Old Meg she was a Gypsy

Miss Mowat, or a name like that, came for a year. Her big thing was poetry, not Admirals All, or Hiawatha, or John Moore being buried, but My love is like a red, red, rose. Slushy things like that. Even worse, she’d tell us we had to read it to a girl, to the giggles of the girls and the dour disapproval of us boys. We tried to think of some way to get revenge. It came from her own choice of big T, who could break wind, from either end, at will. She asked him to read Old Meg.

T started, ‘Old meg,’ poop, ‘she was a gypsy,’ poop poop.

‘And she went from town to town,’ poop, poop, poop!

As I say Miss Mowat left the school at the end of the year.

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Leprechauns and fairies

Living with Granny Clarke at the seaside, with two cousins only eight years older was a new world for me. I had written bits of things for school and a few tries at poetry, why, I can not explain, other than my mother's enjoyment of it and my father's love of quoting Robert Burns. Uncle John wrote poetry, drew cartoons and built model aeroplanes, which fascinated me. Unknowingly, Granny Clarke with her stories of leprechauns and fairy rings which were to be avoided at midnight or one was whisked off to Fairyland was preparing me for another school year. Whatever, my mother and I survived the trip and came back to preparations for the annual flower show and a scatty teacher called Miss Mowat, I think. It was her first posting and since she had come from among the fairies at the bottom of the garden somewhere, unused to laddies who knew what bulls were for, she never had a chance.

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