The Long Version of Me

Chancery Stone describes herself as "the genius of sick". With a lifelong ambition to outdo the Marquis de Sade she has modelled herself on mavericks through the ages.

No, she hasn't.

Chancery Stone has been shocked to discover, many times, that she is simply herself.

Much as she has tried to find someone just like her so that she could compare herself to them, and you would instantly get a picture of her and know her better than your own mother, she has totally been unable to do so.

Like most people she is unique. Only more so.

She was born in East Kilbride, eight miles outside Glasgow, too many years ago, when it actually was a New Town, to Mary and Andrew Henery - seamstress and bricklayer. She was born upside down and backwards at home, in a 1950's tenement flat at 23 Falkland Place, West Mains, which, as some Glaswegians may recall, was where "Milk from the Mains builds bonnie wee weans." An excellent use of the dialectic vernacular if a slightly saccharine concept.

She was, indeed, just one such bonnie wee wean, being light and limber and possessed of white skin, red cheeks and black hair (except the cheeks - not so much).

She was indeed, as fast as you, dear reader, to discover that she looked rather like Snow White and was thrilled at age seven or so to be asked to audition for the part in a school play.

In her first couple (few?) years of primary school she was considered the best reader in the junior, or possibly the whole, school. Her memory was never very great, however, which is why she can't remember that exactly now.

Her Best Reader status went along with An Excellent Vocabulary. She sensed this was A Good Thing from her parents' obvious pleasure (or smug self-satisfaction - they had fuzzy boundaries), but didn't know what it was till she was told it was that she "knew lots of words." Subsequent to this early bent for soaking up language she starred as Chief Narrator of the Nativity Play for some now-forgotten quantity of years.

However, when Snow White rolled up she received the first ugly jolt in her stellar career.

In pursuit of being A Good Girl and Pleasing Mummy & Daddy she had discovered that some grown-ups didn't like it if you stole the limelight or appeared too smart (especially her Uncle Ian who detested her for upstaging his jokes). She decided to play the humility card and show the teacher that she "knew words" and was "well-spoken" (no ugly Scots dialect for her), but she would rein-in her natural love for getting right into the drama of the thing and tone down her performance to one more suitable for a girl who knew adults didn't like "showing off".

Unfortunately, one Caroline, a hard little thing with a well-developed sense of herself and incredibly white socks ( and ironed hair ribbons) had no such qualms. I suspect, in fact, that Caroline had to perform songs from the shows for her mother before she left for school each morning.

Caroline emoted till she could have got an acceptance from the Laurence Olivier School of Hammy Acting. I know even now it wasn't very good acting, but it was acting, which was more than little Chancery was doing. Caroline got the part.

It was a terrible blow. Caroline looked nothing like Snow White, she was small and cute, not tall and willowy and interesting like me, with my raven hair and my white skin, and....

Sad. Very sad.

All at once there was a hole in my universe. Parents could be wrong. Teachers could be unfair. People could miss the obvious. 'Good' wasn't always rewarded. Adults held different opinions. Show-offs, and rather untalented ones at that, often got the part. Drama required acting, not false modesty. A good vocabulary wasn't as important as a melodramatic rendering of being caught on a bramble bush. I might not be special after all. The list of ugly revelations was endless.

My universe had fallen apart.

I think I can safely say that that was the very first time I realised my parents' way might not be the right way. Ah, if only I had acted on it and, Dick Whittington style, left home right then.

But no, I put it down to lack of impartiality on the teacher's part, the conniving of cunning Caroline in fooling the teacher into thinking she was "a nice girl" (I still hadn't grasped that that didn't matter). There were just too many things to integrate, too much to take in and digest, so I stuck with the Henery Maxims For Living. Don't stand out till you're sure no-one will judge you for it.

Outside in the playground, however, I continued to be the terror of Kirktonholme Primary School - dominant, territorial, bossy and, I later found out, much to my horror, a bully to weaker children.

I beat up boys who provoked me on a regular basis, often drawing prize-fight crowds. It was cheating, really. I was bigger than most of them.

I led games or, if the weather didn't permit that, I held story-telling sessions under the stairs where I scared the living bejesus out of everyone, once causing a panic attack of mass hysteria during a thunderstorm (well, it was a shame to waste those natural special effects) which reduced several children to tears and screaming and came perilously close to getting me into trouble.

This queen of the roost thing inevitably took me to a fall. Not the last in my shady career.

