A life in letters: Blue Circle Cement

When I was in Primary 7 our teacher Miss Angus distributed a magazine containing full-page advertisements for a range of different businesses. Each of us was told to choose a company whose wares we found appealing, and write and post a letter to them – in return, we would receive some promotional material. I chose Blue Circle cement, and in due course had a reply – ever since then, I have felt an affinity with this product and had a homely sense of ownership every time I’ve seen a concrete transporter sporting the familiar logo (Blue Circle was taken over in 2001 by the French company Lafarge which continued to use the ‘Blue Circle’ brand.) But what I particularly recall was my embarrassment at asking my father at the age of 11 for a real stamp to send a real letter. Other than the mandatory thank-you letters after Christmas and birthdays, I had hardly ever posted anything in my life. Eventually, one day in the garden, I blurted out my request and was questioned quite closely as to why exactly I needed the stamp before one was handed over. I didn’t occur to me to go and buy one for myself.

A life in letters: Brown, John of Priesthill (1627-1685)

What moved me more than anything else I experienced in any school classroom was our Primary 7 teacher Miss Angus reading us the story of the death of one of the Scottish Covenanters, John Brown of Priesthill in Ayrshire during the ‘killing times’. The Covenanters refused to compromise on the values of Presbyterianism and the Scottish Reformation. John Brown apparently had talken no part in the Covenanter’s military rising: it is said that his only crime lay in refusing to go to hear the local Episcopalian curate preach, yet he was shot at the front door of his cottage on 1 May 1685 in the presence of his pregnant wife and young children by government dragoons led by John Graham of Claverhouse. Before his death, the story goes that he turned to his wife, reminded her that when he had proposed marriage to her he had warned her that the time might come when he would be killed for his faith. ‘Are you willing to part with me?’  ‘Heartily willing,’ she replied. ‘This is all I desire,’ he said. ‘I have nothing more to do than to die.’ He then kissed his children, and  Claverhouse himself fired the fatal shot. ‘What do you think of your husband now?’ the dead man’s wife was asked. ‘I aye thocht muckle o’ him, but never sae muckle as I do this day,’ she replied. What affected me so deeply was not so much the Covenanter’s faith and courage, but the sad intensity of the story, and my empathy with the pain of those seeing a loved one killed before their eyes.

A life in letters: Carluke Primary School

I went to Carluke Primary School in May 1962 towards the end of my P5 year, and completed my primary education there. The school (one of three primaries in Carluke, the others being St Athanasius’ Primary and Crawforddyke Primary) was close to the centre of the town in Kirkton Avenue, across the road from the jam factory – the ‘jelly works.’ It was a late Victorian building, surrounded by a tarred playground. Over the wall lay the playing field, and the town’s Well Green – during my time in Carluke the precise location of the old well was rediscovered and a circular stone wall built around it.

(Carluke Primary School was later demolished, and a new school, Kirkton Primary built on the site.)

There was a hollow in the stone half way up the wall at a corner of the playground. You could put your toe in it, swing yourself up and over the wall, before jumping down on the Green at the other side.

Down a path from the playground beside the playing field there was small prefabricated building which I recall being used for medical checkups. I remember my friend Paul Hoskins standing under the canopy outside the door of this building practising the Pete Seeger’s song If I had a hammer (with which Peter Paul and Mary had recently had a hit) and  inviting me to join him in performing it at some event, and being ever so slightly miffed at my refusal.

The Primary 5 teacher was a lady called Maggie Cassells. My only recollection of my few weeks in her class was of the day when, for some unaccountable reason she formed the impression that I was persistently grinning at her in a deliberately cheeky way. No matter how hard I struggled to keep my features looking entirely normal, she insisted that I was smirking in her direction. Eventually Miss Cassells banished me to an empty classroom across the corridor where I sat at a desk beside the wall until she came to summon me back, my punishment deemed to be over. I can’t say this temporary exile disturbed me: it was the injustice of the accusation which troubled me.

I suppose it would have been in Miss Cassells’ class that my lack of knowledge of the times tables became an issue – the result, my parents claimed, of poor teaching practice at Westerton Primary School where memorising was undervalued. As I recall, I had to make a frantic effort to catch up – I remember standing at the foot of my parents’ bed working my way stumblingly through the nine times table. Similarly, when we were given a psalm to memorise, my mother had me sing it over and over as she accompanied me on the piano in an attempt to lodge the words in my mind.

My P6 teacher was Miss Burns, a redoubtable lady, white-haired with the appearance to us 10-year-olds of extreme age. She had a heart of gold and a leg, so she informed us repeatedly, made ‘of the strongest cahoutchie’ (Scots for rubber) ‘…ye canna pull it.’ I would have thought that a rubber leg would be particularly susceptible to being pulled, but we’ll let that pass. Of lessons in Miss Burns’ classroom I remember next to nothing, but I have an impression of lightness and laughter and joy. And this despite Miss Burns’ proneness to take her belt from the drawer of her table. Frequently, if we were annoying her, she would line most of us up in a row, and give each child in turn a desultory thwack on the palm with the belt. This worried us not in in the slightest because we knew that, though she was strict, she loved us. I took a piece of graph paper, headed it ‘Burnsie Belting Record’; and stuck it on my bedroom wall. Day by day, I recorded the number of times Miss Burns had used the belt.

