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My School Years
The burgh of Earlsferry didn't have a grade school so all the Earlsferry children went to school at the neighboring burgh of Elie. My school years were a wonderful time in my life. That is, except for the first week. On the first day my parents had dressed me up in a complete new outfit. New black leather boots, heavy knee length woolen stockings, knee length woolen trousers, new shirt, a tie that strangled me and a woolen jacket. As each stiff new garment went on I became greatly alarmed as my temperature and my temper rose. By the time I was outfitted I was boiling and terrified. All my life I'd roamed free. Free as the wind. All summer long I ran barefoot. I'd no need or use for shoes. At low tide I could run over the slippery tangles, the seaweeds and the barnacle covered rocks. And I don't mean slowly. I was so sure footed in my bare feet that in this element I was a gazelle and I never felt cold. Even when I got soaking wet from the sea. And now this. Dressed up to kill like a tailor's shop window dummy. No, I wasn't going to school. If this is what it took, I wanted none of it. School must be an awful and terrible place if this is what it took to go there. Nobody was going to do this to me. I started to tear off the horrible clothes I was wearing. At this, for the first time, my parents laid down the law. You're going to school and you're going respectable. It became a tug of war. I yelled, screamed, howled, kicked and squirmed. I did everything I knew to escape but my father had a stranglehold on my collar. It was a mile to school. More than being frog-marched I was dragged in the gutter, bawling, howling, snarling and kicking all the way. I don't remember any more of that day but I'm sure I was an awful handful for my teacher, Miss Mowat. When my parents finally arrived to pick me up, I immediately escaped, fled home, threw off my awful clothes and sought refuge down in the rocks. I remember the second day was almost a repeat of the first. Slowly, I gave in. I give full credit for that to Miss Mowat. It didn't happen all at once but within three months I was running to get to her class. As a young boy and right in to my teen years I never walked. Everywhere I went, I ran. Soon, each day, I was making two, two mile round trips between home and school in record time.
I remember Miss Mowat's amazement when she discovered that I knew how to count and knew intervals of time. This was all due to the Elie Lighthouse. Each night I went to sleep counting the flashes of the lighthouse as the rotating beam reflected on to my bedroom ceiling. I was sorry when my two years with Miss Mowat ended as she'd won me over to the point that I'd become teacher's pet.
After Miss Mowat came Annie Don. She was a different proposition. She ruled with an iron rod. None of this dangling the carrot stuff for her. She believed in the hammer. No boy or girl was going to get away from her without everything she taught being thoroughly pounded in.
In addition to the scholastic subjects, Mr. Harrison, who was the headmaster, ( and succeeding him Mr. Beveridge) taught and gave us a love for gardening. In the thirties the Elie School had quite a large piece of garden ground that was separated from the golf course by a stone wall. All children participated in the making and the upkeep of the garden. A wooden shed housed all of our garden tools. On the walls we espaliered fruit trees and each of the school year classes had it's rectangular vegetable garden plot. We drew a diagram of the plot on paper and voted on what we would grow. We calculated how many rows of this and that we'd grow and how many seeds we'd need. As well as being great fun it was a valuable learning experience. At the end of the school year we harvested, divided up and took home the fruits of our labors.
The end of each school year was marked by Prize Giving Day. A table was set up on the golf course right behind the school. It got loaded with the many beautiful books that were presented for this or that achievement. Chairs were set out on the grass to seat all from the village who came for the event. The last and final prize that I won was the Moncrieff Prize. It was for the boy most likely to --- something or other. Helen Greig, who'd been my main competitor all these years at Elie School, won the prize as the girl most likely to ----
And so it was on to The Waid Academy
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The Waid Academy Each day going to the Waid Academy was a great adventure as we traveled from Elie to Anstruther on the East of Fife, coastal railway. A great belch of smoke signaled the arrival of the steam engine train as it emerged from the tunnel to stop at the Elie railway platform. The train had a driver and a fireman, whose job it was to shovel coal into the boiler's firebox. These pair understood boys. Each day from a different village along the way two boys were invited to ride the footplate and be firemen for the day. Often our clean shirts were coal smudged by the time the train arrived at Anstruther. The train made stops at St. Monance and Pittenweem.
