4 DANNY
As Douglas's first term at Craigton Hall passed from Halloween to Christmas, the novelty and strangeness of his surroundings slowly solidified into familiarity and routine. While he waited at home, the blind school had seemed a place of mysteries, but gradually his questions were being answered. How, he had wondered, would blind students cope with maths - drawing graphs, for instance? He learned that there was a delightful can-do spirit at Craigton Hall, where improvisation frequently overcame austerity and adversity. Graphs were made on a sheet of paper with embossed squares. The sheet was laid on to a block of soft balsa wood and secured with a drawing pin at each corner. The coordinates of the graph were plotted by sticking round-headed map pins down through the paper into the balsa wood. The graph line was then made by joining up the pins with rubber bands. It was surprising how accurate the results could be and the line of bands and pins formed a picture in sharp, satisfying relief, like a line of rock climbers, roped together to ascend the page.
Basket making was another mystery. He was rather shocked at first to find it on the curriculum at all. Soon he learned that, at Craigton Hall, it was not just a 'technical' subject for less academic pupils. Everyone joined in as an exercise in the skill and aesthetics of craft.
The basket shop was a curious wooden building, long and single-storeyed, resembling a ranch house with a veranda fronting it. Each week, the 'technical' boys of Senior 3 had a double period of basket-making together with the 'academic' boys of Senior 2. Douglas soon found himself enjoying these lessons, which combined purposeful activity with the camaraderie of the old-fashioned craft shop. This atmosphere was encouraged by Mr McKay, the basket teacher, who was himself a veteran craftsman.
The boys stood around a long table in the middle of the room, weaving cane
into various objects, useful and beautiful. Around the walls were to be seen
samples of the basket maker's art. There was a perfect sphere of woven willow,
created for games of crab football in the gym. On a shelf stood a table lamp,
formed entirely of delicate cane, from base to shade. A pair of handsome wicker
chairs sat side by side, as if waiting to receive the sitters for whom they
were made.
'Dick Greenslade,' said Mr McKay, on Douglas's first day in the basket shop, 'take Douglas here to the tank and show him how to prepare his cane.'
Dick took Douglas by the arm and they went out on to the veranda. At the back of the basket shop they found a large metal tank filled with water.
'Feel in here,' said Dick. 'That thin cane held under the surface by the weights is used for light baskets - shopping baskets, wastepaper baskets, that sort of thing. It comes in graded thicknesses so that you can vary the pattern of weaving.'
Douglas felt the long strands of thin cane curled up in the water, like spaghetti in a cooking pot.
'Under that is the willow,' went on Dick. 'It's a lot heavier. We use it for really heavy stuff - post-office hampers mainly. All this cane has to be soaked for a long time,' added Dick, 'so that it becomes soft and pliable for weaving.'
The willow canes at the bottom of the tank reminded Douglas of the sinewy branches he used to cut from the trees in his father's allotment. As thick as his thumb, with nodes like knuckle joints, they made great bows and arrows on sunny Saturdays to play with while his father dug the earth. But sitting all day in a basket shop, weaving and twisting these wriggly serpents into heavy hampers, would be a job for hard hands, strong muscles and patient souls.
Dick told Douglas to remove enough cane to begin making his first basket. It did not turn out a great success. Under Mr McKay's guidance, he managed well enough to weave the base, threading the sinewy cane around a star-shaped frame. Into this circular base he was shown how to insert the stakes, which were then bent upwards to form the vertical skeleton of the basket. Round this he had to weave row after row of cane, in a variegated pattern of single and double-stranded weft. The work was supposed to culminate in a miniature wastepaper basket with a plaited cane border ornamenting its rim.
'Well, well,' said Mr McKay, inspecting the finished article. 'It's no bad, Douglas, if you wanted an egg cup instead o' a wastepaper basket.'
Everybody laughed in a friendly way. 'Aye,' said Dick, who operated as Mr McKay's right-hand man. 'Everybody starts like that. It's really hard to keep the stakes straight and sloping outwards while you weave.'
Douglas's next effort, a miniature shopping basket, was more successful. He had to concentrate carefully while plaiting the top border, but winding split cane round the hoops to make the handle was easier and the boys often fell into conversation while performing the simpler tasks.
'What will you do when you leave school, Trawler?' asked Douglas, speaking over the table to Ian Ross on a subject that interested him very much. Nearly all the boys had nicknames, and Ian was called 'Trawler' because his father was a fisherman who hailed from the north-east coast of Scotland.
