Monday, 21 January 2013

A life in letters: Bearsden Academy Primary School Westerton Annexe



Two classrooms next to the shops in Maxwell Avenue, Westerton where I spent my Primary 1 and 2 years. I think I remember my first day at school in August 1957 – my mother standing outside the black, metal-slatted fence with the other mothers while I walk resolutely (but perfectly happily) towards the door, perhaps looking back once or twice to wave.

The two classes, the domains of respectively Miss Paul (Primary 1) and Mrs Ramsay (Primary 2) were separated by the small workroom. The building was completed by a short central wing separated from the classrooms by a corridor, and here was the room where I endured elocution lessons. The structure was surrounded by a tarred playground, with a few trees. What struck me particularly in Primary 1 was the size of the boys a year above me, who seemed to tower over my head.

The classrooms were heated by coal-burning metal stoves, situated against the back wall in each room and surrounded on three sides by a metal fire guard. On rainy days, wet clothes would be hung on these guards to dry and a steamy damp smell filled the room. Once there was concern that the stove in Miss Paul’s room was releasing smoke and fumes, and we were evacuated into the playground from where we watched surprisingly matter-of-factly the activities of the fire brigade.

Miss Paul I remember most for her morning routine with the long wooden pointer which she used to direct our attention to specific details written on the blackboard. At the start of each school day, she would hold this stick upright, and eye it expectantly. ‘Good morning, boys and girls,’ Mr Pointer would obediently intone, his voice sounding surprisingly like our teacher’s. ‘Good morning, Mr Pointer.’  Our dutiful chant was languid, with the emphasis on the first syllable of ‘morning’.

I remember one of my classmates bringing in a yellow toy truck which I coveted. My parents, wishing I think to recompense me for having had to endure an appendectomy, offered to buy me one if could describe it adequately enough for them to identify it in a toy shop. Sadly for me, on this occasion my powers of description failed.

I remember one day we are working through a list of questions relating to a passage in our reading books. I raise my hand, and when invited to do so, respond correctly to a question. The answer is ‘Tom.’ I notice that the answer to the subsequent question is also ‘Tom.’ To indicate my preparedness to answer it, I mutter sotto voce ‘Tom…Tom…Tom’, until Miss Paul tells me to be quiet. I am a little aggrieved that she fails to appreciate my anticipatory precocity.

Apparently it was noted in Primary 2 that my English skills were a little above-average. I was one of a number of pupils to be given extension activities – work cards with a series of questions printed on them, beneath each of which was a window cut out of the card. You laid the card on a sheet of paper, and wrote the appropriate answer in each window.

I remember the day a boy didn’t show up in class at the end of break. Mrs Ramsay asked if anyone had seen him, and I, eager to please, was the one who said ’Yes!’ I had spotted him in the toilet block. The teacher despatched me to retrieve him from the cubicle where I found him still standing morosely. Clearly, he had not quite made it to the toilet in time.

He followed me across the playground back to the classroom. Rather than walking beside him, I strode self-importantly in front as the faces at the window watched. ‘He was dirty, wasn’t he?’ they said, when he was being cleaned up elsewhere, and I was back in the classroom. ‘No!’ I retorted, lying, but loyal.

Whatever else I learned in Mrs Ramsay’s class, one thing I would never forget, and never forget where I had learned it – John Bunyan’s poem To be a Pilgrim, which is in the hymn books, and was Sir Winston Churchill’s favourite hymn. It was perhaps not the most relevant piece for six-year-olds, but I can’t remember any difficulty in memorising it. I loved the sound of the words, especially that ‘Hobgoblin nor foul field can daunt his spirit’ in the last verse, which sounded spectacular. These words have sadly been edited out in some anaemic modern versions of the hymn.

The small workroom between the two classes looked across the field to the railway line. I remember it as a sanctuary of glitter, blunt-ended safety scissors, and coloured paper. And somehow with that room I forever associate the delicious vocabulary of two old hymns:

Oh God of Bethel, by whose hand
Thy people still are fed

and especially

By cool Siloam’s shady rill
How fair the lily grows

Though I did not understand the meaning of these words, the string of luscious syllables was a beauty touching somewhere deep.  I can never hear the tune of ‘cool Siloam’ without knowing a strange wistful longing for that workroom, and recovering the smell of glitter and glue, and the sound of Blue Trains clattering past.

In June 1959, without ceremony, I left the Westerton Annexe for the last time. After the summer holidays, my class would migrate to the Bearsden Academy Primary department in Bearsden itself.

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