The Black Halo (41 page)

When he went in the door his mother looked up. Her hands were white with flour.

‘I’m not going back,’ said Torquil.

‘What did you say?’

‘I’m not going back. Ever,’ said Torquil.

‘I am going for your father,’ said his mother, and she went into the byre where her husband was busy with harness.

‘Torquil has come home,’ she said, ‘and says he’s not going back to school again.’

Her husband raised his grave pale bearded face and said,

‘I will see him. Tell him to come in here.’

She went back into the house and told Torquil,

‘Your father wants to see you in the byre.’

Torquil went into the byre where his father was waiting. The smell of leather calmed him: he would like to learn how to plough. Next spring he would ask his father to let him.

‘What is all this?’ said his father. ‘Sit on that chest.’ Torquil sat down.

‘Well, then,’ said his father.

Torquil told him his story. He tried to tell his father that the worst part of it was not the belting but the difference between him and the minister’s son, but he couldn’t put into
words what he felt. He put his raw hands under his bottom as he sat on the chest. His father didn’t say anything for a long while and then he said,

‘Mr Macrae is a good man. He is a good teacher.’

‘Yes, father,’ said Torquil.

‘The one before him was too slack.’ Then he stopped. ‘I will think about it.’ Then, ‘Mr Macrae is a good navigation teacher,’ he added as if this was as
important. ‘Go inside now.’

At half past four Torquil saw Mr Macrae heading for the house on his bicycle, a small figure on which the snow was falling. Through the window, itself almost covered with snow, he saw him
approaching and then his father going to meet him. He couldn’t hear what Mr Macrae was saying but saw that he was gesticulating. His father stared at the ground and then shook his head. He
seemed to be much calmer than Mr Macrae who was like a wasp humming about a bull. Then after Mr Macrae had talked a great deal, Torquil saw him get on his bike and ride away. After he had gone his
father sent for him.

‘You are not going back to school,’ he said. ‘You will work with me on the croft. We will say no more about it.’

Torquil saw that his mother was about to say something but his father looked at her and she bent her head to the plate again.

That spring Torquil was allowed to help his father with the ploughing which was harder than he had thought. The plough refused to go in a straight line, the patient horse tugged and tugged.
Seagulls flew about the sparse ground, and a fresh wind was in his nostrils. Sometimes as he walked along he could hear a voice in his head saying

The black earth turned and the blades were hit by stones. He felt as if he was captain of a ship, his jersey billowing in the breeze.

‘You’ll come on fine,’ said his father and then to his mother that night. ‘He’s coming along fine.’

When he was eighteen years old, because there was no employment, he decided to emigrate to Canada. He stood on the pier, his father and mother beside him. The ship’s sails swelled in the
breeze.

‘You will be all right,’ said his father. ‘You have a good grounding in navigation. Mr Macrae saw to that.’

‘Yes,’ Torquil agreed.

He went on board the ship after kissing his mother and shaking his father by the hand. As the ship sailed away from the pier he saw them standing there with a lot of other people who were seeing
relatives off. The sails swelled and soon they were far from shore and the island was a long line of green with lights twinkling here and there. Then it could not be seen at all.

He had a hard time of it in Canada for it was during the thirties that he emigrated. Sometimes he slept in doss-houses, sometimes he worked on the railway tracks. At nights he and the other boys
from Scotland kept themselves warm by dancing the Highland Fling. His underclothes were in rags and one morning in spring after washing them in a stream he threw them away. Eventually he reached
Vancouver and there got a job as a Fire Officer. He trained hoses on charred bodies in burnt rooms.

One night at a ceilidh in another islander’s house he had an argument with him about the Garden of Eden.

‘It wasn’t an apple that was mentioned,’ he said. ‘It was just any fruit. I’ll show you.’ And, after asking him to get his Bible, they both studied it. It
didn’t mention an apple at all. It simply said the Tree of Good and Evil.

‘You know your Bible sure enough,’ said the islander whose name was Smith, and who was lame because of an accident on the grain elevators.

Torquil didn’t say anything.

