My teacher was a Miss Herron, Miss Meta Herron, and when I saw her for the first time I wondered if I was the only one to notice how apposite her name was, for she had these long pipe-cleaner legs sheathed in beige-coloured lisle, while her head was kept cocked semi-permanently sideways as if on the lookout for something to spear with that great bony neb of hers. She wore rimless spectacles which she was forever polishing with a tiny, lace-edged hanky delicately looped through her watch-strap.
I remember thinking at the time that it had to be the very acme of elegance, that little wisp of femininity so daintily trapped there. But then what did I know? And, before I leave the subject, she always smelt of essence of violets.
"Well, Hugo," she said eyeing me up that first day, "I sincerely hope you're not going to turn out to be a chip off the family block. I've had four Dinsmores in this class at one time or another and all, without exception, have given me nothing but heartache. I must say you don't look the tiniest bit like any of them, so that may be a good sign. Do you know your ABCs? Your multiplication tables? Ah, well," she sighed, "I suppose that's just a little too much to expect."
Head lowered to the lid of the desk in front of me, I concentrated on the initials carved there, while the rest of the class, those great overgrown gawks from the labourers' cottages, stared open-mouthed.
"Well?"
But I refused to provide an answer to such a question. Of course I knew the alphabet, for heaven's sake! Already I could read better than the rest of that lot at Larkhill put together, and in my head do long division, decimals, not to mention a smattering of algebra. Sarcastic, insensitive, plain woman, already I despised her.
"So," she said, "it seems we have a dummy in the class as well as a. . . " hesitating over that word, the one I would never allow myself to utter in case of scalding my tongue, even though, dear knows, I'd heard it enough times from others' lips.
But the damage had been done, and from that point on undiluted hatred coloured everything I did for her. Which was the bare minimum to ease me through each day in her class. I made a vow to never give her the satisfaction of either punishing or rewarding me, and so I set myself to seek out her weaknesses. Presiding up there behind her tidy table with those little treasures of hers spread in front of her like a line of defence against the rest of us hemmed in by the scaly, metal legs of our baby desks, she may well have imagined she had all the advantages and none of the shortcomings, but she had made a grave error in underestimating Hugo Dinsmore.
Master Hugo Dinsmore, if you don't mind. Which brings me to another thing, for when Miss Meta Herron of Belmont, as she was always so fond of reminding us - as if it was somewhere in the Home Counties, for God's sake, and not some dreary Belfast outer suburb - when she disparaged my relatives in that way I felt the stirring of something which I never would have believed possible. Without realising it I had become infected with clan loyalty. Insulting the family name meant she was insulting me.
I have to say it was a shocking revelation, yet inspirational, too. There we were out at Larkhill living in the way that we did as if behind a moat or a high wall - well, we were, we were - different from other people, not merely because of our haircuts and khaki uniforms, but also because we smelt. Yes, we did. Other children refused to sit beside us in a double desk because of it and so, almost by necessity, we banded together. For the very first time that sense of being a loner, little Mister One-Off, began loosening its hold over me.
At lunch break, for instance, instead of munching my bread and jam sandwich somewhere off by myself, as I imagined I would be doing, I found myself gravitating towards our little tribe. Bessie was there and Junior and the rest of the crew and I slid up and joined them, drawn magnetically to the strongest force in the playground. Which was Junior Dinsmore, for he radiated the same malevolent energy away from home as he did at Larkhill, that cropped, burning, bullet head of his standing out like a warning beacon to anyone who might consider tangling with him.
On occasions he would parade provocatively about the cindered expanse, while we stayed close to him. Like being swung along on the tail of some slow-moving, yet deadly red comet, I liked to fantasise. Or, at other times, we would be his own personal wolf-pack with me the puniest cub tagging along. He ignored me completely, of course - nothing new in that - but then he ignored all of us, and so I began to feel as if I was a proper Dinsmore at last, not one of those namby-pamby pony riders who all went to some posh private school anyway, but just another of those roughs from that damp dump in the hollow where no one ever did a hand's turn except what he wanted to do and where we all lived like heathen savages, as someone once described us.
