Another birthday, more memories ...

Another week, another rush of birthday memories. My second son was born on a bleak February day 37 years ago, exactly 4 years and one week after his brother. Writing that, it seems absurd that it was only four years, for in that time my life had changed so completely. For one thing, it seemed as if I had completed the transition from my Glasgow childhood - including university, work and marriage - to the adult life I've lived ever since. Not only that: I'd moved from the odd transience of our initial 18 months after moving to Dunoon with our 5 week old first child, 18 months when the fact that we were living in a council house used by the education department held out the promise of a possible return to the city - I'd moved from that to the house I still live in, overlooking the Firth, as solid a house as I'd lived in as a child. I'd made new friends, at least one of whom had already moved away to another life; I'd joined the church choir, become a vestry member. It was as if no-one had actually realised that I was a novice mum, a novice church member, a novice adult. From this perspective, 37 years on, I feel that four years are but a blink, but then they were a life-changing lifetime.

Having a baby in Dunoon - and are babies still born here, I wonder? - was very different from my

Glasgow experience. No due-date induction here; this was a GP maternity unit and you waited "until baby is ready". In my case, that meant waiting almost a fortnight past the due date that I at least had calculated with some accuracy: a fortnight of dragging my poor mother for walks up the Bishop's Glen in the hopes of getting something started, of complaining of the heat in our draughty sitting room of an evening when others were huddling round the fire. When I eventually reached the stage of thinking something was happening, it was the middle of the night; I phoned the hospital and was told to go back to sleep and come in after breakfast. Talk about anti-climax.

The morning was grey; there was light snow falling. I waddled carefully up the path to the car, waving goodbye to #1 son and grandma. I was admitted, the only patient on the maternity ward. And then it all stopped again. Another woman came in, I remember, clearly pregnant but convinced she just had a stomach upset. By teatime, she had a baby - she'd mixed up her dates. I was still unmoved. My GP arrived, told me he'd leave it to his colleague the next day if nothing happened before then. Nothing did. And so, two weeks later than I'd anticipated, I was induced after all.

But it was still very different. I was brought my lunch, and ate it between contractions. "You'll need all your strength", the nurse said. My husband arrived, suffering from flu and looking worse than I felt. Four hours later, #2 son was born, delivered by one of my lovely GPs in a pink shirt and a plastic apron. "You've got another great big boy here, Mrs McIntosh," he told me. We were left - husband, baby and I - in the delivery room, to get acquainted. We wondered at the red eyes of this large baby - the effort of birth had affected us both. He looked solemnly at us. Later, over a cup of tea, he was returned to me, clean and sleeping. "He's got all his bits," I was reassured. There was no-one else in the small ward - the other mother was next door.

In that half hour or so, while the nurses went for their tea (I presume) and the early evening darkened outside, I knew I was happy. This doesn't often happen - frequently we look back and recognise happiness after it's over. But I was suffused with a happiness that I knew and owned, and I've never forgotten it.

One sad memory from the week that followed: I could never bear saying goodbye to 4 year old #1 son at the end of afternoon visiting. He used to cry, and when he'd left, I cried too, in that bleak time in hospitals between visiting and teatime - and see how that is the same time when I was so happy on this date? And so began the juggling that is the lot of anyone with more than one child ...

So, #2 son, if you read this from wherever in the world your extraordinary job takes you, this shows once more how much more memorable your children's birthdays are than your own. Of course, you and your brother already know this - and you in your turn will still be remembering, God willing, in 2055.

How, I wonder, will you choose to record the memories then?

I voted YES because ...

By the time I have finished writing this post, the polls will have closed. In fact, I shall shortly stop writing so that I can watch the 10 o'clock news, not because I expect to learn anything new about the Referendum Poll just closing all over Scotland, but because I feel I'm living through a moment in history that I can't bear to miss.

Today I voted YES. Actually, I voted ... what? three weeks ago? Because I had a postal vote, left over from a previous election which clashed with a holiday. I felt excited when I posted it, and I felt excited today, all over again. Not that my local polling station gave much sign of its huge importance in  today's events - it's a dreary place, in a rather dull street, and there is little on the pavement outside to lift the heart.

