John Bull's Schooldays

Saint Columcille's

By COLM BROGAN SAmu COLUMCILLE'S was one of seven elemen- tary schools in Rutherglen, a burgh half- industrial, half-suburban on the outskirts of Glasgow. Its social rating, in local opinion, was seventh out of seven. Because it was a Catholic school, it was not, in those days, even a Board school, it drew no support from the rates and the Board school teachers who didn't get much them- selves felt a mild pity for the Catholic teachers who got even less. Money was in short supply for necessary equipment.

However, we, the alumni, resented and resisted the popular rating. We said we were no lower than Ferry Street School. Nothing could be lower than Ferry Street, which drew its customers from the more uncivilised elements among the lumpen- proletariat. Ferry Street was the kind of school teachers tried not to get into. It was the kind of school much in the minds of the police, who were quite infrequent visitors to our own academy.

If we had known better we could have pitched our claims higher. Having no suspicion of English social standards in education we never dreamt of saying that our school had a modest kind of cachet simply because it was not a Board school; in fact, we had a kind of direct-grant status if we had only known it. More surprisingly, there was another claim to social regard which never occurred to us. Although most of the pupils were the children of unskilled labourers, there was a fair sprinkling of the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. They were a small minority, but still in every class you could find one pupil or two who came from a middle-class home; in the class above me was the daughter of a genuinely wealthy man.

We never thought of making this claim because we were totally unconscious of class. Saint Colum- cille's was nothing if not democratic. It never occurred to us of the middle class that we might consider ourselves apart because we were better fed and clothed. Nor did the children of the poor resent our better fortune in any way that I could ever discover. We were all boys and girls together; there wasn't the makings of an angry young man in the whole building.

These were the days before the First World War when poverty was the real thing. I can re- member unemployed parents of some of my own classmates who could not go out into the street because the seat had come apart in their only pair of trousers, and some of the children came to school in little better than rags. Every autumn my mother and other women hell-bent on doing good came together in the Clothing Society and made sure that, by one means or another, they could provide a pair of clogs for every half-destitute child before the winter cold became too severe.

Nevertheless, my early experience has effec- tively inhibited me from sharing Mr. Harold Wil- son's grief at the plight of the bare-footed school- child. For nearly half the year we were all bare- footed. The day of liberation came in late spring when we were allowed to take shoes off and run about everywhere in bare feet till the first chills of autumn. We always protested and begged for a postponement when we were told that shoes must be worn again, and we half-envied the very poor boys who would be foot-free for a few weeks more till the Clothing Society caught up with them.

In my six years at that school I suppose I came into the most intimate contact with more soul- and body-destroying poverty than Mr. Harold Wilson has ever come across in his life; the poverty I knew was the poverty he has read about in books. Nevertheless, poverty was accepted as a fact in itself, with no favourable or unfavourable implications as to the quality of the persons who happened to be poor. Poverty was a handicap, like short sight or a game leg. It was nothing to be ashamed of, nor was there any point in bleating about it. I can remember a classmate telling me blithely, 'I seen your faither yesterday. He was in our hoose.' lie had gone to the house to dis4ribute charitable relief, but to the boy it was all the same as if he had come to ask for a subscription.

In a way, I suppose, I was more privileged than the other little bourgeois because my sister taught in the school and so could keep an eye on me, and the parish priest who ran the school was my mother's brother. However, avuncular interest was hardly conspicuous, for brother and sister were temperamentally incompatible, and mY mother hardly ever spoke to my uncle. (For good measure, she had another brother in the parish to whom she never spoke at all.) But I never had the faintest feeling that mY small social and personal advantages made me any different from the crowd, or had the slightest effect in making the crowd think differently of me. Yet, looking back, I can see that the gulf betweea the middle class and the poor was very far front small. After all, there can hardly be a bigget social distinction than between those who can be sure of having enough to eat and those who cannot.

During my years at Saint Columcille's I saW what might be described as the first tiny and shy beginnings of the Welfare State. The Health authorities of the burgh made efforts from time to time to educate the proletariat in hygiene and dietetics. They ran little food exhibitions showing which foods were both cheap and nutritious. These exhibitions went some little way, perhaps, to meet a real need for, when times were prosperous, the proletarian wives were most extravagant cooks. They also ran a teeth-cleaning campaign in schools, selling for fourpence a toothbrush and a tin of tooth powder. The brush was a distinctly primitive affair and the powder tasted horrible. However, it was no worse than the salt which my mother insisted was the second-best thing for cleaning teeth. The best of all, she said, was soot, but even the most docile child revolts at some point.

