This book contains five signatures – exactly 160 pages. Since the first five stories do not quite fill them I will write another, a true one because just now my imagination can invent nothing short enough. Like other stories in this book it deals with education. I heard it from Angela Mullane, once a colleague of the teacher who is the story’s most active yet least interesting character. A school in the east of Glasgow taught children who could barely read, or found it hard to sit still and concentrate, or had other traits which unsuited them for normal schooling without qualifying them for medical care. In times of full employment (and this was in a time of full employment) such children can be prepared for ordinary jobs by teaching them to read, count and talk with greater confidence, but they cannot be taught really well in classes of more than ten. The average class size was twenty-five so the teachers often had to teach badly. Before 1986 this meant threatening and sometimes inflicting physical pain.
