I was a Killy Kid

EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION! If Mr Blair's earliest empty mantra seems far away, then so do the freedom and democracy I enjoyed at school; its climate of eccentric justice and forgiveness. Life at Kilquhanity was on the human scale. There, an autistic boy was embraced for his genius in mending radios and television sets. He was also epileptic: soon even the youngest child knew what to do when he had a fit and calmly did so. There were the children of Yorkshire landowners and tearaways from Glasgow estates, the offspring of lawyers, of film-makers, and of an engraver of banknotes; of soldiers; of a woman who had risen to heights in MI5; of American psychiatrists and university lecturers. People still liked Americans in those days. Our farm hand had been road manager for The Incredible String Band, who gigged there once before my time.

We had our own parliament, where it was virtually impossible to lie and get away with it; where members of the community represented themselves in person; where all was defined by fluid but extensive boundaries, all relative to our sense of place and defined by a degree of respect for one another. Kilquhanity was co-educational. We had our own farm with four cows, pigs and chickens. We smoked. There was a lot of teenage sex, a bit of dope, and we made rockets and bombs. We drank. I had a twelve-bore under my bed and God kept a pretty low profile. Instead of preachiness, there was a non-judgmental sense of community.

Today, the school would be quickly labelled a `terror cell' and soon be swarming with armed police, social workers, counsellors, shrinks and do-gooders. I suppose that there was a slight whiff of subversion from time to time, when American draft-dodgers turned up. When one pupil sent a letter to America with `Kill Nixon the Bastard' written on its envelope, men in macs came all the way up from the US Embassy in London to interview her. I recently heard of an English state school teacher who has resorted to techniques recommended by Niccolo Machiavelli when dealing with subversive pupils. Subversive kids would have had a lean time at Killy, where there was nothing to subvert.

Kilquhanity House School was started in 1940 near Castle Douglas in Scotland by the educational pioneer John Aitkenhead. His founding motto for Kilquhanity was `Liberty, Equality and Inefficiency'. `Revolutions that are efficient', he observed, `always end up killing people.' John Aitkenhead believed that education is `the generation of happiness'. He believed that children should be free to express their humanity in a natural way, in an atmosphere free from sexual and intellectual repression. At first, he followed the libertarian doctrine of A S Neill to the letter -- until pupils voted to abolish bedtime. When he found a pupil fast asleep in a laundry basket after two sleepless nights, he successfully reasoned to a yawning assembly that bedtimes should be reinstated.

John Aitkenhead's founding motto for Kilquhanity was `Liberty, Equality and Inefficiency'

Because only democracy was compulsory, there was only one school rule: everybody -- staff, kids, farmhand, cook, etc -- must turn up for the Council Meeting. Held at four o'clock each Thursday afternoon and chaired by a kid, it was the forum for all manner of suggestions and complaints, where everybody could cast a vote. John A was frequently overruled, at times even by his own wife and children. Anything and anybody could be brought up at a Council Meeting, without fear or favour, before the entire school. `I'll bring you up' was an effective threat in an environment where reason proved more effective than fear. If Johnny broke a window, then Johnny bought a new pane and mended it himself. Most of us became expert glaziers after a while. So tight-knit was the community that there was no need for video surveillance at Killy, and lies never survived for long in a Council Meeting. Where no conclusion could be reached immediately, `Inquiries' would `look into things'. With only the vaguest terms of reference, they worked in a magisterial way, so as to get at the truth. Some blurred lines existed in the sand. After a rare instance of shirt-lifting between a male member of staff and a boy, John A came out with the immortal line: `As far as I'm concerned, mutual masturbation is OK -- but I draw the line at buggery!' John was, all said and done, in some ways a traditionalist.

Because lessons were optional, several of us spent time working on local farms as tractor drivers or rough-shooting or snaring rabbits and foxes for their pelts. It follows that some of us were armed, mostly with shotguns, some with .22s and one with a Lee Enfield .303. We swapped ammo as others swapped stamps.

There were a few grey areas, I suppose, of the moral and legal kind. Several boys dealt in scrap: a couple of them enriched themselves to the extent that they could buy a car when the South of Scotland Electricity Board foolishly left a huge drum of copper high voltage mains cable lying around. Palls of smoke frequently hung over the school as insulation was burnt off whatever copper cable could be found.

Some of this money went on betting. More than one of the older boys ran accounts at bookies in Castle Douglas or Dumfries. Tobacco was usually bought from the bearded woman at Knockvennie (or `Knockers'), a mile or two away. She sold Number 6 cigarettes one at a time at exorbitant rates. Neither this, nor the usual driving rain, could deter determined users of tobacco. In an economy drive, I once bought some War Horse chewing tobacco, ground it up and tried to smoke it. I was sick for two days.