Once Miss Burns had to be out of the classroom for some time. We sat, chatting quietly. When eventually she returned, the first thing she saw was the puddle of liquid beneath a girl’s desk. ‘You should just have gone!’ she exclaimed, distressed that her pupil had held back from going to the loo because she hadn’t been there to ask.

The Primary 7 classroom was off the school hall where we performed orchestral manoeuvres with bean bags during gym. The P7 teacher was Miss Angus another treasure of the old school. I doubt if her approach would have been out of place in the 1890s when the building first opened.

We sat in rows of individual desks – 3 or four rows of boys on your left as you came in the door, and then, towards the windows, rows of girls. We sat roughly in order of academic ability – thus my mate Colin Menzies, the ablest boy, sat at the back corner of the class, furthest from the teacher’s desk. Paul Birrell and I sat along the back wall in the rows adjacent to Colin. Those classmates who for educational or behavioural reasons required most input from the teacher sat at the front.

The week began with Miss Angus collecting in ‘dinner money’ and selling biscuits, while the class worked through arithmetical ‘problems’ she had written up on the blackboard. You could go to her desk and buy a few rich tea, digestive, or even chocolate digestive biscuits to sustain you through the day for something like a penny. I think some kids purchased whole packets of biscuits – presumably this was deemed to be supportive of families in financial difficulty – I have no idea if this diversification into the grocery business was simply a personal initiative of Miss Angus’s.

More arithmetic or mental arithmetic would follow. Then, perhaps there would be reading. We used a reading book so ancient that it wouldn’t have been out of place in a Victorian classroom. We read the sentimental story of Jackanapes by Juliana Horatia Ewing, published in 1884 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This story glorifies death in battle on behalf of your country: the boy nicknamed ‘Jackanapes’ manages to save a fellow-soldier at the cost of his own life, and the sermon at his funeral service was on the text "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.”

We read round the class, which meant that while others were reading, the more able among us could read far ahead.

We also read and learned poems. I remember A man's a man for a' that, and ‘O young Lochinvar is come out of the west’ (I loved the sound of the words in ‘”They’ll have fleet steeds that follow”, quoth young Lochinvar’) and Alfred Noye’s Highwayman  (‘The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas’)  with its poignant, tragic conclusion as Bess, the landlord’s daughter ‘watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.’ But never were we exposed to contemporary writing.

Grammar we studied on a Wednesday after noon – ‘Grammar with a capital G is worse than the sting of a bumble bee,’ I rhymed. We used a book called First Aid in English by one Angus Maciver. I marvelled that someone with a name so similar to that of the Scottish author Angus Macvicar whose works I loved in print and on the radio could produce a text so boring in comparison with the Campbelltown author’s oevre.

‘Remember you’re a Maxwell!’ was a phrase from one of the language books we used. I was intrigued by this verbalisation of the concept, which was new to me, of family solidarity. Carluke Primary School had some pages in the annual magazine of Carluke High School, with which it was linked. My first published piece of work appeared in the summer 1964 issue.

We learned history and geography, but for the most part this was taught in a thoroughly unimaginative way. We learned by rote, chanting statements dictated by the teacher and written down in our jotters, which didn’t give us much of an imaginative feel for the subject. The phrase ‘Barcelona and Valencia and the Bal-e-a-ric Islands,’ repeated ad nauseam until it had firmly lodged in our brains, didn’t awaken us to an understanding of life in that part of the world, even if I have never forgotten where on the map to find the islands in question. That Miss Angus adhered to this didactic method is strange, because she knew how to use story to captivate us. I have never forgotten the day she read to us about the death of one of the Scottish Covenanters, John Brown of Priesthill.

During 1963-64, I must have taken my 11+ exam. After leaving Carluke Primary School the less academically able pupils went to Carluke High School (a ‘junior secondary school’). The majority of the remainder went to Wishaw High School, although you could opt to attend Lanark Grammar, Dalziel High in Motherwell (where my friend Paul Birrell went, following a family tradition) or even Hamilton Grammar (which was deemed to have the strongest academic tradition.) I had successfully sat exams for entry to the High School of Glasgow, which I presume was a fee-paying school, but I opted to go with the majority of my classmates who attained a senior secondary level to Wishaw High School.

And so I said goodbye to primary education, goodbye to Carluke Primary School, goodbye to Miss Angus, academically able, but sheltered and naïve.

I remember the sunny day at the very end of our Primary 7 year, fooling around in the classroom with some of the class. Miss Angus is out of the room. Teasingly, I pull down a little way the zip at the back of one of the girl's dresses. I’m unprepared for the negative reaction from the others. It seems I’ve done something very wrong, and I can’t understand why, and nobody tells me.