There was a small boy who came from a 'bad' family - large, poor, rough and aggressive - one of the odd children who looked and felt like Catholics, but weren't. He decided one day to get a rise out of me and was following me home harassing me with insults. It was nothing very important as I recall. I even feel he was kind of half-hearted about it. But my territorial nature was up, no boy was going to cat-call me. I charged right back and started a fight with him. It was a piece of piss. He was about a foot and a half shorter than me.

Oh dear, bad idea.

I got trounced. He fought like a wild thing, making me look like an amateur. He actually hurt me. I'd been hurt before but not like this. I did the hurting. He went in, both fists flying and didn't let up till I was a snivelling bundle.

I realise now, looking back on it, that all I'd actually encountered was someone angrier than me and, possibly, with some training from his dad on how to fight - those swings were a bit too practiced and stylish, both fists, one after the other, always aimed at the head. But from that day on I had a supernatural dread of fist-fights. I'd lost my nerve.

It's rather a shame, in retrospect, that my dad didn't teach me how to box. He attempted to teach my brother (we'd had two or three amateur boxers in the family), but, me being a girl, didn't count. Because, of course, girls don't need self-defence.

Hell, if I'd been taught I could have called a rematch and trounced the little cunt. Might have saved my self-esteem. Might have spared me the guilt that it was all somehow my fault. Might have stopped me following the path of all other women before me, avoiding conflict and pleasing everyone.

Okay, I'm not good at that, but think how unstoppable I could have been with the right training. Next time your daughters come home complaining of being beaten in a fight don't lecture them on how they shouldn't be fighting - teach them how to throw a killer punch.

Anyway, it went on, striving and achieving and being teachers' pet indoors and a life of wild imagination outdoors. I was strangely untrammelled in my life out of school up until I was about ten or eleven. During the summer holidays I was like a cat. I got up at first light, went out the door, often wandering off great distances on Grand Adventures, and only showing up when I needed fed.

When my family moved to Lindores Drive at the age of seven, when my brother was born, I found my first real best friend - Maureen.

Maureen was docile, sweet-natured and plump. She was the eldest girl in a family of four catholic children and my next door neighbour. Nothing was expected of Maureen academically or any other way. She'd grow up, get married, get pregnant, live the life and die. That was it.

But Maureen was bright, good fun, easy-going and up for anything provided you didn't get her out of bed too early. I always called for Maureen, never vice versa. As I grew older Maureen and I took to walking further and further afield, up round all the industrial estates that surrounded East Kilbride, off into the farmland where that Milk from the Mains was produced, down lanes, up hills, off through alien housing schemes. We had absolutely no idea where we were going but I had been taught by my father how to orientate yourself in strange landscapes so that "You can never get lost" and believed his wisdom absolutely because, invariably, he was right.

Following the course of a river outwards did always lead you to a town, going downhill in a forest always brought you to a road, making mental notes of skylines always gave you a compass for where you were relative to a landmark. Memorise churches and tall buildings, remember odd and distinctive things, watch for road signs, always head towards the town centre if you get lost because all roads lead from there. It went on and on and never failed me. Maureen trotted along beside me, never questioning my ability to get us home again.

And get us home I did.

We took to walking to High Blantyre, the birth place of both my parents and the home of my maternal grandparents. Going to visit my Gran was a delight. She belonged to a far older town where the very life smelt different. It was a mining town and the slag heaps were visible everywhere. In damp weather, which was common in the days before global warming, it got thick orange fogs, the likes of which I haven't seen since I was twelve.

I am always forcibly reminded by films and stories of Jack the Ripper that people nowadays really do not know what pea-souper fogs were like.

They were so thick you literally could not see in front of your face, so thick that street lights were rendered impenetrable by them. They varied in colour from a yellowish-green, exactly like pea-soup, to a dark sulphurous orange. Those ones you could taste. It was like a thick bath of smoky coal-tar. It stank up your hair and your woollen coat and your itchy jumper and left your hair and skin wet. If you got caught out in one you could be in serious trouble if you didn't know where you were heading. People didn't go out in those fogs. They stayed indoors, by the fire (all belching the thick smoke that had helped make the fog) and drew the curtains muttering, "Some night" and glad to be indoors.

