Mad Tam

Mr Jowl may once have been a perfectly good Maths teacher, but his dedication to his craft had eroded over time like chalk cliffs facing an incessant tide. In his case, the tide was succeeding generations of the children of Castlehouse, a vast housing estate on the fringes of the city of Danderbunkie, vice-Capital of the dark country of Mausoloneum.

The rain lashed at the classroom windows as he gazed forlornly at his charges. Algebra, trigonometry, geometry – what was the use? These kids were off at the first opportunity to work in either of the three local industries; the brewery, the cigarette factory or the abattoir. Mathematically, all they’d be doing is counting cans, fags or coos.

He spent the forty minute class having fun with them, making them laugh. He’d pick on one of the tougher, trendier-dressed ones – maybe young Ged McQuillan – grab him pretend-aggressively by the hair, make him guess an answer…

“What is x boy?”

The class would be screaming with laughter, hysterical that they might be next. Mr Jowl only picked on the tough ones, though. Bring them down a peg or two.

Crow Road Comprehensive was from the educational ark, even in Danderbunkie terms. Ink wells, desks with lids, Slade Prison gothic it had everything but the suicide nets. Late Victorian Gradgrindian, one expected the gymnasium to be attired with torture fixtures – knee-splitters and the odd Judas chair. The students looked like space aliens, with their feathered mullets and long leathers, giant flairs and six-inch platform shoes sat behind desks designed for nineteenth century waifs. Like thirty David Essex’s and Suzi Quatro’s sat behind toy furniture. No wonder they didn’t take any of it seriously. Yet, still they had to go through with the charade ‘Todays class is elementary equations which you won’t be taking a blind bit of notice of and I can’t say I blame you’.

This was no longer so much an academic establishment more a finishing school for thugs and hard men. Only a few months ago the then head master, a Mr Thompson brought in to ‘sort the place out’, walked down to the playground hands-in-air  peace-maker style to stop a gang fight and was promptly kicked in the nuts by one of the fourth years. Mayhem ensued of course and the police brought in again. Jowl knew fine well that if he were to check the lining of Ged McQuiilan’s coat he’d find a knife – or even a sword – and he wouldn’t be the only one carrying hardware.

“Fuckin hauns up ya cunt” Mr Masson, the Arts teacher demonstrated how a teacher down at Black Moat Comp, a Mr McSloan, had been subjected to a hostage taking and given six of the belt by one of his pupils, a rather ‘gemmie’ individual named ‘Mad’ Tam McGurk. McGurk and his cohorts had then locked the unfortunate tutor in his equipment cupboard only to be discovered by the school caretaker, Mr Halitos, quite a while after the end of the school day.

The staff room was what you’d expect at an inner city comprehensive in mid-seventies Danderbunkie. The air was foetid with cigarette smoke and grubby text books lay in piles amid a rabble of chairs and tables laden with educational supplements and old copies of the Daily Herald.

Mr Cream, the Modern Studies teacher always made sure there were a few copies of Socialist Worker strewn about and would deliberately read out loud about car strikes and the obvious perfidy of governments and bosses generally. The teachers occupying the chairs and standing about ‘the kettle area’ were a care-worn bunch in the main. All had the look of folk who had run an arduous race but still had more than half the course to go.

Mr Masson was a large, dark, gangly man with hands like spades. He held them out now in mock-supplication to indicate the plight of poor Mr McSloan, who was in reality a vicious bastard who always aimed for the wrists with his tawse. For an art teacher, Mr Masson, displayed few of the sensibilities one might expect of the artistic nature. Boorish and seemingly dull of imagination one wondered if he was in fact an art teacher at all. Maybe one day he’d covered for an absentee art teacher who’d never returned and been left there ever since.

At the ‘fuckin hauns up ya cunt’ Miss Chappel, the Religious Studies teacher, blanched. It was bad enough teaching the Gospels to groups of teenagers suddenly devoted to sex, violence and the acquisition of garish footwear without her fellow teachers resorting to such industrial language. Miss Chappel was ‘old school’, quite literally, she’d been teaching here since the war years when the school was a ‘senior secondary’ and such as Masson would have been lucky to be among the cleaning staff. In those days, a certain calibre of pupil was the expectation. Some were now famous in their various fields of endeavour, and Miss Chappel held on to this fact when she felt she was going under with the general educational trend. To Miss Chappel, the ideal of ‘comprehensivism’ threw the baby out with the bath water. It dragged the cream down and raised the hoi polio to a false level.