My own first car was bought when I was 15. A derelict ex-Post Office Telephones Morris van with bald tyres, it had once been yellow and was now blue, except where the two had combined to make it green. It cost £8. Instead of a silencer, there was a golden syrup tin. It made a terrific noise and could be heard from miles away, so whenever I wanted to use it, I had to push it a good distance before firing up the engine. We drove it for miles -- sometimes to Dalmellington, a tough mining town in Ayrshire, for dances where girls lined up on one side of the Parish Hall and boys on the other. Perhaps two big lassies would be dancing together over their handbags (the kind Billy Connolly describes as having `corned-beef legs and nicotine up tae their elbows'). When the last dance came (the `creep, as it was known), the lights were suddenly turned off and there was an almighty scrum as each sex dragged their victims of choice around the back of the hall. A friend and I were once snogged then hustled outside by two trainee teachers from Paisley. Having the van, we were, as you might say, in pole position.

My maths career at Kilquhanity was short-lived. Asked to calculate the quantity of explosive required to remove a tree stump, I obliged and miscalculated, true to form, by one decimal place. Ten times the appropriate amount of homemade ordnance took out windows and flipped roof tiles back on themselves like playing cards. After that, bombs were `in'. We made half a dozen, with weedkiller, sugar, fertiliser, soap, etc. Most were let off over the course of one weekend when staffing was especially low and John A was away at an educational conference.

The largest we made employed an empty fire-extinguisher as a casing, buried in the midden next to the byre, with contact wires running out into the long grass. It went off with a soft crump that shook the ground and lifted tons of cowshit several feet into the air. Unfortunately, the cowman was entertaining the cook in his hut at the time, and as the windows came in, they were liberally soused. I shall never forget the sight of those two-tone naked figures bolting out of the door, the cook dangling bra-less, the cowman priapic. Do not try this at home -- or anywhere else. We grew out of bombs and guns after a while, when John Aitkenhead's reasoning won through. `The thing is, son, inside yourself, you just know it was wrong, don't you?' Bottom lip quivering, I did.

Far more enjoyable than terror was copulation, of which there was a great deal, especially at the Lodge, where the older girls were billeted. That nobody got pregnant (at least during my time) is a miraculous non-conception. Expeditions to the Lodge were exciting and well-prepared. We did nonchalant recces by day, to learn which floorboards creaked; we secretly oiled hinges, locks and door-handles and furtively hid assault ladders in the undergrowth beneath windows. We `borrowed' staff keys and cut doubles. Those most prized were for larders and storerooms, from which we raided industrial quantities of breakfast cereal, bread, jam, honey, coffee and tea, potatoes and hid them behind false panels in the lofts of our rooms. Girls occasionally came to see us, but the first move was usually left to us. Many of the first steps in courtship, however, were innocent, tender and intense. Going on a `Midnight Walk' was often a key moment. Would she still hold your hand in the dark after you had helped her over the stile at Square Point? Whether they were in high summer or in bitter moonlit frost, those were moments I shall never forget.

The cuisine was erratic. Food was plentiful and wholesome, if repetitive, and porridge made from real pinhead oatmeal was de rigueur. So when Mr Stephenson the baker came once a week, a long queue of ragged, snotty children formed behind his van. Real coffee was served at about eleven each morning, and real cocoa in enamel jugs, with homemade Allinson bread and honey, or jam `pieces'. A bright winter morning, a mug of coffee in one hand, a `jeely piece' in the other, a fag smoked in silence broken by birdsong down by `Lydia's Thinking Place' was heaven.

`Useful Work' had to be undertaken by everyone, kids and staff alike, for 45 minutes after breakfast. Mopping, washing up, recycling rubbish, lighting fires... my own chores were lighting the staff room fire and collecting the cows from a field three-quarters of a mile away -- or, when the cows were dry, collecting five gallons or so of milk in a stainless steel bucket from the contiguous dairy farm. The milk swayed perilously on the crossbar of my bicycle down the steep hill from Tag's Farm. God knows how I never dropped it.

What did we learn, apart from trapping, farming, epilepsy, commodities trading, glazing, building, boat-building, bomb-making, autism, driving, shooting, fucking, democracy etc? Though a committed Scots Nationalist, John Aitkenhead was an inspired teacher of English. He brought alive George Mackay Brown, Shaw, Wilde, Orwell, Wells -- even Bertrand Russell and Homer Lane. He read us Sassoon and Owen, R S Thomas and Robert Graves. Chris Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) and Zelda were friends of the Aitkenheads and sometimes came to visit. When one boy created his own alphabet, John learned it so as to correct any mistakes his pupil made and gradually taught him the conventional one. John took an interest in dyslexia long before it became a fashionable concept, when one of his own children had difficulty in reading and writing. Asked how he cured him within a few short months, John replied: `I just took him on my knee and read with him.'

Sad, in retrospect, were the days spent dismantling the Dumfries to Stranraer branch railway line (after it was closed!) for the sleepers we used for practically everything. The only educational trips during my time were to the Gorbals and the slaughterhouse in Castle Douglas. Swimming was in the River Urr. Camping trips to the north of Scotland were magical. Lessons and lectures were given by a wide range of talent: Anne Reidpath taught drawing and Mr Douglas Lees, a card-carrying CPGB communist from the Auchencairn Spar shop (where everything was twice the price) argued for the nationalisation of land. We all voted against. Football was played on what remained of the lawn, and refereed by Jody, a (by my time) snappy and arthritic border collie.