Although I was always shy, I don’t recall having too
much difficulty in making friends at primary school. As far as I remember I was
perfectly relaxed around Douglas Anderson at Westerton, and when I was at
Carluke Primary I played in an unselfconscious way with the kids who lived near
me in Douglas Street, who were a little younger than me in years, but perhaps a
little older in maturity – Jennifer Muncie, Linda Whiteside and the cousins Norman
and Leslie Steel on whose drive I spent, it seems, many long summer days
driving Dinky cars with appropriate sounds effects round the long track we
bulldozed through the gravel each morning.
I remember a bunch of us local kids taking off one
sunny afternoon for a walk with Jennifer’s grandad – down the lane from Clyde
Street to Station Road, long since built over, under the echoing railway
bridge, down the hill and across Jock’s Burn and then up the path to the right
and into the countryside bordering on the golf course – hours of carefree joy.
The people in my class I spent most time with were
Colin Menzies (who pronounced his surname in the Scots way, ‘Mingus’, and
became rather cross at the teacher who persisted in calling him ‘Meengeez’) and
Paul Birrell. There’s a picture of Colin and me on a day trip to Troon with my
parents, sitting on the Ballast Bank.
Paul lived with his mum and two sisters in an upstairs flat in Clyde
Street, and I frequently walked home with him. I still remember the relish with
which he recited a schoolboyishly disgusting poem about ‘Tarzan in the jungle, sitting
on a gate, Bursting for the toilet…’ (there then followed a noise, as revolting
as Paul could manufacture by screwing up his lips and exhaling, to denote an
unrestrainable evacuation before the third line reached its melancholy
conclusion.) ‘Too late!’
Paul and I spent a great of time constructing things
in Lego, and then destroying them in epic military conflicts, which Paul’s mum
Mildred found rather distasteful. We did
however agree that if we were every conscripted we would endeavour to join the
Royal Engineers so that we would not be directly involved in killing people.
Somehow, after I progressed to Wishaw High School, I
grew more conscious of being (or simply imagined I was) ‘different’ and this
impeded friendships. (Paul went to Dalziel High.) But I felt at home with my
class, and indeed with my year group, although many of them are little more than
names to me now. One lad, I think a year beneath me, somehow greatly impressed.
His name was Gavin White, and he came from Allanton. Though I don’t recall long
conversations with him, I felt there was something outstanding about Gavin – a solidity,
an integrity. I also remember how affected we were by the death in 1969 of a
girl in our class, Mary Leach, who had struggled into class even when she was
clearly very ill with cancer. We attended her funeral at Daldowie Crematorium.
During my time at Wishaw High, I was probably closest
to Campbell Armstrong who befriended me in 1A2 – I remember one lunchtime he
took me with him on a return visit he was paying to his former Primary School,
and introduced me to the head teacher. Campbell was a persistent befriender – I
have often thought that he was a better friend to me than I was to him – and we
have remained in touch – I was his best man in 1977. I remember typing up for
him a histrionic drama he composed in his execrable handwriting, I think on a
historical theme – and I also remember him conducting a sadistic experiment during
a junior school history lesson, grabbing my fingers and pulling them in opposite
directions as violently as he could.
Along with James McGonigle who came to Wishaw High in
our fourth year we formed a trio, sharing an interest in history, and visiting
one another’s houses to listen to music. These musical sessions continued after
our school years. I remember hearing Evita
for the first time at Jim’s house, when it had been released on disc prior to
being staged. ‘Don’t cry for me,
Argentina!’ And I remember sharing a
recording of Mahler's 2nd Symphony, the epic Resurrection with the others. I was gratified that Jim and Campbell
found it as overwhelmingly powerful as I did. As a musical dessert, to bring us
down to earth gradually I followed it up with Elgar’s sweet Introduction and Allegro for Strings.
Music was the initial link with another friend, George
Cringles, with whom I felt more at home than with most people at school because
we shared a common Christian milieu. I remember standing in one of the open
courtyards in the school one autumn lunchtime waiting for the bell to ring. I’d
been out to Bairds for lunch as usual, and had bought a new Music for Pleasure
record on which the pianist known professionally as simply ‘Solomon’ (Solomon
Cutner) performed the first two Beethoven piano concertos. And there I stood,
clutching this LP to my side, displaying the cover as if it were some badge of
honour.
