A musical interlude

Miss Quatermass the singing teacher used to visit our primary school - in the sense that a plague visits - once a week. She was a monstrous regiment of a woman clad in paisley pattern curtains, a creature with large-pored foam rubber skin and a brittle undulation of translucent peach hair. Her face would probably have looked less fearsome inside out. Utterly humourless, she tolerated no misbehaviour of any description. "Someone's talking!" she once boomed. "I can always tell when someone is talking. Long, invisible tendrils come out of my ears and reach every corner of the class." This was all the proof I needed that I was dealing with a Doctor Who alien, and a malevolent one at that.

Miss Quatermass taught the doh ray me's, complete with hand signals. A deaf observer of our class might have concluded that three dozen reluctant nine year-olds were being coerced into shaking hands with wave upon wave of invisible freemasons of varying height. Never shy of letting us know how she had suffered for her art, Miss Quatermass once informed us that, as a little girl she had to protect her piano-playing hands at all costs. If she fell, she had to throw them upwards and land flat on her face. That explained a lot, viz-a-viz her visage, though in later years her more than ample chest undoubtedly bounced her straight back up again.

Visible over the top and at both sides of the piano simultaneously, our teacher would direct us to the page in our song book that contained the lyrics to that all time classic and virtual anthem of Carluke, the Devon Song. We got Burns too, but the foisting of "The Bold Men of Devon" on the terrified weans of Lanarkshire was merely one example of the incongruous choices our teacher made for us.

We had two or three periods of respite from this sort of thing. In primary three a young man briefly took over from Miss Quatermass. He broke the previously established laws of music and smiled as he sang as if he was enjoying himself and expected us to do so too. We did. Then, like all good Doctor Who monsters, Old Granny Quatermass was back. And you thought she'd been destroyed with her spaceship in the last series.

In the days before Mr Peebles was the headteacher, our primary school held assemblies every morning. These were in the charge of a beaming, white-haired gentleman whose name I remember as Mr Crappy, though this was surely not the case. Mr Crappy used to conduct the singing of the hymn - always the same one - we sang to start the day. It was for impersonating him that I was given my worst punishment of being made to sing in front of the rest of the class.

Whilst his efforts to keep us in time were laudable, Mr Crappy would have been still more effective as a musical director had he taught the words of the song. It appeared that no one had done this for years. The result was that not one of the three hundred children knew what he or she should have been singing, other than by a bizarre musical version of Chinese Whispers. "Mee showassal dazzal!" we belted out quasi-religiously. "Parra mee see oom!" It was a metaphor for so much of life that was to come.

Metaphors could doubtless be found to describe Mrs Fairylight, my first secondary school music teacher. In the absence of any good ones, the word "bonkers" would do. Looking like a sit-com elderly relative of the non-Lady Bracknell type, she'd smile at us and explain the theory of musical notation. This had something to do with all cows eating grass and every good boy deserving favour. "This note has a tail!" she informed us, "just like a pussy cat." She drew such a note on the interestingly-lined blackboard. "And this note has two tails," she continued, "what a funny pussy cat!" We must have been a pretty tame bunch. Rather than riot we merely admired the view from the best-placed room in the school or sang "So Sir Page" in a variety of Monty Python funny voices.

Although she treated us as sub-primary, Mrs Fairylight was an improvement on Miss Quatermass. Battiness was better than ill temper. Mrs Fairylight had a secret weapon in her armoury too. It was the glockenspiel and it added variety to the subject. They all had two missing black keys. Perhaps our teacher had hung them round the necks of her funny pussy cats to warn the birds. Plink, plink, plonk, I went, half a beat behind everybody else, my innately cautious personality forcing me to wait to hear what the rest of the class were playing before committing myself.

In second year a new music teacher arrived, almost too late to make a difference. Her name was Miss Vincent and she wore a vampire bat cloak. She was very strict at first, but only so that she could establish some ground rules. After a month or so things got more interesting. We were invited to bring in our own records.

Ronald McDonald, the second year king of the bootleg rock tape, took up her offer. He brought in albums by Uriah Heep and Status Quo. The latter had a lyrics sheet supplied. Miss Vincent asked Ronald to read out the words of the song he proposed to play.

