job

Much has changed in education since I first mopped my first floor (I started as a cleaner). What things are called for example. The education side of education is now part of Children and Families, my side of education now falls under the department of Place, or something. By the end of my time I was no longer a janny, I had risen, through Service Support Officer to become a Facilities Management Technician. What we, the department we worked in and other council workers were called changed often. I often wondered if the high heid yins were devotees of Le Guin’s Earthsea books — if only they could discover the real name for a job it would all magically work. I suppose all these important changes gave management something to do.

Management itself has gone through major changes. When I started the headteacher was my boss, and I was in charge of the cleaners. I hired and fired them and supervised their work. The head did the same for me. There was something called, Janitorial, which lived in a building in Torphichen Street and, like the Sublime Porte, was referred to as such. They provided cover for our holidays, approved our requisitions and did little else that I could see. Occasionally you’d get a visit but they didn’t bother us much.

By the time I retired I had two bosses, who looked after other schools as well, but whom I’d see nearly every day. The cleaners had two bosses of their very own. My bosses had a boss (who I’d see very often), who had two bosses (who I’d see often), who had a bigger boss (who I’d see never)… There were bosses beyond I suppose, perhaps it was bosses all the way up? I was no longer part of the school — I worked in the school, but for a different department. In theory the school had no hold over me and I had no loyalty to it. These changes didn’t happen all at once of course. It was a gradual, a reorganization here, another boss there… Are all these new bosses necessary? Have they improved things? It’s actually very hard to say.

If you walked into an average school in the eighties and compared it with an average school today you’d have no trouble spotting the difference. They’re as different as chalkboard (what a blackboard is now called) and interactive whiteboard. Schools are cleaner, better equipped, classrooms are carpeted, properly heated and ventilated, better lit, the furniture is modern. I could go on but you get the picture. However a lot of this is down to a great deal more money being spent on education and who makes the decisions about how that money gets spent.

When I started the young adults halved the pages in their jotters to make them go further; today every secondary school pupil in Scotland gets their own iPad, which they get to take home. Then it seemed that there was no money for anything, and every penny was controlled by mysterious juntas tucked deep in Torphichen Street, far, far from the school. I had to beg for every tin of seal to varnish the (wooden) floors. Nowadays there’s much more money, but more importantly most of it is devolved to individual schools who decide how, and where, it gets spent. So it gets spent, if not always more wisely, at least on things that a school actually wants.

So it’s more than conceivable that all these new managers weren’t needed at all. I probably wouldn’t go that far. I think what we did need was training and support, we were incredibly amateur when I started out and we had too much power. I hired and fired cleaners. If I needed a new cleaner I placed a card in the newsagent’s window. There wasn’t an interview, I’d just hire the first person to turn up. What if they had a criminal record? for child abuse? It’s not as if I could tell by looking at them. What I could tell by looking at them was their gender and the colour of their skin. I was young and idealistic, I tried to be fair. Some jannies weren’t. Cleaners were nearly all old white women in those days. I could also get rid of cleaners if I didn’t like them without much difficulty. There was a union, but that was run by other jannies, who’d take my side if it came down to it. Today we have proper HR.

Then there was the technical side. We were given no training at all. Picking up litter and delivering the milk isn’t rocket science, but there were things that required knowledge and skill. We looked after pools and boilers. There are many ways a coal boiler can kill you, and there are even more ways a pool can take out both you and everybody else.

Take the pool at Bruntsfield. When I started wee Davy, the other janny, showed me what to do. I suppose that he’d been taught by some other janny. I wasn’t sure if he really understood what he was doing. There was something mechanical about the way that he told it, a series of steps to be taken rather than a process that he understood. There was no documentation, even at that time I found this strange; my only other real experience of work was the Post Office where there were reams of paperwork for even the slightest of tasks. To have nothing at all written down felt odd. There wasn’t even anything that came with the chemicals, none of the COSHE sheets that we’d have today. And these chemicals were real nasties, right up there with mustard gas for potential harm. I used to dose the pool with the chlorinating agent using an old soup ladle, protected by a pair of marigold gloves.

Many years later I did a pool training course, it was two full days, there were textbooks and tests, a tutor was shipped in all the way from Yorkshire. Bosses were present, it was all very organized and formal. This confirmed to me the view that I held then; that what I was doing was pretty dangerous and I was pretty ignorant.

As far as I know nobody was maimed, abused by a cleaner or killed as a result of our ignorance and incompetence but that can have only been down to sheer luck. I’ve complained endlessly about managerial inflation, and the pointless rules they make up, but there can be no doubt that big changes were needed. At least all these new managers have ensured that we don’t get to touch anything too life-threatening adjacent these days.

The main change is surprisingly invisible — computers. Computers, the internet, email, are so ubiquitous these days that it can be hard to remember that they weren’t there once. When I started at Bruntsfield there was one computer, a BBC Micro on a trolley so that you could wheel it around between classes. I don’t know what other people did with it but I managed, when I was supposed to be cleaning, to create a reasonable version of the first level of Space Invaders. Such was my then ignorance that I couldn’t see how to create the other levels without repeating all my code.