But Maureen and I never saw those on our walks. Our walks were bright sunny day affairs when the tar melted on the roads and stained our sandshoes and sometimes - oh, oh - our socks. We clumped along miles of road in our trendy stone leather Scholl sandals and shorts, taking the old disused single-track road, between ancient trees, alongside the river, never seeing a car, hidden from the dual carriageway, stopping - the delight of our trip - to buy Caramel Logs at the old garage that had been left behind.

We talked endlessly. I have no idea what about. We laughed a lot and wandered off-track a lot.

When we got to my grandmother's she was unfailingly glad to see us and always set out a proper tea on a white tablecloth in the living room and we got tea and sandwiches and mixed cakes form Dougies' round the corner. Always Tunnocks teacakes and, if we were lucky, pineapple cakes so sickly you needed three cups of tea to wash them down. We talked, told her of the things we'd seen, the places we'd been and then left, fed and full of our own adventuring spirit.

Inevitably though the day came when my own bold orienteering failed me.

Blantyre was too safe, we'd done it too often, we needed a challenge. I decided to walk to Hamilton, to see my Aunt Kate.

My Uncle Danny was a scary, bad-tempered, angry man who said fuck and called people cunts as if it was an everyday occurrence. He was the black sheep in the Henery family, the "one of the brothers" who wouldn't take his turn at housing my ailing, ancient grandfather, the one who said he wouldn't have "the old bastard" in his house. Oddly, though, I could never dislike him, even although he was a misogynistic pig. For reasons that elude me still, he and Frank were the only two Henery brothers I liked. I loved the way he swore, abused everybody and anybody, spilled his life out onto the street like some common guttersnipe, had an extended family of musicians and ne'er-do-wells that wandered in and out the permanently open door, had dogs everywhere, bike engines in the living room and a kitchen sink full of sump oil. He let the weeds grow in his garden, had a huge boat he worked on religiously that never saw water and brought up all his children as musicians and singers with not a single academic among them. Danny was rude, offensive, foul-mouthed and honest, something that none of his brothers, including my father, were.

But Kate... ah, Kate was lovely. As sweet and kind as Danny was foul, as warm and embracing as a real mother, a non-saccharine Disney mother. She was (one of) the mothers I wanted to have. Kate would always love you, never judge you.

Kate was my fantasy nurturing mother, straight out my favourite comic, the Judy (along with my Aunt Eleanor, who was my fantasy glamorous mother).

Hamilton was a good distance away. I don't know how far exactly but maybe 20 miles or more there and back. Blantyre was a good 12 to 16, I think, so it didn't seem that hard to me.

There was one major problem, unlike the road to my grandmother's I didn't often travel to my Uncle Danny's and had only the vaguest knowledge of the route. We set out at the opposite end of East Kilbride, following the signs for Eddelwood. We were going in the right direction.

We were plunged almost immediately into old, winding single-track roads with very few road signs and those it did have were the old black and white cast iron, fun to turn in the wrong direction and often knocked out of place by passing hay loads. We walked and walked and walked. It was lovely walking, very quiet and pleasantly scented. But it soon became apparent when I didn't recognise any of the road signs, and we were not showing any signs of reaching civilisation, that we had taken a wrong turning, or many wrong turnings.

What to do? It was high hedgerow after high hedgerow, no road signs, no landmarks. Eventually we did the only thing we could, we turned round and followed the route back.

It was early evening by now, around seven 'o' clock. I don't know if we had anything to eat with us or not, but we knew we were going to "get it" when we got home. I wasn't frightened of being lost. I knew I was "never lost" as long as I just followed the same route back, but I was frightened of the trouble we were going to get into for being so late and missing tea.

Fortunately we were saved by a lorry driver who stopped and asked if we wanted a lift. He wanted to know if we were hitch-hiking (I was always taken for being much older than I was). I explained we were out walking and had got lost. He asked how old we were. When he found out he drove us back to East Kilbride. After telling us off for wandering about on our own in the middle of nowhere without knapsacks or any idea of where we were going.

It was nine 'o' clock when we finally got home. Both families had been frantically calling round relatives by means of the jungle telegraph, driving here and there searching for us. People with phones (there weren't many then) were roped in to go "down the street an' see if they're there".

Fortunately everybody was just so pleased to see us in one piece that my telling off was barely recognisable as such. But I was careful never to go out again without a surer knowledge of the route.

Strangely though I was still not stopped or discouraged from simply wandering off as the fancy took me. People didn't worry about perverts and rapists then and my family were very confident of my abilities. I'm not sure what Maureen's family made of it, or how much they knew about the extent of our adventures. I think it was always, "Jane's sensible." Indeed on the night of the missing children my Dad said that to Maureen's parents, reassuring them that there was no need to panic, I'd bring her back in one piece.

