LIFE NOTES: MAY 1977

It would have been late May, 1977, coming towards the end of my second year at Uddingston Grammar. On balance I’d say that was my favourite year there. In the first year you’re all nervous, trying to figure out how the thing works. By year two you’re used to it and know how to work the thing. Apart from the fact that we had to pick out which subjects we were going to do for our O Grades – determining our future lives at an age when we really shouldn’t be asked to make such major decisions – there wasn’t any pressure. When spring arrived and the streets of Uddingston (or street; there really is only one Main Street) felt brighter and warmer, there was a slight swagger to one’s sense of freedom. You could saunter to class in a red Adidas T-shirt with the white stripes on the shoulders – most of the boys did so, anyway – and not worry about such oblique concepts as “The Future.”

 

I could get away with anything in English class. It helped that I had a great teacher that year, Mr Shaw, at whom all the boys not so secretly laughed for liking such profoundly uncool things (by 1976-7 standards; no revisionism here) as Amon Duul II. My ink exercise book was dotted with maximum marks for my writing. Mr Shaw seemed impressed that I knew and used words like “succinctly” in my stories. That year I came joint top in English with a whopping mark of 98%. Besotted by Damon Knight’s Science Fiction Argosy anthology which I’d borrowed from the library and kept in my bedroom for fully six months, and too much Spike Milligan and Monty Python for anyone’s own good, I also embarked on a crazily radical novel entitled Leap Into Version Five, which cheerfully broke all the rules of literature in ways which anticipated Nicola Barker (and I was also not unaware of B.S. Johnson at the time). The fourth wall? Leap Into Version Five erupted through at least six walls. Publish it now – or, better still, then – and it would probably win (or have won) the Booker. I never finished it and don’t know what became of the stock requisition notebook in which I wrote it.

 

Uddingston Grammar also – at the time – did annual House Shows and amateur dramatics every May. I was in Calder House – the pupils were assigned a House on the basis of their surname, and if yours was A-C you were put into Calder – but since I couldn’t and cannot sing or dance for toffee I declined to participate in their House Show and acted in the plays instead. That year we produced something called The Chinese Mask, written by one Michael Drin, an actor about whom it is very difficult to find information online, except that he was likely South African and his real name may well have been something like Mike McCullaugh.

 

The Chinese Mask was 20 or so minutes of modestly-entertaining juvenile trivia, and its prep school study setting and arcane schoolboy vocabulary were, even in 1977, probably already a couple of generations out of date – the play is included in the 1963 anthology The Second Windmill Book of One-Act Plays. Still, we were set on getting it right and spent some six months rehearsing it over and over until we did so. There is very little to its story, which centres upon a group of schoolboy friends, one of whom is a wannabe detective (the character is appropriately named Pinkerton), and a valuable stamp goes missing – the mystery being: who stole it? The mystery is solved, nothing major occurs as a consequence, nobody gets hurt, and life goes on, though not quite as before.

 

We did two performances of the play; one just after lunchtime, in front of an audience of our cynical pupil peers, and – more glamorously – one in the evening, in front of an audience of children’s parents, including mine (I tried to talk them out of it but they insisted on coming). Now that felt really special; Mr Ross, the English teacher who was directing us, dressed in a flashy early seventies casual shirt, and there was a genuine excitement; it felt as though we, as children and perhaps as actors, were actually going somewhere. It was frankly liberating to exist outside the narrow circle of Being A School Pupil. We might actually count, mean something. It was good to be outside our assigned selves.

 

It couldn’t and didn’t last. In the evening performance, despite endless weeks of rehearsal, I managed to corpse. As with sport, so with drama; it doesn’t matter how good you are, what matters is that you have to be good, if not great, at a very specific time in a very specific environment. If you can’t manage that then I’m afraid you’re never going to count for anything in that sphere, and buona sera sonny. Wee Ross Phillips, who played mild-mannered Milton, was certainly the best actor out of any of us.

