6 HOME TEACHING
At the beginning of July, Douglas was back in Monkshill for the long summer holidays. Eight weeks stretched ahead; eight weeks before he would see Louise again.
She lived on the other side of Glasgow, about six miles off. It would take two buses to reach her. Douglas felt sure he could do the journey. Since going up to the hostel he had become quite adept at travelling about on public transport in Edinburgh. But visiting Louise was entirely out of the question. His mother would not hear of it. For one thing she was still terrified of him going out alone. But her opposition would stem in this case from more than an understandable fear of another traffic accident. The merest suggestion of a girlfriend sent her off the deep end.
'I don't mind you having a girl for a friend,' she said, sternly. 'But not a girlfriend. There's plenty of time for that when you're older.'
Mrs Barr was frankly incredulous when Douglas told her he was allowed to travel about Edinburgh by himself. On the other hand she would have been quite ready to believe that he was enmeshed in an intrigue of the heart. The fear of it was always present in her mind. Anxiety that Douglas might form a romantic attachment in a coeducational boarding school had been her last objection to Craigton Hall. The only thing she liked about Major Royle was her conviction that he would 'stand for no nonsense'.
Not surprisingly, then, Douglas had told his parents nothing about Louise. Mr and Mrs Cummings were a little more relaxed about relationships, but they were just as terrified as Peggy Barr of Louise travelling alone about the city. There could be no question of meeting Douglas in town and going for a coffee or something. So Douglas and Louise had to resign themselves to separation, keeping their romance alive by Braille correspondence.
'Ah well,' Douglas thought, 'at least mother won't be able to read my letters.' He settled down to write in the first week of the break:
'My Dearest Louise,
'I am missing you terribly. I know you'll be feeling the same. I wish we could
see each other during the holidays. I'd love to take you to the pictures, just
like other boys with
their girlfriends.
'If we even had the telephone it wouldn't be so bad. My father may be getting it soon to help with his trade-union work. Is there any chance of your parents getting the phone?
'I am still having battles with my mother about going out on my own. She doesn't believe that we hostel boys are allowed to go anywhere in Edinburgh by ourselves and tries to insist that she must accompany me if I go any farther than the pillar box at the corner. Last night, I went to see my friend, Jack Wilson. You remember me mentioning him, I suppose. He's two years older than me and joined the army shortly after I came to Craigton Hall. He's home on leave now. My mother wanted to send my brother Alistair with me, but I held out for going on my own. It's an easy walk, but there's a difficult bit on the other side of Peters Road, where there's a big stretch of waste ground. There's no wall or anything to listen out for and the boundary between the waste ground and the pavement is very indistinct.
'I crossed Peters Road all right, but instead of going straight on, got somehow on to the waste ground and was uncertain for a moment how to get back on the pavement. As I was shuffling about, like you do when you're trying to detect a change of surface under your feet, my brother's voice came from behind me saying, "Lost or something?"
'I was so embarrassed! But what made me more furious than his actually being there, was the sneer in his voice. He might just as well have said, "We told you so, didn't we?" I was also very annoyed with my mother. She had agreed to me going alone and then sent Alistair to spy on me. I knew he would tell her - about me getting lost, I mean. I was so angry, I ordered him to go back home and not to follow me any further.
'Darling Louise, I miss you so much. Jack and I went for a walk on the country road, which was quite nice, but it wasn't like being with you. When I'm with you the time flies. Here it doesn't just creep - it wraps round me like a boa constrictor and suffocates me.
'When I'm with Jack we always get round to talking about girls, and that makes me miss you even more.
'I love you very much, Louise, and can't wait to hear from you. Please write soon.
'Your loving Douglas.'
* * *
'My dearest Douglas,
'Thank you for your wonderful letter. I miss you very much, but I tell myself it's only six more weeks. And, of course, I have the Guides' trip to Switzerland to look forward to. We leave for London next week and stay at the Guide headquarters there for one night. Then to Paris where we stay another night. After that, we take the train to Adelboden, where we will stay at the International Guide Chalet. That'll be four weeks of this miserable separation over and only four to go.