Ronald was an early developer whose voice had not so much broken as collapsed in on itself like a crumbling Victorian drain. "Spent a low down evening in a low down honky-tonk bar," he intoned gravely. "Pulled a low down lady in a long black honky-tonk car..."

Miss Quatermass would have exploded, taking most of the Clyde Valley with her. Mrs Fairylight would have grabbed her funny pussy cats and shut herself inside her piano. Miss Vincent was of a different breed. She simply explained why she didn't care much for Status Quo but had a lot more respect for Uriah Heep.

We had seen the future.

Never a tawser

Cut to Carluke Primary, Mrs White's class: Mrs White's nose is wrinkling because some of us boys have had our hair plastered down by a noxious concoction devised by the local barber. It was green and sold in Rose’s Marmalade jars and worked by gluing each strand of hair to its neighbour. Perhaps it was Rose’s (lime) Marmalade. Mr Peebles the headmaster comes in. "Excuse me please, Mrs White." He points to John Sculler, the biggest boy in the class. We all know that John threw a snowball that hit a teacher.         

"Out here!" They pass through the doorway. The door is closed behind them and angry shouts can be heard from Mr Peebles, a man who rarely has to raise his voice. There is a brief pause, a faint rustle and:

Tishhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! We all picture the belt searing through the air from its hiding place under the shoulder of the headmaster's jacket.

                "Gung!" A choked, gasping sob, followed by a terrible howling. "Oooh hooo hooo!"

Enter Mr Peebles to calmly and firmly explain what the crime had been and why John had been belted. He could also have offered us a definition of deterrence.

Indeed, it was two years before John was in as much trouble again. This time he demonstrated that the worst part of the punishment was the build up. Mrs Glenmuir was talking about worms and the worm casts they left behind. John thought that "worm cast" was a bit of a euphemism.

                "Shite," he sniggered, just a little too loudly.

                "What did you say?" asked our teacher. A lifetime of snapping "what did you say?" had given her voice a robotic edge. Think: “Exterminate! Exterminate!”

                "Nothing." John didn't sound as if he believed it himself and the grins of those around him must have been a bit of a give-away.

                "You did not say nothing!" It wasn't the time to query Mrs Glenmuir's use of the double negative. "Come out and stand here!"

She exited, chin first, backside following a full three seconds later, a bit like a human bendy-bus. Only certain primary teachers, in a full flush of outrage, can walk like that.

When she returned she had Mr Peebles for company. In her absence, John had been in the unenviable position of having to contemplate the consequences of his remark while the rest of us were still smirking at it.

                "Now, what did you say?" Mrs Glenmuir repeated. John's lips trembled a little as he stood in the headmaster's shadow but he said nothing.

                "What did you say?" This time it was said with such vehemence that John stepped back.

There was a sniff and a squeak. "Shite." The word wasn't funny anymore.

                "Outside!" commanded Mr Peebles.

Tishhhhhhhhhhhhh! Gung! Oooh hooo hooo!

Beltings at our primary school were rare and I managed to avoid the strap altogether. I did get rulered, made to stand in the corner and forced to sing in front of the class. In the last case it was not clear who was being punished. All of this was accepted. The only time I felt ill at ease about pre-secondary corporal punishment was when a young male supply teacher stood in for our regular primary three teacher and, on more than one occasion, gave a friend of mine a hard slap on the face. I was belted at secondary school. The man who administered the punishment was a Mr Coulter, a very pleasant fellow. I ended up working alongside him a couple of years after I finished college and rarely cast it up to him, mentioning the belting only every other time we met.

Mr Coulter was teaching history to our first year class when another teacher came into the room to talk to him. Most of us began to chatter. When the other teacher left, Mr Coulter, still apparently his usual, genial self, asked: "Now, come on. Be honest. How many of you were talking while I was?" A large number of honest hands went up. "Boys out here!" he said curtly. "Girls get an essay!"

Each boy got two of the belt. For a while after I felt as if I had giant, throbbing, cartoon character hands. I looked at them now and again in a detached sort of way. They were red dappled with white but still in proportion to the rest of my body.

It was quite sore. So was the ruler but neither was administered by a sadist. They ranked as demonstrations of the teacher's extreme displeasure rather than human rights-violating physical violence. Being made to stand in front of the class and sing was a lot worse.

