of those institutions where to turn up at all and stay awake till the end of the day was an achievement. In that community, Catholics had to be very careful: their children should not stray, their schoolteachers should be seen to be diligent and strong on discipline. To encourage near-perfect attendance, the work was carefully designed so that it was not too difficult, while being mildly rewarding. At least, that was how it seemed to me. I was bored in school, most of the time; the only exception was in Scripture class, when we studied the life of Jesus and looked at beautiful, ancient-looking maps of Palestine and Judaea. I liked the teachers well enough. They lent me books and gave me special problems to solve.
At five, however, I didn’t much like the children. I imagine this is something many children discover, on their first day of school, but there is so much pressure to socialise, at school and beyond, that they learn to adapt. I didn’t have that pressure, however: my mother’s efforts to improve me at home meant that I was – and stayed – at least a year ahead of my classmates. This meant I received special treatment, sitting off by myself with a book of my own, or more advanced sums to work out, while the others practised their pencraft, or plasticine-doggy-making. At the time, this was considered an enlightened view, though there was no mistaking the look in the eyes of my teachers, a look that suggested they thought of me as a freak, not of nature, so much as of abnormal nurture. Looking back, I realise that the smartest of my primary schoolteachers, Miss Conway, recognised in me a boy made clever, but not particularly intelligent, by an ambitious, or rather, desperate, mother. It would take me another ten years to stop admiring that cleverness. Nevertheless, I was an anomaly in that little coal-town classroom: hypersensitive, overly polite, occasionally cruel, I thought other boys were the strangest little animals and avoided them as much as I could. Unlike the stereotypical ‘sensitive’ child, however, the one who likes books and nice pictures, I was big and ready to defend myself if the need arose. I also had the distinct advantage of being related to the hardest, leanest, most uncompromising older boy in town, my bright, funny and utterly merciless cousin, Kenneth. Kenneth was a boy’s boy, an outdoors type who knew every bird in the woods and every fish in the loch. I admired him from afar; but then, he seemed like an adult to me, the way he knew everything you couldn’t learn from a book. Even then, I saw that there was more to life than my mother had taught me: all I had was words and diagrams, Kenneth had life itself. To me, he was more grown up than most grown-ups, and more alive than anybody I had ever met.
He was the exception, however. The other children at school, especially the boys, bored and annoyed me and, by the time I was eight, I liked them even less than I had at five. Truth to tell, though I didn’t realise it at the time, they reminded me of my father. They lived in the same world of minor grudges and willed confusion, and I felt fortunate to inhabit my own little universe of books for older children and logic problems, the scriptures and Church Latin. At the time, all Catholic children were supposed to acquire a smattering of medieval Latin, so they could follow the Mass, and I loved it. The words were so beautiful: strange in the mouth, tasting of unleavened bread and church incense, they carried an incontrovertible authority, the authority, not only of the divine, but also – as I had just begun to realise from my extracurricular studies in zoology – of the scientific. I had no words to articulate the feeling but, for me, the fact that Latin was the language of both priests and biologists was a source of excitement, even inspiration, and I was sure there was some great secret out there, waiting to be discovered, a private, arcane knowledge that only the privileged were
At five, however, I didn’t much like the children. I imagine this is something many children discover, on their first day of school, but there is so much pressure to socialise, at school and beyond, that they learn to adapt. I didn’t have that pressure, however: my mother’s efforts to improve me at home meant that I was – and stayed – at least a year ahead of my classmates. This meant I received special treatment, sitting off by myself with a book of my own, or more advanced sums to work out, while the others practised their pencraft, or plasticine-doggy-making. At the time, this was considered an enlightened view, though there was no mistaking the look in the eyes of my teachers, a look that suggested they thought of me as a freak, not of nature, so much as of abnormal nurture. Looking back, I realise that the smartest of my primary schoolteachers, Miss Conway, recognised in me a boy made clever, but not particularly intelligent, by an ambitious, or rather, desperate, mother. It would take me another ten years to stop admiring that cleverness. Nevertheless, I was an anomaly in that little coal-town classroom: hypersensitive, overly polite, occasionally cruel, I thought other boys were the strangest little animals and avoided them as much as I could. Unlike the stereotypical ‘sensitive’ child, however, the one who likes books and nice pictures, I was big and ready to defend myself if the need arose. I also had the distinct advantage of being related to the hardest, leanest, most uncompromising older boy in town, my bright, funny and utterly merciless cousin, Kenneth. Kenneth was a boy’s boy, an outdoors type who knew every bird in the woods and every fish in the loch. I admired him from afar; but then, he seemed like an adult to me, the way he knew everything you couldn’t learn from a book. Even then, I saw that there was more to life than my mother had taught me: all I had was words and diagrams, Kenneth had life itself. To me, he was more grown up than most grown-ups, and more alive than anybody I had ever met.
He was the exception, however. The other children at school, especially the boys, bored and annoyed me and, by the time I was eight, I liked them even less than I had at five. Truth to tell, though I didn’t realise it at the time, they reminded me of my father. They lived in the same world of minor grudges and willed confusion, and I felt fortunate to inhabit my own little universe of books for older children and logic problems, the scriptures and Church Latin. At the time, all Catholic children were supposed to acquire a smattering of medieval Latin, so they could follow the Mass, and I loved it. The words were so beautiful: strange in the mouth, tasting of unleavened bread and church incense, they carried an incontrovertible authority, the authority, not only of the divine, but also – as I had just begun to realise from my extracurricular studies in zoology – of the scientific. I had no words to articulate the feeling but, for me, the fact that Latin was the language of both priests and biologists was a source of excitement, even inspiration, and I was sure there was some great secret out there, waiting to be discovered, a private, arcane knowledge that only the privileged were
Similar Books