'I hope you won't feel too lonely, dear, while I'm away. This might just as well be Switzerland, for all the chance I have of seeing you.
'Yes, I think there is a good chance that we will get the phone. Everybody seems to be installing one these days. Meanwhile, I could ask one of my sisters to take me to the public telephone box and ring you from there - once your father gets his, I mean. I wish he had it now.
'Look after yourself, Douglas, and don't go getting lost around Monkshill. I couldn't bear it if anything happened to you.
'Your own Louise.'
* * *
Louise was quite open with her parents about Douglas and could hardly believe that Mrs Barr was as hostile about her as Douglas said. She thought he must be exaggerating a little. Nobody could be that bothered about an innocent boy and girl relationship!
So it was Louise herself who blew Douglas's cover at Monkshill by sending a postcard from Switzerland. The Guide Captain wrote it for her as they sat on a rustic bench near Adelboden, overlooked by jagged peaks.
'How shall I sign?' asked captain, when she finished writing the usual kind
of
holiday message.
'Love, Louise.'
'And kiss, kiss, kiss?'
'There's no need to go right over the top. It might give him ideas.'
Captain laughed and signed the card as directed. About a week later, it arrived at Monkshill Drive. Douglas was lying late in bed - one way of dealing with the holiday boredom. His brother Alistair came into the bedroom they shared.
'You're for it now!' he announced.
'How?'
'She who must be obeyed found a postcard from that girlfriend of yours. It's signed "Love, Louise".'
'What did she say?'
'I'll give him love. But I don't think she really meant that. She's stuck it up on the mantelpiece in front of the clock, and glares at it every time she passes.'
Douglas stayed under the blankets as long as possible, pondering the character of his mother. Very ambitious for her boys, she was sunshine itself whenever she thought they were doing well. But she was prone to overreaction when they failed to conform to her expectations. His mother had always been fond of having her own way. Her mood could swing quite suddenly from gladness to gloom. When it did, she might pick up the nearest 'rod' - belt, brassiere or braces - and spare nothing in the cause of not spoiling the child. Although his accident had made her mood swings worse, Douglas had noticed that she checked herself, albeit with difficulty, from physically abusing her blind son.
Nevertheless, he would rather have tangled with a she-bear than have a confrontation with his mother. He could not avoid it by staying in bed all day. He rose when he heard Housewife's Choice finishing on the sitting-room wireless. To delay a little longer and assess the situation for himself, he went straight into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He could hear Mrs Barr banging pots about in the kitchen.
'She's cooking up a big row,' he thought.
When his mother entered the sitting room with a mug of tea and a bacon roll for him, her tone was severe, more severe in fact than Douglas had ever heard.
'Alistair, read him the postcard,' she commanded.
Alistair obeyed.
'Thanks,' said Douglas, desperately trying to maintain an air of nonchalance, which only made his mother more furious. She went back into the kitchen and banged about some more. When he finished, she cleared away and came to sit at the other side of the fireplace. Reaching to the mantelpiece, she took down the offending missive.
'How well do you know this girl, Douglas?' she demanded. She struggled to maintain a tone of approachability in her voice, but Douglas could only think of the famous painting of the Roundhead demanding of the Cavalier's son: 'When did you last see your father?'
'She's just a friend,' replied Douglas, who was not a convincing actor either.
'Don't lie to me! Friends don't sign cards "Love, Louise". There must be more to it than that and I insist on knowing.'
'Aren't you taking all this a bit too seriously?' ventured Alistair, who felt that he had some future interest in the outcome of this contest.
'You hold your tongue,' snapped the mother, her rage rising with her embarrassment. Here we go, thought Douglas. She'll be into this like a dentist's drill.
And sure enough, when Mrs Barr continued, it was in a tone that rose to a horrible screech. 'He doesn't know anything about the passions of youth, and neither do you, Alistair.'
