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.
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