Hellfire and Herring Read online

  We looked at it. We looked at it every day of our lives.

  ‘Now does that bird look remotely capable of bringing a baby boy or girl safely down your chimney? I ask you.’

  We had to admit it seemed improbable. Not that we had ever believed it in the first place. Or even thought about it.

  ‘So where do baby boys and girls come from then?’

  My hand shot up.

  ‘Liza Leslie, miss.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid!’

  A crestfallen silence, and then I remembered. Of course. ‘Please, miss.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Boys from the Bass and girls from the May.’

  The class collapsed while Shuggie raged. ‘I’ve had enough of you for one day, you blasphemous brat! Go and stand in the corner!’

  I stood in the corner while Shuggie explained that the child comes from God and that human life is his gift. In Shuggie’s class lessons all came to the same thing.

  History: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

  Art: And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.

  Biology: And out of the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman.

  Geography: And He placed at the east of the garden of Eden a cherubim and a flaming sword.

  Arithmetic: Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work.

  All the humanities she gave us in one sentence: For dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.

  So Shuggie kept us in the wilderness. We never came to Canaan. But a retiral in the next class up brought a new teacher to the village, and Miss Balsilbie came like one of the daughters of Zion to show us the promised land.

  When she swept through the pale green door of Room Five at the start of the new session, I felt my toes tingle and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. Miss Balsilbie’s blouses were white roses that fluffed and fell as she breathed, and an infant’s breath might have blown them clean off her back, sending all those soft and snow-crimped trimmings fluttering to the floor.

  I held my breath.

  Miss Balsilbie carried her white roses all round the room, visiting each desk in turn and sitting down beside us, which the dragons had never done. I waited my turn in a state of breathless excitement. But when she came to me I was beating my head against the blind brutal wall of my sums. My jotter was a mass of errors and erasions, filthy with ignorance. My sleeves were ragged, fingers ink-stained, nails bitten down, shoes unpolished, bare legs grimy from playground games. How could she bear to sit near me? The roses brushed my cheek, whispered something to the lid of my desk. I held my breath as tightly as I could. Miss Balsilbie extended her swansnecked, swansdowned arm and her hand touched my exercise book. She held in her fingers a long, beautifully sharpened red pencil. Her nails were strawberry moons. The pale-blue veins showed up like dim far-off rivers.

  ‘No, no, dear,’ she drawled, ‘you don’t know how to divide, do you? Here, let me show you.’

  She squeezed herself into the desk beside me, her skirt rustling mysteriously like water falling over my knees, making me shiver.

  ‘Goodness me, child, you’re shaking. What in the world is the matter with you?’

  She placed her pencil on my desk and put her arm around me. ‘You don’t have to be frightened of me now, dear, do you? Even though you can’t divide.’

  Her laughter tinkled as she hugged me tighter, drew me so closely into the roses that I was afraid to breathe. I’d never been this near to a teacher, could never have imagined such softness. The roses fell – and swelled again. My heart was cold as ice. It belonged to Miss Balsilbie, now my snow queen, who taught me how to divide, where all the others had failed.

  Miss Balsilbie read us poetry.

  Have you seen but a bright Lillie grow

  Before rude hands have touched it?

  Ha’ you mark’d but the fall o’ the Snow

  Before the soil hath smutch’d it?

  Ha’ you felt the wooll o’ the Bever?

  Or Swans Downe ever?

  Or have smelt the Bud o’ the Brier?

  Or the Nard in the fire?

  Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

  O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

  ‘Does that poem remind you of anyone, boys and girls?’

  We gaped.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you think of someone? Anyone you know?’

  My heart beat hotly in its case of ice. I wanted to tell her. The voice continued to woo us.

  ‘Is there no one in the world like this? Or is it just a dream?’

  My hand rose shakily. ‘Please miss, it’s you.’

  The roses fluffed and fell again and she blushed.

  ‘Me? Why, gracious me! Why does it remind you of me, I wonder?’

  Words failed me.

