News Time with Miss Gowdie
Outside the classroom, clouds hide the January sun. Through the steamed-up sash windows we see only greyness. Inside, the room is bright and buzzes with anticipation. Nobody is playing the clown, everybody is alert: we’re waiting for News time. In the silence as Miss Gowdie calls our names, we hear metal crates being stacked beside the radiator in the hall. When playtime comes, the milk will be nicely tepid. It won’t chill our stomachs, as we peel the foil off the bottles and make milky bubbles with our paper straws. But a lot has to happen before then.
Miss Gowdie finishes marking circles in her big blue register, and sends Monty the Minger to the office with it. Monty gets over excited at News time, and often wets himself where he sits. With luck he will get talking to his friend the Janitor, and we can enjoy ourselves in peace.
Now we sit, leaning forward, arms folded in the approved manner. Miss Gowdie snaps a fresh stick of chalk in half, and starts writing today’s date. We watch, willing on the chalk as she drags it into slow curls and loops. No sound but the clicks and soft scrapes as the words form. She makes commas with tails like tadpoles, and careful round dots. She finishes writing ‘News’, and turns round to face us.
“Who has News for us today?” she asks, and we all release our breath.
It is like waiting for the pictures to start, you never know what is going to happen. It might be sad, or funny, or serious, or scary. But you know you will be swept away out of your own ordinary world, into the exciting and peculiar lives of other people. Miss Gowdie is the best teacher in the world.
She chooses five people to come out to the front of the class. One of them is Billy, who sits beside me. What is Billy doing, volunteering? Billy and I never share our News with the class. We know our place in things: we’re the audience, not the performers. Even if Miss Gowdie asks us, “Billy, Hector, any News?” we just look down. I try to catch Billy’s eye but the show is already under way. Morag is dancing about in her little slippers, tossing her shiny hair from side to side.
“My Auntie sent me a new clasp. From America, look.”
She turns her head to the side, pulling her hair back off her face like a film star. The clasp is white, and shaped like a big flower. It holds her hair just above her ear.
Morag lets her hair go. Nobody else in the class has hair like it. We all watch it falling back into its place like a heavy black curtain.
“Very nice Morag,” says Miss Gowdie. There is no expression in her voice. Miss Gowdie’s hair is puffy and bits of it spring in front of her eyes when she is correcting your sums.
“Next,” says Miss Gowdie, “Donald.”
Donald says in a wee quiet voice, “My Nan died.”
“Oh Donald,” says Miss Gowdie, and our eyes watch her put an arm round him. “How are you feeling? Are you very upset? Do you want to tell us all about it?”
Donald doesn’t know how to begin. We’re not worried. We know Miss Gowdie will get the story out of him.
“Was your Nan ill?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Was she in the hospital?”
And, encouraged by Miss Gowdie, Donald tells us how his Nan lived with them, and dressed him and his brothers and sisters every morning, and made them their tea when they got home. Donald’s Mum had run away and left them when Donald was a baby. Now his Nan is in a box with the lid screwed on, and she is never coming back.
“And who’s going to look after you now?” asks Miss Gowdie, sympathetically, “Or will you and your brothers and sisters have to go into a home?”
We watch Donald manfully screw up the sides of his mouth and his forehead, but it is no good, the tears just run down his cheeks anyway, and the snot runs out of his nose. We watch it crawl down his lip. Miss Gowdie asks if he has a hanky, and sends him outside to wash his face. We sigh. It is better than the pictures.
It is good that Miss Gowdie asks so many questions. It is helpful if you can’t think of a lot to say. Because then, your story can turn out to be quite long, and you will have lots to write in your News Diary, and you will get a red star. It also makes it interesting for the class. Otherwise we might get bored listening to other people’s News.
Next it is Linda.
But before Linda can get started something awful happens. Miss Gowdie looks at her watch and sighs. “We’re fairly rattling through the News today. Hector,” she says, and my blood runs cold, “We’ll hear from you at the end.
The shock runs down the back of my hands and hits my finger-ends. My heart is thumping like the engine of an old lorry. What will I say? I am too hot, I can’t breathe. When the room comes back, Miss Gowdie is saying, “There was a fight in your house, Linda? Tell us.”
