his mother derided him. ‘Playing wi’ a lot o’ weans and ye call yourself Moses!’
‘They’re not weans,’ he shouted. ‘They’re innocent children. And Christ has said unless ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’
‘Oh, it’s Christ now, is it?’ cried his baffled mother. ‘You’d gar anybody grue so you would the way you talk. Moses! Christ!’
She returned to the dishes in the basin in the sink.
At that point in their friendly discussion he banged out of the house, scampered down the three storeys to the close, went into the littered smelly street and walked across the city to the University. He liked passing through the Main Entrance in University Avenue. He felt he was entering the land he should have inherited. He often walked through the University to comfort himself. When he crossed the Arts Quadrangle and approached the Bute Hall he felt happier and lighter. All his grudges dropped from him. He was where he ought to be. If the girl in the library could see him now she would think he was a student all right. A university student, that was the life.
Bach’s music didn’t get over to him, but he was pleased to be sitting there while the choir and orchestra went through it. His attention drifted peacefully. Music always made his mind wander. That was why he liked to go to orchestral concerts. He felt liberated. So while the sopranos got lost in ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ he plunged contentedly through the jungle of his grievances.
All he wanted was peace, peace and quiet, and he couldn’t get it. He wanted to be free from the need to earn his living so that he could be a poet like Shelley or make documentary films like Peter Scott or be a novelist like Tolstoy or even a television personality. He knew he had other talents too. He had helped to prepare and move the scenery when the Drew Rowan Youth Club put on a pantomime, and he enjoyed being back-stage. He knew he had a good sense of the theatre. He could produce plays, or he could travel round the world with a cinecamera and do a series about strange places and peculiar peoples. There was nothing hard in what David Atten- borough did. Anybody could do it. All you needed was money. Anything was possible if you had the money to give you the leisure to do it. He could be an authority on modern art. Nobody else in Packing and Dispatch had read the amount of stuff he had read on Picasso and Henry Moore. Shelley and Wordsworth had enough money to write poetry without having to work as well. If they had been a janitor’s son like him they wouldn’t have had the chance. If he had the money he could buy a house on some lonely part of the coast in Devon or Cornwall, and it would be peaceful enough there to be a poet. To be a poet you had to see things as children saw them, all fresh and unspoilt, like the smell of apples or the colour of the sky when the sun was setting behind the Campsies in summer or the touch of a cat’s fur or the taste of a glass of milk and a buttered roll. And because he liked to be with kids and listen to them blether so that he could keep roots in the world of his childhood people laughed at him. They said he was soft.
They had said he was soft since the first day he went to school. He blamed it on his name. He hated it for years. Percy was a sloppy name. It was too uncommon in the tenements, too Kelvinside, too English, to get respect. It was worst in the qualifying class, where even the teacher made jokes about it. She kept on saying he was slow in arithmetic and backward in reading and poor at spelling and hopeless at composition. Her daily crack was to tell him he must persevere.
‘Ah, here’s Percy again,’ she said to the class every day when those with no sums right lined up for the strap. ‘He tries very hard. He’s very trying, is our Percy. It’s a fine old English name, Percy. So is Vere.’
She raised his hand a little higher, straightened his palm, and addressed him as she strapped him.
‘Well, Percy, you must Percy Vere. That’s all.’
And every day the boys and girls preparing for the eleven-plus examination laughed at the same joke and laughed at him. It was the girls’ laughter hurt him most. It fell from Heaven like the merriment of angels looking down on the antics of a clod-hopper who couldn’t get his big feet out of the mud. He grew sullen at Miss Elginbrod’s daily joke and one bright morning in May he challenged her. The room was stuffy in the early sun. Miss Elginbrod always kept the windows closed because she disliked draughts. His head was hot and he didn’t know what the sums were about. It was trains one minute and marbles the next, then it was rolls of cloth, then it was tons and quarts. One minute she was saying you add the speeds, then she was saying you subtract them. She kept on hopping about. You were just beginning to think you were bringing pounds to pennies when she made you bring pounds to ounces. She never gave you peace. So for the thousandth time he had only two sums finished out of the five, both wrong, and for the thousandth time she shrugged over him.
‘Well, Percy, you’ve just got to persevere, that’s all.’
He faced her, rather round-shouldered because of his height. Even then he was much taller than other boys of his age, and it made him look gawky.
‘Please, miss,’ he said, and then his nerve failed.
‘Yes?’ said Miss Elginbrod, looking at him with patronizing patience, swinging the strap in a practice smack. ‘Is there something you don’t understand?’
Her question gave him back his determination to oppose her.
‘I don’t understand why you call me Percy Vere. My name isn’t Percy Vere, it’s Percy Phinn.’
An earthquake unpredicted by the eight o’clock weather forecast shook the class. A cyclone of laughter lifted the roof and a tornado of girlish screams whipped the walls apart. He felt himself naked to the wind and weather when he had expected to stand there proud and respected in an awed silence. He was frightened. There was never a mockery like this, clawing at him on all sides and tearing him apart to eat him up.
For causing a disturbance in the class Miss Elginbrod gave him three hard ones with her strap, not the thin one she always had in her hand but the thick one she kept away at the back of her desk out of sight until she was really angry. And when she had done that she said he had been insolent, and gave him another three.
When he was reborn at sixteen he looked back on his past life and blamed Miss Elginbrod for his failure in the examination. She had discouraged him. She ought to have seen he was a case of late development like Sir Winston Churchill. She ought to have seen his true merit and given him love and understanding. She wasn’t fit to be a teacher. People like her would have failed to see Shelley’s gifts when he was a boy at school. She had never even told him he had the same name as Shelley. She just made a joke of it. That proved she was so ignorant she didn’t know Shelley’s first name. He had to find it out for himself after he had left school. The discovery excited him. He stopped hating his name. He became proud of it. It made him something of a poet too. He read up on Shelley. In a biographical dictionary in the public library he found a sentence that he copied out and learned off by heart. ‘Percy was a boy of much sensibility, quick imagination, generous heart, and a refined type of beauty, blue-eyed and golden-haired.’ He hadn’t only the same name as Shelley, he had the same colour of eyes and the same colour of hair – though his mother said his hair was ‘like straw hinging oot a midden’. But his mother had no sensibility, no quick imagination. It was a mystery where his had come from. And he was a rebel too, just like Shelley. It was for being a rebel that Miss Elginbrod had given him six with her Lochgelly strap. Well, he would remember her, and when he was famous as a poet or a producer or an authority on modern art she would be ashamed of herself. But to get fame he would have to get leisure, and to get leisure he would have to get money. It always came back to money.
‘If only!’ he dreamed while the choir exulted in the Gloria. ‘If only I had enough money to live without having to go out to work every day. If only I had a private income