I don't know what effect these improving efforts had. Not much, I am afraid, for the working class I knew were very nearly slaves to their established conventions and habits. The Charity Organisation Society sent an urgent message to my father one Sunday to report a Catholic family who were literally starving. He went down to the house and found the wife desperately ill and lying on the floor. There was no furniture except boxes. There was no food at all, and there were small children. As an immediate measure my father gave the head of the house ten shillings and told him to go straight out and buy bread, milk, butter and tea. The man quietly turned down this absurd sugges- tion. He was a man and he could not possibly be seen in the street carrying groceries. It was as unthinkable as dressing himself up as a woman. I fear the best-meant propaganda would have small effect on him.

The school curriculum was rather limited but the teaching was excellent. The teachers were all women and I cannot remember one who was not competent, devoted and kindly. I can remember only once a teacher flying into a rage with me. I had done a piece of arithmetic that was remark- ably bad even for me. She took it in to show the teacher next door and when she came back, flushed and breathless, she flung my exercise book at my head. I felt no resentment at all, for I knew the anger she felt was exactly like the anger of a mother whose child nearly gets himself run over; it was a product of her anxiety to see me doing well.

However, in my last year I was the victim of a considerably more violent scene, at the hands of a man who had been brought in to teach part time. Someone had thought up the idea that book-learn- ing was not enough; there must also be training of the hand and eye. This, I suppose, was the small beginning that led to the notion of the secondary modern school. I dare say the idea sounded impres- sive in the pages of a Government memorandum, but there was nothing impressive in its application in my alma mater. The parish owned a broken- down old building across the school yard and a room there was equipped for manual instruction. My class went over for instruction on the second half of Friday afternoons, but for some reason I have now forgotten I was kept in the main school for the first few weeks.

When I joined the class for the first time, I didn't like the look of things. The room was dark and dingy and sawdust stung my nostrils. We were Put in pairs to the work of chipping and planing bits of wood into a shape that had no imaginable use or meaning. Nobody knew what he was sup- posed to be making and nobody cared.

The instructor was a tall, thin man with a ginger moustache and stricken eyes. He had a low and Muffled voice and was plainly quite uneducated. After he had told us, more or less, what we were to do he stood staring sadly out of a window. He was so still that I had forgotten all about him till suddenly he gave a kind of strangled roar. A boy shouted to me, 'Quick, Colm. Under the table.' The whole class disappeared from view and I could hear the instructor running between the tables beating them with a big brush used for sweeping up sawdust. Curiosity overcame me and I literally stuck my neck out, but at very much the wrong time. The instructor was just beside me. He brought down the brush on the back of my head and knocked me unconscious.

When I came to, the class were back at work and the instructor was once again staring sadly out of the window. I made my way rather dizzily out- side and went to the public park, where I sat on a bench till four o'clock. I made no complaint and told nobody at home, but .when I learned that the instructor ran amok once in every lesson I decided that manual was not for me. I cannot remember feeling any resentment, but it seemed to, me un- reasonable that r should submit to being knocked unconscious in the process of learning how to handle a plane, a thing I had no desire to learn anyway. So, every Friday when the rest of the class went to manual I went out of the school gate and up to the public park, where I stayed till I heard the school bell.

Nothing happened, for I had the instructor by the short hairs. If he had reported my absence and the reason had come out he would have been sacked on the spot. But I did not reason in this way. I merely acted from self-preservation and I felt vaguely sorry for the man who so plainly had some strange devils in his mind.

The weather was beautiful and those Friday afternoons in the park are still a pleasant memory. In fact, I suspect they tint my whole memory of my time at the school. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the respect and affection I feel for my old school, my old teachers and my old playmates. I had a close worm's-eye view of poverty and proletarian life. That experience, I think and hope, has saved me from ever being either censorious or sentimental about the poor. I went on from Saint Columcille's to other places of learning, but Saint Columcille's is the one that holds my deepest loyalty. Come to think of it, it is the only educational institution I ever attended that taught me much I couldn't have taught myself.

If I have one fault to find it is this. M y inepti- tude with figures was notorious throughout the school, but no teacher ever noticed that I was quite exceptionally good at mental arithmetic. I find this curious. But no school is perfect, not even Saint Columcille's.