Ultimately I was rather glad to have been belted by Mr Coulter. It was part of the nineteen sixties/ seventies school experience. I can say this lightly because being belted never did me any harm. Seeing someone else on the receiving end of the tawse had a much greater effect on me.

Edward Baron was the hard man of our second year class.  He had long hair- really long hair, not just the "over the ears" style popular in the seventies, and stubbed-fag eyes. He sneered with every part of his body at teachers and at wee guys like me. I didn't like him even before he put a road cone on my head while I waited for the Carluke bus. Mr Hutt was an art teacher with the sort of stare that suggested he ran a motel in his spare time, the sort where it was inadvisable to take a shower or ask after his mother.

One day, as part of his civic duties, Edward let out a protracted, watery belch. Greeeeek! It was like a large frog down a deep well. It earned him three of what turned out to be the very best. He was howling and shaking his head after one but Mr Hutt persisted with the other two. If the intention had been that we kept our flatulence very much to ourselves in the future then our teacher succeeded. If he wanted at least one of the onlookers to be in fear of going to art for a year then he scored there too.

I am too young to have been allowed to belt as a teacher. Sometimes I fantasise about what it would have been like. I could have been Clint Eastwood, the man with no nickname. A kid would give me cheek. I'd look at him, saying nothing. Somewhere, a bell would toll. He'd look at me. I'd look back at him and he'd open his mouth to speak. I'd already be going for the belt inside my jacket and he'd never get the words out. Or I could have been an Indiana Jones-type trickster, flicking a piece of gum from a kid's hand or leaving the mark of Zorro on a jotter. What a tawser I could have been!

A colleague who'd started teaching a year or two before I did explained the reality of the situation. She hadn't become a teacher in order to hit children. Since she was a non-belter in a culture where belting was the way discipline was enforced, things got almost irretrievably out of hand. She was told by another member of staff that she'd have to use the strap so she took one home and practised by putting a slipper on her bed and thrashing it. Then she went back to work and sorted out her classes. The same lady has excellent discipline in the enlightened belt-free age and is the sort of teacher who is both respected and regarded with affection by her charges.

Those who express the view that there has been a drastic fall in the standards of behaviour in schools probably grew up in a school system where they were separated from the troublemakers at an early age. Do they really want to return to an era where a seven year-old could be walloped for making a spelling mistake? We live in better, happier times.

A word in your ear

I first posted this on Facebook, commenting then that it was the nearest thing I'd do to a blog post.

I've wondered about posting this, about whether it would come across as preachy or patronising. In the end, I've decided I'll go ahead. It probably started about ten years ago, with me having to ask family and colleagues to repeat themselves rather too often. Sometimes, in the classroom, I'd have to say to a pupil, "I'm sorry, I'm just not hearing what you're saying." At other times, my hearing seemed perfect. Acute, even. Around that time, I moved out of the classroom, temporarily at first, and the problem was, to an extent, masked. I mentioned at a "men's health" check that my hearing wasn't always what it should be. The doctor had a look for excessive wax in my ear, didn't find any and told me to come back if my hearing became bad enough to affect me socially. At that point, I ought to have said, "It is affecting me socially," but the deterioration had been gradual and I was getting by anyway, so I believed.
On returning to the classroom, I found it all but impossible to hear speech over background noise. Family members were increasingly irritated at my frequent requests for a sentence to be repeated. Eventually I'd be told, "It's not important. Forget it." To be honest, this was a bit hurtful. If there was something wrong, surely I deserved a bit of patience? Actually, I'd had plenty of patience and the impatience stemmed from me not doing anything about a condition that was obvious to everyone except me. A move permanently away from the classroom lessened the need to sort things out for a time. Then everyone at work seemed to be laughing for no apparent reason. I could hear Homer Simpson, but Lisa's voice was a hurdy-gurdy of tinkling glass. I started getting strange looks after answering questions that hadn't been asked. Eventually, without telling anyone, I made an appointment at the doctor's and was fixed up with a visit to an audiology clinic. A half hour session mapped out my hearing response. I couldn't hear high frequencies any more. I needed hearing aids.