Slowly that changed. The office staff got word processors, then real computers. Computer suites were set up. Schools were wired for data, we were connected something called the world wide web. Email became our main tool for talking. Soon everyone had a computer and we spent more of our lives online. At first there was resistance to jannies getting computers, what do you need them for?. Then it was realized that sending a request by email was preferable to having to talk to a janny in person. By the time I left I had a computer and an iPhone all of my very own. Without these there would have been no nature journals here to read.

How all this has changed things, and will change things in future is anybody’s guess. I’ve likened it to the invention of printing, which may hold some clues. Not many, and how printing changed things still causes historians to bicker and bad-mouth each other in public even today. We’re on the cusp here, young adults growing up today will be the first generation who won’t know what it was like not to be online, not to have a mobile phone… Will they be very changed? Will AI replace them? Will they even be human? The only thing I know is that if someone tells you that they know what will happen then they’re a fool, are trying to scam you, or they’re a liar, most probably all three at once.

Then there’s the people, the people have changed. The snowy-haired, foul-mouthed wee women with whom I drank tea with on dark mornings are long dead. They’d tell me their stories, of the useless, jobless, drunken, gamblers that they’d married and stayed with for worse. They’d discuss, laugh with, and console each other about the many difficulties of their hard lives. They’d probe me for my details, did I have a girlfriend?. If I wasn’t careful their daughters would turn up, with at least one bairn, to give me the eye over. I had a job and a flat you see. These weren’t beaten women, their dignity was intact, they got up at three to clean their homes before heading off for a dayful of cleaning jobs. The world might be rotten but they’d beat it. They were funny and mostly happy, they didn’t expect much and got about that.

Cleaners nowadays are different, more varied. They’re much younger, there are more men, and they hail from all over — from Poland to Ghana, from the Philippines, China, Australia… they’re all in the mix. I’d still have tea with them occasionally but the conversation was different — less personal, they talked mostly of shopping; and I was no longer the silly wee boy that I was.

The jannies were different too. Part of that was down to me growing older; when I started I was by far the youngest janny and the others were mostly old men at the end of their working lives. And it was an end. Being a janny wasn’t the job for the aspiring lad — there wasn’t going to be any promotion, there was no place to go. If you were lucky you got yourself a job with a tied house, then you might lead a reasonable life. Your wife would be a cleaner, possibly a dinner lady too, your future when you retired was a nice council house, in a good area, and a job as a lollipop man. It wasn’t riches, you weren’t that well off, but you were comfortable and your job was safe.

That world changed. First came the poll tax, previously our rates had been paid for us. That was a blow, but one that a lot of low-paid people shared. Then they sold off the council houses, where were we going to live when we retired? There were still options but they weren’t such nice ones. Then, after I’d got my tied house, they turned the tied houses into council houses. Suddenly, from having your rent taken from your wages unnoticed, you had to pay nearly a whole week’s pay in rent each month. You did now have the option to buy your house, which a lot of the older jannies did; for us younger ones this wasn’t possible — we hadn’t lived there long enough to get a decent discount. Each year the pay rises got smaller, until they virtually stopped. Jannies weren’t alone in this, whole swathes of working people suffered in similar ways. Many of the jobs these days are part-time, or don’t pay a living wage, working people are having to claim benefits.

There has been one change for the better — all the new managers. Not in themselves, but the new management structure does provide a ladder for career advancement. Nowadays it’s possible to start as a janny and go up in the world. Jannies like me, who had been there forever, are going to become even more rare.

The following are bits that I wrote when I was, sort-of, planning an autobiography. I soon gave that up — I’ve led a very boring life. Well the parts of it that I’m willing to share with the world anyway. They do give a feel of what my life was like when I started out, so I’ve included them here.

bruntsfield

I started off my janitorial life as cleaner in Bruntsfield, mum was a teacher there, she got me a job for the summer clean. This was a thing then, jannies hired and fired cleaners, people who worked in education obtained last-chance employment for their useless, or student, offspring this way. The summer clean was a thing then too.

The summer clean is long gone now. My part in the process, that year, involved moving all the desks out of the classrooms, throwing buckets of soapy water onto the floor, scrubbing them with the rotary machine, sooking up the slurry with the sooker, doing the skirtings with ‘green pad’ to remove the greasy-black build up of Kleengel™ and finally sealing with Bourneseal™. Strictly speaking this was all janitor’s work but I didn’t know that then.

My memories of that summer are of slanted sunlight and shadows in hot, high, bare classrooms. Of golden motes slowly drifting in the rafters. The smell of wet wood, of sore knees, of wet feet, of the cloying chemical tang of drying Bourneseal, of the vinegar we used to prepare the floor for seal. There was no real noise, the scratch of scrubbing pad, the thick slup of seal in its pan, the jugga-jagga of the buffer, the ascending slurp of the sooker. Like penitent monks we worked in silence, there was no talk.

I was partnered with Alan, an intense, black, saturnine man. Shabbily dressed in murky, he worked fast, charging at whatever we were doing with a zest, gleaming with sweat, his thin hair slicked into a point at the rear, small black eyes burning with fury. His sole interest in other people was, do you think they make one hundred pounds a week? It may have been his sole interest in life, I don’t remember him ever saying anything else.