At Waid, Tom Croal was gym teacher. Miss Nisbet( Nizzy), taught French. Next room to her was Miss (Granny) Sangster who taught German. Mr. (Bully) Allen taught Math in general. Next came Jackie White, who taught higher Math. Jack (Chuck) Liston and George Napier both taught Physics Science and Chemistry. These were my favorite classes, especially on the days that we pulled apart Magdeburg hemispheres or fired up Bunsen burners to make glass tube thermometers and thirty inch long mercury barometers. Mr. (Tammy) Young, at the top of the stair, taught Latin. Mr. Gourdie taught Geography. Mr. Sutherland taught Art, Miss (Annie) Duncan taught History. Alistair Chrichton taught English as also did Mr. (Bill) Ferrier. Mr. (Danny) Blair taught Music and was responsible for the first thing in the morning prayer session. Mr. (Cocky) Robin taught machine drawing and woodworking. Mr. Thompson (Sharky) was the Rector (principal) of the school. ( Our use of first names and nicknames were truly all words of endearment.)
Bill Ferrier was every bit an artist as was Vermeer only instead of using paint brush and canvas to preserve his creativity and artistry Bill Ferrier used words. His pupils were his canvas. A picture is worth a thousand words but not when it applies to Bill Ferriers artistry. It's a paradox as I was just about to write, Words just can't describe how Bill Ferrier put meaning into words. That's my shortcoming. Be that as it may, the four years that I had the privilege to be tutored by him are just as alive in me today at 80 as when I was 15. The visuality and pathos he put into Burns' observation of, the wee cowrin timrous beastie; the gleam in the eyes of the parents in, the Cotters Saturday night; the solitude of Wordsworth's, I wandered lonely as a cloud; the wailing of the wind across the mere in The Death of King Arthur; Portia's, The quality of mercy is not strain'd---; the shivering cold that we actually felt as he intoned,
St. Agnes' Eve, Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl for all it's feathers was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold : Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censor old Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
Mr. Ferrier involved and enlightened us as he painted his portraits of many hundreds of such passages. Like me I'm sure that all of his pupils who are now in our 80's still remember him vividly and see him as he adjusted and looked over the top of his glasses as he exposed us to yet another of his pearls of wisdom. I defy any artist's painting to come anywhere close to the mystique of the invisible portraits that Bill Ferrier painted.
Chuck Liston our science teacher was also our rugby coach. He knew just how to get the most and the best out of us. I never made the first fifteen but several times I was good enough to captain the second team.
1941 Waid Rugby Team First XV Second from the right in the back row is Elie's Bert Stewart.
I really loved all of my years at the Waid. They were great. I can't say enough about these great teachers. They brought to life the poets of the past and the authors of the classics. They gave meaning to the teachings, the values and the wisdom of our predecessors. They instilled relevance to all of their subject specialties. To this day I remember most of what I was taught. The one thing that I most got from the Waid is that black is black, white is white. Grey is the domain of thinking, speculating and believing. When all's said and done you either know or you do not know. You can speculate, believe and think all you want to but a skyscraper (or any other process of thought) must be built from bedrock on up upon a solid series of factual steps of information. The organization of knowledge BIF (Basis In Fact).
Many years later BIF was brought home to me when one day I was invited to visit the Boeing Airplane Plant. At that time the 747 was just a number. There on the runway sat the, as yet not flown, prototype. It dwarfed every other airplane I'd ever seen. I was awestruck. For its day it was monstrous. How could such a behemoth get off the ground? I made the mistake of asking my host, "Do you really think it will fly? Do you really believe it will get off the ground?" He looked me straight in the eye and with a somewhat jaundiced look he gave me an emphatic, NO. I don't "think" it will fly nor do I "believe" it will get off the ground.
I'll tell you this, when it rolls along the runway for the first time we at Boeing "know" precisely how many feet it will travel before it lifts off. We "know" how much lift is generated from each square foot of wing. We "know" its weight. We "know" the thrust of the engines. We "know" what the drag is. No sloppy speculating, thinking, hoping and believing with us. At Boeing we "know". We "know" exactly what we do.
In all seriousness, he asked, "Would you want to fly on anyone's airplane whose engineers "thought" it would fly?" He made his point. BIF - Shades of the Waid. |
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