Bell's Went! by Catriona

Did you have a favorite teacher that had major influence on you as a writer?

I did and he was in touch only yesterday to say good luck for the mid-terms.  WOOOOHOOOOOO!

He blew in like Mary Poppins and was different from all the other teachers. Even the other English teachers. For one thing, he is actually English and took a lot of pleasure in the kids' Scottish dialect.

When the bell rang, most teachers said "The bell is a signal to me, not to you." Quite pompous. Stuart would clap the book shut, or snap the chalk in half, or abandon his point mid-sentence, and shout "Bell's went!" - our cue to scatter. 

Another memory is Stuart writing on the blackboard, coming upon a word like . . . necessary or embarrassment . . . and giving the chalk a good work-out saying, "Oh, lots of Ss probably". Because he wasn't teaching us spelling; he was teaching us poetry. He taught us to love it, and to love books, language, story, drama . . . (Actually, I already loved books and stories. And language. But he taught me to feel more at home and to have fun with them. Less reverence and more joy.)

We read The Twelfth Day of July, by Joan Lingard. It's about Catholic and Protestant teenagers at the height of 'the troubles' in Belfast and was a bold choice in the 80s in Scotland, even in the east of Scotland, which wasn't quite as sectarian as the west of Scotland, but was still deeply divided by (basically identical) religions. Well, it wasn't really about religion. Pro tip: if you've colonised a country and you're finally getting out, don't keep a bit. Or to put it another way, look at a map of Britain and Ireland and see if you can work out where the border is. I'm just saying.

And one of the reasons I'm saying it is Stuart Campbell. 

We read a book called Nowhere to Stop by Geraldine Kaye, another bold choice. It's the story of a family of gypsies as we then called them, although I'd probably ask what they'd like to be referred to as now and make a guess at Roma if I couldn't check. It's a cold December as the book opens and they're camped at a pretty miserable town dump with a new baby due any day. It made a big impression. We had read Anne Frank's diary (well, I had) and we'd all been glued to Alex Haley's Roots a few years before, but Kaye's novel made us face a prejudice that was still revoltingly prevalent. Is still revoltingly prevalent.

One of the reasons I'm revolted by anti-traveller bigotry is Stuart Campbell.

So we'd read Romeo and Juliet in Northern Ireland and the Chrtistmas story set on the town dump, but when we came to Macbeth, we read Macbeth. It was local. We also went on a bus trip to see a film of Macbeth. Thing is, it was Roman Polanski's Macbeth, in which Polanski made directorial choices informed by the trauma he was experiencing after the recent murder of his pregnant wife at the hands of the Manson Family. So . . . yeah. We all got back on the bus again and one of the teachers made a heartfelt plea to the kids not to say anything about what had just happened. I don't know if we all kept to it (until now) but certainly nothing more was ever said.

I don't know either if Stuart Campbell was involved in that eye-opening cinema visit, but if I had to pick a teacher who knew what the film was like and decided to take us anyway, it would definitely be him.

We lost touch for a good few years after I left school and he left teaching to do something even more admirable. Then he found out I had written a book - Scotland is tiny - and came along to help me celebrate its launch. Then I found out he was writing a book and I found myself in the unsettling position of being the one who had things to teach him, about the world of publishing. Me! Teaching Mr Campbell! I was already having a hard enough time calling him Stuart.

He has written eight books now.  You can find them all here.

Cx