Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [19]
“Going along London Street would remind him of the walk to the nursery school,” she said quietly. “That’s the route which I took him to that . . . that place.” She shuddered involuntarily, remembering her last confrontation with the nursery-school teacher, and that awful morning when Bertie had finally been suspended for writing graffiti, in Italian, in the children’s toilets. That had been so unfair, so cruel. It was entirely natural for small boys to explore their environment in this way and to seek to express themselves. If there were any fault involved, then surely it was that of the nursery itself, which had failed to provide adequate stimulation for him; not that that woman who ran the place would even begin to understand that.
36
A Bus for Bertie
“I don’t want Bertie to be reminded of his suspension,” she said firmly. “So that rules out the number 10.”
“Fine,” said Stuart. “And if the 27 involves a shorter walk, then shouldn’t we opt for that? Is there much else to be discussed?”
“There is a difference between a 27 bus and a 23 bus,” said Irene. “It’s not just a question of which bus goes where.”
Stuart smiled. “The Morningside factor?”
Irene nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You could refer to it as that. The 23 bus is probably the most middle-class bus there is. It’s the archetypical Edinburgh bus, if one uses the word Edinburgh in its pejorative sense. Do we want Bertie to become part of that whole Edinburgh scene? Is this not the reason why we’re sending him to a less-stuffy school? To get him away from that whole tight Edinburgh attitude, that whole middle-class, Merchant Company view of the world?”
“Then why don’t we send him to the school round the corner?” asked Stuart.
Irene shook her head. “Impossible. It’s a question of music lessons. It’s not their fault, but many schools don’t have the resources. It’s society’s fault. We let this happen. We’ve starved the schools of resources.”
Stuart was silent. There was a sense in which his wife was right. We had allowed state education to decline because we had not been prepared to make the sacrifices needed to support the schools. But it went deeper than that in places like Edinburgh, where the middle classes – or a large part of the middle classes
– had developed a parallel world for their children. But they would reply that all that they were doing was paying for that which the state did not provide. And this might be countered with the argument that their lack of commitment perpetuated this state failure. And so the debate went on.
“I don’t think that it matters too much,” he said calmly. “And, anyway, it looks as if the 27 is the solution. Unless . . .”
Irene hesitated. “The 27 can get a bit rough sometimes,”
she said, almost apologetically. “There are some bits of Oxgangs . . .”
A Thin Summer
37
“Then it’s the 23,” said Stuart.
Irene hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. “Yes,” she said. “The 23.”
12. A Thin Summer
Bertie had not enjoyed a particularly good summer. It had seemed to him – as it seems to all small boys – that the months of summer would be endless, a long, hazy succession of days of adventure and excitement. But that was not how the summer had actually turned out.
To begin with, they had barely left the city in spite of his repeated requests that they go somewhere – anywhere. Even the Pentland Hills would have done. He had heard that there were lochs there in which you could catch trout. A boy who lived in Fettes Row had told Bertie that he went there with his father and they had both caught two trout. It was easy, said the boy; you put the fly in the water and the trout jumped out and ate it. “Even somebody like you could do it,” the boy went on.
“Can I go fishing in the Pentlands?” Bertie asked his mother.
“That boy who lives in Fettes Row went fishing with his dad and caught two trout. You like trout, Mummy. I could catch some for you. And I could catch some almonds to put on top of the trout.”
“If that’s a joke, Bertie,” said Irene severely, “then it’s not very funny. Fishing is cruel. Think of