“‘Hauns up ya cunt!’ I mean, what’s it coming to eh? Poor auld McSloan. Nae chance now wi’ kids like that. Well, they’re not even kids eh? Just thugs. What say you Boab?”

“Aye, it’s a worry right enough. Let’s hope it doesn’t catch on here” Robert ‘Boab’ McCluskey was Head of Physics and due for retirement in five months’ time. He’d made the mistake of befriending Masson one drunken night out and now Masson presumed upon their relationship with unwanted familiarity. McCluskey had a strange look of Rupert the Bear about him. A wee teddy bear of a man, all whiskery and big bellied. He was one of those old blokes who wore trousers with massive zips that seemed to stretch from groin to chest. He wore the clothes of the elderly bowling club member – checked shirt, brown leather shoes and beige blouson. This elderly genteelness was belied by his over-affection for the children in his charge. Savile-like, this was widely suspected but no-one had ever bothered to pursue the truth of it, and since he was near-retirement, it was assumed that this was the carpet under which his sordid career of abuse would be swept.

“Ye widnae stand for that wid ye Boab? Nae chance. Try that with me and they’ll be in for a shock” 

Masson took on a Bogart-like stance as if he was some sort of hard man from The Bronx. The whole staff-room knew he shit his pants the time wee Malky Forsyth had pulled a Stanley on him. The whole school had laughed about it.

“Don’t tell me ye’ve got a gun in your drawer, Tam?” Linda Squelch, the blonde bombshell of a gym teacher, knew Masson hated being referred to as ‘Tam’. He knew the ‘kids’ called him ‘Mad Tam’ in a derisory sort of a way, and as he had feverish fantasies of a very erotic nature over Ms Squelch he was crestfallen at the implied contempt.

“Got a gun in ma poakit Linda, can ye no’ tell?” Masson seemingly couldn’t help but say the coarsest things at every opportunity. Pre-Tourette’s awareness perhaps but Thomas Masson, Senior Art Teacher at Crow Road Comprehensive seemed to have an involuntary instinct for saying the wrong thing.

Linda Squelch was the goddess of Crow Road Comprehensive. Pubescent males were forced into masturbatory paroxysms every night thinking of her blonde locks and soft cleavage. It’s not known if she was anywhere near aware of the liquid tons of bodily fluid spurted on her account but she certainly must have been aware of the lecherous stares of pupils and staff alike.

A woman, certainly one as outrageously erogenous as Linda Squelch, knows when she is making an impact. Fourteen year olds had their eyes on stalks Looney Tunes style as ‘Miss Squelch’ bent over to pick up a basketball in her tight gym shorts. Their love-lives were ruined forever as no female outside the realm of high-class porn would ever come up to scratch for them.

What they didn’t know was that Miss Squelch was a fervent lesbian with a serious and baffling crush on one of the dinner ladies, the redoubtably butch Edina McGubbligan, a mother of six who owned a face like a bag of chisels and a pelvic floor akin to a sailors hammock.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the beholder in this case was long overdue for a visit to Specsavers. Edina, as yet unaware of the ardour that existed for her within the plentiful bosom of Miss Squelch, had recently wondered why she kept bumping into her. She seemed to be duty teacher at every sitting these days and seemed to make a point of trying to engage Edina in conversation, even to the point of ignoring the other dinner ladies offer of assistance until Mrs McGubbligan was free.

Edina had barely thought of Lesbianism and if she ever did, it was something for posh folk to be involved with, not women from the Castlehouse Estate. Women from here married men with drink problems and had sex solely to have children. If there ever had been a sensual side of Edina McGubbligan it had long disappeared amid the shitey nappies and the raging marital battles. She’d seen lesbians on the telly and they always looked angry and unhappy.

Squelch the lesbian wasn’t exactly unhappy though she was deeply frustrated. Usually, men or women that she’d given even the merest signal of interest to fell at her feet in an instant. She wasn’t even sure if Edina McGubbligan had noticed her at all, and this was more than upsetting, it was almost insulting. The big hulking housewife had no right to ignore such glamour and sexuality. She’d worn her most revealing blouses and shortest skirts. She’d worn high heels and pouted her lips.

There were boys and teachers alike who had been fainting and panting in her wake as she had made her way to the dinner hall. Her perfume held in their nostrils as they rushed away home or to the school toilets to relieve their sexual tension. Plumbers were called in to fix blockages but refused when the cause was discovered. Outraged by the mass sinfulness, local priests held demonstrations outside the school gates, but, suspected of pederasty, they were chased off by worried parents.

Miss Squelch would have to resort to more desperate measures to lure the apple of her eye.