houses one day when he took charge and, using us as a decoy, (you can imagine how we got into the spirit of the thing), outmaneuvered and captured the trained troops of the 'enemy' in the wood across the other side of the field. The officer's swearing was something to hear! Real Dad's Army!

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I wanted to reflect how happy childhood had been for me in a Cairndhu type village but as I mentioned there were low points in the life of those villages and those are better reflected in Miss Kirkwood's story in A Land Fit for Heroes, which was written in memory of all those ladies who lost fiancees in WW1 and took to teaching. They gave us such a warm start to our schooldays that I felt they needed someone to recognise their contribution. Don't think it is doom and gloom, village life is always like tartan or a tweed, a healthy mixture. I had hoped to interest a literary agent and one does one's best but life is full of these little disappointments.

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Life in a village like the fictional Cairndhu had its downs as well ass ups. Three of us including my friend Rob were playing at  being a military band. Our drums were a mixture of one with diagonal stripes like the real thing, a plain red one and mine, with Mickey Mouse, Mini Mouse and Donald Duck chasing each other round the rim. The other two took turns at leading but when I insisted it was my turn to lead I was told Mickey Mouse drums always come last. Even at that age I could see the logic. I've since worked in some real Mickey Mouse operations and the logic still holds true. I suppose it all comes under the heading of Character Development.

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I shouldn't have described our house. It was small, only two rooms and a kitchen, but I don't want to create the reaction that several people have had to This Boy  and have them feel sorry for us, or feel how courageous we were to overcome our back ground, or think we were deprived. It was home, a place where we had the love of our mothers and the wisdom of our fathers. We were sorry for those who lived in ten room mansions with a governess, who barely saw their mother and whose fathers were remote figures they barely knew, and who had to go to boarding school and fag for bullies. Our common room was the moorland where the larks spiralled up into the sky singing a welcome, or the field above which the lapwing was doing acrobatics in the air, or the wood where the deer and rabbits lived and where you might glimpse a fox sneaking along or hear the rooks argue. It wasn't deprived, it was home!

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