That may well have been old Principal Mooney, by the way. Certainly it sounds like him, for it was just the sort of thing he would say. A chalky-fingered, bald brute in a speckled tweed suit smelling of sweat, pencil parings and rancid hair oil, he held his tongue in check for no man. Two classrooms further up, along the length of Kilcarn Public Elementary School, we heard the swish of his cane, or the dreaded ebony pointer detonating on some unfortunate's skull, and from day one, don't ask me why, I just knew Junior was his favoured target, even though he never cried out, swore, or ever complained to the rest of us once. All those scars on his scalp like tiny, pale, tick marks where the fuzz refused to grow, I convinced myself now, I knew where they had come from.
Once, I remember, as he stalked the playground looking for aggravation, the rest of us trailing in his wake trying to appear equally threatening, I caught a glimpse of old Mooney watching from one of the high arched windows. That look aimed in our direction gave me the shivers, meaning only one thing as far as I was concerned. We were being measured up for future treatment as a family package, commencing the day we moved up into that senior class of his.
As I say, Mooney's tongue was almost as deadly as his favourite, hook-handled cane, the tip frayed like an old toothbrush. Even the minister took on this awful, cringing aspect when he came to put us through our catechism. Master Mooney would be drifting about the back of the classroom humming almost absentmindedly to himself, making the short hairs on our necks bristle, while the Reverend Gillespie would be stuttering on about Man's chief end being to glorify God or some such drivel. Poor, pathetic creature, he was to do himself in some years later over that sexual affair involving those Boys' Brigade campers. Drowned down a well, of all places. To do it like that took some guts, you could say, or a degree of despair hard for the rest of us to comprehend. Upside down like a human cork. Often it struck me there might well be some biblical precedent. Away off out in those desert wastes by yourself, after all, if the urge came upon one, what else was there but find a deep hole somewhere, with or without water at the bottom. Poor Eric Gillespie...
But any familiarity with the Scriptures I might have had was as a blank page. Old Baldy Mooney may well have been right about one thing when he called us heathens for, as far as I recall, none of us at Larkhill ever darkened a church door. Sundays were spent worshipping the god of combustion engines which no longer ran, or sending ferrets down rabbit holes, or taking trout from someone's stream while they worshipped unawares in Kilcarn Presbyterian church, It was as if there were this little pocket of godlessness ringed all around by piety and we were in it. As the sound of hymn-singing wafted towards us - it travelled on the still air like the wireless - unwashed and deliciously unkempt, we would go about our lazy pursuits much as usual. Uncle Harry would be off up among the trees somewhere with his flute, and if I wasn't there, too, flat on my belly, luxuriating in those bubbling arpeggios, I might sometimes accompany the distant church singers, a little choir of one, the only lark at Larkhill, for by now I found it well nigh impossible not to chime in with any tune as soon as I'd heard it. Even halfway through I couldn't help myself and, in school, despite my vow to get through the day with the least amount of application or attention, when singing lessons came round my resistance would crumble.
Most of the pieces Miss Herron taught us were like herself, sentimental and second-rate, for beneath that chill and beaky exterior she had this other side which I quickly homed in on.
For me nothing exemplified it more than the row of tiny, spun glass animals she kept ranged along the front of her desk. Oh, the purest kitsch imaginable. How my stomach would churn when some suck in the class, usually a girl, but occasionally a sissyish boy, would plead, "Oh, tell us again about how you got your lovely wee seahorse, Miss Herron," and then this look of utter skittishness would transform that old bitch's features.
"Well, if you're sure you're really all that interested, I suppose I could just tell you the story. Although, dear knows, you've heard it a hundred times or more," she would simper, patting her bun.
Just try and stop me, I felt like saying, as she launched yet again into the account of her one and only trip across the water with her dear good friend Winnie Maxwell. The pair of them strolling along the front at Blackpool, for all the world like a couple of toffs, she would giggle. The longest promenade in the whole of Great Britain, would you believe! My beloved blue and gold Children's Encyclopaedia told a different story. Llandudno held that record. But, of course, how could I contradict her, no matter how I longed to do so? By this time I'd begun to notice, you see, how people's eyes would sharpen in on you if ever you happened to let slip some morsel of lore or information you weren't supposed to know about. No one liked a show-off, I'd discovered, even though, deep inside, was this secret raging exhibitionist, or would have been, given half a chance. The singing was another matter. There I could indulge myself to my heart's content, for everyone, it seemed, tolerated a boy soprano, even one with a convict haircut.