‘The funny thing is that I never see you in church,’ said Smith.

‘You will never see me in church,’ said Torquil.

But he didn’t say why not. It seemed to him strange that he felt no anger towards Macrae whom he still regarded as having been a good teacher, especially of navigation. Sometimes when it
was snowing gently he would see the belt descending, he could hear the words of that poem which he had never forgotten and he could see the thick neck and face of the minister.

‘No,’ he repeated, ‘You’ll never see me there.’

When he started teaching first Mark Mason was very enthusiastic, thinking that he could bring to the pupils gifts of the poetry of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Keats. But it
wasn’t going to be like that, at least not with Class 3g. 3g was a class of girls who, before the raising of the school-leaving age, were to leave at the end of their fifteenth year. Mark
brought them ‘relevant’ poems and novels including
Timothy Winters
and
Jane Eyre
but quickly discovered that they had a fixed antipathy to the written word. It was not
that they were undisciplined – that is to say they were not actively mischievous – but they were thrawn: he felt that there was a solid wall between himself and them and that no matter
how hard he sold them
Jane Eyre
, by reading chapters of it aloud, and comparing for instance the food in the school refectory that Jane Eyre had to eat with that which they themselves got
in their school canteen, they were not interested. Indeed one day when he was walking down one of the aisles between two rows of desks he asked one of the girls, whose name was Lorna and who was
pasty-faced and blond, what was the last book she had read, and she replied,

‘Please, sir, I never read any books.’

This answer amazed him for he could not conceive of a world where one never read any books and he was the more determined to introduce them to the activity which had given himself so much
pleasure. But the more enthusiastic he became, the more eloquent his words, the more they withdrew into themselves till finally he had to admit that he was completely failing with the class. As he
was very conscientious this troubled him, and not even his success with the academic classes compensated for his obvious lack of success with this particular class. He believed in any event that
failure with the non-academic classes constituted failure as a teacher. He tried to do creative writing with them first by bringing in reproductions of paintings by Magritte which were intended to
awaken in their minds a glimmer of the unexpectedness and strangeness of ordinary things, but they would simply look at them and point out to him their lack of resemblance to reality. He was in
despair. His failure began to obsess him so much that he discussed the problem with the Head of Department who happened to be teaching
Rasselas
to the Sixth Form at the time with what
success Mark could not gauge.

‘I suggest you make them do the work,’ said his Head of Department. ‘There comes a point where if you do not impose your personality they will take advantage of you.’

But somehow or another Mark could not impose his personality on them: they had a habit for instance of forcing him to deviate from the text he was studying with them by mentioning something that
had appeared in the newspaper.

‘Sir,’ they would say, ‘did you see in the papers that there were two babies born from two wombs in the one woman.’ Mark would flush angrily and say, ‘I don’t
see what this has to do with our work,’ but before he knew where he was he was in the middle of an animated discussion which was proceeding all around him about the anatomical significance of
this piece of news. The fact was that he did not know how to deal with them: if they had been boys he might have threatened them with the last sanction of the belt, or at least frightened them in
some way. But girls were different, one couldn’t belt girls, and certainly he couldn’t frighten this particular lot. They all wanted to be hairdressers: and one wanted to be an engineer
having read in a paper that this was now a possible job for girls. He couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her that it was highly unlikely that she could do this without Highers. They
fantasised a great deal about jobs and chose ones which were well beyond their scope. It seemed to him that his years in Training College hadn’t prepared him for this varied apathy and
animated gossip. Sometimes one or two of them were absent and when he asked where they were was told that they were baby sitting. He dreaded the periods he had to try and teach them in, for as the
year passed and autumn darkened into winter he knew that he had not taught them anything and he could not bear it.

He talked to other teachers about them, and the history man shrugged his shoulders and said that he gave them pictures to look at, for instance one showing women at the munitions during the
First World War. It became clear to him that their other teachers had written them off since they would be leaving at the end of the session, anyway, and as long as they were quiet they were
allowed to talk and now and again glance at the books with which they had been provided.