Half way through a shift we stopped for a tea break, which we took in a small room, a cupboard with a window really, filled with wet mops, broken cleaning equipment, lollipop mens’ winter coats and hundreds of old paint cans. We sat, elbow poking elbow, around a table and listened as the janny enlarged upon his philosophies.

This janny, Jimmy, was a stocky sepia man with a cigarette constantly on the go. He wore the traditional brown janny’s coat, black-slick with wear at cuff and arse. He shambled around, oddly silent, in a pair of brown slippers without any socks. This, the lack of socks, was deeply unsettling to me. I had an almost physical revulsion to the sight, his skin was an unhealthy grey colour. Why it was this, rather than any other aspect of his dress or manner that made me dislike him I don’t know.

His philosophies were ones of sloth. Any activity, ambition or doctrine that involved expending effort was bafflingly suspicious to his way of thinking. Today’s joggers would have caused him an existential pain. I remember the sad lost look on his crumpled grey face, its big pulpy nose, marbled with black veins, wobbling as he shook his head in confusion about some aspect of human behaviour. No matter who else was around the table it was always to me that he addressed these pensées. I suspect that this was because my mother was a teacher rather than of anything about me. Alan sat on my right, head nodding fiercely, looking for an opportunity to ask about someone’s weekly take home.

Eventually a fag would be stubbed out, his cup drained and he would begin the process of rising to his feet. This was our cue to resume work. He would repair to the medical room for a sleep on the couch there. I used to have fun ringing the bell that called for the janny, running to the top of the stairs and watching through the railings as he lurched, confused, out of the room, clutching at his disarray.

Towards the end of the summer teachers started to filter back into school, to set up their classrooms for the new term. This involved us in re-setting their furniture which, despite the maps we had drawn on the blackboards, was, “in a complete disarray”. And once a primary teacher has caught hold of you they will find a thousand and one, and another one, tasks with which you can help them. Cleaning took a bit of a backseat for a while.

So the summer idled to its end. Outside of work it was the usual round of pubs and parties, football in the park, barbecues and playing at being a grown-up. I felt reasonably content, I seemed to have some foot in the world again. And so it was that I stayed on after the summer to become a proper cleaner.

cleaner

Every job has its hidden arts I suppose, the secrets that you can only learn by doing the job, cleaning certainly has them. Cleaners are human Sparrows: ubiquitous, unostentatious and unseen by most. No, unseen is the wrong word, unremarked might be a better one. Every building, be it school, hospital or office you visit will have its crew, a hidden artel, a semi-secret community with a rich life of its own. With hum-drum routines and friendships, where meaningful looks are exchanged, where passions are stirred and feuds are begun.

Everyone cleans, men not so much perhaps, but more or less everyone; even Her late Majesty of blessed memory was said to don the pink marigolds on occasion. There’s a difference between cleaning your living room every so often and spending your working hours cleaning up after others. The task has been altered, the parameters changed. Basically you learn how to skimp, to do the least possible. To see, through cleaner’s eyes, the dirt and to judge how much of it others will notice. All dirt must go at some stage but some of it doesn’t have to be banished today if nobody but you notices it.

I’ve put that wrongly — I’ve made it seem like cleaners just want to be lazy, on the whole they don’t, but the way you clean changes. Your use of your time changes — sometimes you’ll spend an hour on one room and five minutes on the rest. Cleaning up after others is a marathon, cleaning your house is a sprint. Cleaners are the equivalent of those thin figures who run long-distance races, not the muscle-bound sprinters of the hundred meters. This metaphor has now been tortured to death methinks. Hopefully you get the idea, I’ve done my best.

My section was the top floor, six rooms and a staff only toilet. I had the boys’ toilets to do first, literally a shitty job, the young aim their bottoms like grown men aim their cocks, then I went up the stairs to sweep and wipe desks. Occasionally I’d mop a floor using an ancient tin bucket on wheels and a Kentucky mop. There would be teachers still working when I started cleaning, they soon left, leaving me on my own in the quiet. I wandered the high rooms. In summer in the golden light that shone through the huge skylights, in the winter in the half-dark provided by the pendant fluorescents.

If I wasn’t lazy I could finish my section easily. I’d even have time to do a wee bit extra somewhere — clean shelves, deep-clean the toilet, tidy the teacher’s desk. If I was lazy I could leave stuff for the morning to be finished off.

I remember the mornings best, they were the worst. We started at six and after a cup of tea I did the girls’ toilets. These were bleak, beyond bleak actually, sepulchral might be the word. This wasn’t a place for the living, even at the height of summer these middens hosted no flys. On a winter’s morning, illuminated by the inadequate light from a couple of dim bulbs, the floor a ringing ox-blood red tile, cold and damp and smelly and awful, it seemed to be the very portal of Tartarus. I can’t remember how many stalls there were but I remember the process: flush; wipe the cistern and bowl with luke-warm soapy water; fill the porcelain holder with a packet of razor-sharp Izal toilet paper; use the bog brush; flush again; finally mop your way out.