  At bible-reading time she recited portions of the Song of Solomon:

  I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.

  I am dark but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.

  Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for

  I am sick of love.

  She was the goddess of the hour, the heroine of the Old Testament. And if she was the apple of her own eye, she was of ours too.

  It couldn’t last. The Women’s Guild? The raging Shuggie? Or just a child’s chance remark? Whatever the reason, the charge and the verdict were the same. We heard it vaguely whispered that Miss Balsilbie had been considered ‘unsuitable’. And so Miss Balsilbie was exiled from Eden and a Miss Quinney, an Englishwoman, came in her place. She was horrified by our local dialect and barbaric accent, and left at the end of session, breathing fire. But by that time the fiercest dragon of them all was waiting for us.

  Miss Sangster was a long frozen leek of a woman, standing straight and hard as an undriven nail. From her coat-hanger shoulders her smock hung like a faded flag, covering her bony crêpe-stockinged shanks almost down to her ankle boots. Even on her own head she had no mercy – as if to ask us how we could expect any ourselves. The thin grey hair lay like ash on the pink skull. She parted it simply, scorning her womanhood, shearing it just above the ears and leaving bare the reptilian nape of the neck. The eyes were glittering pin-pricks under the glasses, the lips pursed prunes. Vinegar veins and chalk arteries, she blew on the embers of numbers and words, covering forgotten dates with her dusty breath, warming cold fingers before the tired fires of life. These fingers of hers were always ringed with plasters and little bandages covering a multitude of warts. They were the broken hands of a loveless lady, the sex within her denied and defeated long ago. But with these hands Miss Sangster beat us into daily submission.

  A panoply of punishments stacked her armoury. The warty fingers closed on an ear, a nose, a tuft of hair, and for minutes at a stretch she would be tweaking and tugging and twisting for an answer. She slapped our faces, banged our heads against the wall, beat us on the backs of our bare legs if we did our sums wrong. She jammed our foreheads down on to the lids of our desks until our flesh took on the grain of the oak, and we wore it in our faces for the rest of the day.

  Knuckle-jabs were her speciality, delivered with a hissing insult. Taut as a tiger, she crept up on an unsuspecting idler, bending one warty forefinger until the bone shone whitely through the parchment skin, drew back her elbow and let fly. The arm shot like a piston, dug deeply into a sleeping back. She had three treasured body blows: she attacked the spine itself, or the flesh just beneath the ribs, or the kidneys. Rabbit-punches she threw out ten a minute, striking either with the heel or with the battle-axe edge of her hand, sharply across the napes of our bowed necks.

  It never occurred to us to consider the moral or educational implications of any of this. It was her teaching method and an intrinsic part of the lesson. Questions and answers were punctuated by the punches she landed, the smart slaps of the ruler, the stinging whiplash of her tongue. Eleven sevens are seventy-seven, whacked across the knuckles. Darnley died at Kirk o’
Fields, dented upon our heads. Sheffield gives us steel, hammered out on our hides. Miss Sangster was fists and fingers and feet.

  But her most feared instrument of torture was the belt. At school, belts or straps or tawses acquired the mythical status of Notungs and Excaliburs, and the teachers who wielded them became legends in their lifetimes. Personal styles were compared, annual belting averages calculated, record punishments of individual offenders committed to memory. Mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles – all stripped their sleeves and showed their scars. Uncle Billy flaunted his with alacrity, sustained at Miss Sangster’s hands, ignoring grandfather’s kindly assurances to me that these were recent abrasions caused by hauling on the nets, and nothing more. But present fears were worsened by the horrible imaginings which continued to colour the truth, long after it was plain and clear.

  Legend had it that Miss Sangster’s belt was at least six yards long, the length, perhaps, of the average dragon’s tail, from which it was cut, still hard with agony. Yet all of us could see that it was no more than twenty-four inches. It had nine tails, apparently, like the notorious cat used on the Marship, whereas it was plain to see that the leathery lizard’s tongue had no more than two tails. The whole world knew that Miss Sangster kept her belt steeping overnight in a stone jar full of vinegar, just for the purpose of increasing its bite. But when I looked into that notorious stone jar on the window-shelf, I saw that it contained nothing more than a jumble of broken coloured chalks.