Oh my god, thought Douglas. This is Major Royle all over again. They fear the worst and funk frankness.
Feeling himself grow angry, he said, witheringly, 'Mother, you're a prude.'
Mrs Barr leaped from her armchair shouting, 'How dare you talk to me like that?' and Douglas thought it best to make his escape from the sitting room as his mother bore down on him like a Fury, flailing her dish towel about his ears.
***
An uneasy truce descended over Monkshill Drive for the next few days, during which I paid Douglas a surprise visit. Now that Douglas was a pupil of Craigton Hall I had no responsibility for teaching him anything, but I still had to look after his welfare in other ways. I thought he should be able to claim some financial assistance for the holidays and needed his signature on a form. So I called in unannounced.
I could tell at once that all was not well. Douglas and Alistair had gone out
and Mrs Barr was, as we say in Glasgow, 'up to high doh'. Her face was flushed
and she was puffing fast at a cigarette. Taking me into the sitting room, she
indicated a chair facing the beautiful view of
the braes.
'Just sit for a minute, Mr Sanderson, and I'll make you a cup of tea. A
wee
sandwich, maybe?'
I thanked her and thought it was just as well that home teachers had to do a lot of walking, otherwise they'd be too wide to go through the doors of their clients' homes.
Mrs Barr handed me the tea in her best china and sat down opposite, reaching immediately for her cigarettes.
'Is there something upsetting you, Mrs Barr?' I ventured.
'To be quite honest, Mr Sanderson there is. Look at this postcard.'
I read, smiling. 'Well, he's a fast worker,' I joked.
Mrs Barr was more than a little taken aback. 'You don't see any harm in it
then?'
she challenged.
'Knowing Major Royle, I would say it could get him into some hot water, but on the other hand it's probably something that'll blow over quite quickly.'
'I'm not so sure,' the mother rejoined, dropping her gaze. 'I learnt the hard
way about love, Mr Sanderson. It seems like a bed of roses at that age, but it
can put a halter round
their necks.'
I knew what she was driving at. As a welfare worker I had access to a lot of records, and had noticed that Douglas's date of birth was significantly soon after his mother's wedding day. 'Shotgun weddings' were common enough in those days, but no married people liked admitting that theirs had been one.
'But I don't think this will go as far as that,' I said. Craigton Hall is well known for teen-age crushes. They nearly always fizzle out.'
'That's not exactly what I've heard,' she said, frowning. 'In any case I know Douglas. He's very stubborn. He'll be in it up to his neck, and he won't listen to me or his father. I'd like you to speak to him about it, Mr Sanderson. I won't be able to make him see sense and his father's useless about these things.'
I could see there was no reasoning with her at that moment, so I agreed, hoping to help Douglas. All the same, I felt myself to be in a slightly false position. Home teachers were not expected to be personal development counsellors. Those are common today and it seems that every schoolchild receives guidance on relationships. Post-war Scotland was very different. The authorities were expected to uphold the proprieties and I, as their official representative, was expected to toe the line. But who was I to lecture anyone? I had joined the army in 1940 and campaigned with a tank brigade, first in the desert and then in Italy. Amid the danger I was glad that I had no wife or fiancee to mourn for me. But I did not live like a monk and my experience of love and war gave me a different perspective. Nobody had expected me to do without sex until I was either dead or demobbed.
Douglas was now going on 17, nearly as old as I was when I joined up. Besides, I reflected, most of his contemporaries would now have left school, going to work with the opposite sex. Why should Douglas be any different?
Of course I could sympathise with Peggy Barr to a certain extent. Her married life had had 'a bad start', as people called it. She had had to struggle, no doubt, to bring up her family decently on a postman's wage. Horace was an inspector now and, looking round her sitting room, I could see the pride she took in their success. A large radiogram stood in the corner, gleaming with french polish and chrome. Near it was a new piano, and we were sitting on the chairs of a three-piece suite, covered in the latest fabric.