This all took about forty-five minutes by which time I’d be freezing. When I went to my section I’d curl up against one of the big iron radiators to get warm again. If I hadn’t been lazy the night before there was nothing to do. I usually read a book that was there. Because these were aimed at children, who notice crap, some were very good. I particularly remember Moomin Valley in Autumn, Wild Wood and Minnow on the Say . Something about their wistfulness caught my mood at the time. I had to keep an eye out for teachers and Davy but I was usually unbothered. At eight I would go down to use the only hoover in the school to hoover the carpet in the dining hall.

The weeks went past, the seal that we’d laid down in summer gradually wore away where the desks and chairs moved and people walked. I was living at home with my parents so the money was enough and there was always overtime. When I became a janny I realized why this was. A school was allotted a certain number of cleaning hours, there were never enough cleaners, so the difference was made up with overtime whether there was anything to do or not. This was exploited by the jannies to get themselves overtime, they needed to be there for the cleaners so they got overtime too.

So the year passed. Ali was president of the student union at Moray House that year, so we spent a lot of time in the bar there. My life was in a pleasant limbo. This was the mid-eighties, the miners’ strike was crawling to its inevitable end. We had lost, we weren’t going to change the world, there was no point in dreaming any more. Our future had been ripped up, we were the enemy within that they’d routed. They cackled their triumph, waving their cash. What was the point? So I cleaned.

As a cleaner you start to pick up the rhythms of the school: the day; the holidays; any special event. You’re a semi-detatched participant, on the edge of that world. Slowly I was being drawn in to school life. I won’t say that I noticed this at the time, being a cleaner was only a part of my life, I was busy frittering away the last of my youth the rest of the time. But, at the end of the next summer Jimmy had a stroke, I was made up to janny, this was a real change.

becoming a janny

My janitorial life started in an atmosphere of mild panic, the reason? Davy. Davy had been Jimmy’s assistant, the boilerman, and as such he knew only half the job. The thought of responsibility terrified him and he made sure that everyone knew this. The first day was spent in a series of frantic conferences where Davy shook his head and wittered nonsense. Eventually Mike was called over from Boroughmuir. This was my first meeting with Mike, I was impressed. If I had one complaint it was that he seemed to like talking a wee bit too much; he over explaining everything. He did sort everything out though, he reassured Davy and showed us how to do the paperwork. We were set it seemed, although Davy was still shaking his head and claiming that it was all beyond him.

Poor Davy, I came to love him but there was no doubting that he was an idiot, one of nature’s bunglers and dupes. Mike said that he was useless because he’d been a pongo, by which he meant a soldier, and not required to think. This was a wee bit harsh but had a grain of truth. Davy had done national service in Israel during the end of the mandate. Incredibly he had no stories to tell about his time there.

Davy was short, fattish, balding, he didn’t have a comb-over but it was heading that way. He wore a battered peaky blinders cap and looked up at the world through a pair of heavy framed glasses. From the start he leaned heavily on me. In fact in his own hapless fashion he took advantage of me. We used to get a free lunch from the kitchen which he always got for us, once I caught him eating the chips from my plate out of the side of his mouth as he brought the plates through. I could only admire the mandibular dexterity. Everything was slanted in his favour, overtime, breaks, work and my lunch plate it seemed; he got the better end of every deal. This didn’t bother me too much, I was happy enough to let him have his win. I was never sure if he realized that I noticed.

Davy had an undeserved reputation for laziness, this was unfair, he worked very hard, he just worked stupid. Work is a theatre, much of the effort is back-stage and unseen. If you want to get a reputation for diligence, you have to appear on the stage, your work needs to be noticed. Davy didn’t get this, what he did went unnoticed.

Davy was a perpetually worried wee man, always fussing and fretting. This used to get on my nerves at the time, it wouldn’t now. Well it would, I’d just deal with it better. The only time he settled was when he was with Ruby, his wife. She used to sit with him when he did overtime, doing her knitting. They were the sweetest of couples, I suppose that they were in their mid-fifties at the time, they still held hands in the street. That was one of the things that I loved about Davy. But mostly I loved him because he meant no wrong, there was no harm in the wee man.

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 when the job came up.

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. 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, so 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 locked and unlocked doors a hundred times a day.. In my life I’ve probably used, and carried around, ten thousand keys. Keys are metal, which wears, locks are metal, which wears, different people using keys causes both lock and key to wear in different ways. After a while keys and their lock develop idiosyncrasies. You have to wiggle and jiggle, you pull the door, or you lift it, you may not even notice that you’re doing it unless you think about it. The job is like that — you do stuff that you don’t notice yourself doing, patterns develop that are hard to describe. And merely 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.

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, to heat anything, is surely a thing going or 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 the winter 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 dark coffer lit only by a couple of sixty watt bulbs. Long and low, 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 there, 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, so it can jam the worm, which would burn out the motor, which you don’t want; the engine’s an expensive thing. So to connect the motor to the worm there are two flat plates with slots in. These plates rotate together when there’s a split-pin in the slots. This pin is made of soft brass and will break if there’s a bad clog in the worm. Very clever. Trouble is that split-pins usually only break in the depths of cold nights. So you come in to a freezing cold school and the horrid job of unclogging the worm. To do that you need to go into the bunker and take your life in your hands.