  In any event the belt never left her person, because she wore it under the frayed flowers of her smock, draped across the shoulder and down her back. It was thus within easy reach, and when stung to an anger that could not be assuaged by the application of a finger-jab or a punch, she shot her hand between the two loose buttons of her smock and whipped out the belt as if she were pulling a gun. Then she let fly.

  So in many a playground battle where tense gunfighters faced one another for the draw, the imaginary weapon turned out to be Miss Sangster’s belt, and instead of a scenario cruel with cordite fumes and the whang of bullets, we watched the last scenes of such dramas turn to farce. Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill held out their hands in mock misery and each flogged the other to within an inch of his life, wielding a belt of the mind, created out of our common suffering. The heroes then thrashed the air wildly with their palms, or tucked them tightly into armpits and groin while they moaned and intoned:

  Davy Crockett married Sangster,

  Got the belt, became a gangster.

  In her application of the belt Miss Sangster’s dedication and experimentation knew no limits. A girl would normally be let off with a straightforward licking on the open palm, executed without frill or flourish. The boys enjoyed no such maimed rites. For us she retained a repertoire of tricks which and to which she was always refining and adding.

  She made us put both hands together but place one beneath the other so that even the unbelted palm underneath would get the benefit of the blow. The hands were then switched so that the bottom one could come on top and receive its proper due, having already foretasted the pain. Sometimes she told us to place our hands on the hard slabs of our desk lids, knuckles against the wood, palms upwards. Then she slammed down on us with all her strength.

  She had developed a way of flicking the belt so that it curled around the victim’s wrist and arm, leaving long red snaky weals. We swung our arms aloft like flaming windmills, desperately trying to cool the burning, and because we could not hold our pens properly afterwards, she thumped our heads with dictionaries, complaining bitterly about our inability to write, even with the benefit of a good belting behind us. According to uncle Billy, however, she had mellowed since his day – all of seven years ago. As he had been unable to put pencil to paper to her satisfaction, she had offered him some encouragement. She jammed his pencil crossways between his fingers, the pencil resting on little finger and forefinger and held fast by the two middle fingers. Then she thrashed and thrashed until the pencil broke.

  ‘How many strokes did it take?’ I asked Billy.

  ‘I lost count,’ he said. ‘Over a hundred, certainly.’

  ‘A hundred!’

  ‘That’s nothing. She said the pencil was too thin. Next time she used a joiner’s one – and a thousand lashes later the pencil still hadn’t broken.’

  He reached into a nearby drawer. ‘Here it is, the very same pencil.’

  I took it carefully and held it in both hands, breathless with veneration and dread.

  Sometimes a boy would jerk his outstretched hand away just as the belt was coming down for the fifth or sixth time. If the belt then struck her on thigh or knee, she reacted like a threshing-machine gone mad. She lashed out with her leather at legs, arms, body, backside, head and ears, anything that could be reached, chasing the wrong-doer round and round the free-standing blackboard until he was caught and beaten or ran right out of the classroom door, down the corridor and into the fields, not to reappear until her white-hot wrath had died down once more to its slow constant smoulder.

  One day the blackboard that had been the centre of so many circular pursuits became the focus of activity of an unexpected sort. Miss Sangster was hard at it, hammering facts like nails into our resistant skulls, when the door opened quietly. Mr Gourlay, the headmaster, entered solemnly and waved us back down in our seats as we made to stand. He motioned to Miss Sangster that he would like to speak to her, and it was clear that his sign language indicated ‘behind the blackboard’. The two of them then disappeared from sight, except for their legs. They were not only on view but the only source of interest and amusement on offer in Room Five at that moment. The headmaster talked in whispers and had scarcely begun when we saw the two pairs of legs, the crêpe stockings and the plus-fours, draw quickly together until they were touching, almost interlocked. Miss Sangster’s legs seemed to go limp and we heard her produce a little moan. We looked around wildly at one another. This was unbelievable. Shit-catcher was kissing Sangster and she had collapsed with passion in his arms.