I have a sneaking suspicion he was secretly proud of me.

Unfortunately, though, such halcyon days could not last. Inevitably secondary school loomed, academic achievement subtly changed from people pleasing to a vague terror of "ending up in the BSR."

This was my family's ultimate bogey-man. Only life's losers ended up in the BSR, a factory that made styluses and turntables, I think, for record players and, I assume, paid only minimum wage. I think they were the refuse no-one school of employer and took all the dross dumped out by the old 11-plus system which had just died a death.

I went to the "New, comprehensive," Duncanrig Secondary School.

Duncanrig had been East Kilbride's grammar school, the posh school, the school the bright kids with futures went to. It was still very much in that mode, with a sizeable amount of staff who did not like the sudden influx of average dross and working class low-lifes. I don't know if it was a sop to their injured pride or simply some utopian idea of egalitarian schooling, but the authorities decided to grade us all according to our IQ tests.

My last couple of years in primary had been dogged by these unknown, misunderstood and sadly overemphasised IQ tests. They were new to the Scottish Education system and I sometimes wonder how many kids' lives they blighted with their decidedly lopsided pseudo-'scientific' brains means testing.

I and Sheila Clucas, a fellow-classmate, had birthdays respectively on the 3 rd of December and the 30 th of November. Because of this Sheila and I were made to sit no fewer than four (or possibly six - there's that memory thing again) IQ tests. Most kids sat one, occasionally two, but we sat four (or six - let's say four or we'll be here all day). This was because we fell on the cusp of what year we should be moved to secondary school. As the school was hovering they decided to make us sit the tests both intake years "just in case".

We ended up sitting two sets of guinea pig trial tests and two official ones.

I wasn't unduly unnerved by the tests at first, not realising what they were for.

I can't even remember if my parents were allowed to see the scores for them. I know I didn't.

But somewhere, somehow, somebody alerted me to the fact that these tests were "very serious" and that my future life depended on them. I know at some point we were given (or my parents had to buy?) books of practice IQ tests to get us in the habit.

They were weird, resembled nothing that I had ever seen before. They were just rows of texts that you wrote one word answers to, sums you didn't work out, weird shit with shapes that I hadn't been asked to deal with since I was five, multiple choices where there was only ever One Right Answer.

Ah, the writing was on the wall, yet another Dick Whittington Moment. Run away, Chancery, run away Jane, don't let them do this to you.

But do it they did.

Gradually the 'importance' of these tests seeped into my consciousness. If I didn't start reducing all responses into right way and wrong way, learn how to equate B with digging a hole, and C with how long it took to do it, I would end up in the BSR, I would fail at life, and my parents wouldn't love me ever again. I was in imminent danger of being found wanting, a fake, not as smart as I thought I was.

I was in deep trouble.

I didn't know how deep till I arrived at Secondary school and discovered to my absolute humiliation and horror that the IQ tests had indeed found me out.

I was stupid, irretrievably dumb. It was all a lie. I'd thought I was bright, always at the top of the class, the pupil Mrs Mackie - the most terrifying teacher in the school - called by her first name and entrusted with money to go buy her potatoes. They'd been right, all those teachers who'd stood me by the blackboard for talking too much - a constant problem in my school career till Mrs Mackie terrorised it out of me - all those teachers who said I could be even more brilliant if I just applied myself.

I had failed.

The school was 'streamed' into four grades graded by intelligence which had been decided, not by our teachers, or our school performance but by the new and wonderful solves all educational problems - IQ test. The IQ test was going to make Britain great again. The IQ test was going to sort the wheat from the chaff, the losers from the winners, those worthy of education from those to be tolerated till you could dump them.

There were four streams - A, B, C, & D.

Broadly speaking it ran like this. Grade A pupils were the brilliant students, the ones with great futures. To mark their greatness they had one special class that set them apart from the rest of us. They learnt Latin. Because, of course, they were going to be doctors, nuclear physicists, barristers, all of whom needed Latin. And, of course, they might be eligible for Oxbridge. Duncanrig was still sufficiently in its grammar school mode to believe that they might pick out the shiny nuggets and groom them for the ruling classes.