Coal is horrid stuff. To start with it’s dusty. So when you work with it dust sticks to you — it gets up your nose, between your toes, in your mouth, in your hair, it works its way into the very crannies of your baws. There wasn’t a shower so I’d walk around all day smutty, gritty and unclean. Then it can hurt you, it’s very hot. You had to manually remove the clinker using a long handled shovel way taller than me. It wasn’t easy to use. Chunks of clinker would always be falling off to burn you or your clothes. I usually sported a couple of nasty burns and always smelt a bit singed. The most dangerous place was the bunker.

I’d spend hours in the bunker, shovelling coal. There were two worms but they’d use up the coal near them; you needed to heap up the far away stuff. There was a big danger here, one that nobody warned me about. The coal was wet and would stick together, so the worms had a tendency to hollow out hidden caves with a solid looking crust over them. If you weren’t careful you’d break through a crust and find yourself buried in coal.

This happened to me once, I fell in up to my thighs. You wouldn’t think that this would be too much of a bother, but coal, when it’s heaped, behaves strangely like a kind of super-dense liquid. One you can’t push your way through, and it’s hard to dig yourself out. The coal keeps falling back on you. It took me about half-an-hour to make my way out. Thankfully my arms were free, otherwise I’d have been stuck there forever. Such a nice way to die.

Working with the boilers did have one compensation — the fire. Ah, fire, mans’ red flower, the first and greatest of our tools. Without it there would be nothing else. It warms us, cooks our food, it was it that lured the Cats from the twilight. We can use it to burn heretics and smoke kippers. 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 roaring; it burned your face red and beckoned you to it. I often caught myself just staring into a boiler, lost somewhere far off in a dream. But the horrors outweighed the wonder, it’s good that they’re gone.

Just before I retired one of my bosses told me that my name had come up in a meeting, and that one of the bigger bosses described me as a character. I wasn’t sure how to parse that. I’ll admit that to others I might seem a bit off the main sequence, but a character? Here are some characters…

mary

Mary was a barrel-bodied wee woman perched on a pair of short, nearly cylindrical legs. Her feet were splayed under her weight but she tottered around with a curious grace. Her head was topped off with a poodle-style mop of curly black hair. Really she should have been rosy cheeked but she wasn’t, the cheeks were just right, the colour was wrong. Her big blue eyes were full of a delightful mischief. She treated me like a wayward child — nice enough, but whit an arse o’ a laddie. She was a carer as well as a cleaner. She might have been good carer for all I knew (she wasn’t up to much as a cleaner) but I always felt that even if she was rubbish at it she was in the right job; she had a knack for making people happy, her clients must have been delighted to see her. I’m not sure how to go about fixing the world but a good start would be a few more Marys.

Her path and mine would cross and uncross over the years. If we weren’t working at the same school we would see each other in the street, or in Clancy's. Clancy’s was a wee pub hanging over the approach road, it’s gone now. It had a clientele that matched the local demographic: bikers, builders, wee old men and women and “the drug prowling horde”. It was the place to go if you weren’t a bammer — they drank in the ‘nam. [Now the Fountainbridge Tap or something, then called something else but nicknamed the Vietnam.] Clancy’s had a good jukebox and the place was always full of laughter. I dropped in there often, especially when I lived nearby.

So I’d often bump into her in Clancy’s; literally. Clancy’s was always packed and Mary wasn’t shy when it came to barging her way through crowds — What the…? Oh it’s you. We’d sit for a while and exchange the gossip. Then she’d go back to her husband and I’d go back to whoever I was with.

When I got the job at Craiglockhart we lost touch. I was out of the area and I didn’t socialize as much. I suspect that Mary is no longer with us, which is a shame as she’d have made the perfect monster of a granny.

hughy

Hughy was exiled to Boroughmuir for re-education. The exact nature of the crime he had committed to warrant this was never made clear to us. He claimed that it was because he had ordered too much stock and his store cupboard was a regular cornucopea of cleaning supplies. So selling cleaning products for one thing then. None of us believed that this was the only reason. There must have been something else — if only that he was always half drunk.

Hughy fell only a wee bit short of presenting as a distinguished old man. He had a large shock of white hair, fine blue eyes and a hansome angular face that should have been attractive. All was spoiled by his battleship-grey skin and the large red nose of the immoderate soak. He didn’t stand out as a drunk, he seemed quite alert and he didn’t smell of drink exactly, it was a more powerful yeasty smell, like living next to a brewery. Even if this hadn’t been a problem his teeth would have doomed him. I say his teeth but he had none of his own, he a top and bottom set which through some triumph of dentistry didn’t fit to the exact amount so as to render his every utterance a series of liquid sibilant clacks. You could understand what he was saying, just, but it was difficult to concentrate on anything but the rattling of teeth.

