A Life of Sorts

I’d write something funny about my school days, but it would be a sacrilege to humour. An historical misnomer of staggering proportions. A bit like writing a book called ‘Fun and Laughter at the Somme’ or ‘The Cheerful Life of a Galley Slave’. My school days were the opposite of funny and eleven years of a waste of time (OK, I was rendered semi-literate and a quarter numerate and I could tell time but otherwise I left only with the curious knowledge of a few rudimentary steps to ‘The Valetta’ and ‘The Dashing White Sargeant’ and that President Richard Nixon’s middle name was Milhouse.)

I was even considered to be quite clever at one time and always in the top two in class but slowly this notion of me drained away like dishwater down a blocked sink and I ended up with the very lowest of the low; experts in housebreaking and boys that sniffed their own farts for pleasure. The well-jacketed lot from the better catchment areas that I was supposed to tag along with jogged away in the opposite direction to become land surveyors and executive officers in the Civil Service. (One of them even jogged away to become Ford Kiernan, the comedy actor.)

If all of this had not been the case, I may not have found himself in a cubicle in the ladies toilet in a Scottish Government building where I was – somehow- a clerk on the payroll section. i had scored a perfect thirty in his competency-based interview where I’d had lied somewhat impressively through six ‘competency areas’ at one point telling them how I’d retrieved a wielded plant pot from a very angry and pregnant claimant in a job centre in England. My interviewers had nodded along appreciatively no doubt picturing a similar scenario with an off-shore trawlerman that they hadn’t paid premium bonus to. What they failed to ask me, incredibly, was if I was any good at manipulating numbers with the correct results appearing on folk’s payslips to which my honest answer would have had to have been a resounding ‘No, most definitely not’. Surely ‘competency-based’ should mean competency to perform the necessary tasks at hand or had the world really gone so far askew that you weren’t allowed for some reason to do with discrimination to address such matters?

I'd only begun to realise that I was performing my ablutions in a cubicle in the ladies toilet when I’d heard the click of high heels on the tiled floor. Was this some sort of ‘Trans’ thing? I tried to think of any such individuals who would be wearing high heels in the men’s toilet but came up blank. Hang on! There was a fragrance in the air not reminiscent of the gent’s lavs. Was it lavender? And had I noticed urinals in my rush to evacuate?

The penny dropped and I very quickly had to plan a strategy of escape, my faux pas undetected. I was already, after only a matter of weeks, considered somewhat of an odd-bod and to be found lurking around in the ladies would do nothing to improve this perception.

“He fooled us into thinking he was competent, your honour. We were given no clue as to his pederasty!”

This was my seventh stint as a civil servant of lowly rank. Three times employed by the dole in its various guises and three in the tax office. Other than the Child Support Agency these were the lowest echelons of government work. One serving benefit claimants who were to be generally despised and the other with errant taxpayers who were to be largely accommodated if they were rich and chased vigorously if they weren’t.

I’d had jobs outside ‘the service’ but had always ended up back in it somehow. Maybe it was just a continuation of school as a lot of work was. Instead of teachers, there were supervisors and ‘team leaders’ to keep you in line, some of them OK and some of them absolutely awful with atrocious people skills. Bullies and incompetents who made you wonder how on earth they’d achieved their position. In the old days, it was sheer favouritism and having a face that fitted but now, in this new-fangled fancy way, you did it by being good at competency-based interviews (plus a certain element of ‘face fitting’) and then you found yourself in a position you really weren’t suited for and the folk under you suffered as a consequence. They scatter-gunned their ineptitude at all and anybody willing to take such treatment. If you were unlucky in this regard and found yourself under the authority of such an ogre, you could find yourself just as much a victim of bullying in the workplace as you ever were at school.

Scene: Whitehill Secondary 1975

Mr Smith the ancient Maths teacher has given up trying to teach us his subject properly and either teases the class with his comic stuff, lets us all play three-card-brag or else lets us all out to play football on the blaize pitch. He’s one of the good guys and doesn’t believe in humiliating us or patronising us. Noone in this class is ever going to understand algebra or trigonometry or any arithmetic more advanced than how many ‘single’ fags you can buy at the local mini-mart for two bob.

Auld Smithy is a chain-smoker when given a chance, but his own sense of ethics forbids him from smoking in the class but the fingers on his right hand are a satisfying dark brown with nicotine stains. He may have been a school-teacher from the days of the Covenanters and he's too old now to change his ways. He picks the toughest boys in the class, the one’s with the long leathers and the high-waisted trews with names like ‘Big Ged’ and ‘Mad Hammy’ and gives them mad sums to solve and when they can’t he grabs them by the ears.

“What’s 70 times times 43,  boy?” he asks and the whole class howls with the fun of it. Even the ‘tough guy’ is laughing and ‘taking a beamer’ but we all love Mr Smith, and no one takes offence.

 This school is old school from Victorian times. It is drizzle grey and austere like a prim lady in mourning. It has an impressive alumni (Lulu and Alisdair Gray) and was once a ‘good school’ but those days are long gone. Nowadays it’s just an ordinary Glasgow Secondary school, the posher kids wear uniforms and are generally left alone to their own wee world of study and ‘talking properly’ and the masses gather in Bay City Roller-esque garb with feather cuts and the talk is gangs and smutty films and – always – there is a poor unfortunate soul in your class who is dubbed with the unfortunate moniker ‘Smelly’.