“That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Lessons from the Clydeside
Let me set the record straight. I was born on the Clydeside in the late fifties, where I woke each morning to the sound of angry hammers and neurotic welding torches; sounds that helped build massive vessels destined to sail the seven seas.
I left school at St Gerard’s Senior Secondary in Govan, Glasgow, at fourteen—probably—but I poked my nose back in occasionally, just to make sure I got my Leaving Certificate, because as far as I knew you didn’t get a job without one. To my knowledge, no one in my class ever went on to win a Nobel Prize for literature, peace, science or anything else. I suppose in today’s world we’d be called losers.
It wasn’t that we weren’t bright. It was that high school was chaotic. One year we broke for summer and returned for third year only to discover, after the holidays, that every teacher had been replaced. It was traumatic, like losing a family overnight.
I missed Mr A… , who taught us how to make fishing rods and took us fishing in the Clydebank canal, where the goldfish were enormous thanks to the warm water from the local Singer factories. And by the way, every man and his dog owned a Singer sewing machine back then, we weren’t a holy nation.
There was also the music teacher who made me feel Scandinavian while he played and explained The Hall of the Mountain King. And the English teacher who never really taught us English at all, but read to us Rob Roy, Treasure Island and Ivanhoe.
But I digress. What I’m trying to say is this: we yearned for learning—just not in the way it was meant to be delivered.