Hughy led a very regular life. Seven in the morning saw him in a Leith pub having his simple breakfast of a couple of pints. At eleven thirty it was his lunch break which he spent in some private club in Morningside that he’d blagged his way into. There he had four pints. On his return he had his actual lunch, salmon paste sandwiches, then spent the rest of the afternoon collecting coppers for his grand kids in the playground. At four thirty it was back off to Leith for some more pints before buying the forty ounce bottle of whisky with which he would spend the evening. As Charlie said, he was always topping up. You rarely saw him actually drunk. Well once, maybe. For some reason he’d been working overtime, so he was drinking cheep german wine with us, which messed up his rythym. He spent the afternoon gibbering incoherently in the corner of the howf. It all ended badly when he got an electric shock from a wet-buffer and spat his teeth half-way across the room.

There was some mystery to Hughy: he claimed to have been to Edinburgh University, he owned several flats which he rented and he hadn’t spoken to his son for years. We got this from scraps of his conversation, he wasn’t very forthcoming.

For us Hughy was a bird of passage, after six months he was gone. His penance done, re-education complete. He went off to cover holidays and sickness in other schools. We lost the very light touch of him that we had. We did see a letter from a headteacher, it was evidence in some union case of Mike’s. Her janny had been sent home for being pissed and she was pleased at the arrival of the very competent… Hughy? How drunk was her janny, that Hughy was an improvement?

daft davy

Davy was built on the grand scale, muscular, six foot odd, topped off with a bonnet of ginger wire. There was nothing of the Greek ideal about him, the parts were all there, somehow they just didn’t fit together right. He had that rather raw looking skin that some red-heads have, as if the surface layer of had been grated off, leaving a slightly reddened under layer. He reminded me of hot-shot Hamish, there was a loud clumsy destructiveness about him, he didn’t move right, anything that was near him was in danger. I rather liked him, although it was clear that his janitorial career would end in tears at the very least.

After a while being a roaming janny Davy got the job at Dalry primary, how I don’t know. He was a nice enough guy but even a slight acquaintance should have raised warning flags. He didn’t last all that long. For a while all we had were dark rumours on the janitorial grape vine. At one point we heard that he was being harassed by groups of local young adults. A janitorial posse, to go down and “sort the wee buggers out” was planned. I made it plain that I wasn’t going to get involved — no good could have come from that I felt. Eventually, as expected he got himself sacked. His downfall was a split-your-sides laughing Greek tragedy. Utter stupidity rather than something more worthy, like hubris, being Davy’s tragic flaw.

Davy was in the habit of sharing his simple lunch, a couple of pints, with the lollipop man in the Clock Inn. A pub long gone now but which used to be right across the street from the school. The Clock looked like a cut-price nuclear bunker and had a reputation far worse than it looked. It was the kind of place where you could buy an old mortar shell. Which, one lunchtime Davy did.

I wouldn’t have done that, but so far no real harm done. Taking it back to the school and putting in on the desk in your office was chancing it, but again, not an actual crime. Davy popped out to do something, leaving the lollipop man in charge. The headteacher popped in.

——Mr. Cobbles (a made up name), what is that on Mr. Dunderheid’s desk? She had spotted the mortar shell.

——It’s a mortar shell, I used them in the war. Mr. Cobbles wasn’t digging Davy out of any holes here.

——Is it dangerous?

——Very.

Well the idiot Davy was in trouble here, but nothing fatal — he’d get some type of discipline but would still have a job. (I’m making the assumption here that the shell wasn’t actually a live one, if it was he was already stuffed.) But no. When Davy returned to his office he denied knowing anything about the bomb (as it was now called). And he continued to do so as the school was evacuated and the bomb squad was called. The after match analysis uncovered the truth. There could be no cover-up — the Evening News had splashed the sad farce all over the front page. The lollipop man was interviewed where he noted, the Germans never managed to close the school during the war. It was ta-ta for Davy.

I never heard anything about Davy again. He’ll have been in trouble, it just won’t have made the national news.

a sandwich with wee john

Exams are a pain for all, even if you’re only setting up the desks. Back in the day this task usually fell to wee John and I. It should have been a four person job but wee John and I usually ended up doing this on our own. I preferred it that way, I think that John did too.

Wee John was the third janny in the pecking order at Boroughmuir, I was the fourth. He had the tied house in Montpelier Park opposite St. Ozzy’s which was his special responsibility. He was four foot nothing (probably about four feet ten) with short wiry brown hair and a pair of glasses that magnified his eyes to brown hugeness.

He had all the diseases traditional to working man of his age in that day: diabetes, bad eyes, bad feet, arthritis of every member, few teeth and piles. You would often find him squirming his bum on the edge of a stool, eyes clenched like a cat being stroked, to obtain a measure of relief from the last.

In his day he’d been quite the footballer, the story was that he would have played for Hearts if he hadn’t been so wee. When we and Charlie’s kids played three-and-in in the school doorway you could see that he had once been very good. Despite his infirmities he could sell you a dummy with a slow snake of the body, without moving his feet.

When it came to setting up for exams, I would unstack the desks, which towered up against the War Memorial, way above John’s head, and barrowed them over to just where he wanted them so that he could place them out. Unstacking the desks went faster than setting them out, so every so often I’d do a bit of placement so things were evened up. Slowly we raced through the job.