I try think of some News I could say. Something that’s not interesting. Something that will not lead to extra questions. Something that won’t tempt any kid to put their hand up and say, “That’s a lie, he doesn’t have a ...”
“My Da came home,” Linda announces, “and he was fighting my uncle Jim.”
The class have perked up, willing Miss Gowdie to draw out Linda’s story.
“Does anybody have a good question for Linda?” she asks.
Half the class raise their hands, myself among them. I have worked out that if there are lots of questions for Linda, my turn at the front might never come.
“What were they fighting with?”
“My Da had a sword,” says Linda to appreciative gasps. I think of Errol Flynn fighting his way up the wooden stair in Linda’s council house, swinging from the landing light. I wonder if I could say I fell down the stair – no, too interesting.
Linda goes on, “And my uncle Jim punched my Da on the face and told him, What are you doing out, you --- Miss Gowdie, I don’t want to say the word.”
“Was it a word beginning with B, Linda?”
“No Miss. It started with a M.” We look at each other. Nobody has a clue. How fantastic – a new swear word! We will get it out of Linda later. What a lot we are learning today. For my News, I could say, ‘I learned a new word.’ And then refuse to say it.
“You can whisper it to me later Linda. On you go. Your uncle Jim punched your Dad, and asked him what he was doing there. What happened then?”
“My Ma got the sword off them and hid it in the coal bunker. And they were fighting out in the lobby and they broke the mirror. It was all blood. And I found a tooth on the floor.”
I am impressed. I can see it all – the head thudding into its reflection, the tooth flying out, the jagged bits of mirror – seven years’ bad luck -- the pools of blood. What if I said I broke a mirror? Cut myself ? Maybe I could say I was at the dentist. Or I could say I lost a tooth and the tooth fairy came. Fat chance. And they’d want to see the evidence.
“Who won the fight?” asks Sandra.
“My Ma chucked them both out of the house,” says Linda. “And I helped my Ma tidy up and we made popcorn. And I got to sleep in my Ma’s bed. And they never came home all night.”
“Threw, not chucked,” says Miss Gowdie. “Any more questions?”
“Where did your Dad come out of?” is the one I’m thinking of, but I ask instead, “What were they fighting about?”
“Uncle Jim put all my Dad’s goldfish down the toilet,” Linda explains. We all want to know more, specially me. But Miss Gowdie has had enough.
“Billy,” she says.
He looks nervous, but determined. What can he have to say? I have read his News diary. He writes the same sentence in it every day, ‘I was playing,’ (though on the first page it actually says ‘I saw plang.’) On the blank page opposite his News, he always draws himself standing to attention, a stick boy with a fat head and a blue scribble on his chest.
Sometimes Miss Gowdie lifts his book and says, “What were you playing?” and she writes in more for him to copy, like, ‘I was playing with my gun’, or ‘I was playing in the park’. Sometimes I help him add the extra bits. It is all lies, Billy doesn’t have any toys and nobody plays with him, you see him just standing around after school, leaning on fences and walls. He doesn’t even get bullied. He’s not worth the bother.
At least my News pages are all different. ‘My Mum made a currant cake but it did not rise’ – I got that one out of a book, ‘The Woman’s Weekly’. ‘My big brother helped me build a fort’ – that was in a library book. Catch my big brother helping anybody. All he does is go out on jobs with my uncle and get drunk, and come home and torment me and smash the place up. One time he fell asleep with his boots on and I tied his laces together and when he got up he crashed to the ground trying to stand up, it was brilliant. I had to run away and hide out in the woods while he was after me. It was worth it, it was the best thing I ever saw.
I make up all my News stories. This is called Fiction. I am practising to be a writer when I grow up. I usually steal somebody else’s News and say it happened to me. But you have to choose the right News: not, ‘My Auntie is getting married ‘, or ‘My family is moving to England’. If you put that, Miss Gowdie will always be asking you about it and you will have to keep making up stuff and remembering what you said. Fiction is hard.
And suddenly, I am inspired. I will say I was playing with Billy in the park. We were playing cowboys. Billy won’t deny it, nobody else will care if it is true, and I can make up any details I like. I examine my plan from all angles, it seems OK. I relax, lean back in my seat.
