AT THE turn of the year one is apt to receive some jolting intimation

of one's mortality. This year my clap of change, ageing, and doom came

in a pleasantly chatty greetings card from a revered former teacher.

With much talk of this and news of that, she observed casually:

''Margaret Goodwin retired in November -- last of the old crew''.

Miss Goodwin had retired! And suddenly my past life swept before me,

and my few remaining years turned to laugh at me; change and decay in

all around I saw. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my

trousers rolled . . .

This Miss Goodwin was indeed the last -- as far as I can be sure -- of

my primary teachers who still taught. She was one of the best teachers I

ever had. She was the only primary teacher I had who was actually

younger than my parents. And she was, without question, quite the most

formidable woman I have ever met; to this very day, there is a certain

type of determined female -- the sort you meet in the SNP, or in the BBC

labyrinth of Queen Margaret Drive -- sufficiently reminiscent of her to

reduce me to trembling servitude.

It was a long time ago. It was another world. It was Jordanhill

College School, in the western suburbs of Glasgow, still at that time a

demonstration school attached to the teacher-training establishment. It

was in the mid-seventies, which in the cultural context of the West End

was still the early sixties. We pupils wore immaculate brown uniform.

The wee boys actually had caps and the wee girls horrid little hats kept

on by elastic. And the teachers stalked the corridors and playgrounds in

black gowns. There was morning assembly every morning, by the most

orthodox rites of the Church of Scotland.

Another world. As Jack McLean pointed out to me, many years later,

this was the era when cranks and power-trippers at Jordanhill College

were formulating and unleashing the theories, the methods that have

subsequently done much to destroy Scottish education. But their school

remained -- perhaps as some scientific control -- a bastion of

traditional, God-fearing dedication to the three Rs.

When Miss Goodwin took us, 18 years ago, we had just learned how to

write with nib-pens. Essays done in pencil, approved, had then to be

laboriously transcribed into a copy-book. Miss Goodwin led us chanting

times-tables. Miss Goodwin taught us a little French. Miss Goodwin

devised, and deployed, shattering 20-question tests in mental

arithmetic. We multiplied fractions. We divided fractions. And then

there was English. We parsed. We conjugated. ''Kind, number, gender,

case,'' we obediently repeated, or would reply: ''A subordinate

adverbial clause of time, Miss Goodwin''.

I still remember these primary teachers. Over the department presided

Mrs Mann, who was regal and lovely and deliciously firm; when you were

very small, she was apt to merge in your mind with the Queen. And there

was Miss Hogg, a very little woman, dimpling and smiling -- until her

eyes froze into chips of grey glass that read your soul. And there was

Mrs Kinnis, in Primary Seven, brisk and beaming, who still sends me that

Christmas card every year. But they were all old -- at least 40 in those

days -- and grey-haired, and given to sensible clothes, and I suspect

that they smoked.

Miss Goodwin? She was much younger. She had long lovely hair, and a

face like some rare and precious breed of cat, and wore light and

colourful things, and moved with a delicious grace. But the hair was

invariably pleated, ponytailed, or bunned. Not a smidgen of makeup did I

ever see on that face. It was inconceivable that Miss Goodwin smoked.

Now all of us in that department held all the teachers in awe, but

Miss Goodwin was regarded with peculiar terror. On refectory duty, or in

the liturgy of morning assembly, or deputising for the regular mistress,

her ferocious style became rapidly apparent. But Miss Goodwin could

rant. Miss Goodwin could rage. Miss Goodwin could stun a class into

aghast submission by a wide variety of carefully choreographed effects.

She could wheel from the blackboard in an instant, and fling the chalk

to the floor in a puff of seeming smoke even as her gown flared behind

her like a vampire's wings. She knew, and used, the name of every single

pupil in the school. She knew, and could deploy, the faint icy smile

with that merest hint of sadistic enjoyment. She had wit that would have

had you laugh out loud, had you dared. She could see through the back of

her head.

Like I said, she terrified every pupil. Except, that is, for the ones

she actually taught. For Margaret Goodwin was that rarest thing, now

seldom met -- a truly born teacher. She loved her job. She loved

children. But above all she loved knowledge, learning, breadth, and

culture -- and by the time she had finished with us, did Miss Goodwin

vow perpetually, so would we. She was utterly, absolutely,

irreproachably fair.

She treated us almost like mini-adults. At the start of that Primary

Six year she told us gravely that she would not normally teach us maths

or arithmetic in the afternoon, because she knew pupils resented it --

as long as we kept abreast of the work.

She had a gift of sharing passion. Miss Goodwin had a passion for many

things. One was music; she helped Miss Hogg in directing the primary

choir, and had an unexpected gift for directing drama productions; when

we had an Easter cantata, the year after I left her class, she proved a

veritable Hitchcock.

What I remember most, however, was her love for Burns. She had a

magnificent slide-show, which she showed to the whole primary department

most years, replete with eerie shots of the Auld Kirk and the Brig O'

Doon, to which she read a mesmerising commentary. She knew most of

Rabbie's oeuvre by heart. We had to learn a good deal of it too. This

was the secret of Miss Goodwin's greatness: because she loved something

and revelled in it, she could bring us to delight in it too.

And when, in this summer of 1977, the holidays loomed and we were to

be liberated for ever from the tutelage of this awesome woman, we quite

spontaneously gave her three cheers. And she giggled and blushed like a

little girl -- before leading us, in a rigid and sober crocodile, all

the way to the college for the prizegiving.

I last saw Miss Goodwin during the General Election, nearly three

years ago. I came upon her at the end of the school day, ushering

another crocodile from the class. She greeted me with coy pleasure, and

we stood and talked for a little while. She was a little older, but had

changed very little, except that she now seemed disconcertingly small. I

reminded her of her past awesomeness: the chalk-throwing, and so on.

''Oh, but that was an act,'' she said, ''and it worked too, didn't it?''

She cannot be a day over 55. I now call on the authorities of this

land to send deputations, raise an army, and call on all the authority

of the state to restore Miss Margaret Goodwin to the classroom. How dare

she abdicate? Give her money, give her lands, give her a peerage if need

be -- for now, bereft of such a teacher, tremble for the future good of

Scotland.