We never talked much, perhaps an enquiry about the pudger every now and then. The pudger, Pudger McGudger to give it its full name, was an old badminton stand that we used to pudge (lever) stacks of desks up against, and away, from the wall. We needed to talk about this as it was a two person task, one to hold the stack as the other pudged. We had names for a lot of our tools, Barry McGarry was another one. Doof McNaffer was our generic name for a tool.

John, being diabetic had to eat to a schedule, so at ten o’clock we went over to his house for a snack. His door looked like someone had taken an axe to it. Which was exactly the case, the culprit was him, several times. For a janny he had a strange proclivity for losing his keys. In fact of losing his anything. When we lifted the carpet in his house when he moved out we found ten bank cards that he’d stashed away there, “for safety”, over the years. There was a big notice on the inside of the door — remember your keys. As I always say, people don’t read signs.

The snack consisted of a random can of beer from the collection that people had brought over when they were first-footing. This was poured into a wet glass of the wrong size, it came with its can looking flat and the sandwich. The sandwich was a thing of such wonder that it deserves its own chapter, we’ll make do with a paragraph.

The sandwich was made with soft white bread, crudely spread with butter straight from the chiller cabinet of the fridge. It was now a string vest of a thing. Edam was our cheese, a difficult cheese for even a cheesemonger to cut into slices. John hacked it into various multi-sized irregular-prisms that everywhere poked through the bread. He didn’t even cut the sandwich in half, ensuring that there was no way that you could eat it without some part of it falling onto the floor.

We would sit there companionably, me reading The Scotsman, him the Record, eating our snacks, picking up cheese from the floor. Sometimes we might chat about football, Charlie and Mike’s stupidities or those of other people we knew. John had a good instinct for people, he saw through their lies, he could often predict their behavior. Soon enough it was time to get back to work.

John is gone now, I miss him, those days, and his sandwiches.

a bad idea

When I first started at Boroughmuir, in the late eighties, the school was being renovated. In those days the school was split over two buildings — the main school at Viewforth, and the Junior School on the Links. S1/2 did their learning at the Junior school, S3-6 were in the main school. So we had a reasonable amount of space, which may have led to the, interesting, decision to renovate the place while we were still in it. Chunks of the main school would get boarded off, the workies would do their business and then it was on to another chunk. Whatever the merits of this plan it had one big up side — it involved plenty of moving stuff around, which meant plenty of overtime for us jannies.

In those far-off days groups of janitors from different schools often gathered for a weekend of overtime. You’ll notice I said overtime, not work, there’s a reason for that. The weekend, at Boroughmuir, always developed along similar lines:

Saturday 08:30–09:30

We sat around drinking coffee and telling war tales. Of headteachers stymied, supervisors reduced to tears and work avoided. Nearly all lies.

Saturday 09:30–13:00

Some work is done.

Saturday 13:00–17:00

Lunch is held in the pub, where more tales are told.

Saturday 17:00

The day is finished. We all head off, to the pub for a night of continued debauchery in most cases.

Sunday 08:30–11:30

People arrived, at various times, hungover, shaking, red-eyed, a shameful bunch of wasters. Not much talking is done until the hair-of-the-dogs start to kick in.

Sunday 11:00

It is agreed that we should do some work.

This particular weekend we were clearing furniture from the top floor. It all had to be carried down the stairs (we didn’t have a lift in those days). It was a considerable pain: bulky and heavy. Cupboards took four of us to carry down to the skip, which was situated in the courtyard below. It was only a matter of time, and drink tooken, before someone suggested that we cut out the middleman — the stairs.

——Why don’t we just chuck it out the window?

Said someone, eyeing the skip four floors below. The wasn’t much of a discussion, in a trice a cupboard was hanging out of the window and so were the jannies, we all wanted to see this. It was heaved out. The first thing that we all noticed was that it wasn’t going to hit the skip. Then there was the noise. We weren’t the only people to notice the noise. Remember it was a quiet Sunday morning, the sound of a cupboard exploding after a hundred feet drop was noticeable. Almost immediately the windows of tenements opposite were filled with faces. Scared pale faces. A noise that loud signalled nothing good.

We were professional, we knew just what to do — we locked up the school and fled to the pub. I was sent back later to sweep up the remains of the cupboard, but we never heard anything more about it. Probably did the neighbours some good — a wee bit of adrenaline on a Sunday morning.

the jape

Mike was on a diet, which annoyed me. Not because he was on a diet, but because he was cheating and lying about it. He was on the Complan and he claimed to have, “just a bowl of soup’ for his lunch. I was suspicious so I asked Bonny, from the kitchen, about it. Bonny’s eyes flashed, and although I couldn’t see any steam I heard it venting from her head, “bowl of soup? bowl of soup? He has at least three courses, and as many extra puddings as he can cram down his fat gob.” It was as I expected.

I should explain Mike’s lunch routine, it’s going to be important to what follows. Drunk or sober, Mike always went down to the kitchen for lunch where there was a table reserved for staff. The Head (Tom D.) had his lunch there, who Mike liked to hobnob with. I went once, which was once too often. Mike always put on his uniform jacket for the occasion.

