A life in letters: School Friends

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.