'I dinna really ken,' answered Trawler, in the lilting dialect that Louise found so attractive. 'I'd like to go to the fishing with faither, but there's no chance of that with my sight the way it is.'
'Aye, that's about it,' chimed in another lad, Donald Simpson, who was known as Totem, because he was tall, strong and thick-set, like a Red Indian totem pole. 'I'd like to go back to the Mearns and work on the farm with my dad. That's the life for me,' he went on, warmly. 'Last summer I helped with the stock. Aye. I had to hold up the cow's tail so the bull could serve her.'
He said this with a mischievous grin and everybody laughed. 'Aye, weel, ye can a' laugh,' said Totem, 'But at least I know what to do when my tail's up.'
'Well,' said Douglas, when the laughter died down, 'Fishing might be a bit
beyond even you, Trawler, but farm work is surely OK for a man like you, Totem,
you being a good
partial like?'
'No, no,' answered Totem, shaking his head gravely. 'That's no for the likes o' me. I'm to go to the Aberdeen workshops and be a basket maker.'
The blind basket maker, thought Douglas. What a stereotypical blind man's lot - shut away in a 'blind asylum'. Douglas's mother had had a blind aunt who worked as a french polisher there. 'She did beautiful work,' his mother had said. 'It's because they work by touch you know.'
But proud of her aunt as she might be, Peggy Barr had no desire to see her son follow in her footsteps. And Douglas heartily agreed. 'The blind asylum!' The very name seemed insulting. Even though this basket making had its aesthetic side, and you could be proud of a well-made basket, you were sidelined into jobs that nobody else did these days and, to add insult to injury, associated with the poor, mad people of the 'lunatic asylums'. Douglas felt he would do anything to avoid that fate, even type in an office or operate a telephone switchboard.
In any case, Douglas had always known that he was on the academic track. It had been his mother's dearest wish that he should stay on at Oaklands Academy, then go to Glasgow University and study to be a doctor. Well, doctoring was out of the question now, but why should university be beyond him? Was Craigton Hall the school to get him there? The question was beginning to trouble him. The work he was asked to do in school was not very challenging. Before coming to Craigie he had mastered the Braille code, with its 63 embossed signs, selected from a 'cell' or matrix of six dots arranged in domino formation. This had been my contribution as his 'home teacher', enabling him to commence straight away with lessons in English, Latin and Maths.
Soon piano lessons were added, which were given only to the cleverest pupils. Douglas was fascinated to see how the same six-dot cell could be adapted to write music. Of course you couldn't put Braille music up and look at it. You had to read it with your fingers and memorise it, bar by bar. Eventually you could play the piece from memory. Douglas had a good memory and this came quite quickly.
But all this, to a quick intelligence like Douglas's, was more like dabbling in crafts and hobbies than really working hard at learning.
'Remember, Douglas,' I once told him, 'no one will push you at Craigton Hall. You'll have to push yourself.'
And he could see now that this was true. Many of the Craigton Hall teachers were the kind who would have been called soft at his sighted school. Some tolerated a lot of informal talking in class, which contrasted markedly with the strict silence demanded in mainstream schools of those days. There, inability to control the class was a mark of failure in a teacher. Here, nobody seemed to think very much about it.
Some teachers were strict disciplinarians by choice. Mr Lake, for instance, was almost the type of the traditional Scottish 'dominie'. He kept you hard at work on the basic skills - grammar, dictation, reading aloud, all that sort of thing. True, he never used the notorious 'tawse' or leather strap, drawn across the palm of the hand. It has become a notorious legend of Scotland's past, but here, at Craigton Hall, it was a punishment held in reserve for the head to use in very serious circumstances. Mr Lake, however, had his own form of condign punishment for anyone whose impenetrable resistance to knowledge tried his patience too far. He would take the malefactor by the shoulders and shake him or her until their whole body, and the chair they were sitting on, rocked wildly backwards and forwards, like a ship in a storm. This was known throughout the school as 'getting a jolly boat', and graphic tales were told by many who had survived one of those hazardous voyages.
Another rather frightening teacher, a bit of a stickler for hard work, was Miss Inkerman, the blind music teacher. She was known as Jumbo because she was very stout. I used to think the asthmatic wheeze in her voice probably made her caustic remarks sound more belittling than she actually meant. She liked Douglas because he was clever, but even he could get on the wrong side of her.
'Barr,' she would wheeze, 'You can be a bit dreamy sometimes. You should have
learnt all of that piece since your last lesson. If you don't finish it for next
week, I'll stop your
piano lessons.'