Naturally, she had taken Douglas's accident very hard, but she was determined that he would overcome it. She knew what education was good for and her highest ambition was to see Douglas graduate from university into a salaried profession. Was he to throw his chances away in a fling with a girl before he'd hardly got going?
I could also see where Major Royle was coming from. I knew him quite well, having trained as a home teacher at Craigton Hall. The Major had been friendly towards me. He liked ex-servicemen and had exaggerated respect for men who had been in action.
I knew from his lectures that he had played a pioneering role before the war. Blind children in Scotland needed a good school to give them the best chance in life. He understood that small local schools were not fit for this purpose. He believed, with perhaps some exaggeration, that home life tended to spoil blind children and curb their full development, so he had no time for the argument that small children needed to be educated near their homes. So the answer was plain enough to Major Royle: there should be a single, centralised school for the whole of Scotland. This meant most children would have to board, but there weren't enough blind and partially sighted children to allow for the traditional boarding school solution of segregating the sexes. Boys and girls from Orkney to Hadrian's Wall had to be educated together in one residential school in Scotland's capital.
In these circumstances, it was easy to understand why Major Royle was so down on boy and girl romances. As Danny Dangerfield knew, he feared scandal. Nothing would have done more to discredit his educational project. Without Craigton Hall, no blind student stood a chance at physiotherapy or home teaching. That is why he felt he had to come down so hard on Ian and Harriet. He told me so because I was there training at the time of that little drama. I felt very sorry for Harriet. Ian had got off more lightly, and why, anyway, did either have to suffer so much humiliation for an educational strategy that threw them together?
As I have already said I hope young people today are treated better. In my opinion they need good counselling about loving relationships and safe sex. That solution would have horrified Major Royle. He thought he was 'broad minded' in his willingness to tolerate innocent conversation between young people in mixed company. But he knew - or thought he knew - where to draw the line, and he employed care staff who were more than willing to police it. Miss Starkey had been a nurse in a field hospital during the first world war. It was said that death at the front, in robbing her of a fiance, had left her embittered. Riddell and Drury were veterans of the same conflict - cynical old soldiers both. All three secretly despised the Major's willingness to believe in 'healthy' boy and girl relationships and took a prurient interest in their appointed task of checking the amorous propensities of the young people in their charge.
So they maintained constant surveillance. Many years after this episode, when I was at university, I read Jeremy Bentham's fascinating book, The Panopticon . There he proposed a new kind of prison for the 19th century. The guards would be able to see the prisoners at all times, but the prisoners would not be able to see the guards. In the circumstances, Bentham argued, the prisoners would internalise the standards set by the prison authority.
It struck me that Craigton Hall was a Panopticon. Classrooms, with their huge, uncurtained windows and glass-panelled doors, were as transparent as fish tanks. Supervisors would enter rooms silently to pick up gossip among the pupils. This was relayed to the staff dining room, where the smallest signs of romantic attachment were analysed over the teacups. On St Valentine's Day, for example, dining-room gossip would inform Miss Starkey about cards received by girls and boys under their care.
My understanding of the Major's project was one thing, my approval another. Army service had suggested to me the futility of recommending chastity to young people. People who know no better talk about Victorian values, but our grandparents were not so 'moral' as the myth would have us believe. Anyway, in the 1950s, public opinion was moving on. Sex was all around us. Celestial bodies shone from cinema posters. The painted nudes of high art were reproduced in popular magazines, as much for their erotic charge as their aesthetic value. The popular Daily Mirror had its cartoon sweetheart Jane take off her clothes for the titillation of the troops. In fact prudery was being chased fast out of every hiding place. A magazine called Picture Post had already run a very frank discussion called Sex and the Citizen. It dealt with what people actually did instead of what they were supposed to do.
So here was my problem. I ought to be honest with Douglas. He represented the future. His mother stood for the past. Unfortunately, so did my employers. I was still a fairly new home teacher. Up at The Mission to the Outdoor Blind, the Superintendent was one of the old school and did not quite trust ex-servicemen. I knew I had to watch my step, but I could not honestly tell Douglas that I agreed entirely with Mrs Barr.