Today I voted YES. And in that vote, and in my hopes, are all the memories. Memories of the first time I began to feel aware of the effect on my life of the policies that I had always imagined affected ... other people. I shall never forget the sudden pang of realisation that I had brought my young firstborn baby to live next to a foreign nuclear submarine base: the US Navy's Site One. When that first child was joined by a second, I was on the road to activism. Throughout the miserable '80s I demonstrated, made speeches, appeared on radio and television and went to court as an expert witness in several trials of Greenham Women arrested when they came to join us in demonstrating against the Holy Loch base. I picketed polling stations; I leafleted countless households. Always the word came back: What can we do?

I remember more. I remember hearing a British Naval officer addressing a meeting in Ardentinny Hall, telling us that in the event of an accidental explosion at the Coulport base across the loch, Glenfinart Bay would somehow, miraculously avoid the blast as there would be a ... dent, a distortion of the blast circle. I remember the day Thatcher was re-elected, and the despair I felt; I remember drinking champagne in the sun that day in 1997 when Tony Blair was elected, and I remember the fading of that hope as his government ploughed on, betraying all that we had hoped for. I remember marching with thousands through a frosty Glasgow, protesting against the Iraq war. It happened anyway.

I remember too that day I stood on the Royal Mile watching the strange assortment of people that told us Scotland had its own parliament again - the Queen, Donald Dewar, Sean Connery. The Red Arrows thundered overhead. Something was changing. And of course I remember - how could we forget? - the day we learned that something else had happened against all expectation, that the SNP had won an overwhelming majority and that we were bound to have a referendum.

All this streams behind us tonight. Whatever the result of this closely-contested poll, we will never be the same. We have engaged with the issues in an unprecedented fashion and we have grown in confidence as a nation. I hope personally that the fearful have not prevailed this night, and that our new hope and new alignments will carry us forward from tomorrow morning. But even if the NO vote wins, we cannot go back to the old certainties, the old obedience.

And as I finish, I can be proud that the children I so feared for in their infancy have grown into the men they are - one with a vote today, the other disqualified by living elsewhere. My vote in this Referendum began with them, and the future is theirs.

Reflections on a life-long process

A discussion this afternoon as we walked down the Bishop's Glen under a miraculously cleared sky had me thinking. Not, on this occasion, of how cold my head had become - it was, we discovered, only 1ºC - nor of how lucky we were to have hiked for over an hour without getting wet, but about education. Again.

Thing is, when you spend 17 years of your first quarter-century in formal education, and the best part of your adult life involved in imparting the fruits of your learning to others, it's hard to retire the bit of your brain that thinks about such matters. And I keep reading blog posts that make me remember and reflect, and then I find I have to discharge these reflections to make room for more development. This particular outpouring, actually, also has its genesis in the English grammar test that was doing the rounds on Facebook last week; I was amused to see that among my circles I and one other judged the test by our 100% scores rather than the other way round.

So I can write correct English by the standards of the past century. I know my subjects and my objects, I recognise errant apostrophes and misrelated participles (all wildly common these days), I tend not to split my infinitives despite the mootness of the imperative that dictates such niceness. And yes, I know how to use "nice" correctly. But why? And how did this come to be?

Of course, it's a process. A lifelong process that began when I learned to read before I started Primary School, continued through the reading before I was 10 of books like "Treasure Island", Whymper's "Scrambles amongst the Alps" and the historical novels of Conan Doyle, was underlined by regular lessons and exercises in analysis and parsing all through primary school and into S1 and S2 and culminated - I suppose - in the mastery of Latin grammar at secondary school and university. I was taught from first Infants by teachers who were graduates - as far as I can remember, they all turned up in Glasgow MA hoods at special occasions - and who seemed possessed of infinite knowledge. (Here I have to single out the unfortunate BSc who took over my class in P7 - he struggled dreadfully with the English homework he set us, and had to seek help from my father, an old acquaintance from University.)

When I think about it, I can't remember ever not knowing how to write correctly - given, of course, that I was of an age to be literate. I couldn't always spell, and still have words that I like to check - but they're few and far between. I used to use "like" as a conjunction in careless speech, and may sometimes still do so, but I can hear my father's voice telling me not to. At dinner, God help me. Did such knowledge make me a good English teacher? Of course it didn't. But it made me a confident one. I didn't worry about the things I didn't know, because I could underpin everything I considered with a solid foundation. I never minded having to check something, or ask the class what they took from a text, because I enjoyed the stimulus of doing new stuff - there was no fear of being outgunned. I never needed to use half of the things I knew, but they were there, in the background, like a full tank of petrol, ready to emerge as a matter of interest, or to help in the delving. And when an earnest child assured me that it was wrong to start a sentence with "and" I was able to assure them that it was perfectly fine as long as you knew what you were doing. That kind of thing.

