apocrypha

After a while people started asking me to write for other things

ghosts

When we were in the old building people would often ask me if I thought that the place was haunted, here in the new place nobody has yet been curious about the bogey population. I guess that it’s assumed that phantoms don’t do new builds.

There are only a few of you left who were at the old school — you arrived in August and we moved here in February. So, before being a pupil in the old building passes from the living memory of this building, I will share my memories. (Although Mr Munro and Mr Beard were pupils there once too.)

I think that the things that you would notice about the old place were how cramped it felt, that there were areas where daylight never fell, the tiles that were everywhere, and the patina of time. Generations of pupils and staff had added their mark by smoothing everything to a soft-glow. The building, once spanking-new, was showing its age.

The classrooms, in their final form, you would recognize as classrooms; somewhat smaller and taller with windows too high to see out of, but recognizable classrooms. Their original wooden steps had been removed from everywhere except for Ms MacIntosh’s very long, very cold room. The classrooms on the top floor were huge and tall, you could look up and see the riveted metal beams that held up the roof. Mr Dempster’s classroom was here, painted, at my suggestion, a garish turquoise and yellow. I don’t think that he’s ever forgiven me for that, he had to become headteacher to escape the horror of that room.

The atrium was, I suppose, a bit like our atrium in that it was large, open to the sky and people ate their pack lunches there. It was used for assemblies, drama, parents’ evenings, and anything we needed a large space for. The banners we have in our stairwells were originally hung there. The only furniture was two hundred odd chairs and a grand piano. The chairs were blue, the floor was blue, it all seemed very blue.

The dining hall was low-roofed, pink and silver-gray, glum; it let out onto an overgrown courtyard. In summer we opened the doors to the courtyard and Squirrels and Blackbirds came in when lunch was over to forage amongst the leavings of lunch.

Then the were the parts which few people ever got to see: the cellar, crazy-piled with the lumber of years; the service tunnels, a maze of pipes, cobwebbed, where far-off noises sounded near; the bell towers, giant water tanks topped by a square of sky.

The War Memorial came with us and I have one keepsake — an old wooden school desk that I made the staff scratch their names on graffiti style. I keep that under our new stairs so that someone from the future will find it and wonder.

Did I think that it was haunted? The old place? No. This place? Now that’s a rather stranger tale…

I wrote this for the school magazine. They also used some of my other stuff.

remembrance service

In the old school preparations for the remembrance service started at the back of ten. People bustled and scurried, music stands and microphones would appear, cables would be laid out and taped down, the IT technician would do some last-minute pfaffing to the flat-screen presentation (poppy fields, grave stones and pictures of our dead). Us jannies would wheel the ancient wonky-wheeled upright piano from the music department into place and bring the lectern from wherever it had been. Meanwhile the guests would start to arrive, to be ushered into the head’s office, for a small sherry perhaps?

Once break was over and the last few stragglers had been chivvied on their way the front doors would be closed. The sixth years would arrive, in drabs and dribs, arranging themselves on the stairs and stairwell, talking softly; the musicians took their places, the poor sod who was to play the last post trying not to look as nervous as they felt. Finally the quality appeared out of the head’s office, single filed, heads bowed, black and slow as treacle. Silence fell. We could begin. We jannies went to stand guard in the nearby corridors to ensure that there were no interruptions.

There was music, speeches, the wreaths were laid, there was the minute’ silence, the last post was played and we made our act of resolve. The quality trooped off for another sherry, the doors were opened, the wreaths were hung on the nails that had been put there for that purpose some time before living memory, all was put away. Soon everything seemed as it had been; few people left there unchanged.

There are several school events solely for the sixth years — the prom, the leaving breakfast… But the remembrance service is the most important. Aside from the essential solemnity of the occasion itself, it gives them a sense of the continuity of the school — that our pupils and staff have gone off to war and died, that other sixth years have made the resolve that they have just made, that they are part of a tradition that will outlast their time on this earth.