* * *
So I broached the subject cautiously with Douglas on my next visit, when Peggy was out on a shopping expedition.
'I hear your mother is up to high doh about you and Louise,' I ventured.
'There's a battle royal going on.'
'I suppose she's just worried.'
'Worried? What about?'
'Well about you getting involved with a blind girl.'
'Why is it worse with a blind girl?'
'She's thinking of the long run,' I said evasively. 'I suppose she thinks Louise wouldn't be able to cope.'
'You mean if we were married?'
'Well - yes, I suppose I do,' I said, feeling a little foolish.
'Well, we're certainly not thinking about marriage,' Douglas laughed. 'I want to be a lawyer so I've got years and years of studying ahead of me. And Louise wants to be a professional pianist.'
'Oh I see.'
'But even if we were thinking about getting married, I don't see the problem. Two blind people could manage, no bother. After all, Mum expects me to wash up and do housework now. What's the difference whether it's my house or hers?'
'Well, I suppose there might be children to look after,' I said, feeling even more uncomfortable as I plunged into deeper water. 'She's worried about how you would look after a wee baby. How would you know if it was ill? Louise wouldn't see the spots. Or if it was going to stick its hand in the fire?'
Douglas thought for a minute.
'If I'm a lawyer we'll be able to afford somebody to help, which takes care of the spots.'
'And the fire?'
'We had a fireguard when Alistair was a baby.'
'Perhaps,' I said, 'she's worried about hereditary blindness. It would be very hard on you all if you had a blind child - just speaking hypothetically.'
'It sure would,' Douglas expostulated. 'But I was blinded in a street accident, as you know, and Louise was blinded by measles. You can't inherit measles or street accidents, as far as I know.'
I didn't dare go any deeper, for I did not then know Douglas well enough to
raise the question that was really worrying Mrs Barr. Douglas might think he was
not going to marry for years, and perhaps would never marry Louise. But he might
have to, and a lot sooner than
he thought.
To my surprise, Douglas himself took up this issue on the next visit. 'I told Louise in my last letter about our conversation,' he said.
'Oh, and what was her reply?'
'She's not thinking about marriage or babies either. But she says I ought to understand Mum's feelings better. Louise said something I hadn't thought of. Here, let me read it to you.'
He smoothed the Braille pages of her letter on his knee and began to read: 'It's not me your mother objects to. She doesn't know me. She's hardly even seen me and she certainly hasn't talked to me. She can't know how well I'd cope whenever I decide to marry. There are two things she worries about. First, that you will marry any blind girl at all!
'My parents feel the same way about blind boys. They can't imagine any who wouldn't be a comedown for me and they have a total horror of hereditary blindness. It's no use me saying, "but Douglas's blindness isn't hereditary". They just think, well, there'll be another boyfriend after Douglas and he probably will have inherited blindness.
'Second, they're terrified that I'm going to have to marry you. A shotgun wedding to a sighted husband would be bad enough, but nothing like as bad as a blind groom. So they adopt the same policy as the school. They talk liberal in the spirit and draw the line in the flesh.
'I see things differently, Douglas. Nobody has to have a child, before or after marriage, and I certainly don't intend to run any serious risks. I've told my mother this, but I know she still thinks I'm too young to know what I'm talking about.'
I was delighted with this letter, and not just because Douglas's Braille reading had improved so much.
'I think you two have got it quite weighed up, if you ask me,' I said, looking at him on the other side of the tiled fireplace. 'Your mother won't have much to worry about if you keep your heads screwed on like that.'
Douglas looked pleased, but said, with a mischievous smile, 'How do you mean?'
'I'm sure you know very well what I mean, Douglas Barr,' I said, taking the bull by the horns at last. 'Don't make Louise pregnant. Think very hard before you run any risks.'
This was hardly a resolution of the situation, I thought, as I left Monkshill Drive, but perhaps it was enough for the time being. These young people could probably look after themselves, with a bit of help from Lady Luck.