Last
Friday, I took a trip over to the Western Isles to attend an event celebrating
134 years of Scalpay School – and to mark its closing at the end of this term.
There’s
something very strange about stepping over the threshold of your first ever classroom
after an absence of nearly forty years. Structurally, the room looked just the
same. The colours are brighter now (yellow, green and white instead of light
grey and dark grey) and every available wall space today is busy with words,
pictures, projects.
The school, pretty much as I remember it: http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.virtualhebrides.com/hebrides_images/scalpay_images/school/schoolfront.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.virtualhebrides.com/scalpay/scalpay/scalpay_location/villmain/school.htm&h=281&w=400&sz=99&tbnid=Yym5688niZedcM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=128&zoom=1&usg=__Tjll_xTvHTEeszQskHifBioAikw=&docid=S3ydQ7JoMxVWQM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZOHlT_XONfOX0QXO-_j3CA&ved=0CGMQ9QEwAA&dur=1222
The
walls of Mrs Cunningham’s ‘infants’ room’ were comparatively sparse in my day: an alphabet
chart; a tables chart; and not much else. There was a free-standing rolling
blackboard and a collection of dusters, now long gone. But it’s still the same
place. It actually smells the same: a nostalgic mix of pencil sharpenings, wax
crayons, plasticine.
I
don’t remember much about the year before starting school, or the year after
it, but I remember Primary 1 – the lessons, the visiting teachers, the songs,
the stories – with astonishing clarity. On my first day, I wore a tartan pinafore
and a white roll-neck jumper. I had a brown leather satchel with my name on it and
t-bar leather shoes. We drank milk in the canteen out of blue plastic beakers.
My father, headmaster at Scalpay School for nearly thirty years, rang the school
bell leaning out of the staffroom window.
Outside
of school, we had a lot of physical freedom and knew our island territory well.
The slippery timbers under the pier at low tide made excellent gymnastic beams.
Just as well my mother never knew. The doorways of the telephone exchange and
the school canteen were the best shelters when it pelted with rain. We pulled
off dramatic rescues too. A seagull with a broken wing, a cat locked inside an
empty house. We were mobile on bikes and on foot, and later, in cars fitted out
with speakers and cassette players. Brillo’s Mini Clubman. Donny Mossy’s red
Renault. We congregated around the tiny island shops. Not to buy anything, just
to socialise.
Last
week, as we drove around the island, I noticed all those things you forget when
you’re away. The wrecks of old ships and herring stations still holding out
against the elements. The way families with the same surname colonised
particular spots on the island. How practically every house in Scalpay is within
a stone’s throw – or a shout – of the ocean.
Scalpay
occupies a large room in my house of memories. A high-ceilinged airy room with
tall windows. Four rows of wooden desks, a disused inkwell still in place in
the top right-hand corner of each one. This is where I learned to read, to
write, to count. To figure things out.
So how about you? Good memories or bad? Feel free to comment.