Now for an admission. Every time I read something, I'm judging it by the standards that have their roots in this past. When someone who is supposed to be educated doesn't know their comma-splice from their dangling participle, I notice. When someone writes about English teaching and does so in a less than literate fashion, it pains me. But I wonder about the future - about whether all this stuff that lies behind my thinking about the language and what we do with it will come to be seen as irrelevant, and if it does, whether that will be because no-one will have been educated in the way that we were.

Was it boring? Did we switch off? Sometimes. But in the end, I acquired what I needed because I attended a selective school, and most of us accepted that we had to learn. Even my distractions tended to be academic, like reading a book under the desk. I didn't meet non-academic children until I started teaching. But here's a thing. A boring teacher will make anything boring. Everything they touch will be tarnished by tedium. Pupils seem to me to be less likely to accept boredom than in the past. They are used to professionally packaged entertainment, all the time, on tap. They know when someone hasn't got what it takes, and they react predictably. Gone the days - happily gone - when a class of forty would sit in silence while the teacher droned through a bowdlerised "Hamlet" without ever giving one of them a shot at the lead role. As for parsing ten sentences in their jotters before the bell rang ...

Happily,  the selection and training of teachers is quite another story.

Climbing through the past

Familiar stair
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Well, that was fun. Two hours spent in a building that seemed (predictably) to have shrunk and (less predictably) to have become an unfamiliar maze reduced me to giggling exhaustion - though the giggles didn't come on till after this photo was taken, as I hadn't met someone I used to know by then. The stair I'm on here actually looks much as it always did - worn, glossy stone treads, tiled walls - though in the 50s the paintwork was cream and there were no pupils' paintings on the walls. But elsewhere, dreadful things have happened in the name of safety, and whole staircases have been dismantled and moved to places that don't fit at all with the architecture. It was, as I said in my last post, always a challenging place to find your way round the central stairwell, but now it's impossible.

Upwards was the clue. If we kept climbing, we arrived first at the top landing under the glass cupola, a space now sadly diminished by a new partition wall and the addition of fluorescent lights round the Parthenon frieze (replica). Beyond that, I knew, was The Attic, where I used to go for sewing classes between 3 - 4pm Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I saw a dingy stair heading up into the gloom and followed it - only to find that we seemed to be in a building site, linked to the rest of the school by a corrugated iron corridor with a wonky floor. We crept carefully along this, and emerged on the Attic landing: it was the fire escape. And of course we'd all have died hideously in the 50s if a fire had happened lower down in the school, as there was only the one exit, down the central stairwell. We never gave it a moment's thought - and neither, presumably, did our parents.

Because of the nature of Hillhead until the mid-70s, the returning FPs of my generation tended to share a pretty recognisable set of characteristics, including self-confidence and articulate self-expression. I was totally amused to meet up over a mass school photo with someone whom I remembered, with increasing clarity, from the 2nd violins of the school orchestra. She'd been in the year below me, along with Alison, and her hair had been very dark. I now realise I also knew her brother - even after we left school. Her pal I knew less well, but remembered her big sister - and their father had been a colleague of my own. She knew several people in my life, including one ABF who comments on this blog. It was all very incestuous and great fun.

I am grateful to the mother of a current pupil, who let me out into the shed apparently closed off because of an unsafe roof - her daughter assured me the pupils still go into it. And I was amused by the closed-in area under the school which used to be the boys' shed, open all down one side and used when it was just too wet for footie in the playground. I don't know how they got on playing footie round the pillars - I imagine it led to increased ball skills.

I was hugely impressed by the amount of work obviously done by the present teachers, and by the quality of the work on display. And I realised early on what a nightmare the building has become, with the cramped conditions imposed by the alterations and the leaking windows and unstable stonework in the attic. I had a vision of some of the classrooms as they had been - large, square, well-lit by tall windows, 40 pupils sitting in rows at desks with flap-down seats attached and the teacher at the front at the high desk - and realised I was in another world.

Take it for all in all, I think I prefer where we are now..

Note: I've had to repost this, as it vanished during Blogger's recent sickness. Hence the wrong date - it belongs, like myself, to yesterday.

Time travelling today ...

