Skool Sux

Here’s a draft of a much longer piece I’m planning to write on my childhood — an idea that came about due to the incident I describe in what follows.

Every once in a while the urge seizes me to search online for friends I once had in a different place and a different time. Usually I just type their names into google and hope for the best — but this haphazard approach generally gets me nowhere.

The name alone is really not sufficient; even if it’s seemingly an odd name it’s never odd enough to clear away the resulting mass of ambiguity. Well, anyway during one of these periodic searches, which on this occasion I opted to conduct via facebook, I typed in the name of someone I’d known in primary school in Port Glasgow, and had last seen and heard from around 16-17 years ago.

This might not seem too long ago if you’re in your fifties or sixties, but it means a lot to someone in their twenties.

This time I got back the usual long list of contenders, but the photo second from the top was unmistakably the one I wanted. I recognised him straightaway even though close to two decades separated this worn out lived-in face in front of me from the cherubic schoolboy countenance indelibly imprinted on my memory.

I waited a couple of days before summoning up enough courage to send a message. But when I did he responded instantly and with amazement that it was me, and there followed on facebook chat that evening one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had.

You know I always feel a sense of wonder when I think back on my primary school years, at how adult I was then and how much I thought I understood about the grown up world. And it wasn’t just me: I seem to recall the same untimely maturity in my childhood peers exemplified most of all by the surreal and ironic humour we all shared and revelled in. Or maybe it’s not that I was so precociously mature then, but that I still feel a lot like that wee boy I was then, enough to retrospectively add on to the image I have of him the few adult traits I’ve accumulated since then.

And maybe that’s why this person I was chatting to — who I will now refer to as S — didn’t come across as a stranger, as a completely different person to the one I had known as a child, even though so much had passed between us, all the tribulations of adolescence and early adulthood: the teenage anxieties, awkwardnesses and disappointments that are decisive in fashioning an adult human being.

What I’m trying to say that there was a heartening familiarity between us that I had not expected. I’d been genuinely afraid before I’d contacted him that his attitude toward me would be one of indifference and perhaps even hostility.Actually to properly appreciate what this online reunion meant to me, you probably need to understand how formative I consider those years I spent at primary school, to who I am now — how they’ve been a steady fixture in my dreams ever since I left that school in Port Glasgow.

I was born in and as a child lived mostly in Glasgow. But since my dad ran a small clothes shop (the `boutique’) in Port Glasgow, on its narrow high-street, and because he wanted to keep an eye on me and my sister, we had to commute there with him every weekday morning to attend nursery and primary school. Port Glasgow, since you’re unlikely to ever have heard of it, is a small town located close to the fringes of Glasgow on one side and is not far from the mouth of the Clyde on the other. It was superlatively well placed to take advantage of the momentous spurt in industrialisation and trade which characterised Victorian era Britain, allowing the town formerly known as Newark to bill itself as Port to the second city of the Empire — no idle boast during the Empire’s heyday.

But when that era of prosperity faded, and the shipbuilding industry which had given a living to most of Port Glasgow, speeded onto its terminal decline, the town really started to hit the skids. It’s the same old cliched sob story: as the work began to dry up so Port Glasgow fell prey to the blights of urban decay and poverty, and with those twin afflictions came the usual social maladies.

In particular Port Glasgow seemed to take to heroin particularly avidly.

During the time when I went to school there in the Eighties and early Nineties it was already well on the way to becoming the derelict junkie’s haven it is now — though it wasn’t so bad then that I as a kid wasn’t able to ignore it. Nowadays Port Glasgow as part of the small Inverclyde district along with Greenock and Gourock has now been officially classed as Scotland’s heroin capital — and trust me beating Glasgow in this particular league table is something of a feat. According to my former classmate things really began to go downhill when the IBM factory just outside the town closed making hundreds of people redundant. The effect of that and of a spate of other closures in the area was completely devastating, sucking just so much vitality out of a town which could spare next to none.

But back to me…

As a child I had really resented the fact that I had been torn away from my Glaswegian neighbourhood where I had played with kids who were, like me, second-generation Pakistani immigrants, who all looked like me, had embarrassing provincial parents like I did who they spoke Urdu to, in fact with whom I shared everything culturally — only to be transplanted to a small racially monotonous town on the banks of the Clyde to attend a school where I was the only nonwhite child. Indeed, where I had to endure taunts because of my colour and where my utter cultural difference would always serve to mark me out and create a sense of division between me and the other kids, something I never managed to bridge properly.

This feeling of apartness, between me and the children was always there — and didn’t I feel it then and don’t I still feel it now? (Don’t get me wrong I also have very fond memories of my primary school years. In some ways those were, comparatively speaking, the happiest days of my life — things began to get even worse after that )

My mother has always felt bitter at my father’s decision to school me and my sister away from our community in Glasgow; she thinks, as I do, that my experiences of that time are at the root of my introverted disposition, my shyness and my dire want of social skills. She has always suspected that in this all-white community, the hostility of the parents towards my father, the Pakistani shopkeeper, who had the effrontery to open a shop right there in the midst of them when so many were struggling to find jobs, was inevitably being passed onto their children. But my mother can also be very paranoid so I don’t know how true that is.