The memorial has hidden ties to the past. One summer we sent the bronzes off to be cleaned, I suspected that they had been cleaned before, and half expected… I was right. Behind one plaque the jannies of the time had written — Taken to be cleaned… with a date and, in beautiful copperplate, signed their names. Daz, Danny and I, in a far less attractive hand, did the same. I suspect that when the memorial was moved down to the new school the joiners added something too. And in the future, when the bronzes are cleaned again, or when the memorial is moved to our next building others will do likewise.

Our school is like The Ship of Theseus — a living entity, smeared in time; its parts ever changing, its soul abiding. Its past flows into our now and shapes our futures. We should remember this, our past, the children we sent off to wars, and try to live up to their sacrifices. It is good and fit that, for at least one day a year, together we pause, and stand, and think.

I wrote this for the former pupils association newsletter.

culture

There’s an old Broons cartoon, which suggests that even in the nineteen-fifties Edinburgh was seen as a multicultural place. At least from the braw-pots of bonny Dundee. As a teenager in the seventies I’m not sure that I experienced it that way. For me it was a boring white, heterosexual, monoculture with bad music and a sprinkling of random violence. People may have been having fun but they weren’t sharing any of it with me. Now Edinburgh is a multi-cultural city, I hear a dozen languages on the shortest of journeys. This old town hosts a marvelous mix of humanity.

I love to see the rough-hewn Polish lads having an evening stroll, with their cans of lager and their elegant women. Or the barbecues, of every stripe, in Harrison park; African, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, different smells, different sounds and different ways. The sound of happy children is universal, of course. Best of all I love the beautiful Japanese children, in their pairs, so elegant, so happy, smiling and chattering in their bird tongue. Who can help but smile along?

Which is why I’m always brought up short when I hear someone say, or write, something along the lines of, “London seems like a different city to me…” Now I’m not a dog, but I can hear the whistle — there are too many foreigners about.

We have a long, and for some people, proud history of being unpleasant to foreigners (A good overview is Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder). Certainly for as long as I’ve been alive there have been dire predictions of us being overrun by these awful aliens. We’re to be replaced, have our culture destroyed, our jobs taken from us, our women molested and our benefits system sucked dry by these evil chancers. Not that I’ve noticed any of these things happening.

pranks

A leaving sixth year are expected to play pranks. It's traditional. And we wouldn’t want to mess with tradition, would we? The problem is that one person’s jolly jape is another’s act of moral degeneracy. One year St. Thomas’s sixth released a swarm of locusts into the building. (Apparently you can not only buy live Locusts online but also have them delivered alive through the post.) Mention of this event will cause the average headteacher to shake the napper and chew the wasp. Such things are not forgotten.

When I was a janny I made it my business to offer the sixth years access for them to do their dark business. I think that they thought that this was me being very sporting; of course my real reason was to ensure that I knew what the little rascals were up to. All in all this worked out fairly well for both parties.

There was one occasion where I missed a trick. I gave them access to Ms. Boag’s room and left them to it. There I made my floater, as Bertie Wooster might say. They’d bought a load of plastic cups from the web and covered every surface with these, filled to the brim with water. And I mean every surface — they’d even managed to attach them to the windows using the vacuum principle. It was impressive I suppose but can’t say I felt happy as I cleared it away. Ms Boag claimed to me that she’d never mentioned anything about hydration. I have my suspicions, it seemed a very targeted act and Ms. Boag is the sporty type, one prone to wittering about the dubious benefits of water.

Internet shopping introduced a new wrinkle, the ability to purchase crap en masse (Locusts for instance). The young adults must have been believers in Stalin’s dictum, “quantity has a quality all of it’s own”. Many things were purchased to strew around the building — rubber ducks, little plastic figures (which I was still finding in crannies five years later), and alarm clocks. The alarm clocks were a pain I must admit. Balloons were, of course, perennially popular, many a room was filled to the brim with these; or if Helium was involved, filled to the floor.