But Mark, whose first year this was, felt weighed down by his failure and would not admit to it. There must be something he could do with them, the failure was his fault and not theirs. Like a
missionary he had come to them bearing gifts, but they refused them, turning away from them with total lack of interest. Keats, Shakespeare, even the ballads, shrivelled in front of his eyes. It
was, curiously enough, Mr Morrison who gave him his most helpful advice. Mr Morrison spent most of his time making sure that his register was immaculate, first writing in the Os in pencil and then
rubbing them out and re-writing them in ink. Mark had been told that during the Second World War while Hitler was advancing into France, Africa and Russia he had been insisting that his register
was faultlessly kept and the names written in carefully. Morrison understood the importance of this though no one else did.

‘What you have to do with them,’ said Morrison, looking at Mark through his round glasses which were like the twin barrels of a gun, ‘is to find out what they want to
do.’

‘But,’ said Mark in astonishment, ‘that would be abdicating responsibility.’

‘That’s right,’ said Morrison equably.

‘If that were carried to its conclusion,’ said Mark, but before he could finish the sentence Morrison said,

‘In teaching nothing ought to be carried to its logical conclusion.’

‘I see,’ said Mark, who didn’t. But at least Morrison had introduced a new idea into his mind which was at the time entirely empty.

‘I see,’ he said again. But he was not yet ready to go as far as Morrison had implied that he should. The following day however he asked the class for the words of ‘Paper
Roses’, one of the few pop songs that he had ever heard of. For the first time he saw a glimmer of interest in their eyes, for the first time they were actually using pens. In a short while
they had given him the words from memory. Then he took out a book of Burns’ poems and copied on to the board the verses of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’. He asked them to
compare the two poems but found that the wall of apathy had descended again and that it was as impenetrable as before. Not completely daunted, he asked them if they would bring in a record of
‘Paper Roses’, and himself found one of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’, with Kenneth Mackellar singing it. He played both songs, one after the other, on his own record
player. They were happy listening to ‘Paper Roses’ but showed no interest in the other song. The discussion he had planned petered out, except that the following day a small girl with
black hair and a pale face brought in a huge pile of records which she requested that he play and which he adamantly refused to do. It occurred to him that the girls simply did not have the ability
to handle discussion, that in all cases where discussion was initiated it degenerated rapidly into gossip or vituperation or argument, that the concept of reason was alien to them, that in fact the
long line of philosophers beginning with Plato was irrelevant to them. For a long time they brought in records now that they knew he had a record player but he refused to play any of them.
Hadn’t he gone far enough by playing ‘Paper Roses’? No, he was damned if he would go the whole hog and surrender completely. And yet, he sensed that somewhere in this area of
their interest was what he wanted, that from here he might find the lever which would move their world.

He noticed that their leader was a girl called Tracy, a fairly tall pleasant-looking girl to whom they all seemed to turn for response or rejection. Nor was this girl stupid: nor were any of
them stupid. He knew that he must hang on to that, he must not believe that they were stupid. When they did come into the room it was as if they were searching for substance, a food which he could
not provide. He began to study Tracy more and more as if she might perhaps give him the solution to his problem, but she did not appear interested enough to do so. Now and again she would hum the
words of a song while engaged in combing another girl’s hair, an activity which would satisfy them for hours, and indeed some of the girls had said to him, ‘Tracy has a good voice, sir.
She can sing any pop song you like.’ And Tracy had regarded him with the sublime self-confidence of one who indeed could do this. But what use would that be to him? More and more he felt
himself, as it were, sliding into their world when what he had wanted was to drag them out of the darkness into his world. That was how he himself had been taught and that was how it should be. And
the weeks passed and he had taught them nothing. Their jotters were blank apart from the words of pop songs and certain secret drawings of their own. Yet they were human beings, they were not
stupid. That there was no such thing as stupidity was the faith by which he lived. In many ways they were quicker than he was, they found out more swiftly than he did the dates of examinations and
holidays. They were quite reconciled to the fact that they would not be able to pass any examinations. They would say,