Douglas knew there was some justice in her reproof. Left to himself he was a dreamer and, under the often lackadaisical system of teaching at Craigton Hall, you often were left to yourself. Mr Macgregor, a blind teacher who took history, taught his subject by reading from a textbook. The book was dry and the lessons made dryer still by Mr Macgregor's painfully slow speed at reading Braille. Students had been known to fall asleep. Douglas did not do that, for he was interested in the subject, but he would find his imagination wandering far away from the boring book. For instance, in a lesson on Bonnie Prince Charlie, Douglas would conjure up scenes of the 'Forty-five' from the Hollywood film. There was David Niven as the handsome Prince, moustache curved tenderly over sensuous lip, under a brightly roving eye; or Flora McDonald, roused to save her 'Chevalier'. The romance of clan rebellion fired Douglas more than details about the Highland system of landholding or the bad governance of Scotland under the Hanoverians. But his fertile imagination was not too much of a distraction. It led him to the six Braille volumes of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, which he borrowed from the school library and read twice.
It was very unusual for the boys in his class to read anything. Wee Davie Shepherd, for instance, was so bad at reading Braille as to be almost illiterate. One day, Mr Lake asked him to read the famous opening soliloquy from Richard III.
Davie proceeded haltingly: 'N-n-now is the win-win - What's this? Oh aye, winter, that's right - winter of our dis- dis- discontent. Made g-l- orious sum- sum- summer by this son of - what's this? Er, er. Y-o-r-k.'
Such reading was quite common at Craigton Hall and hardly made for lively learning. It was one of the reasons why boys like Trawler and Totem were destined for the blind asylum.
Taken together, Douglas thought, the boys in his class and dormie were good pals, cheerful and supportive of one another. The Head's formal letter of invitation to join the school had said, 'Our children are almost all friendly', and this was true. Bullying was rare at Craigton Hall, unlike the rougher Glasgow schools he had attended. But with this relaxed cheerfulness went freedom from any educational pressure. Expectations were low and the students seemed to Douglas very naive after years of close confinement. They had been at this school from infancy, and their world revolved around dormitory, playroom and playground. Occasionally, they ventured out for a stroll 'round the block', making small purchases from the shops in the 'back road', or posting a letter home. Such letters were infrequent, however. None of them was taught to type or even master handwriting with a pen. Letters had to be dictated to one of the teachers. As they grew older, they found this embarrassing and rarely used the service, so contact with family gradually withered, at any rate for the majority who lived any distance from Edinburgh. Similarly, very few children had preserved friendships with their peers back home, since the long absences at school killed any relationships that might have developed.
Secluded, then, in their idyllic retreat, the Craigie children had little interest in the wider world. President Nasser might nationalise the Suez canal and Britain go to war. They were largely ignorant of such events and their chief concern remained the fate of their football team each Saturday.
* * *
Luckily for Douglas, the other class in the academic stream was different. The boys of Senior 6 were about two years older, and on the threshold of adult life. Douglas had a penchant for the company of thinking people and he gravitated towards the senior boys. They had developed interests beyond football and could be overheard in their cloakroom, number two, arguing about those Scottish nationalists who were then blowing up pillar boxes in Edinburgh because the royal insignia on them read 'ER II' and not 'ER I', which they should have done because she was the first Elizabeth to reign over Scotland.
Douglas came from a political family. His father, Horace, worked in the post office. Like his wife he was a trade unionist with a keen interest in history and current affairs. Visitors to his home were often fellow workers in the cause, and political discussion over the teacups could be lively. Because of this, Douglas loved talking politics and would hang around with these older lads, chipping in his own views from time to time.
Few of them had much time for an upstart who should know his place, but one
took an increasingly friendly interest in him. This was Danny Dangerfield.
Douglas had thought him stuck up at first, and it was true that he came from a
'better' part of Glasgow, where people lived up tenement 'closes' with tiled
walls and stained-glass windows in their front doors. In other words, Danny was a
social class above Douglas because his father was a ship's pilot on
the Clyde.
Douglas soon found, however, that there was nothing snobbish about Danny. He was as cheerful and down to earth as his sailor-father. In addition, the younger boy loved talking to Danny because he had taken the Scottish higher leaving certificate. Since Douglas had ambitions to take the Highers himself, he made it his business to discover what S6 were up to on that front. He was puzzled that none of them seemed to have any ambition to go to university. It was such a contrast with his mother's expectations.