Billy just stands there, not knowing how to begin speaking to so many people. But Miss Gowdie will make him. Standing up in front of everybody and not breaking under tough questioning, that is an important skill we learn in Miss Gowdie’s class. We are learning useful things as well as interesting things.
“What’s your News, Billy?” says Miss Gowdie.
Forty sets of eyes are fixed on him. You can almost see him wilting. What is he doing out there? Will he come out with “I was playing”, or will he lose his nerve and bolt for the door? I see his terrified eyes return to their usual blank stare, and he takes a breath.
“A ghost was in my kitchen,” he says.
I give a snort of laughter. I can’t help it, it’s just the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. The rest of the class join in, but they don’t know why they’re laughing, they haven’t seen Billy’s News book, filled with, ‘I was playing football’, ‘I was playing cowboys’. Billy is laughing too because everyone else is. Even Miss Gowdie is laughing. Billy has gone bright red, is squirming like a boy who needs the toilet, and won’t say another word. I’ll ask him about this afterwards. Does he really think he saw a ghost? Or is Billy going for a career in Fiction too?
James is last in the line, he always comes out for News even when he doesn’t have any, he tells us in the most self-important voice what he had for dinner, what his mum said to him yesterday, and what he said back to her. You can hear the groans starting up all around when he opens his mouth. But just when you think you know what is coming next, News time hits you with a surprise punch. James delivers it.
“My big sister is up the duff and she is having a wean and our whole family is going bananas and it is a secret.”
“If it is a secret you’d better not tell us any more,” says Miss Gowdie, but James has said more than enough. The room is in an uproar.
“Hector,” shouts Miss Gowdie, and I scramble out and say my piece about playing with Billy. I could have said, ‘A space ship landed in our garden and aliens came and had their tea with us’. Nobody is the least bit interested, they are talking about James’ big sister, and asking him which sister it is, the horrible one or the other one.
That is the end of News time. Miss Gowdie claps her hands and shouts, “Quiet! Settle down! No talking! News diaries out, take a new page, write today’s date.” It takes her a while, but at last there is silence. She folds her arms and leans back on her desk, waiting for somebody to ask for a word to be spelled on the board. Before her, our bent heads, grunting and tongue-twisting with the effort of making thoughts visible on blank paper.
Billy writes ‘I was a gots’. Everybody else writes, ‘James’s big sister is having a baby, but which one?’ Miss Gowdie, mindful of Parents’ night when our News books will go on display, is shouting, “Write your own News, not somebody else’s!” We all draw pictures of babies. And then it is Milk time. After that we put our wellies on and go outside in the freezing mist and eat our play-pieces.
The playground is full of children stamping the slush into slush dams and slush rivers. We corner James against a wall. We soon get the whole story out of him. His sister is in first year at Big school. It is the bad sister, not the other one. It means she will be somebody’s mum but she is too young to get married, so they will take the baby off her and it will be a Dopted. She would be a good mum, she is scary, and good at shouting. She is in a gang and the police are never away from James’ door because of her.
At lunchtime James’s sister and two big boys came into our school playground, looking for James. We all stared, trying to see if she had a fat belly under her coat, but she just looked the same as always, horrible and scary. “What are youse piggin’ lookin’ at,” she shouted at us. We all pretended not to be looking.
They found James and we listened to the screaming from a safe distance. First it was James’s sister doing the screaming. Then it was James.
We took James to the school Nurse. We couldn’t tell if he was badly hurt because he was making so much noise and a lot of him was covered in blood. He never came back to school. He went to live with his auntie, and that was the last we ever saw of him.
When television entered our lives, we watched the News hopefully. Alas, Lord Reith’s standards were not those of Miss Gowdie. We soon got tired of News that was boring, incomprehensible, and not about people we knew. It was many years later that News and Entertainment came to mean the same thing.
I have one photo from those far-off days, black and white naturally. Miss Gowdie looks out of it, respectable, dull-looking. But my memories her are all in colour. For me, she lights up the dim grey past. Had she been born later, with her firm grasp of what the public wants, she would surely have been running her own News Channel.