Hearing aids. Is there anything that says "old man" more than hearing aids? I thought. Recently, when Top Gear designed a car for old people, they decided that hearing aid beige was the ideal colour to paint it.
How wrong could I have been? Within a week, I felt younger, able to hear as I used to. Losing the high frequencies doesn't make everything quieter, just less distinct. Imagine a similar effect on sight. Things wouldn't go dim, just muddy and featureless. Now imagine seeing all the subtle colours again and the detail that would bring out. I realise that I had become reluctant to go to social events. I used to put it down to the stereotypical physicist personality but I think there was an element of what people with hearing loss call "being in the bubble", isolated from conversation. Now I'm much happier to go for a night out. And music... I can't properly express how much of a kick I get out of rediscovering certain pieces, of finding out what's really there, of hearing it as it's meant to be heard.
Things aren't perfect. That's never going to happen, but my hearing is so much better, indeed it's not an exaggeration to say that aspects of my life have become so much better because of getting sorted out. The sorting out happened two years ago, all for free on the NHS. If you recognise anything of yourself here, don't wait. Get wired for sound as soon as you can. Thanks for listening.

How it began... Moped memories

I was fifteen and joking around with my friend Minto. We'd seen a competition in the Sunday Mail to win an electric motorbike. "Imagine rolling up at your pal's house. Their telly goes funny. Aw that must be Gregor on his electric motorbike."
But an idea was planted. Couldn't you get a motorbike of some sort at 16? I'd been into cars from whenever, probably influenced by my dad who had been in mechanic in the RAF and a designer at Austin. He used to say that at age three, I could recognise every car I saw, though he was prone to exaggeration. At fifteen, I suddenly realised that I was a year closer to motorised transport than I'd previously thought.
At that age, I could be very single-minded. Perhaps obsessive. I would set a goal - a new cassette recorder, a flashgun or whatever, and save like the blazes for it. Operation Moped, for that was all you could ride at 16, was put into action. Stage one was research. Drive magazine, which my dad received by post from the AA, had an article about sports mopeds in it, essentially suggesting that these machines, souped up and with pedals whose only real function was to make the bike meet the legal requirements, should be banned, restricted, tamed. The sports moped was a phenomenon that had arisen when the age at which you could ride a proper motorcycle had been raised to 17. I wanted one. I knew I would never be able to afford one. I didn't have a job or parents who spoiled me. Plan B was to persuade myself that a district nurse-style step-thru moped would be OK.
This wasn't difficult because I didn't give a hoot about looking silly, or perhaps I did, but not enough to dissuade me from having my own transport.
At school, there was a boy called Mouse whose brother did up bikes. We'd been sort-of-friends but, as is often the case with boys, became firm friends when we discovered a shared interest. A month before my sixteenth birthday, Mouse told me that his brother had a moped for sale. At £25, it was in my price range. My dad took me to see it and I ended up swapping my savings for a ten year old Raleigh Supermatic. This moped had a double seat that I would never use, and a bizarre automatic transmission system with a rubber belt and expanding pulley. To compensate for the changing pulley diameter, the engine hinged backwards and forwards.
There was a field near our house. My dad went over the bike's controls with me. I sat astride. You could put the Raleigh on its stand and start it by pedalling, dropping it to the ground and holding it on the brake as the automatic clutch disengaged. I sat on one of the lowest-powered motor vehicles available with its 49cc engine idling beneath me. Tentatively twisting back the throttle, I raised my feet up and took off. Forget the low power. I felt the hand of God on my back.
My O Grade exams planked themselves inconveniently between my getting the bike and my sixteenth birthday. When the day came, I had the bike on my driveway as I waited for 9 a.m.
when my insurance became valid. I wore a bright orange open-face helmet, a birthday present to replace the ragingly-eccentric pudding basin job donated by an uncle. Nine. I was off. Nothing will ever shift the memory of that first ride. I felt I was reaching escape velocity. Perhaps I was thinking in cliches, but I had a real sense of breaking free. There's a point about a mile from my house where that feeling crystallised, a pond on the other side of the road from a wood. I can never walk, cycle or drive past there without remembering that moment.



So that's how it began. The Raleigh was unreliable, particularly in my unsympathetic hands. It forced me to learn about basic mechanics - before I got it I suspect that I knew more about the theory of engines than anyone else in my year apart from Mouse, but I'd never changed a tyre. From fourteen to thirty I probably only visited the doctor twice, save for the two years when I had motorbikes. Two x-rays and Bell's palsy. Freedom came at a price, on balance, a small one.