'You'll get a grant, son,' she had said. 'You don't have to be stuck in the working class now, like your dad and me.'
Douglas learned that Danny had taken the 'lower' leaving certificate and English at the higher level. That was not good enough if he, Douglas, were to aim for university. He knew from his time at Oaklands school that you needed three subjects at higher and five at lower.
Douglas's friendship with Danny blossomed over chess. Danny began to teach Douglas, who had never played the game. He showed him a Braille chess board, with the white squares sunk a little below the level of the black. The white men, he explained, had little points on top of their heads, to distinguish them from the black. Douglas compared them. The white men looked like the witch's army in The Wizard of Oz, he thought.
Danny showed him how to set the pawns and pieces out on the board and demonstrated the moves. Chess was not like draughts, he explained. You didn't win by sweeping all your opponent's men from the board. The point was to render his king powerless by making it impossible for him to move. This was called checkmate or just mate.
Douglas was a quick learner and they soon got on to end games. Danny showed Douglas how to play an end game with two bishops, trapping the king into the corner of the board. 'You can do the same thing with a queen alone.'
'How?'
Danny set up the board with a black king and a white with his consort.
'The king is the weakest piece on the board, entirely dependent on the support of his subjects. The queen is the most powerful of these. If the king loses his queen it is a disaster for him. But he can lose all his other pieces and still win if he has his queen left and the other king has been reduced to nothing.'
He demonstrated the method.
'That's really clever,' Douglas said admiringly. 'I love the way weak kings can gang up with strong queens to defeat the other king.'
They began to meet every weekend for an afternoon game of chess. Douglas soon became quite proficient, though not yet a match for Danny, who could play in his head without feeling the board.
'You are a clever monkey, Danny,' said Douglas as his friend moved a final piece into position and quietly said, 'Check.'
'Another game?' Danny inquired.
'No thanks, Danny. I'd like to talk to you now.'
'OK.'
'What are you going to do when you leave here, Danny?'
'I'm going to train as a physiotherapist at a special college for the blind in London. My course begins in January, so I will be leaving Craigie at the end of this term.'
'Why are you all going to be physiotherapists? Is it because the white coat goes with the white stick?'
'Hey you! We don't use white sticks at Craigton Hall,' Danny expostulated.
Douglas understood his friend's indignation. White sticks were frowned upon and the pupils were encouraged to go about confidently, relying on clues from their hearing and the ground under their feet. Some managed to do this much better than others. A few failed hopelessly and sank into torpor. No one seemed to think it necessary to do anything about them beyond occasional ridicule.
'Anyway, to be honest,' said Danny, 'there isn't much else you can do as a total.'
'But there must be more than one job.'
'Oh there are. There's home teaching, for instance - teaching Braille and
crafts to the blind in their own homes. But most people go blind when they're
old. I wouldn't like a job like that, dealing nearly all the time with old
people. And anyway they tend to think it's a job
for women.'
'Why don't you go to university and try to be a school teacher or something?'
'That's what my father would like, believe me, but they never let a total be
a
teacher now.'
'What about Mr Lake and Miss Inkerman?' asked Douglas in amazement.
'They belong to the Stone Age,' said Danny, smiling.
'The what?'
'The previous headmaster here was a Mr Stone. He encouraged blind people to train as teachers and gave them jobs here in the school when they qualified. But Major Royle set his face against blind teachers and introduced a lot of other changes, so we talk about the Stone Age here as the time when everything was different - prehistoric.'
'That's ridiculous!' Douglas objected. 'Mr Lake and Miss Inkerman seem good enough teachers to me.'
'Yes, they are, but they can't do all the things Major Royle wants.'
'Like what?'
'Well, I think it has a lot to do with sex.'
'How's that?'
'In the Stone Age, boys and girls were never allowed to meet outside class, never allowed to talk to one another even. Everything was strictly 'hands off' and 'keep your distance'. Then Major Royle took over just before the war. He had new ideas and wanted to free things up a bit. You see how it is yourself. You can talk to girls after school for a while in the classrooms.'
'Yes, I know the rules,' said Douglas. 'The classrooms must be locked by tea at 5pm, and you hostel boys have to clear out of the school by 6pm. We school lads can only play football outside or go up to the dormies. No one is to hang about on the bottom corridor after 6pm.'
'That's it. Major Royle doesn't mind boys and girls talking together for a while, but there's a terrible row if they're found winchin'.'
Douglas smiled again at the old-fashioned word. Danny continued on the theme.
