Alfred. ‘Whether you believe in original sin or believe in evolution, you can’t deny there’s wickedness and stupidity in the world.’
‘You know that and I know that,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘But the top brass won’t admit it. They’ve never worked nine to four, Monday to Friday in a classroom. They talk as if there was only a shower of little Newtons and Einsteins who haven’t had a fair chance because you didn’t teach them right.’ (pp. 543–4)
Miss Seymour, ‘airy-mannered, brisk-moving, swift- speaking and fully fashionable’, sums it all up:
‘Spelling and grammar don’t matter … just as long as they write something. Creative activity, that’s what counts … What you see there is what the inspectors want. This is the day of the child- dominated classroom.’ (pp. 545–6)
It is in this strange world that Mr Alfred is drowning:
Mr Alfred didn’t like it. He wanted to teach. But nobody wanted to learn. He knew it was his job to make them. He tried. He failed. It was like talking into a phone with nobody at the other end. (p. 543)
It is not only Mr Alfred who illustrates the challenges of teaching. Mr Daunders, headteacher in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, is another well-sketched character. Like Percy Phinn, Mr Daunders too wants ‘peace and quiet to sit in the sun and read’ (p. 167). He spends much time lamenting his fate:
… he sighed at the destiny that had condemned him to be a headmaster in a small primary school in one of Glasgow’s wild-life reservations, a pocket of vandalism, a pool of iniquity. (p. 68)
The school in Tulip Lane provides centre stage for the action of The Boy Who Wanted Peace; here Percy’s late father had been janitor and his mother was a cleaner; in its basement, among the old Sunshine Readers and boxes of stage props, is concealed the robbers’ loot; Percy himself is a former pupil and his gang are pupils of the school. Similarly in Mr Alfred M.A., Collinsburn Comprehensive, Waterholm Comprehensive, and the vandalised annexe of Winchgate Primary are key locations. It is no exaggeration to say that the smells of childhood – of school corridors, playgrounds and classrooms – haunt and pervade the pages of two of these three books.
It is maybe not entirely surprising that one of the young George Friel’s literary heroes was James Joyce. Appropriately enough for a son of first-generation Donegal emigrant parents, George’s notebook sketches indicate plans to write a Glasgow version of Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), and in some respects his short stories of the 1930s stand comparison with Joyce’s classic collection. In the novels represented in this publication, there are explicit references to Finnegans Wake (1939) in Grace and Miss Partridge; and to Stephen Dedalus in Mr Alfred M.A., as well as a quote by Mr Alfred – he ‘had silence and exile, but no cunning’ – from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). And at the end of Mr Alfred’s story, the scene in the mental hospital with the two psychiatrists is straight out of the work of another James Joyce fan – Samuel Beckett. It is to the work of these writers that George Friel’s fiction seems most akin, rather than to that of his Scottish contemporaries.
Some of the wordplay of Friel’s writing echoes Joyce and Beckett in its economy and exactness, and occasionally in its poetry:
Still, with his usual politeness he answered insincerely, or with his usual insincerity he answered politely. (p. 392)
A ruffled hen laying a complaint and making a song about it. (p. 406)
Tordoch … became a waste land of bracken and nettles surrounded by a chemical factory, gasworks, a railway workshop and slaghills. At that point the town council took it over for a slum-clearance scheme. They built a barrack of tenements with the best of plumbing and all mod cons and expected a new and higher form of civilisation to flare up by spontaneous combustion. (p. 408)
[Gerald Provan] grinned, hands in the pockets of his tightarsed jeans, kicking the kerb, radiant with the insolence of an antimath idling out his last term at school. (p. 414)
Wanting to kiss Rose. Rose upon the rood of time. Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days. Rose of the world, Rose of peace. Far off, most secret and inviolate Rose. (p. 468)
The linguistic distinction of Friel’s writing is consistent. Anyone picking up Mr Alfred M.A. is duly warned to be on the alert in the two pages of the book’s opening chapter:
She had always to be protecting [her son] from the malice of the world. (p. 387)
The anapaests of his bawling were hammered out by his punches. (p. 388)
… confounding her mother and her brother in one strabismic glare. (p. 388)
Friel can also be linguistically jocular, as when he describes the thug Gerald Provan in the nice zeugma ‘wearing new jeans and an old smirk’ (p. 456), or the educational spokesperson (English, of course) ‘leaving no stone unturned till she nips us in the bud’ (p. 439). Or:
He said he was sick and tired of all the feuding and fighting that was going on in the school and he was determined to stamp it out. He nearly said with a firm hand. (p. 429)
As one of the characters points out regarding Mr Alfred: ‘Half the things he said were quotations’ (p. 429). This is a very Joycean tendency, and can be both effective and amusing: ‘… there was a breathless hush in the lane that night and Mr Alfred knew his moment had come. Cowan lunged, Turnbull dodged, and Mr Alfred spoke out loud and clear’ (pp. 415–16).
The downside of Friel’s linguistic interests is most apparent in Mr Alfred M.A. It is in this work that he seems to flaunt obscure words in a manner at once ponderous and irritating, a point that was taken up by Auberon Waugh. So we have ‘He sprawled raniform’, ‘invulting arms’, ‘a newly acquired claudication’, ‘aposiopesis’, ‘palaestra’, ‘silent catatropia’, ‘nuzzer’, ‘the gamekeeper’s tetragrams’ (the famous four-letter words in D. H. Lawrence’s most notorious fiction), ‘the autochthonous tribes’, ‘imbibitions’, ‘a mammose wench … flushed with hebetic vulgarity’, ‘a perlustration of the city’, ‘a nuchal smack and an auricular threat’; and many more. All these words and phrases are appropriately defined in the Shorter Oxford; but it seems a pity to have to stop and look it up quite so frequently. Arguably, this is a sub-Joycean feature of George Friel’s writing style.
A more topical aspect of Friel’s writing style is his pioneering effort to capture in print the speech patterns of Glasgow demotic. In his use of ‘mamurrer’ (= my mother), ‘Feudcleanyurears’ (= if you’d clean your ears), ‘Hoosnagang’ (= who’s in a gang), Friel is a precursor of Tom Leonard, Stephen Mulrine, Bill Keys, Adam Mac- Naughtan, Margaret Hamilton and many later writers. Friel had a good ear for vernacular speech, and might well have made a reliable contributor to Michael Munro’s The Patter: A Guide to Current Glasgow Usage (1985). He also put down one or two interesting markers anent the use of Scots as opposed to standard English in schools. When, in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, the young Garson is interviewed by the headteacher about an insult which had provoked a fight with Savage,
… he couldn’t use Savage’s words. He answered in the book-English a bright Scots schoolboy uses when he talks respectfully to his teachers. ‘Heaccused my mother of eloping with a Negro,’ he said. (p. 102)
Savage had actually said something slightly different: ‘Yer maw ran awa’ wi’ a darkie’ (p. 87). Similarly, in Mr Alfred M.A., when the teacher grabs
