The Music Room

From my kitchen window I watched the snow white cat patrol its territory, gliding gracefully between the lavender blue bed sheets flapping in the back green of this old grey Edinburgh tenement. It was observed keenly by the cat on the flat tin roof, a mackerel ginger tabby that typically hunched its back in mock readiness to jump each time snow white passed. I wondered who belonged to the enormous pink and purple spotted pyjamas, fully inflated and furiously agitated on the washing line — the spooky brown bear from The Singing Ringing Tree came to mind. As with the hypnotic effect of rigging ringing repeatedly on a ship’s mast, sheets snapping in the breeze tend to make me a little drowsy, and I drifted now, gently, effortlessly, weightlessly, upon an ocean under a bright yellow sun, aware of nothing other than that I was happy to be pulled in by its powerful currents. And I might have wafted more deeply had a voice, albeit softly spoken, not called my name and startled me back to reality. It came from inside, like a myoclonic jerk, forcing me back to the land of the living, and I realised I had simply dozed off for a moment. In that same moment someone had hung a stuffed animal effigy on the spiked railings opposite my window. Was I awake? It had tall ears, whiskers, a cherry nose, and was sporting a bow tie, tight-buttoned black coat and patent shoes with a silver buckle. For a second I thought it was a child in costume, but the eldritch anthropomorphic creature remained perfectly still. Clearly it was hooked onto the railings simply to be aired, yet its haunting presence summoned Logan and a few of his cronies from the darkest depths of memory.

Logan was odd. Though his music lessons were memorable, I can confidently confirm that over the three years in which I was legally obliged to attend his class, I learned nothing. And I don’t mean nothing of worth, I mean nothing. The lessons were memorable, but memorable in the way piffle is memorable, the way absurdity is memorable, absurd piffle to the power of ten. Lacking interest but equally lacking instruction on how to improve, for two hours each week our class was compelled to learn and perform what amounted to harsh and jarring renditions of the Sloop John B, The Wild Rover, The Jolly Miller, that idiotic nickety-nackety-noo nonsense, a mixture of songs on the theme of military patriotism, and a variety of ballads about drunken brawls between sailors — usually in far off lands like Tasmania, where I imagine Logan dreamed of occasionally dropping anchor for rum and a punch up. Glassy-eyed and distant, he seemed blissfully unaware of the dissonant and inharmonious grating of our choral chaos, and happily hammered out chords on his jangling upright piano by way of an accompaniment. It was death to music.

Logan didn’t labour his pupils with the study of musical notation, he didn’t bother them with the business of learning a musical instrument, and he didn’t trouble them with thoughts on any aspect of musical history, musicology, discussion, composition or performance. He simply and brutishly whipped up the mob to shout songs flatly, loudly, madly and discordantly in a feverish cacophony for two debilitating hours every Tuesday morning. But it wasn’t just the music. Before starting the lesson, the boys were forced to shuffle into a silent line outside the music room, and might be made to stand there for five excruciating minutes. On entering they would glide noiselessly towards their desks, and be required to sit with their arms folded, eyes front. If one person spoke, or if a chair being pulled back screeched noisily along the wooden floor, we would all have to leave the room and line up in the corridor to go through the whole process again. Anyone deliberately producing a sound of any sort might be given the belt severely across the hands, or be bent over in front of the class and beaten on the backside with the board ruler, his weapon of choice. The singing countered this tension, this tightly wound spring, as might the harrowing howls of condemned souls bursting free from the torments of hell.

Shortly after the start of the lesson, if sitting stiffly in silence and fear can be called the start of a lesson, two boys would be told to bring in the milk crate. After putting it down on the floor silently — failing to do so meant taking the crate back out to the corridor and then creeping back in with it again — the boys would place a bottle of milk and a straw on each of the desks. Logan would then wander round the room with his hands clasped behind his back to inspect each desk, ensuring all the bottles and straws were perfectly placed and lined up identically. We continued to sit at our desks with our arms folded in an oppressive silence until given further instructions, which usually arrived in the form of drill commands. “Lift…straws! In…sert! Wait for it…wait for it — Suck!” Anyone making the mistake of so much as smiling during this ordeal would be subjected to severe pain.

On one of those terrible Tuesdays, perhaps the worst, I broke the silence when draining the last drop from my bottle by making that distinctive staccato sound, the part when milk meets air. Heads turned, everyone’s eyes were on me, and I knew instantly that all hell was about to break loose. My punishment was not the belt or the massive board ruler across my backside, however, but something altogether stranger. Logan pushed back his chair and rose slowly from his desk with a baleful stare. After putting a roll of sellotape in his tweed jacket pocket, he led me out of the classroom and into the yard. Once there, he lifted me up by my thick coat shoulders and hooked me onto the railings, spreading my arms out like Jesus on the cross, if you can imagine Jesus in scuffed chisel-toe shoes and a duffle coat. He then sellotaped my mouth several times over, and told me to remain there, hanging on the railings with my feet dangling off the ground, my hands gripping the spikes, until luncheon. I remember thinking how absurd it was for anyone to use the word luncheon, but then everything about Logan was absurd. 