'He's forever giving us Dutch uncle lectures about it. Once after morning prayers, he sent all the girls out and kept us back for half an hour.
'"No one here objects to you talking to a girl."' Danny could mimic perfectly the Major's clipped military style of speech, every syllable chopped off and fired like a bullet. '"But keep it to talking. Don't go into corners where you think you can't be seen and don't touch one another. Touching leads inevitably to connection. You may think you'll stop before going all the way. You think it's like taking the train from Glasgow to Waverley. I can always get off at Haymarket, you tell yourself. Let me assure you, you can't get off at Haymarket."'
Douglas laughed. He had no experience of sex directly, but it was funny to picture it like a steam train puffing along, letting off a blast of its whistle from time to time.
'And what does all this have to do with blind teachers?' he asked.
'Well, think about it. They can't go snooping about like Drury or Jimmy Riddell. They can't look through the glass panes on the classroom doors and keep an eye on everybody. Drury or Riddell patrols the school after 6pm, chasing out the hostel boys and making sure that nobody is winchin' in the shrubbery or classrooms.'
Douglas thought he knew all about Jimmy Riddell by now. 'The Beadle' was feared by nearly everyone, and not just because he patrolled the school and grounds. Douglas knew another reason why many boys were scared of him.
'Jimmy sees that you take your bath and wash and everything,' Dick had explained, and Andy sniggered.
'Aye, every thing!'
On his first bath night at the school, Douglas had been embarrassed by the behaviour of Jimmy in the large tiled bathroom, where four boys bathed at the same time.
He made unpleasant jokes about the size of their 'Willies'. While leaning over a boy in his bath, he chuckled, 'Let Uncle Jimmy make sure you're washing that thing right.' The boy squealed and there was a lot of splashing.
Mr Drury, the woodwork teacher, Jimmy Riddell and Miss Starkey were known to
the older pupils in the school as the sex police because, as Danny had said, it
was their duty to patrol the buildings and grounds. It was said to be a necessary
precaution against criminal intruders, though these were rare. In effect it
heavily repressed any pairing off among the older boys
and girls.
Not that there was much of this going on, Danny informed Douglas. Major Royle strongly discouraged pupils from forming relationships with one another.
'He said to me once,' Danny recalled, '"Dangerfield, the most important decision you will make in your life is the choice of a woman to marry. Make sure you choose wisely. A blind woman will be out of the question. You would be doubling your handicap."'
'I thought he was right, so I've kept away from them,' Danny went on.
'I've heard you go out with one of the maids who serves in the dining hall.'
'Yes, Davina,' said Danny. 'We've been going out for a year. It's much better with a sighted girl. They can take you around and show you things.'
Douglas felt this was a bit hard on the blind girls in the school. He had noticed that most of the hostel girls were far less active than the blind boys of their own age. It was not just that they played no football, or any other game. Very few had boyfriends. Since no young sighted men were employed at school, like the serving maids and housemothers on the care staff, they did not have Danny's option of choosing a sighted date. And Miss Starkey did everything she could to keep blind boys away from them. If she caught any of the hostel boys chatting up any of the girls on the drive after they should have quit the school, she shooed them off like foxes from a chicken coop. 'Why do you have to hang around these girls,' she would quaver. 'Go and sweetheart the maids if you must sweetheart somebody!' So the blind girls were becalmed in a kind of doldrums of the teens, when their sighted peers were already becoming more closely acquainted with the opposite sex.
'Anyway,' Danny went on, 'you can't find safe places for winchin' with a blind girl. It's just impossible to know when you're safe from prying eyes. That's how Ian McDowall got into hot water.'
'Who's he?'
'Well,' said Danny, lowering his voice to a confidential pitch, 'he left about three years ago. He went with a girl called Harriet. She was a total, but he had a lot of sight. They were always being hunted up by the sex police. Ian got so fed up with it that he stole Jimmy Riddell's master key. He had a copy made and used to let himself into the clothes store with Harriet every Saturday night.'
'Where?'
'You know, up in the attic where you get measured for school clothes. They must have got up to some high old jinks, because she had to be measured for a maternity skirt.'
'She got in the family way!' Douglas was shocked.
'Yes. She was expelled at 17. He was just coming up to the Highers, so Royle let him take them and sent him off to physiotherapy school in London.'
'But that wasn't fair.'
'No it wasn't. But things haven't worked out too badly for them. He wanted to marry her and did the decent thing. Her mother looked after the baby while she worked in the blind workshops for a couple of years.'
'And what are they doing now?'
