The Words of the Mouth Read online

CHAPTER TWO

  I had to leave home because of mounting tension between me and my father.

  My entire adolescence had been a guerilla action against his hysterical attempts to break my will and rape my mind by forcing his ideas down my throat. But the more he battered, the more defiant I became.

  I was constantly being criticised and attacked as he tried to organise my life, refusing to let me be myself, trying to dominate me, and everybody around him, and viewing everything, so it seemed to me, through the wrong end of a logical telescope.

  While pouring out a stream of logical drivel, he was himself the most illogical of beings. During WW2, he was nearly court-martialled for mutiny because he had refused an order, declaring stoutly, "I can't do that, it's against my principles." Fortunately he had an understanding officer who saved him.

  Another time, an acquaintance of his declined a whisky for fear of being breathalyzed by the police as he drove home. My father had an appalling revelation : the man actually did not care that he might be breaking the law or that he might cause an accident; his only concern was to avoid being caught. A stern and impassioned sermon lashed his hapless ears.

  There was no harmony in the family; every mealtime would end with him flying into an illogical rage, slamming his fist on the table, his eyes glaring and his moustache bristling, and me shouting back at him, my mother weeping – total bedlam.

  While his idea of morals and ethics was that I should support the law and the state, he didn't seem to care, paradoxically, about what I did, as much as my reason for doing it. When 1 was about nine, I had thrown some rotten apples at a neighbour's boy, in retaliation for his throwing them at me from his garden. He then threw over some pebbles, so I picked up a brick and whirled about like an athlete putting the shot. But the brick flew off at an angle, hitting the supporting timber of his father's greenhouse and the whole side of it crashed down with much splintering of glass. I ran off to hide, while the boy's father, a minister whom my father heartily disliked, phoned our house.

  "Your son has just smashed the side of my greenhouse!” he declared indignantly.

  "Did you have it insured?" my father demanded.

  "No."

  "Well you bloody well ought to have had!" And he hung up, I was not chastised; I think he was secretly very pleased.

  He lived under the shadow of his own father, a son of the Manse and a man of staggering intellect who read over twenty languages. And he was haunted by his mother-in-law; he saw her as a raving nutcase, the archetypal hellish woman.

  Terribly energetic in an off-putting way, she was an ardent feminist who wandered around barefoot in wild dresses she made from colourful fabrics sent from India, She was a gardener with the proverbial green thumb, she cast pottery, painted pictures, and sang fervently in a dreadful soprano voice at the Episcopalian Church where her husband had been the curate. She had started off one of the first contraceptive clinics in Britain, and had tramps staying in the barn.

  She insisted I didn't wear shoes, made me sleep in cold rooms and wouldn't let me have a hot water bottle. She gave me horrible things to eat like skimmed milk, rennet pudding and over-cooked game stew made from dead pheasants she would find on the road. For breakfast, she had muesli, ate vitamin C, drank volumes of codeine cough mixture and was perpetually speeding on caffeine pills.

  My father had a maniac loathing of her, a greek legend kind of hatred.

  My father wanted me to go to Sandhurst or enter one of the professions, so I was sent to George Watson's School. It slowly dawned on me that, far from being an educational establishment, the real purpose of this place was to destroy the minds of its inmates. We were constantly being reminded of how much our parents had sacrificed to keep us there, how privileged we were, and of the responsibilities we had. Beneath this screen of 'noblesse oblige',bullying and general nastiness flourished in the numerous group activities and sports we were forced into.

  I was always near the top of my class until they tried to make me write with my right hand, which I couldn't do. And I had to write with an ink pen which always made blots, no matter how careful I was. I would work on ink exercises until two in the morning, sometimes weeping with the effort and blotting my paper with tears as well. To no avail; everyone else in the class would get stars on their work except me. It wasn't that I got the answers wrong, I just made blots. I felt strongly that I deserved some recognition for effort at the very least, and I was becoming neurotic and ill with my futile attempts to please the masters.

  I began to hate the school; I manufactured illnesses, convincing myself I was sick, studying how to describe symptoms which would get me off school, but being careful not to say that the pain was in a place which would cause the Doctor to send me for an operation. I 'developed' asthma and hay fever to keep me out of swimming and games where the bullying was at its worst. I began staying off regularly on Mondays and Fridays.

  My form teacher, Mr. Gumming, also my French master, hated me and began making sneering remarks about me to the other boys when I wasn't there. He caused a lot of trouble for me by using by using his power to manipulate the attitudes of the others. He also deliberately gave me the lowest mark in French, even when my work was good.

  "I don't feel well, sir," I would frequently announce, to keep up the appearance of being sick.

  "Well, go outside for a quarter of an hour, boy,"

  I was careful to come back in exactly that time, but would still get a row for being too long away.

  After I had seen my G.P. about being ill, I asked for a certificate to cover my absence.

  "Why do you want that?"

  "My form teacher tells everyone I'm not sick, I'm skiving classes,"

  "He says you've been skiving? He's saying I'm a liar," the doctor exclaimed with some heat. "We'll see about this."

  He was on the Board of Governors, it happened, and he not only complained strongly to the Headmaster, but brought the matter up at the next meeting of the Board, calling for Mr, Gumming's dismissal.