A lad I didn’t recognise approached me and nodded at the record sleeve. ‘Beethoven!’
he said, and we got talking. George had originally attended a Junior Secondary
School before progressing to Wishaw High. He lived in Waterloo, near Overtown,
but we had mutual friends in Carluke where he occasionally played the organ at
St Andrews Church. We became friends. George would invite me to join him at the
Church when he was practising the organ, and sometimes let me have a go myself,
although I could never co-ordinate feet and hands sufficiently well to conquer
the pedal parts. Occasionally, when he’d been invited to play at a wedding and
wasn’t available on the date in question, George very trustingly asked if I
felt up to deputising for him and earning the fee involved, but I never quite
had the confidence. Given my limited keyboard competence I was wise to decline.
I used to visit George’s home, meet his family and
their frisky Alsatian dog, eat pancakes and strawberry jam, and listen to recordings
of thunderingly spine-tingling performances played on historic organs. I have
kept in touch with George too. On leaving school he first worked for Halfords
before being called to the Church of Scotland ministry serving at Alness,
Dunblane and then with a group of churches in Argyll based at St Oran’s at
Connel.
I was, of course, attracted to some of the girls in
my year group – May and Yvonne, and especially Lesley, the girl who sat across
the aisle from me in history, Lesley, the girl with the long auburn hair which
she brushed aside with a deliberate movement before continuing to fill the page
of her jotter with her neat writing in blue fountain-pen ink. I switched to
using a similar script in my own writing in tribute and have never written in joined-up
letters since. One February, I found out Lesley’s address and sent her an
anonymous Valentine card, dropping it into the post-box outside the flats in the
Main Street after heart-thumping moments of hesitation. Lesley must have
guessed its origin, for a day or two later I received a similarly anonymous
card with a verse on it beginning ‘don’t make love in a cornfield’, which
confused and embarrassed me.
I made no move, and didn’t try to connect with
Lesley. I knew that in my church and family context any relationship with a
girl who was out-with the evangelical fold (as I assumed without really knowing
that Lesley was) would not be countenanced. To go against that was, for me,
unthinkable. I embraced this orthodoxy unquestioningly and even had I wished to
break free, I lacked both the confidence and the inner resource to do so. And
so at that stage I was unable to form any kind of deep friendship with these
girls whom I longed for from a distance.
Some of my year group took themselves off to the
Scottish National Orchestra Prom concert at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow on
evening in June 1970? Why did I not go too? They’d been promming, and there was
lots of space in the prom area, and so Lesley and a boy, one of my friends, had
sat in shirt sleeves, leaning back to back, supporting one another as they were
immersed in the music. When I heard this, I felt a deep, melancholy yearning.
There was another girl though, Linda, who was several
years younger than me. She travelled every day in the bus to Wishaw High School
from Carluke with her older sister Marion and their brother Arthur who was
ahead of me in the school. I liked the three of them, but somehow as we walked
along Kenilworth Avenue and down the long path past the playing fields to the
school, it was always Linda I walked with, chatting freely with her. I’m not
sure whether I am romanticising this in looking back, but in retrospect it seems that there was a
closeness, a special quality in our friendship which I am grateful for now, and
wish I had recognised at the time.
And then there was the girl whose arrival at the bus
stop I waited for with keen anticipation. So much so that once on my way home
from a concert the 6th year had been involved with in Motherwell I
broke my journey at Wishaw just so that I could be standing there in the queue
when she came. This girl’s arrival brought a joy I’d never known before, and I
longed for her, and yet at the time I remained silent.
As an introvert, I never found friendship easy,
particularly as a young man; as someone at times lacking in self-worth I found
it difficult to believe that I had anything to offer in a friendship; as
someone immersed in a particular Christian tradition I found it challenging to
relate to people with different backgrounds.
I am grateful for the acceptance of me of my year
group, and for the persistent friendship initiatives of people like Campbell
and Jim and George. I wish I had been more open to friendship while at school,
but the truth is that I was simply not comfortable enough in my own skin to
feel really at home, to be really ‘me’, to accept myself and thus be able to embrace
the acceptance of others.
