An Ayrshire primary school in the 1960s.

Miss MacNab (“M-A-C CAPITAL N”) had impressive arms, marbled and massive, like Popeye’s. Maybe she ate spinach every day. Dad had given me a spoonful once, dark green, almost black from a tin. It tasted of grass and earth. My biceps didn’t expand, as Popeye’s did in the cartoon, not by a fraction, an eighth of an inch. We didn’t have millimetres, not then.

Miss Sumner taught music at my Ayrshire primary school, or to be precise, made us sing in screeching unison. The boatie rows, the boatie rows….what was that about? Only now, more than 60 years later, do I realise it was about fishing.

O weel may the boatie row,

And better may she speed!

And weel may the boatie row,

That wins the bairns’s bread!

The boatie rows, the boatie rows,

The boatie rows indeed;

And happy be the lot of a’

That wishes her to speed!

Boats. Rowing boats. Fishing. Not just random syllables howled by seven year olds.

There were male teachers, all tweeds and a mixture of the kindly and the viciously psychotic. Mr Ledgard looked like Harry Worth off the TV. Was he the one with a missing arm, a sleeve tucked neatly into a jacket pocket? Another teacher, Mr Jolyon, nicknamed Jolly but never living up to it, had something wrong with his face, was always bellowing furiously at stray corridor waifs. War survivors, former soldiers, and probably not even old, though they seemed ancient to us.

Raffia for handwork, milk in tiny bottles at break, Reading Laboratory, everyone but me learning a weird partial printing instead of the cursive handwriting I’d had belted into me at my old school in Glasgow.

The belt. The tawse. We were battered and bludgeoned, sometimes by reluctant dominies, most fearsomely by Mr Nicholson, the head. He banned the sweetshop lady from across the road from selling chocolate through the playground railings. He had a black Lochgelly belt, stiff and blistered and stained, presumably with the blood of countless children… 

Toilets so foul you never went for a shite, not ever, and you’d hold a pee if possible until the red Western SMT bus took you home. Sometimes there were accidents. The shame was quickly shrugged off, or seemed to be. School dinners: Unlimited prunes and semolina. Frogspawn tapioca.

The nit nurse. Lifting locks of your hair to surprise the little bastards. Only two boys in our class were infested, twin brothers. I can feel their utter humiliation when they were led back into the classroom, disinfected and glistening. A woman teacher, pinned, silver haired, reeking of tobacco smoke like the entire staff did: “Do you know what these boys had?” She asked, dripping with contempt. “NITS! They had NITS!” The boys wept in shame. None of us knew what nits were. She drew alien space monsters on the blackboard.

Next day the twins arrived with heads shaved to the wood, bouncy and apparently devoid of psychological scarring. For the next seven years we were schoolmates, before they left secondary school’s ‘Three Vocational’ class at 14. Maybe they forgot about the nits.

I heard that one of them became a fisherman.

O weel may the boatie row,

That fills a heavy creel,

And cleads us a’ frae head to feet,

And buys our parritch meal.

The boatie rows, the boatie rows,

The boatie rows indeed;

And happy be the lot of a’

That wish the boatie speed…