I think my favourite ever prank was when they wrapped up everything in Mr. D’s room in, well, wrapping paper. Desk, chair, computer, stapler, pictures … anything that could be wrapped was wrapped. I did wonder a wee bit if I should allow it; what finally swung it for me was that, for once, I wouldn’t be the one who had to restore the status quo. It was just after we’d moved into the new building and we had a few extra janitors kicking about who I could dedicate that task to. Mr D. took it in very good part, I’ll bet he still has the photographs.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the Prank, the legendary prank, the acmé of practical jokes. This took place at a time when bubble cars were a thing and a teacher owned one, which he parked outside the school. In an example to modern youth of collective action, the sixth years, acting as a team, hauled this car up the main stair of the old building and deposited it on the top landing. Now, when I first heard this tale I suspected that it wasn’t true; but my head janny had it from his head janny, who had it from his head janny… And, as in the Scottish regiments — what the head janny (Sergeant major) deems to be true, is true. Who were these enterprising sixth years? The first fifteen was mentioned but I expect that the entire year was involved somewhere. I expect that we will never know. Well at least we wouldn’t look amongst the committee members of the organization responsible for this newsletter. Maybe you wouldn’t, I might.

I wrote this for the former pupils association newsletter.

On the Runaround

Until I got the job at Craiglockhart I spent ten or so years on the runaround. That’s what I called it anyway, it meant me providing cover, being the locum janny if you will, for buildings where the regular janny was off for some reason. As fourth man at a secondary this was seen as part of my duties, it was a major part of my working life. Cleaners acting up was the other main method of providing cover in those days, this often led to a job as a janny; it was the way that I got my start. Nowadays this is done by pay-to-claims, or an ad-hoc mixture of supervisors and overtime and not really providing any cover at all.

In those days this was considered as me gaining the experience which would lead eventually to the reward — my own school and the tied-house that went with it. That I spent ten years doing it, an unusually long time, was put down by those who liked me, to me being, too useful to them to get my own school. I doubt that they even thought about that. Getting a job then was usually a fit-up of some kind, you knew someone, you had something on someone, you’d done something or had something done to you that meant you had to be shifted. Or you were already filling in there, and liked, when the job became available. There was none of the modern above-board HR onboarding processes that they go in for these days. I got the job at Craiglockhart by being there and making sure that I was liked.

For me there were two major problems with the runaround — I didn’t know where I was going to be from week to week, or even day to day, and I was never very sure how much money I was going to get. As I’ve said overtime was a major part of my wages, and in some places there was little to none. It made any short term planning, the only type I did, very difficult. It wasn’t so bad if this was expected cover, for holidays for instance, at least then I got some notice and knew how long I was going to be there, and I could arrange overtime at Boroughmuir if there wasn’t any. But there were many times when I was called up at four in the afternoon to go somewhere that I’d never been before and I was expected to work till ten that night. Bang went my night off and any plans that I’d made for it. And if I’d been drinking any introductions were going to be fraught.

If it was somewhere that you’d been before and knew what to expect then being dumped there at the last minute wasn’t too much of a problem. If it was somewhere new it was a bit more tricky. If you were lucky you got to meet the janny, always a man in those day, although that might not be much of a help. I’ve handed over schools myself, and I try to be helpful but it’s difficult, there are only a few fixed-points in the day: open school, deliver the milk, setup for assembly, do the playgrounds… You knew how to do those things. A lot of the job consists of dealing with people and situations, and even if you want to these are hard to explain to others. A useful, and job appropriate, metaphor for this are the keys.

You will be familiar with keys, you’ll have a few and use them about half a dozen times a day, in locks that perhaps four other people use. So you know nothing about keys really. You probably don’t even know how they work. I know keys, I lock and unlock doors about a hundred times a day, locks that many others use. In my life I probably used, and carried around, ten thousand keys. Keys are metal, which wears, locks are metal, which wears, different people using keys causes them to wear in different ways. After a while keys develop idiosyncrasies. You start to wiggle and jiggle the key, you pull the door, you lift it, you may not even notice that you’re doing it; unless I concentrate I don’t. The job is like that — you do stuff that you don’t notice yourself doing, you may even be surprised if it was pointed out to you. Having the right key doesn’t mean you can use it.