 

But there was never any follow-up. I didn’t get the call from Scottish Youth Theatre. Who knows what I could have gone on to do? In my third year, however, the plays and House Shows were cancelled, because our teachers had gone on strike and were working to rule, thereby ruling out any extracurricular activities. So that pretty much fucked up any future I might have had as an actor. I don’t blame the teachers or their union – their cause was justified and righteous – but if you are of a certain vulnerable age, such things impose scars which reside with you lifelong.

 

Things just went…back to normal. There were musical productions, of course (“operas,” they called them) – Oklahoma! and Oliver! being two of them (and possibly the only two – but the latter boasted a tremendous performance from the aforementioned Ross Phillips in the title role, and a quite remarkable one from my art teacher Mr Graham as Fagin). But it wasn’t quite the same. It was O Grade time and your options were being dutifully and mercilessly narrowed down. My peers started talking about university, careers, cars and mortgages. They were of course growing up. But it didn’t seem much fun any more, third year. Everybody was getting serious. MC Joker Carlin was beginning to come across as a minor embarrassment. When’s he going to grow up, ffs?

 

Actually I took things a lot more seriously than it seemed to my fellow pupils (and perhaps also my teachers) and it may well be that I was actually the most serious pupil of the lot, since I ended up being one of just two pupils in my whole time at the Grammar who made it to Oxbridge (albeit, in my case, after a false start at St Andrews). Out of myself and my best friend at school, Alex S (who played Pinkerton in The Chinese Mask) I’d maintain that only one of us was ever really serious – and it wasn’t the one Alex thought it was. Nevertheless I continued to treat it as an extended joke, even as I realised that by then most of the things I was learning about life and art weren’t coming from school, as such. The solitary wanderer haunting Glasgow city centre, Kelvingrove/Hillhead and the Mitchell Library of a Saturday, buying records, reading, looking at and absorbing works of art – that was the actual me, the MC you never saw in school during the week. And perhaps the autodidactic element of me ended up taking over.

 

This, of course, is now over forty-five years ago, and I wanly shudder still to think what might have become of everybody else at the Grammar. Oh, most of us got proper careers, and we cautiously reckless kids are now nearing sixty; most of those with whom I sat, and argued, in the various classrooms we had to attend, are almost certainly now grandparents. However, there is the realisation that, by the law of averages, some are gone; the ones whose names didn’t turn up on Friends Reunited, let alone Facebook or Twitter. Well, you know, most of them are likely living more than decent lives some way away from any social media. But you also recognise that there are a few who didn’t make it, went prematurely - in one recent case, they magically rematerialised on Facebook very near the end, like the extra light a bulb suddenly radiates before it is extinguished. My teachers are now either very old (and therefore retired) or (as sadly I suspect is the case with most of them) deceased.

 

I don’t intend the above to read as anything more than a melancholy reminiscence. I have no wish to deploy my recollections as a metaphorical stick with which to beat Today. Children now have infinitely more possibilities and chances than my generation could ever have had (what I would have done with the internet in 1977! Although the restoration of free tertiary education would be more than welcome…). We had disco more than punk in 1977, and a lot of gloopy AoR. Now there are Kendrick Lamar, Wet Leg and, as I speak, Eliza Rose at number one, which is a hell of a lot more happening than, say, David Soul. Pop now is at least as good as, and very probably superior to, what was in the air when I was a young teenager. Which is fine; that’s pop’s purpose.

 

I should, however, point out that, at the end of my second year, I didn’t win any prizes. Those were determined by averaging out everybody’s exam marks. Despite coming first in four different subjects (including a perfect 100% in one), and second in two others, I got a miserable 12% in Technical Drawing and that dragged my overall average down to well below prizegiving level.  Hence even then I got the message that life isn’t about how great you might or might not be, but how well you fit in. But you didn’t – yet – need to take any of it seriously. It was a laugh. I’m not certain I’ve ever grown out of that.