  Our jubilation, however, proved to be as brief as the moment itself. The legs parted, said goodbye, and Mr Gourlay left as quickly as he’d come. Miss Sangster then re-emerged from behind the blackboard, faced us with glistening eyes and said in a voice we had never heard from her before: ‘Class, you are dismissed for the rest of the day. Our King, George the Sixth, is dead.’

  At the time we had no notion of the date. Some of us could scarcely have given the correct year, if asked. But now I know, of course, that the day when we thought, with a wild surmise, that the plus-fours and the crêpe stockings had fallen madly in love must have been 6 February 1952.

  What do I really remember from her? What are the roots that clutch out of the stony rubbish that she gave me? What fragments to shore against my ruins? Nothing from T. S. Eliot, that’s for certain. A few spellings? A few capitals and kings?

  Open your sum books at the end. Put your hands behind your heads. What is the capital of Norway? Tell me the time on the clock. Tell me the date of the Battle of Culloden. Tell me the sixth commandment.

  Poor, lonely, unloved, unmanned, unwomanned, suffering Miss Sangster, who wept at the king’s death, who taught me compassion years too late – what was the point of your time spent in the classroom, beating banalities into us by the sweat of your brow, by the denial of your sex, by six of the best, by all that was uncouth, unholy and utterly uneducating? Dear, dreadful, sweet and sour Miss Sangster, you passed on, out of Room Five, out of our lives, out of your own life, into the classless coffin-desked kirkyard that swallowed up your answers as of no account and left behind you only one eternal question.

  Miss Sangster did not die in office but retired as soon as she’d educated us, as if the effort had exhausted her. Uncle Billy, however, assured me that she’d been drafted on to the Marship to quell a mutiny by the bilge boys, and had approved so much of the regime of floggings and torments that she’d decided to stay on board for the rest of her life as cat-o’-nin
e-tailer in chief and able-bodied spinster.

  But I was beginning to suspect Billy’s stories. He lectured me on our submissiveness to our teachers and reminisced about his schoolday adventures in the notorious One-Gallus Gang. Galluses were the braces we all wore in those days if we were unlucky enough not to be the owner of a striped, elasticated belt with a snake clasp. Members of the One-Gallus Gang made a virtue of necessity and proclaimed their individuality by snipping off one of the two front straps of their braces and pulling the single remaining strap crosswise down their chests to meet buttons that had been shifted to the middle of the trousers. This simple sartorial alteration lent them an air of stubborn disreputability, which they studied to deserve.

  Members of the One-Gallus Gang did no homework, brought no books, gave no quarter. When they came to school, which they did only when they chose, they beat up the headmaster and held the teachers hostage in the outside toilets. They turned on taps, redrew the map of the world and drank ink through straws. Most of their time they spent well away from school, avoiding the feared Whipper-In, the School Attendance Officer, employed to ascertain that absences were legitimate and illnesses genuine.

  One day they lay in wait for him as he pursued his rounds up in the country. They ambushed him near Balcaskie, sank him up to his head in a dungpit, tied him up, and brought him back to the village in triumph and a wheelbarrow. They tied his shoelaces together and tossed him into the harbour at low tide. Then they returned to raid the school gardens. In broad daylight they dug up every furrow of potatoes planted by Primary Four, pelting the teachers with clods when they tried to prevent this spoliation. The headmaster called the policeman, who arrived with a dripping Whipper-In on the back of his bike. As it was wartime the Home Guard was called in and Billy and his bandits found themselves facing reinforcements, eager for some sort of action. They beat them off and within half an hour Dad’s Army was in full retreat. Then the headmaster went to a special telephone, a red one in a locked cupboard, and rang Field Marshal Montgomery …