  Realising he couldn't touch me, Gumming shut up, but he never addressed another word to me again.

  All my good grades died; I rebelled and vowed never again to work at school, to do only the minimum I could possibly get away with. The injustice of the place rankled, and I began to skive in earnest. My parents caught me and wrote a note to the Headmaster saying, "We found our son deliberately missing school," and made me hand it to him. Imagine; their own son!

  I gave him the note and he read it while I stood, waiting,

  "Why were you skiving, Sangster?" he said grimly, turning to face me,

  "No matter how hard I work, I somehow never get good marks, I stay up late at night trying to please the masters, I'm getting ill, the pressure is too much for me," and I burst into tears.

  He instructed the masters to stop giving me homework. That was great, except that it made the other boys very jealous and resentful. But I always had an excuse; I had doctors, psychiatrists, even dyslexia experts, all examining me and testifying to my problems.

  Occasionally, I was genuinely excited by a lesson, as in Science one day when the master began explaining about atoms and molecules. I had been thinking about them already and understood the philosophy behind them.

  "Sir, they're just like planets, aren't they?" I asked, enthusiastically.

  "Sangster, you think you know it all, don't you?" the master sneered. "Just go and sit in the back of the class and shut up."

  Art was my best subject; it was the only class where I was the pet. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted: pottery, painting, drawing. I would come in at lunch or after school to do extra work. On the first day of art, Mr. Coull, the teacher, spoke to us: "I can tell what you've been thinking from what you've drawn. I want you to paint me a picture now. If, after what I've just said, you try to hide what you're thinking, I'll know even faster what you've got inside." I thought that was a fantastic thing to say.

  He walked up and down between the desks, stop
ping next to Keiller and Ritchie, a loathsome pair of bullies and sneaks who ingratiated themselves with all the other teachers.

  "As for you two miserable specimens, I KNOW YOU. Any trouble out of you and.... WHACK!” went his ruler on their desk.

  I was made to drop art; instead they gave me technical drawing, which

  is the worst thing for an artist, and accounting. Mr. Coull was unable to prevent it, as he was locked in a power struggle with the rest of the department because of his left-wing views. I got a glimpse of this during one of his lessons when we were using rulers. The Head of the Art Department came in and said, "Students are not allowed to use rulers in the Scottish Certificate Examinations, they must work free hand."

  Mr. Coull flew at him in a rage, his meter stick upraised: "Get out, get out" he roared.

  They refused to accept me as a person; they were trying to destroy my

  talent. O.K., I decided resentfully, I'm bad, I'm not a good person, I'll just be a criminal, then. Fuck them.

  And so I left school with no qualifications.

  I believe this decision kept me healthy. My badness was in fact good; what they saw as arrogance, selfishness and willfulness was me refusing to be beaten and lie down under their jackboot heels.

  I went to Napier College to get the Highers I needed to go to Dundee Art College. Most of the girls in my class were accepted by Edinburgh, and I passed the preliminary entrance exam into Dundee. For this, I had to bring in a portfolio of my paintings, which included one canvas seven feet by six feet. Afterwards, I found it was too big to fit in the taxi, so I asked the lecturer: "Is it all right to leave my portfolio here until tomorrow?"

  "Yes, it'll be safe," he assured me. But when I returned the next day, they

  had burnt my entire portfolio, put it in the furnace.

  How dare they?

  I was appalled and embittered; violent fantasies involving bombs boiled up in my head.

  At the end of term, the final blow fell: I was refused entry into Art College.

  But by now, I was beginning to enjoy the underworld existence the system seemed to have destined for me. I got a delightful dead-end job as a scaffie down in Portobello. The other workers and I used to spend a lot of time and effort picking up seaweed and driftwood from the beach, starting around 7.00 a.m. By 11,00 we were pushing our barrels between holiday-makers from the Glasgow Fair. We would collect the seaweed in a barrel, then wheel it up to the prom, where it was transferred to a bigger barrel which would be wheeled along to a depot in Pipe Street, There we would dump our gatherings in the middle of the yard; soon there would be a twenty-foot high hill of rotting seaweed and other rubbish. Then a huge digger would come from the Central depot in Kings Stables Road, pick up all this stuff in its great bucket, and take it down to the sea at low tide, where it was dumped.

  The following day, all the seaweed would be swept up on the beach and we would spend the next week cleaning it up again, I would recognize bits of wood and old durex, and boil over with fury at the pointless futility of what 1 was doing.

  "Why don’t you sell all this seaweed to farmers for fertilizer?" I complained to the gaffer, "or make it into ice-cream; do something useful with it?"

  "Think yer fuckin smart, you student types, know it all. This is the way it's been done, and this is the way it's gonna be done."

  At school, I'd had an English teacher called Baston, who would pick on me. "Sangster," he used to say, "you clarty, scruffy swine, the way you're going, you'll end up just being a scaffie."

  There I was, several years later, a scaffie, having a cigarette on the promenade, dressed in an old plastic mac and a hat, the rain drizzling down, when who walked around the corner but old Mr. Baston and his wife. Gleefully, I walked up to him and said, "Don't recognise me, do you?"

  "No," he gulped apprehensively, alarmed by my familiar manner.

  "It's Sangster. You were right. I'm a scaffie," I laughed.