Mrs Morton (Blasphemy and Me)

An amateur rebel, a bad pupil

I want to describe my own experience of committing, not blasphemy as such, but something akin to it. The experience is key to my present-day thoughts on the issue.

Whenever one critiques society or “people in general”, the danger is always that one is actually critiquing oneself, but obscuring this both from one’s audience and from oneself. The technique is to transfer one’s flaws onto “people in general”, those anonymous others who are innocent of the allegation but cannot reject it, instead of the truly guilty person. Thus, one gets to acknowledge one’s flaws but in a way that taints everybody else while making one seem, not just innocent, but unusually insightful and critical. It’s a sort of “cleansing by proxy”, a la Dorian Gray. One comes out of this deeply egotistical process feeling like the font of goodness and reason, when in fact one should feel double shame: for having the flaw one transfers to everybody else, and for doing so.

It is thus important for me to acknowledge: there is a part of me that is subversive, which is excited by upsetting and befuddling people (being controversial), and which is deeply resentful of social convention. All my life, I have been very aware of the various ways in which I am rare or unusual - left-handed, eccentric, INFJ, intelligent, creative, etc. Even now, when I am old enough to know that I should merely accept these as prosaic facts of my existence, I instead derive great pride from them. Perhaps I will outgrow this eventually, but for now I am still very glad that I am rare. However, these days I try to temper this trait - which is probably sheer egotism - with awareness that I am a deeply flawed and rather dysfunctional person, and that other people, while more normal and boring than me, are much less dysfunctional and in some crucial ways definitely better than me, and furthermore are often contending with burdens that I will never have.

When I was 17, these two tempering factors were many years away. My ego had free rein. That is the way with young men, but my ego was exceptional. It had to be, to cover a gigantic mass of insecurity. I feel shame now about how egotistical I was, but at the same time, life changes you so much that looking back on the teenager I once was feels like observing a person separate from me altogether. It’s a write-off, there’s no justifying or excusing or mitigating it, I just have to forgive him and, while apologising to other people for him, ask that they do the same. After all, the brain is not fully mature until 25, or even older. My own case exemplifies that.

Being dropped off at school to sit a final exam, circa April 2000. I was 17 and hated the place

One of my favourite subjects at school was English. This combined study of classical literature with creative writing. (By my time, formal teaching of grammar had dwindled away.)

My best English teacher, actually the best teacher I ever had in any subject, was a fifty-something woman called Mrs Morton. (I believe her first name was Isobel, but can’t be sure.)

She taught me English at Standard Grade. She took us line by line through The Merchant of Venice. It was my first experience of Shakespeare. I didn’t like the play, but Mrs Morton’s teaching of it gave me an initial understanding of what Shakespearean verse is, and how incredibly good he was at capturing meanings with words, and with lyricism and beauty. She also oversaw my “RPR” (review of personal reading) essay on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and another essay on Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, a novella that fascinated me at the time.

Despite this, I did not like Mrs Morton. She was a very conservative, serious, prim, proper, strict, clinical and humourless woman, prickly, easy to annoy, hard to please, and merciless in her rebukes. Sour and slight with short cropped hair, she had that sexless demeanour one associates with piously religious women, though I don’t know whether she was religious.

I got a different teacher for English at Higher level. Mr Allison took us line by line through Macbeth - my second Shakespeare play and much more appealing to me than the first. He was a good teacher, but, like a lot of male teachers, his mind seemed to be elsewhere much of the time, on more challenging things. As a result his style was more laid-back; he was just doing a job, even though he was good at it. By contrast, Mrs Morton was serving her vocation. But for me at that time, Mr Allison’s approach was more pleasant and, on a personal level, he was much easier to get along with than Mrs Morton, so that year was a relief for me. I was glad to be away from her.

But then for the final year of school I elected to do the Sixth Year Studies in English. This was the most advanced level, taken by few pupils so there was only one class per year, and it was always handled by Mrs Morton. (This is significant because it probably means she was regarded as the most competent and committed teacher in the English department.)

I slightly dreaded the prospect of another year under her tutelage. I was right to.

Now she took us through Romeo & Juliet, elucidating the brilliance of the text and giving me a deep appreciation of Shakespeare that has stayed with me ever since. Macbeth was more “my kind of thing”, but Mrs Morton’s clarity and devotion, and her obvious awe at the examination of young love, made studying Romeo & Juliet much more rewarding. I had already seen the Baz Luhrmann film at the cinema, but Mrs Morton took us into every metaphor, every allusion. It was wonderful.

And yet, in that year, I hated her.