The B stream were all the rest of the bright kids that were just below being bright enough to deserve Latin. They'd be middle managers, managing the BSR rather than working on the assembly line. They'd be solicitors, go to red-brick universities, maybe even do some path lab work at Hairmyres, East Kilbride's hospital. These kids were destined for good things, the back-bone of Scotland's economy, just not brilliant, that's all.

The C kids were the troubled homes, the sexist children of sexist mothers who thought boys built with their hands and girls baked. They were bright enough, but they were never going to apply themselves. No point on wasting an education on them.

Then there were the D stream. D for dumb. Here were the angry kids, the bored kids, the dyslexic kids, the kids from homes so troubled school was the place where they held you against your will till you could legally run away.

We were then further graded. The A & B stream children were educated together, except for that mystical Latin class that set the A's as a class apart. The C's & D's were shunted off elsewhere. We never saw them, other than in toilets and bike sheds, smoking. We didn't know their names, what they were taught. I seem to recall we weren't even at the same house assemblies together. (We had 'houses' which served no purpose whatsoever. Don't ask me, I still don't know what thy were for.)

There might as well have been a wall between us. At twelve we already knew who we were, either bright kids, better, a cut above; or slackers, bright enough but never likely to rise far above their station, or, finally, the downright irredeemable.

I was irredeemable.

Yes, I was a grade B student.

I remember late in my career a friend of mine, an A grade student, somehow finding out (I have a feeling she asked a teacher she was chummy with, I really don't remember now) that I was literally four points away from being an A grade student. But it didn't matter by then, the damage was done. I came from a household of black and white. If you weren't a winner you were a loser. 'Almost' didn't cut it. You hadn't applied yourself. You were less and you just had to accept that. I even remember my father telling me, and meaning it, when I was telling him something I'd found out about the insane realities of the IQ system, that I just wasn't as smart as I thought. These kids were smarter than me and I had to accept it. Except he wasn't quite as kind about it.

It didn't matter that B was almost as good. It didn't matter that by the time I was old enough to realise how arbitrary and irrelevant this testing was it was already being discredited as inaccurate and unpredictable, notably, and not coincidentally, for children who had high word skills and creative abilities. Artistic children with high visual skills sometimes came out as sub-normal. The scientists had designed the tests for mathematicians like themselves, leaving kids like me mutilated by our sudden relegation to fatally flawed. It didn't matter that in the course of my six year secondary education the school itself quietly dropped them, trying to pretend they had never happened. None of it mattered.

My father's vanity was wounded. I had let the family down. Groomed to be a shining star I had besmirched the family name by being four or eight or ten points lower than a Gifted Person, a Special Person, one of God's chosen.

Not that my parents knew what my IQ was. They were never told, to my knowledge, and never bothered to find out. They just accepted the authorities' take on their daughter's capabilities. She was less than they thought, The Man said so. An odd attitude for communists. But so it goes.

I didn't find out until late in my school career, at the same time my friend found out how close I'd actually come to learning Latin, that those four or six tests that Sheila and I had to endure had almost certainly lowered our chances of success. Instead of taking them in consecutive order or letting us go with the highest score they averaged them and thus, in the name of 'fairness' had lowered our overall chance at shining.

It's not a coincidence that Sheila and Robert Macdonald, a boy whose birthday was the same as mine and who went through the same IQ hell with us, were all B grade students.

In fact I believe I'm right in saying my primary school produced no A grade students, that the handful at Duncanrig had all come from other schools.

So profound was this belief in my own stunted capabilities that I started to rein myself in, never doing as well as I could until I absolutely had to. I began to resent the imposition, the emphasis on being a performing seal. No-one asked me what I wanted, no-one bothered to find out how I felt about it. I was supposed to be satisfied by the lure of 'a good job'. Whatever that might be. A lawyer, as far as my father was concerned. I still remember the shock when I was seventeen discovering I was supposed to have Latin for that. Nobody had told me. And it was too late to take it now.

I was secretly relieved at being let off the hook of living out my father's fantasies of me being some Representative of The People, fighting worthy causes for The Common Man. I found out later, with my final grades, that I could have studied law at the prestigious St Andrew's; they were prepared to make an exception for me. But I kept quiet about it and applied for English courses instead, never letting on that at the end, the IQ test didn't count for shit and one of the most highly-esteemed, deeply conservative old-school universities in the country would have been happy to train me to be a barrister, no Latin in sight.

The IQ tests were wrong, my school was wrong, the authorities were wrong, and in the end it was The Man who said so.

Ain't life strange.

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