Today I'm going to visit the school this grinning child attended: Hillhead Primary School in Glasgow. (And if you follow me on Twitter you'll recognise the young Mrs Blethers - the photo was taken when I was about six, I think, or maybe seven. My pigtails vanished when I was ten.) At the time, the uniform was strictly adhered to; the school was one of Glasgow Corporation's grant-aided selective schools for which an entrance exam had to be sat, a consequence of which being that you could be asked to leave it you were deemed unsuitable in any way. So there I was, in my navy gym-slip with the box pleats and the badge; the cream blouse (never, ever white for the girls); the navy tie with the gold and brown narrow stripes. My hair ribbons were navy blue and my knee-high socks an unpleasant brown.

But I loved school; I loved it wholeheartedly and was as sad to leave at 18 as any heroine of a girls' school story. I never even noticed that the outdoors toilets were a barbaric and chilly idea - and they froze solid in a cold winter and we were all sent home - nor cared that the arrangement of stairs in the Primary School was such that some classrooms could only be reached from the left-hand stair. (I did, however, quail at the idea of asking the fierce teachers in the middle landing for passage through their classrooms if I got it wrong - I preferred to sprint downstairs and start again.) We played all the traditional games in their proper seasons - skipping, ball-games against the wall, scrap-swapping (a winter pursuit, carried out in the shed) - and wildly dangerous ones, like first dreeping off a ten-foot wall and then learning to jump off it without breaking anything. I still remember the concussion of landing on the concrete - and I was a skinny wee thing.

I shall doubtless return to this topic after this evening. The school is to be moved to another site, amalgamating with two others, and I have yet to discover the future of the building in Cecil Street. I shall take my camera, and there is a chance that the visit might destroy some memories. But I doubt it.

Ghosts of winters past

Pretty, innit? Snow on Newhaven Harbour, with the Forth Bridges in the distance. A good cue to get me started, as the Forth Road Bridge was closed for a time last week because of snow/ice/not-gritting-lest-the-bridge-is-corroded-by-salt. Now the country is closed, it seems - all these poor souls stuck on the M8 yesterday, and perhaps still as far as I know. Could have been us, too - but we left Edinburgh on Sunday, when the road was absolutely clear. Someone loves us ...

But to my theme. It's obvious why yesterday's terrible stramash happened: people rose early for work, as the world now seems to do, saw that it was dry - and set off. When they were on their way, strung along the ends of the motorway or whatever, the snow began. Someone jack-knifed; they all ground to a halt. Result: blocked road. Gritters couldn't get along it. No point in whining that folk ought to have stayed at home, as several moaners did on Radio Scotland this morning. They didn't have the choice when they set out. Perhaps the gritter moguls should have trusted the weather forecast and sent the lorries out early - but that's easy to say now. Besides, it was apparently too cold for the salt to have much effect - certainly the bit of path I spilled water on while emptying a basin (our waste pipe was frozen) is now a sheet of ice, despite my immediate application of salt at the time.

I don't remember this massive disruption from my past. I do remember fierce winters - for heaven's sake, I can just remember a morning when we had a coal briquette in the range surrounded with potato peelings*, in what must have been the winter of 1947 when the pipes in the tenements all froze and people had to use stand pipes in the streets. I can remember being sent home from school when the outside lavatories froze - the joy when the jannie would appear in the classroom with his mop in his hand and whisper to the teacher and we'd all go home just after playtime. (Presumably our bladders were supposed to last till we got home). I remember the joy of sledging all alone when I was home and my pals weren't - the virgin snow above the old air-raid shelters in Novar Drive. And of course I remember the brown sugar of the old snow in Great Western Road, and trudging up the hill in the snow to the number 10 tram terminus. And there were wonderful patterns of ice on the inside of the windows in the mornings - ferns, mainly, and starbursts. They were especially beautiful in the small maid's room off the kitchen where I slept, I remember. And I was the lucky one - the range in the kitchen kept the temperature in my wee room bearable.

Of course it must have been bad. And writing this has answered my question to myself, now I think about it. I saw only the effect on me. We didn't have a car, and there were trams (though I don't know how well they functioned in snow, and now there's no-one alive in my family who can tell me, dammit). We were accustomed to put on multiple layers of clothing and walk. We had wellies - though once I had a warmer pair of boots, in blue leather with crepe soles to which the snow clung in such layers that walking became impossible. We made fantastic slides in the playground and hurled ourselves along them; we were consumed with rage when the janny salted them while we were in class (presumably they had rudimentary Health & Safety even then). I loved the snow, my parents didn't seem unduly perturbed by it, we didn't have to worry about loved ones who were driving across the country/flying to London/travelling to Paris. My father had the longest commute - from Hyndland to Springburn - every day, and the rest of us took the tram, about 4 stops, I think.