But, getting back to the glass menagerie, it was the first thing we saw when we looked up from our jotters, this miniature, petrified queue heading to, or maybe from, some invisible Noah's Ark, although there was no duplication. According to Miss Herron each animal was unique and individual and had a story behind it which we had re-told to us to the point of nausea. A sort of rage used also to seize hold of me at the rest of the class for pretending such utter fascination each time we heard about the giraffe from Newcastle, the elephant from Cushendall, the Bundoran hippo, the Portrush zebra, the Omeath tiger. God Almighty, was there nothing these two grown women ever got up to on their holidays by the seaside save trawl gift-shops bagging ornamental small game!
Her friend, the exceptionally stout Winnie Maxwell, for we had seen photographs of the two on safari, only collected cats and dogs. Early on they had agreed to specialise in different areas of the animal kingdom, untamed and domestic, so as to make the chase more an adventure. After all, Miss Herron would confide with a strange, sideways smile, they didn't want to ever fall out, now, did they? My imagination, being what it was, came up with a very different image of the pair, developing in my head like a negative in the dark, Mistress Beefy and Mistress Bony secretly loathing one another, the one eating herself into an early grave, and the other never putting on an ounce, while continually trumpeting the fact. Two sorry figures endlessly promenading on a wet fortnight together around the tail-end of every July.
But, as I may have mentioned, I didn't seem to possess a lot in the way of compassion in my make-up then. Quick imagination in abundance, certainly, but not much sympathy of any kind. But, then, again, why should I? And so, inevitably, my mind turned more and more towards reprisal every time the skinny one let slip yet another remark about "those dreadful Dinsmores". While busy with my crayons and Plasticine - a further humiliation for someone like me - I plotted away, inevitably fastening on the orderly little caravan marching head-to-tail along her table. Concentrating all my powers of spite, I willed one of them, oh, just one, to topple, for they appeared so fragile, so vulnerable, their tiny carcasses as see-through as a Glacier Mint. But by some mental force much greater than mine Miss Herron always managed to keep them anchored safely in front of her as though glued there.
Only one other person in the class was allowed to touch or go near themn. This was a thin, intense girl with glasses and pigtails named Betty Cairns. She looked, in fact, like a younger version of the teacher, even acted like her, too, and so was entrusted to dust and polish each individual figure in the collection with a soft, yellow cloth kept in the drawer expressly for the purpose.
Stoking up the fires of revenge, I watched her at her work, pretending to be absorbed in colouring a house or a tree or rolling a worm of Plasticine between palm and desk-top, something I loathed, the oily touch and smell of the stuff lingering until I could get to the outside tap and wash it away. So I watched and waited like a cat at a mouse hole for the right moment to arrive and, strange to relate, it was indeed that very creature which was to give me my opportunity.
One afternoon while we were printing out the alphabet in our pale blue Vere Foster jotters - you may imagine how frustrating this was for someone already secretly halfway through The Dog Crusoe - suddenly one of the girls at the back of the class shrieked, pointing towards part of the wood panelling lining the walls.
"A rat!" she cried out. "Oh, a great big rat! I saw it! I saw it, I tell you!"
She hadn't, of course, the silly goose, for it was no such thing, but instantly the entire class erupted, climbing on to their chairs and bawling for their mammies. For my part, I sat where I was. A mouse. What was a mouse to me, for Christ's sake? At Larkhill, my bedroom, if you could call it such, quickened nightly like a ballet performance with tiny harvest creatures the size of fluff-balls who had moved in for the winter. But then as I sat there, still centre of that storm of stupid terror, what did I see but Miss Herron acting like the rest of her charges. Waving her arms about, she had retreated to a far corner under the picture of little African piccaninnies at play in their village.
"Don't panic!" she kept yelling, "don't panic!" while showing all the signs of it herself.