Indeed, it was to a very large extent an absurd school and an equally absurd education, one bearing a violently psychotic edge within an industrial slum with impoverished people in poor health living in substandard housing in the heart of resources-rich Scotland. Scottish education, many of our teachers frequently assured us without any recourse to the facts, was outstanding — the best in the world! The myth was regularly reproduced through stories about the great men of yore, those Scots who had discovered this and invented that, who had designed, fashioned, built, moved, sacrificed and sunk the biggest, the greatest and the rarest, thereby bestowing upon us the (dubious) legacy of citizens of the second city of the Empire, as was. And we were reminded too that among those great men of history were the martyrs, leaders, pioneers and social campaigners, men who fought for education, housing, justice and progress for the poor, who set an example for a better life for the citizens of this blessed country, and some of the others that we helped civilise. Whatever special substance we had coursing through our veins, it made us better than any other nation, even when we were living hand to mouth with our arses hanging out of our trousers. Blatantly disregarded was the fact that every city in Britain had a similar story. And not just in Britain, but Ireland, India, Malaysia, Brazil and China. They all had their plaques to remarkable men. Occasionally women. The boys listened in awe and somehow transferred the mythical heroics and faux greatness to the football arena and sectarian hatred. Of those I knew, three made it into apprenticeships, but the majority were destined for semi-skilled factory work, unskilled casual work, the army or the dole, and it must be said a few landed in Longriggend young offenders institution, and Barlinnie prison. From the perspective of our social class in Glasgow, Scotland certainly led the rest, but in bullshit, bagpipes and perpetual puffery.

After Logan unhooked me from the railings, I marched off, furiously humiliated, and spent the remainder of the afternoon on a bench in Glasgow Green nursing my injured pride and aching arms. I had survived worse. I came close to death when I was abducted by a group of psychopaths back when I was in primary school a few years earlier — beaten, bruised, bleeding, I was suffocating in the darkness of a cramped enclosure in a disused warehouse. Logan’s efforts, though cruel, hadn’t come close to that episode, but I was angry, and perhaps that was all he really wanted to accomplish: to humiliate, to aggravate, and to sense the power that can be derived from that. When I got home I fell face down on my bed. Sensing something was wrong, my mother looked in my room and said my name by way of a question, but I didn’t answer. It wasn’t the done thing to talk about hurt feelings or abuse at the hands of teachers in those days. Some people did, admittedly, and brought them down or made them apologise, publicly or otherwise, but in the estimation of our peers it was considered something that only the weak, spiteful and spineless would do, and in any case I just couldn’t face anything or anyone but my pillow after the public disgrace of hanging like a puppet on a parapet for two hours, and this visibly on the railings dividing the boys’ and girls’ sections of the school. I would no doubt earn an unshakeable nickname from this episode — scarecrow seemed the least offensive of the ones I dreamed up — but strangely enough one never arose, and I wasn’t prepared to give anyone ideas.

Apart from the imbecilic janitor who leaned on his brush to stare at me hanging on the railings, slowly shaking his head — he would have fitted in perfectly with the camp guards at Auschwitz — a few teachers had walked past, even the deputy head, but no one did more than glance briefly in my direction. I wasn’t Jesus in a duffle coat after all, but one who was no better than the thieves, the lesser mortals that few consider and fewer remember from either side on Calvary. In their eyes, this was a character-building punishment, something to harden me, to prepare me for my place among the rank and file — an apt military metaphor given that this school was essentially a boot camp, a disreputable one where human rights didn’t always apply. That is not to say that every teacher agreed with those principles, but suffice to say those who didn’t rarely lasted long. As one teacher told me years later, it was very difficult to find anyone decent to teach there. Whilst I had no doubt that this was true, it was a strange comment coming from one of the school’s biggest thugs.

Logan’s uniquely deviant punishment apart, I was beaten a lot by teachers for a variety of misdemeanours throughout my secondary school years, most commonly forgetfulness, and that catch-all term, laziness. On one occasion before belting me, the deputy head said, “We come down hard and heavy on you boy in order to bring out your best.” But it seemed to me they just liked exercising their authority, and humiliating and beating the crap out of kids. I knew I had the capacity to do better, but I would rather spite myself than sing from the same senseless hymn book, than join in their ridiculous refrain or dance to their tune. Far above effort and success, blind obedience and conformity were both their objective and the ethos of the school, and they failed utterly, just as I failed utterly. When it came to the final exams, all six of them, I sat quietly still with my arms folded throughout, my pen perfectly aligned with my paper, eyes front.