Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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      Childhood Writing and Mr Meikle

      This story is not fiction, for the dream occurred to me, though I admit adding to the end more poets than I recalled upon waking. I also imagined the last reparteé with Archie Hind. It came last in my book Ten Tales Tall and True in 1993, published by Bloomsbury, one of 13 tales. The title page said, “This book contains more tales than 10, so the title is a tall tale too. I would spoil the book if I shortened that, spoil the title if I made it true.” Mr Meikle did not live to see the book but I read him the story before he died and drew his portrait, to place as a vignette on the last page. He was pleased about that. I am glad it has the same place here. This was my first book to be type-set by a friend living in Glasgow, Donald Saunders.

      AT THE AGE OF FIVE I SAT in a room made and furnished by folk I never met and had never heard of me. Here, in a crowd of nearly forty strangers, I remained six hours a day and five days a week for many years, being ordered about by a much bigger, older stranger who found me no more interesting than the rest. Luckily the prison was well stocked with pencils and our warder (a woman) wanted us to use them. One day she asked us what we thought were good things to write poems about. The four or five with opinions on the matter (I was one of them) called out suggestions which she wrote down on the blackboard:-

       A FAIRYA MUSHROOMSOME GRASSPINE NEEDLESA TINY STONE

      We thought these things poetic because the verses in our school-books mostly dealt with small, innocuous items. The teacher now asked everyone in the class to write their own verses about one or more of these items. With ease, speed, hardly any intelligent thought I wrote this:-

       A fairy on a mushroom,sewing with some grass,and a pine-tree needle,for the time to pass.Soon the grass it withered,The needle broke away,She sat down on a tiny stone,And wept for half the day.

      The teacher read this aloud to the class, pointing out that I had not only used every item on the list, I had used them in the order of listing. While writing the verses I had been excited by my mastery of the materials. I now felt extraordinarily interesting. Most people become writers by degrees. From me, in an instant, all effort to become anything else dropped like a discarded overcoat. I never abandoned verse but came to spend more time writing prose – small harmless items interested me less than prehistoric monsters, Roman arenas, volcanoes, cruel queens and life on other planets. I aimed to write a novel in which all these would be met and dominated by me, a boy from Glasgow. I wanted to get it written and published when I was twelve, but failed. Each time I wrote some opening sentences I saw they were the work of a child. The only works I managed to finish were short compositions on subjects set by the teacher. She was not the international audience I wanted, but better than nobody.

      At the age of twelve I entered Whitehill Senior Secondary School, a plain late 19th-century building of the same height and red sandstone as adjacent tenements, but more menacing. The playgrounds were walled and fenced like prison exercise yards: the windows, though huge, were disproportionately narrow, with sills deliberately designed to be far above our heads when we sat down. Half of what we studied there impressed me as gloomily as the building. Instead of one teacher I had eight a week, often six a day, and half of them treated me as an obstinate idiot. They had to treat me as an idiot. Compound interests, sines, cosines, Latin declensions, tables of elements tasted to my mind like sawdust in my mouth: those who dished it out expected me to swallow while an almost bodily instinct urged me to vomit. I did neither. My body put on an obedient, hypocritical act while my mind dodged out through imaginary doors. In this I was like many other schoolboys, perhaps most others. Nearly all of us kept magazines of popular adventure serials under our school books and when possible stuck our faces into The Rover, Hotspur, Wizard and highly coloured American comics, then new to Britain, in which the proportion of print to pictorial matter was astonishingly small. Only the extent of my addiction to fictional worlds was worse than normal, being magnified into mania by inability to enjoy much else. I was too clumsily fearful to enjoy football and mix with girls, though women and brave actions were what I most wanted. Since poems, plays and novels often deal with these I easily swallowed the fictions urged on us by the teachers of English, though the authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walter Scott) were far less easily digested than The Rover etc.

      Mr Meikle was my English teacher and managed the school magazine. I met him when I was thirteen. He became my first editor and publisher, and a year or two later, by putting me in charge of the magazine’s literary and artistic pages, enabled me to edit and publish myself. There must have been times when he gave me advice and directions, but these were offered so tactfully that I cannot remember them: I was only aware of freedom and opportunity. Quiet courtesy, sympathy and knowledge are chiefly what I recall of him, and a theatricality so mild that few of us saw it as such, though it probably eased his dealings with those inclined to mistake his politeness for weakness. I will try to describe him more exactly.