That’s what it like taking over a school — you get a big bunch of keys and a job you don’t fully understand.

As I said, I did this for ten years.

the lollipop men

The lollipop men, or crossing guards, took their breaks in a room of describable squalour. The same room we took our breaks in. It was nearly completely filled by an old wooden table with half a dozen mismatched chairs wedged in wherever they would fit

——

man’s red fire

I worked with coal boilers for six months, in the eighties. It wasn’t a happy time. By then the technology was as advanced as it will ever become. I hope. Burning coal to heat a school is surely a thing long gone.

I’d be sent to Broomhouse to cover for a couple of days that turned into months. Bob, my supervisor dropped me off in his car, suspicious in itself, I only got ferried to a new place if there was something iffy about it. I asked about the boilers — you’ll pick it up he said. It wasn’t the heating season, I was only there for a couple of days, the problem might not come up. What Bob knew and I didn’t was that the janny, a grade A bastard, had the habit of taking winters off.

In principle coal heating is a simple thing — you burn coal, which heats water, which is pumped round the school. The devil, as always, is in the detail. The coal, in the case of Broomhouse, was kept in a bunker, a dismal coffer lit by a couple of sixty watt bulbs. Big, thick with the smell of wet coal, solemn, the type of place where the bodies that are never found get dumped. From there an electrical motor brings the coal to the boiler usings an Archimedes’ screw, the worm. (Everything here, tools, machine, or tube will have had been named, nobody told me what most of these were, so I may be naming them wrong. Nobody ever talked to me about any of this.)

Coal, as you know, is lumpy, and the coal that’s used for boilers is lumpier still. It’s a different type of coal, for one thing it burns way hotter, as the janny who stole some found out — when his grate melted onto his carpet.

Fire, mans’ red flower, the first and greatest of our inventions. Without it there would be nothing else. It warms us, cooks our meat, it was it that lured the Cats from the twilight. If humanity survives to span the stars we’ll still stare into it, besotted. All time spent with fire seems time well spent, and this was no ordinary fire — it was fierce and white and roared.

bruntsfield

Bruntsfield was the first building that I owned. I say owned, I owned it only in the sense that jannies own their schools. But then who does own a school? Many people are involved in its care and feeding, people who work there and people called in to fix or feed. As janny you’re the focal point, the building’s guardian, who all must pass. During my career there’s been a personnel inflation — more people are involved, which has reduced a janny’s importance, but you’re still the point of contact; those who use, clean, repair and renew must interact with you. You’re also the building’s working memory — who did what and when, what has been done and what is still to do? Only you have been in every part of the building, only you have opened every door. You’re by no means the most important person but without you things would drift and fray. No, we own our schools.

Bruntsfield was one of the schools built in the late nineteenth century, the 1872 act having overfilled what buildings were available. In Edinburgh these were built to three main patterns, with individual variations. I named these patterns after schools I worked in over the years: Bruntsfield, South Morningside and North Merchiston.

Big buildings have issues that small one don’t share; they settle and change their shape, their roofs are always leaking somewhere, bits are damp, or crumbling to dust, their equivalent of that cupboard full of crap that you have under your sink is a whole room. More likely several rooms. Schools have another problem — forty weeks of the year they are crowded with people and heat, twelve weeks they are empty and chill. These things are hidden from most of the users. To a janny they are writ large. We have to fix things, go everywhere and be in them alone.

Not many people get to be alone in big buildings. They don’t wander around them in the half-dark, listening to their especial noises, smelling their smells, feeling the airs move and the temperatures change. I don’t consider myself overly sensitive but there is an eerieness involved, nothing supernatural, merely strange and unusual. I can see how it might be an unpleasant experience for some people; it’s something that I quite enjoy. Buildings have characters, there are a lot different factors involved, some of which you carry in with you inside of your head; a church is always going to feel different from a school even if they look very alike.