A life in letters: Westerton Primary School

I was among the first intake of pupils at the new Primary School in Westerton which opened in January 1960. I spent the second half of Primary 4 there (still taught my Mrs Robertson who had moved from the Bearsden school with the class) and the bulk of my Primary 5 year, until my parents and I moved to Carluke in May 1962.

I liked the new building with its well-lit classrooms overlooking the village. The playground was an oblong of tar – the natural slope of the hill had been built up to create a flat playing surface, at one end of which the ground sloped steeply downwards. When covered in thick snow, the playground was ideal for rolling enormous spheres of snow bigger than we were. When they’d grown so enormous that we could hardly move them with our breathless shoulders we shoved them over the edge, and watched with cold-palmed satisfaction as they disintegrated among the bushes below.

I also remember enjoying the crafts we were given to do.  There were sheets of card with outlines on them which you could cut out with blunt safety scissors and then score and fold and paste to make various models which you could be painted or coloured. I remember my disappointment that the aircraft I laboured clumsy-fingeredly laboured over did not turn out as successfully as I had anticipated. My chicken, on the other hand, I judged to be a success despite it being moderately skew-whiff. It was made from pieces of yellow felt, cut out using a template for guidance and then stitched together, stuffed with cotton wool, and finished off with an orange felt beak, and orange circles for eyes. My mother preserved this cheerful creation for many years.

My 18-months sojourn at Westerton Primary School was the only time during my primary education when I was unhappy at school. Partly my unhappiness was due to my Primary 5 teacher, whom I didn’t find sympathetic. I noted with satisfaction that the word ‘Horrid’ alliterated with her surname in pleasing symmetry. The main source of my unhappiness however, was the head teacher (whom, I noted, had the same surname as our milkman.)

My parents had possibly raised some issues about the teaching style at the school – I know they were concerned that I was never given anything to memorise, and their concern was valid: I recall the struggle I had to learn times tables and poems by heart  when I moved to Carluke Primary School where lessons were still taught as they would have been half a century earlier.  Anyway the head called me down to his office, on more than one occasion I think, sat me down in a chair and without explanation fired mathematical and factual questions at me.

For some now inexplicable reason I had been conscripted into (or had volunteered for) what was known as the ‘Special Art Class’ despite having few discernible artistic skills (fragile monoplanes and slightly unstable chickens excluded.) Before Christmas 1961, the Class was assigned the task of providing seasonal decorations, and it was decided that we should create a small crib at the very front of the stage in the school hall, with a number of camels approaching in dignified processions from either side of the stage. I have no doubt that there were shepherds and sheep as well, and a Holy Family, but it’s the camels I remember because my skills, such as they were, were deployed  on the camel design team.

It didn’t seem to occur to the teachers in charge of this project that the appearance of wise men from diametrically opposite directions might be at variance with the biblical narrative. The star must surely have carried out some spectacular celestial gymnastics in order to keep on track both contingents of wisdom seekers. I quickly discovered that while it is difficult to draw camels travelling from left to right, it is close to impossible (for me at least) to draw them travelling from right to left. And so my time in the Special Art Class was not a season of unalloyed glory.  But I still felt it was hurtful and uncalled for when the head said to me, sneeringly, during one of our tête a têtes ‘What were you doing in the Special Art Class?’

I don’t know whether I was eager to please, or just thoughtlessly signing up for everything on offer, but I was also a member of the school choir at along with my friend Douglas Anderson. I wasn’t a very conscientious chorister  - I remember my mother had to write the words of our pieces out for me in a small black-covered notebook in her clear, blue script. ‘All in an April evening, April airs were abroad.’

My musical experimentation extended to taking violin lessons. I was lent a child-size fiddle by the school and had regular lessons from a visiting teacher, but it must have been immediately obvious that my potential as a violinist was minimal.  I don’t know whether I was subconsciously doing things which would get me out of the less-than-sympathetic teacher’s class. I do recall asking if I could ‘be excused’ at about the same time each morning, and relishing my few moments of freedom as I walked along the bright, empty corridor and down the stairs to the toilet below (which reminds me that I also have a recollection of accidentally dropping one or more empty glass jam jars down the same stair-well at some point.) But the teacher cottoned on to the regularity of my escapes, and I never asked again.

This teacher’s classroom, and the violin case led to my saddest interaction with the head teacher. I am sitting at my desk, the violin case innocently laid in the aisle beside me. The head  is in the room. My violin case falls on its side with a clatter – I presume someone must have taken their foot to it. The head takes me to task, and as I am protesting my innocence, an electric train passes the village, and sounds its horn. In the quiet classroom someone vocally echoes the sound.

The head is indignant. ‘Who made that noise?’ No-one owns up. He asks each child to point towards the source of the sound. Many fingers point in my direction. ‘It wasn’t me!’ I say, but he doesn’t listen. I have no sense that my classmates are betraying me. My anger at the injustice is directed solely against the head. I am told to follow him downstairs to his office, where he produces his belt. I do not cry. I go home, violin case in hand with my right shirt sleeve pulled down over my wrist, afraid that my parents will catch sight of the red weal.

One day in spring 1962, I sit at my bedroom window and write on dozens of small pieces of yellow paper, about the size of a business card,  the words ‘The Dempster are leaving.’ I take these to school with the strange idea of broadcasting them around building and playground. But soon I take cold feet, and stuff them in a bin, from where someone, curious, retrieves them and brings them to me. ‘How strange!’ I say.