Funnily enough I only recently realised that most of the kids I went to school with then had distinctly Irish names and were therefore also of recently arrived immigrant stock, the effect of the Victorian boom.

I spent a good part of the 1980s having this same routine of commuting back and forth between Glasgow and Port Glasgow. Then everything changed. In 1991 my father died of cancer and although my mother heroically tried to keep the shop going for a few months, single-handedly I will add, it just wasn’t viable and she eventually gave it up. So me and my sister had to go to school back in Glasgow.

This displacement happened during the middle of my seventh and final year at primary school, and the sense I had then of unfinished business because I couldn’t be there for graduation and because after 7 years I wasn’t able to join them all in their new lives at high school was overpowering and stayed with me for years. I had felt then that I was finally getting somewhere, that I had begun to sense a much greater acceptance from my peers during my last year in Port Glasgow just before I had to leave. It was as if all I had been working on all these years, this war of attrition in which I had just started to make some headway, went into stasis and I desperately needed resolution. I didn’t get it, and I never really got over that lack of closure. So inevitably what I perceived as the landscape of my defeat was always popping up in my dreams nagging at me. My school was perched on a cliff overlooking the clyde and I remember that on sunny days when we played in the playground it would glint brightly like a jewel and sparkle over a rich cobalt blue — and almost two decades on from that this wonderful vista remains a fixture of my sleeping hours.

And that deep childhood yearning for the imagined triumph which could have been mine still haunts me to this day, although as the years pass it sinks further and further into the back of my mind, overlaid by fresher, rawer neuroses and insecurities. And that’s pretty much where it stayed for most of my conversation with S — in fact it was only after we’d stopped chatting and I was able to properly reflect on the deeper implications of what had taken place that it all began to really register.

Inevitably, we were both of us deeply curious to hear about what the other had been doing during the intervening gap of 17 years; although I was also extremely eager to learn the fate of my other primary school classmates. S assured me that he had lived an extremely eventful life.

So eventful, in fact, and so full of drink (he described his vocation at one point of his life as “piss head”), drugs, and general debauchery that he came across as — and in his recent photos had the look of — a jaded middle aged hedonist, who’d only been finally compelled to give up his lifestyle of over indulgence by the looming certainty that he was nearing the point of no return.

He had packed a good three decades worth of excess into those 17 years and, having gone as far as he could along that line, was now content to sit back with an endless supply of tales to tell and to look after his new born son; whereas I, who had barely been led astray at all, was ashamed to tell him how little I had experienced in the way of revelry and excess — or had achieved in worldly matters in compensation for my timid abstinence.

It also turned out that quite a few of the other kids I had known had got heavily into drugs, and S told me about this one guy who had been in the year above and had had a reputation as a playground bully, and who had died of an overdose years later– though I couldn’t put a face to the name.

I couldn’t believe all of what he’d been telling me about the descent of Port Glasgow into deprivation, it didn’t really scan. I mean, how could you reconcile this sordid adult world with my innocuous childhood memories?

Even if drugs had been somewhat of a problem in Port Glasgow during the 80s, our primary school was still a safe haven, nor do I recall hearing much about them second hand in or outside of the playground — and these things would have inevitably filtered down to us if drugs had had the impact they had from the 90s onwards. It was precisely because they hadn’t intruded onto my childhood world that had made it such a shock to hear about their subsequent ubiquity. And these kids I knew, they all seemed level headed, sensible (as I mentioned earlier they seemed so grown up to me then as young children) and intelligent — a lot of them were brighter than me — so I never thought that any of them would end up anything but successful young adults.

I enjoyed being imaginative and creative at primary school, priding myself on being the best at drawing and art and feeling immense pleasure at being able to use my imagination to write stories. But mathematics was my Achilles heel. I had stalled at the 3 times table and try as I might I just couldn’t learn it nor did I make much headway with the 4, 6, 7 and 8 times tables. In general I had no time for mental arithmetic — there was something too cold and abstract about mathematics for me, and this also carried over to music which was a jumble of notes with no associations to real, concrete life. My deficiency with numbers meant that I was stuck in the second bottom maths group just above the kids with learning difficulties. Also, rather embarrassingly I was probably the last person in my class to learn to read the time from a clockface.

Academically speaking I was never in the top rung, and my current attachment to academia is more a means of avoiding the real world than any kind of attempt on my part to honourany innate intellectual gifts I possess. I did my time trying to find employment in the real world and I realise now that academia is a much more forgiving environment. It had never occurred to me that out of everyone in my class I would end up being the scholarly one or that our paths would so diverge.. Neither had I expected that any of them would still be living in Port Glasgow as quite a few are: a town that promises next to nothing to any young person with even a modicum of ambition nestling in his/her breast.

This conversation — which had unleashed a steady rush of multicoloured highly charged childhood memories and emotions through my consciousness and at a pace that left me quite disoriented — went on for around an hour and a half. It ended when S had to attend to his baby son.

And I haven’t seen S online again to pick up our conversation, which is a shame because I really would like to know what happened to James Gillies.