Not everyone liked Mr Meikle’s teaching. He did not stimulate debates about what Shakespeare or Pope said, he simply replied to any question we raised about these, explained alternative readings, said why he preferred one of them and went on talking. Nor did he dictate to us glib little phrases which, repeated in an essay, would show an examiner that the student had been driven over the usual hurdles. He let us scribble down what we liked in our English note-books. This style of teaching seemed to some as dull as I found the table of elements, but it just suited me. While he told us, with erudition and humour, the official story of English literature, I filled note-book after note-book with doodles recalling the fictions I had discovered at the local cinemas, on my parents’ bookshelves, in the local library. I was not ignoring Mr Meikle. While sketching doors and corridors into the worlds of Walt Disney, Tarzan, Hans Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and H G Wells I was pleased to hear how the writers of Hamlet, Paradise Lost, The Rape of the Lock and Little Dorrit had invented worlds which were just as spooky. I was still planning a book containing all I valued in other works, but one of these works was beginning to be Glasgow. I had begun to think my family, neighbours, friends, the girls I could not get hold of were as interesting as any people in fiction — almost as interesting as me, but how could I show it? Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man suggested a way, but I doubted if I could write such a book before I was seventeen. Meanwhile Mr Meikle’s voice often absorbed my whole attention. I remember especially his demonstration of the rhetorical shifts by which Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar changes the mind of the mob.
My private talks with Mr Meikle took place before the class but out of its earshot. We could talk quietly because my head, as I stood beside his desk, was level with his as he sat leaning on it. I remember telling him something about my writing ambitions and adding that, while I found helpful suggestions in his teaching and in the music, history and art classes, the rest of my schooling was a painful hindrance, a humiliating waste of time for both me and my teachers. Mr Meikle answered that Scottish education was not designed to produce specialists before the age of eighteen. Students of science and engineering needed a grounding in English before a Scottish university accepted them, arts students needed a basis of maths, both had to know Latin and he thought this wise. Latin was the language of people who had made European culture by combining the religious books of the Jews with the sciences and arts of the sceptical Greeks. Great writers in every European language had been inspired by Roman literature; Shakespeare only knew a little Latin, but his plays showed he put the little he knew to very good use. Again, mathematics were also a language, an exact way of describing mental and physical events which created our science and industry. No writer who wished to understand the modern world should ignore it. I answered that Latin and maths were not taught like languages through which we could discover and say great things, they were taught as ways to pass examinations — that was how parents and pupils and most of the teachers viewed them; whenever I complained about the boring nature of a Latin or mathematical exercise nobody explained there could be pleasure in it, they said, “You can forget all that when you‘ve been through university and got a steady job.” Mr Meikle looked thoughtfully across the bent heads of the class before him, and after a pause said he hoped I would be happy in what I wished to do with my life, but most people, when their educations stopped, earned their bread by work which gave them very little personal satisfaction, but must be done properly simply because their employers required it and our society depended upon it. Schooling had to prepare the majority for their future, as well as the lucky few. He spoke with a resignation and regret I only fully understood eight or nine years later when I earned my own bread, for a while, by school-teaching.
This discussion impressed and disturbed me. Education — schooling — was admired by my parents and praised by the vocal part of Scottish culture as a way to get liberty, independence and a more useful and satisfying life. Since this was my own view also, I had thought the parts of my schooling which felt like slavery were accidents which better organization would abolish. That the parts which felt like slavery were a deliberate preparation for more serfdom — that our schooling was simultaneously freeing some while preparing the rest to be their tools — had not occurred to me. The book I at last wrote described the adventures of someone a bit like me in a world like that, and though not an autobiography (my hero goes mad and commits suicide at the age of twenty-two) it contained portraits of people I had known, Mr Meikle among them. While writing the pages where he appeared I considered several pseudonyms for him. (Strang? Craig? McGurk? Maclehose? Dinwiddie?) but the only name which seemed to suit him was Meikle, so at last I called him that. I was forty-five when the book got published and did not know if he was still alive, but thought he would be amused and perhaps pleased if he read it.
And he was alive, and read it, and was pleased. He came to my book-signing session at Smith’s in St Vincent Street, and said so. It was wonderful to see him again, as real as ever despite being a character in my book. Of course his hair was grey now, his scalp much balder, but my head was greying and balding too. I realized he had been a fairly young man when I first saw him in Whitehill, much younger than I was now.
Three years ago I got a note from Mr Meikle saying he could not come to the signing session for my latest novel, as arthritis had confined him to his home. He had ordered a copy from the bookshop, and hoped I would sign it for him, and either leave it to be collected by Mrs Meikle (who was still in good health) or bring it to him myself. I phoned and told him I could not bring it, as I was going away for a month immediately after the signing session, but I would inscribe a copy for Mrs Meikle to collect, and would phone to arrange a visit as soon as I returned. He said he looked forward to that.
I went away and tried to finish writing a book I had promised to a publisher years before. I failed, came home a month later and did not phone Mr Meikle. He was now one of many I had broken promises to, felt guilty about, wanted to forget. When forgetting was impossible I lay in bed remembering work to be finished, debts to be paid, letters to write, phone-calls and visits I should make. I ought also to get my false teeth mended, tidy my flat and clean the window facing my door on the communal landing. All these matters seemed urgent and I often fell asleep during efforts to list them in order of priority. Action only seemed possible when I jumped up to fend off an immediate disaster, which Mr Meikle was not.
Suddenly I decided to visit him without phoning. It seemed the only way. The sun had set, the street-lights shone, I was sure he was not yet abed, so the season must have been late in the year or very early. The close where he lived was unusually busy. A smart woman holding a clipboard came down and I was pressed to the wall by a bearded man rushing up. He carried on his shoulders what seemed a telescope in a felt sock. I noticed electrical cables on the stairs, and on a landing a stac of the metal tripods used with lighting equipment. None of this surprised me. Film making is as common in Glasgow as in other cities, though I did not think it concerned Mr Meikle. It did. His front door stood open and the cables snaked through it. The lobby was full of recording people and camera people who seemed waiting for something, and I saw from behind a lady who might have been Mrs Meikle carrying round a tray loaded with mugs of coffee. Clearly, a visit at this time would be an interruption. I went back downstairs regretting I had not phoned first, but glad the world was not neglecting Mr Meikle. I even felt slightly jealous of him.