It struck me it was a bit like that scene from one of those same Bible pictures covering the walls, the one with the crowd fleeing before the Egyptians, and I was that lost boy in the middle of it all, stooping to pick up something. It looked like a pot or jar of some kind. And suddenly it also struck me, an opportunity like this might never come my way again.
So, under cover of all that yelling and milling about, I edged up to the teacher's desk and without stopping to think too much about it my fist closed around one of those precious little glass figures. In my hot and sweaty hand it felt just like a lump of ice, then, still without looking at it, into my trouser pocket it went. Glancing around I saw no one had noticed, particularly its owner still gibbering away in her corner oblivious to everything but the state of her nerves. That tiny, chill, awkward object seemed to bite through the lining of my pocket, the right, incidentally, which happened to have no hole in it. If it had gone into the other one, then it might have worked its way through to break on the floor at my feet, my crime apparent for all to see, a starburst of splinters instead of a puddle of piss, the usual manifestation of shame in that particular classroom.
Then it came to me, when all the fuss died down and the animal was seen to be missing, for surely it must, a search would be made. First, the insides of our desks, then schoolbags. Finally, our pockets turned out in front of us. One half-chewed apple core, the key from a Spam tin, a small German coin, one spent bullet, a horseshoe nail for boring chestnuts with, a blown wren's egg, an army Fusilier's badge. Roughly my usual tally. But now, a miniature glass camel, a present from Ballybunion as well.
Simply swallowing it did cross my mind, just as I'd done with my collar-stud all that time ago, both objects nestling companionably together somewhere deep inside. But the notion passed. Torn between hanging on to the little humpbacked creature or quickly hiding it, I looked about me, for, yes, I admit I did consider planting it in someone else's schoolbag, the saintly Betty Cairns coming to mind. But then that would only mean Miss Herron would get her prized piece back again, when what I intended was to prolong her punishment. Indefinitely, if possible.
Oh, the rapture of revenge. Sexual, too, in its way, for to my great surprise didn't I sense my little charlie coming to attention, poking his way unerringly through the hole in my empty pocket as though determined not to be left out of things. Cupping the little rascal in my left hand, I grasped the camel from Kerry with the other, edging through all those bawling idiots towards a windowsill where a geranium grew in a big brown pot, its soil still moist from Betty Cairns's nurturing and, taking a last good look around me, and with my back to it, I pressed my plunder deep down into the earth, burying it far below the surface.
Eventually, for it had to happen, Old Baldy poked his head through. Spotting him there, Miss Herron appeared to shake off her hysterics for the moment, moving to meet him, hands outstretched and waving slightly like somebody about to be punished. Which, of course, was what I had in mind all along.
"A rat," I heard her lie above the din. "Oh, the most awful big rat. Mr Mooney. You should have seen it. Oh, as big as a cat."
Old Baldy looked at her. Then, as if hearing the clamour for the first time, he brought his cane down hard on one of the desks, raising a chalk storm, the detonation cutting through the racket like a pistol bark.
"Be quiet!" he roared, and we dropped into our chairs as if shot.
Striding to the door, he yelled "Dinsmore!" and I felt as if I really had been pierced by a bullet. But then in a moment Junior appeared, grinning, hands in his pockets as if interrupted in his favourite pastime of pocket billiards.
"Go and fetch the pointer, boy," ordered Baldy, and after another short interval my relative returned with it in his hand.
Standing there, gripping that polished rod, he looked about him as though determined to make the most of his brief moment of celebrity. Oh, I have to say I felt so proud of him, of me of all the Dinsmores, in that instant. And, to make my moment even more complete, didn't he give me a great big wink.
"There. Behind the coats," piped old Skinny Legs, yet another lie, pointing to the low row of hooks where all the children's rainwear hung almost to the floor.
Slouching across to the rack, Junior proceeded to belabour the coats for all he was worth, whereupon some of those ninnies began to blub anew at seeing their best Burberrys being abused in that way and with such obvious relish, too. After a time when nothing ran out from under the barrage with fur and a tail Mooney called his beater off and Junior returned the way he'd come, the pointer under his arm like a swagger-stick.