'Ian's nearly finished his course and they'll set up as a respectable married couple as soon as he finds a job.'
'So all's well that ends well?'
'For them, maybe, but not for us at the school. The whole thing gave Royle an awful fright. He was terrified it would get into the newspapers and ruin the reputation of the school. So he tightened up a lot. Now he holds the expulsion threat over the head of any boy or girl who steps the slightest bit out of line.'
Douglas was silent for a long time, reflecting on all this. 'I suppose it's all right to go out with one of the blind girls if she's in the hostel?'
'In theory, yes,' Danny rejoined. 'But I said it was better - easier I mean -
to go with a sighted girl. Suppose you go to the park with a blind girl on a
summer evening. Where are you going to do your winchin'? As soon as you start,
somebody is going to see you. It might be a member of the staff, out walking the
dog, or just some busybody who phones up the school
and complains.'
'Yes, I see. Walking and talking, but not touching - the same rule applies everywhere.'
'Yes, that's it. In the school or out of it.'
* * *
When the Christmas holidays came round, I visited Douglas at his home in Monshill. We had a long interview in which he revealed to me his growing doubts about Craigton Hall. He was settling in quite well, he said. He could already recognise many of its 100-odd pupils by sound of voice and was making good friends. Danny was clever and stimulating. Dick and Andy were true pals. But the low level of expectation was worrying him. Even in Douglas's supposedly academic class, nobody did very much about the illiteracy of some boys. No one guided or even cajoled the brighter students in private study. Boys with partial sight read comics in secret with their eyes and never developed Braille skills. Some of the totals were quick readers, usually girls, but their learning was chained to the drag of these bored boys, who could never see the point.
I knew what he was talking about from my own days at Craigton Hall, training as a home teacher. Major Royle said, dogmatically, that it took two years longer to educate a blind child than a sighted. Nobody left Craigton Hall, therefore, before they were 18. That wouldn't have been so bad if the two years had pushed them ahead of their sighted competitors. But even at 18 they were hardly even abreast. The brighter pupils might have reached the 'Lowers'. Douglas knew his brother, Alistair, in mainstream, would take Lowers at 16 and Highers at 17. To take a full set of Highers, Craigton students would have to stay at school until at least 20.
Douglas had already observed that no one was being groomed for university. Major Royle explained this by saying that former pupils who had graduated from Edinburgh University never obtained professional jobs. They had had to be content with work in Braille publishing or general office work. He thought it better to play safe, directing bright students, whether round pegs or square, into the tried and tested holes of physiotherapy or home teaching.
Douglas had become very suspicious of these ways of justifying low expectations. He thought I, as his home teacher, had been right to say that no one pushed the pupils hard enough at Craigton Hall. I told him of Major Royle's belief that blind children needed a longer time at school to develop confident mobility. He saw to it that they spent a lot of time on gym, games and swimming. To develop manual coordination, they were put to a lot of handwork. But it seemed to Douglas, as it had seemed to me, that some of the really bright boys and girls had been supremely successful in these directions by their early teens. They could run about fearlessly, jump from heights, kick balls, sew clothes and saw wood. What the brighter students needed was concentrated tutoring in academic subjects. Given that, students like Danny could have progressed as far and as fast as his father desired.
Douglas told me he had decided that he would not conform to Major Royle's expectations. He would break the mould of recent years by going to university and studying law. Law and politics, that would be a great combination for him. Even if Royle made him hang around until he was 21, he was determined to take the Highers before making his escape.
I encouraged his ambition and left his home to continue on my round of clients. What I didn't know until much later was Douglas's thoughts about the emotional side of Craigton Hall. Having lost his belief in the Major's educational system, Douglas became just as disrespectful of his views on relationships. That shocking story of Ian and Harriet! Who did Major Royle think he was? Back at Monkshill, his friend Jack Wilson had been dating girls for over a year. He often told Douglas about his adventures 'roon' the back' after walking girls home from dances. True, Douglas's mother had set her face against 'that sort of thing' and Douglas's blindness had cut him off from summer-time flirting in the streets and parks. But he had seen enough to know that youngsters 'outside' did not live under the unremitting gaze of men like John Knox.
All in all, the regime at Craigton Hall was just too heavy-handed. He was not going to be made to live in the Stone Age for the next five years. Major Royle was a fool. Anyone could see how Jimmy Riddell flouted the very conventions he was supposed to uphold, and a school that taught no modern languages really was a fossil. The only honourable thing to do with chains and slavery was shake them off. That was what he meant to do.