It’s weird to see a place that for five years dominated your life – setting parameters on how you spent most of your time, determining most of the people whom you met and became friends (or enemies) with, and having a considerable bearing on how the rest of your life would turn out – in rubble. I’m talking about my old alma mater Peebles High School, which I attended from 1977 to 1982. Most of it has now been demolished and I visited the remnants of it when I was back in Peebles, in the south of Scotland, two months ago.
Strictly speaking, Peebles High School isn’t a pile of rubble. Since November last year, a brand new school, built at a cost of 46 million pounds on the site of the old school’s playing fields, has been open for business. (“A bit IKEA,” was the verdict of my two nieces, who’ve been pupils there.) I’m talking about the old school. In November 2019, a third of it was destroyed in a fire. It limped on in a moribund condition for the next half-dozen years, while the replacement building was approved, planned and constructed. Now it’s almost completely gone.
I made a pilgrimage to what’s left of that old school one afternoon and spent five minutes peering through the mesh on the copious barriers, there to hold the curious public at bay, and thinking such melancholy thoughts as: “Jings! That hillock of debris is the spot where I once had a fight with Roy Kilner!” It was a desolate and depressing sight.
The few parts of the premises still standing that afternoon included the four-storey tower – once the tallest structure in Peebles – which contained an entrance hall, cloakrooms and toilets (ground floor), the maths department (first floor), the business studies department (second floor) and the geography department (third floor). It was as a fifth-year student that, one day, I exited the late John Cornwall’s geography class, tripped coming down the staircase from the top floor to the second floor and sprained my right ankle so badly that for the next month I hobbled around on crutches with my right foot in plaster. The reason the tower hasn’t been demolished yet is, depending on whom you speak to in Peebles, because bats, a protected species, have been discovered roosting inside it, or because it’s been found to be riddled with asbestos.
There was also part of a building to the north of the tower, which if I remember correctly contained the home economics department and which you passed through to get to the (now flattened) science labs. Did the side of that building facing onto the playground also contain the home of the school janitor, who was affectionately known to pupils as ‘Johnny the Janny?” I can’t remember now.
There’s a Facebook page dedicated to past times in Peebles, one that’s popular with older folk in the area. A vintage black-and-white photo of the town, or a reference to something in it that no longer exists, frequently attracts nostalgic comments – about how Peebles was so much better when, for example, it still had a railway or its edges didn’t sprawl with new housing developments. I was surprised, then, when someone recently posted photos of the ruins of the old school and many of the comments underneath – frequently from people who’d been pupils there in the 1950s and 1960s – were decidedly not nostalgic.
One wrote, “…for me seeing the rubble certainly doesn’t encourage any tears.” Another described a lot of the teachers then as “cruel bullies”, which prompted somebody else to reply, “back then they were the very worst you could find. Most of them should have been sacked for what they did to us.” Yet another commentator stated, “I would quite like to go up and throw a couple of bricks at what’s left of the windows…”
Well, I have certain memories from my five years at Peebles High School that would make me happily undergo electroconvulsive therapy if I thought it would erase them from my brain, forever. But generally my recollections of the place aren’t bad. Some of them are quite good, actually. I think the fact that by the 1970s the school contained some younger teachers with more humane and principled ideas about what teaching involved – i.e., imparting knowledge to younger minds and maybe even trying to instill a love of learning in them, as opposed to herding them, containing them and controlling them like you were a cop on riot duty – made my experiences there better than those of the older Facebook commentators.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were a few throwbacks left in the teaching staff,. I remember a decrepit old science teacher handing back exam papers one day and a sleepy pupil failing to hear his name being called out repeatedly. When the pupil woke up and hurried forward to belatedly collect his paper, the teacher flung it on the floor in front of him and ordered him, “Well, pick it up, lad!” The pupil crouched down – and the teacher started kicking him about the floor. Another time, that teacher lost the rag at a pupil who, at the end of an experiment (heating some solution over a Bunsen burner), made the mistake of pouring the solution down a sink. He chastised the kid by seizing him by the hair and shaking him like a ragdoll. His scalp must have been agony afterwards. That guy was an incredibly shite teacher, by the way.
I should add that there were a few old teachers who were good. I liked Mr. MacPherson, the art teacher, who seemed a kind soul. One Remembrance Sunday, because I was a member of the local scout troop, I had to attend a Remembrance service in Peebles’ Saint Andrews Leckie Parish Church and Mr. MacPherson gave one of the Bible readings – he turned up with a bunch of medals fixed to the breast of his jacket, so in addition to being kind he’d obviously been brave during his days in uniform. Meanwhile, Miss Spence, one of the maths teachers, was a fearsome disciplinarian and ran her classes with military precision. But she was an excellent teacher too. I was crap at maths but scraped a pass in the Higher exam after a year of her tutelage – a great achievement on her part.
But it was the younger teachers who were responsible for most of the good memories I have of Peebles High School. And some of them taught us things I actually remember. When I read news reports about the current, catastrophic wildfires in Spain, France, Canada and elsewhere, I recall Mr. Roxborough telling my second-year, general-science class about the Greenhouse Effect. That was the first time I ever heard the term used. “I won’t be around to experience it,” he said, his eyes twinkling mischievously, “but you young folks probably will.” Or when the news that a mouse had been cloned made the headlines in 1979, I remember our biology teacher Dr McHardy explaining to us just what exactly cloning involved – and when asked the inevitable question about cloning humans, replying, “Oh, it’s certainly possible to clone a human. We simply haven’t developed the science to do it yet.”
Who else? I have fond memories of Ian Jenkins and Dick Thornton teaching English, Sandy Boak teaching modern studies, Midge Jenkins and Dave Mallon teaching languages… At the end of my time at school, when I was accepted as a participant on a European Economic Community scheme whereby young people were given grants to allow them to visit an EEC country and do a project about some aspect of the local culture, it was Dave Mallon who fixed me up with contacts in France and arranged accommodation for me there for three weeks. Doing that project was first time I’d ever set foot outside the United Kingdom and Ireland and I was grateful to him for his help with the experience. Alas, while I was back in Peebles, I learned that he’d passed away last year.
Anyway, all this proves that it doesn’t matter how financially well-off or well-resourced or high-tech a school is. It’s useless if it doesn’t have decent teachers. My old high school might be rubble now, but at least it had a few of those.