hear? Every one of you.’
The dominie crouched for a moment, the pointer gripped tightly in his left hand. Then he sprang towards a group of bigger boys occupying the back benches. What happened afterwards was never very clearly explained. There was a terrific struggle; blows rained from the pointer; there were yells and screams; some of the girls became hysterical. Then the dominie fell with a crash to the floor. His fall was immediately followed by a mad stampede to the door on the part of the boys concerned. Ned MacCalman, bleeding from a cut on the brow, was leading.
A moment later Mrs. Gibb rushed into the class-room and rescued her badly shaken husband.
The school was dismissed for the day. But not before Mrs. Mirren Gibb had told them just exactly what kind of dirt and vermin they were.
Jean had to explain to her father why the school had broken up so early. He listened to her disconnected story with great patience.
‘Aye: John Gibb has more than his sorrows to seek: he didna get his hand burned like that for nothing. But a maist dastardly thing to do for all that. There’s a wicked ungovernable spirit growing up among the scholars to-day. John Gibb’s no’ the man to discipline them. Well, it’s telling you ye had no hand in that, my lass, or I’d have teached ye better how to respect your elders. Aye …’
Having delivered himself gravely of this unusually long homily, Tom Gibson attacked his soup with relish.
It was his firm belief that there were always two sides to a story: neither of them necessarily right or wrong. Common sense told him that the dominie didn’t get his hand burned for nothing: at the same time he could not see him guilty of an offence justifying such punishment.
But the incident only touched him remotely. He had more urgent and pressing problems. The best horse on Craigdaroch was in the stable with a bad weed: he was still a few acres behind with his spring ploughing. And his wife was a week overdue with her confinement …
Jean knew there was something troubling her mother. Instinct, rather than knowledge, told her what was wrong. But she could not dwell on her mother’s condition. Her unbidden thoughts terrified her. In a vague way she experienced resentment against her father. Somehow she knew he was responsible. And as she watched him un-noticed, massive, dominating and yet somehow remote and unconcerned, and then looked at her mother, white-faced thin and grotesquely mis-shapen, she was conscious of a deep revulsion: a desire to withdraw from them both.
A night or two later she was wakened by her mother’s agonised moaning and her blood ran cold and shiver after shiver went through her. She recognised the voice of a neighbour, Mrs. MacHaffie.
‘It’ll no’ be long now, Mrs. Gibson: it’ll no’ be long now. God help ye: but it’s me that knows what ye’re suffering …’
Suffering? She did not need to be told her mother was suffering. But why should she suffer … and where was her father? In a sudden stillness she heard his step on the paving outside: slow, deliberate … She imagined him smoking quietly at his pipe and pausing for a moment on the turn of his step to spit and then draw the back of his huge hand across his bearded lips before the deliberate replacing of his pipe between the strong regular teeth that flashed so white against the lustrous blackness of his beard.
There came a terrible cry from her mother, through the wooden division of the bed. Jean stiffened and held her breath. She stiffened with terror and the terror was cold and agonising. Her mother whom, in her blind generous way she loved more than anything else in the world … Her mother who was frail, uncomplaining, enduring – and now crying in an agony that was as helpless as it was despairing. Only some trial vast and terrible could wring that cry from her. Maybe … but she heard her voice, low weak indistinct, followed by the soft rush of Mrs. MacHaffie’s reply.
She relaxed. The tears were streaming from her eyes. She heard the latch being pulled on the door.
The soft padding and shuffling of feet on the dry earthen floor caressed her mind. She was very young and she was very tired. The thin wailing of her newly-born brother did not reach her. She had cried herself to sleep.
The ugly incident of the poker made a deep impression on Jean Gibson and she lived in terror and dread of Johnny Gibb. Ever since then the dominie had been more repressive in his attitude towards the scholars. He used the pointer freely and with little or no discrimination. The scholars were completely terrorised. They learned little even if they memorised much. For the Craigdaroch children there was little fun going across the fields to school in the morning. They were too busy memorising a portion of Catechism and eight or ten verses of a psalm. Religious instruction came first every morning and it had become the most terror-ridden hour of the day.
There was a reason for this. Johnny Gibb knew that there was always the possibility of some of the children complaining to their parents. As a consequence, the parents might complain to him – rather unpleasantly. But what answer could a parent make to the charge that its child had been guilty of neglecting either its Catechism or the psalms of David? Here, indeed, the dominie felt he could not be accused of spoiling the child by sparing the rod.
But though he reckoned on a safe margin in which he could work, he was guilty of a miscalculation that almost cost him his life.
June came: a hot dry June but with enough rain to satisfy the farmers. The school was about to break up for a spell. The children would soon be needed for turnip thinning, weeding, the early potatoes and peat cutting. The children were eagerly looking forward to the break – even though most of them had bitter memories of the toil of the fields. But any toil was preferable (in anticipation) to the nagging and bullying of Johnny Gibb.
Inside the school-room it was intolerably hot and stuffy: the steady bright sunshine shafting in at the small window, mingling with the sharp exultant cries of the sea swallows, was an agony. In the foreground the figure of the hunchback spat and girned: an object of fear, hatred and terror.
It was after the lunch interval. The day outside had been warm and breathless and a heat haze hung out on the calm dull blue sea. The children who could not get home had run down to the beach and bathed, girls and boys together, and skelped up and down the shore till they were dry. All too soon the bell had rung, cutting peremptorily across their timeless sense: imposing a world of duty and obedience. Their fun had been healthy and vigorous. The sense of life had been heightened by the free intercourse of glistening and naked bodies. Had they attempted to cover their nakedness, a fatal sense of physical self-consciousness would have been introduced. They were not indifferent to the sight of their naked bodies. They experienced a keen un-selfconscious sense of invigorating stimulation.
In this the Galloway children were like uncorrupted children anywhere: like savages. There was no shame in the naked body: no shame in the performance of the natural functions. Shame came with puberty and morality. At the moment they were young, unsophisticated …
But the school bell had cut across their hour of exultant pleasure. Now they were back in the stuffy class-room listening with at least one ear to the shrill cry of the terns. The dominie was in a foul temper: the heat gave him a headache: the carefree laughter of the children jarred on his nerves. He had never known laughter even as a child. His infirmity had isolated him. More than anything his marriage had embittered him. He was impotent. And his wife’s frustration had hardened into a poisonous sadistic persecution. His whole life was a bitter misery: the more bitter and miserable since he did not know the root causes of it all.
His head throbbed violently. He had no patience to teach arithmetic or spelling. He set the pupils to hand-writing. While they were copying the sentence he had written on the blackboard he walked up and down the passage, his hands behind his back: in his hand he held a thin twelve inch ruler.
Jean Gibson was a poor calligraphist: she could not master the tortuous method of character formation which was in the copper-plate tradition. Nor could she hold her pen for long in the prescribed fashion. To-day her whole spirit rebelled at the task. Her whole body was aglow with intense physical excitement: she wanted to run and shout and liberate her spirit…
She bent closer to the copybook