"Back to work," ordered Old Baldy, giving Miss Herron a look that made her grow pale. "Not another peep out of the lot of you," he said glaring at us. Her, as well.
I looked at him standing in the doorway there between the two classrooms, jaw jutting, eyebrows twin tufts of harness hair, and brute and brutish were the words which sprang to mind. And if that comes across as another of those cliches, for so many of our country teachers then seem to have been like him, forgive me, but that was how it was. To get their jobs in the first place they had to grovel and bootlick, humiliated by a bunch of pig-ignorant, farming folk on some school committee or other. I was to see this in action myself later on, but, recalling what they would soon turn into once they got their great feet planted on a schoolroom floor and were free to vent all that ingrown spite and resentment on a bunch of poor kids like ourselves, sympathy took a trip.
But getting hack to that day when I discovered the thrill of thieving allied with sweet revenge - after the door closed the class returned to some kind of normality, while a trifle tense still and softy humming like a motor running down. One of the girls occasionally would give a smothered gasp and a little babyish cry and quite a few asked to be excused to go to the toilet. Being something of an expert on such matters, Junior said nerves, pure and simple, made them want to pee like that, they couldn't help it.
In the connecting wall between both sets of outside lavatories he had loosened a brick with the spike of his clasp-knife and would crouch there with his eye pressed to the hole in pursuit of his researches. Sometimes, too, he told us. for the fun of it, he would poke his prick through just to hear them shriek. Secretly, of course, they loved seeing it appear in that way like another inflated peeper spying on them as they sat on their wooden seats making their water. On our side we had to make do with chipped, bare china, chill as an iceberg.
So I waited for the moment to arrive when Miss Herron would notice the gap in her display of seaside souvenirs. And, sure enough, didn't it come a little while after she had dropped down at her desk, face still white from her ordeal with the imaginary rodent and Master Mooney. Under cover of my Golden Pathway Reader I saw her eyes widen and her mouth fall open. Then her head came forward until her spectacles practically brushed the line of animals, glass upon glass.
"My dromedary!" she wailed. "Who's taken my lovely wee dromedary?" the class becoming agitated all over again as if the room had become infested a second time, only on this occasion with something they had never ever heard of before, as foreign-sounding to those dumbos as mammoth or mastodon.
And I was right, too, about the searching of our schoolbags, desks and pockets. Naturally nothing was found and a perfectly good half-hour of lesson time squandered. At the end of it all Miss Herron laid her head sideways on her desk and wept. We watched and listened in horrified silence, for the sight, but especially the sound, was so strange, this odd gulping like the rasp a rusty old pump might make before it's primed with a bucket of water. Because of the state she was in Master Mooney was brought into the investigation and yet again we were made to turn out our belongings in front of us, overcoat pockets as well, this time.
Old Baldy stood up straight at the front of the class while Miss Herron sat crushed and wilting at her desk, balled wet hanky pressed to her lips. Her eyes were red, as was her nose. But you could tell he was fed up with the whole affair, animals too, for he kept glaring over Miss Herron's shoulder at them, yellow teeth showing like the Bengal tiger might well have done if ever it were to come alive. Earlier he had gone amongst us prodding at our spread treasures with the furry tip of his cane as if he might catch something. Close up he smelt pretty contagious himself, the old bastard, even an arm's length away, as he picked through my own scattered little hoard. Well, he finished off my lovely bird's egg, I do remember, but without a word of apology or regret. Bound to happen, of course, a miracle it had stayed intact so long, anyway, but I hated him for it and added him to my list of present and future enemies.
The whole sorry business ended some little time later with Junior being blamed, even though his pockets yielded nothing save his beloved clasp-knife and a creased photograph of Jane Russell lying back in some Hollywood hay barn or other. You know the one. The consistent whack of the cane accompanied by old Mooney's synchronised gruntings carried through to us over on our side of the partition, and in some way I felt pleased with myself for having somehow managed to dole out a double dose of retribution to both my tormentors. Then I experienced an unsettling and unexpected moment of guilt at having got a fellow Dinsmore into trouble in that way. But that passed quite quickly. As it always does.
