School Milk 1960
A violent incident in the early days of my school that shaped my attitude over the next many years. Initially a scared and stuttering child to transformation to resilience, compassion and the world of rescue.
Malcolm Duckworth
The broken school milk bottle was rammed into the boy’s face. He fell with a gurgled, guttural scream his blood now staining the soil and sparse grass. “Kill him,” they screamed. An ancient primordial collective madness had removed all faith in the sanctity of life. No empyrean domain existed here. High on St Margaret’s church, adjacent to the school, its large golden crucifix bore witness to this modern Calvary crowd baying for blood.
The fight was over. The assailant turned and strode his arrogant smirk through the circle of spectators. We parted as if by silent command. Twelve years old I stood in frozen fear on the edge of that circle as they howled for blood. This terrifying initiation, on waste ground beside the school, began my secondary education in the ‘Devil’s Cathedral’.
We returned to the playground through the arched granite entrance passing the stacked milk crates full of future weapons. Back in school the violent kick to my back from a known bully was followed with “you saw nothing”. Coercion and violence happened in the playground, outside school and in the classroom. Violence pervaded the very atmosphere; humanity did not exist and humility a sign of weakness.
Mr Bull, in his tight brown lab coat, ruled the Technical Department with an ebony hardwood ruler and Mr Lawson the English Department with his fists and feet. Pulled upright by your hair and kneed in the groin to eject you into the corridor was a witnessed classroom control technique. We performed as automatons and learnt nothing except the art of remaining invisible.
Fear induced confusion caused me one occasion in the maths class to add the wrong columns, a basic primary school error. Explanation and rectification were delivered with mockery, sarcasm and physical intimidation. Stupid and thick were commonly used adjectives. For those with genuine ‘additional support needs’, a term not heard for another forty years, the nightmare was daily.
Every day I walked through the warren of grim slum Victorian tenements that surrounded the school and over the Gallowgate. On the grey dank days the smoke from the numerous coal fires hung with a sullen determination – a miasmic portent of doom. From the high point of the hill, I looked down on this ‘granite spired cathedral of hate’, my thoughts resonating with the panic of those poor unfortunates who had travelled this ancient street four hundred years earlier to their fate on the scaffold. A fate far worse than mine.
Once a week we were instructed to bring a towel, for some of us a procurement challenge, and marched to a local primary school for a shower. Lukewarm water in a cubicle behind a dirty white tarpaulin for five minutes, frequently without soap, produced the required standard of cleanliness. The other concession to cleanliness was the fortnightly swimming lesson. Like many other lessons this was conducted in a manner designed to generate fear. Shouting accompanied by a range of threats, including to be pushed into the deep end, passed as educational instruction. Inevitably we failed to learn to swim. The deepest water most of us had ever seen previously was six inches in a galvanised tin bath.
We were the ‘no right to ambition’ children caught in the twisted briars of a ruptured and dark social order. A very visible rent in the values of society existed here. Violence blew through our porous souls like a demented zephyr.
The Faindouran mountain bothy lies deep in the Cairngorms recessed in the remote valley of the River Avon. A place with a sense of loss where the mournful winter Easterlies carry the voices of the ghosts.
Above it to the south are the ominous looming mountain masses of Ben Avon and Ben A’Bhuird with their high tundra plateaus, steep granite corries and long lying winter snows. Two of Scotland’s biggest mountains.
All day long an insistent and belligerent south westerly pushed us north across the plateau and the old snow fields, until now in its confused tumbling turbulence, we descended, in the last of the grey light, to the valley. A weak moon struggling through the broken cloud and rain found the river and the ford. Black and cold, heralding winter, the River Avon wrenched with vengeful determination at our legs as we crossed to the track and the dark eyeless bothy. Beyond the creaking door darkness and the evocative stale smells of old wood and candle smoke. “This bothy has an aura” – she said standing in the dark – “maybe it’s lost souls”. Indelible traces of a hundred years of shelter, friendship, love and loss.
By torch and candlelight the fire was lit and our shadows danced like spectres to the flames as we cooked and ate.
The bothy cupboard invited inspection. A museum of past times its old tins, utensils, bottles, suspicious packets and books reflecting previous visitors.
Look she said placing a small bottle on the table. Its grimy glass reflecting the flickering fire.
“Do you remember these, we used to get our school milk in them”.
Malcolm Duckworth
Poverty and a violent inner-city school led to a protective resilience moderated with compassion and ultimately a degree, three professions and twenty-five years in mountain rescue. A prize-winning published poem plus family pressure to write a memoir has combined to stimulate a strong creative momentum across poetry, prose and art.