Maybe we expected less. Our shopping was local, our messages limited to what we could carry. The shops had basics, and seasonal basics at that. When I was really small, we still had rationing. We had powercuts and candles, coal fires and a range in the kitchen. I can remember my mother cooking on it in a powercut. We all had chilblains every winter. It must have been grim, and I would probably hate it now.

We did, however, survive - and I look back on my childhood winters with undiluted pleasure. But excuse me while I go and turn up the heating ...

*This was, I believe, because the stockpiles of coal were frozen solid and no coal could be taken off them.

New poem on Orkney

I've written a new poem, based on my experience in Orkney. I know I need to read and study some more poetry - there's a bit of a desert in my brain right now, born of excessive busyness - but this suggested itself in the form of a sort of incantation.

You can read Touching the past here

Worshipping teachers (not teachers worshipping!)

I found myself reading an account by Robert Service of his schooldays (In A Hillhead Album, if you're interested) in which he told of the blow to his hero worship of a teacher when he caught sight of said teacher reeling drunkenly from a pub one evening. The combination of his memories and the book they were in (and the fact that we both attended the same school, in our respective eras) had me wondering: do pupils still hero-worship teachers?

I have a feeling they may not. I think they may be more savvy, more exposed to media or sporting heroes, flawed or otherwise, in comparison with whom all mortals will appear pallid. And part of me thinks this is probably a good thing: what a huge responsibility to be the object of such worship, such unquestioning devotion, as well as for the literacy or numeracy or whatever of the child.

And yet I think back to my very first teacher, whom I loved; to the Primary 3 teacher who taught us all about wild birds; to the first male teacher I had, in Primary 6, who was the object of devotion of every one of the 20 or so girls in his class (of 40). Such innocent devotion, I fear, lasted only while we were in Primary school; thereafter there tended to be an element of a more gender-orientated frisson involved in my robustly mixed school and we pitied such friends as had been sent to the likes of Laurel Bank and had to suffer grass-green uniforms as well as a completely female environment. But were these teachers in fact more worthy of devotion than unknown celebrities? And does this sort of thing still happen?

So: if you're still in the classroom, are you aware of pupils adoring you? How do you feel about it if you are? Does it irritate you or flatter? And do you attempt to put them off? Or is this something belonging to a more innocent past when the world was a much smaller place?

Sounds of the past

It is often said that smells are among the most evocative stimuli, but as I languished in what might well turn out to be the embrace of swine flu I've been thinking about sound and its power to conjure up the past. It began with the sound of my own teeth, chattering. As I curled up in a vain attempt to get warm, that first, shivering night, I could hear them, galloping away in a parody of cold, and the part of me that stays dispassionately aware giggled, somewhere, and remembered ... Scooby Doo.

I have not the least idea if Scooby Doo still appears on the telly, but when Mr B and I first set up home in a relatively bijou flat in Hyndland (red sandstone kid to the last, me) we had the telly in our living room. Actually, that first year we had most of our furniture, other than the bed, in the living room: we couldn't afford to put more than the piano and a bookcase in the large front room until the following summer. This was the first time I'd ever been in the same room as the telly in the early evening, and I used to put it on to keep me company as I learned to cook. (Sorry - read "made the dinner" there). And so it is that the chattering of my own teeth took me, via the chattering of the scared S.D's teeth and the sudden memory of the theme music, back to the time when I worried in case I'd spent too much on meat that wasn't going to last two days and thought that every evening meal should include a pudding.

Lying abed the following day, thinking of nothing at all, really, I suddenly recalled the time when I found myself at a loose end in my own house at the start of my first maternity leave. This was a strange limbo, really, as we were contemplating a move to Dunoon at the time as well as expecting a baby, and two things stand out as markers for memory. One of these is not sound but taste - the taste of Old Jamaica Rum & Raisin chocolate - but the other is the sound of the music that introduced an early afternoon TV programme - Crown Court. I recently discovered it was real music in its own right, for I heard it on Classic FM and it had a name all of its own which Mr B could doubtless supply, were he to hand, but to me it is always two o'clock in 1974 and I'm at home waiting for my first child to arrive. Tatatatatatatumtumtumti...tatatatatatatumtumtumti pom pom....