In those days our uniform consisted of a grey suit. Mostly we just wore the trousers; wee John and I, who were working jannies, wore the traditional brown dustcoats, mine festooned with costume jewellery. Why? Somebody lost a broach, which I put on my dustcoat with the idea that they’d see it and claim it. People started to give me jewels, eventually I had quite a collection. Yes, I was an arse then too. Mike’s jacket, which lived on the back of his chair, was festooned too, not with tasteful baubles but with union badges and the like. He always wore it to lunch.

Which gave me the idea — one jacket looked much like another; wee John’s was much smaller than Mike’s. A substitution might be arranged? So for the rest of the week we indulged in banter along the following lines:

——Are you sure you’re on a diet? You look like you’re putting on weight.

Come Friday the switch was made. Care was taken to ensure that the badges were correctly positioned and the contents of his pockets were transfered across. Just before lunch wee John and I took up position. Me at the counter, wee John bottom-perched on an apex of the filing cabinet in an attempt to assuage the wrath of his bum-grapes. Wee John was a martyr to his piles. Mike donned the jacket.

There was a slight pause as his arm extended out of the sleeve more than usual but it was just a blip. The penny half dropped as he tried to get the other arm in, he took the jacket off and held it up. He turned it back and forth. Another attempt was made which failed in a similar manner.

——I told you were putting on weight, you don’t even fit into your jacket now.

——Perhaps Complan is fattening.

——Sure has porked Mike up.

At this point we started laughing and Mike realized what we’d done. He chucked the jacket on the floor.

——You f____ b____.

He stormed out without a jacket but in compensation he sported a head like a giant tomato. I decided to make myself scarce — He would have sensed that this was my idea and would have made me suffer. (He once made me clean the boiler house at St. Oswald’s, the janitorial version of being sent to the gulags, after I’d put up posters all over the school of him dressed as a clown collecting for red nose day labeled — Mad Cow Disease — shock new findings.

——Tell him I’ve been sent to North Merchy. I said over my shoulder as I headed for the pub.

My only regret is that we didn’t loosen the seams.

twa rogues

Joe and Derek were rogues. Rogues of different stripes, but both rogues. Derek I liked, as everyone who ever met him did. Joe I didn’t like. In a way they shared a pathology — you could randomly swap most of the following stories between the without damaging the essential truth. It just seemed different when Derek did things, somehow less selfish and nasty. They could both be described as crafty, there was a touch of Odysseus about them both. Whatever the situation they could exploit it.

For example, one night Joe came back from the pub to find the police in the school. There’d been a report of suspicious persons seen roaming. The school was wide open, the lights were all on. Joe was supposed have been working and not in the pub. Schools were all open late in those days, for night school and football and whatever. The janny got overtime for this but was supposed to be there. Joe was in trouble? You or I might have been, not Joe.

——They went that way! He rushed in pointing, the police hared off in pursuit.

Pretty slick but note what Joe did next — he went round the back of the school and broke about twenty windows. He reported this crime to the police when they returned empty-handed. Why did he break the windows? Joe had an arrangement with a local glazier. The glazier charged for fixing sixty windows, for which Joe got a cut, and a nice wee bit of extra overtime into the bargain. How do I know this? He told me, he wasn’t shy about his crimes.

Some of these crimes were huge. When they closed his school there was a period where the fixtures and fittings were being ripped out and sold off. It was an old Victorian building, full of good stuff — mahogany science benches, cupboards to make a dip n’ strip merchant drool, miles of copper piping… There was real money to be made. Most of us might have been tempted to sell a few wee things — he was much more ambitious and was smart enough to see a way to do it.

When any contractors pitched up to remove anything he’d refuse them access, lock the doors and chase them off. He made such a complete pest of himself that eventually the bosses got mad and gave him a letter instructing him to let anybody in. This letter proved very useful to him when the inquiry into where all the stuff had went convened. He even managed to sell the old school bell, a huge heavy thing, for scrap.

Joe was unpleasant to be around. He was boastful and opinionated, he had a way of making the world seem tawdry and mean. Everything was about him and how clever he was. Derek was very different.

Derek looked like a seventies porn star who’d fallen on hard times — he had the moustache and the shoulder-length wavy hair, he was just tattered, stained and bashed. His skin was the result of an unvaried diet of lager and fish suppers, but he had sapphire eyes, atwinkle and bright. He got up to much the same things as Joe did, they just didn’t seem so sordid when he did them.

The best story I know about Derek happened before my time. It was a Saturday afternoon, a team of janitors were working overtime in Tyncastle School, right next to Tynecastle Stadium where there was a Hearts match going on. In those days, before they built the new stand you had a great view of the pitch from the roof of the school. So, you can guess what happened. This was before televised football was a regular thing — live matches were non-existent, so the jannies thought they were safe. Alas, for some reason the match highlights were going to be broadcast on Sportscene later that night. The opening shot was a slow pan round the ground, featuring the jannies sprawled out on the roof with many a can. The commentator, it would have been Archie, noted their presence.

——There’s some people enjoying a very good view.

They got away with it because of the way that overtime worked — you didn’t make a claim for overtime until after you’d done it. And they weren’t going to claim knowing that they had been caught. They got a slap on the wrist but even the bosses thought that it was funny.

I could go on forever. So many people, so many stories; all gone now, we’ll not see their like again.